Paul Kearney - Kings of Morning

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.’

Ahead, the mountains rose in a long serried parade clear across the sky. As the sun settled into the lowlands of the west, so the saffron light coloured the peaks and slopes, tinting the snowfields and filling the valleys with shadows black as ink.

Leading up to the mountains, climbing steadily from the wide river-plain below, a series of bristling snakes inched their way eastwards as though nosing for a crevice to sleep in. Now and then as they moved they caught the sunset in a flickering line of light.

They were columns of marching men, each pasangs long. They filled every road leading east, and trudged uphill in their patient thousands with the last of the sunlight bright as flame on their bronze armour, winking on the spearheads.

On their flanks columns of horsemen rode, red-cloaked like the infantry, their helms hanging from their saddles and lances resting on the shoulders of the riders. Knots of unarmoured cavalry swarmed over the rising hills further to the east of their fellows, their ranks as formless as a summer cloud of gnats.

This was the satrapy of Askanon, the wide floodplain of the Sardask and Haneikos rivers. Some of the most ancient cities of the Kufr stood here; Eskis, Kumir, and mighty Ashdod. They perched on their tells of earth and stone like castles of sand on a beach, whilst around them rivulets and rivers of armed men coursed across the earth.

The armies of the Macht were on the march again. To their rear, thick bars of black toiling smoke rose up the sky, lit bright and bloody by the sunset. To their front, the Korash Mountains stood marking the borders of the Middle Empire as they had from time immemorial.

The city of Ashdod had stood for perhaps five thousand years. It rose up like a tiered cake out of the plain, the brick and timber walls which encircled it as dark and warm in hue as an earthenware bowl. Within those walls the population numbered many tens of thousands, perhaps more.

And now it was burning.

‘They rely too much on mud and straw for their defences,’ Fornyx grunted. ‘They should have gone to the mountains for stone and made their walls of that.’

‘If they had,’ Rictus said, ‘We’d be sitting outside them still. The Kufr don’t think like us, Fornyx. They haven’t had our history, where every city is at the throat of every other, where every man has his spear. They’re a peaceable folk, by and large.’

‘Much good it may do them.’

They listened. As the evening darkened, so the fires in the city grew brighter, until they began to define its silhouette against the darkening plain. They could be heard, a distant roar, sometimes the deeper rumble as some building collapsed, its timbers burnt through.

‘Druze reckons we’ll collar maybe twenty thousand Kufr tonight,’ Fornyx said, his tone lowered. ‘That’s twenty thousand more shoulders to the wheel. It worries me, Rictus, this reliance on Kufr sweat. Can’t we just do the damn thing by ourselves? I don’t like being followed by a train of slaves.’

‘Parmenios needs labour, and there aren’t enough of us to go around,’ Rictus said with a grim smile. ‘And we’re not even in the Middle Empire yet. All we’ve seen and done so far, Fornyx, is the warm-up act before the real players take to the stage.’

‘You think he’ll come? The Great King?’

‘He will.’ Rictus gestured to the distant hell of the burning city. ‘Corvus has made sure of that now.’

‘Is that why he did it? And him so delicate about civilians and all. I wondered if the little bastard hadn’t just had a tantrum.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t shrink from, brother, if he thought it necessary.’

‘I just wish he wasn’t so damned cold-blooded about it, is all. He just gave the order, no quarter, and there we were hip-deep in gore, whilst up to now we’ve been treading on tip-toe through this country, and it as ripe and rich as a willing woman.’

‘Darios defied him, after being offered good terms. This had to happen. What’s the matter, Fornyx, are you getting squeamish in your old age?’

‘Maybe I am. And maybe you’re not so high and mighty about killing as you once were.’