Paul Kearney: Kings of Morning

They lay in the heather with the sun on their backs and stared east, the bees busy in the tangled fronds and roots about their faces, the scent of the birthing summer all about them, a fragrance as old and as new as life itself. They were perched on the tawny hillside like ticks on the flank of a great-backed hound, the land unaware of them, going about its existence as it had these thousands of centuries. They felt their own impermanence, the tiny pricks of their souls on the existence of the world, and they smiled as they caught one another’s eye, attuned to that knowledge.

East again, their gaze turned, and they saw the huge blooming sweep of the world open out before them like a hazed cloak swung over oddments, vast beyond comprehension, and yet intimate, bulging here and there with hills, scabbing over with the blossom of forests. All of it blurred and lazy under a warm sunlight, a blessing in the air itself.

The younger of the two turned, lay on his back under the sun and stared up at the sky. He was a pale, slender fellow, but there was a golden tinge to his skin that answered the sunlight.

‘He is not taking us seriously, Rictus.’

The other, an older man, lay watching, his grey eyes as pale as the underside of a snake. He rested his chin on his forearm, and the lumped flesh under his lip jutted out, an old scar. His forearm, too, was silvered with streaks of long-healed wounds, matching the badger-thatch of his hair. He was gaunt, austere, a man who seemed to have been peering into the wind all his life.

‘Serious enough. It’s as big a camp as I’ve ever seen.’

The younger man turned on his stomach again, shaded his eyes and stared across the sunlit plain before him.

‘All things are relative, my friend. We look out here upon a sensible riposte to our enterprise. He has sent enough to answer the challenge; not enough to crush it.’

‘And?’

‘And — ’ the younger man’s face darkened. For a second it seemed almost that the bones within it grew more pronounced, making him into something else entirely; a grim creature of humourless will.

‘And he is not here himself. There is no Imperial tent. He has sent his lackeys to fight us, Rictus.’

Now it was the older man’s turn to roll on his back. He rubbed at the white scar furrowing his chin. ‘Then they will be the more easily beaten.’

‘Where’s the glory in that?’

Rictus smiled, and for a second he seemed a much younger man. ‘After everything we have done, Corvus, do you still need the glory of it?’

‘Now, more than ever.’

The young man looked down on the older one. In some ways they were akin; the high cheekbones, the colour flaring in them, the scars they both carried. Corvus leant and kissed Rictus on the forehead.

‘My brother,’ he said, ‘Were it not for the glory, I would not be here at all.’

Imperial Ashur, greatest city of the world. The last of the spring breezes which swept cool and blue from the Magron Mountains to the west had sunk into the drying earth of the vast Oskus valley. Now the first true heat of summer was upon the city, and the sun glinted in painful brilliance off the polished gold tiles plating the ziggurat of Bel.

The dust was rising in the streets, and the striped canopies of traders and merchants were lowered against the growing heat of the year. Mot and Bel had finished their struggle for one more season; the rains had come and gone, the glittering grid of irrigation channels that spangled the earth for pasangs all around the tall city walls were gurgling and alive with frogs, which the local farmers brought into the city in baskets, as a seasonal delicacy. In old Kefren, this month had once been known as Osh-ko-ribhu; the Time to Eat Frogs.

Kurun bit into his with relish, tearing the delicate meat off the skewer with teeth as small and white as a cat’s. He had a face like a cat too, all pointed chin and large eyes, and a small snub nose which was considered ugly by the high-caste Kefren, who preferred something more beak-like to enhance their long, golden faces. Kurun was a hufsan from the Magron Mountains, a small, wiry youth with the dark skin and eyes of his people, and black hair which, when it was not oiled, stood up straight and thick on his head like the pelt of a cat in a thunderstorm. He had a winning smile, and the man with the skewered frogs knew him well, and would not take his money, but stood tending his charcoal and listened as Kurun told him news from the High City, the words tripping out of his mouth between mouthfuls.

‘And Auroc, the Kitchen-Master, he says that the Couch-Chamberlain has told him already to make preparations for the move to Hamadan. They have the Tithemen on the roads as I speak, Goruz, and are bringing in half the imperial herd from Bokosa. Twenty thousand cattle, Auroc said, and he is worried that the new grass is not yet high enough to keep them in flesh all the way to Hamadan.’

‘Twenty thousand cattle,’ the frog-seller said, shaking his grizzled head. ‘At this time of year they will strip the land of every growing blade and ear. It will hurt the valley farmers.’

Kurun wiped his mouth. ‘The Lord wants the roads clear before high summer — so they say in the Palace. I can’t think why. Didn’t the army already leave months ago?’

‘Perhaps they want another army gathered,’ Goruz said with a shrug.

‘What need of another army? Surely one is enough.’

‘I was at Kunaksa, Kurun, one of the city levy. I saw our left wing, thirty thousand strong, blown away like straw in the wind when those monsters crashed into them. They are demons — who is to say that they did not do the same to the army that left for the west?’

Kurun frowned. ‘That is a story, Goruz, put out to frighten the common folk. Everyone knows that the demons from across the sea were destroyed by our Lord, chased back across the mountains and broken into pieces. He sent their heads to every corner of the Empire.’

Goruz shrugged again, the resigned shrug of the misbelieved poor. ‘I know what I saw. It was near thirty years ago, but I do not forget that day. I remember it better than any day before or since — that is what war is like. The memory of it stays clear and cold in a man’s mind.’

Kurun handed the old man back the hardwood skewer and tossed a tiny thigh-bone into the street. ‘Well, whatever happens, Goruz, at least the frogs are good this year.’

‘They are, at that, as plump and fine as I’ve seen them, Bel be praised. Are you back to the High City now, Kurun?’

‘Where else?’ The boy flashed a white grin. ‘There is an audience this afternoon, Goruz. There are couriers due in from the Middle Empire. If I can wriggle my way to the platforms I’ll have more news for you, by and by.’

‘Mind you your station, boy — that skinny back of yours was not made to take a whipping!’ Goruz called. But Kurun was already gone, darting through the crowded street like a minnow flashing between stones in a brown river.

He wore the purple stripe of the imperial household on his chiton, and tattooed on his shoulder was the stylised horse head that was the Great King’s mark. He belonged to the man who owned everything. He was a creature of the High City, as the Palace ziggurat was called by those below. He knew the back ways up to the heights, the dark entrances which led to the bowels of the Palace wherein toiled legions of slaves from every race in the world. The ziggurat was more ancient than Ashur itself, a man-made tell as large as one of nature’s mountains, a city within a city whose inhabitants numbered in the tens of thousands, slave and free, high and low.