Eunion and Garin shouldered Aise aside, hefted their spears, and stood to meet the incomers. Two of the strangers held back, and the taller yelled, “Alive! There is no need for killing here!”
Garin charged like a bull, knocked aside an aichme with the deftness of a man who has faced down wild boar, and thrust his own spear into the belly of the man in front of him. There was a high pitched gurgling cry, and the man fell to his knees. The spear went down with him, clutched by his intestines. The other men roared with fury. A spearhead flicked out and transfixed Garin through the eye. He fell backwards, off the blade, a bright arc of blood in the air following his body to the ground.
Aise scrabbled for his weapon, but was kicked in the ribs once, twice -
“Fucking cunt,” her attacker snarled.
Eunion barrelled into him, smashing the shaft of his spear into the man’s face, thumping the butt of it into the chest of a second. The third stabbed him at the base of the spine, grunting with the effort of the thrust. Eunion fell to his knees, startled. He looked down at Aise as she lay gasping for breath in the snow.
“This is not -”
Two more spearheads were pushed into him. One was thrust so hard it exited his chest, a grotesque spike under his chiton. He looked down at it in utter bewilderment. Then the man behind him set his foot in Eunion’s back and booted him off the end of the spear. He fell over Aise, warm, twitching, his blood hot and coppery over her.
She heard Rian shriek and tried to rise, pushing Eunion to one side. His eyes were still moving and his mouth opened, but nothing came out except the smell of the onion he had eaten for breakfast. His face went still.
Someone kicked Aise again, hard in the back.
“Stay down there, bitch.”
She tried to rise regardless. Rian was screaming, and she could hear Ona sobbing. The man set a boot on her breasts and leant on her. He looked down, a black shadow against the blue sky.
“Nice looking cunt, Sertorius. Things are looking up.”
“Keep her there. Adurnos, go check the house. How’s Fars?”
“He’s dead. That fucking slave killed him, and that bald fucker broke my nose.” “Makes you prettier. Now, go do as I say. Let the filly loose; she won’t leave the mare.”
Aise heaved for breath, the man’s foot crushing it out of her.
“Their own fault, Phaestus – don’t you give me that look. They came at us first, so fair’s fair. Anyway, we have what we came for.”
Phaestus? Aise scrabbled through the white panic in her mind.
“Phaestus?” she croaked aloud.
“Get your foot, off her, Sertorius. I’ll see to her.” An older man’s voice, familiar.
“Leave that girl alone!” Another voice shouted, a boy’s yell raised in outrage.
“Philemos – get the daughters, bring them to me.”
There was a cry inside the farmhouse, and Aise heard Styra scream. The men laughed and whooped.
She closed her eyes. Setting out her hand she touched Eunion’s head, the feather-soft tendrils of white hair about the ears. Her eyes burned. But she would not weep.
A shadow over her, a new one that did not smell as bad as the last.
“Aise, let me help you up.”
She laboured to her feet, and Rian was hugging her, white face streaked with tears. Ona was clinging to her skirts, silent, empty-eyed with her thumb in her mouth.
She knew this man in front of her: a friend of Rictus, an important figure in Hal Goshen. She knew him as vain and proud and full of himself, but a man of probity and wit. A guest-friend. He had eaten at her table. He had drunk wine with Eunion, whose corpse now lay on the snow between them.
Eunion -
Her face hardened. “Phaestus,” she said, and her voice was steady, as cold as the stone in the frozen river. “What is this evil you do here?”
There had been something like remorse on his face – dismay at least. Now that fled. His face matched hers, stone for stone.
“I revisit on the family of Rictus the evil he has done mine,” he said.
“What has my husband done to you, his guest friend?” Aise asked, and her voice cracked on the last word.
“He has made us ostrakr, robbed us of everything we had and set us on the roads like vagabonds. He has brought my city to servitude and shame. And all for a mercenary’s purse.”
“Hal Goshen?” Aise asked, shaking her head.
“Corvus now owns my city, like a paid-for whore.”
Aise looked down at Eunion’s body. She wanted to take the old man in her arms, to kiss his eyes shut. For twenty years he had been like a father to her, a more constant companion than the husband who had brought them here. Now he lay like slaughtered meat in the snow. His half-eaten onion was still on the table inside.
The tears brimmed up and burned like acid in her eyes.
“Did Rictus do this to you?” she asked simply, and opened her hands to the dead man.
“This was unforeseen, an accident,” Phaestus said.
“I had not meant it to be like this.”
A shriek from inside the house. Styra’s voice.
The young man standing beside Phaestus looked stricken. “Father, we must stop them.”
“She’s only a slave,” Phaestus said.
“But-”
“No!” he roared, face flushed red. “Be silent, Philemos. The world works like this – as well you see it first hand at last. If you can’t hold your tongue then go and get the mules – not another word!”
Rian had stopped sobbing. She knelt in the bloody snow and closed Eunion’s eyes, then bent and kissed him as Aise had wanted to do. She straightened.
“I know you,” she said to Phaestus. “So does my father. When he hears of what you have done here he will find you, and he will kill you. This I promise.”
Her eyes were grey, like Rictus’s, and in them was some of the same wild fury. Phaestus stared back at her a moment. His mouth opened. Then he swung his arm and back-handed her across the face. Rian tumbled into the snow. Aise knelt at once and gathered her into her arms. Ona let out shrill scream.
“Sertorius! – get out here! Sertorius!”
The gap-toothed brigand came out of the farmhouse with a wineskin in one hand, grinning. “Got everything you want, Phaestus? Who’d have thought there’d be such fine flesh up here in the arse of nowhere?”
“Take these three and tie them up, hands in front of them. But let them get some things out of the house first – travelling clothes. And take whatever you can from the place in the way of food.” “Whoa there, my fine friend – aren’t we going to hole up here for a day or two? That was the plan. We could be pretty snug here; they have a whole winter’s supplies squirreled away.”
“Take what you need and what won’t slow us down – we move on at once.”
“Listen, chief -”
“Do as I say, Sertorius, if you want that big welcome in Machran.”
“What of the dead meat lying here?” Sertorius asked, surly now.
“Throw them into the house, and then burn it.”
Aise moved through the familiar rooms in a fog. In a normal, everyday tone she told Rian to dress in her best woollens, and the fur-lined cloak her father had brought back from Machran.
Everything inside the house had been kicked over and picked through, things broken for no reason. The little aquamarine pot in Aise’s room was smashed in blue shards upon the floor. Rictus’s battered old farm sandals lay to one side.
I wish you were here, husband, she thought. Though it is you that has brought this upon us.
In the back room, Styra lay naked and sprawled like a broken doll. Her face was beaten into a swollen fruit, a pulp of bone and blood, and she had been stabbed below her left breast.