Kings of Morning (16 page)

‘Plainly spoken,’ Rictus said, and all eyes turned to him. ‘Let me speak plainly also. I admire your people. I saw them at Kunaksa – they have no lack of courage. But if you do betray the Macht, you must know what kind of enemy we are, and what kind of man leads us. It would not end well for your people. This is not a threat. I state it as mere fact.’

For the first time the Juthan dropped his eyes. ‘I hear you,’ he said. ‘Your name is known in my country.’

Corvus and Rictus looked at one another across the table, and Rictus nodded minutely. Corvus patted Marcan’s huge shoulder.

‘I believe it is settled. You may go back to Proxanon, my friend, and tell him we welcome his help, and we embrace his people as brothers in our great enterprise.’

Marcan smiled strangely, shaking his head. ‘I will send back the rest of my embassy, but I stay here with you.’ He looked at Demetrius, whose one eye was still glowering.

‘The King thought there might be a problem of trust between us at first, so I am to remain here to assuage your suspicions, as a hostage.’

‘What’s a single Juthan to him, more or less?’ Demetrius snapped.

‘This Juthan means more to him than most. King Proxanon is my father.’

EIGHT

M
EMORIES IN THE
S
TONE

B
ENEATH THEIR FEET,
the land changed, becoming stonier, a mangy pelt of grass giving way to upland heather, stretches of black mere, oozing peat bogs, and stone. More and more grey rock strewn across the earth and pushing up through it, the bones of the world uncovered, tawny with lichen, warm to the touch under the sun of early summer.

They left three morai, almost three thousand men, in and around the ruins of Ashdod, under orders to mop up any enemy remnants that might still be hiding out in the surrounding villages; and Parmenios dropped off part of his immense waggon train and a mora of his engineers to begin the work of reconstruction. Ashdod was to be rebuilt as the capital of the new Macht province, and this time her walls were to be reared up not in mud brick, but quarried stone. Five thousand of the newly enslaved citizens of the city would provide the labour for the undertaking. The rest of the army was moving on.

Into the mountains.

The Korash were not the Harukush, and the pass that ran through them from Ashdod to Irunshahr was wide enough for an army to take in normal marching order. Perhaps forty thousand fighting men followed the meandering gash through the peaks, their way cleared by the tireless Parmenios and his work gangs, both slave and free. Druze’s Igranians went ahead to reconnoitre the route, and on the flanks of the marching columns Ardashir’s Companion Cavalry picked their way, the Kefren riders caching their lances with the baggage train, and stringing their great recurved compound bows instead.

It was summer, but there was still snow in blinding fields across the pass, some of it knee deep. And as the year warmed, so the ice higher up the slopes melted, and the men below had to keep their eyes open for sudden avalanches.

But they were Macht, most of whom had been weaned in the shadow of the Harukush. They were not starving, pursued and hauling waggonloads of wounded, as the Ten Thousand had been, fleeing in the opposite direction thirty years before.

Rictus knew this. And he kept to himself the spasm of helpless memory which had struck him as they entered the mountains.

They had been less than a week on the High Road, and were making good time, when it began to snow. It was no winter blizzard, but a fine-skeined drizzle of grainy snowflakes that dotted the men and melted, and greyed out the way ahead.

The world was blank, nothing more than the stones underfoot and the steam of the straining men in front. Voices were lowered, as if some primitive instinct had kicked in, and even the progress of the tens of thousands of men and beasts who trailed through the mountain pass for pasangs became subdued as the snow fell on the sounds and muffled everything.

But Rictus, wiping his eyes as they watered, thought he saw something out in the snow.

He rode a horse from time to time now, an animal as quiet and biddable as the livery-master could find, and he kicked it into an unwilling trot, doubling the column, looking for Corvus.

The King was never in the same place for long. Though his baggage and his personal bodyguards might keep rigidly to their allotted positions on the march, he travelled up and down throughout the day, on foot and on his big black Niseian, dismounting to talk to the men and their officers, galloping upslope to check on Ardashir and his flanking cavalry, or forging ahead to meet with Druze.

A conscript with blistered feet, finding the going hard, might look up to find the King marching beside him, asking after his health, wanting to know his name and where he hailed from. A few minutes’ talk, and then the King would be off again, but the footsore soldier would bask in the glory of his moment, envied by his comrades, forgetting his weariness, and willing now to charge mountains for the strange young man who led them.

Thus Rictus found Corvus. He was marching along with a file of Demetrius’s newest recruits, the ones who had been sent east to fill in the gaps after the Haneikos battle. These youngsters had a thin time of it, for they were green as grass and the only men in the army who had not yet been blooded in a great fight. But Corvus was strolling alongside them now, as earnest in talk as if they were his oldest veterans. He told them one of Fornyx’s dirty stories, which set up a roar for yards up and down the files. He did not tell it as well as Fornyx, and Rictus was not even sure he found it amusing himself, but he told it well, with the skill of a natural mimic.

The boy could have been an actor, if all else had failed, Rictus thought.

Corvus looked up at the snowbitten red cloak on the horse, raised a hand. ‘It’s my old warhorse,’ he cried, ‘on his old warhorse. Phobos, Rictus, can’t you let us find you something better to ride than that nag?’

‘She suits me well enough. Corvus, a word, if I might.’

