As commander of the garrison it was within his power to assign soldiers as escorts to private parties. Merchants, usually, crossing the border with their goods in a time of peace. Peacetime didn’t mean the roads were safe, of course. Normally the mercantile parties would pay for their military escort, but not invariably. Sometimes a commander had his own reasons for sending soldiers across the border. It gave restless men something to do, tested new soldiers, allowed a separation of those showing the tensions of being too much together for too long. He’d sent Nishik with the doctor, hadn’t he?
The garrison commander of Kerakek didn’t know— there was no reason for him to know—the arrangements proposed for the younger wife and daughter. If he had, he might not have done what he did.
Instead, he made a decision. Reversed a decision, actually. Swiftly, precise now, befitting his rank. Made a choice that might have been considered by any detached observer to be folly on a grand scale. As he spoke, both women began to cry. The boy did not. The boy went away. They heard him a little later in his father’s treatment rooms.
‘Perun guard us. He’s packing things,’ the younger mother said, still weeping.
The folly of Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, resulted, at the end of that same week, in two women, two children, a garrison commander (that was the point, after all, and his second-in-command could use the experience of a period in control), and three chosen soldiers setting off on the dusty, wind-swept road towards the border of Amoria, bound for Sarantium.
AS IT HAPPENED, Rustem the physician, oblivious as all travellers must be to events behind them, was still in Sarnica on the day his family set out after him. He was buying manuscripts, giving lectures, would not leave that city for another week. They weren’t, in fact, very far behind him.
The plan was for the four soldiers to escort the women and children and do some inconspicuous observing of their own as they went west and north through Amoria. The physician would have to deal with his family when they reached him. It would be his task to get them all to Kabadh when the time came. And it would be the women’s problem to explain their sudden presence to him. It might be amusing to see that first encounter, Vinaszh thought, riding west along the road. It was curious how much better he’d felt the moment he made the decision to leave Kerakek. The doctor’s women, the child, this request—they had been a gift of sorts, he decided.
He and his three men would simply go north with this small party and turn around, but the journey, even a winter journey, would be so much better than lingering in the sand and wind and emptiness. A man needed to do something when the days darkened early and his thoughts did the same.
He would send a written report to Kabadh when they returned, containing whatever observations they had made. The journey could be couched, described, represented as something routine. Almost. He would decide later whether to mention the boy. There was no hurry with that. For one thing, the fact that such people existed didn’t mean this child, Shaghir, son of Rustem, was one of them. Vinaszh had yet to be persuaded of that. Of course, if the child wasn’t what his mother thought he was, then they were all making an absurd winter journey simply because a small boy missed his father and was having bad dreams because of it. Best not, for the moment, to think about that, Vinaszh decided.
That proved easy enough. The energy of travel, of the road woke dormant feelings in the commander. Some feared the open spaces, the rigours of travelling. He wasn’t one of them. Setting out on a day so mild it seemed a blessing of Perun and the Lady upon the journey, Vinaszh was happy.
Shaski was very happy.
Only as they approached Sarantium, some time later, would his mood change. Never a talkative child, he’d been in the habit of singing sometimes to himself as they went along or to calm his infant sister at night. The singing stopped about a week north of Sarnica. And shortly after that the boy grew entirely silent, looking pale and unwell, though voicing no complaint. A few days later they would finally reach Deapolis on the southern bank of the famous strait and see black smoke across the water, and flames.
In Kabadh, in his glorious palace above the gardens that hung as if by miracle down along the slope to the lowest riverbed, with contrived waterfalls running through and behind the flowers, and trees growing upside-down, Shirvan the Great, King of Kings, Brother to the Sun and Moons, lay with one wife or another that winter or with favoured concubines, and his sleep was disturbed and restless, despite drinks and powders administered to him by his physicians and priestly incantations at head and foot of his bed before he retired for the night.
This had been going on for some time.
Every night, in fact, since his return from the south, where he had almost died. It was said quietly—though never in the presence of the Great King himself—that dark dreams before dawn were not infrequently an aftermath of great peril survived, a lingering awareness of a near visitation from Azal the Enemy, the touch of black wings.
One morning, however, Shirvan awoke and sat straight up in his bed, barechested, the mark of a fresh wound still red at his collarbone. His eyes fixed on something invisible in the air, he spoke two sentences aloud. The young bride beside him sprang from the bed and knelt, trembling, on the richly textured carpet, naked as when she had entered the world of Perun and Azal’s undying conflict.
The two men honoured with places in the king’s bedchamber at night, even when he bedded a woman, also knelt, averting their eyes from the shapely nakedness of the girl on the carpet. They’d learned to ignore such sights, and to keep silent about what else they saw and heard. Or, most of what they saw and heard.
The eyes of the King of Kings had been like cold iron that morning, one of them was later to say admiringly: hard and deadly as a sword of judgement. His voice was that of the judge who weighs the lives of men when they die. It was considered acceptable to report this.
The words Shirvan spoke, and was to say again when his hastily summoned advisers met him in the adjacent room, were: ‘It is not to be allowed. We will go to war.’
