Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (3 page)

Bas of course thought little of it, his attention taken up with the horde of men occupying the field some few cables distant. They seemed very large, as hordes of men tend to. The Marchers’ camp looked haphazard by the elaborate standards of the Aelerians, but Bas knew that impression to be a false one. This was not a mass of raiders and bandits, brought together by the promise of booty. The confederation that lay across from him represented an extraordinary accomplishment of diplomacy, hundreds of man-hours spent by the counsel fires trying to convince a warlike people to put aside centuries of enmity, to forget their traditional freedoms and swear obedience to a single leader. That it existed at all was testament to the degree to which the Commonwealth was hated.

It was twenty minutes before Hamilcar made out the Hetman and his lifeguard riding out from the vast horde, and another five before Bas could do the same. Mykhailo had been a leader of the Marchers for thirty years, and a year to the plainsfolk meant six months shivering in their tents and six months making war on their neighbours. They had no notion of power as a hereditary gift, nor as an obligation. Success was what they honoured, the only acceptable currency – success in raids against the Aelerians and against their fellow barbarians, success that could only be achieved with a strong arm and a sharp eye. Mykhailo possessed all of these qualities in abundance, had demonstrated them for decades in an arena as brutal as could be found.

He was smaller than his reputation might have suggested, and age hung over him like a mantle. His face was strained as old leather, his eyes grey and small, his hair bone-white, hip-long and pulled back in a gaudy silver clasp. But his body was perfectly erect in the saddle, and his war lance equally steady, and he greeted his enemy without a tremor. ‘Hail Bas, Killer of Gods. May death pass over you another day.’

It was what the Marchers called him. Even two thousand cables distant, among a people who had never seen an Other, Bas’s great act of murder had elevated him above the common rung of men. ‘Hail Mykhailo, son of Bohdan, who rode between the raindrops. May fate view your enemies with displeasure.’

Mykhailo had brought with him a half-dozen of his riders, young men, tall and fierce-looking, each mounted on a shaggy pony and carrying a steel weapon. ‘Are you so sure you wish that, God-Killer? For my enemies to meet with misfortune?’ He spoke Aelerian confidently, though with a harsh accent.

‘We aren’t yet enemies, Hetman. There’s still time to avoid bloodshed.’ But Bas knew better even as he said it. If Mykhailo had wanted peace, if this had been a show of force to sell a few more years of tranquillity for golden trinkets and Commonwealth-forged steel, he would have brought with him a yurt, one of the small horsehide tents that could be set up and taken down within the span of a few minutes. And they would have sat beneath it and drank the fermented mare’s milk that the barbarians loved more than wine, and paid each other elaborate compliments, and the Legatus would promise the Hetman trade goods and coin, and the Hetman would promise not to kill anyone for a while, or at least not to kill any Aelerians.

Bas knew when Mykhailo didn’t get off his horse that there was no chance of averting the coming battle. He had known before that, really, but he was sure then.

‘Why do I find the son of Bohdan here, on territory the people long ago granted to the children of Aeleria?’ Bas asked.

Mykhailo turned his head to one side and coughed over his shoulder. ‘Who made you this grant? Mykhailo, who comes with the setting sun?’

‘With the great Chief Longinus, whose banner you rode beneath.’

‘Rode beneath for one summer, five years ago. I swore no oath to that flea-ridden cripple. He is no kin of mine, not by birth, nor suckling. If he is happy eating Aelerian bread, that is his burden to take to the ancestors. I am not content, and I have made no such promises. Better to ask the God-Killer what it is that brings him so far from his home, and his hearth?’

‘Aeleria is wherever its people are. And wherever its people were. We’ve come east from Eilweid. The Commonwealth has seen the bodies of her citizens in half a dozen freeholds all the way up from the mouth of the Pau. The bodies and what were done to them.’

‘The bodies of invaders, of trespassers well-warned.’

‘Do invading armies bring with them their women and children?’

‘Your kind do. They bring their families and they fence in the grass, and they build their foolish wooden houses that freeze in the winter and burn as soon as a torch is put to them. And then they come screaming to the God-Killer to save them from their own foolishness. Does it ever bother you, being the running dog of halfwits too weak to protect their own seed?’

