by Kearney Paul
‘Yes, she is. She brought me ten thousand Arakosan cavalry. One does not gainsay a woman with a dowry like that.’
‘You insulted her with that other one. You would have supplanted her. You humiliated her!’
‘I was in love,’ the King said quietly. ‘Have you ever been in love, Kouros?’
Kouros bent his head, blinking, his jaw working as though he had a lump of gristle between his teeth. It was a question no-one had ever asked him before, but he knew the answer instantly.
‘No,’ he said, the word choked out of him.
His father watched the workings of his face, his own dark with sadness.
‘Son, you lie.’
Kouros turned away, eyes burning, the rage rising in him, the black desire to choke the life and light out of something, someone, anything.
‘Do not turn your back on me.’ The snap of command.
Ashurnan’s eyes flashed.
‘You will not understand this truth until it is too late, but you will hear it now. Kouros, if you hunt down your brother and sister – if you kill them – then I promise you that you will never know a moment of true peace for the rest of your life. Even throned in glory over all the empire, that remorse will eat at you, and you will grow old and empty with the gnawing of it. Listen to one who knows.’
‘One cannot be a king, and do what one wants – you did tell me that,’ Kouros snarled.
‘What eats at you will one day put a canker into your reign. You are young, Kouros. You do not have to be the man your mother wants.’
‘I am my own man!’
‘We are none of us our own man. We only try to do what is right and honourable, and in time that honour becomes part of us. Once it is lost, it is gone forever. Hear me in this, son.’
Kouros faced his father, the blackness rising in him, that familiar sweetness. It would be so easy to bring up the iron brim of his helmet and swing it at the old man’s head. He knew he had the strength in him for that one blow, and one blow was all it would take.
But instead he strangled the impulse, as he daily murdered so many others. He leaned close and kissed his father on the cheek.
‘Do you think I have it in me to be a good man?’ he asked, child-like, unable to hold in the question.
‘You are a better man than Rakhsar.’
And that was all he was given.
He bowed deeply, his heavy face impassive, and left the Great King’s tent without ceremony. The Honai straightened as he passed them. Beyond them, the immense encampment hummed and steamed and smoked to the far horizon. He felt that the blackness in his soul could have eaten it all and asked for more.
Mot’s Blight is in me, he thought. It must be done. My mother is right. The old man is too soft for the days ahead.
He called his guards to him, and then stalked off to his own complex of tents, where he would find something suitable to defile.
MY DEAREST SON,
I write in some haste and with my own hand and I will add no polish to my words, but know they come to you with all your mother’s love. If the seal upon this letter is broken, you must hold the messenger to account. If it is not, and it has reached you before the two moons rise on the month of Granash, then you may reward him.
Kouros looked at the sweating, filthy, horse-smelling hufsan courier who had brought this letter, along with a bucket of others as a blind.
‘What is your name?’
The hufsan was light-boned as a girl, and he looked as though he had not slept in days. His brown skin had a greyish tint.
‘Jervas of Hamadan, my prince.’
‘You have done well. Eleven days from Ashur to Carchanis – it must be something of a record.’
‘Thank you, my prince. I killed nineteen horses –’
‘You stopped at Ab Mirza, as we had arranged?’
‘Yes, lord. The second letter is hidden in the rim of the scroll bucket. The seal is intact, I swear it.’
‘Excellent. Now leave me, Jervas of Hamadan. My chamberlain will see to your needs. Remain close at hand. There will be a return journey soon.’
The hufsan sagged a little. ‘Thank you, my prince.’ He withdrew, taking the acrid stink of horse-sweat with him.
Kouros began to read again, but was distracted. ‘Anarish!’
The chamberlain tucked aside the tent flap and bowed.
‘Get that girl out of here. Her snivelling is making my head hurt.’
The naked, weeping girl was led away, red, bloody stripes livid upon her skin. Kouros’s face closed, as it always did when he was deciphering his mother’s code. He knew it off by heart, but still had to mouth the words aloud as he rearranged them, and occasionally he had to count upon his fingers down the alphabet.
Rumour outruns horses, they say, and I am certain as I write that Darios has failed to hold the passes of the Korash. If that is so, your father will take the opportunity to remove him. He has had his suspicions about Darios for many months now.
That leaves our position weakened. You must make sure of Dyarnes if you can, and if not, then Marok, his second in command. I know Marok’s wife, or one of them, and he is well pleased with his gifts. But you must not approach him directly. It is enough to hold him in play.
I shall hold the capital. It has turned out well. The nonentity, Borsanes, whom your father left in command, has acceded to all my wishes. We now have Arakosans we can trust within the walls, and more are on their way to Hamadan as we speak.
Not a word of the war – the real war. Orsana lived in a bubble that was rarely pricked by events beyond her own private horizon.
Rakhsar must be found. As long as he is at large, there is a danger – you know this. I have agents out all over Pleninash, but as yet there is no firm word of him. He has estates near Arimya, and I have sent some people there also, though I doubt he would be so foolish as to visit the place. You must sound out the senior officers of the levies. Rakhsar may be in touch with some of them. In any case, he will be active and on the move – it is not in him to sit still, nor to choose discretion over a gaudy gesture. Trust our Arakosans – they are your people and will not betray any son of mine. Use them to help you track your brother down.
