Kings of Morning

THREE

I have been lucky, he told himself. He looked out on the great cedars, which were as old as the very line of his family, and exhaled silently, the happiness nothing more than a passing brightness across his face. No more. A king must always think of who might be near, even when they were those he loved best in the world.

And those he loved best must never be aware of their position, for that would mean their lives were cast into the Game. The unending game, of who does what to whom in this world.

I am past sixty, an aged man. A monarch past his prime.

I am the most powerful person in this world.

And yet. He looked out across the gardens, past the assembled diners and the hordes of courtiers and attendants who flitted across the grass in the lamplight, beyond to where young voices could be heard under the deeper shadow of the woods.

Look at these children, playing beneath the stars. They are my sons and daughters, and I know them not. They are to be reared like blood stock, brought to maturity and then winnowed out, until I can find one worthy to hold all this in his hands. His hands.

Bel, Lord of sunshine and song and fruitfulness, look upon me now. Your brother, Mot, has brought a second great storm into my world, and I need you now. I need a way to look into the hearts of my enemies.

He stared out, impassive, at the night-time garden, the quiet river, the playing children who were his and yet not his. He strove to hoard the memory of it, to set this scene in amber, or imperishable crystal, and set it aside in some untwisted portion of his mind. He knew how to do this. He had practised it for many years. As long as he had been a king.

Give them time. Give me time. Lord of us all, lend me your patience.

‘Majesty.’ It was Dyarnes, faithful as a hound, ever beside him. His father Midarnes had died at Kunaksa, leading the Honai, and now the son stood in his place.

God-of-all, Ashurnan thought — has it really been thirty years since that day?

‘Yes, Dyarnes.’

‘There is an intruder in the gardens — my men have him. Will you give me leave to see to it?’

‘Of course. You will miss the best of the wine, Dyarnes. I will have Malakeh keep you a cup.’

Dyarnes bowed deeply, then fastened his komis about his face and strode off.

Kouros paused with his cup halfway to his beard. ‘Is something amiss, father?’

‘Dyarnes has it. Enjoy your wine, Kouros. Smell the stars. Drink with your brother and let me see you be civil to one another.’

Kouros was one of those known across the empire as a Black Kefre. His hair was dark as a crow’s back and he was heavily built, but he had the eyes of the high castes. His mother was not here tonight — she disliked dining out of doors — and he had inherited her colouring.

Beautiful Orsana, whom Ashurnan had taken as First Wife some thirty-five years before. She came from Bokosa, capital of the vast, rich satrapy of Arakosia. Back in the half-mythic past before the Great Wars, her ancestors had been kings, and Ashurnan’s union with her had bound the proud Arakosans ever closer to the imperial family.

Ashurnan remembered the first few years of their marriage. It had been like coupling with a panther, and he could not help but smile at the memory.

His gaze travelled down the table. Rakhsar and Roshana, the twins borne by his second wife. They had their mother’s looks, as fine and graceful as the thoroughbreds her country reared. Ashana had been a beautiful, willowy girl, a gentle soul. Ashurnan had married the spitfire Orsana out of political necessity and pure lust, but Ashana had taken his heart. A Niseian princess, she had seemed too good for this world, and so it had proved. She had given Ashurnan the twins, and then died soon after — of a fever. Or so it had been decided. Ashurnan had not gone back to his First Wife’s bed since, for the rumours had tallied too closely with his own suspicions.

After that there had been minor wives, countless concubines, a garden of beautiful faces. But Orsana remained First Wife, his Queen, and she vetted them all. There would never be another Ashana, another woman to share his heart with. He had been lucky, that once.

The Great King raised his cup, and tilted it first to Kouros, his eldest son, and then to Rakhsar and Roshana, the twins whose mother he had loved. The three siblings returned his salute, and up and down the long tables the other guests let their conversations wither into the warm air, and watched.

He held their eyes one after the other. Kouros, dependable, thin-skinned, eternally suspicious and yet always on fire for some word of affection or commendation. Roshana, whose face seared something in Ashurnan’s heart, so that it was sometimes hard to look upon her beauty for the memories it evoked.

