King of Thorns

17

Four years earlier

When you journey north, past the River Rhyme, you start into the Danelands, those regions still unclaimed by the sea where the Vikings of old came ashore to conquer and then settle among the peoples who bowed before the axe. There are few Danes who will not claim Viking blood, but it’s not until the sea bars your path that such claims take on weight and you start to feel yourself truly among the men of the wild and frozen north.

We crossed the bridge at Remagen leading our horses, for in places the metal weave of the deck had holes punched up through it, some the width of a spear, some wide enough to swallow a man. Nowhere did rust have a hold on the silver metal, and what had made the holes no one could say. I remembered the peasant in his house of gravestones back by Perechaise, unable to read a single legend from them. I shouldn’t have sneered. We live in a world made from the Builders’ graves and can read almost none of the messages they carry, and understand fewer still.

We left Remagen without trouble and rode hard along the North Way so that trouble wouldn’t catch us up if it followed. Farms, forests, villages untouched by war, good land to ride through with the sun on your back. It set me in mind of Ancrath, cottages golden with thatch, orchards in bloom, all so fragile, so easy to erase.

“Thank you for not burning up too much of the circus, Gog,” I said.

“I’m sorry for the fire, Jorg,” Gog said behind me.

“No great harm done,” I said. “Besides, the stories they tell about it will bring more people to the show.”

“Did you see the little men?” Gog asked.

“The midgets?” I asked.

His claws dug in. “My little men, from the fire.”

“I saw them,” I said. “It looked like they were trying to pull you in.”

“Gorgoth stopped them,” Gog said. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad about that.

“You shouldn’t go,” I said. “You need to learn more. To know how to be safe. To know that you can come back. That’s why we’re going to Ferrakind. He can teach you these things.”

“I think I’ve seen him,” Gog said. At first I didn’t think I’d heard right above the thud and clatter of hooves.

“I can look into one fire and see out of another,” Gog said. “All sorts of things.” He giggled at that and for a moment he sounded like William, laughing on the morning we climbed into that carriage.

“Did he see you?” I asked.

I felt him nod against my back.

“We’d best go on then,” I said. “There’s no hiding from him now. Best find out what he has to say.”

We rode on and the rain started to fall, the kind of rain that comes and goes in the spring, cold and sudden and leaving the world fresh.

Heimrift lies in the Danelore, a hard ride from the Rhyme-lands. We made good speed and paced the season, caught in an unending wave of wakening, as if we carried the May with us.

Gorgoth ran beside me as often as not, tireless, pounding the road with great feet that seemed almost hooves. He spoke so seldom that it made you want him to, as if by storing each word he made it precious. I found him to be a deep thinker though he had never read a book or been taught by anyone.

“Why do you ask so much?” he asked once, his arms punching in and out like the great engine at York as he ran.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” I said.

“Socrates?”

“How in hell do you know that?” I asked.

“Jane,” he said.

I grunted. She could have reached out from the dark halls of the leucrotas, that child, even without taking a step from the entrance caves. I had walked some of the paths she took, and the paths of the mind can take you anywhere.

“Who was she to you anyhow?” I asked.

“My eldest sister,” he said. “Only two of us lived from my mother’s line. The rest.” He glanced at Gog. “Too strong.”

“She was fire-sworn too?” I remembered the ghost-fire dancing across her.

“Fire-sworn, light-sworn, mind-sworn.” Gorgoth’s eyes narrowed to slits as he watched me. Jane died because of my actions, because of me, because I hadn’t cared if she lived or not. Mount Honas had fallen on Jane and the necromancer both. The wrong one survived. I still owed Chella for the Nuban and other Brothers besides, but even my thirst for vengeance wouldn’t see me digging in the burning wastes of Gelleth for her any time soon.

“Damnation!” It suddenly struck me that I should have asked Taproot about the Dead King. The excitement of the circus had somehow put him out of my mind. Given that a dozen and more severed heads had mouthed the Dead King’s name at me, it’s a tribute to the power of sawdust and greasepaint that they could push it out.