Mykhailo was a fine speaker, even in his second tongue. Most of the plainsfolk were – the leaders anyway, skills honed over long winter fires in the communal yurts, telling jokes and false stories of their accomplishments. Bas wasn’t a good speaker, had never wanted or tried to be so. ‘I won’t argue the rights and wrongs of it with you, Hetman. This is not the first time we’ve stood across from each other. I need not boast of the strength of my themas – you’ve watched your riders break against them more than once.’

Mykhailo smiled, brown-toothed but honest. ‘Do I look so young as to bend knee for a few more years beneath the sky?’

‘And your men? Are there none among them who would prefer life to death?’ Bas pointed almost unconsciously to one of Mykhailo’s bodyguards, a hulking brute who became furious at being singled out. He shook his lance and said something unfriendly to the Hetman. Mykhailo responded in his native tongue, too swiftly for Bas to make out, though he recognised the tone, each word like a lash. And indeed the bodyguard fell silent and turned his eyes away to hide his shame.

The conflict averted, or more accurately postponed, Mykhailo took a long time before answering. ‘Better an honest death in battle than a dotage as protectorates of Aeleria. When first you came here, God-Killer, we rode free from the Salt Flats to the Pau River, and never saw a yurt or a cow that was not ours. Now the dark-skinned children of Aeleria plant wheat on the graves of my fathers, tell me where to ride and whom to kill. Your hunger is never-ending. You speak of peace, but what peace can be made with fire?’ Mykhailo fell into a long coughing jag, spat a hunk of yellow into the wind. ‘Enough, God-Killer – between us there is nothing but war. I will die this morning, or you will.’

Mykhailo had intended this to be the last word, was turning his pony back the way he had come when Bas reached out and grabbed his forearm. ‘Think hard before refusing. If you find victory today you will not have long to enjoy it – by spring Aeleria will have sent another army to avenge me, and a third if that proves insufficient. And on the day that fortune turns against you, they will plant stakes from here to the wastes, and spike your men atop them, and sell your womenfolk into bondage. And there will be no one to remember your glory beside the fires, or carry your name onward. We do not make war for glory, or for captives.’ Bas spread his free hand out over the empty plains around them. ‘Aeleria will till these fields. If not this year, then the next.’

‘I know how your kind make war,’ Mykhailo said, tearing his arm away from Bas. A spark of fury uncoiled itself from the Hetman’s soul and spread up into his eyes. Hamilcar shifted his hand to the hilt of the sabre that hung down his saddle, and a second later Bas’s small lifeguard did the same.

But the Hetman’s rage ended suddenly, becoming a drawn-out cough, followed by the hint of a smile. ‘And there are no other men like you, God-Killer. You should have been born one of us. We would have had fine roaming together. If you die today, I will build a pyre six spans wide to send you on your way, and burn a dozen hoplitai alive on top of it, that you will not enter the next world unattended.’

As many men as he had sent to it, Bas had never spent much time thinking about the afterlife. Whether he would sit at the feet of Enkedri the Self-Formed as his native priests insisted; or ride endlessly across the skies, as the Marchers believed; or if he would sleep cold and ignorant beneath the unfeeling loam, Bas neither knew nor cared. If Mykhailo died today, Bas could offer the man no gallantries. He would go in the mass ditch the themas dug for all their enemies, to join his fellows in perpetual and unmourned anonymity. It was the custom of the Commonwealth, and Bas was not one to buck tradition.

‘Then it seems the affair is settled,’ Bas said.

‘Not yet. But very soon, God-Killer. Very soon.’ He turned on his nag and rode off. His followers did the same.

‘What do you think?’ Bas asked Hamilcar quietly, after their enemies had ranged out of earshot.

Hamilcar scratched black fingernails through a black beard. ‘I think the ravens won’t go hungry.’

‘They rarely do.’

‘I think that cough of the Hetman’s will kill him before spring, and I think he knows it. I think the one next to him would have liked to try you right then, to test his strength against that of the God-Killer, to make his name atop your corpse. I think there are fifty thousand men on their side of the field that would like to do the same, and barely twenty on yours to keep them from doing so. I think their cavalry will come along your right flank sometime after noon, and I think they will come hard, very hard indeed. So the question is a simple one – will your line hold?’

