Even through the haze of his exhaustion, Rictus found himself wondering; close to what?
Karnos of Machran is dead.
Karnos has been slain on the field of battle.
Karnos died heroically – no, no, damn it, that’s not it.
He lay in the wet crushing darkness and listened to the rain tap on the stiffened bodies which lay atop him. He was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life before. In fact it seemed to him that he had never really understood the true nature of thirst before. When the rain came he opened his mouth and let it trickle in, foul-flavoured from the corpses on top of him, but wet.
Life.
Karnos is alive, in the midst of the dead.
Men had gone back and forth across the battlefield in the aftermath of the fighting, looking for their own wounded, for enemy wounded to slay, for some trinket which might make their labour worthwhile, or perhaps a better weapon – or, if the gods were smiling, one of those miraculous finds, a black cuirass.
The expensive armour which had so impressed Karnos in the confines of his villa, he now knew to be inferior, gimcrack shite, and these men had seen it as such also. That had saved his life, for they had not tried to strip it from his very much alive and terrified body. And thus he lay here with his fellow citizens sheltering him from the rain.
And pinning him to the ground.
His arm was numb from the shoulder down, and he could not bring himself to look at the black shaft which protruded grotesquely from his flesh. It was a Kufr arrow, fired from a Kufr bow, created by a Kufr fletcher in some far-flung portion of the world which knew nothing of him. And yet it was now inside his flesh, intimate with the very meat of him. All that way, across the sea, in some strange foreign creature’s quiver, then laid against that bow, to flash through the cold air of the Harukush, and end up inside him, Karnos of Machran.
He started at his task again; that which had preoccupied him since the fall of darkness and the departure of the battlefield scavengers. He was inching the bodies of the dead off his own in increments a child could measure with their fingers. In this he showed a patience which he had previously not known he possessed.
As he did, his mind wandered. He remembered squatting in the heat and dust of Tinsmith’s Alley in the Mithannon, scratching at the scabbed-over burns on his bare feet where the sparks from his father’s hand-forge had landed.
He was seven years old, and a passing aristocrat in a himation as white as snow had dropped him a copper obol. He was staring at the little green coin, which would buy him a stick of grilled meat from a foodstall, or a pear-sized cup of wine from one of the shops at the bottom of the alley. It was the first time in his life he had been given something for nothing, and he liked the feeling.
One of the corpses toppled over, as stiff and unlike a living man as an overstuffed sack of flour. Karnos smiled, grunting at the pain, but swallowing it down, as he had swallowed down the beatings he had received as a child. Even then, he had known his father loved him, but knew also that he’d had to lash out on occasion at the nearest thing to hand.
If it were not Karnos, it would be one of the starving strays that littered the city alleyways, and Karnos pitied them even more than himself. They were used and discarded by the slumdwellers who had spawned them, feral little beasts who could barely speak, whose sex was indeterminate, whose eyes held nothing but fear and greed. If they survived they would grow into whores and thieves and beggars, and beget the curse of their existence on another generation. Thus were the slums of Machran renewed.
Karnos began to breathe more easily. He was feeling the cold now, and a warm lassitude came creeping over his battered frame.
They think I have so many slaves because I love lording it over them; me, the boy from the Mithannon, making his own little kingdom. Kassander knows better.
I keep them slaves to protect them. No man or woman wearing my collar will ever be abused in Machran. They are safe with me. Polio knows that. He knows me better than anyone.
He wanted to shout for Polio now, to tell him that his bed was damp, that he needed an extra coverlet. He raised his hand to push back the wet covering that was stealing his thoughts away, and his hand settled on the cold wax-hard face of the dead man whose body lay upon his own. The jolt of that snapped him out of his reverie, and the pain came flooding in, clearing his head. He ground his jaw shut and pushed the chilled meat away from his face, found a leg loosened, and ploughed himself through the mud on his back.
He was freezing cold, but free, staring up at the invisible rain, the teeming dark. How far to Machran? It must be over a hundred pasangs.
Machran, the sun of his world. He loved his city more than he would ever love any wife. One could walk there upon stones that had been shaped in the dawn of his race’s existence. It was rumoured that below the circle of the Empirion were caverns in which the first of the Macht had lived, sealed chambers which housed the dust and dreams of millennia.
My city.
The rain was easing, and in the tattered dark of the sky he could see glimpses of the stars peering through the cloud as the wind picked up and began to harry them away. Phobos was long set, but the pink glow of Haukos could still just be made out, and to one side, Gaenion’s Pointer, showing the way north. He fixed it in his mind, and some almost unconscious part of him made his fist dig a hole in the mud pointing north.
I think my father taught me that. He lived his life in a half dozen narrow streets, and yet he knew about the stars – how is that?
Because even the poor can look up past their next meal. Even the drunkard pauses now and then to cast his face to the sky and hope, and wonder.
We are beaten, Karnos thought. He beat us fair and fully, outnumbered and in the muck of winter when his horses could not run.
I should have offered Rictus more. His men were in front of me today – or yesterday – his Dogsheads. Corvus did that on purpose. What a marvellous bastard he must be. I wish I knew him.
I hope Kassander got away.
And with that thought the rags of the present came back to him. The League he had spent years building was cast to the wind, and the flower of Machran had been slaughtered here, around him.
How many died here today?
He sat up, and the pain became something quite novel in its intensity. He had heard old campaigners say that the worse the wound, the less the pain. He hoped it was true.
Polio, I need a bath. Who knew that war would stink so bad?
Karnos of Machran stood up, a fat man in a gaudy cuirass, barefoot and slathered in mud and blood, a black arrow poking from his right shoulder. He was the only thing moving upon the flooded mere which had been a battlefield.
The Plain of Afteni, they will call it, he thought, for Afteni is not twenty pasangs away along the road. That is where they will be, those who are alive. That is where I must be, if I am to live. He began walking west.
Paul Kearney
Corvus
THIRTEEN
Phaestus – one-time Speaker of Hal Goshen, until Rictus had shown up at his gates – had always been a man who prided himself on his appearance. He liked the attention of women; his wife, Thandea, had been a noted beauty in her day and was still a handsome matron. More to the point, she was an amenable adornment to his life who kept his household running smoothly in conjunction with his steward, leaving Phaestus to consider the weightier things in life, be they the running of a great city or the pursuit of other men’s wives.
That was all in the past.
To become ostrakr was a blackened distinction within the Macht world. It meant a man had no city, no citizenship, and hence no redress for wrongs done to him.