Black Salt

Black Salt - Chapter 38

 He couldn't see it, from where he stood, with the creak of wooden boards under his feet, the gentle sloshing of water, the feel of the wooden rail, rough in his hands. He couldn't see it, but he could picture it. The crowds, jostling and murmuring as they lined the king's road, some few standing on the very spot where a lion, the lion, had slain a good man and a bad, though the palace slaves would have left no sign. They would talk, guzzle down cheap mixed wine, and chew the bread the king had given out "to celebrate the glorious day."

Those loaves had saved the kingdom, he'd heard some royal baker joke. Stuffed with olives, onions, and strips of meat, they would bring many men and women and tearful children back from the edge of starvation, and if they couldn't preserve the kingdom, they could, and would go a long way to restoring faith in the king, faith vital, faith needed, faith that had almost been shattered by the tale of a curse.

But kings do not live by bread alone. And curses need stronger medicine yet. So the people of the city, young, old, wasted by hunger and fattened by trade, stinking of the gutter, fragrant as rose petals, draped in rags and hand me downs, elegant in star patterned silks, all that could walk, crawl or be carried would mass together on the edge of the king's road.

And then would come the king. First would march the trumpeters, clad in the leather sandals and plain linen skirts of the common soldier, they would play their gleaming instruments, a call to alert the crowd. After them the drummers, marching in time with the beat. The honour guard would follow, a column of the best, handpicked warriors. They would wear glittering helms, with tall plumes, red, green and blue. They would carry a wide shield on the left, with engraved and enamelled scenes of battle: Diomedes charging the walls of Troy, Achilles come as death to Hector, Herakles, his hands on the neck of the Nemean lion. They would carry a long spear in the right hand, and, visible or not, he knew a clear eyed watched could see a single drop of dry blood at the tip of each spear: they had marked their weapons with the lion's blood.

He took it as a compliment.

Behind the honour guard would come the litter, a huge work of cedar beams, inlaid with gold and silver, and on it a pair of cushioned thrones, and an image of frowning Poseidon rearing up behind those royal seats, his fierce eyes glaring with the light of rubies, a star sapphire on his forehead, a trident in his hand, and this again had been anointed with the blood of the lion.

Ptolemaios would sit, swaying a little as twenty slaves laboured to carry the weight of all that wood and finery, as well as his own fleshy body, and his sister at his left. Whether he would smile to sit on that swaying throne, under Poseidon's furious gaze, Nikias could not say. He would live, he would keep his throne, he would suffer no more from Black Salt, neither the originals, set free that night, expelled from the city that dawn, nor the false ones, dead and dead and dead. He had survived, and the people, feasting on his bread, were already telling stories about how he had summoned the lion slayer, and could do so again. He had survived, and now he would marry his sister, as had his father and his grandfather and all the Ptolemies.

But he had survived.

The procession would go from the palace to the temple of Poseidon, where Garantzis would play his part. The king would wed his queen, bells would ring, drums beat, wine flow, and the city would feast and dance and sing.

He couldn't see it, from where he stood, but he could picture it. And as the water lapped at the hull, the banks of oarsmen pulled, and the ship pulled away from the dock, the corners of his mouth turned up.

"Father, call a doctor," said Leaina. "There's something dreadfully wrong with you."

He eyed her sidelong and raised one eyebrow.