Saevus Corax Deals With the Dead

Book 1: The Corax trilogy

by K.J. Parker

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Young Adult

Synopsis

The first novel in a new epic fantasy trilogy from World Fantasy Award-winner K. J. Parker.

There’s no formal training for battlefield salvage. You just have to pick things up as you go along. Swords, armor, arrows – and the bodies, of course.
 
Over the years, Saevus Corax has picked up a lot of things. Some of them have made him decent money, others have brought nothing but trouble. But it’s a living, and somebody has to deal with the dead.
  
Something else that Saevus has buried is his past. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite succeed.

For more from K. J. Parker, check out:

 

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It
A Practical Guide to Conquering the World
 

The Two of Swords

The Two of Swords: Volume One

The Two of Swords Volume Two

The Two of Swords: Volume Three

 

The Fencer Trilogy

Colours in the Steel

The Belly of the Bow

The Proof House

 

The Scavenger Trilogy

Shadow

Pattern

Memory

 

Engineer Trilogy

Devices and Desires

Evil for Evil

The Escapement

 

The Company

The Folding Knife

The Hammer

Sharps

Release date: October 3, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Lying is like farming, or draining marshland, or terracing a hillside or planting a grove of peach trees. It’s an attempt to control your environment and make it better. A convincing lie improves on bleak, bare fact, in the same way human beings improve a wilderness so they can bear to live there. In comparison, truth is a desert. You need to plant it with your imagination and water it with narrative skill until it blossoms and bears nourishing fruit. In the sand and gravel of what actually happened I grow truths of my own; not just different truths, better ones. Practically every time I open my mouth I improve the world, making it not how it is but how it should be.

In order to grow strong, healthy plants you also need plenty of manure, but that’s not a problem. According to most of the people I do business with, I’m full of it. I accept the compliment gracefully, and move on.

Rest assured, however, that everything I tell you in the pages that follow is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This is a true and accurate history of the Great Sirupat War, told by someone who was there.

A big mob of crows got up as we—

No, hang on a moment. I was going to leave it at that, but I did say I’d be honest with you, and now is as good a time as any.

People tend not to like me very much, and I can see why. They say I’m arrogant, callous, selfish and utterly devoid of any redeeming qualities; all, I’m sorry to say, perfectly true. I’m leaving out devious, because I happen to believe it’s a virtue.

Arrogant, yes; I was born to it, like brown eyes or a weak chin, and the fact that I’m still alive after everything I’ve done, with luck not usually in my favour, suggests to me that I’ve got something to be arrogant about, even if it’s only my deviousness, see above. I’m callous because I’m selfish, not because I want to be, and I’m selfish because I like staying alive, though God only knows why. People say the world would be a better place without me and I think on balance they’re right, but it’s stuck with me for a little while, as are you if you want to hear the truly thrilling story. And you do, I promise you, but unfortunately I come with it, like your spouse’s relatives.

When I started writing this, I edited myself, naturally. I neglected to record some of my more objectionable remarks and barbarous actions, because I wanted you to like me. If you don’t like me, you won’t want to read my story, and I’ll be wasting my time and a lot of forty-gulden-a-roll reed-fibre paper telling it, and the truth about the war (which actually matters) will never be known. It even crossed my mind to stick in a few not-strictly-true incidents designed to show me in a better light, because nobody would ever know, and then I’d be a lovable rogue instead of a total shit. Then I thought: stuff it. The truth, and nothing but the horrible, inconvenient truth. All those facts have got to go somewhere. You might as well have them, if they’re any use to you. I certainly don’t want them any more.

A big mob of crows got up as we walked down the hill onto the open ground where the main action had been. Crows hate me, and I don’t blame them. They rose like smoke from a fire with no flames, screaming abuse at us as they swirled round in circles before reluctantly pulling out and going wherever it is that crows go. I got the impression that they had a good mind to lodge an official complaint, or sue me for restraint of trade. All my years in the business, and they still make me shudder. Probably they remind me of me.

