Corvus by Paul Kearney Page A

black-eyed bastard Druze surrounded the place with what looked like a
thousand men, then sent in word that they had you and Fornyx and were
negotiating a contract with you.”
    “They gave us safe
passage if we would follow them to their camp,” Valerian said. “By the time we
had formed up they had a thousand more on the hills outside the town, and
cavalry too. What the fuck could we do, Rictus?”
    “You could keep a
better watch,” Rictus said quietly.
    “This fellow
Corvus knows all about you,” Kesero rumbled. “Your history, your family, the
farmhouse. He must have had spies on every road from Idrios to Machran watching
out for the Dogsheads these last few months.”
    “What about the
men - how are they provisioned ?”
    “They’re being fed
by Corvus’s quartermasters. They’ve even been issued tents and a place in the
baggage train.” Valerian shook his head. “It’s all been organised, like it was
set up for us weeks ago.”
    “I believe it was,”
Rictus said. “Corvus does not like to leave things to chance. I know that much
now.”
    “So what’s the
play?” Kesero asked. “You want to try something, or are we to bow our necks to
this boy and let him fuck us up the arse?”
    Rictus looked at
the maps on the table. Everything is deliberate, he realised. He left these
here to let me see what he has done, what he has achieved and what he means to
do.
    What would this
phenomenon be like in battle, with his strange ideas, his men on horses? Once
again, the curiosity of it welled up in him.
    “How stupid would
it be, to let pride get in the way,” he murmured, touching the map table,
seeing the whole of the Macht countries laid out there before him like some
picture of history already drawn. He thought of the petty, brutal campaign of
the summer and the winter before it. The crass incompetence of the men who had
hired him. And before that, the countless little quarrels he had fought in over
the last twenty years, purposeless warfare, squalid little battles with nothing
to show for them but the dead and the maimed and the enslaved.
    How boring it had
all been.
    And he remembered
Kunaksa, the terrible glory of those days on the Goat’s Hills, fighting for the
fate of an empire. Creating a legend.
    “We could do worse
things,” he said, musing aloud. He regarded his two junior centurions with one
eyebrow lifted. “You look like shit. How long have you been here?”
    “Five days,”
Valerian said with a nervous grin. “We’ve been keeping ourselves to ourselves.”
    “Clean yourselves
up - I want you in scarlet by the time we sit down with this fellow’s officers.
We’re not going to look like some vagrant bandits in front of him.”
    “The same goes for
the men,” Fornyx added sternly, but there was a light in his eye. “We’re
professionals - this fellow Corvus, he’s just a gifted amateur.”
     
    The officers of the amateur’s army
trooped in later that evening, as the campfires of the host began to brighten
in the blue rain-shimmered dusk. Trestle tables had been set up, with narrow
benches lining the sides.
    A group of
beardless boys waited on the diners. They were not slaves, and in fact held
themselves with a peculiar nonchalance. They watched Rictus and his centurions
with open curiosity.
    The others were
more guarded. These were mostly young men, Valerian’s age. Corvus introduced
them as the food was placed up and down the table without ceremony. Plain army
fare: black bread, salted goat meat, yellow cheese and oil and vinegar to help
it down. The wine was local; Rictus had drunk it a thousand times before.
Apparently the best vintages were saved for special guests and occasions.
    Druze was there,
as chieftain of the Igranians, and a broad shouldered strawhead named Teresian
was named as general of Corvus’s own spears. Looking at his face, Rictus saw
himself twenty years before, raw-boned, grey-eyed and withdrawn.
    An older man,
perhaps in his thirties, was named as