Kings of Morning

TEN

Rakhsar knelt in the noisome water of the ditch and breathed softly through his mouth, ignoring the mosquitoes whining about his face. Up ahead the road was clear, and the only light was that of a single torch left guttering in a sconce on the waystation wall, with moths as big as sparrows fluttering around it.

He looked up. Firghe, moon of patience, was setting, and the pale glow of Anande had begun to rise in the north-east. All across the sky between the two moons the stars blazed in a welter of spangled lights. He felt he had been staring at stars, at the moons, at the black night sky, for a long time. He could barely think of walking upright and unafraid under the sun.

I am still here, he thought. I have made it this far, and I am my father’s son.

He brought the pommel of the scimitar to his swollen lips and sucked gently on it. He was very thirsty, for they had lain up all day, and the insects of the Bekai River valley had sucked them dry. The stinking water of the ditches had not yet tempted him, unlike Roshana.

He turned, his eyes a gleam of violet light in the dark, and beckoned to the deeper shadow of the overgrown ditch. Tall irises rose on both sides, creating a space almost as good as a tunnel, but he had grown to hate their fragrance with a passion. If ever he sat on a throne, his palace would not have an iris within ten pasangs of it.

The boy splashed to his side first, his dark skin a perfect camouflage in the night, the same colour as sun-paled mud.

‘You know what to do,’ Rakhsar said, and Kurun nodded. He climbed out of the ditch and padded across the road, a dark shape against the dust. Then he ran noiselessly up to the waystation, a passing shadow, no more.

Roshana was beside him now, breathing heavily, her face darkened with smeared filth. He touched her cheek gently, and felt the swollen stipple of bites ringing her eyes. Behind her the looming hulk of Ushau rose up in the ditch like some child’s monster.

‘Make sure she does not stumble,’ Rakhsar said in a sharp hiss to the giant hufsan, and Ushau nodded.

The shadow reappeared at the side of the nearest blockhouse, and waved.

‘Time to go,’ Rakhsar said in a whisper, and he laboured out of the ditch. He was barefoot, for the muck had sucked the footwear off all of them days ago, and as he stood upon the roadway the familiar agony of his blisters began to throb again.

Slippers! He thought. And I once considered myself wise in the world. We knew nothing.

Roshana was hauled out of the ditch by Ushau, protesting feebly. She could barely take her own weight, and at an impatient gesture from Rakhsar the big hufsan scooped her up in his arms as he had Kurun in the early days of their flight. The three of them hobbled and hopped across the road, Rakhsar spitting with pain and anger, the scimitar a carmine gleam in the last light of the red moon.

A horse ruckled softly down its nose in the shadow behind the blockhouse. Kurun was already lifting a halter from a peg on the wall. They heard laughter within, and there was the yellow gleam of a lamp under the ill-fitting wooden door.

The door opened, and the light was like a white, silent explosion in the night, so accustomed had Rakhsar’s eyes become to the dark.

‘Two horses!’ he hissed to Kurun, and then he moved in with a strange, light-hearted happiness, the scimitar held two-handed, the blade resting on his right shoulder.

A dark silhouette in the doorway, and the beginnings of a shout, felt as much as heard. Rakhsar swung the sword with all the pent-up fury of the day, and the beautifully chased blade took the figure in the doorway at the collarbone.

The blade went through flesh and bone as it had been crafted to do, and the superlative steel continued the arc, through the ribs and lights, until it was free again. The shape in the doorway fell in two cleanly sliced pieces. Something akin to laughter gurgled in Rakhsar’s throat. He recovered, as the best weapons-masters in the empire had taught him to do, and when the second hufsan came charging out of the lamplight he skewered him as cleanly as a frog on a grillspike.

Again, recover. The doorway was blocked with bodies, or parts of them, and even the dust could not swallow up the slick ropes of clotting gore sliding out of the bodies like shit from a dysenteric sphincter.

‘Rakhsar!’ it was Roshana’s voice, hoarse and low.

He stepped backwards. The night was ruined with shouting now, and the red moon had set. Anande, that the Macht named Phobos, moon of fear, had risen, and Rakhsar stood in the cold rising light under the stars, and laughed.

The horses were stamping and panicking at the smell of blood. Ushau sat on one, as incongruous as a dog on a chair, with Roshana in his arms. Kurun clung to the back of the other, fists knotted in its mane. The animal half-reared under him, but he hung on with the tenacity of the undercity.