Gorgoth turned his head but didn’t ask.

“Who’s the Dead King?” I asked him. Gorgoth had enough dealings with the necromancers, and who better than necromancers to know about someone who speaks through corpses.

“ Who he is I can’t say.” Gorgoth spoke in the rhythm of his running. “I can tell you something of what he is.”

“Yes?”

“A new power, risen in the dry places beyond the veil, in the deadlands. He speaks to those that draw their strength there.”

“He spoke to Chella?” I asked.

“To all the necromancers.” A nod. “They did not want to listen, but he made them.”

“How?” Chella struck me as a hard person to coerce.

“Fear.”

I sat back in the saddle and chewed that one over. Gorgoth ran in silence, matching Brath’s trot, and for the longest time I thought he wouldn’t speak again. But then he said, “The Dead King talks to all who reach past death.”

“So what should I do when he talks to me?”

“Run.”

Gorgoth’s sister had once given me the same advice. I resolved to take it this time.

We made good time and each evening I fought Makin, learning at every turn and occasionally teaching him a new trick. I taught him a new trick the very first day I met him, training squires in the Tall Castle. Since then, though, the process had seen a slow reversal. Somewhere along the line Makin turned from my rescuer, sent out by Father to recover me, into a follower, and ever since he decided to follow my lead the man had been teaching me. Not with books and charts like Tutor Lundist but in that sneaky, indirect way the Nuban had, the kind of way that gets under your skin and turns you slowly by example.

Four days out from Remagen a storm found us on the plains, a fierce cold squall carrying all the cruelty that spring can muster. Lashed by rain we found our way to the town of Endless by tracks turned to swollen streams. Some lordling undoubtedly calls Endless his own but whatever men he set to watch over it had found better things to watch that night. We clattered unopposed along the cobbled main street and found a stable by the glow of a single lantern hung behind the torrent spilling from its eaves. The stable-keep allowed that Gog and Gorgoth could stay with the horses. Taking the pair among the good folk of Endless would be an invitation to carnage.

“We’ll be out of here at dawn,” I told the stable-keep, a lean fellow, pockmarked, but along one side only, as if the pox had found no foothold on his right half. “Let me return to find gawkers here staring at my monsters and I’ll have the big one twist your legs off. Understand?”

He understood.

We shed our sodden cloaks in some nameless tavern and sat steaming before a cold hearth while a serving girl fetched our ales. The place was packed with wet and sweating bodies, lumbermen in the main, some stinking drunk, others just stinking. We drew looks, not a few of them hostile, but none that lasted long when offered back.

Sim had his harp with him, a battered thing but quality, stolen from a very rich home once upon a time. He’d pulled it from his saddlebag and unwrapped it with the kind of care he usually reserved for weapons. As our drinks arrived he started to pluck a tune from it. He had quick fingers did Sim, quick and clever, and the notes rolled out fast enough to make a river.

By the time I left for my bed, in the inn across the road, the storm had passed. Sim and Makin had half the locals bawling out “Ten Kings,” and Sim’s voice, high and clear, followed me out of the door, rising over the deeper refrain and Makin’s enthusiastic baritone. Strains of “The Shallow Lady” reached up through the window as I poked my way in under crawling blankets and let the bugs set to. At least it was dry. I fell asleep to the faint sounds of the nonsense doggerel “Merican Pie.”

I woke much later in the calm dead hours of the night, still tangled in the song though all lay quiet save for the brothers’ snoring.

Chevylevy was dry.

Moonlight reached across the room and offered me two figures in the doorway, one supporting the other. Makin stopped to close the door behind him. Sim hobbled on, something broken about his walking.

“Trouble?” I sat up, the ale still spinning in me.

My, my, missamerican pie.

Why two drunk brothers staggering in should spell trouble I couldn’t have said, but I knew trouble was what we had.

