Kings of Morning

THIRTEEN

They had found the house shut up, neglected but not quite derelict. The gardens were overgrown with a kind of shabby loveliness: rose-bushes run wild, vines covering an outdoor terrace and making of it a shaded bower. The orchard was heavy with unpicked fruit, and more lay at the feet of the trees, worm-eaten apples and pears and pomegranates, like the mouldering skulls of a forgotten battlefield.

But there was water in the well, and the key which Rakhsar carried fitted the lock, though it would not turn. Finally it was Ushau’s brute strength that smashed open the door, and as they trooped inside, swallows swooped past their heads, screaming madly, and there were wands and bars of light stabbing down through the holed roof, making brilliant sunlit shapes all about their feet.

Just inside the door was a beautiful mosaic-covered fountain, dry as sand. Behind it, two staircases led up to the outflung wings of the house, the steps littered with leaves, as gapped and broken as a beggar’s mouth.

‘Nice to see they kept the place in good order,’ Rakhsar said, strolling past the fountain, his hand on his sword-hilt.

‘They thought we would never see it,’ Roshana told him. ‘We were never supposed to come here.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have — I wanted to have a look, though. It is the only thing I own, outside the ziggurat.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Kurun said, stepping light-footed across the broken tesserae, whirling round like a dancer, smiling. ‘It is like a secret place. And the gardens!’

Roshana smiled. She put her arm about the boy and stroked the nape of his neck. ‘Perhaps we could stay a while.’

‘Ushau, take the left. I will take the right,’ Rakhsar said. ‘We’d best examine the lie of the place. Roshana, when you are done fondling our little eunuch, I want you to find some way to strike a light. There should be cellars, and I would kill someone for a cup of wine.’

They scattered through the house, exploring like children. The place had been abandoned and left to the elements, and the quick-growing vegetation of the fertile plains had all but smothered it. Creepers edged in at every window, dislodging the shutters with tendrils as thick as a woman’s wrist, and some of the mosaic floors were all but hidden by a growth of weeds and thorns, stands of giant mushrooms in damp corners. Geckos watched them warily from the walls, and the swallows continued to dart about their heads in protest, dropping balls of mud and flitting within inches of destruction as they carved aerobatic loops around balustrades and broken arches.

At the back of the house they found the kitchens, and they were massively built and in better repair. There was a fireplace wide enough to roast a brace of pigs, rusted fire-irons which could still be swung above the flames, and copper pots gone green but still with a bottom to them. They found knives, skewers, and earthenware jars with the seals intact, and opened them one by one, finding good oil, vinegar, and — marvel of all — honey, congealed hard as plaster, but still sweet and good.

Kurun kindled a fire in the broad kitchen hearth while Roshana hauled water out of the well and filled a trough outside for the horses. The water was clear, iron-tasting, and she had only to brush the skimming insects off it to drink her fill.

At the back of the house the kitchen garden was surrounded by a high wall — broken now, but within it were tomato plants, peppers of every hue, massive onions and wild garlic, and a riot of herbs. Roshana and Kurun gathered whatever caught their eye, brought it indoors in the folds of her cloak, and set to scrubbing some of the copper pots by the crackling smokeless fire. Kurun began sharpening one of the long iron knives on a whetstone, paused to stare blindly at the blade for a long moment in a spasm of unwanted memory, and then grimly carried on.

Rakhsar and Ushau entered the kitchen bearing dry lamps, which they filled from the jars and set to burning. With the lamplight and the firelight, and the water boiling, it was as homely a place as they had known in months.

The dark drew in, and secret creaking and rustling and skittering could be heard through the house, above the squeak of the hunting bats outside. When they had all eaten, the twins threw their bedrolls on the stone before the fire and sat upon them, Roshana sewing a rent in her robe, Rakhsar sharpening his scimitar with long screeching sweeps of the whetstone. Ushau went outside, to look upon the horses and keep an eye out, though it seemed barely credible that anyone would ever chance upon such a forgotten place who was not searching for it.

Kurun sat in a corner, nodding with tiredness, forgotten for the moment. The kitchen and its warmth reminded him of happier times, back in Ashur before the world had gone mad.

But he did not want to go back. He sat at the edge of the firelight and watched Rakhsar and Roshana, and found himself filled with simple wonder, at the things he had seen and the widening of the world he knew. He had crossed the Magron Mountains, been buried in snow, seen people die sudden and violent deaths. He had watched the sun rise over the endless plains of the Middle Empire.

And he had known these two, this royal pair. He had been caressed by the Great King’s daughter.

He would not have missed any of it. Not even for the thing which had been taken away from him.