There were other hufsan in the doorway now, standing in horror, their feet swathed in the mire of their comrades’ gore. They saw Rakhsar standing before them with the black-slimed scimitar, his eyes blazing like those of a wolf caught in torchlight, and that wide grin splitting his face.

‘Come out to me, if you dare!’ he cried, and the happiness and the laughter fluttered in his breast until he felt he could barely breathe, and barely needed to.

The figures retreated inside, back to the lamplight and the sanity within. Rakhsar leapt the fence, and in another bound he was up behind Kurun, and he felt the horse gather itself under him, aware that there was a thing on its back now which could master it and would brook no rebellion.

Still laughing, Rakhsar kicked the animal’s ribs, and it took off into an instant canter, while behind him its fellow lumbered along gamely, Ushau thumping it mightily on the shoulder with one great fist, Roshana a limp figure in front of him, her white face hooded by a mat of black filthy hair.

They galloped like fiends along the Imperial road in a pale cloud of moonlit dust, and once they had left the waystation behind the night was dark and tranquil again, except for the exertions of the beasts that bore them. Rakhsar had always been a good horseman, but Kurun was bouncing upon the withers of the animal like a sack, and Rakhsar heard him cry out in pain, his fists clenched in his groin.

‘Throw up a leg — I’ll hold you,’ he said to the boy, and Kurun writhed until he was sat on the horse sideways, and only Rakhsar’s arm kept him from sliding off feet first. Rakhsar kissed the boy on his salty, dust-caked neck, and gripped the barrel of his mount between his knees until the animal grunted. He looked back, and saw Ushau still belabouring his own horse, to some effect, for it was killing itself to keep up with them. Rakhsar reined back into a canter.

‘The next stop is Arimya,’ he said into Kurun’s ear. ‘I have an estate there I’ve never seen, and I have need of a bath and a bed.’

‘Yes, lord,’ Kurun said.

‘As do you, my stinking little friend.’

They left the road and cast off across the fields and paths to the north of it shortly before dawn. It was while they stood stock still in a thicket of tamarisk, holding their horse’s noses, that they saw the pursuit storm past. A dozen hufsan soldiers on the hardy scrub ponies the lower ranks rode, trotting up the wide stone road and shouting to one another, spears in their fists and apprehension written all over their faces.

They passed, and the travellers drew a breath.

‘We have Mot’s luck with us,’ Rakhsar said.

‘Don’t say such things,’ his sister snapped.

‘We have become creatures of the night, Roshana, who live by guile and murder. We are Mot’s children. Bel has turned his face from us.’

Roshana did not speak, but clambered awkwardly away into the bushes with a moan and squatted there. They heard the liquid gush out of her. A few weeks ago Rakhsar would have been scandalised. Now he merely gathered up some dry leaves and grass and joined his sister in the depths of the thicket.

She lay on her side, her skirts pulled up, white legs drawn up to her stomach like those of an unborn baby. Rakhsar looked her over, and grimaced.

‘Kurun!’

The boy came scuttling over at once.

‘Master?’

‘Clean my sister.’

He hesitated, and then with infinite tenderness he set to wiping Roshana free of the liquid filth that smeared her buttocks, her thighs, her private places.

‘How long since you ate?’ Rakhsar asked his twin, his face close to hers.

‘No food — I cannot stomach it, even the thought.’

‘We are a long way from the garden and the nightingales, Roshana. You must keep life in you.’

‘I want clean water. I am so thirsty.’

‘We’ll find some tonight.’ They had not realised just how different the world beyond the palace was. Not just in the obvious things, but in the very food they ate and the water they craved. The peasant farmers of Pleninash drank a liquid that was as opaque as soup, called it water, and seemed to thrive on it, as did Kurun and Ushau. Rakhsar could just tolerate it, but it had devastated Roshana.

‘We will sleep in comfort tonight,’ Rakhsar said fiercely. ‘I promise you that.’

Beside him, Kurun finished his task, and pulled Roshana’s garments down over her legs. Hesitantly, he patted the Kefren princess’s thigh.

‘Take your paws off my sister,’ Rakhsar snapped.

‘Forgive me, lord.’

‘Do not forget your station, Kurun. I value you, but you are still only a slave.’

The boy hung his head. ‘Yes, master.’

