Prince of Thorns Page 7

  “Berrec, it don’t seem right.” Grebbin furrowed his broad forehead. “He’s a young-un an’ all.”

  Berrec pulled the poker from the coals and held it toward Grebbin. “You don’t want to stand between me and a ducat, my friend.”

  The black man’s naked chest glistened below the glowing point. Ugly burns marked his ribs, red flesh erupting like new-ploughed furrows. I could smell the sweet stench of roasted meat.

  “He’s very black,” I said.

  “He’s a Nuban is what he is,” Berrec said, scowling. He gave the poker a critical look and returned it to the fire.

  “Why are you burning him?” I asked. I didn’t feel easy under the Nuban’s scrutiny.

  The question puzzled them for a moment. Grebbin’s frown deepened.

  “He’s got the devil in him,” Berrec said at last. “All them Nubans have. Heathens, the lot of them. I heard that Father Gomst, him as leads the King himself in prayer, says to burn the heathen.” Berrec laid a hand on the Nuban’s stomach, a disturbingly tender touch. “So we’re just crisping this one up a bit, before the King comes to watch him killed on the morrow.”

  “Executed.” Grebbin pronounced the word with the precision of one who has practised it many times.

  “Executed, killed, what’s the difference? They all end up for the worms.” Berrec spat into the coals.

  The Nuban kept his eyes on me, a quiet study. I felt something I couldn’t name. I felt somehow wrong for being there. I ground my teeth together and met his gaze.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “Do?” Grebbin snorted. “He’s a prisoner.”

  “His crime?” I asked.

  Berrec shrugged. “Getting caught.”

  Lundist spoke from the doorway. “I believe . . . Jorg, that all of the prisoners for execution are bandits, captured by the Army of the March. The King ordered the action to prevent raids across the Lichway into Norwood and other protectorates.”

  I broke my gaze from the Nuban’s, and let it slide across the marks of his torture. Where the skin remained unburned, patterns of raised scars picked out symbols, simple in design but arresting to the eye. A soiled loincloth hung across his hips. His wrists and ankles were bound with iron shackles secured with a basic pin-lock. Blood oozed along the short chains anchoring them to the table.

  “Is he dangerous?” I asked. I moved close. I could taste the burned meat.

  “Yes.” The Nuban smiled as he said it, his teeth bloody.

  “You shut your heathen hole, you.” Berrec yanked the iron from the coals. A shower of sparks flew up as he lifted the white-hot poker to eye-level. The glow made something ugly of his face. It reminded me of a wild night when the lightning lit the faces of Count Renar’s men.

  I turned to the Nuban. If he’d been watching the iron, I’d have left him to it.

  “Are you dangerous?” I asked him.

  “Yes.”

  I pulled the pin from the manacle on his right wrist.

  “Show me.”

  13

  Four years earlier

  The Nuban moved fast, but it wasn’t his speed that impressed, it was his lack of hesitation. He reached for Berrec’s wrist. A sudden heave brought the warder sprawling across him. The poker in Berrec’s outstretched hand skewered Grebbin through the ribs, deep enough so that Berrec lost his grip on it as Grebbin twisted away.

  Without pause, the Nuban lifted himself halfway to sitting, as close to upright as his manacled wrist would let him. Berrec slid down the Nuban’s chest, sliding on sweat and blood, into his lap. He started to raise himself. The Nuban’s descending elbow put an end to the escape attempt. It caught Berrec on the back of the neck, and bones crunched.

  Grebbin screamed of course, but screams were common enough in the dungeon. He tried to run, but somehow lost his sense of direction and slammed into a cell door, with enough force to drive the point of the poker out below his shoulder blade. The impact knocked him over and he didn’t get up again. He twisted for a moment, mouthing something, with only wisps of smoke or steam escaping his lips.

  A cheer went up from those cells containing occupants too stupid to know when to stay silent.

  Lundist could have run. He had plenty of time. I expected him to go for help, but he was halfway to me by the time Grebbin hit the ground. The Nuban pushed Berrec clear, and freed his other wrist.

