by Adrian Selby
“I worked through the remaining compounds, skin rubs for the sores, kannab salves for the rubs. Then my prickly eyes settled on you.
“Those violet eyes were full of pity. Pity! I couldn’t hold your gaze for it; I could see enough what your father’s courtroom had become: a whorehouse for men drowning in his luxurious patronage. I had had so little to do with children, nothing at all relating to the care of them, until, for whatever reason, your father saw fit to make me your and Petir’s guardian. I could not understand it myself, except perhaps that the fear of drudhas would discourage anyone out to hurt you more than the fear of a soldier, however good. It was extra coin, a sidepurse for me, and I took it with so little else to do. I did not, could not expect you to be so inquisitive, so interested in my work and in my teaching you your letters. For a time I took some pleasure in your achievements, and in the schooling of Petir with a blade and his forms. But I did not expect the pity for the state of me, had not expected, over those months, the questions a child can ask that a man cannot answer. Why did I kill for coin? What was it like to kill? Had I killed any girls like you?” He was silent for a moment, and put his hand to his mouth to disguise some muttering, and I had the sense he was ashamed of it.
“But it was about to end, our time with your father the king. The all-powerful merchants of Citadel Argir had wielded their political rapiers that last year in the dissection of your father’s power. They made the court and its judges theirs, they dispensed what justice they saw fit from a guildhall a league or so away from us in the citadel’s main square, their bid for power supported against you by the Post. The Post had long coveted a more central role in Argir’s trade than your father would concede to them. He stood little chance as a result, given he had no more than respect from the people, where love is required when a test of strength is made.
“So, he was duly strangled in the kind of web a sword cannot break, nor the eye of a soldier see.
“Your family and other courtiers and men of office hated us, for they saw the coup coming and no real way to get away with any of his wealth from the palace. The soldiers we were trying to train cared more for the fires and beer at their posts than the forms and drills, and hated us as well. When the guilds could no longer trap the king in their politics while Kailen was called to be present, they moved decisively in the shadows.
“Soon after I saw you I noticed that Kailen had woken up, staring around us, at you and me. He had pissed himself during his dreams. He gave me a curt shake of his head, clear where he put the blame for merely providing his men, his ‘brothers’, with the lucins and mixes they sought to escape the boredom of this last purse.
“You called my name and ran over to me. You were frightened, perhaps by seeing so many of us naked. I put my robe on as quickly as I could. I remember hugging you to me; you smelled of lavender, a bottle of it that your father had given to you that had belonged to your mother from years before. Then I took you outside to the balcony and down the steps to the gardens. A cold wind woke us properly. I remember the palace stood high up against the peaks that formed the backbone of the great citadel and overlooked the city beneath us. Perhaps we will go back one day soon.
“You told me that your father, Doran, said you’d have to leave that day. I saw that the guards and the serfs that worked the gardens and the house were not guarding or working. They stood in small groups about the overgrown lawns and beds of weeds and dead roses. They smoked pipes and shared skins. This was the mutiny beginning, but they could not raise a hand while we stood at the king’s side.
“Your father loved you, Gala. He was always a fraught man for whom the crown and the games at court were a maze of nettles and debilitating traps, his marriage to your mother an icy union of expedience between fathers themselves colder still.”
“She was a soak that I remember only for hitting me or Petir. I wished she’d drown in her goblet.”
“She did, in a sense. Well, I heard shouting from the courtroom behind us. I thought the mutiny had started, and we were being roused. Back inside I saw Kailen dragging whores off Shale, Harlain, Kheld and Sho while the others found robes to put on.
“I told him I thought the mutiny was beginning. ‘Fuck you’ was all I got back from him.
“Moadd argued with him then; Kailen must have said something about disbanding the Twenty while I was out in the garden with you. He said it had been over for a long time. He was right. Said we were no more a fighting unit than some aristos dancing to guitars and trumpets.
“Ibsey had a go at him then, shivering for a fix almost the moment he woke. He moaned because it was easy money and because he was, by then, as good as a drooper. He made me sick.
