Kings of Morning

TWENTY

As the evening came, tawny with spent dust on the wind, bright with the first of the moons, so the camp began to fill up again.

Roshana and Kurun sat outside their tent with their feet to a campfire that a chastened Macht had built for them, and watched as the waggon-park on the plain below the tented city came to life with torch and firelight. At first they could see clearly the slow procession of the waggons as they trickled in below, but later, when night fell, they could only hear them. They followed the progress of the convoys by the shrieks of those that were in them: the wounded of the Macht army.

‘So many,’ Roshana said. She was gripping her komis close to her mouth in one white-knuckled little fist. ‘How can there be so many? They must have been defeated, Kurun. They are screaming in their thousands.’

‘If they lost, then what of us?’ Kurun asked.

‘If they won, what of us?’

‘I do not want the Macht to win, mistress.’

‘Nor do I. But I hope Kouros was in the battle. I hope he died. I hope Corvus killed him.’

Kurun looked at the slight, crop-headed girl with the blazing eyes, and then he looked back down at the waggon-park and the field hospitals with a sigh.

‘It is too big for me. I only know that I want to live. And I want you to live. There is nothing else.’

Roshana took his hand. ‘There is still vengeance.’

‘It is not for a slave to seek. He merely endures.’

‘Not you — you are no slave. Not to me.’

Kurun said nothing. He knew better than to speak.

They could not sleep that night for the screaming; neither of them had ever heard anything like it. They sat wrapped in a single blanket and occasionally Kurun would scour the surroundings for scraps of wood to keep the fire going. But it was burnt down to a glowing nub by the time the solitary figure walked towards them up the slope from the waggons below. By that hour, many thousands of men had already returned to the camp, not just wounded, but infantry marching in cadence, in silence, shrouded by the ochre dust. And lines of limping horses too lame to bear a rider.

The shadow came into the last red light of their fire and they saw that it was a Kefre, a tall man of some breeding. He was covered in dust and dried blood and he moved with the slow careful steps of the very old and the very tired.

‘My name is Ardashir,’ he said to Roshana and Kurun, and the fire lit up a friendly smile in his haggard face. ‘May I join you?’

He sat down without answer, though it was closer to a fall. Elbows on knees, he stared at the sullen coals and his eyes blinked slowly as though sleep was a precipice and he was on the very edge.

But he collected himself. ‘The King sent me to see how you were faring, and to ask if there was anything you need. He apologises for not coming in person, but he… he had things to attend to that will not wait.’ Here Ardashir licked his dry lips and pointed out across the plain to the east. There were lights out there in the black desert, moving torches, an impression of great activity.

‘I am to bring you to a ceremony.’ The words staggered from his tongue. Kurun offered the Kefre a waterskin and he smiled, and squeezed one swallow after another into his mouth until the liquid was brimming over and running down his neck. It carved tracks in the dust coating his skin.

‘Ah, my thanks. I was beginning to wilt.’

‘Who won the battle?’ Roshana asked him in a low tone.

‘We did, lady. The army of the Great King has been shattered and is in rout along every eastern road for forty pasangs.’

Roshana’s mouth opened. But Ardashir had not finished.

‘The Great King is dead. He died fighting, like a brave man. I am to bring you to his funeral with the coming of the dawn. My condolences, lady. King Corvus would not have had it so. He would have taken your father alive had he been able, and treated him with honour. As it is, we have built a pyre worthy of him. It is lit at dawn. That is why I am here.’

He turned his head to look at Roshana. ‘You were not close to your father.’

‘He had many children. He barely knew most of them.’ The shock of the news was cold upon them both. Kurun tucked his face into his knees and began to weep, not knowing why. For the death of a world he had known, perhaps. Nothing could be brought back now, any more than his own body could be made whole again.

‘What of the crown prince?’ Roshana asked. ‘What of Kouros?’

Ardashir frowned. ‘We captured no nobles. They are either dead or fled. Lady, on the plain of Gaugamesh east of here the bodies lie like a carpet for pasangs. Many thousands died today; we have barely begun to count them, let alone know who they were. This Kouros may be alive, he may be dead. There will be no way of knowing.’

Roshana nodded. She bent her forehead into Kurun’s shoulder. Her own tears came now, silent. She, too, was weeping for she knew not what. For a father who had barely ever spoken to her? Or for the loss of that world which Kurun wept for also. For the brother who had disappeared with it.

