had whipped the slave, but the blows had been meant for him.
After that it had been a relief to leave the city, to join his father’s army and eat dust day after day, to ache with the constant riding, to sweat like a serf in the daily swordplay his weapons-master insist he practice.
But still, his thoughts were constant — where was Rakhsar? And Roshana.
He had loved Roshana once. She had been kind to him when as children they had occasionally been allowed to play together. Those moments had been like miracles to him.
But her love for her brother curdled his feelings for her, for between Rakhsar and Kouros there had been nothing but black, unalloyed hatred from the first. It was as if they had the instincts of wild dogs, sensing a rival in the pack. It was unreasoning from the beginning, and then as they grew older there had been too many more reasons to ever begin to question it.
But he had wept, in private, over Roshana, for she was one of a handful of people who had shown him kindness without hope of gain, for no other reason than pure decency.
It was why he hungered now to catch and degrade her, to force himself on her in front of her twin, to wipe that knowing sneer off Rakhsar’s face one last time, and then expunge it from the world forever.
Tears rose in his eyes as he pitied himself, remembering the utter loneliness of his childhood. There had been one other in those days, a single other who had shared his world for a time. But his mother had disapproved. Orsana’s disapproval meant mutilation, death, exile. No-one was allowed to come close to her son, who would one day be ruler of the world.
His mother loved him, but that love frightened him, for it was entangled in expectation and ambition and bloody, unyielding determination. She loved him, but if he could not be King, then he did not like to think what that love could do.
There were times when he wished she was… gone.
And he thought of what it would be like to be King, to do as he pleased, and the thought settled his mind, calmed him. He even patted the rancid, foam-flecked neck of his horse as though he cared.
‘Barka,’ he said.
From the huddle of riders a respectful distance behind him, one trotted forward. A Kefre, but low-born, with dark eyes and long hair dyed red as an apple and bound in an oiled queue. He had a sword scabbarded each side of his saddle’s pommel and wore a plain leather corselet studded with bronze. A scar tugged down one corner of his mouth, so it looked like he was leering, but his eyes held no humour.
This was Kouros’s weapons-master; an Arakosan, brought to Ashur fifteen years before by Orsana to teach her son how to be a man. He was also the only person who had ever beaten the young prince, for mistreating a horse. Kouros had gone to his mother at once, and the Arakosan had never laid a hand on him since, but Kouros still remembered the beating. He knew Barka despised him, but he also knew the Arakosan would die for him without thought, because of who his mother was.
‘My prince?’
‘Do we know yet where the imperial tent will be sited tonight?’
‘Yes, lord. The scouts have plotted a site some twenty pasangs ahead, on the outskirts of Kinamish.’
‘And my household?’
Barka pointed below, to where the Imperial road was a long snake of dust, a golden caterpillar inching across the land with black ants crawling within it.
‘Our gear is with the Great King’s caravan, as always, lord.’
Kouros was aching for a bath, some wine, something softer than a saddle to take his bulk. He frowned. The entire army and everyone in it travelled at the pace of the slowest ox-cart in the Great King’s baggage train. And no tent could be pitched before the King’s. It would be many hours yet.
Kouros wiped his face, his palm coming away gritty with dust. Kinamish was a small town with some of the amenities of civilization. It was unnoticeable, unimportant. It was perfect.
A well-mounted man could be there in an hour, if he pushed his horse. The timings had worked well.
‘Let us ride ahead, and make sure the people of Kinamish are ready to receive my father,’ Kouros said lightly.
Barka looked at him. He had an unsettlingly direct gaze that was wholly free of deference. Since Orsana had spoken to him, all those years ago, he had never again ventured to correct the young prince, but Kouros always knew when Barka disapproved of him. He would have rid himself of the scarred Kefre long before, except that he knew — somehow — that Barka could be trusted utterly. The weapons-master might not think much of his prince, but he would never betray him. It was the closest thing to loyalty Kouros had ever experienced. Almost.
‘Very well,’ Barka said. ‘The escort also, my lord?’
‘No.’ No, that might attract attention. Kouros snarled inside at the thought of being patiently taken to task by Dyarnes or another of his father’s veterans. They feared him — all of them — but they still had the casual confidence of old campaigners. And there were things they did not need to know.
‘You and I, Barka — we’ll go alone.’
‘As you wish, lord.’
They pushed the horses hard. Kouros’s riding was graceless but effective; he made the animal do what he wanted, and there was never any emotional connection between horse and rider. He had seen his father commiserate with hardened soldiers on the death of a favourite horse, and had been utterly baffled by the sight. These were grown men with blood on their hands, who would have a thieving slave crucified without a moment’s thought, and they wept over a dead animal.
The big Niseians pounded along willingly enough, for they had been travelling at a crawl all morning. Barka sat his as though stuck to it, moving with the rise and fall of the animal, the reins an irrelevance, held lightly in one hand. He talked to his horse in a low voice now and again, crooned to it like it was a child he wanted to reassure.
Baffling.
The last pasangs of the Heart of Empire rolled along under them, the land rising to meet the Magron mountains, which were a huge cloud now on the western horizon, dun-coloured and tipped with white, forests a darker stubble at their knees.
There was no irrigation system in this part of the world, for the moist easterlies struck the mountains and shed their water freely in tumbled thunderheads every spring and winter. The land was a less violent green than the manicured fields of the Oskus valley, and much of it was given over to pasture. They herded cattle here, and goats to clear up after them. The people were the shorter, darker, upland hufsan who made up the bulk of the empire’s populations.
Herd boys stopped to stare at the two superbly mounted Kefren who galloped past them, and Barka, with a boyishness quite unlike him, waved at those they passed with a white grin splitting his leathered face.
He is happy, Kouros realised. He is genuinely happy to be galloping along, slathered in sweat, miles from the capital, with only the ground to sleep on and the prospect of some half-seared campfire meat to eat tonight.
To ride a horse, to use a bow, to tell the truth. Those were the ancient tenets of life for the Kefren, still given lip service even in the opulent luxury of Ashur’s palaces. Kouros’s mother never tired of telling him that in Arakosia the nobles still trained their sons how to shoot from the saddle, that a Kefre’s word was counted a contract as good as any scribe’s scrawl.
But Orsana had been in the Harem these thirty years and more. What did she know?
Kouros had been at intrigues since he was a child, recognising his elevated status and working on it, utilising slaves and tutors and bodyguards and their dependence on his favour. No bows or horses, there, and not much of the truth, either. Leverage was what counted; the ability to hold a person’s dismissal or disgrace over their head.
He smiled a curious half-smirk as he rode along.
Nobles had given him their wives for a night to buy his favour, and the more unwilling the woman, the sweeter it had tasted. He loved to be there to give the husband back his wife the next morning, to see the eyes of them both. That moment was better than the sex itself.
‘Kinamish,’ Barka said, pointing, ruining his sordid little daydream.
‘I am not blind,’ he snapped.
‘Lord, we should slow our pace, rest the horses.’