“Kailen closed on Ibsey and gave him a single fierce punch. Ibsey was flattened cold, the crack of his jaw silenced us.
“Kailen found his mark on all kinds of problems with us, seeming to rise like bile from him, from whatever clarity of our situation we seemed to share that morning. Then one of the boys down the line belched, just as Kailen was wailing on at the shape we needed to find, the jobs to pick up after an uncounted time in the golden silence of the best presses and smokes Ibsey and I could cook.
“It was how our final line ended, that belch. I laughed as he fell silent, for it was oddly liberating. Too long I had been criticised for my methods, too long I took shit from him and the others, treating me like some village cooker. There was an accidental, casual disrespect to that belch. But something had ticked over in his head at that moment and he walked from the court without a word, without turning back. Kailen’s Twenty ended there.
“Stixie Four and Bresken lifted Ibsey onto a bench and set about bringing him to. His jaw was smashed and I had to bind it tight and blend his mixes. The rest of the Twenty dispersed. We were all shocked by how suddenly it had happened. Elimar and Milu found a couple of pipes and packed some press to get about rising again. Others, like Mirisham and Valdir, pissed into large carved pots containing exquisite miniature soora trees before leaving to find some food.
“Those two had been the ones I had most friendship with. Mirisham was someone we all looked up to, like The Prince, a few years older and good at talking us down off a bad rise or out of the fights we’d all be looking for when the brandy soaked our good senses red.
“But things about us had moved quickly as I had suspected. Once the king had seen the serfs gathering at the gates he knew that the coup was imminent. Kailen was with him handing out our final purses. We were in armour, belts and swords, waiting in the grand hall outside the king’s private quarters. I was the last man in, each of us going in turn to see them both.
“Kailen had not spoken to us since the morning but we all knew it was over. After years of rising and falling, side by side in the front lines, meeting each crossing like we were immortal, we shuffled in and out of the king’s quarters barely able to countenance this dissolution, this being bereft of purpose. With hard embraces and few words there was an agreement we might make our way to some lavish Juan planthouse to consider what we would then do.
“In the room, your father and Kailen stood behind the delicate writing desk that had once been the queen’s. Dresses of hers were still in piles on the day chairs about his bed and her screen. Mould and moths had disfigured them. A carved wooden dog, a toy of Petir’s you might remember, sat on a mantle over the dust of the disused fireplace. The ghost of your mother still poisoned the present, leaving a room that you no longer played in.
“On the desk was a ledger. Kailen pushed forward my purse. I had no words for him. At the end of it he had no words for me either, no acknowledgement of my part in creating his legend. My brews and mixes were the masterpieces of our generation, originals we were able to sell on for many times more than the purses themselves. No battles before or since we fought in the open field left the skin of our enemies bubbling and exploding after the merest splash or cut. Word spread of the Hevendor serfs’ uprising ending with a field of a thousand silent men fully paralys
ed. I watched their eyes fluttering like newborn moths and weeping as their teeth were pulled and other sport had with them by the scavengers descending as the loyalists had ridden away. Kailen took the glory for all my own pride in the recipes.
“I took the heavy velvet purse from the frail table and signed the ledger. It was heavy enough that I looked quizzically at both the king and Kailen.
“‘You are the last, Kigan,’ said the king. ‘Thank you for your protection. Kailen, would you leave us?’
“Kailen didn’t like it, gave us a lingering glance before nodding and leaving the room. Your father waited some moments before speaking, a once-commanding voice frayed with pipesmoking and the wheezing of a chest beyond my repair.
“‘The uprising will begin in days. A party of Justices, with a charge of incompetence and fraud concocted by the rancid clowns cowed before the Post and that cunt from Eural, arrives tomorrow. The guilds have bought my clearks and stopped their men from working until I am dethroned. My nobles have abandoned me.’ I imagine they too were bribed with some of the Welvale land, your birthright, Gala, in exchange for their allegiance. Your father knew he was done.
