Black Salt

Black Salt - Chapter 36

 "You must be blessed in the sight of the most high."

Nikias turned, and saw Zalm, sitting atop a handsome horse, all white except for a patch of black hair over the eyes. The assassin wore a green silk tunic, flowing blue trousers, and red sandals that looked too small for his feet. He had a sword strapped across his back, and two daggers at his belt. He looked strong, too strong; he appeared unmarked, for all the ordeals he had faced. Looking up at him, Nikias felt a twinge of envy for the man's freedom to appear and disappear, to kill whom he chose and call it justice, and through it all, never to suffer the smallest disfigurement.

He felt all these things, and exhausted besides, and no words came.

Zalm grinned down at him. "Blessed, or cursed above all men."

He found his voice. "Ajax," he said.

Zalm shrugged. "I don't understand your barbarian words." He laughed.

"Ajax. The boy. The boy you murdered, so you could set your pet cat on us."

"He had a sword, and a knife, and he had you. I have never killed any man who stood unarmed."

He remembered Lorcas, on his knees and mewling. He remembered Pompus, and shame grew in him, until fury burned it out. "You lie. You lie! You run around my city, murdering at will, and call me the barbarian!"

He lunged at Zalm, but the killer trotted out of reach.

"You're angry," said Zalm. "You should be. They've used you as ill as they've used me. But who do hate more, me? Or the man at the Sema?"

With those words, he shouted at his horse, and galloped away, towards to the city.

Nikias hefted the sword, thinking to throw it, but Zalm was already out of range. He caught his face, mirrored in the iron. Beaten, bruised, ugly with wet blood and dried, he looked like a denizen of Tartarus. "Blessed am I? Blessed? I hate you both. I hate you all!"

Then he was done with shouting. He sheathed the blade, sticky with lion's blood, and started to run.

...

Nikias raced on foot as long as he could, and when he reached the end of the royal road, and came upon a gathering crowd of half-starved, stinking citizens, shouting abuse at the king, ever so nearly within earshot of the palace, he found himself stuck. "Let me through," he shouted.

"Give us bread, you monster," replied a man too bold to be quiet, too timid to step out of the crowd.

He paused to think.

The Sema stood in the city centre, an ugly mass of cranes, winches, wooden scaffolding, surrounded by the shanty town that had built up around the work site Ptolemaios's grandfather or great grandfather had commanded the tomb be built. A generation and more of workers had come, lured by the promise of the king's gold, seduced by longing for fame, fame they might win, and immortality, by hitching their work to the chariot of the young god who died.

They had not counted on the pride of the Ptolemies.

Every king who reigned, every man who wore the crown and sat the throne, conceived a new and grander plan of the tomb. Alexander's glory was to be their glory, and their visions were glorious, of temples, towers, statues, a new pyramid...

And the end of all these dreams was this, a stunted stone tomb, surrounded by cranes, winches, and wooden scaffolding, a pebble in a pile of sticks.

A pebble he could not reach.

"Give us bread, or run back to the palace."

"Yeah, give us bread and meat."

"Give us your sandals and your harness to boil and eat. It'd be better than the scraps we've fed on these past days."