Emperor of Thorns

53

On the road my brothers spoke of death many a time. The stranger who walked with us. But more than they talked of death they talked of dying, and often the business of avoiding it. Brother Burlow would speak of the light. The light that came to a man lying in his blood, when more of it lay out than in.

‘I’ve heard men say it starts so faint, like a dawn, Brothers. And you look and you find yourself in the tunnel that’s your life, that you’ve walked in darkness all your years.’

Burlow was a reader, you understand. It doesn’t pay to trust a lettered man on the road, Brothers, their heads are full of other men’s ideas.

‘But don’t look into that light,’ he said. ‘For sweet as it might be, there’s no coming back from there, and it will draw you in, yes it will. I’ve sat by too many men, laid broken on the verge, and heard them whisper about that light through dry lips. They none of them walked the road again.’

At least that’s how Fat Burlow had it. And maybe his light was sweet, Brothers. But I’ve looked into that light and it comes at first as a cold star in the dark of night. Closer and more close it draws, or you are drawn — these things are equal in a place without time — and you come to know it for what it is. A white hunger, Brothers, the incinerating incandescence of the furnace mouth, ready to consume you utterly.

That light took me in and it spat me out, far from the world.

I thought I knew death. I thought it dry. But the death I fell into was an ocean, cold and infinite and the colour of forever. And I hung there, without time, or up, or down. Waiting, always waiting, for an angel.

This death fell wet upon me.

I spat the water from a dry mouth. A cry escaped me and the pain came again, too deep to be endured. Lightning flashed and the thorns and coils of the briar made sharp black shapes against the sky. The rain lashed cold, and I hung in its embrace, unable to fall.

‘The thorns.’ My senses had left me for a moment.

A second crack of lightning, across the rolling thunder of the previous stroke. The carriage lay beside the road, figures moving all about it.

‘I’m in the thorns.’

‘You never left them, Jorg,’ she said.

She stood beside me, my angel, she of warmth and light and possibilities.

‘I don’t understand.’ The pain still lanced me, my flesh tenting crimson around a hundred barbs, but with her beside me it was only pain.

‘You understand.’ Her voice nothing but love.

‘My life was a dream?’

‘All lives are dreams, Jorg.’

‘Was- was none of it real? I’ve been hanging in the thorns all my life?’

‘All dreams are real, Jorg. Even this one.’

‘What-’ My arm twitched and red agony flooded me. I found my breath again. ‘What do you want of me?’

‘I want to save you,’ she said. ‘Come.’ And she offered me her hand. A hand in which colour moved like the faintly-shadowed skin on molten silver. To take that hand would end all pain. She offered me salvation. Maybe that was all salvation had ever been. An open hand waiting to be taken.

‘I bet my brother told you to go to hell,’ I said.

Lightning struck once more and there was no angel, just a Renar soldier carrying William by the ankles like a hunter’s kill. Carrying him toward that milestone, carrying him to dash his head open.

Nature shaped the claw to trap, and the tooth to kill, but the thorn … the thorn’s only purpose is to hurt. The thorns of the hook-briar are like to find the bone. They do not come out easy. If you make a stone of your mind, if you thrash and tear, if you break and pull and bite, if you do these things you will leave the briar for it cannot hold a man who does not wish to be held. You will escape. Not all of you, but enough to crawl. And crawling, I left the briar. And reached my brother.

We died together. As we always should have.

A cold stone hall. Echoing. The ceiling black with smoke. Whimpers of pain. Not human pain, but familiar nonetheless.

‘One more,’ Father said. ‘He has a leg left to stand on, does he not, Sir Reilly?’

And for once Sir Reilly would not answer his king.

‘One more, Jorg.’

I looked at Justice, broken and licking the tears and snot from my hand. ‘No.’

And with that Father took the torch and tossed it into the cart.

I rolled back from the sudden bloom of flame. Whatever my heart told me to do, my body remembered the lesson of the poker and would not let me stay. The howling from the cart made all that had gone before seem as nothing. I call it howling but it was screaming. Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.