  “Run!” I shouted at Lundist in case it hadn’t occurred to him.

  Actually, he was running, only in the wrong direction. I knew the years lay less heavy on him than an old man had a right to expect, but I didn’t think he could sprint.

  I moved to put the table, and the Nuban, between Lundist and me.

  The Nuban unpinned both ankles as Lundist reached him. “Take the boy, old man, and go.” He had the deepest voice I’d ever heard.

  Lundist fixed the Nuban with those disconcerting blue eyes of his. His robes settled, forgetting the rush from the doorway. He held hands to his chest, one atop the other. “If you go now, man of Nuba, I will not stop you.”

  That brought a scatter of laughter from the cells.

  The Nuban watched Lundist with the same intensity I’d seen earlier. He had a few inches on my tutor, but it was the difference in bulk that made it seem a contest between David and Goliath. Where Lundist stood slender as a spear, the Nuban had as much weight again, and more, corded into thick slabs of muscle over heavy bone.

  The Nuban didn’t laugh at Lundist. Perhaps he saw more than the prisoners did. “I’ll take my brothers with me.”

  Lundist chewed on that, then took a pace back. “Jorg, here.” He kept his gaze on the Nuban.

  “Brothers?” I asked. I couldn’t see any black faces at the bars.

  The Nuban gave a broad smile. “Once I had hut-brothers. Now they are far away, maybe dead.” He spread his arms, the smile becoming half grimace as he felt his burns. “But the gods have given me new brothers, road-brothers.”

  “Road-brothers.” I rolled the words across my tongue. An image of Will flickered in my mind, blood and curls. There was power here. I felt it.

  “Kill them both, and let me out.” A door to my left rattled as if a bull were worrying at it. If the speaker matched his voice, there was an ogre in there.

  “You owe me your life, Nuban,” I said.

  “Yes.” He jerked the keys from Berrec’s belt and stepped toward the cell on my left. I stepped with him, keeping him between Lundist and myself.

  “You’ll give me a life in return,” I said.

  He paused, glancing at Lundist. “Go with your uncle, boy.”

  “You’ll give me a life, brother, or I’ll take yours as forfeit,” I said.

  More laughter from the cells, and this time the Nuban joined in. “Who do you want killed, Little Brother?” He set the key in the lock.

  “I’ll tell you when we see him,” I said. To specify Count Renar now would raise too many questions. “I’m coming with you.”

  Lundist rushed forward at that. He pivoted past the Nuban, delivering a kick to the back of his knee. I heard a loud click as the black man went down.

  The Nuban twisted as he fell, and lunged for Lundist. Somehow the old man evaded him, and when the Nuban sprawled at his feet, Lundist kicked him in the neck, a blow that cut off his oath and left him limp on the stone floor.

  I almost skipped free, but Lundist’s fingers knotted in my hair as it streamed behind me. “Jorg! This is not the way!”

  I fought to escape, snarling. “It’s exactly the way.” And I knew it to be true. The wildness in the Nuban, the bonds between these men, the focus on what will make the difference—no matter what the situation—all of it echoed in me.

  From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the cell door opening. The click had been the key turning.

  Lundist held my shoulders and made me face him. “You’ve no place with these men, Jorg. You can’t imagine the life they lead. They don’t have the answers you want.” He had such intensity
to him, I could almost believe he cared.

  A figure emerged from the cell, stooping to come through the doorway. I’d never seen a man so big, not Sir Gerrant of the Table Guard, not Shem the stablehand, nor the wrestlers from The Slavs.

  The man came up behind Lundist, quick, a rolling storm.

  “Jorg, you think I don’t understand—” The sweep of a massive arm cut off Lundist’s words and sent him to the stone floor with such force I’d have winced even if he hadn’t taken a handful of my hair with him.

  The man towered over me, an ugly giant in stinking rags, with his hair hanging down in matted curtains. The scale of him mesmerized me. He reached for me, and I moved too slow. The hand that caught me could almost close around my waist. He lifted me level with his face, and his filthy mane parted as he looked up.