“I told him his best chance was with us, the Twenty, for getting out of the Citadels alive. He shook his head and moved from behind the table to look out of the mildewed shutters at the colourless dawn.
“‘I’ll not shame my family further. My brother, Moren, was to be the better king; the people made that much clear to me. He always had a way with Galathia; Petir too adored Moren for his prowess as a soldier. I miss him.’
“Your father told me then that you loved me.”
“We did, you know we did.” I held him closer to me as he talked. “You may well have had time on your hands, Kigan, but you chose to tolerate us, to treat us intelligently, challenge us to use our privilege. My father never had the time, never made the time.”
“Well, he knew he wasn’t leaving his kingdom, with his talk of shame. The years, the duty, had aged him. He looked like a man withered by a disease at the end; jowls no longer full of fat and strength, bags of skin settled over each cheek filled with tiredness.
“After a moment’s silent scrutiny, meeting my eyes, searching them for something, he bowed his head, a grief rising in him. He was looking for a way out, Gala, do you understand? Despite knowing there could be none. Then he told me to take you out of the Citadel, you and Petir. He gave me a bronze seal, an oversized coin with the royal heraldry.
“He said the most valuable items had been removed from the treasury, the Argir Book, flasks of rosanna pea and henbane wax, flasks of sun’s heart preserve, fire weed, emeralds and diamonds and so forth. These were to provide you both with the means to live comfortable lives far away from any assassins looking to end your line. More than comfortable, for I had not seen such a quantity of rare plant as that. He told me I had to present the seal to Alven, his drudha, at Post House Snakewood three days on from that morning, so Alven could then lead us to where the treasure was hidden. He paid me thirty more gold coins for this service.
“‘Galathia always wished to see the great Sar ocean,’ he said. I was to be paid a further fifty gold coins upon delivering you to Alven in Snakewood. This ought to have secured your passage to Jua. You can see, I hope, why I could not have betrayed you for coin, never mind betray a purse once it was agreed. Not at that price.”
As Kigan spoke of my father, remembering his words, he had brought him to life for a moment, his last wish for us itself resurrected.
“What happened to us? What more do you remember? When I think of Snakewood, all I can remember is those people in carts everywhere, slaves I suppose, and the windmill where you left us. I don’t remember much of our journey there from the palace, just it was dark all the time, it seemed. Cold and dark.”
“These days I’ve described are as clear as any now, up until the night I left you,” said Kigan. “This part of my life is part of me again.
“Hours after speaking to the king, I said goodbye to Mirisham and Valdir, promising to meet up with them when my last duty was done, a promise I doubted I would keep. I stood at a small servant’s doorway to the royal gardens as your father wept and held you for the last time. I respected him for that, staying to meet his fate head on as a king should.
“You cried your heart out, insisted he join us. Your brother just closed up, a boy now the height of his father, a quiet and helpless rage in him against the forces pushing him into fleeing with a mercenary like me to unknown crossings.
“‘Kigan will protect you and I will follow you when I can,’ he said. He made such a fuss of your pack and boots, Petir’s dagger belt.
“Once you could bear to let your father go, making him promise to meet you again in the plains of Jua, we followed a wall in the cellars to a point where the smallest of catches, shaped like the stone around it, opened a concealed door into a dank passage. I carried you, though you faced me to better see past my shoulder your father behind us as we descended some steps under the light of a torch. Petir did not look back.
“Petir refused to believe he was crying in his sleep, and refused any salves for his blisters as his feet grew accustomed to such long hours walking. You and I spent the nights humming songs as we passed the ruins of old forts and stone outposts that formed the historic frontiers of the Citadels.
“Soon enough we reached Snakewood, its well-beaten tracks taking us into the settlement alongside numerous caravans and carts. A major outpost of stables for the messengers the Post ran, Snakewood was a key hub in the Old Kingdoms slave trade. Seasoning camps and pens for the big slave-trading operations surrounded the main square; forts of high stone walls plain but for the stages set with heavy doors where the slaves were displayed in iron galleries.
