Corvus Read Free

the endless marching through the dust, the incompetent
wrangling of the men who were his employers. Blood blazing scarlet in the
withered grass. A man with his guts spilled out, trying vainly to keep the
flies off them. His men singing as they slew. Rictus closed his eyes for a
second.
    “It was nothing
much. A lot of running around in the hills about Nemasis. Scarcely real
soldiering at all.”
    “What about your
men? Are they - are they all alive?”
    “Not all of them,
my honey. That is war; not everyone can come back from it. But we sang the
Paean over the pyres of the dead, and gave the losers back their kin, and so
settled the thing.”
    “And is Valerian
all right?”
    Rictus looked at
her with eyes only half amused. “Valerian is all of a piece, the same as ever.
Don’t tell me you still carry a lamp for him, my girl?”
    Rian blushed, and
her face seemed to bloom like a flower. “I was curious, is all.”
    “Well, you may see
him up close ere the winter comes. He and Kesero have promised to visit before
the snow closes the passes.”
    “Really?” Her face
lit up - a daisy touched by the sun. She reached up and put her arms about his
neck and kissed his scarred chin.
    “Really. Now get
to bed, and take your sister with you. It’s near the middle of the night.”
    “In the morning I’ll
show you a new cave where Eunion says the bears sleep.”
    “Yes, you do that
- now off to bed.”
     
    Over the years the farmhouse had
been enlarged and extended. Once it had been no more than a long room with a
rude firepit and a single crooked doorway covered by a flap of goatskin. That
had been in the early days. Back then Rictus and Fornyx and Eunion had clinked
up the walls themselves, stone by raw stone, and used willow withies to support
a turf roof. Aise had cut the turves herself, handing them up to the men as
they perched on the walls above.
    That first winter
had been so cold that all four of them had huddled under the sheepskins
together at night, so close to the fire that the wool was singed black, and
wolves had prowled and snuffled just outside the door.
    Since then, the
place had expanded with almost every year - near on twenty of them. And in that
time, Rictus had fought in fifteen campaigns, missing all but a handful of
summers and springs here.
    Andunnon, he called this valley of his - The Quiet Water - for as the river curled
round the glen bottom beyond the house, so it broadened in its bed and became a
sleepier, brown thing with trout as tawny as freckles flitting shadowlike in
the sunlit depths. It had also been the name of his childhood home, far north
and cast of here, near the burnt ruins of what had once been a city.
    Now, Andunnon had
blossomed from a single stone hut into a farm proper. They had cut back the
brush and tamed the tangle of wild olive trees on the western slopes, planted
vines to the east where the glen caught the best of the sun, and harvested
barley in the flat rich soil of the valley floor. Bread, wine, and olives, the
trinity of life, they had made here. And children, to carry that life on after
them. It was more than Rictus had once ever dreamed of having. And it had cost
no blood to build.
    The farmhouse had
annexes and extensions grafted onto it now: rooms for slaves and visitors, and
for Fornyx, whose home this was also. It had become an ungainly, ill-planned
sprawl of stone and turf and reed-thatch which nonetheless seemed as much part
of the landscape as the river which bounded it. The farm had settled into the
earth itself, part of the seasons as a man’s hand is part of his arm. No matter
how far Rictus marched, and how many men’s eyes he took the light from, this,
here, was where he belonged, and where his spirit found what peace his memories
allowed.
    Fornyx had
staggered off to bed, the potent yellow wine singing in his head, and now
Rictus joined Aise by the dying fire, the hounds lying sprawled and content at
their feet. She had snuffed out the lamps, all