Emperor of Thorns

10

Fifty horses churn up a lot of mud. With the season heading into autumn and seven times that number of cavalry we made a river of the stuff. The wagons, set close to the rear of the column, slid through it, their wheels little more than sled-runners often as not. It turned out to be more comfortable than jolting over ruts. In fact if you must travel by carriage I recommend having an army at horse smearing the road out ahead of you.

‘Well this is nice,’ I said.

Actually for a carriage it was about as nice as it gets. Lord Holland had paid to have almost as much attention lavished on the interior as he did at home. The exterior had been finely worked too, but a thick layer of mud obscured all that.

Gomst sniffed and rummaged for his snot-rag. The bishop had acquired a cold for the journey. As a priest he used to wipe his nose on the black sleeve of his vestment. Bishops have different standards it seems. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t decide to sail, King Jorg,’ he said.

‘I considered it.’ The voyage of nearly three thousand miles by sea cut the overland distance from five hundred easy miles to a hundred over mountains. As much as I liked my new flagship I couldn’t talk myself into such a plan.

Osser Gant sat beside the bishop, sharing his cold. Two old men sniffing and spitting together. Miana, Marten and I sat opposite, facing the direction of travel. I’d squashed in for a look-see and set my muddy feet on the carpet.

‘You need a nursemaid and a midwife,’ I said. ‘A bishop, a chamberlain, and a general aren’t going to be much help when your time comes.’

‘I have three nursemaids and two good midwives,’ Miana fixed me with that stare of hers. ‘Jenny and Sarah are back at the Haunt. I wasn’t expecting to be bundled off to Hodd Town then hauled off to Congression!’

‘We’ll just have to collect some replacements on the way,’ I told her.

‘Some waifs and strays? Farmgirls skilled in the delivery of cows and sheep?’

Women aren’t expected to be reasonable when getting ready to squeeze out a child. I still had my own doubts about the whole process. It seemed as though it would be a tight fit and I was glad I didn’t have to do it. ‘Peasants have babies too, Miana. Lots of them. But no, not a farmgirl. We’re going to be travelling through Teutonia. They’re at least half-civilized, so I’m told. We’ll stop by one of the local lords and prevail on him to volunteer some women of suitable quality and experience.’

I peered through the window grille, eager to be back out there. I’d spent a whole minute in the carriage and had had enough of it. Swapping the carriage bench and all its fine cushions for Brath’s saddle seemed a fair exchange given that I also got to swap Gomst and Osser for a view, and their sniffing and snotting for a fresh breeze. Outside, the Gelleth lowlands slid past, green and pleasant, fields in the main with occasional strips of woodland splashed in autumn colours. No sign here of the havoc I’d wrecked in the north at Castle Red.

Our route took us across Gelleth under empire pax and would lead on through Attar to bridge the Rhyme at the city of Honth. From there Captain Harran planned to guide us along the River Danoob through half a dozen Teuton kingdoms until we reached Vyene. A trip estimated at a touch over three weeks. We could make better time and easier travelling on a barge once we reached the Danoob, but with over three hundred horses and their riders aboard most barges have a tendency to sink, and without them aboard, any barge carrying me through Teutonia would be guaranteed to sink. My father held a lot of alliances with the Teuton kingdoms, Scorron in particular, and Teutonia had never liked the idea of the coast kingdoms uniting to the west of them.

‘Jorg?’ Miana at my side.

‘Sorry?’

She sighed and folded tiny hands across her belly.

‘Yes.’ I guessed an answer. It seemed to satisfy her. She nodded and turned to speak to Marten.

It wouldn’t be long before he wanted out of there too. A few days for his bruises to fade, maybe a while longer, for he wasn’t young, and he would want to be riding. Something niggled at me, guilt perhaps, for being so ready to abandon Miana. It seemed probable that I should want to spend time with her, but I just didn’t. I liked her well enough, but not well enough to spend three weeks in a carriage with. I wondered if any man would want to spend three weeks sat next to his wife. Would I feel any different if I’d chosen her? If she had chosen me? If it were Katherine beside me?

