Emperor of Thorns Page 22

  The last of the water from the skins on the stallion’s back did little more than take the edge from our thirst when split three ways. I would have taken it all of course had I not thought we could all three make it out and back to the Bad Dogs’ barrels.

  The Bad Dogs’ camp held few signs of its former masters. A split bone here and there, the weapons, tatters of cloth, scraps of armour, all filmed over with dust. I stayed long enough to take one of Toltech’s bitter pills and fill my water-skins.

  I took a look through the view-ring before I left. Part of me wanted to see Fexler there, to tell him how much his freedom had cost, to see if he cared. The ring showed nothing, just the world through a hoop of silver-steel. As I took it away the view flicked to the one seen from the lower slopes of paradise, nations laid out in browns and greens, without regard for the boundaries on men’s maps, the oceans swirled about in deepest blue. And there, on the coast to the south, on the thin arm of sea that divides our lands from Afrique … a red dot, burning.

  ‘I’m not your toy, Fexler. You can’t set me chasing across empire to join your little dots.’

  Balky snorted, as if wondering whether I’d gone mad in the heat. I put the ring away. ‘Dammit.’ I’d been planning a journey to that exact spot.

  ‘King Honorous Jorg Ancrath.’ The flunky with little rod for rapping doors afforded me the introduction he omitted on my first visit.

  The provost sat in her ebony chair as if she had remained there since I left, seated the whole time with her ledgers and tallies, amid the geometric splendour of her Moorish halls. The writing desk beside her lay empty, the scribe perhaps dismissed while the provost checked his work. She watched me cross the floor with sufficient interest to pause her quill-scratching.

  ‘Sanity prevailed, King Jorg?’ she asked. ‘You turned back before the Hills? When I sent Lesha to guide you I had hope that it would be her scars that showed you the way – back through the city gates.’

  ‘Your granddaughter was both a caution and an inspiration, Provost.’ I came to the step of her dais and offered a deeper bow than she merited. I carried bad news after all. ‘She was an explorer. Our world needs more like her.’

  ‘Was?’ The old woman didn’t miss much. I felt rather than heard the tensing of the two men at the door.

  ‘Outlaws attacked our camp while we slept. Perros Viciosos.’

  ‘Oh.’ That made her old, those two words. Years that had only toughened now for a moment hung their weight upon her head. ‘Better to have found the fire a second time.’

  ‘Lesha died in the struggle before we were taken, Provost. My man, Greyson, was not so lucky. His was a hard death.’

  And yet you survived. She didn’t say it. The Hundred and their spawn have an instinct for survival and it never pays to ask the cost.

  The provost sat back in her chair and set her quill on the armrest. A moment later she let her papers fall. ‘I have sixteen grandchildren you know, Jorg?’

  I nodded. It didn’t seem the time to say ‘fifteen’.

  ‘All bright and wonderful children who ran through these halls at one time or other, shrieking, laughing, full of life. A trickle of them at first, then a tide. And their mothers would put them on my lap, always the mothers, and we’d sit and goggle, young to old, a mystery to each other. Then life would sweep them on their way, and now I could more quickly tell you the names of the sixteen district water marshals than of those children. Many I wouldn’t recognize in the street unless you told me to watch out for one.

  ‘Lesha was a bold girl. Not pretty, but clever and fierce. She could have done my job maybe, but she was never meant for city life. I’m sorry now that I didn’t get to know her better. More sorry for her father, who knew her even less well perhaps but will weep for her where all I have are excuses.’

  ‘I liked her. The same force pushed us both. I liked Greyson too,’ I said.

  It struck me that finding someone I might call a friend had been a rare thing in my life. And in the space of three short months I’d discovered and lost two.

  ‘I hope whatever you found proves worth the sacrifice.’

  The gun hung heavy at my hip, wrapped in leather. Almost as heavy as the copper box on the hip opposite. The provost took up her quill again. No talk now of receptions, feasts with merchants, mass with the cardinal. Perhaps she first wanted to tell her son that his daughter was dead.

