Kings of Morning

SIX

Ashurnan felt the palanquin move under him, with the stately pace of the elephant that bore it. He drew back the fine weave of the curtains to look up the road ahead, and once again his fist clenched involuntarily as he took in the line of wagons, pack-animals, cavalry and marching men that stretched to the bright, dust-hazed horizon.

Dust in his beard. Dust in his shoes. Dust in the very food he ate. Asuria itself was impregnating every part of him; his own country, the heart of empire, the place his ancestors had walked and ruled for years beyond count.

His father Anurman, whom some named the Great, had deigned to speak to him of the empire once. One did not rule it, any more than a mariner dictated every movement of a ship at sea. One steered it. And sometimes, it took patience to get it back on course when the waves were in your teeth.

I am older now than my father was when he died, Ashurnan thought. I have ruled longer than he did. I have fought fewer wars, but those in which I have taken part have been greater than any he ever saw. Does that make me a better king than my father, or a lesser?

Once again, his thoughts travelled back down the dusty pasangs of the Royal Road, to his capital.

Where are you now, Rakhsar? In some highland castle, fomenting rebellion? Or down in the marshes, peering into some peasant’s fire? No — that is not your style.

Again, his fist clenched and unclenched.

I should have given him a command, taken him with me. He has an energy Kouros lacks, and courage.

But that was his heart talking. He had been as generous with his own brother, and Kunaksa had been the result.

It has always been Kouros, he thought. I cannot stand against both the Macht and Orsana. I have not the strength.

But he found himself smiling, despite the gloom of his ruminations. It had been a long time since he had been part of an army on the march. There was no denying that it brought back good memories as well as bad, a tincture of youth.

One war at a time, he thought.

At long last, the Great King himself had set forth from Ashur on campaign, with the first contingent of the Imperial Levy, and the bulk of the Household. This was but a tithe of the force that would eventually form up on the far side of the Magron Mountains, but still it choked every road leading west for dozens of pasangs. Ten thousand Honai, five thousand Arakosan cavalry who had crossed the Oskus only the week before. Twenty thousand of the local levy, small farmers called up to the banners of the King, the year’s second harvest thickening in the fields behind them, their wives and sons left to gather it in as best they might.

And that was just the beginning. To the rear of these fighting men marched another army. Teamsters, smiths, leatherworkers, carpenters, herdsmen, slaves by the thousand, and an amorphous gaggle of wives and children who could not bear to be parted from their menfolk. These were nearly as numerous as the clanking columns who bore spear and shield, and every night since leaving Ashur they had straggled into camp hours after the vanguard of the army, spent and dust-painted, but ready to attend to the needs of those who had been called upon to bear arms, to fight the Great King’s war for them.

And that still did not include the Great King’s own entourage. In his youth, Ashurnan had been stubborn, proud and fit enough to travel almost as lightly as one of his junior generals; a half dozen mule-carts carried everything he needed to live in comfort in the field. But he was old now, and his sense of what befitted a king’s campaigning had changed. Two hundred wagons carried his personal tents, his furniture, his carpets, his stores of food and drink, his favourite concubines (Orsana had picked them for him, and he had not argued the matter).

His Household was an army in itself, moving ahead of the rest of the troops to escape the tower of dust they kicked up (for this was not real campaigning, not yet; the Macht were still thousands of pasangs away), and he had his scouts and stewards out on the roads ahead to make sure there was a suitable campsite each night. In the past, Great Kings had stayed with local nobles on their travels, but Ashurnan had learned early in his reign that to put up the King and his fellow travellers for even one night could beggar the richest satrap in the empire.

And besides, when those same nobles came to offer him obeisance in his vast, multi-coloured, towering tent, its gilded poles as thick as the masts of a mighty ship, one could see that the effect was worth the effort.

