Kings of Morning (25 page)

They did not look back. The path ahead was a slightly paler bar between black overhanging trees, a tunnel of growth that smelled of dank earth and wild garlic in the dark. The rain had subdued all sounds of life save the frogs, which were burping to each other in the ditches, a mindless chorus.

They disappeared into the tunnel, the horses clopping along through fetlock-deep puddles, and the water streaming down on them from the trees above – everywhere, the sound of gurgling water, the whole night awash.

Rakhsar reined in and set his hand on his sword-hilt, stiffening like a downwind deer.

‘Kurun,’ he whispered, his lips close to the boy’s ear. ‘Listen.’

It was the merest tangle of distant noise, but it rang out, clear of the dripping water and the frogs and the breathing of their own animals. There was a click of metal on metal, like a spoon clattering against the bottom of a pot. Or a spearhead on armour.

And all at once a horse neighed, high and clear in the night, the sound as startling as a horn-blast.

Rakhsar’s own horse, a mare, began to reply, and he punched it between the ears. It threw its head up but was silent, knowing better than to argue the point.

Roshana’s mount crowded up against them, the animals abreast in the narrow lane. ‘What is it?’ she demanded in a low hiss. For a second she sounded just like her brother.

‘Trouble. Back away, Roshana – back to the house. We cannot leave this way.’

They turned the horses round. The darkness pressed close on them now, and everything was soaked and awkward, twigs poking their faces, leaves slapping them derisively. Firghe broke through the clouds for a few moments, and his red light streamed down on them, bloodying the puddles.

There were men standing in the lane behind them.

Roshana cried out, a dark wail. Rakhsar drew his scimitar.

‘Do not try it, Rakhsar,’ a voice said, in good Kefren. ‘I have my people all around you. There is nowhere to run.’

Feet splashing in the water, the flicker of movement. The wind had begun to pick up, and the limbs of the trees moved in mockery of their fear, mimicking the shapes of the hunters.

‘I’m not running,’ Rakhsar said clearly. He shoved Kurun off the horse with his rein-hand and raised the red-gleaming sword in the other. Then, with a wordless cry, he kicked his mount in the ribs, and the beast whinnied and leapt almost from its haunches into a canter, straight down the lane.

Kurun toppled into the ditch at the foot of the trees. There was reassurance in the undergrowth about him. He felt almost invisible. He drew his knife and lay wide-eyed.

Then Roshana screamed, and he clambered to his feet with a snarl.

They were coming up the other end of the lane also; shadows pelting on foot, weapons raised red in the moonlight. Ushau was off the horse and charging them, an immense shape wielding the gleam of a kitchen hatchet. Roshana’s horse bolted, galloping after Rakhsar with her clinging to its neck. Kurun stood alone in the lane. He saw Ushau scatter the figures to their rear like tailor’s dolls. There was the clang of iron on iron.

‘Forgive me,’ Kurun muttered, and he began to sprint after Roshana and her brother.

‘H
OLD YOUR GROUND
!’ someone shouted in Asurian. ‘That’s no warhorse. Stand fast!’

It seemed that Rakhsar was going to ride down the figures in his way, the wicked scimitar point questing for their faces, but at the last moment the horse balked and twisted, lost its footing in the muck underfoot, and fell heavily in a spray of water. Then it was all flailing hooves, teeth and mane as it struggled to its feet again.

Rakhsar rose with it, his eyes shining red as they caught the moon. He slashed the animal’s flank and it screamed in pain and kicked away from him, bowling over the men before it and sending them flying.

Rakhsar held onto its tail and was pulled with it. The scimitar licked out and one of the men sank to his knees, hands pressed to the streaming slash in his throat. He toppled onto his face and lay gurgling and drowning in the bloody lane.

Roshana’s horse came galloping through a moment later. Someone struck out at its forelegs; it cartwheeled with a scream and she went hurtling through the air, splashed to the ground and rolled like a ball of rags. When she raised herself groggily to her hands and knees, one of the attackers kicked her in the head and she went down again.