  “Jesu, but you’re one hideous offence to the eye.” I could tell he was going to kill me, so no point in being tactful. “I can see why the King wants to execute you.”

  Even from the anonymity of the cells the laughter was hesitant. Not a man to mock, then. Nothing soft in his face, just brute lines, scar, and the jut of bone beneath coarse skin. He lifted me, as if to dash me on the stone, like throwing down an egg.

  “No!”

  I could see under the giant’s arm, an old man and a red-haired youth had followed him out and were now helping the Nuban to his feet.

  “No,” the Nuban said again. “I owe him a life, Brother Price. And besides, without him, you’d still be in that cell waiting on the pleasures of the morrow.”

  Brother Price gave me a look of impersonal malice, and let me fall as though I’d ceased to exist. “Let them all out.” He growled the words.

  The Nuban gave the keys to the old man. “Brother Elban.” Then he came across to where I’d landed. Lundist lay close by, face to the floor, blood pooling around his forehead.

  “The gods sent you, boy, to loose me from that table.” The Nuban glanced at the torture rack, then at Lundist. “You come with the brothers now. If we find the man you want dead, I kill him, maybe.”

  I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like that “maybe.”

  I looked to Lundist for a moment. I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. I sensed a ghost of the guilt I should perhaps have felt, the itch from an amputated limb, still niggling though the flesh has long since gone.

  I stood beside the Nuban, with Lundist at my feet, and watched as the outlaws released their comrades. I found myself staring into the orange heat of the coals, remembering.

  I remembered a time when I lived in the lie. I lived in a world of soft things, mutable truths, gentle touches, laughter for its own sake. The hand that pulled me from the carriage that night, from the warmth of my mother’s side, into a night of rain and screaming, that hand pulled me out by a doorway that I can’t go back through. We all of us pass through that door, but we tend to exit of our own volition, and by degrees, sniffing the air, torn and tentative.

  In the days following my escape and illness, I saw my old dreams grow small and wither. I saw my child’s life yellow on the tree and fall, as if a harsh winter had come to haunt the spring. It was a shock to see how little my life had meant. How mean the dens and forts in which William and I had played with such fierce belief, how foolish our toys without the intensity of an innocent imagination to animate their existence.

  Every waking hour I felt an ache, a pain that grew each time I turned the memory over in my hand. And I returned to it, time and again, like a tongue to the socket of a missing tooth, drawn by the absence.

  I knew it would kill me.

  The pain became my enemy. More than the Count Renar, more than my father’s bartering with lives he should have held more precious than crown, or glory, or Jesu on the cross. And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain. I analysed its offensive, and found its lines of attack. It festered, like the corruption in a wound turned sour, drawing strength from me. I knew enough to know the remedy. Hot iron for infection, cauterize, burn, make it pure. I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root.

  “Come.”

  I looked up. The Nuban was speaking to me. “Come. We’re ready.”

  The brothers were gathered around us in ragged and ill-smelling array. Price had one of the warders’ swords. The other gleamed in the hand of a second giant of a man, just a shade shorter, a shade lighter, a shade younger, and so similar in form that he could only have been squeezed from the same womb as Price.

  “We’re going to cut a way out of here.” Price tested the edge of his sword against the short beard along his jawline. “Burlow, up front with Rike and me. Gemt and Elban, take the rear. If the boy slows us down, kill him.”

  Price threw a look around the chamber, spat, and made for the corridor.

  The Nuban put a hand on my shoulder. “You should stay.” He nodded to Lundist. “But if you come, don’t fall behind.”

  I looked down at Lundist. I could hear the voices telling me to stay, familiar voices, but distant. I knew the old man would walk through fire to save me, not because he feared my father’s wrath, but just . . . because. I could feel the chains that bound me to him. The hooks. I felt the weakness again. I felt the pain seeping through cracks I’d thought sealed.

  I looked up at the Nuban. “I won’t fall behind,” I said.

