The Immortal Throne (2016)

by Stella Gemmell

  ‘Someone should go down and finish her,’ his friend Franken said, squatting beside him. The smell of smoke rolled off him.

  ‘You go,’ Jan replied.

  It was a conversation they had had before.

  ‘Rats deserve everything that’s coming to them,’ Franken opined.

  The dunghill Rats – as the Odrysians called the City fighters – had come down on them before dusk as they trudged along the valley on their way back to the main body of their army. The skirmish had lost them a hundred or more. With darkness thickening around them they had retreated up to these caves to lick their wounds, ready to break out and hit back at the City the next day. But that night had brought heavy snowfall and the temperature had dropped like a stone. Dawn the next day had revealed a valley bright with whiteness, muffled and still.

  ‘City sorcery,’ Franken offered, sucking his teeth and spitting in the snow.

  He was still talking about the woman. Jan made no reply.

  Franken glanced at him. ‘I wouldn’t be a Rat.’

  It was a common subject for discussion among the allied forces. They all knew Rats were hard to kill. They didn’t know why, though there was much superstitious talk about their emperor, whom the City fighters called the Immortal, and his magics. But whatever the reason, and Jan Vandervarr didn’t much care what it was, it made City warriors formidable enemies. Even the women. No one wanted to die – and yet if you had a mortal wound you prayed for a quick death or the salvation of a comrade’s merciful blade. No one wanted to die like this woman, lost in the snow.

  Jan sighed. His years in the Odrysian army had shown him there were no easy deaths, no easy answers. A vision of his wife Peg, dead these ten years, flashed before his eyes. He pushed it away ruthlessly. That life was long gone. This was his life now.

  There was another blast of warm, noisome air from the cave-mouth, and a third soldier squatted on the ledge beside them. Jan glanced at him. It was the red-haired officer who had joined them in the autumn from a company destroyed by the City’s Maritime army at Copperburn. The newcomer was young and tall and very thin, with legs like a crane’s, and his fiery hair was pulled back in a wiry bunch behind his head. Jan grinned to himself. The three of them perched in a row looked like gargoyles he’d seen on the imperial palace in Old Odrysia, now lost to the Dravidian Empire.

  Faint sounds drifted up from the snowy valley.

  ‘Someone should go down and finish her,’ Franken commented to the new man pointedly.

  The officer nodded his agreement then stood and stepped off the ledge into the deep snow. His skinny shanks sank into the icy crust and he nearly lost his balance.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Franken asked with alarm, grabbing the redhead’s shoulder to keep him upright.

  ‘Going down to despatch her, as you suggest,’ the young officer replied, regaining his balance and taking another step.

  ‘They’ll despatch you before you get to her,’ Franken told him, pointing to the rocky crags across the valley. ‘Those bolts of theirs will skewer you like pork.’

  The officer looked back and smiled. Jan saw he had the strangest violet-coloured eyes.

  ‘No they won’t,’ he told Franken. ‘They’ll wait until I’m on my way back.’

  Then he plunged forward and started forging his way through the hip-deep snow, moving his arms as if paddling a boat. It was slow going and twice he fell over, but he struggled to his feet and pressed on. As his dark figure dwindled Jan expected him to go down at any moment, felled by a crossbow bolt, but he trudged on until he reached the woman and there he stood, leaning above her like a wading bird, taking his time.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Franken asked, squinting, as if Jan might have better information than he. ‘He’s talking to her.’ Then he added, ‘Man’s a fool.’

  Women warriors make fools of us all, Jan thought. The Odrysians all despised the Rats, or claimed to, for including women in their ranks, but no one hesitated to kill them along with the men they stood with. In a good honest hand-to-hand battle the women were easier to kill, mutilate or disarm. But most fighting was in the scramble of a skirmish, at night, or in bad weather, or on tough terrain, and the women were often faster, presented a smaller target, and were lower to the ground, better balanced. Many of his dead comrades had learned that the hard way when hesitating to despatch a woman. Jan had no trouble killing them now, and he had learned to fear them just as much as their menfolk.

  ‘He’s coming back,’ Franken announced, his finger, as always, on the pulse of the obvious.