Makin turned, pulling aside the hood on the lantern he’d brought up with him. “I found him in the street,” he said. “Left him an hour ago with five locals, the last in the tavern.”

Sim looked up. They’d given him a hell of a beating, lips split and swollen, half a tooth gone, one eye full of blood. From the way he moved I guessed he’d be pissing pink for a week. In fact something in the way he moved suggested other kinds of hurt had been done to him.

“They took my harp, Brother.” He turned out his empty hands. It had been a time and a half since Sim had called me Brother. I wondered what else had been taken.

I kicked Rike in the head. “Up!” Kent and Grumlow were already rising from the floor. “Get up,” I said again.

“Trouble?” Kent asked, echoing my own question. He sat still in the dark, moonlight making black pits of his eyes. Always ready for trouble was Red Kent, though he never sought it out.

Grumlow found his feet quick enough and took Sim’s arm. The boy flinched him off but Grumlow took firmer hold and led him to the window. “Bring the lantern, Makin, some stitches needed here.”

“Five of them?” I asked.

Sim nodded as he passed me.

“I can’t let this stand,” I said.

Makin let the lantern drop an inch or two at that. “Jorg-”

“They took the harp,” I said. “That’s an insult to the Brotherhood.” I let the pride of the Brotherhood take the slur: it would shame Sim to have this be for him.

Makin shrugged. “Sim cut at least one of them. There’s a trail of blood in the street.”

“Were they armed?” I asked. Know thy enemy.

Makin shook his head. “Knives. Probably have their wood-axes to hand by now. Oh, and the short one, he had a bow. Likes to do a bit of hunting he said.”

My, my.

I threw the bundle of my blankets at Rike and made for the door. “Let’s be about it then. You too, Brother Sim, you’ll want to see this.”

I let Rike go first into the street and followed, watching the dark windows, the lines of the rooftops. Makin found the trail of blood drops again, black in the cold light of the moon, and we followed, past the church, past the well, along the alley between tannery and stables, the dull rumble of Gorgoth’s snore from within deeper than the snort of horses. Past a warehouse, a low wall, and out into the rough pasture between town and forest. We gathered with our backs to a barn, the last building before the woods took over. No one had to be told-your enemy has a bow, you keep a building at your back and don’t let the light silhouette you.

“They’re in the forest,” Grumlow said.

“They won’t be far in.” Makin set the lantern to one side, its light hidden.

“Why not?” Grumlow asked, eyes on the black line of the trees.

“The moon won’t reach in there. Not a place to walk blind.” I lifted my voice loud enough for the men in the woods. “Why don’t you come out? We only want to talk.”

An arrow hammered into the barn wall yards above my head; laughter followed. “Send your girlfriend in after us if she wants some more.”

Grumlow took a step forward at that, but he wasn’t dumb enough to take another. Rike on the other hand took two and would have taken more if I hadn’t barked his name. It was Rike’s true brother, Price, who took young Sim from that Belpan brothel in the long ago. Why he picked one child to save and made red slaughter of the rest, along with the grown whores and their master, none of the brothers could ever tell me, but it seemed to matter to Rike that he had. And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things: the thorns, that dog, the hope that Katherine might make me better than I am. Even Rike’s blunt wants were born of losses he probably remembered only in dreams. All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know. I told Rike no, but hardly a part of me didn’t want to charge those woods.

“It’ll have to keep for morning,” Makin said.

I didn’t like to admit it but he was right. I would have left it there save for Gorgoth coming along the alley beside the barn. A strange mix of clever and stupid, that one. He made a nice target with the moon bright behind him, a big one too. I heard the hiss of an arrow and then his deep grunt.

“Here, idiot!” I called out to him and he lumbered to my side, Gog scampering around his legs. Makin lifted the lantern but I kept him from opening the hood. “He’s not dead. He can wait.”

“Take more than an arrow,” Rike muttered.

