The Heretic Kings

TWENTY-FIVE

The woman was beautiful in the winter sunlight, tall and slim as a mountain birch, with something of the same starkness about her colouring. The officers on the galley quarterdeck directed quick, hungry glances at her as she stood by the starboard rail. She was veiled, of course, as all the Sultan’s concubines were, but Aurungzeb was so proud of his Ramusian beauty that her veil was translucent, scandalous, as was her clothing. As the wind shifted the layered gauze about her body it was possible to see the momentary imprint of her nipples, the line of her thigh and calf. The stolen looks kept many of the Merduk sailors dreaming for weeks, while the slaves who toiled at the oars and who had once been free Ramusian citizens regarded her with pity and outrage. She was somehow more evocative of her people’s enslavement than the chains that shackled them at wrist and ankle, a taunting display of Merduk prowess.

It seemed that she was staring out at one thing only, and saw nothing else: the monstrous central tower of what had once been the cathedral of Carcasson, horned, forbidding and black with the flames it had survived. It stood alone amid the rubble of what had once been the greatest city in the world and was now a desolated wasteland, save where the walls of the larger buildings stood like monuments to a lost people.

Aekir, the Holy City. Months had passed since its fall, but it was still a ruin. The Merduks had encamped by the thousand around the Square of Victories, where the statue of Myrnius Kuln stood yet, and their tents formed streets and villages in the middle of the desolation, but even their teeming thousands could not fill a tithe of the space within the broken circuit of the city’s walls. They were like maggots come squirming in the long-dead corpse of a unicorn, and Carcasson was the dead beast’s horn.

The woman called Ahara by her lord and master the Sultan Aurungzeb had once been someone else. A lifetime, a millennium, a nightmare ago, she had been named Heria and had been married to an ensign of cavalry named Corfe. Until Aekir fell.

Now she was the bed toy of the greatest conqueror in the east. She was a trophy of war as much as ruined Aekir was, and she stared out at Carcasson’s lonely spire as if in communion with it.

Her grasp of Merduk was very good now, but the Sultan did not know that. She had been careful to appear slow in comprehension and muddled in her own efforts at conversation. Not that there was much conversation required when Aurungzeb blew into the harem like a gale, calling for his favourite bedmate. One had to be willing and uncaring, and submit to whatever the Sultan had in mind.

She had no hope of deliverance: that dream had been knocked out of her long ago. And since her Corfe, who had been her life, was dead it did not seem to matter in what manner she spun out her existence. She was like a ghost hovering on the fringe of life, with no expectations and no prospect of change.

But she kept a little corner of her soul to herself. It was for this reason that she pretended to be slow in learning the Merduk language. Aurungzeb would say things in front of her, or hold discussions in her presence which he was sure she could not understand. That was power of a sort, a tiny gesture towards the maintenance of some personality of her own.

And thus she stood here as the Sultan’s galley was rowed down the broad expanse of the Ostian river, with ruined Aekir running along the banks on either side. And she listened.

The commander of the main field army of Ostrabar, Shahr Indun Johor, was deep in talk with the Sultan whilst the staff officers kept to the port side of the quarterdeck. Heria, or Ahara, was able to eavesdrop on them as the toiling slaves propelled the galley downriver towards the concentration of ships and men that waited farther downstream.

“The Nalbenic transports have already docked, highness,” Shahr Johor was saying. A tall, fine-featured young man, he was the successor to Shahr Baraz, the old khedive who had taken Aekir and made the first, fruitless assaults on Ormann Dyke.

“Excellent.” Aurungzeb had a white-toothed grin that was somehow startling in the midst of that expanse of beard, like suddenly glimpsing the bared canines of a dark-furred dog. “And how soon will the fleet be ready to sail?”

“Within two days, highness. The Prophet has blessed us with mild winds. The transports will be in the Kardian Gulf before the end of the week, and at their assigned stations on the Torunnan coast three days after that. In less than two sennights we will have an army on Torunnan soil south of the Searil river. We will have outflanked Ormann Dyke.”

“Ah, Shahr Johor, you gladden my heart.” Aurungzeb’s grin broadened. He was a hearty man with a thickening middle and eyes as black and bright as shards of jet. “Your excellency!” he called to the group of men on the other side of the quarterdeck. “I must congratulate your lord on his swift work. The treaty is only signed a week and already his galleys are at their station. I am most impressed.”

One of the men came forward and bowed. He was of below medium height, dressed in rich embroidered silk and with a gold chain about his neck: the Merduk badge of an ambassador.

“My sultan, may he live for ever, will be gladdened by your confidence and pleasure, highness. Nalbeni has never wanted anything else but that it and Ostrabar might work together, as brothers would, for the propagation of the faith and the defeat of the unbelievers.”

Aurungzeb laughed. His high spirits were spilling out of him. “We shall have a banquet tonight to toast this new cooperation between our states, and the confusion of the enemy who will no longer be able to defy the might of our armies behind walls of stone, but will have to come out into the field and fight like men.”

Ahara was forgotten. The Sultan and his staff went below with the Nalbenic ambassador to pore over the maps they had already been poring over for days and fix the last details of their joint plans in place.

Ahara remained by the galley’s rail. Aekir slid by, and the river became busier. There were hundreds of ships here, moored at the remnants of old wharves. A mighty fleet flying the Nalbenic flag, and an army encamped on the riverbank beside it. A hundred thousand men they said it numbered. Some had been withdrawn from before the dyke, others were fresh levies gathered throughout the winter from the farms and towns of Ostrabar and Nalbeni. Soon Torunna would be overwhelmed, the fortifications of Ormann Dyke rendered useless by the amphibious invasion. This panorama of men and ships was the death knell of the Ramusian west.

And it did not matter. The world Ahara had known had died here, in a welter of slaughter and rape and burning. She was numb to the possibility that the rest of the continent might soon fare similarly. She was only glad, in the small portion of her that remained her own, that she was allowed to stand here in the sunlight and listen to the seagulls and smell the salt air of the Ostian estuary. She gloried in her solitude.

But it ended, as it always did, and she was called below to attend upon the Sultan and his guests. Her dancing had come on apace, and Aurungzeb loved to have her perform for an audience. It whetted his appetite, he said.

The galley sailed on, the slaves bending at the oars, the vast armada of men and ships and munitions sliding past on each side. It seemed that the whole world had been picked up and reconfigured. It was a different place now, impervious to the wishes of the men who inhabited it. Some dreadful engine had begun to turn in the hot darkness of its vitals and could not be stopped any more than the sun could be halted in its path. The “force of history,” a philosopher might call it, or a more practical man might simply name it “war.” Whatever its epithet, it was about to break apart the world men had known, and fashion from the pieces something terrible and new.