“I thought Machran had greater reserves of food,” another said.
“They had.” It was Ulfos who spoke up now. He worried at his thumbnail like a terrier after a rat. “So many refugees came into the city from Arkadios and some of the other hinterland cities that the numbers went beyond normal reckoning. Too many mouths to feed.”
Parnon tapped the crumpled scroll against his upper lip. “How many spears can we still turn out, Ulfos?”
“Maybe three thousand, if we leave nothing behind.”
“You think we could persuade the other polemarchs to meet here? Pontis, Arienus?”
“They’ve already been beat once by Corvus, Parnon. What makes you think they’ll stake another throw of the knucklebone?”
Parnon held the scroll out. “Corvus lost a thousand men in his failed assault. He has had to detach more to hold down Arkadios, Afteni, and the other hinterland cities. He has nothing like the numbers that faced us before. If we do not try again now, then it is over for Machran.”
“If Machran falls, then no-one can stand against him,” one of the Kerusia said, an old man who banged his olive-wood walking stick on the floor with a crack. “The cities of the Planaean Coast have no armies to speak of; Minerias grows wine, not fighting men. They’re soft – useless! There’s us, the Pontines and the Arienans. That’s all the backbone left in this part of the world. By Phobos, were I young again -”
“Therones is right,” Parnon said. “All the best of the Macht fighting cities are either already gone, or were at Afteni with us. We must reassemble them -it has to be worth a try. I will go to Pontis myself.”
“Then you’d best run as fast as that brave boy with the bloody feet,” old Therones barked, and he banged his stick again.
North, along the ancient caravan trails which ran in the hollows of the hills and followed the fastest path like the flow of water. The roads were brown now, rutted with hardened mud, and there were few people upon them at this dark heart of the year.
The southern hinterland of Machran had not yet seen the host of Corvus in all its might, but they had endured the foraging parties he sent out to keep his army fed, and the people of the small farms and towns south of Machran had marvelled at the sight of the Companions on their tall black Kefren horses, beasts bred from the Niseians that bore the Great King himself.
The Kufr who rode them spoke Machtic, after a fashion, and sometimes they even paid for the grain they took and the animals they herded away. They never cleaned out a district entirely, but left the seed-corn and the makings of a new flock or herd behind when they left.
The small farmers of the plain about Gast and Nemasis and Avennos did not quite know what to make of them; they possessed better discipline than the citizen armies that had tramped over their lands from time immemorial, and their outlandish appearance lent them a kind of alien glamour.
There were those who grew hot-headed at the thought of Kufr looting the country of the Macht, but for the most part these kept their thoughts to themselves, as did so many in these days.
North again along the ancient caravan trail, and the land grew empty. The foraging parties of Corvus would find nothing to glean here, for Karnos had already stripped the country bare in preparation for the siege, and the local people had fled their farms rather than starve. What had once been well-tilled farmland was now bare and sere, and scattered houses lay empty to the rain and snow.
And finally the city itself, the centre of the winter world, a subject of conversation in every wineshop from Sinon to Minerias.
Machran had always been a crowded city, even before the siege, but with the addition of the refugees who had followed their retreating spearman rather than live in their own occupied cities, the condition of the place had deteriorated. What open spaces that existed within the walls had over the weeks been transformed from parkland and gardens to shanty-towns, and thousands lived in cobbled together shacks packed into every space available.
The first deaths had begun. Not the normal everyday passing of the old and the very young, but deaths caused by sickness and exposure. The old died as they always had, but they died in greater numbers, unable to afford food or firewood at the inflated prices now soaring all over the city. The Kerusia had tried to stamp out profiteering, and hanged the worst offenders from a gallows newly erected near the Amphion, but a thriving black market existed in the Mithannon and was too widely patronised to be shut down.
The Kerusia met infrequently now, and when it did there was little Karnos asked of them that they did not agree to. A council of older men with their wisdom and their insight might be a fine thing in time of peace, but in wartime hope withered in the old more quickly than the young.
In most respects the city was ruled by himself and Kassander, with help from Murchos and Tyrias. Due legal process was quietly set aside for the duration, and the edicts of the quartet went unquestioned, backed up as they were by all the fighting men of the city.
The ground barley and oats that were held in the city granaries were doled out once a week in the open area around the Amphion where the assembly had usually been convened in happier times. Now it was a fight to keep the hungry people in line, and the gravelled walkways were becoming ever more constricted, hemmed in by the jerry-built slums of the refugees from Arkadios.
The ground in the Avennan Quarter had always been low-lying, and soon it became infamous for the miasma which hung around it, the effluent from thousands of people living more or less in the open, squatting to relieve themselves wherever they could find a quiet corner.
Karnos went everywhere in a nondescript box chair now, borne by four of his most trusted slaves. When he walked on the streets openly he would not get a hundred paces before some woman would be holding her sick baby up to him and shrieking. So he went through the streets of Machran – his city -looking out from behind a twitching curtain while the slaves negotiated a way through the febrile crowds, aided by a file of spearmen who were unafraid to use their shields to bowl the stubborn or bloody-minded out of the way.
He watched as day by day the great capital of the Macht, with its towering marble buildings and soaring domes, became a cesspool of the desperate and the wicked. Little could be done about public order, because the spearmen were needed on the walls – even so, they had put out two major fires in the last week.
He climbed out of the box-chair in front of his house, and Polio was waiting for him, slamming the heavy doors behind him, and shutting out the close-packed chaos of the streets outside. Like water, the people seemed to gather in the hollows of the city in preference to the hilltops, and the Kerusiad Hill was quieter than the districts around the Empirion and the Amphion.
As for the Mithannon, it had become a law unto itself, and gangs were operating there with relative impunity. Not the old, well-established street-tribes of Machran, but new, disorderly, vicious bodies of desperate men who would not pick up a weapon to defend the walls, but would fight to maintain control over the few wretched alleyways they considered theirs to rule.
No doubt that was where Sertorius and his henchmen were now.
The three had broken out of the villa the day after they had arrived and had disappeared into the vastness of Machran. There was no point in trying to find them again; they would fit well into the anarchy prevailing in the Mithannon. Karnos was glad they were gone, in a way that made him feel ashamed. He had wanted the three of them dead, for the brute animals that they were, but his own part in the death of Rictus’s wife left him with dirty hands. He did not feel he had the right to sit in judgement over anyone anymore, no matter what Kassia said.
He was not the only one, either. Phaestus had joined his family in a rented villa further down the hill, and Karnos had not spoken to him since the day after his arrival in the city. He was failing fast, at any rate, coughing his lungs out of his mouth piece by piece. Antimone’s wings beat over him now, and from what Philemos had told Karnos, the old man did not seem to mind. He had led a blameless life, but had ended it with one brutal act, and seemed to feel that his painful death was punishment for it.