Prince of Fools

NINE

The pregnant woman, done for the moment with her tattooing, led me to Varga’s wagon. She waddled ahead of me looking fit to pop at each step, though she said her time lay weeks ahead.

“Daisy,” she told me. Her name, or perhaps what she planned to call the whelp if it proved female. I hadn’t been listening too hard. We’d passed a wagon where a woman in tight silks sat with her ankles crossed behind her head, and my attention had wandered.

“Daisy? A fine name.” For a cow.

I spotted the elephant, corralled by a fence that it could swat aside, tethered to a thick post by a length of chain. A number of circus men, showing off lean and muscular bodies, lounged around a bar made of two barrels and a plank, watching the elephant and whatever else might pass. Behind them a well-laden beer wagon provided shade. Circuses always came amply provisioned with ale for the audience. I guess it must be easier to impress a drunken crowd.

Further on we passed a shabby tent stitched with moon and stars, symbols of the horoscope dotted amongst the faded heavens. An ancient sat outside on a three-legged stool, snaggle-toothed and liver-spotted.

“Cross my palm, stranger.” I couldn’t tell if the creature was man or woman.

“Don’t humour her.” Daisy increased the speed of her waddle. “Cracked, that one is. Everything’s doom and gloom. Drives the punters away.”

“You’re quarry.” The old woman called after us, then coughed as if a lung had burst. “Quarry.” I couldn’t tell which of us she’d aimed the words at.

“Save it for the peasants,” I called back, but it left a chill. Always does. I expect that’s why prophecy sells.

We walked on until the hacking cough faded behind us. I laughed, but in truth I had felt hunted since we left the city. Though by what I couldn’t say. More than the Silent Sister, more than Maeres’s terrors even, it was the eyes behind that enamel mask that watched me from my quiet moments. Just a glimpse at the opera, just a glancing encounter, and yet it haunted me.

“Varga.” Daisy pointed at a wagon much as Taproot described. She drew in a deep sigh and started to waddle off, back the way we’d come. I offered no thanks, distracted now by the small crowd of scantily clad young women clustered around the open end of Varga’s wagon. Dancers, by the litheness of them and the snatches of silk they wore.

“Ladies.” I approached, flashing them my best smile. It seemed, however, that a tall blond prince of Red March was less interesting than a huge dark Norseman bulging with muscle as if his arms and legs had been crammed with boulders. The girls pointed into the gloom beneath the awning, giggling behind their hands, exchanging appreciative whispers. I leaned around and stepped up onto the buckboard.

“You didn’t need to take his shirt off,” I said. “It’s his hand that needs removing.”

Snorri offered me a dark look from the sloping couch he’d been arrayed upon. He really did have an alarming topology, his stomach ridged and divided by muscle, his chest and arms bursting with power, veins writhing across him to feed blood into the engines of his strength, all tensed now against the pain Varga’s investigations were causing him.

“You’re blocking my light.” Varga turned from the messy work in hand. She was a woman of middling years, tending to grey, with a homely face of the kind that supports compassion and disapproval in equal measures.

“Will he live?” I asked, my interest genuine though self-motivated.

“It’s a nasty wound. The tendons are undamaged but one of the small bones of the hand has been broken, others displaced. It will heal, but slowly, and only if the infection is contained.”

“A yes then?”

“Probably.”

“Good news!” I turned back to the girls outside. “That calls for a celebration. Let me buy you fine ladies a drink and we can afford my companion a little privacy.” I stepped down amongst them. They smelled of greasepaint, cheap perfume, sweat. All good. “I’m Jalan, but you can call me Prince Jal.”

At last my old enchantment started to work. Even the sculpted magnificence of Snorri ver Snagason had a hard time competing with the magic word prince.

“Cherri. Pleased to meet you, Your Highness.” Some doubt in her voice, but I could tell she wanted to believe her prince had come.

I took her hand. “Enchanted.” And she smiled up at me, pretty enough with a snub nose and wicked eyes, fair hair, curled, streaked with blond.

“Lula,” said her friend, a petite wench with short black hair, pale despite the summer, and sculpted as if to satisfy a schoolboy’s dream.

With Cherri on one arm, Lula on the other, and a clutch of dancers following behind, I led the way back to the beer wagon. Snorri let out a sharp gasp from under Varga’s awning. And life was good.

• • •

The afternoon passed in a pleasant haze and parted me from the company of my last silver crowns. The circus men proved remarkably tolerant of my pawing their women, as did the circus women, and we sprawled on cushions before the beer wagon drinking wine from amphorae, growing louder as the shadows lengthened.

