by Kearney Paul
He was attended to by an old Kefren physician named Buri, who had been found in the wreckage of the Great King’s army, and who had chosen to help the wounded of his conquerors. He was too old for flight or bitterness or ambition, and Corvus had found him to be an able man. He had set him the task of keeping Rictus alive.
He was aided in this task by Kurun, the hufsan slave-boy, who, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to help the old man heal the Macht marshal. And because the youngster was often in the caravan with Rictus, the crop-headed Kefren princess, Roshana, was there also as often as not.
Buri did not know who Roshana was, and she did not tell him, but he did ask Kurun why the boy wanted to see the Macht veteran live.
‘He helped us once,’ was all Kurun would say, with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. And then he would be out the back door of the caravan, leaping off it as they plodded along in search of firewood or water or fresh linen. He had become an able thief, and the three Kufr in the caravan ate well. Rictus would eat nothing. He would only drink water, as much as any man could hold. It was as if he were trying to flush the dust of Gaugamesh out of his throat.
So it was that when they reached Carchanis, it was deemed a natural thing that apartments be found in the high citadel to accommodate them all close at hand to each other. By that point Rictus was able to sit up, though his raw-boned face had lost its colour and the flesh had fallen from his bones, so that his head seemed too big for his body. Buri’s administrations kept his wounds clean and knitting, and fought off the dank fierceness of a fever; the same that was carrying off hundreds of the other Macht wounded. All the same, Rictus was gone for several days after their arrival in Carchanis, lost in some twilit world where Antimone watched over him and folded him in her black wings. Kurun watched over him day and night, pouring water down his throat and wiping the sweat from his body. And Roshana sat in a corner with her komis over her face and carried water from the fountained courtyard as though she were the servant and old Buri her master.
It was the sound of marching feet and the call of bronze horns which finally roused Rictus from his stupor. The city was full of the sound of an army, but the horns were deep and strange. They did not belong to the Macht, or to the empire. He opened his red-crusted eyes to find Kurun looking down on him, his young face hollow-eyed but cheerful. In Kefren, the hufsan said, ‘Buri, the Macht awakes.’
‘Help me up,’ Rictus told him, knowing the face but not connecting it to any memory as yet. The boy seemed to understand him, but even in his gaunt state Rictus was too heavy to shift. Finally Roshana propped herself under his other shoulder and they helped him out of the bed. He stood naked between them, his body covered with purple wounds and linen dressings, and limped over to the high window.
Into the hot sunlight, the heat of it like a blast of memory. Rictus closed his eyes a moment against the glare, and when he could finally see again he found himself looking down on the serried clay-tile rooftops of a great city, as great as Machran or larger. The buildings of it swooped down with dizzying steepness to walls of pale stone far below, and beyond, a great river, brown as the back of a thrush, crossed by a massive bridge of ancient stonework. Beyond that, the green country of the Middle Empire opened out into a shimmering haze of heat and dust, and beyond that lay the dark blue guess of the Magron Mountains at the edge of sight.
But that was not what caught Rictus’s eyes. It was the dark worms of marching men slowly inching across the green country, blackening the pale roadways to the city with their numbers and their strange banners, the beat of their feet to be heard as a distant blood-quickening drum even up here in the heights of the citadel.
‘Who are they?’ he asked. Again, the boy Kurun understood him, though he spoke in Machtic.
‘They Juthan. Juthan army here. Juthan King here today,’ he said, the words ill-formed in his mouth but perfectly understandable.
‘Where is this?’
‘This Carchanis. Big city. Big river. Enough now.’
They tried to move Rictus away from the tall balconied window, but Rictus was as immobile as a standing stone, staring as though he had just seen the world for the first time.
‘Carchanis,’ he said. ‘The Bekai River.’
And then, in a whisper, ‘Fornyx, my brother.’ He stood there with the two young Kufr under his arms, old Buri beginning to fuss and fret around him, and the tears came dripping from his eyes and trailed down a gaunt face as hard as stone.
