Authors: Paul Kearney
But that was not
the whole. The Macht lines were drawn some six pasangs from the eastern walls
of Tanis, but between them and the walls was an even larger encampment. This
was less ordered, a hiving, chaotic and many-tented city of some tens of
thousands. A haze of dust hung over it, along with the smoke of a thousand
cooking fires, and out upon its western borders great herds of animals darkened
the earth. These were the beasts and soldiers of Arkamenes himself, his own
household and the troops which Gushrun of Artaka had granted him. There were
perhaps thirty thousand of them all told, and that did not take into account
the camp-followers. Their camp was closer to the river, where there was still
some grass. In the spring, all this would be a lush plain and there would be
reed-beds down by the Artan, for the river flooded twice a year, swelled by
some unknown source far back in the uncounted wildernesses of the interior. For
now, the Macht were using a series of ancient wells out here on the plain and
getting used to the sensation of sand in their teeth.
“If yonder host is
ready to move at nightfall, then I’m a lady’s maid,” Pasion grunted, still
kneading his jaw. “What is it, Phiron? There’s a lot to do.”
“Our elders in the
Kerusia made a good point, Pasion, about talking to the Kufr. It had occurred
to me also. To that end, I have something here.” Phiron had bent and was
rolling up his calfskin map. It was a gift from Arkamenes, and detailed the
lands from Tanis to the Magron Mountains. Sometimes he wished he had never seen
it. Four hundred pasangs on that calfskin was no more than a handspan. He
thrust it into the oxhide bag he had been carrying on his back for twenty
years, and dug out something else instead. “Jason, for you. Pasion, you may use
it too if you’ve a mind to.”
A close-written
scroll. Jason opened it in his hands, dragging the spindles apart. “What’s
this? I see words here, Machtic script, and then some gibberish opposite.”
“It’s a
word-hoard, a dictionary. Arkamenes’s vizier, Amasis, had a scribe in Tanis
write it out plain and fair for me. It tells you Machtic words in Asurian, the
common tongue of the Empire, written as they sound in our own script.” Phiron
grinned, for Jason’s face had lit up like a boy’s. “We need someone who can
understand what these bastards are saying besides myself. We can’t always be
relying on interpreters, or the charity of our allies.”
“The charity of
our allies…” Pasion mused on the phrase a moment before continuing. “We’ll
need that charity by the ton ere we’re done, Phiron. What food will take us
across this desert we can take on our backs, and you say there’s water-holes
out there too. But when we get to Geminestra, the bag is empty. I hope our
princely employer has some skill with logistics, or we’ll be eating mule before
a month is out.”
“It’s been
arranged, Pasion,” Phiron said testily.
“I’m
quartermaster. I like to arrange these things for myself.”
Phiron tapped a
finger on the scroll Jason held. “Then read this. Learn these things. If you cannot
speak to the Kufr, how can you tell him what you want?”
Pasion set his
jaw. He smiled a little. “As you say. Jason, I wish you joy of your studies. I
go to count up sacks of grain, and hope they have multiplied in my absence.” He
turned and descended the hill, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun.
“He’s a
professional, and thus dislikes being brigaded with amateurs,” Phiron said,
watching him go. “Can’t say as I blame him. We march on the word of a Kufr, and
from now on will eat and drink on his say so.”
“If we run short,
there are always other ways of making up the difference,” Jason said. He rolled
up the scroll and set the closer in place. “Thank you for this, Phiron. I’ll
put it to good use.”
“What? No, no. I
know what you’re saying, Jason. But we cannot pillage lands we hope to win to
our side. Arkamenes will look after us— it’s in his own interest after all. I
do not fear being betrayed or neglected, not by him. At least, not while he
still lacks a crown.”
The two men looked
at one another, understanding. Jason sighed. “I was happier when I was
ignorant—as ignorant as I shall keep my centurions. I never thought being a
general would entail so much talk.”
“It is always the
way. He’s offering us help with the baggage, you know.”
“Help?”
“Eight hundred
Juthan with broad backs. I’ve heard they’re hardy as mules.”
“I’d keep them out
of our lines, for now, Phiron. Our men are not yet used to the Kufr
cheek-by-jowl.”
“As you say. We
may be glad of them before long though. We march out tonight, Jason, whatever
the Kufr do.”
“And if they are
late?”
“If they are late,
then they can eat our dust.”
