“In Hur-ar it was said, the Narim were the gods of the poor, Ba’al god of the rich. But the only true god in Hur-ar was gold.”
-Conversations with the Uros.

The Chronicle of Fu Xi

***

Before the Cataclysm.

Head held high, chest puffed with pride, the Lion of Hur-ar marched to glory. The crimson glow silhouetting the mountains announced dawn’s imminent arrival, ushering in his ascendency as one of Hur-ar’s most powerful men. He only need ensure nothing went wrong during this morning’s routine ceremony.

He gazed up at the Black Fortress only a few yards ahead, its darkness untouched by the rose-colored rays chasing the stars from the sky. Bal-eeb, Captain of the Wall, sidestepped to the Cliff Road’s edge and inspected the procession as it passed. The ceremonial guard marched by two abreast, sandaled feet crunching the gravel in unison. Eyes locked forward, their misty breath floated on the chilly autumn air. Highly polished bronze chest plates clinked softly against chainmail and provided an eerie music to accompany the trade delegation.

Behind the warriors, six muscled slaves, nude and sweating in the morning chill, struggled under the gilded litter’s weight. They bore lounging Norrufi, Supreme Royal Trader and second cousin to the King. Rolls of perfumed fat spilled from underneath an ornate blanket, jiggling in rhythm with the jostling litter. His threadbare beard hung under a perpetually dour expression and did nothing to conceal the eunuch’s many chins.

Bal-eeb nodded in deference as the litter passed by, trying not to wrinkle his nose in disgust.

He smells like a woman. Suitable, I suppose, for someone who traded his balls for power.

Men possessing such power and wealth could not be trusted with an heir to challenge the King. Nevertheless, the Supreme Royal Trader held significant influence in court and Bal-eeb suffered the fat fool’s insolence. He needed Norrufi’s well-placed whispers if he were to depose the Captain of the Palace Guard. The man reclining on the golden litter assured Bal-eeb this morning’s duties played no small part in advancing this goal.

In many ways Norrufi’s opposite, Bal-eeb stood half a head taller than most men, in the prime of youth and well-muscled. Powerful, wealthy, and brutally ambitious, the city idolized the man they called the Lion of Hur-ar.

The warriors crested the cliff overlooking the city just as dawn’s first rays crept over the mountain beyond the Black Gate. They split into two ranks of five and formed a wide opening for Norrufi’s litter and the wagons.

“Look sharp, lions of Hur!” Bal-eeb barked.

A simple assignment, yes, but there could be no mistakes this morning.

Three massive ox-drawn wagons, almost too wide to negotiate the narrow Cliff Road, rumbled close behind Norrufi’s litter. Goods from Hur-ar’s vast trading empire, iron tools and bags stuffed with grain, packed each cart to the breaking point. With mouths foaming and eyes wide in agony, the oxen struggled up the mountain. A small army of slaves, scribes, and functionaries from the royal houses and trading guild, trudged in the caravan’s dusty wake. Each man played a small part; from carrying the Supreme Trader’s piss pot to interpreting the clay tablets left by the Narim.

Deep in thought, Bal-eeb stroked his curly, coal-black beard. His mind raced beyond this morning’s proceedings, to plans and plots laid months, even years, earlier. His mother once instructed him,
Make fear and gold your friends and Ba’al will grant all the desires of your heart.
Like his mother, he knew what he wanted and did what was necessary to take it. Events put in motion by his role in this morning’s trading ceremony, might eventually place him on the Throne of Gold, as King of Hur-ar. Today, he also took an important step in slipping from beneath his mother’s long shadow.

Ashtoreth
...common folk only spoke her name as a curse symbolizing seduction and betrayal. In court it dripped from noble lips, gushing with false reverence and adoration, knowing her spies lurked everywhere. Most in the city simply called her “The Snake”.

She confided to Bal-eeb her fondness for the title.

Ashtoreth insinuated herself into the House of the Second Prince of Hur-ar as a lowly Sammujad consort, accompanied by her bastard son on the edge of manhood. She quickly bewitched the prince and, in only a few months, cunningly eliminated her rivals one-by-one to claim the role of First Wife. Ashtoreth and her son banished or slew the children of the deposed First Wife, leaving Bal-eeb to inherit the prince’s fortune. After the prince’s mysterious death, Ashtoreth reigned as the Court’s most ruthless and feared noble.

