Kings of Morning Read Free Page B

ziggurat. It held the various levels together, and was the one concourse wide enough for vehicles which ran through every height of the immense structure. Many pasangs long, it was also meticulously maintained by gangs of road-slaves who cleared the detritus of passage day and night, and overseers who saw to it that traffic went smoothly.
    When there were heavy crowds on the Silima, one could stand on a stone floor in the kitchens of the upper city far above, and feel the entire tell vibrate minutely under one’s feet, like some gargantuan organism, a great animal whose insides were swarming with minute parasites.
     
     
    T HE KITCHEN LEVELS were close to the top of the ziggurat. Here, the shafts opening out on the sunlit sides of the tell made the wide pillared chambers within seem dazzlingly bright after the sweating lamplight of the Slave-City. There were pullied platforms upon which entire banquets were hoisted up to the summit above, cold rooms stacked high with ice brought all the way from the Magron, corridors lined with wine-jars a man could drown in, and cages of live birds singing their hearts out in the patchworked sunlight, heedless of the filleter’s block that stood beside them.
    Every possible foodstuff from across the Empire was represented here, when it was in season. Currently, woven baskets stood everywhere alive with the croaking of frogs, and such was the glut that the cooks paid no mind to thieving spit-turners who would snatch one from above the coals when they thought they were unobserved. Kurun had once been one of these grimy youngsters, and he remembered well the unending work, day and night, the furtive snatched meals, the fights, the rancid loincloths which were their only clothing, and the wit-stretching struggle to catch the eye of the cooks, to gain favour, to climb the ladder. It had taken him two years, he thought – he was not quite sure. He had seen boys kill one another for a comfortable place to sleep, their corpses tossed out in the morning without comment by the cooks, just more rubbish from the kitchens to be dropped down the garbage pits. Two years. It had marked him as deeply as war.
    He touched the purple stripe on his chiton as if for reassurance. It marked him as a slave with a difference. The guards of the slave-city could not raise their whips at him, and he was spared the casual abuse meted out to the young in the lower levels. Not only that, but those who wore the stripe were marked for better things, the possibility of advancement. Not freedom, never that – even Auroc was a slave, bound to service in the ziggurat for his lifetime – but there were degrees of servitude. Kurun had even been allowed to accompany his superiors to the world under the sun above, when they were short-handed on feast-days, or sometimes simply as a forgotten afterthought. To breathe the same air as the Great King himself on the sacred summit of the ziggurat. For such moments he had strained and connived and laboured all his short life.
     
     
    A UROC SAW HIM , raised a hand and barked at one of his assistants to mind the fish. Smoke hung in the air here, but not enough to sting the eye or taint the food. Ventilation shafts led out to the slopes of the ziggurat, and on still days the spit turners would be set to cranking on the massive wooden ceiling fans that hung below them, greasing their axles with olive oil that they licked from their fingers.
    The heat was shattering, a shimmering vice that sucked the water from men’s bodies. It rose from charcoal grills, radiated from the bread ovens, and seemed to be soaked deep into the very stone of the floor. Auroc raised a dripping gourd from one of the water-jars that were stationed everywhere and drained it dry. ‘Kurun, you little brown-faced shit – you took your time. Follow me, boy.’ A knowing look. Kurun nodded and patted his sash. Auroc closed one eye for a moment.
    There were bakers of bread, butchers and fishcutters and poulterers,