The Last Bastion (26 page)

32

MOONTONGUE

‘F
arri Moontongue.’ Gallow lay slumped in the castle yard, too tired to even yelp with pain as Arda washed his wounds and bound them. The yard was full of exhausted and battered Marroc, some still bleeding but all savouring the evening quiet. A moment of bliss. A moment to make peace with Modris, a moment to laugh, to remember or perhaps to forget. Some men stared, eyes far away. Others wept.

‘People will remember us for what we did today.’ Valaric sat beside Gallow, trading bawdy jokes with Sarvic and a few of his Crackmarsh men. ‘We turned the forkbeards back. We slew the iron devils, every one of them, and when they come tomorrow the sixth gate will stand closed and that’s how it stays. And you’re sitting there thinking of some old forkbeard dead the best part of twenty years?’

Gallow said nothing. He’d seen the Moontongue once. He’d been ten summers old and there was no way to tell whether the dead thing he’d killed today had been the same man. The Moontongue he remembered had been a thundercloud filled with storms and lightning but also with laughter.

‘All I know is he stole the Crimson Shield from your iron devils and then sank into the sea. Pity I can’t say the same for the rest of you.’

‘He was the Screambreaker’s brother and they were the bitterest rivals. Yurlak favoured the Screambreaker and
Moontongue thought he was better. That’s about as much as I know. I only saw him the once before I crossed the sea but that was enough. He wasn’t the sort of man you forget.’

‘I heard he was tight with Neveric the Black. Neveric would turn on Tane and then the two of them would turn on you forkbeards and Neveric would sit on the throne of Sithhun and the Moontongue would be king across the sea. So Moontongue stole the shield and then Neveric turned on him and they all died and good riddance to the lot of them.’ Valaric snorted. ‘Neveric was always a bastard. Still, it’s easy to tell tales of the dead. If it’s all the same to you I’ll keep my mind on thinking what tales they’ll be telling of us.’

Gallow flinched as Arda poked a graze on his shoulder. ‘Doesn’t need stitches but I’ll be dropping some brandy on that.’

‘No, you won’t!’ said Valaric and Gallow at once.

Arda snorted and did it anyway. ‘It’s what your wizard would have done.’

The next arrow came straight at Medrin. The first Oribas knew of it was when the Crimson Shield suddenly shifted and the king jerked in his saddle. For a moment Oribas thought Medrin had been hit.

‘Maker-Devourer!’ When Medrin lowered the shield Oribas saw the arrow. Medrin looked at it. ‘That’s a Vathan arrow meant to pierce mail.’ He laughed. ‘No, wizard! This is some trick of yours. I’ll not believe your Vathan woman is up there with a bow now, already ahead of us! No.’ He pulled the arrow out of the shield and closed on Oribas. ‘This arrow isn’t real. And the archer on the mountain? Not real either. What are you doing, wizard?’ He grabbed Oribas by the shoulder and stabbed him with the arrow’s tip. Not deep or hard but enough to draw blood. His face changed: the smile fell away and left a cold hardness beneath. He shook his head. ‘No, Aulian. Not your Vathan
woman. Just some Marroc.’ He kicked his horse to a canter and sped away, a dozen Lhosir at his heels while more began to climb the slope towards the archer. A soldier took the reins of Oribas’s horse and led him away too. The last time Oribas looked back he saw several Lhosir still labouring up the slope. The archer hadn’t moved. He had no doubt at all that it was Mirrahj.

They slept in the open that night. Oribas dozed now and then, wondering what the Lhosir king had done with Achista. Twice he jerked awake to shouted alarms from the Lhosir sentries but the commotion never came any closer. In the morning they dragged him to his feet and hauled him back to his horse, and then Medrin took him to the edge of the camp to where a gang of surly Lhosir soldiers were dragging a bound Marroc by a rope. The king shouted at them to stop, and it dismayed Oribas how his heart jumped when he realised who the Marroc must be even before he saw her face. She glared at King Sixfingers and spat into the dirt in front of his horse. Medrin laughed.

‘See, Aulian, she still has all her arms and legs and most of her blood on the good side of her skin. She has nothing I want, so how long she stays that way lies with you.’ He turned to the Lhosir. ‘Beat her though, for her disrespect. Aulian, you may stay and watch or ride with me now, as you prefer.’ Oribas didn’t want to watch but he knew he had to, and so he stayed as the Lhosir punched his Achista to the ground and then kicked her half to death.

