Kings of Morning (35 page)

The Arakosan escort had surged forward, and now the imperial cavalry were battling it out at a standstill all around the royal chariot, the horses biting and kicking, their riders hacking at one another and stabbing with short lances. The battle was here, now, right upon them. Kouros rolled along the ground while his barely knitting ribs grated in his chest and burst his mind wide open with the agony of it. But the fear that flooded him also kept him going.

The couriers were battling at the rear of the chariot, but they were unarmoured and young, inexperienced. The Kefren who fought them seemed transported; they battled like demons, and there were more and more of their fellows streaming in from the west, a veritable army of enemy cavalry which seemed to have somehow sprung up out of the dust.

Kouros stood up. He saw the Great King’s standard tilt and then fall as the chariot was overturned. The horses still harnessed to it panicked and tried to bolt, dragging the vehicle along. His father was still inside it, hanging on with one hand and lashing out with the scimitar.

A horse knocked him down, its hoof striking him in the temple. Kouros barely felt it, but for a few minutes as he struggled to his knees in the midst of the melee, he found himself recording everything he saw with a strange, remote detachment. He saw Ashurnan speared through the chest by an enemy trooper and fall from the overturned chariot to be hidden behind the trampling feet of the horses. He saw the Arakosan escort fighting to the last for possession of the standard, men losing hands and arms to keep hold of it. But the blue-armoured Arakosans were now a mere struggling handful.

He saw the enemy cavalry, horsemen who were Kefren, yet somehow Macht, flood in a tide past the wrecked chariot. There was no-one left to oppose them, no-one left to kill.

He saw Corvus, the pale youth with the terrible eyes, dismount, and lay his cloak over the trampled corpse that had once been Ashurnan, Great King of the Asurian empire, ruler of the world.

And with that, the strange remoteness left him. Kouros staggered to his feet, the Macht cavalry galloping past him in squadrons to spread ruin through the rest of the army. They took with them the standard of Asuria, which had flown on victorious battlefields for years beyond count. It was a trophy now, stained with the blood of the men who had tried to preserve it.

He caught a horse with his good arm, and hung onto the reins like a man down to his last straw as it danced and reared around him. Somehow, he pulled himself into the saddle, wholly ignored. He did not wear armour, he bore no weapon that the enemy could see, and he was plainly injured. They left him alone; he was just one more fleeing Kufr in the dust and the destruction of the Asurian army.

The King is dead, he thought muzzily as he kicked the horse into motion and set the sun at his back. Long live the King.

He joined the mob of men and animals running eastwards, some in flight, some in pursuit.

He did not know where he was going. He knew only that he had to get away from that pale faced youth, the boy who had killed his father.

TWENTY

F
UNERAL
P
YRES

A
S THE EVENING
came, tawny with spent dust on the wind, bright with the first of the moons, so the camp began to fill up again.

Roshana and Kurun sat outside their tent with their feet to a campfire that a chastened Macht had built for them, and watched as the waggon-park on the plain below the tented city came to life with torch and firelight. At first they could see clearly the slow procession of the waggons as they trickled in below, but later, when night fell, they could only hear them. They followed the progress of the convoys by the shrieks of those that were in them: the wounded of the Macht army.

‘So many,’ Roshana said. She was gripping her komis close to her mouth in one white-knuckled little fist. ‘How can there be so many? They must have been defeated, Kurun. They are screaming in their thousands.’

‘If they lost, then what of us?’ Kurun asked.

‘If they won, what of us?’

‘I do not want the Macht to win, mistress.’

‘Nor do I. But I hope Kouros was in the battle. I hope he died. I hope Corvus killed him.’

Kurun looked at the slight, crop-headed girl with the blazing eyes, and then he looked back down at the waggon-park and the field hospitals with a sigh.

‘It is too big for me. I only know that I want to live. And I want you to live. There is nothing else.’

Roshana took his hand. ‘There is still vengeance.’

‘It is not for a slave to seek. He merely endures.’

‘Not you – you are no slave. Not to me.’

Kurun said nothing. He knew better than to speak.

They could not sleep that night for the screaming; neither of them had ever heard anything like it. They sat wrapped in a single blanket and occasionally Kurun would scour the surroundings for scraps of wood to keep the fire going. But it was burnt down to a glowing nub by the time the solitary figure walked towards them up the slope from the waggons below. By that hour, many thousands of men had already returned to the camp, not just wounded, but infantry marching in cadence, in silence, shrouded by the ochre dust. And lines of limping horses too lame to bear a rider.

The shadow came into the last red light of their fire and they saw that it was a Kefre, a tall man of some breeding. He was covered in dust and dried blood and he moved with the slow careful steps of the very old and the very tired.

‘My name is Ardashir,’ he said to Roshana and Kurun, and the fire lit up a friendly smile in his haggard face. ‘May I join you?’

He sat down without answer, though it was closer to a fall. Elbows on knees, he stared at the sullen coals and his eyes blinked slowly as though sleep was a precipice and he was on the very edge.

But he collected himself. ‘The King sent me to see how you were faring, and to ask if there was anything you need. He apologises for not coming in person, but he... he had things to attend to that will not wait.’ Here Ardashir licked his dry lips and pointed out across the plain to the east. There were lights out there in the black desert, moving torches, an impression of great activity.

