The Hollow Throne by Tim Leach

Author:Tim Leach [Leach, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800242975
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

15

Upon the horizon, the flames burned brightly – the night sky above a bloom of red and gold, the stars hidden by smoke. All about Kai, the others gathered, Sarmatian and Votadini alike, to bear witness to that fire.

There were some amongst the Votadini who gave soft calls of victory to see the Wall broken, the fulfilment of a dream long wished for – revenge against the Empire that had burned them from their own lands. The Sarmatians were silent. That fire spoke of death to them, a great pyre for the friends and companions they had left behind. A little grief in that silence, but, more than that, the hope that those men had met their deaths bravely. For them, there was no shame or sadness in a death well met.

But even so, from amongst them, a single voice cried out in the night.

It was Lucius, his hands raised, trembling and shaking, towards that fire upon the Wall. The Roman tried to speak but it seemed the words would not come. He turned away, pressed his face against the mane of his horse and wept.

‘What grieves you so?’ asked Kai. ‘What matters that fort to you after the lives you have already thrown away today?’

And Lucius lifted his face, and his horse’s mane shone with the tears he had left there. ‘Arite is there,’ he whispered. ‘Your son is there. Can you forgive me?’

It was as though Lucius spoke some lost language, some secret tongue of an ancient people that held no meaning any more – Kai’s mind, in some strange act of mercy, sought to keep the truth from him for just a little longer.

But then the words echoed once more: Arite. Your son. And at last he understood.

He had seen men and women driven mad with grief, tearing at their faces and screaming at the sky, but such a madness did not come. Nor did hate, or a promise of revenge; nothing, save for a pitiless kind of clarity. The knowledge that he had abandoned Arite and his child, and so doomed them to the worst of deaths.

He felt a heavy hand upon his shoulder – Mor, offering what comfort he could. ‘A cruel jest the gods play,’ he said.

Kai kept his eyes upon the fire – a victory trophy to the Painted People, a funeral pyre for Arite and the son that he would never see. ‘What can we do now? How can this end?’

‘The only thing that might stop them,’ the chieftain answered. ‘We must take the Burning Cauldron from them.’

A hiss from Laimei. ‘You say it is as though it is some childish trick to take their greatest treasure,’ she said. ‘You might as well ask us to pluck the noonday sun from the sky.’

‘It is no simple thing,’ Mor said. ‘Perhaps it cannot be done at all, and not without great sacrifice. But when did a champion fear such a thing? How it may be done, I cannot say, whether it shall be by bravery or magic or the cunning of a trick.

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