Kitabı oku: «The Broken Empire», sayfa 5

8

In the six kingdoms I took from the prince of Arrow there are many cities larger, cleaner, finer, and in every way superior to Hodd Town. There were cities in my domain that I had yet to see, cities where the people called me king and my statue stood in markets and plazas, that I had not been within ten miles of, and even these were finer than Hodd Town. And yet Hodd Town felt more mine. I had held it longer, taken it in person, painted the streets red when Jarco Renar raised it in rebellion. It was not a place where they remembered Orrin of Arrow. None in Hodd Town spoke of his goodness and vision or voiced the common belief that he would be named a saint before his memory grew cold.

All of Hodd Town turned out to greet our arrival. No one lingers at home when the Gilden Guard ride through their city gates. Highlanders lined the streets cheering, and waving whatever flags they had. Of the Hoddites who would whisper in hoarse voices the next day, heads pounding with the echoes of celebration, not one in ten would be able to give a good account of why they cheered, but in a place like the Highlands it’s hard not to get excited over any touch of the exotic or foreign. At least as long as it’s just passing through and doesn’t look at your sister.

I rode at the head of the column and led it to the gates of Lord Holland’s mansion, the grandest building in the city, or at least the grandest complete building. One day the cathedral would outshine it.

Lord Holland came to throw his gates open in person, a beefy man sweating in his finery, his wife wobbling along behind, a fan of silver and pearls to hide her jowls.

‘King Jorg! You honour my house.’ Lord Holland bowed. His face said his hair should be grey with age so I half expected the glossy black wig to fall as he bent to me, but it stayed in place. Perhaps he kept his own hair and used lampblack on it.

‘I do honour you,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve decided to stay the night while I wait on word from the Haunt.

I swung out of my saddle, armour clanking, and waved him to lead on. ‘Captain Harran.’ I turned, holding a hand up to stop his mouth. ‘We’re staying here until dawn tomorrow. There’s no discussion to be had. We will have to make the time up on the road.’

He looked grim at that but we knew each other well enough that after a few moments holding his eyes to mine he turned away and called for the guard to set a perimeter around Holland’s mansion.

The Hollands’ house-guard moved to block Gorgoth’s path as he followed Makin and myself to the front doors. I had to commend their bravery. I’ve seen Gorgoth reach out both hands and crush two men’s skulls without effort. Lord Holland paused on the steps ahead of me, sensing trouble. He turned with a questioning look.

‘I’m taking Gorgoth through the Gilden Gate in Vyene, so I think he ranks high enough for your front door, Holland.’ I nodded him on.

The guards stepped back with evident relief and we went inside.

Lord Holland’s guest chambers proved to be more than well appointed – even luxurious might be too small a word. Thick rugs covered the floor, woven silk shipped from the Indus and worked with all manner of pagan gods. No wall remained without art, either tapestry or oil and brush, and elaborate plasterwork, gilded to a high shine, decorated the ceilings. Holland had offered me his own rooms but I didn’t want to live amid his old man’s stink. Besides, if they were richer than his guest rooms I’d be hard pressed to resist stealing stuff.

‘Decadence begins when the budget to beautify a man’s home exceeds the coin spent to ensure its defence.’ I turned back to Makin. Gorgoth closed the doors behind him and stood at Makin’s side.

Makin smoothed back his hair and grinned. ‘It’s pretty. No doubting that.’

Gorgoth let his gaze wander. ‘There’s a whole world reaching into this room.’

He had it right. Holland had assembled pieces from all corners of empire and beyond. The works of brilliant men. Years of effort concentrated within four walls to ease the eye of a rich lord’s guests.

Gorgoth lifted an elegant chair in one blunt hand, his fingers curled around intricate scrollwork. ‘The beauty to be found beneath mountains is more … robust.’ He set the chair down again. I imagined the legs splintering if he tried to sit upon it. ‘Why are we here?’

Makin nodded. ‘You said bad beds, grinning officials, and fleas. But here we are even so. The beds look fine. Perhaps a little soft and …’ he glanced at Gorgoth, ‘weak, and there may be fleas, though a better class of flea no doubt, and yes, the officials grinned.’

I pursed my lips and threw myself back onto the grand bed. I sunk into eiderdown, the coverings almost closing above me as if I had fallen into deep water.

‘There’s something I need to sleep on,’ I said.

It took an effort to lift my head to sight Gorgoth. ‘You two amuse yourselves. I’ll send if I need you. Makin, be charming. Gorgoth, don’t eat any servants.’

Gorgoth rumbled at that. They turned to leave.

