Emperor of Thorns

16

Perhaps the Engine of Wrong had found a new gear for nothing felt right after Kent brought news that my father’s carriage preceded us. I rode to the front of our column, Makin and Rike falling in around me. At Captain Harran’s side a few minutes later, cresting a low rise, I saw the dull gleam of the Ancrath column ahead. It takes more than a river of mud to keep the Gilden Guard from shining.

I pulled up to stare at the carriage bumping along amidst the horsemen. I last rode in it when I was nine. The old bastard had salvaged it.

‘He scares me too,’ Makin said.

‘I’m not scared of my father.’ I showed him my scowl but he only grinned.

‘I don’t know how he puts the fright in a man,’ Makin said. ‘I mean, I swing the better sword, and yes he’s got a cold temper on him and harsh ways, but so have a lot of kings, and dukes, and earls, barons, lords — hell, any man you give command to is likely to put an edge on it just to keep hold. He’s not even given to torture: his brother, his nephews, all well known for it, but Olidan he’ll just have you hung and be done.’

Rike snorted at that. He’d seen my father’s dungeons from the wrong side. Still, Makin had it right, there were plenty around who made Olidan Ancrath seem a reasonable man.

‘I said I wasn’t scared of him.’ My heartbeat told the lie but only I could hear it.

Makin shrugged. ‘Everyone is. He puts the fright in you. He’s got the look. That’s what does it. Cold eyes. Makes you shiver.’

I’ve been known for bold moves at times, for daring the challenge even when I’ve known I shouldn’t. Under that grey sky though, with a cold wind blowing wet from the north, I felt no inclination to catch up to the carriage labouring ahead of us and demand an accounting for the past. My chest ached along the thin seam of that old scar and for once I found myself wanting to let something lie.

We rode without talking, the column moving around us, so many guardsmen in their fine armour, so sure in their purpose. The chill breeze nagged at me and all my yesterdays crowded at my shoulder, wanting their turn to rattle in my skull.

‘Cerys,’ I said.

Makin pushed back his helm and looked at me.

‘Killed when she had three years to her. Tell me.’ I had thought that if we ever spoke of Makin’s daughter it would be in maudlin drunkenness in the small hours before dawn, or perhaps as with Coddin it would take a mortal wound to turn our conversation to matters of consequence. That it might happen riding in the mud in the cold light of day surrounded by strangers had not occurred.

Still Makin watched me, jolting in the saddle, unaccustomed stiffness in that flexible face of his. For the longest moment I thought he wouldn’t speak.

‘My father had lands in Normardy, a small estate outside the town of Trent. I wasn’t the first son. I got married off to a rich man’s daughter. Her father and mine settled some acres on us and a house. The house came a couple of years after our official marriage. Something less than a mansion, more than a farmhouse. The sort of place you might have raided when you led the brothers on the road.’

‘It was outlaws?’ I asked.

‘No.’ His eyes glittered, bright with memory. ‘Some official dispute, but too petty to be called a war. Trent and Merca quarrelling over their boundaries. A hundred soldiers and men-at-arms on each side, no more. And they met in my wheatfield. We were both seventeen, Nessa and me, Cerys three. I had a few farmhands, two house servants, a maid, a wet-nurse.’

Even Rike had the sense to say nothing. Nothing but the clomp of hooves in mud, Gorgoth’s heavy footfalls, the creak of harness, dull chinks of metal on metal, the high sharp arguments of birds invisible against the sky.

‘I didn’t see them die. I might have been lying in the dirt by the main door clutching my chest. Nessa likely got cut down while I lay there looking at the clouds. I blacked out later. Cerys hid herself in the house and the fire probably reached her after I’d been dragged unconscious into a ditch. Children do that, they hide from the fire rather than run, and the smoke finds them.

‘Took me six months to recover. Stabbed through a lung. Later, I raided into Merca, with a band who survived that day. I found out that the lord’s boy who led that raid had been sent to a cousin’s in Attar to keep him safe. We met a year later. I tracked him to a little fort-town about twenty miles north of here.

‘My route back took me through Ancrath, and I stayed there. In time I found service with your father. And that’s all there is to it.’

Makin didn’t have a grin on him, though I’ve seen him smile at death time and again. He kept his eyes on the horizon but I knew he saw further than that. Across years. ‘That’ is never all there is to it. Hurt spreads and grows and reaches out to break what’s good. Time heals all wounds, but often it’s only by the application of the grave, and while we live some hurts live with us, burning, making us twist and turn to escape them. And as we twist, we turn into other men.

‘And how long does it take for a child that you cross nations to avenge, because you couldn’t save her when saving her was an option, to become a child that you knife because you couldn’t accept him when accepting him was an option?’

Makin gave half a grin then though he didn’t look away from whatever past held him. ‘Ah, Jorg, but you were never as sweet as Cerys, and I was never as cold as Olidan.’

Another day passed and we trailed the Ancrath column through Attar’s heartlands. Everywhere peasants came on rag-bound feet to watch us pass, wreathed in the smoke from fields where red lines of fire ate the stubble. They abandoned the harvest’s funeral rites, the laying and the stacking of crops, the pickling and the drying for winter, to watch the Gilden Guard and see the pennants of jet and gold flutter on high. Empire meant something to them. Something old and deep, a half-forgotten dream of better things.

In the late afternoon, sunshine broke through a fissure in the clouds and Miana emerged from Lord Holland’s carriage to ride a sedate mile side-saddle as we plodded through a ford town with the unlikely name of Piddle. Marten took to saddle as well and when Miana retired he kept at my side.

