Prince of Fools

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‘I was rather distracted,’ I said. ‘But, yes, I do recall some problems.’

‘What witch?’

‘What?’

‘You said “bloody witch”. What witch?’

‘Oh nothing, I—’ I remembered the fight-pits. Lying to the man on this point would probably be a mistake. I was lying out of habit in any case. Better to tell him. It might be that his heathen ways could lead to some kind of solution. ‘You met her. Well, you saw her in the Red Queen’s throne room.’

‘The old völva?’ Snorri asked.

‘The old what?’

‘That crone at the Red Queen’s side. She’s the witch you’re talking about?’

‘Yes. The Silent Sister everyone calls her. Most don’t see her though.’

Snorri spat into the water. The current took it away in a series of lazy swirls. ‘I know this name, the Silent Sister. The völvas of the North speak it, but not loudly.’

‘Well now you’ve seen her.’ I still wondered at that. Perhaps the fact that we could both see her had something to do with her magic failing to destroy us. ‘She set a spell that was to kill everyone at the opera I went to last night.’

‘Opera?’ he asked.

‘Better not to know. In any event, I escaped the spell, but when I forced my way through, something broke, a crack ran after me. Two cracks, inter-woven, one dark, one light. When you grabbed hold of me the crack caught up and ran through both of us. And somehow stopped.’

‘And when we separate?’

‘The dark fissure ran through you, the light through me. When we pull them apart it seems the cracks try to tear free, to rejoin.’

‘And when they join?’ Snorri asked.

I shrugged. ‘It’s bad. Worse than opera.’ However nonchalant my words might be though, and despite the heat of the day, my blood ran colder than the river.

Snorri set his jaw in that way I’d come to recognize as consideration. His hands quietly strangled the oars. ‘So your grandmother sentences me to the fight-pit and then you bring down her witch’s curse on me?’

‘I didn’t seek you out!’ The nonchalance I’d been striving for wouldn’t come from a dry mouth. ‘You stopped me dead in the street, remember?’ I regretted using the word ‘dead’ immediately.

‘You’re a man of honour,’ he said to no one in particular. I looked for the smirk and found nothing but sincerity. If he was acting then I needed lessons from the same place he’d got his. I concluded that he was reminding himself of his duties, which seemed odd in a Viking whose duties traditionally extended to remembering to pillage before raping, or the other way around. ‘You’re a man of honour.’ Louder this time, looking right at me. Where the hell he got that idea I had no notion.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘We should settle this like men.’ Absolutely the last words I wanted to hear.

‘Here’s the thing, Snorri.’ I eyed the various escape options open to me. I could jump overboard. Unfortunately I’d always viewed boats as a thin plank between me and drowning, and swimming as the same again but without the plank. The tree offered the next best option, but willow fronds aren’t climbing material unless you happen to be a squirrel. I selected the last option. ‘What’s that over there?’ I pointed to a spot on the riverbank behind the Norseman. He didn’t so much as turn his head. Shit. ‘Ah, my mistake.’ And that was me out of options. ‘As I was saying. The thing is. The thing. Well, honestly.’ The thing had to be something. ‘Um. I’m afraid that when I kill you the crack will run out of you just the same as it would if we got too far apart. And then – boom – a split second later I’d be too far apart. So tempting as it is to pit my princely fighting skills against those of a … what is your rank? I never found out.’

‘Hauldr. I own my land, ten acres from Uulisk shore to the ridge top.’

‘So as much as it tempts me to break with societal rules and pit the arm of a prince of Red March against a … a hauldr, I’m concerned that I wouldn’t survive your death.’ From his frown I could see that it might be a risk he was willing to take if no better alternative were on offer, so to forestall him I added, ‘But as it happens I’ve always had a hankering to visit the North myself and see firsthand just how reaving is done. And besides, my grandmother worries so about these dead ghost-men of yours. It would put her heart at ease to have the business sorted out. So I’d best come with you.’

‘I mean to travel fast.’ Snorri’s frown deepened. ‘I’ve left it too long already and the distance is great. And be warned: it will be a bloody business when I get there. Slow me down and … but you were moving pretty quick when you crashed into me.’ His brow smoothed, thunderclouds clearing, and that smile lit him up, half-wild, half-friendly, and all dangerous. ‘Besides, you’ll know more about the terrain than me. Tell me about the men of Rhone.’

And just like that we were travelling companions. I’d bound myself to his quest for rescue and vengeance in some distant land. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long. Snorri could save his family then slaughter his enemies to the last man, necromancer and corpse monster, and that would be that. I’m good at self-deception but I couldn’t manage to make the plan sound like anything other than a suicidal nightmare. Still, the icy North was a long way off – plenty of opportunity to break the spell that bound us together and run away home.

