Paul Kearney - Kings of Morning

He wondered where Roshana was — whether the Macht had killed her, or merely taken her as a slave. For a few moments he dwelled with lubricious pleasure on the thought of her beauty in chains, serving the bestial needs of those animals. The thought cheered him. He drank more wine. His aching ribs took solace in the vintage and he grew more at ease, wondering when it would all be declared over. He craved a bath above all other things. The grit was grating in his very scalp.

There were shadows coming out of the dust, running forms, very like the broken crowds of the levies that had been sent up against the Macht line earlier in attack after attack. They ran past with mouths agape, fighting for breath, eyes like marbles in their heads.

They were Honai.

The wine curdled in Kouros’s mouth. His father was leaning on the front rail of the chariot, saying nothing. The old man tugged down the folds of his komis as though that would help him see through the storm of dust, the running shadows.

Crowds of the bronze-clad warriors were looming up now, many painted with blood, their bright armour dull and scored. They had thrown away their shields to aid their flight; the age-old badge of the broken soldier.

The Honai. It could not be possible.

The Great King himself railed at them, shouting like a junior officer, to no avail. His cavalry escort halted them for a time. They staggered into the chests of the big Niseians, and many collapsed there, sobbing for breath. To run in full armour, in this heat, this dust; it was a killing exertion. But they were staggering on, pushing their way between the ranks of the horsemen, cursing the Arakosans and punching at the heads of the horses blocking their paths.

Finally the chariot bodyguard leapt down from the vehicle and seized one of his comrades by the wing of his cuirass. He swung him off his feet and shouted furiously into the Kefre’s face.

‘What has happened?’

The Honai took a moment to come back to himself; the panic was flooding his eyes.

‘Cavalry. They hit us with thousands of horsemen, and other infantry. We were strung out. We thought it was over.’

‘Have you seen Dyarnes?’

The Honai shook his head dumbly.

‘Bel’s blood,’ the bodyguard said. He released the fellow and after a second the Honai got up, tottered in a confused circle, and then took off, staggering.

‘My lord, we should go,’ the bodyguard said to Ashurnan. ‘If the Honai are broken, then we are exposed here.’

The Great King shook his head. ‘I must know what has happened.’ He turned to his couriers, who sat on their trembling, sweating horses like men eager to begin a race.

‘Go forward. Find Dyarnes, or at least find out what has happened.’ And to another one; ‘Go to Lorka and the Arakosans. Find out what has occurred on the left.’

Kouros tossed aside his cup. ‘Father!’

They were like ghosts. They charged out of the murk like shapes made of shadow and dust, and all at once the dust was swept away by the veering wind, and the sun burst bright upon them, setting alight the bright lance-heads, the swords, the gleam in their eyes.

Kefren on Niseians, a line of them. They might have been imperial cavalry, except that their garments were dyed red as holly-berries and their armour was strangely shaped. At their head rode a pale-faced youth, his eyes blazing under a horsehair crest, his very face shining, as though he had been just that moment incarnated from some terrible dream. His armour was black, as lightless as if it were made of a hole scooped from the very fabric of the world. There was a banner with the device of a raven upon it, sable on white, flying above his head. He raised his sword and cried out wordlessly. And Kouros felt a thrill of terror scale his flesh as he recognised the face.

‘It’s him!’ he cried, and he leapt from the chariot even as the driver whipped the horses.

The cavalry charged into them like a foaming wall. Ashurnan drew his sword and laid about him like a young man while his bodyguard held up a shield to protect him. The chariot snagged, jerked, the Niseians that drew it fighting breast to breast with the horses of the newcomers. The driver had his whip-hand slashed from his wrist, and then his head was taken from his shoulders and he toppled in a fountain of blood.

The Arakosan escort had surged forward, and now the imperial cavalry were battling it out at a standstill all around the royal chariot, the horses biting and kicking, their riders hacking at one another and stabbing with short lances. The battle was here, now, right upon them. Kouros rolled along the ground while his barely knitting ribs grated in his chest and burst his mind wide open with the agony of it. But the fear that flooded him also kept him going.

The couriers were battling at the rear of the chariot, but they were unarmoured and young, inexperienced. The Kefren who fought them seemed transported; they battled like demons, and there were more and more of their fellows streaming in from the west, a veritable army of enemy cavalry which seemed to have somehow sprung up out of the dust.

Kouros stood up. He saw the Great King’s standard tilt and then fall as the chariot was overturned. The horses still harnessed to it panicked and tried to bolt, dragging the vehicle along. His father was still inside it, hanging on with one hand and lashing out with the scimitar.

A horse knocked him down, its hoof striking him in the temple. Kouros barely felt it, but for a few minutes as he struggled to his knees in the midst of the melee, he found himself recording everything he saw with a strange, remote detachment. He saw Ashurnan speared through the chest by an enemy trooper and fall from the overturned chariot to be hidden behind the trampling feet of the horses. He saw the Arakosan escort fighting to the last for possession of the standard, men losing hands and arms to keep hold of it. But the blue-armoured Arakosans were now a mere struggling handful.

He saw the enemy cavalry, horsemen who were Kefren, yet somehow Macht, flood in a tide past the wrecked chariot. There was no-one left to oppose them, no-one left to kill.

He saw Corvus, the pale youth with the terrible eyes, dismount, and lay his cloak over the trampled corpse that had once been Ashurnan, Great King of the Asurian empire, ruler of the world.

And with that, the strange remoteness left him. Kouros staggered to his feet, the Macht cavalry galloping past him in squadrons to spread ruin through the rest of the army. They took with them the standard of Asuria, which had flown on victorious battlefields for years beyond count. It was a trophy now, stained with the blood of the men who had tried to preserve it.

He caught a horse with his good arm, and hung onto the reins like a man down to his last straw as it danced and reared around him. Somehow, he pulled himself into the saddle, wholly ignored. He did not wear armour, he bore no weapon that the enemy could see, and he was plainly injured. They left him alone; he was just one more fleeing Kufr in the dust and the destruction of the Asurian army.

The King is dead, he thought muzzily as he kicked the horse into motion and set the sun at his back. Long live the King.

He joined the mob of men and animals running eastwards, some in flight, some in pursuit.

He did not know where he was going. He knew only that he had to get away from that pale faced youth, the boy who had killed his father.

As the evening came, tawny with spent dust on the wind, bright with the first of the moons, so the camp began to fill up again.

Roshana and Kurun sat outside their tent with their feet to a campfire that a chastened Macht had built for them, and watched as the waggon-park on the plain below the tented city came to life with torch and firelight. At first they could see clearly the slow procession of the waggons as they trickled in below, but later, when night fell, they could only hear them. They followed the progress of the convoys by the shrieks of those that were in them: the wounded of the Macht army.