THERE WAS A banquet that night, to welcome the King of Jutha into the city. Proxanon himself had led his grey-skinned legions clear across the Middle Empire, fighting several battles along the way, but he had missed the great conflagration of Gaugamesh. The long hall which was the centrepiece of the governor’s palace was packed tight and bright with Macht and Juthan, and the city was flooded with them. The evening had been set aside for celebrations, the first Corvus’s army had known since the battle. In the wake of their victory there had been too much to do, too many wounded to take care of, too many details to be rounded off, for there to be any real sense of their triumph. But now that they were ensconced in a rich, civilised city with plentiful provisions to hand and the prospect of some rest to come, the Macht king had declared a holiday. The city was decked out as though for a festival and hundreds of wine-barrels had been roused out of the palace cellars and set rolling in the streets. The smell of roasting meat hung over all, entire herds and flocks of animals slaughtered for a night of largesse, of excess. The men had earned it. They needed it.
The inhabitants of Carchanis, unmolested until now, drew inside their houses and locked the doors and shuttered the windows, while in the streets the wine ran in the gutters and the teeming soldiers grew steadily more raucous.
Rictus heard them as he lay by the tall window. He had insisted they move the bed there so he could feel the wind on his face and watch the torchlight in the streets below. A cup of wine sat in his hand, untasted, and a platter fit to feed a family had been sent up from the banqueting tables, still untouched. He sat and looked out at the warm, fire-studded night while Kurun squatted on the floor beside him, with his elbows on his knees, and plied him with endless halting questions in broken Machtic. The boy had a mind like a magpie, forgetting nothing, endlessly curious, and he was picking up the foreign tongue with all the speed of youth, intelligence and stubbornness that was in him. Rictus responded to his sallies with monosyllables, but he liked having the boy there beside him. Like some bright flame of life still burning bright beside the spent lamp of his own spirit.
The noise of revelry grew louder as the door to the chambers was opened, then shut out again. Rictus knew the footsteps that approached. He did not turn round. He could smell the wine, and some Kufr perfume. Kurun rose easily to his feet and bowed.
‘Where is the princess Roshana?’ Corvus’s voice.
‘The girl went to bed, though how she’ll sleep with this racket I don’t know,’ Rictus said. He turned to look upon his king, now the most powerful man in the world.
Corvus had vine-leaves laced in his hair, and his eyes had been drawn out dark with stibium so that his white face was more of a mask than ever. The wine was heavy on his breath and he had a jar of it dangling from one hand. He smiled, sat down on the edge of Rictus’s bed with a heaviness quite unlike him. He was drunk, Rictus realised. For the first time in all the years he had known Corvus, the boy was drunk.
Not a boy, though. Despite the painted face and the vine leaves, this was no callow youth who sat beside Rictus now, and the smile on his face was as painted as his eyes.
‘How is my old warhorse – I meant to look in on you earlier – how is my friend Rictus? Old Rictus, old man. Never dead yet. How is he? Have some wine, brother –’ He lifted the jar, slopping the red liquid on the bed.
‘I have some,’ Rictus said, raising his untasted cup.
‘As well you should, Rictus. We should all have wine tonight, as much as we can hold. It washes away the dust. Boy! Drink wi
th me!’
Kurun looked at Rictus quickly, and then gulped from the proffered jar as Corvus held it for him.
‘That’s the stuff, boy. Phobos, but you’re a pretty one. Near as pretty as your mistress. I must look in on her. I’ll be quiet. I want to see her –’
He raised himself from the bed, but Rictus took him by the wrist. ‘Let her sleep, Corvus. Not everyone wants to drink tonight.’
‘No – no – of course not.’ He seemed to sober somewhat. His face changed. Rictus had never known any other man with such mobile features. For a second Corvus seemed on the verge of weeping, but then he seemed to collect himself. He poured a stream of wine to spatter redly on the floor.
‘For absent friends,’ he said thickly.
And now Rictus drank deep from his own wine, suddenly needing the warmth of it in his own gullet. His throat had narrowed. He tossed the dregs onto the stone as Corvus had.
‘I did not mean them all to die,’ Corvus said quietly. His words were slurred, but the thuggish gaiety had left him. He was himself again.