Kurun sprinted up beside this man – a stocky
hufsan
in a leather cuirass – and stabbed up, beneath the waist of the armour, feeling the blade go deep, deep, until his very fingers were in the wound.

He pulled the knife out with a grunt, and then stabbed again, and again. He punched the knife into the man’s flesh in a silent frenzy, and as the
hufsan
sank to his knees, he shifted his grip on the blade, and stabbed down into the side of the man’s neck. The
hufsan
collapsed like a puppet with slashed strings, ripping the knife out of Kurun’s nerveless fingers.

He ran to Roshana, but was kicked aside. A curved blade licked out and took him in the ribs, the blow not a sharp thing, but like a solid punch. He clasped his side, gaping like a landed fish, and went down with his head resting at Roshana’s feet, his face half-buried in water. It was raining again, and he could feel the drops strike his cheek, but from his breastbone down, there was no sensation at all. It was as if his legs had suddenly disappeared.

A foot flipped him over; a shadow looked him in the face, and then ran on. There was a chaos of shouting. Roshana was dragged limply away. But he could still hear swordplay, the clack and ring of steel.

‘Kill them, master,’ he whispered. ‘Save her.’

Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he no longer felt anything, and the red moon made a bone-carved mask of his bloodless face.

T
HE HORSEMEN CHOKED
the lane, a stamping cavalcade of them. Kouros cursed and swore and lashed out with his riding crop as he strove to get to the forefront of the crowd. He had brought too many, and had not thought about deploying them, merely told his guards to charge hell-for-leather towards the house in which Kuthra had finally cornered his half-brother. A dead horse in the lane had brought down two of the lead riders, and the rest was chaos. Some of them were bearing lit torches, and the fitful yellow light almost made the thing worse.

The Niseian under him remembered its training. It shouldered the other horses aside, biting and kicking with the fury of its rider. A wild leap, and it was over the bodies on the ground – a surprising number of them – and then Kouros was galloping alone up the track. He cast aside the whip and drew his sword.

Another horse. The Niseian crashed into it deliberately, the big warhorse knocking the smaller animal clear off its feet. But the shock shook Kouros in the saddle. He dropped his sword, gripped the pommel of his saddle with both hands, and struggled to stay on the wild warhorse’s back. The reins now loose, the Niseian lifted its head and screamed out a challenge to the blank darkness of the house looming under the moon. There were more bundles underfoot, and it danced over them; like all horses, it was unwilling to step on a body.

Kouros roundly consigned the animal to Mot’s shadow, and leapt off. It sprang away. Now he saw that the girth had slipped and it was trying to kick the saddle free. The iron-shod hooves went by his head so close he felt the wind. He dropped to the ground, scrabbling for his sword, a little incredulous that his moment of triumph should have taken such a turn. He came upon a warm body lying in the rainwater, a boy’s face that seemed familiar. He could not find his sword, and splashed through the puddles while the rain grew colder on his back. At last he found a hilt to hand. A long kitchen knife, bloody to the handle – it would do; it would have to do.

He stood up. ‘Kuthra!’ Where were his men? He looked back down the track leading from the house, that tree-dark tunnel, and saw shapes milling there, shattered torchlight, a meaningless melee. What were they at?

No matter. They would be with him by and by.

‘Kuthra!’

He ran forward, wiping the rain out of his eyes, puffing. Bushes and undergrowth everywhere, a veritable jungle out of which the dark bulk of the house rose like some lightless monolith, and behind it the red moon glowed in a speeding welter of broken cloud.

‘Here, brother,’ a voice said. And there was a dark shape sitting at the wall of the house, like a man taking his ease. Kouros sprinted to it, cursing the heavy cuirass he wore and his water-filled boots that sloshed at every step.

