by Kearney Paul
Roshana lay on a mud-built platform, covered in a thick mat of woven reeds. Aside from two stools made from the hewn cylinders of a palm trunk, this was the house’s only furniture. The woman had a large shallow pot of poor iron which she took down from its place on the wall as if it were a king’s crown, and setting it on the coals she dashed oil into it from a gourd and then tossed in some greens and corn. This she poked at for a few seconds, then tilted up the pot and emptied the shining contents onto two flatbreads. They were rolled up, torn in two, and offered round.
No-one spoke. It seemed to Rakhsar he had never in his life tasted anything so fine. Kurun smiled up at the woman from where he squatted on the floor, and she smiled back, warming to his beauty and his youth. Ushau thanked her gravely in Asurian, prayed briefly over the morsel, and then ate it in two bites, closing his eyes as he chewed.
Roshana could not eat. She lay on the woven reeds shivering, though it was sweating-hot in the house. The woman bent over her, touched her white forehead, sniffed, and then before Rakhsar could stop her, she had lifted up his sister’s robes and was peering below, frowning.
Rakhsar leapt up. ‘Don’t touch her!’
The woman cowered, and the child began to cry. In the corner the little pi-dog bared his teeth and snarled.
‘Master, she means no harm,’ Kurun said. The boy rose and held out his hands like a priest blessing them both.
‘My sister is not to be gawked at by some swamp-caste bitch hufsa.’
The woman spoke, lifting her child into her arms, gesturing to Roshana and then to Rakhsar.
‘She wants us to leave.’
Rakhsar reached inside his sash-purse, which was now as thin as the sash itself. He found two copper obols and held them out. ‘Give these to her. Tell her my sister must sleep here tonight. We cannot leave.’
The woman took the money, and her eyes grew shrewd. She spoke again.
‘She says she can help the lady Roshana.’
‘Well, let’s see if she can, Kurun. But I shall watch over her, and if she does us wrong, I shall have Ushau break her neck. And her brat’s, too.’
THE WOMAN WAS alone. As they sat there through the night, she told Kurun that her husband had been sent for by the Great King to fight in his army, and had gone east some weeks before.
She talked almost continually as she worked, and little by little the sense of the words began to order itself to Rakhsar. Asurian and High Kefren had once been the same language, but the high castes that dwelt in the ziggurats had drawn apart from the hufsan who made up the bulk of the empire, and over centuries of privilege their speech patterns had changed. Since the Great King spoke this evolving language, so did every courtier, high ranking officer and civil servant of the empire. It had become the language of the rulers.
All high caste Kefren still knew Asurian, for they mixed with the lower orders on a daily basis; but for Rakhsar and Roshana it had been different. They had never known the need to learn Asurian. What little they possessed was a half-remembered relic crooned over them by their wet-nurses.
I was never allowed to learn it, Rakhsar realised. Right from the beginning, it had been decided that there was no need.
Try as he might, he could not blame his father for this. He sensed the hand of Orsana.
A prince who cannot speak to his people. How ingenious of her – and such a simple thing to accomplish in the rarefied world of the palace, where even the slaves knew the high tongue.
But after all these weeks on the road listening to Ushau and Kurun, and now to this woman, Rakhsar’s inquisitive brain began to decipher the meanings of the half-familiar, half-alien words. He sat on one of the palm-trunk stools and watched, and listened, and for once in his life began to appreciate that one could gain without demand.
The hufsa woman stripped Roshana and washed her with warm water, then rubbed her down with palm oil scented with lavender and thyme, an incongruous fragrance in the smoky confines of the hovel. Ushau and Kurun went outside for this, but Rakhsar watched, and even went so far as to help the woman rinse out Roshana’s hair. Clumps of mud were so fastened in it that the woman despaired of the brush, and Rakhsar offered her his own knife to make the cut.
She took the pearl-handled blade gingerly, as though afraid to touch it, but once her dark fist covered the ornate hilt it became just another knife to her, and she began to cut away Roshana’s heavy black mane of hair, which had doubled in weight from its cargo of mud. When she had finished Roshana was left with a scalp as shorn as Kurun’s, and looked more like a boy than he did, the strong bones of her face accentuated by the weeks of lean living.
