Kings of Morning

PROLOGUE

They lay in the heather with the sun on their backs and stared east, the bees busy in the tangled fronds and roots about their faces, the scent of the birthing summer all about them, a fragrance as old and as new as life itself. They were perched on the tawny hillside like ticks on the flank of a great-backed hound, the land unaware of them, going about its existence as it had these thousands of centuries. They felt their own impermanence, the tiny pricks of their souls on the existence of the world, and they smiled as they caught one another’s eye, attuned to that knowledge.

East again, their gaze turned, and they saw the huge blooming sweep of the world open out before them like a hazed cloak swung over oddments, vast beyond comprehension, and yet intimate, bulging here and there with hills, scabbing over with the blossom of forests. All of it blurred and lazy under a warm sunlight, a blessing in the air itself.

The younger of the two turned, lay on his back under the sun and stared up at the sky. He was a pale, slender fellow, but there was a golden tinge to his skin that answered the sunlight.

‘He is not taking us seriously, Rictus.’

The other, an older man, lay watching, his grey eyes as pale as the underside of a snake. He rested his chin on his forearm, and the lumped flesh under his lip jutted out, an old scar. His forearm, too, was silvered with streaks of long-healed wounds, matching the badger-thatch of his hair. He was gaunt, austere, a man who seemed to have been peering into the wind all his life.

‘Serious enough. It’s as big a camp as I’ve ever seen.’

The younger man turned on his stomach again, shaded his eyes and stared across the sunlit plain before him.

‘All things are relative, my friend. We look out here upon a sensible riposte to our enterprise. He has sent enough to answer the challenge; not enough to crush it.’

‘And?’

‘And — ’ the younger man’s face darkened. For a second it seemed almost that the bones within it grew more pronounced, making him into something else entirely; a grim creature of humourless will.

‘And he is not here himself. There is no Imperial tent. He has sent his lackeys to fight us, Rictus.’

Now it was the older man’s turn to roll on his back. He rubbed at the white scar furrowing his chin. ‘Then they will be the more easily beaten.’

‘Where’s the glory in that?’

Rictus smiled, and for a second he seemed a much younger man. ‘After everything we have done, Corvus, do you still need the glory of it?’

‘Now, more than ever.’

The young man looked down on the older one. In some ways they were akin; the high cheekbones, the colour flaring in them, the scars they both carried. Corvus leant and kissed Rictus on the forehead.

‘My brother,’ he said, ‘Were it not for the glory, I would not be here at all.’