And that gave them all some pause.
Yarvi the most, for it came to him then he could have stayed a cook’s boy, and gone anywhere. Traipsed after Rulf to say hello to his wife or followed Nothing to whatever madness his cracked mind settled on. Gone with Jaud to drink from that well in far Catalia, or on with Sumael to the wonders of the First of Cities. The two of them, together …
But now there was nowhere to go but into the Black Chair. Except through the Last Door.
“My name isn’t Yorv, it’s Yarvi. And I am the rightful King of Gettland.”
There was a long silence. Even Nothing had forgotten his polishing and twisted about on his stone to stare with eyes fever-bright.
Ankran softly cleared his throat. “That would explain your shitty cooking.”
“You’re not joking, are you?” asked Sumael.
Yarvi returned her gaze, long and level. “Do you hear me laughing?”
“Then if I may ask, what was the King of Gettland doing lashed to an oar on a rotting trading galley?”
Yarvi pulled his fleece tight about his shoulders and looked into the fire, the flames taking on the shapes of things done and faces past. “Because of my hand … or the lack of it, I was to give up my birthright and join the Ministry. But my father, Uthrik, was killed. Betrayed by Grom-gil-Gorm and his minister, Mother Scaer … or so I was told. I led twenty-seven ships on a raid against them. My Uncle Odem laid the plans.” He found his voice was quivering. “Which included killing me and stealing my chair.”
“Prince Yarvi,” murmured Ankran. “Uthrik’s younger son. He had a crippled hand.” Yarvi held it up to the light and Ankran considered it, thoughtfully stroking the side of his crooked nose. “When we last passed through Thorlby there was talk of his death.”
“The announcement was made a little early. I fell from a tower, and Mother Sea washed me into the arms of Grom-gil-Gorm. I pretended to be a cook’s boy, and he put a collar on me and sold me to slavers in Vulsgard.”
“And there Trigg and I bought you,” mused Ankran, turning the story over for truth as a merchant might turn over a ring, trying to fathom how much gold was in the alloy. “Because you told me you could row.”
Yarvi could only shrug as he pushed his crippled hand back inside the warmth of his fleece. “As you can see, not the biggest lie I’ve ever told.”
Jaud puffed out his cheeks. “No doubt every man has his secrets, but that is larger than the average.”
“And a good deal more dangerous,” said Sumael, eyes narrowed. “Why break the silence?”
Yarvi thought about that for a moment. “You deserve to know the truth. And I deserve to tell it. And it deserves to be told.”
More silence. Jaud rubbed more fat into his feet. Ankran and Sumael exchanged a lingering frown. Then Rulf pushed his tongue between his lips and made a loud farting sound. “Does anyone believe this rubbish?”
“I believe.” Nothing stood, eyes black and huge, lifting his sword high. “And I now swear an oath!” He rammed the blade into the fire, sparks whirling and everyone shuffling back in surprise. “A sun-oath and a moon-oath. Let it be a chain about me and a goad within me. I will not rest until the rightful King of Gettland sits in the Black Chair once again!”
This silence was even longer, and no one was more stunned than Yarvi.
“Did you ever feel you were living in a dream?” muttered Rulf.
Jaud gave another of his sighs. “Often.”
“A nightmare,” said Sumael.
EARLY THE NEXT DAY they crested a ridge and were greeted by a sight straight out of a dream. Or perhaps a nightmare. Instead of white hills ahead they saw black, distant mountains ghostly in a haze of steam.
“The hot country,” said Ankran.
“A place where the gods of fire and ice make war upon each other,” whispered Nothing.
“Looks pleasant enough,” said Yarvi, “for a battlefield.”
There was a stretch of verdant green between the white land and the black, vegetation shifting with the breeze, clouds of colored birds wheeling above, water glimmering in the thin sun.
“A strip of spring cut out from the winter,” said Sumael.
“I do not trust it,” said Nothing.
“What do you trust?” asked Yarvi.
Nothing held up his sword, and did not so much smile as show his broken teeth. “Only this.”
