Prince of Fools

TWELVE

On the morning after Snorri’s tale of horror in the North, we neither of us spoke of it. He broke his fast in a sombre mood, but by the time it came to ride on, his good humour had returned. Much of the man was a mystery to me, but this I understood well enough. We all practise self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There’s not enough room in a man’s head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on. Snorri’s demons might have escaped into a quiet moment the night before while we sat watching the stars, but now he’d harried them back into some cellar of his own and barred the door once more. There’s tears enough in the world to drown in, but Snorri and I knew that action requires an uncluttered mind. We knew how to set such things aside and move on.

Of course he wanted to move on to daring rescue and bloody revenge in the North whilst I wanted to move on to sweet women and soft living in the South.

• • •

Another day’s travel: damp, muddy, grey skies, and a stiff wind. Another roadside camp with too little food and too much rain. I woke the next morning at dawn, disappointed to find myself beneath the same dripping hedge and wet cloak I’d shivered myself to sleep under the evening before. My dreams had been full of strangeness. At first the usual horror of the demon from the opera stalking us through the rain-dark night. Later, though, my nightmare became full of light and it seemed a voice addressed me from a great distance at the heart of all that brilliance. I could almost make out the words. . and finally as I opened my eyes to the first grey hints of the day it seemed I saw, through the blurry lash-filled slit of my eyes, an angel, wings spread, outlined in a rosy glow, and at last one word reached me. Baraqel.

• • •

Three more days riding through the continuous downpour that served as a Rhonish summer and I was more than ready to gallop back south towards the myriad pleasures of home. Only fear bound me to our course. Fear of what lay behind and fear of what would happen if I got too far from Snorri. Would the cracks run through me from toe to head, spilling out light and heat until I crisped? Also fear of his pursuit. He would know the direction I took, and though I trusted my riding skills to keep me safely ahead in the chase I had less faith in the city walls, town guard, and palace security to keep the Norseman out once I’d stopped running.

Twice over the next three days I saw a figure, half-imagined through miles of rain, on distant ridges, dark against the bright sky. Common sense said it was a herder following his flock or some hunter about his business. Every nerve I owned told me it was the unborn, escaped from the Sister’s spell and dogging our heels. Both times I urged my gelding into a canter and kept Snorri bouncing along behind me until I’d outrun the worst of the cold terror the sight put in me.

With dwindling resources we ate mean fare in small portions, cooked by peasants I wouldn’t trust to feed my horse. We spent two more sleepless nights huddled beneath lean-to shelters of branches and bracken that Snorri constructed against the hedgerows. He claimed it to be all a man needed for slumber and proceeded to snore all night. The downpour he proclaimed to be “fine damp weather.”

“North of Hardanger the children would run naked in warm rains like these. We don’t sew our bearskins on until the sea starts to freeze,” he said.

I nearly hit him.

I slept better in the saddle than I had in his shelter, but wherever sleep found me, dreams came too. Always the same theme-some inner darkness, a place of peace and isolation, violated by light. First bleeding through a hairline fracture, then brightening as the crack forks and divides, and beyond the thin and breaking walls of my sanctum, some brilliance too blinding to look upon. . and a voice calling my name.

“Jal. . Jal?. . Jal!”

“Wh-what?” I jerked awake to find myself cold and sodden in the saddle.

“Jal.” Snorri nodded ahead. “A town.”

• • •

The sixth night out from Pentacost saw us in through the gates of a small, walled town named Chamy-Nix. The place sounded vaguely promising but proved to be a big letdown, just another wet Rhonish town, as dour and worthy as all the rest. Worse still, it was one of those damnable places where the locals pretend not to speak the Empire Tongue. They do, of course, but they hide behind some or other ancient language as if taking pride in being so primitive. The trick is to repeat yourself louder and louder until the message gets through. That’s probably the one thing my military training was good for. I’m great at shouting. Not quite the boom that Snorri manages, but a definite blare that comes in handy for dressing down unruly servants, insubordinate junior officers, and of course as a last-ditch means of intimidating men who might otherwise put a sword through me. Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed. If you can bluster your way through dangerous situations it’s all to the good, and a fine shouting voice helps immensely.

