Emperor of Thorns tbe-3 Page 5

  ‘There are places in the Iberico Hills, unmarked save for the barren look of them, where a man’s skin will fall from him as he walks.’ My uncle pushed the horse away and stepped closer to me. ‘What grows in those hills is twisted, what lives there unnatural. I doubt your need exceeds the risks.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. And he was. But when was the world ever so simple as right and wrong? I blinked twice and the red dot watched me from the darkness behind my eyelids. ‘I know you’re right, but often it’s not in me to take the sensible path, Uncle. I’m an explorer. Maybe that itch is in you too?’

  He rubbed his beard, a quick grin showing through the worry. ‘Explore somewhere else?’

  ‘I should take my foolish risks while I’m young, no? Better now than when that little girl you’ve found for me is grown and looking to me to keep her in silks and splendour. If my mistakes prove fatal, find her another husband.’

  ‘This is nothing to do with Miana. You just shouldn’t do this, Jorg. If I thought it would stop you I would tell you “no” and set a guard to watch you.’

  I bowed, turned, and walked away. ‘I’ll take a mule. No sense risking good horseflesh.’

  ‘On that we’re agreed,’ he called after me. ‘Don’t let it drink from any standing water there.’

  I stepped back into the brightness of the day. The wind still raked across the courtyard, cold from the sea, but the sun would burn you even so.

  ‘Visit Carrod Springs first!’ Robert’s shout reached me as I started for my quarters.

  ‘Qalasadi and Ibn Fayed.’ The names tasted exotic.

  ‘A man of power and a powerful man.’ My grandfather rested in the chair where the Earls of Morrow had sat for generations, facing the sea.

  A circle of Builder glass, stronger than the walls around it and a full three yards in diameter, showed us the Middle Sea, the curvature of the Earth making it an azure infinity, white-flecked with waves. Out beyond sight across those depths, across the Corsair Isle, no further from us than Crath City, lay Roma and all her dominions.

  Caliph Ibn Fayed might keep his court in the heart of a desert but his ships reached out across that sea, Moorish hands seeking to reclaim these lands that had been passed back and forth between Christendom and the Moslems since forever. Ibn Fayed’s mathmagician, Qalasadi, had likely returned to the shadow of the caliph’s throne to calculate the optimal timing for the next strike, and the odds of its success.

  Far below us a wave slapped the cliffs, no tremor of it reaching the room but a high spray beading the glass. Twice a day they lowered a stable-boy with bucket and cloth to ensure that nothing but age dimmed Grandfather’s view.

  ‘Four sails,’ he said.

  I had only seen three. The merchant cog, red-hulled, hauling cargo along the coast, and two fishing boats, bobbing further out.

  Grandfather saw my frown. ‘Out there, on the horizon.’ A soft-voiced man despite the creaks of age.

  A white flash. The sails of some wide-ranging vessel. A warship? A pirate cutter from the Isle? Or some flat-bellied scow out of?gypt, treasure-laden?

  I went closer to the glass, pressed a hand to its coldness. How many centuries ago had it been looted and from what ruin? Redmon surely had a scroll in his windy tower that held the secret.

  ‘I can’t allow them to live,’ I said. The caliph was just a name to me, Qalasadi filled my thoughts. The numbered man.

  Grandfather laughed in his chair, the whale-ivory back of it spreading above him like the spray of a breaking wave. ‘Would you hunt down every man who wronged you, Jorg? However far-flung? However long they run? Seems to me a man like that is a slave to chance, always hunting, no time for living.’

  ‘They would have seen you die screaming while the poison ate you,’ I said. ‘Your wife too. Your son.’

  ‘And would have had you take the blame.’ He yawned wide enough to crack his jaw and ran the heels of both palms across the grey stubble of his beard.

  ‘Poison is a dirty weapon,’ I said. Not that I had been above its use in Gelleth. I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

  ‘We play a dirty game.’ Grandfather nodded and watched me from his wrinkles with those dark eyes so like Mother’s.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the poison that irked me. Or setting me up for the fall — a chance inspiration surely and none of Ibn Fayed’s doing. I recalled Qalasadi in that courtyard the only time we met, his assessment, his calculation as he considered the probabilities. Maybe that lack of malice had made it so personal; he reduced me to numbers and played the odds. Fexler’s ghost had been constructed by reducing the true man to numbers. I found I didn’t like the process.

