A thousand smiles; and one frown. He gave me the frown.
“I killed him for the hell of it, but also because it would only be a matter of time before he came against me. Before he tried to slit my throat in the night. And not just for the cutting of his hand.”
“What does bloody Gemt have to do with—” He cut down another man who slipped the line and I loosed an arrow at the men flanking our right side.
“There were four deaths in two years rather than forty because the Highlanders pre-empt avalanches,” I said. “They set them off.”
“What?”
“They watch the snow. They see the shades. They see the ups and downs, not the flat page. They dig and test. And then they pre-empt.” I waved my bow overhead, purple ribbon cracking in the wind. “In the caves. Now!”
When a slope looks dangerous the Highlanders take themselves above it by ridge and pass and cliff. They take with them straw, stones, a crude bowl of fired clay, kindling, charcoal—often from the burners in Ancrath’s woods—a glazed pot and a sheep’s bladder. They dig themselves a hole at the very top of the most treacherous layers, setting the bowl on top of several inches of packed straw. In the bowl they put kindling and charcoal, and set stones so that the pot will be held above the bowl. They fill the pot with snow and inflate the bladder, blowing into it as hard as they can and tying it off with a strip of gut-hide. They light the kindling and leave.
The men of the Watch started to pack into the caves. I had thought it would be crowded, once upon a time, back when I ordered the spades to be left there. I had wondered if we would all fit. Fewer than a hundred men made it in. We had space aplenty.
So much in life is simply a matter of timing.
I took my place at the cave mouth, eager to cross swords with the men of Arrow. I had the timing wrong. Plain and true. I should have said what mattered to Coddin days ago, months ago. My timing had been off.
Tired men die easy, as if they relish the prospect of infinity. My legs had the trembles but my arms were ready enough. I held my blade two-handed and took the first man in the eye with its point. Makin came to fight beside me. Beyond the enemy I could see forever. I could see the wildness and wideness of the mountains. Beyond them, the day moon, white like the memory of bone. Faint strains of the sword-song reached me as I crossed blades again, shearing partway through a man’s neck. My sword felt lighter, twitching to the song as if it held a life of its own and pulsed with its own blood. Snicker-snack, snicker-snack, and men fell away in pieces. The sun flashed crimson on my uncle’s sword as if heliographing a message to the Prince of Arrow.
“I’m sorry!” I shouted, for Makin and the others.
Timing.
We weren’t far enough ahead. The men of Gutting would have lit the fires in their bowls as they saw us emerge from the neck of the valley onto the mountain’s shoulder. I had thought we would reach the caves with a clear margin. That we would dig in and rake the slope with bow-fire. I was wrong. Just a few minutes’ error but plenty long enough for the enemy to fill the caves with our corpses.
Makin gave an oath and fell back, throwing himself beyond a swinging blade.
I nearly said “Sorry” again—but a mountain is a good place to die. If you’re going to die, try to make it somewhere with a view.
For moments without time I fought, enfolded with a fierce joy, the heat rising in me until the burns on my face blazed and the wind had no hold on me. Each part of that fight played out to a secret score and the timing that had eluded me returned in the scream of steel against steel. A wildness infected me and I thought of Ferrakind incandescent and consumed, whatever made him human abandoned to the inferno.
A block, a sway, step to the side, the ring and scrape of my sword as it slid from the foe’s sheared flesh. When a heavy blade meets the head of a man who has discarded his helm in the long climb, a red ruin is wrought. Worse than the neat butchery of the slaughterman in his abattoir is this destruction. Brain, skull, and hair follow the swing of your sword in a wet arc of crimson, white, and grey. Pieces of a face hang for a frozen moment: an accusing eye, its juices leaking, then everything falls and the next man stumbles through to battle, wearing scraps of the last.
Fire wrapped me, or so it felt, hot lines of it snaking from Gog’s burn, scorching, fierce.
