Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  I was woken by a man who said I reminded him of his daughter, a hunter checking his traps like those we’d preyed upon weeks previously. He put a bearskin over me and his mittens on my hands, fed me morsels of bread, for my saddlebag had been scattered in my delirium. I remember little beyond the beautiful clean white whiskers of his moustache, protecting his smile from the world. He was thin too, he’d lost flesh and his jumper slumped around the bones of his shoulders. After a small bitter apple, he gave me his walking stick and helped me away to his camp.

  He had to argue with his camp’s leader and his wife to be allowed to nurse me, for the bandits and the winter that had moved south from the mountains and highlands of the Citadels and Mount Hope had brought hunger and its attendant savagery to the borders of the wealthiest country in the Old Kingdoms. If I could give that man all the gold I had I would, for he saved my life and fed me at some cost to his own family and people. It did not last long of course; they had no room for another mouth to feed unless it came with a strong back or a good sword-hand.

  They spared me some boots and woollens as the price of my goodbye and gave me directions to the nearest Post House, for I wanted to tell the Post of what had happened to Nielus and his awful crew, and I hoped they would send a party up to the hills to look for my brother. The Post of our nursery tales was as dead as Nielus said it was, or at least had too few of the leaders and numbers to do much more than keep its routes from being overrun completely by bandits.

  A sleepy boy, not much older than myself, walked me from the gate of the Post House to an office next to the stores. He had armour on that must have belonged to a man twice his size, with what looked like two arrow holes in it, at the centre of his chest. He asked for my story of the events that befell us and wrote it down. Shortly, a Red came in cussing and took off his cloak.

  “Carving up fucking pigs again, Reeve’s sold two of ours to some merchant we’ve got our finger up who’s trying to work a contract for tin and he wants one for a spit and the other made into cuts and broth.”

  “Canny’s got you doing it again after last time? He said you fucked it,” said the boy laughing.

  “You need a butcher?” I said.

  “You offering?” They both laughed at me. “Sorry, girl, for you sounds too well spoken altogether for that profession,” said the boy.

  “Who’s this?” said the Red.

  “She come in from the mountains, said Nelly’s up there with his boys but got done by bandits. You need to tell Canny to put a crew together.”

  “Give me the pig that needs butchering and some proper blades,” I said. “If you think you can do better, kick me out. If not, feed me and give me a bunk for the night.”

  He clapped his hands. “I’ll let you sleep with me if you manage it.”

  I knew they would give me the chance, and as charming as the boy was (I felt he had a good heart) I had to tell him to fuck off, but he took it well and the Red cackled away for a good minute while I gathered my blankets and woollens and pack and followed him through to the kitchens. I had stayed out of my mother and father’s way by spending time in the kitchens or with the herdsmen out in the fields, and I’d made a nuisance of myself until they let me help. Over the years I’d learned a lot about the preparation of pigs, cows and birds, more than these Reds.

  I asked the Red what he would do about Nielus and my brother.

  “Nielus was a good man, we’ll get a sortie out for them. Right, here’s the kitchen, this is Foddy. Foddy, she’s doing the pigs or she’s out on her ass.”

  An old man was hunched over a pig on the ground, sewing it up for the spit. He gestured to the other pig stretched out, mouth wide open as though killed while startled.

  The Red left us and the old cook helped me with the pig onto the bench and I earned my bunk with his knives and cleaver. An hour or so later the captain of the Post House came in to tell me that they’d sent a crew of twelve up to find Nielus and the others, confirm whether or not they’d been killed.

  I washed my hands and arms in a bucket of water, exhausted, and the cook saw me to a bunk with the boy and two other Reds that were all that was left.

  “She is an excellent butcher,” was all Foddy said before leaving us.

  I was kicked out of my first proper bed since Snakewood at dawn the following day and made myself useful until the Reds returned from the Donag passes, though that was four days later. I helped Foddy with a stew for them and demanded I help serve so I could ask what had happened as they warmed themselves in the main hall. They had returned with the cloaks that all Reds wear, including Nielus’s. But nothing else. They spent the night getting soaked and singing and telling stories of Nielus, as well as Gerin and Sten, which I couldn’t bear.

  The captain saw me leave and followed.

  “I’m sorry you lost your brother. Nielus’s wife will be here tomorrow, same as always. I would like you to give her his cloak. She may understand then that he made a sacrifice for you and find some peace in his death in the days to come.”

  I washed, dried and folded his cloak myself, ready for the following morning, and I polished his old Marschal’s clasp. It was a piece of copper carved into the shape of a Coldbay Tern, wings like scimitars and tail like a pitchfork, chosen as the Post’s symbol by the Seventh Red, who had seen them in the north and the south and so was the first to know them to fly so far between the seasons.

  Nielus’s wife came up the track to the gates of the Post House and started shaking her head, bringing her horse to a standstill some distance away as she saw all the Reds stood in a row outside the gate, leathers and chain freshly waxed, and their cloaks as bright red and clean as poppies. I stood out in front of them, holding his cloak across my arms as I’d been shown.

