Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

“Sometimes I think there can be no such thing as gods at all,” mused Jaud, stroking thoughtfully at his pursed lips with a fingertip. “Then I wonder who can be making my life such hell.”

“An old god,” said Yarvi. “Not a new.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Rulf.

“Before the elves made their war upon Her, there was one God. But in their arrogance they used a magic so strong it ripped open the Last Door, destroyed them all and broke the One God into the many.” Yarvi nodded towards that giant building site. “Some in the south believe the One God cannot ever be truly broken. That the many are merely aspects of the one. It seems the High King has seen the merits of their theology. Or at least Grandmother Wexen has.” He considered that. “Or perhaps she sees a profit in currying favor with the Empress of the South by praying the same way she does.” He remembered the hungry brightness in her eye as he knelt before her. “Or she thinks that folk who kneel to one god will kneel more easily to one High King.”

Rulf spat again. “The last High King was bad enough, but he ranked himself as first among brothers. The older this one gets the more he’s taken with his own power. He and his damn minister won’t be happy ’til they’re set above their own One God and all the world kneels before their withered arses.”

“A man who worships the One God cannot choose his own path: he is given it from on high,” mused Yarvi. “He cannot refuse requests, but must bow to commands.” He drew up a length of his chain and frowned down at it. “The One God makes a chain through the world, from the High King, through the little kings, to the rest of us, each link with its right place. All are made slaves.”

Jaud was frowning sideways. “You are a deep thinker, Yorv.”

Yarvi shrugged and let his chain drop. “Less use than a good hand to an oarsman.”

“How can one god make all the world work, anyway?” Rulf held his arms out to encompass the rotting city and all its people. “How can one god be for the cattle and the fish, and the sea and the sky, and for war and peace both? A lot of damn nonsense.”

“Perhaps the One God is like me.” Sumael sprawled on the aftcastle, propped on one elbow with her head resting on her bony shoulder and one leg dangling.

“Lazy?” grunted Jaud.

She gave a grin. “She chooses the course, but has lots of little gods chained up to do the rowing.”

“Pardon me, almighty one,” said Yarvi, “but from where I sit you look to have a chain of your own.”

“For now,” she said, tossing a loop of it over her shoulder like a scarf.

“One God,” snorted Rulf again, still shaking his head towards the quarter-built temple.

“Better one than none at all,” grunted Trigg as he stalked past.

The oarslaves fell silent at that, all knowing their course would take them past the land of the Shends next, who had no mercy on outsiders, and prayed to no god and knelt to no king, however high he said he was.

Great dangers meant great profits, though, as Shadikshirram informed the crew when she sprang back aboard, holding high her rune-scrawled licence, eyes so bright with triumph one might have thought she had it from the hand of the High King himself.

“That paper won’t protect us from the Shends,” someone grunted from the bench behind. “They skin their captives and eat their own dead.”

Yarvi snorted. He had studied the language and customs of most of the peoples around the Shattered Sea. The food of fear is ignorance , Mother Gundring used to say. T he death of fear is knowledge . When you study a race of men you find they are just men like any others.

“The Shends don’t like outsiders since we’re always stealing them for slaves. They’re no more savage than any other people.”

“As bad as that?” muttered Jaud, eyeing Trigg as he uncoiled his whip.

They rowed east that afternoon with a new licence and new cargo but the same old chains, the Tower of the Ministry dwindling into the haze of distance beyond their wake. At sunset they put in at a sheltered cove, Mother Sun scattering gold on the water as she sank behind the world, painting strange colors among the clouds.

“I don’t like the look of that sky!” Sumael had swarmed up one of the masts, legs hooked over the yard, frowning off towards the horizon. “We should stay here tomorrow!”

Shadikshirram waved her warnings away like flies. “The storms in this little pond are nothing, and I have always had outstanding weatherluck. We go on.” And she flung an empty bottle into the sea and called to Ankran for another, leaving Sumael to shake her head at the heavens unmarked.

While the South Wind rocked gently and the guards and sailors huddled at a brazier on the forecastle to dice for trinkets, one of the slaves began to sing a bawdy song in a voice thin and cracked. At one point he forgot the words and filled them in with nonsense sounds, but at the end there was a scattering of tired laughter, and the hollow thumping of fists on oars in approval.

Another man broke in with a rousing bass, the song of Bail the Builder, who in truth had built nothing but heaps of corpses, and made himself the first High King with fire and sword and a hard word for everyone. Tyrants look far better when looked back on, though, and soon enough other voices joined the first. Eventually Bail passed through the Last Door in battle, as heroes do, and the song came to an end, as songs do, and the singer was rewarded with a round of wood-thumping of his own.

“Who else has a tune?” somebody called.

And to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, it turned out Yarvi did. It was one his mother used to sing at night, when he was young and scared in the dark. He did not know why it came to him then, but his voice soared high and free, to places far from the reeking ship and things these men had long forgotten. Jaud blinked at him, and Rulf stared, and it seemed to Yarvi that, chained and helpless in this rotting tub, he had never sung half so well.

There was a silence when he was done, with only the faint creaking of the ship on the shifting water, and the wind in the rigging, and the far, high calls of distant gulls.

“Give us another,” someone said.

So Yarvi gave them another, and another, and another after that. He gave them songs of love lost and love found, of high deeds and low. The Lay of Froki, so cold-blooded he slept through a battle, and the song of Ashenleer, so sharp-eyed she could count every grain of sand on a beach. He sang of Horald the Far-Traveled who beat the black-skinned King of Daiba in a race and in the end sailed so far he fell off the edge of the world. He sang of Angulf Clovenfoot, Hammer of the Vanstermen, and did not mention the man was his great grandfather.

Each time he finished he was asked for another, until Father Moon’s crescent showed over the hills and the stars began to peep through heaven’s cloth, and the last note of the tale of Bereg, who died to found the Ministry and protect the world from magic, smoked out into the dusk.

“Like a little bird with only one wing.” When Yarvi turned Shadikshirram was looking down at him, adjusting the pins in her tangle of hair. “Fine singing, eh, Trigg?”

The overseer sniffed, and wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, and in a voice choked with emotion said, “I never heard the like.”

The wise wait for their moment , Mother Gundring used to say, but never let it pass . So Yarvi bowed, and spoke to Shadikshirram in her own language. He did not know it well, but a good minister can make anyone a fine greeting.

“It is my honor,” he said sweetly, while thinking about putting black-tongue root in her wine, “to sing for one so famous.”