Kings of Morning

EIGHT

Beneath their feet, the land changed, becoming stonier, a mangy pelt of grass giving way to upland heather, stretches of black mere, oozing peat bogs, and stone. More and more grey rock strewn across the earth and pushing up through it, the bones of the world uncovered, tawny with lichen, warm to the touch under the sun of early summer.

They left three morai, almost three thousand men, in and around the ruins of Ashdod, under orders to mop up any enemy remnants that might still be hiding out in the surrounding villages; and Parmenios dropped off part of his immense waggon train and a mora of his engineers to begin the work of reconstruction. Ashdod was to be rebuilt as the capital of the new Macht province, and this time her walls were to be reared up not in mud brick, but quarried stone. Five thousand of the newly enslaved citizens of the city would provide the labour for the undertaking. The rest of the army was moving on.

Into the mountains.

The Korash were not the Harukush, and the pass that ran through them from Ashdod to Irunshahr was wide enough for an army to take in normal marching order. Perhaps forty thousand fighting men followed the meandering gash through the peaks, their way cleared by the tireless Parmenios and his work gangs, both slave and free. Druze’s Igranians went ahead to reconnoitre the route, and on the flanks of the marching columns Ardashir’s Companion Cavalry picked their way, the Kefren riders caching their lances with the baggage train, and stringing their great recurved compound bows instead.

It was summer, but there was still snow in blinding fields across the pass, some of it knee deep. And as the year warmed, so the ice higher up the slopes melted, and the men below had to keep their eyes open for sudden avalanches.

But they were Macht, most of whom had been weaned in the shadow of the Harukush. They were not starving, pursued and hauling waggonloads of wounded, as the Ten Thousand had been, fleeing in the opposite direction thirty years before.

Rictus knew this. And he kept to himself the spasm of helpless memory which had struck him as they entered the mountains.

They had been less than a week on the High Road, and were making good time, when it began to snow. It was no winter blizzard, but a fine-skeined drizzle of grainy snowflakes that dotted the men and melted, and greyed out the way ahead.

The world was blank, nothing more than the stones underfoot and the steam of the straining men in front. Voices were lowered, as if some primitive instinct had kicked in, and even the progress of the tens of thousands of men and beasts who trailed through the mountain pass for pasangs became subdued as the snow fell on the sounds and muffled everything.

But Rictus, wiping his eyes as they watered, thought he saw something out in the snow.

He rode a horse from time to time now, an animal as quiet and biddable as the livery-master could find, and he kicked it into an unwilling trot, doubling the column, looking for Corvus.

The King was never in the same place for long. Though his baggage and his personal bodyguards might keep rigidly to their allotted positions on the march, he travelled up and down throughout the day, on foot and on his big black Niseian, dismounting to talk to the men and their officers, galloping upslope to check on Ardashir and his flanking cavalry, or forging ahead to meet with Druze.

A conscript with blistered feet, finding the going hard, might look up to find the King marching beside him, asking after his health, wanting to know his name and where he hailed from. A few minutes’ talk, and then the King would be off again, but the footsore soldier would bask in the glory of his moment, envied by his comrades, forgetting his weariness, and willing now to charge mountains for the strange young man who led them.

Thus Rictus found Corvus. He was marching along with a file of Demetrius’s newest recruits, the ones who had been sent east to fill in the gaps after the Haneikos battle. These youngsters had a thin time of it, for they were green as grass and the only men in the army who had not yet been blooded in a great fight. But Corvus was strolling alongside them now, as earnest in talk as if they were his oldest veterans. He told them one of Fornyx’s dirty stories, which set up a roar for yards up and down the files. He did not tell it as well as Fornyx, and Rictus was not even sure he found it amusing himself, but he told it well, with the skill of a natural mimic.

The boy could have been an actor, if all else had failed, Rictus thought.

Corvus looked up at the snowbitten red cloak on the horse, raised a hand. ‘It’s my old warhorse,’ he cried, ‘on his old warhorse. Phobos, Rictus, can’t you let us find you something better to ride than that nag?’