‘Are we safe here?’ Roshana asked her brother. In the firelight, her eyes were huge and dark and her face white.

‘For a while, perhaps. We will stay a few days, no more.’ Rakhsar continued to sweep the whetstone down the sword blade.

‘Surely they will give up on us, leave us alone. Brother, perhaps they think us already dead.’

‘Roshana, you know as well as I that Kouros and Orsana will not be satisfied until they stand over our corpses. Just because we do not have soldiers thundering after us on horses does not mean we have not been watched, and followed.’

‘Have you seen anything?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rakhsar laid down the sword on his thigh and squeezed shut his eyes, bright lights in dark hollows. ‘Sometimes I see a spy behind every bush, and sometimes, like tonight, I cannot conceive of ever being tracked and found again. But this place is probably known to our enemies. They will look for us here eventually.’

‘What are we to do, Rakhsar, keep running west until we meet the Macht, or reach the sea? It has to end.’

‘I am thinking on it.’

‘Rakhsar — ’

‘I said I am thinking on it!’

They sat in silence after that. Roshana picked out the wayward stitches she had been sewing without seeing, and began again. The whetstone began its thin glide along the blade of the scimitar once more. In the corner, Kurun watched, head nodding. In his hand he had the sharpened knife with which he had prepared their supper. The blade grew warm against his flesh. He slept.

Before dawn Kurun was up and awake. He bent, blew life into the fire, added some sprigs of dry creeper to it to bring up the flame, and set a pot of water upon the coals.

Roshana and Rakhsar lay in one another’s arms, still asleep. The privations they had both undergone in the last weeks and Roshana’s shorn hair made them look more than ever like reflections of each other. Kurun knelt beside them, and touched Roshana’s cheek. His brown fingers traced the soft line of her earlobe. She murmured, and Kurun straightened.

Ushau sat upright by the wall, watching.

‘Do not mistake your place, young fellow,’ the giant hufsan said softly.

‘I mean no disrespect.’

‘I know. But remember what you are, and what blood flows through them. We are not in the ziggurat now, but they are still far beyond us.’

‘They would be dead if it were not for us.’

‘That is of no account. One day, if they are spared, they will live in a palace again, lords of the world, and we will be forgotten.’

‘They will not forget us — how could they?’

Ushau smiled, and leaned his head back against the wall. ‘Go look on the horses.’

Outside, the birds were singing in invisible crowds from every bush and tree. Not even in the Gardens of the Great King had Kurun ever heard so many together. The sun was rising fast; it seemed to slide up the sky with unseemly haste in this part of the world, so that the moment of the dawn, that daily miracle, was barely to be experienced before it was over.

The horses were head-hung and silent, though they turned to Kurun as he approached, knowing his smell. He had brought them an apple each, and they ate them with relish, but seemed barely awake.

The sunlight rose over the broken walls of the garden, flooding the back of the house, warming the world. Tendrils of mist which had been coiling along the ground withered at its touch, and Kurun stood feeling the light and life of Bel the Renewer soak into him. It seemed to him in that moment he had found for himself a corner of a better world, and he knew that in such a place he could be happy, even if he were only a slave.

Four days passed in peace and silence. The disparate foursome lost the aches and pain that constant travel had ground into them, and began to feel rested, clean, almost normal. The headlong urgency of the past weeks faded, and in the warm air of the lowland summer, the snows of the Magron became but a dream. Their lives in the ziggurat seemed more distant still, a memory to puzzle over.

In a chest in the upstairs of the house they found clothes, put away with bunches of lavender and columbine so as to deter the insects. They were, it seemed, plain garments, suited to a prosperous lower-caste household. Roshana set to adjusting them with her wayward needle skills, and Rakhsar took Kurun farther afield, to look over the estate which had been bought in his name at his birth.

Poplars, cypress and plane trees had been planted in lines fanning out from the house, but over the years the lines had become irregular and entangled with saplings and all manner of secondary growth. The borders of the estate were impossible to define, though Rakhsar and Kurun stumbled across a deep, overgrown ditch with water running at the bottom of it which seemed a boundary of some sort.

They raised partridge, pheasant, and — once — a magnificent heron out of the wetter ground as they beat the bounds of the little kingdom. There was no sign of people anywhere, and the city of Arimya was a mere bump of shadow on the hazy horizon.

But there was something almost indefinable which intruded on the peace. Kurun could not put a word to it until Rakhsar lifted his head and sniffed the air like a hound.

‘Woodsmoke,’ he said, frowning.

