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I hooked the hunter between the legs and yanked up as hard as I could.
Where the crash of thunder and the roar of the wind had failed, the hunter’s scream succeeded. The Nuban woke up. And to his credit there was no wondering where he was or what was happening. He surged to his feet and had a foot of steel through the man’s chest in two heartbeats.
We stood with the hunter lying between us, each with our weapon blooded.
The Nuban wiped his blade on the hunter’s cloak.
‘That’s a big old crossbow!’ I toed it across the floor and marvelled at the weight of it.
The Nuban lifted the bow. He ran his fingers over the metalwork inlaid on the wood. ‘My people made this.’ He traced the symbols and the faces of fierce gods. ‘And now I owe you another life.’ He hefted the crossbow and smiled, his teeth a white line in the lantern glow.
‘One will be enough.’ I paused. ‘It’s Count Renar that has to die.’
And the smile left him.
17
The old corridors enfolded me and four years became a dream. Familiar turns, the same vases, the same suits of armour, the same paintings, even the same guards. Four years and everything was the same, except me.
In the niches small silver lamps burned oil squeezed from whales in distant seas. I walked from one pool of light to the next, behind a guard whose armour beggared my own. Makin and Gomst had been led to separate destinations, and I went alone to whatever reception awaited. The place still made me feel small. Doors built for giants, ceilings soaring so high that a man with a lance could scarcely touch them. We came to the west wing, the royal quarters. Would Father meet me here? Man to man in the arboretum? Souls bared beneath the planetarium dome? I had imagined him seated in the black claw of his throne, brooding above the court, and me led toward him between the men of the Imperial Guard.
I followed the single guard, feeling vaguely cheated. Did I want to be surrounded by armed men? Had I grown so dangerous? To be heaped with chains? Did I want him to fear me? Fourteen years old, and the King of Ancrath quaking behind his bodyguard?
I felt foolish for a moment. I brushed a hand over the hilt of my sword. They’d cast the blade from the metal that ran through the castle walls. A true heirloom, with a heritage at the Tall Castle predating mine by a thousand years at least. I ached for a confrontation then. Voices rose at the back of my mind, clamouring, fighting one against the other. The skin on my back tingled, the muscle beneath twitched for action.
‘A bath, Prince Jorg?’
It was the guardsman. I nearly drew on him.
‘No,’ I said. I forced myself to calmness. ‘I’ll see the King now.’
‘King Olidan has retired, Prince,’ the guard said. Was he smirking at me? His eyes held an intelligence I didn’t associate with the palace guard.
‘Asleep?’ I would have given a year of my life to take the surprise from those words. I felt like Captain Coddin must have: the butt of a joke I had yet to comprehend.
‘Sageous awaits you in the library, my prince,’ the man said. He turned to go, but I had him by the throat.
Asleep? They were playing with me, Father and this pet magician of his.
‘This game,’ I said. ‘I expect it will provide amusement to somebody, but, if you … worry me … one more time, I will kill you. Think on it. You’re a piece in somebody else’s game, and all you’ll earn from it is a sword through the stomach, unless you redeem yourself in the next twenty seconds.’
It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.
‘Prince, I … Sageous is waiting for you …’ I could see I’d turned his smug superiority into terror. I’d stepped outside the rules of play. I squeezed his throat a little. ‘Why would I want to speak to this … Sageous? What’s he to me?’
‘He-he holds the King’s favour. Pl-please, Prince Jorg.’
He got the words out past my fingers. It takes no great strength to throttle a man if you know where to grip.
I let him go and he fell, gasping. ‘In the library you say? What’s your name, man?’
‘Yes, my prince, in the library.’ He rubbed at his neck. ‘Robart. My name is Robart Hool.’
I strode out across the Hall of Spears, angling for the leathered door to the library. I paused before it, turning back to Robart. ‘There are turning points, Robart. Forks in the path we follow through our lives. Times that we look back to and say, “If only”. This is one of those times. It’s not often we get them pointed out to us. At this point you’ll either decide to hate me, or to serve me. Consider the choice carefully.’ I threw the library door open. It slammed back into the wall and I walked through.
In my mind the library walls stretched to the very heavens, thick with books, pregnant with the written word. I learned to read at three years of age. I was talking with Socrates at seven, learning form and thing from Aristotle. For the longest time I had lived in this library. Memory dwarfed reality: the place looked small now, small and dusty.
