Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  Bas knew the emissary had arrived before he could see him from the buzz coming off the south road. Not long after a man on horseback could be seen trotting towards the centre of camp, very conscious of his moment of glory.

  ‘Legatus,’ the emissary said, ‘I return.’

  Bas sheathed his sword, stood and approached the man. ‘What news?’

  ‘Hetman Mykhailo agrees to a meeting. Midway between the camps, in thirty minutes’ time.’

  Bas nodded, dismissed him and returned to the fire. The area had grown crowded with officers waiting to hear the news or just to bask in the glory of their leader.

  ‘What’s the word then, Legatus?’ Hamilcar asked. The Dycian sat cross-legged on the ground, stringing his long, horn-sheathed bow. Hamilcar was tall and dark, dark even by the standards of his nation, with lively eyes that seemed to smile even when his mouth was a grim line. And indeed, his tone suggested that he found the threat of imminent violence a source of amusement. Everything seemed to be a source of amusement to Hamilcar, and though levity was a quality for which Bas had little regard, he found the Dycian’s skill and cleverness nearly made up for it. ‘Are we finally to finish chasing these mule-fuckers?’ Hamilcar said.

  ‘Make sure your people are ready,’ Bas replied.

  Hamilcar lifted one arse-cheek off the ground and let loose a wet fart. The expulsion failed to interrupt the work of his hands. ‘My people are always ready.’

  It had taken three themas five years to subdue the Dycians, a contest that had only ended with the capture and virtual destruction of their capital. Bas himself had been part of the force that had stormed the ramparts, could remember the mad rush as his soldiers had swarmed past the remaining defenders and into the great city itself. In part as a guarantee of their continued loyalty, in part because the Commonwealth always needed more killers, a force of three thousand were pressed into service as auxiliaries. The greater part of these had found themselves fighting on the Marches these last ten years, firing their arrows from beneath Aeleria’s banner. Had Bas been a poet, this reversal of fortune might have offered him some fodder.

  Bas was very much not a poet, though Hamilcar had some pretensions in that regard. He liked to say that his tongue was sharper than his eye, before demonstrating the excellence of the latter with some extraordinary act of marksmanship, bringing down a bird on the wing or piercing a coin at a hundred paces. Hamilcar’s men were less impressive manifestations of the ideal set by their leader, rough-bodied and cruel, good with a long knife and better with a bow; reckless in victory, brave in defeat. Loud, arrogant, dishonest, clever verging on untrustworthy. In short, excellent allies, so long as you kept a boot on their neck.

  Hamilcar finished with his bow, slipped it gently back in the case at his side and took to stuffing his long clay pipe full of tobacco. ‘When you die today, boy,’ he asked Theophilus suddenly, ‘will the Marchers be impressed enough with your bravery to give you a spot on their pyres? Or will they leave your corpse to be picked apart by the winter wolves?’

  ‘I will labour not to dishonour my fathers,’ Theophilus said, young enough for such seriousness to be forgiven.

  ‘Then you think to see battle?’

  ‘The Legatus said to keep my sword sharp.’

  Hamilcar held a small branch in the fire till the tip turned red, then brought it to his pipe. ‘The Legatus can only speak in orders. “Sharpen your sword.” “Ready your people.” When he lies with a woman, his first words are,“Moisten your cunt.”’

  Theophilus turned redder than the kindling. Isaac turned a chuckle into a cough. No one else in the camp, perhaps no one else in the Commonwealth, would have dared to make a joke at Bas’s expense.

  Bas pretended he hadn’t heard the remark. In truth, his temper was not so fierce as was generally believed. He didn’t find Hamilcar amusing, particularly – there was very little indeed that Bas found amusing – but neither was he so consumed by self-importance as to resent the occasional joke.

  ‘If you talked as well as you fought,’ Isaac said, ‘I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of raping your mother in front of your palace.’

  ‘Wasn’t my mother,’ Hamilcar answered, taking a draw from his pipe. ‘Was my grandmother. She hadn’t had a good roll for years, and you Aelerians are energetic, if fundamentally untalented.’

  ‘Remember me to her in your letters,’ Isaac said, taking his leather cap off and holding it to his chest for a moment. ‘She was very tender.’

