“Modest little bastard, ain’t he?” Fornyx said, sitting down heavily.
“A phenomenon,” a voice said, and both Rictus and Fornyx started. It was Eunion, forgotten in the corner. He rose stiffly now and approached the table with the scroll still hanging in his hand. The dogs whined as they picked up the mood of the room.
“A slave’s gift,” he said with a tight smile. “To have oneself overlooked.”
“A gift I find myself wishing I had,” Rictus conceded.
“You think he means what he says?” Fornyx asked.
It was Eunion who answered. “He means it, master, he means all of it. He is a man who has a certain picture of himself in his head, and he will do anything to keep that picture real. Such men are the most dangerous of all to know. They are not pragmatists, but dreamers.”
“His dreams have taken him far,” Fornyx said sourly, running his fingers through his beard. “Rictus, we’re in a corner here – we’ll have to go along with the little fuck, for now at least.”
Rictus sat rolling the wine around in his mouth. He was curiously detached. He felt that he had never in his life tasted a cup of wine so completely, enjoying every nuance of its taste. There were complexities within it he had not guessed at, far beyond the run of his own mountain vintages.
Something else – this Corvus knew him, knew him well enough to prod at the weaknesses in his makeup. Not just the veiled threats to his family and his men, not just a crude leverage. One gained men’s obedience that way, but not their loyalty.
Corvus had lifted a curtain and made a promise of something greater beyond it, and Rictus knew, without question, that if this slender, terrible boy gave his word on something,” he would keep it. Because, as Eunion had said, he was a dreamer, and to break his word would destroy some picture he held of himself in his mind.
Rictus looked at his friends. “We can trust him,” he said. “I know it.”
Fornyx let out a low whistle. “You’re going to do it.”
“It’s that or death – why not?” Rictus replied. He stood up, the wine loosening his brain. Looking around the homely room, he realised that this place had always been a refuge for him, and he hoped it always would be. But Corvus had been right – and Fornyx too.
He would live and die with a scarlet cloak on his back.
FIVE
Hal Goshen. In old Machtic the name denoted a gateway, and in the centuries since men had settled there, that was what it had been, commanding a gap between stone and water.
The Gosthere Range, a jagged, rocky, bare-headed line of high hills or low mountains, threw out a long spin here, some two hundred pasangs from north-east to south-west. At the end of it, on a wide flattened knob of high ground, the city had been built. It overlooked the ancient highway that connected the eastern portion of the Harukush with the western, and was a scant fifteen pasangs from the sea.
The lowland ground between coast and mountain hail been fought over for generations, and was the root of Hal Goshen’s prosperity. It had deep, black soil which might yield two good crops a year, if the weather were kind, and down on the shore to the south were scores of fishing villages and small towns whose menfolk counted themselves citizens of the city on the hill, and voted in its assemblies. The port of Goshen itself was the largest of these, linked to the hilltop city by a fine road. It had one of the best natural harbours on the southern seaboard, and a prosperous fishing fleet was based there.
An army travelling west across the Harukush would find the land narrowing between the mountains and the sea, until the grey tufa walls of Hal Goshen were before it, like the cork in a bottle. To drink the wine of the west, that cork would have to be popped.
A company of men stood on the high ridge northeast of the city and halted there to take in the wide sweep of the world before them. It was bitterly cold, and snow was blowing across the ridge in clouds as hard and heavy as sand, pluming off the peaks of the mountains behind them in long banners across a pale sky, blue as a robin’s egg.
Corvus seemed to feel the cold more than most. He was buried in a thick cloak, highlander’s felt, and held the hood close about his mouth.
“There she lies, the door to the west. I hope we shall not have to knock too hard,” he said.
Rictus scanned the open country to the south of the city, the scattered farms, so much closer together than in the highlands. A taenon of earth here would be a mere tithe of the expanse a man would need to support a family in the high country. Even with autumn well into its stride, the place had a prosperous, comfortable look, lined with vines and well-spaced olive trees, the woods cut back, the wetlands drained, neat tufa walls everywhere; a thousand years of labour or more. A tamed landscape, this; a fat pigeon waiting for a hawk.
“It does not seem to me that the men of Hal Goshen are much panicked by your army,” Fornyx said. Snow had greyed his beard and eyebrows. He looked pinched, almost as grizzled as Rictus.
“Our camp is eight pasangs back to the east,” Corvus said, his gaze fixed hungrily on the city. “But I hey know we’re here. They closed their gates eight days ago, and brought what provisions they could within the walls. The road to the port has been cut by my cavalry.”
“I see no burnt farms or uprooted vines,” Rictus said.
“That is not the way I make war,” Corvus told him. “I mean to possess this city, and the lands around it. I do not intend to capture a wasteland.”
“Then how do you feed your men?” Fornyx asked, genuine surprise in his voice.
“Trains of supply wagons are sent to me from my eastern possessions,” Corvus said. “That is why I am able to keep campaigning with winter coming on. We do a certain amount of foraging when we are on the march, but in general I find that it is best not to despoil a country whose inhabitants you wish to conciliate.”
“It could be argued that a man whose farm is burning is more apt to listen to reason,” Fornyx said.
Corvus turned his strange pale eyes upon him. “I have found that there are two ways of dealing with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.”
“Your world is a stark and simple place,” Fornyx said.
“I sleep well at night,” Corvus retorted with a grin.
Rictus listened to their exchange without a word. He was thinking of Hal Goshen. For twenty years he had lived close by – Andunnon was barely sixty pasangs away, up in the Gosthere hills. He knew the men inside those tufa walls, had sat at their tables and drunk their wine. Phaestos, the Speaker of their kerusia, had hired him more than once, had eaten in Andunnon, hunted with him. He and Aise had been to the theatre there, to see Ondimion acted. Her scarlet dress had been bought in the city agora.
It was from the port of Goshen that Rictus had taken ship for the Empire, so long ago. The sea had been black, then, with the ships of the Ten Thousand.
He had no wish to see this city besieged, assaulted, or watch its people broken and enslaved. This was too close to home, to the memories that spanned the web of his life.
“Your reasoning is sound,” he told Corvus. “Hal Goshen and its surrounds can muster some four thousand fighting men, maybe two thirds of them spearmen. They have no chance. If we inform them of that fact, then I don’t believe that it will prove difficult to make the Kerusia open the gates.”
Corvus nodded, watching Rictus’s face closely. “That would be my take on it also. Of course, it would be better if this were pointed out to them by someone they know. Someone they trust.”