‘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.
Other mounds were then lit. All around the King’s pyre they stood in gruesome piles, stacked high with anything flammable that could be found on or near the battlefield. Even sheaves of arrows had been stacked about the corpses of the Macht.
They were kindled one by one, and the Great King’s pyre had the company of half a dozen others as large, but containing hundreds of bodies. The black smoke rose as the dawn light waxed and the red tint left the eastern sky. The soldiers trooped back to their camp, and behind them the pyres burned down to ash which the west wind took and blew across the earth in a grey mist, towards the peaks of the Magron Mountains.
For three days, the Macht policed the great battlefield, searching for those that still lived, collecting the dead and burning them in yet more pyres, collecting a mountain of armour and weapons and other equipment which had been abandoned on the field. But only a tithe of them remained there to do this. Most of the army was already on the march eastwards again, the Companions in the forefront, harrying the survivors of the battle and travelling east among panic-stricken mobs of levy-soldiers who wanted nothing more, now, than to get back to their farms and their homes and their families. These were ignored; they were no longer any threat to the advance.
The prize in this race was the city of Carchanis, the great citadel that guarded the crossings of the Bekai River and which had been used by the Great King as his base of operations. The lead troops of the Macht came within sight of the city four days after the battle, and at once sent word to its governor to surrender, or face assault and siege with no quarter given.
It was a bluff. The army was not yet in any condition to assault or besiege so much as a hamlet. Parmenios’s siege equipment was still back at the waggon-park, and the men and animals of Corvus’s army had been pushed to the limits of their endurance.
But the bluff worked. Governor Beshan of Carchanis opened his western gates to the invaders and surrendered the city, having first opened the eastern gates to allow the remnants of the Arakosans under Lorka to continue their flight.
Word was sent back to the tented camps around Gaugamesh. The battlefield was to be abandoned, and the entire army was to move up on Carchanish, where the Great King had stockpiled enough supplies to feed it for months. Corvus himself rewarded Beshan for his surrender by allowing him to remain as Governor of the city, but he also appointed a military advisor to help the Kefren administration cope with the change in pace. And to keep an eye on things.
The breakneck pursuit was called off for a few days to allow the bulk of the army to regroup and rest. Around the ancient walls of Carchanis the tented city of the Macht sprang up once more, like a plague of dun mushrooms. But it was not as large as it had been before Gaugamesh.
In his long life, Rictus had known many injuries, and he had learned how to deal with pain. But it seemed to him that the journey in the waggon-bed from Gaugamesh to Carchanis produced the greatest agonies he had ever known. And he did not know why.
His wounds were many, varied and uninteresting. None of them in themselves were even close to fatal, but the combination of them all had brought him as close to Antimone’s Veil as he had ever been in his life.
He travelled in a well-sprung caravan which had been looted from the baggage train of the imperial army. It was superbly made, drawn by four quiet horses used to the traces, and it had a wooden roof painted blue and traced with silver filigree; a line of horses galloping endlessly round and around, their manes flying, their tails curling and tossing. Rictus lay on the rope-hung cot within the cart, sweating sour memories into the linen sheets, and watched those horses go round and around, waiting for death.
He was attended to by an old Kefren physician named Buri, who had been found in the wreckage of the Great King’s army, and who had chosen to help the wounded of his conquerors. He was too old for flight or bitterness or ambition, and Corvus had found him to be an able man. He had set him the task of keeping Rictus alive.
He was aided in this task by Kurun, the hufsan slave-boy, who, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to help