The Great King on the move was like some force out of nature, as impressive as the grandest storm, and these petty princes and Archons and local lords were to be the officers in his levies. On their loyalty, or respect, or fear would turn the fate of the battle to come. Let them look upon the grandeur that was Ashurnan, and tremble. It would stiffen their resolve when the Macht came marching towards them in full panoply of war.

The grandeur that was Ashurnan. The Great King sipped from his cup, cold water sprinkled with the juice of limes, crackling with ice from the straw-insulated chests further down the column. Most of the folk in this great host had never seen ice; they were creatures of the lowlands, and their lives had been spent in the shimmering, irrigated fields of the Heart of Empire. But now when they raised their heads and looked beyond the dust, they could glimpse snow on the rim of the world, the white peaks of the mighty Magron, and in their foothills the King’s summer capital, Hamadan, where for centuries the Asurian Kings had gone to escape the stifling heat of the low country. Hamadan was the fortress-key to the Asurian Gates, the only path an army could take through the Magron to the Middle Empire beyond. And it was there, in the land of the Rivers, that Ashurnan felt the matter would be decided.

He did not believe Darios would be able to hold the line of the Korash; his army had been blown to chaff. No, the thing would happen in ancient Pleninash, somewhere on the Imperial Road between Kaik and Irunshahr.

Somewhere on the same line of march that the Ten Thousand had taken, a generation before.

That same bloodied highway was going to see another bloodletting, but this one would be greater even than Kunaksa. Ashurnan could feel it in his thinning bones, and he felt no relish at the prospect. He still remembered vividly being woken from sleep after the first day at Kunaksa, when he had thought the thing won, only to be told that the Macht, leaderless, alone, betrayed, were nonetheless attacking, and putting to flight the best the Empire could throw at them. He remembered those sombre men in bronze and scarlet advancing remorselessly over their own dead, marching in cadence, singing as they came. And a chill ran up his backbone at the memory.

Kouros reined in his horse with a jerk, the animal jittery under him, catching his mood. He rode a Niseian, as did many Kefren with money or high blood, but he disliked the beast. Coal-black and fiery tempered, like all its kind, it had been bred for the hunt, for war; two activities Kouros knew little of. He carried a whip, which few Kefren horsemen did, the high-born of the empire having been brought up with horses since childhood. There was a semi-mythical bond between the high-caste Kefren of Asuria and the Niseians. Legend had it that the tall black horses were a gift to the world from Bel himself, and their sire was the west wind.

Darker myths even said that the big horses’ forbears had been brought east by the Macht in their youth, but this was not a tale that found much favour among the Niseian breeders.

Kouros did not name his horses, nor did he ride for pleasure. The animals were a necessary accessory to him, nothing more, and nothing could make his eyes glaze over faster than a group of petty lords discussing studs and bloodlines. They were animals, that was all. Kouros’s world was to do with people. Horses were nothing more than transport.

He sat upon his horse now, biting his thumbnail, looking down on the dust-shrouded Imperial Road leading north-west to Hamadan. To the south and east more dust-clouds rose, like tawny stormclouds anchored to the earth. More columns of marching troops. They were converging from all over Asuria, and more were behind them. His spies told him that the Arakosan main body was still a week to the east, eight thousand heavy cavalry bright as kingfishers in the blue-enamelled armour of their people. His mother’s people.

His people.

His mother never let him forget his Arakosan blood. She came from a line of kings as ancient as that of Asuria, and considered herself as royal as any scion of Asur. Minosh, satrap of Arakosia, was her cousin, and they had been close as children, the palace in Bokosa housing a more easy-going regime than that of Ashur. Minosh was a satrap of the Great King, a loyal servant. But he was also a great ruler in his own right. Minosh had to be wooed, if Kouros’s claim to the throne were to be set in stone.

Especially now, with Rakhsar on the loose.

Kouros bared his teeth in anger, thinking on it, and when the horse began to dance and snap under him he seized the reins and yanked back hard. He used a hard wolf-bit on his horses, which was essentially a bronze blade laid against the tongue. It was not unusual for him to turn his mount over to the grooms with blood dripping from the animal’s mouth.

