Nobody’s Son

by Sean Stewart

  Still no sound of pursuit. He was safe—for the moment.

  For the first time he looked around. He was in the Red Keep’s large courtyard. A line of stables had been built against the Keep’s west wall. Mark stood facing the Great Hall. At night the servants would have rolled out their mats and slept there. Two buildings flanked the Hall: on one side, an elegant wing the size of a great manor house. Where the royalty lived, no doubt. A squat wooden building jutted from the other side of the Hall: kitchens, probably.

  And where the manor house touched the Keep’s eastern wall, the Scarlet Tower stood, its flanks flushing with the dawn.

  Frustration clenched in him. If Stargad failed scaling the Tower, you’ve got no bloody hope, lad. That was your best idea, your ace to play to break the spell.

  Now he didn’t even have a sword. After a lifetime of training he had run out of plans. Why didn’t Duke Aron get around to this place when he was thrashing the Ghost-King in the Time of Troubles, eh? Wi’ no spells, how can a man hope to…

  Unless…

  He blinked. Must be something wrong wi’…

  Shift the ground, shift the ground. If you don’t have the answer, change the question!

  By God you’re a genius, Shielder’s Mark! He let out his breath in a long soft sigh. “You’re a genius.”

  He scanned the courtyard: emptiness, silence. He slipped quietly across it until he stood under the eaves of the Great Hall. He stopped, listened, waited. Nothing. He crept toward the Tower. As he passed one of the open kitchen windows, a gleam of ruddy light caught his eye and he froze. Light? No torches burned in the Red Keep’s brackets, no lamps hung above the stable doors. Unless he disturbed things, the Keep should be as silent as the grave, as dark.

  Mark peered through the window.

  An old man sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, stirring in the ashes of a tiny fire, all dull coals and cinders. His head was pale as a mushroom, bald and wrinkled with age. He sat in profile to Mark; the white line of an ancient scar ran raggedly down behind his right ear.

  If the Old Man saw Mark, or heard him, he gave no sign, but only sat and stirred his ashes, as if looking for a secret hidden in the cinders.

  But I didn’t do nowt to summon this Awd Man, Mark thought. Uncanny awd bastard.

  Like a rock rising from a river the Old Man jutted from the Red Keep’s enchanted sleep. He seemed real, where even Stargad had been half a dream. Fear flowed from him, and age, and terrible patience. The darkness of death was in the Old Man’s black robes; in the shadows that mantled him; in the coals from which he did not raise his eyes.

  So why, cased within his fear like a seed within a nut, did Mark feel a great desire to go to him?

  He shivered. You’ve a job to do, Shielder’s Mark. If you aren’t here to battle heroes, then you aren’t here to hark to an awd man’s tales neither; your business is wi’ the dagger, nowt else.

  He forced himself to go on, passing the kitchen, until the red glow of the little fire was lost.

  Why had Stargad said he should not take the dagger? Enchanted, of course. Obviously each failing hero was enspelled to defend the treasure he came to steal.

  And yet…

  On t’other hand, t’Awd Man wants you to take it.

  Angrily Mark shook his head. Why should he think such a thing? The Keep was whispering strange thoughts into his heart.

  When he reached the east wall it took him only a few moments to find what he was looking for, a stair leading up to the battlements. Reaching the parapet, he walked swiftly to where the outer wall abutted the east wing of the manor. As he had expected, there was a door there: this was the way someone coming from the royal apartments to the East Tower must pass.

  He knew Queen Lerelil’s son meant to kill his father with the dagger of which the Queen and Stargad had both spoken. Either he had come to the Tower from the Great Hall, crossing the courtyard, or he had come from his own chambers. On balance, Mark thought his chambers more likely.

  The door was a solid one of iron-banded oak, and opened outward. Mark drew his knife and reversed his grip, holding it like a club. Then he pulled the door open, stepped into the shadows behind it, and waited for the Prince to come out. Because of course the Prince must have come this way, and closed the door: and must do so again when Mark left it open, sure as any summoning. This way Mark could get to Prince and dagger before they ever came to the Tower. This way he would never have to face whatever had killed Stargad.