  Hamilcar laughed, went to continue in that line, but Bas cut him off. ‘Enough,’ he said, standing. ‘Hamilcar, you’re with me. Isaac, the camp is yours.’

  Hamilcar feigned a scowl, tapped out his half-smoked pipe and stood. It was a source of pride that Bas kept him in his counsels despite his foreign birth and former allegiance, that his intellect and ability was respected by the Legatus. In fact, Bas would have preferred to take Isaac, who was more reliable if less brilliant than the Dycian. But in the unlikely event that the Marchers decided to violate the flag of truce, Isaac would be required to lead the hoplitai in revenge of their fallen commander. Or, failing that, maintain a capable fighting retreat.

  Bas grabbed a pair of bodyguards and his personal standard-bearer, and they walked quickly towards the stables. Bas did not count himself much of a horseman, and his opinion contained no weight of false modesty. To be a truly skilled rider requires empathy, the capacity to interpret and alter the moods and feelings of a dumb animal, and this was not a quality that Bas could justly claim. He worked best on two feet, or in the thick of battle where manoeuvre counted for little. Oat was the name of the horse he chose – a silly name, but Oat had been given it long before Bas had owned him and Bas had never cared enough to change it. Oat was a stallion, strong and mean. He obeyed Bas for the simple reason that Bas was stronger and meaner.

  Though his people were little-regarded as riders, Hamilcar was a masterful horseman. It was what he did best, he claimed, after bending a bow and pleasuring a woman, and though Bas couldn’t speak to the last, he had seen the Dycian feather enough men to recognise at least that much of the boast as truth. ‘Shall we die today, then, Legatus?’ Hamilcar asked, boosting himself into the saddle. ‘Will Mykhailo do the wise thing, as my people should have done, and kill you as soon as he sees you?’

  ‘If they kill me they’ll kill you the same.’

  ‘I’d die happy, knowing that Aeleria has lost the tip of her spear.’ Hamilcar had been a servant of the Commonwealth for ten years, had signed up for a second term after his first had expired. In all that time he had never returned to Dycia, though he claimed three wives and a passel of lovers still wept his name into the night. Hamilcar would die in a foreign land, the victim of some quarrel in which he had no particular interest. He was as much a soldier now as Isaac; the talk was just posturing, and posturing was how he handled his nerves.

  Everyone had a way, and Bas had seen most of them. Some yelled, some boasted, some prayed. Isaac was steady as a stone in the thick of things, but as soon as it was over he’d find the nearest flask and drink himself into oblivion. Jon the Sanguine, who had taught Bas everything he knew of war, used to piss himself before a hard scrap, a bloom of yellow spreading out through the crotch of his trousers – but despite the odour his orders were unfailingly correct, and in those few instances when his own life had been in danger he had fought like a man possessed, laughing and cutting flesh like spring flowers.

  Bas put spurs to his beast by way of answer, and Hamilcar and the bodyguards followed after him. Down the south road leading out of camp, through the open gate and into the plains beyond. It was late summer and the March was striking if not quite beautiful, the grass high enough to hide a troop of soldiers, the land so flat that it extended out into the horizon, a sea of blue meeting with a sea of green.

  Bas of course thought little of it, his attention taken up with the horde of men occupying the field some few cables distant. They seemed very large, as hordes of men tend
to. The Marchers’ camp looked haphazard by the elaborate standards of the Aelerians, but Bas knew that impression to be a false one. This was not a mass of raiders and bandits, brought together by the promise of booty. The confederation that lay across from him represented an extraordinary accomplishment of diplomacy, hundreds of man-hours spent by the counsel fires trying to convince a warlike people to put aside centuries of enmity, to forget their traditional freedoms and swear obedience to a single leader. That it existed at all was testament to the degree to which the Commonwealth was hated.

  It was twenty minutes before Hamilcar made out the Hetman and his lifeguard riding out from the vast horde, and another five before Bas could do the same. Mykhailo had been a leader of the Marchers for thirty years, and a year to the plainsfolk meant six months shivering in their tents and six months making war on their neighbours. They had no notion of power as a hereditary gift, nor as an obligation. Success was what they honoured, the only acceptable currency – success in raids against the Aelerians and against their fellow barbarians, success that could only be achieved with a strong arm and a sharp eye. Mykhailo possessed all of these qualities in abundance, had demonstrated them for decades in an arena as brutal as could be found.

