Paul Kearney: Kings of Morning

The endless meetings in the audience hall, with Kouros sitting on the throne that had been his father’s; the stifling formality of it all, the time wasted on protocol and ceremony, when every moment counted. It threw Kouros into icy rages, which he took out on a succession of unfortunate slave-girls. He did not yet care to inspect his father’s concubines, nor would he ever let his mother choose more for him, so slaves were sent up to him from the lower city in a steady stream, and night after night they went back down again, bruised and bleeding. In this, at least, he felt he had some control.

Ten days after his entrance to the city, something new was admitted to the echoing audience hall with its lines of courtiers and scribes. Orsana was there that day, seated to Kouros’s right like the queen she was. There was something of a stir as Akanish the chamberlain announced the arrival of Archon Gemeris, a name Kouros knew. He rose from the throne, smiling, as the tall Kefren noble stalked up the length of the hall. He was clad in Honai armour, and the sight of it sent a glad murmur down the walls from the assembled notables and nonentities.

Kouros did not let the man kneel, so glad was he to see him, but took his hand.

‘Gemeris — you are well met. So, you made it down from Hamadan in good time — are all your men with you?’

‘Yes, lord. Something over three thousand of your bodyguard are now within the city walls.’

‘Excellent! We — ’

‘My lord, listen to me.’ Gemeris had marched with Kouros clear across the Magron. He presumed on their acquaintance now, his face stark with urgency.

‘I bear bad tidings as well as good. The Macht king is over the Magron Mountains. He has already taken Hamadan; the city opened its gates to him without a fight. Now he is already on the march for Ashur.

‘My lord, he will be here in a week or less, and his whole army with him.’

The passes through the Magron Mountains were not like those of the Korash to the north-west of the world. Though the Magron were the highest peaks known on Kuf, wide valleys lay between them, linking up to make as good a thoroughfare as any in the homeland of the Macht. Only in the darker half of the year were any of the passes closed, and even then, small bodies of men had been known to win through at some cost, as the imperial couriers had been doing for centuries.

The Imperial Road continued here, not the broad straight highway it was in the Middle Empire, but a meandering track under yearly assault from the elements. It was regularly washed away by meltwater or buried in avalanches, but the empire kept the road open, each waystation along it home to a work-gang of slaves who spent their entire lives labouring in the mountains to this end.

Rictus and his companions left Carchanis some two weeks after the Macht army had departed. They did so in some style, for Corvus had left the forty-six survivors of the Dogsheads behind to provide a kind of honour guard. Under Sycanus of Gost, a short, muscular veteran who had once stood with Rictus upon the walls of Machran, these men now accompanied him east in the wake of the army. Most of them were past the first flush of youth, as seamed and scarred as any old campaigner could be, but there were a few younger men in their ranks too, eager to get across the mountains and view the fabled heartland of the Kufr empire.

They rigged out the blue-roofed caravan once more, though they swapped the horses that drew it for hardier mules, and accompanied by more mules bearing packs, the company left Carchanis behind, following in the rutted track of the main host and marvelling at the views behind them as they clambered higher into the foothills of the Magron.

For Rictus, it was his first time travelling into a region he had never seen before. For the others, it was a relief to leave behind the heat of the lowlands and breathe the cool blue air of the hills.

The waystations were deserted now, their crews having run away at the approach of the Macht army. And they passed abandoned homesteads of stone and heather-thatch close to the road, their doors kicked in, their interiors rifled. It would seem that some of the new recruits were missing the iron hand of old Demetrius.

Not for long, though. They also passed a gibbet hung with three young men, Macht soldiers, their eyes already pecked empty by the crows. Corvus had never shown any mercy to looters, when he had not sanctioned their actions himself.

The company did not hurry, but they still made better time than the army, unconstrained by a vast baggage train. As it was, they passed abandoned waggons on the road, dead mules and horses, and massive stone-built cairns left at regular intervals, as though Corvus were leaving markers for them to follow.

The nights were short, but grew more bitter as they climbed higher into the Mountains. Ragged patches of snow began to appear on the mountainsides close to the road, hardy upland wildflowers springing up beside them, like two seasons living in truce together. It reminded Rictus of the Gosthere Mountains back around his home, or the place he had once called home. There were green glens here with rivers running down them that might have been in the Harukush, and once he caught his breath as they turned a corner on the road and saw, off to one side, a steep-sided valley winding past tree-covered spurs, and a wide, shallow river in the bottom of it, as brown as a trout. In a flash, he was back in Andunnon, building the house with Fornyx and Eunion stone by stone while Aise tended the fire and set barley bannock to baking on a rock griddle. It was so clear in his mind it almost seemed real, and when he came back to himself there was a moment of crushing despair. They were all dead now, every one of them. He was the only person left in the world who still possessed memories of that time and place.

That night, by the fire, he was withdrawn and morose, sitting propped up against a stone with the thornwood stick in his hands, the cold aching in his battered bones. He watched Sycanus and the other Dogsheads around other fires, listening to the timeless banter of soldiers, talk which had been the backdrop to all his adult life. He realised, in that moment, that he was no longer a warrior himself. Rictus of Isca, leader of the Ten Thousand. Who remembered his exploits now, since Corvus had risen like a storm to hurl the world on its head? The boy who had marched beside Jason, who had fought at Kunaksa — he was utterly gone. Even the cursebearer who stood in the front line and held men to his will was no more.

I am old, he thought. I will see Ashur, to sate the dregs of my curiosity, and then my service is over. I owe nothing to any man alive.

Kurun handed him a bowl of steaming goat stew with a smile. Beside him, Roshana was already eating hers with a crude stick-spoon. The three sat apart from the Macht soldiers by choice, whereas once Rictus would have been right at the lip of the centon, in the heart of them.

‘Does she know what Corvus has planned for her?’ he asked Kurun, nodding at Roshana.

Kurun dropped his eyes. ‘She knows. I told her.’

‘And how does it sit with her?’

‘I will marry him.’ To Rictus’s astonishment, it was Roshana who spoke. ‘He will be Great King. I will be Queen.’

‘I didn’t know you spoke our tongue.’

‘A little. I learn, for him, for Corvus.’

‘You taught her?’ Rictus asked Kurun. The boy nodded, stirring his stew with the spoon as though he no longer had any appetite.

‘She made me. For marriage.’

He loved her; it was clear in his eyes. But what could a boy-eunuch offer the wife-to-be of a king? Rictus felt a pang of pity for him.