  It only took a moment for a tall, proud man in his early forties to emerge, clenching a black dagger in his fist as if it were an adder. As he closed the door, Mark clubbed him. He fell with a groan and lay twitching on the parapet.

  Got to practise that.

  The fallen man moaned. He was badly dazed, but when Mark tried to take the dagger from him he clutched it fiercely. “Thief!” he cried.

  Mark looked around in panic, waiting for the rush of torches, servants’ running feet. He clubbed the Prince again, much harder, and grabbed the dagger from his nerveless fingers.

  Magic lay in the iron dagger, heavy as time; sorcery clotted its dull blade like blood. It burned ice-cold; Mark yelped with the touch of it. Swiftly he flung his old knife over the battlements into the moat, and jammed the iron dagger into its sheath. He sprinted down the stairs and burst into the courtyard.

  No servants had come at the Prince’s call, just as no one had come at the ring of steel when Mark and Harler fought. Mark slowed to a walk, grinning like a madman. He had done it!

  Then the earth began to heave. The air filled with a weird, sighing sound. A dark wind gusted in the courtyard.

  Mark quickened his pace. In the breaking daylight a shadow shuddered across the courtyard. Looking up, Mark saw the Scarlet Tower begin to sway. Running grooves appeared in its tall granite walls, as if its stone were melting into crimson cloud, cut by the wind rising throughout the Keep.

  Mark yelped and ran.

  The dagger was a spike of ice along his leg; suddenly he had the feeling that it was not the stone walls and towers that were weightless, but the dagger that was heavy. Like a real knife stuck through a painting, it was the one true thing in this night of dreams. It was the dagger’s weight alone that kept the rising wind from whirling him up like a leaf, or blowing him apart like a man of mist.

  Mark leapt through a small door in the outer walls; a blast of wind roared out with him, wild and damp as a spring storm.

  Fierce exultation gripped him, a delight almost like rage. He yelled—

  —until a horrible thought cut his triumph short.

  What if the Queen’s buggered off?

  He almost cried with relief when he saw her crouched among the rushes. “You haven’t left!”

  “There’s some words weightier than thine,” she said haughtily. “I told tha: I am Queen.”

  Mark gripped her by her astonished shoulders and bussed her on both cheeks. “And pretty as a milkmaid,” he cried. “Now, into the boat! We’re almost free!”

  The Queen stood her ground. She squinted in the grey morning light. “Caught a gash you have, boy.” She moved his shirt gently to one side just below his right collarbone.

  “It’s nowt but a scratch. Look, this whole Keep is coming down around our ears, so get—”

  “Where camest tha by thy talisman?” Queen Lerelil whispered, staring fascinated at Husk’s charm. She ran her fingers over the crude carving as if not trusting her eyes in the dawnlight.

  Mark shrugged impatiently. “It’s nowt but a trinket some awd madwoman gave me.”

  “Some old madwoman…” Lerelil murmured, still as a statue. “Tha saved my life, boy. I have not forgotten it. There is a gawd I would joy to give you.” And so speaking she reached under the collar of her elaborate gown and pulled out a golden chain, from which hung a silver medallion. On it, a golden serpent with ruby eyes was biting its own tail.

  Mark touched the wooden charm hanging around his neck, staring at the Queen’s gif
t. By God it’s a bastard child of Lerelil’s amulet! His eyes met hers, standing by the rushes on the eastern marge of the Red Keep, and for a moment they shared a mystery.

  A great ghostly murmuring rose from behind the walls, a babble of faint voices, barking dogs, clattering horse-hooves, shouts and orders, screams and whispers. Overhead, the Scarlet Tower began to melt and run like a great red candle consumed by a terrible heat.

  “You waste our time!” Lerelil cried. Dropping her medallion over Mark’s head she turned to clamber into the boat. He jumped in behind her, and pushed off with one tremendous shove. Rushes swayed and creaked around them, and then they were gliding across the moat. Dawnlight turned the water grey as dead men’s flesh; cherry blossoms clotted their prow. When they were almost becalmed he risked one hard, chopping oarstroke, forcing himself not to look down even when he felt his oar snag and then tear free of something like seaweed, or tangled hair.

