I knew there was bad blood between the Horse Coast kingdoms and Liba, raids across the sea and such, and that the Ancraths had alliances with the Morrow, which made Liba their foe. What I thought one man could do to the Caliph of Liba, especially if his head was like mine this morning, I wasn’t sure. This was, however, Jorg Ancrath who had destroyed Duke Gellethar along with his army, castle and the mountain they all sat upon. We had returned through Gelleth months after the explosion and the sky was still— ‘Christ! The explosion. In the desert! It was him, wasn’t it?’
‘It was.’ Omar signed for Allah’s protection. ‘He has met with my father and they are now friends.’
I stopped in the street and thought about that for a moment. ‘Starting his empire building young, isn’t he?’ I was impressed though. My grandmother had alliances in Liba – she’d reached out far and wide in the hope of good marriages – but her goal had been finding blood that mixed with her sons’ would produce a worthy heir, someone to fill in the gaps in the Silent Sister’s visions of the future … my sister. Jorg of Ancrath had other plans and I wondered how long it would be before they took him to Vyene to present his case to Congression and demand the Empire throne. ‘How far will it take him, I wonder…’
‘What do you make of him?’ Omar had come back for me, a caliph’s son waiting for me in the dusty street. He seemed strangely interested in my answer. It struck me then that I’d never seen him as clearly as I did there that morning, burdened by my self-inflicted pain. Soft, pudgy, Omar, the bad gambler, too rich, too amiable for his own good. But as he watched me with an intensity he saved for the roulette wheel I understood that the Mathema saw a different man – a man who would not only insert my answer into an equation of unearthly complexity, but one who might also solve it. ‘Can he match his ambition?’
‘What?’ I clutched my head. I didn’t have to fake it. ‘Jorg? Don’t know. Don’t care. I just want to go home.’
5
Omar and Yusuf came to the outskirts of Hamada to see me off, Omar in the black robes of a student, Yusuf in the fractal patterned grey-on-white of a master, his smile black and gleaming. They’d calculated me safe passage to the coast with a salt caravan. Travel with Sheik Malik, they told me, would not end well, though whether my downfall would have been at the sheik’s instigation, or by djinn or dead man, or perhaps through indecency with his lovely daughters, they didn’t say.
‘A gift, my friend!’ Omar jerked his head back at the three camels his man was leading behind them.
‘Oh you bastard.’
‘You’ll warm to them, Jalan! Think of the heads you’ll turn in Vermillion riding in on camelback!’
I rolled my eyes and waved the man forward to add my trio to the laden herd browsing karran grass a short way behind me. Soon all four score of them would be trekking the dunes with just me and twelve salt merchants to keep order.
‘And give the Red Queen my father’s regards,’ Omar said. ‘And my mother’s.’
Omar’s mother I liked. The second eldest of the caliph’s six wives, a tall Nuban woman from the interior, dark as ebony and mouth-wateringly attractive. Funny too. I guessed Omar’s sense of humour came from his father. Giving a man three camels after he’s been locked up for assaulting one is mean-spirited, and not at all amusing.
I turned to Yusuf. ‘So, master Yusuf, perhaps you have a prediction for me, something I can use.’ Tradition has it that nobody of consequence leaves Hamada without some numerology to guide their way. Most come from failed students who ply their trade in whatever way they can, be it as accountants, bookmakers, or mystics selling predictions on the street. A prince, however, might hope for an audit of his possibilities and probabilities to be issued by the Mathema itself. And, since I knew Yusuf from my days in Umbertide, there seemed no harm in trying to coax one from a master.
Yusuf’s smile stiffened for a moment. ‘Of course, my prince. I’m afraid our halls of calculation are occupied with … notables. But I can do a quick evaluation.’
I stood there, trying not to let my offence show, while Yusuf scratched away with startling speed on a slate taken from inside his robe. ‘One, two, thirteen.’ He looked up.
I pursed my lips. ‘Which means?’
‘Ah.’ Yusuf glanced down at the slate again as if seeking inspiration. ‘First stop, second sister, thirteenth … something.’
