The cavalry reined in perhaps two pasangs to their front. A few isolated, running dots were all that remained of the sixteen hundred men who had faced Rictus in line what seemed like only minutes before. The city of Goron had just lost its menfolk. All of them.
“What will he do now, sack the city?” Fornyx asked.
Druze shook his head. “That is not his way. He cannot abide violence done to women or children. I think maybe something happened to him in boyhood, to his own people. It is the thing he hates most.”
Rictus felt a strange relief. He had seen enough cities sacked before this, and not just his own. He loathed the vileness which came out in even the best of men when all the rules were taken away, when the basest of appetites were freely indulged.
“How did you come to serve him?” he asked Druze, wondering. The dark Igranian did not seem a man who had ever been defeated. He had the self assurance of someone always on the winning side.
“Corvus killed my father,” Druze said simply. “He beat my people in open battle one fine day west of Idrios. His Companions rode us down like they did these men today.”
“Phobos!” Fornyx exclaimed.
Druze smiled his dark smile. “My father was a fine warrior, but also a brigand and a braggart. I loved him, but I was not blind to his failings.
“He fought Corvus sword to sword, and fell. And afterwards Corvus gave him a funeral worthy of a king. My people are not city-dwellers. You would call them uncivilized, and you would be right; but they can appreciate greatness in a man just as you can. Corvus has it. And me, I wish to be there when it comes to full flower – for the adventure of it. I want to be part of the story.”
Rictus and Fornyx looked at one another, and Fornyx’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.
The army camped that night outside the walls of Goron, their tent-lines greater than the city itself. During the afternoon, Corvus had had his men gather up all the dead from along the road and set them on a pyre, to be burned the next day. All through the night, the women of the city trickled down to the hill of bodies to keen and wail and mourn their husbands, their fathers, their sons, and their cries carried over the camp of the army like an accusation, as though Antimone herself were hovering overhead, black wings beating in the darkness, her tears falling unseen upon the snow.
Rictus was called to Corvus’s tent some time before the middle watch of the night, and entered to find most of the high command there, seated around the map-table with clay cups in their hands, braziers glowing bright and hot about them. Corvus was striding up and down, his long black hair loose. In the uncertain light of the hanging lamps he looked like some beautiful exotic girl dressed in a man’s chiton. The silver weapon scars on his forearms marred the image.
He greeted Rictus with that peculiarly winning smile, like that of a son who thinks he has pleased his father.
“Your men lived up to their reputation today, Rictus. That is the first time I have ever seen a spear phalanx keep its formation at a run. You have given Teresian’s spears something to think about.”
Teresian himself, a younger version of Rictus, did not seem particularly thoughtful. He stared at Rictus with veiled hostility, but held up a wine-cup in a grudging gesture of respect.
“We should not have had to fight today,” Corvus said, resuming his pacing of the tent. “It was stupidity on their part – what did they hope to accomplish?”
Anger lifted his voice a tone. He sounded almost shrill. “I have made an object lesson of the men of Goron – that example will travel ahead of us. I’m optimistic that we’ll have no more futile stands before we come to the hinterland of Machran itself. It is there that the campaign will have its climax. Word has come to me that the Avennan League is mustering at last, and Karnos has persuaded all the cities to send contingents. The decisive battle will be fought soon, before midwinter.”
“Karnos has done well,” Demetrius, the one-eyed marshal of the conscript spears said, tilting his head to bring his eye to bear.
“He’s quite the orator, it seems, and the Machran polemarch, Kassander, is an old friend of his – they work together like the hand and the gauntlet. All this is to our advantage.”
“I fail to see how,” Rictus said. “The League can muster thirty or forty thousand men if it has the time to muster them. We don’t have half that here.”
Corvus smiled. “But if those thirty or forty thousand are fairly beaten in open battle, the thing will be done at a stroke – all the hinterland cities will have been defeated at once.”
“If they are defeated.” Rictus was more puzzled than alarmed. Did this boy want to fight against hopeless odds?
Corvus seemed to catch his thought. “Where is the glory, Rictus, in beating citizen armies one by one in an endless series of petty battles? No, we will let them combine. Let them grow confident in their numbers. Once they have mustered, they will find the confidence to come out and meet us spear to spear.”
“Glory,” Rictus repeated. He looked round the other men in the tent, thinking of the morning’s slaughter. That had been a petty affair indeed, but the women keening at the funeral pyre would disagree.
He shook his head. Maybe I am too old, he thought. I have forgotten what ambition was like. What it can do in a man.
Druze winked at him. Teresian was lost in his wine. Demetrius, the oldest, seemed as unperturbed as a stone. Rictus had heard his name before; he had commanded a mercenary centon years in the past, lost his eye fighting for Giron on the Kuprian Coast, and had gone east. To end up with Corvus.
And Ardashir, the Kufr marshal. He met Rictus eye to eye, and there was something surprising in his face. A kind of fellow-feeling. A sympathy. Then the Kufr looked away and Rictus was left imagining it.
“What is it you want?” he asked aloud. “What is all this for?”
Corvus stopped his pacing, his pale face lifted in surprise.
“An odd question for a sellspear to ask,” Teresian sneered.
Yes, Rictus thought; one day you and I will have a reckoning, my friend.
“Not so odd,” Corvus said. “And Rictus is more than a sellspear. Much more.” He cast his gaze about the tent, and a silence fell in which the keening of the women out at the pyre could be heard as a rumour on the wind.
“He commanded an army once, the most celebrated army the Macht have ever fielded, outside of legend.”
I commanded it by chance, Rictus thought. Because all the best men were dead. It was a whim of Phobos, no more.
But he said nothing.
“I was born outside of Sinon, in the land beyond the sea,” Corvus went on. “Most of you here already know this. I have seen the Empire that Rictus marched through, or a corner of it – as has Ardashir. He and I grew up together, and whether he be Kufr or no, he is my brother in all things but blood.” He stared at the men in the room deliberately, meeting their eyes one by one.
“Sinon is where the march of the Ten Thousand ended, where their epic came to a close.” Now he looked at Rictus.
“Not in glory, but in squalor. When the last centons of these heroes finally straggled down to the shores of the sea, what did they do?
“They set about each other like squabbling dogs. They killed one another for gold, for insults given and taken on the long march west. They were riven into pieces before they even saw the sea. They were Macht, and they had defeated the armies of the Great King over and over in open battle. They had humbled an Empire, but they could not govern themselves.”
A flash of something passed over Corvus’s face, something between contempt and anger. It chilled Rictus’s spine to look upon it. This boy, he was -
“That is the fatal flaw within the Macht,” Corvus ploughed on. His face was a mask without colour, the strange violet eyes within it bright as those of some feral animal.
“Unless they face death from without, then they will spend their lives fighting each other – farmyard cocks all crowing on their separate dunghills. This is what we are, here in the Harukush, the poorest patch of stone in the world.