King of Thorns Page 7

  I made my way along the margins of the forest toward the Roma Road. They say you can put foot on that road and never leave it till you reach the pope’s front door. I planned to walk the other way.

  There’s a cemetery near the Roma Road, mostly eaten by the forest, mostly forgotten. I hunted through it as a child, crumbled mausoleums choked with ivy, smothered with moss, cracked by trees. The cemetery covers acre upon hidden acre, a lost necropolis. Perechaise they call it in dusty books. The legends mean nothing to me, Beloved, 1845. Dearly departed, 1710. My heart lies here, 1908. Barely legible. So long ago even their calendar loses meaning.

  The stones are set with a clear resin, harder than glass, which wards them in a skin no thicker than a hair. It took years before I noticed it. The weathering they’d suffered happened in the distant long ago. Now not even a hammer blow will mar them. The Builders held these old markers precious and kept them from the centuries.

  I found my way through toppled gravestones close to the road where some of it is kept clear. Much has been robbed out. There’s a peasant’s cottage, a little to the west, entirely built from headstones, weathered granite markers with time-blurred legends remembering the dead for illiterate field-men. A house built of stories, to shelter a man who cannot read.

  I found her by the road’s edge, hair pink with fallen blossom. The cycle of seasons has worn the definition from her features. But the beauty remains, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the grace in long limbs, the gentle swell of a child’s breast, a freckling of lichen. She needs no deep-carved runes to spell out her life. Here I buried my child. A message for which reading is not required. She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would have given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.

  I saw her first in autumn, long ago, when the leaves fell so thick they hid the stone dog she chases. Whilst I watched her other travellers hurried past on the road, clenched against the sharp-fingered wind. Some paused to wonder what she chased, hugging themselves, squinting into the rain. They moved on. I stayed. Maybe they wondered what they were chasing.

  She’s after her dog. A little terrier, remembered in stone, lost that autumn in a drift of wet ochre. A centuries-old chase that has seen the death of everyone who cared, the end of every soul that knew the terrier’s name. A chase that saw the stilling of each hand to touch this child, the loss of every life that shared her world.

  I came again with the snows on the first day of winter, to see my statue girl. My first love maybe. I watched and the snow fell, tiny crystals, the kind so perfect they almost chime against the ground. The light failed early and a wildness infected the wind, swirling the snow into rivulets of milk across the Roma Road, ice hissing over stone. A frost came and etched silver tracery across her dress, with only me to see.

  The seasons turn, and here I am again, and still she waits for spring.

  They buried high lords and high ladies here. Poets and bards. Now it’s a place for servant corpses. Close enough to the Tall Castle for sentimental ladies to visit their wet-nurses, far enough away to be seemly. They bury old servants, sometimes even faithful dogs, around my girl who waits for spring. Soft-hearted ladies from court come with their perfumed toys that have ceased to yap. And one time a boy of six, soaked and half-frozen, dragging something that might once have been a wolf.

  “Hello, Jorg.”

  I turned and between the old graves walked Katherine, the sun making magic of her hair.

  10

  Four years earlier

  Hello, Jorg. Was that all she said to me? Katherine, there in the Rennat Forest, among the gravestones. Hello, Jorg?

  I’m trying to wake up from something. Maybe I’ve always been trying. I’m drowning in confusion, somewhere high above me light dances on a surface, and past that the air is waiting. Waiting for me to draw breath.

  I hardly know Katherine but I want her, with unreasonable ferocity. Like a sickness, like the need for water. Like Paris for Helen, I am laid low by irresistible longing.

  In memory I study the light on her face, beneath the glow-bulbs of the Tall Castle, beneath the cemetery trees. I envy those patches of sunlight, sliding over her hair, moving unopposed the length of her body, across her cheekbones. I remember everything. I recall the pattern of her breath. In the heat of Drane’s kitchen I remember a single bead of sweat and the slow roll of it, down her neck, along the tendon, across her throat. I’ve killed men and forgotten them. Mislaid the act of taking a life. But that drop of sweat is a diamond in my mind’s eye.