‘Why can’t these ever be like, on the third day of spring give the fifth man you see four coppers to avoid disaster? See, that’s simple and useful. Yours could mean anything. First stop … on my way home? An oasis? A port? And second sister? My sister, the Silent Sister? Help me out here!’
‘The calculation is done on the basis that you are told what I told you – if I wanted to tell you more I would have to do the calculation again and it would be a different answer, a different purpose. If I told you more now then it would disrupt the outcome and the numbers would no longer be true. Besides, I don’t know the answers, that’s where the magic comes in and it’s hard to pin down. You understand?’
‘So, do it again. It only took you a moment.’
Yusuf showed me his black smile. ‘Ah, my friend, you have found me out. I have been processing your variables since we first met in that Florentine bank. I may have misled you when I implied that you were not important to the shape of things to come. I thought perhaps it would have been easier for you if you didn’t know.’
‘Well … uh, that’s better.’ I wasn’t sure it was. I’d been happier being outraged about not being important enough to factor than I was knowing that my actions mattered. ‘I, uh, should be going. Allah be upon you, and all that…’ I raised my hand in farewell but Omar was too fast for me and launched himself forward into a hug that, truth be told, was pretty much a cuddle.
‘Good luck, my friend.’
‘I don’t need luck, Omar! And I have the figures to prove it … one, two, three—’
‘Thirteen.’
‘One, two, thirteen. That should see me safe. You come visit us in Red March when you’re bored with balancing equations.’
‘I will,’ he said, but I know from experience it takes practice to lie when cuddling someone, and Omar had not practised.
I disentangled myself and set off toward the front of the caravan.
‘Don’t forget your camels, Jalan!’
‘Right.’ And with reluctance I angled my way toward the rear of the group being lined up, already tensing to dodge the first barrage of camel-spit.
The desert is hot and boring. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s also sandy, but rocks are essentially dull things and breaking them up into really small pieces doesn’t improve matters. Some people will tell you how the desert changes character day by day, how the wind sculpts it endlessly in vast and empty spaces not meant for man. They’ll wax lyrical about the grain and shade of the sand, the majesty of bare rock rising mountainous, carved by the sand-laden breeze into exotic shapes that speak of water and flow … but for me sandy, hot, and boring covers it all.
The most important factor, once water and salt are covered, is the boredom. Some men thrive on it, but me, I try to avoid being left alone with my own imagination. The key if one wishes to avoid dwelling on unpleasant memories or inconvenient truths is to keep yourself occupied. That fact alone explains much of my youth. In any event, in the desert silence, with nobody but camels and heathens to speak to, none of them with much mastery of Empire tongue, a man is left defenceless, prey to dark thoughts.
I held out until we hit the coast, but that last trek along the narrow strip of sand between the wideness of the sea and the vast march of dunes broke me. One chill night we camped beside the skeleton of some great ocean-going ship that had floundered close enough to port for the irony to be more bitter than the seawater. I walked among its bare and salt-rimed spars rising from the beach, and setting a hand to one ancient timber I could swear I heard the screams of drowning sailors.
That night sle
ep proved impossible to find. Instead, beneath the bright and cold scatter of the stars, my ghosts came visiting and dragged me back to Hell.
‘Isn’t there supposed to be a bridge?’ I ask, staring out across the fast-flowing waters of the River Slidr. It’s the first water I’ve seen in Hell. The river lies at least thirty yards wide, the opposite shore is a beach of black sand sloping up to a set of crumbling black cliffs. The cliffs vault toward the dead-lit sky in a series of steps, and above them clouds gather, dark as smoke.
‘It’s the River Gjöll that has a bridge, not the Slidr. Gjallarbrú they call the bridge. Be thankful we don’t need to cross it, Módgud stands guard.’
‘Módgud?’ I don’t really want to know.
‘A giantess. The far shore of that river is corpse upon corpse. They build the Nagelfar there, the nail ship that Loki will steer to Ragnarok. And behind that bridge stand the gates of Hel, guarded by the chained hound, Garm.’
‘But don’t we need to—’
‘We’re already past the gates, Jal. The key, the door, all that took us into Hel.’
‘Just the wrong bit of it?’
