Kings of Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

armour, the clasp of a Royal Companion shining on his corded forearm. Asuria’s Kings had met their end in many places, and the palace, even the tranquil gardens, had seen its fair share of treachery and bloodshed down through the centuries. It was the way the world worked, and no man who wore the diadem ever forgot it.
    There were children in the trees also, laughing and chasing one another while the Honai watched on. They flashed in and out of the last light of the sun, as carefree as birds, while their elders lined up to do obeisance to the man who had fathered them. The children were all scions of Ashurnan, their mothers a host of concubines from every satrapy in the empire. They were all brothers and sisters, but did not know it.
     
     
    K URUN WATCHED THEM from behind a tree, these golden, beautiful children, so much taller than him, so carefree. They baffled him. There was no purpose to the way they chased one another through the darkening gardens, flitting like fireflies about the lanterns. What were they at – what purpose did it serve?
    He shrank into deeper shadow as a hulking Honai strode by, the lanternlight setting his armour aflame with reflections and smeared shadows. Kurun could see the shine of his eyes in the dark. It was the sign of the highest castes, like the golden skin and the hawk nose. He could not begin to imagine what all ten thousand of these creatures must look like arrayed for war – it defeated the imagination.
    He began to shrink back the way he had come, fear rising up now to strangle curiosity. He was naked, having left his fine white chiton behind in the palace, his brown skin a better match for the twilit woodland. He had been told to stay by the kitchen platforms, but the haughtiness of the palace staff had been too much for him, and the beauty of the evening had enticed him outside.
    ‘You must be as dumb as a stone, as still as a vase, when you are up there,’ Fat Borr had told him, his face shining with earnestness. ‘A slave in the world above has no feelings, no needs, no loves and no fears.’
    And yet, Kurun was also a boy – one who would soon be a man – and there was in him a spirit which neither his life nor his intellect had yet tamed entirely. He had left his station, knowing it would be hours yet before they began to return the dishes and platters for the descent to the kitchens. He had walked the corridors of the palace as though he belonged to them. He was just one more striped chiton scurrying along the marble, and his anonymity had emboldened him further. The man’s caution had given way to the boy’s curiosity.
    Until he had found himself under the open sky, and for the first time in his memory, had looked up at the stars.
    They had dizzied him, smote him open-mouthed with their beauty, their myriads, swirling in half-guessed shapes and foaming breakers, as though splashed across the black vault of the night sky by the hand of God Himself.
    And against them, the darker shadow of the great cedars and cypresses of the gardens. Kurun had never in his life before seen trees in such numbers, planted in grass, no order to them it seemed – they were not lined in avenues, or placed in pots. They were real, massive, fragrant with resin, alive with the wind. He touched them with something approaching reverence, running his hands down the ancient bark.
    Kurun looked back. The King’s feast went on amid the trees like some magical pageant. There was music now, someone softly strumming an instrument Kurun knew nothing of, singing a song he had never heard. But the melody of it wrenched at his young heart. Tears rose in his eyes. This, then, was heaven – this was how the gods lived. And he could even see the far figure of the Great King himself, seated on his black throne with his white komis thrown low about his beard and smiling – smiling!
    He would have so much to tell when he went back down to the kitchens. He would have such a story. It swelled up in his breast,