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A short corridor brought him to the great hall. Here the belly of the smoke lay higher, a dark and roiling ceiling that he would have to reach up to touch. Flames scaled the walls wherever a tapestry or panelling gave them a path. The crackling roar deafened him, the heat taking the tears from his eyes. A tapestry behind him, that had been smouldering when he passed it, burst into bright flames all along its length.
A number of pallets for the sick lined the room, many askew or overturned. Makin tried to draw breath to call for the prince but the air scorched his lungs and left him gasping. A moment later he was on his knees, though he had no intention to fall. ‘Prince Jorg …’ a whisper.
The heat pressed him to the flagstones like a great hand, sapping the strength from him, leaving each muscle limp. Makin knew that he would die there. ‘Cerys.’ His lips framed her name and he saw her, running through the meadow, blonde, mischievous, beautiful beyond any words at his disposal. For the first time in forever the vision wasn’t razor-edged with sorrow.
With his cheek pressed to the stone floor Makin saw the prince, also on the ground. Over by the great hearth one of the heaps of bedding from the fallen pallets had a face among its folds.
Makin crawled, the hands he put before him blistered and red. One bundle, missed in the smoke, proved to be a man, the friar’s muscular orderly, a fellow named Inch. A burning timber had fallen from above and blazed across his arm. The boy looked no more alive: white-faced, eyes closed, but the fire had no part of him. Makin snagged the boy’s leg and hauled him back across the hall.
Pulling the nine-year-old felt harder than dragging a fallen stallion. Makin gasped and scrabbled for purchase on the stones. The smoke ceiling now held just a few feet above the floor, dark and hot and murderous.
‘I …’ Makin heaved the boy and himself another yard. ‘Can’t …’ He slumped against the floor. Even the roar of the fire seemed distant now. If only the heat would let up he could sleep.
He felt them rather than saw them. Their presence to either side of him, luminous through the smoke. Nessa and Cerys, hands joined above him. He felt them as he had not since the day they died. Both had been absent from the burial. Cerys wasn’t there as her little casket of ash and bone was lowered, lily-covered into the cold ground. Nessa didn’t hear the choir sing for her, though Makin had paid their passage from Everan and selected her favourite hymns. Neither of them had watched when he killed the men who had led the assault. Those killings had left him dirty, further away from the lives he’d sought revenge for. Now though, both Nessa and Cerys stood beside him, silent, but watching, lending him strength.
‘They tell me you were black and smoking when you crawled from the Healing Hall.’ King Olidan watched Makin from his throne, eyes wintry beneath an iron crown.
‘I have no memory of it, highness.’ Makin’s first memory was of coughing his guts up in the barracks, with the burns across his back an agony beyond believing. The prince had been taken into Friar Glen’s care once more, hours earlier.
‘My son has no memory of it either,’ the king said. ‘He escaped the friar’s watch and ran for the woods, still delirious. Father Gomst says the prince’s fever broke some days after his recapture.’
‘I’m glad of it, highness.’ Makin tried not to move his shoulders despite the ache of his scars, only now ceasing to weep after weeks of healing.
‘It is my wish that Prince Jorg remain ignorant of your role, Makin.’
‘Yes, highness.’ Makin nodded.
‘I should say, Sir Makin.’ The king rose from his throne and descended the dais, footsteps echoing beneath the low ceiling of his throne room. ‘You are to be one of my table knights. Recognition of the risks you took in saving my son.’
‘My thanks, highness.’ Makin bowed his head.
‘Sir Grehem tells me you are a changed man, Sir Makin. The castle guard have taken you to their hearts. He says that you have many friends among them …’ King Olidan stood behind him, footsteps silent for a moment. ‘My son does not need friends, Sir Makin. He does not need to think he will be saved should ill befall him. He does not need debts.’ The king walked around Makin, his steps slow and even. They were of a height, both tall, both strong, the king a decade older. ‘Young Jorg burns around the hurt he has taken. He burns for revenge. It’s this singularity of purpose that a king requires, that my house has always nurtured. Thrones are not won by the weak. They are not kept except by men who are hard, cold, focused.’ King Olidan came front and centre once more, holding Makin’s gaze – and in his eyes Makin found more to fear than he had in the jaws of the fire. ‘Do we understand each other, Sir Makin?’