‘Gorgoth!’ He paused before the door, a door so tall that even he would not have to duck beneath it. ‘Don’t let them give you any shit. You can eat them if they try. You’re coming to Congression as King Under the Mountain. The Hundred may not know it yet but they will.’

He tilted his head at that, and they both left.

I had my own reasons for bringing the leucrota to Congression, but good as those reasons were it had been the chance to represent his new people, his trolls, that had persuaded Gorgoth, and lord knows he needed persuading, for I couldn’t order him. And that in itself made another good reason. I had few men around me that would speak honestly and tell me if they thought me wrong. I had only one man who I couldn’t order, who at the very last would twist my head off rather than obey against his instinct. Everyone needs somebody like that around sometimes.

I sat in Lord Holland’s delicate chair, at a desk of burr walnut so polished it seemed to glow, and played with the chess set I had filched from the guards’ pavilion. I killed a few hours staring at the squares, moving the pieces in their allotted fashion. Enjoying the weight of them in my hand, the glide of them across marble. I have read that the Builders made toys that could play chess. Toys, as small as the silver bishop in my hand, that could defeat any player, taking no time to select moves that undid even the best minds amongst their makers. The bishop made a satisfying click when tapped to the board. I beat out a little rhythm, wondering if any point remained in playing a game that toys could own. If we couldn’t find a better game then perhaps the mechanical minds the Builders left behind would always win.

Holland took me at my word and allowed no visitors, no requests, no invitations. I sat alone in the luxury of his guest rooms and remembered. There was a time when a bad memory was taken from me. I carried it in a copper box until at the last I had to know. Any closed box, any secret, will gnaw at you, day on day, year on year, until it reaches the bone. It will whisper the old rhyme – open the box, and face the danger, or wonder – till it drives you mad, what would have happened if you had. There are other memories I would rather set away from me, beyond use and recollection, but the box taught me a lesson. Nothing can be cut away without loss. Even the worst of our memories is part of the foundation that keeps us in the world.

At last I stood, tipped over the kings, both the black side and the white side, and fell once more into the bed. This time I let it swallow me and sank into the white musk of her dreaming.

I stood in the Tall Castle before the doors to my father’s throne room. I knew this scene. I knew all the scenes that Katherine played for me behind those doors. Galen dying, but with my indifference overwritten by all her yesterdays so that he fell like an axe through both our lives. Or Father’s knife, driven into my chest at the height of my victory, as I reached to him, son to father, a sharp reminder of all his poison, aimed for the heart.

‘I’m past games,’ I said.

I set my fingers to the handles of the great doors.

‘I had a brother who taught me a lesson that stuck. Brother Hendrick. A wild one, a stranger to fear.’

And no sooner was he mentioned than he stood at my side – like the worst of devils summoned by their name. He stood beside me before my father’s doors, with a laugh and a stamp of his boot. Brother Hendrick, dark as a Moor, his long hair in black knots, reaching past his shoulders, lean muscled, rangy like a troll, the pink and ragged slash of a scar from his left eye to the corner of his mouth, stark against dirty skin.

‘Brother Jorg.’ He inclined his head.

‘Show her how you died, Brother,’ I said.

He gave a wild grin at that, did Brother Hendrick, and the Conaught spearman charged again from a sudden rolling smoke. The Conaught spear is an ugly weapon, barbed and barbed again as if it’s never intended to come out, cutting blades along the length.

Hendrick caught the spear in his gut, just as I remembered it, right down to the bright sound of mail links snapping. His eyes went wide, that grin of his wider, twisted now and scarlet. The Conaught man had him, stuck on that spear, out of reach of Hendrick’s sword even if he had the strength to swing.

‘Now I’m doubting that Brother Hendrick could get himself off that spear,’ I said, over the ghosts of screams and the memory of swords on swords. ‘But he could have fought it, and maybe just maybe he’d have thrown himself clear. He would have left more yards of his guts on those barbs than remained in his body though. He could have tried to fight it, but sometimes the only option is to raise the stakes, to throw yourself the other way, to force your opponent further down the path they’ve chosen, further than they might want to go.’

Brother Hendrick dropped his sword and shook the shield from his arm. With both hands he seized the spear high along its haft, past the blades, and hauled himself along it. The point sprang black and dripping from his back, a yard of wood and cutting edges passed into his stomach, tearing a terrible wound, and in two driving steps he reached his foe.

‘Watch,’ I said.

And Brother Hendrick slammed his forehead into the spearman’s face. Two red hands gripped behind a Conaught neck and pulled him closer still. Hendrick fell, locked to his man, his teeth deep in exposed throat. The smoke rolled over them both.