  Jan watched as the officer presented his back to the enemy and started plodding back up the treacherous hillside towards them.

  ‘They’ll take him now,’ Franken said confidently, but still the young man came on, unskewered, until he was out of crossbow range and scrambling up the steep incline beneath the ledge. Jan and Franken offered a hand each and pulled. The officer’s boots slid on the icy shelf, then he was beside them again. He stamped the snow off his legs and turned back towards the cave.

  ‘Is she dead?’ Jan asked him.

  The young man nodded.

  ‘What were you talking to her about?’ Franken asked. But the officer moved back towards the cave-mouth, offering no reply.

  ‘Well, what did she say?’ Franken asked his back.

  The officer hesitated and turned for a moment.

  ‘She said, “Marcellus is coming.”’

  The redheaded officer, whom the Odrysians knew as Adolfus but whose real name was Rubin Kerr Guillaume, pushed aside the heavy groundsheet which screened the men from the worst of the cold, then ducked his head and with a sniff of distaste entered the reeking cave. There were two fires, one for the officers, one for the men, but they were poor weak things, fuelled by damp brush and twigs, pouring out more smoke than heat. The smoke lay in a thick layer in the roof of the cave. It was impossible to see through, impossible to breathe, and Rubin hurried, doubled up, stepping over injured soldiers to his billet where he sat down against the rock wall and took a cautious breath. Several junior officers watched him sourly. He was not a popular man, he knew, and if they wondered what he’d been up to they didn’t ask.

  Rubin, under direct orders from the City’s First Lord Marcellus Vincerus, had infiltrated the Odrysian company after the Battle of Copperburn, where the City’s veteran Maritime had crushed an alliance of Blues in a three-day battle of unparalleled awfulness. Rubin’s command of the Odrysian tongue was pitch-perfect, and he had previously spent two years in their country, long enough to convince the keenest of inquisitors that he was a native. No, the other junior officers didn’t dislike him because they suspected him of being a spy. They disliked him because they suspected him of being an arrogant, opinionated dilettante. Which was at least partly true, and which was just the way Rubin liked it.

  He rummaged in his pack, pulling out some crusty old bread and leathery meat. He sniffed the meat, decided it would last a day or so more, and chewed on the bread, which wouldn’t.

  A dark figure emerged from the smoke, coughing. ‘General wants you.’

  Rubin sighed. In the scramble to find shelter after the battle two days before he had stuck closely to the senior officers and found himself in the same cave as the general. He liked to stay near the centre of things. But now it meant having to explain himself, something he didn’t care for. He stood and ducked under the smoke again to where Arben Busch was encamped.

  Rubin loomed awkwardly over him until the general glanced up and gestured him to sit. Busch was dark-faced and bad-tempered, but he had the reputation of a brilliant strategist, a reputation Rubin was starting to doubt now they were a hundred-odd men trapped in caves at dead of winter.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ the general asked him.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She was affecting the men’s morale, sir.’

  Busch sighed, deeply pouched eyes red and weary.

  ‘Did it occur to you that if sh
e was affecting our morale she was affecting the enemy still more?’

  ‘No it didn’t, sir,’ Rubin said straight-faced.

  Busch snorted. ‘Did you question her? What did she say?’

  ‘She said Marcellus would come and destroy us all.’

  ‘Marcellus is fighting in the south,’ put in another officer, a loudmouthed know-nothing called Camben.

  ‘As far as we know,’ added the general thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. ‘Just words,’ he concluded. ‘She wields Marcellus like a bogeyman to frighten us with.’

  Rubin told him: ‘She was blind. She thought I was a comrade.’

  ‘You speak the City tongue?’ asked Camben suspiciously, glancing at his general to see if he was impressed by this keen deduction.

  ‘Of course,’ Rubin replied. ‘Know your enemy and his ways. Don’t you?’ he asked in mock surprise.

  ‘I don’t succour the enemy,’ replied Camben, reddening.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Busch snapped. ‘How is the terrain?’ he asked.