  She got down from the trap unsteadily and held onto the harness as she straightened herself. She strode up the slope and the captain began humming “Brother Red”, which the others took up. It always moved me to hear it, and never more than on that morning. She smiled as she approached, the look any good mother would give to a suffering child, for I must have looked dreadful, grey and thin with hunger, damp blackened woollens and the leather boots I was given by that hunter, far too big for me.

  I couldn’t help but cry, knowing of Nielus’s love for her, and I held out his cloak as the Reds became a choir and the captain led them in a beautiful high voice through the words of their glorious and melancholy hymn. The tears shone on her cheeks like gold in the sun, and she shook out his cloak, the breeze catching it, flinging it out behind her, cracking as it rippled. She took the collar and swung the cloak over her shoulders in a smooth strong arc. She clasped it at the neck and took a handful of it up to her nose to breathe it in before wiping her eyes with it.

  She looked at all of them as they sang, clasped her hands in thanks and bowed her head until they’d finished. I stood to the side as each took his turn to approach and share a word with her before going into the Post House, leaving us and the captain alone.

  “How did he die?” she asked, looking at me; she must have intuited that I was with Nielus before he died, for my presence was otherwise incongruous.

  “I was gathering berries, I saw raiders and ran to alert them all. We were ambushed. He, he found my brother and me starving on one of the passes.”

  “The Farlsgrad Creed,” she said. “You lost your brother, didn’t you?”

  “He saved my life. He saved us both, for a time.”

  “You are far from home, a Citadels girl by the looks of you, so beautiful.”

  “She has nowhere and no one,” said the captain, “but she’s by all accounts an excellent butcher; I’m sure she could find work.”

  The woman nodded. “Well then, gather up your things. You can keep me company for the next few days and tell me of my husband.”

  A purse passed between them, some whispered words as they embraced. I had retreated to the gate watching them, but when I came back the captain was gone and she was back on the trap.


  “Put your things in the back and come sit with me. We’ve got some miles to do before we can camp. I’m Sylve.” She pinned back her greying hair and reached down to pull me up, which she managed almost entirely without my help, strong sinewy arms from a life’s hard work.

  She made more of a fuss of me in those few days than my mother ever did. She bathed and washed me, gave up on my matted hair and cut it all back and fattened me up as best she could on cheese and porridge. She had decided to try and find me work and somewhere else to live at a market fair the herders and growers would come to every year in this province of northern Jua.

  It was similar to the markets back in the Citadels. Thousands had come to the City of Elden’s market. There were the auctions for livestock through to the plays and recitals I could not follow because they were in Juan but that seemed from the players to be as bawdy and lacking in deference as those I watched at Argir, judging by the foolery of those in the fine garments having their breeches pulled down or wigs knocked off. Peddlers and traders from the coast of Jua came up with their cages of speaking birds, mewling puppies and stoic lizards, cookers promised brews and compounds that were miracles from furthest Tarantrea or the fabled Hanwoq and Coral Bay. Sylve bought me some tea leaves that were more common here than further north, which I threaded with some soft kannab. I’ve made that tea ever since.

  I wandered into the livestock market, dominated by those buying and selling for the lords. Much of it I couldn’t understand because they weren’t speaking Common, but there was a boy not much older than me haggling over a couple of cows that didn’t look worth anything.

  “Don’t buy them,” I said. I thought he might have been buying for his family, but it turned out he was working for a Juan lord and his master hadn’t arrived, the instruction being to purchase at least five cows.

  “Piss off, girl. You lost?” said the seller.

  I could read him well enough. He knew full well the condition of the cows; I could read it too in their eyes, the way they stood.

  “What makes you think they in’t right?” said the boy.

  “Teats. Apart from being dirty, which is appalling for cows being sold, a couple look infected, they’re leaking. Looking at the back of that one, the haunches are narrow, so you might not have such good calving, and apart from being able to see the ribs on this one a bit too well, I’d say there was only a finger between them, so it won’t fatten as well. Shall we look at the hooves?”

  The boy bowed his head in dismay, and I got the impression he had just avoided getting into an awful lot of trouble.

  “Can you help me…?”

  “I’m Galathia. Yes.” He shook my hand when I held it out.

  “You saved me a beating.”

  “I need somewhere to live. I can work,” I said. Sylve did not have the means, especially now, to feed me.

  “I can speak to my master. He was due here and I’m not sure what’s held him up.”

  I found the boy some good cows, cost him most of the silver he’d been given, and in return he bought us some bread and some berries. Later, his master, head of the lord’s livestock, caught up with the boy and inspected the cows.

  “It was all down to her,” said the boy, fearing getting it wrong, a pained look in his eyes and his ragged mop of brown hair covering his face as he stared at the ground.

  “Well, she has an eye, this girl you’ve picked up. Seven silver is a good price.”

  “He said you might have a place I can sleep. I can work, worked in a royal palace up at the Citadels.”

  “Who are you here with?”

  “Woman that rescued me. I was abandoned.” Strange how I’d lived with it for all this time but only in saying it did I nearly lose control.

  “I think we can find a stable for now and I can have a word with the lord.”

  I found Sylve and told her I had some work as a servant of some sort. She held me, begged me to be safe and gave me some coppers which she wouldn’t let me give back.

