Kings of Morning (2 page)

H
EART OF
E
MPIRE

ONE

M
ONTH OF
F
ROGS

I
MPERIAL
A
SHUR, GREATEST
city of the world. The last of the spring breezes which swept cool and blue from the Magron Mountains to the west had sunk into the drying earth of the vast Oskus valley. Now the first true heat of summer was upon the city, and the sun glinted in painful brilliance off the polished gold tiles plating the ziggurat of Bel.

The dust was rising in the streets, and the striped canopies of traders and merchants were lowered against the growing heat of the year. Mot and Bel had finished their struggle for one more season; the rains had come and gone, the glittering grid of irrigation channels that spangled the earth for pasangs all around the tall city walls were gurgling and alive with frogs, which the local farmers brought into the city in baskets, as a seasonal delicacy. In old Kefren, this month had once been known as
Osh-ko-ribhu
; the Time to Eat Frogs.

Kurun bit into his with relish, tearing the delicate meat off the skewer with teeth as small and white as a cat’s. He had a face like a cat too, all pointed chin and large eyes, and a small snub nose which was considered ugly by the high-caste Kefren, who preferred something more beak-like to enhance their long, golden faces. Kurun was a
hufsan
from the Magron Mountains, a small, wiry youth with the dark skin and eyes of his people, and black hair which, when it was not oiled, stood up straight and thick on his head like the pelt of a cat in a thunderstorm. He had a winning smile, and the man with the skewered frogs knew him well, and would not take his money, but stood tending his charcoal and listened as Kurun told him news from the High City, the words tripping out of his mouth between mouthfuls.

‘And Auroc, the Kitchen-Master, he says that the Couch-Chamberlain has told him already to make preparations for the move to Hamadan. They have the Tithemen on the roads as I speak, Goruz, and are bringing in half the imperial herd from Bokosa. Twenty thousand cattle, Auroc said, and he is worried that the new grass is not yet high enough to keep them in flesh all the way to Hamadan.’

‘Twenty thousand cattle,’ the frog-seller said, shaking his grizzled head. ‘At this time of year they will strip the land of every growing blade and ear. It will hurt the valley farmers.’

Kurun wiped his mouth. ‘The Lord wants the roads clear before high summer – so they say in the Palace. I can’t think why. Didn’t the army already leave months ago?’

‘Perhaps they want another army gathered,’ Goruz said with a shrug.

‘What need of another army? Surely one is enough.’

‘I was at Kunaksa, Kurun, one of the city levy. I saw our left wing, thirty thousand strong, blown away like straw in the wind when those monsters crashed into them. They are demons – who is to say that they did not do the same to the army that left for the west?’

Kurun frowned. ‘That is a story, Goruz, put out to frighten the common folk. Everyone knows that the demons from across the sea were destroyed by our Lord, chased back across the mountains and broken into pieces. He sent their heads to every corner of the Empire.’

Goruz shrugged again, the resigned shrug of the misbelieved poor. ‘I know what I saw. It was near thirty years ago, but I do not forget that day. I remember it better than any day before or since – that is what war is like. The memory of it stays clear and cold in a man’s mind.’

Kurun handed the old man back the hardwood skewer and tossed a tiny thigh-bone into the street. ‘Well, whatever happens, Goruz, at least the frogs are good this year.’

‘They are, at that, as plump and fine as I’ve seen them, Bel be praised. Are you back to the High City now, Kurun?’

‘Where else?’ The boy flashed a white grin. ‘There is an audience this afternoon, Goruz. There are couriers due in from the Middle Empire. If I can wriggle my way to the platforms I’ll have more news for you, by and by.’

‘Mind you your station, boy – that skinny back of yours was not made to take a whipping!’ Goruz called. But Kurun was already gone, darting through the crowded street like a minnow flashing between stones in a brown river.

He wore the purple stripe of the imperial household on his chiton, and tattooed on his shoulder was the stylised horse head that was the Great King’s mark. He belonged to the man who owned everything. He was a creature of the High City, as the Palace ziggurat was called by those below. He knew the back ways up to the heights, the dark entrances which led to the bowels of the Palace wherein toiled legions of slaves from every race in the world. The ziggurat was more ancient than Ashur itself, a man-made tell as large as one of nature’s mountains, a city within a city whose inhabitants numbered in the tens of thousands, slave and free, high and low.

Kurun had been born among the real mountains that lined the rim of the world far to the west, but he no longer had any memory of them. When the poor folk of the Magron could not pay the Imperial Tithemen on their yearly visit, they gave up their children to them instead, and these were brought to Ashur by the thousand every year, slaves of the King, to be reared in his service and then disposed of as he saw fit. They worked his fields, carried his burdens, serviced the carnal needs of his soldiers and officials, and generally oiled the workings of the teeming metropolis that was ancient Ashur, mistress of the world. It was the way it had been in all of history and memory. It was the way it would always be.

Kurun had been lucky, gifted almost straight away to the Household, his owner the Kitchen-Master of the Court itself. His earliest real memory was of turning a spit above a charcoal grill, his tears sizzling as they dripped upon the coals. Before that there was only a hazy impression of cold air, bright blue skies, and the blaze of sunlight on snow. He had never seen snow since, except on clear autumn days when one could make out the white-tipped peaks of his homeland glimmering on the horizon. When the Great King moved his court to Hamadan to escape the heat of the summer lowlands, Kurun had always been left behind, no matter how hard he tried to insinuate himself with his master. He was a
hufsan
slave, and there were thousands like him in the uplands of Hamadan.

