King of Thorns (41 page)

They had some strength among them. Crowded on the gallery and stairs, crossbow men from the Westfast under Lord Scoolar, hard-eyed and wind-burned. Packed before the splintering gate, men of the Hauntside, tough fighters from the hills, in leather and iron, axes honed, round wooden shields layered in goat-hide. Behind these, warriors from Far Range, their iron helms patterned with silver and tin, each man armed with hammer and hatchet. And to the rear, ranked before the keep wall, Cennat shield dancers, their warboards taller than a man.

I walked among them, Makin at my shoulder, amid the stink and heave of bodies, the tension a taste in the air at once both sour and
sweet. I hadn’t words for them, no kingly gestures, no speech to shout above the screams from beyond the wall and the crash of the ram. When you fight alongside Brothers you bind them with word and deed. When you fight among subjects you are a figure, a form, an idea. Men will die for many things; lives hoarded with care can be spent for the strangest of reasons. What bound us here, we men of the Highlands, was defiance. All men will dig their heels in if pushed enough. All men will reach the point that they say “no” for no reason other than opposition, for no reason other than the word fits their mouth, and tastes as good as it sounds. And in the Highlands, among our mountains, the heights breed men who will give no single inch without defiance.

I walked between the men of the Highlands, the old and young, some bearded, others clean-cheeked, some pale, some red, the trembling and the steady, and came to stand before the portcullis, iron-bound timbers splintered, the rush of the ram beyond, the savage cries of the hundred wrestling it toward me. My fingers found my knife hilt and I pulled it clear. Laid against my unburned cheek the metal felt like ice. The portcullis shuddered and groaned before the ram. Men of Arrow screamed and died as missiles rained upon them. The knife blade cut skin soft as a kiss. I took the blood on scarlet fingers and wiped it over the gate timbers. I turned my back on the gate, crouched before my men, and smeared a line of blood across the flagstones. As I returned to the keep I set my hand to a score of warriors, the eager ones, the ones in who I saw an echo of the same hunger that made me want that gate open every bit as much as those men on the ram.

“King’s blood!” Sir Elmar of Golden raised his axe, the crimson smear of my fingers left across his shining helm.

“King’s blood!” A hairy Hauntside warrior pressed the heel of his hand to the red imprint I set across his brow.

“King’s blood!” A Cennat dancer twirled the huge shield where my handprint sat scarlet across the white moon of his house.

“King’s blood!”

The roar pulsed back and forth, following us within the keep. A king is a sigil, not a man but an idea. I thought they had the idea now.

I took myself up to my throne-room with Makin at my side, and called for my table-knights, Red Kent, and the captain of the contingent from the House Morrow, Lord Jost.

Lord Jost arrived last, with a second knight and Miana. Queen Miana I supposed I should call her. She still wore her wedding dress, though with the train and veils taken off and a shawl set with pearls added against the cold. Lord Jost looked rather embarrassed by her presence at my council of war.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “My lady.”

I sat in the throne. Slumped would be more accurate. It felt good to take the weight off my feet. I’d done more running and climbing and descending than I wanted and was ready to sleep for a week.

“How many of the enemy did you kill, and at what loss?” Miana asked. The men had been waiting for me to speak. She felt no such need. I would have asked the same question.

“About six thousand for the loss of two hundred,” I said.

“A thirty to one ratio. Better than the rate of twenty to one needed.” To hear her high sweet voice recite the statistics of our body count seemed wrong.

“True. But they were two hundred of my very best, and I have played the aces from my hand.”

“And Chancellor Coddin has not returned,” Miana said. She was remarkably well informed for a little girl.

A pang of something ran through me at that. I saw Coddin once more in the tomb we made for him. “He’s safer than we are,” I said. He would probably live longer too. He would linger.

I took a goblet of watered wine from a page and a plate with crusted bread and goat cheese.

“And your plans?” she asked.

I blew through my lips. “We will have to place our faith in stone and mortar, and hope that in the time they buy us, fortune decides to smile our way.” The wine tasted like heaven and made me dizzy after one sip.

“Perhaps my new father-in-law will send us aid?” Miana said, her smile faint and years too old for her.

“I was hoping something similar myself,” I said.

More than in muscle heaped on bone, Brother Rike’s strength springs from the ability to hate the inanimate.

“She’s gone, yes?” Makin shaded his eyes against the sunrise and squinted back across the marsh. We stood on rolling scrubland now with yellow rock breaking through in sandy patches here and there.

“I hope so,” I said. Part of me wanted Chella to find destruction at my hands, the personal touch, but perhaps she ended there in the marsh amongst the burning dead. I hadn’t felt it. No sense of satisfaction, but my uncle’s death had taught me that revenge is far less sweet than it promises to be. An empty meal, however long you take over it.

We took to horse for the first time in what seemed an age. Rike on Row’s roan since his own plough-horse proved too heavy for its own good in the bogs. Kent and Makin on their horses. Grumlow riding double with me since he and I were the lightest of the Brothers and Brath the strongest of the nags.

The sour stink of the marshes followed us for miles. Black mud caking on our clothes, drying grey and flaking away. More persistent than stink or mud, the image of Chella as the flames rose around her, and the echo of her last words.
The Dead King sails.

