Coin of Kings (The Powers of Amur Book 2)

by J. S. Bangs

  Kirshta

  Four more days before Jaitha. Four days before Chadram would know that Kirshta was a liar. And if that happened, four days before Kirshta died at the end of Chadram’s sword.

  He was a little worried.

  The sun was at its zenith, peering through a rift it had bored in the monsoon clouds. The rains had slowed them a little, but not as much as Kirshta had hoped, because every day they delayed gave him more time to find a way out. He had tried, in the long march to Jaitha, to meditate in hopes of perceiving something useful, something that he could present to Chadram in exchange for forgiveness of the previous lie. He hadn’t been very successful. Mostly he had given himself nightmares.

  A man in red silk bled out onto a red carpet. A black shape stalked through the forest. A mouth of stone devoured him.

  A chill of cold passed through him. The sun—he looked up at it to drive away the memory. Oh, sometimes farsight was a curse. When his eyes began to water, he blinked away the tears and wiped his eyes clean. A little pain helped keep him awake and alert.

  The soldiers marching next to Kirshta were staring at him. The Red Men marched in a column three abreast, and Chadram assigned Kirshta to the first ranks. So he saw the same few faces around him most of the time, but they rarely spoke to him. This one was an archer with a bow on his back and a javelin in hand. He returned the man’s glare.

  The man looked away. Kirshta heard a snicker through the rank behind him.

  “What are you looking at?” Kirshta asked.

  “Why were you staring at the sun?” the man asked.

  “To help me stay awake.” They marched so much that such an excuse sounded perfectly plausible.

  The man chewed his lip for a moment. He was very tall; Kirshta barely came up to his shoulder, and he was young, probably younger than Kirshta himself, with a long nose and a corner missing from his right ear. Kirshta wondered whether it was a battle scar or a souvenir of childhood.

  “Are you Chadram’s seer?” the man asked after a minute.

  “Yes,” Kirshta snapped.

  “Farsight,” sneered the man on the other side of the column, a barrel-chested brute with an ugly, misshapen nose. “That’s a heap of dhorsha shit. You don’t know any more about the future than I do.”

  “I don’t?” Kirshta retorted. “Even if I learned from Ruyam?”

  “If Ruyam could see into the future and all that, then why is he a pile of ash in Virnas?” The man sniffed and spat onto the road. “These thikratta, they play with fire and they get burned, and farsight is a prank they play on the rest of us. That’s what I say.”

  “Shut up,” the tall one said. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Oh, you’re going to contradict me?” The crooked-nosed man spat. “Did you learn this from sticking your dick in the goats back in your village?”

  The other Red Men in the column laughed. The tall one shrugged and slouched, giving the man a glare of hatred. After a few moments of quiet he looked at Kirshta with an expression of wary curiosity. “Can you tell me whether I’ll make it back to Majasravi?”

  “I can’t just tell you that,” Kirshta said. “It takes a long time to see something with farsight, and what you get isn’t always what you were looking for.” A mouth of stone devoured him. He shivered despite the heat.

  The tall man’s face fell. “Oh. Never mind, then.”

  “I told you,” the crooked-nosed man said. “Thikratta don’t know nothing.”

  Oh, but I’m an idiot, Kirshta realized. This was his chance, his deliverance from the dilemma of Chadram. “Wait,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Me?” the tall one answered. “I’m Apurta. And this corn-headed lout is Geshtam.”

  Geshtam reached over Kirshta’s head and smacked Apurta on the back of his skull. “You don’t get to use my name, goat lover.”

  Apurta grabbed at Geshtam’s wrist, but he pulled his hand away and sent Apurta rocking with a shove. Apurta swatted at his hand, missed, and let his shoulders drop into a sulk. The Red Men around them laughed.

  Kirshta watched with interest. Apurta was taller, but Geshtam was the strong one in the eyes of the other Red Men. Pity about Apurta, but Kirshta needed strength on his side.

  “Listen, Geshtam,” Kirshta said. “What are you looking for in Majasravi?”

  “Home,” Geshtam said bluntly.

  “You mean the Dhigvaditya?”

