second of the Dogsheads, these were perhaps his closest friends, if one did not count the King himself. Fornyx had fought at Rictus’s shoulder for going on twenty-five years, and Ardashir had saved his life at the siege of Machran.
Further along the table was dark Druze of the Igranians, who never seemed to lack a smile or a cup — usually with dice in it, not wine. He was fuller-faced than he had once been, but he could still run down a horse. It was his men who had been first into Ashdod after the walls were breached. The ensuing slaughter did not seem to have dimmed his humour.
One-eyed Demetrius, almost as old as Rictus, led the conscript spears, and was a harsh, unsmiling man who was one of the finest trainers of men Rictus had ever known. He could take a snivelling boy and make a soldier of him, in a process he had refined over the years into a model of efficiency and brutality. He was lame now, though, the legacy of a wound he had taken at the Haneikos River. He had stood in the water there and held the line while the river ran red around his knees.
Teresian sat beside him, an unlikely other half. He was a tall strawhead that a stranger might have said was Rictus’s close kin, so similar did they seem. He commanded the Shieldbearers, those spearmen who had volunteered for the army and were in the ranks for life, because they found that the life suited them.
In a previous era they would have been mercenaries, but since the world had changed they were now part of the standing army that Corvus kept in being at all times. Before his coming, a city might have maintained a professional cadre of a centon or two to train its citizens. Since the Macht had acquired a king and become a nation, that had all changed. The Shieldbearers were kept ten thousand strong at all times. Even Rictus did not know if, in this, Corvus had been inspired by the original Ten Thousand, or by the Honai of the Great King.
The last of the Marshals was a small, round-shouldered but heavily muscled man with a bald head. He did not seem like a soldier, and in fact at one time he had been Corvus’s chief scribe. This was Parmenios. He had a genius for building and engineering projects, and was even more ingenious at engineering their destruction. He was master of the siege train, which since Machran had become a permanent part of the army’s establishment.
His sprawling kingdom embraced oxen, mules and slaves by the thousand, wagons, teamsters, metal- workers, tanners, rope-makers and angular machines of war, all built to his own designs, dismantled, and reassembled every time the army came across a walled city which insisted on shutting its gates in the face of the Macht. It was his rams, catapults and siege towers which had brought down the walls of Ashdod, and which were even now being taken down and repacked within their heavy long-bedded waggons for the advance into the mountains.
That completed the list of Corvus’s high command. These men who sat at the long table sharing the wine led an army which dwarfed the one Corvus had used to unite the Macht, and more soldiers were pouring over the narrow straits between Idrios and Sinon every day.
There were no more wars in the Harukush. Corvus had left behind a garrison at Machran under Kassander, who had once been polemarch of that city’s army. The cities still trained new classes of fighting men as they always had, but these now tramped east for a stint in the overseas army instead of remaining at home, where the temptation to foment mischief might prove too much. So it was that Corvus harnessed the energies of his people, and gave them outlet in an exotic, faraway campaign.
Fornyx, unwilling to grant Corvus credit for anything, had once told Rictus that they had created a great beast which had to keep on the move to survive, eating up the world as it went.
And even to himself, Rictus had to admit that there was some justice in that.
The wine ran to their heads somewhat, for it had been a long day. Lower down the ranks, this would have produced laughter, ribaldry, meaningless boastful exchanges and fistfights, but here in Corvus’s tent these men who led so many and had seen so much simply grew more thoughtful, spoke in quiet voices among themselves, and stared at the smoothworn wood of the table.
‘Where in hell is he?’ Fornyx asked.
‘Where else?’ Ardashir smiled, his long golden face hollow-painted with smoke. ‘He’s out checking on the men one last time.’
‘Or the horses,’ Rictus added. Corvus liked to walk the horselines at the end of the day. He loved the animals as much as he loved his troops, and seemed to find in their company some kind of peace.
‘He has half my men pushing up into the foothills. They’ll be camping in the heather tonight,’ Druze said. ‘It’s like Phobos is at his heels.’
‘There are fifty thousand Kufr swarming the countryside like ants who’ve lost their hole,’ Demetrius rumbled. ‘We cannot advance while the city is still burning — it’s chaos down there.’
Teresian yawned. ‘Well, the men are happy. It was a rich city, and good pickings.’
‘Only for those who got there first,’ Fornyx told him. ‘Your greedy bastards swiped the lot, Teresian, and the fires took the rest.’
‘Fortune favours the light fingered,’ Teresian said with a smile, and finding his jug almost empty, he poured the last red drops upon the tabletop. ‘For Phobos. This was one of his days.’
‘For Phobos,’ Rictus repeated, and up and down the table they all, save Ardashir, repeated the phrase, faces suddenly sombre. The god of fear had been abroad today indeed. They had all seen the Kufr women who had thrown themselves from the walls rather than be captured.
The sentries at the tent entrance clapped their spearheads against their shields and stood straight. A lithe, boyish figure stood with the darkness behind him, the light of the lamps within the tent vanishing as it struck the black cuirass he wore. He touched one of the sentries on the shoulder, called him by name, nodded at the other as though they were old friends, and then strode into the tent.
At once, the assembled Marshals rose to their feet. The young man in the black armour stood still, and looked them up and down. He was lean as a snake, pale-skinned, with strange violet-coloured eyes that seemed almost to possess a light of their own. A silver circlet sat on his black hair, which shone with the lustre of a raven’s wing. He looked underfed, tired, and there was an old scar at the corner of one eye.
‘All hale and sound,’ he said. ‘Even you, Druze. You went over that wall so fast this morning I thought you must have had a bet on it.’ Druze grinned.
‘Rictus.’ The newcomer tugged at the neck of his cuirass. ‘Give me a hand, will you?’
Rictus helped him unfasten the wings of the cuirass and raise them, and then undid the black arrow-shaped clasp under the left arm. The cuirass came open and he lifted it, then set it upon its stand at the back of the tent.
Corvus stretched, and looked his Marshals up and down again. He seemed weary, and his strange eyes were sunk in orbits of purple flesh. But his high voice filled the tent.
‘Well, don’t tell me you’ve drunk all the wine, you dogs — Ardashir, go get the pages to bring in some more, for the love of God. And food, too — we’re all famished.’ Then he called after the tall Kufr. ‘No; water and towels. We’ll wash first. We’re not barbarians — not all of us, at any rate. Seat yourselves, brothers. It’s been a long day, and it’s not over yet, but we’ve seen off the worst of it.’
The tent came to life. More lamps were lit, the pages ran hither and thither, braziers were kindled and sticks of meat set to grill upon them. The Marshals washed and were brought clean linen and oil. Then the table was laid. Cups of glass appeared, platters of bread and fruit and a wheel of hard army cheese. More wine, the fresh green drink of the outer empire.
Corvus sat at the head of the table and it seemed that his presence among them had lifted some constraint. The tent filled with talk, and toasts were proposed, to the men, to the horses, to the wine itself. They did not speak of killing or burning or the sack of cities, but revelled in the fact that they were alive another day, with all their limbs and senses, and Antimone’s wings were beating elsewhere.
How many years since Machran — six, seven? Rictus and Fornyx had been new to this table then, feeling their way through a certain amount of hostility and resentment, slightly bewildered by the strange-eyed boy at the head of it and his vast dreams. Now Rictus knew the men around the table as well as he had known anyone in his life. There was still friction there, even conflict from time to time, but they were all harnessed to the one chariot, and the charioteer handled them with consummate skill.
Fornyx was telling one of his inexhaustible filthy stories. Most they had all heard before, but every time there