“I muddied our faces and robes to better conceal us while we looked for the drudha. My sword, jerkin and pads I gave to one of the beggars that lined the tracks. Both of you would be my children, if anyone was to ask.
“The caravans of slaves, both on the Droop and those yet to be seasoned, surrounded us as we picked our way through the hawkers, singers and other shit filling the main street passing the square. It was as we were passing an exhausted-looking but raucously voiced row of taverns that Alven, the king’s drudha, approached us, having followed us from the gates. His experience, as with all long-serving soldiers and drudhas, I measured by his colours and the eyes; his had gone black from the experimental salves and leaves used to sharpen sight. It was for these reasons more than my being recognised that I muddied my own skin.
“We led you through some alleys to the back of the main square. You tried to push yourself into my robe; no doubt this was your and Petir’s first encounter with the comparatively shrivelled existence of the labourers and commoners of the world.
“The mill was at the southern edge of the settlement atop a natural slope, with a view to the plains of Lagrad. Alven greeted his former drudhan, now working the mill, with a purse and we were led into the storehouse.
“Alven told me that he’d seen the rest of the Twenty coming into Snakewood. I thought it would be wise to see which of them were going to Jua and would be willing to go along with us.
“I took a pail of water into the storeroom from the well and washed the mud off us. You permitted me to wash your hair. Then you leaned into Petir and settled back against the wall. I watched you drift off to sleep, his arm hanging over your shoulder, his cheek on your head. It is one of my most vivid and precious memories, one that I had before I could remember who either of you were. He would have made a fine king, Petir, a handsome and strong man that the serfs would have admired. I hoped the wealth and the luxuries of Jua would not destroy him. Between Alven and myself I was sure we could settle you.”
“I blamed you for so long,” I confessed. “I thought you were complicit.”
“You’ve survived, Galathia, you’re strong, brave as well; you got dirty with the world.”
“The world has worked me over one too man
y times. What choice do you have but to fight back?”
“Many don’t, deceiving themselves about who really is to blame for their condition. Tell me about you and Petir. Tell me you’ve seen him.”
Her later account of this, presented below, is no doubt at least as full an account of what happened to her and Petir after Snakewood as that she would have told Kigan, so is included at this point.
Goran
The first touches of grey speckled Petir’s beard and hair the last time I saw him. This was recently of course, long after Snakewood. He stank from the month or so of his journey from the Wilds north of Hevendor. He had crooked yellow nuggets for teeth, a finger missing, though he had paid the colour somewhat and had grown as strong and tall as Kigan had believed he would. He would indeed have been a beautiful king but for the life we were given. He told me that to see me so grown, so beautiful and him so rough broke his heart, or would have if he had not such stories to tell me of a daughter he had named after me.
This is what I remember of how we got here.
The evening after Kigan left us in that windmill Petir had gone out with Gemayel, Alven’s drudhan from the windmill, to look for him. We never saw Alven again either, and Snakewood was so busy, so frightening at night, that we had little hope of finding either of them among the rest that plied their trade with the caravans. Days turned into weeks. Petir’s resentment and anger grew, however. Before long he had robbed Gemayel of a harvest’s takings at the point of a sword and dragged me south in a cold autumn that preceded a vicious winter. Gemayel had done his best and didn’t deserve what Petir had done to him. Raiders had come out of the mountains around the borders of Fort Donag and Lagrad in greater numbers than anyone alive had seen, their own nomadic pickings dwindling as their animals died of starvation and cold among the high peaks. Petir had found passage at the cost of most of the coin we’d stolen, with nomads moving south to the Lagrad border hoping for support from the Lake Ahm clans against the raiders. Extra mouths were unwelcome in the north at that time and we were forced to move on alone, beggars by then. At some point we had crossed into Ahmstad itself. The snows had been, but it had become too cold for more to fall, so we found even less in the way of forage, just the silence and indifference of winter.