Kings of Morning (11 page)

‘They closed the wound with fire, mistress, but missed part of it. I would bind the boy’s legs together for now. He will need to be sewn up, but I cannot do that here. I need –’

A brass clang rattled through the air, as though some titan had dropped a metal pot out of the sky. Rakhsar stood up. ‘Your butchery can wait, Maidek,’ he said. ‘That’ll be the chime the boy spoke of. Ushau, clamp him tight.’

The light grew, grey and cool across the massive chamber ahead. It revealed gangs of
hufsan
, who were now straightening from their labour upon orderly rows of squared stone, heaps of rubble. A swarm of talk rose. Suddenly the place seemed crowded, as more apron-clad
hufsan
trooped in from outside, and from stairways and ramps leading down from the dark bulk of the ziggurat above. The tall gateway loomed beyond, brightening moment by moment. There was an inrush of cooler air that brought the dust of the stoneworkers with it to grit their teeth, and something else. The mingled stinks of the world beyond, the promiscuous perfume of the city itself.

‘The boy was right,’ Roshana said. ‘That is the light of the dawn.’

‘Up. Move,’ Rakhsar snapped. ‘Follow me.’

He had sheathed his sword, but kept his hand on the hilt as they trailed through the work-gangs, gathering rock-dust, the sweat and toil of the slave-city pressing in on them with the milling crowds of workers. The fresh, cool air of the city beyond drew them on, filling their lungs. Rakhsar uttered a strangled laugh as they stepped out of the ziggurat, into the morning cacophony that was Ashur, and looked around themselves like an island of idle fools in a sea of busy people.

‘I smell grilled frog,’ Rakhsar said to his sister, grinning. The sweat lay like pearl beads on his forehead. ‘What say you we treat ourselves to one, and then find a place to lay our heads for a while?’

He strode off, and the rest trailed after him like the tail of a kite. Ushau looked down on Kurun and tapped a knuckle against the boy’s chest.

‘You are a good little fellow,’ he said. Then he held Kurun close, and followed his master, and they were lost in the coursing torrent of faces, bodies, flapping feet and waving hands that was the Imperial City, while behind them the ziggurats were lit up, level by level, by the burgeoning light of the dawn.

SIX

F
RIENDS IN
O
DD
P
LACES

A
SHURNAN FELT THE
palanquin move under him, with the stately pace of the elephant that bore it. He drew back the fine weave of the curtains to look up the road ahead, and once again his fist clenched involuntarily as he took in the line of wagons, pack-animals, cavalry and marching men that stretched to the bright, dust-hazed horizon.

Dust in his beard. Dust in his shoes. Dust in the very food he ate. Asuria itself was impregnating every part of him; his own country, the heart of empire, the place his ancestors had walked and ruled for years beyond count.

His father Anurman, whom some named
the Great
, had deigned to speak to him of the empire once. One did not
rule
it, any more than a mariner dictated every movement of a ship at sea. One steered it. And sometimes, it took patience to get it back on course when the waves were in your teeth.

I am older now than my father was when he died, Ashurnan thought. I have ruled longer than he did. I have fought fewer wars, but those in which I have taken part have been greater than any he ever saw. Does that make me a better king than my father, or a lesser?

Once again, his thoughts travelled back down the dusty pasangs of the Royal Road, to his capital.

Where are you now, Rakhsar? In some highland castle, fomenting rebellion? Or down in the marshes, peering into some peasant’s fire? No – that is not your style.

Again, his fist clenched and unclenched.

I should have given him a command, taken him with me. He has an energy Kouros lacks, and courage.

But that was his heart talking. He had been as generous with his own brother, and Kunaksa had been the result.

It has always been Kouros, he thought. I cannot stand against both the Macht and Orsana. I have not the strength.

But he found himself smiling, despite the gloom of his ruminations. It had been a long time since he had been part of an army on the march. There was no denying that it brought back good memories as well as bad, a tincture of youth.

One war at a time, he thought.

A
T LONG LAST,
the Great King himself had set forth from Ashur on campaign, with the first contingent of the Imperial Levy, and the bulk of the Household. This was but a tithe of the force that would eventually form up on the far side of the Magron Mountains, but still it choked every road leading west for dozens of pasangs. Ten thousand Honai, five thousand Arakosan cavalry who had crossed the Oskus only the week before. Twenty thousand of the local levy, small farmers called up to the banners of the King, the year’s second harvest thickening in the fields behind them, their wives and sons left to gather it in as best they might.

And that was just the beginning. To the rear of these fighting men marched another army. Teamsters, smiths, leatherworkers, carpenters, herdsmen, slaves by the thousand, and an amorphous gaggle of wives and children who could not bear to be parted from their menfolk. These were nearly as numerous as the clanking columns who bore spear and shield, and every night since leaving Ashur they had straggled into camp hours after the vanguard of the army, spent and dust-painted, but ready to attend to the needs of those who had been called upon to bear arms, to fight the Great King’s war for them.

And that still did not include the Great King’s own entourage. In his youth, Ashurnan had been stubborn, proud and fit enough to travel almost as lightly as one of his junior generals; a half dozen mule-carts carried everything he needed to live in comfort in the field. But he was old now, and his sense of what befitted a king’s campaigning had changed. Two hundred wagons carried his personal tents, his furniture, his carpets, his stores of food and drink, his favourite concubines (Orsana had picked them for him, and he had not argued the matter).

