Kings of Morning

NINE

They lined up around the walls of Irunshahr in full battle array, deliberately taking their time. The reasons for this were manifold. Firstly, it had been three weeks or more since a single man in the army had done any drill, and the raggedness of their formations as they took up position around the upland fortress threw Corvus into a white-lipped fury.

He never raised his voice when he was angry — only when it suited him to appear so. But when he spoke quietly, and his eyes flashed and the blood had left his already pale face, then his officers knew that he was in earnest.

So the men trudged into position meekly, shouted at by centurions whose faces were as scarlet as their cloaks, cursed for useless idle sons of whores. But it was the sight of their young king, sitting silent on his black horse and watching them without a single word of disapprobation, that truly unnerved them. They began to step more lively after that, to leave behind the ‘mountain shuffle,’ to straighten their backs and hold their spears tight against their bodies, so that, as one centurion put it, the weapons did not wave around like a thicket of limp pricks.

But the protracted deployment of the army suited Corvus’s purposes for two more reasons. Firstly, because the walls of Irunshahr, tall, grey and forbidding, were now lined with thousands of the fortress-city’s inhabitants, and the spectacle of tens of thousands of Macht on the ridges below would do wonders for their attitude.

And lastly, Parmenios had set up shop on a convenient hill not two pasangs from the city gate, and was busy assembling some of his infernal machines to impress the defenders further with the hopelessness of their plight.

Corvus meant to take Irunshahr, one way or another, for it was the gateway to the west, and it guarded their lines of communication with the Macht homeland. Those lines were long and frayed enough without leaving the city intact and untaken to worry them finer still.

Once Parmenios had finished his arcane work, his machines were hauled and pushed by a small army of Kufr slaves up to the back of the Macht lines. His own skilled engineers then went to work with a will, and many was the conscript spearmen who looked to his rear in some consternation as he stood in file, wondering what the angular timber and iron machines behind him were about to do.

The smell of burning pitch carried over the breeze, drifting across the ranks of the army. The warhorses of the Companions caught the familiar reek and began to prance and sweat in their formation, while the Kefren riders soothed them in their own language.

The Companions were up front, where the Niseians and their riders could be clearly seen. They had donned their best battle armour, cuirasses of leather and layered linen studded with bronze scales and worked with lapis lazuli and black enamel. Their horsehair crests moved idly in the warm air. They were a magnificent sight, clad in their red cloaks despite the warmth of the day, and with their lances holstered in stirrup-cups, every shaft carrying a newly tied pennon.

‘Ardashir’s lot have dressed for the occasion,’ Fornyx said to Rictus as they stood together a few paces in front of the Dogsheads. ‘Wonder what their Kufr will make of our Kufr.’

The thought had occurred to every Macht in the army. The Companions had won the day at the Haneikos, but had been kept aside at the sack of Ashdod. They loved Corvus to a man, and Rictus was fully convinced they would follow him anywhere, but Fornyx spoke his thoughts for him when he said; ‘Ever wonder what they would do if Corvus were not here to lead them?’

What would any of us do? Rictus wondered silently. And he put the thought away, as something unlucky.

There was a swooping noise, then a sharp crack as one of the catapults at the back of the line was loosed. The long arm of the contraption swept through half a circle, and launched into the air a globe of fire which soared high across the blue sky. It cleared the walls of the city with ease and disappeared into the buildings on the hill behind. A strange noise, like a wail, passed over the people on the walls. And then Corvus rode forward with a green branch in his hand, accompanied only by Ardashir.

‘I want to hear this,’ Rictus said, and began to march towards the walls also. Fornyx joined them, and they were a fearsome looking pair, both clad in Antimone’s Gift, both red-cloaked, wearing the close helm with its transverse crest which transformed a man’s face into a fearsome anonymous mask, both bearing their shields with the raven sigil painted upon them.

They stopped when they could hear Ardashir’s voice shout loud and clear up to the figures on the walls. He was speaking in Kefren, of which Fornyx knew nothing and Rictus only a few words, and the two men looked at one another and laughed at their own simplicity.