‘It was the Aulian of Sithhun who set me on the path, and you’re an Aulian too. That’s really the only reason I haven’t made ravens out of both of you.’ When the army was ready to march, Oribas found himself led to Medrin’s side once more. ‘You deserve it for what you did. Burning men like that, their bodies sunk into water where no one will ever speak them out.’ He spat. ‘You think I want the red sword, don’t you? Three years ago I wanted it more than anything.
Not any more.’ He shook his head. ‘The Vathen came and my father was too old and fat to lead an army. It fell to me to go to Andhun, to be the king of the Lhosir across the sea whether I liked it or not. In Andhun I learned that the sword the Vathen carried to war was the Edge of Sorrows. I learned, at last, its other names.’ He chuckled again. ‘I wanted that sword, Aulian, and if Gallow had ever stopped to wonder why, if he’d ever asked me, perhaps all of this might have been different, perhaps we might have sailed side by side to the frozen wastes and the Iron Palace amid the Ice Wraiths and put an end to the Eyes of Time, each of us with one hand on the sword together. I just wanted to avenge Beyard and if he’d known, he’d have had a piece of that too, I think.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I never even knew the Eyes of Time had made an ironskin of Beyard. I just thought he was dead all those long years ago.’

He unbuckled the Crimson Shield from his arm and held up his iron hand. ‘For running away that day in the Temple of Fates, Gallow cut off my hand with that sword in Andhun. I was Medrin Twelvefingers before. Now I’m Sixfingers, Medrin Ironhand. I should have died. Gallow should have killed me, or the wound he gave me should have done it. But for a second time I lived.’ He tapped the shield and strapped it back to his arm. ‘The Vathen took Andhun and everything east of the Isset. My men took me back home. Yurlak took one look at me, flew into a rage and rushed across the sea to put down the filthy Vathen or Marroc or whoever had had the audacity to damage his son.’ Medrin spat again and there was an edge of bitterness to his words. ‘Never mind that it had been a Lhosir, never mind that I might die, he crossed the sea and got away from the sight of me as fast as he could. He died within the year and I shed no tears. He’d done what was needed. He’d outlived the Moontongue and the Screambreaker and that was all I was ever going to get from him. And while everyone else was fighting, I spent my time
at the Temple of Fates and looking for the Screambreaker’s fortune.’ His face wrinkled into a suppressed smile. ‘All those years of fighting and winning should have made him as rich as a king but he never took much. He did it for . . .’ Medrin shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. But by the end of my looking it was the Moontongue I came to understand. They say the Moontongue stole the Crimson Shield as a gift to Neveric the Black of the Marroc, that he meant to betray his brother and his king and that Neveric betrayed him in turn, but Moontongue had a sea more ambition to him than that. When I understood, Aulian, for a moment I was in such awe of him that I forgot to breathe. I had found a Lhosir I could finally truly admire, safe in the knowledge that he was dead. You see, the Moontongue stole the Crimson Shield for himself, not for some Marroc, and he stole it because he believed it could make the Eyes of Time into his servant. He believed he would see the future, know all things before they came to pass, and with that knowledge he would crush Yurlak, grind his brother to dust and lead a conquest the like of which the world hasn’t seen since the glorious days of Aulia. He wasn’t killed by some renegade Marroc. It was ironskins who sank his ship.’

He sighed. ‘I took salt with me, Aulian, and other things, and I took the Crimson Shield. I took the knowledge I found in the house of the wizard of Sithhun and in the secret letters of the Moontongue.’ He smiled again, although his smiles never touched his ice-blue eyes. ‘Of course, nothing was what I thought. I was more careful than the Moontongue perhaps, but still ignorant.’ The king lifted his iron hand. The fingers flexed and Oribas jerked in his saddle.

‘How . . .?’

‘The Eyes of Time made this hand for me. Through it the Fateguard obey me. I learned quickly enough why I was so favoured. I did the same as you – I threw salt. Now when I do that, I burn too.’ Medrin slipped the shield back over
his arm. ‘I keep it hidden. I already have a finger more than most men and there are limits to how much witchery a brave Lhosir warrior will take. I found I couldn’t make the Eyes of Time my slave, but with the shield nor could I be easily dismissed. We bargained. In the end, for this hand I gave my blood oath that I would search for two pieces of iron armour, lost for hundreds of years somewhere near the mountain crossing to Aulia. I knew, as I gave it, that I would never find them.’

