Last Argument of Kings tfl-3

by Joe Abercrombie

  There was a smattering of King’s Own padded out by some squinting members of the city watch, a few puffed-up tradesmen with leather jerkins and polished swords, some slouching labourers with antique flatbows and tough expressions. These were the very best of what was on offer. They were accompanied by a random assortment of citizens of both sexes and all ages, equipped with a bewildering range of mismatched armour and weapons. Or nothing at all. It was difficult to tell who was supposed to be a soldier and who a citizen, if, indeed, there was still a difference. Every one of them was looking at Jezal as he smartly dismounted, his golden spurs jingling. Looking to him, he realised, as he began to walk out among them, his well-armoured bodyguard clanking behind.

  “These are the defenders of this borough?” murmured Jezal to Lord Marshal Varuz, following at his shoulder.

  “Some of them, your Majesty. Accompanied by some enthusiastic townsfolk. A touching spectacle.”

  Jezal would happily have traded a touching crowd for an effective one, but he supposed a leader had always to appear indomitable before his followers. Bayaz had told him so often. How doubly, how triply true of a king before his subjects? Especially a king whose grip on his recently won crown might be thought of as slippery at best.

  So he stood tall, pointed his scarred chin as high as he dared, flicked out his gilt-edged cloak with one gauntleted hand. He strode through the crowd with the confident swagger he had always used to have, one hand resting on the jewelled pommel of his sword, hoping with every step that no one caught an inkling of the cauldron of fear and doubt behind his eyes. The crowd muttered as he swept past, Varuz and Bayaz hurrying behind. Some made attempts at bows, others did not bother.

  “The king!”

  “I thought he’d be taller…”

  “Jezal the Bastard.” Jezal snapped his head round, but there was no way of telling who spoke.

  “That’s Luthar!”

  “A cheer for ’is Majesty!” Followed by a half-hearted murmur.

  “This way,” said a pale-looking officer before the gate, indicating a staircase with one apologetic hand. Jezal climbed manfully, two stone steps at a time, spurs jingling. He came out onto the roof of the gatehouse and froze, his lip curling with distaste. Who should be standing there but his old friend Superior Glokta, bent over on his cane, his repulsive toothless smile on his face?

  “Your Majesty,” he leered, voice heavy with irony. “What an almost overwhelming honour.” He lifted his cane to point towards the far parapet. “The Gurkish are that way.”

  Jezal was attempting to frame a suitably acidic reply as his eyes followed Glokta’s stick. He blinked, the muscles of his face going slack. He stepped past the cripple without saying a word. His scarred jaw crept gradually open, and stayed there.

  “The enemy,” growled Varuz. Jezal tried to imagine what Logen Ninefingers would have said faced with the sight below him now.

  “Shit.”

  In the patchwork of damp fields, over the roads and through the hedgerows, between the farms and villages and the few coppices of old trees beyond the city walls, Gurkish troops swarmed in their thousands. The wide paved road towards Keln, curving away southwards through the flat farmland, was a single crawling, glittering, heaving river of marching men. Gurkish soldiers, in column, flooding up and flowing smoothly out to encircle the city in a giant ring of men, wood, and steel. Tall standards stood out above the boiling throng, golden symbols flashing in the watery autumn sunlight. The standards of the Emperor’s legions. Jezal counted ten at his first glance.

  “A considerable body of men,” said Bayaz, with awesome understatement.

  Glokta grinned. “The Gurkish hate to travel alone.”

  The fence that Marshal Varuz had referred to earlier was already rising, a dark line winding through the muddy fields a few hundred strides from the walls, a shallow ditch in front of it. More than adequate to prevent supplies or reinforcements reaching the city from outside. Further away several camps were taking shape: vast bodies of white tents erected in neatly ordered squares, several with tall columns of dark smoke already floating up into the white sky from cook-fires and forges. There was a deeply worrying feeling of permanence about the whole arrangement. Adua might still have been in Union hands, but even the most patriotic liar could not have denied that the city’s hinterland already belonged firmly to the Emperor of Gurkhul.