Even so, light blossomed and we saw the shaft jutting from Gorgoth’s shoulder, the head buried only an inch deep or so, as if the leucrota’s flesh were oak.

“Makin! I said no-”

But it wasn’t Makin. The light bled from Gog’s eyes, hot and yellow.

I could have told Gog no, bundled him around a corner and left the woodsmen till morning, but the fire that burned in Gog at seeing Gorgoth harmed echoed a colder fire that lit in me when Sim hobbled through that door. I’d grown tired of saying no. Instead I took Gog’s hand, though the ghosts of flame whispered across his skin.

He looked up at me, eyes white like stars. “Let it burn,” I told him.

Something hot ran through me, up my arm, along the marrow of my bones, hot like a promise, anger made liquid and set running.

“What’s cooking?” The taunt rang out from the tree-line, somewhere out past an old cowshed sagging in its beams.

Gog and I walked toward the sound, slow footsteps, the ground sizzling where his bare feet touched wet grass.

“The hell?” Voices raised in concern in the dark of the woods. An arrow zipped through the night, wide of its mark, the glowing child a disconcerting target, fooling the eye.

We heard the hissing before we’d gone ten yards, a thousand snakes hissing in the darkness…or perhaps just steam escaping the trees as their sap started to boil. A laugh bubbled from me in the same way, escaping my heat. The anger I brought with me ignited, becoming too large for my body, detaching from the men who hurt Sim and becoming an end in and of itself, all-consuming, a glorious laughing ecstasy of rage.

A skin of flame lifted from Gog, washing over me in a warm wave. Back in the forest the first of the trees exploded, its fragments bursting into incandescent flame as they found air. Fire lifted around the intact trunks, rising through the spring foliage, making each leaf a momentary shadow. More trees exploded, then more, until the blasts became a continuous rumble of brilliant detonation. The cattle-shed ignited though it stood twenty yards back from the closest flame, one side of it just snapping into liquid orange fire. I saw a lone archer running from the edge of the forest, clothes alight. Farther back human torches staggered and fell.

That power, Brothers, is a drug. A fiercer joy than poppy-spice, and more sure to hollow you out. If Gorgoth hadn’t knocked me aside and snatched up Gog we neither of us would have stopped until no tree remained, no board or beam of Endless. Maybe not even then.

Dawn found us still in the wet grass behind that barn, a smoking hole in the forest before us, acres wide. Gog went hunting amid the embers and returned with a twitching tangle, Sim’s harp strings fused together and twisted by the heat. He took them with a curious smile, lopsided from his beating. “My thanks, Gog.” He held them up and shook them so they rattled one against the next. “A simpler song, but still sweet.”

And that was Endless.

We saw the smoke days from our goal, still skirting the borders of the Teuton kingdoms. A grey column reached miles into the sky, mountain high and higher still, as if Satan were trying to smoke the angels out of heaven.

The sight prompted Red Kent to curiosity. “What is a volcano, Jorg?”

“Where the earth bleeds,” I told him. Sim and Grumlow rode in closer to hear. “Where its blood bubbles up. Molten rock, like lead melted for the siege, poured red and runny from the depths.”

“It was a serious question.” Kent turned his horse away, looking offended.

Days later we could smell the sulphur in the air. In places a fine black dust lay on the new leaves even as they unfurled, and stands of trees stood dead, acre after acre bare and brown, waiting for a summer fire.

You know you’re entering the Dane-lore by the troll-stones. You start to see them at crossroads, then by streams, then in circles atop hills. Great blocks of stone set with the old runes, the Norse runes that remember dead gods, the thunder hammer and old one-eye who saw all and told little. They say the Danes choose one rock above another for troll-stones because they see the lines of a troll in some but not the next. All I can say is that trolls must look remarkably like chunks of rock in that case.

We hadn’t seen so many troll-stones before a rider joined us on the road. He came from the south, setting a fast pace and slowing as he caught our band.