He reined in his horse abruptly and turned in the saddle to face Oribas. ‘And then you came. You and Gallow, whom everyone thought was dead, and the Edge of Sorrows, and I have to wonder what is coincidence and what is fate. That the Fateguard I unwittingly sent to Varyxhun was Beyard? That he had the red sword in his hand and Gallow in his grasp and did nothing? That you found the two pieces of iron? Coincidence or fate, Aulian? I must believe that the Eyes of Time knew, as we struck our bargain, that these things would come to pass.’

Oribas looked away. ‘King of the Lhosir, my people do not believe in fate.’

‘But mine do.’ Medrin rounded on Oribas and now his voice took on a sharpness. ‘What did your people entomb out here so very far from their home? What will it become if it’s made whole? Answer me that and answer in truth and I’ll give you that palace in Sithhun and everything in it. You can live out your days there in service to me. You can have your Marroc woman too, as long as she never leaves the walls of your house. Otherwise I make her into a raven and you will watch every moment of her agony.’

‘What will it become?’ Oribas shrugged. ‘What it already is – a monster.’ He looked at the river, at the rushing water still rising. A man who looked for it could see how the water was higher today than it had been yesterday.

*

Night after night Gallow and Valaric stood on the walls and watched the forkbeards at the bottom of the mountain. Sometimes Addic came and stood beside them and sometimes Arda. Sometimes Gallow brought the children, Tathic and Feya and Jelira and even little Pursic. He showed them the Lhosir and told them that these were his people. Then Arda told them stories, Marroc stories of men who were more than men, slow to anger and reluctant to lift their swords yet who fought with a relentless fury when evil came, protecting the folk around them until the bitter end. In Arda’s stories they always won but at a terrible cost, so they died in the end.

And then Gallow told his own stories, the ones he’d learned as a child, and his too were of men who were more than men, and sometimes they too protected the weak who looked to them for shelter, but more often they fought against those who claimed to be strong and did it for no better reason than it was there to be done, and sometimes they won and sometimes they died, and often they lost a hand or a foot or an eye and none of it ever for any reason but to see who was the better man. They weren’t Marroc stories and they didn’t follow the Marroc way, and when Tathic asked which was better, Gallow only shrugged. ‘All our stories say one thing. That a man must speak his heart and speak the truth he finds there. That he must defend both with his life if he has to.’ He pointed down the mountain. ‘I’m here beside you and my people are down there, and soon we’ll fight because our hearts follow different songs. But I’ll tell you this and they would tell you too: a man who lies, a man who gives his word freely and without thought or meaning, is a man who is worthless. This is what my people mean when they say
nioingr
. A traitor to his kin, but worst of all a traitor to himself. It’s not our nature to be kind or merciful. Those are Marroc ways and my brothers of the sea sneer at them,
but even so only our beards are forked, never our tongues. That is what it means to be Lhosir.’

In the afternoon, Oribas was with the first riders as they came into Varyxhun and suddenly King Medrin was beside him again. They walked their horses off the Aulian Way and through the town and into streets filled with Lhosir soldiers. Medrin led the way to the edge of the river and stopped there. ‘So, Oribas of Aulia. I keep seeing your eyes stray to the water as we talk. Will it flood and wash us away? Do you know the answer or do you simply wonder?’

Oribas let out a deep breath. ‘I do not know the answer, O King of the Lhosir. Perhaps the mountains are angered or perhaps they are not.’

Medrin shook his head. ‘The river is a river and does what every mountain river does: rises in spring. Yet Varyxhun is not washed away and rebuilt each summer. The river will not save your Marroc friends. So . . . the Eyes of Time. Do you have an answer for me?’

‘Beyard was Gallow’s friend and yours. Make your peace with Gallow. Whatever the creature is, he will destroy it. He will help you. I will see to it.’

‘Make peace with him?’ Sixfingers held up his metal hand, almost shouting in his outrage, ‘He took my hand, Aulian, and Beyard is dead now.’ He stared across the river and up the valley to the mountains that towered over the distant Aulian Way. ‘I’ll crush the Vathen if I must but my heart lies across these mountains now. The Lhosir will build Aulia once more.’

‘I do not think it can be done.’ Oribas shook his head. ‘Not by any king, no matter how great he might be.’

‘Nothing is done that is not tried. Isn’t that an Aulian saying? And should it
not
be tried?’ His hand swept up the valley to the castle of Varyxhun. ‘Look at what you made, Aulian. Look at what you were!’