  “You have to admire their organisation,” said Varuz grimly.

  “Yes… their organisation…” Jezal’s voice was suddenly creaky as old floorboards. Putting a brave face on this seemed more like insanity than courage.

  A dozen horsemen had detached themselves from the Gurkish lines and now rode forward at a steady trot. Two long flags streamed above their heads, red and yellow silk, worked with Kantic characters in golden thread. There was a white flag too, so small as to be barely noticeable.

  “Parleys,” growled the First of the Magi, slowly shaking his head.

  “What are they but an excuse for old fools who love to hear their own voices to prattle about fair treatment before they start on the butchery?”

  “I suppose on the subject of old fools who love to hear their own voices, you are the absolute expert.” That was what Jezal thought but he kept it to himself, watching the Gurkish party approach in brooding silence. A tall man came at their head, gold shining on his sharply pointed helmet and his polished armour, riding with that upright arrogance that shouts, even from a distance, of high command.

  Marshal Varuz frowned. “General Malzagurt.”

  “You know him?”

  “He commanded the Emperor’s forces, during the last war. We grappled with each other for months. We parleyed more than once. A most cunning opponent.”

  “You got the better of him though, eh?”

  “In the end, your Majesty.” Varuz looked far from happy. “But I had an army then.”

  The Gurkish commander clattered up the road, through the jumble of deserted buildings scattered beyond Casamir’s wall. He reined in his horse before the gate, staring proudly upwards, one hand resting casually on his hip.

  “I am General Malzagurt,” he called in a sharp Kantic accent, “the chosen representative of his magnificence, Uthman-ul-Dosht, Emperor of Gurkhul.”

  “I am King Jezal the First.”

  “Of course. The bastard.”

  It was pointless to deny it. “That’s right. The bastard. Why don’t you come in, General? Then we can speak face to face, like civilised men.”

  Malzagurt’s eyes flickered across to Glokta. “Forgive me, but the response of your government to unarmed emissaries of the Emperor has not always been… civilised. I think I will remain outside the walls. For now.”

  “As you wish. I believe you are already acquainted with Lord Marshal Varuz?”

  “Of course. It seems an age since we tussled in the dry wastelands. I would say that I have missed you… but I have not. How are you, my old friend, my old enemy?”

  “Well enough,” grunted Varuz.

  Malzagurt gestured towards the vast array of manpower deploying behind him. “Under the circumstances, eh? I do not know your other—”

  “He is Bayaz. First of the Magi.” A smooth, even voice. It came from one of Malzagurt’s companions. A man dressed all in simple white, somewhat in the manner of a priest. He seemed hardly older than Jezal, and very handsome, with a dark face, perfectly smooth. He wore no armour, carried no weapon. There was no adornment on his clothes or his simple saddle. And yet the others in the party, even Malzagurt himself, seemed to look at him with great respect. With fear, almost.

  “Ah.” The General peered up, stroking thoughtfully at his short grey beard. “So this is Bayaz.”

  The young man nodded. “This is he. It has been a long time.”

  “Not long enough, Mamun, you damned snake!” Bayaz clung to the parapet, teeth bared. The old Magus was so good at playing the kindly uncle that Jezal had forgotten how terrifying his sudden fury could be. He took a
shocked step away, half raising a hand to shield his face. The Gurkish aides and flag-carriers cringed, one going so far as to be noisily sick. Even Malzagurt lost a sizeable chunk of his heroic bearing.

  But Mamun gazed up just as levelly as before. “Some among my brothers thought that you would run, but I knew better. Khalul always said your pride would be the end of you, and here is the proof. It seems strange to me, now, that I once thought you a great man. You look old, Bayaz. You have dwindled.”

  “Things seem smaller when they are far above you!” growled the First of the Magi. He ground the toe of his staff into the stones under his feet, his voice carrying now a terrible menace. “Come closer, Eater, and you can judge my weakness while you burn!”