And Rakhsar, mercurial, sardonic, the brightest light of the three, and the most dangerous. Ashurnan loved his younger son, but did not pretend to himself that he knew him at all. Rakhsar’s flashing wit turned aside any attempt to know him. Roshana understood him, perhaps, but Ashurnan did not believe he ever would.

And there was the pity of it.

The Great King drained his cup, barely tasting the wine. Beside him the Taster sipped, and then nodded, and the royal cupbearer refilled it from the jar.

The three royal siblings drank their own wine, Kouros and Roshana barely sipping theirs, Rakhsar emptying his cup with a flourish and a grin. He had about him the air of a condemned man who is intent on savouring every morsel of his life, whereas Kouros was like a priest wedded to duty and penitence.

Kouros, and Rakhsar, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. One will be King, and one must die. That is the way our world works.

An image lashed through his mind — his brother’s face at Kunaksa as his own scimitar opened the throat below it. Ashurnan closed his eyes a second. Thirty years. He was an old man now, and in his dreams his dead brother’s face was always the same. He could still smell the dust of that day, kicked up in vast clouds by the horses. He could hear the Macht death hymn as they advanced.

He had witnessed a dozen battles since then, but always, Kunaksa was foremost in his mind. It had been his first, and though the imperial records might say otherwise, he knew it had been a defeat.

And now they come again.

God, I am too old. I do not have the strength. I am no longer sure I even have the wit to choose the right men to fight for me any more.

The wine smote him — he had eaten almost nothing. The sour suspicion that his Queen was trying to poison him cut the appetite. That cat-eyed bitch. How much of a hold did she have over Kouros? Could he be his own man?

And Rakhsar — would the cruelty in him ever bloom into full, disastrous flower?

I must stay alive, he told himself. There is no time for this. I am Great King, and it is I who will take on this fight, as I did once before.

He raised the hand which had killed his brother and stared at it. The liver-spots on the golden skin, the blue-wormed veins thick about the knuckles. Then he looked down the table at Kouros again. Imagine the empire ruled by those knotted brows, that thick-boned forehead, and behind him his mother, whom the palace slaves lived in terror of. Not fear, or respect, but stark terror. She had once bade the Honai rape a pretty little Bokosan noblewoman to death, because the girl had refused her beloved son’s advances.

Power is cruelty, in the last examination, Ashurnan thought. But for some the pain is an end in itself.

Kouros was an adequate leader of men, and he had a following in the army. The Arakosans provided the best cavalry in the empire, and they would follow him to the death, for his mother’s sake. If Kouros were to be discarded, it would mean something akin to civil war, here in the heartland itself. There was no other option.

And yet, watching Kouros’s powerful jaws champing his food, Ashurnan’s heart sank. The empire, clamped in those dour jaws. At any other time, it would knuckle under the Black Kefre and his mother, go on as it always had; but this was not any other time.

Malakeh leaned close, leaning on his ebony staff of office. Gaunt as blackthorn, the old Vizier had run the clockwork of the court for a quarter of a century.

‘Lord, the western messengers have been fed and are waiting.’

‘Where are they?’

‘On the Ivy Terrace. They have spoken to no-one.’

‘Good. I will go to them, Malakeh, alone.’

‘Lord — ’

‘Alone, Malakeh. We are not to be disturbed — no Honai. But tell Dyarnes.’

The Vizier bowed. Ashurnan almost thought he could hear the old man’s spine creak. He rose, holding out a hand to keep the assembled diners in their seats. Even after all these years, he still felt a flash of impatience at the protocol of the court. He had pruned away as much of it as he dared, but a Great King needed some pomp and mystery about himself, even among those who knew him well.

Kouros stood up despite the gesture, setting down his cup. Ashurnan hesitated a moment, and then motioned his eldest son to follow. He did not have the strength or the patience to put Kouros in his place in front of the whole table.