  ‘A man who can’t make sacrifices has lost before he starts, Provost. There was a time when I could spend the lives of those around me without care. Now, sometimes, I care. Sometimes it hurts.’ I thought for a moment of the Nuban falling away after I shot him. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I can’t and won’t sacrifice absolutely anything rather than allow it to be used to rule me, rather than have it be made into a way to lose.’

  ‘Well now, there’s an attitude that will serve you well at Congression, King Jorg.’ The provost offered me a grim smile, tight in the creases of her face.

  ‘Your granddaughter though was not something I gave up to advance my cause. I did my best to save her from pain.’

  The provost took a scroll and dipped her quill. ‘These Perros will face justice soon enough.’ She shot me a cold look. ‘These road-brothers. This order will send enough of the city guard to hang them all.’

  ‘They’re all dead, I believe. Perhaps one or two escaped.’ I remembered flinging the hatchet, the man’s arms thrown up as he fell, the second runner vanishing over the rise. ‘One.’ I wanted to go back and hunt him down myself. With effort I unclenched my jaw and met the provost’s gaze.

  ‘We know of the Perros Viciosos in Albaseat, King Jorg. Tales are brought through our gates, many tales.’

  ‘Well, let them add that to Lesha’s own story. At the last she brought an end to the Bad Dogs and saved many others from their predations. And I was the end she brought them.’ I thought perhaps Lesha might have approved of that.

  The provost shook her head, just a fraction, telling me her disbelief without words. ‘It can’t be that there are less than scores in that band, not with the trouble they have caused, the atrocities …’

  ‘Two dozen, a few more perhaps.’ I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t take many hands or much imagination to build a reputation on blood and horror.’

  ‘Two dozen – and yet you killed all but one?’ The provost arched a brow and set her quill down again as if unwilling to record a falsehood.

  ‘Dear lady, I killed them from youngest child to oldest woman, and when I was done I blunted three axes dismembering their corpses. I am Jorg of Ancrath – I burned ten thousand in Gelleth and didn’t think it too many.’

  I gave her my bow and turned to leave. The men at the door, wide and gleaming in the black scales of their armour, stepped aside sharply.

  28

  Five years earlier

  I turned fifteen on the voyage to Afrique. I had always imagined such a journey as an endurance at sea, like the storm-tossed odysseys of legend that end clinging to a raft of wreckage, hidden from the sun by a square of tarpaulin, on the point of drinking your own urine as the faint haze of land rises over the horizon.

  The truth is that from Albaseat you can travel by good roads through the kingdoms of Kadiz and Kordoba and come to the Kordoban coast where a promontory ends in a vast rock miles wide – Tariq’s Mountain. Look south from the watchtowers on the heights of this wave-lapped mountain, across two dozen miles of ocean, and the shores of Afrique may be seen, bare peaks rising in challenge above a morning sea mist. Look west, across Tariq Bay and you’ll see Port Albus where many ships wait to carry a man with gold in his pocket to whatever corner of the Earth he desires.

  It isn’t that Afrique is so far away that gives her mystery. From the realms of the Horse Coast you can almost reach out to touch her, but as I’ve learned with Katherine, touching is not knowing. The fringes of Maroc may be seen from the watchtowers of the Rock, but the vastness of Afrique sprawls south so far that at its extreme are regions more distant
from the Horse Coast than the frozen north of the Jarls, as far as Utter in the east, as far even as the Great Lands of the West across the ocean.

  In short then I was at sea for only a day, and on that day, midway between two continents, out of sight of all land – thanks to the persistence of the coastal mists – the hour of my birth came and went and I entered my fifteenth year.

  I had arrived at Port Albus burned dark by the Kordoban sun, which in truth is much the same as the sun of Kadiz and of Wennith and of Morrow, though the Kordobans like to claim it as their own. I negotiated passage across the straits on quays thronged with as many Moors, Nubans, and men of Araby as with men of the Horse Coast or Port Kingdoms. Captain Akham of the Keshaf agreed to carry me that morning. I waited while thick-muscled Nubans, black as trolls, brought ashore the last of his cargo. They stacked up white salt-blocks thick as a hand span and a foot square, carried from the unknown across great deserts on camel trains. And beside them, baskets of fruit from the groves of Maroc. Lemons larger than any I’d held, and objects picked from no tree I had seen before. I had a stevedore name them for me, pineapple, star fruit, hairy lychee. I bought one of each for two copper stallions, both a little crimped, and went aboard an hour later with sticky hands, sticky face, sticky dagger, and a mouth wanting to taste more of foreign shores.