‘She suits me well enough. Corvus, a word, if I might.’

Corvus mounted, raised a hand to the farewells of the grinning spearmen who a half hour before had been glum as owls, and he and Rictus trotted upslope, into the falling snow.

‘I may have seen something. We’re well into the mountains now, and this is the place for them.’

‘Qaf?’

Rictus nodded. Corvus brightened. ‘What a wonder that would be — like seeing a myth made flesh.’

‘I’d rather we saw none of them,’ Rictus said. ‘Besides, they may not attempt anything against so great a host.’

‘The officers are forewarned, which is more than you were,’ Corvus said, gripping the older man’s arm a moment. ‘Rictus, don’t worry!’

‘A hazard of advancing years; one begins to worry about everything.’

They went into camp that night as usual, the men in concentric rings with their feet to the flames of the campfires — campfires which were appreciably smaller than they had been at the outset of the march, for the only wood they could burn now was that which they had brought with them in the waggons.

The horselines were heavily guarded, and on the King’s orders the sentries were doubled. Such precautions would normally have elicited some groaning from the veterans, but they, too had glimpsed unsettling sights in the quietly falling snow throughout the day, and they turned to with a will.

Corvus himself did not seem to sleep these days at all, and he did not spend the night in his tent, but walked the camp ceaselessly all through the dark hours, checking with the guards, running the orderly officers ragged.

Finally, he joined Rictus and Fornyx at the Dogheads’ lines, and the three of them walked out beyond the camp and its firelight, driven by some impulse they could not define. They stood in the dark, listening.

But the night was silent. Even what wind could be heard was far off, up in the peaks above their heads, keening like a new widow. The snow fell steadily in the darkness, the flakes fattening, blanking out the world and hiding the stars utterly.

‘A night like this,’ Corvus said in a low voice, ‘feels like a moment before the making of the world. Not a light, not a sound. Nothing but the cold dark and the stone. It is as though we were at the beginning of all things.’

‘Or the end,’ Fornyx said, with a gravity quite unlike him. ‘Antimone is close tonight, brothers — can you not feel it? I swear I can hear the beat of her black wings when I close my eyes.’

Something moved, out in the dark, a rattle of stone. They went very still, save that Rictus and Fornyx lowered their spears in slow, graceful arcs until the aichmes pointed outward. Corvus did not twitch a muscle. He was rapt, as if listening to a song.

And then they saw it. Taller than a man, with two lights blue as sapphire for eyes. It was paler than the mottled stones behind it, and were it not for the eyes it might have been nothing more than a squared-off crag itself. It was watching them, not five spear-lengths away. Rictus found his own heart high in his throat, thumping hard and fast; with his mouth open he could hear the blood going through it, a sound like the panting of a dog.

And then it was gone. The lights went out as it turned and unhurriedly picked its way upslope, not dislodging so much as a pebble now, in its passing. Fornyx advanced as though in a trance, spear still levelled, but Corvus held him back.

‘Let it be. It did not come to fight. Not this time.’

In the morning it seemed more than half like a dream to Rictus. He woke to find Valerian trying to blow life into the grey coals of last night’s fire, his scarred lips pursed like the neck of a drawstring bag as he blew red life into the ash. When a flame had licked up, Rictus threw aside his cloak and the fine covering of snow which had stiffened it, and sat hunkered and shivering, aching, feeling as old as he ever had in his life.

‘What’s the matter with your tent?’ Valerian asked, passing him the wineskin. ‘Was there a mouse?’ He grinned, the lopsided ruin of his face making the gesture singularly sweet.

‘The old need less sleep than you think,’ Rictus said, tossing the skin back to him.

‘There were things in the dark last night. Men all along the column saw them. It’s the talk of the camp.’

‘The camp always has something to yap about,’ Rictus said, stifling a groan as he rose to his feet and his limbs straightened.