‘Good.’ Rakhsar touched Kurun under the chin, raising his head. ‘Now help me get her to the horses.’

Off the road the countryside was a patchwork of dyked fields in which rice rose green and thick from the water. There were raised causeways of red earth which the travellers took in single file, and each led to a junction of fruit trees — which they knew now to leave alone, for they were not yet ripe, though even the sight of the hanging peaches and pears set their soured mouths watering.

At the centre of each cluster of fields and clumped orchards would be a mud-brick hut with the earth packed into a yard around it, sometimes a rough wooden fence hemming in a few chickens, or a brace of hogs. They had avoided these little steadings up until now, but Rakhsar did not know how many more nights in the open Roshana could survive.

This night would be different.

A hufsa woman saw them as she went to the well with a leather bucket. She stopped in her tracks, and a naked toddler came running after her and set its fists in her skirts and began to wail.

‘Talk to her,’ Rakhsar told Kurun. ‘Tell her we want food, clean water set to boil, and a place to sleep. I will pay her husband.’ His hand settled on the hilt of the scimitar, and he made sure the woman saw it.

It was interminable, this reasoning with people. Rakhsar was not accustomed to it. All his life he had stated what he wanted and it had been instantly to hand. He could barely get by in the common Asurian that the hufsan spoke, and this far into the backwaters of the empire, the people knew no Kefren.

And yet this, too, is my own country.

It had been easier crossing the Magron, for there were more places to hide in the high country, and the water was good, the highland folk a sturdy, hospitable breed who were used to seeing high-caste Kefren come and go. Their travels in the mountains had accorded more with Rakhsar’s notions of what a heroic escape should be. At least at first.

They had lost Maidek and Maryam to an avalanche, and the horses too. Ushau had dug the rest of them out of the suffocating layered snow one by one, and the rest of their passage had been on foot. They had become thieves in the night, stealing and poaching to eat, afraid of every shadow, barely able to light a fire in the dark to keep the blood in their veins from freezing. Like dogs, they had huddled together, all differences in caste and station forgotten in the struggle to survive.

But it had hardened them. Kurun had healed with the astonishing speed of the young, and Ushau was well-nigh indestructible. Rakhsar had adjusted also, something long buried in him rising to the challenge. Even savouring it, as an angry man will savour his own fury.

But Roshana had shrunk before their eyes, a bird unaccustomed to life outside the cage.

And now it had begun to tease Rakhsar’s thoughts in the darkest spaces of the night.

What if she dies?

And even; she slows us down. Better to leave her, somewhere safe.

But if they did, Ushau would stay with her, no question. Perhaps the boy, too. Rakhsar had no illusions about his own ability to generate loyalty.

And so they had limped along, down into the warm wet plains of the Middle Empire at last, into a floundering march of muck and insects and noisome water. No-one asked Rakhsar where they were going, and there were times he no longer knew himself. He knew only that they must continue west, ahead of Kouros’s agents. They could not stop moving. They had come too far to be caught now.

But he knew also that there were not many more pasangs left in them.

The interior of the mud house was smoke-blackened, the earth floor packed hard as marble. The woman of the house was baking flatbreads on a stone griddle above the fire, turning them with the easy flick of long practice. The child clung to her leg, and when urine dribbled unheeded down its own, a little pi-dog came fawning out of a corner and licked it clean, before retreating apologetically again.

Roshana lay on a mud-built platform, covered in a thick mat of woven reeds. Aside from two stools made from the hewn cylinders of a palm trunk, this was the house’s only furniture. The woman had a large shallow pot of poor iron which she took down from its place on the wall as if it were a king’s crown, and setting it on the coals she dashed oil into it from a gourd and then tossed in some greens and corn. This she poked at for a few seconds, then tilted up the pot and emptied the shining contents onto two flatbreads. They were rolled up, torn in two, and offered round.

No-one spoke. It seemed to Rakhsar he had never in his life tasted anything so fine. Kurun smiled up at the woman from where he squatted on the floor, and she smiled back, warming to his beauty and his youth. Ushau thanked her gravely in Asurian, prayed briefly over the morsel, and then ate it in two bites, closing his eyes as he chewed.

Roshana could not eat. She lay on the woven reeds shivering, though it was sweating-hot in the house. The woman bent over her, touched her white forehead, sniffed, and then before Rakhsar could stop her, she had lifted up his sister’s robes and was peering below, frowning.