Ardashir hauled himself to his feet. He rubbed his hand over his face, grimacing as the palm came away black. ‘It is time, lady,’ he said with the gentleness peculiar to him. ‘We must leave now. There is a cart waiting to take you.’

Roshana looked up at him, like some beautiful lost beggar-child. ‘I will come. I’m ready.’

The pyre was some thirty feet high, made of broken waggons, shattered spears and wizened trees felled from the scrub-scattered plain. The Great King’s chariot had been hauled to the top of it, and his body was laid out upon its shattered frame, braced on a wooden bier. He had been wrapped in the red cloaks of the Macht infantry, and above his head the royal standard of Asuria flew, tattered and bloodstained, but catching the wind so that the rags spread like the pinions of a dark bird.

As the dawn light touched the standard, so Corvus stepped forward, bearing a lit torch which glared bright in the morning-dark.

The pyre caught quickly, the flames streaming along the base and reaching up as the wind fanned them. Soon the whole pyre was alight and roaring, and the sunrise lit it brighter still, and cast long shadows across the plain.

Many thousands had gathered there to see the pyre of a Great King. They stood filthy, grimed and bloody, but in perfect ranks and complete silence as the tall pyre began to collapse in on itself, the chariot at its top sinking into the embers below with a fantail of sparks, the Asurian standard itself catching light at the end and streaming away in one last bright flammifer.

Other mounds were then lit. All around the King’s pyre they stood in gruesome piles, stacked high with anything flammable that could be found on or near the battlefield. Even sheaves of arrows had been stacked about the corpses of the Macht.

They were kindled one by one, and the Great King’s pyre had the company of half a dozen others as large, but containing hundreds of bodies. The black smoke rose as the dawn light waxed and the red tint left the eastern sky. The soldiers trooped back to their camp, and behind them the pyres burned down to ash which the west wind took and blew across the earth in a grey mist, towards the peaks of the Magron Mountains.

For three days, the Macht policed the great battlefield, searching for those that still lived, collecting the dead and burning them in yet more pyres, collecting a mountain of armour and weapons and other equipment which had been abandoned on the field. But only a tithe of them remained there to do this. Most of the army was already on the march eastwards again, the Companions in the forefront, harrying the survivors of the battle and travelling east among panic-stricken mobs of levy-soldiers who wanted nothing more, now, than to get back to their farms and their homes and their families. These were ignored; they were no longer any threat to the advance.

The prize in this race was the city of Carchanis, the great citadel that guarded the crossings of the Bekai River and which had been used by the Great King as his base of operations. The lead troops of the Macht came within sight of the city four days after the battle, and at once sent word to its governor to surrender, or face assault and siege with no quarter given.

It was a bluff. The army was not yet in any condition to assault or besiege so much as a hamlet. Parmenios’s siege equipment was still back at the waggon-park, and the men and animals of Corvus’s army had been pushed to the limits of their endurance.

But the bluff worked. Governor Beshan of Carchanis opened his western gates to the invaders and surrendered the city, having first opened the eastern gates to allow the remnants of the Arakosans under Lorka to continue their flight.

Word was sent back to the tented camps around Gaugamesh. The battlefield was to be abandoned, and the entire army was to move up on Carchanish, where the Great King had stockpiled enough supplies to feed it for months. Corvus himself rewarded Beshan for his surrender by allowing him to remain as Governor of the city, but he also appointed a military advisor to help the Kefren administration cope with the change in pace. And to keep an eye on things.

The breakneck pursuit was called off for a few days to allow the bulk of the army to regroup and rest. Around the ancient walls of Carchanis the tented city of the Macht sprang up once more, like a plague of dun mushrooms. But it was not as large as it had been before Gaugamesh.

In his long life, Rictus had known many injuries, and he had learned how to deal with pain. But it seemed to him that the journey in the waggon-bed from Gaugamesh to Carchanis produced the greatest agonies he had ever known. And he did not know why.

His wounds were many, varied and uninteresting. None of them in themselves were even close to fatal, but the combination of them all had brought him as close to Antimone’s Veil as he had ever been in his life.

He travelled in a well-sprung caravan which had been looted from the baggage train of the imperial army. It was superbly made, drawn by four quiet horses used to the traces, and it had a wooden roof painted blue and traced with silver filigree; a line of horses galloping endlessly round and around, their manes flying, their tails curling and tossing. Rictus lay on the rope-hung cot within the cart, sweating sour memories into the linen sheets, and watched those horses go round and around, waiting for death.