  “I mean Majasravi,” Geshtam said. “Family is there. Everyone. And I hate it here in the south. Their accent sounds like pissing on rocks, and the girls are ugly.”

  “You only say that because the farm girl in the last village wouldn’t lay you,” Apurta said.

  Geshtam slugged Apurta in the side of the head. “You’ve never laid a girl except when you paid her.”

  Apurta shoved him back. “You’ve spent a lot more clay on whores than I have.”

  “Great,” Kirshta broke in, “but the record of who has the most whores doesn’t help me. Farsight is ambiguous and requires interpretation. If you want me to tell you something about your future, you need to give me context. What do you want? You’re both from Majasravi—”

  “I’m not from Majasravi,” Apurta broke in. “I’m from Lashmirti.”

  “And where is that?”

  “The end of nowhere,” Geshtam broke in, “where they have nothing to do except fondle goats for their amusement.” The others laughed.

  “Whereas Geshtam thinks he’s the Emperor’s kin just because he lived in Majasravi.”

  Kirshta thought that Apurta’s barb was as good as Geshtam, but Apurta got no laughs.

  “Anyway,” Apurta said with a wave, “Lashmirti is up in the kingdom of Gumadha, but it hardly matters because I won’t be going back until my service is done, and my mother will be dead by then. She was already falling ill when I left.”

  “Then why did you leave?” Curiosity had flared up within Kirshta despite his intentions.

  Apurta looked at him like he had grown goat’s horns. “Because the Red Men called me.”

  “But you could have refused—”

  Both Apurta and Geshtam burst out laughing. “You refuse the Red Men?” Geshtam said. “Listen, dhorsha dung, do you have any idea how you join the Red Men?”

  “No,” Kirshta admitted.

  “So, dhorsha dung—”

  “Thikratta are not dhorsha.”

  Geshtam rolled his eyes. “Every three years the Emperor sends some shit-head around to count up the people in the villages and take some of them for the guard. He makes some deal with the khadir, or something—I don’t know what the shit-heads do when they’re off talking in their estates—anyway, when it’s done they pick out boys they like and send them to the Dhigvaditya. But me they picked off the streets of Majasravi.” He grinned wolfishly. “Because I fought with the servants of one of the khadir in Majasravi and beat the shit out of them, and the khadir wanted to get rid of me.”

  “And I was the tallest in my village,” Apurta added glumly. “I pretty much expected to get taken.”

  Until this moment, Kirshta had never bothered to consider where the Red Men were recruited from. He had assumed they were volunteers, attracted by the conditions and the pay which the Emperor offered. Don’t be blind, he reminded himself. Ruyam had been too dazzled by his own power to notice Kirshta. Kirshta couldn’t afford to make the same mistake.

  “So we’re all conscripts,” he said.

  “You aren’t,” Geshtam said scornfully. “You begged to come along.”

  “I begged to come along after Ruyam died,” Kirshta said. “But I was taken as a slave from the mountains when I was a boy, then traded into Ruyam’s service because I had learned to read. I never chose to be here.”

  “Oh,” Geshtam said. He looked at Kirshta with slightly softened contempt.

  For a while the conversation lapsed. The sky overhead was growing hazy, blurring the disk of the sun into a harsh white smear, and in the east the horizon was
darkening for another round of rain. Another night sleeping wet. This is why kings normally warred in the dry season. Only Ruyam had the gall to march the Red Men to Virnas knowing that the rains would start before they could return.

  “So what are you keen after in Majasravi?” Apurta asked Kirshta.

  “My sister,” Kirshta said. “I left her there.”

  “I thought you said you were taken from the mountains,” Geshtam said, as if to gloat at having caught Kirshta in a lie.

  “Vapathi and I were taken together. And we’ve managed to stay together, and I’m not about to let the delusions of a mad thikratta break us now.”

  “How loyal,” Geshtam said. “Like a pet ewe running after her owner.”

  Apurta slugged Geshtam in the shoulder. “What do you know about loyalty? The only reason you ever used a ewe was when you couldn’t afford a whore.”

  Geshtam shoved him back. “That joke works better when I say it,” he growled, but he seemed to have lost interest in the fight. He rubbed the shoulder where Apurta had punched him.