You don’t usually find crows in the desert; in fact, I think that particular colony is the only one. They used to live off the trash and dunghills of a large town, which was razed to the ground in some war or other thirty years ago. But the crows stayed. There are enough wars in those parts to afford them a moderate living without the need to prod and worry about in shitheaps, and for water they go to the smashed-up aqueduct, which still trickles away into the sand, now entirely for their benefit. I guess the crows figure the austerity of their lifestyle is worth it for the peace and quiet, which I’d just come along and spoiled.

I hadn’t watched the battle but I could figure out what happened from the spacing and density of the bodies. Over there, a shield wall had held off the lancers but couldn’t handle massed archers at close range; they’d broken and charged, and the hussars hidden in that patch of dead ground over there had darted in to take them in flank and rear. That was the end of them, but no big deal; they were just a diversion to bring the other lot’s cavalry assets over to the left side of the action, nicely out of the way so that the dragoons could burst out of those trees over there and roll up the heavy infantry like a carpet. After that, it was simply a matter of the losers salvaging as much as they could from the mess; not much, by the look of it. The hell with it. All the more for me.

I glanced up at the sky, which was pure blue from one side to the other. I have strong views on hot, sunny weather. I’m against it. Nobody wants to work in driving rain, naturally, but I’d rather be drenched in rainwater than sweat any time. Heavy manual labour in searing heat isn’t my idea of the good life, not to mention the flies, the seepage and the smell, and hauling dead bodies around when they’ve been cooking up in the heat isn’t good for you. This was going to be a four-day job, quite possibly five unless we could face working double shifts by torchlight. We’re used to that sort of thing, but even so. It was one of those times when I wished I’d stayed at home, or got into some other line of work.

Gombryas had been going round picking up arrows. He had a sad look on his face. “They were wearing Type Sixes,” he said, showing me a half-dozen bodkin heads, their needle points blunted or bent U-shaped by impact on steel. Poor arrows; I felt sorry for them, in a way I find it hard to feel sorry for flesh and blood. Not their fault that they’d been wasted by an idiot in a futile attempt to pierce armour. Theirs not to reason why, and we’d see them right, so that was fine.

“It’s only taxpayers’ money,” I said. He grinned. He grumbles, but he knows the score. It would be the job of his division to straighten out and repoint all those cruelly maimed arrowheads; then he’d winkle the broken shafts out of the sockets, fit new ones, replace the crushed and torn fletchings, all to the high standard our customers have come to expect from us. What Gombryas doesn’t know about arrows isn’t worth knowing. He swears blind he can recognise an arrowhead his boys have worked on when he pulls it out of some poor dead bugger in a place like this. Some of them, he says, are old friends, he’s seen them and straightened them out so many times.

The Type Sixes that had annoyed Gombryas so much were mostly in a small dip, where the hussars had rounded them up and despatched them. Personally, I like the Type Six infantry cuirass. It’s built from small, rectangular plates laced together, so all you have to do is cut the laces, fish out the damaged plates, replace them and sew the thing up again, and there you are, good as new. Buyers go mad for the stuff, though it’s a shame the various governments can’t get together and agree on a standard size for the plates. We have to carry a dozen different sizes, with variations in lace-hole placement, and occasionally you get really weird custom jobs where you have to fabricate the new plates from scratch.

Armour is Polycrates’ department, and his boys were straight on to it as usual. They’ve had a lot of practice, and it’s a treat to watch them when they get into the swing of it. One man rolls the body over onto its back, kneels down, gets his arms under the armpits and stands up, lifting the body so his mate can dive in underneath, undo the buckles and shuck the armour off in one nice easy movement, like opening shellfish except that the bit we want is the shell, not the meat. Then on to the next one, leaving the body for Olybrius’ clothes pickers and Rutilian’s boot boys. Rings, earrings, gold teeth and bracelets we leave for Carrhasio and his crew, the old timers who’ve been with the outfit for years but who can’t manage the heavy lifting like they used to. Then all that remains is for me to come round with the meat wagons. By this point, of course, heat, wildlife and the passage of time have all started to work their subtle alchemy, which is why I handle the final stage of the process myself. I wouldn’t feel right asking one of my friends to do a job like that. They may be tough, but they have feelings.