‘I’ve burned more books than this!’ I said.
Sageous stepped out from the aisle given over to ancient philosophy. He was younger than I expected, forty at the most, wearing just a white cloth, like the Roman togara. His skin held the dusky hue of the middle-lands, maybe Indus or Persia, but I could see it only in the rare spots the tattooist’s needle hadn’t found. He wore the text of a small book on his living hide, cut there in the flowing script of the mathmagicians. His eyes – well I know we’re supposed to cower beneath the gaze of potent men, but his eyes were mild. They reminded me of the cows on the Castle Road, brown and placid. His scrutiny was the thing that cut. Somehow those mild eyes dug in. Perhaps the script beneath them bore the power. All I can say is that, for a time uncounted, I could see nothing but the heathen’s eyes, hear nothing but his breath, stir no muscle but my heart.
He let me go, like a fish thrown back into the river, too small for the pot. We stood face to face, inches apart, and I’d no memory of closing the gap. But I’d come to him. We stood among the books. Among the wise words of ten thousand years. Plato to my left, copied, copied and copied again. The ‘moderns’ to my right, Russell, Popper, Xiang, and the rest. A small voice inside me, deep inside, called for blood. But the heathen had taken the fire from me.
‘Father must depend upon you, Sageous,’ I said. I twisted my fingers, wanting to want my sword. ‘To have a pagan at court must vex the priests. If the pope dared leave Roma these days, she’d be here to curse your soul to eternal hellfire!’ I had nothing but dogma with which to beat him.
Sageous smiled, a friendly smile, like I’d just run an errand for him. ‘Prince Jorg, welcome home.’ He had no real accent, but he ran his words out fluid and musical, like a Saracen or a Moor.
He stood no taller than me, in fact I probably had an inch on him. He was lean too, so I could have taken him to the floor there and then, and choked the life out of him. One murderous thought bubbled up after another, and leaked away.
‘There’s a lot of your father in you,’ he said.
‘Have you got him tamed too?’ I asked.
‘One doesn’t tame a man like Olidan Ancrath.’ His friendly smile took an edge of amusement. I wanted to know the joke. He could manage me but not my father? Or he could manipulate the King and chose to cover the fact with a smirk?
I imagined the heathen’s tattooed head shorn from his shoulders, his smile frozen and blood pumping from the stump of his neck. In that instant I reached for my sword and threw all my will behind the action. The pommel felt cold beneath my touch. I curled my fingers around the hilt, but before I could squeeze them tight, my hand fell away like a dead thing.
Sageous raised a brow at that. He’d had them shaved like his head, and drawn back in. He took a step backward.
‘You’re an interesting young man, Prince Jorg.’ His eyes hardened. Mild one moment, and in the next, dead as flint. ‘We shall have to find out what makes you tick, yes? I’ll have Robart escort you to your chamber, you must be tired.’ All the time he spoke, the fingers of his right hand traced words in the flowing script across his left arm, brushing over one symbol jumping higher to a black crescent moon, underlining a phrase, underlining it again. I did feel tired. I felt lead in every limb, pulling me down.
‘Robart!’ he called out loud enough for the corridor.
He looked back to me, mild again. ‘I expect you’ll have dreams, Prince, after so long away.’ His fingers moved over new lines, left hand, right arm. He traced words blacker than night across the veins in his wrist. ‘Dreams tell a man who he is.’
I struggled to keep my eyes open. On Sageous’s neck, just to the left of his Adam’s apple, amid all the tight-packed scrawl, was a letter, bigger than the rest, curled and recurled so it looked like a flower.
Touch the flower, I thought. Touch the pretty flower. And as if by magic, my treacherous hand moved. It took him by surprise, my fingers at his throat. I heard the door open behind me.
He’s skinny, I thought. So skinny. I wonder if I could close my hand around his neck. I admitted no hint of violence, just curiosity. And there it was, my hand around his neck. I heard Robart’s sudden intake of breath. Sageous stood frozen, his mouth half open, as if he couldn’t believe it.
I could barely stand, I could hardly keep the yawning from my voice, but I held his eye and let him think that the pressure I put on him was a threat, and not to keep me from falling.
‘My dreams are my own, heathen,’ I said. ‘Pray you’re not in them.’
I turned then, before I fell, and strode past Robart. He caught up in the Hall of Spears.