There was an exchange. Corvus began to speak, in Kefren as perfect as Ardashir’s, and Rictus thought he could almost feel the army behind him shiver at the sight of their king speaking Kufr like a native.

‘One day that chicken will come home to roost,’ Fornyx muttered, frowning.

The exchange went on for some minutes, and it was punctuated by the agonised screeching of leather and wood being wound tight on spoked pulleys, as Parmenios’s crews began to methodically cock back and load the dozens of catapults reared up in a long line behind the fighting men. The smell of burning tar grew, and in the ranks of the Companions the big Niseians neighed and stamped and blew through their noses, impatient to be let loose, to be allowed to carry out what they had been bred and trained to do.

Then there was a different sound, a heavy rumble. Almost, Rictus thought he could feel it as a vibration in the very ground beneath his feet.

The gates of Irunshahr, massive cliffs of green bronze, began to grind open.

As they did, the men of the army clashed their spears against their brazen shields and let out a deep-throated cheer.

‘The little bugger has done it again,’ Fornyx said. He doffed his helm, wiped his sweat-gleamed hair back from his forehead and shook his head ruefully.

‘He didn’t sleep for a week after Ashdod,’ Rictus said. ‘He won’t let that kind of thing happen again if he can help it.’ And he was profoundly glad in his own heart. A battle in the open was one thing, where men squared off against their enemies in open war; but the taking of a city was a nightmare he had experienced too many times. His home city, Isca, had died in front of his own eyes, and at the fall of Machran he had seen the worst that men could do to one another. And to the innocents that got in the way.

Fornyx clapped him on the arm. ‘Who knows? We may sleep under a roof tonight, Rictus, with a cup of real wine in our hands instead of that army piss. Things are looking up!’

There was indeed a roof for them that night, and as grand a one as could be imagined. There were perhaps fifty thousand people in Irunshahr, but they were outnumbered by those who now camped outside the walls. All day the carts and waggons and pack animals had gone back and forth between the fortress city and the tented town below it. Irunshahr was feeding Corvus’s army with what remained in the city granaries at the end of spring, and it was a startling amount.

In an excess of relief, perhaps, at the unexpectedly civilised behaviour of the Macht troops, the governor of Irunshahr, Gosht, had bade his people raid their larders to placate the invaders. The Macht had not eaten so well since they had left the shores of the sea. Despite the time of year, Irunshahr’s hinterland had already seen one harvest gathered in, and if Bel were kind would see another before the summer was out. Such was the richness of the Middle Empire, and the Macht, used to the hardscrabble farming of their own country, marvelled at it.

The city was not part of any satrapy, but because of its strategic importance had been allotted a governor instead, and stood independent of the lowland provinces. From its gates the Imperial road ran all the way to the Magron Mountains in the far east, and from there through to Ashur itself, capital of the world.

The reason for the city’s sudden capitulation became clear as the Macht moved in to survey the place and establish a garrison. There were no more trained soldiers within the entire circuit of the walls than in the average town back home. Perhaps a centon of Gosht’s personal guard remained. The rest had been commandeered by Darios and taken west. They had died at the Haneikos and at Ashdod. Thus, for Irunshahr, surrender had been the only sensible option, for the levy of the Great King had by all accounts and rumours not yet crossed the Magron, and was still weeks away.

That night, the marshals of the army dined in the great hall of the governor, and somewhat to their astonishment, Gosht himself was invited by Corvus to attend. He sat at the King’s right hand, in the place of honour, an elderly Kefre with almost translucent, golden skin, and a long, pointed beard dyed deep red.

It was a stilted meal. Corvus and Ardashir tried to make conversation in the kindliest way with the old Kefre, but he replied in monosyllables and merely stared up and down the long table at the assembled Macht generals and their strange king, in a mixture of bafflement and fear. When his eye alighted upon Marcan, the Juthan, a light of real hatred crept into it. Finally he excused himself and rose, the King rising with him, as solicitous as if Gosht had been an elderly uncle. The old Kefre recoiled from Corvus’s touch instinctively, as a man will pull his hand back from a flame, and was seen out of the vast, echoing hall by two of his attendants, round-eyed hufsan almost as bewildered as he.

