Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns

Armed men stood among the peasants, not so many but enough, bullies in helms and padded jerkins keeping order for whatever lordling held sway here. I met their eyes, beckoned to a group of three over by the horse trough. They shrugged and turned away. I can’t say it pleased me. Makin stood just beyond the trio, his compromise not having taken him as far as the closest alehouse after all.

“Tell me no!” My sword cleared its scabbard so fast it almost rang.

Blood-hunger on faces in the crowd, the shock that they had been denied their due. I shared it too. Like a sneeze that goes unvoiced, a vacuum demanding to be filled. I waited, more than half of me wanting them to riot, to sweep forward in a wave of outrage.

“Tell me no.” But they stood silent.

The prisoners’ ropes gave before my sword’s honed edge. “Get out,” I told them, angry now as if it were their fault. The mother limped away pulling her girls behind her. Makin helped them down.

I wondered later if it would be enough to send my ghost away, if my good deed, whatever the reason for it, would keep that dead baby from my dreams. But he returned as ever with the shadows.

We stayed a full day in Hanver and left on a bright morning, our saddlebags full, and with the bunting still overhead. Such is the beauty of places untouched by war. And the reason they don’t last.

Four years earlier

I had left my monsters in the North-Gog and Gorgoth-my demons I carried south with me as ever.

We made good time on our journey south. We crossed the Rhyme aboard one of those rickety barges I had been so dismissive of on the way north. I found it an interesting experience-my first journey by water rather than merely through it or over it. The horses huddled, nervous in the deck pen, and for the few minutes it took to haul the barge across by means of a fixed rope, I leaned over the prow and watched the river sparkle. I wondered at the captain, a sweat-soaked bulge of man, and the three men in his service. To live their lives on a broad river that would bear them to the sea in a few short hours. To haul their craft for mile after mile, hundreds in a month, and never get more than shouting distance from where they started.

“Remind me again,” Makin said when we alighted on the far shore. “Why aren’t we just going back to the Haunt where we, well you at least, can live like kings, instead of crossing half the world to see relatives you’ve never met?”

“I’ve met some of them. I’ve just not been to where they live.”

“And the reason we’re doing it now? Did you take the Highlands just so Coddin could rule it for you?” Makin asked.

“My family has always had a high regard for stewards,” I said.

Makin smiled at that.

“But we’re going because we need friends. Every soothsayer and his disembowelled dog is telling me that the Prince of Arrow is set for the empire throne. If that’s even part true then he’s going to roll over the Renar Highlands soon enough, and having met him I’d say we’d have a hard time stopping him. And despite the legendary friendliness of my nature it seems that these days I have to cross half the world to find someone who might be ready to help out in time of need,” I said.

All that was true enough, but more than any move in the game of empire, I quite wanted to find a member of my family who didn’t yearn to kill me. Blood runs thick they say, but what I have from my father is thin stuff. As I got older, as I started to examine the parts from which I’m made, I felt a need to see my mother’s kin, if only to convince myself not all of me was bad.

We passed among the roots of Aups, mountains that put the Matteracks to shame both in size and number. Legion upon legion of white peaks marching east to west across nations-the great wall of Roma. Young Sim found them a fascination, watching so hard you might think he’d fall off his mare at any moment.

“A man could never climb those,” he said.

“Hannibal took elephants across them,” I told him.

A frown crossed him then passed. “Oh, elephants,” he said.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me he hadn’t the least clue what an elephant was. Even Dr. Taproot’s circus didn’t have elephants. Sim probably thought they climbed like monkeys.

For weeks we rode along the lawless margins of minor kingdoms, along the less worn routes. Seven is a dangerous number of men for travelling. Not so few that you can pass unnoticed. Not so many that safety is assured. Still, we looked hard-bitten. Perhaps not as hard-bitten as we were, but enough to dissuade any bandits who might have watched us pass. Looking poor helps too. We had horses, weapons, armour, true enough, but nothing that promised a rich prize, certainly not a rich enough one for taking on Rike and Makin.

The foothills of the Aups roll out along the margins of Teutonia in long barren valleys divided by high ridges of broken stone. Bad things happened here in the distant long ago. The Interdiction they called it, and little grows in the sour dust, even now. Amid the emptiness of those valleys, a week’s march from anywhere you might want to be, we passed the loneliest house in the world. I have read that in the white north, beyond a frozen sea, men live in ice houses, sewn in their furs, huddled from a wind that can cut you in half. But this stone hut, dwarfed amongst abandoned boulders, its empty windows like dark eyes, it seemed worse. A woman came out of it and three children lined up before her to watch as we rode past. No words were spoken. In that dry valley with just the whisper of the wind, without crow call or the high song of larks, it felt as if words would be a sin, as if they might wake something better left sleeping.

The woman watched us from a face that looked too white, too smooth, like a dead child’s face. And the children crouched around her in their grey rags.

Riding north, we had paced the spring. Now it seemed we galloped into summer. Mud dried to hardpan, blossoms melted away, the flies came. Rike turned red as he does in any hint of summer, even the dirt won’t keep him from it, and the sunburn improved his temper not a bit.

We left the mountains and their grim foothills, finding our way across wild heathlands and into the great forests of the south.

At the end of a hot day when my face hurt less, not healed but no longer weeping, I drew my sword. We had set camp on the edge of a forest clearing. Row found us a deer and had a haunch spitting over the fire.

“Have at ye, Sir Makin of Trent!”

“If you’re sure you’ve not forgotten how to use that thing.” He grinned and drew. “My liege.”

We sparred a while, parrying and feinting, stretching our limbs and practising our strokes. Without warning, Makin picked up the pace, the point of his blade questing for me.

“Time for another lesson?” he asked, still grinning, but fierce now.

I let my sword-arm guide me, watching only the plot of the fight, the advances and retreats, not the details of every cut and thrust. Behind Makin the sun reached through the forest canopy in golden shafts like the strings of a harp, and beneath the rustle of leaves, above the birds’ calls, I caught the strains of the sword-song. The tempo of our blades increased, sharp harsh cries of steel on steel, the rasp of breath-faster. The burn on my face seemed to reignite. The old pain ran in me, acid and lightning, as if Gog’s fragments were lodged in my bones, still burning. Faster. I saw Makin’s grin falter, the sweat running on his forehead. Faster-the flicker of reflected light in his eyes. Faster. A moment of desperation and then-“Enough!” And he let the sword fly from his fingers. “Jesu!” he cried, shaking his hand. “Nobody fights like that.”