Paul Kearney - Kings of Morning

They rode up the Huruma amid the spray of the fountains, the palace ziggurat looming ever closer and taller above them, casting a shadow as large as that of a stormcloud. Only when Kouros set his horse to climb the King’s Steps did the guards come awake, and he found himself surrounded by a knot of hufsan with whips and scimitars. He thought of the gleaming Honai who should have been there, now dead on the barren plain of Gaugamesh, and something like grief rose in his throat. He did not speak, and let his Arakosans do the talking for him. They cursed and swore at the hufsan in common Asurian, the language of the masses, but the hufsan guards were adamant; no-one save the Great King himself might mount the Steps on horseback.

Finally, as the Arakosans began to draw their swords, Kouros spoke. In high Kefren he said, ‘I am Kouros, son of Ashurnan. My father was Great King of the empire, and I am his heir. The crown is mine; this ziggurat is mine. This city and everything in it belongs to me, as do your lives. If you do not let me pass I will summon my army into the city and have you impaled at this very spot. Will you let me pass, or will you wait here to die?’

Something in his tone stilled them. The guards muttered among themselves, looking at the bright steel in the hands of the Arakosans. They noted the Niseian warhorses, and the effortless confidence of the Black Kefre who spoke to them. Finally they gave way.

Kouros began pacing his horse up the wide-spaced steps that led to the summit of the ziggurat.

This would have been the highlight of my life, once, he thought. Now it is just another road.

They had word of him on the summit before he arrived, so swiftly did the rumour-mill grind in the ziggurat. He dismounted to find an honour guard awaiting him, gaudily armoured Kefren who looked as though they had never held a spear before. There was a disordered flurry, a kind of silent, low-key panic as some sense of ceremony was grasped at. Kouros stood by his patient horse and smiled a little as he saw his mother approach, decked out like a queen in a city’s worth of silk and jewels, flanked by Charys, the brutal-faced head eunuch, and little Nurakz, the harem secretary. A train of beautiful young women brought up the rear, as butterfly-like as ever. They blinked in the sunlight and held up little parasols to protect their complexions.

‘My son — is it really you?’

She glided up close to him as smoothly as if she ran on wheels, and took Kouros’s face in her cold ring-bright hands.

‘Bel’s blood, your poor face. You are burnt black with the sun.’

‘The Mountains will do that to a man. Did you get the despatches?’

‘They arrived five days ago. I did not think to find you so close behind them — what are you wearing? Was there no-one to greet you into the city?’

He shook his head free of her hands. ‘We must talk.’

‘You must bathe.’ She clapped her white hands. ‘Charys, see to prince Kouros — see that — ’

‘I am King now, mother. I need no crown for that. I saw my father die, as I saw Rakhsar die. The throne is mine.’

She stared at him for a long, wordless moment, the heavy cosmetics stark in the sunlight, her eyes unreadable. At last she bowed to him, and as she did, so did everyone else in the courtyard.

‘My lord King,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you wish, and it shall be done.’

They changed the bathwater three times before he got to the end of the dirt ingrained in him. It was his mother’s bath in the harem, not that in the royal bedchambers, for the Great King’s apartments were being refurbished and aired in readiness for their newest occupant. Kouros did not greatly care. He had not stopped to bathe even at Hamadan, and he had become used to the grime of travel, the smell of woodsmoke, the hard ground for a pillow.

Hufsa slaves as naked as he wiped him down with wooden strigils and applied sweet oils to his abraded skin, combing out the long black hair that fell to his shoulderblades and tying it up in the customary topknot. He stood to be dried and dressed and was too tired to do more than run one hand in absent speculation across the breasts of the prettiest slave. Standing there as they belted the silk robe about his waist, he began to understand his father a little better. He thrust the knife which had killed his brother into the broad sash they wound about his middle. It was an artefact from another world, a world more real than this.

He joined his mother that evening to eat, reclining amid the marble pillars of the harem and lifting ridiculously small dainties from a platter of beaten gold. He had eaten horsemeat in the mountains, and found it not at all bad. In any case, he had little appetite for anything but wine, and this Orsana served him herself in a crystal cup. Kouros held it up to the lamplight and marvelled at the workmanship, the fragility of it in his brown fingers.

‘War has made a man of you,’ Orsana said from her couch.

‘I see things differently now, it’s true.’

‘I have already sent out a proclamation; the city criers are shouting it all over the streets. Asuria has a new king. My son is alive, and the throne is no longer empty. I will begin preparations for the coronation in the morning.’

‘Make it swift, mother. We do not have time to indulge these things any more. The enemy is hard on my heels. He will be in front of our walls before the summer is out.’

She leaned forward. ‘So soon?’

‘He is a man in a hurry.’

‘What did you save out of the wreck, Kouros?’

He thought of the long nights in the mountains, the waystations lost in a sea of refugees, the broken wreckage of a once-mighty army. It had melted away like a late snow. If he had not witnessed it with his own eyes, he would not have deemed it possible.

‘A few thousand of the Honai survived. I left them at Hamadan to hold the city, and came on with the Arakosans. Lorka will be within the city walls tonight; he has brought some two thousand horsemen with him, and the contents of Hamadan’s treasury. There are thousands more still on the move in the foothills, but they are no more than a common rout.’

The shock sat hard on his mother’s face. He almost enjoyed watching her master it.

‘Is that all?’

‘The Macht did a thorough job. They hunted us all the way to the passes of the mountains. And I have heard that the Juthan have sent an army to join them. There is nothing left beyond the Magron, mother. Asuria is all that remains.’

‘And Arakosia,’ she said instantly. He tilted his cup to her in agreement.

‘We have only the city guard here in Ashur,’ she went on, staring into space. ‘Five thousand hufsan who direct traffic and beat slaves. That is all.’

Kouros lay back on the cushioned couch. It was too soft for him. The weeks in the mountains had accustomed him to the feel of earth and stone under his back.

‘I killed Rakhsar with my own hand.’ He drew the knife from his sash. ‘That, at least, is done.’

‘And Roshana?’

‘The Macht took her, I think; if she lived. She is immaterial now. The intrigues are over, mother. We must think of gathering more men. We must send to Arakosia, somehow scrape up another levy. These walls must be held.’

She nodded, watching him. She looked upon the blood-grimed blade of the knife he held in fascination and disgust.

‘We must meet with Borsanes in the morning,’ Orsana told him. ‘He commands the city guard. Lorka also. I must talk to him as soon as he gets in. The Arakosans have been coming west for weeks now, but in small numbers. There are perhaps a thousand of them in the city, and more at Hamadan.’

‘Enough to stage a palace coup — not enough to fight off an invading army. You must change your sense of scale, mother.’