Free Corvus by Paul Kearney Page A

be
argued that a man whose farm is burning is more apt to listen to reason,”
Fornyx said.
    Corvus turned his
strange pale eyes upon him. “I have found that there are two ways of dealing
with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in
between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.”
    “Your world is a
stark and simple place,” Fornyx said.
    “I sleep well at
night,” Corvus retorted with a grin.
    Rictus listened to
their exchange without a word. He was thinking of Hal Goshen. For twenty years
he had lived close by - Andunnon was barely sixty pasangs away, up in the
Gosthere hills. He knew the men inside those tufa walls, had sat at their
tables and drunk their wine. Phaestos, the Speaker of their kerusia, had hired
him more than once, had eaten in Andunnon, hunted with him. He and Aise had
been to the theatre there, to see Ondimion acted. Her scarlet dress had
been bought in the city agora.
    It was from the
port of Goshen that Rictus had taken ship for the Empire, so long ago. The sea
had been black, then, with the ships of the Ten Thousand.
    He had no wish to
see this city besieged, assaulted, or watch its people broken and enslaved.
This was too close to home, to the memories that spanned the web of his life.
    “Your reasoning is
sound,” he told Corvus. “Hal Goshen and its surrounds can muster some four
thousand fighting men, maybe two thirds of them spearmen. They have no chance.
If we inform them of that fact, then I don’t believe that it will prove difficult
to make the Kerusia open the gates.”
    Corvus nodded,
watching Rictus’s face closely. “That would be my take on it also. Of course,
it would be better if this were pointed out to them by someone they know.
Someone they trust.”
    Rictus looked down
at the hooded youth, frowning. “Indeed.”
    Fornyx broke in. “Well,
what say you we go take a look at this army of yours first? I want to see what
all the fuss has been about.”
     
    An army’s camp usually announced
itself on the wind, with the stink of men’s excrement. That, and woodsmoke. As
they tramped down from the high land to the plain below they were able to take
in the smell on the breeze, and at once it brought back to Rictus a spate of
memories.
    In all the
fighting he had done since returning with the Ten Thousand over two decades
before, he had never been part of a force greater than two or three thousand
men. The inter-city conflicts of the Macht were small-scale affairs, conducted
almost to a kind of ceremony. Sieges such as that of his last campaign were unusual.
    The fighting men
of two cities would line up in the summer, well before harvest-time, and crash
into each other with all the tactical refinement of two rutting slags. Often
the battlefields they fought upon had been fought over by their fathers and grandfathers,
cockpits of war since time immemorial. One side would win, one would lose, and
the victor would dictate terms. It was rare that such an encounter would lead
to the extinction of a city as a political entity - the Macht considered it
vaguely impious to destroy a polity entirely.
    There were special
cases, however. Rictus’s own city, Isca, had been extinguished by a combination
of her neighbours because Isca had drilled her citizens like mercenaries and
made war on others with the intention of subjugating them entirely to her will,
rendering them her vassals. To the Macht this was intolerable, unnatural. War
in the Harukush was a bloody ritual, a way to make men of boys, and enhance a
city’s riches and prestige. It was not conducted with the aim of outright
conquest.
    And now Corvus had
changed all that.
    How the hell did
he do it? Rictus wondered. Who is this boy and where does he come from? He had
so many questions, and he had not yet admitted even to himself that part of the
reason he was here was sheer, avid curiosity. He wanted to see how it had been
done.
    The camp of Corvus’s
army was huge, a sprawling scar