by Kearney Paul
Kouros took Kuthra’s face in his hands. There were tears in his eyes. They brimmed, and spilled over onto his cheeks. ‘It was the price for your life.’
‘I know. She should not have made you watch, though. She knew you would blame yourself for it, when it was her doing alone.’ Kuthra wiped the tears from Kouros’s face with his only hand.
‘She has mellowed since then.’ They both began to laugh. Kuthra thumped the table with his stump. ‘More wine here! Are you all asleep? Landlord, step quick now!’
‘Don’t draw attention to us,’ Kouros hissed urgently. ‘This is risky enough as it is.’
‘We sit face to face once every four or five years, if we are lucky. The rest of the time it is letters and notes and whispers in the dark. Let me drink with my brother Kouros – let us raise our cups together for a little while at least, like normal folk.’
‘If Orsana knew –’
‘Fuck Orsana. She will not live forever.’ Kuthra leaned in and set his hand on Kouros’s. ‘Brother, one day you will be King, and on that day and every other after you will have me by your side, and I will always keep the jackals from your back.’
‘You shall be a prince again, Kuthra.’
‘Once a prince, always a prince,’ Kuthra grinned.
The wine arrived. It was a dry, bitter vintage from the foothills of the Magron, but it quenched the thirst.
‘Let us speak of princes, since we’re here,’ Kuthra said casually. At once, Kouros’s face changed. Some of the old rancour settled into it, dragging it down.
‘You have located them?’
‘I have located them three times, brother, but on each occasion I have been like the slow fox, snapping at the tail feathers and missing the meat. They left Ashur on foot, which was clever of them, and then bought nags from a dealer in Goronuz, twenty pasangs up-river of the city. After that they disappeared for a while. I have our people watching the Asurian Gates like vultures at a hanging, but the Gates are not the only way over the mountains. There are many lesser routes that a small party might manage.’
‘Kuthra, are you telling me –’
‘I picked up their trail again west of Hamadan. They showed sense enough to avoid the city and went straight up into the highlands. I know they swapped horses for mules, and they may even be on foot again by now. But they have disappeared, brother. We have no agents that far into the Magron.’
‘Bel’s blood. You’re telling me we’ve lost them.’
‘Only for now. They cannot stay up in the mountains forever, and we have as many eyes in the Middle Empire as we have here. When they descend again they will be easily traced, for they will be wanting horses again, no doubt. That is if they make it through the mountains. Rakhsar and Roshana are creatures of the city; they may not find the heights to their taste. They could become truly lost, or die in an avalanche or a snowdrift, or fall prey to the Qaf.’
Kouros shook his head. ‘Rakhsar will survive. He always does. Three times over the years my mother has tried to have him killed, and each time he has lived, through his absurd luck as much as anything else. Kuthra, you must get back on his trail. My father has not stood in our way until now, but if Rakhsar were to suddenly appear in front of the Imperial tent and beg to accompany him on campaign, the old fool might weaken. He doesn’t like me; he knows I am the only sane choice as heir, but he has this damnable attachment to the memory of that Niseian bitch he tried to supplant my mother with. He grows sentimental in old age. There’s no telling how he might let things go, not any more.’
Kuthra nodded, face hard. ‘Brother, you need not concern yourself. Unless Rakhsar can grow wings, I will have him, in the end.’
‘If anyone can, it will be you.’
‘You know that your mother has people out on the same errand. A horde of them, sniffing around every bolt-hole in the empire.’
‘You must get there first. I want Rakhsar and Roshana brought in front of me, alive.’
Kuthra raised an eyebrow. ‘Both of them, or just Roshana?’
Kouros’s face darkened, blood filling it. ‘Just do as I ask.’
‘They must both die, brother. It has gone too far for that. There was a time when perhaps you could have spared the girl, but that time is gone. It is simply a question of whose hand they perish at. You must not make it personal.’
‘I make everything personal,’ Kouros said, bitterly. ‘It is the way I am.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Don’t look at me like that – you remind me of Barka – dutiful and disapproving.’