Snorri took up the oars again, paused, then, ‘Stand a moment.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. I’ve good balance on a horse and none at all on water. Even so, not wanting to fall out with the man within moments of our new understanding, I got to my feet, arms out to steady myself. He tipped the boat, a sharp deliberate move, and I pitched into the river, grasping desperately at willow twigs as a man about to drown will clutch at straws.

Above the splashing I could hear Snorri having a good old laugh to himself. He was saying something too, ‘… clean … together …’ But I could only catch the odd word since drowning is a noisy business. Eventually, when I’d given up trying to save myself by swallowing all the water and had slipped below the surface for the third and final time, he snagged my waistcoat and hauled me back in with distressing ease. I lay in the bottom flopping about like a fish and retching up enough of the river almost to swamp the boat.

‘Bastard!’ My first coherent word before I remembered quite how big and murderous he was.

‘I couldn’t have you come to the North smelling like that!’ Snorri laughed and steered back out into the current, the willow trailing its fingers over us in regret. ‘And how can a man not know how to swim? Madness!’

8 (#ulink_28dd73dc-729b-5009-9303-c2791de03c72)

The river took us to the sea. A journey of two days. We slept by the banks, far enough back to escape the worst of the mosquitoes. Snorri laughed at my complaints. ‘In the northern summer the biters are so thick in the air they cast a shadow.’

‘Probably why you’re all so pale,’ I said. ‘No tan and blood loss.’

I found sleep elusive. The hard ground didn’t help, nor did the itchiness of anything I used to soften it. The whole business reminded me of the misery that had been the Scorron Campaign two summers earlier. It’s true I wasn’t there more than three weeks before returning to be feted as the hero of the Aral Pass and to nurse my bad leg, strained in combat, or at least in inadvertently sprinting away from one combat into another. In any event, I lay on the too-hard and too-scratchy ground looking at the stars, with the river whispering in the dark and the bushes alive with things that chirruped and rustled and creaked. I thought then of Lisa DeVeer and suspected that few nights would pass between now and my return to the palace when I wouldn’t find occasion to ask myself how I ended up in such straits. And in the smallest hours of the night, feeling deeply sorry for myself, I even found time to wonder again if Lisa and her sisters might have survived the opera. Perhaps Alain had convinced his father to keep them home as punishment for the company they’d been keeping.

‘Why don’t you sleep, Red March?’ Snorri spoke from the darkness.

‘We’re in Red March, Norseman. It only makes sense to call someone by their place of origin when you’re a long way from it. We’ve been through this.’

‘And the sleeping?’

‘Women on my mind.’

‘Ah.’ Enough silence that I thought he’d dropped off, then, ‘One in particular?’

‘Mostly all of them, and their absence from this riverbank.’

‘Better to think of one,’ he said.

For the longest time I watched the stars. People say they spin, but I couldn’t see it. ‘Why are you awake?’

‘My hand pains me.’

‘A scratch like that? And you a great big Viking?’

‘We’re made of meat just like other men. This needs cleaning, stitching. Done right and I’ll keep the arm. We’ll leave the boat when the river widens, then skirt the coast. I’ll find someone in Rhone.’

He knew there would be a port at the mouth of the river, but if the Red Queen had marked him for death then it would be madness to go there seeking treatment. The fact that Grandmother had ordered his release and that the port of Marsail was a renowned centre of medicine, with a school that had produced the region’s finest doctors for close on three hundred years, I kept to myself. Telling him would unravel my lies and paint me as the architect of his fate. I didn’t feel good about it, but better than I would if he decided to trim me with his sword.

I returned to my imaginings of Lisa and her sisters, but in the deepest part of the night it was that fire which lit my dreams, colouring them violet, and I saw through the flames, not the agonies of the dying but two inhuman eyes in the dark slit of a mask. Somehow I’d broken the Silent Sister’s spell, escaped the inferno, and borne away part of the magic … but what else might have escaped and where might it be now? Suddenly each noise in the dark was the slow step of that monster, sniffing me out in the blind night, and despite the heat my sweat lay cold upon me.

Morning struck with the promise of a blazing summer’s day. More of a threat than a promise. When you watch from a shaded veranda, sipping iced wine as the Red March summer paints lemons onto garden boughs – that’s promise. When you have to toil a whole day in the dust to cover a thumb’s distance on the map – that’s threat. Snorri scowled at the east, breaking his fast on the last stale remains of the bread he’d stolen in the city. He said little and ate left-handed, his right swelling and red, the skin blistering like that on his shoulders but not burned by the sun.