In three days we came by moorland and scrub, then by forgotten
roads, and finally by country tracks, to the free port of Barlona. Rike made ceaseless complaint about his sunburn until I convinced him to smear pig-shit over the worst affected areas. For some reason it seemed to help though I hadn’t intended it to. Suggestion can be a powerful thing.

The ancient walls shimmered in the summer heat as we approached. They must have been impressive a thousand years ago. Now only the base of the walls remained, twenty foot high and just as thick, spilling black stone in great heaps for the peasants to raid to make huts and boundary walls for their fields.

I liked the city from the moment we rode in. The air held exotic scents, spices and cooking smoke that made my stomach growl. The people thronged, loud in voice and clothing, bright silks, garish jewellery made of glass and base metals, flesh of all colours on display in wide swathes. Men and women as light as me, as dark as the Nuban, and all shades in between. None as pale as Sindri and Duke Alaric though. Those, I think the sun would melt.

Music came from almost every corner in as many shades as the people. It seemed that the citizens walked in time to the beat and pulse of a thousand drums, horns, voices. I’d not heard such sounds before, so many strange melodies, some reminding me of the marching beats the Nuban used to slap against his thigh as we walked and which he elaborated on around the campfire. Others held remembrances of the curious atonal humming Tutor Lundist lapsed into in empty moments.

A port is an open ear to the world, a mouth ready for new flavours. Approaching my fifteenth year I felt more than ready to explore the wideness of the world that Barlona offered up.

“You know, Makin, you can take ship from here to almost any place you’ve ever heard of and a thousand that you haven’t,” I said.

“Ships make me hurl.” Makin looked as if he were remembering the taste.

“You don’t like them?”

“It’s the waves. I get seasick. I vomit from one shore to the next. I was nearly sick crossing the Rhyme.”

“Well, that’s good to know.” With Makin you can keep digging and find a new fact year on year. I hadn’t known he’d ever crossed an ocean, or even travelled under sail.

“How is that good to know?” He frowned.

“Well, the only way to get to the Horse Coast is by sea and I’m going alone. Knowing what a bad sailor you are just makes it easier to send you back to the Haunt.”

“We can ride there,” Makin said. “It’s less than a hundred miles.”

“Through the Duchy of Aramas and then the lands of King Philip the nine hundredth,” I said.

“Thirty-second,” Makin corrected.

“Whatever. The point is that those are not places men like us can pass unnoticed, whereas a ship will sail me right to my grandfather’s doorstep in a day or two.”

“So we take a ship and I coat the decks in vomit. What’s the problem?”

“The problem, dear Makin, is that I don’t want Rike there, or Grumlow, or Kent. I don’t even want you there. I want to make my own introductions in my own time. This is family business and I’ll do it my way.”

“That tends to mean everyone dies.” Makin grinned.

“Maybe, but I don’t need you there for that either. Just get them back to the Haunt. We’ve lost too many on this trip. I won’t say we’ve lost good men, but ones that I would rather have kept. Though if you misplace Rike on the way back, that would be fine.”

“This is a bad idea, Jorg.” Makin had that stubborn look of his, lips pressed tight, a vertical line between his brows.

“I need you in Renar,” I said. “I needed you there from the start. If you recall I did my damnedest not to have you come in the first place. Coddin’s a good man but how long can he hold a kingdom together for?
Go back, crack any heads that need cracking, and let my people know I’ll be returning.”

“Oi!” Grumlow’s cry. A man running away through the crowd. I saw Grumlow’s arm flick back and throw. The man fell without a sound twenty yards off, shoving his way through the crowd.

I walked with Grumlow to where he lay. People got out of our way, except for the children who ran everywhere as if we were part of a show. Grumlow pulled his saddlebag from the man’s limp hands.

“Cut the bloody strap! That’ll cost!” he said.

“I told you to secure it better,” I said. The few bits and pieces Grumlow had managed to bring through the bogs were tied randomly around Brath’s tack.

Grumlow grunted and bent to retrieve his knife. It had hit the man hilt-first in the back of the head. A pool of blood glistened beneath the man’s face, but it must have come from his nose or mouth hitting the cobbles. We didn’t bother turning him over to find out.

“I love this city,” I said, and we went back to the others.

We stabled the horses and sat at a tavern by the docks. I call it a tavern but we sat outside, around tables in the sun if you please, with wine in bottles shaped like tear drops with baskets woven around them. Makin with his bare feet, traces of dried mud still visible. Rike complained of course, about the sun, about the wine, even about the chairs which seemed unable to support his weight, but I paid more attention to the seagulls’ chatter. I sat and watched the ships moored at the quayside, bigger than I had thought they would be, and more complex, with rigging and spars and deck ropes and a multitude of sails. I felt better than I had in an age. Even my burns hurt less fiercely, as if the hot sun soothed their anger. For the first time in a long time we relaxed, smiled, and spoke of the dead. Of Brother Row, who I would remember, and Brother Sim, who I would miss for his harping and for his promise. We raised our bottles to them both and drank deep.

Only Kent put up any resistance to the idea of returning without me. I let him protest a while until he ran out of things to say and in the
end convinced himself that my plan was the best one. Red Kent’s like that. Give him a little space to turn and he’ll come around.

I stood, rolled my neck, and stretched in the sunshine. “Catch you on the road, Brothers.”

“You’re going now?” Makin asked, putting down his bottle-in-a-basket.