  ‘Hopeless,’ Rubin told him. ‘The snow is still waist-deep in parts. Crossing the valley would take half a day. They could pick us all off at their leisure with those hefty crossbows of theirs.’

  ‘We don’t even know if the City crossbowmen are still there,’ argued Camben. ‘We haven’t seen them for more than a day.’

  ‘They’re still there,’ said Rubin.

  Camben scowled at him, but Busch asked, ‘How are you so sure?’

  Rubin shrugged and flashed a smile, which was wasted on the dour general. ‘I could feel their eyes on me,’ he lied.

  ‘You can take guard duty tonight.’ The general cocked his head towards the cave-mouth, dismissing him.

  As Rubin turned away new arrivals covered with fresh snow came in from the cold, stamping their feet, shaking themselves like wet dogs. Officers from the other caves were gathering, and Rubin would be stuck outside unable to hear what was going on. He returned to his pack, took out a thick wool scarf and a thin blanket, swallowed the last piece of bread, then went out into the icy air.

  It was snowing hard now and he could see nothing but a moving white wall a few paces in front of him. It was blowing away from the cave-mouth, though, and Vandervarr and Franken had erected a small awning in the lee of a rocky outcrop. They looked quite cosy, and Rubin joined them.

  ‘Punishment?’ Vandervarr asked in his friendly way.

  Rubin smiled briefly and nodded.

  ‘Perhaps I can go back inside then,’ Franken suggested hopefully.

  Vandervarr grimaced. ‘We may as well all go in. We’re doing no bloody good out here.’

  It was true. The entire City army could walk up to them and they wouldn’t see it until it was a sword’s length away. Rubin scrambled back until his spine was against the rock wall, then he wrapped the scarf round his head and the blanket round his shoulders. As an afterthought he pulled out his long-bladed knife and positioned it on the ground near his left hand.

  ‘That’s a pigsticker,’ Franken commented.

  ‘My father’s,’ Rubin replied and the two others nodded in satisfaction. This was what they expected to hear.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Jan Vandervarr asked.

  ‘Parabel,’ Rubin said, pulling out a familiar story from his mind’s backpack of handy tales. ‘Upper Heights. My father owned an inn there.’ The mere mention of a tavern made a fighting man feel at ease, he’d discovered. ‘Before the Great Catastrophe,’ he added. Reference to the destruction of the winter palace and the execution of the Odrysian royal family created a bond of loss.

  Franken snorted. ‘You’re a rich boy, then.’

  Rubin shrugged. ‘I bleed and die for my country like any man,’ he said piously.

  ‘Terrible old boots, though,’ Franken added, staring at them.

  ‘I’ve marched a long way in these boots.’

  Franken snorted in derision. ‘You’re not old enough to have marched a long way in any boots.’

  You’ve no idea what I’ve done, fat man, Rubin thought. But he smiled amiably.

  ‘Married?’ Jan Vandervarr asked.

  Rubin could have laughed. But he shook his head as if with deep regret. ‘You?’

  He listened as Jan told an age-old tale of a wife slaughtered, children lost, then the three of them swapped stories of the evils of the City. Franken was a blowhard, but Rubin liked Jan, his quiet way of listening and considering. When Rubin told him a largely true story about his family’s suffering at the hands of the City Rats – true in that it had happened, although not to him – the older man nodded sympathetically, and said quietly, ‘Life’s a funny old dog.’

  As they talked the falling snow thickened and they were warmed by their companionship. Rubin found himself growing sleepy, yet it was barely starting to get dark. It was going to be a long night.

  The war between the City and the allied forces City warriors called Blueskins had been going on for more than a century, fuelled, his lord Marcellus had told him, by greed and envy. The two mightiest enemies were the Odrysians and the Petrassi, whose territory abutted that of the City, but they were aided by many nations and tribes and opportunist bands of criminals from encircling lands. Here in the Blacktree Mountains an Odrysian army and hundreds of Buldekki tribesmen were holding a vital pass to the north, and the City’s Fifth Imperial infantry were fighting to wrest it from them.