No one mentioned yesterday’s revelation as they trudged on. As though they did not know whether to believe him, or what to do if they decided they did, and so had settled on pretending it had never happened and treating him just as they had before.
That was well enough with Yarvi, in the end. He always had felt more like a cook’s boy than a king.
The snow grew thin under his ragged boots, then melted and worked its way into them, then left him slipping in mud, then was gone altogether. The ground was patched with moss, then covered with tall green grass, then speckled with wildflowers that even Yarvi did not know the names of. Finally they stepped onto a shingle bank beside a wide pool, steam rising from the milky water, a twisted tree spreading rustling orange leaves over their heads.
“I have spent the last few years, and the last few days in particular, wondering what I did to earn such a punishment,” said Jaud. “Now I wonder how I deserved such a reward.”
“Life ain’t about deservings,” said Rulf, “so much as snatching what can be got. Where’s that fishing rod?”
And the old raider began to pluck pale fish from that cloudy water as quickly as he could bait his hook. It had started to snow again but it would not settle on the warm ground, and dry wood was everywhere, so they set a fire and Ankran cooked a banquet of fish on a flat stone above it.
Afterwards Yarvi lay back with his hands on his full belly and his battered feet soaking in warm water and wondered when he was last this happy. Not taking yet another shameful beating in the training square, that was sure. Not hiding from his father’s slaps or wilting under his mother’s glare, for certain. Not even beside Mother Gundring’s fire. He lifted his head to look at the faces of his mismatched oarmates. Who would be worse off if he never went back? Surely an oath unfulfilled was not the same as an oath broken …
“Perhaps we should just stay here,” he murmured.
Sumael had a mocking twist at the corner of her mouth. “Who’d lead the people of Gettland to a brighter tomorrow then?”
“I’ve a feeling they’d get by. I could be king of this pond, and you my minister.”
“Mother Sumael?”
“You always know the right path. You could find me the lesser evil and the greater good.”
She snorted. “Those aren’t on any map. I need to piss.” And Yarvi watched her stride off into the long grass.
“I’ve a feeling you like her,” murmured Ankran.
Yarvi’s head jerked towards him. “Well … we all like her.”
“Of course,” said Jaud, grinning broadly. “We’d be lost without her. Literally.”
“But you,” Rulf grunted, eyes closed and hands clasped behind his head, “like her.”
Yarvi worked his mouth sourly, but found he could not deny it. “I have a crippled hand,” he muttered. “The rest of me still works.”
Ankran gave something close to a chuckle. “I’ve a feeling she likes you.”
“Me? She’s harder on me than anyone!”
“Exactly.” Rulf was smiling too as he wriggled his shoulders contentedly into the ground. “Ah, I remember what it was, to be young …”
“Yarvi?” Nothing was standing tall and stiff on a rock beside that spreading tree, showing no interest in who liked who and staring off the way they had come. “My eyes are old and yours are young. Is that smoke?”
Yarvi was almost glad of the distraction as he clambered up beside Nothing, squinting southwards. But the gladness did not last long. It rarely did. “I can’t tell,” he said. “Maybe.” Almost certainly. He could see faint smudges against the pale sky.
Sumael joined them, shading her eyes with one hand and giving no sign of liking anyone. Her jaw muscles tightened. “It’s coming from Shidwala’s steading.”
“Maybe they’ve made a bonfire,” said Rulf, but his smile was gone.
“Or Shadikshirram has,” said Nothing.
A good minister hopes always for the best, but prepares always for the worst. “We need to get up high,” said Yarvi. “See if anyone’s following.”
Nothing pursed his lips to gently blow a speck of dust from the bright blade of his sword. “You know she is.”
And she was.
Squinting through the strange round window of Sumael’s eyeglass from the rocky slope above the pool, Yarvi could see specks on the snow. Black specks moving, and the hope drained out of him like wine from a punctured skin. Where hope was concerned, he had long been a leaky vessel.
“I count two dozen,” said Sumael. “Banyas I think, and some of the sailors from the South Wind. They have dogs and they have sleds and more than likely are well armed.”
“And intent on our destruction,” muttered Yarvi.