“Well met,” he called, standing in his stirrups. A local man, hair braided in two plaits, each ending in a bronze cap worked with serpents, a round iron helm tight on his head and a fine moustache flowing into a short beard.

“Well met,” I said as he drew level at the head of our column. He had a shortbow on his back, a single-bladed axe strapped to his saddlebags, a knife at his hip with a polished bone handle. He gave Gorgoth a wide berth. “You should follow me,” he said.

“Why?”

“My lord of Maladon wishes to see you,” he said. “And it would be easier this way, no?” He grinned. “I’m Sindri, by the way.”

“Lead on,” I said. A band of warriors probably watched us from the woods, and if not, Sindri deserved to be rewarded for his balls.

We followed him a couple of miles along a trail increasingly crowded with traffic, wheeled and on foot or hoof. Occasionally we heard a distant rumble, not unlike a giant version of the lion Taproot had caged, and the ground would tremble.

Sindri led us past two grey villages and brought us along the side of a narrow lake. When the mountains grumbled, the water rippled from shore to shore. The stronghold at the far end looked to be made of timber and turf with only the occasional block of stone showing above the foundations.

“The great hall of the Duke of Dane,” Sindri said. “Alaric Maladon, twenty-seventh of his line.”

Rike snorted behind me. I didn’t bother to silence him. A voice was speaking at the back of my mind, just beyond hearing, a low moan or a howl…a stone face swam across my vision, a gargoyle face.

Men were gathered before the hall, some at work, others preparing for a patrol, each armed with axe and spear, carrying a large round shield of painted wood and hide. Stable hands came to take our horses. As usual Gorgoth drew the stares. When we passed I heard men mutter, “Grendel-kin.”

Sindri ushered us up the steps to the great hall’s entrance. The whole place had a sorry look to it. The black dust coated everything with a fine film. It tickled the throat like a feather. The patrol horses looked thin and unkempt.

“The Duke wants to see us still wearing the road?” I asked, hoping for some hot water and a chair after so many miles in the saddle. A little time to prepare would be good too. I wanted to remember where I knew the name from.

Sindri grinned. Despite the beard, he hadn’t too many years on me. “The Duke isn’t one for niceties. We’re not fussy in the northern courts. The summer is too short.”

I shrugged and followed up the stairs. Two large warriors flanked the doorway, hands on the hafts of double-headed axes, their iron blades resting on the floor between their feet.

“Two of your party should be enough,” Sindri said.

It never hurts to trust someone, especially when you’ve absolutely no other option. “Makin,” I said.

Makin and I followed Sindri into the gloom and smoke of the great hall. The place seemed empty at first, long trestle tables of dark and polished wood, bare save for an abandoned flagon and a hambone. Wood-smoke and ale tempered the stink of dogs and sweat.

At the far end of the hall on a fur-strewn dais in a high oak chair a figure waited. Sindri led the way. I trailed my fingers along the table as we walked, feeling the slickness of the wood.

“Jorg and Makin,” said Sindri to his lord. “Found heading north on your highway, Duke Alaric.”

“Welcome to the Danelands,” the Duke said.

I just watched him. A big man, white-blond hair and a beard down his chest.

The silence stretched.

“They have a monster with them,” Sindri added, embarrassed. “A troll or Grendel-kin, big enough to strangle a horse.”

In my mind a gargoyle howled. “You brought a snow-globe,” I said.

The Duke frowned. “Do I know you, boy?”

“You brought a snow-globe, a toy of the ancients. And I broke it.” It had been a rare gift, he would remember the globe, and perhaps the avarice with which a little boy had stared at it.

“Ancrath?” The Duke’s frown deepened. “Jorg Ancrath?”

“The same.” I made a bow.

“It’s been a long time, young Jorg.” Alaric stamped his foot and several of his warriors entered the hall from a room at the end. “I’ve heard stories about you. My thanks for not killing my idiot son.” He nodded toward Sindri.

