We all think more and more in terms of death and the gods these days, Karnos thought. We flick out our libations and make light of it when we have wine inside us and the wolf is far from the door, but break down our world a little, let us glimpse the eyes watching us from beyond the firelight, and we call on the gods like children wailing for a parent.
“Any trouble?” he asked Polio automatically.
“No, master. The guard’s day shift was just relieved. There is nothing to report.”
Twice in the last fortnight, prowling mobs had sallied up the hill looking for the house of Karnos, to let him know just how much they resented his mishandling of the city’s administration. Twice, Machran spearmen had beaten them back, and killed several of their own citizens in the process.
Law and order, Karnos thought. In the end it all comes down to who has the biggest stick.
“Have we visitors?”
“Master Philemos is here, and the lady Kassia is waiting for you. Polemarch Kassander sent word by runner that he will be here for dinner.”
“Dinner!” Karnos laughed. “Very well. Thank you, Polio.”
He looked in on Rictus’s children. They had a suite of rooms at their disposal, and he had hired a quiet, middle-aged Arkadian woman to look after the youngest.
She was kneeling on the floor now with the little russet-haired girl, Ona, and the two of them were assembling wooden blocks in front of a meagre fire.
For weeks now, the child had withdrawn from the world. She cried silently night and day, and would speak to no-one except her sister, but would become absorbed at the sight of a trinket or crude toy, crooning over it for hours.
The room was warm, at least, and there were a couple of lamps burning. He met the eyes of the nurse and shook his head when she made to lift the little girl for him to look at, then walked past the doorway without a sound, feeling like a thief in his own home.
Rian, Rictus’s beautiful eldest daughter, was in the inner courtyard, sat on a bench with a blanket round her shoulders. Philemos stood in front of her, chattering away. He was quite a talker when he got going, Philemos. Karnos liked the lad; he had courage, though he would never be physically formidable, and he was clearly besotted with Rian.
Karnos stood silently behind a pillar and watched the pair of them. Rian’s skin was pale as a hawthorn bloom, and her ordeal had brought out the exquisite bones of her face. Sadness made her features even finer. Philemos had told Karnos of their journey to Machran, and he knew there was a strength in Rian that matched that of her dead mother.
You had a fine family, Rictus, Karnos thought. You should have kept out of all this, stayed in the hills and left your spear by the door. How could a man not be happy with what you had?
Rian looked up and saw him there. Philemos paused in mid flow, and gave her his hand. They came towards him side by side, and Karnos suddenly realised that the affection was not all one way.
It was Kassia who had drawn their eyes. He could smell her perfume as she came up behind him and slid her arm through his.
“The master of the house returns. How went the day, Karnos?”
He set his hand on hers, smiled at Philemos and Rian.
“It goes much better now than it did. What say you we all take a seat by the fire, and I’ll tell you about it?”
TWENTY-THREE
The foraging party was two hundred strong, strung out along two pasangs of track, its column broken up by lumbering waggons and the braying stubbornness of a mule train. At its head a knot of horsemen rode with their cloaks pulled up over their heads, and the tall Niseians plodded below them in gaunt doggedness, their coats staring and as muddy as the harness of their masters.
“Old Urush here is near the end of his rope,” one of them said in Kefren, patting the corded neck of his mount. “It’s been nothing but yellow grass and parched oats for him these three weeks past.”
“The Macht eat horses,” another said. “They think nothing of it. How can a race pretend to civilization when they will eat a horse?”
“You might be glad of a taste of it ere we’re done,” a third said, a grin splitting the golden skin of his long face. “Ardashir, what say you?”
Their leader reined in and held up one long-fingered hand. “Shoron, you have good eyes – look south to where the track goes round the spur of the hill, maybe seven pasangs.”
“I can’t see a thing. The rain is like a cloud in this country.”
“Wait a moment, it will shift – there. You see?”
The Kefren called Shoron dug his knees into the withers of his horse and raised himself up off the saddle. He shaded his eyes as though it were a summer day.
“Mot’s blight, that’s infantry, a column marching this way. I count… blast the rain. Maybe five thousand – the column’s at least a pasang long. Could be more.”
“Bless your sight, Shoron,” Ardashir said. He looked back at the long train of horsemen and waggons and mules behind him. His mount picked up his mood and began to lumber impatiently. He hissed at it. “Easy, Moros, you great fool.” He shook his head.
“It’s no good. We must leave the waggons – even infantry can outmarch the damn things. Bring the mules along. We must pick up the pace and get back to the city. Arkamosh, head back down the column and tell the rest. Break off back the way we came. Make all speed.”
“I thought we had all the Macht beaten or penned up in the city,” Shoron said.
“They are a stubborn people,” Ardashir replied. “Defeat does not come easy to them.”
The men at the head of the infantry column saw a fistful of horsemen in the distance, half hidden by the rain; they disappeared over the crest of a hill and were gone. The rain turned icy, and the day closed in on them. Steam rose from the men tramping along in their armour. Their shields bore the alfos sigil of Avensis, and further back in the column, the piros sigil of Pontis. They marched in their stubborn thousands, their faces set towards the north, and the siege-lines of Machran.
“Empty your pockets, gentlemen. Let’s see what we’ve all brought to the pot,” Sertorius said.
The gang about the battered table muttered and did as they were told, like hulking children obeying a schoolmaster. Onto the burn-scarred wood fell scraps of root vegetables, a rind of salted meat, cheese blue with mould and some crusts of flatbread, hard as the wood of the table itself. A pause, and Sertorius ran his eyes over them one by one. A second shower of scraps followed, much like the first.
“Now the other. Don’t hold back, brothers – we are all in this together now.”
There was a clinking little waterfall of coin. Bronze obols for the most part, but there were threads of silver in it, and at the end Bosca grinned yellow in his beard and set a single gold obol atop the pile. There was a silence as the other men about the table looked at it.
“Bosca, how in the world?” Sertorius began.
“I ventured up Kerusiad Hill last night, boss, and a fine-looking lady gave me this to escort her home.”
“You fuck her?” Adurnos asked. A professional enquiry, nothing more.
“She was older than my mother, and hardly a tooth in her head.”
“He did, then,” Sertorius said, and the table broke into laughter.
People walking by the group of men at the crossroads stopped and stared a moment at the mirth, then walked on hurriedly.
They were gathered together under a tattered cloth awning in the front of what had been a wineshop. But the shop had been looted and burnt out weeks ago, and was now little more than a shell, a fitting base of operations for Sertorius’s new venture in Machran.