Chapter 1428: Kingship(4)

The plush Azanian-woven pile tickled against the bruised soles of his feet.

A fair reward, after a quarter-league of merciless flagstones. It was the kind of softness that only boundless silver can purchase, and Alpheo savoured every single stride of it.

To left and right the great assembly looked on in absolute breathless silence. The Yarzat loyalists and the Yarzat betrayers standing shoulder to shoulder, the sullen lords of Herculia, the newly bent men of Oizen, all of them watching his passage with faces carved out of impassive stone, giving up nothing of the treason or the terror sitting in their bellies.

Alpheo knew their minds without needing to ask after them.

The proud old bloodlines seethed at the sight of him, as they always did. Their pride had forever come first where utility ought to have held the reins, and it would cost them everything in the end for their inability to accept what never was.

Others, sharper and considerably more dangerous, and useful too if handled with care, saw only a market opening. Eager to emulate Herculia’s surrender. Eager to trade royal subservience for lucrative charters and quiet concessions, as houses Malaspada and Vond had already done and had already profited by.

Alpheo saw no reason at all to disillusion them. If they chose to see the crown as a ladder for their own ambitions, then let them swallow as many daggers as they liked, so long as it was his longsword lying across the table while they chewed.

And he would need every ounce of iron he could lay hands on soon enough.

This past season had been spent putting out fires, rebuilding shattered bridges, and burying the rotting dead where they had fallen. The next would be the season of the spider. Weaving through the local blocs, buying the greedy, crushing the stubborn, and drawing every province in tight against the iron grip of the Crown.

In time each of them would show what cloth he was cut from. And in time the Crown would deal with each of them accordingly.

I do not need them to love me, Alpheo thought, his scarred spine unbending as he paced the aisle. I need the greed of a few and the plain terror of the rest. Love might well endure, but terror would suffice so long as strength would.

Where ancient legitimacy failed him, legionaries would do the mending. The realm would be forged beneath a single sky, whether the highborn wept over it or cheered for it.

It had cost a dozen blood-soaked fields to reach this dais. Thousands of butchered foes, and the bones of a brother he had loved. He had paid every copper of that toll out of his own flesh, and carried the receipts on his back for anyone who cared to read them.

Let the sun of Oizen rise and set as it pleases. Let the roosters crow from the high barn roofs. Let the grey towers of the south stand proud in their ancient dust, so long as none of that dust presumed to mingle with Yarzat stone.

The sky belonged to the Falcon now, and the grass beneath it belonged to the Fox. And in their shadow nothing would be permitted to rest unless it first learned how to bow.

And so they would bow.

At the foot of the high porphyry steps, Alpheo sank to his knees upon the crimson carpet.

Archon Vesparian loomed above him in ivory vestments. All white, all pure, and all of it thoroughly dirty.

The old man’s face was an unreadable mask of holy severity, though deep behind those watery grey eyes there flickered the unmistakable gleam of a man watching his own plan arrive on schedule. And why should it not? This ought to have been Yarzat’s triumph first and foremost, but the Archon was not trailing far behind that cart, and had been careful about where he set his feet.

He had not journeyed south merely to bless a crown out of pious duty. He was playing the grandest game on the board. Once the gold came down upon Alpheo’s skull, the Archon would march back to the Eternal City with the promise of spears of Yarzat behind him and the gold of Kakunia beside him, vaulting himself straight at the high primacy, free at last to play the game he had always wanted to play.

The great wheels turned, cog catching cog in a slow dance of bloody ambition. Yarzat would grease the Kakunian wheel. The Bull would turn the holy cogs. And the Archon would seize his sacred throne, and bless whoever had handed it to him.

So all of them would prosper, each in his own fashion, and each at someone else’s expense.

But this hour belonged to Yarzat.

And no man alive was going to cheat him of it.

Vesparian extended a trembling, liver-spotted hand. A novitiate knelt instantly at his elbow, offering an ornate vial of chased gold which he accepted gladly.

The Archon unstoppered the flask, the rich, heavy fragrance of consecrated nard, crushed frankincense, and myrrh spilling into the air.

Alpheo lowered his gaze from the blazing chandeliers, fixing his eyes upon the red wool between his knees.

He spread his arms wide, palms upturned to the vaulted heavens.

Archon Vesparian dipped his thumb deep into the dark, shimmering oil, raising his voice.

