Kings of Morning (17 page)

He dropped the aichme as though it burned.

‘What happened here?’ Druze asked, dark face puzzled. ‘Who did you fight?’

‘The things in the night,’ Corvus answered him. ‘Didn’t you ever read the story, Druze? The Qaf attacked them here, after the Ten Thousand split up. Rictus was voted warleader, but a fool called Aristos took a disaffected few hundred and split off from the main body. The Qaf slaughtered them, but they made it to the coast too.’

Rictus caught the King’s eye. Aristos had survived, long enough to kill Corvus’s father, on the very shores of the sea they had marched so far to reach, almost within sight of home.

‘We’re wasting daylight, my king,’ he said, as harsh as an old crow. ‘We must get moving.’

He mounted his horse, wincing at the click of pain in his knees. Corvus continued to watch him.

‘Wherever we travel, Rictus, death walks before us. We all go into the dark together.’

‘With the Curse of God on our backs,’ Rictus whispered. Then he tugged hard on the reins and turned the long-suffering mare away, setting her face towards the east. Towards yet more memories.

E
IGHTEEN DAYS AFTER
entering the Korash Mountains, runners from Druze came sprinting back down the column, hallooing as they came. The slow-trudging infantry and even slower baggage train ground on for hours before they could see with their own eyes what had so excited those at the forefront of the army.

Green country, opening out before them like some dream of summer.

The mountains withdrew, sinking into the rich warm earth of Pleninash, the Land of the Rivers. From the commanding heights of the foothills a man might see hundreds of pasangs across the plains below, the sun glinting on the gleam of water everywhere, a warmth in the air unknown even in the Kufr lands west of the mountains. There was no breeze from the sea here to leaven the rising heat of the season. There would never be snow, nor even a hard frost in this green country.

For the first time, the men in the army felt that they had truly entered a foreign land, where even the taste of the air in the mouth was strange, and the earth smelled of something else. Some of the Macht, small-farmers in a previous life, bent and grasped the soil of this new place in handfuls, as though it were somehow different from that they had known before.

And as the army spread out to the east, the single vast column splitting up into half a dozen smaller ones, so men hurriedly doffed the furs and blankets they had worn on the slow march through the high country hitherto. There was a warmth in the air here, though they were still in the uplands, and there was heather underfoot. They could sense the heat of the approaching summer, and wondered at the flat verdant world before them, already shimmering in the heat and alive with a chorus of insects.

Thus did the host of King Corvus of the Macht enter the Middle Empire, in the forty-first year of the reign of the Great King Ashurnan.

NINE

D
ANCE OF
A
RMIES

T
HEY LINED UP
around the walls of Irunshahr in full battle array, deliberately taking their time. The reasons for this were manifold. Firstly, it had been three weeks or more since a single man in the army had done any drill, and the raggedness of their formations as they took up position around the upland fortress threw Corvus into a white-lipped fury.

He never raised his voice when he was angry – only when it suited him to appear so. But when he spoke quietly, and his eyes flashed and the blood had left his already pale face, then his officers knew that he was in earnest.

So the men trudged into position meekly, shouted at by centurions whose faces were as scarlet as their cloaks, cursed for useless idle sons of whores. But it was the sight of their young king, sitting silent on his black horse and watching them without a single word of disapprobation, that truly unnerved them. They began to step more lively after that, to leave behind the ‘mountain shuffle,’ to straighten their backs and hold their spears tight against their bodies, so that, as one centurion put it, the weapons did not wave around like a thicket of limp pricks.

But the protracted deployment of the army suited Corvus’s purposes for two more reasons. Firstly, because the walls of Irunshahr, tall, grey and forbidding, were now lined with thousands of the fortress-city’s inhabitants, and the spectacle of tens of thousands of Macht on the ridges below would do wonders for their attitude.

And lastly, Parmenios had set up shop on a convenient hill not two pasangs from the city gate, and was busy assembling some of his infernal machines to impress the defenders further with the hopelessness of their plight.

Corvus meant to take Irunshahr, one way or another, for it was the gateway to the west, and it guarded their lines of communication with the Macht homeland. Those lines were long and frayed enough without leaving the city intact and untaken to worry them finer still.

Once Parmenios had finished his arcane work, his machines were hauled and pushed by a small army of Kufr slaves up to the back of the Macht lines. His own skilled engineers then went to work with a will, and many was the conscript spearmen who looked to his rear in some consternation as he stood in file, wondering what the angular timber and iron machines behind him were about to do.

The smell of burning pitch carried over the breeze, drifting across the ranks of the army. The warhorses of the Companions caught the familiar reek and began to prance and sweat in their formation, while the Kefren riders soothed them in their own language.

The Companions were up front, where the Niseians and their riders could be clearly seen. They had donned their best battle armour, cuirasses of leather and layered linen studded with bronze scales and worked with lapis lazuli and black enamel. Their horsehair crests moved idly in the warm air. They were a magnificent sight, clad in their red cloaks despite the warmth of the day, and with their lances holstered in stirrup-cups, every shaft carrying a newly tied pennon.

‘Ardashir’s lot have dressed for the occasion,’ Fornyx said to Rictus as they stood together a few paces in front of the Dogsheads. ‘Wonder what their Kufr will make of our Kufr.’

