Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns

“In that case, your path lies that way.” I pointed north. “I should note that the first quarter mile of that path is on a street that boasts several fine-looking whorehouses. So take your time. As for me-I’m going to find out about ships.”

I set off at an amble, following my shadow across the bright flagstones.

“Look after Brath for me,” I called back.

They picked up their bottles and drank to me. “Catch you on the road,” they replied. Even Rike.

And if Makin hadn’t been there I think I really could have ditched them that easily.

Four years earlier

In a great port like Barlona there are hundreds of ships at harbour. Most belong to merchants, or collectives of merchants, and hug the coastline loaded with things that are cheap where the ships set out and that command a higher price where they are bound. It’s a simple equation and the devil lies in the details. There are warships too, owned in name by the Prince of Barlona and in the service of his people. In reality it is the wealthiest of the merchants who put new princes on the throne, and the warships serve to protect their trade routes. And among the merchant cogs and the Prince’s warships, a scattering of ocean-going ships, triple-masted and more, deep-hulled, from the strangest and most distant shores. Even one great vessel of sickwood, twice the size of her largest rival, her grey planks grown one into the next, half-living despite the lumberman’s saw. Her hull, crusted with barnacles large as dinner plates even above the wave-line, bore many scars, and on her decks men with copper skin worked at repairs.

I spent a few hours watching the great ships with their foreign crews, yellow men from Utter, black crews from the many Kingdoms of Afrique, turbaned sailors with curling beards, sun-stained, strutting the decks of pungent spice-boats. The Prince of Arrow’s words returned to me. His observations on the smallness of my world and the largeness of my ignorance. Even so, every man amongst these travellers knew of the empire, even though it stood in pieces. And so we had us some common ground.

I saw Makin and the others trailing me almost from the start. He’d had the sense to leave Rike behind, most likely in one of the whorehouses I’d suggested. Rike’s not one to be missed, even on a crowded street. Makin would have done better to leave himself and Red Kent in the whorehouse too. Grumlow I might not have spotted. Grumlow has quiet ways about him.

The smaller and more shabby of the merchant cogs stood at anchor on the margins of the great harbour. They moored along sway-backed quays that abutted semi-derelict warehouses separated by dangerous alleys where the stink of rotted fish made my eyes water. I followed two bare-chested men carrying a barrel up the gangplank onto the Sea-goat.

“You! Get off my ship.” The man shouting at me was smaller and dirtier than the other men on deck but loud enough to be the captain.

“A ship now is it?” I looked around. “Well, I suppose if you set a sail in a rowboat you can call it a ship. But you were unwise to throw away the oars.”

“I was going to let you choose which side you left by. But that offer is now void,” the little man said. The mass of black curls framing his ugly face looked to be a wig, but why anyone would want to set ten pounds of stolen sweaty hair on their head in this heat I couldn’t fathom.

I magicked a silver coin into my hand, an Ancrath royal stamped with my father’s head. “Customer,” I said.

The fat man advancing on me stopped. He looked relieved.

“I want to get to the Horse Coast,” I said. “Somewhere around the ear would do.”

The Horse Coast isn’t named for the stallions that make it famous these days. Apparently the peninsula coastline resembles a horse’s head. I’ve studied the map scrolls in my father’s library and I can say with surety that it looks like a horse’s head in the same way that troll-stones look like trolls, or that the constellation of Orion looks like a belted giant holding a club. They could have called it the Happy Pig Coast or the Crooked Thumb Coast just as well. To give the ancients the benefit of the doubt I will note that the sea has risen twice the height of the Tall Castle since the time of Building and the old maps had to be rewritten many times. Even so, I’d stake a bag of stolen gold on the fact that there was never a time that “horse” was the first thing to spring to mind when contemplating the run of the Horse Coast.

I had plenty of time to think while the little captain favoured me with a sour stare and chewed his lip. I could have picked a ship at random. Any small vessel actively loading would be departing for ports up the coast from Barlona or down the coast. I’d bought a couple of ales for a sailor earlier in the day. He’d gone through his share from his previous trip and was delaying a new signing until the last possible moment. In return for my keeping him from sobriety for a few more hours he’d run off a list of the best bets for a trip south. The Sea-goat ’s name had taken my fancy. Who wants to sail on the Maria, or the God’s Grace, when there’s a Sea-goat to be ridden?

“Two silver and you haul rope when told,” he said.

“One silver and I get fed with the crew,” I said and started walking toward the gangplank. I could ride the Maria just as well. In fact it sounded better each time I said it.

“Done,” he said.

And so I sailed on the Sea-goat with Captain Nellis.

Before the Sea-goat hoisted sail I took a last walk around the seafront and stopped in at the Port Commander’s office long enough to place a bribe of sufficient weight to considerably lighten my gold supply. Ideally the Brothers would be steered onto a ship that would take them north up the coast and abandon them in a minor port. Makin would be too busy vomiting to notice which side of the boat the land lay off. Failing that, they need only arrest Makin and hold him a week or two-long enough for my trail to grow cold and to remind him that in the end when your king tells you to do something, you do it.

I like the sea. Even with a gentle swell, with the coast in plain view just ten miles to starboard, it sets me in mind of mountains in motion. I like the nautical phrases. Splice this, belay that. If Lundist proves right and we are all reborn, I’ll go once more round life’s wheel as a pirate. Everything about the ocean puts me in a good mood. The smell and the taste of it. The cry of seagulls. God jammed some kind of magic down their throats. No wonder the crows want to murder them and the ravens are unkind.

Captain Nellis didn’t like me being on the quarterdeck, or so he said, but I spent my time there, legs dangling through the rail with him behind me, dwarfed by the wheel. He could have roped it off for all the steering he did, but he seemed to like to hold it while he shouted at his men. To my eye he steered them as little as he did the ship. His curses and instructions rolled off the crew and they went about their tasks oblivious.

“I’ll buy me a ship one day,” I said.

“Surely,” Captain Nellis spat something thick and unpleasant onto the deck. Without men like him and Row, decks probably wouldn’t need swabbing at all.

“A big one, mind. Not a barge like this. Something that cuts the waves rather than wallows about in them.”

“A young sell-sword like yourself shouldn’t set his sights so low,” Nellis growled. “Buy a whole fleet.”

“A valid point, Captain. Very valid. If my kingdom ever gets a coastline I will buy a fleet. I’ll be sure to name one of them the Spitting Nellis.”

And so for the rest of that day, and most of the next, the Sea-goat wallowed its way sedately around the shore, stopping once in a small port to unload a huge copper pot and to fill the space with red-finned fish called…red-fin. I slept a night in a hammock, below decks, rolling in the gentle arms of coastal waters and dreaming of absolutely nothing. I can only recommend hammocks if you’re at sea. On dry land there seems no point to them. And sleep above deck if you have the chance. The Sea-goat had an appropriately animal smell to it in the stale heat of its hold.