"The ten thousand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kearney Paul)

NINE

The news was brought to Vorus with a quiet tap on the door of his apartments. He grunted out some response, the dreams of the night still fogging his mind, and in came the morning-maid with her head bowed and a sealed scroll of parchment quivering like a bird upon the silver tray she held out.

He rose in the bed, the silk sheets whispering off his torso to reveal the broad form of an athlete-he had always been vain about his physique-and took the message from the tray. “I’ll eat in the garden, Bisa.”

“Yes, lord.” The girl, a low-caste hufsa, bowed and left with the soft slap of bare feet on the mosaic floor. From outside, Vorus could hear the birds squabbling in the fountain, and the rill of the water got him thinking on other things. He reached the silver pot out from under the bed and stood pissing into it while breaking the seal of the letter. Astiarnes of Tanis-a good man. He remembered-

“Phobos!” He puddled the floor before collecting himself, and the parchment flapped in his fingers. “Kyrosh!”

A tall Kefren with skin the colour of birch-bark glided through the door. He bowed deep, azure eyes gleaming. In his hand he held a wand of ivory. “Lord.”

“My best, and the Macht cuirass. A closed litter, and the swiftest bearers we know. No, wait; we must put on a show. I must go to the Palace, Kyrosh.”

“It shall be arranged, my lord. I shall send in the dresser. Might I recommend the Arakosan silk?”

“No.” Vorus was thinking clearly now. His face had become calm. “My chiton, the scarlet. And the Curse of God. My old gear, Kyrosh.”

The Kefren blinked, and licked his thin lips. He moved forward a pace. “Lord, for the Palace?”

“Do as I say. And get that litter.”

Kyrosh bowed deep and left, face impassive. Once outside the door, his voice could be heard like the crack of a whip. Other doors banged; the household came to life, a well-ordered panic. Vorus seldom rose this early.

Arkamenes is on the march from Tanis with twenty-five thousand foot and five thousand horse. Artaka has declared for him, and Gushrun is his creature. But that is not all. He has brought an army from over the sea-Ten Thousand Macht heavy spearmen, mercenaries under a general named Phiron. Arkamenes plans to raise up Jutha against the Empire, and carry battle into the Land of the Rivers. He seeks nothing less than the throne itself.

The letter had been three weeks on the road. They must have killed a dozen horses to get it here so quickly. From old Astiarnes, one spy amid hundreds, thousands, which had been planted down the years in every alleyway and upon every highway of the Empire. But Astiarnes was not from the Royal Corps of Spies. He was retired. In his own youth, Vorus had used to boast sometimes that the Great King had a hand in every pocket. But they had missed this, somehow. A Macht army. Mercy of God.

The dresser came in, along with the muddled maid bearing bread and honey and a poached egg. Vorus smiled at her bewilderment. “Leave it here, Bisa. This morning, I eat on the wing.”

This was the finest time of the year to be in Ashur. The Imperial capital lay on both banks of the Oskus River, and the water was full and high, a gleam of blue and silver instead of the midsummer brown. Ashur had been laid out in a grid, maybe four thousand years before. Vorus had studied on it, and believed the city to be twice as old; but always built on the same pattern. Imperial Ashur. Her walls were a hundred and fifty feet high, and sixty pasangs long. In their shadow lived some two million people. Kefren of all castes, Juthan by the scores of thousands, common Asurians, Arakosans, Yue, Irgun, Kerkhai. They were all here.

Dominating the skyline were what might first appear to be a pair of steep-sided hills in the midst of the city. These were Kefren-made tells, mounds of brick and stone reared up century upon century until they now loomed like mountains over the flat river-plain below. Upon these ziggurats were the Palace of the Kings and the high fane of Bel, as the Kufr chose to call their God. Each was a city within a city, and there were priests and slaves who had been born on both yet had never left either. The brick which supported these phenomena had been faced in dark blue enamel, laced with traceries of gold, and the walls of each were surmounted by battlements topped in silver plate. On the summit of the Temple ziggurat, the face of the Fane itself was covered in plates of solid gold, so that it caught the setting of Araian, the sun. Her beams were snared here at sunset by the grim teeth of the Magron Mountains to the west, but her last light was always caught by the temple walls, a beacon set ablaze by her farewell, a promise of her return. It was for this reason that the Fane ziggurat had been built, with tolerances of a few fingerspans.