  ‘They struck at my family,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I’ve built a kingdom on not allowing such acts to go unpunished.’

  He watched me then, with the sunlight streaming around me from the sea window, making me a shadow cut from light. What went on beneath that thin circlet of gold, I wondered, what calculations? We all make them. Not so cold-blooded as Qalasadi’s but an arithmetic of sorts nonetheless. What did he make of me, this watering-down of his seed, beloved daughter mixed with detestable Ancrath? Nothing but a name to him a month ago. No child to remember, no soft toddling innocence from years past to blunt the sharp angles of the young killer before him — blood of his blood.

  ‘How would you do it? The Caliph of Liba lives in lands that are not like ours. You would be a white man where almost no white men are. A stranger in a strange land. Marked at every turn. Reported from the moment you set foot on the Afrique shores. You’ll find no friends there, only sand, disease, and death. I would gladly have Ibn Fayed and Qalasadi die. Fayed for striking at me in my halls, the mathmagician for his treachery. But if a lone assassin, especially a lone white assassin, could have accomplished it I would have dispatched one. Not in answer to Fayed’s raids — as a man of honour I meet war with war — but in response to his assassin.’

  All men of ambition must pray to be pitted against men of honour. Although I pitied my grandfather at that moment, also it made me happy to know that at least somewhere in the mix from which I sprung there lurked a dash of such a man.

  ‘You’re right to say it would not be easy, Earl Hansa.’ I bowed. ‘Maybe I’ll wait until it becomes easy … certainly I need to learn more, consider more.’

  Grandfather came to a decision. I saw the change as his face hardened into it. He would make a terrible player of poker.

  ‘Leave Ibn Fayed and his creatures to me, Jorg. They struck at Morrow, at me and mine in the Castle Morrow. The vengeance is mine to take and I will take it.’

  The old man had weighed his odds. In one hand the life of an unknown relative, tainted by bad blood, in the other the chance of destroying an enemy. Whether ‘unknown relative’ had grown into ‘Rowan’s son, my daughter’s child’ and outweighed the gain, or whether he judged my chances of success so feather-light as to be outweighed by any claim on kinship, I didn’t know.

  ‘I will leave them, then.’ I bowed again. The lie came easily. I chose to believe he saw me as his daughter’s son.

  I provisioned well, loading my mule with water-skins and dried meat. I would find fruit on the way: on the Horse Coast in high summer you had only to stretch out an arm to find an apple, apricot, plum, peach, pear, or even an orange. I packed a tent, for shade is a rarity in the dry hills behind the coastlands, and without the sea breezes the land bakes. I’m told the Moors have held the southern kingdoms time and again, Kadiz, Kordoba, Morrow, Wennith, Andaluth, even Aramis. They find it not so different from the dusts of Afrique.

  ‘So the Iberico, is it?’

  I finished cinching the load-strap beneath my mule and looked up.

  ‘Sunny!’ I grinned at his scowl. Months back I chose the name for the guardsman after he did his best to keep me out of the castle that first day when I arrived incognito.

  ‘Minding my own business I was and up comes Earl Hansa. “Greyson,�
�� he says. He likes to know all the men’s names. “Greyson,” he says, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Young King Jorg is making a trip and I’d like you to go along with him.” “Volunteering”, he called it.’

  ‘Sunny, I can’t think of a man I’d rather have with me.’ I stood and patted the mule’s haunches. It seemed a sturdy beast, shabby but strong. The ostler said he was forty years and more, and wise with it. I thought it good to have at least one greybeard in the party.

  ‘This is revenge for making you drink from the horse trough, ain’t it?’ Sunny said. He had a sour look to him that made me think of Brother Row.

  I waggled my hand. ‘Little bit.’ In truth I hadn’t known I was getting an escort, let alone picked the man. ‘In any case, you’ll enjoy getting out and about,’ I said. ‘Surely even the Iberico Hills beat a day standing guard at the Lowery Gate?’