‘She’s finding it difficult, sire,’ he said, unprompted.

‘More difficult than being at the Haunt waiting for guests from the Vatican?’

‘It’s hard work carrying a child in the last month.’ Marten shrugged but I felt he cared more than that.

Sometimes it cuts to see other men more passionate than I about the things that I should care for. I knew that if the Pope’s assassin had killed Miana and our unborn child I would have grieved. But also I knew that some terrible part of me, down at the core, would have raised its face to the world with a red grin, welcoming the chance, the excuse, for the coming moments of purity in which my revenge would sail upon a tide of blood. And I knew that rage would have swept away everything else, including sorrow.

‘It’s a hard world, Marten.’ He glanced across, confused for a moment as we’d ridden a quarter mile since he last spoke. ‘It shouldn’t be easy to bring someone into a hard world. It’s too easy to make a new life, too easy to take an old one. It’s only right that some part of the process present a little difficulty.’

He kept his gaze upon me, a right earned over and again in my service, and the weight of his judgment built upon me.

‘Dammit.’ I snorted my exasperation. ‘I feel outnumbered in that carriage.’

Martin smiled. ‘A married man is always outnumbered.’

I spat in the mud and pulled on Brath’s reins with a curse. Five minutes later I sat in the carriage once more beside Miana.

‘My father’s carriage is just ahead of us,’ I said.

‘I know.’

It felt odd to be talking about him, especially with Gomst and Osser sat watching us. Gomst at least had the sense to pull out his bible, a book near big enough to hide the both of them, and engage the older man in discussion of some or other psalm.

‘Coddin wants me to vote with my father at Congression. To make peace with him.’ The words made my mouth dirty.

‘And you would rather … not?’ A smile quirked at the corners of her lips but I didn’t feel mocked.

A snatch of Gomst’s conversation reached me. ‘“Father, where is the lamb that is to be sacrificed?” And Abraham replied, “My son, God will provide the lamb”.’

‘I have many reasons to want him dead. And almost as many reasons to want to be the one to do it.’

‘But do you want to do it? The Jorg I know tends to do what he wants to do, and if reasons oppose him he changes them.’

‘I-’ I wanted to understand how it all worked, this business of living and of raising children. I wanted to do the job better than he had. ‘Men will tell our son how it was between me and my father.’

Miana leaned closer, raven-dark hair falling around her pale face. ‘So what will they tell our child?’ She refused to call him ‘our son’ until he came out to prove himself.

‘Even the king can’t control men’s gossip,’ I said.

Miana watched me. She wore a circlet of woven gold but her hair did as it pleased, taking at least two maids and a handful of clips to constrain. At last my incomprehension drove her to explain. ‘How can a clever man be so stupid? How it was between you and Olidan isn’t finished. The story that will be told is not yet written.’

‘Oh.’

I let her shoo me out of the carriage.

Not until chance took a hand though did I finally find the stones to ride to my father’s carriage. A guard captain came with news and found me skulking mid-column, Gorgoth at my side. Gorgoth always proved good company if you didn’t want to talk.

‘The Ancrath carriage has broken an axle.’ He didn’t bother with my title. ‘Can room be found in yours? There’s some objection to using one of the baggage wagons.’

‘I’ll come and discuss the matter.’ I suppressed a sigh. Sometimes you can sense the current of the universe flowing and nothing can deny its will for too long.

All my men rode in my wake. Word had spread fast. Even Gorgoth came, perhaps curious to see where a son such as I had sprung from. We passed the Gilden Guard in their hundreds, all halted on the trail. Every head turned our way. And in a narrow stretch of road, unremarkable save for the stream on whose rocky bed my father’s carriage had broken its axle, I came once more to speak with the King of Ancrath.

I felt Coddin at least would be pleased. I may not have taken his advice but fate seemed to disagree with my decision, pushing the Ancraths one step further along the path of the old prophecy. Two Ancraths working together were required to break the power of the hidden hands and here were the last two Ancraths. Well, you can lead a horse to water, but I choose what I damn well drink and I hold a low opinion of prophecy. It would take more than hell freezing over to see me allied to my father’s cause.

They had dragged the carriage some twenty yards up the slope from the stream. I dismounted close by, my boots sinking six inches into churned mud. A breeze tugged the bare twigs in the hedgerows, a taller tree overreached us, black-fingered against a pale sky. The hand on Brath’s reins shook as if the wind pulled on it too. I bit off a curse at my weakness and faced the carriage door. A thousand years ago Big Jan had pulled me through that door, from one world into another.

I stood there, cold, my bladder too full, a tremble in my limbs, turned in heartbeats from the king of seven nations bound for Congression to a scared child once again.

The guard captain of the Ancrath column applied his mailed knuckles to the wood. ‘Honorous Jorg Ancrath requests audience.’

I wanted to be anywhere else, but stepped closer. None of the guard but the captain had dismounted to prevent violence. Either they didn’t know the stories men told of me, or they didn’t care. Perhaps they saw their job as retribution for breaking pax rather than prevention of such breaches.

The door opened and from the dark interior emerged a slim and pale hand. A woman’s hand. I stepped forward and took it. Sareth? Father had brought his wife?

‘Nephew.’

And she stepped out onto the riding board, all whispering silks and stiff lace collars, her hand cool yet burning in my grip. The carriage behind her lay empty.

‘Aunt Katherine,’ I said, my words once again in short supply.