‘The Kefren worship Bel, the sun, the renewer,’ he said to Rictus’s curious look. ‘But the Juthan revere Mot. The Kefren would have us believe he is the god of blight and sickness and disease. But there can be no life, unless death has gone before. We worship Mot as the power which brings the one true end to all of existence. That is the final truth — we all die. We cannot say who or what will be born. Therefore Mot is the centre of life itself. All that goes before death is chaos.’
‘We worship Antimone, goddess of pity and death,’ Rictus said. ‘She does not protect us, but she takes us to her when we die, and brings us to God, and intercedes for us.’
‘The Juthan and the Macht are more similar than you think,’ Marcan said. ‘My grandfather’s best friend was a Macht general, Vorus, who in this very place let our people go free from a slavery they had known for untold centuries. We venerate his name. For that reason, as well as all the others, we will fight with you. It is a debt worth repaying.’
Turning, Rictus found the Juthan watching him.
‘I know who you are,’ Marcan said. ‘Your name is also known to my people.’
‘Your people have long memories,’ Rictus grunted.
‘As long as the stone, we say. We were a nation of slaves, and slaves forget little.’
Rictus had meant to make some quip about the fifty thousand spearmen, but something in the dignified mien of the Juthan stopped him. To the average Macht, the Juthan and the Kefren were all Kufr, all inferior foreigners, barbarians. He had never realised quite how unalike they were. Not just physically, but in the very stuff of their thoughts.
The sun rose, the heat grew. The patrol continued down the Imperial Road as though they were ordinary citizens of the empire about their business, and indeed, save for Rictus, they did not look out of place.
Once they were twenty pasangs from Irunshahr, the abandoned, bereft look of the countryside was ameliorated by their first sight of the inhabitants. They began to see hufsan farmers guiding buffalo through waterlogged fields. Others were knee deep in the brown water, planting seedlings one by one. On higher ground there was wheat and barley, tall and green but with the gold already coming into it. And there were orchards of pomegranates, apples, oranges and scented lemons, each as large as Rictus’s fist.
It was an abundance, a seething, thriving, growing world. The irrigation channels were surrounded by wild irises and alive with frogs, and white egrets pattered through the lowland like flags planted in the green-tipped mud. And everywhere the sliding rattle of cicadas, crickets, the belching of toads, and the darting iridescent brilliance of dragonflies.
‘They have waystations on the Imperial Road,’ Rictus called forward to Ardashir, ‘and each has a garrison.’
‘We are fifty,’ the Kefre said, turning in the saddle and setting his knee on his horse’s rump. ‘It will not even be sport, Rictus.’
Soon after, one of the waystations appeared out of the stubborn mist creeping along the irrigation embankments. It was a massive square tower of fired brick which rose out of the sodden fields beside the road and was surrounded by smaller blockhouses. There were fenced-in paddocks on all sides, and in them every manner of beast which had ever been trained to bear a burden.
The road itself was clogged by many carts, some little more than two-wheeled barrows, others grander, with gaily painted canopies of linen and leather. And there were several tall-sided waggons hitched to camels that looked more bored than any creature had a right to be.
In the midst of this scrum of vehicles and beasts, a crowd of Kufr, both Kefren and hufsan, were standing arguing, gesticulating and jumping up and down in fury. Perhaps a dozen armed guards were blocking the road with wide-bladed halberds, and their officer was waving a scimitar that glittered white in the sun, and shouting himself hoarse at the crowd.
Ardashir turned back to Rictus again, and he was laughing. ‘Perhaps we can be of help, eh, Rictus?’
Rictus muttered. He had no spear, only a drepana, and he felt unsafe and ill at ease on the horse. Beside him, Marcan reached back of his saddle and with a hissing sound drew forth a long white knife, as wide as a child’s wrist. ‘You miss your spear,’ he said to Rictus. ‘For me it is the weapon of my people I would have here, the akson. It is not fitting for a man to fight with a knife.’
‘Or on a damned horse,’ Rictus muttered. The cavalcade of Kefren riders on the massive Niseians surged past them. ‘Lances!’ Ardashir called out in his clear voice, and they cantered forward in twos with the long weapons pointing at the ground. The sun set their magnificently caparisoned armour alight; they looked almost too glorious to be warlike, but the crowd bickering in the roadway ahead did not seem to have any notion of the threat. Nor did the officer who was haranguing them.
Rictus slid off his horse and at once felt better, though his view was reduced. Marcan stood beside him; the squat Juthan came barely to his breastbone.
‘He’s telling them to clear the roadway,’ Marcan said, scratching one cheek with the point of the knife. ‘This is a strange way to fight a war.’
‘I have sometimes thought the Kefren do not take war seriously enough,’ Rictus admitted.
But then there was a scream. Rictus saw the white flash of a blade, and somehow the Kefren officer was down, and Ardashir’s troopers were barrelling forward with lances levelled. The crowd in the road exploded across the fields, and there was blood in the dust, the clang of steel on steel. Rictus’s mare whinnied in alarm and he soothed the beast by slapping it hard on the head with the flat of his sword.
Then it was over. Rictus and Marcan walked down the road like men arriving late at a funeral. There was not much to see, but for a litter of bodies skewed across the stone-slabbed road, and a host of abandoned vehicles, from one of which came the sound of a crying baby.
Ardashir was on foot, his horse standing unconcernedly beside him. The other troopers had dismounted, exchanged their lances for bows, and were fanning out through the little knot of buildings while a few of their number did duty as horse-holders. Ardashir rose from one of the bodies grim-faced.
‘Damn fool. He had no need to start that. I would have disarmed them and let them go — what’s a dozen more soldiers to us now?’
Rictus looked down on the dead Kefre. He was young, and though Rictus had never fully admitted this to himself, he thought that, like all high-caste Kefren, he could have been Ardashir’s brother. The features of the race seemed all so alike. To a Macht, at least.
‘He was armed, he had his blade drawn. It was honourable enough,’ he said, gruffly. Better than being trampled to death in the middle of a phalanx, at any rate.
‘Chief.’ One of Ardashir’s men had emerged from the waystation tower. ‘There are a lot of documents in here, but not much else. What shall we do, fire the place?’
Ardashir’s eyes cleared. ‘Bring the papers, round up the horses and cattle, and then torch it. There’s nothing to discover here. If the Great King’s army is in the Middle Empire, then it’s nowhere near us. These were just hufsan customs officials, checking over a caravan which was still heading west.’
He turned to Rictus. ‘Customs officials. Bel’s blood, Rictus; do they even know what’s going on in this country?’
‘They know,’ Marcan broke in sombrely. ‘The wheels take a time to set turning, that’s all. Once the empire sets things in motion, it comes down on you with the weight of a mountain. You have not yet felt that power, but it will come upon you, as sure as the rising of the moons.’ He gestured at the endless shimmering plains to the east.
‘This wide country will drink a river of blood, your people’s and mine, before the thing is done. Do not be impatient for that time to begin.’
TEN
Rakhsar knelt in the noisome water of the ditch and breathed softly through his mouth, ignoring the mosquitoes whining about his face. Up ahead the road was clear, and the only light was that of a single torch left