Annoyingly, the dancers kept asking me about Snorri, as if the hero of Aral in their midst weren’t quite enough to hold their attention.

“Is he a chieftain?” Lula asked.

“He’s so big.” A red-haired beauty named Florence.

“What’s his name?” A tall Nuban girl with copper loops through her ears and a mouth made for kissing. “How is he called?”

“Snorri,” I said. “It means wife-beater.”

“No?” Cherri, all round-eyed.

“Yes!” I faked sadness. “Terrible temper-if a woman upsets him he cuts her face.” I drew a line across my cheek with one finger.

“What’s the North like?” The Nuban girl wasn’t so easily deflected.

I tipped the amphora to my mouth, gulping wine while I held my hand out at a steep angle. “Like that.” I wiped my lips. “Only icy. All the northmen slip to the coasts, where they congregate in miserable villages smelling of fish. It gets very crowded. Every now and then a bunch more come sliding down from the hills on their arses and the only place for the ones closest to the shore is on a boat. And off they sail.” I mimicked a ship’s progression across the waves. I gave Lula my amphora. “Those horns on their helms?” I made myself two horns, a hand to each side of my head. “Cuckold’s horns. The new arrivals are bouncing abed with the wives left behind. Terrible place. Don’t ever go there.”

A small girl and small boy came out to sing for us, a remarkable pair with high clear voices, and even the elephant moved closer to listen. I had to shush Cherri to hear uninterrupted when the children sang “High-John,” but I let her giggle through their rendition of “Boogie Bugle.” Without warning their voices soared into an aria that drew me back to Father’s opera. They sang it sweeter and with more heart, but still the world seemed to close about me and I heard those screams in the fire. And beneath those screams my memory ran a deeper sound, something heard but at the time not understood, a different kind of howling. The roar of something angry rather than scared.

“Enough.” I threw a cushion at them. It missed and the elephant snagged it from the ground. “Scram!” The little girl’s lip wobbled for an instant and they both fled.

“. . ‘give them what they want, dears.’ That’s all he says. With Taproot it’s all hips and tits. There’s no art in it for him.” Lula looked up at me over her clay goblet, seeking affirmation.

“Well, to be fair, Lula, you are mostly hips and tits,” I said, a slight slur to my words now.

They giggled at that. The combination of a title and freely flowing wine will have people laughing at anything you offer up as funny, and I’ve never once complained about it. A sharp oath rang out from the direction of Varga’s wagon. I put an arm around Cherri, another around Lula, and drew them close. Enjoy the world while you can, I say. A shallow enough philosophy by which to live, but shallow is what I’ve got. Besides, deep is apt to drown you.

The first evening stars watched me being taken for a guided tour of the dancers’ wagon, supported on either side by Cherri and Lula, though who was doing the most supporting would be hard to say. We tumbled inside and strange to say that in the dark nearly everything we wanted to do required three pairs of hands.

• • •

In the dead of night a commotion interrupted proceedings within the dancers’ wagon. At first we ignored it. Cherri was making her own commotion and I was doing my best to help. We ignored it until the wagon’s rocking stopped dead, moving Cherri to draw breath. Until that point I’d heard little above her exclamations and the creaking of axles and supports.

“Jalan!” Snorri’s voice.

I stuck my head out through the flaps into the starlight, far from pleased. Snorri stood with one thick arm gripping the wagon bed, arresting its motion. “Come.”

I hadn’t the breath to tell him that was what I was trying to do. Instead I slipped out, lacing up what needed to be laced. “Yes?” Not keeping the temper from my voice.

“Come.” He led off between the nearest wagons. I could hear weeping now. Wailing.

Snorri followed the field’s gradient, letting it lead us a little way out from the wagons and carts encircling Taproot’s tent. Here several dozen of the circus folk huddled before a bright fire.

“A child died.” Snorri set a hand to my shoulder as if offering comfort. “Unborn.”

“The pregnant woman?” A foolish thing to say-it had to be a pregnant woman. Daisy. I remembered her name.

“The babe’s buried.” He nodded to a low mound in the dirt out past the fire, snug between two old grave markers. “We should show our respects.”

I sighed. No more fun for Jal tonight. I felt sorry for the woman, of course, but the troubles of people I don’t know never reached that far into me. My father, in one of his rare moments of coherence, declared it to be a symptom of youth. My youth, at least. He called on God to visit compassion upon me as a burden to be carried in later life. I was just impressed that he’d noticed me or my ways this once, and of course it’s always nice for a cardinal to remember to call on God every now and then.