“I’m sure the tales have been over-told,” I said. “I’m not a violent man.”

Makin had to cover his mouth at that. Sindri frowned, looking rapidly from me to Makin and back at the Duke.

“So what brings you to the Danelands then, Jorg of Ancrath?” the Duke asked. No time wasted here, no wine or ale offered, no gifts exchanged.

“I’d like some friends in the north,” I said. It hadn’t been part of my thinking but once in a long while I like a man on sight. I’d liked Alaric Maladon on sight eight years earlier when he brought my mother a gift. I liked him now. “This place looks to have missed a harvest or two. Perhaps you need a friend in the south?”

“A plain speaker, eh?” I could see the grin deep in his beard. “Where’s all your southern song and dance, eh? No ‘prithees,’ no ‘beseeching after my health’?”

“I must have dropped all that somewhere on the way,” I said.

“So what do you really want, Jorg of Ancrath?” Alaric asked. “You didn’t ride five hundred miles to learn the axe-dance.”

“Perhaps I just wanted to meet the Vikings,” I said. “But prithee tell me what ails this land. I beseech you.”

He laughed out loud at that. “Real Vikings have salt in their beard and ice on their furs,” he said. “They call us fit-firar, land-men, and have little love for us. My fathers came here a long, long time ago, Jorg. I would rather they stayed by the sea. I may not have salt in my beard but it’s in my blood. I’ve tasted it.” He stamped again and a thickset woman with coiled hair brought out ale, a horn for him and two flagons for us. “When they bury me my son will have to buy the longboat and have it sailed and carted from Osheim. My neighbour had local men make his. Would have sunk before it got out of harbour, if it ever saw the ocean.”

We drank our ale, bitter stuff, salted as if everything had to remind these folk of their lost seas. I set my flagon on the table and the ground shook, harder than any of the times before, as if I had made it happen. Dust sifted from the rafters, caught here and there by sunlight spearing through high windows.

“Unless you can tame volcanoes, Jorg, you’ll not find much to be done for Maladon,” Alaric said.

“Can’t Ferrakind send them to sleep for you?” I asked. I’d read that volcanoes slept, sometimes for a lifetime, sometimes longer.

Alaric raised a hairy brow at that. Behind us, Sindri laughed. “Ferrakind stirs them up,” he said. “Gods rot him.”

“And you let him live?” I asked.

The Duke of Maladon glanced at his fireplace as if an enemy might be squatting there among the ashes. “There’s no killing a fire-mage, not a true one. He’s like summer-burning in a dry forest. Stamp out the flames and they spring back up from the hot ground.”

“Why does he do it?” I knocked back the last of my salt beer and grimaced. Almost as bad as the absinthe.

“It’s his nature.” Alaric shrugged. “When men look too long into the fire it looks back into them. It burns out what makes them men. I think he speaks with the jotnar behind the flames. He wants to bring a second Ragnarok.”

“And you’re going to let him?” I asked. I cared little enough for jotnar, or any other kind of spirit. Push far enough past anything, be it fire or sky or even death, and you’ll find the creatures that have always dwelt there. Call them what you will. “I heard tell there was no problem that a Dane couldn’t cut through with an axe.” It’s a dangerous business questioning a man’s courage in his own hall, especially a Viking’s, but if ever a place needed shaking up then this was it.

“Meet him before you judge us, Jorg,” Alaric said. He sipped from his ale horn.

I had expected a more heated response, perhaps a violent one. The Duke looked tired, as if something had burned out of him too.

“In truth I came to meet him,” I said.

“I’ll take you,” Sindri said, without hesitation.

“No.” His father, just as fast.

“How many sons do you have, Duke Maladon?” I asked.

“You see him.” Alaric nodded to Sindri. “I had four born alive. The eldest three burned in the Heimrift. You should go home, Jorg Ancrath. There’s nothing for you in the mountains.”