Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“Valhalla!” Snorri swiped the first foaming tankard off the tray as the serving women brought them out.

“Valhalla!” A pounding of the table.

“A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.” Snorri had their attention. He paused to drink deep and long. “I didn’t fight at Einhaur, but I heard the tale of it from Sven Broke-Oar, if any straight word can come from his crooked tongue.”

The crew of the Ikea exchanged glances at that, muttering amongst themselves. The tone of the snatches I caught made it clear they shared a low opinion of the Broke-Oar.

“The battle at Eight Quays I fought in. A massacre more than a battle. My survival shames me every day.” He drank again, and told the story.

The sun dropped, shadows stretched, the world went by, but unnoticed. Snorri held us under the spell of his voice and I listened, sipping my ale without tasting it, even though I had heard it all before. All of it until he reached the Black Fort.

• • •

When Snorri first saw the black spot he thought it part of dying, his vision failing as the wilderness claimed him. But the spot persisted, kept its place, grew as he staggered on. And in time it became the Black Fort.

Built of huge blocks carved from the ancient basalt fields beneath the snows, the Black Fort sat in squat defiance of the Bitter Ice, dwarfed by the vast and rising cliffs of the ice sheet just five miles to the north. In all the long years of the fort’s existence the ice had advanced, retreated, advanced again, but never quite reached those black walls, as if the fort stood as man’s final guardian against the dominion of the frost giants.

Strengthened by the sight, Snorri journeyed closer, drawing his sealskin cloak all about him, white with snow. An east wind picked up, scouring across the ice, picking up fine dry snow and driving it in eddies and streams. Snorri leaned into the teeth of the gale, the last scraps of warmth stolen away from him, each step threatening to end in a huddle from which there would be no rising.

When the fort’s bulk blocked the wind, Snorri almost toppled, as if his support had been snatched away. He hadn’t seen that he was so close, or truly believed that he would ever reach his goal. Nobody watched from the battlements. Each narrow window stood shuttered and snow-clad. No guard waited on duty at the great gates. Numb of hand and brain, Snorri stood, uncertain. He had carried no plan with him, just the desire to finish what had started in Eight Quays and what should have ended there. He had outlived two children. He had no desire to outlive Egil or Freja, only to battle to save them.

Feeble as he was, Snorri knew that he would only grow weaker waiting in the snow. He could no more scale the walls of the fort than he could climb the cliffs of the Bitter Ice. He took Hel in both hands and with his father’s axe he beat upon the doors of the Black Fort.

After an age a shutter high above broke open, scattering ice and snow upon Snorri’s head. By the time he looked up the shutters had closed once more. He pounded the door again, knowing his mind clouded with the slowness and stupidity that cold brings, but unable to think of an alternative.

“You!” A voice from on high. “Who are you?”

Snorri looked up and there in wolf furs, leaning out for a better look, Sven Broke-Oar, face unreadable in the red-gold swirl of his hair.

“Snorri. .” For a moment Snorri couldn’t summon his full name to numb lips.

“Snorri ver Snagason?” the Broke-Oar boomed in amazement. “You vanished! Fled the battle, men said. Oh, this is most fine. I’ll be down to open the doors myself. Wait there. Don’t run away again.”

So Snorri stood, white hands tight around his axe, trying to let his anger warm him. But the cold had wrapped around his bones, sapping strength, sapping will and even memory. Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.

The scraping of the doors shook him from his reverie. He startled backwards. The grunting of men at labour as the two great slabs of timber juddered back over icy stone. If they had simply left him waiting he might never have moved again.

Ten yards back, beyond the thickness of the walls, standing in the open courtyard, Sven Broke-Oar waited, axe in one gloved hand, his small iron buckler across the other.

“I could have finished you with a spear from the walls, or let the snows have you, but the champion of the Iron Fields deserves a better end than that now.”

Snorri wanted to say that a man concerned with honour, or with the rights and wrongs of how a warrior dies, should have come to Eight Quays in the daylight, sounding his horn across the fjord. He wanted to say a lot of things. He wanted to talk of Emy and of Karl, but ice had sealed his lips and whatever strength remained he would use to kill the man before him.

“Come then.” The Broke-Oar beckoned him in. “You’ve come this far. It would be a shame for fear to keep you from the last few paces of the journey.”

Snorri made a shambling run, his feet too frozen for speed. Sven Broke-Oar’s laugh-that was the last thing he remembered before the club struck the back of his head. The men who had drawn open the doors simply waited behind them and brought him down once he’d passed by.

A blazing heat woke him. Heat in his arms, stretched above him. Heat in his extremities, as if they burned. Heat across his face. And pain. Pain everywhere.

“Wh-”

The breath that broke from him plumed the air. Fragments of ice still clung to his beard, water dripping to his chest. Neither so hot as it felt then, nor so cold as it had been.

Raising his head brought the wound at the back of his skull against the rough stone wall, and half an oath burst from his cracked lips. The hall before him housed a dozen men, crowded before a small fire in a cavernous hearth around the far end of a long stone table. Broke-Oar’s men, Red Vikings from the Hardanger, even less at home so close to the Bitter Ice than the Undoreth, who kept to the Uulisk shores.

Snorri roared at his captors, bellowed his rage, uttered dire curses, shouted until his throat grew raw and his voice weak. They ignored him, sparing hardly a glance, and at last sense prevailed over his anger. No hope remained to him, but he realized what a pathetic figure he cut, tied there on the wall and issuing threats. He had had his chance to act. Twice. He had failed both times.

The Broke-Oar entered the hall from a doorway close by the fire and warmed his hands there, exchanging words with his men before walking the length of the table to inspect his prisoner.

“Well, that was foolish.” He rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger. Even close up his age proved elusive. Forty? Fifty? Scarred, weathered, raw-boned, huger even than Snorri, his mane of red-gold hair still thick, crow’s feet at the corner of each dark eye, a shrewdness in his gaze as he weighed his man.

Snorri made no reply. He had been foolish.

“I expected more from a man trailing so many mead-hall tales.”

“Where is my wife? My son?” Snorri made no threats. The Broke-Oar would laugh at them.

“Tell me why you ran. Snorri ver Snagason has been shown to be stupid and I’m not greatly surprised. Though I expected more. But a coward?”

“Your creatures’ poison brought me down. I fell and snow covered me. Where is my son?” He couldn’t speak of Freja before these men.