To Kill a King by Jack Geurts

Author:Jack Geurts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jack Geurts
Published: 2018-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Pound of Flesh

They arrived in Lacedeus the following day, and it was unlike anything Asherah had ever laid eyes on.

She had seen cities before. She had seen towns and villages before. But those were Liberite settlements. Or Qo-Hadastan settlements, rather, which the Liberites presently occupied.

Lacedeus was an Elladic city, which the Ardojans presently occupied.

Riding in on a worn dirt road, the travellers had begun to experience something resembling traffic as they approached. Ox and donkey carts rolling north and south, the path growing more and more congested the closer they got. The carts were loaded with crops and bags and jugs and barrels. Things bought in the markets of Lacedeus or intended to be sold there. Farmers and slaves. Qo-Hadastans and Liberites.

Asherah, Nikkal and Decius picked their way through the multi-racial, socially-stratified crowd on horseback. The Tenebrisian on his fat little pony had to follow directly behind Gisgo lest he be swallowed up by the river of people and livestock flowing in both directions. He got a few strange looks as he passed and Decius, feeling foolish, tried to ignore them. Asherah and Nikkal, too, received their fair share of sideways glances, but they weren’t strange enough to stop or insult or, thankfully, attack.

They kept their heads down. Kept moving.

The white walls of Lacedeus rose above the thick, green foliage of the trees. The central plain on which the city had been built was surrounded by mountains. Not the Pendaktylos mountains – those were still some way off to the north, though growing closer every day. These mountains were smaller, their slopes more gradual, but still, they formed a kind of loose, natural barrier around the city.

Passing through the southern gate, Asherah was left momentarily breathless by the huge marble columns holding up the covered walkways. By the red roof tiles capping every building in sight. By the throngs of people speaking a language she could not understand, but which she had first heard long ago, as Longinus sang for his dead brother.

Decius began to point out features of Elladic art and architecture which were prominently on display here. The covered walkways often surrounded public buildings and gathering spaces in large squares or rectangles. The statues of gods and warriors, frozen in heroic poses – some with the spear and armour of what Decius called a hoplite, others on the back of a rearing horse, and others simply standing, radiating an effortless authority.

But perhaps most impressive of all were the giant temples where people could go to make offerings.

It was while looking up at one of these temples that Asherah noticed some similarities with other temples she’d seen. She wasn’t thinking of the one they’d slept in the previous night, which was very similar indeed, but of the Qo-Hadastan temples in Castellum, and other large towns in Nemeros. The gabled roofs. The columns. They weren’t identical, but there were definitely elements of one in the other, and Asherah wondered which had been the original design, and which civilisation had copied it.

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