Rakhsar, free and alive. He thought he had stopped every bolthole, covered every contingency.

His mother had flown into a rage at the news. It had meant she must stay in Ashur through the heat of the summer, to watch over the city for Rakhsar’s mischief.

She had stripped one of her slaves at random and whipped the girl’s flesh from her white back in front of him. He had not so much as dared to wipe the blood from his face, but stood there dumb and motionless while the screaming slave died under her blows. Orsana had stood afterwards with her black hair skeined over her face, eyes socketed in blood, the hem of her robe soaking it up from the puddle mosaic of the floor.

How can you be King? She had shrieked, and Kouros had felt terror he had not known since childhood. She had whipped the slave, but the blows had been meant for him.

After that it had been a relief to leave the city, to join his father’s army and eat dust day after day, to ache with the constant riding, to sweat like a serf in the daily swordplay his weapons-master insist he practice.

But still, his thoughts were constant — where was Rakhsar? And Roshana.

He had loved Roshana once. She had been kind to him when as children they had occasionally been allowed to play together. Those moments had been like miracles to him.

But her love for her brother curdled his feelings for her, for between Rakhsar and Kouros there had been nothing but black, unalloyed hatred from the first. It was as if they had the instincts of wild dogs, sensing a rival in the pack. It was unreasoning from the beginning, and then as they grew older there had been too many more reasons to ever begin to question it.

But he had wept, in private, over Roshana, for she was one of a handful of people who had shown him kindness without hope of gain, for no other reason than pure decency.

It was why he hungered now to catch and degrade her, to force himself on her in front of her twin, to wipe that knowing sneer off Rakhsar’s face one last time, and then expunge it from the world forever.

Tears rose in his eyes as he pitied himself, remembering the utter loneliness of his childhood. There had been one other in those days, a single other who had shared his world for a time. But his mother had disapproved. Orsana’s disapproval meant mutilation, death, exile. No-one was allowed to come close to her son, who would one day be ruler of the world.

His mother loved him, but that love frightened him, for it was entangled in expectation and ambition and bloody, unyielding determination. She loved him, but if he could not be King, then he did not like to think what that love could do.

There were times when he wished she was… gone.

And he thought of what it would be like to be King, to do as he pleased, and the thought settled his mind, calmed him. He even patted the rancid, foam-flecked neck of his horse as though he cared.

‘Barka,’ he said.

From the huddle of riders a respectful distance behind him, one trotted forward. A Kefre, but low-born, with dark eyes and long hair dyed red as an apple and bound in an oiled queue. He had a sword scabbarded each side of his saddle’s pommel and wore a plain leather corselet studded with bronze. A scar tugged down one corner of his mouth, so it looked like he was leering, but his eyes held no humour.

This was Kouros’s weapons-master; an Arakosan, brought to Ashur fifteen years before by Orsana to teach her son how to be a man. He was also the only person who had ever beaten the young prince, for mistreating a horse. Kouros had gone to his mother at once, and the Arakosan had never laid a hand on him since, but Kouros still remembered the beating. He knew Barka despised him, but he also knew the Arakosan would die for him without thought, because of who his mother was.

‘My prince?’

‘Do we know yet where the imperial tent will be sited tonight?’

‘Yes, lord. The scouts have plotted a site some twenty pasangs ahead, on the outskirts of Kinamish.’

‘And my household?’

Barka pointed below, to where the Imperial road was a long snake of dust, a golden caterpillar inching across the land with black ants crawling within it.

‘Our gear is with the Great King’s caravan, as always, lord.’

Kouros was aching for a bath, some wine, something softer than a saddle to take his bulk. He frowned. The entire army and everyone in it travelled at the pace of the slowest ox-cart in the Great King’s baggage train. And no tent could be pitched before the King’s. It would be many hours yet.