Or did he? Ashurnan turned, and said to Malakeh, ‘Have Prince Rakhsar join us.’

The Ivy Terrace was on the northern edge of the gardens, half a pasang away under the starlit trees. Ashurnan’s father, Anurman, had built it, as a place to sit and drink wine with his friends, his comrades-in-arms. Anurman had been a fighting king, a man who made and kept friends with an ease Ashurnan could only marvel at. He had drunk under the ivy there with Vorus, the Macht, and Proxis, the Juthan, both of whom had loved him like dogs, both of whom had betrayed his son. Proxis had taken Jutha out of the empire and now it was an independent kingdom. Vorus had let the Juthans leave at Irunshahr when the utter destruction of the Ten Thousand was teetering in the balance.

There were charcoal braziers lit on the terrace, and a few lamps. The three figures rose from their seats at the Great King’s approach and went to their knees. Ashurnan studied their faces. All three were Kefren of high caste. Two, he did not recognise, but the third was a familiar face.

‘Merach,’ he said. ‘It has been a while.’

The grey haired Kefre smiled and looked him in the eye. Merach had been his personal bodyguard. They had ridden side by side at Kunaksa. There were few people in the world Ashurnan trusted more, for Merach was utterly devoid of ambition. He was a soldier, simple and pure. But he was also an Archon of the western army.

‘Despatches?’

Merach looked at the ground, opened his palm and gestured to a leather-topped scroll-bucket on the table.

‘Enough to keep a man reading for a month, lord.’

Kouros was already breaking the seal on the bucket and rifling through the scrolls within, like a pig rooting for truffles. Rakhsar stood to one side, face in shadow.

‘Suppose you tell me yourself, Merach,’ the Great King said, though it was already written across the Kefre’s face, which was as grey as his hair.

Merach looked up. There was weariness carved bone-deep in his features, and the grease of a hungry man’s meal on his chin.

‘The Haneikos River was a disaster, Lord. He came at us through the water with his line and we held him on the bank. We had good ground, as good a position as I’ve ever seen men hold. But his cavalry broke the left. He has five thousand armoured horsemen — he calls them his Companions, and they are both Kefren and Macht. Lord, he has Kefren of our own caste fighting for him!’

Kouros looked up from his scroll. ‘Impossible! You are overwrought, Merach.’

‘Lord, I saw them myself. They destroyed our flank — ’ Here Merach’s voice sharpened. ‘We had Arakosan cavalry stationed there, but he blew through them like a gale.’

Kouros threw the scroll at the kneeling Kefre. ‘That’s a lie!’

Merach went silent, bowing his head. It was Rakhsar who retrieved the scroll, rolling it up on its spindle. ‘Brother, you might want to hear the fellow out before you begin throwing things at him,’ he said with a smile.

‘Go on,’ Ashurnan said. He fumbled for a chair, and it was Rakhsar who slid one behind him.

‘I bear the official despatches from satrap Darios himself — you can see his seal on the scrolls.’

‘Why send you as his messenger?’ Kouros demanded, undaunted. ‘You’re an Archon of the western army, not some despatch-rider.’

‘He hoped that my presence would give weight to what he had to tell,’ Merach retorted.

‘Mind your tone, general. I am a royal prince.’

Rakhsar poured himself some wine from the table, smelling it before sipping. ‘Father, despite my brother’s luminous presence, shall we let these men get up off their knees? The stones are hard on the bones.’

Ashurnan nodded. He looked at his younger son, and immediately Rakhsar gave him the winecup. ‘I shall be your taster,’ he said. ‘It’s not the best, but I’ve had worse.’

‘General Merach shall speak now, without interruption,’ Ashurnan said tiredly.

‘And with some wine to loosen his throat,’ Rakhsar said, handing the grey-haired Kefre another cup.

There was a quiet. The wind moved in the ivy, and there was the hoot of an owl off in the trees. Not another sound. They were in the midst of the greatest city in the world, but the ziggurat lifted them far above it, and the wind here was night-cool, as though they were in the foothills of the mountains. The scent of the honeysuckle which wound through the ivy came and went with the breeze, too sweet, too heavy for the charcoal-warmed dark.

