“He’s on his way back to Machran, it’s said. The Afteni may have surrendered, but some of the hinterland cities are sticking by the League and marching their men back with him.”
“How many?” Rictus asked.
“Enough to make a fight of it.”
“Looks like our triumphal entry into Machran will be problematic,” Fornyx said, and spat into the mud.
“What does he mean to do, Druze?” Rictus asked.
“What do you think? He’s Corvus. He’d chase them to hell if they were still thumbing their noses at him. You mark my words, brothers, before the month is out we’ll be sitting in front of Machran looking at those big white walls and wondering how to get on top of them.”
“You can’t assault Machran, it’s never been done. It’s the strongest city in the world,” Fornyx protested.
Druze grinned. “All the more reason for him to try.” He patted Fornyx on the shoulder. “Cheer up! This is what it takes to make history.”
The army slogged onwards. Rolling out of their sodden blankets and tireless, cheerless camps well before dawn, the men were on the road while still chewing on salt goat and mouldy biscuit. They would march all day, though march was a euphemistic term for their mudsucking, agonising progress.
Then, as night fell, they would go into camp -another euphemism for lying huddled together in knee-deep mud with their cloaks and blankets drawn round their shoulders, their feet spoked towards whatever pitiable fire they could coax into life through the rain.
Corvus shared it all with them. The tents had been left behind with the baggage train, but a team of mules carried his along with the main body. He had it set up each evening with braziers burning bright and hot within, and he would spend part of every night rousing up those who seemed worst off with the flux or the cold, or carrying old wounds, and he would set them on clean straw in his tent, ply them with his own stock of wine, and a store of stories no-one had known he possessed. He did not seem to sleep at all.
The men who were brought to his tent for the night were few in number, considering the size of the army, but they would go back to their comrades with fresh heart, telling of how the general of them all had sat down beside them and poured them wine, piled their plates with fresh meat and bread, and taken the time to hear the stories of their lives.
Good news and bad travels faster through an army than a man can run, and these efforts on Corvus’s part put new heart into the men. It was deftly done, and Rictus, for one, marvelled not only at Corvus’s handling of his many thousands, but at the stamina of the man, who never admitted to weariness, never lost his temper.
Youngsters from Hal Goshen, Goron and Afteni, conscripted into an army which had extinguished their city’s independence, would look up to find the man who had done it all to them enquiring after the state of their feet and their stomachs. After a half hour’s banter, Corvus would slap them on the shoulder as though they were old campaigners he had shared a thousand campfires with, and disappear.
They would be envied by their peers, pressed for stories of the encounter. They would begin to feel part of the massive bristling, brutal mass that was the army around them.
The army needed that boost to its cohesiveness. More and more of the spearmen in the ranks were now conscripts. Some of them had even fought against Corvus in the last battle. His treatment of conquered cities might be lenient by Macht standards, but the levies he imposed upon them were rigidly enforced. Demetrius, marshal of the conscript phalanx, was not a man to take no for an answer. When he enforced a levy, he split up the city centons of the men who had been pressed into service, scattering them throughout his morai, breaking up the identities of cities in the ranks, embedding loyalty within the formations he created to replace them.
It was an efficient but harsh process, and almost every morning when the army moved on they left behind them a gibbet with bodies swinging from it. To be left for carrion was the worst thing a Macht could imagine happening to him after death, and the lesson was quite deliberate – and it had been sanctioned by Corvus, the same smiling fellow who came round the campfires at night enquiring after the state of his new conscripts’ feet.
He appeared at Rictus’s campfire one night, walking in noiselessly from the teeming dark like an apparition.
About the struggling flames were all the usual suspects of Rictus’s acquaintance, plus a few more.
Valerian was there, and Kesero, as always; Fornyx, and Druze, who often dropped by with gossip once the army bedded down for the night. Rictus had come to like the dark Igranian, and he and Fornyx had become like bantering brothers, unable to say anything to one another that was not in some sense a goad. Each knew it, each enjoyed it. They were all listening intently to a particularly vile story that Fornyx was telling, interrupted with great relish every so often by Druze, when they realised that Corvus was just on the brim of the firelight, watching them, his face a white mask with a smile painted across it.
“Fornyx, don’t look at me like that. I’m not your mother.”
“Not with those hips,” Fornyx shot back. “Lord high and mighty – why don’t you pull up a knee and have some wine – I found a skin of it on the road today. It tastes like piss, but so does the water we’ve been drinking this last week.”
Corvus squirted wine into his mouth and swallowed. “That’s an Afteni vintage, if I’m any judge.”
“I think it followed the army a while before it lay down to die,” Fornyx said with a wink.
Corvus handed over the skin. “Here and there, if a skin of wine goes wandering, there’s no harm I suppose. So long as it does not become a habit. This army is made up of soldiers, not thieves.” He smiled.
The lazy drunken light left Fornyx’s eye in an instant. He sat upright, his splayed fingers sinking into the mud as he rose. “Thief is an ugly word. Not one to be thrown around lightly.”
The men around the fire fell silent, watching. The rain was hissing about the logs farthest from the flames, and beyond them the hum of other conversations about other fires went on, a background murmur. But here it seemed as though a silent bell had been struck, and they were listening to its echoes.
Druze broke it. “Tell the truth, I think I pissed in that wineskin earlier. My cock is so shrivelled these days, the neck just about fit. You ever tried to fuck a wineskin, Rictus?”
Rictus smiled, still watching Fornyx and Corvus. “Not me. I’m hung like a donkey. Ask Fornyx – you ever wonder why he’s such a bow-legged bastard?”
The men about the campfire lit up with laughter, and even Fornyx threw his head back with the rest of them. Rictus and Corvus caught one another’s eye, each smiling falsely with their mouths.
“Chief,” Rictus said, rising with a loud groan, “let me escort you away from these degenerates. They’re ill-educated runts. The best part of them ran down their mother’s leg.”
Another chorus, laughter, feigned outrage. The skin tossed about the campfire. Rictus took Corvus by the arm; his bicep was as slender as that of a girl, but made of steel wire.
“Let’s walk the camp, you and I.”
Corvus came with him, the rain falling on them both in the darkness. Rictus was as drunk as cheap wine and short commons could make him. He set his good arm about the younger man’s shoulders, and for some inexplicable reason thought that moment of Rian, and how he had kissed her hair in the upland pasture while they sat there with Eunion talking about the slight young man now walking beside him.
I’m getting old, he thought. Those tall enough to bear the spear are now young enough to be my sons. This boy here, he is a thing of genius, and he teeters on the edge of disaster. I see it now.
Phobos, how I miss them.
The drink set his mind running down courses he would as soon as left alone. He gripped Corvus tighter.