  While I waited and ate my fruit a man joined me at the barrel-stack, just opposite the gangway. A man stranger than any on the quay, though by no means the furthest flung.

  ‘Sir Jorg of Conaught.’ I sketched him a bow. ‘And you’ll be a Florentine?’

  He nodded, a curt motion beneath the tall cylinder of his hat. No part of his flesh showed, save his face, a plump and pasty white beneath the two-inch brim of that hat. How it didn’t burn scarlet I don’t know.

  ‘I’ve not met a modern before.’ I hadn’t liked the curtness of that nod so I spat out any politeness with the tough skin of the pineapple chunk I’d been chewing on.

  He had nothing to say to that and looked away to where two men struggled with his luggage, a large trunk, covered with the same black fabric his frock coat, trews, waistcoat, and shirt appeared to have been cut from. A symphony in black with only his white cotton gloves and, of course, his pale face, to sour it. Sweat trickled along the side of his nose, his coat looked thick with it, shiny with human grease.

  ‘A Florentine banker bound for Afrique with not a bodyguard in sight?’ I asked. ‘I’ll keep the footpads off you for a few days if you have the coin.’ I thought I might attract less attention as the guard to a man even more out of place than myself.

  He glanced my way, failing to keep his distaste hidden. ‘Thank you, sir, no.’

  I shrugged, yawned and rolled my head. I imagined the wideness and wildness of the world must be a shock to any of the banking clans after the swordless peace their clockwork soldiers maintained in Florence. The next piece of pineapple glistened on the point of my dagger – gone in one noisy mouthful.

  ‘Your name, banker,’ I said.

  ‘Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South.’

  ‘Well good luck, Master Marco.’ I turned my back on him and followed his trunk onboard. He would probably need all the luck he could afford, but reason demanded that he must have something to him or he wouldn’t have survived to get this far from the counting tables of the Florentines.

  On the bleached white decks of the Keshaf I spent hours watching the swelling sea from the prow and discovered that though the south had stained me I would never be so dark that the sun couldn’t burn me that bit more. The second half of the voyage found me skulking in the sails’ shade.

  ‘My lord?’ The captain’s boy with water in a leather mug.

  I took it. Never refuse water in dry places – and there is no place more dry than the seas off Afrique. ‘My thanks.’ Thirst made me grateful.

  I travelled as a down-at-heels knight rather than a king, with letters from my grandfather to ease passage where needed. Losing the weight of my title made life far more simple. I sipped the water and leaned back against coiled rope, more at ease that I had been in an age. I had had enough of formality in Albaseat, even if I did escape the threatened receptions. Better to learn the ways of empire incognito, from the streets, from the sewers if need be, than amongst the fountains and scented shade of the rich.

  At times like these, finding peace in anonymity, I could only wonder, if I gained such pleasure in slipping the bonds of kingship why I kept repeating my claim to a greater throne, a heavier crown? With the creak of timbers about me, the flapping shade of the sails, and a cool sea-breeze to take the sweat away, replying to such questions came hard. My fingers found the answer. A copper box, thorn-patterned. Even here, in the wide blue sea, driven by restless winds, the child would find me, and though the box might hold the worst of my crimes, enough of them still roamed free, such that if I ever lingered too long, however bright a paradise I may have found, the past would catch me up, rise around me in a dark tide, and devour peace.

  If you must run, have something to run toward, so it feels less like cowardice. And if you must run to something, why not make it the empire throne? Something suitably distant and unobtainable. After all, getting everything you wish for is nearly as dire a curse as having all your dreams come true.