Our Arakosans. They were hers and hers alone. Kouros did not deceive himself otherwise. She had agents watching him as surely as she had them out looking for his brother.
He put the letter aside. It hurt his head to decode it, to have his mother’s voice in his ears from a thousand pasangs away.
She charges me high rent for the nine months she bore me, he thought with bitter humour.
The second letter he found after a few minutes scrabbling around the interior rim of the despatch-bucket. Under the leather lining it lay, still sealed with cheap tavern wax, the intaglio design the same as that he wore on his signet ring. He smiled as he looked upon it, and then peered out the flap of the tent’s private chamber.
‘Anarish, no-one enters until I say otherwise.’
The chamberlain did not so much as blink. ‘As you wish, lord.’
No code here, and a handwriting as florid and graceless as Orsana’s was minute and spiderish.
Brother!
Give you joy, I am still alive and still able to put it in a tavern girl when I have a mind to. I write from a town named Orimya, west of Carchanis. From what I hear you are encamped on the western bank of the Bekai River, two or three day’s ride to the east. I rejoice to find you so close, but am alarmed to find myself square in the path of such a juggernaut as the Great King’s army. I trust that when the inevitable collision occurs you will not do anything so absurd as fight. There are common soldiers enough for that.
I approach my news the long way round – my apologies. I have tracked our quarry down at last. There is an estate north of here near the city of Arimya which our friend appears to own, though he will never have seen it. I set people to watch the place weeks ago, just in care, and these associates tell me he is there now. It appears he has lost all sense. Or per
haps he merely tired of life below the ziggurat. In any case, I will be in position within two days, and soon your worries will have a stopper on them. You may even wish to join me yourself – the house is but two hard day’s ride from the encampment of the army. In any case, I will remain at the place to await further instructions once the principals are secured. I know you wish to see them yourself before any final decisions are made.
Wish me Mot’s luck, brother. I feel him drawing early upon the world this year. They say he shadows the advance of the Macht, and his darkness is upon their faces.
A last point. The courier who bears this note is a worthy fellow, who had to cast over half of eastern Pleninash to track me down. I have sounded him out, and my nose tells me his affections are worth winning. He is a born horseman, with discretion and good sense. Such qualities should be recognised. You should use him to send me your reply. His former employer has no further claim on his loyalties, by the way.
K
There it was. Rakhsar had been run to ground at last.
Kouros sprang to his feet and began pacing up and down the tent feverishly. There was not space enough for his joy; he swept out of the place, startling the chamberlain, drawing surprised jolts from the guards.
The darkness outside, barely a darkness at all. The world fairly blazed with light. Both moons were up and Firghe was almost full. Between them the stars swept in a gleaming horse-tail of diamond. And below, the campfires of the army stretched for as far as the eye could see, as great as a city, a crop of lights sown upon the sleeping earth and now in full flower.
I am the better man, Kouros thought. He told me so, and it is true. And Rakhsar will know it too before he dies. And Roshana –
Roshana will feel me in her flesh. She will know my strength. I will bring her pleasure in the pain. I will own her. I will collar her. She will kneel naked at my feet and beg for my touch before I am done with her.
‘Anarish!’ he roared, all aglow, the breath filling his lungs like wine. ‘Send the courier to me. And have the horses saddled and packed for a journey. Dismiss the night’s guards and send me the morning shift. Be quick, Anarish!’
The black light within his soul was in full flower, cackling and dancing with glee.
THIRTEEN
THE GARDEN IN THE NIGHT
THEY HAD FOUND the house shut up, neglected but not quite derelict. The gardens were overgrown with a kind of shabby loveliness: rose-bushes run wild, vines covering an outdoor terrace and making of it a shaded bower. The orchard was heavy with unpicked fruit, and more lay at the feet of the trees, worm-eaten apples and pears and pomegranates, like the mouldering skulls of a forgotten battlefield.
But there was water in the well, and the key which Rakhsar carried fitted the lock, though it would not turn. Finally it was Ushau’s brute strength that smashed open the door, and as they trooped inside, swallows swooped past their heads, screaming madly, and there were wands and bars of light stabbing down through the holed roof, making brilliant sunlit shapes all about their feet.
Just inside the door was a beautiful mosaic-covered fountain, dry as sand. Behind it, two staircases led up to the outflung wings of the house, the steps littered with leaves, as gapped and broken as a beggar’s mouth.
‘Nice to see they kept the place in good order,’ Rakhsar said, strolling past the fountain, his hand on his sword-hilt.
‘They thought we would never see it,’ Roshana told him. ‘We were never supposed to come here.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have – I wanted to have a look, though. It is the only thing I own, outside the ziggurat.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Kurun said, stepping light-footed across the broken tesserae, whirling round like a dancer, smiling. ‘It is like a secret place. And the gardens!’
Roshana smiled. She put her arm about the boy and stroked the nape of his neck. ‘Perhaps we could stay a while.’
