I am old, he thought. I will see Ashur, to sate the dregs of my curiosity, and then my service is over. I owe nothing to any man alive.
Kurun handed him a bowl of steaming goat stew with a smile. Beside him, Roshana was already eating hers with a crude stick-spoon. The three sat apart from the Macht soldiers by choice, whereas once Rictus would have been right at the lip of the centon, in the heart of them.
‘Does she know what Corvus has planned for her?’ he asked Kurun, nodding at Roshana.
Kurun dropped his eyes. ‘She knows. I told her.’
‘And how does it sit with her?’
‘I will marry him.’ To Rictus’s astonishment, it was Roshana who spoke. ‘He will be Great King. I will be Queen.’
‘I didn’t know you spoke our tongue.’
‘A little. I learn, for him, for Corvus.’
‘You taught her?’ Rictus asked Kurun. The boy nodded, stirring his stew with the spoon as though he no longer had any appetite.
‘She made me. For marriage.’
He loved her; it was clear in his eyes. But what could a boy-eunuch offer the wife-to-be of a king? Rictus felt a pang of pity for him.
‘And you?’
‘I stay with her.’
‘Even in Ashur?’
He hesitated. ‘Even in Ashur.’ But the words did not ring true. Rictus realised in that moment that Kurun did not want to return to the imperial capital. Once there, all his dreams would be snuffed out, and the reality of his station would be brought home to him.
Well, we have that in common, Rictus thought.
After ten days on the road they came to the highest point in the passage of the mountains. It was marked by a huge granite monolith, chiselled deep with words in the Kufr language, which Rictus could not read. Of them all, only Roshana could decipher it, and she lacked the skills to render the inscriptions into Machtic, so they passed it in ignorance. It was already a relic from another world. In passing, Corvus had set up a bigger stone, and had carved into it his name and the pasangs marched to this point. Below his name were carved others; those of all his marshals. Ardashir, Druze, Teresian, Demetrius, Parmenios — even Marcan. But Rictus had not been included. Wrapped in his threadbare scarlet cloak, Rictus stood and read the names on the stone over and over again, thinking on it. He realised that Corvus had not forgiven him for staying behind, for becoming old, perhaps. He was no longer part of the adventure.
How Fornyx would have fumed at this, he thought, smiling.
After they passed the stone markers, they were over the divide, and little by little they realised that they were descending again. The high point of the Magron had been crossed, and the rivers ran eastwards now, following their feet. Every stream they crossed was a tributary of the Oskus, far below. The water that ran cold and clear over the stones would soon be coursing in brown channels through the irrigation network of Asuria.
Sixteen days out of Carchanis, the pass widened until it was no longer a cleft between mountains, but a whole widening country of oblong hills, each the shape of a boiled egg sliced down its length. The air grew warmer — almost overnight they had to pack away their furs and cloaks as the heat of the lowlands returned, edging up into the high places. Summer was waning, but the sunlight still set a shimmer upon the landscape, and out of that shivering haze they saw a city on a hill to the north-east, walls of grey stone rising in ordered terraces to a string of stately towers. Roshana pointed at the city and threw back the folds of her komis, her face alight.
‘Hamadan,’ she said.
They had come through the Magron, and that night they were able to look down across the sleeping black plains of Asuria and see the lights of Ashur glimmering in the far distance, like a mound of jewels abandoned in the depths of a mine.
TWENTY-FOUR
Kouros stood on the high battlements of the western barbican as the sun rose behind him. The city was coming to life under it, and at this hour it almost felt like one vast living beast stirring into wakefulness. Lamps were being lit, fires kindled, and already he could hear the first clamour of the marketplaces as the stallholders set up shop. Another day in the greatest of all cities. Another morning as King of the world.
But not ruler of all he surveyed. He was staring out across the plain at a rival, a rigidly regimented encampment within which the fires were also being lit to meet the dawn. It was so close that he could see the flicker as men walked back and forth in front of the flames. A city in itself, walled in by a wooden stockade and ditch which had ruined the irrigation system for pasangs around. A tented town, harbouring thousands of men and beasts.
He could still not quite believe that it was here, less than two pasangs from where he stood. A Macht army was in Asuria, and now gazed upon the ancient ziggurats of the Asurian Kings.
He looked up and down the walls. They were manned thinly. On this side of the city he had stationed the bulk of Gemeris’s Honai, so that the enemy below might see the gleam of their armour upon the walls. Lorka’s Arakosans were further north, manning the defences that led up to the Oskus River. Thousands of men, but the endless walls swallowed them up so they were hardly seen. Ashur had never truly been made for defence; it was simply too big. Two million people lived and died within its confines, a population greater than that of many whole kingdoms. The only wars it had seen were murderous private skirmishes on the heights of the palace ziggurat, assassinations and coups fought by small groups of men intent on the deaths of a few nobles. War as the Macht fought it — it did not enter into the equation here, for the city or the people in it.
There must be a way, he thought, tapping his knuckle on the stone of the ramparts. It cannot be the end. We will hold the walls until they tire of attacking. There are not enough of them to besiege this city — they must attack.
‘They have been felling trees and building at something in that lumber-yard of theirs for three days now,’ Gemeris said beside him.
‘These walls are a hundred and fifty feet high,’ Kouros told him. ‘No-one can make a ladder that long.’
‘They’re not making ladders, my lord; that I would swear to. They have a pitchworks and a tannery set up, and half a hundred forges with smiths beating upon iron night and day. You can see the red gleam of them in the dark. The Macht have a genius with machines of war. They are at some devilment to see them over this wall, or through it, or under it.’
‘Nothing can bring down this wall, Gemeris. It has survived earthquakes.’
The Honai said nothing, and Kouros felt a rush of anger as he sensed the doubt in the man.
‘Send to me if anything changes. I am going to walk the towers and make an inspection.’
‘My lord, that is not your place.’
‘What?’
Gemeris was white-faced but insistent. ‘You are Great King. It is not for you to patrol the walls like a junior officer. Your place is not here. The people expect their king to be where he — ’
‘Where he belongs?’
‘Where tradition has him. Forgive me, lord, but you should be up on the ziggurat, not down in the middle of the fight.’
Kouros simmered. There was something to that.
‘We cannot lose another king,’ Gemeris said. ‘I beg you, my lord, go back to the palace.’
‘Very well. But I want a despatch every hour, Gemeris, even if nothing so much as a mouse stirs. You will keep me informed.’
‘As you wish, my lord.’
Kouros turned away. As he walked towards the stair that led down to the city below, he realised that a fundamental thing in him had changed since Gaugamesh.
He was no longer a coward.
The sun rose, the city went about its business much as it had these past four thousand years and more. With one difference. All the western gates were closed now, and the markets on that side of the city were thinly attended. Honai had been marching through the streets these last few days, seizing any man who was young, of low-caste, and who looked fit to hold a spear. The unfortunates had been rounded up in their thousands, hastily equipped from the city arsenals, and then shunted up in droves to man the walls. They stood there now among the Honai and the Arakosans, as out of place as pigeons among a flock of vultures.