‘You need to grow a thicker skin, Kouros.’
‘I have only the one I was born in.’
‘And Orsana has been flaying it off you strip by strip, since you could walk.’ Kuthra held up his stump. ‘She has marked me less than you. I count myself lucky to have escaped the Court so cheaply.’
‘You were lucky your mother was nothing more than a slave.’
‘We are all slaves, Kouros. Even your father is trammelled and confined by his station. Do you think him a happy man?’
‘Are you happy, Kuthra?’ Kouros’s voice was hoarse and earnest.
‘I am. I have no ambitions, and I know those whom I love and those I hate. My life is simple –’
‘You’re a spy – you slink across the empire like a cat at midnight. How simple can it be to live with all your secrets, to kidnap and slaughter strangers at another’s bidding?’
Kuthra shrugged. ‘Perhaps I lack a certain curiosity. I have my orders, and I fulfil them. I get paid, and I spend the money. Then I get more orders. Thus the wheel of my life turns.’
‘I wish I could take my horse and ride away with you, right here and now, Kuthra. We could cross the mountains together, leave all this behind.’
‘And do what?’ Kuthra tapped the back of his elder brother’s hand. ‘You were born to be what you are – I do not know if being King will make you happy, Kouros, but I do know that not being King would crack your soul. It is the way you have been made.’
They drank the last of the wine, the resin-scented vintage oiling their throats, loosening up their minds. Kuthra sat up straight suddenly. Barka had reappeared at the side of the loggia.
‘Lord, the horses are rubbed down, and fed and watered. May I have your permission to eat?’
Kouros nodded. Barka bowed slightly. His gaze flicked to Kuthra and a half-knowing light came into his eye. Then he walked away.
‘My brother’s keeper,’ Kuthra said.
‘He serves my mother.’
‘I know Barka, Kouros, or his type at least. The Arakosans, they say, are Asurians before the coming of the cities. Folk who retain the memory of a simpler time.’
‘The horse, the bow, the truth – I have heard all this at length from my mother since my ears could hear.’
‘There is truth to it. You can trust Barka, so long as you do not ask him to dishonour himself. That is what the Arakosans are like. Faithful as dogs, and as vicious. You wrong one, though, and you have an enemy for life.’ Kuthra nudged his brother with a smile. ‘There is more Arakosan in you than you know.’
Kouros rubbed his forehead. ‘When I talk to you, Kuthra, I feel that there is another man buried in me who raises his head and sees some chink of light ahead in the darkness. I was that man once, or could have been. It is he who says these things to you now; and the Kouros they all hate, my mother’s son, he is gone.
‘But it is only for a little while. One day there will be no light left, and the darkness will be all.’
‘Not so long as I live.’
‘I have done cruel things. Sometimes I feel that I am a poison-filled jar, full to the brim and ready to spill over.’
‘You’re a better man than you give yourself credit for, or you would not feel this way. We have all done terrible things, Kouros – our lives have called it out of us.’
‘There was a boy, back in the city, a kitchen-slave who took it upon himself to spy on a dinner my father gave in the
gardens.’
‘Some lackey of Rakhsar’s?’
‘I thought so, at first. But I knew, when I questioned him, that he was telling me the truth. That he had been there out of sheer curiosity, the stupidity of his youth. And I gelded him anyway, with my own hands, and sent him to Roshana.’
Kuthra leaned back from the table and chuckled. ‘Now, that is something your mother would do.’
‘I know.’ Kouros looked up, and his eyes were haunted. ‘I did it because I had it in my power, and I was angry, and I wanted to hurt something. That same evening, when my father met with the couriers from the west, he had Rakhsar join us, affronting me before the whole table.’
‘At least you let the boy live.’
‘I was ashamed, afterwards. Kuthra, can a king feel shame, if there is no-one to tell him he does wrong?’
‘I will be there, brother. I promise, I will tell you.’