IT IS OFTEN THE CASE that a decision avoided, wrestled with, provoking intense anxiety and disturbed nights, seems obvious once made. One looks back in bemusement and consternation at the long hesitation, wondering what could possibly have deferred a resolution so transparent, so evident.
It was so with the King of Kings that morning, though his advisers, not sharing his winter dreams, required matters to be put in language they understood. It was possible, of course, to simply tell them what to do without explaining, but Shirvan had reigned a long time now and knew that most men did better when they grasped certain ideas for themselves.
There were two facts, really, that compelled a war, and a third element that meant they had to do it themselves.
One: the Sarantines were building ships. Many ships. Traders to the west and spies (often the same men) had been reporting this since the beginning of autumn. The shipyards of Sarantium and Deapolis were resounding with the sounds of hammers and saws. Shirvan had heard this hammering in the darkness of his nights.
Two: the queen of the Antae was in Sarantium. A living tool in the hand of Valerius. A different kind of hammer. How the Emperor had achieved this (and Perun knew Shirvan respected the other ruler as much as he hated him) no one had been able to say, but she was there.
These things, taken together, spelled out an invasion of the west for any man who knew how to read such signs. Who could now fail to see that the vast sums of gold Valerius had paid—two instalments now—into Bassania’s coffers were designed to keep the eastern border quiescent while he sent his army west?
Shirvan had taken the money, of course. Had signed and sealed the Eternal Peace, as they named it. He had his own border problems, north and east, and his own difficulties paying a restive army. What ruler did not?
But the King of Kings needed no dream-reader now to unveil for him the meaning of his nights. The charlatans might have tried to tell him the sounds of hammering, the images of fire and the rest
lessness flowed from the arrow wound and the poison in his neck. He knew better.
The poison that mattered had not been on his son’s arrow, but was lying in wait: the venom lay in how much power Sarantium would have if Batiara fell into its grasp. And it might. It could. For the longest time he had almost wanted the Sarantines to go west, believing they would never succeed. He didn’t think that any more.
The lost homeland of the Empire was fertile and wealthy—why else had the Antae tribes moved down there in the first place? If the golden Strategos, hated Leontes, could add that richness to Valerius’s treasury, give him wealth and security in the west, no troops tied down in Sauradia, then . . .
Then how much more beleaguered would anyone sitting on the throne in Kabadh feel?
It could not be allowed to unfold in that way. There was poison in all of this, deadly and absolute.
Some in that room might have hoped, wistfully, that a portion of the Sarantine money, if diverted to Moskav, could pay for a summer of unrest in the north, forcing
Valerius to keep a part of his army back, undermining his invasion.
An idle thought, no more than that. The fur-clad barbarians of Moskav could as easily take the offered money and sweep down upon Mihrbor’s wooden walls, within Bassania itself. They attacked when they were bored, where they chose, as they smelled weakness. There was no sense of honour, of proper conduct among those savage northerners, so sure of their safety in their wild, vast land. A bribe, an agreement would mean nothing to them.
No, if Valerius were to be impeded, they would have to do it themselves. Shirvan felt no compunction at all. No ruler who truly loved and guarded his country could be expected to be stopped in this resolve by something so trivial as a treaty of Eternal Peace.
Once a decision was made, Shirvan of Bassania was not the sort to waste time pondering such nuances.
An excuse would be created, some concocted incursion along the northern border. A Sarantine border raid from Asen. They could kill a few of their own priestly caste, burn a small temple, say the westerners had done so, breaching the sworn peace. It was the usual thing.
Asen, which had been burned and looted and bartered back and forth half a dozen times, would be the obvious target again. But there was more in Shirvan’s thought, there was something new this time.
‘Go farther west,’ the King of Kings said to his generals, in his deep, cold voice, looking at Robazes first and then the others. ‘Asen is nothing. A coin for exchanging. You must force Valerius to send an army. And so you will go to Eubulus itself this time, starve and batter it. And bring me back the wealth that lies within those walls.’
There was a silence. There was always silence when the King of Kings was speaking, but this was different. In all their wars with Valerius and his uncle before him and Apius before him, Eubulus had never been taken or even besieged. Neither had their own great northern city of Mihrbor. The battles between Sarantium and Bassania had been entirely about gold. Border raids to north and south for plunder, ransom, money for the treasuries on each side, payment for the armies. Conquest, the sack of major cities, had never been an issue.
Shirvan looked from one of his generals to another. He knew he was forcing them to change the way they thought—always a risk with soldiers. He saw Robazes, as expected, grasp the implications first.
He said, ‘Remember, if they are going to Batiara, Leontes will be in the west. He will not be at Eubulus to face you. And if we draw enough soldiers from his army of invasion because they must go north to meet you instead, he will fail in the west. He may . . . die.’ He said that last very slowly, giving it time to register. They needed to understand this.
Leontes would be west. Their scourge. The too-bright image of terror in their dreams, golden as the sun the Sarantines worshipped. The military commanders of Bassania looked at each other. Fear and excitement were in the room now, a slow dawning of comprehension, first awareness of possibility.