She opened her eyes; she had not spoken a word or uttered a protest through the whole operation, though she had whimpered some when the hufsa sawed a little too vigorously.
‘I am glad to be rid of it,’ she said, quietly.
‘You are more beautiful than ever,’ her brother told her, and meant it.
The hufsa was more sure of herself now. While her child and the little dog lay sleeping in a warm tangle on the floor, she heated water to boiling and then began twitching off handfuls of herbs from the drying bundles on the walls. These went in the water, and the smell of them in the steam that rose was wondrously refreshing, like some breath from a cooler world.
Finally, she sat by Roshana and took the girl’s head on her knee, then made her drink the hot herb-infused brew sip by sip.
By the time she was done it was far past the middle of the night. The woman pulled a handwoven blanket over Roshana and stroked her black, spiky scalp.
‘It will grow back,’ she said in Asurian.
And Rakhsar understood her.
Then she curled up on the floor beside her child, without further ceremony, and went at once to sleep.
Rakhsar stayed awake, watching the woman, her child, the twitching dog, and his own sister, now hardly recognisable but sleeping soundly on the peasant mat, in a smoke-blackened house made of mud.
And he knew something akin to peace, for the first time in his cosseted and quarrelsome and watchful life.
ELEVEN
A CUP OF WINE
FROM IRUNSHAHR THE army uncoiled and began to march east. The raven banner snapped in the wind on the topmost tower of the fortress, and they were cheered to the echo by the three thousand Macht left behind to hold Corvus’s latest acquisition. At their head was Valerian, the Dogshead with the ruined face who had once loved Rictus’s daughter.
His appointment was a promotion, but he had not taken it well. All his adult life, Valerian had marched with Rictus and Fornyx and the Dogsheads. He was one of the originals, an almost extinct breed. But now he was to live in a palace with three whole morai to command and a city to administer, and it seemed almost like a punishment. Because he was going to miss out on the great fight to come, a battle to ring down the ages as Kunaksa had.
On Corvus’s orders, Rictus had persuaded him to take the command. There had been a time when he would have liked nothing better than to see his daughter marry the scarred young man with the gentle spirit, who had seemed already a son to him. But that was all in the past now. Rian was swimming strong within the tide of her own life, and Valerian was a good enough man not to resent it. He was also utterly trustworthy. Even Rictus had not been able to come up with a more fitting occupant for the post. If it came to it, Valerian would die on the walls of Irunshahr rather than open the gates to anyone save Rictus and his king.
But it was something of a blow, nonetheless, to march away once more with the ranks of those he trusted that little bit thinner. And the Dogsheads felt it too. Kesero, the big, bluff whorechaser who had been the banner-bearer these ten years, was moved up to second-in command under Fornyx.
Rictus’s status within the army was increasingly nebulous, but it was generally recognised that if Corvus were ever brought low, it would be Rictus’s task to take command. Even Demetrius did not dispute that. But it did leave Rictus sometimes feeling a little bereft. Fornyx commande
d the Dogsheads just as well as Rictus ever had, which was hardly surprising, since Rictus had moulded and trained up the younger man from an early age. And Rictus found himself as much a quartermaster-general and military sounding-board to Corvus as anything else.
The role of wise counsellor was beginning to grate on him. He might find it difficult to crack his limbs into movement some cold mornings, but he still had a good fight or two left in him. He could still stand in the front rank if he had to.
DOWN THE IMPERIAL Road the infantry marched, ten abreast, while the cavalry and Druze’s Igranians went ahead and spied out the lie of the land, and noted those regions which were rich in foodstuffs and livestock. As the infantry marched east, so herds of cattle and goats were hustled west, to join the moving larder in the midst of the baggage train. And Corvus sent small mounted parties out to the south, also, to watch for any word of King Proxanon and his five legions.