I looked into the flame and found it that same incinerating incandescence which had waited for me at the end of my tunnel, blind, white hunger, blind, white pain. Flesh knows what it wants and will refuse the fire whatever you have to say about the matter.

But sometimes flesh must be told.

‘I.’

I couldn’t do it, Brothers.

‘Can’t.’

Have you ever dared a jump, perhaps from some untold height into clear waters and found that at the very edge you simply cannot? Have you hung from four fingers above an empty span of yards, hung by three fingers and by two, and known in that moment that you can’t drop? While any grip remains, your flesh will save itself in the face of all odds.

The heat of that fire. The fierceness of the blaze. And Justice twisting in its heart, screaming. I couldn’t do it.

I could not.

And then I could. I leapt. I let myself drop. I held my dog. I burned.

A dark sky, a tugging wind. It could be anywhere or any when, and yet I knew I had never been here.

‘You found me, then?’

William, seven years to him, golden curls, soft child’s flesh, Justice curled at his feet. The old hound lifted his head at the scent of me, his tail beating once, twice against the ground. ‘Down, boy.’ William set his hand between those long ears.

‘I found you.’ We shared a smile.

‘I can’t get in.’ He waved at the golden gates towering behind us.

I walked across and set a hand to them. The warmth filled me with promises. I pulled away.

‘Heaven is over-rated, Will.’

He shrugged and patted our dog.

‘Besides,’ I said. ‘It’s not real. It’s a thing we’ve made. A thing that men have built without knowing it, a place made out of expectation and hope.’

‘It’s not real?’ He blinked at that.

‘No. Nor the angel. Not a lie, but not real either. A dream dreamt by good men, if you like.’

‘So what is death, really?’ he asked. ‘I think I have a right to know. I’ve been dead for years. And here you are, five minutes in, knowing it all. What is real if it’s not this?’

I had to grin at that. The older brother all over.

‘I don’t know what real really is,’ I said. ‘But it’s deeper than this.’ I waved at the golden gates. ‘Fundamental. Pure. And it’s what we need. And if there’s a heaven it’s better than this and requires no gates. Shall we find out?’

‘Why?’ Will lay back, still scratching between Justice’s ears.

‘Did you see your nephew?’ I asked.

Will nodded, hiding a shy smile.

‘If we don’t do this, he’s going to burn. Him and everyone else. And it will get pretty crowded around here. So help me find it.’ No half-measures. No compromise. Save them all, or none.

‘Find what?’

‘A wheel. That’s how Fexler thought of it. And expectations seem to matter here.’

‘Oh, that?’ Will hid a yawn and pointed.

The wheel stood on a hilltop, black against a mauve sky, horizontal on a raised shaft that sunk down into the stone. We walked across to it. The sky lightening above us, fractures spreading across it through which a whiter light bled.

From the hilltop we could look down over the dry lands, sloping away into darkness.

‘I’m sorry I left you, Will.’

‘You didn’t leave me, Brother,’ he said, shaking away some fragment of a dream.

I put both hands to the wheel, cold steel, gleaming. Builder-made. Builder-steel. ‘We need to turn this back and lock it off. It will take both of us to do it.’ I hoped I had the strength. My arms looked strong, smooth and corded with muscle. For some reason that smoothness surprised me, as if there should be something written there, old scars perhaps. Had there been scars once? But that was the past and I had let it go. It had let me go. ‘We need to turn it.’

‘If anyone knows how to push, it’s us.’ Will set his hands to the steel. ‘Can this save them?’

‘I think so. I think it can save them all. All the children. Even the dead ones. Even Marten’s son, Gog, Degran, Makin’s daughter, let loose from the dreams of men and given over to whatever was made for them.

‘At the very least the Builders’ machines won’t scorch everyone we ever knew from the face of the Earth.’

‘Sounds good enough.’

And so we strained to turn the wheel.

There was no wheel of course, no golden gates, no hill, no dry lands. Just two brothers trying to right a wrong.