Rakhsar leapt up. ‘Don’t touch her!’

The woman cowered, and the child began to cry. In the corner the little pi-dog bared his teeth and snarled.

‘Master, she means no harm,’ Kurun said. The boy rose and held out his hands like a priest blessing them both.

‘My sister is not to be gawked at by some swamp-caste bitch hufsa.’

The woman spoke, lifting her child into her arms, gesturing to Roshana and then to Rakhsar.

‘She wants us to leave.’

Rakhsar reached inside his sash-purse, which was now as thin as the sash itself. He found two copper obols and held them out. ‘Give these to her. Tell her my sister must sleep here tonight. We cannot leave.’

The woman took the money, and her eyes grew shrewd. She spoke again.

‘She says she can help the lady Roshana.’

‘Well, let’s see if she can, Kurun. But I shall watch over her, and if she does us wrong, I shall have Ushau break her neck. And her brat’s, too.’

The woman was alone. As they sat there through the night, she told Kurun that her husband had been sent for by the Great King to fight in his army, and had gone east some weeks before.

She talked almost continually as she worked, and little by little the sense of the words began to order itself to Rakhsar. Asurian and High Kefren had once been the same language, but the high castes that dwelt in the ziggurats had drawn apart from the hufsan who made up the bulk of the empire, and over centuries of privilege their speech patterns had changed. Since the Great King spoke this evolving language, so did every courtier, high ranking officer and civil servant of the empire. It had become the language of the rulers.

All high caste Kefren still knew Asurian, for they mixed with the lower orders on a daily basis; but for Rakhsar and Roshana it had been different. They had never known the need to learn Asurian. What little they possessed was a half-remembered relic crooned over them by their wet-nurses.

I was never allowed to learn it, Rakhsar realised. Right from the beginning, it had been decided that there was no need.

Try as he might, he could not blame his father for this. He sensed the hand of Orsana.

A prince who cannot speak to his people. How ingenious of her — and such a simple thing to accomplish in the rarefied world of the palace, where even the slaves knew the high tongue.

But after all these weeks on the road listening to Ushau and Kurun, and now to this woman, Rakhsar’s inquisitive brain began to decipher the meanings of the half-familiar, half-alien words. He sat on one of the palm-trunk stools and watched, and listened, and for once in his life began to appreciate that one could gain without demand.

The hufsa woman stripped Roshana and washed her with warm water, then rubbed her down with palm oil scented with lavender and thyme, an incongruous fragrance in the smoky confines of the hovel. Ushau and Kurun went outside for this, but Rakhsar watched, and even went so far as to help the woman rinse out Roshana’s hair. Clumps of mud were so fastened in it that the woman despaired of the brush, and Rakhsar offered her his own knife to make the cut.

She took the pearl-handled blade gingerly, as though afraid to touch it, but once her dark fist covered the ornate hilt it became just another knife to her, and she began to cut away Roshana’s heavy black mane of hair, which had doubled in weight from its cargo of mud. When she had finished Roshana was left with a scalp as shorn as Kurun’s, and looked more like a boy than he did, the strong bones of her face accentuated by the weeks of lean living.

She opened her eyes; she had not spoken a word or uttered a protest through the whole operation, though she had whimpered some when the hufsa sawed a little too vigorously.

‘I am glad to be rid of it,’ she said, quietly.

‘You are more beautiful than ever,’ her brother told her, and meant it.

The hufsa was more sure of herself now. While her child and the little dog lay sleeping in a warm tangle on the floor, she heated water to boiling and then began twitching off handfuls of herbs from the drying bundles on the walls. These went in the water, and the smell of them in the steam that rose was wondrously refreshing, like some breath from a cooler world.

Finally, she sat by Roshana and took the girl’s head on her knee, then made her drink the hot herb-infused brew sip by sip.

By the time she was done it was far past the middle of the night. The woman pulled a handwoven blanket over Roshana and stroked her black, spiky scalp.

‘It will grow back,’ she said in Asurian.

And Rakhsar understood her.

Then she curled up on the floor beside her child, without further ceremony, and went at once to sleep.

Rakhsar stayed awake, watching the woman, her child, the twitching dog, and his own sister, now hardly recognisable but sleeping soundly on the peasant mat, in a smoke-blackened house made of mud.

And he knew something akin to peace, for the first time in his cosseted and quarrelsome and watchful life.