bathe even at Hamadan, and he had become used to the grime of travel, the smell of woodsmoke, the hard ground for a pillow.
Hufsa slaves as naked as he wiped him down with wooden strigils and applied sweet oils to his abraded skin, combing out the long black hair that fell to his shoulderblades and tying it up in the customary topknot. He stood to be dried and dressed and was too tired to do more than run one hand in absent speculation across the breasts of the prettiest slave. Standing there as they belted the silk robe about his waist, he began to understand his father a little better. He thrust the knife which had killed his brother into the broad sash they wound about his middle. It was an artefact from another world, a world more real than this.
He joined his mother that evening to eat, reclining amid the marble pillars of the harem and lifting ridiculously small dainties from a platter of beaten gold. He had eaten horsemeat in the mountains, and found it not at all bad. In any case, he had little appetite for anything but wine, and this Orsana served him herself in a crystal cup. Kouros held it up to the lamplight and marvelled at the workmanship, the fragility of it in his brown fingers.
‘War has made a man of you,’ Orsana said from her couch.
‘I see things differently now, it’s true.’
‘I have already sent out a proclamation; the city criers are shouting it all over the streets. Asuria has a new king. My son is alive, and the throne is no longer empty. I will begin preparations for the coronation in the morning.’
‘Make it swift, mother. We do not have time to indulge these things any more. The enemy is hard on my heels. He will be in front of our walls before the summer is out.’
She leaned forward. ‘So soon?’
‘He is a man in a hurry.’
‘What did you save out of the wreck, Kouros?’
He thought of the long nights in the mountains, the waystations lost in a sea of refugees, the broken wreckage of a once-mighty army. It had melted away like a late snow. If he had not witnessed it with his own eyes, he would not have deemed it possible.
‘A few thousand of the Honai survived. I left them at Hamadan to hold the city, and came on with the Arakosans. Lorka will be within the city walls tonight; he has brought some two thousand horsemen with him, and the contents of Hamadan’s treasury. There are thousands more still on the move in the foothills, but they are no more than a common rout.’
The shock sat hard on his mother’s face. He almost enjoyed watching her master it.
‘Is that all?’
‘The Macht did a thorough job. They hunted us all the way to the passes of the mountains. And I have heard that the Juthan have sent an army to join them. There is nothing left beyond the Magron, mother. Asuria is all that remains.’
‘And Arakosia,’ she said instantly. He tilted his cup to her in agreement.
‘We have only the city guard here in Ashur,’ she went on, staring into space. ‘Five thousand hufsan who direct traffic and beat slaves. That is all.’
Kouros lay back on the cushioned couch. It was too soft for him. The weeks in the mountains had accustomed him to the feel of earth and stone under his back.
‘I killed Rakhsar with my own hand.’ He drew the knife from his sash. ‘That, at least, is done.’
‘And Roshana?’
‘The Macht took her, I think; if she lived. She is immaterial now. The intrigues are over, mother. We must think of gathering more men. We must send to Arakosia, somehow scrape up another levy. These walls must be held.’
She nodded, watching him. She looked upon the blood-grimed blade of the knife he held in fascination and disgust.
‘We must meet with Borsanes in the morning,’ Orsana told him. ‘He commands the city guard. Lorka also. I must talk to him as soon as he gets in. The Arakosans have been coming west for weeks now, but in small numbers. There are perhaps a thousand of them in the city, and more at Hamadan.’
‘Enough to stage a palace coup — not enough to fight off an invading army. You must change your sense of scale, mother.’
Suddenly Kouros hurled the beautiful crystal cup away. It soared through the air and smashed in a shower of glass and wine against the pale Kandassian marble of a nearby pillar, staining the stone. Kouros stood up.
‘We are at the end of things here, the finish of everything we have known. Lorka looks to me now; he knows it is I who rule in Ashur. Your intrigues have not prepared you for the waging of war.’
‘And running from a battlefield has suddenly transformed you into a general of genius, I suppose!’
Kouros smiled, where once he would have flown into a fury. ‘You said yourself; war has made a man of me.’
He strode over to Orsana, where she crouched, cat-like, in a billow of silk, the knife still in his hand. From behind a pillar, he saw Charys, the massive chief eunuch, sidle out, as broad as the pillar himself.
Kouros bent and kissed his mother’s cheek, tasting the chalk that whitened it.
‘I’m going to bed, to sleep in the chambers of the King where I belong. I will see Borsanes and Lorka in the morning, and I will notify you of events as they occur. Sleep well, mother.’
Her eyes seemed black in the light of the lamps, as cold as stones on a mountainside.
‘Do not overreach yourself, Kouros. You stand in my world.’
‘Your world is too small,’ he retorted. ‘You have forgotten what life is like beyond it.’
Then he walked out of the harem, sliding the iron knife back into his sash, and not deigning to give so much as a glance at the glowering eunuch whose eyes followed him all the way to the doors.
The city was a changed place the next morning. In the early hours, before even the sun had struck the pinnacles of the ziggurats, the proclamations had gone round with the sprinting, great-lunged city criers. Crowds congested the streets in a feverish hunger for good news. For weeks now, there had been nothing but ominous rumours out of the west. A great battle had been fought, it was generally agreed, but if it had gone well, then the victory tidings would have been spread about without delay. Defeat had been suspected, but never had the high and humble of the imperial capital even dreamed that the Great King himself could be slain in battle. This was the first confirmation they had of the extent of the catastrophe now overtaking the empire. For many, it was the first time they had ever heard Kouros’s name spoken.
He rode through the streets at noon that day with an escort of Arakosan cavalry resplendent in their blue armour. A second Royal Standard had been unearthed out of the palace vaults and flew above him in a billow of rich purple and gold, the sigil of the Asurian kings catching the light in a reassuring blaze. Those who were close to the procession as it paraded down the Sacred Way could see that this new king was wind-burnt and thin. He looked like a warrior, not an aristocrat, and they took some comfort in that, and in the white grin with which he received the tossed flowers that carpeted the stones in front of his horse.
Keen observers might also have noticed that the mounts of the Arakosans were not in good flesh, and their riders had dark, tired rings under their eyes which belied the magnificence of their enamelled armour. But the parade reassured the city populace, or at any event it gave them something else to talk about. It took their mind off the storm approaching over the mountains.
In the days that followed, Kouros found he could not rest in the ziggurat — it held too many memories for him, both of his father and his mother, and it was too stiflingly confined by protocol for him to bear, after all the months on campaign. He elected to meet with his officers at the western barbican in a plain room above the gate itself. He wore a diadem now, though he had not been crowned. His father’s had been black silk. Kouros chose scarlet, perhaps as a kind of nod to the red-clad men who were now tramping across the empire.
He, Lorka, and Borsanes stood there looking down at a map of the city walls, and flicking through a bundle of tally-sticks representing those available to defend them. Kouros gripped one of these birch-wood counters in his hand as though he could squeeze more out of it.
‘It’s no good — we must recall the garrison from Hamadan. There are almost three thousand Honai up there; they will do more good with us than in the hills.’