The temple predated the palace, but those who dwelled in the latter had been making up for lost time over the last few millennia. The top of the palace ziggurat was perhaps fifteen taenons, and of those, ten were covered by the structures of the palace itself. The remainder was a green-walled park, a garden as big as five farms in which the great cypresses of Ochir had been planted, along with poplar from Khulm, plane-trees from the Tanean coast, and date palms from the Videhan Gulf. Springs welled there, turning into clear streams that coursed around the roots of the ancient trees. These were not natural but torrents of pumped water, serviced by an army of Juthan slaves who inhabited the bowels of the mountain-ziggurat. Thousands of them laboured there in the dark so that the trees of the Great Kings might drink. Thousands never saw daylight, but were born, laboured there, bred their replacements, and died, and above them the serene parks and gardens swelled and bloomed under the sun.

In the lower city, the real city, as Vorus often called it in his mind, the teeming population went about its business with little or no thought of those in the ziggurats above. They revered the concordats of the priests, they were awed when the Great King chose to make a processional down the wide space of Huruma, the Sacred Way, but by and large they were intent on buying and selling, on eating and drinking and procreating, the same as any other creature with a brain in its head that walked the earth. And Vorus loved them for it. He loved the close-packed streets of the lower city, the shadowed canopies of the stallholders, the dark alcoves of the artisans where one might walk by and be showered in sparks, the spice-merchants, the carpet-bazaars, the metal-workers’ plinths. He loved the slave-yards, where snivelling creatures of every race and type and colour were on display. He loved the packed busyness, the life, the arrogance, the insistence of this place. It was his city-he was more at home here than in any other place upon the teeming face of Kuf. No matter that he had been born in a snowbound mountain village of the Harukush; this was his home, had been for going on twenty-five years. He was no longer Macht. He was the servant of a Great King who ruled an Empire rooted in history-great, bloody, and enduring history. And he knew that he would fight to his death for it to remain that way.

When one alighted from the litter, there were the Steps to endure. These had been constructed so that horses could walk up them in swift, dignified strides, but for those with two feet they were a wearying experience, Added to this, on one’s left as the ascent continued, there were carved upon the wall and inlaid in brilliant colour the spectacle of two hundred successive Kefren Kings of the line of Asur, subjugating their enemies in an unending series of sieges and battles. The Steps had been counted, and were something over two thousand. No one save the Great King might mount them on anything save their own two feet. Thus were the mighty made breathless who came to pay court on the Ruler of the Empire. But to Vorus now they were an irritating necessity that did nothing more than squeeze the sweat from his back. He passed more sedate supplicants on their way to the Audience Hall, striding upward and remembering mountains-real mountains-as he felt the strain in his thighs. There were quicker paths to the face of the Great King, of course, but he, as a hired foreigner, was no longer privy to them, never mind the fact that he had served the court for decades. And bled for it, and for the father of this Kufr he now had to meet.

“General Vorus of the Macht,” he was announced. Always, of the Macht. It was that epithet that made heads swivel in the Court, that silenced the bullshit tapestries of conversation weaving their delicate ways about the King’s ears. Vorus knew this Great King to speak to, but his father he had known better. Anurman had been a soldier, a hunter, a gardener. He had loved everything which nature had created, had planted bulbs with his bare hands, and with his bare hands had slain several assassins who had hoped to end his line. A plain Kufr, one of courage and honesty and humour, Vorus had learned generalship at his side. At first a novelty- the Macht renegade-he had progressed to errand-runner, and thence to warleader. But first, foremost, and forever, he had been a friend.

That was the pity of it-that Anurman’s heirs were wood from some different tree. But Vorus served the son because of love for the dead father. It was why he was here now, sweating under the undulating air stirred by half a thousand fan-bearers. Because he owed it to the man he had known.

“You may advance,” the outer chamberlain said with the great stately patronising chill of his caste. “Keep your eyes down, and always-”

“I know this dance,” Vorus said and strode forward, scarlet cloak wrapped about his left arm, black cuirass sucking light from the hall.

The usual crowds, a long, useless length of them clad in the raiment that ten thousand villages toiled every year to produce. The Great King had entire towns devoted to the production of his slippers. One might laugh and disbelieve, until one saw it. Half a world given over to the luxuries of a few thousand; it was monstrous, until you realised that they were well paid and lived in peace. That was a good thing, was it not? To live in peace, even if that peace were servitude, and at the whim of the next high-caste Kefren higher in the preening order.

A phalanx of court officials stood on either side of the throne, and two Honai in full armour but for their shields. Vorus halted, and then went to his knees. He lowered himself further, until his forehead kissed the cool marble of the floor, then regained his feet with a swiftness that belied his years. The prostration was performed by those not kin to the King, or outside his favour. In the old days Vorus had performed a bow, no more, and then Anurman would stride forward and take him by the hand and look him in the eye.