‘Yes, highness.’ Makin looked away.
‘You may go. See Sir Grehem about your new duties.’
‘Yes, highness.’ And Makin turned on his heel, starting the long retreat to the great doors.
He walked the whole way with the weight of King Olidan’s regard upon him. Once the doors were closed behind him, once he had walked to the grand stair, only then did Makin speak the words he couldn’t say to Olidan, words the king would never hear, however loud-spoken. ‘I didn’t save your son. He saved me.’
Returning to his duties, Makin knew that however long the child pursued his vengeance it would never fill him, never heal the wounds he had taken. The prince might grow to be as cold and dangerous as his father, but Makin would guard him, give him the time he needed, because in the end nothing would save the boy except his own moment in the doorway, with his own fire ahead and his own cowardice behind. Makin could tell him that of course – but there are many gaps in this world … and there are some that words can’t cross.
Footnote
Makin has always been an interesting character for me, a failed father-figure if you like. He should be Jorg’s moral touchstone but too often finds himself swept along by the force of Jorg’s personality and by the chaos/cruelty of the life he’s entangled in. We root for him to recover himself.
Sleeping Beauty (#ulink_954c6414-524d-5de6-95c4-da36240acec9)
A kiss woke me. A cool kiss pulled me from the hot depths of my dreaming. Lips touched mine, and deep as I was, dark as I was, I knew her, and let her lead me.
‘Katherine?’ I spoke her name but made no sound. A whiteness left me blind. I closed my eyes just to see the dark. ‘Katherine?’ A whisper this time. Damn but my throat hurt.
I turned my head, finding it a ponderous thing, as if my muscles strove to turn the world around me whilst I remained without motion. A white ceiling rotated into white walls. A steel surface came into view, gleaming and stainless.
Now I knew something beyond her name. I knew white walls and a steel table. Where I was, who I was, were things yet to be discovered.
Jorg. The name felt right. It fitted my mouth and my person. Hard and direct.
I could see a sprawl of long black hair spread across the shining table, reaching from beneath my cheek, overhanging the edge. Had Katherine climbed it to deliver her kiss? My vision swam, my thoughts with it – was I drunk … or worse? I didn’t feel myself – I might not yet know who I was, but I knew enough to say that.
Images came and went, replacing the room. Names floated up from the back of my mind. Vyene. I had a barber cut my hair almost to the scalp when I left Vyene. I remembered the snip of his shears and the dark heap of my locks, tumbled across his tiled floor. Hakon had mocked me when I emerged cold-headed into the autumn chill.
Hakon? I tried to hang details upon the void beneath his name. Tall, lean … no more than twenty, his beard short and bound tight by an iron ring beneath his chin. ‘Jorg the Bald!’ he’d greeted me and fanned out his own golden mane across his shoulders, bright against wolfskins.
‘Watch your mouth.’ I’d said it without rancour. These Norse have little enough respect for royalty. Mind you neither do I. ‘Has my beauty fled me?’ I mocked sorrow. ‘Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in war, Hakon. I surrendered my lovely locks. Then I watched them burn. In the battle of man against lice I am the victor, whilst you, my friend, still crawl. I sacrificed one beauty for another. My own, in exchange for the cries of my enemies. They died by the thousand, in the fire.’
‘Lice don’t scream. They pop.’
I recalled the bristling of scalp beneath palm as I rubbed my head trying to find an answer to that one. I tried now to touch the hair spread out before me across the steel but found my hands restrained. I made to sit up but a strap across my chest held me down. Straining, I could see five more straps binding me to the table, running across my chest, stomach, hips, legs, and ankles. I wore nothing else. Tubes ran from glass bottles on a stand above me, down into the veins of my left wrist.