Merach drained his cup. ‘Our left was destroyed, and in the centre he had us pinned. He lost a lot of men there. The bodies piled up so thick in the water they changed the river’s course, and the water ran red as a pomegranate crushed in your fist. His cavalry wheeled on our phalanx’s rear, and after that the thing fell apart, and it became a hunt. They chased us for pasangs across the plains south of the Haneikos. We took fifty thousand spears up to the river. I doubt a fifth of that made it back to Gansakos. We lost our baggage, our stores, the paychests, even the remounts. He has light infantry who work with javelin and what they call a drepana, a curved, slashing sword. They run as fast and far as horses.’

Merach placed his empty cup on the table with a click.

‘My lord, I am told you knew something of this defeat already — you have the meat, but Darios wanted me to bring you the raw bones. I have been two weeks on the road, killing three horses a day to stand before you. Darios bade me say that Gansakr is lost, and Askanon cannot hold. He is moving his quarters south to Ashdod, and if necessary will stand siege there.

‘My lord, we need another army. We need your presence on the battlefield to inspire our people, as you did at Kunaksa. We need the Honai. Without such a grand levy, the outer empire cannot hold. This is no mere adventurer we face. This man comes to conquer.’

‘We know the facts of these things, Merach,’ Kouros growled. ‘Every satrap west of the Magron has been forwarding rumours of your disgrace for weeks. Perhaps we do not need a grand levy — perhaps we only need generals with a little backbone.’

Merach lowered his gaze. His eyes were as bright as coins caught in the sun. He said nothing.

‘Bravely said, brother,’ Rakhsar drawled. ‘It’s quite a feat to insult a man who cannot answer back — you truly have the knack of it.’

‘Go back to the women’s quarters, Rakhsar. We talk of the real world here. If we want to hear harem gossip we will send for you.’

Rakhsar smiled, but only with his mouth. ‘I doubt you need my help for that, Kouros. There’s not a whisper comes out of there that your mother has not heard before anyone.’

Kouros drew himself up like an infuriated bear. ‘You bastard spawned little shit! You do not speak of my mother — she is Queen of the empire — yours is nothing but forgotten bones.’

‘Indeed — well, the Queen would know all about that, don’t you think, brother? When you visit her, do you drink her wine, or do you bring your own?’

Startled, Merach had to step back as the two brothers lunged at one another, Kouros a black bulk, Rakhsar a rapier-lean shadow. They bore no weapons, but seemed about to fly at each other’s throat nonetheless.

‘Stand still!’ Ashurnan shouted, his angry bellow clear as a cymbal in the night. His head swam, and it seemed that there were black flies circling in the light of the lamps.

The two princes froze, their eyes locked on one another, the hatred sizzling in the air between them.

Perhaps I should leave them to it, Ashurnan thought; get it over with here and now. But the part of him that had grown grey since Kunaksa, that had sat on a throne for four decades, was too disgusted.

‘You are princes of the empire, sons of the Great King, not brawlers in some hut in the Magron. Bel’s blood, do you think you can behave so in front of me? Is this how kings are made? I have seen traitors go to the spike who show more respect to the diadem than you. Get out of my sight — and do not speak a word to one another as you go. I will deal with you — both of you — later. Now go!’

Kouros glared at his father, and in that instant, Ashurnan saw the older man within him; the heavy jowls, the down-turned lines about the petulant mouth. Then he strode off, feet pounding into the ground as if each step set his seal upon it.

Rakhsar lingered a few seconds more. His face was one perpetual sneer — what would it take to wipe it off? Then he bowed to his father and sauntered away into the trees.

‘Perhaps they will finish their argument out in the dark,’ Merach said, and then coloured. ‘Forgive me, lord.’