Snorri led us to a dreadful dive, a low-roofed subterranean tavern thick with the stink of wet bodies, spilled ale, and woodsmoke.

“It’s a touch warmer and slightly less damp than outside, I’ll grant you.” I elbowed my way through the crowd at the bar. Local men, dark-haired, swarthy, variously missing teeth or sporting knife scars, packed around small tables towards the back in a haze of pipe smoke.

“At least the ale will be cheap.” Snorri slapped what might be our only copper on the beer-puddled counter.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez boire?” the barkeep asked, still wiping someone’s spit from the tankard he intended to serve in.

“Kesquer-what?” I leaned in over the counter, natural caution erased by six days of rain and the foul mood that torrent had exposed. “Two ales. The best you have!”

The man favoured me with the blankest of stares. I drew breath to repeat myself rather more loudly.

“Deux biéres s’il vous plaît et que vous vendez repas?” Snorri answered, sliding his coin forwards.

“What the hell?” I blinked at him, talking over the barkeep’s reply. “How-I mean-”

“I wasn’t raised speaking the Tongue, you know?” Snorri shook his head as if I were an idiot and took the first full tankard. “When you’ve had to learn one new language you develop an interest in others.”

I took the tankard from him and eyed the beer with suspicion. It looked foreign. The floating suds made an island that put me in mind of some alien place where they’d never heard of Red March and cut princes no slack. That put a bad taste in my mouth before I’d even sipped it.

“We of the North are great traders, you know?” Snorri continued, though what sign I’d given that I might be interested I could not imagine. “Far more comes in through our ports on Norse cargo ships than in the holds of longboats returning from raids. Many a Norseman knows three, four, even five languages. Why, I myself-”

I turned away and took my foul-tasting beer off towards the tables, leaving Snorri to negotiate the food in whatever mangled tongue was required.

Finding a space proved problematic. The first burly peasant I approached refused to move despite my obvious station, instead hunkering over his huge bowl of what looked to be shit soup, but smelled infinitely worse, and ignoring me. He muttered something like “murdtet” as I moved off. The rest of the ill-mannered louts kept to their seats, and in the end I had to squeeze into place beside a nearly spherical woman drinking gin from a clay cup. The soup man then proceeded to give me the evil eye whilst toying with his wicked-looking knife-an implement generally not required for the consumption of soup-until Snorri came up with his beer and two plates of steaming offal.

“Budge up,” he ordered, and the whole row of locals edged along, my neighbour wobbling like gelatine as she undulated to the left, leaving sufficient room for the new addition.

I eyed the plate before me. “This is what any decent butcher removes from the. . what I’ll generously assume was a cow. . before sending it to the kitchens.”

Snorri started tucking in. “And what you leave will make a meal for someone who’s really hungry. Eat up, Jal.”

Jal again! I would have to sort that out with him sometime soon.

Snorri cleared his plate in about the same time it took me to decide which bit of mine looked least dangerous. He took a stale hunk of bread from his pocket and started scraping up the gravy. “That fellow with the knife looks like he wants to stick it into you, Jal.”

“What can you expect from this kind of establishment?” I tried for a manly growl. “You get what you pay for, and soon we won’t be able to pay for even this.”

Snorri shrugged. “Your choice. If you want luxury, sell your locket.”

I restrained myself from laughing at the barbarian’s ignorance-all the more puzzling, as you would think a man accustomed to the business of loot and pillage would have a better eye when it came to appraising which valuables to carry off. “What is it with you and my locket?”

“You’re a brave man, Jal,” Snorri said, apropos of nothing. He poked the last of the bread between his lips and started chewing, cheeks bulging.

I frowned, trying to figure out why he’d said that-was it some kind of threat? I also tried to figure out what the thing dangling from the end of my knife was. I put it in my mouth. Best not to know.