  Mark shipped his oars when they reached the far shore. Lerelil stepped from the prow, and began to fade. “No!” Mark shouted, but understanding came too late, and he could only watch as with one stride she stepped from the one eternal night of the Red Keep and into the future.

  And then she was gone, a year from him, or twenty, or a hundred, and he had so much left to ask her.

  Shaken, Mark held the dagger well before him when he stepped from the boat. The very air tightened against him. For one sickening moment it was like walking against a hurricane; he feared he would slip back and fall into the moat.

  Then the dreamy world split like meat around the iron dagger and Mark pitched sprawling onto the bank.

  A great wind sprang up. For the space of three heartbeats the air was a storm of blossoms, a thousand years of cherry petals bursting from the bud, flowering, dropping in an instant.

  When they settled to the ground, the moat was only a grassy ditch. Here and there the sun’s first rays glinted on what might have been metal, or bone. The walls of the Red Keep were stone, sagging and moss-eaten. The Tower roof had fallen in. A shadow passed off the Forest like a ghost at cock-crow, blown to tatters by the wind.

  Quickly Mark jammed the black dagger back in his sheath.

  You did it.

  You did it! Did what all the high born bloody heroes failed to do, the princes, the kingdom’s greatest sons for a thousand years. Fhilip Four-fingered and Devid that Dared, lightfingered Silverhand and Stargad the Shrewd: you kicked their arses all! Delight filled Mark again, hot as rage, sharp as steel. You showed the bastards!

  He would be a great man and ride a great horse and live in a manor with five hundred men. He would be a Duke and live behind stone walls high enough to keep out an army, thick enough to baffle any wind. He and his would be protected, where no war could come. No more would loneliness creep in to take his family away.

  He started down a thin path where once white stones had lain. Far underfoot now. He imagined a wave of time sweeping across the Ghostwood, washing away old dust and old dreams, leaving the Forest glistening and ready for life, eager for the sunrise.

  Oops.

  Shite. No pack. He’d left it behind when he fled from Stargad.

  He faltered. So much for his food, his tent, his spare pair of socks. They were all gone now, lost a thousand years ago.

  Husk’s little hut was long empty, its branches blown apart. A few cherry stones still remained beneath an ancient oak, and a pile of tiny bones at the bottom of a black metal pot that might once have been a helmet.

  Husk…Thoughtfully Mark took out his two medallions, one cedar and one silver. Two serpents hung about his throat, swallowing their own tails. Who was that old moon-mad woman? A woman, maybe, who had died a thousand times one night: and lived once, wreathed in squirrels.

  Like a fierce blaze that falls to embers, Mark’s exultation dimmed; he was filled instead with wonder. He was happy, yes, happier than he had ever been, but it was the happiness of a child. He looked back at the shattered Keep with new eyes.

  He, and the boy he had been, had fled together from the Red Keep’s ruin. That boy sat inside him, waking from a long sleep, remembering what it was to see marvels in a spider web, to hoard up secrets and run from witches.

  Steady on. Mark settled himself on the grass and waited for sunrise. He was too full of feeling to go. Not now, not yet.

  Besides, the incomparable Sweetness lay just across a grassy ditch. He’d never have a better chance to get a sword worthy of a Hero; and he wouldn’t even have to make up its name!

  Mark remembered the way the sword had sung to a hollow place in his heart. He shuddered, recalling Stargad’s crushed face.

  “Well, he won’t miss it,” he growled.

  2

  Before The King

  What a bloody joke, Mark thought a fortnight later as a pair of beefy men in livery started forward to throw him out of Swangard Palace. What ever happened to happily-ever-after?

  It had taken him two weeks to trudge back from the Ghostwood: two long, cold, hungry weeks without his pack and blankets. Each night he had eaten just a morsel of daydream to fill his belly, and warmed his hands over the thought of his triumphant reception before the Crown.

  But after getting to Swangard it had taken him all day just to get inside the Palace and up to the Spring Room where the King was holding court. By now it was beginning to occur to Mark, as the guards drew their broadswords, that things weren’t going to get any easier for a dirty country boy in this rich man’s world.

  ‘Art tha not cloddish, i’ sooth?’…I guess this means no parade.

  Bastards.