  He was smaller than his reputation might have suggested, and age hung over him like a mantle. His face was strained as old leather, his eyes grey and small, his hair bone-white, hip-long and pulled back in a gaudy silver clasp. But his body was perfectly erect in the saddle, and his war lance equally steady, and he greeted his enemy without a tremor. ‘Hail Bas, Killer of Gods. May death pass over you another day.’

  It was what the Marchers called him. Even two thousand cables distant, among a people who had never seen an Other, Bas’s great act of murder had elevated him above the common rung of men. ‘Hail Mykhailo, son of Bohdan, who rode between the raindrops. May fate view your enemies with displeasure.’

  Mykhailo had brought with him a half-dozen of his riders, young men, tall and fierce-looking, each mounted on a shaggy pony and carrying a steel weapon. ‘Are you so sure you wish that, God-Killer? For my enemies to meet with misfortune?’ He spoke Aelerian confidently, though with a harsh accent.

  ‘We aren’t yet enemies, Hetman. There’s still time to avoid bloodshed.’ But Bas knew better even as he said it. If Mykhailo had wanted peace, if this had been a show of force to sell a few more years of tranquillity for golden trinkets and Commonwealth-forged steel, he would have brought with him a yurt, one of the small horsehide tents that could be set up and taken down within the span of a few minutes. And they would have sat beneath it and drank the fermented mare’s milk that the barbarians loved more than wine, and paid each other elaborate compliments, and the Legatus would promise the Hetman trade goods and coin, and the Hetman would promise not to kill anyone for a while, or at least not to kill any Aelerians.

  Bas knew when Mykhailo didn’t get off his horse that there was no chance of averting the coming battle. He had known before that, really, but he was sure then.

  ‘Why do I find the son of Bohdan here, on territory the people long ago granted to the children of Aeleria?’ Bas asked.

  Mykhailo turned his head to one side and coughed over his shoulder. ‘Who made you this grant? Mykhailo, who comes with the setting sun?’

  ‘With the great Chief Longinus, whose banner you rode beneath.’

  ‘Rode beneath for one summer, five years ago. I swore no oath to that flea-ridden cripple. He is no kin of mine, not by birth, nor suckling. If he is happy eating Aelerian bread, that is his burden to take to the ancestors. I am not content, and I have made no such promises. Better to ask the God-Killer what it is that brings him so far from his home, and his hearth?’

  ‘Aeleria is wherever its people are. And wherever its people were. We’ve come east from Eilweid. The Commonwealth has seen the bodies of her citizens in half a dozen freeholds all the way up from the mouth of the Pau. The bodies and what were done to them.’

  ‘The bodies of invaders, of trespassers well-warned.’

  ‘Do invading armies bring with them their women and children?’

  ‘Your kind do. They bring their families and they fence in the grass, and they build their foolish wooden houses that freeze in the winter and burn as soon as a torch is put to them. And then they come screaming to the God-Killer to save them from their own foolishness. Does it ever bother you, being the running dog of halfwits too weak to protect their own seed?’

  Mykhailo was a fine speaker, even in his second tongue. Most of the plainsfolk were – the leaders anyway, skills honed over long winter fires in the communal yurts, telling jokes and false stories of their accomplishments. Bas wasn’t a good speaker, had never wanted or tried to be so. ‘I won’t argue the rights and wrongs of it with you, Hetman. This is not the first time we’ve stood across from each other. I need not boast of the strength of my themas – you’ve watched your riders break against them more than once.’

  Mykhailo smiled, brown-toothed but honest. ‘Do I look so young as to bend knee for a few more years beneath the sky?’

  ‘And your men? Are there none among them who would prefer life to death?’ Bas pointed almost unconsciously to one of Mykhailo’s bodyguards, a hulking brute who became furious at being singled out. He shook his lance and said something unfriendly to the Hetman. Mykhailo responded in his native tongue, too swiftly for Bas to make out, though he recognised the tone, each word like a lash. And indeed the bodyguard fell silent and turned his eyes away to hide his shame.

