Kings of Morning (24 page)

‘Nice to see they kept the place in good order,’ Rakhsar said, strolling past the fountain, his hand on his sword-hilt.

‘They thought we would never see it,’ Roshana told him. ‘We were never supposed to come here.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have – I wanted to have a look, though. It is the only thing I own, outside the ziggurat.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Kurun said, stepping light-footed across the broken tesserae, whirling round like a dancer, smiling. ‘It is like a secret place. And the gardens!’

Roshana smiled. She put her arm about the boy and stroked the nape of his neck. ‘Perhaps we could stay a while.’

‘Ushau, take the left. I will take the right,’ Rakhsar said. ‘We’d best examine the lie of the place. Roshana, when you are done fondling our little eunuch, I want you to find some way to strike a light. There should be cellars, and I would kill someone for a cup of wine.’

They scattered through the house, exploring like children. The place had been abandoned and left to the elements, and the quick-growing vegetation of the fertile plains had all but smothered it. Creepers edged in at every window, dislodging the shutters with tendrils as thick as a woman’s wrist, and some of the mosaic floors were all but hidden by a growth of weeds and thorns, stands of giant mushrooms in damp corners. Geckos watched them warily from the walls, and the swallows continued to dart about their heads in protest, dropping balls of mud and flitting within inches of destruction as they carved aerobatic loops around balustrades and broken arches.

At the back of the house they found the kitchens, and they were massively built and in better repair. There was a fireplace wide enough to roast a brace of pigs, rusted fire-irons which could still be swung above the flames, and copper pots gone green but still with a bottom to them. They found knives, skewers, and earthenware jars with the seals intact, and opened them one by one, finding good oil, vinegar, and – marvel of all – honey, congealed hard as plaster, but still sweet and good.

Kurun kindled a fire in the broad kitchen hearth while Roshana hauled water out of the well and filled a trough outside for the horses. The water was clear, iron-tasting, and she had only to brush the skimming insects off it to drink her fill.

At the back of the house the kitchen garden was surrounded by a high wall – broken now, but within it were tomato plants, peppers of every hue, massive onions and wild garlic, and a riot of herbs. Roshana and Kurun gathered whatever caught their eye, brought it indoors in the folds of her cloak, and set to scrubbing some of the copper pots by the crackling smokeless fire. Kurun began sharpening one of the long iron knives on a whetstone, paused to stare blindly at the blade for a long moment in a spasm of unwanted memory, and then grimly carried on.

Rakhsar and Ushau entered the kitchen bearing dry lamps, which they filled from the jars and set to burning. With the lamplight and the firelight, and the water boiling, it was as homely a place as they had known in months.

The dark drew in, and secret creaking and rustling and skittering could be heard through the house, above the squeak of the hunting bats outside. When they had all eaten, the twins threw their bedrolls on the stone before the fire and sat upon them, Roshana sewing a rent in her robe, Rakhsar sharpening his scimitar with long screeching sweeps of the whetstone. Ushau went outside, to look upon the horses and keep an eye out, though it seemed barely credible that anyone would ever chance upon such a forgotten place who was not searching for it.

Kurun sat in a corner, nodding with tiredness, forgotten for the moment. The kitchen and its warmth reminded him of happier times, back in Ashur before the world had gone mad.

But he did not want to go back. He sat at the edge of the firelight and watched Rakhsar and Roshana, and found himself filled with simple wonder, at the things he had seen and the widening of the world he knew. He had crossed the Magron Mountains, been buried in snow, seen people die sudden and violent deaths. He had watched the sun rise over the endless plains of the Middle Empire.

And he had known these two, this royal pair. He had been caressed by the Great King’s daughter.

He would not have missed any of it. Not even for the thing which had been taken away from him.

‘A
RE WE SAFE
here?’ Roshana asked her brother. In the firelight, her eyes were huge and dark and her face white.

‘For a while, perhaps. We will stay a few days, no more.’ Rakhsar continued to sweep the whetstone down the sword blade.