His Household was an army in itself, moving ahead of the rest of the troops to escape the tower of dust they kicked up (for this was not real campaigning, not yet; the Macht were still thousands of pasangs away), and he had his scouts and stewards out on the roads ahead to make sure there was a suitable campsite each night. In the past, Great Kings had stayed with local nobles on their travels, but Ashurnan had learned early in his reign that to put up the King and his fellow travellers for even one night could beggar the richest satrap in the empire.

And besides, when those same nobles came to offer him obeisance in his vast, multi-coloured, towering tent, its gilded poles as thick as the masts of a mighty ship, one could see that the effect was worth the effort.

The Great King on the move was like some force out of nature, as impressive as the grandest storm, and these petty princes and Archons and local lords were to be the officers in his levies. On their loyalty, or respect, or fear would turn the fate of the battle to come. Let them look upon the grandeur that was Ashurnan, and tremble. It would stiffen their resolve when the Macht came marching towards them in full panoply of war.

The grandeur that was Ashurnan. The Great King sipped from his cup, cold water sprinkled with the juice of limes, crackling with ice from the straw-insulated chests further down the column. Most of the folk in this great host had never seen ice; they were creatures of the lowlands, and their lives had been spent in the shimmering, irrigated fields of the Heart of Empire. But now when they raised their heads and looked beyond the dust, they could glimpse snow on the rim of the world, the white peaks of the mighty Magron, and in their foothills the King’s summer capital, Hamadan, where for centuries the Asurian Kings had gone to escape the stifling heat of the low country. Hamadan was the fortress-key to the Asurian Gates, the only path an army could take through the Magron to the Middle Empire beyond. And it was there, in the land of the Rivers, that Ashurnan felt the matter would be decided.

He did not believe Darios would be able to hold the line of the Korash; his army had been blown to chaff. No, the thing would happen in ancient Pleninash, somewhere on the Imperial Road between Kaik and Irunshahr.

Somewhere on the same line of march that the Ten Thousand had taken, a generation before.

That same bloodied highway was going to see another bloodletting, but this one would be greater even than Kunaksa. Ashurnan could feel it in his thinning bones, and he felt no relish at the prospect. He still remembered vividly being woken from sleep after the first day at Kunaksa, when he had thought the thing won, only to be told that the Macht, leaderless, alone, betrayed, were nonetheless attacking, and putting to flight the best the Empire could throw at them. He remembered those sombre men in bronze and scarlet advancing remorselessly over their own dead, marching in cadence, singing as they came. And a chill ran up his backbone at the memory.

K
OUROS REINED IN
his horse with a jerk, the animal jittery under him, catching his mood. He rode a Niseian, as did many Kefren with money or high blood, but he disliked the beast. Coal-black and fiery tempered, like all its kind, it had been bred for the hunt, for war; two activities Kouros knew little of. He carried a whip, which few Kefren horsemen did, the high-born of the empire having been brought up with horses since childhood. There was a semi-mythical bond between the high-caste Kefren of Asuria and the Niseians. Legend had it that the tall black horses were a gift to the world from Bel himself, and their sire was the west wind.

Darker myths even said that the big horses’ forbears had been brought east by the Macht in their youth, but this was not a tale that found much favour among the Niseian breeders.

Kouros did not name his horses, nor did he ride for pleasure. The animals were a necessary accessory to him, nothing more, and nothing could make his eyes glaze over faster than a group of petty lords discussing studs and bloodlines. They were animals, that was all. Kouros’s world was to do with people. Horses were nothing more than transport.

He sat upon his horse now, biting his thumbnail, looking down on the dust-shrouded Imperial Road leading north-west to Hamadan. To the south and east more dust-clouds rose, like tawny stormclouds anchored to the earth. More columns of marching troops. They were converging from all over Asuria, and more were behind them. His spies told him that the Arakosan main body was still a week to the east, eight thousand heavy cavalry bright as kingfishers in the blue-enamelled armour of their people. His mother’s people.

His people.

His mother never let him forget his Arakosan blood. She came from a line of kings as ancient as that of Asuria, and considered herself as royal as any scion of Asur. Minosh, satrap of Arakosia, was her cousin, and they had been close as children, the palace in Bokosa housing a more easy-going regime than that of Ashur. Minosh was a satrap of the Great King, a loyal servant. But he was also a great ruler in his own right. Minosh had to be wooed, if Kouros’s claim to the throne were to be set in stone.

Especially now, with Rakhsar on the loose.

Kouros bared his teeth in anger, thinking on it, and when the horse began to dance and snap under him he seized the reins and yanked back hard. He used a hard wolf-bit on his horses, which was essentially a bronze blade laid against the tongue. It was not unusual for him to turn his mount over to the grooms with blood dripping from the animal’s mouth.

Rakhsar, free and alive. He thought he had stopped every bolthole, covered every contingency.

His mother had flown into a rage at the news. It had meant she must stay in Ashur through the heat of the summer, to watch over the city for Rakhsar’s mischief.

She had stripped one of her slaves at random and whipped the girl’s flesh from her white back in front of him. He had not so much as dared to wipe the blood from his face, but stood there dumb and motionless while the screaming slave died under her blows. Orsana had stood afterwards with her black hair skeined over her face, eyes socketed in blood, the hem of her robe soaking it up from the puddle mosaic of the floor.