King of Thorns

13

Wedding day

The first man I killed in my eighteenth year had done most of the job for me. Running two hundred yards up a steep and rocky slope in chain armour is hard work. The soldier looked about ready to keel over, like the old woman in the market who never got up after seeing Gorgoth for the first and last time. I let him run onto my sword and that was the end of it.

The next man went pretty much the same way, only I had to be a little faster and thrust at him rather than just let him impale himself. In battle the thrust is a much cleaner death than the cut. Unless of course it’s the guts where you get it and then you’re going to have a long hard time of it before the rot sets in and carries you off screaming days later.

The third man, tall and bearded, took the two bodies at my feet as a hint and slowed down to face me. He should have waited for his friends behind him on the slope, but instead he came in swinging his broadsword, still huffing and puffing from his run. I stepped back to avoid the sweep of his blade then swung my own and took his throat. He turned, spraying arterial blood over the friends he should have waited for, then tripped and fell amongst the rocks. Until you’ve seen it you won’t believe how far blood will spurt from the right cut. It’s a wonder we don’t feel that pressure inside us all the time, a wonder that we don’t just explode sometimes.

I should have turned and run at that point. It was the plan after all. My plan. And the men of the Watch were already in full retreat behind me. Instead I advanced, moving quickly between the two blood-spattered soldiers who leapt out of Beardy’s way as he fell. I made a figure-eight cut, lashing out from one side to the other, and both of them fell, their mail torn, a shattered collarbone on the right, sliced chest muscle on the left. It shouldn’t have taken them both down, but it did, and I felt that four years’ hard practice with the blade hadn’t been entirely wasted.

Both men were flopping on the ground, calling out about their wounds, as I cut the sixth down, another staggerer, exhausted from his charge. That done, I turned and fled, outpacing the pursuit and working hard to catch the Watch.

The men of Arrow were never going to outrun us, but they could hardly stop the chase and let us come back to practise our archery again, so they kept at it. The captains driving them were making the right choices given what they had to work with. What they should have done, however, was to withdraw to the main force and rely on their commander’s battle sense to deploy his archers as a defence against us. Though perhaps the Prince of Arrow was happy enough sending a few thousand soldiers up the mountain to contain the threat and to keep his army focused on the Haunt.

I caught Makin up a few minutes later, threading my path past Watch men with less go in their legs than I had that day. Watch-master Hobbs ran with him, his captains beside him, Harold, Stodd, and old Keppen who’d made the wise choice and refused to jump for a previous watch-master back at Rulow Falls years ago. I say the Watch-master ran but by that point “brisk walk” would cover it.

“Set four squads on those ridges,” I said. “Let’s shoot a few more Arrows.”

“And when the enemy reaches them?” Hobbs asked.

“Time to run again,” I said.

“At least they’ll get a rest,” Keppen said, and spat a wad of phlegm on the rock.

“You’ll get one too, old man.” I grinned. “It’s your squads I’m thinking should stay.”

“I should have jumped,” he muttered. He shook his head and raised his shortbow high, its red marker ribbon snapping in the wind. His men started to converge behind him as he jogged off toward the ridges.

“Running’s all very well,” Hobbs said, striding on, “but we’ll run out of mountain in the end, or be chased out of the Highlands entirely.”

“Which sounds like”-Makin heaved in a breath-“the best option when all’s said and done.” Of all of them he looked the worst off. Too many years letting a horse do the running. He clambered up a large boulder and stood on top looking back down the valley. “Must be three thousand of the bastards after us. Maybe four.”

“Likes to keep the odds in his favour does the Prince,” Hobbs said. He scratched his head where the grey grew thickest and the hair thinned. “I hope you’ve got a hell of a plan, King Jorg.”

I hoped so too. If not for Norwood and Gelleth these Watch men would have fled an age ago. How quickly fact turns into fiction, and strangely when fact becomes legend, folk seem more ready to believe it. And maybe they were right to have faith, for I did reduce the Lord of Gelleth, his mighty castle, and his armies all to dust. Maybe they were right and I was wrong, but I found it hard to believe in whatever tricks I might have stowed in a small copper box.