The thought had occurred to every Macht in the army. The Companions had won the day at the Haneikos, but had been kept aside at the sack of Ashdod. They loved Corvus to a man, and Rictus was fully convinced they would follow him anywhere, but Fornyx spoke his thoughts for him when he said; ‘Ever wonder what they would do if Corvus were not here to lead them?’

What would any of us do? Rictus wondered silently. And he put the thought away, as something unlucky.

There was a swooping noise, then a sharp
crack
as one of the catapults at the back of the line was loosed. The long arm of the contraption swept through half a circle, and launched into the air a globe of fire which soared high across the blue sky. It cleared the walls of the city with ease and disappeared into the buildings on the hill behind. A strange noise, like a wail, passed over the people on the walls. And then Corvus rode forward with a green branch in his hand, accompanied only by Ardashir.

‘I want to hear this,’ Rictus said, and began to march towards the walls also. Fornyx joined them, and they were a fearsome looking pair, both clad in Antimone’s Gift, both red-cloaked, wearing the close helm with its transverse crest which transformed a man’s face into a fearsome anonymous mask, both bearing their shields with the raven sigil painted upon them.

They stopped when they could hear Ardashir’s voice shout loud and clear up to the figures on the walls. He was speaking in Kefren, of which Fornyx knew nothing and Rictus only a few words, and the two men looked at one another and laughed at their own simplicity.

There was an exchange. Corvus began to speak, in Kefren as perfect as Ardashir’s, and Rictus thought he could almost feel the army behind him shiver at the sight of their king speaking Kufr like a native.

‘One day that chicken will come home to roost,’ Fornyx muttered, frowning.

The exchange went on for some minutes, and it was punctuated by the agonised screeching of leather and wood being wound tight on spoked pulleys, as Parmenios’s crews began to methodically cock back and load the dozens of catapults reared up in a long line behind the fighting men. The smell of burning tar grew, and in the ranks of the Companions the big Niseians neighed and stamped and blew through their noses, impatient to be let loose, to be allowed to carry out what they had been bred and trained to do.

Then there was a different sound, a heavy rumble. Almost, Rictus thought he could feel it as a vibration in the very ground beneath his feet.

The gates of Irunshahr, massive cliffs of green bronze, began to grind open.

As they did, the men of the army clashed their spears against their brazen shields and let out a deep-throated cheer.

‘The little bugger has done it again,’ Fornyx said. He doffed his helm, wiped his sweat-gleamed hair back from his forehead and shook his head ruefully.

‘He didn’t sleep for a week after Ashdod,’ Rictus said. ‘He won’t let that kind of thing happen again if he can help it.’ And he was profoundly glad in his own heart. A battle in the open was one thing, where men squared off against their enemies in open war; but the taking of a city was a nightmare he had experienced too many times. His home city, Isca, had died in front of his own eyes, and at the fall of Machran he had seen the worst that men could do to one another. And to the innocents that got in the way.

Fornyx clapped him on the arm. ‘Who knows? We may sleep under a roof tonight, Rictus, with a cup of real wine in our hands instead of that army piss. Things are looking up!’

T
HERE WAS INDEED
a roof for them that night, and as grand a one as could be imagined. There were perhaps fifty thousand people in Irunshahr, but they were outnumbered by those who now camped outside the walls. All day the carts and waggons and pack animals had gone back and forth between the fortress city and the tented town below it. Irunshahr was feeding Corvus’s army with what remained in the city granaries at the end of spring, and it was a startling amount.

In an excess of relief, perhaps, at the unexpectedly civilised behaviour of the Macht troops, the governor of Irunshahr, Gosht, had bade his people raid their larders to placate the invaders. The Macht had not eaten so well since they had left the shores of the sea. Despite the time of year, Irunshahr’s hinterland had already seen one harvest gathered in, and if Bel were kind would see another before the summer was out. Such was the richness of the Middle Empire, and the Macht, used to the hardscrabble farming of their own country, marvelled at it.

The city was not part of any satrapy, but because of its strategic importance had been allotted a governor instead, and stood independent of the lowland provinces. From its gates the Imperial road ran all the way to the Magron Mountains in the far east, and from there through to Ashur itself, capital of the world.

The reason for the city’s sudden capitulation became clear as the Macht moved in to survey the place and establish a garrison. There were no more trained soldiers within the entire circuit of the walls than in the average town back home. Perhaps a centon of Gosht’s personal guard remained. The rest had been commandeered by Darios and taken west. They had died at the Haneikos and at Ashdod. Thus, for Irunshahr, surrender had been the only sensible option, for the levy of the Great King had by all accounts and rumours not yet crossed the Magron, and was still weeks away.

That night, the marshals of the army dined in the great hall of the governor, and somewhat to their astonishment, Gosht himself was invited by Corvus to attend. He sat at the King’s right hand, in the place of honour, an elderly Kefre with almost translucent, golden skin, and a long, pointed beard dyed deep red.

It was a stilted meal. Corvus and Ardashir tried to make conversation in the kindliest way with the old Kefre, but he replied in monosyllables and merely stared up and down the long table at the assembled Macht generals and their strange king, in a mixture of bafflement and fear. When his eye alighted upon Marcan, the Juthan, a light of real hatred crept into it. Finally he excused himself and rose, the King rising with him, as solicitous as if Gosht had been an elderly uncle. The old Kefre recoiled from Corvus’s touch instinctively, as a man will pull his hand back from a flame, and was seen out of the vast, echoing hall by two of his attendants, round-eyed
hufsan
almost as bewildered as he.