‘We need to cross the river.’
Thirst rather than a lack of caution draws me on, hurrying me down those last few yards of the shore.
I advance to the shallows. ‘Yeah. That’s not going to happen.’ The riverbed shelves away rapidly and although the swift-flowing water lies unnaturally clear it soon becomes lost in darkness. Crossing a river like this would be a serious problem under any circumstances but as I kneel to drink I spot the real show-stopper. In defiance of all reason there are daggers, spears, and even swords, being borne along in the current, all silvery clean, and sparkling with sharpness. Some are pointed resolutely in the direction the current takes them, others swirl as they go, scything the waters all around.
Snorri arrives at my shoulder. ‘It’s called the River of Swords. I wouldn’t drink it.’
I stand. Further out the blades look like fish shoaling. Long, sharp, steel fish.
‘So, what do we do?’ I stare upriver, then down. Nothing but miles of eroded banks stepping up to the badlands on either side.
‘Swim.’ Snorri walks past me.
‘Wait!’ I reach forward to get an arm in his way. ‘What?’
‘They’re just swords, Jal.’
‘Yessssss. That was my point too.’ I look up at him. ‘You’re going to dive in among a whole bunch of swords?’
‘Isn’t that what we do in battle?’ Snorri steps into the water. ‘Ah, cold!’
‘Fuck cold, it’s sharp I’m worried about.’ I make no move to follow him.
‘Crossing the Slidr isn’t about bridges or tricks. It’s a battle. Fight the river. Courage and heart will see you across – and if it doesn’t then Valhalla will have you for you will have fallen in combat.’
‘Courage?’ I know I’m sunk before I start then. Unless simply wading in constitutes courage … rather than just stupidity.
‘It’s that or stay here forever.’ Snorri takes another step and suddenly he’s swimming, the water churning white behind him, his great arms rising and falling.
‘Crap on it.’ I stick a foot in the water. The chill of it reaches through my boot as if it isn’t there and shoots up the bones of my leg. ‘Jesus.’ I take the foot out again, sharpish. ‘Snorri!’ But he’s gone, a third of the way across, battling the waters.
I take the opportunity to put the key back around my neck on its thong. I find it hot in my grasp, reflecting nothing, not even the sky. I wonder if I call on Loki will the true God see and drown me for my betrayal? I hedge my bets by calling on any deity that might be listening.
‘Help!’
The way I see it is that God must be pretty busy with people appealing to him all the time, so he probably appreciates it when prayers cut to the chase.
I pause to consider the injustice of a Hell that contains no lakes that drown heroes and let cowards float, but instead holds test upon test over which someone with nothing to recommend them save a strong arm may triumph. Then, without further consideration I run three steps and dive in.
Swimming has never been my forte. Swimming with a sword at my hip has always resulted in swifter progress, but sadly only toward the bottom of whatever body of water I’m drowning in. The Slidr however, proves unusually buoyant when it comes to sharp-edged steel and Edris Dean’s blade rather than dragging me down, holds me up.
I thrash madly, my lungs too paralysed by the cold even to begin pulling back the breath that escaped me when I hit the river. The iciness of the water is invasive, seeping through blood and bone, filling my head. I lose contact with my limbs but it’s not drowning that concerns me – it’s keeping warm. Deep in my head, in the dark spaces where we go to hide, I’m crouched, waiting to die, waiting for the ice to reach me, and all I have to burn are memories.
I reach for the hottest memory I have. It isn’t the blind heat of the Sahar, or the crackling embrace of Gowfaugh Forest engulfed in flame. The Aral Pass unfolds, dragging me back into that blood-soaked gorge packed with men at war, men screaming, men at cut and thrust, men fallen about their wounds, time running red from their veins, men dying, whispering beneath the cacophony, speaking to their loved and lost, calling for their mothers, last words twitching on blue lips, bargains with the Devil, promises to God. I see another man slide back from my sword, leaving it black with gore. By now it’s too dull to slice, but a yard of steel is still deadly whatever edge it carries.