The Asvogel brothers – the competition; I don’t like them very much – have recently taken to dunking the bodies in pits of quicklime, to burn off the flesh and leave the bones, which they cart home and grind up for bonemeal. I guess it’s worth their while, though I can’t see it myself. For a start, it takes time, which is proverbially money, not to mention the cost of the lime, and then you’ve got the extra transport, fodder for the horses there and back, drivers, all that, in return for a low-value bulk product. Waste not, want not, the Asvogel boys say. It’s a point of view, but I’m in no hurry to get into the bonemeal business. I burn all ours, unless it’s so damp you can’t get a decent fire going. Chusro Asvogel thinks I’m stupid, pointing out the cost of the charcoal and brushwood. But we cut and burn it ourselves between jobs, so it doesn’t actually cost us anything, and we take it there in the carts we use for the job, which would otherwise be empty. Burning gives you a clean, tidy battlefield, and the ash does wonders for the soil, or so they tell me. That’s nice. I think it’s our moral duty to give something back if we possibly can.

No rain in the night, but a heavy dew. The next day’s the best time to handle them, in my opinion. The stiffness has mostly worn off, so you haven’t got arms and legs sticking out at awkward angles, which makes them a pain to stack, and with any luck they haven’t begun to swell. This point in the operation usually turns into a battle of bad tempers between me and Olybrius. I want to get the meat shifted and burned before it starts to get loathsome. Olybrius wants to do a thorough job with minimum damage to the stock in trade, which means carefully peeling off the clothes rather than yanking them about and cutting off buttons. Ideally, therefore, he doesn’t want to start until the stiffness goes. He’s quite right, of course. It’s much easier to get a shirt off a dead man when he isn’t stiff as a board, and sewing buttons back on costs a lot of money, which comes out of his share of the take. But he works for me, so he has to do what I tell him, or at least that’s the theory. By now our tantrums are almost as ritualised as High Mass at the Golden Spire temple. We know we’re getting fairly close to the end of the arguing process when he points out that in the long run rushing the job and ruining the clothes costs me money, not him, and I come back at him with something like, it’s my money and I’d rather lose out on a few trachy than catch something nasty and die. When we reach this point we both know there’s nothing more to be shouted; we then have a staring match lasting between two and five seconds, and one of us backs down. It would probably be easier and quicker if we flipped a coin instead, but I guess the yelling is more satisfying, emotionally and spiritually. Anyway, that’s how we do it, and it seems to work all right.

On that particular occasion, I won the battle of the basilisk glares, so we got a move on and had the pyres burning nicely barely seventy-two hours after the last arrow was loosed. In the greater scheme of things, General Theudahad and the Aelian League had taken a real shellacking, losing 5,381 men and 3,107 horses to Prince Erysichthon’s 1,207 men and 338 horses. It was a setback, but it didn’t really make a difference. Theudahad’s relief column was only thirty miles from Erysichthon’s main supply depot, less than a day’s brisk ride for the Aelian heavy dragoons, and without supplies for his men Erysichthon would be forced to risk everything on one big pitched battle somewhere between the river and the sea. He’d still be outnumbered three to one, his allies had had enough and wanted to go home, and he’d made Theudahad look a complete idiot, which meant the Great Man had a score to settle, so all the young prince had actually achieved with this technically brilliant victory was to get a superior opponent really angry. Another reason for us not to hang about. I’d paid a lot of money for the rights to this campaign, and the last thing I wanted was to turn up late for the grand finale and find the battlefield had already been picked over by the local freelancers.

“My money,” Gombryas said to me as we stood back from the newly lit pyre, “is on the prince. He’s smart.”

“You’re an incurable romantic, is what you are,” I told him through the scarf over my face. “You always root for the little guy.”

He glared at me. “Fine,” he said. “I’ve got twelve tremisses says that Erysichthon’ll squeeze past the allies and make it back to the city before Theudahad can close the box. Deal?”

The oil-soaked brushwood caught with a roar and the wave of heat hit me like a smack on the face. “In your dreams,” I said. “I don’t bet on outcomes, you know that. Besides,” I added, a little bit spitefully, “surely you want Theudahad to win so you can make up the set.”