  Mark was hungry. Weary. Filthy. Enraged. And really tired of beefy men in livery. “Stand back, damn your eyes!” he swore. Then he drew Sweetness.

  For one eternal instant, time stood stiller in Swangard Palace than it ever had at the Red Keep. Across the room the King froze, halfway out of his chair. Beside him the Queen’s fleshy face sagged in shock. Her eldest daughter recoiled, her second gasped.

  The youngest princess grinned.

  On the King’s other side his two councillors, gaunt Anujel and stout Vultemar, glowered in outrage. Behind the throne Sir William, the King’s champion, looked on, greying eyebrows raised with interest.

  Sweetness murmured its grim enchantments, freezing the ladies and gentlemen of the Court who stood between Mark and his King. Whole village wouldn’t pawn one lady’s dress or one Jack’s cloak and boots, Mark thought, stuck between awe and anger. The men were dressed soldier-style, all epaulets and medals and braid. The monstrously thin women wore hoop-skirts with rigid hems just below their knees: They look like butter churns wi’ legs, Mark thought sourly. But you must admit that all the girls are handsome, and all the fellows pretty.

  “Thanks for your attention,” he growled.

  Shielder’s Mark was not a pretty young man. His brown hair was shaggy and unwashed. His long narrow jaw was covered with black stubble that looked like a boy’s bad first beard. His hands were too hard; his fingernails were blunt and dirty. His cloak was travel-stained; the leathers on his boots were parting from their soles. And frankly, he stank.

  He bowed with a flourish and raised his magic blade above his head, so that every corner of the room was filled with its keening, crying song. “This is Sweetness, greatest sword of grandfather days. I picked it from between Stargad’s bones in the Red Keep, where he lies. I’ve broke the Ghostwood’s spell, and come to claim my reward. I’ve had two weeks walk, little food, less sleep, and no thanks. I’ve spent half the day trying to get past your bloody doormen and stewards and underministers of this and bloody that, and I’m sick of being polite.

  “I will be heard, and I will get what’s owed me! If any man doubts my word, he’s welcome to come wi’ me to the Ghostwood, and look for himself.”

  He dropped his sword-point, and the spell was broken; everyone started jabbering at once.

  At a glance from the King, Vultemar bellowed for silence.

  Sinking slowly into his
throne, His Munificence Astin IV, his spare frame draped in the royal black, studied Mark with a profound lack of enthusiasm. “And do you know those harsh and rigid medicines the Law prescribes in case your claim be proven false?” He nodded at Sir William, who alone among the men in the room was plainly dressed, in brown silks without lace or military honours. “In such a case would we our champion ask to chastise your impertinence.”

  “If I were lying, he could try,” Mark growled. “But can you doubt your ears? There’s only one sword as sings: Sweetness, that was lost in the Ghostwood as everyone knows.”

  Eyes glanced across the chamber; whispers twittered from every corner. Mark looked slowly around the room, feeling dirty and wild and fierce. Like songbirds under a hawk’s shadow, courtiers cringed beneath his gaze.

  Sir William, the King’s champion, dropped his hand from his sword-hilt. “The boy speaks sooth.”

  Astin IV turned in astonishment. “William! Are you mad? One thousand years has darkness lain upon that Wood, and spilled its gloom upon our hearts, a tristeful tributary, fouling with its melancholy spring the shining Sea that is our kingdom. Stargad tried to break this spell, and thumbless Fhilip; Silverhand and countless others. Can that blot not even Aron could erase have now been lifted by,”—the King waved an angry hand at Mark—“By a ragged cloak and pair of mildewed boots?”

  Sir William shrugged. “One sword only ever sang, Your Majesty. I must believe my ears.”

  Mark’s fierce elation drained away before the older man’s level gaze; he felt like a boy, and a bragging boy at that. Sir William gave him the ghost of a smile. “Beside this, I am a fair judge of young men; my heart tells me that he speaks the truth.”

  Mark looked at him gratefully. Now that’s more like a knight should be. When you’re a Duke, make that man welcome in your castle any time.

  “We…” The King faltered. “We confess ourselves amazed. Anujel, Vultemar: advise us.” Two heads bowed down to whisper in his ears, one gaunt and grey, the other pink and fat.