But he felt better, for some reason. The sense of dread that had been with him ever since the army had entered the mountains was gone. It was as though an old nightmare had been explained away.

There were no more sightings in the night. The army continued on its way unmolested for several more days, until one morning there was a shout up at the van of the column, and word was sent down that Rictus was to go forward at once.

He pushed the patient mare hard, her unshod hoofs crunching in the frostbitten ground, and one of Druze’s Igranians met him near the head of the army, panting, his drepana resting on one shoulder. He pointed eastwards, to where a knot of horsemen and infantry were gathered together over a mound of scree.

‘Corvus wants you, chief. Seems they’ve found something.’

The King was standing peering at something he held in his hands. Druze was beside him, and tall Ardashir, who felt the cold more than most, being a Kufr, and was almost unrecognisable in his layered furs.

‘What is it?’ Rictus asked, dismounting stiffly.

Corvus did not speak, but handed him a rusted shard of iron, heavy to the touch, half as long as a man’s forearm.

It was an aichme, an iron spearhead of Macht design.

And looking at the oval-shaped mound of rubble and stone, Rictus suddenly realised.

This was a burial mound.

His fists tightened a moment on the spearhead. So powerful was the memory that he saw other men standing there with him: young Phinero, and bald Whistler, who had been members of Phiron’s Hounds, the light infantry of the Ten Thousand. Other faces jockeyed for position also. So little had the surroundings changed in thirty years that for an insane second Rictus thought he was about to see Jason himself come striding up the slope to join them.

He dropped the aichme as though it burned.

‘What happened here?’ Druze asked, dark face puzzled. ‘Who did you fight?’

‘The things in the night,’ Corvus answered him. ‘Didn’t you ever read the story, Druze? The Qaf attacked them here, after the Ten Thousand split up. Rictus was voted warleader, but a fool called Aristos took a disaffected few hundred and split off from the main body. The Qaf slaughtered them, but they made it to the coast too.’

Rictus caught the King’s eye. Aristos had survived, long enough to kill Corvus’s father, on the very shores of the sea they had marched so far to reach, almost within sight of home.

‘We’re wasting daylight, my king,’ he said, as harsh as an old crow. ‘We must get moving.’

He mounted his horse, wincing at the click of pain in his knees. Corvus continued to watch him.

‘Wherever we travel, Rictus, death walks before us. We all go into the dark together.’

‘With the Curse of God on our backs,’ Rictus whispered. Then he tugged hard on the reins and turned the long-suffering mare away, setting her face towards the east. Towards yet more memories.

Eighteen days after entering the Korash Mountains, runners from Druze came sprinting back down the column, hallooing as they came. The slow-trudging infantry and even slower baggage train ground on for hours before they could see with their own eyes what had so excited those at the forefront of the army.

Green country, opening out before them like some dream of summer.

The mountains withdrew, sinking into the rich warm earth of Pleninash, the Land of the Rivers. From the commanding heights of the foothills a man might see hundreds of pasangs across the plains below, the sun glinting on the gleam of water everywhere, a warmth in the air unknown even in the Kufr lands west of the mountains. There was no breeze from the sea here to leaven the rising heat of the season. There would never be snow, nor even a hard frost in this green country.

For the first time, the men in the army felt that they had truly entered a foreign land, where even the taste of the air in the mouth was strange, and the earth smelled of something else. Some of the Macht, small-farmers in a previous life, bent and grasped the soil of this new place in handfuls, as though it were somehow different from that they had known before.

And as the army spread out to the east, the single vast column splitting up into half a dozen smaller ones, so men hurriedly doffed the furs and blankets they had worn on the slow march through the high country hitherto. There was a warmth in the air here, though they were still in the uplands, and there was heather underfoot. They could sense the heat of the approaching summer, and wondered at the flat verdant world before them, already shimmering in the heat and alive with a chorus of insects.

Thus did the host of King Corvus of the Macht enter the Middle Empire, in the forty-first year of the reign of the Great King Ashurnan.