This room, this white and windowless chamber, had not been made by any people of the Broken Empire. No smith could have fashioned the table, and the plasteek tubes lay beyond the art of some king’s alchemist. I had woken out of time, led by dreams and a kiss to some den of the Builders.
The kiss! I flung my head to the other side, half-expecting to find Katherine standing there, silent beside the table. But no – only sterile white walls. Her scent lingered though. White musk, fainter than faint, but more real than dream.
Me, a table, a simple room of harsh angles, kept warm and light by some invisible artifice. The warmth enfolded me. My last memories had been of cold. Hakon and me trudging through the snow-bound forests of eastern Slov, a week out from Vyene. We picked our path between the pines where the ground lay clearest, leading our horses. Both of us huddled in our furs, me with only a hood and a quarter inch of hair to keep my head from freezing. Winter had fallen upon us, hard, early, and unannounced.
‘It’s buggery cold,’ I said unnecessarily, letting my breath plume before me.
‘Ha! In the true north we’d call this a valley spring.’ Hakon, frost in his beard, hands buried in leather mittens lined with fur.
‘Yes?’ I pushed through the pine branches, hearing them snap and the frost scatter down. ‘Then how come you look as cold as I feel?’
‘Ah.’ A grin cracked his wind-reddened cheeks. ‘In the north we stay by the hearth until summer.’
‘We should have stayed by that last hearth then.’ I floundered through snow, banked along a break in the trees.
‘I didn’t like the company.’
I had no answer for that. Exhaustion had its teeth in me and my bones lay cold in white flesh.
The house in question had stood implausibly deep in the forest, so isolated that Hakon had been convinced the tales of a witch were true.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I’d told him. ‘If there’s a witch living in the forest and she eats children then she’s going to want to live on the edge, isn’t she? I mean how often does a little Gerta or Hans come wandering this far in?’
Hakon had caved beneath the undeniable weight of my logic. We’d gone to ask for shelter, and failing it being offered, to take it. The door stood ajar – never a good sign in a winter storm, and the snow in front of the porch lay heavily trodden, covered with a fresh fall that obscured detail.
‘Something’s not right.’ Hakon unslung his axe, a heavy, single-bladed thing with a long cutting edge, curved to bite deeper.
I’d nodded and advanced, silent save for the crump of fresh snow beneath my boots. Reaching out with my sword, I pushed the door wider. My theory about little girls and the middle of forests didn’t survive the hallway. A child lay sprawled there, golden curls splashed with crimson, arms and legs at broken angles. I advanced another step, my nose wrinkled against the stink. Blood, the reek of guts, and something else, something rank and feral.
A hand clamped my shoulder and I nearly spun to hack it off. ‘What?’
‘We should leave … the witch—’
‘There’s no witch living here.’ I pointed at the corpse. ‘Unless she’s got teeth big enough to bite a girl’s face off, a taste for entrails, and a nasty habit of shitting in her own hallway.’ I pointed to the brown mound by the foot of the stairs, which, unlike the girl’s guts, was still steaming ever so slightly.
‘Bear!’ Hakon released my shoulder and started to back away. ‘Let’s run.’
‘Let’s,’ I agreed.
A big black head thrust out from beneath the stairs as we retreated to the horses. I saw another bear, larger still, through the broken shutters to the side of the house, licking out a bowl in the kitchen. And, as we reached our steeds and started to hurry away, a cub watched us from the attic bedroom, its wet muzzle thrust out between the winter boarding, teeth scarlet.
Why did it have to be bears? If it had been a witch I’d have stuck my sword through her neck and moved in. Bears though … Better to run, even if it’s out into the killing cold.
Each step sapped my strength as the heat left me, stolen a scrap at a time, squandered into the night air with every breath.