In spite of her reputation for cruelty, Ashtoreth’s beauty and sexual prowess fueled a fierce competition among Hur-ar’s nobles to share her bed. Some say she was Ba’al’s own concubine, summoned from hell by a rogue temple priest. If hell was a Sammujad village razed to the ground by Scythian raiders, then Bal-eeb would agree. He knew what truly motivated his mother, death and hunger.

Now only Hecktar, First Prince and Captain of the Palace Guard, stood between Ashtoreth’s son and the throne. Ashtoreth arranged every step of his career, including his posting as Captain of the Wall. Bal-eeb vowed to supplant Hecktar by his own hand, without The Snake’s gold or influence. The Lion carefully laid his own plans, which didn’t include The Snake.

The King grew weary of holing up in the city, waiting for traders to bring the world’s wealth to his doorstep. Unchallenged on the vast steppe, the Scythians grew more powerful and arrogant with each spring. The filthy horsemen demanded greater tribute to permit caravans to pass unmolested to Hur-ar. Only the mystique of the Narim and their Black Fortress kept the raiders at bay. However, this state of affairs was about to change.

Three successive Hur kings built a magnificent army, one possessing bows and horses every bit as powerful as Scythia’s. The Hur legions would strike swiftly on winter’s eve as the horsemen settled in their winter camps. They would torch the horsemen’s winter food stocks, driving the haughty barbarians to starvation. With spring, the well fed and rested Hur army need only clean up the mess. With their western flank secure, the Hur armies would sweep from the edge of the northern Icelands, to the Great Sea, to the mountainous southwest. Booty and slaves would flood into the city. Then they would turn south, where the eastern shore of the Great Sea met the mighty Adyghe Mountains. These were the lands of the Thrax, who held the treacherous southern passes. Beyond the Thrax lay Havilah, where traders spoke of abundant gold, summoned from the ground not by Narim, but by men. Havilah, the ultimate prize, could not be seized without first liquidating the Scythian horde.

As the procession began to take their appointed places, he peered over his shoulder at the city far below. Torches twinkled across rooftops and in the streets. Bal-eeb thought of Hecktar asleep in the palace, blissfully unaware a delegation stood before the Black Gates this morning.

A thousand pardons,
Norrufi would shrug to Hecktar before the sun set this day.
I’m sure all the required notifications were made. If the Captain of the Palace Guard cannot carry out his required duties, then the Captain of the Wall is obligated to escort the King’s trade delegation.

“Bureaucrats!” Bal-eeb chuckled. “Deadlier than assassins.”

He studied the city far below, from the city wall to the base of Cliff Road, a thousand feet immediately below him.

So few of these soft city dwellers have ever ventured beyond the wall.

Bal-eeb secretly ventured far and wide to lay his plans, plots neither his mother, the Commander or the King knew of.

Bal-eeb knew Scythia stretched farther west than anyone in Hur-ar imagined, even the King. The horsemen could summon tens of thousands of kinsmen and roll over Hur’s legions. If they ever lost their superstitious fear of the Black Fortress, they could take Hur-ar itself.

But only Bal-eeb knew the horsemen’s weakness. Now
his
influence,
his
gold,
his
schemes would ensure his appointment as the campaign’s second-in-command, next only to the Commander himself. The Lion, not the Snake, would eliminate Hecktar and seize the throne on his own terms.

The Captain of the Wall gazed into the darkness beyond the city, beyond the steppe.

The Great Sea and its endless marshes...that is the key to defeating Scythia.

Bal-eeb turned and climbed the short distance remaining to the top. There, he took his place and prepared for the trading ceremony.

The slaves deposited the Norrufi’s litter softly on the crushed stone before the Black Gate. The wagons rolled between the columns of warriors and halted behind the litter. The entourage split into two halves; free men behind the warriors’ right flank, slaves behind the left. The delegation crowded forward on the narrow ledge, avoiding the drop off by several paces.