He was attended to by an old Kefren physician named Buri, who had been found in the wreckage of the Great King’s army, and who had chosen to help the wounded of his conquerors. He was too old for flight or bitterness or ambition, and Corvus had found him to be an able man. He had set him the task of keeping Rictus alive.

He was aided in this task by Kurun, the hufsan slave-boy, who, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to help the old man heal the Macht marshal. And because the youngster was often in the caravan with Rictus, the crop-headed Kefren princess, Roshana, was there also as often as not.

Buri did not know who Roshana was, and she did not tell him, but he did ask Kurun why the boy wanted to see the Macht veteran live.

‘He helped us once,’ was all Kurun would say, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. And then he would be out the back door of the caravan, leaping off it as they plodded along in search of firewood or water or fresh linen. He had become an able thief, and the three Kufr in the caravan ate well. Rictus would eat nothing. He would only drink water, as much as any man could hold. It was as if he were trying to flush the dust of Gaugamesh out of his throat.

So it was that when they reached Carchanis, it was deemed a natural thing that apartments be found in the high citadel to accommodate them all close at hand to each other. By that point Rictus was able to sit up, though his raw-boned face had lost its colour and the flesh had fallen from his bones, so that his head seemed too big for his body. Buri’s administrations kept his wounds clean and knitting, and fought off the dank fierceness of a fever; the same that was carrying off hundreds of the other Macht wounded. All the same, Rictus was gone for several days after their arrival in Carchanis, lost in some twilit world where Antimone watched over him and folded him in her black wings. Kurun watched over him day and night, pouring water down his throat and wiping the sweat from his body. And Roshana sat in a corner with her komis over her face and carried water from the fountained courtyard as though she were the servant and old Buri her master.

It was the sound of marching feet and the call of bronze horns which finally roused Rictus from his stupor. The city was full of the sound of an army, but the horns were deep and strange. They did not belong to the Macht, or to the empire. He opened his red-crusted eyes to find Kurun looking down on him, his young face hollow-eyed but cheerful. In Kefren, the hufsan said, ‘Buri, the Macht awakes.’

‘Help me up,’ Rictus told him, knowing the face but not connecting it to any memory as yet. The boy seemed to understand him, but even in his gaunt state Rictus was too heavy to shift. Finally Roshana propped herself under his other shoulder and they helped him out of the bed. He stood naked between them, his body covered with purple wounds and linen dressings, and limped over to the high window.

Into the hot sunlight, the heat of it like a blast of memory. Rictus closed his eyes a moment against the glare, and when he could finally see again he found himself looking down on the serried clay-tile rooftops of a great city, as great as Machran or larger. The buildings of it swooped down with dizzying steepness to walls of pale stone far below, and beyond, a great river, brown as the back of a thrush, crossed by a massive bridge of ancient stonework. Beyond that, the green country of the Middle Empire opened out into a shimmering haze of heat and dust, and beyond that lay the dark blue guess of the Magron Mountains at the edge of sight.

But that was not what caught Rictus’s eyes. It was the dark worms of marching men slowly inching across the green country, blackening the pale roadways to the city with their numbers and their strange banners, the beat of their feet to be heard as a distant blood-quickening drum even up here in the heights of the citadel.

‘Who are they?’ he asked. Again, the boy Kurun understood him, though he spoke in Machtic.

‘They Juthan. Juthan army here. Juthan King here today,’ he said, the words ill-formed in his mouth but perfectly understandable.

‘Where is this?’

‘This Carchanis. Big city. Big river. Enough now.’

They tried to move Rictus away from the tall balconied window, but Rictus was as immobile as a standing stone, staring as though he had just seen the world for the first time.

‘Carchanis,’ he said. ‘The Bekai River.’

And then, in a whisper, ‘Fornyx, my brother.’ He stood there with the two young Kufr under his arms, old Buri beginning to fuss and fret around him, and the tears came dripping from his eyes and trailed down a gaunt face as hard as stone.