Gombryas collects bits of famous military and political leaders – bones, scalps, fingers and toes and scraps of innards carefully preserved in vinegar or honey – and why not? After all, their previous owners don’t need them any more, and it presumably gives him some sort of quiet satisfaction. He has quite possibly the best collection in the south-west, though Sapor Asvogel might dispute that, and one of his prize exhibits is the skull of Erysichthon’s father, which he acquired six years earlier, when we cleaned up after the last war in those parts. He’s also got Erysichthon’s grandfather’s ears and his uncle’s dick – he swapped two royal livers and a minor Imperial shoulder blade for it with Ormaz Asvogel – and various other family bits and bobs, so it’d be only natural for him to want a piece of the prince, too. Given that Erysichthon had no children and all his male relatives had contributed freely to Gombryas’ collection, it’d mean that getting the prince would complete the series (I think that’s the technical term in collectors’ circles) and a complete series is worth far more than just a dozen or so isolated pieces. Not that Gombryas would ever think of selling. He loves his collection like family.

Anyway, he decided to take offence at my tasteless remark and stomped off in a huff. I gave the pyres a last once-over to make sure they weren’t going to collapse or fall sideways, then turned my back on the glorious battle of wherever-the-hell-it-was and trudged back to the column. One more thing to do and then I could give the order to move out. Fingers crossed.

Doctor Papinian was sewing someone up in the big tent. He hates being interrupted when he’s got a needle in his hand. “We’re about ready to go,” I told him.

“Piss off,” he said, without looking up.

Wounded soldiers abandoned on the battlefield are another bone of contention between me and the Asvogel boys. They don’t bother with them. Knock them on the head or just leave them, they say; it’s the combatants’ responsibility to remove all viable assets from the field, and anything left behind is contractually deemed to be abandoned (bona vacantia in legalese), therefore legitimate salvage, therefore the property of the contractor, to deal with as he sees fit. And, yes, it does say that in the standard form of agreement, which is what we all use in the trade, so strictly speaking he’s perfectly right. I, however, take a different view. I figure there’s good money to be made out of collecting the wounded, patching them up and then selling them back to their respective regimes, and so far I haven’t been proved wrong. Mostly that’s thanks to Doctor Papinian, who has the most amazing knack of saving the merchandise, no matter how badly it’s been chewed up. He was an Echmen army surgeon for thirty years before he got himself in a spot of bother and had to disappear, and he’s got that Echmen fanaticism when it comes to saving and preserving life, bless him. Personally, I like the old savage, but he gets right up the noses of everybody else.

“What the hell are you doing to that man?” I asked.

“What does it look like?”

He had a bunch of what looked like weeds in his left hand, and he was stuffing them into a hole in the wounded man’s belly with his right forefinger. I should’ve known better than to ask. “We’re moving out now,” I said.

“No, we’re not.”

There are some people you don’t expect to win against. “Fine,” I said. “How much longer are you going to be?”

“Depends on how long you’re going to stand there annoying me.”

He teased a wisp of green weed out between finger and thumb and poked it into the hole. Rumour had it his father was a butcher, noted for his exceptionally fine sausages.

“You could kill someone doing that,” I said.

“Go away.”

Gut wounds are certain death. Everybody knows that, apart from Doctor Papinian. If he ever finds out, a lot of wounded soldiers are going to be in deep trouble, so I make sure nobody tells him. “Get a move on,” I said, as I walked away. “You’re holding everybody up.”

I was too far away to hear his reply, which was probably just as well. His orderlies were laying out the men Papinian had finished with in neat rows, like fish drying in the sun; the ones who’d made it on one side, the less fortunate on the other, as though there was a real possibility of getting them mixed up unless everything was done properly. About a dozen long-suffering assistants were going round seeing to the routine bandaging, bone-setting and arrow extractions. Nobody seemed to be in any particular hurry. That annoyed me. Time is money; by taking their time, they were taking my money, and I don’t like people imposing on my good nature. Still, I knew better than to yell at them, since it was Papinian’s fault, not theirs. I resolved to leave them to it and give the pyres a final once-over. A good reputation is everything in this game, and nothing says unprofessional like a stack of half-burned bodies.

Just as I was about to leave the big tent, a voice called out a name, one I hadn’t heard in years. I spun round, maybe just a tad too fast.

He was in a hell of a mess, but I recognised him instantly. I gave him a cold stare; pretty good going, since my heart was pounding hard enough to break my ribs.

He said the name again; then, “It’s me.”