We sat a little apart from the main group, though close enough to feel the fire’s heat.

“How’s the hand?” I asked.

“Hurts more, feels better.” He held out the appendage in question and flexed it slightly, wincing. “She removed a lot of the poison.”

Thankfully Snorri omitted greater detail. Some folk will seek to entertain you with the gory details of their ailments. My brother Martus would have painted each glistening drop of pus for me in one of his woe-is-me monologues for which the only remedy is a swift exit.

The night held enough warmth, combined with the fire and my recent exercise, to leave me pleasantly sleepy. I lay back on the ground, without complaint for the hardness of it or the dust in my hair. For a moment or three I watched the stars and listened to the soft weeping. I yawned once and sleep took me.

Strange dreams hunted me that night. I wandered an empty circus haunted by the memory of the eyes behind that porcelain mask but finding only the dancers, each sobbing in her bed, and breaking into bright fragments as I reached to touch them. Cherri was there, Lula too, and they broke together, speaking a single word. Quarry. The night fractured, cracks running through tents, wheels, barrels; an elephant bellowed unseen in the darkness. My head filled with light until at last I opened my eyes to keep from being blinded.

Nothing! Just Snorri’s bulk, seated beside me, knees drawn up. The fire had fallen to red embers. The circus folk had gone to their beds, taking their sorrow with them. No sound but for the whirr and chirp of insects. My heart’s pounding slowed. My head continued to ache as if it were cracked through, but the blame for that lay with a quart of wine gulped down in the heat of the day.

“It’s a thing to make the world weep, the loss of a baby.” Snorri’s rumble was almost too deep to make sense of. “In Asgard Odin sees it and his unblinking eye blinks.”

I thought it best not to mention that technically a one-eyed god can only wink. “All deaths are sad.” It seemed like a good thing to say.

“Most of what a man is has been written by the time his beard starts to prickle. A babe is made of maybes. There are few crimes worse than the ending of something before its time.”

Once more I bit my tongue and made no complaint that this was exactly what he had accomplished at the dancers’ wagon earlier. It wasn’t tact that held me silent so much as the desire not to get my nose broken yet again. “I suppose some sorrows can only truly touch a parent.” I’d heard that somewhere. I think perhaps Cousin Serah had said it at her little brother’s funeral. I recall all the grey heads nodding and exchanging words about her. She probably fished it from a book. Even at fourteen she was scheming for Grandmother’s approval. And her throne.

“When you become a father, it changes you.” Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. “You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with.”

I wondered if he was drunk. That’s when I tend to speak profundities to the night. Then I remembered that Snorri was a father. I couldn’t picture it. Wee ones bouncing on his knee. Tiny hands tugging at his battle braids. Even so, I understood his mood better now I could guess what he might see amongst the embers. Not this unborn child, but his own children, fleeing horrors in the snows. The thing that drew him north against all sense.

“Why are you still here?” I asked him.

“Why are you?”

“I passed out.” Mild exasperation coloured my voice. “I’m not sitting vigil! In fact, now that I’m awake I’ll find a better place to sleep.” Perhaps one with more interesting contours and a snub nose. I stood, aching along my side, and stamped to get some life back into my legs.

“Can’t you feel it?” he said as I turned to go.

“No.” But I could. Something wrong. A sense of brokenness. “No, I can’t.” Even so, I didn’t step away.

With one breath the insects ceased their chorus. A deep noise reached me, rumbling up through the soles of my feet, still bare. “Ah hell.” My hands trembled, with the customary terror of the unknown, but also with something new, as if they were full of fractured light.

“Hel’s about right.” Snorri stood too. He had his stolen sword in hand. Had he held it all the time or gone to fetch it while I slept? He pointed the blade towards the baby’s grave. The noise had come from there. A burrowing, a scratching, the sound of roots pushing blind paths through soil. The headstone to the left tilted as the ground sank beneath it. The one to the right toppled forwards, coming to rest with a dull thud. All around the child’s mound the soil cracked and heaved.

“We should run,” I said, having not the least idea why I was not already doing so. The word quarry repeated over and again behind my eyes. “What’s happening down there?” Perhaps a sick fascination kept me there, or the immobility of the rabbit beneath hawk’s claws.

“Something is being built,” Snorri said. “When the unborn return, they take what they need.”

“Return?” I sometimes ask even when I really don’t want to hear the answer. Bad habit.