Kouros wiped his face, his palm coming away gritty with dust. Kinamish was a small town with some of the amenities of civilization. It was unnoticeable, unimportant. It was perfect.

A well-mounted man could be there in an hour, if he pushed his horse. The timings had worked well.

‘Let us ride ahead, and make sure the people of Kinamish are ready to receive my father,’ Kouros said lightly.

Barka looked at him. He had an unsettlingly direct gaze that was wholly free of deference. Since Orsana had spoken to him, all those years ago, he had never again ventured to correct the young prince, but Kouros always knew when Barka disapproved of him. He would have rid himself of the scarred Kefre long before, except that he knew — somehow — that Barka could be trusted utterly. The weapons-master might not think much of his prince, but he would never betray him. It was the closest thing to loyalty Kouros had ever experienced. Almost.

‘Very well,’ Barka said. ‘The escort also, my lord?’

‘No.’ No, that might attract attention. Kouros snarled inside at the thought of being patiently taken to task by Dyarnes or another of his father’s veterans. They feared him — all of them — but they still had the casual confidence of old campaigners. And there were things they did not need to know.

‘You and I, Barka — we’ll go alone.’

‘As you wish, lord.’

They pushed the horses hard. Kouros’s riding was graceless but effective; he made the animal do what he wanted, and there was never any emotional connection between horse and rider. He had seen his father commiserate with hardened soldiers on the death of a favourite horse, and had been utterly baffled by the sight. These were grown men with blood on their hands, who would have a thieving slave crucified without a moment’s thought, and they wept over a dead animal.

The big Niseians pounded along willingly enough, for they had been travelling at a crawl all morning. Barka sat his as though stuck to it, moving with the rise and fall of the animal, the reins an irrelevance, held lightly in one hand. He talked to his horse in a low voice now and again, crooned to it like it was a child he wanted to reassure.

Baffling.

The last pasangs of the Heart of Empire rolled along under them, the land rising to meet the Magron mountains, which were a huge cloud now on the western horizon, dun-coloured and tipped with white, forests a darker stubble at their knees.

There was no irrigation system in this part of the world, for the moist easterlies struck the mountains and shed their water freely in tumbled thunderheads every spring and winter. The land was a less violent green than the manicured fields of the Oskus valley, and much of it was given over to pasture. They herded cattle here, and goats to clear up after them. The people were the shorter, darker, upland hufsan who made up the bulk of the empire’s populations.

Herd boys stopped to stare at the two superbly mounted Kefren who galloped past them, and Barka, with a boyishness quite unlike him, waved at those they passed with a white grin splitting his leathered face.

He is happy, Kouros realised. He is genuinely happy to be galloping along, slathered in sweat, miles from the capital, with only the ground to sleep on and the prospect of some half-seared campfire meat to eat tonight.

To ride a horse, to use a bow, to tell the truth. Those were the ancient tenets of life for the Kefren, still given lip service even in the opulent luxury of Ashur’s palaces. Kouros’s mother never tired of telling him that in Arakosia the nobles still trained their sons how to shoot from the saddle, that a Kefre’s word was counted a contract as good as any scribe’s scrawl.

But Orsana had been in the Harem these thirty years and more. What did she know?

Kouros had been at intrigues since he was a child, recognising his elevated status and working on it, utilising slaves and tutors and bodyguards and their dependence on his favour. No bows or horses, there, and not much of the truth, either. Leverage was what counted; the ability to hold a person’s dismissal or disgrace over their head.

He smiled a curious half-smirk as he rode along.

Nobles had given him their wives for a night to buy his favour, and the more unwilling the woman, the sweeter it had tasted. He loved to be there to give the husband back his wife the next morning, to see the eyes of them both. That moment was better than the sex itself.

‘Kinamish,’ Barka said, pointing, ruining his sordid little daydream.

‘I am not blind,’ he snapped.

‘Lord, we should slow our pace, rest the horses.’