‘And what are you thinking about, Jorg?’ she asked. She fixed me with dark eyes. Not black but hinting green, leaves in moonlight. I’d never taken note of their colour before. Strange what strikes you and when.

‘I’m thinking I should take my muddy boots out of this fine carriage and check to see that Harran isn’t leading us astray.’

She didn’t say so but I could see her disappointment at the corners of her mouth. I stepped out feeling less than a king. Life can be complicated enough even when nobody is trying to kill you.

I rode alongside the carriage for a while in a black mood. A fine rain fell, unseasonably warm and light enough for the wind to blow into my face whatever angle I held my head. Makin rode up with his usual grin, spitting out the rain and wiping it from his cheeks.

‘Lovely weather.’

‘People who talk about the weather would be better served by admitting they’ve nothing to say but like the sound of their own voice.’

Makin’s grin broadened. ‘And don’t the trees look beautiful this time of year?’ I suspected he’d taken a pinch of clove-spice, the stink of it seemed to be on him a lot these days.

‘Do you know why the leaves change colour, Makin?’ They did look spectacular. The forest had grown around us as we travelled and the canopy burned with colour, from deepest red to flame orange, an autumn fire spreading in defiance of the rain.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why do they change?’

‘Before a tree sheds a leaf it pumps it full of all the poisons it can’t rid itself of otherwise. That red there — that’s a man’s skin blotching with burst veins after an assassin spikes his last meal with roto-weed. The poison spreading through him before he dies.’

‘I never knew death could be so pretty,’ he said, indefatigable.

We rode in silence for a while and I wondered if men were the world’s leaves. If as we aged the world filled us with its poisons so as old men, filled to the brim with the bitterest gall, we could fall into hell and take it all with us. Perhaps without death the world would choke on its own evils. The northmen, Sindri’s people, have it that a tree, Yggdrasil, stands at the centre, with everything — even worlds — hanging from it. And with Sindri came images of his milk-haired sister, Elin, tall and pale-eyed. Come to me in winter, she had said. I remarked to myself on her eyes in the moment I met her. Miana’s after three years. A tree might stand at the centre of an old man’s world. Whenever I turned my own face to the centre though, I saw a woman. Most young men do.

Three days later Lord Redmal’s soldiers opened the road-gates to let us cross the border into Attar. Redmal’s grandfather had built a fort across the road fifty years ago to let the folk of Gelleth know they weren’t welcome. Merl Gellethar had flattened it in a dispute a decade before I reduced him to poisoned dust. Attar soldiers now infested the fort’s ruins and watched the Gilden Guard with undisguised awe as they streamed past.

On the map Attar is a sizeable land, but the Engine of Wrong still turns and turns at Nathal as it has for ten centuries, and the north of Attar is a wasteland. I’m told it’s not a poison or disease that keeps men away from Nathal and the lands around it, just a feeling, just the certainty that nothing there is right.

It took a day to cross the Attar hill country, where they keep the vineyards on the southern slopes and grow the grapes from which the Blood of Attar is fermented, a wine found at many royal tables. On the margins of the wine lands, as the hills smoothed themselves out for tobacco fields and small farmsteads, Red Kent came riding back from the column’s vanguard with news.

‘Another guard column ahead, sire,’ he said, as humble and loyal as you please. I think Kent loved being a knight more than anything and, burned as he was, with that scary rasping voice, he made a good king’s fist to send into trouble and to end it.

‘Not the last we’ll see, I suspect. Who is it?’

He paused and then I knew. Who else would it be. I owned every other land east of us until the sea.

‘It’s from Ancrath, a hundred guard.’

The votes of Ancrath and Gelleth, both resting in my father’s hand.

I thought again of falling leaves and wondered if it wasn’t time for another old man, full to the brim with poison, to make that final drop.