Two weeks, they travelled like this, living off the land like a tide of locusts, but such were the riches of Pleninash that they did not leave starvation in their wake, and Corvus kept the men on a tight leash. Only once did he have to rear up the gibbet and gather the army in to witness punishment. Three men, conscripts, had left the line of march to raid a farm and force themselves on a hufsa woman they found there. Their centurion hunted them down, and Corvus hanged them without hesitation or pity, and left their bodies dangling for the crows while the whole army was marched past. This was the same affable young man who went up and down the column every day inquiring after their welfare, who told them dirty stories around the campfires at night. His face as the men died on the gibbet was marked by many; a grim white mask that seemed somehow not human at all.
There was no more straggling after that, and there were no more unanswered names at the morning roll calls.
If there was a thing missing, which rattled with every member of the army, high and low, it was the absence of the enemy. Along the Imperial Road, which led them like a ribbon tied to the beating heart of the empire, the troops took the surrender of two more large cities. Anaris and Edom, thriving metropolises built on high tells in the Kufr way, and visible for scores of pasangs across the flat plains. They both surrendered as Irunshahr had, opening their gates without a fight and soon after opening their granaries and their treasuries also.
There was satisfaction at these gains, and the men appreciated the fact that they never had an empty belly after the day’s march, but the sense of epic adventure that had taken them across the Korash was missing. Centurions reported mutterings around the communal centoi as the men cooked their evening meals. They would march forever, and take city after city – but to what end? They were paid what they always had been, and no-one was becoming rich despite the staggering wealth on display in every city they passed. There had to be more to the expedition than this. At the moment, their pockets were no fuller than they would have been serving in the Harukush, and since the Haneikos there had been barely a battle worth the name.
‘THEY’RE BORED,’ RICTUS told the other marshals one evening, stamping into the King’s tent and shaking the rain from his cloak. It had come on dark and thick and wet this past few days, though still stiflingly hot, and the bronze was greening with verdigris; mould was attacking every strap of leather, and the very fabric of their clothes was beginning to rot on their backs.
‘They’re eating like pigs, and they haven’t had to bleed in a battle-line these two months and more,’ Demetrius retorted. ‘Don’t the stupid fucks know when they’re well off?’
‘They can be fickle as girls, soldiers, especially veterans,’ Fornyx said. He was nursing a cup of wine and staring into an unnecessary brazier, keeping an eye on the skewered frogs that sizzled above the coals. He sighed and finished his drink, tipping out the last of it onto the floor of the tent. ‘For Haukos, to give us patience.’
‘No word from the east?’ Rictus asked. He held out his hand, and Teresian gave him a brimming cup.
‘Not so much as a fart,’ the strawhead grunted. He’ll still be in the Magron. I’ve heard how the Great King travels. He brings his harem, they say. How many wagonloads of girls do you suppose he’s hauling over the mountains?’
‘I’ve a mind to go and help him haul,’ Fornyx said, with feeling. ‘I’ve cobwebs in my crotch, it’s been so long.’
‘I know what you mean,’ dark Druze spoke up from the corner. ‘I tell you, brothers, there are a few fellows among the latest conscripts who are beginning to look good to me.’
They laughed at that, and were still laughing when the King entered the tent, his black hair plastered flat by the rain and his face more than ever like a mask of immutable bone. He was muddied to the waist, and clods of clay dropped off his bare legs as he stood motionless a moment, his gaze taking them all in with one flat sweep.
A page came forward to take his cloak, and he smiled mechanically at the boy, but his eyes were far away.
‘Make yourselves at home,’ he said mildly, but there was something in his tone that made them all take to their feet.
‘Parmenios and I have been wrestling waggons out of the mud down the road a way,’ he said, still in the same mild tone. ‘It seems to me my teamsters are growing careless.’
Rictus handed the King his own wine, and Corvus raised the cup, and downed the contents at a gulp. Then he tossed the cup away.
‘We are becoming comfortable. We march, we pluck a city from the world like a man takes a fig from a tree.’ He strode forward, squeezed water out of his hair, refused the linen towel offered by another of the pages, and stood over the long table that was set up in the tent at the end of every day’s march. Inked on the long map across it was the progress of the army.
