Prince of Fools

TWENTY-FOUR

Some hangovers are so horrific that it seems the whole world rocks and sways around you, the very walls creaking with the motion. Others are relatively mild and it just turns out that in your drunkenness a collection of Vikings have thrown you onto a heap of coiled ropes in their longship and set to sea.

“Oh, you bastards.” I cracked open an eye to see a broad sail flapping overhead and gulls wheeling far above me beneath a mackerel sky.

I sat up, threw up, stood up, tripped up, threw up, crawled to the side of the boat, vomited copiously, crawled to the other side and groaned at the thin dark line on the horizon, the only hint at the world I knew and might never see again.

“Not a sailor, then?” Arne Dead-Eye, watching me from a bench, his oar locked before him, a pipe in his hand.

“Vikings smoke?” It just looked wrong, as if his beard might catch light.

“This one does. You don’t get handed a book of rules, you know.”

“I suppose not.” I wiped my mouth and hung there on the boat’s side. The quins were doing complicated things with sail and rope. Tuttugu watched the waves from the prow and Snorri held the tiller at the stern. After a while I felt strong enough to lurch over and collapse on the bench beside Arne. Thankfully the wind carried his smoke the other way or we would have had a chance to see whether any of last week’s meals might reappear if I tried really hard.

“What other rules in this handbook that you don’t get have you broken?” I needed distraction from the heave and swell. We appeared to be weathering some kind of storm, despite the clearing skies and moderate winds.

“Well.” Arne puffed on his pipe. “I’m not really one for the mead-hall and the singing of all those songs. I’d rather be out on the ice doing a spot of fishing.”

“You’d think a man of your talents would want to be stalking prey that he could bring down with a shot rather than hook out of the water through a small hole in the ice.” I’d placed a fair measure of my hope for survival in Arne Dead-Eye. The great thing about a man who is deadly with a bow is that not much gets close enough to trouble him. Those are the sort of men I like to stand next to in a battle if events conspire to keep me from galloping off into the distance. “Hell! Where’s my damn horse?”

“Bits of it are probably all over the lower slopes of Den Hagen.” Arne mimed chewing. “Stew, sausages, horse-bacon, roast horse, tongue soup, liver with onions, fried horse, mwah. All good.”

“What? I-” My stomach had the last word of that sentence. A long word full of vowels and spoken mostly over the side at the rolling sea.

“Snorri took her up to the stockyard this morning and sold her,” Arne called at my back. “Got more for the saddle than the mare.”

“Hell.” I wiped more drool from my chin before the wind had a chance to decorate the rest of me with it. Back on the bench I rested a moment, head in hands. It seemed we were coming full circle. This nightmare had started with me being bundled into a boat full of Viking, and now here we were again. A bigger boat, more water, more Vikings, and the same number of horses.

“Dead-Eye, heh?” I hoped to cheer myself with the idea that Arne might keep me safe. “How’d you earn that title?”

Arne puffed out a cloud of vile smoke, which was quickly stripped away by the wind. “There’s two ways to hit a small target that’s a long way off. Skill or luck. Now I’m not a bad shot-I’m not saying that. Better’n average for sure. Especially now with all the practice I get. It’s ‘Let the Dead-Eye take the shot.’ ‘Give Arne the bow.’ But that day at Jarl Torsteff’s wedding celebrations. .” Arne shrugged. “Had men from all over come to take part in the contests. Axe-throwing. Rock-lifting. Wrestling. All that. Archery, well, it’s never been our strong point, but there were plenty willing. The jarl set up this coin, far too far out, and nobody could hit the damn thing. It was getting dark before they let me have a go. Took it down first try. Never heard the last of it. And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die-take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”

I groaned and lay back across the bench, trying to find some angle that brought it past the halfway mark on the line dividing “torture device” and “bed.” I would have just lain down between the benches, but each lunge of the boat brought foul-smelling bilgewater sloshing along the aisle in miniature imitation of the vast waves on which we tossed.

“Wake me when the storm’s passed.”

“Storm?” A shadow fell across me.

“You’re going to tell me that it’s always like this, aren’t you?” I squinted up at the figure, dark against the bright sky, sunlight fracturing around him to sting my eyes. A tall man, annoyingly athletic. One of the quins.

“Oh no.” He sat on the bench opposite, his good cheer like acid on my hangover. “It’s rarely as good as this.”

“Urrrg.” Actual words seemed insufficient to express my feelings on the matter. I wondered if Skilfar had seen that I was destined to fill a longship with vomit and drown in the resulting mess.

“Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” He started tugging up his sleeve without invitation. “I’m Fjórir, by the way-we can be hard to tell apart.”

“Jesus!” I winced as Fjórir unwrapped the soiled linen from around his forearm. The jagged tear went right down into the meat of him, with every shade from black to puce on show in the puffy flesh to either side. The stink of it told the story. When a man’s wound starts to smell wrong, you know he’s on a slow walk to the cemetery. Perhaps losing the arm might save him-I didn’t really know. Beyond adjusting the odds when betting on pit fights, my experience didn’t really concern such things. True, there had been similar unpleasantness on the Scorron borders, but I’d successfully discarded those memories. Or at least I had until a whiff of a Norseman’s putrid arm brought them all back in a flood. At least this time I made it to the side before retching into the dark swell of the waves. I spent a long time hanging there, holding a loud but wordless conversation with the sea.