Believer or not, the box was all I had. So I pressed it to my forehead, hard, as if I could push the memory I needed through the bone. The feeling is like that misremembered name appearing without preamble on your tongue, ready to be spoken, after so long dancing beyond reach on its tip. Except that instead of one word, there are many, images with them, and touches and tastes. A piece of your life returned to you.

The memory flooded me, taking me from the cold slopes, back across years. Gone the crowded Watch men, gone the shouting and the screams.

I lunged for the next hold, throwing my body after my arm and hand, loosing the last hold before my fingers had found a grip on the next, before I lost momentum. Climbing is a form of faith, there’s no holding back, no reserve. My fingers jammed into the crack, the sharp edge biting, toes scrabbling on rough rock, the soft leather finding traction as I started to slip.

There’s a spire of stone in the Matteracks that points at the sky as though it were God’s own index finger. How it came to be, who carved it from the fastness of the mountains, I can’t say. One book I own speaks of wind and rivers and ice sculpting the world in the misty long ago, but that sounds like a story for children, and a dull one at that. Better to talk of wind demons, river gods, and ice giants out of Jotenheim. It’s a more interesting tale and just as likely.

Arm aching, leg straining, curved in an awkward pose across the fractured stone, I gasped for air, stealing a cold lungful from the wind. They say don’t look down, but I like to. I like to see the loose pieces fall away and become lost in the distance. My muscles burned, the heat stolen by the wind. It felt as though I were trapped between ice and fire.

The spire stands clear of a vast spur where one of the mountains’ roots divides two deep valleys. From the scree slopes at the spire’s base to the flat top of it where a small cottage might squeeze, there are four hundred feet of shattered rock, vertical in the main, in places leaning out.

A hundred feet below I could see the ledge where I had met the goat. The heights a mountain goat will scale for the possibility of a green mouthful never cease to amaze me. They must use their own kind of magic to climb without the cleverness of fingers or toes. I’d pulled myself up and come eyeball to eyeball with the beast, its long face framed by two curling horns. There’s something alien in a goat’s eye, something not seen in dog or horse or bird. It’s the rectangular pupil. As if they’ve climbed out of hell or fallen from the moon. We sat together in mutual distrust while I caught my breath and waited for life to find its way back into limbs and extremities.

I found the rock pillar in my first year as King of Renar and in all my time on the throne it was perhaps that spare needle of mountain that came closest to killing me. I failed to climb it seven times, and I am not a man who gives up any attempt easily.

Coddin once asked me why I climb and I spun him some pretty lies. The truth-at least for today-is that back when I hadn’t many years on me, my mother would play for William and me on an instrument from the vaults of the tall castle. A piano. A thing of magic and many keys in black and white. We were trouble, Will and I, it has to be said. Fighting, scheming, digging out mischief of any kind that might be had-but when she played we fell silent and just listened. I remember every moment, her long fingers moving on the keys so fast they blurred together, the sway of her body, her hair hanging in a single long plait between her shoulders, the light falling across the wooden body of the instrument. But I can’t hear it. She plays behind glass, walled behind too many years, lost when I walked away from it all, from her, from that damn carriage and the thorns.

I see, but I can’t hear.

When I climb, and only then, on the very edge of everything, I catch stray notes. Like words robbed of meaning on the cusp of hearing…the music almost reaches me. And for that I would dare any height.

I made an eighth assault on the Spire at the start of the summer in which the Prince of Arrow crossed my borders with his armies new laden with loot from conquests in Normardy and Orlanth. Loot and, it must be said, recruits, for the lords of those lands were not well loved and the Prince won the people’s hearts almost before their dead were boxed and buried.

Climbing is about commitment. On the Spire there are places so sheer that one hold must be wholly relinquished before the next can be obtained, and sometimes then only by hurling yourself up an open expanse of rock that offers no purchase. In such moments you are falling, albeit upwards, and if the next hold escapes you then that fall will carry you to the ground. There are no half measures in such ascents: you place everything you are or will be on each decision. Lives can be lived in this manner, but I do not recommend it. In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives-the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.

There comes a point on a long climb when you know you have to surrender or die. There’s no quarter given. I hung to cold stone fifty feet beneath the summit, weak as a child, aching with hunger, blistered hands and feet, arms screaming. The art of survival in the mountains is knowing when to give up. The art of reaching the top is knowing when not to.