Finally Snorri managed to swallow down his huge mouthful and explained. “You let Maeres Allus break your finger rather than pay your debts. And yet you could have paid the man off at any time with that trinket of yours. You chose not to. You chose to keep and honour the memory of your mother over your own safety. That’s loyalty to family. That’s honour.”

“That’s nonsense!” Anger got the better of me. It had been a rotten day. A rotten week. The worst ever. I whipped the locket from its hiding place in a small pocket under my arm. Better judgment warned me against it. Worse judgment warned me too, but Snorri had worn both away. Snorri and the rain. “This,” I said, “is a simple piece of silver and I’ve never been brave in my-”

Snorri tapped it out of my hand and it went sailing in a bright and glittering arc that set it splashing down in the soup man’s dish, splattering him with a generous helping of brown muck. “If it’s not worth anything and you’re not brave, then you won’t be going over there to get it back.”

To my astonishment I found myself most of the way across the intervening space before Snorri had got past his third word. Soup man rose, bawling out some threat in his gibberish: “murdtet” featured again. His knife looked even more unpleasant up close, and in a desperate attempt to stop him sticking it into me I caught hold of his wrist whilst punching him in the throat as hard as I could. Sadly his chin got in the way, but I knocked him back and as a bonus the wall smacked him round the back of the head.

We stood there, me frozen in fear, him spitting out blood and soup through the gaps left by missing teeth. I clung onto his wrist for dear life before realizing that he wasn’t making any effort to stab me. At that point I noticed that my dinner knife was still clenched in the fist I had wedged under his chin. A fact that he had already registered. I stared expectantly at his knife hand and he obliged by opening it to let his blade fall. I released his wrist and snagged the chain of my locket from the edge of his bowl, bringing the trinket dripping from the soup.

“If you have a problem, peasant, bring it up with the man who threw it.” My voice and hand shook with what I hoped would be considered suppressed manly rage but was in fact cold terror. I nodded towards Snorri.

Having kicked the man’s knife under the table, I withdrew my own from beneath his chin and returned to sit by the Norseman, making sure my back was to the wall.

“You bastard,” I said.

Snorri tilted his head. “Seems that a man who would come back with my sword against an unborn wasn’t going to be scared of a mill worker with an eating knife. Even so, if it were worthless you might have paused for thought before going to reclaim it.”

I wiped at the casing with what had left the city of Vermillion as a handkerchief and was now little more than a grey rag. “It’s my mother’s picture, you ignorant-” The soup smeared away to reveal the jewel-set platinum beneath. “Oh.” I’ll admit that seen through a coating of muck and the misting in my eyes it was hard to judge the thing’s value, but Snorri had not been far off. I remembered now the day that Great-Uncle Garyus set the locket in my hand. It had glittered then, catching the light within cut diamonds and returning it in sparkles. The platinum had glowed with that silver fire that makes men treasure it above gold. I remembered it now as I hadn’t for many years. I’m a good liar. A great one. And to be a great liar you have to live your lies, to believe them, to the point that when you tell them to yourself enough times, even what’s right before your eyes will bend itself to the falsehood. Every day, year on year, I took that locket and turned it in my hand and saw only cheap silver and paste. Each time my debts grew, I told myself the locket was worth a little less. I told myself it wasn’t worth selling, and I offered myself that lie because I had promised old Garyus, up there on his bed in that lonely tower, crippled and twisted as he was, that I would keep it safe. And because it held my mother’s picture and I didn’t want a reason to sell it. Day by day, by imperceptible degrees, the lie became real, the truth so forgotten, so walled away, that I sat there and denied Maeres Allus-the lie became so real that not even when the bastard had his man break my finger did any whisper of the truth reach me and allow me to betray that trust to save my hide.

“Ignorant what?” asked Snorri without rancour.

“Huh?” I looked up from cleaning the locket. One of the diamonds had come loose, perhaps from hitting the bowl. It came free in my fingers and I held it up. “Let’s get some real food.” Mother wouldn’t begrudge me. And so it began.

