“I have learned to trust to my luck sometimes, Rictus. And it has held. Phobos watches over me. He brought us out of there.”
“It was insane,” Rictus persisted.
“If a sane and sensible life includes walking past rape without blinking, then I would rather be dead,” Corvus said, and there was a cold menace to his words that made Rictus and Druze look at one another.
He wiped his eyes with his cloak hem. “Sneer if you will, Rictus.”
“I am not sneering.” Rictus thought of the sack of Isca, of Ab Mirza in the Empire, the excesses of the Ten Thousand.
Once, I was the same, he thought.
“It may be expedient to tolerate what revolts you,” Corvus said, “but where does that leave you, in the end? Better to die fighting for what you know is right and wrong.”
“Black and white,” Rictus said.
Corvus smiled. “Indeed. Druze, my brother, how is that arm?”
“It stings a little.” Druze’s face was pinched with pain.
“Then let’s get you back home.” Corvus put his arm about Druze’s shoulders and pulled him close, then kissed him on his forehead.
“You took that blade for me,” he said.
They staggered through the marshland with the adrenaline of the fight still singing in their nerves. It brought them another pasang or so, before draining away, leaving them wrung-out and thick-headed. At least that was how Rictus felt. Corvus began to talk again, as easily as a man lingering over his wine.
“Twenty sigils; that’s the hinterland cities plus a few more. I saw the alfos and hammer of Arienus there, and Gast and Ferai – even Decanth. But they are not sending their full levies, or Karnos’s army would be twice as big. Druze, give me your arm – that’s it.
“It means they’re holding back. Even now, they are not fully combined. Perhaps they do not rate their own danger as high as they should. I want them all in front of me, the men of every great city of the Macht. If we are to help our friend Karnos gather them all in his ranks, we will have to twist his tail a little more – more than we have done tonight.”
“Boss, I think you went over there looking for a fight,” Druze said.
“Perhaps I did. Did you see their lines? Amateurs, ankle-deep in their own shit, half-drunk most of them, their sentries gathered around fires and blind to the dark. At least we got them out of their blankets for a night.”
He looked back. A grey light was growing in the air, Araian making her slow way up the back of the clouds to the east.
“Dawn is coming, and they’re forming up on the brink of the hill – look, Rictus – they’ll be all morning at it.”
A black line was growing across the land, thickening and lengthening with every minute. Spearmen, moving into battle array.
“It would be rude not to respond,” Corvus said, his pale grin back on his face. “When we get back, I think I’ll have to turn out our lot to say hello.”
Rictus looked at him sharply.
“You mean to bring on a battle?”
“Why not? Warfare is half blood and half bluff, Rictus. Karnos does not know what we’re about, so he’s taking the sensible route; he’ll stand his men there in the rain for as long as he thinks we’re about to come at him. Last night, the curtain went up. Now I intend to amuse the audience further.”
With the rising of the sun, the clouds that had blanketed the sky for so many days finally began to part and shift, as though Araian had become impatient and was peeling them back to see what had become of the world. The rain petered out, and as the light broke broad and yellow across the flooded plain between the two camps it was caught by the pools of standing water and set alight in dazzling flashes of rippled reflection.
The curtain rises, Karnos thought. You would almost think he had planned it that way.
He stood uncomfortable and self-conscious in his panoply, acutely aware that there was not a single dint in his shield or scrape on the bronze greaves strapped to his shins. He had bought a layered linen cuirass in Afteni years before, the best of its kind, the belly reinforced with iron scales, the wings painted crimson and inlaid with black niello work. It had seemed splendid and martial back then; in this camp it now seemed brash and ostentatious when worn amid thousands of heirlooms and hand-me-downs, scraped and patched and rebuilt after numerous campaigns.
Men received their panoplies from their fathers; some were decades old, rebuilt and repaired time and again. The bronze breast-plates could be older still. But Karnos’s father had never been prosperous enough to belong to the ranks of armoured spearmen that formed the backbone of every citizenry.
I am Karnos of Machran, he told himself. It may be that I am not much of a soldier, but it is I who have created this army, and I hold it together. They sneer at me as the slave-dealer from the Mithannon, but it is I who am cheered by the mob of Machran. I have done what none of them could do, for all their noble heritage and their bloodlines and their ancient heirlooms.
He turned around. Some two dozen men faced him, all in full armour, six in the Curse of God. This was the military Kerusia of the Avennan League, and it comprised the fighting leadership of the greatest of the Macht cities. They were all here today in some form or other: Ferai, Avensis, Arienus, even great Pontis from the south, whose membership had been for decades considered purely nominal. They had all brought their citizens to this hill, perhaps not as many as they might have, but they were here.
Kassander was here too, and his smile warmed Karnos, brought him upright in his heavy war-harness. He had never before been so conscious of his girth: amid these lean, ascetic-looking aristocrats he looked soft; even Periklus of Pontis, twenty years older, seemed more athletic.
But he spoke for Machran here, and the seven thousand spears she had sent to the field. His city was more populous than any two of the others combined, and had once been the seat of the ancient monarchy that had ruled all the Macht. The names of those kings had been lost to history, but the legend of them remained, as did the pre-eminence of Machran itself.
“The enemy moves,” Karnos said, raising his voice to be heard over the marching phalanxes on the slopes below. The tents were emptying like a decanted jug, pouring a sea of men out onto the plain of Afteni.
“Last night it seems he conducted a reconnaissance of our camp. Today, he has set his troops in motion. It would seem that his numbers have been exaggerated; we outnumber him three to two, and what is more the ground is too soft for his cavalry. The odds favour us, brothers” – how that word almost stuck in his throat – “and while not all the promised city levies have yet joined us” – he paused, looking his sombre audience up and down with a hint of accusation, a note of disappointment – “we have the power here to defeat this Corvus where he stands. He has made a mistake, one which we must make fatal.”
“You mean to fight here?” Glauros of Ferai asked. “Today?”
“Today.”
“The ground may be bad for horses, but it is too wet for spears also,” Ulfos of Avensis said. “Can you see our morai advancing through that muck?”
Kassander spoke up.
“Corvus is a soldier of great talent. His strength is in manoeuvre. His troops are better drilled than ours and thus more flexible. We must bog him down and bring our numbers to bear.
“This place, at this time, we can rule his cavalry out of the equation, and we cannot be sure of doing that somewhere else, or at some other time. We have a unique chance here. Citizen levies put their heads down and push; it is almost all they are trained to do. We do that here, and our numbers will soak up anything he can throw at us. We have the soldiers of twenty different cities here who have never fought together before – brothers, we cannot let this thing get complicated.