  He spat at that, strengthening his resemblance to Row still further. ‘I’m a wall guard, not a house flower.’ A stretch of his arm showed off the sun’s nut-brown stain. House guards are never so tanned.

  With the mule’s tether in hand I set off for the gate. Sunny followed. His packhorse stood outside the castle wall in the shade of an olive tree, high laden as if we were bound for a crossing of the Aups.

  However reluctant the show Sunny put on, my mule had him beaten. I had to haul the beast past the horse trough. I named him Balky and encouraged him with a stick. In the end I had my way, but the fact that Balky did not want to go where I led was never in doubt. I guess he really was the wise one after all.

  5

  Five years earlier

  Castle Morrow, like the Haunt, is set apart from the region’s main town. Both castles are placed for defence of their occupants. In the Hundred War the conquering of kingdoms is the business of avarice. The Hundred want their new lands to be rich and plentiful, full of taxpayers and recruits. Most attacks will aim to kill the land’s ruler so the aggressor may claim his throne and take the kingdom unharmed. Wars of attrition where the peasantry are slaughtered, cities burned, crops destroyed, are less common and happen most often when the two sides are evenly matched, both struggling to gain the advantage required to assault the foe’s castles.

  The city of Albaseat rests on fertile plains maybe fifty miles inland from Castle Morrow. It took Sunny and me three days to walk the distance, having started late on the first day, and pausing for frequent stick-based negotiations with Balky. The River Jucca feeds the surrounding farmlands. We approached the city along the Coast Road, which for the last few miles leads along the riverbank, past orchards of every sort, through vineyards, along the foot of slopes thick with olive groves. Turning for Albaseat’s gates we walked between tilled fields heavy with tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, cabbage, potatoes, enough food to feed the world.

  The walls and towers of Albaseat shone in the southern sun.

  ‘Makes Hodd Town look like a pile of offal,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’ Sunny asked.

  ‘Capital city of the Renar Highlands,’ I said. ‘The only city really. More of a big town. Well a town anyhow.’

  ‘The Renar Highlands?’

  ‘Now you’re just trying to irk me.’ I didn’t think he was, though. He blinked and looked away from Albaseat’s towers.

  ‘Oh that Hood Town, my apologies.’ It wasn’t often that Sunny remembered I was the king of anywhere and it always left him looking surprised.

  ‘Hodd Town!’

  The guards at the city gates let us pass without question. It wasn’t often that I remembered Sunny was Greyson Landless, royal guard from Earl Hansa’s court.

  Albaseat not only left Hodd Town looking like a tumbledown village, it made Crath City look shabby in comparison. The Moors had ruled Albaseat for generations and left their mark everywhere, from the great stone halls that stabled grandfather’s cavalry to the high towers from whose minarets you could look out over the source of his wealth, laid out in many shades of green. I did just that, paying a copper to climb the winding stair of the Fayed Tower, a public building at the heart of the great plaza before the new cathedral. Sunny stayed at ground level, watching his horse and Balky from the tower’s shade.

  Even a hundred yards above the plaza’s baking flagstones it felt oven hot. The breeze through the minaret was worth a copper on its own. Without the slow green waters of the Jucca the fields would be desert. The green gave over to parched browns as the land rose and I could see the first rolling steps of the Iberico Hills away to the north. Whatever taint they carried seemed to stain the air itself, turning it a dirty yellow where the horizon started to reclaim the hills.

  I leaned out, hands on the windowsill, to spot Sunny below. The city marched off in all directions, broad and ordered streets lined with tall, whitewashed houses. To the west grander mansions, to the east the low homes and tight alleys of the poor. My grandfather’s people living in the peace of his reign, his nobles plotting, merchants trading, blacksmith, tanner, and slaughterman hard at work, whores aback, maids aknee, washerwomen hauling loads to the river-side meadows where horsemen trained their steeds, the pulse of life, an old and complex dance of many partners. Quick, quick, slow.

  To leave all this behind and dare old poisons, to risk an end like those I had given the people of Gelleth, made no sense. And still I would do it. Not for the hollowness inside me, nor the weight of the copper box that held what had been taken, not for the promise of old magics and the power they offered, but just to know, just to do more than skitter about on the surface of this world. I wanted more than I could see from a tower, however high, or even from the eyes the Builders set among the stars.