Already the gleam of the thing was attracting attention. A man watched intently from the bar, a man with short iron-grey hair save for a peculiar broad strip, darker than a raven’s wing, across the top, as though the years had missed that part. I hid the locket away sharpish and he smiled, but kept on looking as if I’d been the object of his interest all along. For a moment I felt a shudder of recognition, though I’d swear I never met the man. The déjà vu passed as my fingers left the locket, and I busied myself with my ale.

• • •

Snorri spent the last of his money on a bigger bowl of slop, more ale, and a few square yards of space on the floor of the tavern’s communal sleeping hall. The hall seemed to serve as a method to prevent loss of drunks who might otherwise wander off in search of a spot to sleep and wake closer to some competing tavern. By the time we were ready to retire, the remaining locals were busy roaring out songs in Old Rhonish.

“Alley wetter, Jonty’s alley’s wetter!” boomed Snorri, rising from his seat.

“A fine singing voice you have, to be sure.” This from a man close by, nursing a pewter cup that brimmed with dark liquor. I looked up to find it was the fellow with the blue-black strip amidst his greying hair. “Edris Dean I am. Traveller myself. Will you be heading north in the morning?” He stepped from the bar and leaned in to be heard above the song.

“South,” Snorri said, the humour gone from him.

“South. Do you say so?” Edris nodded and sipped his drink. He had a hard look about him under the smile. A smile that not only reached his eyes but filled them with good humour-which is a difficult trick to pull if you don’t mean it. Even so, something in the thin-seamed scars along his arms, pale through the dirt, made me nervous. That and the quick but solid build of the body wrapped by the worn leather jerkin, and the knives at each hip-and not the kind for eating, more the kind for opening a bear from gut to growl. He had a thick ridge of scar on his cheek too, an old one, running along the bone. That one drew my eye and made me hate him, though I couldn’t say why.

Edris smacked his lips and called across to two men he’d been with at the bar. “South, he says!”

Both men joined us. “My associates. Darab Voir and Meegan.” Darab looked to have a touch of Afrique in his mix, swarthy and a bruiser, overtopping me by an inch or so, with the blackest eyes and ritual scar patterns on his neck vanishing down into his tunic. Meegan scared me the most, though, smallest of the three but with long ropey arms and pale staring eyes that put me in mind of Cutter John. Beneath a pretence of casual interest, all of them studied me with an intensity that set my teeth on edge. They marked Snorri too, and I found myself wishing he hadn’t stowed his axe with the horses.

“Stay. Have another ale. This lot are only getting warmed up.” Edris waved at the tables, where the singing had reached a whole new level.

“No.” Snorri didn’t smile. Snorri had smiled at the bear; now he looked grim. “We’ll sleep well enough, song or no song.” And with that turned his broad back on the trio and walked off. I managed an apologetic grin, spread my hands, and backed away after him, instinct not allowing me to present the space between my shoulder blades to them.

In the gloom of the next hall it was easy enough to find Snorri-he made the largest lump.

“What was that about?” I hissed at him.

“Trouble,” he said. “Mercenaries. They’ve been watching us half the night.”

“Is this about the locket?” I asked.

“I hope so.”

He was right; any alternatives I could imagine were worse than robbery. “Why would they tip their hand? Why be so obvious?” It made no sense to me.

“Because they don’t mean to act now. They might hope to spook us into unprepared action, but failing that it’s just to give us a night or two without sleep-to wear at our nerves.”

I settled down close by, kicking aside the outstretched arm of a rather pungent human-shaped lump and the legs of another. Tomorrow I’d sell that diamond and put an end to this nightly misery of choosing between stench and lice, or cold and rain. I made a pillow of my cloak and set my head on it. “Well,” I said. “If they meant to spook us, it’s working.” I kept my eyes on the arch into the barroom and the shapes in silhouette that passed back and forth. “Damned if I’m sleeping. I wo-”

A familiar rumbling snore cut across me.

“Snorri? Snorri?”