  The fat man Franken was telling an elderly joke about a farmer, his goat and a magician’s daughter when Rubin heard the subtle scrape of swords stealthily drawn. He grabbed his knife and leaped up as a dozen dark figures loomed out of the flying snow, armoured and armed with bright blades. Fear clutched his chest as he saw they were clad in the black and silver of the City’s elite warriors, the Thousand.

  ‘I am a friend!’ he cried in the City tongue, raising his hands in surrender. ‘My name is Rubin Kerr Guillaume!’ As the silent warriors paused, swords raised, he bent and dug in the hidden pocket in his boot. He pulled out his gold insignia.

  ‘See! I am a loyal man of the City! This was given to me by Marcellus himself!’

  The leader snatched the gold square and pocketed it, then he gestured to Jan and Franken who were still frozen in place, white-faced, using hope to fend off the enemy swords.

  ‘Prove it,’ the leader said, his voice muffled under his full-faced helm.

  Rubin stepped behind Franken, pulled his head back and sliced the man’s throat; then as the blood sprayed he turned to Jan Vandervarr. In the instant before he pierced him in the heart, he thought he saw relief in the older man’s eyes.

  Life’s a funny old dog, Jan.

  The leader of the City soldiers nodded then cuffed Rubin across the side of the head with a heavy gauntlet. ‘Bind him. Don’t kill him,’ Rubin heard him say as he fell dazed to the snowy ground.

  In the time that followed he fell in and out of consciousness as he was shackled then dragged and manhandled up and down icy slopes to an unknown destination, sliding helplessly at times, kicked and pushed and pulled like a carcass. His two captors had been told to keep him alive, but beyond that their only interest was getting him off their hands as fast as possible. At last they reached an encampment and Rubin was shoved into a large tent among piles of provisions and armour. He fell to his knees. There was snow on the ground and it was cold as a widow’s tit in there. Knowing he’d die if left bound and helpless, Rubin appealed to his guards, who were retreating, laughing and talking.

  ‘I’ll be dead within the hour if you leave me here!’

  They paused and looked at each other, then left. But a short while later one returned with two blankets which he threw at Rubin. The young man stood with difficulty and pushed together two crates. He laid one blanket over them, then wrapped himself in the other and lay down. He fell asleep on the instant.

  He was four years old and in his father’s house on the Salient, sitting at table one sunny morning, awaiting breakfast. The little boy was always asked if
he wanted one boiled egg or two. He would tell the servant one, then ask for another when he had finished the first. He sat, spoon at the ready, but no eggs appeared and no servant came to ask what he wanted. After a while he slid off his stool and trotted into the kitchens. The place was in ferment, cooks and servants, some of whom he’d never seen before, racing about shouting at each other. When his friend Dorcas, the youngest maid, spotted him she hurried over and picked him up and settled him on her hip.

  ‘Where’s my breakfast?’ whined little Rubin, pulling at Dorcas’ fair braids.

  ‘Be a good boy. Sit at the table and I’ll bring your eggs.’

  ‘Where’s Mama?’ The boy was suddenly anxious about all the strangeness in the house. He was used to a calm, ordered routine.

  ‘Your mother’s busy. Eat your breakfast first, then we’ll go and find her.’

  He’d barely had time to eat his first egg when his mother came in, looking excited and pleased. She picked him up and held him close. Rubin could smell perfume which made his nose itch, and soap and, more faintly, horses.

  ‘You must be a good boy today. This is an important day for all of us. Marcellus Vincerus is coming to visit Papa.’

  ‘Who is he? Can I see him?’

  ‘He is the First Lord of the City, and our greatest hero. You must be very good and stay with Dorcas and do as she tells you.’

  ‘Where’s Indaro?’ He craned his neck around.

  ‘She’s at her lessons. She’s being a good girl.’

  All day long the boy heard whispered talk of the great lord Marcellus and, excited beyond endurance, he nagged Dorcas until the harassed girl agreed they could watch for the visitor from a first-floor balcony. They waited, as the rest of the house waited, in a state of suspended frenzy.

  As night fell the sound of many hoofbeats echoed from the distance and a group of twenty or more riders broke out from the gloom. Rubin, dozing in Dorcas’ lap, threw off his tiredness and craned his neck to see past the stone balusters.