‘I’ve never seen anyone lay hand on Sageous, my prince.’
My prince. That was better. There was admiration in his voice, maybe genuine, maybe not, I was too tired to care.
‘He’s a dangerous man, his enemies die in their sleep. That or they’re broken. Lord Jale left the court two days after disagreeing with the pagan in front of your father. They say he can’t feed himself now, and spends his days singing an old nursery rhyme over and over.’
I reached the West Stair, Robart prattling beside me. He broke off all of a sudden. ‘Your chamber is off the Red Corridor, my prince.’ He stopped and studied his boots. ‘The Princess has your former chamber.’
Princess? I didn’t care. Tomorrow, tomorrow I would find out. I let him lead me to my room. One of the guest rooms off the Red Corridor. The chamber could have housed many a tavern I’d slept in, but it was a studied insult none the less. A room for a country baron or distant cousin visiting from the protectorates.
I stopped at the door, reeling with exhaustion. Sageous’s spell bit deeper and my strength left me like blood from sliced veins.
‘I told you it was time to choose, Robart,’ I said. I forced the words out one by one. ‘Get Makin Bortha here. Let him guard my door this night. Time to choose.’
I didn’t wait for a reply. If I had, he’d have had to carry me to bed. I pushed the door and half-staggered, half-fell, into the chamber. I collapsed back against the door, closing it, and slid to the floor. It felt like I kept on sliding, deeper and deeper, into an endless well.
18
I woke up with that sudden convulsion you get when every muscle you own suddenly realizes it’s dropped off on duty. Next came the shock of realizing how deeply I’d been asleep. You don’t sleep like that on the road, not if you want to wake up again. For a moment the darkness would yield nothing to my confusion. I reached for my sword and found only soft sheets. The Tall Castle! It came back to me. I remembered the pagan and his spell.
I rolled to the right. I always left my gear on my right side. Nothing but more mattress, soft and deep. I might have been blind for all the help my eyes gave. I guessed the shutters were shut tight, for not the slightest whisper of starlight reached me. It was quiet too. I reached out for the edge of the bed, and didn’t find it. A wide bed, I thought, trying to find some humour in the situation.
I let go the breath I’d been holding, the one I sucked in so fast when I woke. What was it that made me start? What dragged me out of the pagan’s spell in this oh so comfortable bed? I pulled my hand back, drew my knees to my chest. Somebody had put me to bed and taken my clothes. Not Makin, he’d not leave me naked against the night. That somebody and I would be having a discussion soon enough. But it could wait until morning. I just wanted to sleep, to let the day come.
Only sleep had kicked me out, and it wasn’t about to let me back in. So I lay there, naked in the strange bed, and wondered where my sword was.
The noise came so quiet at first I could believe I imagined it. I stared blind into the darkness and let my ears suck in the silence. It came again, soft as the whisper of flesh on stone. I could hear the ghost of a sound, a breath being drawn. Or maybe just a night breeze fingering its way through the shutters.
Ice ran up my spine, tingling on my shoulders. I sat up, biting back the urge to speak, to show bravado to the unseen terrors. I’m not six years old, I told myself. I’ve made the dead run. I threw the sheets back and stood up. If the pagan’s horror was waiting in the darkness then sheets would be no shield. With my hands held up before me, I walked forward, finding first the elusive edge of the bed, and then the wall. I turned and followed it, fingers trailing the stonework. Something went tumbling and broke with an expensive crash. I barked my shins on an unseen obstacle, nearly groined myself on a sideboard of some kind, then found the shutter slats.
I fumbled with the shutter catch. It defied me maddeningly, as though my fingers were frost-clumsy. The skin on my back crawled. I heard footsteps drawing closer. I hauled on the shutters with all my strength. Every move I made seemed slow and feeble, as though I moved through molasses, like in those dreams where the witch chases you and you can’t run.
The shutters gave without warning. They flew back and I found that I was standing high above the execution yard, drenched in moonlight. I spun around. Slow, too slow. And found nothing. Just a room of silver and shadows.
The window threw the moonlight on the wall to my right. My shadow reached forward in the arch of the window and fell at the feet of a tall portrait. A full length picture of a woman. I went numb: my face felt like a mask. I knew the picture. Mother. Mother in the great hall. Mother in a white dress, tall and icy in her perfection. She said she never liked that picture, that the artist had made her too distant, too much the queen. Only William softened it, she said. If she’d not had William hugging to her skirts she would have given the picture away, she said. But she couldn’t throw little William away.