"By the all-seeing eye of the All-Knower, let wisdom guide the blade. By the righteous wrath of the Warrior, let iron break the foe. By the balance of the Father Protector, let justice hold the scales."

The priest’s oily thumb pressed down hard upon the crown of Alpheo’s head, tracing the five-pointed star of dominion. The sacred unguent was thick and ice-cold against his warm skin, dribbling in slow, dark rivulets through his black hair.

The king shivered at its touch in pleasure.

"May thine ears be anointed to hear the cries of the righteous and cull the whispers of the black-feathered deceiver" Vesparian droned, reaching down to press his oil-slicked fingers firmly behind the King’s right ear, and then across the scarred, hollow where his left had been shorn away in the wars.

The cold oil stung the scar-tissue, but it came out in a pleasing burn.

Vesparian stepped closer, dipping his hands once more, and laid his glistening palms flat upon Alpheo’s bare, scarred shoulders, pressing the holy seal into the knotted muscle and old whip-bites.

"May thy shoulders bear the crushing burden of the realm, unbroken beneath the vault of heaven, an anvil against the storm that all men must overcome."

Vesparian put his fingers back into the heavy folds of his ivory chasuble and thrust the empty vial back toward the trembling acolyte. His liver-spotted hands hovered for a tense heartbeat, then clenched tight as the final prize was brought forward on its cushion of black velvet.

Even as the Archon took the brutal thing into his grip, his rheumy eyes betrayed a flicker of genuine revulsion. He handled the circlet with exquisite, terrified care, minding precisely where his brittle fingers touched.

Alpheo bit down on the meat of his cheek to stifle the feral grin threatening to split his lips.

He fears to cut his skin on it, he realised, not that he minded, the thing was hard to grasp no doubt.

It was no delicate bauble of spun filigree and polite sapphires. It was an abomination of cold, dark steel and thick river gold, forged with hard, unforgiving spires that looked more fit to crack a man’s skull than adorn it. His hand had the making in the iron, his wife on the gold and gems.

That abomination was what came out from that union. Somewhere in there there was an irony he supposed.

He was anointed; now he was to be crowned.

"Let the Five Gods cast their holy gaze upon this hall," Vesparian proclaimed, his high, reedy voice echoing off the ribbed stone arches, "and let their boundless mercy and righteousness descend upon their servant!"

The gods had the barest of hands in this harvest, Alpheo sneered into the wool of the carpet. It was cold steel, bad rations, and ten thousand screaming men that brought me to this dais.

"May the heavens bless the shepherd who watches over the flock," the priest intoned, stepping forward, his frail arms trembling under the sheer weight of the metal as he raised it toward the golden chandeliers. ’’Chosen by the god for that holy charge!’’

And by what holiness he came by it! His hands stained with his goodfather’s blood, much to the pleasure of the daughter.

The wolves had broken the sheepfold,killed the old rams, and now the biggest beast in the pack wore the shepherd’s fleece and all others were made to bleat and kneel.

"May the Weaver mend the fractures of his people, and may the Father Protector guide his hand as he guides his charges in justice and love!"

He would hardly rule with any of the two.

He threw a gaze at the lords.

If any sheep wanders from my pasture, I’ll slit its throat and roast it over the fire.

"By the witness of man and god!" Vesparian’s voice rose, vibrating with ancient, theater-bred grandeur. "Behold the prince who rises, chosen of the divine, strengthened by the sacred word!"

Chosen by three legions and foreign mad axemen who would each gut the Archon for a pouch of silver.

"Anointed in the purest of holy oils..."

Washed in the gore of the Ford, soaked in the bile of dying boys, and scrubbed clean with the sweat of a dozen battles.

"...Invested with the sacred mandate of law, peace, and eternal order!"

Bound only by the reach of my sword and the terror my name strikes in the hearts of lords.

Archon Vesparian lowered his trembling arms. The heavy, sharp-rimmed circle of gold and iron descended through the candle-glow, hovering for a breathless fraction of a second above the dark, oiled waves of the King’s hair.

"We crown thee Alpheo, first of the name," the old man breathed, he suddendly paused, perhaps with the terrible reality of the beast he was consecrating or perhaps just to take a breathful of air. "Sovereign of Yarzat, Protector of the Highlands, Shield of the Low, and King of Yarzat and Herculia."

The cold, unforgiving weight slammed down upon Alpheo’s skull, biting into his brow like an iron vise.

Down a prince knelt, and up the king rose.

And the world bent for him.