Kouros knuckled his eyes like a tired child. ‘I hope so.’ He stood up. ‘It is time I was back with the column. The Heir cannot disappear for too long without comment.’
‘I understand.’
But Kouros took Kuthra’s stump-wrist in his grasp as the other rose in his turn.
‘They think I am a monster, Kuthra. The spoilt, twisted product of my mother’s ambition. Perhaps they are right. But I will tell you something they do not know.’ He paused, lowered his voice almost as if afraid.
‘My brother, Rakhsar; so charming, so quick with his wit and his smile...
‘He is worse, far worse than I.’
PART TWO
DREAMS OF FIRE
SEVEN
A KUFR IDEA
AHEAD, THE MOUNTAINS rose in a long serried parade clear across the sky. As the sun settled into the lowlands of the west, so the saffron light coloured the peaks and slopes, tinting the snowfields and filling the valleys with shadows black as ink.
Leading up to the mountains, climbing steadily from the wide river-plain below, a series of bristling snakes inched their way eastwards as though nosing for a crevice to sleep in. Now and then as they moved they caught the sunset in a flickering line of light.
They were columns of marching men, each pasangs long. They filled every road leading east, and trudged uphill in their patient thousands with the last of the sunlight bright as flame on their bronze armour, winking on the spearheads.
On their flanks columns of horsemen rode, red-cloaked like the infantry, their helms hanging from their saddles and lances resting on the shoulders of the riders. Knots of unarmoured cavalry swarmed over the rising hills further to the east of their fellows, their ranks as formless as a summer cloud of gnats.
This was the satrapy of Askanon, the wide floodplain of the Sardask and Haneikos rivers. Some of the most ancient cities of the Kufr stood here; Eskis, Kumir, and mighty Ashdod. They perched on their tells of earth and stone like castles of sand on a beach, whilst around them rivulets and rivers of armed men coursed across the earth.
The armies of the Macht were on the march again. To their rear, thick bars of black toiling smoke rose up the sky, lit bright and bloody by the sunset. To their front, the Korash Mountains stood marking the borders of the Middle Empire as they had from time immemorial.
The city of Ashdod had stood for perhaps five thousand years. It rose up like a tiered cake out of the plain, the brick and timber walls which encircled it as dark and warm in hue as an earthenware bowl. Within those walls the population numbered many tens of thousands, perhaps more.
And now it was burning.
‘They rely too much on mud and straw for their defences,’ Fornyx grunted. ‘They should have gone to the mountains for stone and made their walls of that.’
‘If they had,’ Rictus said, ‘We’d be sitting outside them still. The Kufr don’t think like us, Fornyx. They haven’t had our history, where every city is at the throat of every other, where every man has his spear. They’re a peaceable folk, by and large.’
‘Much good it may do them.’
They listened. As the evening darkened, so the fires in the city grew brighter, until they began to define its silhouette against the darkening plain. They could be heard, a distant roar, sometimes the deeper rumble as some building collapsed, its timbers burnt through.
‘Druze reckons we’ll collar maybe twenty thousand Kufr tonight,’ Fornyx said, his tone lowered. ‘That’s twenty thousand more shoulders to the wheel. It worries me, Rictus, this reliance on Kufr sweat. Can’t we just do the damn thing by ourselves? I don’t like being followed by a train of slaves.’
‘Parmenios needs labour, and there aren’t enough of us to go around,’ Rictus said with a grim smile. ‘And we’re not even in the Middle Empire yet. All we’ve seen and done so far, Fornyx, is the warm-up act before the real players take to the stage.’
‘You think he’ll come? The Great King?’
‘He will.’ Rictus gestured to the distant hell of the burning city. ‘Corvus has made sure of that now.’
‘Is that why he did it? And him so delicate about civilians and all. I wondered if the little bastard hadn’t just had a tantrum.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t shrink from, brother, if he thought it necessary.’