With the help of his body slave, Norrufi sat up with a huff. Doughy fat spilled over his golden girdle as he adjusted his waist wrap and straightened his tall, conical cap. Despite the cool morning, sweat trickled down his bare chest. It took all of Bal-eeb’s guile to mask his disgust.

Breathing heavily, Noruffi waddled up to the massive iron bell, suspended from a heavy kupar frame and secured to the gate with iron spikes. Offerings left by the city’s poor; withering bundles of prairie flowers, clay jars of honey, and candles littered the black stained gravel before the Black Gate.

Noruffi took his place next to the bell’s rope and peered into the crowd with narrow, pig-like eyes as if looking for someone. A tall, painfully thin man, with an axe-like face pushed through the line of warriors. Bal-eeb bowed slightly as Shellbaz, High Priest of Ba’al, passed by. A bejeweled golden jar in his bony clutches, he stank of sour wine. Beardless, like all of his order, the priest’s black kaffiya and open chested robes fluttered behind him. To Bal-eeb, he resembled an emaciated crow.

The Order of Ba’al despised the Narim, constantly seeking to turn the city against the Masters of the Black Fortress. Only the Hur-po’s love of the yellow metal spared the mysterious immortals the Black Dragon’s wrath. However, during the last king’s reign the Priests managed to inject themselves into trading ceremony.

Bal-eeb didn’t believe in Ba’al, though his mother did. Bal-eeb believed only in power, gold and himself. However, that didn’t stop him from courting the influential High Priest’s favor, going so far as mandating his warriors wear the Black Dragon amulet.

Wearing a look of disgust, Shellbaz kicked several of the offerings aside and, in doing so, almost fell over. Steadying himself, he took his place beside the bell, opposite Noruffi. He held the jar high over his head and, with a slurred voice, shouted to the crowd, “Let the power of the god of this world, master of earthly princes and mortal thrones, sanctify these proceedings!”

He tipped the jar and let the crimson fluid pour onto the gravel. Shellbaz’s hung-over, bloodshot eyes came alive, a hungry, sexual, grin flashing at the sight of blood. Norrufi stepped back to avoid being splattered. The priest tucked the empty jar back into his robes and nodded to Noruffi. From another fold he produced a bottle of wine and staggered back into the crowd.

Sludgy and full of clots, the blood seeped away from the gate. The Supreme Royal Trader covered his mouth and tried not to gag.

With the exception of the intercession of the priests, the trading ceremony remained unchanged since the Narim sealed themselves behind the Black Gate generations ago. The Supreme Royal Trader would ring the iron bell, and a few moments later, a brass bell answered from within. The outer gate would open, and the teamsters would wheel the wagons into a central holding area. After that, the Supreme Royal Trader rang the outer bell again, and the outer gates closed. A groan would rise beyond the wall as the inner gates opened. The delegation always listened intently as someone, or something, unloaded the wagons. After several minutes, the groan returned and the inner bell rang again. In short order, the outer gates reopened and the goods would be replaced with gold ore and clay tablets bearing magical markings. The markings held the Narim’s wishes for the next trade delegation and could only be interpreted by guild scribes.

Norrufi grasped the gray, fraying rope and swung the bell, beginning the ceremony in earnest. Under Norrufi’s soft, pudgy hands, it issued a single, dull clunk.

A child could ring the bell louder
, Bal-eeb thought, but knew it didn’t matter. The Narim always heard.

As he waited for the answer to the call for trade, Bal-eeb’s mind drifted to a woman with olive skin and almond eyes uncannily like his mother’s. She possessed ambition every bit as naked and ruthless as Ashtoreth’s. He could not say he loved this woman, though he’d never loved a woman. She did hold a certain raw allure the pampered creatures in court lacked. This woman held a more important allure than her body. She held the key to defeating the Scythians.

An unexpected western breeze caressed his face. He could almost feel the Great Sea’s sultry air and her lithe, sun washed body pressed against his in the tall marsh grass.

Patience, my little Marsh Snake. I will return soon enough.

The breeze shifted again, dry and cold, snapping him back to the moment.

Something is wrong.

BOOK: Tears of the Dead

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