Fjórir was still sitting where I left him when I came back empty-stomached and trembling. The whole boat continued to threaten to capsize at each surge of the waves, but nobody else seemed concerned.

“That’s. . That’s a hell of a cut you’ve got there,” I said.

“Ripped it on a loose spear in a storm off the Thurtans.” Fjórir nodded. “Nasty, though. Gives me no peace.”

“I’m sorry.” And I was. I liked the quins. They were that sort. And soon they’d be quads.

“Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” Fjórir returned to his theme. He seemed unaccountably cheerful about the whole business, though I wouldn’t bet on him lasting the week.

“Well, I’m not.” I peered at the mess with morbid fascination. “You seem less worried about it than I am.”

“The gods are taking us in order. Youngest first.” Again that grin. “Atta fell to ghouls in Ullaswater. Then a dead man pulled Sjau into the bog at Fenmire. Sex took an arrow from a Conaught bowman. So Fimm’s next, not me.”

And all of a sudden I found myself scared as hell. Snorri I understood. I didn’t share his passions or bravery, but I could feel them as greater or lesser versions of my own emotions or thinking. The man before me looked like one of us on the outside, but inside? The gods had put the Torsteff octuplets together differently from other men. Or at least this one. Perhaps the parts he was missing were present twofold in one of his brothers. Or maybe when the eight started dying, each death left the survivors more broken. Fjórir still had the amiability, the immediate sense of dependability, but I couldn’t know what else might be missing behind that too-easy grin and those wide, ice-blue eyes.

“I don’t know why Snorri said that-I’m no doctor. I don’t even-”

“He said you’d try to weasel out of it. He said for you to do what you did in the mountains.” Fjórir held his arm out for me, no hint of trepidation on his face.

“Go on!” Snorri shouted from the back of the boat. “Do it, Jal!”

Pressing my lips tight against revulsion, I extended a hand without enthusiasm, holding it several inches above the injury. Almost immediately a warmth built in my palm. I snatched the hand back. My plan of faking it seemed unlikely to succeed now-the reaction had been far stronger and more immediate than with Meegan’s wound back in the Aups.

“The last person I did this to, Snorri threw off a cliff a moment later.”

“No cliffs at sea. That felt good. Do it again.” Fjórir had no guile in his eyes, like a child.

“Ah, hell.” I stuck my hand back out, as close to the rotting flesh as I could without risk of being slimed. Within seconds I could see the glow from my hand, as if it were a white handprint through that blustery northern day into the desert blaze of the Indus. My bones buzzed with whatever ran through them and the heat built. The wind grew icy around me; the weakness from my vomiting became enfeeblement to the point that even holding my hand up was a labour of Hercules. And suddenly I wasn’t holding anything up. The boat revolved around me and I pitched into darkness.

A bucket of cold and salty water hauled me back into the waking world.

“Jal? Jal?”

“Is he going to be all right?”

A reply in their heathen tongue.

“. . soft, these southerners. .”

“. . bury at sea-”

More nonsense words in northern gibberish.

Another bucket. “Jal? Talk to me.”

“If I do, will you stop pouring seawater over me?” I kept my eyes shut. All I wanted to do was lie very still. Even moving my lips seemed too much effort.

“Thank the gods.” Snorri paused. I heard a heavy bucket being put down.

They left me alone to dry after that. I sprawled on the bench until a particularly big wave rolled me off. Then I lay against the hull. Occasionally I called on Jesu. It didn’t help much.

The light was failing by the time I found the strength to haul myself up and sit on the spot where I’d fallen from. Fjórir brought me over some dry fish and cornmeal cake, but I couldn’t do much more than glance at it. My stomach still rolled with each wave and made no promise to keep anything I gave it.

“My arm’s better!” Fjórir held it out by way of proof. The wound still looked ugly but free of infection now, and healing. “My thanks, Jal.”

“Don’t mention it.” A weak murmur. I guessed he really was invulnerable until poor Fimm took his place in line. Hopefully he’d pay me back by putting his invulnerable self between me and harm’s way.

• • •

The sun set and Snorri spent that time in the Ikea’s prow, staring north, his black eyes no doubt hunting the Norsheim coast. My strength made no return; if anything, I grew weaker as the night fell. I tried some dry bread and water, donated them to the sea, and dropped into a dreamless slumber.

Dreamless at least until I started dreaming of angels.

I stood in the predawn, on the hills just beyond Vermillion’s farmlands, looking down at the Seleen snaking westward towards the distant sea. Baraqel stood above me, on the hilltop, statued against the sky, unmoving until the rays of the rising sun lit his shoulders.

“Hear me, Jalan Kendeth, son of-”

“I know who I’m son of.”

The angel had far more gravitas about him now than he had in his early visits. As if he spoke more with his own voice than the one I’d fashioned for him back when he was nine parts imagination.