  The conflict averted, or more accurately postponed, Mykhailo took a long time before answering. ‘Better an honest death in battle than a dotage as protectorates of Aeleria. When first you came here, God-Killer, we rode free from the Salt Flats to the Pau River, and never saw a yurt or a cow that was not ours. Now the dark-skinned children of Aeleria plant wheat on the graves of my fathers, tell me where to ride and whom to kill. Your hunger is never-ending. You speak of peace, but what peace can be made with fire?’ Mykhailo fell into a long coughing jag, spat a hunk of yellow into the wind. ‘Enough, God-Killer – between us there is nothing but war. I will die this morning, or you will.’

  Mykhailo had intended this to be the last word, was turning his pony back the way he had come when Bas reached out and grabbed his forearm. ‘Think hard before refusing. If you find victory today you will not have long to enjoy it – by spring Aeleria will have sent another army to avenge me, and a third if that proves insufficient. And on the day that fortune turns against you, they will plant stakes from here to the wastes, and spike your men atop them, and sell your womenfolk into bondage. And there will be no one to remember your glory beside the fires, or carry your name onward. We do not make war for glory, or for captives.’ Bas spread his free hand out over the empty plains around them. ‘Aeleria will till these fields. If not this year, then the next.’

  ‘I know how your kind make war,’ Mykhailo said, tearing his arm away from Bas. A spark of fury uncoiled itself from the Hetman’s soul and spread up into his eyes. Hamilcar shifted his hand to the hilt of the sabre that hung down his saddle, and a second later Bas’s small lifeguard did the same.

  But the Hetman’s rage ended suddenly, becoming a drawn-out cough, followed by the hint of a smile. ‘And there are no other men like you, God-Killer. You should have been born one of us. We would have had fine roaming together. If you die today, I will build a pyre six spans wide to send you on your way, and burn a dozen hoplitai alive on top of it, that you will not enter the next world unattended.’

  As many men as he had sent to it, Bas had never spent much time thinking about the afterlife. Whether he would sit at the feet of Enkedri the Self-Formed as his native priests insisted; or ride endlessly across the skies, as the Marchers believed; or if he would sleep cold and ignorant beneath the unfeeling loam, Bas neither knew nor cared. If Mykhailo died today, Bas could offer the man no gallantries. He would go in the mass ditch the themas dug for all their enemies, to join his fellows in pe
rpetual and unmourned anonymity. It was the custom of the Commonwealth, and Bas was not one to buck tradition.

  ‘Then it seems the affair is settled,’ Bas said.

  ‘Not yet. But very soon, God-Killer. Very soon.’ He turned on his nag and rode off. His followers did the same.

  ‘What do you think?’ Bas asked Hamilcar quietly, after their enemies had ranged out of earshot.

  Hamilcar scratched black fingernails through a black beard. ‘I think the ravens won’t go hungry.’

  ‘They rarely do.’

  ‘I think that cough of the Hetman’s will kill him before spring, and I think he knows it. I think the one next to him would have liked to try you right then, to test his strength against that of the God-Killer, to make his name atop your corpse. I think there are fifty thousand men on their side of the field that would like to do the same, and barely twenty on yours to keep them from doing so. I think their cavalry will come along your right flank sometime after noon, and I think they will come hard, very hard indeed. So the question is a simple one – will your line hold?’

  ‘It held against you,’ Bas answered, turning his horse and heading back to camp.

  2

  Domina Eudokia Sabina Aurelia, Revered Mother by the order of the Senate, awoke shortly after dawn, promptly and without preamble. Eudokia considered it a matter of pride that she never overslept, never stalled beneath the blankets, never spent an extra few moments ensconced in warmth. She had given five hours to repose and would allow not a moment more – there was simply too much to do.

  On the other side of the cot, bunched in covers and drooling slightly, Heraclius moaned softly. Eudokia waited for him to return to slumber, not wanting to endure the sexual overture he would initiate on awaking, too busy to spare half an hour for pleasure. After a moment he pulled the blankets back up to his neck and returned to snoring. Eudokia slipped on the robe that hung above her bed and left.