‘Ushau, take the left. I will take the right,’ Rakhsar said. ‘We’d best examine the lie of the place. Roshana, when you are done fondling our little eunuch, I want you to find some way to strike a light. There should be cellars, and I would kill someone for a cup of wine.’
They scattered through the house, exploring like children. The place had been abandoned and left to the elements, and the quick-growing vegetation of the fertile plains had all but smothered it. Creepers edged in at every window, dislodging the shutters with tendrils as thick as a woman’s wrist, and some of the mosaic floors were all but hidden by a growth of weeds and thorns, stands of giant mushrooms in damp corners. Geckos watched them warily from the walls, and the swallows continued to dart about their heads in protest, dropping balls of mud and flitting within inches of destruction as they carved aerobatic loops around balustrades and broken arches.
At the back of the house they found the kitchens, and they were massively built and in better repair. There was a fireplace wide enough to roast a brace of pigs, rusted fire-irons which could still be swung above the flames, and copper pots gone green but still with a bottom to them. They found knives, skewers, and earthenware jars with the seals intact, and opened them one by one, finding good oil, vinegar, and – marvel of all – honey, congealed hard as plaster, but still sweet and good.
Kurun kindled a fire in the broad kitchen hearth while Roshana hauled water out of the well and filled a trough outside for the horses. The water was clear, iron-tasting, and she had only to brush the skimming insects off it to drink her fill.
At the back of the house the kitchen garden was surrounded by a high wall – broken now, but within it were tomato plants, peppers of every hue, massive onions and wild garlic, and a riot of herbs. Roshana and Kurun gathered whatever caught their eye, brought it indoors in the folds of her cloak, and set to scrubbing some of the copper pots by the crackling smokeless fire. Kurun began sharpening one of the long iron knives on a whetstone, paused to stare blindly at the blade for a long moment in a spasm of unwanted memory, and then grimly carried on.
Rakhsar and Ushau entered the kitchen bearing dry lamps, which they filled from the jars and set to burning. With the lamplight and the firelight, and the water boiling, it was as homely a place as they had known in months.
The dark drew in, and secret creaking and rustling and skittering could be heard through the house, above the squeak of the hunting bats outside. When they had all eaten, the twins threw their bedrolls on the stone before the fire and sat upon them, Roshana sewing a rent in her robe, Rakhsar sharpening his scimitar with long screeching sweeps of the whetstone. Ushau went outside, to look upon the horses and keep an eye out, though it seemed barely credible that anyone would ever chance upon such a forgotten place who was not searching for it.
Kurun sat in a corner, nodding with tiredness, forgotten for the moment. The kitchen and its warmth reminded him of happier times, back in Ashur before the world had gone mad.
But he did not want to go back. He sat at the edge of the firelight and watched Rakhsar and Roshana, and found himself filled with simple wonder, at the things he had seen and the widening of the world he knew. He had crossed the Magron Mountains, been buried in snow, seen people die sudden and violent deaths. He had watched the sun rise over the endless plains of the Middle Empire.
And he had known these two, this royal pair. He had been caressed by the Great King’s daughter.
He would not have missed any of it. Not even for the thing which had been taken away from him.
‘ARE WE SAFE here?’ Roshana asked her brother. In the firelight, her eyes were huge and dark and her face white.
‘For a while, perhaps. We will stay a few days, no more.’ Rakhsar continued to sweep the whetstone down the sword blade.
‘Surely they will give up on us, leave us alone. Brother, perhaps they think us already dead.’
‘Roshana, you know as well as I that Kouros and Orsana will not be satisfied until they stand over our corpses. Just because we do not have soldiers thundering after us on horses does not mean we have not
been watched, and followed.’
‘Have you seen anything?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rakhsar laid down the sword on his thigh and squeezed shut his eyes, bright lights in dark hollows. ‘Sometimes I see a spy behind every bush, and sometimes, like tonight, I cannot conceive of ever being tracked and found again. But this place is probably known to our enemies. They will look for us here eventually.’
‘What are we to do, Rakhsar, keep running west until we meet the Macht, or reach the sea? It has to end.’
‘I am thinking on it.’
‘Rakhsar –’
‘I said I am thinking on it!’
They sat in silence after that. Roshana picked out the wayward stitches she had been sewing without seeing, and began again. The whetstone began its thin glide along the blade of the scimitar once more. In the corner, Kurun watched, head nodding. In his hand he had the sharpened knife with which he had prepared their supper. The blade grew warm against his flesh. He slept.
BEFORE DAWN KURUN was up and awake. He bent, blew life into the fire, added some sprigs of dry creeper to it to bring up the flame, and set a pot of water upon the coals.
Roshana and Rakhsar lay in one another’s arms, still asleep. The privations they had both undergone in the last weeks and Roshana’s shorn hair made them look more than ever like reflections of each other. Kurun knelt beside them, and touched Roshana’s cheek. His brown fingers traced the soft line of her earlobe. She murmured, and Kurun straightened.
Ushau sat upright by the wall, watching.
‘Do not mistake your place, young fellow,’ the giant hufsan said softly.
‘I mean no disrespect.’
‘I know. But remember what you are, and what blood flows through them. We are not in the ziggurat now, but they are still far beyond us.’