I plodded on, deep in myself, refusing exhaustion. It had been time to leave Vyene, whether winter was approaching or not. I might regret it now, freezing in the pathless forest, but I’d stayed too long. Sometimes the dream of a place sucks you in and before you know it you’re part of that dream too. In a city as grand and as old as Vyene the dream is one of glory, steeped in history, but like all dreams it’s an illusion that will use you up while grass grows under your feet, while thorns spring up, dense on all sides, and hem you in. A kiss had woken me there too. Elin, leaving with her brother, Sindri, to their halls and duties in the north. Hakon had wanted to stay, but he’d had enough of the ancient capital and wanted to see the provinces, to slum it with the King of Renar. And so we’d left, escaped the trap of intrigue and politicking that was Vyene, shook ourselves free before its soft jaws closed entirely around us, and moved along.
Full night and a bitter moon found us some miles further on, breaking from the treeline and setting out across a snowfield where the land turned stony and started to rise. Snow began to fall once more, large-flaked, ghostly, ponderous at first, then rushing as the wind picked up again.
I lay on the steel table remembering – seeing lost days unfold. The dreams that had wrapped me still clung, leeching away urgency and care. It occurred to me that some drug pulsed in my veins, some sleeping draught to keep me dull. I jerked my body within the bands that kept me on the table. Nothing moved. The thing must be bolted to the floor.
Each strap had a buckle. One free hand and I’d be out of there. So all that truly held me was the binding on my wrists. I strained to break a hand free but the bands weren’t made for breaking.
‘Fuck.’
I stared around the room. In the top corner, opposite me, a glass eye watched, a short black cylinder ending in a dark lens.
The tubes that ran, from bottles on a steel stand to needles in my arm, hung tantalisingly close. Straining until my neck screamed and my vision blurred, I could almost touch the nearest of the trio with the tip of my tongue. Close! But ‘close’ can be the difference between cutting a throat and slicing air.
I stared at the tubes, hating them, trying not to let the drugs drag me down again. I felt myself sinking, the whiteness of the ceiling filling my mind.
Sinking.
I had felt myself sinking into a white embrace when we left the trees behind. The snow crust lay too thin to hold my weight and beneath it, cold soft depths where a man could flounder. In the drifts a man would lose the last of his heat quick enough, and find at the limits of his strength that the snow became almost warm, a cradle into which he might relax, and perhaps sleep, just for a moment, to recover himself.
‘Here!’ Hakon held the haft of his axe for me to grab hold and hauled me onto firmer ground.
‘Why did we leave the woods, again?’ I asked the question with numb lips, the words coming out blunt-edged. At least my teeth had ceased to chatter, which seemed as if it should be a good thing. The wind scoured the hillside. In the forest the trees had muted it.
‘Nothing beats a cave for shelter.’ Hakon pushed me on.
‘Cave? Where?’ I could see little past swirling snow and darkness.
I’d promised Sindri to send his cousin back alive after his trip to Renar. So far it looked as though it was Hakon keeping me alive. ‘And where’s my damn horse?’
‘Back in the trees with mine. I saw a light. We’re checking it out. You’ll remember when you’re warmer. Let’s get to the cave.’ Hakon kept up a steady pace and I stumbled after him.
‘Cave? There’ll be bears!’ I remembered something about a baby bear with a red muzzle, and a girl with golden locks and no face. Swords and axes aren’t a match for a bear’s strength. Put a length of steel through one and the beast will still kill you before it realizes it’s dead.
‘Bears don’t carry lanterns.’ Hakon scrambled up a boulder. ‘There! I see it. A light.’ He slid back down. ‘Doesn’t look like a fire though.’ A note of concern creeping in amid the excitement.
‘Hell if I care.’ I pushed past him, weaving a path up the slope.
In the end he followed. What choice was there other than to freeze to death? The bitter weather had come on us unexpectedly, a vicious early bite of winter at the tail of a mild autumn.
It’s the simple things often as not that lay us low. It’s the everyday world intruding on our little dreams of power and glory that kills us. For all my cunning and deathly swordplay a prince of Ancrath could die coughing up the flu, or choking on a fishbone, or frozen on a lonely slope by a freak snowstorm, same as any other man.