He picked his way through the crowds with unfocused ease. The Oskus valley produced two harvests a year, and some of the more adept farmers of the floodplains were already in the city with their wares, stealing a march on their fellows with cartloads of rice, the first corn, pomegranates, and palm hearts. The dust was already thickening underfoot, and an inkling of the summer reek had begun to rise from the vaulted sewers that gurgled in every street. In the poorer sections, these were little more than brick-lined ditches; closer to the ziggurats, and they were massive underground tunnels which Goruz said a wagon could be driven through.

Kurun stopped to inhale the fragrance of a bunch of purple irises from a flower-stand. They grew like weeds across the Oskus valley, lining the irrigation ditches in bright borders. Here in the city, almost every house had bunches of them in earthenware jars to sweeten the air. The smell was as much a harbinger of summer as the stink of the sewers.

The city opened out before him as he entered the wide expanse of the
Huruma
, the Sacred Way, a massive thoroughfare some half a pasang wide which linked the Fane of Bel to the Palace. It ran through the city with the precision of a knife-cut, and was loud with the sound of running water, the air full of the spray of fountains. Here, the famed processions of history were held; Great Kings rode along it to be crowned on the summit of the Fane, and conquering satraps led parades. The Priests themselves blessed the fountains every year in a haze of incense, accompanied by the singing of the people and the tolling of ancient bronze bells. Folk travelled from all over the Empire to stand here, to look up at the ziggurat of Bel and that of the Great King, to dip their hands in the holy water and fill a flask which they would take back home to sprinkle on their fields and thus gain the blessings of the highest priests of the earth. The breath of God Himself, it was said, was in the waters of the Huruma, and Kurun paused, as he always did, to brush the surface of one of the pools and touch the cool liquid to his forehead. The water was too sacred to be drunk; it was even used to anoint the head of the Great King on the day he was crowned. Only he was allowed to sip it, thus ingesting the Breath of God, and rendering himself holy and inviolate, one touched by the Creator Himself.

Kurun felt a tug at the hem of his chiton, and looked down to see a dark, bright-eyed face, a shock of hair ragged as a cow’s tail. ‘Kurun! Bel kiss you and bless you!’

Kurun seized the child by the shoulder and hauled it to one side, into the shadow of an awning. ‘You can’t be on the Huruma, Usti. Don’t you know anything? The waterwardens will cane you all the way to the gates.’

‘I wanted a touch of the water, for luck.’

‘A
nomoi
isn’t allowed.’

‘Who’s to notice?’

‘They always notice, Usti.’ Kurun relented, loosening his grasp on the child’s stick-thin arm. He thumbed the moist patch that remained on his own forehead and touched the filthy little face. ‘There – I have given you my blessing from the water. Bel keep you.’

A grin, showing brown, gapped teeth. ‘A blessing from you, Kurun, is worth more than money.’

‘No it isn’t. Don’t try that with me,’ Kurun warned the urchin. ‘And keep your hand by your side. You’ve none to spare anymore.’

The child lifted up one arm, and the threadbare sleeve fell back to reveal a gnarled stump of flesh. ‘This is my life, Kurun. I eat like a Priest this time of year; the farmers toss me all manner of things from their carts in pity at the sight of it. I will be fat before midsummer!’

‘The farmers are kind-hearted fools,’ Kurun said, with the condescension of the city-dweller. But he smiled, and dug into the folds of his sash. A copper obol flashed in the light, new-minted and barely tinged with green. The child’s jaw dropped.

‘Take this, and stay off the Sacred Way.’

He dropped the coin into Usti’s palm, and the child clamped its fingers around it until the bones showed white through the dirt.

‘You bless me twice today, Kurun. I shall buy a green frog and sacrifice it for you at the Garden Gate.’

‘Don’t be sacrificing frogs; buy a skewer of them off Goruz instead, while they’re still to be had.’

The child backed away, eyes shining. ‘My brothers will eat meat today, Kurun – we will sing a holy song for you at the –’

‘Yes, yes – now get yourself lost before the waterwardens catch a whiff of you.’

In a twinkling, Usti was gone, as a mouse will vanish in sudden light. Kurun stood in the shade of the awning, the people here barely glancing at his purple stripe. His young face creased with momentary sadness. Then he shook his head, and yawned, and carried on his way to the looming ziggurat of the King.

T
HE
K
ING'S
S
TEPS
soared up, a stairway to the sky. They were for the high caste, civil servants, diplomats, men high in the King’s service. And they called for fit men, because there were three thousand steps, each wide as a ledge. The Great King rode his horse to the summit of the ziggurat, but for everyone else the climb had to be made on foot.

At their base the Royal Honai stood, like golden statues resplendent in polished bronze, with silver pomegranates on the butts of their spears. There were ten thousand of these tall Kefren, the finest soldiers in the Empire, the bodyguard of the Lord himself. A great army had been sent west the winter before, but the Honai had stayed behind, and the King with them. Whatever war was flickering out at the borders of the Empire was not considered important enough to warrant his personal attention. And why should it? This was the world that all people knew, and had always known. There was not a generation living that had contemplated anything else.

The Steps were not for the likes of Kurun. He padded quickly through the serried manifold maze of alleyways and mud-brick streets that congregated along the base of the High City like the breakers of a brilliantly coloured sea. In this babel of shouting, haggling, gesticulation and barter, the small merchants and traders of the city traditionally had their stalls, their carts, their shops and lean-tos. They sold small animals for sacrifice, sweet incense, flowers, bolts of cloth to be draped and cut upon the wearer in the street, sandals of plaited reeds, trinkets of every base metal and some precious ones, bright pebbles from the river polished to brilliance, and cuttings touted as sprigs from the gardens of the Great King himself.