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
As 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.’
The 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.