“That or they’re very, very keen to wish us well on our journey,” said Rulf.
Yarvi lowered the eyeglass. It was hard to imagine they had been laughing just an hour before. His friends’ faces were back in the drawn and worried shapes which had become so wearyingly familiar.
Apart from Nothing, of course, who looked precisely as mad as he always did.
“How far back are they?”
“My guess is sixteen miles,” said Sumael.
Yarvi was used to counting her guesses as facts. “How long will it take them to cover that?”
Her lips moved silently as she worked through the sums. “Pushing hard with sleds, they might be here at first light tomorrow.”
“Then we’d better not be,” said Ankran.
“No.” Yarvi looked away from his placid little kingdom, up the hill of bare scree and shattered rock above. “In the hot land their sleds will be no help.”
Nothing frowned into the white sky, scratching at his neck with the backs of his filthy fingernails. “Sooner or later, steel must be the answer. It always is.”
“Later, then,” said Yarvi, hefting his pack. “Now, we run.”
24.
RUNNING
They ran.
Or they jogged. Or they waddled, and stumbled, and shuffled over a hellish landscape of blasted stone where not a plant grew or a bird flew, Father Earth tortured into a hot waste as empty of life as the cold had been.
“The winds of fate have blown me to some glamorous places of late,” mused Ankran as they crested a ridge and stared out at another vista of smoking rock.
“Are they still following?” asked Jaud.
“Hard to see men in this broken country.” Sumael peered through her eyeglass to scan the desolation behind them, which was misted with stinking steam. “Especially ones who’d rather not be seen.”
“Perhaps they’ve turned back.” Yarvi sent up a prayer to He Who Turns the Dice for a little rare luck. “Perhaps Shadikshirram couldn’t convince the Banyas to follow us.”
Sumael wiped grimy sweat across her face. “Who wouldn’t want to come here?”
“You do not know Shadikshirram,” said Nothing. “She can be most persuasive. A great leader.”
“I saw scant sign of it,” said Rulf.
“You were not at Fulku, when she led the fleet of the empress to victory.”
“But you were, I suppose?”
“I fought on the other side,” said Nothing. “I was champion to the King of the Alyuks.”
Jaud’s forehead wrinkled with disbelief. “You were a king’s champion?” Looking at him it was hard to imagine, but Yarvi had watched great warriors in the training square, and never seen the like of Nothing’s blade-work.
“Our flagship was aflame.” The old man’s knuckles were white about his sword’s grip as he remembered. “Roped by a dozen galleys, slick with the blood of the fallen, crawling with the soldiers of the empress when Shadikshirram and I first fought. I was tired from battle and sore with wounds and unused to the shifting deck. She played the helpless woman, and in my pride I believed her and she made me bleed. So I came to be her slave. The second time we fought I was weak from hunger, and she had steel in her hand and strong men at her back and I stood alone with only an eating knife. She made me bleed a second time, but in her pride she let me live.” His mouth twisted into that mad smile and made flecks of spit as he barked the words. “Now we shall meet a third time, and I have no pride to weigh me down, and the ground shall be of my choosing, and she shall bleed for me. Yes, Shadikshirram!”
He raised his sword high, cracked voice echoing from the bare rocks, bouncing about the valley. “The day is here! The time is now! The reckoning comes!”
“Could it come after I’m safely back in Thorlby?” asked Yarvi.
Sumael grimly tightened her belt a notch. “We have to move.”
“What have we been doing?”
“Dawdling.”
“What’s your plan?” asked Rulf.
“Kill you and leave your corpse as a peace offering?”
“Don’t think she’s come all this way for peace, do you?”
Sumael’s jaw muscles worked. “Sadly, no. My plan is to reach Vansterland ahead of them.” And she started down the slope, gravel trickling from every footstep.
The ordeal by steam was almost worse than the ordeal by ice had been. Though the snow was falling it grew hotter and hotter, and layer by layer they stripped off their jealously-hoarded clothes until they were slogging along half-naked, sweat-soaked, dust-smeared as labourers emerging from a mine. Thirst took the place of hunger, Ankran rationing out the cloudy, foul-tasting water in their two bottles more stingily than ever he had the stores on the South Wind.