A swordpoint traced its path within a hair of my brow, whispering across the bridge of my nose as I jerked back. Lunging, I thrust out both arms, my blade a bar held at hilt and end, the point hard against the iron plate in the palm of my leather glove. The Builder-steel divided the man’s face horizontally between nose and lip. The grip of his bone tried to take the sword with him as he fell but I kept the hilt and let the motion swing the blade out right, catching a spear thrust and angling it over my shoulder. That man I kicked down the slope and the roar that burst from me rippled the air like a furnace breath. If I’d had the time to look down I would not have been surprised to see the snow shrink back from the heat pulsing off my skin.
Much of me, very nearly all of me perhaps, wanted to surrender to the battle-madness, to be consumed, to throw myself down among the foe and paint the mountain with their blood no matter the cost. But surrender of any kind comes hard to me. Instead I drew back and the fury left me, blown out as swiftly as it ignited. I had a plan to follow and I’d follow it even though all hope seemed lost. And following plans requires a clear head.
More men pressed at me. My arms started to feel as tired as my legs. We just needed a few more minutes, but sometimes you don’t get what you want, or what you need. My eyes flickered to the view. Time to die.
In the past I have been saved by a horse. Not borne to safety by a noble steed, but saved by the wild kick of a panicked horse. That had been unexpected. It probably surprised Corion even more. To be saved by a sheep’s weak bladder though…that takes the biscuit. It takes all the biscuits.
High above us slow fires burned, melting the snow in the pots, heating the inflated bladders now floating in the steaming water. The process gives the Highlanders time to retreat to a point of safety. You have to place the pots in the danger zone. You do it as high up as you can for your own preservation, but not so high that it won’t have the desired effect.
The hot air expands. The bladders swell further. Stretching beyond the point a man could inflate them. It’s just a matter of time. A matter of timing. The water starts to boil. The pressure builds. And bang!
The Highlanders play the bladder-pipe. The things had screeched at my wedding that morning, similar to the bagpipes found farther north, less complex but just as raucous. You wouldn’t think an exploding bladder would be so loud. The sound is as if every squeal and howl a bladder-pipe might make in its long and unfortunate life has been squeezed into half a moment. It’s a noise to wake the dead. But this was a case of a noise to make the dead.
One of the six sheep that donated the six bladders to the six avalanche pots, that the men of Gutting lit on the slopes when we came into view, must have been a particularly incontinent beast for its bladder exploded several minutes earlier than expected.
You feel an avalanche before you hear it. There’s a strange build-up of pressure. It presses into your ears. Even with men trying to slice me into bloody chunks I noticed the pressure. Then there’s the rumble. It starts faint and builds without end. And finally, just before it hits, there’s the hissing.
My timing came good at the right moment. I threw myself into the cave. Before the men attacking me could follow, the world turned white and they were gone.
36
Wedding day
The cave lay blind dark and silent although it held close on a hundred men.
The last rumbles of the avalanche stilled. In my fall I had bruised my arse on an unforgiving rock and my curse was the first sound.
“Shitdarn!” I’d learned that one from Brother Elban and felt a duty to roll it out from time to time since no one else ever used it.
Still no noise, as if a gang of trolls h
ad ripped the head from each man as he entered.
“There’s lanterns at the back, and tinder,” I called.
Scuffling now.
More scuffling, the scritch of flint on steel and then a glow cutting dozens of men from the darkness.
I looked at the silver watch on my wrist for the first time in an age. A quarter past twelve. The arm for counting seconds tick tick ticked its way in yet another circle.
“I know my spade made it in here,” I said, standing, careful not to brain myself on the low ceiling. “Find some more and dig us out.”
“We should take a roll-call,” Hobbs said, moving to the front. More lanterns were lit and the wall of snow behind him glistened.
“We could,” I said. I knew his wasn’t just a bureaucratic interest. He had lost friends, protégés, the sons of friends, and he wanted to know what remained of the Watch, of his Watch. “We could, but it’s not the snow that kills men in an avalanche,” I said. “None of those soldiers out there are dead.”
I had their attention now.