I knew that, of course. “My name is Saevus Corax,” I told him. “Do I know you?”

I wasn’t lying. I’d just left a word out: nowadays my name is Saevus Corax. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Get some rest,” I added, because that’s what doctors always say, and then I got out of the tent in a hurry.

I don’t like being rattled. When something unexpected like that happens, I feel like I can’t hear what my brain is telling me, so I have no idea what to say or do. In point of fact, some of my best decisions have been made on the hoof, with no opportunity for careful thought or due consideration of all relevant factors, but I don’t like it, it bothers me, and I’ve spent a lot of time, money, effort and blood getting to a point where I don’t have to put up with being bothered. I think maybe that’s why I chose a line of work so closely concerned with dead people. When a man’s dead, you can be pretty sure he’ll still be dead tomorrow, and very likely the day after that. You know where you stand with dead people, whereas the living seem to delight in screwing me around.

Just as well I’d gone back for another look, because the main pyre was listing badly. My guess is they’d put the bodies we stripped first at the bottom, which is really bad practice, and if I’ve told them about it once I’ve told them a thousand times: a stripped body dries out faster, therefore burns more quickly, and then the weight of the unburned stuff on top makes the whole heap slip sideways. I got a dozen or so of the lads and some twelve-foot poles, and we poked and prodded about and succeeded in making things a whole lot worse. So then we did what we ought to have done in the first place; we got the long hooks, dragged the (relatively) fresh material off the top and stuffed it in at the side where the dry stuff had burned through. All a bit grim; you have to stoke the fire up pretty hot to burn people, so I had half a dozen men fetching and carrying jugs of water to keep us damped down while we worked; then, of course, the wind changed, and the pyre started shooting out jets of flame in our faces, like a dragon; and I don’t think I’ll ever be truly comfortable with that smell. The only good thing was that by the time we’d sorted it all out, Papinian had finished with his embroidery and was complaining about the holdup and why weren’t we moving yet? So that was all right.

In this job you find yourself feeling grateful for all manner of weird stuff. For example, it was truly thoughtful and considerate of General Theudahad to choose a battlefield so close to a straight, fast, properly maintained road. It hadn’t done him much good, because it allowed Erysichthon to bring up his reserve archers, who otherwise wouldn’t have got there in time, but it made my life much easier. There’s nothing worse than sixty heavily laden carts floundering about in sand or mud or on stony ground that breaks spokes and axles. A short trundle over the flat and we were straight on to proper metalled carriageway. Things like that make a big difference when you’ve just finished a job, and you’re tired and fratchetty and you just want something to go right for a change. I sat back on the box of the lead cart, trying not to notice that I stank to high heaven of burned bones and smoke, and fell asleep.

I woke up starving hungry. It’s a problem I have. While we’re doing a job, I rarely eat. Partly, there just isn’t time, but also there’s something about my everyday workplace environment that takes the edge off my appetite, for some reason. Fortunately my friends know me by now. Someone had put a sack between my feet while I slept. In it I found a pound loaf of munitions bread, a fist-sized chunk of white cheese and an Aelian dried sausage. I like it when the Aelians lose, because they only make that particular type of dried sausage for the military; you can’t buy them in a market, and the Aelian commissariat grimly refuses to share the recipe. There’s one particularly hot, aromatic spice – it’s only there to mask the dubious nature of the meat, but I love it. I hoped there was more where that had come from, because the Aelians don’t lose all that often. Some people have no consideration for others.

It’s just conceivably possible that bumping around in an unsprung cart on country roads for three days isn’t your idea of a wonderful time. This goes to show how effete and dissipated you are, and how you’ve allowed your sybaritic lifestyle to sap your moral fibre. For us, cart time is down time. There’s nothing you can do on a moving cart except sit with your mouth open (to stop your teeth smashing together when you go over a deep pothole). You can’t mend armour or patch clothes or sew on buttons or write up the books. You can talk, if you don’t mind shouting at the top of your voice so as to be heard over the rumble of the wheels and the clanking of the cargo, but that’s about it. You sit. You do nothing. You rest. If death is like that – better, presumably, since you’re lying rather than sitting, and you’re perfectly still instead of being shaken about like a rat in a dog’s mouth – I really don’t see why people make such a fuss about it. Bring it on, I say.