From Tanis, the
Gadinai Desert stretched out flat and brown, a parched plain that extended all
the way to the Otosh River in the north, broken by wadis and gullies that the
flash-floods of the rainy spring carved out deeper every year. To the south,
the Gadean Hills stretched in line after line of broken, pale-coloured stone.
White cliffs marked them out from afar, and dotted through them were the timeworn
quarries from whence the very stuff of Tanis’s mighty walls and towers had been
hewn, in block after gargantuan block. Kefren shepherds roamed the hills,
tending their goats as they had for time immemorial. Further south, tribes of
hill-bandits made their lairs in the maze-like confusion of the bluffs and
canyons.
These watched,
amazed, from the highest of the crumbling escarpments, as now a great rash
spread over the desert, a river of men, dark under the sun save where the light
caught the points of their spears. They raised a dustcloud behind and around
them, a tawny, leaning giant, a toiling yellow storm bent on blotting out the
western sky. It seemed a nation on the march, a whole people set on migrating
to a better place. The sparse inhabitants of the Gadinai drew together, old
feuds forgotten, and watched in wonder as the great column poured steadily
onward, as unstoppable as the course of the sun. It was as grand as some
harbinger of the world’s end, a spectacle even the gods must see from their
places amid the stars. So this, then, was the passage of an army.
SERVANT OF KINGS
The news was
brought to Vorus with a quiet tap on the door of his apartments. He grunted out
some response, the dreams of the night still fogging his mind, and in came the morning-maid
with her head bowed and a sealed scroll of parchment quivering like a bird upon
the silver tray she held out.
He rose in the
bed, the silk sheets whispering off his torso to reveal the broad form of an
athlete—he had always been vain about his physique—and took the message from
the tray. “I’ll eat in the garden, Bisa.”
“Yes, lord.” The
girl, a low-caste
hufsa,
bowed and left with the soft slap of bare feet
on the mosaic floor. From outside, Vorus could hear the birds squabbling in the
fountain, and the rill of the water got him thinking on other things. He
reached the silver pot out from under the bed and stood pissing into it while
breaking the seal of the letter. Astiarnes of Tanis—a good man. He remembered—
“Phobos!
”
He puddled the floor before collecting himself, and the parchment flapped in
his fingers. “Kyrosh!”
A tall Kefren with
skin the colour of birch-bark glided through the door. He bowed deep, azure
eyes gleaming. In his hand he held a wand of ivory. “Lord.”
“My best, and the
Macht cuirass. A closed litter, and the swiftest bearers we know. No, wait; we
must put on a show. I must go to the Palace, Kyrosh.”
“It shall be
arranged, my lord. I shall send in the dresser. Might I recommend the Arakosan
silk?”
“No.” Vorus was
thinking clearly now. His face had become calm. “My chiton, the scarlet. And
the Curse of God. My old gear, Kyrosh.”
The Kefren
blinked, and licked his thin lips. He moved forward a pace. “Lord, for the
Palace?”
“Do as I say. And
get that litter.”
Kyrosh bowed deep and
left, face impassive. Once outside the door, his voice could be heard like the
crack of a whip. Other doors banged; the household came to life, a well-ordered
panic. Vorus seldom rose this early.
Arkamenes is on
the march from Tanis with twenty-five thousand foot and five thousand horse.
Artaka has declared for him, and Gushrun is his creature. But that is not all.
He has brought an army from over the sea—Ten Thousand Macht heavy spearmen,
mercenaries under a general named Phiron. Arkamenes plans to raise up Jutha
against the Empire, and carry battle into the Land of the Rivers. He seeks
nothing less than the throne itself.
The letter had
been three weeks on the road. They must have killed a dozen horses to get it
here so quickly. From old Astiarnes, one spy amid hundreds, thousands, which
had been planted down the years in every alleyway and upon every highway of the
Empire. But Astiarnes was not from the Royal Corps of Spies. He was retired. In
his own youth, Vorus had used to boast sometimes that the Great King had a hand
in every pocket. But they had missed this, somehow. A Macht
army.
Mercy
of God.
The dresser came
in, along with the muddled maid bearing bread and honey and a poached egg.
Vorus smiled at her bewilderment. “Leave it here, Bisa. This morning, I eat on
the wing.”