There was a banquet that night, to welcome the King of Jutha into the city. Proxanon himself had led his grey-skinned legions clear across the Middle Empire, fighting several battles along the way, but he had missed the great conflagration of Gaugamesh. The long hall which was the centrepiece of the governor’s palace was packed tight and bright with Macht and Juthan, and the city was flooded with them. The evening had been set aside for celebrations, the first Corvus’s army had known since the battle. In the wake of their victory there had been too much to do, too many wounded to take care of, too many details to be rounded off, for there to be any real sense of their triumph. But now that they were ensconced in a rich, civilised city with plentiful provisions to hand and the prospect of some rest to come, the Macht king had declared a holiday. The city was decked out as though for a festival and hundreds of wine-barrels had been roused out of the palace cellars and set rolling in the streets. The smell of roasting meat hung over all, entire herds and flocks of animals slaughtered for a night of largesse, of excess. The men had earned it. They needed it.

The inhabitants of Carchanis, unmolested until now, drew inside their houses and locked the doors and shuttered the windows, while in the streets the wine ran in the gutters and the teeming soldiers grew steadily more raucous.

Rictus heard them as he lay by the tall window. He had insisted they move the bed there so he could feel the wind on his face and watch the torchlight in the streets below. A cup of wine sat in his hand, untasted, and a platter fit to feed a family had been sent up from the banqueting tables, still untouched. He sat and looked out at the warm, fire-studded night while Kurun squatted on the floor beside him, with his elbows on his knees, and plied him with endless halting questions in broken Machtic. The boy had a mind like a magpie, forgetting nothing, endlessly curious, and he was picking up the foreign tongue with all the speed of youth, intelligence and stubbornness that was in him. Rictus responded to his sallies with monosyllables, but he liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.

The noise of revelry grew louder as the door to the chambers was opened, then shut out again. Rictus knew the footsteps that approached. He did not turn round. He could smell the wine, and some Kufr perfume. Kurun rose easily to his feet and bowed.

‘Where is the princess Roshana?’ Corvus’s voice.

‘The girl went to bed, though how she’ll sleep with this racket I don’t know,’ Rictus said. He turned to look upon his king, now the most powerful man in the world.

Corvus had vine-leaves laced in his hair, and his eyes had been drawn out dark with stibium so that his white face was more of a mask than ever. The wine was heavy on his breath and he had a jar of it dangling from one hand. He smiled, sat down on the edge of Rictus’s bed with a heaviness quite unlike him. He was drunk, Rictus realised. For the first time in all the years he had known Corvus, the boy was drunk.

Not a boy, though. Despite the painted face and the vine leaves, this was no callow youth who sat beside Rictus now, and the smile on his face was as painted as his eyes.

‘How is my old warhorse — I meant to look in on you earlier — how is my friend Rictus? Old Rictus, old man. Never dead yet. How is he? Have some wine, brother — ’ He lifted the jar, slopping the red liquid on the bed.

‘I have some,’ Rictus said, raising his untasted cup.

‘As well you should, Rictus. We should all have wine tonight, as much as we can hold. It washes away the dust. Boy! Drink with me!’

Kurun looked at Rictus quickly, and then gulped from the proffered jar as Corvus held it for him.

‘That’s the stuff, boy. Phobos, but you’re a pretty one. Near as pretty as your mistress. I must look in on her. I’ll be quiet. I want to see her — ’

He raised himself from the bed, but Rictus took him by the wrist. ‘Let her sleep, Corvus. Not everyone wants to drink tonight.’

‘No — no — of course not.’ He seemed to sober somewhat. His face changed. Rictus had never known any other man with such mobile features. For a second Corvus seemed on the verge of weeping, but then he seemed to collect himself. He poured a stream of wine to spatter redly on the floor.

‘For absent friends,’ he said thickly.

And now Rictus drank deep from his own wine, suddenly needing the warmth of it in his own gullet. His throat had narrowed. He tossed the dregs onto the stone as Corvus had.

‘I did not mean them all to die,’ Corvus said quietly. His words were slurred, but the thuggish gaiety had left him. He was himself again.

‘I did not plan it that way — why would I? They stood beside you, Rictus, to the end. If you had not been there, they would have broken, and they would have survived. The Dogsheads.’

‘They would have stood with Fornyx as they did with me.’

Corvus shook his head. ‘A man will give his life for a legend. You should have done what I asked, and commanded the reserves. You disobeyed me.’

‘I did, and you let me do it. Do you know why, Corvus?’

The King looked at him, hovering somewhere between anger and compassion.

‘Because you knew why I did it. This was one party I could not miss. The greatest of battles. The start of a legend, perhaps. You would have done the same yourself. That is why you allowed me to take my place with my men. It appealed to the romantic in you.’