Awareness also came, after, of certain other things. How this breaking of the peace would put those Bassanids in western lands—merchants, most of them, a handful of others—desperately at risk. But that always happened when a war began, and there weren’t so many in any case. Such considerations could not be permitted to alter anything. Merchants always knew there were risks in going west (or east, for that matter, into Ispahani). That was why they charged so much for what they brought back, how they made their fortunes.
As Shirvan gestured his dismissal and the gathering made obeisance and began to break up, one other man did venture to speak: Mazendar the vizier, who was always licensed to do so in the presence of his king. A small, round man, his voice light and dry as the king’s was grave and deep, he offered two small suggestions.
The first was about timing. ‘Great King, did you propose we attack before they sail west?’
Shirvan narrowed his eyes. ‘That is one possibility,’ he said carefully. And waited.
‘Indeed, my dread lord,’ Mazendar murmured. ‘I see a glimmer of your mighty thoughts. We can do that, or wait until they have set off for the west and then cross the border for Eubulus. Leontes will be pursued by fast ships with panic-stricken tidings. He may be ordered to send some of his fleet home. The remainder will feel exposed and disheartened. Or he may press on, always fearing what we do behind him. And Sarantium will feel utterly exposed. Does the King of Kings prefer that, or the other approach? His advisers await the light of his wisdom.’
Mazendar was the only one of them worth listening to. Robazes could fight, and lead an army, but Mazendar had a mind. Shirvan said, gravely, ‘It will take us some time to assemble our army north. We will attend upon events in the west and make our decision accordingly.’
‘How large an army, my lord?’ Robazes asked the soldier’s question. He blinked in astonishment when Shirvan gave him a number. They had never sent so many men before.
Shirvan kept his expression grim and hard. People should see the countenance of the King of Kings and remember it and report it. Valerius of Sarantium was not the only ruler who could send large armies into the world. The king looked back at Mazendar. He had spoken of two suggestions.
The second concerned the queen of the Antae, in Sarantium.
Listening, the king nodded his head slowly. Was graciously pleased to agree that this proposal had virtue. Gave his consent.
Men went forth from that room. Events began to move at speed. The first signal fires were lit at darkfall that same day, sending messages of flame from hilltop to fortress tower to hilltop beyond, in all necessary directions.
The King of Kings spent much of the day with Mazendar and Robazes and the lesser generals and his treasury officials, and the afternoon in prayer before the palace’s ember of the Holy Fire. At the dinner hour, he felt unwell, feverish. He spoke of this to no one, of course, but reclining upon a couch to dine he suddenly remembered—belatedly—the unexpectedly competent physician who was to be coming to Kabadh in the summer. He’d ordered the man to Sarantium in the interval, until after his necessary elevation in caste. He’d been an observing sort of man; the king had sought a way to utilize him. Kings needed to do that. Useful men had to be put to use.
Shirvan sipped at a bowl of green tea and then shook his head. The movement made him feel dizzy and so he stopped. That doctor would have left for the west already. For Sarantium itself. An unfortunate place to have him now.
It couldn’t be helped. A ruler’s own health and comfort surely had to give way to the needs of his people. There were burdens that came with royalty, and the King of Kings knew them all. One’s personal concerns had to yield at certain times. Besides which, there simply had to be more than one effective doctor in Bassania. He resolved to have Mazendar initiate a proper search . . . it was not something he’d ever done, in fact.
But one grew older, good health became less sure. Azal hovered with black wings. Perun and the Lady waited for all men in judgement. One didn’t have to . . . rush to them beforetimes, how
ever.
A thought came to him as the dinner ended and he retired to his private quarters. His head was still hurting. Nevertheless, he sent for Mazendar. The vizier appeared almost immediately. It seemed to Shirvan at times that the man lived his life poised on the other side of a door, so swift was he always to appear.
The king recollected to his vizier the thought Mazendar had voiced in the morning, about the Antae queen. Then he reminded him of that physician from the south who was in Sarantium, or would be soon enough. He’d forgotten the man’s name. It didn’t matter; Mazendar would know it. The vizier, by a very great deal the quickest of those around him, smiled slowly and stroked his small beard.
‘The king is truly brother to the lords of creation,’ he said. ‘The king’s eyes are as the eagle’s eyes and his thoughts are deep as the sea. I shall act upon this, at speed.’
Shirvan nodded, then rubbed at his forehead and finally had his physicians summoned. He didn’t trust any of them very much, having had the three deemed best killed in Kerakek for their own failings, but surely those here at court were adequate to preparing a concoction of some kind that could ease this pain in his head and help him sleep.
They were, in fact. The King of Kings did not dream that night, for the first time in a long while.
CHAPTER VIII
In winter in Sarantium, when the enormous bulk of the Hippodrome stood quiet, the faction rivalry shifted to the theatres. The dancers, actors, jugglers, clowns vied in performance and the faction members in their assigned sections would produce acclamations (or loud denunciations) of an increasingly sophisticated nature. The rehearsals involved in achieving these spontaneous demonstrations could be quite demanding. If you knew how to follow directions, were willing to spend much of your free time practising, and had an acceptable voice, you could earn yourself a good spot for performances and privileged admission to the faction banquets and other events. There was no shortage of applicants.