‘I did not plan it that way – why would I? They stood beside you, Rictus, to the end. If you had not been there, they would have broken, and they would have survived. The Dogsheads.’
‘They would have stood with Fornyx as they did with me.’
Corvus shook his head. ‘A man will give his life for a legend. You should have done what I asked, and commanded the reserves. You disobeyed me.’
‘I did, and you let me do it. Do you know why, Corvus?’
The King looked at him, hovering somewhere between anger and compassion.
‘Because you knew why I did it. This was one party I could not miss. The greatest of battles. The start of a legend, perhaps. You would have done the same yourself. That is why you allowed me to take my place with my men. It appealed to the romantic in you.’
Corvus smiled tightly. ‘As you say, I would have done the same myself.’ He bowed his head.
Rictus stared into his wine, listening to the sound of the night-time city being painted bright and garish by the celebrations below.
‘Did any survive?’ he asked, a question he had not dared frame since his senses had come back to him.
‘Forty-six,’ Corvus said. He straightened and drank again. ‘Forty-six out of close on three thousand. There’s a legend for you. How the Dogsheads died at Gaugamesh. How that story of theirs ended there, right in front of the eyes of the Great King.’
‘There are worse ways to die,’ Rictus said, in a low rasp.
‘It was a glorious way to die. I hope when my end comes it shall make such a story.’
‘How did we come through, overall?’
Corvus was blinking hard. He rubbed his toe in the puddled wine on the floor.
‘We lost something over six thousand men, dead or too maimed to ever fight again.’
‘That’s quite a butcher’s bill.’
Corvus smiled a little. ‘It was quite a fight, brother. An empire fell that day.’
‘You really think that’s the end of the fighting?’
Corvus shook his head. ‘There will be plenty more fighting. But we will never face another general levy. I’ve invited all the governors of the lowland cities here. I intend to confirm them in their posts if they will swear me allegiance. Things will go on much as they did before. The Juthan have pacified southern Pleninash in their march to join us. Proxanon is a good man – you’d like him. Never smiles, but can set the table in a roar all the same. Drinks like a man who has just discovered his own mouth.
‘His son will bring five thousand of his people across the Magron with us, as part of the army. It will help make up our losses. Plus, we have reinforcements arriving from the Harukush within the month – I received a letter today, from your friend Valerian at Irunshahr. More green spears headed east. They’re already over the Korash Mountains. By the time we leave for Asuria, the army will be bigger than ever.’
But it will not be the same army, Rictus thought. Not for me. The Dogsheads are gone, finished. That part of my life is finally over.
Corvus seemed almost to pick up some current of his thought. He did that often with people; he seemed to be able to read them in some uncanny way. Now he said, ‘Do not leave me, Rictus.’
‘What?’
‘Fornyx is dead, the Dogsheads are gone, the battle is won. I can see it in your eyes. I saw it in you every time I visited you in that blue-roofed cart they hauled you east in. You wanted to die. That’s why I got in Buri, and set Kurun to watch over you. And lovely Roshana. I set them to keeping you alive, but death is still in your eyes.’
‘Perhaps these eyes have seen enough.’
‘They have not seen Ashur, the ziggurats of the Great King, the heart of empire. Stay with me, Rictus, I beg you.’
Startled, Rictus looked the younger man square in the face. ‘What can I do for you, Corvus, that a dozen other men could not? You don’t need my name any more – your own is greater now, greater by far. You have become a legend yourself.’
‘Legends need their friends,’ the younger man said. He hung his head.
Kurun was looking back and forth between Rictus and Corvus with such fierce concentration that Rictus almost had to smile.
‘A man like you will never lack friends.’
Corvus stood up. Something harder crept back into his face. ‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps that is what it truly means to be a king. I would have liked to talk to Ashurnan about it. I would have spared him, had he lived. At least he died like a man should, sword in hand, facing hopeless odds.’
‘It was we who faced the hopeless odds at Gaugamesh,’ Rictus retorted. ‘It is we who prevailed against them. Do not forget the men who died to bring you here.’