‘That spearman should have let go that day,’ I said. ‘You should let go now, Katherine.’

I gripped the handles to the throne room doors and pulled, not on the metal but on the dark tide of my dreaming, on the fever dreams of long ago when I sweated in the corruption of my thorn wounds. Frost spread from my fingers, across the bronze, over the wood, and from every joint and seam in the doors pus began to ooze. The sweet stench of it drew me to the night I woke in sweat and pain to find Friar Glen’s man, Inch, with his hands upon me. As a child of nine I didn’t understand much, but the way he snatched back from me, the look on that mild face, the beading sweat as if a fever held him also, all helped me to know his mind. He turned without words and started for the door, hurried but not running. He should have run.

My hands, white upon the icy bronze of the handles, felt not the cold metal but the weight and heat of the poker that I had snatched from before the fire. I should have been too weak to stand but I had slipped from the table where they bled and purged me, let the sheet fall from me, and ran naked to the roaring fire. I caught Inch at the door and when he turned I thrust the poker up between his ribs. He squealed like pigs do when the butcher is killing them. I had only one word for him. A name. ‘Justice.’

I spread the fire not to be warm, though the fever set my teeth chattering and my hands shaking too much to be of use. I set the fire to be clean again. To burn up every trace and touch of Inch and his wrong. To devour all memory of my weakness and failure.

‘I meant to stay there,’ I said, my voice a whisper. She would hear me even so. ‘I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember how close the flames came.’

They found me in the forest. I had wanted to reach the Girl-who-waits-for-Spring, to lie on the ground where I buried my dog and to wait with her, but they caught me before I got there.

I raised my head. ‘But that’s not where I’m bound tonight, Katherine.’

There are truths you know but will not speak. Even to yourself in the darkness where we are all of us alone. There are memories you see and yet don’t see. Things set apart, made abstract and robbed of meaning. Some doors when they are opened may not be shut again. I knew that, even at nine I knew it. And here, a door that I had closed long ago, like the lid on a coffin, the contents no longer fit for inspection. Fear trembled in my hands and I tightened my grip against it. No part of me wanted this, but I would chase Katherine from my dreams and own my nights once more – and honesty remained my sharpest weapon.

I pulled on the handles to those doors of frost and corruption, I hauled on them and it felt as if I dragged a spear into my guts, inch by bloody inch. And with a squeal of protest the doors opened, not onto a throne room, not to my father’s court, but to a dull autumn day on a rutted path that wound away up the valley to where the monastery sat.

‘Damned if I will!’

Brother Liar was damned long ago but we none of us mentioned that. Instead we stood in the mud of the road and in the chill of a damp westerly breeze and watched the monastery.

‘You’ll go up there and ask them to see to your wound,’ Fat Burlow said again.

Burlow could swing a sword better than most and lay a cold eye on a man. He wasn’t jolly with all that lard, but he didn’t have the authority that Brother Price used to wield.

‘Damned if—’

Brother Rike slapped Liar around the back of the head and he pitched forward into the mud. Grumlow, Roddat, Sim and the others crowded at Rike’s elbows.

‘He wouldn’t see much,’ I said.

They turned to look at me, leaving Liar to get to all fours, the road dripping from him. I may have killed Price with three stones but that didn’t stop me being a skinny ten-year-old child and the brothers weren’t about to take direction from me. That I lived at all came down in equal measures to a quick hand with the knife and to the Nuban’s protection. It would be another two years, after Sir Makin had found me, with both him and the Nuban to watch my back, before I would openly make the brothers’ decisions for them.

‘What’s that, runt?’ Rike hadn’t forgiven me for Price’s death. I think he felt I’d stolen it from him.

‘He wouldn’t see much,’ I said. ‘They’d take him to the infirmary. It’s a separate building usually. And they’d watch him because he looks as though he’d be stealing the bandages while they wrapped him.’

‘What do you know?’ Gemt aimed a kick to miss me. He didn’t have the balls to risk connecting.

‘I know they don’t keep their gold in the infirmary,’ I said.

‘We should send the Nuban in,’ Brother Row said. He spat toward the monastery, lofting the thick wad of his phlegm a remarkable distance. ‘Let him work his heathen ways on those pious—’

‘Send me,’ I said.

The Nuban had shown no enthusiasm for the venture from the moment Fat Burlow first dreamed it up. I think Burlow only suggested hitting St Sebastian’s to shut Rike’s moaning. That and to give the brothers something to better unite behind than his own wavering command.

‘What’re you a-goin’ta do? Ask them to take pity on you?’ Gemt snorted a laugh through his nose. Maical echoed him back down the line, with no idea what the joke was.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well … it does have an orphanage.’ Burlow rubbed his stubble, folding himself a few more chins.