‘Surely they will give up on us, leave us alone. Brother, perhaps they think us already dead.’

‘Roshana, you know as well as I that Kouros and Orsana will not be satisfied until they stand over our corpses. Just because we do not have soldiers thundering after us on horses does not mean we have not been watched, and followed.’

‘Have you seen anything?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rakhsar laid down the sword on his thigh and squeezed shut his eyes, bright lights in dark hollows. ‘Sometimes I see a spy behind every bush, and sometimes, like tonight, I cannot conceive of ever being tracked and found again. But this place is probably known to our enemies. They will look for us here eventually.’

‘What are we to do, Rakhsar, keep running west until we meet the Macht, or reach the sea? It has to end.’

‘I am thinking on it.’

‘Rakhsar –’

‘I said I am thinking on it!’

They sat in silence after that. Roshana picked out the wayward stitches she had been sewing without seeing, and began again. The whetstone began its thin glide along the blade of the scimitar once more. In the corner, Kurun watched, head nodding. In his hand he had the sharpened knife with which he had prepared their supper. The blade grew warm against his flesh. He slept.

B
EFORE DAWN KURUN
was up and awake. He bent, blew life into the fire, added some sprigs of dry creeper to it to bring up the flame, and set a pot of water upon the coals.

Roshana and Rakhsar lay in one another’s arms, still asleep. The privations they had both undergone in the last weeks and Roshana’s shorn hair made them look more than ever like reflections of each other. Kurun knelt beside them, and touched Roshana’s cheek. His brown fingers traced the soft line of her earlobe. She murmured, and Kurun straightened.

Ushau sat upright by the wall, watching.

‘Do not mistake your place, young fellow,’ the giant
hufsan
said softly.

‘I mean no disrespect.’

‘I know. But remember what you are, and what blood flows through them. We are not in the ziggurat now, but they are still far beyond us.’

‘They would be dead if it were not for us.’

‘That is of no account. One day, if they are spared, they will live in a palace again, lords of the world, and we will be forgotten.’

‘They will not forget us – how could they?’

Ushau smiled, and leaned his head back against the wall. ‘Go look on the horses.’

Outside, the birds were singing in invisible crowds from every bush and tree. Not even in the Gardens of the Great King had Kurun ever heard so many together. The sun was rising fast; it seemed to slide up the sky with unseemly haste in this part of the world, so that the moment of the dawn, that daily miracle, was barely to be experienced before it was over.

The horses were head-hung and silent, though they turned to Kurun as he approached, knowing his smell. He had brought them an apple each, and they ate them with relish, but seemed barely awake.

The sunlight rose over the broken walls of the garden, flooding the back of the house, warming the world. Tendrils of mist which had been coiling along the ground withered at its touch, and Kurun stood feeling the light and life of Bel the Renewer soak into him. It seemed to him in that moment he had found for himself a corner of a better world, and he knew that in such a place he could be happy, even if he were only a slave.

F
OUR DAYS PASSED
in peace and silence. The disparate foursome lost the aches and pain that constant travel had ground into them, and began to feel rested, clean, almost normal. The headlong urgency of the past weeks faded, and in the warm air of the lowland summer, the snows of the Magron became but a dream. Their lives in the ziggurat seemed more distant still, a memory to puzzle over.

In a chest in the upstairs of the house they found clothes, put away with bunches of lavender and columbine so as to deter the insects. They were, it seemed, plain garments, suited to a prosperous lower-caste household. Roshana set to adjusting them with her wayward needle skills, and Rakhsar took Kurun farther afield, to look over the estate which had been bought in his name at his birth.

Poplars, cypress and plane trees had been planted in lines fanning out from the house, but over the years the lines had become irregular and entangled with saplings and all manner of secondary growth. The borders of the estate were impossible to define, though Rakhsar and Kurun stumbled across a deep, overgrown ditch with water running at the bottom of it which seemed a boundary of some sort.