  Yusuf Malendra came to stand beside me at the ship’s rail. A tall man, slim, the wind billowing his loose cottons around him. Captain Akham introduced us as I boarded, the only other passenger other than Marco and me, but since then he’d hidden himself away – a difficult feat on a small ship. The modern, Marco of the long title, had thrown up over the side almost before we left harbour, nearly losing that fancy hat of his. He vanished below decks soon after. Perhaps Yusuf had been hidden down there too.

  ‘Impressive is it not?’ He nodded toward the Rock – Tariq’s Mountain, miles behind us yet still huge.

  ‘Very. This Tariq must have been a great king,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody knows. It’s a very ancient name.’ He gripped the rail in both hands. ‘All our names are ancient. The Builders wrote their names in machines and now we can’t read them. The suns burned all that was written on paper except the oldest of writings, that were stored in deep vaults, did you know that? The writings we found were the most precious, valued more for their antiquity than the secrets they held. When the lands became habitable and men crept back to them most of the records they recovered were the works of Greeks and Romans.’

  ‘So we’re behind the Builders in all things, even names?’ A short laugh escaped me.

  For a while we watched the gulls wheel, listened to their cries.

  ‘You are visiting a relative in Maroc?’ he asked. ‘Getting married?’

  ‘You think your ladies would like me?’ I turned my burns toward him.

  Yusuf shrugged. ‘Daughters marry who their fathers tell them to.’

  ‘And are you getting married?’ I lifted my gaze from the slim and curving sword at his hip to the dark mass of his hair, an expanding confusion of tight curls, imprisoned with bone combs.

  He threw his head back and laughed. ‘Questions for questions. You’re a man who’s spent time at court.’ He let the swell lean him back into the rail and shot me a shrewd look. ‘I’m too old for more wives, Sir Jorg, and you perhaps think yourself too young for the first?’ Dark lips framed his smile, darker than the caramel of his skin. I guessed he might be thirty, certainly no older.

  I shrugged. ‘Surely too young for any more. And to satisfy your curiosity, Lord Yusuf, I am merely travelling to see what the world has to offer.’

  A wave slapped the hull sending up an unexpected spray over both of us.

  The Marocan wiped his face. ‘Salty! Let’s hope the world has better to offer than that, no?’ Again the grin, teeth long, even, and curiously grey.

  I grinned back. An odyssey would have been all right with me, barring the drifting wreckage and the consumption of urine. One day at sea was too few. Besid
es, entering a new world deserves a journey of consequence, not just a hop across a thirty-mile channel.

  ‘You will come and stay with me, Sir Jorg. I have a beautiful home. Come with me when we disembark. Let it not be said Maroc offers a poor welcome. I insist. And you can tell us what you hope to find in Afrique.’

  ‘You honour me,’ I said.

  We stood without speaking for a time, watching the gulls again and the white flecked waves, until at last the distant mist and haze offered up the mountains once more, the jagged coast of a new world. I wondered what I would tell my hosts when they asked at table what brought me there. I could give away my rank and speak of Congression, of how the provost of Albaseat put into my mind that in Vyene the empire throne might be won in a different kind of game, with less bloodshed and more lying. And that to play in this new game I needed to know more about the key figures in the Hundred, more than they chose to show before the Gilden Gates. I could perhaps speak of the Prince of Arrow. Of how, more than the wind in the Keshaf ’s sails, his derision drove me to see the borders of empire for myself, to know what I would own, to give me better reasons for wanting it. And at the last, if foolishness took hold, I might speak of Ibn Fayed and of a mathmagician named Qalasadi. I had spent years in pursuit of revenge against an uncle who killed my mother and brother, and here was a man who would have slain all my mother’s kin in one night and left me holding the blame. Surely he deserved no better than Uncle Renar got?

  The port of Kutta sprawled across a long and dusty arc of coastline, hemmed between the sea and mountains that launched skyward, browns and dark clumps of greenery soon giving way to bare rock. We stepped ashore onto a long and rickety quay crammed with so many people it seemed that at any given moment a dozen of them threatened to fall into the water. I let Yusuf forge a path. The balance between the force that may be exerted in such endeavours and the nature of the response when offence is taken varies with geography. Rather than pitch headlong into a pointless fight mere yards into what I planned to be a long journey through Afrique, I let myself be led, and kept close and watchful.