‘We’re nearly there, Barka. They can rest all they like when we reach the town.’

‘As you wish, my lord.’ Barka’s high spirits withered. He was again the grim-faced guardian.

They dismounted in a tawny square of mud-brick buildings. Kinamish was not important enough to need a wall, and this far into the Heart of Empire it would not have occurred to the inhabitants to build one. Asuria had not known the footfall of war for generations, and only the greatest of her cities still maintained defences, more out of tradition than anything else.

There was a tavern, with a vine-shaded loggia. Leaving Barka with the steaming horses, Kouros sat himself there. He dropped his komis from his face and slapped the dust from his clothes with his riding-gauntlets. Slowly, as the local drinkers, farmers and ne’er-do-wells watched, the colours emerged from his garments. Kingfisher blue, imperial purple, and the silver embroidered horse heads of the royal house. The loggia cleared around him, and he smiled again, clicking his fingers for service.

‘Wine, and cold water,’ he said without looking up.

‘At once, my lord.’

He did not seem surprised when he was joined at his table by another traveller, who sat down beside him without ceremony and reached for the communal olive-bowl, wetting his fingers on the oil and then applying it to sunburnt patches on his nose. With the same hand the newcomer dropped the folds of his own komis, and sighed. He was a broad-faced Kefre with a cropped head and eyes as bright as cornflowers. His skin and his clothes were all the colour of the dust that puffed in pale zephyrs around the little square. When the water arrived he drank straight from the jug, and, wiping his mouth, he left on his face a smear of clean skin the colour of new wood.

‘Straight from the well, none better. My thanks to your honour.’

Kouros sipped his wine, grimaced, then swallowed half the cup. ‘Tell me you have news, Kuthra.’

‘I have. Maybe not the type you’d like to hear, but useful nonetheless.’ The dusty Kefre stared at Kouros expectantly, and with a sliver of mockery folded into his smile. ‘You’ve put on weight, brother.’

‘The hazards of palace living.’

‘Ah, of course. It’s been so long I had forgotten. How long has it been, Kouros, since I shared the heights with you?’

Kouros shifted in his chair, though his gaze never left the other’s face, and there was a strange glimmer in his eyes. ‘I am here for information, not to reminisce.’

‘Indulge me. We see each other so rarely, these days.’

Kouros reached into his blue robes and brought forth a doeskin purse, a beautifully made thing which looked to have been chosen with some care. As it settled on the table it clinked heavily. Kuthra did not once look at it, but continued to study Kouros’s face.

At last, Kouros said, ‘It is seventeen years.’

‘Seventeen years! How fast they have flown. Do you remember how we used to meet in the darkest corners of the gardens to lie under the trees and talk of all the great things we would do when we were grown? You would be King and I would be at your side. I would look out for you, and keep the jackals from your back. I wanted nothing more.’

Quietly, Kouros said, ‘Neither did I.’

Deliberately, Kuthra raised his right arm and set it on the table. The folds of his travelling gear fell back to reveal a stump at the wrist, an old wound long seamed shut in a swirl of flesh.

‘Such a pity your mother did not agree.’

The two men looked at one another. Finally they both leaned close in the same second and embraced, burying their faces in each other’s shoulders.

Kouros took Kuthra’s face in his hands. There were tears in his eyes. They brimmed, and spilled over onto his cheeks. ‘It was the price for your life.’

‘I know. She should not have made you watch, though. She knew you would blame yourself for it, when it was her doing alone.’ Kuthra wiped the tears from Kouros’s face with his only hand.

‘She has mellowed since then.’ They both began to laugh. Kuthra thumped the table with his stump. ‘More wine here! Are you all asleep? Landlord, step quick now!’

‘Don’t draw attention to us,’ Kouros hissed urgently. ‘This is risky enough as it is.’