  “The time was you could have crushed me with a word, I do not doubt it. But now your words are only empty air. Your power has leaked away with the slow years, while mine has never been greater. I have a hundred brothers and sisters behind me. What allies have you, Bayaz?” He swept the battlements with a mocking smile. “Only such as you deserve.”

  “I may yet find allies to surprise you.”

  “I doubt it. Long ago, Khalul told me what your final, desperate hope would be. Time proved him right, as it always has. So you went to the very edge of the World, chasing shadows. Dark shadows indeed, for one who calls himself righteous. I know that you failed.” The priest showed two rows of perfect white teeth. “The Seed passed out of history, long ago. Interred, dark leagues beneath the earth. Sunk, far below the bottomless ocean. Your hopes are sunk with it. You have only one choice left to you. Will you come with us willingly, and be judged by Khalul for your betrayal? Or must we come in and take you?”

  “You dare to speak to me of betrayal? You who betrayed the highest principals of our order, and broke the sacred law of Euz? How many have you murdered, so that you could be powerful?”

  Mamun only shrugged. “Very many. I am not proud. You left us a choice of dark paths, Bayaz, and we made the sacrifices we had to. There is no purpose in our arguing over the past. After these long centuries, standing on opposite sides of a great divide, I think neither one of us will convince the other. The victors can decide who was right, just as they always have, since long before the Old Time. I know your answer already, but the Prophet would have me ask the question. Will you come to Sarkant, and answer for your great crimes? Will you be judged by Khalul?”

  “Judged?” snarled Bayaz. “He will judge me, the swollen-headed old murderer?” He barked harsh laughter down from the walls. “Come and take me if you dare, Mamun, I will be waiting!”

  “Then we will come,” murmured Khalul’s first apprentice, frowning up from under his fine black brows. “We have been preparing long years to do it.”

  The two men fell to sullen glaring, and Jezal frowned with them. He resented the sudden feeling that the whole business was somehow an argument between Bayaz and this priest and that he, although a king, was like a child eavesdropping on his parents’ conversation, and with just as little say in the outcome.

  “Speak your terms, General!” he bellowed down.

  Malzagurt cleared his throat. “Firstly, if you surrender the city of Adua to the Emperor, he is prepared to allow you to retain your throne, as his subject, of course, paying regular tribute.”

  “How generous of him. What of the traitor, Lord Brock? We understood that you have promised him the crown of the Union.”

  “We are not altogether committed to Lord Brock. He does not hold the city, after all. You do.”

  “And we have scant respect for those who turn on their own masters,” added Mamun, with a dark look up at Bayaz.

  “Secondly, the citizens of the Union will be permitted to continue to live according to their own laws and customs. They will continue to live in freedom. Or as close to it as they have ever really been, at least.”

  “Your generosity is astonishing.” Jezal had meant to sneer it, but in the end it escaped without much irony.

  “Thirdly,” shouted the General, with a nervous glance sideways towards Mamun, “the man known as Bayaz, the First of the Magi, be delivered over to us, bound and in chains, that he may be conveyed to the Temple of Sarkant, for judgement by the Prophet Khalul. Those are our terms. Refuse them, and the Emperor has decreed that Midderland shall be treated as any other conquered province. Many will be killed, and many more made slaves, Gurkish governors will be installed, your Agriont will be made a temple, and your current rulers… conveyed to cells beneath the Emperor’s palace.”

  Jezal half opened his mouth to refuse on an instinct. Then he paused. Harod the Great, no doubt, would have spat his defiance at any odds, and probably pissed on the emissary to boot. The slightest notion of negotiating with the Gurkish was against every long-held belief he possessed.

  But, thinking about it, the terms were far more generous than he had ever expected. Jezal would probably have enjoyed more authority as a subject of Uthman-ul-Dosht than he did with Bayaz staring over his shoulder every moment of every day. He could save lives by saying a word. Real lives, of real people. He reached up and rubbed gently at his scarred lips with a fingertip. He had experienced enough suffering on the endless plains of the Old Empire to think long and hard about risking so much pain to so many, and himself in particular. The notion of cells beneath the Emperor’s palace caused him some pause.