  “Hello, Jorg.” And my clever words desert me. She makes me feel my fourteen summers, more boy than man.

  I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I’ve made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh. She’s just a person, just a girl, but she stands at the door to an old world, and although I can’t go back…she can come through, and maybe bring with her a scent of it, a taste of that lost warmth.

  These feelings are too fierce to last. They can only burn, making us ash and char.

  I see her in dreams. I see her against the mountains. High, snow-cold, snow-pure, unobtainable. I climb, and on the empty peak I speak her name to the wind, but the wind takes my words. It takes me too. Tumbling through void.

  “Hello, Jorg.”

  My flesh prickles. I rub at my cheek and my fingers come away bloody, sliced open. Every part of me burns with pins and needles. Real pins, real needles. I scream and like buds on the branch each prickle erupts, a hundred thorns sliding from my skin, growing from the bone. There are animals impaled, stabbed through like exhibits on a gamekeeper’s board. Rat, stoat, ferret, fox, dog…baby. Limp and watching.

  I scream again and rotate into darkness. A night with only a whisper to give it form. A whispered chant, growing louder.

  Topology, tautology, torsion, torture, taunt, taut, tight, taken, taking…taking…take…what’s he trying to take?

  Somebody fumbling at my arm, fingers too stupid for the clever catch on the watch. A quick move and I had his wrist, impossibly thick, strong. I dug my thumb into the necessary pressure point. Lundist showed it to me in a book.

  “Arrg!” Rike’s voice. “Pax!”

  I sat up sharp, breaking the surface, drawing that long-awaited breath, and shaking the darkness from my mind. Topology, tautology, torsion…meaningless webs of words falling from me.

  “Rike!” Crouched over me, blocking the too bright sun.

  He sneered and sat back. “Pax.”

  Pax. Road-speak. Peace, it’s in my nature. An excuse for any crime you’re caught in the middle of. Sometimes I think I should wear the word on my forehead. “Where in hell are we?” I asked. An empty feeling ran through me, welling from my stomach and behind my eyes.

  “Hell’s the word.” Red Kent walked over.

  I lifted my hand. Sand all over. Sand everywhere in fact. “A desert?”

  Two of the fingernails on my right hand were torn away. Gone. It started to hurt. My other nails were torn and split. I had bruises all over.

  Gog came out from behind a lone thorn bush, slow as if he thought I might bite.

  “I—” I pressed my hand to the side of my head, sand gritty on the skin. “I was with Katherine…”

  “And then what?” Makin’s voice from behind.

  “I…” Nothing. And then nothing. As if little Jorgy had been too full of the spring’s warmth and possibilities, and then a stone looped out of the shadows and took him off the bough.

  I remembered the thorns. The itch and sting of them stayed with me. I lifted my arms. No wounds, but the skin lay red and scabbed. In fact Kent had it too, red as his name suggests. I turned to find Makin, also scabby, leading his horse. The beast looked worse than him, ropes of mucus around its muzzle, blisters on its tongue.

  “This is not a good place to be, I’m thinking.” I reached for my knife and found it gone. “What are we doing here?”

  “We came to see a man named Luntar,”
Makin said. “An alchemist from the Utter East. He lives here.”

  “And here is?”

  “Thar.”

  I knew the name. On the map scroll the word had sat along the edge of the Thurtan grasslands. There had been a burn mark on the map obscuring whatever the name labelled. But perhaps the scorch mark hadn’t been an accident.

  “Poisoned land,” Makin said. “Some call them promised.”

  A Builders’ Sun had burned here, many centuries ago. The promise was that one day the land would be safe again. I thrust my fingers back into the sand. Not the ones missing fingernails. I could touch the death there. I could roll it between fingertip and thumb. Hot. Death and fire together.

  “He lives here?” I asked. “Doesn’t he burn?”

  Makin shuddered. “Yes,” he said. “He does.” It takes a lot to make Makin shudder.

