‘I make everything personal,’ Kouros said, bitterly. ‘It is the way I am.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Don’t look at me like that — you remind me of Barka — dutiful and disapproving.’
‘You need to grow a thicker skin, Kouros.’
‘I have only the one I was born in.’
‘And Orsana has been flaying it off you strip by strip, since you could walk.’ Kuthra held up his stump. ‘She has marked me less than you. I count myself lucky to have escaped the Court so cheaply.’
‘You were lucky your mother was nothing more than a slave.’
‘We are all slaves, Kouros. Even your father is trammelled and confined by his station. Do you think him a happy man?’
‘Are you happy, Kuthra?’ Kouros’s voice was hoarse and earnest.
‘I am. I have no ambitions, and I know those whom I love and those I hate. My life is simple — ’
‘You’re a spy — you slink across the empire like a cat at midnight. How simple can it be to live with all your secrets, to kidnap and slaughter strangers at another’s bidding?’
Kuthra shrugged. ‘Perhaps I lack a certain curiosity. I have my orders, and I fulfil them. I get paid, and I spend the money. Then I get more orders. Thus the wheel of my life turns.’
‘I wish I could take my horse and ride away with you, right here and now, Kuthra. We could cross the mountains together, leave all this behind.’
‘And do what?’ Kuthra tapped the back of his elder brother’s hand. ‘You were born to be what you are — I do not know if being King will make you happy, Kouros, but I do know that not being King would crack your soul. It is the way you have been made.’
They drank the last of the wine, the resin-scented vintage oiling their throats, loosening up their minds. Kuthra sat up straight suddenly. Barka had reappeared at the side of the loggia.
‘Lord, the horses are rubbed down, and fed and watered. May I have your permission to eat?’
Kouros nodded. Barka bowed slightly. His gaze flicked to Kuthra and a half-knowing light came into his eye. Then he walked away.
‘My brother’s keeper,’ Kuthra said.
‘He serves my mother.’
‘I know Barka, Kouros, or his type at least. The Arakosans, they say, are Asurians before the coming of the cities. Folk who retain the memory of a simpler time.’
‘The horse, the bow, the truth — I have heard all this at length from my mother since my ears could hear.’
‘There is truth to it. You can trust Barka, so long as you do not ask him to dishonour himself. That is what the Arakosans are like. Faithful as dogs, and as vicious. You wrong one, though, and you have an enemy for life.’ Kuthra nudged his brother with a smile. ‘There is more Arakosan in you than you know.’
Kouros rubbed his forehead. ‘When I talk to you, Kuthra, I feel that there is another man buried in me who raises his head and sees some chink of light ahead in the darkness. I was that man once, or could have been. It is he who says these things to you now; and the Kouros they all hate, my mother’s son, he is gone.
‘But it is only for a little while. One day there will be no light left, and the darkness will be all.’
‘Not so long as I live.’
‘I have done cruel things. Sometimes I feel that I am a poison-filled jar, full to the brim and ready to spill over.’
‘You’re a better man than you give yourself credit for, or you would not feel this way. We have all done terrible things, Kouros — our lives have called it out of us.’
‘There was a boy, back in the city, a kitchen-slave who took it upon himself to spy on a dinner my father gave in the gardens.’
‘Some lackey of Rakhsar’s?’
‘I thought so, at first. But I knew, when I questioned him, that he was telling me the truth. That he had been there out of sheer curiosity, the stupidity of his youth. And I gelded him anyway, with my own hands, and sent him to Roshana.’
Kuthra leaned back from the table and chuckled. ‘Now, that is something your mother would do.’
‘I know.’ Kouros looked up, and his eyes were haunted. ‘I did it because I had it in my power, and I was angry, and I wanted to hurt something. That same evening, when my father met with the couriers from the west, he had Rakhsar join us, affronting me before the whole table.’
‘At least you let the boy live.’
‘I was ashamed, afterwards. Kuthra, can a king feel shame, if there is no-one to tell him he does wrong?’
‘I will be there, brother. I promise, I will tell you.’
Kouros knuckled his eyes like a tired child. ‘I hope so.’ He stood up. ‘It is time I was back with the column. The Heir cannot disappear for too long without comment.’
‘I understand.’
But Kouros took Kuthra’s stump-wrist in his grasp as the other rose in his turn.
‘They think I am a monster, Kuthra. The spoilt, twisted product of my mother’s ambition. Perhaps they are right. But I will tell you something they do not know.’ He paused, lowered his voice almost as if afraid.
‘My brother, Rakhsar; so charming, so quick with his wit and his smile…
‘He is worse, far worse than I.’
PART TWO
SEVEN
Ahead, the mountains rose in a long serried parade clear across the sky. As the sun settled into the lowlands of the west, so the saffron light coloured the peaks and slopes, tinting the snowfields and filling the valleys with shadows black as ink.
Leading up to the mountains, climbing steadily from the wide river-plain below, a series of bristling snakes inched their way eastwards as though nosing for a crevice to sleep in. Now and then as they moved they caught the sunset in a flickering line of light.
They were columns of marching men, each pasangs long. They filled every road leading east, and trudged uphill in their patient thousands with the last of the sunlight bright as flame on their bronze armour, winking on the spearheads.
On their flanks columns of horsemen rode, red-cloaked like the infantry, their helms hanging from their saddles and lances resting on the shoulders of the riders. Knots of unarmoured cavalry swarmed over the rising hills further to the east of their fellows, their ranks as formless as a summer cloud of gnats.
This was the satrapy of Askanon, the wide floodplain of the Sardask and Haneikos rivers. Some of the most ancient cities of the Kufr stood here; Eskis, Kumir, and mighty Ashdod. They perched on their tells of earth and stone like castles of sand on a beach, whilst around them rivulets and rivers of armed men coursed across the earth.
The armies of the Macht were on the march again. To their rear, thick bars of black toiling smoke rose up the sky, lit bright and bloody by the sunset. To their front, the Korash Mountains stood marking the borders of the Middle Empire as they had from time immemorial.
The city of Ashdod had stood for perhaps five thousand years. It rose up like a tiered cake out of the plain,