‘We sit face to face once every four or five years, if we are lucky. The rest of the time it is letters and notes and whispers in the dark. Let me drink with my brother Kouros — let us raise our cups together for a little while at least, like normal folk.’

‘If Orsana knew — ’

‘Fuck Orsana. She will not live forever.’ Kuthra leaned in and set his hand on Kouros’s. ‘Brother, one day you will be King, and on that day and every other after you will have me by your side, and I will always keep the jackals from your back.’

‘You shall be a prince again, Kuthra.’

‘Once a prince, always a prince,’ Kuthra grinned.

The wine arrived. It was a dry, bitter vintage from the foothills of the Magron, but it quenched the thirst.

‘Let us speak of princes, since we’re here,’ Kuthra said casually. At once, Kouros’s face changed. Some of the old rancour settled into it, dragging it down.

‘You have located them?’

‘I have located them three times, brother, but on each occasion I have been like the slow fox, snapping at the tail feathers and missing the meat. They left Ashur on foot, which was clever of them, and then bought nags from a dealer in Goronuz, twenty pasangs up-river of the city. After that they disappeared for a while. I have our people watching the Asurian Gates like vultures at a hanging, but the Gates are not the only way over the mountains. There are many lesser routes that a small party might manage.’

‘Kuthra, are you telling me — ’

‘I picked up their trail again west of Hamadan. They showed sense enough to avoid the city and went straight up into the highlands. I know they swapped horses for mules, and they may even be on foot again by now. But they have disappeared, brother. We have no agents that far into the Magron.’

‘Bel’s blood. You’re telling me we’ve lost them.’

‘Only for now. They cannot stay up in the mountains forever, and we have as many eyes in the Middle Empire as we have here. When they descend again they will be easily traced, for they will be wanting horses again, no doubt. That is if they make it through the mountains. Rakhsar and Roshana are creatures of the city; they may not find the heights to their taste. They could become truly lost, or die in an avalanche or a snowdrift, or fall prey to the Qaf.’

Kouros shook his head. ‘Rakhsar will survive. He always does. Three times over the years my mother has tried to have him killed, and each time he has lived, through his absurd luck as much as anything else. Kuthra, you must get back on his trail. My father has not stood in our way until now, but if Rakhsar were to suddenly appear in front of the Imperial tent and beg to accompany him on campaign, the old fool might weaken. He doesn’t like me; he knows I am the only sane choice as heir, but he has this damnable attachment to the memory of that Niseian bitch he tried to supplant my mother with. He grows sentimental in old age. There’s no telling how he might let things go, not any more.’

Kuthra nodded, face hard. ‘Brother, you need not concern yourself. Unless Rakhsar can grow wings, I will have him, in the end.’

‘If anyone can, it will be you.’

‘You know that your mother has people out on the same errand. A horde of them, sniffing around every bolt-hole in the empire.’

‘You must get there first. I want Rakhsar and Roshana brought in front of me, alive.’

Kuthra raised an eyebrow. ‘Both of them, or just Roshana?’

Kouros’s face darkened, blood filling it. ‘Just do as I ask.’

‘They must both die, brother. It has gone too far for that. There was a time when perhaps you could have spared the girl, but that time is gone. It is simply a question of whose hand they perish at. You must not make it personal.’

‘I make everything personal,’ Kouros said, bitterly. ‘It is the way I am.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Don’t look at me like that — you remind me of Barka — dutiful and disapproving.’

‘You need to grow a thicker skin, Kouros.’

‘I have only the one I was born in.’

‘And Orsana has been flaying it off you strip by strip, since you could walk.’ Kuthra held up his stump. ‘She has marked me less than you. I count myself lucky to have escaped the Court so cheaply.’

‘You were lucky your mother was nothing more than a slave.’

‘We are all slaves, Kouros. Even your father is trammelled and confined by his station. Do you think him a happy man?’

‘Are you happy, Kuthra?’ Kouros’s voice was hoarse and earnest.