  The empty feeling gnawed at me, eating away at the questions I most wanted to ask.

  “And what,” I said, “did we want from this east-mage?”

  Makin held out what he had been holding all along. “This.”

  A box. A copper box, thorn-patterned, no lock or latch. A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.

  “What’s in the box?” I didn’t want to know.

  Makin shook his head. “There was a madness in you, Jorg. When you came back.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Luntar put the madness in there.” Makin thrust the box back into his saddlebag. “It was killing you.”

  “He put my memory in that box?” I asked, incredulous. “You let him take my memory!”

  “You begged him to do it, Jorg.” Makin wouldn’t look at me. Rike on the other hand couldn’t stop.

  “Give it to me.” I would have reached for it but my hand didn’t want to.

  “He told me not to,” Makin said, unhappy. “He told me to make you wait for a day. If you still wanted it after that, you could take it.” Makin bit his lip. He chewed on it too much. “Trust me in this, Jorg, you don’t want to go back to how you were.”

  I shrugged. “Tomorrow, then.” Because trust is how a leader binds his men. And because my hands didn’t want that box. They’d rather burn. “Now, where’s my fecking dagger?”

  Makin would only look at the horizon. “Best forgotten.”

  We moved on, leading the horses, all of us reunited. We headed east, and when the wind blew, the sand stung like nettles. Only Gog and Gorgoth seemed unaffected.

  Gog hung back, as if he didn’t want to be near me. “Is it all like this?” I asked him, just to make him look at me. “Even where Luntar lives?”

  He shook his head. “The sand turns to glass around his hut. Black glass. It cuts your feet.”

  We walked on. Rike marched beside me, sparing the occasional glance. Something had changed in the way he looked at me. As if we were equals now.

  I kept my head down and tried to remember. I teased at the hole in my mind. “Hello, Jorg,” she had said.

  Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull. I would have back what was mine. I would open the box.

  “Hello, Jorg,” she had said. We were by the statue of the girl and her dog, by her grave where sentimental ladies and foolish children bury their animals.

  Nothing.

  I learned a time ago that if you can’t get what you want by going in the front door, find a back way. I know a back way to that cemetery. Not by a path I wanted to tread, but I would take it even so.

  When I was very young, six maybe, a duke called on my father, a man from the north with white-blond hair and a beard down his chest. Alaric of Maladon. The Duke brought a gift for my mother, a wonder of the old world. Something bright and moving, swirling within glass, first lost in the hugeness of the Duke’s hand and then in the folds of Mother’s dress.

  I wanted that thing, half-seen and not understood. But such gifts were not for tiny princes. My father took it and set it in the treasury to gather dust. I learned this much from quiet listening.

  The treasury in the Tall Castle lies behind an iron door, triple-locked. Not a Builder-made door, but a work of the Turkmen, black iron set with a hundred studs. When you’re six, most locked doors present a problem. This one presented several.

  Of all memories, the first I have is of leaning from a high parapet into the teeth of a gale, with the rain lashing and me laughing. The next is of hands pulling me back.

  If you’re determined, if you set your mind, there are never enough hands to pull you back. By the time I reached six I knew the outside of the Tall Castle as well as I knew the inside. The Builders left little for a climber to use, but centuries of tinkering by the Ancraths, and the House of Or before us, had provided plenty of footholds, at least plenty of ones deep enough for a child.

  There is a single high window in the royal treasury, set in a plain wall a hundred feet above the ground, too narrow for a man and blocked by a forest of bars set so close as to give a snake quite a wriggle of it. On the far side of the castle, close to the throne-room, is a hole that leads to a gargoyle’s head on the outer wall. If the treasury door opens, then the movement of air through the castle makes the gargoyle speak. On a still day he moans and when the wind is up he howls. He will also speak if the wind is hard in the east and a particular window in the kitchen stores is left unshuttered. When that happens there’s a fuss and somebody gets whipped with rope and wire. Without the treasury’s high window the gargoyle would not speak and the king would never know when the door to his treasures stood open.