There was something different about the King this evening. A crackling, damped-down energy which could be sensed by them all, as a dog smells approaching thunder.
‘Do you remember how hard they fought at the Haneikos, brothers? How you, Rictus, and Fornyx and Teresian, went at it shield to shield in the river, and dammed the water with the bodies?’
He turned away from the table. His eyes were shining, and a strange smile bent his mouth.
‘It was glorious, was it not?’
He thumped his fist on the table, so hard the timber jumped.
‘I said to you once, Rictus, that if it were not for the glory of it I would not be here at all. I meant it.’
‘I know you did,’ Rictus said quietly.
‘If I was content with coin and power and a crown I could have stayed in Machran. I did not enter the empire to become rich, brothers. I came to earn a name, to make a story.’
He pointed at Rictus. ‘This man is a legend. He led home the Ten Thousand, or what was left of them, brought them to the shores of the sea and so found his way into all the books of history that will ever be written.
‘Before Rictus commanded the Ten Thousand, they were led by another man, named Jason of Pherai. Do any of you here, save Rictus, know his name?’
Blank looks. The smell of burning frog.
‘Of course not. He died in a tavern brawl in Sinon. Yet it was he who took on the leadership of the Macht after their generals were killed at Kunaksa, he who brought them back west as far as the Korash.
‘He was my father.’
Almost a decade, they had known this young man, and to none save Rictus and Fornyx had he ever said as much. The marshals stared at their king in astonishment.
‘I knew no man better –’ Rictus began.
‘He is forgotten! Do you see how easily it happens, brothers? How quick we fall through the cracks in history, our names lost, our deeds as good as dust?’
Again, that strange smile, something unearthly about it.
‘That will not happen to us, to me or to you. I will not allow it.’
The table was thumped again. ‘Marcan’s people have sent us word. The Great King is over the mountains. His muster is complete. As we stand here, he is crossing the Bekai River at Carchanis, some
four hundred pasangs away.’
A cloud of exclamations. The marshals crowded up to the map-table. Wine-cups were cast aside. Fornyx swept his burning frogs from the brazier with a wave of his hand and stood rubbing his beard, his eyes as wide as a deer’s.
‘Those waggon-loads of girls make better time than we thought,’ he said.
‘Any word on numbers?’ Demetrius asked.
‘We can assume there will be a lot of them,’ Corvus said with a human grin. Mercurial as ever, he seemed to have warmed to their reactions in a moment.
Only Rictus and Ardashir stood back from the table, watching the King, silent.
‘Brothers, this changes everything. The Great King is not on the Imperial Road. He has struck north, following the line of the Bekai and gathering the last of his levies as he goes. Carchanis will be his base of operations, and the river will guard his left flank and rear. He has only to wait for us in line of battle and the thing will begin.’
‘If he’s come this far, he won’t leave the river in his rear – he’s not stupid enough for that.’ This was Demetrius, head tilted to one side to bring his eye to bear on the map. ‘He’ll come out, Corvus. He’ll march west, to give his cavalry room to shake out.’
‘I believe he will,’ the King said.
‘Four hundred pasangs – that’s fifteen days’ march, less if the two armies are converging,’ Fornyx mused. He was biting his beard.
‘We can expect to see his skirmishers any day now,’ Druze said, and his dark face was split by a wide white grin.
‘This is news the army must hear,’ Corvus said briskly. ‘Brothers, there is no time to lose. Our stroll through the empire is about to become more earnest. I want you all to go to your commands and break word of this around the centoi.’
‘They’ll piss themselves when they hear this,’ Teresian said, and he cackled.
‘At dawn I want you all back here. We shall have a council of war before the tent is struck. After that we must pick up the pace, and the columns must be tightened up. Druze is right; if the main host of the enemy is at Carchanis, then he will have sent a screen of light troops ahead to look for us. It must be destroyed. Ardashir, you must warn the Companions. Druze, your Igranians will work with them. That is all. Now, get out of here and get into that rain. There is a lot to do before morning.’