Corvus smiled tightly. ‘As you say, I would have done the same myself.’ He bowed his head.

Rictus stared into his wine, listening to the sound of the night-time city being painted bright and garish by the celebrations below.

‘Did any survive?’ he asked, a question he had not dared frame since his senses had come back to him.

‘Forty-six,’ Corvus said. He straightened and drank again. ‘Forty-six out of close on three thousand. There’s a legend for you. How the Dogsheads died at Gaugamesh. How that story of theirs ended there, right in front of the eyes of the Great King.’

‘There are worse ways to die,’ Rictus said, in a low rasp.

‘It was a glorious way to die. I hope when my end comes it shall make such a story.’

‘How did we come through, overall?’

Corvus was blinking hard. He rubbed his toe in the puddled wine on the floor.

‘We lost something over six thousand men, dead or too maimed to ever fight again.’

‘That’s quite a butcher’s bill.’

Corvus smiled a little. ‘It was quite a fight, brother. An empire fell that day.’

‘You really think that’s the end of the fighting?’

Corvus shook his head. ‘There will be plenty more fighting. But we will never face another general levy. I’ve invited all the governors of the lowland cities here. I intend to confirm them in their posts if they will swear me allegiance. Things will go on much as they did before. The Juthan have pacified southern Pleninash in their march to join us. Proxanon is a good man — you’d like him. Never smiles, but can set the table in a roar all the same. Drinks like a man who has just discovered his own mouth.

‘His son will bring five thousand of his people across the Magron with us, as part of the army. It will help make up our losses. Plus, we have reinforcements arriving from the Harukush within the month — I received a letter today, from your friend Valerian at Irunshahr. More green spears headed east. They’re already over the Korash Mountains. By the time we leave for Asuria, the army will be bigger than ever.’

But it will not be the same army, Rictus thought. Not for me. The Dogsheads are gone, finished. That part of my life is finally over.

Corvus seemed almost to pick up some current of his thought. He did that often with people; he seemed to be able to read them in some uncanny way. Now he said, ‘Do not leave me, Rictus.’

‘What?’

‘Fornyx is dead, the Dogsheads are gone, the battle is won. I can see it in your eyes. I saw it in you every time I visited you in that blue-roofed cart they hauled you east in. You wanted to die. That’s why I got in Buri, and set Kurun to watch over you. And lovely Roshana. I set them to keeping you alive, but death is still in your eyes.’

‘Perhaps these eyes have seen enough.’

‘They have not seen Ashur, the ziggurats of the Great King, the heart of empire. Stay with me, Rictus, I beg you.’

Startled, Rictus looked the younger man square in the face. ‘What can I do for you, Corvus, that a dozen other men could not? You don’t need my name any more — your own is greater now, greater by far. You have become a legend yourself.’

‘Legends need their friends,’ the younger man said. He hung his head.

Kurun was looking back and forth between Rictus and Corvus with such fierce concentration that Rictus almost had to smile.

‘A man like you will never lack friends.’

Corvus stood up. Something harder crept back into his face. ‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps that is what it truly means to be a king. I would have liked to talk to Ashurnan about it. I would have spared him, had he lived. At least he died like a man should, sword in hand, facing hopeless odds.’

‘It was we who faced the hopeless odds at Gaugamesh,’ Rictus retorted. ‘It is we who prevailed against them. Do not forget the men who died to bring you here.’

‘I never forget them,’ Corvus said simply. ‘Any of them. I mourn them as you do, Rictus. But I will not give up on life because they are gone. A whole world awaits us — we have but to begin walking and it will open under our feet. To realise that — it is what it means to live.’

He turned, still unsteady, but sombre now.

‘Would you be happy in the Harukush now, brother, in that little upland farm? Even before I knew you, you never really lived there — it was just somewhere to rest between campaigns. For men such as you and me, there is only the next turn in the road to look forward to.’

He looked back and smiled, boyish again. ‘Stay here a while, and see how it suits you. Within the month, I shall be taking the army east once more, across the Magron Mountains and into Asuria itself. Follow me if you like. I shall leave the princess Roshana in your care; I don’t think the girl cares much for armies.’

He lifted the wine jar in a final toast as he left, and raised his voice to a shout.

‘I will see you in Ashur, Rictus. I shall make kings out of us all ere the end!’