I pulled my eyes from her face, pale in the silver light. She loomed above me, tall in life, taller in the portrait. Her dress fell in cascades of lace-froth: the artist had caught it well. He made it look real.
The open shutters let in a chill and I felt a cold beyond any autumn frost. My skin rose in tiny bumps. She couldn’t throw William away. Only William wasn’t there any more … I took a step back toward the open window.
‘Sweet Jesu …’ I blinked away tears.
Mother’s eyes followed me.
‘Jesu wasn’t there, Jorg,’ she said. ‘Nobody came to save us. You watched us, Jorg. You watched, but you didn’t come to help.’
‘No.’ I felt the window sill cold against the back of my knees. ‘The thorns … the thorns held me.’
She looked at me, eyes silver with the moon. She smiled and I thought for a moment she would forgive me. Then she screamed. She didn’t scream the screams she’d made when the Count’s men raped her. I could have stood that. Maybe. She screamed the screams she made when they killed William. Ugly, hoarse, animal screams, torn from her perfect painted face.
I howled back. The words burst from me. ‘The thorns! I tried, Mother. I tried.’
He rose up from behind the bed then. William, sweet William with the side of his head caved in. The blood clotted black on his golden hair. The eye that side was gone, but the other held me.
‘You let me die, Jorg,’ he said. He spoke it past a bubbling in his throat.
‘Will.’ I couldn’t say any more.
He lifted a hand to me, white with the trickles of blood darkest crimson.
The window yawned behind me and I made to throw myself back through it, but as I did something jolted me forward. I staggered and righted myself. Will stood there, silent now.
‘Jorg! Jorg!’ A shout reached me, distant but somehow familiar.
I looked back toward the window and the dizzying fall.
‘Jump,’ said William.
‘Jump!’ Mother said.
But Mother didn’t sound like Mother any more.
‘Jorg! Prince Jorg!’ The shout came louder now, and a more violent jolt threw me to the floor.
‘Get out of the fucking way, boy.’ I recognized Makin’s voice. He stood framed in the doorway, lamplight behind. And somehow I lay on the floor at his feet. Not by the window. Not naked, but in my armour still.
‘You were jammed up against the door, Jorg,’ Makin said. ‘This Robart fellow told me to come running, and here you are screaming behind the door.’ He glanced around, looking for the danger. ‘I ran from the South Wing for your blasted nightmare did I?’ He shoved the door open wider and added a belated, ‘Prince.’
I got to my feet, feeling as if I’d been rolled on by Fat Burlow. There was no painting on the wall, no Mother, no Will behind the bed.
I drew my sword. I needed to kill Sageous. I wanted it so badly I could taste it, like blood, hot and salt in my mouth.
‘Jorg?’ Makin asked. He looked worried, as if he was wondering if I’d gone mad.
I moved toward the open door. Makin stepped to block me. ‘You can’t go out there with a drawn sword, Jorg, the guard would have to stop you.’
He didn’t stand as tall or as wide as Rike, but Makin was a big man, broad in the shoulder and stronger than a man should be. I didn’t think I could take him down without killing him.
‘It’s all about sacrifice, Makin,’ I said. I let my sword drop.
‘Prince?’ He frowned.
‘I’m going to let that tattooed bastard live,’ I said. ‘I need him.’ I glimpsed my mother again, fading. ‘I need to understand what game is being played out here. Who exactly the pieces are and who the players are.’
Makin’s frown deepened. ‘You get some sleep, Jorg. In the bed this time.’ He glanced back into the corridor. ‘Do you want some light in there?’
I smiled at that. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not afraid of the dark.’
19
I woke early. A grey light through the shutters showed me the room for the first time: big, well-furnished, hunting tapestries on the walls. I uncoiled my fingers from my sword hilt, stretched and yawned. It didn’t feel right, this bed. It was too soft, too clean. When I threw the covers back they knocked the servant-bell from the bedside table. It hit the flagstones with a pretty tinkling then bounced onto a rug and lost its voice. Nobody came. That suited me fine: I’d dressed myself for four years. Hell, I’d rarely undressed! And what rags I had would be put to shame by the meanest of servant smocks. Even so. Nobody came.