“They’re all busy suffocating whilst the snow has them trapped. And that, my friends, is exactly what’s happening to us. Whilst I explain it to you I’m using up the strictly limited supply of air in this cave. Whilst you’re listening to me you are breathing in the good air and breathing out the bad. Each of those lanterns that lets you see me, is eating up the air.” Silent thanks to Tutor Lundist and his lessons in alchemy—I might not outlive my wedding day but I had no desire to exit by snuffing out like the candle in the bell-jar.
They took my point. Three men who had found spades hurried to the snow, others searched for more. Soon all the space at the exit was occupied. I could have just told them to dig, but better they know the reason, better they not think I didn’t share Hobbs’s interest in the Watch’s sacrifice.
I saw Captain Keppen leaning against a boulder, clutching his side. Makin had set himself against the rear wall of the cave on his backside with his knees drawn up to his forehead.
“Get the wounded seen to,” I told Hobbs. I clapped a hand to his shoulder. Kings are supposed to make such gestures.
I found my way to Makin’s side. The cave floor lay strewn with men but whether they had been felled by exhaustion or injury I couldn’t tell. I slid my back down the icy wall and sat beside him. We watched the diggers dig and tried to breathe shallow. He smelled of clove-spice and sweat.
A strange path I had followed to end trapped in a snow-locked cave, buried in the highest of places. From the Tall Castle to the road, from the road to Renar’s throne, a year and more roaming the empire until at last the Highlands called me back. And in the Highlands finding the prize less rewarding than the chase, growing into manhood on a copper crown throne, wrestling with the mundane from plague to famine, building an economy like a swordsman builds muscle, recruiting, training, and for what? To have some preordained emperor trample it beneath his heel on his march to the Gilden Gate.
I closed my eyes and listened as my aches and pains announced themselves into the first pause since Father Gomst married me to Miana that morning. The weight of the day settled on me, squeezing words out.
“There’s men dead out there because I spent too long talking with Coddin,” I said. “Renar men and Ancrath men.”
“Yes.” Makin didn’t lift his head.
“Well, here we are, both dying in a cave like Coddin is. Got anything you need to unburden, Sir Makin? Or do we need more extreme circumstances and even less time?”
“Nope,” Makin looked up, his face in shadow with just the curve of a cheekbone and the tip of his nose catching the lamplight. “Those men chose to follow you, Jorg. And they’d all be dead if it weren’t for your tricks.”
“And why did they choose to follow me? Why do you?” I asked.
I could hear rather than see him lick his teeth before answering. “There are no simple answers in the world, Jorg. Every question has sides. Too many of them. Everything is knotted. But you make the questions simple and somehow it works. For other men the world is not like that. Maybe I could have found a way to drag you back to your father years before you took yourself back—but I wanted to see you do what you promised to. I wondered if you really could win it all.”
“It seemed simple when I had Count Renar to hate,” I said.
“You were…” He smiled. “Focused.”
“It’s about being young too. I hardly recognize myself in that boy.”
“You’re not so different,” Makin said.
The snow around the diggers had a glow of its own now, the daylight reaching down through what remained to clear.
“I was consumed by me, by what I wanted. Nothing else mattered. Not my life, not anyone’s life. All of it was a price worth paying. All of it was worth staking on long odds just for the chance to win.”
Makin snorted. “That’s a place everyone visits on their way from child to man. You just went native.”
I reached into the pouch on my hip and slid my fingers around the box. “I have…regrets.”
“We’re all built of those.” Makin watched the diggers. A spear of daylight struck through into the cave.
“Gelleth I am sorry for…My father would think me weak. But if it were now—I would find another way.”
“There was no other way,” Makin said. “Even the way you took was impossible.”
“Tell me about your child,” I said. “A girl?”
“Cerys.” He spoke her name like a kiss, blinking as the daylight found us. “She would be older than you, Jorg. She was three when they killed her.”
We could see the sky now, a circle of blue, away to the east beyond the snow clouds.