They raised partridge, pheasant, and – once – a magnificent heron out of the wetter ground as they beat the bounds of the little kingdom. There was no sign of people anywhere, and the city of Arimya was a mere bump of shadow on the hazy horizon.

But there was something almost indefinable which intruded on the peace. Kurun could not put a word to it until Rakhsar lifted his head and sniffed the air like a hound.

‘Woodsmoke,’ he said, frowning.

They looked back at the house, and saw the black bar of smoke rising from the kitchen-chimney, like a marker set in the sky. Rakhsar swore, and began to run.

They pelted into the kitchen as though they had wolves on their tail, and saw Roshana by the fire, feeding it with mossy branches she had picked up in the garden. A thick smoke rose from it, to be sucked into the mantle above.

Rakhsar said not a word, but shoved his sister aside, grabbed a fire-iron, and began raking the burning wood out of the hearth. He stamped upon it and beat it with the iron until the kitchen was filled with smuts and sparks and they were choking on it.

‘Where is Ushau?’

Roshana was bewildered. ‘I sent him for more wood.’

‘Get out of my way, you stupid bitch.’ Rakhsar grabbed at a pot of water, which was full of peeled onions, and threw it on the last of the coals. A billow of steam went up. He stood, panting. Roshana cowered against Kurun.

‘What is wrong – what did I do?’

‘We cannot have smoke. Are you stupid? How many times have I told you; if you must have a fire in the day, the wood must be powder-dry. You’ve just signalled our presence here for pasangs all around.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think –’

‘It was not burning long, master,’ Kurun said.

‘Long enough.’ Rakhsar stood, looking into the ruined fire, still breathing heavily. ‘We have been here too long. We are forgetting our fate.’

Roshana began to sob silently, and Kurun put his arm about her shoulders.

‘Stop crying, sister. It will not do anyone any good.’

‘Do we have to leave? Can’t we stay here?’ she wept.

Rakhsar lifted his head, incredulous. He spun round, pushed Kurun out of the way and took his sister by the upper arms. He shook her like a terrier worrying a rat.

‘Is that what you thought – that somehow we could set up home here? My dear sister, I credited you with more wit – even this boy knew better.’

‘I’m tired of running,’ Roshana said brokenly.

‘Are you tired of living?’ He released her. To Kurun, he snapped, ‘Get her out of here, and then clean this mess up.’

‘Yes, master,’ Kurun murmured.

‘And keep your little paws off her, boy. You may have no balls, but I see what’s in your eyes. Now get out.’

T
HEY WERE AFRAID
again. For a short time they had dared to believe the worst might be over, but they all recognised the truth of Rakhsar’s words. That afternoon they began methodically to pack up food and bedding and anything else they could glean from the house which would speed their onward journey. The hearth remained cold and black, and the weather took a turn for the worse in the early evening, a long slew of thunderclouds edging east over the world, and then congregating on the wide plains west of the Bekai River.

Rakhsar did not let them light so much as a single clay lamp, so agitated had he become. He stood and stared out at the silver sheets of the rain, the patient horses standing under it with the bags already packed upon their rumps, and whatever peace they had all known in the last few days entirely gone. The house seemed dank and cold in the rain, streams of water pouring through the threadbare roof and puddling on the floors. It was as though it knew they were leaving, and was turning its face from them.

It was the middle hours of the night before the rain stopped, and Rakhsar herded them out into the dripping garden. Roshana was lifted up onto one of the horses by Ushau, and then the little company went in single file around the drenched, dark building, the overgrown trees and bushes snatching at them with wet fingers. They were soaked before they had gone fifty paces, but finally they were at the front of the house, and here the rest clambered on the horses, Ushau behind Roshana on her horse, Rakhsar and Kurun on the other. It was dark as pitch, with not a star showing; but in the clouds to the west there was a faint red glow as Firghe, moon of wrath, rose far above the swollen thunderheads.