There had been fear before. Yarvi could not remember the last time he had been without it. But it had been the slow fear of cold and hunger and exhaustion. Now it was a crueller spur. The fear of sharpened steel, the sharp teeth of the Banyas’ dogs, the even sharper vengeance of their owner.
They struggled on until it was so dark Yarvi could scarcely see his withered hand before his face, Father Moon and all his stars lost in the gloom, and they crawled in silence into a hollow in the rocks. He fell into an ugly mockery of sleep and was shaken awake what felt like moments later, bruised and aching at the first gray glimmer of dawn, to struggle on again with the splinters of his nightmares still niggling at him.
To keep ahead was all they thought of. The world became no bigger than the stretch of bare rock between their heels and their pursuers, a space ever shrinking. For a while Rulf dragged a pair of sheepskins after them on ropes: an old poacher’s trick to put off the dogs. The dogs were not fooled. Soon enough they were all bruised, grazed, bloodied from a hundred slips and falls, but with only one good hand Yarvi did worse than the others. Yet each time he went down Ankran was there with a steadying hand, to help him up, to help him on.
“Thanks,” said Yarvi, once he had lost count of his falls.
“You’ll get your chance to repay me,” said Ankran. “In Thorlby, if not before.”
For a moment they scrambled on in awkward silence, then Yarvi said, “I’m sorry.”
“For falling?”
“For what I did on the South Wind. For telling Shadikshirram …” He winced at the memory of the wine bottle cracking into Ankran’s head. The heel of the captain’s boot crunching into his face.
Ankran grimaced, tongue wedged into the hole in his front teeth. “What I hated most about that ship wasn’t what was done to me, but what I was made to do. No. What I chose to do.” He stopped for a moment, bringing Yarvi to a halt and looking him in the eye. “I used to think I was a good man.”
Yarvi put a hand on his shoulder. “I used to think you were a bastard. Now I’m starting to have some doubts.”
“You can weep over each other’s hidden nobility when
we’re safe!” called Sumael, a black outline on a boulder above them, pointing off into the misty gray. “For now, we have to turn south. If we reach the river ahead of them we’ll need some way to cross. We won’t make a raft from stones and steam.”
“Will we make it to the river before we die of thirst?” asked Rulf, licking the last drops from one of the bottles and peering hopefully into it as though some might be stuck in there.
“Thirst.” Nothing barked out a chuckle. “It’s a Banya spear in your back you need to worry about.”
They slid down endless slopes of scree, hopped between boulders as big as houses, clambered down spills of black rock like waterfalls frozen. They crossed valleys where the ground was painful to touch it was so hot, choking steam hissing from cracks like devil’s mouths, skirting pools of bubbling water slick with many-colored oil. They toiled upward, sending stones clattering down dizzy drops, clinging with cut fingertips, Yarvi pawing at cracks with his useless hand, finally looking back from the heights …
To see those black dots through Sumael’s eyeglass still following, and always slightly closer than before.
“Do they never tire?” asked Jaud, wiping the sweat from his face. “Will they never stop?”
Nothing smiled. “They will stop when they are dead.”
“Or we are,” said Yarvi.
25.
DOWNRIVER
They heard the river before they saw it, a whisper through the woods that put a little lost spring in Yarvi’s ruined legs and a little lost hope in his aching heart. The whisper became a growl, then a surging roar as they finally burst from the trees, all filthy with sweat, dust, ash. Rulf flung himself down the shingle onto his face and started lapping up water like a dog. The rest of them were not far behind him.
When the burning thirst of a day’s hard scrambling was quenched, Yarvi sat back and stared across the river to the trees on the far side, so like the ones about them, yet so different.
“Vansterland,” muttered Yarvi. “Thank the gods!”
“Thank ’em once we’re across,” said Rulf, clean mouth and patch of beard pale in his ash-streaked face. “That doesn’t look like friendly water to this sailor.”
Half a King Page 15
