Paul Kearney - Kings of Morning

‘She wants us to leave.’

Rakhsar reached inside his sash-purse, which was now as thin as the sash itself. He found two copper obols and held them out. ‘Give these to her. Tell her my sister must sleep here tonight. We cannot leave.’

The woman took the money, and her eyes grew shrewd. She spoke again.

‘She says she can help the lady Roshana.’

‘Well, let’s see if she can, Kurun. But I shall watch over her, and if she does us wrong, I shall have Ushau break her neck. And her brat’s, too.’

The woman was alone. As they sat there through the night, she told Kurun that her husband had been sent for by the Great King to fight in his army, and had gone east some weeks before.

She talked almost continually as she worked, and little by little the sense of the words began to order itself to Rakhsar. Asurian and High Kefren had once been the same language, but the high castes that dwelt in the ziggurats had drawn apart from the hufsan who made up the bulk of the empire, and over centuries of privilege their speech patterns had changed. Since the Great King spoke this evolving language, so did every courtier, high ranking officer and civil servant of the empire. It had become the language of the rulers.

All high caste Kefren still knew Asurian, for they mixed with the lower orders on a daily basis; but for Rakhsar and Roshana it had been different. They had never known the need to learn Asurian. What little they possessed was a half-remembered relic crooned over them by their wet-nurses.

I was never allowed to learn it, Rakhsar realised. Right from the beginning, it had been decided that there was no need.

Try as he might, he could not blame his father for this. He sensed the hand of Orsana.

A prince who cannot speak to his people. How ingenious of her — and such a simple thing to accomplish in the rarefied world of the palace, where even the slaves knew the high tongue.

But after all these weeks on the road listening to Ushau and Kurun, and now to this woman, Rakhsar’s inquisitive brain began to decipher the meanings of the half-familiar, half-alien words. He sat on one of the palm-trunk stools and watched, and listened, and for once in his life began to appreciate that one could gain without demand.

The hufsa woman stripped Roshana and washed her with warm water, then rubbed her down with palm oil scented with lavender and thyme, an incongruous fragrance in the smoky confines of the hovel. Ushau and Kurun went outside for this, but Rakhsar watched, and even went so far as to help the woman rinse out Roshana’s hair. Clumps of mud were so fastened in it that the woman despaired of the brush, and Rakhsar offered her his own knife to make the cut.

She took the pearl-handled blade gingerly, as though afraid to touch it, but once her dark fist covered the ornate hilt it became just another knife to her, and she began to cut away Roshana’s heavy black mane of hair, which had doubled in weight from its cargo of mud. When she had finished Roshana was left with a scalp as shorn as Kurun’s, and looked more like a boy than he did, the strong bones of her face accentuated by the weeks of lean living.

She opened her eyes; she had not spoken a word or uttered a protest through the whole operation, though she had whimpered some when the hufsa sawed a little too vigorously.

‘I am glad to be rid of it,’ she said, quietly.

‘You are more beautiful than ever,’ her brother told her, and meant it.

The hufsa was more sure of herself now. While her child and the little dog lay sleeping in a warm tangle on the floor, she heated water to boiling and then began twitching off handfuls of herbs from the drying bundles on the walls. These went in the water, and the smell of them in the steam that rose was wondrously refreshing, like some breath from a cooler world.

Finally, she sat by Roshana and took the girl’s head on her knee, then made her drink the hot herb-infused brew sip by sip.

By the time she was done it was far past the middle of the night. The woman pulled a handwoven blanket over Roshana and stroked her black, spiky scalp.

‘It will grow back,’ she said in Asurian.

And Rakhsar understood her.

Then she curled up on the floor beside her child, without further ceremony, and went at once to sleep.

Rakhsar stayed awake, watching the woman, her child, the twitching dog, and his own sister, now hardly recognisable but sleeping soundly on the peasant mat, in a smoke-blackened house made of mud.

And he knew something akin to peace, for the first time in his cosseted and quarrelsome and watchful life.

From Irunshahr the army uncoiled and began to march east. The raven banner snapped in the wind on the topmost tower of the fortress, and they were cheered to the echo by the three thousand Macht left behind to hold Corvus’s latest acquisition. At their head was Valerian, the Dogshead with the ruined face who had once loved Rictus’s daughter.

His appointment was a promotion, but he had not taken it well. All his adult life, Valerian had marched with Rictus and Fornyx and the Dogsheads. He was one of the originals, an almost extinct breed. But now he was to live in a palace with three whole morai to command and a city to administer, and it seemed almost like a punishment. Because he was going to miss out on the great fight to come, a battle to ring down the ages as Kunaksa had.

On Corvus’s orders, Rictus had persuaded him to take the command. There had been a time when he would have liked nothing better than to see his daughter marry the scarred young man with the gentle spirit, who had seemed already a son to him. But that was all in the past now. Rian was swimming strong within the tide of her own life, and Valerian was a good enough man not to resent it. He was also utterly trustworthy. Even Rictus had not been able to come up with a more fitting occupant for the post. If it came to it, Valerian would die on the walls of Irunshahr rather than open the gates to anyone save Rictus and his king.

But it was something of a blow, nonetheless, to march away once more with the ranks of those he trusted that little bit thinner. And the Dogsheads felt it too. Kesero, the big, bluff whorechaser who had been the banner-bearer these ten years, was moved up to second-in command under Fornyx.

Rictus’s status within the army was increasingly nebulous, but it was generally recognised that if Corvus were ever brought low, it would be Rictus’s task to take command. Even Demetrius did not dispute that. But it did leave Rictus sometimes feeling a little bereft. Fornyx commanded the Dogsheads just as well as Rictus ever had, which was hardly surprising, since Rictus had moulded and trained up the younger man from an early age. And Rictus found himself as much a quartermaster-general and military sounding-board to Corvus as anything else.

The role of wise counsellor was beginning to grate on him. He might find it difficult to crack his limbs into movement some cold mornings, but he still had a good fight or two left in him. He could still stand in the front rank if he had to.

Down the Imperial Road the infantry marched, ten abreast, while the cavalry and Druze’s Igranians went ahead and spied out the lie of the land, and noted those regions which were rich in foodstuffs and livestock. As the infantry marched east, so herds of cattle and goats were hustled west, to join the moving larder in the midst of the baggage train. And Corvus sent small mounted parties out to the south, also, to watch for any word of King Proxanon and his five legions.

Two weeks, they travelled like this, living off the land like a tide of locusts, but such were the riches of Pleninash that they did not leave starvation in their wake, and Corvus kept the men on a tight leash. Only once did he have to rear up the gibbet and gather the army in to witness punishment. Three men, conscripts, had left the line of march to raid a farm and force themselves on a hufsa woman they found there. Their centurion hunted them down, and Corvus hanged them without hesitation or pity, and left their bodies dangling for the crows while the whole army was marched past. This was the same affable young man who went up and down the column every day inquiring after their welfare, who told them dirty stories around the campfires at night. His face as the men died on the gibbet was marked by many; a grim white mask that seemed somehow not human at all.