His life will be in my hands, Rictus thought, as mine has been in his. I have only to raise my voice in the enemy camp, and he will be captured, and this army of his will fall apart. He knows this.
He had to marvel at Corvus’s audacity. This boy -
No; he was not a boy. That way of regarding him was no longer tenable. In fact he was no younger than Rictus had been when he had been elected leader of the Ten Thousand. Sometimes, with the selective memory of a middle-aged man, Rictus forgot that he, too, had been something of a prodigy.
He took off his cloak, and began unclicking the fastenings of his black cuirass. He stared at the other Curse of God in the tent, perched on its armour-stand like some silent ghost. Who wore you? He wondered. Were you one of us, who made the March beside me?
He placed his cuirass beside its fellow, and for a moment all the occupants of the tent fell silent, looking at them.
These were the keystone of the heritage of the Macht. No Kufr had ever possessed or worn one of them in all of recorded history. Antimone’s Gift was a black mystery at the heart of the Macht world. Sometimes, Rictus thought that if one could puzzle out the origins of these artefacts, then one would have unravelled the enigma of the Macht themselves. He had come to think, during the long march all those years ago, that the Macht were somehow not part of this world they inhabited. At least, they had not been here in the beginning.
And he knew, now, why Corvus hesitated to wear the black armour. He was half Kufr, and even his undoubted courage must flinch at the thought of a creature of Kufr blood donning the Curse of God.
Who knows? Rictus surmised. Maybe it will not even let him wear it. How would that look? So he lets it sit here, a temptation and a reproach.
And he suddenly had a blink of insight into the engine that drove Corvus on.
He wants to rule the Macht, because he wants to feel that he is truly one of them. If the Harukush acclaims him its ruler, how can he not be one of us?
Eunion was right, Rictus thought. He is a dreamer. But there is more to it. This is what drives him on, this thing gnawing at his guts. He has surrounded himself with fatherless boys and made of them a family. He wants to belong.
Perhaps that is his other secret; to take the orphaned and make them feel part of something again.
They left the camp at dusk, three mudstained men in nondescript woollen chlamys, barefoot in the chill suck of the mud, their hoods pulled over their faces like the komis of the Kufr. They bore the lowland drepanas that Karnos’s troops would carry, and Druze had painted across his leather pelta the machios sigil of Machran.
The waterlogged plain between the armies had once been good farmland, and there were still the black thickets of olive groves strewn across it, but it had been inundated with the rain that poured down from the hills so that now it bore more of a resemblance to some wildfowler’s marsh, a grey mere of dappled mud and ochre water.
Karnos had planted his burgeoning army on a low rise across the Imperial road, and the water had filled a ring around its foot so that it seemed like an island, or a vast moated fort, pasangs wide; and the cloud hung so low that it almost met the summit.
Eight pasangs to the rear of the enemy army was the city of Afteni, renowned for its metal-working. And behind that was Arkadios, and then to the west and south of that one of the great cities of the hinterland, Avennos of the Laws, where Tynon himself had lived and lectured for a time, back in the mists of the past. He had been the author of those codes which now governed nearly all the Macht cities. The origins of the Kerusia – the assembly that every Macht polity possessed – lay there.
Avennos was not the metropolis it had been; both Avensis to the south, which had been its colony upon a time, and Arienus to the south-west had grown greater with the passage of the years. But Avennos was a part of the Macht identity as surely as Machran was. That, Rictus reasoned, was why Karnos had thrown his army so far forward, extending his supply lines and landing himself in the same muck as Corvus. To preserve that core of tradition. It was militarily unsound, but politically it could not be faulted.
The darkness drew in over the floodplain, a lightless black without stars or moons. The three men lurched from one footfall to the next, the muck seizing them calf-deep. Once, Druze went on his face and the others had to halt and lever him free, haul him upright again. Corvus was seized by a fit of laughter, and after a contemplation of their absurd condition it flapped through them all so that they stood for a few minutes holding their mouths, leaning on one another like drunks.
“I’ll lead,” Corvus said at last. “I’m lighter than either of you clodhoppers, and I see better in the dark. Grab a hold of my cloak and try not to pull me on my arse.”
They went on, their only frame of reference in that starless murk the subdued glow of the enemy campfires. Only a few were burning, fighting a losing battle with the endless rain. Usually a host like Karnos’s would light up the night sky with its fires like a city at festival time.
Corvus halted, and Rictus felt the young man’s iron grip on his arm.
“Sentries,” he murmured, his breath warm in Rictus’s ear. “We go right, cast around them.”
The three made a laborious dog-leg about the sentries which only Corvus had seen. They were glad of the rain, for the sluicing hiss of it covered their lumpen progress. Rictus found his joints aching as they had not since the winter before, in the siege-camp outside Nemasis, and he felt again the ache of the arrow-wound in his thigh. The cold and the wet were always ready to recall his old scars, as though in league with his ageing body to remind him of his mortality.
They waded as quietly as they could through knee-deep freezing water, clenching their chattering teeth shut, and began to hear other sounds than the rain ahead. Men’s voices, a low hum of talk, and the chink and gleam of lights glancing through the gaps in leather-canopied tents. The ground rose under their feet, became marginally drier in that the mud was only ankle-deep.
“Here we are,” Corvus said, as unconcerned as if he had led them into his own back yard. “From here on in we straighten up and look like citizens. Perhaps we should go under different names. Druze, you look like a Timus to me.”
“Boss,” Druze said, “I would follow you to the far side of the Veil if you asked me, but don’t try to make me laugh. It’s not one of your gifts.”
“I fall short in that respect,” Corvus admitted, and they saw him grin under his hood. He seemed as light of heart as a boy who has found a peephole in a bathhouse wall.
“I wonder if Karnos’s tent is as big as mine. What think you. Rictus? You know him better than I.”
“I think Druze’s accent and your face will give us away in a moment. Let me lead, for Phobos’s sake, and both of you keep your mouths shut.”
Corvus nodded, and in an entirely different, clinical voice said, “Count the sigils you see. I want to know which cities have brought up their levies.”
They walked through the camp as brazenly as though they belonged there, Druze wiping the muck off his pelta so the Machran sigil shone out white in the firelit gaps in the dark. The camp of Karnos’s army stank worse than their own, and Rictus put out of his mind thoughts of what his bare feet must be treading through.
Men were crowded in their tents, huddled around guttering clay lamps and foul-smelling tallow candles. Some resolute souls were keeping campfires going, atop each the familiar villainous black shape of a centos, the great iron pot fighting men had eaten from since time out of mind. There was a toothsome smell on the air amid the baser stinks; Karnos’s men were eating stewed goat, ladling in mounds of lentils and onions to eke out the meat. Lowland food; the smell of it brought back memories of a dozen old campaigns to Rictus.