  I left Elden’s market driving the cart that they’d brought while they led the cows the few leagues to the Juan High Commune, in the Somskaat region, one of the finest communes in the known world. The woes of my trail ended and I found some peace.

  The following years fared better for me. My education made me suitable to write then cleark for the quartermasters overseeing supplies and shipments of plant. I endured, of course, the attention my body aroused in a commune full of men as I became a woman, but in my work in the kitchens I got to know some of the guards, good men who humoured my wish to learn to use a sword, and better use Nielus’s knife. I would no longer be defenceless. I wanted to be strong, and I studied drudhanry with the apprentices. During these years I lost contact with the outside world, which had taken everything. I was determined that were I to leave the commune, I would not be afraid.

  This being Jua, and this being its High Commune, I found myself at the heart of the Old Kingdoms’ most ancient establishment. Jua, along with Old Ceirad and Issana, established the first modern alliance, out of the wreckage of the Orange Empire of Harudan. Others joined and while allegiances came and went, the name for the lands around the east and west coasts of the Sar stuck, for most of them enjoyed long-lasting wealth and stability by profiting richly from trade between each other and south into the gulf over many generations.

  Jua’s royal lineage and patronage ran further back than that, the oldest unbroken line in all the known lands. The network of royals, merchants and lords that ran Jua now comprised the current custodians of ancient families, legacies and guilds. I toured the estates with the Commune Comprado and drudharchs on the Elevens and Beaches; parties and gatherings on invitation only that brought me in touch with the very wealthiest of men and women outside the Dust Coast. The wealth was sickening, an almost innocent self-righteousness of the culture, for the last civil war was too grand a name for what I’d learned really was a dispute over plant growing among the people, and what constituted personal use. Perhaps it was that I saw in their lacquered pomps, satins and silks the life I’d been denied, but I felt only disdain for the rituals they abided by, poisonous words spat between shimmering fans as the ladies shared their gossip in the pavilions pulled along the Elevens highways between their estates.

  The Filston-Blackmore Company were guests of the Post. Their adventuring carracks, mostly Alon’s, had found a supply run from Coral Bay delivering strykna tree seeds that fed a lucrative poisons market among all the High Communes on the Eastern Sar.

  Forgiven their ignorance of centuries of the Elevens and Beaches’ ritualised courtesies of Jua’s high families, they attended the feasts, as we all did from the commune, in a fearful awkward silence. Positioned with the drudharchs in one of the minor pavilions of the second Beaches, Alon and I were seated together on a rug.

  His courting was boring; he missed few opportunities to discuss his fleet and estate, fewer still the stories of great trades and profits, including the strykna seeds discovery. Those from the commune were amused that he should attempt to woo me so seriously, they knowing how little an interest I showed in the flirting that so many of the boys engaged the few girls at the commune in. They encouraged me nevertheless, and spoke well of him.

  That he wasn’t fat nor interested greatly in whoring was enough for me, for it was clear that he was a very rich man, one of many the great Juan families indulged. The time-honoured trade of wealth for respectability and acceptance was as widespread here as anywhere, if a little more discreet. I could hardly believe how easy it was to go along with his rather clumsy fondling. He was gentle enough, when I’d agreed to accompany him for a play that evening. For the first time in my life I was with a man I did not feel intimidated by. Quite the opposite. I enjoyed it. He seemed as nervous as I when it came to us sharing a pillow. I felt nothing for him, I’m sorry to say, but our joining ceremony was opulent and I realised that whatever I wanted to do now, his wealth would enable me to do it.

  Kigan rose to his knee
s to kiss me. His body wrote the story of his pain. All his suffering had been for me. His revenge was my revenge.

  “You will get back your birthright, if not the book and the plant. You will once more sit on the throne of Argir, or Petir will perhaps. I very much want to hear what became of him.”

  “He will cure us all of the Old Kingdoms. The world is going to change and he is at the heart of it. There is a warlord, Caragula, who has united all of the wild tribes east and north of Lagrad, Ahmstad and the Razhani Province. Hundreds of thousands of men are marching towards us, my brother in the vanguard, one of his generals.”

  After our parting on that snowy pass, Petir, inevitably, became a killer. He would not have me say he cried, for he could not look back to where I was hidden, for fear of someone seeing him do so. The raiders had the numbers, Nielus’s crew dropping one by one, closing up to each other’s backs as they were encircled. Five men stood against thirty and three of those had taken poison enough from their wounds that they collapsed dead as they were circled.

  Petir and the last of Nielus’s crew laid down their swords before the raiders, realising the futility of their position. At the raiders’ head was a man he could now hardly describe for being of such little physical distinction. The man picked his sword off the ground and threw it back at him. A choice was offered with a toothless lisp: die together, or kill the last of Nielus’s men and join his crew, his swordsmanship being in sore need. The Red swore by a magist. Petir’s sword arm trembled as he raised it, his sharp thrust bearing the weight of the raiders’ expectation. He was stripped and made to march naked the leagues back to their camp while the Post’s horses were led behind with everything else they owned apart from the cloaks, for they did not need to identify themselves to any of the Post that might come after them by wearing the robes of those they’d killed.