“I follow you because I’m tired of war. I would see it stopped. One empire. One law. It doesn’t matter so much how or who, just being united would stop the madness,” Makin said.
“Heh, I can feel the loyalty!” I pushed up and stood, stretching. “Wouldn’t the Prince of Arrow make a better emperor?” I set off toward the exit.
“I don’t think he’ll win,” said Makin, and he followed.
In the long ago, in the gentle days, Brother Grumlow carved wood, worked with saw and chisel. When hard times come carpenters are apt to get nailed to crosses. Grumlow took up the knife and learned to carve men. He looks soft, my brother of the blade, slight in build, light in colour, weak chin, sad eyes, all of him drooping like the moustache that hangs off his lip. Yet he has fast hands and no fear of a sharp edge. Come against him with just a dagger for company and he will cut you a new opinion.
37
Wedding day
A hundred and twelve men climbed out of the cave below Blue Moon Pass. I let Watch-master Hobbs take his roll-call as they gathered on the new snow. It amazed me that the avalanche which had broken like a wave on the rocks below, and had run like milk into and around the cave, could now support my weight, letting my feet sink no more than an inch or two with each step. I listened to the names, to the replies, or more often to the silence that followed a name.
The new snow glittered below us, perfect and even, no trace of the blood, of the carnage strewn there only minutes before. And as Hobbs made his tally a thousand and a thousand and a thousand men died unseen beneath that fresh white sheet, held motionless, blind, struggling for breath and finding nothing.
Sometimes I feel the need of an avalanche within me. A clean page with the past swept away. Tabula rasa. I wondered if this one had wiped the slate for me. And then I saw a shadow beneath the whiteness at my feet, a child buried so shallow that the snow could not hide him. Not even the force of mountains could clean the stains from my past.
While Hobbs droned on I took the copper box from its place at my hip and sat on the slope, heels dug in.
A man is made of memories. It is all we are. Captured moments, the smell of a place, scenes played out time and again on a small stage. We are memories, strung on storylines—the tales we tell ourselves about ourselves, falling through our lives into t
omorrow. What the box held was mine. Was me.
“What now then?” Makin slumped beside me.
Down beyond the farthest reach of the avalanche I could see movement, tiny dots, the remnants of Arrow’s force retreating to join his main army.
“Up,” I said.
“Up?” Makin did the surprised thing with his eyebrows. Nobody could look surprised like Makin.
It didn’t seem right to die incomplete.
“It’s not a difficult concept,” I said, standing. I set off walking up the slope aimed a little to the left of the peak, where Blue Moon Pass scores a deep path across Mount Botrang’s shoulder.
Hobbs saw me go. “Up?” he said. “But the pass is always blocked in—” Then he looked around. “Oh.” And he waved at the men, who had come forward to answer their names, to follow.
I still held the box in my hand, hot and cold, smooth and sharp. It didn’t seem right to die without knowing who I was.
The child walked beside me now, barefoot in the snow, his death resisting even the light of day.
With the nail of my thumb I opened the box.
Trees, gravestones, flowers, and her.
“Who found you after I hit you?” I ask Katherine. “A man was with you when you recovered your senses.”
She frowns. Her fingers touch the place where the vase shattered. “Friar Glen.” For the first time she sees me with her old eyes, clear and green and sharp. “Oh.”
I walk away.
I leave the Rennat Forest behind me and walk toward Crath City. The Tall Castle stands behind and above the city. It’s a still day and the smoke rises from the city chimneys in straight lines as if making bars for the castle. Perhaps to keep it safe from me.
From the fields I see the sprawl of the Low City reaching out to the River Sane and the docks, and behind it the land steps upward to the Old City and the High City. The Roma Road cuts my path and I follow it to the Low City, gateless and open to the world. I have a hat stuffed in my tunic, a shapeless thing of faded checks such as the bravos at the river docks wear. I tuck my hair into it and pull it low. I won’t be noticed in the Low City. The people who might know my face do not go there.
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