Three thousand steps. They dismounted ere the end to take the weight off their sweating horse, and Rictus walked the last half pasang leaning on Kurun’s shoulder and feeling all his old wounds complain bright and loud. But at the top there was a breeze, a coolness like on the side of a mountain in summer, and they caught the smell of growing things, thyme and lavender and honeysuckle, a whole garden in bloom. Kurun’s face was running with tears. Looking down at the boy, Rictus remembered that not all bad dreams came from battlefields.
‘The world is changed,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened to you here is over. You are a free man, Kurun.’
‘Then, as a free man, I want you to walk with me in the gardens of the King, Rictus, sir.’
‘We can walk anywhere you like.’
A strange symbiosis took place over the following days. Macht spearmen and Kefren Honai stood on guard side by side throughout the palace, mismatched guardians of the new regime. Orsana withdrew to the harem, though Corvus visited her more than once to pay his respects and discuss the running of the city. In the streets below, the Macht mingled with the local population, haggling in the bazaars and making full use of the brothels in the wall-districts. They had the plunder of a continent to spend, and while their ignorance led to a few scuffles, for the most part they were regarded with tolerant curiosity. The city swallowed fifteen thousand of them as though they were a teardrop fallen in a river, and the urban rhythms of Ashur barely changed. The farmers brought their last crop of the year into the markets, the caravans resumed from the east, and imperial slaves still went about their errands bearing the purple-striped tunic of the kings. In the bowels of the ziggurat, thousands still toiled in the dark to see the gardens above watered, the elite of the new empire fed and clothed. Everything had changed, and nothing had.
The lady Roshana was finally escorted into Ashur at the beginning of autumn, borne on a litter and cheered with genuine enthusiasm by the ever-ready rabble of the lower city. She was dressed as an Asurian princess, her eyes painted, a komis of creamy silk masking her face. She was Ashurnan’s daughter, and the people turned out to cheer for her in memory of their dead king as much as anything else. She was transported to the summit of the ziggurat and installed in the King’s apartments, ready for the great day to come. Corvus was to be crowned with Ashurnan’s diadem and married to his daughter in the same ceremony, the one leading to the other. When that happened, his claim on the Asurian Empire would be complete, and an epoch of history would end — or would begin, depending on how one looked at it.
Rictus was summoned to the King’s presence one night, not long before the coronation-wedding. It was Osh-fallanish, the month of cool wind. Kurun had taught him that. He had taught him enough Kefren words to greet and bargain at the stalls of the lower city, enough to salute the Honai in their own language, which damped down some of the hostility still in their eyes. He still could not get used to seeing them stand guard over a Macht king.
The chambers of the King had been stripped out of all their luxuries, for Corvus had never been in any sense a sybarite. Rictus had to smile as he saw the humble camp furniture from Corvus’s campaign tent arranged in the vast echoing emptiness of the Great King’s apartments. He touched the plain brass lamp which stood there with its four dangling wicks, thinking on the nights it had lit up the map table on campaign with them all bent over it, following Corvus’s finger across the features of the world.
He had a bigger table now, marble-topped, with curling legs of pure gold. There were papers heaped across it, and the wooden scroll cupboard sat to one side, a battered contraption that had been with Corvus longer than Rictus had.
The King was not alone. He sat by the balcony in a plain wooden chair with a cup of wine in his lap, and opposite him sat Orsana, wife and mother to two dead kings. She had lowered her komis and her white face turned to Rictus as he limped towards them, his thornwood cane clicking on the floor.
Rictus came to a halt and bowed, at a loss how to proceed.
‘So this is Rictus,’ Orsana said. She spoke in Machtic, her accent light and sibilant, but the words perfectly clear.
‘He is an old man. But then it is thirty years since the coming of the Ten Thousand.’ She stood up and spoke to Corvus in Kefren. There was a fluid exchange between them in the language, informal, affectionate. She offered her cheek and Corvus kissed it. Rictus bowed again as she glided past him. The doors boomed out of time with each other as she left the room, the Honai and Macht guards having not yet synchronised their efforts.
‘How is the leg?’ Corvus asked him.
‘It keeps me upright.’
‘Well, sit, and give it a rest.’
A breeze billowed up the gauze curtains. They sat silent a moment, looking out at the city below, a thousand lights still burning in the darkness, Phobos rising over the Magron like a leering head. It was indeed a view fit for kings.
‘We have not spoken in a long time,’ Corvus said. ‘That is my fault. I felt you blamed me for Fornyx’s death, for the destruction of the Dogsheads.’
‘They were a military resource. You used them to great effect.’ Rictus’s voice was cold.
‘I went too far. Perhaps I expected too much. Rictus, I was wrong — I know that now. You must forgive me for this.’
‘Forgive you?’ Rictus tapped his stick on the floor. ‘We’re soldiers, Corvus. We don the scarlet and we take our chances. Gaugamesh was a victory, and it cost a lot of blood, as victories do. There is no more to be said.’
Corvus stared into his wine. ‘Ardashir tells me you intend to leave.’
‘Ardashir talks too much — he’s damn near as bad as Fornyx was.’
‘Will you not stay to see me crowned?’
‘I have already seen you crowned, Corvus. Do you remember, the night before you were made high King of the Macht? Fornyx and I were with you then, and it was that night you put on Antimone’s Gift for the first time.’
‘How could I forget? You were like a father to me, Rictus.’
‘I know. But the son outgrows the father, as you have. I have nothing left to teach you, Corvus.’
‘That is not quite true. You did one thing before we left Carchanis that taught me a lesson beyond price.’
‘Oh?’
‘You gave Fornyx’s cuirass to Ardashir. You allowed a Kufr to wear the Curse of God.’
‘So?’ Rictus growled. ‘He deserved it. He is one of us, whether he is Macht or no.’
‘No other man could have made that gesture but you. The army would not have stood for it. But because it was Rictus, they knew it had to be the right thing. With that single act, you changed the way they thought of the Kufr. You made me look at the empire itself differently. For that, I will always be in your debt.’
‘There is no debt. You owe me nothing, and nor does any man. I know why you asked me here, Corvus, and it will not work. I am not some kind of talisman, or mascot that you must keep by you. My time in the scarlet is over.’
‘Then stay for just a little while more, as a friend. See me crowned Great King. See me marry Roshana.’
Rictus shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He tapped the floor with his stick again, an old man’s tic which he hated. He had caught himself doing it time after time.
‘Look after her, Corvus. She is a fine young woman, and she is not so strong as she thinks.’
‘I suppose she reminds you of your daughter,’ Corvus said with a smile.
‘No… not my daughter.’ Rictus grimaced, stamping down on the unbidden memories.
‘Protect her. I do not trust Ashurnan’s widow, this Orsana. The woman came over to you too easily. There is no bitterness. I would feel happier if she hated you a little.’
‘You think my charm worked too well?’
‘I think your charm may have met its match. When I got your father killed, all those years ago, your mother hated me. I offered to protect her, and the child she carried, but she walked away into the unknown. She despised me and all the Macht.’
‘I know,’ Corvus said quietly. ‘But as I grew up, she talked of you often. She knew my father loved you like a