  Jeering chatter sounded through the ranks of the Red Men. Kirshta glanced from Geshtam to Apurta. Apurta was looking straight ahead, while Geshtam gave Kirshta weak, sidelong glances.

  “You want to get back to Majasravi?” Kirshta asked.

  “Quiet, dhorsha dung,” Geshtam said.

  “I could try to tell your fortune. Use my farsight, see what I get.”

  “You just said that doesn’t work. And I don’t want my fortune,” he said.

  “Maybe there’s something else I could do to help you.”

  Geshtam gave him another glance. “Not into boys, either.”

  Kirshta fell silent. He needed an ally before they reached Jaitha, and he didn’t have a lot of time to spend. But everyone wanted something. He just had to find out what.

  * * *

  The rains made the roads soggy that afternoon, but before sundown the clouds broke and gave them two hours of heat to dry their clothes. At least it wasn’t raining when they made camp. Chadram called a halt in a stretch of scrubby woodland between two villages, and before the night grew dark there were black, smoky fires sputtering and hissing with the half-dried wood the men had gathered.

  Chadram had given Kirshta a single privilege: the right to eat at the officer’s mess, probably so he could keep a closer eye on Kirshta. It was a small privilege, because for the most part the officers got the same handful of rice and palm-sized leaf of roti that the men did, but some nights there was meat. Tonight was one of those nights: a ewe from their supply was gutted, skinned, and stewed, and Kirshta’s rice came soaked in the spiced broth and sprinkled with flakes of mutton.

  The roti in his hand grew hot from the stew. He looked across Chadram and the other officers, then into the fire-lit gloom of the woods. The smell of the broth was nearly irresistible, but Kirshta set it aside. A thikratta’s discipline.

  It was more useful to him as leverage.

  He found Geshtam sitting with a crowd of Red Men who had been laughing at his jokes that morning. They crouched around a smoking, spitting fire, guffaws and growls dissipating into the leaves of the sal tree above them. Kirshta approached cautiously.

  “Geshtam,” he said.

  The big man turned. “The dhorsha dung wants to talk to me?”

  “I have something you might want,” he said. He held out the roti with the broth-soaked rice.

  Geshtam rose to his feet. The smell of mutton and spices wafted off of Kirshta’s offering. Kirshta withdrew his hand.

  “No, it’s not for free. It’s the price of you listening to me.”

  The circle of Red Men grew quiet. Geshtam’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to listen.”

  Geshtam folded his arms. “Listen to what?”

  Kirshta gestured for Geshtam to come closer, and he stepped away from the circle so that none of the others could hear. He whispered, “I need someone to help me with Chadram.”

  “Help you what?”

  Kirshta inhaled sharply. “I need you to shoot him with an arrow.”

  A pause. Geshtam guffawed. “Are you mad?”

  “No. Let me explain—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish. A flash of Geshtam’s meaty hand snatched the roti from Kirshta’s palm, spilling half the rice on the ground. Geshtam’s fist closed over the other half. His free hand shoved Kirshta back and sent him tumbling to the ground.

  Kirshta cried out. “What…?”

  “You think I’m an idiot?” Geshtam said. “Chadram probably put his pet thikratta up to this as a test.”

  “No, I swear.”

  Geshtam squeezed Kirshta’s roti in his fist, then shoved what remained of it into his mouth. Brown liquid dribbled down his chin. His tongue snaked out and licked up the escaping drops of broth. He leaned down and put his face close to Kirshta’s. Flecks of half-chewed rice showed in his teeth.

  “Listen, dhorsha dung. I don’t know if you’re playing some trick on me for Chadram, or if you’re trying to double-cross him, or what. But I’m not getting mixed up in it. Leave me alone.”

  He stalked back to the ring of fire where the rest of his friends waited. He pointed at Kirshta lying on the ground and said something that prompted jeers and laughs, then sat down.

  Now Kirshta had no supper and no allies.

  He rose and began to sulk back to the officer’s mess. He could reconcile himself to hunger for the night, but Jaitha approached.

