Not for long, though. They also passed a gibbet hung with three young men, Macht soldiers, their eyes already pecked empty by the crows. Corvus had never shown any mercy to looters, when he had not sanctioned their actions himself.
The company did not hurry, but they still made better time than the army, unconstrained by a vast baggage train. As it was, they passed abandoned waggons on the road, dead mules and horses, and massive stone-built cairns left at regular intervals, as though Corvus were leaving markers for them to follow.
The nights were short, but grew more bitter as they climbed higher into the Mountains. Ragged patches of snow began to appear on the mountainsides close to the road, hardy upland wildflowers springing up beside them, like two seasons living in truce together. It reminded Rictus of the Gosthere Mountains back around his home, or the place he had once called home. There were green glens here with rivers running down them that might have been in the Harukush, and once he caught his breath as they turned a corner on the road and saw, off to one side, a steep-sided valley winding past tree-covered spurs, and a wide, shallow river in the bottom of it, as brown as a trout. In a flash, he was back in Andunnon, building the house with Fornyx and Eunion stone by stone while Aise tended the fire and set barley bannock to baking on a rock griddle. It was so clear in his mind it almost seemed real, and when he came back to himself there was a moment of crushing despair. They were all dead now, every one of them. He was the only person left in the world who still possessed memories of that time and place.
That night, by the fire, he was withdrawn and morose, sitting propped up against a stone with the thornwood stick in his hands, the cold aching in his battered bones. He watched Sycanus and the other Dogsheads around other fires, listening to the timeless banter of soldiers, talk which had been the backdrop to all his adult life. He realised, in that moment, that he was no longer a warrior himself. Rictus of Isca, leader of the Ten Thousand. Who remembered his exploits now, since Corvus had risen like a storm to hurl the world on its head? The boy who had marched beside Jason, who had fought at Kunaksa — he was utterly gone. Even the cursebearer who stood in the front line and held men to his will was no more.
I am old, he thought. I will see Ashur, to sate the dregs of my curiosity, and then my service is over. I owe nothing to any man alive.
Kurun handed him a bowl of steaming goat stew with a smile. Beside him, Roshana was already eating hers with a crude stick-spoon. The three sat apart from the Macht soldiers by choice, whereas once Rictus would have been right at the lip of the centon, in the heart of them.
‘Does she know what Corvus has planned for her?’ he asked Kurun, nodding at Roshana.
Kurun dropped his eyes. ‘She knows. I told her.’
‘And how does it sit with her?’
‘I will marry him.’ To Rictus’s astonishment, it was Roshana who spoke. ‘He will be Great King. I will be Queen.’
‘I didn’t know you spoke our tongue.’
‘A little. I learn, for him, for Corvus.’
‘You taught her?’ Rictus asked Kurun. The boy nodded, stirring his stew with the spoon as though he no longer had any appetite.
‘She made me. For marriage.’
He loved her; it was clear in his eyes. But what could a boy-eunuch offer the wife-to-be of a king? Rictus felt a pang of pity for him.
‘And you?’
‘I stay with her.’
‘Even in Ashur?’
He hesitated. ‘Even in Ashur.’ But the words did not ring true. Rictus realised in that moment that Kurun did not want to return to the imperial capital. Once there, all his dreams would be snuffed out, and the reality of his station would be brought home to him.
Well, we have that in common, Rictus thought.
After ten days on the road they came to the highest point in the passage of the mountains. It was marked by a huge granite monolith, chiselled deep with words in the Kufr language, which Rictus could not read. Of them all, only Roshana could decipher it, and she lacked the skills to render the inscriptions into Machtic, so they passed it in ignorance. It was already a relic from another world. In passing, Corvus had set up a bigger stone, and had carved into it his name and the pasangs marched to this point. Below his name were carved others; those of all his marshals. Ardashir, Druze, Teresian, Demetrius, Parmenios — even Marcan. But Rictus had not been included. Wrapped in his threadbare scarlet cloak, Rictus stood and read the names on the stone over and over again, thinking on it. He realised that Corvus had not forgiven him for staying behind, for becoming old, perhaps. He was no longer part of the adventure.
How Fornyx would have fumed at this, he thought, smiling.
After they passed the stone markers, they were over the divide, and little by little they realised that they were descending again. The high point of the Magron had been crossed, and the rivers ran eastwards now, following their feet. Every stream they crossed was a tributary of the Oskus, far below. The water that ran cold and clear over the stones would soon be coursing in brown channels through the irrigation network of Asuria.
Sixteen days out of Carchanis, the pass widened until it was no longer a cleft between mountains, but a whole widening country of oblong hills, each the shape of a boiled egg sliced down its length. The air grew warmer — almost overnight they had to pack away their furs and cloaks as the heat of the lowlands returned, edging up into the high places. Summer was waning, but the sunlight still set a shimmer upon the landscape, and out of that shivering haze they saw a city on a hill to the north-east, walls of grey stone rising in ordered terraces to a string of stately towers. Roshana pointed at the city and threw back the folds of her komis, her face alight.
‘Hamadan,’ she said.
They had come through the Magron, and that night they were able to look down across the sleeping black plains of Asuria and see the lights of Ashur glimmering in the far distance, like a mound of jewels abandoned in the depths of a mine.
TWENTY-FOUR
Kouros stood on the high battlements of the western barbican as the sun rose behind him. The city was coming to life under it, and at this hour it almost felt like one vast living beast stirring into wakefulness. Lamps were being lit, fires kindled, and already he could hear the first clamour of the marketplaces as the stallholders set up shop. Another day in the greatest of all cities. Another morning as King of the world.
But not ruler of all he surveyed. He was staring out across the plain at a rival, a rigidly regimented encampment within which the fires were also being lit to meet the dawn. It was so close that he could see the flicker as men walked back and forth in front of the flames. A city in itself, walled in by a wooden stockade and ditch which had ruined the irrigation system for pasangs around. A tented town, harbouring thousands of men and beasts.
He could still not quite believe that it was here, less than two pasangs from where he stood. A Macht army was in Asuria, and now gazed upon the ancient ziggurats of the Asurian Kings.
He looked up and down the walls. They were manned thinly. On this side of the city he had stationed the bulk of Gemeris’s Honai, so that the enemy below might see the gleam of their armour upon the walls. Lorka’s Arakosans were further north, manning the defences that led up to the Oskus River. Thousands of men, but the endless walls swallowed them up so they were hardly seen. Ashur had never truly been made for defence; it was simply too big. Two million people lived and died within its confines, a population greater than that of many whole kingdoms. The only wars it had seen were murderous private skirmishes on the heights of the palace ziggurat, assassinations and coups fought by small groups of men intent on the deaths of a few nobles. War as the Macht