  Perhaps I just wanted to know what it was that I wanted. Maybe that is all that growing up means.

  Slow steps brought me from the tower, lost in thought. I waved Sunny to me and bid him lead me to the Lord House.

  ‘They won’t want the likes of-’ He glanced back at me, taking in the fine cloak, the silver-chased breastplate. ‘Oh.’ And remembering that I was a king, albeit of a realm he hardly knew of, he led on.

  We passed the cathedral, the finest I’d seen, a stone confection reaching for blue skies. The saints watched me from their niches and galleries. I felt their disapproval, as if they turned to stare once we passed. The crowds thronged there, before the cathedral steps, perhaps drawn by the cool promise of the great hall within. Sunny and I elbowed our way through, pushing aside the occasional priest and monk as we went.

  I came sweating to the doors of the Lord House. I would have stripped to the waist and let Balky carry my gear but perhaps that might have created a poor impression. The guards admitted us, a boy taking our animals, and we sat on velvet-cushioned chairs whilst a flunky in foolish amounts of lace and silk went to announce our arrival to the provost.

  The man returned several minutes later with a polite cough to indicate that I might put down the large ornamental vase I had been studying and follow him. When my hands are idle they find mischief of one sort or other. I let the vase slip, caught it an inch from the floor and set it down. Polite coughs leave me wanting to choke out a cough of a different sort. I left Sunny to return the ornament to its niche and bade the servant lead on.

  A short corridor took us to the doors of the reception chamber. Like the foyer, every inch of it stood tiled in geometric patterns, blue and white and black, fiendishly complex. Qalasadi would have enjoyed it: even a mathmagician would be hard-pressed to tease out all the secrets it held. High windows caught what breeze was to be had and gave a relief from the heat of the day.

  The flunky knocked three times with a little rod he seemed to carry for that sole purpose. A pause and we entered.

  The room beyond took my breath, complex in detail but a sparse and simple beauty on the grand scale, an architecture of numbers, very different from the gothic halls of my lands or the dull boxes the Builders left us. The provost sat at the far end in a high-backed ebony chair. Apart from two guards at the door and a scribe at a small de
sk beside the provost’s seat, the long chamber lay empty and my footsteps echoed as I approached.

  She looked up from her scroll while I closed the last few yards, a hunched old woman with black and glittering eyes, reminding me of a crow gone to grey and tatters.

  ‘Honorous Jorg Ancrath, King of the Renar Highlands. Grandson to Earl Hansa.’ She introduced me to herself.

  I gave her the small fraction of a bow her rank commanded and answered in the local custom. ‘You have the right of it, madam.’

  ‘We’re honoured to welcome you to Albaseat, King Jorg,’ she said through thin, dry lips and the scribe scratched the words across his parchment.

  ‘It’s a fine city. If I could carry it I’d take it with me.’

  Again the scratching of the quill — my words falling so quickly into posterity.

  ‘What are your plans, King Jorg? I hope we can tempt you to stay? Two days would be sufficient to prepare an official banquet in your honour. Many of the region’s merchants would fight for the opportunity to bend your ear, and our nobility would compete to host you at their mansions, even though I hear you are already promised to Miana of Wennith. And of course Cardinal Hencom will require you at mass.’

  I took pleasure in not waiting for the scribe to catch up, but resisted the temptation to pepper my reply with rare and difficult words or random noises for him to puzzle over.

  ‘Perhaps on my return, Provost. I plan first to visit the Iberico Hills. I have an interest in the promised lands: my father’s kingdom has several regions where the fire from the thousand suns still burns.’

  I heard the quill falter at that. The old woman, though, did not flinch.

  ‘The fire that burns the promised lands is unseen and gives no heat, King Jorg, but it sears flesh just the same. Better to learn of such places in the library.’

  She made no talk of postponing my trip until after her nobles and merchants had taken their bites of me. If I were bound for the Iberico Hills such efforts would wasted — money thrown into the grave as the local saying had it.