  It was bizarre that such a vital decision should fall to him. A man who, no more than a year ago, had proudly confessed to knowing nothing about anything, and caring still less. But then Jezal was beginning to doubt that anyone in a position of high authority ever really knew what they were doing. The best one could hope for was to maintain some shred of an illusion that one might. And occasionally, perhaps, try to give the mindless flood of events the slightest push in one direction or another, hoping desperately that it would turn out to be the right one.

  But what was the right one?

  “Give me your answer!” shouted Malzagurt. “I have preparations to make!”

  Jezal frowned. He was sick of being dictated to by Bayaz, but at least the old bastard had played some role in his ascension to the throne. He was sick of being slighted by Terez, but at least she was his wife. Quite aside from any other consideration, his patience was stretched very thin. He simply refused to be ordered around at sword-point by some posturing Gurkish General and his damn fool priest.

  “I reject your terms!” he called airily down from the walls. “I reject them utterly and completely. I am not in the habit of surrendering my advisers, or my cities, or my sovereignty simply when asked. Particularly not to a pack of Gurkish curs with small manners and even smaller wits. You are not in Gurkhul now, General, and here your arrogance becomes you even less than that absurd helmet. I suspect that you will learn a harsh lesson before you leave these shores. Might I add, before you scuttle off, that I encourage you and your priest to fuck each other? Who knows? Perhaps you could persuade the great Uthman-ul-Dosht—and the all-knowing Prophet Khalul too for that matter—to join you!”

  General Malzagurt frowned. He conferred quickly with an aide, evidently having not entirely understood the finer points of that last utterance. Once he had finally taken them in he gave an angry slash of his dark hand and barked an order in Kantic. Jezal saw men moving among the buildings scattered outside the walls, torches in their hands. The Gurkish General took one last look up at the gatehouse. “Damn pinks!” he snarled. “Animals!” And he tore at the reins of his horse and sprang away, his officers clattering after him.

  The priest Mamun sat there a moment longer, a sadness on his perfect face. “So be it. We will put on our armour. May God forgive you, Bayaz.”

  “You need forgiveness more than I, Mamun! Pray for yourself!”

  “So I do. Every day. But I have seen no sign in all my long life that God is the forgiving kind.” Mamun turned his horse away from the gates and rode slowly back towards the Gurkish lines, through the abandoned buildings, flames already licking hungrily at their walls.<
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  Jezal took a long, ragged breath as his eyes flicked up to the mass of men moving through the fields. Damn his mouth, it got him in all kinds of trouble. But it was a little late now for second thoughts. He felt Bayaz’ fatherly touch on his shoulder, that steering touch that had become so very annoying to him over the past few weeks. He had to grit his teeth to keep from shaking free.

  “You should address your people,” said the Magus.

  “What?”

  “The right words could make all the difference. Harod the Great could speak at a moment’s notice. Did I tell you of the time he—”

  “Very well!” snapped Jezal, “I am going.”

  He walked towards the opposite parapet with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man to his scaffold. The crowd was spread out below in all its disturbing variety. Jezal had to stop himself fussing with his belt-buckle. He kept worrying for some reason that his trousers would fall down in front of all those people. A ridiculous notion. He cleared his throat. Someone saw him, pointed.

  “The king!”

  “King Jezal!”

  “The king speaks!”

  The crowd shifted and stretched, drawn towards the gatehouse, a sea of hopeful, fearful, needy faces. The noise in the square slowly died and a breathless silence fell.

  “My friends… my countrymen… my subjects!” His voice rang out with pleasing authority. A good beginning, very… rhetorical. “Our enemies may be many… very many…” Jezal cursed to himself. That was hardly an admission to give courage to the masses. “But I urge you to take heart! Our defences are strong!” He slapped at the firm stones under his hand. “Our courage is indomitable!” He thumped at his polished breastplate. “We will hold firm!” This was better! He had discovered a natural talent for speaking. The crowd was warming to him now, he could feel it. “We need not hold out forever! Lord Marshal West is even now bringing his army to our assistance—”