Corvus mounted, raised a hand to the farewells of the grinning spearmen who a half hour before had been glum as owls, and he and Rictus trotted upslope, into the falling snow.

‘I may have seen something. We’re well into the mountains now, and this is the place for them.’

‘Qaf?’

Rictus nodded. Corvus brightened. ‘What a wonder that would be – like seeing a myth made flesh.’

‘I’d rather we saw none of them,’ Rictus said. ‘Besides, they may not attempt anything against so great a host.’

‘The officers are forewarned, which is more than you were,’ Corvus said, gripping the older man’s arm a moment. ‘Rictus, don’t worry!’

‘A hazard of advancing years; one begins to worry about everything.’

T
HEY WENT INTO
camp that night as usual, the men in concentric rings with their feet to the flames of the campfires – campfires which were appreciably smaller than they had been at the outset of the march, for the only wood they could burn now was that which they had brought with them in the waggons.

The horselines were heavily guarded, and on the King’s orders the sentries were doubled. Such precautions would normally have elicited some groaning from the veterans, but they, too had glimpsed unsettling sights in the quietly falling snow throughout the day, and they turned to with a will.

Corvus himself did not seem to sleep these days at all, and he did not spend the night in his tent, but walked the camp ceaselessly all through the dark hours, checking with the guards, running the orderly officers ragged.

Finally, he joined Rictus and Fornyx at the Dogheads’ lines, and the three of them walked out beyond the camp and its firelight, driven by some impulse they could not define. They stood in the dark, listening.

But the night was silent. Even what wind could be heard was far off, up in the peaks above their heads, keening like a new widow. The snow fell steadily in the darkness, the flakes fattening, blanking out the world and hiding the stars utterly.

‘A night like this,’ Corvus said in a low voice, ‘feels like a moment before the making of the world. Not a light, not a sound. Nothing but the cold dark and the stone. It is as though we were at the beginning of all things.’

‘Or the end,’ Fornyx said, with a gravity quite unlike him. ‘Antimone is close tonight, brothers – can you not feel it? I swear I can hear the beat of her black wings when I close my eyes.’

Something moved, out in the dark, a rattle of stone. They went very still, save that Rictus and Fornyx lowered their spears in slow, graceful arcs until the aichmes pointed outward. Corvus did not twitch a muscle. He was rapt, as if listening to a song.

And then they saw it. Taller than a man, with two lights blue as sapphire for eyes. It was paler than the mottled stones behind it, and were it not for the eyes it might have been nothing more than a squared-off crag itself. It was watching them, not five spear-lengths away. Rictus found his own heart high in his throat, thumping hard and fast; with his mouth open he could hear the blood going through it, a sound like the panting of a dog.

And then it was gone. The lights went out as it turned and unhurriedly picked its way upslope, not dislodging so much as a pebble now, in its passing. Fornyx advanced as though in a trance, spear still levelled, but Corvus held him back.

‘Let it be. It did not come to fight. Not this time.’

I
N THE MORNING
it seemed more than half like a dream to Rictus. He woke to find Valerian trying to blow life into the grey coals of last night’s fire, his scarred lips pursed like the neck of a drawstring bag as he blew red life into the ash. When a flame had licked up, Rictus threw aside his cloak and the fine covering of snow which had stiffened it, and sat hunkered and shivering, aching, feeling as old as he ever had in his life.

‘What’s the matter with your tent?’ Valerian asked, passing him the wineskin. ‘Was there a mouse?’ He grinned, the lopsided ruin of his face making the gesture singularly sweet.

‘The old need less sleep than you think,’ Rictus said, tossing the skin back to him.

‘There were things in the dark last night. Men all along the column saw them. It’s the talk of the camp.’

‘The camp always has something to yap about,’ Rictus said, stifling a groan as he rose to his feet and his limbs straightened.

But he felt better, for some reason. The sense of dread that had been with him ever since the army had entered the mountains was gone. It was as though an old nightmare had been explained away.

T
HERE WERE NO
more sightings in the night. The army continued on its way unmolested for several more days, until one morning there was a shout up at the van of the column, and word was sent down that Rictus was to go forward at once.

He pushed the patient mare hard, her unshod hoofs crunching in the frostbitten ground, and one of Druze’s Igranians met him near the head of the army, panting, his drepana resting on one shoulder. He pointed eastwards, to where a knot of horsemen and infantry were gathered together over a mound of scree.

‘Corvus wants you, chief. Seems they’ve found something.’

The King was standing peering at something he held in his hands. Druze was beside him, and tall Ardashir, who felt the cold more than most, being a Kufr, and was almost unrecognisable in his layered furs.

‘What is it?’ Rictus asked, dismounting stiffly.

Corvus did not speak, but handed him a rusted shard of iron, heavy to the touch, half as long as a man’s forearm.

It was an aichme, an iron spearhead of Macht design.

And looking at the oval-shaped mound of rubble and stone, Rictus suddenly realised.

This was a burial mound.

His fists tightened a moment on the spearhead. So powerful was the memory that he saw other men standing there with him: young Phinero, and bald Whistler, who had been members of Phiron’s Hounds, the light infantry of the Ten Thousand. Other faces jockeyed for position also. So little had the surroundings changed in thirty years that for an insane second Rictus thought he was about to see Jason himself come striding up the slope to join them.