‘I am to bring you to a ceremony.’ The words staggered from his tongue. Kurun offered the Kefre a waterskin and he smiled, and squeezed one swallow after another into his mouth until the liquid was brimming over and running down his neck. It carved tracks in the dust coating his skin.

‘Ah, my thanks. I was beginning to wilt.’

‘Who won the battle?’ Roshana asked him in a low tone.

‘We did, lady. The army of the Great King has been shattered and is in rout along every eastern road for forty pasangs.’

Roshana’s mouth opened. But Ardashir had not finished.

‘The Great King is dead. He died fighting, like a brave man. I am to bring you to his funeral with the coming of the dawn. My condolences, lady. King Corvus would not have had it so. He would have taken your father alive had he been able, and treated him with honour. As it is, we have built a pyre worthy of him. It is lit at dawn. That is why I am here.’

He turned his head to look at Roshana. ‘You were not close to your father.’

‘He had many children. He barely knew most of them.’ The shock of the news was cold upon them both. Kurun tucked his face into his knees and began to weep, not knowing why. For the death of a world he had known, perhaps. Nothing could be brought back now, any more than his own body could be made whole again.

‘What of the crown prince?’ Roshana asked. ‘What of Kouros?’

Ardashir frowned. ‘We captured no nobles. They are either dead or fled. Lady, on the plain of Gaugamesh east of here the bodies lie like a carpet for pasangs. Many thousands died today; we have barely begun to count them, let alone know who they were. This Kouros may be alive, he may be dead. There will be no way of knowing.’

Roshana nodded. She bent her forehead into Kurun’s shoulder. Her own tears came now, silent. She, too, was weeping for she knew not what. For a father who had barely ever spoken to her? Or for the loss of that world which Kurun wept for also. For the brother who had disappeared with it.

Ardashir hauled himself to his feet. He rubbed his hand over his face, grimacing as the palm came away black. ‘It is time, lady,’ he said with the gentleness peculiar to him. ‘We must leave now. There is a cart waiting to take you.’

Roshana looked up at him, like some beautiful lost beggar-child. ‘I will come. I’m ready.’

T
HE PYRE WAS
some thirty feet high, made of broken waggons, shattered spears and wizened trees felled from the scrub-scattered plain. The Great King’s chariot had been hauled to the top of it, and his body was laid out upon its shattered frame, braced on a wooden bier. He had been wrapped in the red cloaks of the Macht infantry, and above his head the royal standard of Asuria flew, tattered and bloodstained, but catching the wind so that the rags spread like the pinions of a dark bird.

As the dawn light touched the standard, so Corvus stepped forward, bearing a lit torch which glared bright in the morning-dark.

The pyre caught quickly, the flames streaming along the base and reaching up as the wind fanned them. Soon the whole pyre was alight and roaring, and the sunrise lit it brighter still, and cast long shadows across the plain.

Many thousands had gathered there to see the pyre of a Great King. They stood filthy, grimed and bloody, but in perfect ranks and complete silence as the tall pyre began to collapse in on itself, the chariot at its top sinking into the embers below with a fantail of sparks, the Asurian standard itself catching light at the end and streaming away in one last bright flammifer.

Other mounds were then lit. All around the King’s pyre they stood in gruesome piles, stacked high with anything flammable that could be found on or near the battlefield. Even sheaves of arrows had been stacked about the corpses of the Macht.

They were kindled one by one, and the Great King’s pyre had the company of half a dozen others as large, but containing hundreds of bodies. The black smoke rose as the dawn light waxed and the red tint left the eastern sky. The soldiers trooped back to their camp, and behind them the pyres burned down to ash which the west wind took and blew across the earth in a grey mist, towards the peaks of the Magron Mountains.

F
OR THREE DAYS,
the Macht policed the great battlefield, searching for those that still lived, collecting the dead and burning them in yet more pyres, collecting a mountain of armour and weapons and other equipment which had been abandoned on the field. But only a tithe of them remained there to do this. Most of the army was already on the march eastwards again, the Companions in the forefront, harrying the survivors of the battle and travelling east among panic-stricken mobs of levy-soldiers who wanted nothing more, now, than to get back to their farms and their homes and their families. These were ignored; they were no longer any threat to the advance.

The prize in this race was the city of Carchanis, the great citadel that guarded the crossings of the Bekai River and which had been used by the Great King as his base of operations. The lead troops of the Macht came within sight of the city four days after the battle, and at once sent word to its governor to surrender, or face assault and siege with no quarter given.

It was a bluff. The army was not yet in any condition to assault or besiege so much as a hamlet. Parmenios’s siege equipment was still back at the waggon-park, and the men and animals of Corvus’s army had been pushed to the limits of their endurance.

But the bluff worked. Governor Beshan of Carchanis opened his western gates to the invaders and surrendered the city, having first opened the eastern gates to allow the remnants of the Arakosans under Lorka to continue their flight.

Word was sent back to the tented camps around Gaugamesh. The battlefield was to be abandoned, and the entire army was to move up on Carchanish, where the Great King had stockpiled enough supplies to feed it for months. Corvus himself rewarded Beshan for his surrender by allowing him to remain as Governor of the city, but he also appointed a military advisor to help the Kefren administration cope with the change in pace. And to keep an eye on things.