‘That is not their style, either of them,’ Ashurnan said. He waved a hand impatiently at Merach’s two mute, horrified companions, who were standing forgotten on the edge of the light. ‘Go — leave us.’ Then he rubbed his eyes, trying to wipe away the black circling flies.

‘More wine, Merach — pour it for us both.’

When they were drinking again, Ashurnan said; ‘Kouros is a coward, for all his size. He has a good head, but he is thin-skinned as an ugly girl, and his mother’s venom has curdled something in him. Rakhsar, he is all scheming and planning, but all to his own back. He thinks nothing of larger things. These, Merach, are my sons. The ones whose voices have broken, at any rate.’

‘They are your sons: they are not King. Lord, there is yet time for one of your other children to grow into a man.’

Ashurnan tilted his head to one side and smiled crookedly. ‘One reason I have always trusted you, old friend, is that you have all your life retained the simplicity of the soldier. And if truth were told, I kept you from this city so that it would remain that way. You know nothing of the workings of the Court and the Harem. These young boys who ran about under the trees this evening — they will all die before they become men.’

Merach bared his teeth a second in a spasm of anger. ‘I should speak no more.’

‘You may say what you like — it is why Darios sent you.’

Lord, forgive me.’ He looked down into his cup. ‘Is it the Queen?’

‘Who else?’ Ashurnan smiled again. ‘A marvellous woman, Orsana. She would have made a fine ruler of this empire in her own right, but she must work through her son, who is an inferior instrument.

‘She will tolerate no other. It is something I have become almost reconciled to, Merach. I have shielded Rakhsar this long because I thought there was promise in him, but I know now I cannot gainsay my wife. Kouros will succeed me, if this phoenix from the west leaves him anything to rule. And Orsana will control the empire at last. It may actually be for the best. She is a poisonous bitch, but she is as able as I am, and lacks my streak of absurd sentimentality.’

‘I call it honour,’ Merach said, and the anger was still smouldering in his eyes.

‘Kings cannot afford a sense of honour, my friend.’

‘Then they are not worthy of the name. Lord, this enemy of ours out in the west, this young man who calls himself Corvus; he — ’ Merach hesitated a second. ‘He took in the wounded we left behind us in our flight, and he had his surgeons treat them as though they were his own. He has not ravaged the land as an invading army ought, and his men are under savage discipline.’

‘Ah,’ Ashurnan said. ‘The Macht. They are something to see, in battle, are they not?’

‘They are like some great machine. He has drilled them to perfection, foot and horse alike. They are clad all in scarlet, as their mercenaries once were at Kunaksa. This boy is something remarkable, my lord. In seven years he has taken almost two hundred feuding city-states and made of them a nation.’

‘Indeed. I wonder what his plans for us are.’ Ashurnan emptied his cup and tossed it out of the lamplight, the gesture a flicker of fury. When he turned back to his friend, his eyes glowed like those of a wolf caught in firelight.

‘This empire will endure, Merach. It has stood for so many centuries that men have stopped counting them.

‘It is civilization.

‘The Macht are barbarians, a race which does not belong to this world, an aberration of nature. They will be defeated by me and mine as the founder of my line defeated them in the ancient days. The empire cannot fall. If it does, it will topple us all into a dark age the likes of which history has never seen before.

‘I will take the field — the preparations have already begun. You may begin your journey back to Darios in the morning. Tell him the Great King is coming, and with him shall march the full army of the empire. He will see us at the end of this summer. Until then he must hold at Ashdod. He must hold the passes of the Korash Mountains for me, no matter what the cost.’

Merach nodded, eyes shining.

‘And Merach-’ Ashurnan rose to his feet, a majestic figure, golden-skinned, the diadem a black line across his forehead. ‘I do not care how this invader behaves, or how gently he treats our people. The Macht must be allowed no quarter. We will take no prisoners and show them no mercy. You must make Darios understand this. We are fighting a different kind of war from those we have known before.’ Ashurnan drew his lips back from his teeth as he spoke, like an animal snarling at its enemy.

‘It is no longer enough to defeat them. The Macht must be exterminated.’