‘You may be pushing courtesy too far,’ Ardashir said to Corvus. ‘You scared the old fellow half to death — I think he expected to be poisoned, or stabbed to death where he sat.’

Corvus was buried in thought, tossing an empty wine cup hand to hand and catching it with that quicksilver grace unique to him. ‘We shall have to leave a sizeable garrison here,’ he said absently, and tossed the cup to Druze, who whipped it out of the air and commenced to fill it.

There were no pages attending the diners tonight; Corvus had given them all leave to roam the city as they might. Only a few hufsan slaves had attended the meal, and they had been dismissed when the governor left. The marshals could lean back in their high-backed chairs and stare at the ornate ceiling, finger the silver knives and plates thoughtfully, and generally gape their fill at the way in which a governor of the empire lived. Their chairs were upholstered in silk, which it seemed a crime to sit upon, and the carpet beneath them was circular, as brightly beautiful as a sunrise. All about the walls hung tapestries of the same calibre, and wonderfully made weapons too beautiful to ever take to war.

‘Ashdod was a pigsty compared to this,’ Teresian said, too taken aback even for avarice.

‘Don’t get over excited,’ Fornyx told him. ‘We’ve checked the treasury; Darios stripped it bare before he went west. What was left, we captured at the Haneikos in his paychests.’

‘I dare say there’s more secreted here and there,’ Teresian said, smirking.

The King slammed his cup down on the table, startling them. ‘This city is mine now, and everything in it. Anyone who steals within these walls steals from me, and will be dealt with accordingly.’ In a softer tone, he said, ‘Besides, you’re rich enough Teresian. What are you doing, saving up to be King?’

There was laughter up and down the table, though it had an uneasy edge.

‘As I said,’ he went on in a quieter tone, ‘This city will require a real garrison. It guards the road any reinforcements will have to take from the Harukush. And the mountain pass will have to be patrolled.’

‘With Irunshahr in your hands, you also guard the northern flank of Jutha,’ Marcan spoke up, his bass deep enough to tremble the cups. The men at the table looked at him. He did not speak much, but he was often there, at the corner of things. Corvus did not seem to mind that the Juthan sometimes joined them at table, even when they were discussing strategy. Rictus had tried to bring up the subject with Corvus, but the King had just laughed.

‘My father’s legions will be on the march by now. It is good that you have a secure base here in Pleninash. The news will travel fast.’

‘I look forward to the day when your people and mine fight together, Marcan,’ Corvus said, with that genuine smile which charmed so many. It was impossible to see if the yellow-eyed Juthan was seduced by it. One might as well have smiled at a stone.

‘Who do we leave here?’ Fornyx asked.

‘I’ll think of someone — not you, Fornyx — we all know you love the Kufr too much.’

‘Best make sure you can trust the beggar, whoever he is. The man who commands this city has his foot on our neck.’

‘I will think of someone,’ Corvus repeated, an edge in his voice. Fornyx was one of the few people he had never charmed.

‘Rictus, I want you to ride out with Ardashir in the morning. He’s taking a mounted patrol east along the Imperial Road, to get a feel for the route and look out for the enemy.’

‘Me? I can barely sit a horse,’ Rictus said, surprised.

‘You sit it better than you think,’ Corvus told him. ‘And I do not expect you to have to charge into battle, brother. I want someone with Ardashir who has seen this country before.’

‘But he’s Kefren — what does he need me for?’

Ardashir smiled. ‘Rictus, I may be Kefren, but this is my first foray east of the Korash. I know as much about the Land Between the Rivers as does Fornyx, or any of the rest of us.’

‘My knowledge is thirty years old.’

‘The empire does not change much from year to year.’ This was Marcan. ‘I can sit a mule, Corvus. May I join them? I know something of this country also.’

The King looked at the blank grey face of the yellow-eyed Juthan, his hostage.

‘A capital idea,’ he said at last, and raised his glass. He ignored the looks the Macht marshals darted up and down the table.