‘I am. I have no ambitions, and I know those whom I love and those I hate. My life is simple — ’

‘You’re a spy — you slink across the empire like a cat at midnight. How simple can it be to live with all your secrets, to kidnap and slaughter strangers at another’s bidding?’

Kuthra shrugged. ‘Perhaps I lack a certain curiosity. I have my orders, and I fulfil them. I get paid, and I spend the money. Then I get more orders. Thus the wheel of my life turns.’

‘I wish I could take my horse and ride away with you, right here and now, Kuthra. We could cross the mountains together, leave all this behind.’

‘And do what?’ Kuthra tapped the back of his elder brother’s hand. ‘You were born to be what you are — I do not know if being King will make you happy, Kouros, but I do know that not being King would crack your soul. It is the way you have been made.’

They drank the last of the wine, the resin-scented vintage oiling their throats, loosening up their minds. Kuthra sat up straight suddenly. Barka had reappeared at the side of the loggia.

‘Lord, the horses are rubbed down, and fed and watered. May I have your permission to eat?’

Kouros nodded. Barka bowed slightly. His gaze flicked to Kuthra and a half-knowing light came into his eye. Then he walked away.

‘My brother’s keeper,’ Kuthra said.

‘He serves my mother.’

‘I know Barka, Kouros, or his type at least. The Arakosans, they say, are Asurians before the coming of the cities. Folk who retain the memory of a simpler time.’

‘The horse, the bow, the truth — I have heard all this at length from my mother since my ears could hear.’

‘There is truth to it. You can trust Barka, so long as you do not ask him to dishonour himself. That is what the Arakosans are like. Faithful as dogs, and as vicious. You wrong one, though, and you have an enemy for life.’ Kuthra nudged his brother with a smile. ‘There is more Arakosan in you than you know.’

Kouros rubbed his forehead. ‘When I talk to you, Kuthra, I feel that there is another man buried in me who raises his head and sees some chink of light ahead in the darkness. I was that man once, or could have been. It is he who says these things to you now; and the Kouros they all hate, my mother’s son, he is gone.

‘But it is only for a little while. One day there will be no light left, and the darkness will be all.’

‘Not so long as I live.’

‘I have done cruel things. Sometimes I feel that I am a poison-filled jar, full to the brim and ready to spill over.’

‘You’re a better man than you give yourself credit for, or you would not feel this way. We have all done terrible things, Kouros — our lives have called it out of us.’

‘There was a boy, back in the city, a kitchen-slave who took it upon himself to spy on a dinner my father gave in the gardens.’

‘Some lackey of Rakhsar’s?’

‘I thought so, at first. But I knew, when I questioned him, that he was telling me the truth. That he had been there out of sheer curiosity, the stupidity of his youth. And I gelded him anyway, with my own hands, and sent him to Roshana.’

Kuthra leaned back from the table and chuckled. ‘Now, that is something your mother would do.’

‘I know.’ Kouros looked up, and his eyes were haunted. ‘I did it because I had it in my power, and I was angry, and I wanted to hurt something. That same evening, when my father met with the couriers from the west, he had Rakhsar join us, affronting me before the whole table.’

‘At least you let the boy live.’

‘I was ashamed, afterwards. Kuthra, can a king feel shame, if there is no-one to tell him he does wrong?’

‘I will be there, brother. I promise, I will tell you.’

Kouros knuckled his eyes like a tired child. ‘I hope so.’ He stood up. ‘It is time I was back with the column. The Heir cannot disappear for too long without comment.’

‘I understand.’

But Kouros took Kuthra’s stump-wrist in his grasp as the other rose in his turn.

‘They think I am a monster, Kuthra. The spoilt, twisted product of my mother’s ambition. Perhaps they are right. But I will tell you something they do not know.’ He paused, lowered his voice almost as if afraid.

‘My brother, Rakhsar; so charming, so quick with his wit and his smile…

‘He is worse, far worse than I.’