“If I die here,” I whispered to the stone. “If I fall and die, I will count it a life lived, maybe not well, but fully. No book will know my end, but I will have died in battle none the less.” And summoning my strength I started to climb again.

Like the Scots king and his famous spider, my eighth attempt proved the charm.

Retching, slobbering on the rock, I crawled over the final corner, horizontal at long last. I lay trembling, gasping, half sobbing, as close to the end of my endurance as I had ever come.

When you’re climbing you take nothing with you that you do not absolutely need. That’s a good discipline to acquire, and the mountains teach it to you for free. They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. The mountains are also great teachers, and better still, they let the occasional star pupil live.

The mountains teach you to be prepared for change. Amongst the peaks the weather can shift from fair to foul quick as blinking. One moment you might be clambering up a forgiving slope and the next you could be clinging to it as though it were your mother, whilst an east wind tries to carry your frozen corpse off with it.

Climbing God’s Finger I learned a lot about holding on by my fingertips. By the time I finally hauled myself weak and trembling onto the very top of the spire, I had come to realize that I’ve been holding on by my fingertips my entire life.

I flopped to my back. I lay there on the rock with nothing to see between me and a relentless blue sky. I had climbed light, taking nothing unneeded with me, no room on that narrow peak for anyone else, ghosts or otherwise, no Katherine, no William, my mother and father four hundred feet below, too far away to hear. Not even the shadow of a child on the rock or the glimmer of a copper box in memory. It isn’t the danger or the challenge that keeps me climbing, it’s the purity and focus. When you’re a five-second drop from being a smear of guts and pulverized bone, when your whole weight is on eight fingers, then seven, then five, your choices are black and white, made on instinct without baggage.

When you climb hard and reach an impossible peak or ledge, you gain a new perspective, you see the world differently. It’s not just the angle you’re looking from that changes. You change too. They say you can’t go back, and I learned that when I returned to the Tall Castle after four years on the road. I walked the same halls, saw the same people, but I hadn’t gone back; I’d come to a new castle, seen with new eyes. The same is true if you climb high enough, only with climbing you don’t need to stay away for years. Climb a mountain, see the world from its highest point, and a new man will climb down to a world of subtle differences the next day.

Metaphysics aside, there is plenty to be seen from a high point in the mountains. If you sit with your legs dangling over the biggest drop in the world, with the wind streaming your hair behind you, and your shadow falling so far it might never hit the ground…you notice new things.

On the road we have our sayings. “Pax,” we say if we’re caught with our hands in another man’s saddlebags. “Visiting the locals,” we say when a brother is off about dark business after a battle. Where’s Brother Rike? Visiting the locals. In the Renar Highlands there’s a saying that I didn’t hear until I struggled up to the village of Gutting with Sir Makin in tow. “’E was taking a rock for a walk, yer worship.” At the time I paid it no attention, a bit of local colour, a streak of green in the manure. I heard the expression a few more times in the years that followed, generally when somebody was off on mysterious business. Taking a rock for a walk. Once you’ve noticed a phrase or word it starts to crop up everywhere. “Lost his flock,” was another one. I’d hear these things on the parade ground in main, from the local recruits. “That John of Bryn had my bowstrings while I was on wall watch.” “What you gonna do about that?” “Don’t you worry none, already happened. Lost his flock he did.”

Up in a high place, especially one hard-reached, you gain a fresh perspective. Looking out over the peaks and cliffs and slopes I’d come to know, I noticed something new. The shadows gave it away, leading the eye here and there to places where the land didn’t lie quite right. It took a time of empty watching, of idle legs dangling, and thought-stuff swirling behind my eyes before, like the snow in the globe, everything settled and I saw clear, the same scene but with new detail.

High on the sides of almost every valley, of all but the highest gorges, the loose rocks gathered too thickly, perched too precariously. At first the eye buys into the deception. It has to be natural. To move that much stone would take a thousand lifetimes, and to what end?

Taking a rock for a walk turns out to be a genuine national pastime in the Highlands, so deep grained, so known, that nobody seems to feel the need to say more. For generations the men going up to tend their goats have filled any idle moment with the business of carrying loose stones from one part of the slope to another higher part, slowly building up the same piles that their father and grandfather built upon.