This was the
finest time of the year to be in Ashur. The Imperial capital lay on both banks
of the Oskus River, and the water was full and high, a gleam of blue and silver
instead of the midsummer brown. Ashur had been laid out in a grid, maybe four
thousand years before. Vorus had studied on it, and believed the city to be
twice as old; but always built on the same pattern. Imperial Ashur. Her walls
were a hundred and fifty feet high, and sixty pasangs long. In their shadow lived
some two million people. Kefren of all castes, Juthan by the scores of
thousands, common Asurians, Arakosans, Yue, Irgun, Kerkhai. They were all here.
Dominating the
skyline were what might first appear to be a pair of steep-sided hills in the
midst of the city. These were Kefren-made tells, mounds of brick and stone
reared up century upon century until they now loomed like mountains over the
flat river-plain below. Upon these ziggurats were the Palace of the Kings and
the high fane of Bel, as the Kufr chose to call their God. Each was a city
within a city, and there were priests and slaves who had been born on both yet
had never left either. The brick which supported these phenomena had been faced
in dark blue enamel, laced with traceries of gold, and the walls of each were
surmounted by battlements topped in silver plate. On the summit of the Temple
ziggurat, the face of the Fane itself was covered in plates of solid gold, so
that it caught the setting of Araian, the sun. Her beams were snared here at sunset
by the grim teeth of the Magron Mountains to the west, but her last light was
always caught by the temple walls, a beacon set ablaze by her farewell, a
promise of her return. It was for this reason that the Fane ziggurat had been
built, with tolerances of a few fingerspans.
The temple
predated the palace, but those who dwelled in the latter had been making up for
lost time over the last few millennia. The top of the palace ziggurat was
perhaps fifteen taenons, and of those, ten were covered by the structures of
the palace itself. The remainder was a green-walled park, a garden as big as
five farms in which the great cypresses of Ochir had been planted, along with
poplar from Khulm, plane-trees from the Tanean coast, and date palms from the
Videhan Gulf. Springs welled there, turning into clear streams that coursed
around the roots of the ancient trees. These were not natural but torrents of
pumped water, serviced by an army of Juthan slaves who inhabited the bowels of
the mountain-ziggurat. Thousands of them laboured there in the dark so that the
trees of the Great Kings might drink. Thousands never saw daylight, but were
born, laboured there, bred their replacements, and died, and above them the
serene parks and gardens swelled and bloomed under the sun.
In the lower city,
the real city, as Vorus often called it in his mind, the teeming population
went about its business with little or no thought of those in the ziggurats
above. They revered the concordats of the priests, they were awed when the
Great King chose to make a processional down the wide space of
Huruma,
the Sacred Way, but by and large they were intent on buying and selling, on
eating and drinking and procreating, the same as any other creature with a
brain in its head that walked the earth. And Vorus loved them for it. He loved
the close-packed streets of the lower city, the shadowed canopies of the
stallholders, the dark alcoves of the artisans where one might walk by and be
showered in sparks, the spice-merchants, the carpet-bazaars, the metal-workers’
plinths. He loved the slave-yards, where snivelling creatures of every race and
type and colour were on display. He loved the packed busyness, the life, the
arrogance, the insistence of this place. It was his city—he was more at home
here than in any other place upon the teeming face of Kuf. No matter that he
had been born in a snowbound mountain village of the Harukush; this was his
home, had been for going on twenty-five years. He was no longer Macht. He was
the servant of a Great King who ruled an Empire rooted in history—great,
bloody, and enduring history. And he knew that he would fight to his death for
it to remain that way.
When one alighted
from the litter, there were the Steps to endure. These had been constructed so
that horses could walk up them in swift, dignified strides, but for those with
two feet they were a wearying experience, Added to this, on one’s left as the
ascent continued, there were carved upon the wall and inlaid in brilliant
colour the spectacle of two hundred successive Kefren Kings of the line of
Asur, subjugating their enemies in an unending series of sieges and battles.
The Steps had been counted, and were something over two thousand. No one save
the Great King might mount them on anything save their own two feet. Thus were
the mighty made breathless who came to pay court on the Ruler of the Empire.
But to Vorus now they were an irritating necessity that did nothing more than
squeeze the sweat from his back. He passed more sedate supplicants on their way
to the Audience Hall, striding upward and remembering mountains—real
mountains—as he felt the strain in his thighs. There were quicker paths to the
face of the Great King, of course, but he, as a hired foreigner, was no longer
privy to them, never mind the fact that he had served the court for decades.
And bled for it, and for the father of this Kufr he now had to meet.