The light and the promised cave both came into view over the next rise. The sight arrested me. The light burned at the back of a yawning cavern but as we approached a second glow began to spread across the slope ahead of us. A luminous mist. The spirit rose from the ground as a swimmer breaks the surface of a river. She moved across the snow-covered rocks. Back and forth before the cave mouth, illumination bleeding from each line, her face a death mask, jawbone gaping. She drifted closer, straggles of pale hair and tatters of dress unmoving despite the wind that tore across the hillside. The snow lit beneath her, each curious lump and bump of it commanding black shadows, revolving to point away from the spirit as she moved, as if indicating the many directions in which we might flee.
I felt Hakon shift behind me, turning to run. ‘Stay,’ I told him. ‘I’ve met ghosts before. None of them with a bite meaner than their bark.’
The white skull tilted on its vertebrae, cocked to the side whilst the empty orbits considered me. ‘Better run, boy. Death waits inside.’ Her voice was a cracked thing that set my teeth on edge.
‘No,’ I said.
‘My curse is on you.’ A bony digit marked me out as her target. Madness wavered in her words, and strain, as if each utterance were gasped out past some unbearable agony. ‘Run and you might outpace it.’
‘I’m too tired to run, ghost. I’m going inside.’
She drifted closer still, surrounding me with a light that held no whisper of warmth. ‘Needles and death, boy, there’s nothing in there for you, just needles and death.’ A gasp.
Something about being threatened lit a fire in my belly and, although the cold seemed all the more bitter for it, I felt more myself.
‘Needles? Might I prick myself on one? That’s probably the silliest curse I’ve heard in a long while – and men are seldom eloquent when sliding off my sword so I’ve heard some stupid curses in my time.’
‘Fool!’ The phantom’s voice built to a piercing shriek, the glow of her bones growing more fierce by the second. ‘Run while you—’ And just as swiftly she was gone, torn to shreds on the wind, her light extinguished.
I stood for a long moment, blind, pinched by the gale’s icy fingers. The moon peered through a wind-torn rip amid the cloudbanks and found the slope again before either of us moved to speak.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘That was unusual.’
‘Odin keep us.’ Hakon’s wisdom on the subject.
‘He’s as likely to keep us as the White Christ is.’ I had no bone to pick with heathen bone-pickers. One god or many, none of them ever seemed to like us much. ‘What did she think to terrify us with? Needles?’ I started in toward the cave.
‘What are you doing?’ Hakon caught my arm. ‘She said we’d die.’
I knew Norsemen took their evil spirits seriously but I hadn’t expected one deranged ghost to unman my axe-wielding barbarian so much. ‘If we see a needle we’ll avoid jabbing ourselves with it. How about that? We’ll go around.’ I drew my sword and waved him on. ‘Does she have some demonic sewing kit in there? Will the thread assault us? The thimbles hurl themselves upon me? Bobbins—’
‘She said—’
‘We’ll die. I know. And what will we do out here?’ Something tugged at my foot as I made to take another step. I crouched and brushed at the snow and my hand came away dark with blood though I’d felt no bite. A gleaming coil of wire lay exposed, emerging from the stony ground, covered in thin blades sharp as razors. Hakon crouched beside me to look.
The wire was a thing of the Builders. None today could make such steel and have it sitting out in the wilds, still sharp, untouched by rust. I looked at the blood blotting into my wrappings then eyed the uneven terrain with new suspicion. The Builders made their own ghosts too – not echoes of emotion or shadows of despair such as men of our time might leave behind, but constructs built of data and light, powered by dry machinery where cogs turned and numbers danced. I mistrusted such monstrosities more than mere phantoms.
‘Perhaps we should build a windbreak among the trees,’ I said. ‘Try the tinderbox again and, if we can get a flame, build a fire big enough to put a boat-burning to shame.’