A haze rose over the land south of Irunshahr, a fug of woodsmoke, excrement, rising sweat, cooking smells, and snoring men. The miasma of an army. It was as familiar to Rictus as the smell of bread to a baker.

The patrol set off early, picking their way through the tented city beyond the walls with the sun rising in their faces, a squat disc of red smeared with cloud, whose rise could be tracked with the eye if one stood still for a few minutes to watch. The Juthan stared at it with his livid eyes as his mule followed the tall rump of the Niseian in front.

Rictus rode beside him, as they were equally uncomfortable on horseback. But if the tall Kefren on their mighty horses were amused by the sight of the odd pair, they did not show it. Rictus was something of a legend in the army, and it was well known that the King considered him his second in command. Also, he was a cursebearer, and anyone who bore one of the black cuirasses inspired a certain amount of awe in the ranks.

Marcan had dropped his reins and let the mule pick its way according to its own good sense. He raised his arms to the rising sun, closed his eyes, and said something in a hard, clicking language Rictus had never heard before.

‘The Kefren worship Bel, the sun, the renewer,’ he said to Rictus’s curious look. ‘But the Juthan revere Mot. The Kefren would have us believe he is the god of blight and sickness and disease. But there can be no life, unless death has gone before. We worship Mot as the power which brings the one true end to all of existence. That is the final truth — we all die. We cannot say who or what will be born. Therefore Mot is the centre of life itself. All that goes before death is chaos.’

‘We worship Antimone, goddess of pity and death,’ Rictus said. ‘She does not protect us, but she takes us to her when we die, and brings us to God, and intercedes for us.’

‘The Juthan and the Macht are more similar than you think,’ Marcan said. ‘My grandfather’s best friend was a Macht general, Vorus, who in this very place let our people go free from a slavery they had known for untold centuries. We venerate his name. For that reason, as well as all the others, we will fight with you. It is a debt worth repaying.’

Turning, Rictus found the Juthan watching him.

‘I know who you are,’ Marcan said. ‘Your name is also known to my people.’

‘Your people have long memories,’ Rictus grunted.

‘As long as the stone, we say. We were a nation of slaves, and slaves forget little.’

Rictus had meant to make some quip about the fifty thousand spearmen, but something in the dignified mien of the Juthan stopped him. To the average Macht, the Juthan and the Kefren were all Kufr, all inferior foreigners, barbarians. He had never realised quite how unalike they were. Not just physically, but in the very stuff of their thoughts.

The sun rose, the heat grew. The patrol continued down the Imperial Road as though they were ordinary citizens of the empire about their business, and indeed, save for Rictus, they did not look out of place.

Once they were twenty pasangs from Irunshahr, the abandoned, bereft look of the countryside was ameliorated by their first sight of the inhabitants. They began to see hufsan farmers guiding buffalo through waterlogged fields. Others were knee deep in the brown water, planting seedlings one by one. On higher ground there was wheat and barley, tall and green but with the gold already coming into it. And there were orchards of pomegranates, apples, oranges and scented lemons, each as large as Rictus’s fist.

It was an abundance, a seething, thriving, growing world. The irrigation channels were surrounded by wild irises and alive with frogs, and white egrets pattered through the lowland like flags planted in the green-tipped mud. And everywhere the sliding rattle of cicadas, crickets, the belching of toads, and the darting iridescent brilliance of dragonflies.

‘They have waystations on the Imperial Road,’ Rictus called forward to Ardashir, ‘and each has a garrison.’

‘We are fifty,’ the Kefre said, turning in the saddle and setting his knee on his horse’s rump. ‘It will not even be sport, Rictus.’

Soon after, one of the waystations appeared out of the stubborn mist creeping along the irrigation embankments. It was a massive square tower of fired brick which rose out of the sodden fields beside the road and was surrounded by smaller blockhouses. There were fenced-in paddocks on all sides, and in them every manner of beast which had ever been trained to bear a burden.