‘It held against you,’ Bas answered, turning his horse and heading back to camp.

D
omina Eudokia Sabina Aurelia, Revered Mother by the order of the Senate, awoke shortly after dawn, promptly and without preamble. Eudokia considered it a matter of pride that she never overslept, never stalled beneath the blankets, never spent an extra few moments ensconced in warmth. She had given five hours to repose and would allow not a moment more – there was simply too much to do.

On the other side of the cot, bunched in covers and drooling slightly, Heraclius moaned softly. Eudokia waited for him to return to slumber, not wanting to endure the sexual overture he would initiate on awaking, too busy to spare half an hour for pleasure. After a moment he pulled the blankets back up to his neck and returned to snoring. Eudokia slipped on the robe that hung above her bed and left.

In the small chamber that bordered her room, Eudokia made her morning obeisances to the household gods – represented on this plane by a pair of rather ill-formed wooden altars. Siraph was given two joss sticks and a few drops of sour wine. Terjunta made do with an absolution of water mixed with honey. Eudokia could never remember a time when she had believed in either, nor a morning when she had not given her prayers to both. That a thing was not real did not mean that it could not have power.

Jahan stood outside the chamber door, as he did every morning. Not much taller than Eudokia herself, still he gave an impression of great bulk, of something bloated and distended. Each fragment of his body seemed oversized, from the bony protrusions of his shoulders to the trunk of his neck to a head the circumference of a globe. He had massive hands – fingers like summer squash, knuckles like the bark from an oak tree. His face was a fleshy oval, his nostrils upturned and wide as copper pennies, a jet-black moustache dovetailing beneath them. In short he was quite hideous, except for his skin, which was the hue of brown sugar, and his eyes, which were almond-shaped and feminine, though generally half hidden beneath heavy lids.

One other point in his favour was that he was a cold-blooded killer of the highest order, deadlier than the swamplands in summer. Such at least was what Phocas had told her, when he had presented Jahan on the occasion of their engagement. ‘He was the best fighter in the grand arena of Kara,’ Phocas had informed her. ‘I paid a hundred solidus for him, after I saw him take on three Dycian whip-men and come away unblooded. He’s kept me safe for four years. Gods willing, he’ll do the same for you far longer.’

At the time all she had seen was a fat man with a corpselike languor and an odour that was less than fresh. It was two years before she could confirm Phocas’s opinion, when a madman with a knife burst out from a crowd of petitioners one morning and Jahan had broken his neck quicker than Eudokia could draw breath, then gone immediately back into his torpor. Since then he had proved his worth a dozen times over, as a bodyguard and more than that. And if he moved slowly at times, it was her understanding that the crocodile was a beast renowned for its sloth as much as its bite. The smell still rankled, but then, one can’t have everything.

He wore the costume of his native land, thin sheets of coloured silk overlapping. Impractical dress, given the climate of his adopted country, but if the cold bothered him he did not let it show. His only visible weapon was a talwar hanging loosely on his right hip. He slouched against the wall and breathed very slowly, as if hoarding his energy for some future effort.

‘Mistress,’ Eudokia heard Jahan say, though somehow without quite going to the effort of moving his lips.

‘Slave,’ Eudokia said. ‘And what of the day?’

‘It rises.’

Eudokia nodded agreement, then entered her toilet. Hot water steamed up from the marble bath, her handmaiden standing beside it.

‘Good morning, Theodora.’

‘Good morning, mistress.’

‘Two drams of the blue salt. And a few drops of rosewater.’

‘Right away, mistress.’

Eudokia spent fifteen minutes in the tub, fifteen minutes almost to the second. Then she stood, allowed Theodora to towel her off. While waiting she inspected herself in the mirror with a dispassionate eye, and what she saw she did not find altogether displeasing. She had already weathered time’s first great sally, watched the beauty of her youth give way to middle age, ripe breasts gone saggy, thighs swelling. But she had kept herself trim, and her tummy was still flat, and her face little lined. Eudokia ran a hand through her hair, white since her fortieth year. She had never bothered to give it colour, and soon it had become the fashion at court. If you looked carefully you could see that half of the snowy-headed widows thronging the city’s salons had brown at their roots.