“The time will soon come when you will need to remember where you sprang from. You sail into the land of sagas-a place where heroes are needed, and made. You will need your courage.”

“I don’t think remembering my father will help there. The good cardinal would turn and run if a goat blocked his path. It wouldn’t have to be a big one either.”

“It’s in the nature of children to see past the strengths of their parents. Time to grow up, Jalan Kendeth.” He lifted his face to me, golden-eyed, glowing with the dawn.

“And what’s so great about being brave? Skilfar had the right of it. We’re all running around each according to our nature, some cunning, some honest, some sly, some brave-but what of it?”

Baraqel flexed his wings. “Your grandmother spoke to her sister of you. ‘Has he the mettle? Has he the courage required?’ An ‘idle, shallow boy, full of bluster but ringing hollow,’ she called you, Jalan. ‘A mind blunted by sloth, blinkered by a dry wit,’ she said, ‘but whet it and that mind could take an edge. Had we but world enough and time what we might make of the child. . but we have neither world nor time. Our cause is narrowing to a point not so many miles distant, a second not so many years hence and in that spot, in that moment, will come a test on which the world will turn.’ These are the words she drew you with.”

“I’d be surprised if she knew which one I was. And I’m sharp enough when I need to be. Bravery is just a different kind of broken. The quins are missing whatever it is a man needs in order to feel fear. Snorri’s scared of being a coward. There’s a wyrm like that in their heathen stories, Oroborus, eating its own tail. Scared of being a coward, is that what bravery is? Am I brave because I don’t fear being afraid? You’re of the light; the light reveals. Shine a bright enough light on any kind of bravery and isn’t it just a more complex form of cowardice?”

I stood a moment, the heels of my palms pressed to my forehead, hunting the words.

“Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.” I ran out of words under his gaze.

“Cleverness builds ever more elaborate structures of self-justification,” he said, judgment spilling from his mouth. “But in the end you know what is and what is not right. All men do, though they may spend their years trying to bury that knowing, burying it beneath words, hatreds, lusts, sorrow, or any of the other bricks from which they build their lives. You know what is right, Jalan. When the time comes, you’ll know. But knowing is never enough.”

They told me I spent the best part of a week insensible. Sleeping twenty-two hours in twenty-four, half-waking to let Tuttugu spoon warm gruel down my throat-some of it down the inside, some down the outside. A quin had to hold each arm when nature called me on infrequent trips to the side, or I’d have pitched in and not have been seen again. We crossed the open sea, then followed the Norsheim coast day upon day, heading north.

“Wake up.” The angel’s only instruction this sunrise.

I opened my eyes. Grey dawn, flapping sailcloth, the cry of gulls. Baraqel silenced. The angel spoke true. I always know what is right. I just don’t do it. “Are we nearly there yet?” I felt better. Almost good.

“Not far.” Tuttugu sitting close by. Others moved about the longship in the dimness.

“Oh.” From behind closed eyelids I tried to imagine terra firma, hoping to stave off a prebreakfast vomit.

“Snorri says you’re good with wounds,” Tuttugu said.

“Christ. This voyage is going to kill me.” I tried to sit and fell off the bench, still weak. “I thought it would be the undead horrors and mad axe-men out on the ice. But no. I’m going to die at sea.”

“Probably for the best.” Tuttugu offered a hand to help me up. “Good clean death.”

I almost took his hand, then snatched mine back. “Oh no. Not falling for that one.” It wouldn’t be long before I couldn’t beat a leper out of my way without curing the bastard. “You don’t look injured.”

Tuttugu buried his fingers in the ginger bush of his beard and scratched furiously, muttering something.

“What?” I asked.

“Brothel rash,” he said.

“Whore pox?” That at least made me smile. “Ha!”

“Snorri said-”

“I ain’t laying on hands down there! I’m a prince of Red March, for God’s sake! Not some travelling apothecary-cum-faith-healer!”

The fat man’s face fell.

“Look,” I said, knowing I’d need all the friends I could make once we hit dry land. “I might not know much about wounds, but whore pox I know far more about than any man ever should. Do you have mustard seed aboard?”

“We might.” Tuttugu furrowed his brow.

“Rock salt? Some black treacle, tanners’ acid, turpentine, string, two needles, very sharp ones, and some ginger. . well, that’s optional, but it helps.”

A slow shake of the head.

“Ah, well, we’ll pick it up in port. I can cook it up to an old family recipe. Apply as a topical paste to the affected regions and you’ll be a new man within six days. Seven tops.”

Tuttugu grinned, which was good, and gave me the Norse punch of friendship, which hurt a lot more than the traditional manly shoulder punch down south, and that was that. At least until he frowned and asked, “And the needles?”

“Well, when I said ‘apply’ what I really meant was ‘smear on a needle and jab in.’ You’ll need more than one as the mixture corrodes them.”

“Oh.” Little remained of Tuttugu’s grin. “And the string’s to hang myself with?”

“To tie the bag on. . Look, I’ll explain the gory details when you’ve got the stuff.”

“Land ho!” One of the quins from the prow, providing a welcome distraction.

My nightmare at sea was all but done.