  The Nuban pursed his lips, shrugged, and set off after the others. I stepped over Lundist, and followed.

  Assassination is just murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.

  14

  So we rode out from Norwood. The peasants watched us, all sullen and dazed, and Rike cursed them. As if it had been his idea to keep them from a Renar bonfire and now they owed him a cheer as he left. We left them the ruins of their town, decorated with the corpses of the men that ruined it. Poor compensation, especially after Rike and the brothers had stripped the dead of anything of worth. I reckoned we could make Crath City by nightfall, riding hard, and be banging on the gates of the Tall Castle before the moon rose.

  I shouldn’t have been turning for home, picking up my old ways, and thinking once more about vengeance upon the Count of Renar. That’s what instinct told me. But today instinct spoke with an old and dry voice and I no longer trusted it. I wanted to go home, perhaps because it felt as though something else required that I did not. I wanted to go home and if Hell rose up to stop me, it would make me desire it the more. We took the Castle Road, up through the garden lands of Ancrath. Our path ran alongside gentle streams, between small woods and quiet farms. I’d forgotten how green it was. I’d grown used to a world of churned mud, burned fields, smoke-grey skies, and the dead rotting on the ground. The sun found us, pushing its way through high cloud. In the warmth our column slowed until the clatter of hooves broke into lazy thuds. Gerrod paused where a three-bar gate led through the hedgerow. Beyond it, a field, golden with wheat, rolled out before us. He tore at the long grass around the gatepost. It felt as if God had poured honey over the land, sweet and slow, holding everything at peace. Norwood lay fifteen miles, and a thousand years, behind us.

  “Good to be back, eh, Jorg?” Makin pulled up beside me. He leaned forward in his stirrups and drank in the air. “Smells of home.”

  And it did. The scent of warm earth took me back, back to times when my world was small, and safe.

  “I hate this place,” I said. He looked shocked at that, and Makin was never an easy man to shock. “It’s a poison men take willingly, knowing it will make them weak.”

  I gave Gerrod my heels and let him hurry up the road. Makin caught me up and cantered alongside. We passed Rike and Burlow at the crossroads, throwing r
ocks at a scarecrow.

  “Men fight for their homeland, Prince,” Makin said. “It’s the land they defend. The King and the land.”

  I turned to holler at the stragglers. “Close the line!”

  Makin kept pace, waiting for an answer. “Let the soldiers die for their land,” I said to him. “If the time comes to sacrifice these fields in the cause of victory, I’ll let them burn in a heartbeat. Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.”

  We rode on at a trot, west, trying to catch the sun.

  Soon enough we found the garrison at Chelny Ford. Or rather they found us. The watchtower must have seen us on the trail, and fifty men came out along the Castle Road to block our way.

  I pulled up a few yards short of the pikemen, strung across the road in a bristling hedge, double-ranked. The rest of the squad waited behind the pike-wall, with drawn swords, save for a dozen archers arrayed amongst the corn in the field to our right. A score of heifers, in the field opposite, saw our approach and idled over to investigate.

  “Men of Chelny Ford,” I called out. “Well met. Who leads here?”

  Makin came up behind me, the rest of the brothers trailing in after him, easy in their saddles.

  A tall man stepped forward between two pikemen, but not too far forward, no idiot this one. He wore the Ancrath colours over a long chain shirt, and an iron pot-helm low on his brow. To my right a dozen sets of white knuckles strained on bowstrings. To my left the heifers watched from behind the hedge, complacent and chewing on the cud.

  “I’m Captain Coddin.” He had to raise his voice as one of the cows let out a low moo. “The King signs mercenaries at Relston Fayre. Armed bands are not permitted to roam into Ancrath. State your business.” He kept his eyes on Makin, looking for his answer there.

  I didn’t care for being dismissed as a child, but there’s a time and place for taking offence. Besides, old Coddin seemed to know his stuff. Putting Brother Gemt out of his misery was one thing, but wasting one of Father’s captains quite another.