Paul Kearney - Kings of Morning

Rictus heard them as he lay by the tall window. He had insisted they move the bed there so he could feel the wind on his face and watch the torchlight in the streets below. A cup of wine sat in his hand, untasted, and a platter fit to feed a family had been sent up from the banqueting tables, still untouched. He sat and looked out at the warm, fire-studded night while Kurun squatted on the floor beside him, with his elbows on his knees, and plied him with endless halting questions in broken Machtic. The boy had a mind like a magpie, forgetting nothing, endlessly curious, and he was picking up the foreign tongue with all the speed of youth, intelligence and stubbornness that was in him. Rictus responded to his sallies with monosyllables, but he liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.

The noise of revelry grew louder as the door to the chambers was opened, then shut out again. Rictus knew the footsteps that approached. He did not turn round. He could smell the wine, and some Kufr perfume. Kurun rose easily to his feet and bowed.

‘Where is the princess Roshana?’ Corvus’s voice.

‘The girl went to bed, though how she’ll sleep with this racket I don’t know,’ Rictus said. He turned to look upon his king, now the most powerful man in the world.

Corvus had vine-leaves laced in his hair, and his eyes had been drawn out dark with stibium so that his white face was more of a mask than ever. The wine was heavy on his breath and he had a jar of it dangling from one hand. He smiled, sat down on the edge of Rictus’s bed with a heaviness quite unlike him. He was drunk, Rictus realised. For the first time in all the years he had known Corvus, the boy was drunk.

Not a boy, though. Despite the painted face and the vine leaves, this was no callow youth who sat beside Rictus now, and the smile on his face was as painted as his eyes.

‘How is my old warhorse — I meant to look in on you earlier — how is my friend Rictus? Old Rictus, old man. Never dead yet. How is he? Have some wine, brother — ’ He lifted the jar, slopping the red liquid on the bed.

‘I have some,’ Rictus said, raising his untasted cup.

‘As well you should, Rictus. We should all have wine tonight, as much as we can hold. It washes away the dust. Boy! Drink with me!’

Kurun looked at Rictus quickly, and then gulped from the proffered jar as Corvus held it for him.

‘That’s the stuff, boy. Phobos, but you’re a pretty one. Near as pretty as your mistress. I must look in on her. I’ll be quiet. I want to see her — ’

He raised himself from the bed, but Rictus took him by the wrist. ‘Let her sleep, Corvus. Not everyone wants to drink tonight.’

‘No — no — of course not.’ He seemed to sober somewhat. His face changed. Rictus had never known any other man with such mobile features. For a second Corvus seemed on the verge of weeping, but then he seemed to collect himself. He poured a stream of wine to spatter redly on the floor.

‘For absent friends,’ he said thickly.

And now Rictus drank deep from his own wine, suddenly needing the warmth of it in his own gullet. His throat had narrowed. He tossed the dregs onto the stone as Corvus had.

‘I did not mean them all to die,’ Corvus said quietly. His words were slurred, but the thuggish gaiety had left him. He was himself again.

‘I did not plan it that way — why would I? They stood beside you, Rictus, to the end. If you had not been there, they would have broken, and they would have survived. The Dogsheads.’

‘They would have stood with Fornyx as they did with me.’

Corvus shook his head. ‘A man will give his life for a legend. You should have done what I asked, and commanded the reserves. You disobeyed me.’

‘I did, and you let me do it. Do you know why, Corvus?’

The King looked at him, hovering somewhere between anger and compassion.

‘Because you knew why I did it. This was one party I could not miss. The greatest of battles. The start of a legend, perhaps. You would have done the same yourself. That is why you allowed me to take my place with my men. It appealed to the romantic in you.’

Corvus smiled tightly. ‘As you say, I would have done the same myself.’ He bowed his head.

Rictus stared into his wine, listening to the sound of the night-time city being painted bright and garish by the celebrations below.

‘Did any survive?’ he asked, a question he had not dared frame since his senses had come back to him.

‘Forty-six,’ Corvus said. He straightened and drank again. ‘Forty-six out of close on three thousand. There’s a legend for you. How the Dogsheads died at Gaugamesh. How that story of theirs ended there, right in front of the eyes of the Great King.’

‘There are worse ways to die,’ Rictus said, in a low rasp.

‘It was a glorious way to die. I hope when my end comes it shall make such a story.’

‘How did we come through, overall?’

Corvus was blinking hard. He rubbed his toe in the puddled wine on the floor.

‘We lost something over six thousand men, dead or too maimed to ever fight again.’

‘That’s quite a butcher’s bill.’

Corvus smiled a little. ‘It was quite a fight, brother. An empire fell that day.’

‘You really think that’s the end of the fighting?’

Corvus shook his head. ‘There will be plenty more fighting. But we will never face another general levy. I’ve invited all the governors of the lowland cities here. I intend to confirm them in their posts if they will swear me allegiance. Things will go on much as they did before. The Juthan have pacified southern Pleninash in their march to join us. Proxanon is a good man — you’d like him. Never smiles, but can set the table in a roar all the same. Drinks like a man who has just discovered his own mouth.

‘His son will bring five thousand of his people across the Magron with us, as part of the army. It will help make up our losses. Plus, we have reinforcements arriving from the Harukush within the month — I received a letter today, from your friend Valerian at Irunshahr. More green spears headed east. They’re already over the Korash Mountains. By the time we leave for Asuria, the army will be bigger than ever.’

But it will not be the same army, Rictus thought. Not for me. The Dogsheads are gone, finished. That part of my life is finally over.

Corvus seemed almost to pick up some current of his thought. He did that often with people; he seemed to be able to read them in some uncanny way. Now he said, ‘Do not leave me, Rictus.’

‘What?’

‘Fornyx is dead, the Dogsheads are gone, the battle is won. I can see it in your eyes. I saw it in you every time I visited you in that blue-roofed cart they hauled you east in. You wanted to die. That’s why I got in Buri, and set Kurun to watch over you. And lovely Roshana. I set them to keeping you alive, but death is still in your eyes.’

‘Perhaps these eyes have seen enough.’

‘They have not seen Ashur, the ziggurats of the Great King, the heart of empire. Stay with me, Rictus, I beg you.’

Startled, Rictus looked the younger man square in the face. ‘What can I do for you, Corvus, that a dozen other men could not? You don’t need my name any more — your own is greater now, greater by far. You have become a legend yourself.’

‘Legends need their friends,’ the younger man said. He hung his head.

Kurun was looking back and forth between Rictus and Corvus with such fierce concentration that Rictus almost had to smile.

‘A man like you will never lack friends.’

Corvus stood up. Something harder crept back into his face. ‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps that is what it truly means to be a king. I would have liked to talk to Ashurnan about it. I would have spared him, had he lived. At least he died like a man should, sword in hand, facing hopeless odds.’