They looked back at the house, and saw the black bar of smoke rising from the kitchen-chimney, like a marker set in the sky. Rakhsar swore, and began to run.

They pelted into the kitchen as though they had wolves on their tail, and saw Roshana by the fire, feeding it with mossy branches she had picked up in the garden. A thick smoke rose from it, to be sucked into the mantle above.

Rakhsar said not a word, but shoved his sister aside, grabbed a fire-iron, and began raking the burning wood out of the hearth. He stamped upon it and beat it with the iron until the kitchen was filled with smuts and sparks and they were choking on it.

‘Where is Ushau?’

Roshana was bewildered. ‘I sent him for more wood.’

‘Get out of my way, you stupid bitch.’ Rakhsar grabbed at a pot of water, which was full of peeled onions, and threw it on the last of the coals. A billow of steam went up. He stood, panting. Roshana cowered against Kurun.

‘What is wrong — what did I do?’

‘We cannot have smoke. Are you stupid? How many times have I told you; if you must have a fire in the day, the wood must be powder-dry. You’ve just signalled our presence here for pasangs all around.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think — ’

‘It was not burning long, master,’ Kurun said.

‘Long enough.’ Rakhsar stood, looking into the ruined fire, still breathing heavily. ‘We have been here too long. We are forgetting our fate.’

Roshana began to sob silently, and Kurun put his arm about her shoulders.

‘Stop crying, sister. It will not do anyone any good.’

‘Do we have to leave? Can’t we stay here?’ she wept.

Rakhsar lifted his head, incredulous. He spun round, pushed Kurun out of the way and took his sister by the upper arms. He shook her like a terrier worrying a rat.

‘Is that what you thought — that somehow we could set up home here? My dear sister, I credited you with more wit — even this boy knew better.’

‘I’m tired of running,’ Roshana said brokenly.

‘Are you tired of living?’ He released her. To Kurun, he snapped, ‘Get her out of here, and then clean this mess up.’

‘Yes, master,’ Kurun murmured.

‘And keep your little paws off her, boy. You may have no balls, but I see what’s in your eyes. Now get out.’

They were afraid again. For a short time they had dared to believe the worst might be over, but they all recognised the truth of Rakhsar’s words. That afternoon they began methodically to pack up food and bedding and anything else they could glean from the house which would speed their onward journey. The hearth remained cold and black, and the weather took a turn for the worse in the early evening, a long slew of thunderclouds edging east over the world, and then congregating on the wide plains west of the Bekai River.

Rakhsar did not let them light so much as a single clay lamp, so agitated had he become. He stood and stared out at the silver sheets of the rain, the patient horses standing under it with the bags already packed upon their rumps, and whatever peace they had all known in the last few days entirely gone. The house seemed dank and cold in the rain, streams of water pouring through the threadbare roof and puddling on the floors. It was as though it knew they were leaving, and was turning its face from them.

It was the middle hours of the night before the rain stopped, and Rakhsar herded them out into the dripping garden. Roshana was lifted up onto one of the horses by Ushau, and then the little company went in single file around the drenched, dark building, the overgrown trees and bushes snatching at them with wet fingers. They were soaked before they had gone fifty paces, but finally they were at the front of the house, and here the rest clambered on the horses, Ushau behind Roshana on her horse, Rakhsar and Kurun on the other. It was dark as pitch, with not a star showing; but in the clouds to the west there was a faint red glow as Firghe, moon of wrath, rose far above the swollen thunderheads.

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.

‘Hold 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.

The 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.

It was Barka 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.’

They 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.

He did not know if his sister was dead or alive, free or captured. Ushau and Kurun were gone, that he knew, but he could not leave without knowing about her. He could not do it.

And so the decision was easily made, in the end.

He hauled himself out of the ditch, stood under the shadow of the juniper and gorse, smelling the blossoms, smiling slightly. The line of beaters was some half-pasang away. And behind them he thought he caught more movement amid the scattered trees on the horizon. Cavalry.

At least Kouros deemed us worthy of a small army, though half a dozen fellows who knew their job might have done better.

He looked down at the black blade of his scimitar. A present from his father, the Great King. It had turned out to be the most useful gift he had ever received.

And all those hours of training had not gone for naught after all.

Kouros, just let me once get close, and I will share our father’s gift with you.

He took off at a loping run for the house. The men in the distance saw him at once, and a cry went up, as hounds will sound at the sight of the fox. The blooms of the torchlight began to cluster in pursuit. Rakhsar grinned, and broke into a flat sprint.

On the horizon, the distant cavalry checked at the sight of the running torches in the fields, and changed course towards the house also, like moths summoned by the light.