When I used to write for the theatre – I promised you, didn’t I? No secrets between you and me. Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I used to write plays for the theatre in Urbissima. I was good at it, and I’d have made a lot of money if I hadn’t been cheated by unscrupulous people. But I didn’t enjoy it very much, mostly because of a ridiculous convention they have in theatrical circles called the Principle of the Unities. The idea is, to be a proper play, it’s got to be:

(a) about one thing,

(b) set in one place, and

(c) all in real time.

You can get round the first one easy as winking. The second one is understandable, because it’s cheap; one set, no need to pay scene-shifters, and if you can’t accommodate your narrative to fit, go write for somebody else. Fair enough. But the real time thing is pointless and infuriating and really made things difficult for me, because life isn’t like that. Which is just as well – one damn thing after another, as the critics said about my Leucas and Marses; three hours of non-stop harrowing with pity and terror, if you had to live like that you’d die of exhaustion before you hit puberty. Take my life, for example: bursts of furious, exhausting, terrifying activity punctuated by long cart journeys. Nobody wants to watch five hundred men with their mouths open sitting on sixty carts bouncing along the Great Military Road for three days. Prose narrative is a relatively new venture for me and I’m not sure I know all the rules yet, but I don’t suppose you want to read about it, either. So, with your permission, we’ll skip all that. The theatre managers I used to work for would have a fit, but screw them. I’d be more inclined to truckle to their delicate sensibilities if they’d ever paid me any money.

We arrived, therefore, at Busta Sagittarum three days later, to find that the battle hadn’t been fought yet. I hate it when that happens. It makes all sorts of difficulties. For one thing, you really don’t want to get caught up in the action, and a battle is a bit like a moorland fire. You have no idea when the wind might suddenly change, and it can move so terribly quickly. I remember Ormus Asvogel telling me about one time when his lot got caught up in the action. He’d positioned his team on what he thought was the extreme western edge of the field, and suddenly he’s got five thousand lancers racing towards him, with seven thousand horse archers on their tails shooting them out of the saddle. He had just enough time to get his carts in a circle and then they were on top of him. The lancers tried to break into the circle to shelter from the archers, but no dice; while they were standing about trying to squash their way in through the breaches the archers shot them all to hell; then, when there were no lancers left, the archers gave Ormus’ boys half a dozen volleys just in case they were somehow involved, killing about three dozen of them. To make matters worse, it turned out that the lancers’ side won, and their general repudiated the contract on the grounds that Ormus had indirectly assisted the enemy, so he forfeited the money he’d paid up front and had to go home with empty carts. His own silly fault for getting too close, except he hadn’t; it was just bad luck and the fortunes of war. You can’t predict these things. The Company of Jackals, an old and respected outfit that used to do good business out East when I was starting out in the trade, got slaughtered to the last man because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some peach-fuzz second lieutenant of hussars mistook them for the enemy supply train.

I, therefore, was taking no chances. We fell back a day’s ride the way we’d just come, circled the carts and built a palisade of stakes round it, just to be on the safe side. Meanwhile, I sent a few scouts to keep an eye on the doings, and we filled in the time doing useful work on the stuff we’d collected from the previous battle. “There’s a sick man down in the hospital tent reckons he knows you,” Olybrius said, as we sat in the shade of a cart darning wound holes in Aelian issue tunics. I didn’t look up. I pride myself on my darning. “Is that right?” I said.

“Only,” Olybrius went on, “he reckons you’re somebody else.”

“Ah well,” I said. “If he thinks he knows somebody else, he can’t be talking about me. That’s your actual logic.”

I didn’t look up, so I didn’t see the look Olybrius almost certainly gave me. “Want me to deal with it?”

Olybrius doesn’t know, of course, but he suspects. Mind you, that’s just him. I think if he didn’t have something to be suspicious about, he’d fade away and die. Olybrius isn’t Olybrius’ real name, it goes without saying. It’s a name he saw painted on the shutter of a corn chandler’s in Auxentia, in whose cellar Olybrius hid when he was running away from the man who’d just paid good money for him in a public auction. Olybrius’ father was a tenant farmer in the Mesoge who got behind on the rent. . .