The river held a brackish air, its banks parting company and surrendering to mud flats. We stood by our boat, the water now fifty yards off, sucked back by tidal flow.

‘Marsail.’ I pointed to a haze on the horizon, a smear of darkness against the wrinkled blue where the distant sea crowded beneath the sky.

‘Big.’ Snorri shook his head. He went to the rowing boat and made a slight bow, muttering. Some damn heathen prayer no doubt, as if the thing needed thanking for not drowning us. Finished at last, he turned and gestured for me to lead the way. ‘Rhone. And by swift roads.’

‘They’d be swifter if we had horses.’

Snorri snorted as if offended by the idea. And waited. And waited some more.

‘Oh,’ I said, and led off, though in truth my expertise ended with the knowledge that Rhone lay north and a little west. I hadn’t the least clue about local roads. In fact past Marsail I would struggle to name any of the region’s major towns. No doubt Cousin Serah could reel them off pat, her breasts defying gravity all the while, and Cousin Rotus could probably bore a librarian to death with the populace, produce and politics of each settlement down to the last hamlet. My attentions, however, had always been focused closer to home and on less worthy pursuits.

We left the broad strip of cultivated floodplain and climbed by a series of ridges into drier country. Snorri ran with sweat by the time the land levelled out. He seemed to be struggling: perhaps a fever from his wound had its hooks in him. It didn’t take long for the sun to become a burden. After a mile or three of trekking through stony valleys and rough scrub, and with my feet already sore, my boots already too tight, I returned to the subject of horses.

‘You know what would be good? Horses. That’s what.’

‘Norsemen sail. We don’t ride.’ Snorri looked embarrassed or perhaps it was the sunburn.

‘Don’t or can’t?’

He shrugged. ‘How hard can it be? You hold the reins and go forward. If you find us horses we’ll ride.’ His expression darkened. ‘I need to be back there. I’ll sleep in the saddle if a horse will get me north before Sven Broke-Oar finishes his work in the Bitter Ice.’

It occurred to me then that the Norseman truly hoped his family might yet survive. He thought this a rescue mission rather than just some matter of revenge. That made it even worse. Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction. It made breaking whatever spell bound us an even higher priority. By the look of his hand, which seemed worse from one hour to the next, with the infection’s spread now marked by a darkening of the veins, any spell-breaking would need to be done soon. Otherwise he might die on me and then my dire predictions concerning the consequence for one of us if the other expired might soon be put to the test. I’d made the claim as a lie, but it had felt true when I spoke it.

We trudged on through the heat of the day, forcing a path through a dry and airless conifer forest. Hours later the trees released us, scratched, and sticky with both sap and sweat. As luck would have it we spilled from the forest’s margins directly onto a broad track punctuated with remnants of ancient paving.

‘Good.’ Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. ‘I’d thought you lost back there.’

‘Lost?’ I feigned hurt. ‘Every prince should know his realm like the back of … of …’ A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. ‘Of something familiar.’

The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.

Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.

‘Horse?’ Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.

‘Please.’

‘It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.’

‘We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.’

‘And fast,’ said Snorri The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. ‘Ayuh.’ And he was past.

Snorri pursed his blistered lips and walked on, until a hundred yards further down the road something stopped him in his tracks. ‘That,’ he said, looking down, ‘is the biggest pile of dung I’ve seen in my life.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen bigger.’ In fact I’d fallen in bigger, but as this appeared to have dropped from the behind of a single beast I had to agree that it was pretty damned impressive. You could have heaped a score of dinner plates with it if one were so inclined. ‘It’s big, but I have seen the like before. In fact it’s quite possible that we’ll soon have something in common.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s quite possible, my friend, that we’ll both have had our lives saved by a big pile of shit.’ I turned toward the retreating old man. ‘Hey!’ Hollered down the road at his back. ‘Where’s the circus?’

The ancient didn’t pause but simply extended a bony arm toward an olive-studded ridge to the south.

‘Circus?’ Snorri asked, still transfixed by the dung pile.

‘You’re about to see an elephant, my friend!’

‘And this effelant will cure my poisoned hand?’ He held the offending article up for inspection, wincing as he did so.

‘Best place to get wounds seen to outside a battle-hospital! These people juggle axes and burning brands. They swing from trapezes and walk on ropes. There’s not a circus in the Broken Empire that doesn’t have half a dozen people who can stitch wounds and with luck a herbman for other ailments.’