‘I never forget them,’ Corvus said simply. ‘Any of them. I mourn them as you do, Rictus. But I will not give up on life because they are gone. A whole world awaits us – we have but to begin walking and it will open under our feet. To realise that – it is what it means to live.’
He turned, still unsteady, but sombre now.
‘Would you be happy in the Harukush now, brother, in that little upland farm? Even before I knew you, you never really lived there – it was just somewhere to rest between campaigns. For men such as you and me, there is only the next turn in the road to look forward to.’
He looked back and smiled, boyish again. ‘Stay here a while, and see how it suits you. Within the month, I shall be taking the army east once more, across the Magron Mountains and into Asuria itself. Follow me if you like. I shall leave the princess Roshana in your care; I don’t think the girl cares much for armies.’
He lifted the wine jar in a final toast as he left, and raised his voice to a shout.
‘I will see you in Ashur, Rictus. I shall make kings out of us all ere the end!’
TWENTY-ONE
THE GIFT
IT WAS JUST past midsummer when the Macht army left Carchanis for what most assumed would be the final stage of the expedition.
By that time, eight thousand replacements had arrived from the west, large-eyed boys in their fathers’ armour who had been on the road from Sinon for the better part of two months. To begin with, they were folded into Demetrius’s command, whilst he transferred several morai of his conscripts – veterans now – to Teresian. Thus was the Macht spearline brought back up to strength.
There were other changes also. Marcan, son of Proxanon, the Juthan king, now led five thousand of his own people as an integral part of the army, and the Juthan prince was named a marshal, part of the regular high command. The move caused surprisingly little upset within the ranks of the Macht, though the Juthan camped separately from the rest of the infantry and there was as yet little mixing between the two races.
King Proxanon led the rest of his army back the way they had come, having signed a formal treaty of alliance with the Macht. He had finally secured his kingdom, which had been at war with the empire almost continually over the last thirty
years.
The other cities of the Middle Empire varied in their response to Gaugamesh. Many sent representatives to Corvus at Carchanis, pledging allegiance. These were sent back to their homes with lavish gifts, and each was accompanied by a half-mora of Macht spearmen under a veteran centurion.
Some did not respond at all, and a few sent letters of open defiance. In the end, Corvus had to leave some six thousand men behind in Carchanish under Demetrius, an independent all-arms command which the one-eyed marshal was tasked with using to bring all of the rest of the Middle Empire to heel. He accepted readily, since in effect Corvus was making him de facto ruler of a vast swathe of the Asurian Empire.
The night after the appointment the old soldier finally married his camp-wife, a sour-faced little woman who had been following him from battlefield to battlefield for a quarter of a century. She bloomed overnight into a well-dressed lady and took to riding in a sedan chair borne by four brawny hufsan slaves. There were those who said that Demetrius would have been better off if he had stayed with the army.
That army was similar in size to the one which Corvus had brought over the Machtic Sea the year before, but there were many changes within it. The Dogsheads were gone, but Corvus now rewarded those who had excelled themselves on the field of battle by presenting them with silver-faced shields. In truth, they were made of highly polished steel, but the name stuck, and these men, many of them cursebearers, formed an elite within the infantry. They were commanded by a young centurion named Arsenios, who was a lion in the battle-line but whose principal prowess was in the field of wine-drinking. Most nights during the army’s stay in Carchanis, he would throw a drinking party at which the guest of honour was invariably the King.
Day by day, something built up around Corvus which had not been there before. Inevitably, there were more demands on his time than there had been even in Machran, and the bald-headed stocky little engineer, Parmenios, performed many of the duties of a chamberlain for him, which was no great leap since he had been the King’s chief scribe before his genius for invention had come to the fore. This meant that there was an extra layer to get through before a solitary soldier with a grievance could see his king in person. In the past, any member of the army might call upon the King’s tent at any time, sure that, given a moment, Corvus would always get around to seeing him. But not any more. There were too many people clamouring for an audience with the conqueror of Gaugamesh. The soldiers were referred back to their officers, and they watched as an unending procession of Kufr dignitaries from all over the western empire were conducted into the King’s presence without delay.