  I left my bed one moonless night. William lay sleeping in his little bed. No one saw me leave, only our great-hound, Justice. He gave a whine of reproach then tried to follow. I cursed him to silence and closed the door on him.

  Those bars look strong but like so much we depend upon in life they are rotten to the core. Rust has eaten them. Even those with steel left at the centre will bend given sufficient leverage. One night when my nurse lay sleeping and three guards on wall-duty argued over the ownership of a silver coin found on the steps at change-over, I climbed down a knotted rope and set foot amidst my father’s wealth. I brushed the rust from my tunic, shook great flakes of it from my hair, and set my lantern, now unhooded, upon the floor.

  The Ancrath loot, robbed from almost every corner of empire, lay on stone shelves, belched from coffers, stood stacked in careless piles. Armour, swords, gold coin in wooden tubs, mechanisms that looked like parts of insects, gleaming in the lantern light and tainting the air with alien scents, almost citrus, almost metal. I found my prize beside a helmet full of cogs and ash.

  The Duke’s gift didn’t disappoint. Beneath a glass dome that wasn’t glass, sealed by an ivory disk that wasn’t ivory, lay a tiny scene, a church in miniature set around with tiny houses, and there a person, and another. And as I held it to the light, and turned its surprising weight this way and that to see the detail, a snowstorm grew, swirling up from the ground until whirling flakes obliterated the view, leaving nothing but a blizzard in a half-globe. I set the snow-globe back, worried for a moment that I had somehow broken it. And miracle of miracles, the snow began to settle.

  There’s no magic to it now. I know that the right collection of artisans could make something similar in just a few weeks. They would use glass and ivory, and I don’t know what the snow would be, but as ancient wonders go, there’s little wonder in such things if you’re much past six. But at the time it was magic, of the best kind. Stolen magic.

  I shook the snow-globe again, and once more the all-encompassing blizzard rose, chaos, followed by calm, by settling snows, and a return to the world before. I shook it again. It seemed wrong. All that storm and fury signifying nothing. The whole world upheaved, and for what? The same man trudged toward the same church, the same woman waited at the s
ame cottage door. I held a world in my hand, and however I shook it, however the pieces fell, in whatever new patterns, nothing changed. The man would never reach the church.

  Even at six I knew the Hundred War. I marched wooden soldiers across Father’s maps. I saw the troops return through the Tall Gate, bloody and fewer, and the women weeping in the shadows as others threw themselves at their men. I read the tales of battle, of advance and retreat, of victory and defeat, in books I would not have been allowed to open if my father knew me. I understood all this and I knew that I held my whole world in my right hand. Not some play land, some toy church and tiny men crafted by ancients. My whole world. And no amount of shaking would change it. We would swirl against each other, battle, kill, and fall, and settle, and as the haze cleared, the war would still be there, unchanged, waiting, for me, for my brother, for my mother.

  When a game cannot be won, change the game. I read that in the book of Kirk. Without thought I brought the snow-globe overhead and smashed it on the ground. From the wet fragments I picked out the man, barely a wheat-grain between my thumb and finger.

  “You’re free now,” I said, then flicked him into a corner to find his own way home, because I didn’t have all the answers, not then, and not now.

  I left the treasury, taking nothing, almost defeated by the rope climb even so. I felt tired but content. What I had done seemed so right that I somehow thought others would see it too and that my crime would not follow me. With aching arms, and covered with rust and scratches, I hauled myself back over the parapet.

  “What’s this now?” A big hand took me by the neck and lifted me off my feet. It seemed that the wall guards had been less argumentative over my coin than I had hoped.

  It didn’t take long before I stood in my father’s throne-room with a sleepy page lighting torches. No whale oil in silver lamps for this night’s business, just pitch-torches crackling, painting more smoke on the black ceiling. Sir Reilly held my shoulder, his gauntlet too heavy and digging in. We waited in the empty room and watched the shadows dance. The page left.