The whole table was watching him; Rictus, leader of the Ten Thousand, thrown into panic by the sight of a single Kufr. He beat it down, grinding his teeth on the wine. When he raised his head again his face was as blank as a flint.
“You are a long way from home,” he managed.
Ardashir bowed his head in acknowledgement. “A friend came this way, and I followed him.”
“Ardashir’s people make up most of the Companion Cavalry,” the one-eyed man, Demetrius, said. “They were among the first to fight for Corvus, and have come all this way -”
“They are my friends, all of them,” Corvus said, his high, clear voice cutting the older man short. “They have fought by my side on a dozen battlefields. The Macht have never been a people to appreciate the potential of cavalry, and a man does not become a horse-soldier overnight. To create a mounted arm, I had to look over the sea. Rictus, in your youth you battled your way across half the Empire. You of all men should be able to appreciate the valour of the people within it.”
Corvus was taut-faced, staring at him. Here was a test, Rictus realised. He spoke to Ardashir again.
“I fought the Great King’s Honai at Kunaksa, and the Asurian cavalry at Irunshahr. I do not have to be convinced of your people’s prowess.”
Druze leaned close to Ardashir and reached up to shake the Kefren by the shoulder. “Prowess or not, he still beat you, you big yellow streak of shit.”
The table erupted in laughter, Ardashir laughing as loud as the rest. He clinked cups with Druze, the two of them as familiar with each other as any two fighting comrades can be. Rictus wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He found Corvus still watching him, smiling without humour. Then the pale-faced youth raised his own cup to Rictus and drained it. It would seem the test had been passed.
“Rictus has drilled his Dogsheads to a level not equalled by any other troops I have seen,” Corvus said, raising his voice. The long table fell silent instantly.
“They are only a half-mora of spearmen, but I intend that their example shall be followed throughout the army. Here and now, I name Rictus of Isca as one of my marshals, equal to all of you here. Demetrius, Teresian, you will consult with Rictus on the drilling of your own men. If we can field a phalanx that fights as well as did the Ten Thousand, then there is nothing in all of the Harukush that can stand against us.”
There was a general buzz of consent, and Fornyx slapped Rictus on the back, leaning in close to speak in his ear.
“Congratulations, marshal. Before you let me kiss your elevated arse, look at your colleagues. I think you just pissed in their wine.”
One-eyed Demetrius, and rawboned Teresian. They drank silently, looking over the rim of their cups at Rictus, and he realised that he had just made his first enemies in Corvus’s army.
SIX
The green branch got Rictus up to the city walls. It was snowing, a wet, dark snow that was the child of the decaying season. Impenetrable though the Curse of God might be, it held no warmth, and Rictus was shivering under his scarlet cloak as he stood with the olive branch held up in one hand, the blank pocked stone of the ramparts looming over him. There was activity up there on the walkway; he could see the conical gleam of helms moving, but as yet the massive city gates remained closed.
It had been a year and a half since last he had stood here, the tail end of the summer, just before he left for the Nemasis contract.
The gates had been open then, the sun warm and the land as rich and ripe as a plucked pomegranate.
The roads had been thick with people and handcarts and animals making their way to the Summersend market. For most of the country folk around about it was a once-a-year trip, to sell what they had grown and reared and woven, and in return to buy what they could not make for themselves on their farms. They would go home with the redware pottery that was unique to the city, or perhaps a new axehead, or a slave, or perhaps even a scroll of poetry to read aloud in the dark hours of the winter.
Hal Goshen was the hub of men’s lives for sixty pasangs around, as much a part of the landscape as the mountains that reached white and remote on the northern horizon. It did not seem possible that a thing of such permanence could be taken away, erased from the world because of the will of one man.
But that might well happen now, if Rictus could not raise an answer out of these walls.
He tried again. “I am Rictus of Isca, and I am known to you and to your Kerusia. I am here to speak for the eastern general, Corvus, whose army is behind me.” Nothing. His temper flared.
“Open the fucking gate, will you? I’m one man, and it’s fucking freezing out here.”
A snap of laughter from above. Finally there was the crack of a reluctant bolt, and a postern in the gate swung open, admitting a heavily cloaked figure. The postern slammed shut behind him.
“I hope Aise has the goats down from the high pastures,” the figure said. “There will be drifts up there by now that would bury an ox.” The man was lean as a whip, with long lank grey hair, and a gold stud in one nostril. When he smiled he had the white teeth of a much younger man – he had always been proud of them, Rictus remembered, and the effect his smile had on women.
“Phaestus,” he said. “Thank the goddess. I was thinking it was about time I got an arrow in my neck.”
“I have bows trained on you,” Phaestus said, “not that they’d be much use against a Cursebearer. So it’s true then; you and the Dogsheads have thrown in with the conqueror of the east.”
“It’s true, though we didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
The two men looked wordlessly at one another for a long drawn out minute. Rictus was a guest-friend; he had dined in Phaestus’s home, brought trinkets for his daughters, and told tales of old campaigns to his son. The two men had hunted boar together in the hills, and had shared wine around a campfire, Fornyx making them roar with his filthy jokes.
“Ah, well, it seems he is adept at making men choose,” Phaestus said at last. “Even you. What do you make of him, Rictus? Is he the all-powerful champion we’ve heard?”
Rictus thought of Corvus, the short, slight youth with the painted fingernails, and said truthfully, “Well, he scares me, as no man I’ve met ever has.”
Phaestus looked genuinely shocked at this. “Phobos!”
Rictus grasped the older man’s shoulder gently and led him away from the walls. “I come to bring you his terms.”
“Does he have Aise and the girls – is that it?”
Rictus shook his head. “Listen to me, Phaestus. And look south. Take in what you see and be honest with yourself.”
The white snow had blanketed the farmland south of the city, rendering it a blank field broken only by the outlines of walls, the barely discernable grids of sleeping vineyards and olive groves. But some four pasangs away from where the two men stood there was a black stain on the world, an ordered rash of lines that could just be differentiated into ranks of men, of horses. A massive host whose lines extended five pasangs from end to end, a distance greater than the width of the city they faced.
“He has twenty-five thousand men, Phaestus, every one of them a veteran, fed on victory. Do not try to tell me that your citizen soldiers can contend with that. I know what the strength of Hal Goshen is. I know your centurions and their drills.”
“I don’t doubt it. But Hal Goshen is not alone in this thing, Rictus. What of Machran, and the League? Karnos himself almost had you in his employ at the end of the summer, and you walked away. But the League will come to our aid.”