If a Renar man takes the ultimate liberty and decides to graze his goats on another man’s land, chances are that there’ll be a sudden rockslide and the man will have lost his flock. If it weren’t a Renar man then he might lose even more than that.

It’s hard to tease out a thread when you’re running, especially when that thread is a plan and you’re teasing it from a memory box, and you’re running uphill with thousands of soldiers in pursuit. But even our enemies call the Ancraths cunning, and I call us clever. So I pulled a little more and all of a sudden I saw the slopes we were running up with a whole new perspective. Or rather, an older one that I had forgotten.

From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

October 25th, Year 98 Interregnum

Ancrath. The Tall Castle. In my rooms again. I’m always in my rooms.

I had that dream again. The one with Jorg. I have the knife as always, twelve inches and thin as a finger. He’s standing there with his arms open and he’s laughing at me. Laughing. I’m standing there in my torn dress with the knife and him laughing, and I thrust it into him, like he thrust…and I stab it into him. And old Hanna watches and she smiles. But her smile isn’t right and when Jorg falls there are bruises on him too. On his neck. Long dark bruises. And I can almost see the fingers and the thumb print.

I’m running this torn satin through my fingers and it’s me that feels torn. My memories fight my dreams. Every single day. And I don’t know who is winning and who is losing. I don’t remember.

November 7th, Year 98 Interregnum

Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Bell-tower-keep-top.

I’ve found a place to be alone, the tallest point on the Tall Castle, just me and the crows and the wind. The tower holds only one bell, huge and made of iron. They never ring it. At least now it’s serving a purpose by sheltering me from the wind.

I find myself wanting to be alone. All the ladies grate on me, even the ones that mean well. There’s no peace in the castle-only the feeling that something is wrong, something I can’t name or touch.

I found initials up here, H.J. A, you can see them out on the far side of the tower where it leans over the outer wall of the keep. I can see no way to reach the spot. It says something about Honorous Jorg Ancrath that even his name is out of reach.

Sageous came to my chamber today. Just to the door. The Prince of Arrow has come again. The Prince and his brother, Orrin and Egan. Sareth said they would come back. She said they would come back to sniff around me again. That’s just how she said it. As if they were dogs and I was a bitch in heat.

I don’t think I am. In heat that is. I can be a bitch. I can be a bitch every day. I made Maery Coddin cry today and I hardly meant to.

Even so, there’s something about Orrin and something else about Egan. Grandmother would say they both burn too bright. Too bright for regular folks, she’d say. But I’ve never counted myself regular. And if they do burn bright-if they do put heat in me-or me in heat-what of it? I fancy I put some heat in them. Or why would they both be back at the Tall Castle a moon after their first visit? I don’t think it’s for the pleasure of King Olidan’s company. I don’t think Orrin’s charm or Egan’s threat had much impact on that scary old man. I don’t think the devil would make Olidan pause. I don’t think he’d bow his head even if God himself sent an angel to his doors.

Sareth says both the Arrows are pointed my way. She has a dirty mouth. She says they’ll both ask for my hand. Even though I’m not Scorron’s first daughter and Father promised alliance and land to Olidan already. She says they’ll both ask for my hand but it’s not my hand they’re interested in, or my dowry. She said more, but her mouth is dirtier than my quill, black with ink though it is. And if they did ask, what would I say? It hardly seems that they can be brothers, one as bright and good as my Sir Galen, the other as dark and tempting as Jorg who killed him.

I dreamed again last night. I woke up speaking the words of that dream and now I can’t even remember the shape of it. I can remember a knife, a long knife. I know I need to use it. I remember Jorg hurt me. I should go back and read my journal, but somehow my hands don’t want to turn the pages back, only forward. I had a dream about that too.

Sageous is at the door again. The princes are waiting.

I don’t like that man’s eyes.

Gorgoth is like no other. There is no mould for the leucrota. Twisted by the Builders’ poisons they fall broken from the womb and follow strange paths as they grow. The ribs that pierce his flesh and reach from each side are black and thick, his hide more red than blood, and the muscle beneath surges as he moves. And though he is shaped for war and for horror, there are few men in Adam’s image whose approval would mean as much to me-and most of them lie dead.