“Great King, here stands General Vorus of the Macht, commander of the city garrison, who served under your blessed father and won high renown at the battles of Carchanis and Qafdir.” The High Chamberlain rolled out the words with a fine, ringing relish, so that all in the hall could hear them. He met Vorus’s eye as he spoke, and the two shared an imperceptible nod. Old Xarnes had been Anurman’s High Chamberlain too, and had a fine sense of loyalty.

“He seeks an audience.”

“I know who he is. He may speak, Xarnes.”

Vorus raised his head. “My lord, I have received a message from the west. It might be better if its content were divulged in a more private setting.”

“We are among our kin here, General, and our friends. You may speak freely.” Ashurnan leaned one elbow on his throne and sat forward with a smile on his face. Taller and paler than his father had been, he had the gold skin of the highest castes, the violet eyes of the nobility. And his father’s smile and easy manner. Vorus stepped forward a pace and lowered his voice.

“Your brother Arkamenes has raised the standard of rebellion against you. He has suborned Governor Gushrun of Artaka, raised an army of Macht, and is leading them east. He left Tanis the better part of a month ago; they will be in Jutha by now. If he is not hindered, he will be before the walls of this city in six weeks. He means to take the throne.”

Ashurnan blinked, the smile freezing upon his face. “How do you know this before I?”

“Your father had me install trustworthy men in most of the major provinces. They reported to me alone, and some still do.”

Ashurnan collected himself with admirable speed, but not before a flicker of the anger shone through. “What of our Royal spies in Artaka? There has been no word of this from them.”

“My lord, they are either dead or have been bought by your brother. It is by the merest chance that we have this information in such a timely fashion. We must begin mustering the Royal Levy at once if we are to meet the traitor in battle.”

The Great King sat back in his throne, his face blank. Only his fingers moved, gripping the arms of the massive, ornate chair until the blood showed blue about his knuckles. “You are quite sure about this, General? You are happy to stake your life on the word of this source of yours?”

Vorus’s voice was harsh as that of an old crow. “Very happy, my lord.” He lifted his head, defying protocol, and looked the king in the eye. “I served your father all my life. I serve his son now with the same measure of devotion. If I am wrong in this, then you may have that life, gladly given.”

Ashurnan held his eyes as one man to another, rank, protocol set aside; he was setting Vorus on the scales of his reckonings, wondering if the son could truly inherit the loyalty that had been freely given to the father. Vorus knew this and stood very still, face set.

“Loyalty must be earned, if it is to be worth anything,” the king said to Vorus. It was as though all others in the hall had disappeared and it was only the pair of them, equals, circling each other’s intentions and memories and wondering how they would dictate the future entanglement of their lives.

“Trust is worth something also, my lord,” Vorus said hoarsely. “Your father taught me that.”

The moment broke. Ashurnan stood up. All down the gleaming length of the hall the talk stilled, and the brilliant creatures of the court bowed deep.

“Xarnes, summon my generals, and some scribes-good ones who write fast and clear. General Vorus, we will adjourn to the ante-room. Your second in the Garrison is Proxis, is it not?”

“Yes, lord.” An old friend, and the only Juthan general in the Empire, Proxis would be drunk by now, it being mid-morning.

“Hand over your command to him. I have other uses for you now. Xarnes! I want runners, and the fastest despatch-riders in the city. Hunt them up. We must make use of our time.”

Robes hissing on the floor, Ashurnan turned on his heel, beckoning them after him with just that abrupt, impatient jerk of his hand that his father had used. Vorus found himself smiling and wondering if there was not some of the old man’s wood in the son after all.

Before noon, the riders began leaving the gates of the city with courier pennants flapping from their spines. These bobbing flags of silk opened up the roadways and sent all other traffic into the ditches as the couriers sped at full, frantic gallop down the good paved roads of Asuria, the heartland of the Empire. They went east, to Arakosia, south to Medis and Kandasar, north to the fastnesses of the Adranos Mountains, and westwards-by far the largest number went westwards. These riders galloped to Hamadan, the king’s summer-capital in the heights of the Magron Mountains, and past that, the Asurian Gates, the narrow series of defiles that led out to the vastness of Pleninash beyond, and the Land of the Rivers with its many cities, lush farmland, and teeming millions of subjects and province governors, each of whom were mighty as kings in their own right. All the messages the couriers carried were the same. Raise your armies and stockpile supplies. The Great King calls you all to war.