The road itself was clogged by many carts, some little more than two-wheeled barrows, others grander, with gaily painted canopies of linen and leather. And there were several tall-sided waggons hitched to camels that looked more bored than any creature had a right to be.

In the midst of this scrum of vehicles and beasts, a crowd of Kufr, both Kefren and hufsan, were standing arguing, gesticulating and jumping up and down in fury. Perhaps a dozen armed guards were blocking the road with wide-bladed halberds, and their officer was waving a scimitar that glittered white in the sun, and shouting himself hoarse at the crowd.

Ardashir turned back to Rictus again, and he was laughing. ‘Perhaps we can be of help, eh, Rictus?’

Rictus muttered. He had no spear, only a drepana, and he felt unsafe and ill at ease on the horse. Beside him, Marcan reached back of his saddle and with a hissing sound drew forth a long white knife, as wide as a child’s wrist. ‘You miss your spear,’ he said to Rictus. ‘For me it is the weapon of my people I would have here, the akson. It is not fitting for a man to fight with a knife.’

‘Or on a damned horse,’ Rictus muttered. The cavalcade of Kefren riders on the massive Niseians surged past them. ‘Lances!’ Ardashir called out in his clear voice, and they cantered forward in twos with the long weapons pointing at the ground. The sun set their magnificently caparisoned armour alight; they looked almost too glorious to be warlike, but the crowd bickering in the roadway ahead did not seem to have any notion of the threat. Nor did the officer who was haranguing them.

Rictus slid off his horse and at once felt better, though his view was reduced. Marcan stood beside him; the squat Juthan came barely to his breastbone.

‘He’s telling them to clear the roadway,’ Marcan said, scratching one cheek with the point of the knife. ‘This is a strange way to fight a war.’

‘I have sometimes thought the Kefren do not take war seriously enough,’ Rictus admitted.

But then there was a scream. Rictus saw the white flash of a blade, and somehow the Kefren officer was down, and Ardashir’s troopers were barrelling forward with lances levelled. The crowd in the road exploded across the fields, and there was blood in the dust, the clang of steel on steel. Rictus’s mare whinnied in alarm and he soothed the beast by slapping it hard on the head with the flat of his sword.

Then it was over. Rictus and Marcan walked down the road like men arriving late at a funeral. There was not much to see, but for a litter of bodies skewed across the stone-slabbed road, and a host of abandoned vehicles, from one of which came the sound of a crying baby.

Ardashir was on foot, his horse standing unconcernedly beside him. The other troopers had dismounted, exchanged their lances for bows, and were fanning out through the little knot of buildings while a few of their number did duty as horse-holders. Ardashir rose from one of the bodies grim-faced.

‘Damn fool. He had no need to start that. I would have disarmed them and let them go — what’s a dozen more soldiers to us now?’

Rictus looked down on the dead Kefre. He was young, and though Rictus had never fully admitted this to himself, he thought that, like all high-caste Kefren, he could have been Ardashir’s brother. The features of the race seemed all so alike. To a Macht, at least.

‘He was armed, he had his blade drawn. It was honourable enough,’ he said, gruffly. Better than being trampled to death in the middle of a phalanx, at any rate.

‘Chief.’ One of Ardashir’s men had emerged from the waystation tower. ‘There are a lot of documents in here, but not much else. What shall we do, fire the place?’

Ardashir’s eyes cleared. ‘Bring the papers, round up the horses and cattle, and then torch it. There’s nothing to discover here. If the Great King’s army is in the Middle Empire, then it’s nowhere near us. These were just hufsan customs officials, checking over a caravan which was still heading west.’

He turned to Rictus. ‘Customs officials. Bel’s blood, Rictus; do they even know what’s going on in this country?’

‘They know,’ Marcan broke in sombrely. ‘The wheels take a time to set turning, that’s all. Once the empire sets things in motion, it comes down on you with the weight of a mountain. You have not yet felt that power, but it will come upon you, as sure as the rising of the moons.’ He gestured at the endless shimmering plains to the east.

‘This wide country will drink a river of blood, your people’s and mine, before the thing is done. Do not be impatient for that time to begin.’