King of Thorns

22

Wedding day

“Where’s Coddin, dammit?”

“Back down there.” Watch-master Hobbs pointed down the valley. The grey rear-guard of the Watch sketched a ragged line ahead of the foremost of Arrow’s troops.

“Should have left him in the castle, Jorg,” Makin said, heaving a breath between every other word. “He’s too old for running.”

I spat. “Keppen’s a hundred if he’s a day, and he’d be up and down this mountain before you’d broke fast, Sir Makin.”

“He might be sixty,” Makin said. “A whack older than Coddin in any case, I’ll grant you.”

Watch-master Hobbs joined us on the ridge, with Captain Stodd beside him, his short beard white against a red face.

“Well?” Hobbs said.

I watched him.

“Sire,” he added.

It’s easy to lose faith on the mountain, but also to find it. Somehow being a few thousand feet closer to God makes all the difference.

Hobbs had good reason for his doubts in any case. Above us the valley narrowed to a steep-sided pass, a choke point that would slow three hundred men to the point where the men of Arrow might finally get to blood their swords after their long chase. Above that, the snowline and the long climb to Blue Moon Pass, blocked at this time of year despite the promise of its name. Below us ten times our number and more filled the valley, a carpet of men in constant motion, the sun glittering off helms, shields, the points of sword and spear.

“Let’s wait for Coddin,” I said. Even Coddin needed his faith restored.

“Sire.” Hobbs bowed his head. He took his bow in hand and waited, his breath heavy in his chest. A good man, or if not good, solid. Father picked him from the royal guard for the Forest Watch, not as punishment but to reward the Watch.

I looked away from the seething mass of men to the peaks, snow-clad, serene. The snowline waited for us not far above the choke point. The wind carried fresh snow, icy crystals in a thin swirl. None of us felt the cold. Ten thousand mountain steps burned in my legs, leaving them to tremble, and warming my blood close to boiling point.

To the west I could see God’s Finger. The tiredness in me was nothing compared to what I felt the day I hauled myself onto the tip of that finger and lay as dead beneath the bluest sky. I lay there for hours and in the end I stood, leaning into the teeth of the wind, and drew my sword.

When you climb take nothing that is not essential. I took a sword, strapped across my back. There’s a song behind the swinging of a sword. On God’s Finger it can be heard more clearly. I had climbed chasing the memory of my mother’s music, but the Spire had sung me a different song. Perhaps it’s that heaven is closer, perhaps the wind brings it. Either way I heard the sword-song that day and I made my blade kata, slicing the gale, spinning, turning, striking high then low. I danced to the sword-song in that high place for an hour maybe more, wild play with an endless drop on every side. And then, before the sun fell too low, I left the blade on the rocks, an offering to the elements, and started down.

Standing on God’s Finger I had first understood why men might fight for a place, for rocks and streams, no matter who calls themselves king there. The power of place. I felt it again at the head of the valley with the hordes of Arrow swarming toward me.

“What ho, Coddin,” I said as my chancellor staggered to us. “You look half-dead.”

He hadn’t the breath for a reply.

“Do you have what I gave you?” I asked. At the time I hadn’t known why I gave it to him, only that I should.

Still gasping, Coddin shrugged off his pack and dug into it. “Be glad I didn’t drop it just to keep ahead of the enemy,” he said.

I took the whistle from him, a Highland whistle such as the goatherds use, a foot long with a leather-washered piston.

“I always trust you to deliver, Coddin,” I said, though I had Makin carry a second and had a third with Keppen. Trust is a fine thing but try not to build plans upon it.

“We’re none of us local men,” I said to my captains, voice raised for the Watch men starting to gather round. “Well, you are.” I pointed to a fellow in the second rank. “But most of us were born and raised in Ancrath.”

The last of the Watch were drawing in now, the men of Arrow a couple of hundred yards farther back, toiling over broken rock.

“You’re here with me, men of Ancrath, because you’re my best warriors, because you learned to fight in lands that are hard to defend and that others want to take. These Highlands of ours, however, are easier to protect, and hold bugger all save stones and goats.” That got a laugh or two. Some of the Watch still had go in them.

“Today,” I said. “We all become Highlanders.”

I took the whistle, held it high, and drove the piston home, not too hard because that spoils the tone. It’s a steady pressure gives the best results.

A goat-whistle will carry for miles across the mountains. It’s pitched to let the wind take it and to bounce from rock to rock. One long blast would reach almost back to the Haunt. Certainly far enough to reach each and every Highlander I had hidden on the high slopes overlooking our path up the mountain. And not just any Highlanders these, but the men who had held these particular slopes from generation to generation. The men who like their fathers and grandfathers would take a rock for a walk. They kept their secrets well, the men of Renar, but from the tip of God’s Finger, that day years before, it had all been revealed to me.

It took the blasts of seven trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho, but they weren’t stacked to fall. One blast of a herder’s whistle set the mountainsides moving in the Renar Highlands. On both sides of the valley, along the full length, a dozen individual rockslides. The Highlanders know their slopes with an intimacy that puts lovers’ knowing of each other’s curves to shame. Big stones poised to fall, boulders on edge with levers set and ready, toppled with a shove and a grunt, rolling, colliding, cascading one into several into many into too many. We felt the ground tremble beneath our feet. The noise, like a millstone grinding, rattled teeth in loose sockets. In moments the whole valley had been set in motion and Arrow’s thousands vanished as the dust rose and stone churned flesh into bloody paste.

“Well, thank you, Coddin. Much appreciated.” I handed him back the whistle. “Hobbs,” I said. “When the dust clears enough for a good shot, if you could have the men knock down anyone still standing.”

“Christ Bleeding,” Makin said, staring into the valley below us. “How…”

“Topology,” I said. “It’s a kind of magic.”

“And what now, King Jorg?” Coddin asked, faith restored but still focused on the numbers, knowing our chances against seventeen or sixteen thousand were scarcely better than our chances against twenty thousand.

“Back down, of course!” I said. “We can’t attack from up here now, can we?”