‘I just wish he wasn’t so damned cold-blooded about it, is all. He just gave the order, no quarter, and there we were hip-deep in gore, whilst up to now we’ve been treading on tip-toe through this country, and it as ripe and rich as a willing woman.’
‘Darios defied him, after being offered good terms. This had to happen. What’s the matter, Fornyx, are you getting squeamish in your old age?’
‘Maybe I am. And maybe you’re not so high and mighty about killing as you once were.’
Rictus stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he has you in his spell, like half the army. If he told you to advance on the gates of hell, you’d start planning the route.’
‘That’s horseshit and you know it.’
Fornyx shrugged, and tugged his worn scarlet cloak tighter about his shoulders. In the failing light, his narrow, pointed face seemed vulpine, especially when the distant flames caught his eyes.
The two men stood leaning on their spears atop a low tell midway between the burning city behind them and the head of the marching columns farther east. Further down the slope a body of spearmen, several centons strong, stood with their shields resting against their knees in the age-old posture of the waiting soldier. They, too, were cloaked in scarlet, and one among their number held a banner, somewhat ragged, and hard to make out with the fading of its colours. It might have carried the image of a canine head.
‘Two days to the mountains, at this pace,’ Fornyx said in a lighter tone. ‘You’ve been through the Korash, of course.’
‘I have.’ It was in the Korash Mountains that the remnants of the Ten Thousand had finally fallen apart. They had split into competing factions, and then the winter had swooped in on them, and with the snow had come the Qaf.
It was in the Korash that Rictus of Isca had been voted leader of the Ten Thousand, except that there had been nowhere near ten thousand left of them at that point.
Rictus raised his head and looked at the high land to the east, that rampart of stone and snow, and something like a shiver went down his spine, the chill wind of his memories.
It would be different this time – he knew that. They were not a hunted band of starving men, but a mighty army, well-supplied and, above all, united.
And they would stay united.
‘Corvus has been giving us orders for long enough now that you should know what he’s about,’ he said to Fornyx. ‘It does no good questioning his intentions.’
I don’t piss and moan in front of the men – you know that,’ the other retorted. ‘Only to a select friend or two, those who have known me for somewhat longer than Corvus has.’ He walked away, descending the slope, using his spear as a staff.
Rictus almost called him back, but thought better of it
. Fornyx would never do more than tolerate Corvus, and he could never think of the strange, brilliant youth who led them as his king. He was here because Rictus was here, and perhaps because he knew no other life.
There had been a time, back after Machran, when it might have been different. Andunnon was thriving; the quiet valley where Rictus had once made a home was risen from its ashes. Philemos lived there now, married to Rictus’s beautiful daughter Rian, and there were children in the house by the river. His grandchildren.
But every time Rictus had tried to settle there, to forswear the scarlet, the image of his own wife had swamped the joy in the place. Poor, wretched Aise, the only woman Rictus had ever loved, whose life had ended in torment and suicide.
Because of him.
I have too many ghosts, he thought. Even Fornyx does not truly understand that.
He remembered his own father, as fine a man as he had ever known, slaughtered after the fall of Isca. Another home in flames around him.
For Rictus, the hearth of a good home brought back too many evil pictures to his mind. Whereas in the camp of an army he felt at ease, and when his soldiers died it was something expected, even fitting. And he knew that in this thing, he and Corvus were the same. The King of the Macht preferred a tent in the open to the halls of a palace, and he was never happier than when surrounded by comrades in arms, all of them bound to a single purpose – that dream of fire which had launched him on his extraordinary career.
It was this which drove him, as much as any lust for conquest. He was afraid of what life would be at the end of the final campaign.
That is the frightening thing, Rictus thought – to get to the end of it all, and find it meant nothing – any of it.
Better to keep marching.
For the older men in the army the very concept of a king was still strange, a Kufr idea. It helped that Corvus had no sense of ceremony about him, and had acquired no airs or graces since his crowning in Machran all those years ago, in the wake of the great siege. He was as like to be found sharing rough wine with a bunch of conscripts in the evenings as he was to be in the royal tent.