We made camp a couple of miles back along the road in a copse of twisted elm and alder, thick with the stink of fox. Burlow had decided in his wisdom that I would approach the monastery a little after dawn when they should be finished with matins prayers.

The brothers lit campfires among the trees and Gains took his cauldron from the head-cart to set over the biggest blaze. The night turned mild with cloud unrolling as the gloom thickened. The aroma of rabbit stew started to spread. We were twenty strong or thereabouts. Burlow moved about convincing men to their duties, Sim and Gemt to watch the road, old Elban to sit where the horses were corralled and listen out for wolves.

Brother Grillo began to pick at that five-string harp of his – well his since he took it from a man who could really play it – and somewhere in the dark a high voice ran through the Queen’s Sorrow. Brother Jobe it was who sang that evening. He’d only sing when it got too dark to see much, as if in the blind night he could be another lad in another place and call out the songs they’d taught that boy.

‘You don’t think we should rob St Sebastian’s?’ I asked the darkness.

It spoke back with the depth of the Nuban’s voice. ‘They’re your holy men. Why do you want to steal from them?’

I opened my mouth, then shut it. I had thought I just wanted to build my reputation with my road-brothers and to share out a little of the anger gnawing inside me. More than that though … they were my holy men, these monks in the fortress of their monastery, echoing psalms in its stone halls, carrying golden crosses from chapel to church. They spoke to God and maybe he spoke back, but the wrongs done to me hadn’t even rippled the deep pool of their serenity. I wanted to knock on their door. My mouth might ask for sanctuary, I might play the orphaned child, but truly I would be asking ‘why’? Whatever lay broken inside me had started to wind too tight to be ignored. I would shake the world until its teeth rattled if that was required to have it spit out an answer. Why?

Brother Jobe ended his song.

‘It’s something to do, a place to go,’ I said.

‘I have a place to go,’ the Nuban said.

‘Where?’ If I hadn’t asked he wouldn’t have told. You couldn’t leave a gap long enough that it would force the Nuban to fill it.

‘Home,’ he said. ‘Where it’s warm. When I have enough coin I will go to the Horse Coast, to Kordoba, and take a ship across the narrows. From the port of Kutta I can walk home. It’s a long way, months, but across lands I know, peoples I know. Here though, in this empire of yours, a man like me can’t travel far, not alone, so I wait until fate leads us all south together.’

‘Why did you come here if you hate it so much?’ His rejection stung though it hadn’t been aimed my way.

‘I was brought here. In chains.’ He lay back unseen. I could almost hear the chains as he moved. He didn’t speak again.

Morning stole through the woods pushing a mist ahead of it. I had to leave my knives and short sword with the Nuban. And no breaking my fast. A rumbling stomach would speak on my behalf at the monks’ gate.

‘Get the lie of the land, Jorg,’ Burlow told me as if it had been his idea from the start.

Brother Rike and Brother Hendrick watched me with no comment other than the scrape of their whetstones along iron blades.

‘Find out where the men-at-arms bed,’ Red Kent said. We knew the monks had mercenary guards, Conaught men, maybe soldiers from Reams sent by Lord Ajah, but maintained and kept in coin by the abbot.

‘Watch yourself up there, Jorth,’ Elban lisped. The old man worried too much. You’d have thought as a man’s years ran out he’d worry less – but no.

And so I started along the road and let the fog swallow the brothers behind me.

An hour brought me mist-damp and muddy-footed to the bend in the road where we first studied the monastery. I walked another few hundred yards before the fog admitted a dark hint of the building, and in ten strides more it slipped from suggestion to fact, a sprawl of buildings to either side of the River Brent. The waters’ complaints reached me as they tumbled through the millwheel before escaping to the farmlands further down the valley to the east. Wood smoke tickled my nostrils, the faintest scent of frying, and my stomach rumbled obligingly.

I passed the bakehouse, brewhouse, and buttery, grim stone blockhouses identified by the aromas of bread, malt, and ale. All seemed deserted, the matins prayers requiring even the lay brothers from their labours in the fields, at the fishponds, or at the piggery. The path to the church threaded the cemetery, headstones all askew as if at sea. Two great trees stood amidst the graves, shouldering the most weathered stones aside. Two corpse-fed yews, echoes of an older faith, standing proud where men played out their lives in service to the white Christ. I stopped to pick a pale red berry from the closer tree. Firm and dusty-skinned. I rolled it between finger and thumb, an echo perhaps of the lost flesh those roots drank, sunk in the ichors of the rotting faithful.