Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

The True North is much as Snorri described it from experience and much as I described it from ignorance. All of it appears to be sloping up to start with, though later it slopes both up and down as if in a great hurry to get somewhere. The air is thin, cold, and full of winged insects that want to suck your blood. Drawing your breath through your teeth helps strain the buggers out and keep your lungs clear. Also they die away as you gain height.

Much of the place is bare rock. As soon as you gain any altitude it’s bare rock covered with last winter’s snow. From the heights you can see mountains, mountains, and more mountains, with lakes and pine forests huddling in the dents between them. I took Tuttugu’s advice early on and bound about my boots the rabbit furs and sealskin overguards from my pack. With this and my feet in thick woollen socks the snows didn’t freeze my toes. It would only get worse as we headed north, though, into the Jarlson Uplands, where the wind off the interior came armed with knives.

We paused in the lee of one high ridge whilst Snorri and Arne discussed our route.

“Ein, is it?” The scar by his eye gave it away.

“Yes.” The quin with the longest life expectancy flashed me a smile.

“How is it that Snorri’s in charge here?” I asked. “You’re Jarl Torsteff’s heir, aren’t you?” I didn’t plan to undermine Snorri’s authority, unless it turned out Ein could order him to give up his quest-which seemed unlikely whatever the chain of command should be-but as a prince it did strike me as odd that a man whose only birthright was a few acres of sloping rock fields should be ordering the North’s aristocracy about.

“Actually I have seven older brothers. Two sets of triplets and a singleton, Agar, Father’s heir. It might be that they’re all dead now, I suppose.” He pursed his lips at that, as if seeing how the idea tasted. “But Snorri is a champion of the Undoreth. There are songs about his deeds in battle. If Einhaur and my father’s halls are burned-then my authority stands on nothing but ash. Better to let a man who truly knows war to lead us on our last raid.”

I nodded. If we were bound to our course, then Snorri was the man to take us to the bitter end. Even so, I didn’t like the concept of a man’s rank being something that could so easily be set aside. It might be true for a jarl’s son here amidst the snows, but in the warmth of Red March a prince would be a prince no matter what came. I took a measure of comfort in that, and in the fact that dawn had long since passed so Baraqel couldn’t sour my mood with his own judgment on the matter of princes.

• • •

Towards evening of that second day we reached a great work and wonder of the Builders, high amongst the peaks. A huge dam wall had been constructed, spanning a valley, taller than any tower, thick enough at the top for four wagons to drive along it side by side, and wider still at the bottom. A vast lake must once have been held behind it, though to what purpose I couldn’t say.

“Wait!” I needed a rest and the ruins provided the perfect excuse.

Snorri came back along the slope, frowning, but he allowed that we might stop for a few minutes whilst I satisfied my aristocratic curiosity. I satisfied it from a sitting position, letting my gaze roam along the valley sides. Enormous stone pipes ran out through the bedrock beneath the dam, obviously to control the flow of water, but why I couldn’t guess. The whole place was built on the scale of the mountains, each structure huge enough to make ants of men. Even the pipes would accommodate several elephants walking side by side, with headroom for riders. In such a place you could believe the Norse stories of frost giants who shaped the world and cared nothing for humanity.

I sat on my pack beside Tuttugu, staring out across the valley, both of us munching on apples he’d dug from his pack, wizened but still sweet with the taste of summer.

“So every Viking name seems to mean something. . Snorri means ‘attack,’ Arne is ‘eagle,’ the quins came out numbered. .” I broke off to let Tuttugu supply the explanation of his own, something heroic probably. If they applied names with any accuracy, Tuttugu would mean “timid fatty” and Jalan would mean “runs away screaming.”

“Twenty,” he said.

“What?”

“Twenty.”

I glanced towards the huddle of quins. “Good God! Your poor mother!”

Tuttugu grinned at that. “No, it’s not my birth name, just what people call me. There was a contest at Jarl Torsteff’s feast after the victory over Hoddof of Iron Tors, and I won.”

“A contest?” I frowned, trying to puzzle how Tuttugu won anything.

“An eating contest.” He patted his belly.

“You ate twenty. .” I tried to think of something a person might reasonably eat twenty of. “Eggs?”

“Close.” He rubbed his chins, short fingers buried in ginger fuzz. “Chickens.”

• • •

It took four days rather than the promised two before we looked down upon the sparkling length of the Uulisk from a high ridge, endless miles of mountain trekking to our rear. Snorri pointed out a dark spot along the shoreline.

“Einhaur.” I could tell nothing of its fate from our remove, save there were no fishing boats at its quays.

“Look.” Arne pointed out along the fjord, further seaward. A longship, tiny from where we stood, a child’s toy out on the flat waters of the Uulisk. Near the prow a red dot. . a painted eye?

“Edris and his Hardanger friends, I’m guessing,” Snorri said. “Best press on.”

The trek to the Black Fort proved much as Snorri had described it. Only a lot worse. Although Edris might have followed us, or have been ahead in the race to the fort, in such a huge and empty expanse it’s impossible to think of yourself as chased or chasing. You are either alone, or not alone. We were alone, and our enemy pressed us on every side. The wind and the cold of the Uplands are things that must be experienced; words will not tame them into something that can be given over. We left behind trees, then bushes, then even the hardiest of grasses until the world was nothing but rock and snow. The snow patches joined each to the next to become unbroken. The days grew shorter with frightening speed, and each morning Baraqel would no longer harangue me but merely unfold his wings, golden with the dawn, and bid me be worthy of my line. Snorri would sit apart from us when the sun fell, plunging from the sky and drawing the long night behind it. In those moments, as ice devoured sun, I could see her walk about him: Aslaug, a lean beauty fashioned from the gloom, her spider form scurrying in her footsteps, black across the snow.

Each hour became a process of taking a dull future and squeezing it into a dull past through the narrow slot of the moment-a moment, like each other, crowded with pain and exhaustion, and with a cold that crept around you like a lover carrying murder in her heart. I tried to keep myself warm with thoughts of better times, most of them in someone else’s bed. Strange to say, and surely a sign of my brain’s slow freeze, although I could summon to mind countless moments of coitus, long limbs, smooth curves, waves of hair, the only face that would appear was Lisa DeVeer’s, showing-as it always did-part amusement, part exasperation, part affection. In fact, as the cold North sucked the life out of me I found myself remembering times outside her bed more than within it-conversations, the way she ran her fingers through her hair when puzzling, the cleverness of her replies. I blamed it on snow fever.

We camped in the lee of any outcrop we could find and burned charcoal from our packs to put a little warmth into our food. The snows south of the Bitter Ice would thaw occasionally. Maybe two years would pass, maybe five, but eventually a particularly high summer would melt them back to bare rock in all but the deep places, and so the ice we walked on was never thick enough to cover every rise and fold of the land. The Bitter Ice itself, however, that glacial sheet never melted, though it might retreat a mile or three over the course of lifetimes. And the land beneath it hadn’t seen the sun in centuries, maybe since Christ walked the world. Maybe never.