Panting, he knelt, and saw Kuthra’s pain-racked face, a smile guttering across it like the last flicker of a spent lamp.

‘Almost on time, Kouros. But not quite.’

‘Where are you hurt?’ Kouros felt a thrill of shock and grief blast through him.

‘He gutted me. A good swordsman, our brother. I did not know that.’

‘Where is he?’ Kouros was weeping soundlessly. He tried to clasp Kuthra’s hand but could not pry the other’s fingers from the great wound in his belly. The very leather of Kuthra’s cuirass had been slashed through, and there were nameless shining things bulging between his straining fingers.

‘Oh Kuthra, my brother.’ He wept like a child. ‘I will take you out of here. My father’s surgeons –’

‘I am a dead man, Kouros. Rakhsar has done for me in fair fight. Do not trouble yourself.’

Kouros leaned until his forehead and Kuthra’s were touching. He kissed the dying man on the cheek. There was nothing else in the world but that face he loved. The one person in creation he trusted.

‘Kill him for me,’ Kuthra whispered, blood on his teeth. ‘I should have lived. I wanted to see you King.’

‘I need you, Kuthra.’

‘You must find someone else to trust, brother. Your mother’s people are here also. That was the problem – we brought too many to this party.’

‘Roshana?’

‘Here somewhere – she may be dead. I made a mess of things, right at the last. Forgive me, Kouros.’

‘I love you, my brother. There is nothing to forgive.’

Kuthra smiled. ‘You are a better man than you know. Be a good king. Remember me, Kouros.’ He struggled, as though he had one last thing to say.

‘
Kouros –
’

But there were no more words. Kuthra sighed, and his face took on a look of mild surprise, as though things were not quite what he had thought. His head tilted to one side and came to rest against his brother’s face, so that Kouros’s tears were on both their cheeks. The straining hands relaxed.

Kouros took one hand in his own, the blood gluing their palms together.

‘Goodnight my dear brother,’ he whispered, and bent his head. He knelt there beside the body in the soft rain, and above them both the Moon of Wrath beamed full and bright in the cloud-streaked sky.

I
T WAS
B
ARKA
who found him, and knelt beside him in the rain. He took one look at Kuthra’s waxen face, and set a hand on Kouros’s shoulder.

‘My prince.’

‘Get your hand off me.’

‘There is work to be done, Kouros.’

‘Find Rakhsar. I want him alive, Barka. The man who takes his life will lose his own.’

‘We have found the lady Roshana.’

At last, Kouros raised his head. Barka recoiled from the look on his face.

‘She lives?’

‘She lives.’

Kouros rose to his feet. He looked down at Kuthra’s body.

‘Give me your cloak.’

Wordlessly, Barka handed it over. Kouros took it and laid it over his dead brother’s body.

‘He will come back with us, Barka. We will bring him back and give him a funeral worthy of a prince. What was denied him in life shall be given him in death, I swear it.’

He raised his head. His eyes shone with a vulpine light.

‘Now, take me to my sister.’

T
HEY HAD FANNED
out and were beating the bushes in line as though flushing out a boar for the spears of the hunters. Torches had been lit here and there along the rank, and by these they kept their intervals and advanced through the forgotten fields and choked thickets of the estate. There were dozens of them: Kuthra’s men, Orsana’s men, and Kouros’s personal guards.

Rakhsar hunkered in the bottom of the overhung ditch with the water running fast round his knees. He had caught his breath after the chaotic fighting up at the house, and reckoned now that he was near the edge of the estate. But beyond it the country was more open, bare as a table in the moonlight. Anande was rising sluggishly now, diluting the light of the red moon and turning the rain into a gem-like shimmer in the air, more a mist than anything else. Dawn could not be far off; he had not much time to waver over his options.

If he could steal a horse, it might yet be enough. He was a better horseman than his clown of a brother, or any of the men he had brought with him. With a good Niseian between his knees, Rakhsar would leave them eating his dust.

But Roshana.