M. Scott: The Eagle of the Twelfth

‘And watch the kings,’ Pantera said, from my other side. ‘See who takes command. It may change what happens next.’

I knew what was going to happen next; it involved razor-knives and hot irons and hammers and pain made to last for days on end. I eased my free hand back, towards the dagger at my waist, trying to work out whether I had time to draw itand plunge it into my own neck before the men on either side could stop me.

Even as I did so, I found myself absorbed in the developing tableau ahead, where the seventeen client kings gathered about the bay mare, none knowing which amongst them had the authority to touch the sacred body of their supreme ruler.

Ranades IX, king of Hyrcania, settled the matter. Breaking free of the others, he pushed his own mount close to the king’s magnificent bay and, leaning in from his own saddle, took the King of Kings in his arms with the care of a man for his most beloved brother.

They were not brothers, in fact, not even distant cousins. Ranades of Hyrcania was a man in his full middle age with six importunate sons who might yet try to depose him, while the King of Kings was one such son among nine, who had succeeded in deposing his father, killed three of his brothers and set himself on the throne.

Nevertheless, the king of Hyrcania’s wide face was composed in lines of evident regret as he eased his supreme ruler free of the gold trappings that held him fast.

Holding the body across his arms as he might carry a child, or a woman, he stepped his horse neatly backwards; a man born to horsemanship. The other kings stepped with him in a ring of royal mourning, each man gluing his shoulder tight to the next, for now was not a time to stand out from the crowd.

Ranades IX, of course, already stood out; the murder had taken place on his land, in his kingdom, by a man invited to his court: Pantera.

I felt the moment when seventeen kings turned their attention our way. I kept still only because Cadus held me, but Cadus himself was cursing under his breath, invoking gods and their progeny with a vicious invective that two years in his legion had yet to teach me.

Pantera was not cursing. Pantera, in fact, was leaningforward on his saddle, watching the kings with a kind of weary patience, as if he had better things to do, more interesting places to be. Two or three of the men opposite recognized the look and began to shout suggestions about how his death might be made as deeply interesting — and lengthy — as possible. Under Ranades’ stare, they fell silent.

‘Let the Nubians come forward.’ Gilded by a new authority, Ranades’ voice lifted over the shouts of his peers.

The forty Nubians hurried to his bidding, although for the first few yards they carried with them the kingfisher pavilion. Enough of them had died for letting it dip below waist level for the rest to have carried it into living fire and died holding it, had they been so ordered.

Ranades took a patient breath. He had grey eyes, the colour of iron, restless as the ocean, with not a shade of doubt in them that I could see.

‘Set down the pavilion. Bring only the trestle. Our lord must be carried to the palace. You may not touch him. There must be furs, somewhere, on which he can lie?’

He looked around, his gaze already glancing over the other kings as over lesser men, and it became apparent that they had missed their first opportunity, and that, did they not act swiftly, all authority would leak from the dead man to this one, living, who was giving all the orders when the others gave none.

Three of the younger men, contemporaries of the dead king, caught each other’s eyes and, as one, stepped their horses smoothly back out of the royal group.

They had features sharp as foxes beneath their beards, and were clearly related. Their eyes had the same vulpine slant, but their cheekbones were neither as high nor as distinct as those in Hyrcania, where men from the king downwards had cheekbones jutting sharp as bridges beneath their eyes from which the rest of their face hung as an afterthought.

They wheeled their mounts, these fox-faced men with their black beards and hate-filled eyes, and pushed them at me, at Cadus, and at Pantera, the trader-archer who had slaughtered the King of Kings, and so signed his own death warrant.

Yet who still carried his bow, and had at his hip a quiver full of arrows, several of them fletched in black.

As one who lives a whole life between heartbeats, I saw him nock one, and draw his bow to its fullest.

‘Which of you first?’ Pantera asked, and smiled.

The three bearded men hauled their horses to a mouth-destroying halt.

‘Do you dare — ’ asked the first. The blue tern on his horse’s brow-harness marked him as Monobasus, king of Adiabene, a province to the south and west of Hyrcania.

Pantera arched one brow. ‘I have killed a usurper, a traitor to the King of Kings, a pretender to the throne that was not rightfully his. Do you wish that I had not? Be careful what you say. There are many others present and they are all listening with interest.’

It was his calm that held them in the first moments. I had heard that voice before, and it set the small hairs upright down the length of my spine. I was relieved that Pantera was not speaking to me.

Covertly, I looked at him. In the spirit of wild detachment that had taken hold of me, I wanted more than anything else to know if Pantera’s heart was beating as hard as my own.

It could not be, I concluded, because Pantera was holding a Scythian war bow at full draw with the arrow perfectly steady. But the knuckles of both his hands were green-white in the cold light and I saw a ribbon of sweat slide down the line of his jugular vein, to vanish beneath the folds of the lamb’s wool cloak. He may not have been strung tight as I had imagined in the morning, but he was nowhere near as calm as he made himself seem.

‘The King of Kings is dead,’ said the king of Adiabene hoarsely.

‘The King of Kings can never die,’ Pantera said with careful patience. ‘And in this case, he certainly has not done so. My lord? It may be timely now for you to reclaim your throne.’

He cast his voice over his shoulder, north, to the ever-moving sea, and there, from amongst the huddle of cooks and pot-boys and serving-men, a figure stepped forward.

He was taller than any of the servants, and, now that he removed the cap that had hidden it, his stone-grey hair was full and flourished to his shoulders; the hair of a man who has fed well through his life, who has never had his head shaved to show his servitude. His bearing was tall and vigorous and as he walked through them the slaves and servants fell to their knees and pressed their brows to the turf.

Very shortly afterwards, the seventeen client kings slid down from their horses and did likewise. King Ranades IX of Hyrcania was not first, but he was most assuredly not last. He dropped the body he had been holding as a man might drop a dead snake, and his brow touched the turf and stayed there while the man they had believed to be dead these past eight months walked past to mount the bay mare.

Thus it was that Vologases, King of Kings, lord of all life, supreme ruler of the Parthian empire, may the gods for ever venerate his name, returned to reclaim the throne from the son who had done his best to usurp it.

One month to the day later, I stood in the royal pavilion and watched a mass of armoured horsemen flow across a valley.

Bright as the polished moon, afire under the early sun, alive with rippling silk in every colour known to the Parthian empire, the heavy cavalry of Parthia, nearly five and a half thousand men, rode their horses at a hand canter from the mouth of a gorge to its blunt end amidst the mountains.