  “Hey,” a quiet voice called out.

  He turned. The tall, lanky man sat leaning against a tree trunk by himself, picking at the dry rice in his roti and watching Kirshta. The man from that morning.

  “That was a pretty stupid way to get to Geshtam,” the man said. “What were you thinking?”

  “Leave me alone,” Kirshta grunted. He didn’t want to justify himself.

  “You can’t really negotiate with Geshtam. He’s too dumb and aggressive for that.”

  “Thank you for the advice,” Kirshta said. He was about to turn and hurry to the officer’s mess, but the thought came to him: he didn’t really have time to be picky. Allies were allies.

  He walked closer to the man. “What’s your name again?”

  “Apurta.”

  “I thought you were Geshtam’s friend.”

  Apurta snorted. “Partner in the marching ranks. Not friends.”

  Kirshta murmured. “Well, I seem to have wasted my time with him.”

  “Everything with Geshtam is wasting time. Now what did you want with him?”

  The hair on Kirshta’s neck stood up in alarm. “Could you hear what I asked him?”

  “Of course not. But I could tell what you were trying to do. I could have told you it wouldn’t work.”

  Kirshta rolled his eyes. “Next time I’ll ask your advice.” He took a deep breath. “But maybe we can help each other. Since neither of us has anybody else while we’re on the road.”

  “I’ve got Geshtam if I need to talk shit,” Apurta said with a shrug. “Here, sit down.”

  He patted the ground next to him on the tree trunk. Kirshta sat, and Apurta extended his hand, which held the roti and a little rice.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Kirshta asked.

  “Well, yes, but you don’t have anything,” Apurta said. “Eat up.”

  Kirshta took a few pinches of rice and dropped them into his palm. He ate a few grains at a time.

  Apurta scooped what was left of the rice into his mouth, then began tearing at the roti. “So what do you want from me?”

  “You mean, what was I asking Geshtam about?”

  “Yeah.” Apurta popped a torn corner of roti into his mouth.

  “That may be slightly complicated.”

  “Thikratta stuff?”

  Kirshta laughed. “Sort of.” He ate the rest of the rice that Apurta had given him, then spoke quietly and hesitantly. “Are you going to report me to Chadram?”

  “What for?
”

  “If I ask you something that Chadram wouldn’t approve of.”

  Apurta gave Kirshta a skeptical look. “Are you playing tricks?”

  “Not a trick… not really.”

  “Working for the king of Jaitha?”

  “Am’s thighs, no. Just….” He sighed and picked a fallen sal leaf up off the ground. He tore at the leaf nervously. “Working for myself, mostly.”

  “Well, hard to argue with that. How about this: I don’t promise I’ll help, but I promise that I won’t get you into any more trouble.”

  He was never going to get more than that. He said as quietly as he could, “I need you to shoot Chadram.”

  Apurta choked on a laugh. “What? Is that how you thikratta do your work?”

  “When we have to, yes,” Kirshta said. “See, I told Chadram that he would be hit by an arrow when we reached Jaitha. I said that I saw it in farsight.”

  “But if you saw it in farsight—”

  “No, Apurta, I saw it, but I saw that I had to make it happen. I also saw… other things, but I needed something that I could bring to Chadram right away. Do you understand?”

  “So you thikratta don’t actually see the future with your farsight?” He sounded honestly disappointed.

  “We do sometimes. But like I told you, it’s difficult, and it takes time. And Chadram needed to see something right then. And this is the only thing I could give him. You understand?”

  Apurta’s brows were furrowed, and he chewed his lower lip. “I don’t know.”

  “I told Chadram that when we reach Jaitha, there will be a clash with the remnants of the king’s forces there. That part I don’t doubt—not farsight, you understand, but simple prediction. But during the clash, I need to make sure that someone hits him in the leg with an arrow. You.”

  Apurta shook his head. “If anyone sees me—”

  “You say it was an accident.”

  Apurta concentrated for a moment, then stuck out his lower lip. “You tell me a good fortune, and I might help you. Otherwise, no.”

  Kirshta made a noise of exasperation. “I told you, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t create your fortune. I can barely even tell your fortune reliably.”