“It’s hard for the unborn to return. They are not like fallen that rise from the deaths of men.” Snorri began to swing his sword left-handed, blurring it around him in fire-glow glimmers, making the air sigh. “They are uncommon things. The world must be cracked open to admit them, and their strength is surpassing. The Dead King must want us very badly indeed.”

I found my feet at that and ran. As the ground heaved and some dark thing rose, shedding dry clods of earth and shrugging off gravestones, I raced five full steps before tripping on an abandoned wine jug-possibly one I’d brought with me-and sprawling face first.

I rolled and saw, edged by the radiance of stars and the faint light of embers, a horror still knee-deep in the earth and yet towering above the Norseman, a thin thing of old bones, tattered cloth, encompassing arms with talons built from too many finger bones to count. And about these dry and creaking remains, something wet and glistening, some vital freshness running along a golem built of long-dead grave litter, knitting this to that, bleeding quickness into the construct.

Snorri bellowed his wordless challenge, but he held his ground: No charging against this foe. It overreached him by a yard and more. The dead thing extended an arm, talons questing for Snorri, then snatched the hand back. A grey skull, filled with new wetness, craned down on a neck that was once the entirety of a man’s spine. And it spoke! Though it had no lungs for bellows, no tongue to shape its words, it spoke. The unborn’s voice squealed like tooth on tooth, grated bone on bone, and somehow carried meaning.

“Red Queen,” it said.

Snorri took a pace back, sword raised. The skull swivelled and those awful wet pits that served for eyes found me, barefoot, weaponless, and scooting away on my backside.

“Red Queen.”

“Not me! Never heard of her.” The strength went from my legs and I stopped trying to escape, although it was the only thing I wanted to do.

“You carry her purpose,” it said. “And her sister’s magic.” It swung its head towards Snorri and I could breathe again. “Or you,” it said. “And you?” The unborn returned its gaze to me, now on my feet. Under that inspection I started to die once more. “Hidden?” The skull tilted in query. “How is it hidden?”

Snorri attacked. As the unborn’s attention pinned me he leapt forwards, sword in his off hand, and hacked at its narrow waist of bone, dry skin, old gristle. The thing lurched alarmingly, recovered itself, and slapped him away with a lazy backhand that lifted the Norseman from his feet and sent him sprawling, his sword flying past me, lost in the night.

Battles are all about strategy, and strategy pivots on priorities. Since my priorities were Prince Jalan, Prince Jalan, and Prince Jalan, with “looking good” a distant fourth, I took the opportunity to resume running away. I find that the main thing about success is the ability to act in the moment. A hero attacks in the moment; a good coward runs in it. The rest of the world waits for the next moment and ends up as crow food.

I made it ten yards before nearly slicing my foot off on Snorri’s sword, which had ended its trajectory point first. Nine inches of the blade lay buried in the hard earth, the rest jutting up dangerously. Even in my terror I recognized the value in three foot of cold steel and paused to haul it clear. The action spun me around and I could see the unborn looming over Snorri, ghostly in the starlight. Weaponless, he refused to run and held what looked to be a gravestone above him like a shield. The stone shattered beneath the unborn’s descending fist. A thin hand of many bones encircled the Viking’s waist-in another moment he would be gutted or have his head torn off.

Something huge and dark and wailing like a banshee swept towards me from the camp. Rather than be flattened beneath its ground-shaking bulk I ran, selecting the direction I happened to be pointing in. I needed all my speed to keep clear of the massive pounding feet behind me, and screaming, I charged directly at the unborn, desperately trying to find the extra legs to veer to the side.

At the last moment, with pants-wetting haste, I dived left, narrowly missing Snorri, rolled, rolled again, and somehow avoided skewering myself on the sword. I rose to watch in astonishment as Cherri bounced past atop an enraged elephant. The unborn went down with the sound of a hundred wet sticks snapping, ground to pieces beneath blunt feet the size of bucklers. The elephant thundered on into the night, still bearing the girl, and trumpeting loud enough to wake the dead, if any had still been asleep.

Snorri landed close by with a thud that made me wince. He lay without moving for five beats of my heart, then levered himself up on thick arms. I held his sword out to him and he took it.

“My thanks.”

“Least I could do.”

“Not every man would run off to recover a comrade’s weapon, then charge an unborn single-handed.” He got to his feet with a groan and stared off into the night. “Elephant, eh?”

“Yup.”

“And a woman.” He went to the fire and started kicking embers over the unborn’s remains.

“Yup.”

Circus folk were streaming towards us now, dark shapes against the night.

“Think she’ll be all right?”

I considered the matter, having spent some time between her thighs myself. “I’m more worried for the elephant.”