The Aral Pass carries me a third of the way across the Slidr. I find my focus and realize the river’s sharp load has not yet cut me open but there’s still too far to go and the opposite shore is slipping by too fast. In the distance I hear a roar, a low, steady, wet-mouthed roar. A long silver spear passes beneath me, too close. I start to swim again, pounding artlessly at the water, and this time it is the bloodshed at the Black Fort that drives me on. I remember the sick sound as my sword point pierces an eye, crunching through the bony orbit and into the Viking’s brain. In an instant the fire is gone from him, a meat puppet with his strings all snipped. An axe cleaves the air in front of my face as I sway back. A high table catches me in the back and I topple onto it, twisting, throwing my legs into the spin. A broadsword hammers into the planks where my head was and I’m over the table, on both feet, swinging, shearing through the arm that held that sword.
The battle madness of the Black Fort releases me at last, panting amid tumbled corpses. I’m two-thirds of the way across the Slidr, still in the choppy, swift-moving clarity of the river. Downstream, in the distance, the valley is choked with mist. That roar has grown louder, filling the world, trembling in the depth of my bones.
I strike out for shore, desperate now. Something bad waits for me in that mist but I’m running out of fight and time. The coldness takes me and all I have to burn is my duel with Count Isen, the high, sharp crash of blade on blade as he tries to kill me and I weave my defence from desperation. It’s not enough. I’m still ten yards from shore and going under. There’s a sharp agony in my leg that reaches me even though the limb is frozen and numb. I’ve been hit. The waters close over me. I surface once more and see that before reaching the rising mist the whole Slidr vanishes as if itself cut by a massive sword. The thunder is louder than thought. I’m being dragged to the falls. I go under again and none of that matters: a shoal of knives is bearing down on me and I’ve no air to scream with.
Somehow, against all sense, my sword is in my hand. A fine way to drown. But then I remember it’s not my sword and the heat that was in my blood in the moment I took it fills me once more. Edris Dean wielded this sword against me, seeking my life as he had sought that of my mother, and of my sister, warm in the womb. I battled him before Tuttugu’s corpse. The corpse of my friend, a coward who died a hero’s death. I remember how it felt to drive my sword between Edris Dean’s ribs, to sink it into the meat of him, to feel it bedded in his flesh and to rip it out again, grating across bone.
I open my mouth and roar, careless of the river, and there I stand, dripping in the shallows, sword in hand, and above me the mist from an endless waterfall rises in clouds that dare the sky. The Slidr plunges over a rocky lip just ten yards on. Swords leap from its clear waters as gravity takes the river and hauls it swiftly away.
I step forward on trembling legs, weak in every limb, three more steps, two more, and I’m on the wet sand. I’ve no injuries that I can see.
A figure is running toward me, Snorri, slowing as he draws near, panting. ‘I—’ He raises a hand, draws in a huge breath, ‘thought I’d lost you there.’
I look at the sword in my hand, the script etched into its blade, the water still dripping from it, diamonds turned rust red in the deadlight. ‘No. Not yet. Not today.’
We climb up the riverbank in silence, both of us wrapped in memories. As the Slidr dries from me I feel that somehow its waters have left me more … connected. I remember my battle at the Aral Pass. I remember the fight within the Black Fort. For the first time Jalan the berserker has met everyday Jalan and we’ve come to some sort of agreement. I’m not sure exactly what it is yet … but something has changed.
Hell on the far side of the Slidr proves steeper than before. Hills of black rock replace the dust, hills in which everything is sharp and that offer a traveller no chance for rest. Everywhere the stone looks as if it were soup on the boil, frozen in the instant, bubbles bursting from it, leaving a myriad edges, all razored. Just touching the ground leaves my fingers bloody. How long the leather soles of my boots will last, and what will become of my feet after that, I can’t say.
We see more souls here, grey clusters of them, flowing like dirty water along the dry valleys, men and women and children, heads down, unspeaking, drawn onward by some call I can’t hear.
We follow, twisting and turning through the black hills, the valleys becoming deeper, broader, more thick with souls. The Slidr is less than a memory now, Hell has parched me again. I feel my skin dying, desiccating, flaking away.
The Wheel of Osheim Page 9
