Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  During the following hour I pasted my knife and reapplied the aconite, then took a measure of the fightbrew I had created in the Hanwoq. The rise was exquisite. Now I could perceive the words of almost everyone in that camp; their shallow boasts, admiration of the babs and backsides of some of the leaders’ consorts, then Harlain, loud like a bull given voice. Around him comments were made about the potency of the sour honey. Then some began to realise something was wrong, a change in tone spreading through conversations about the camp, turning sharply to a panic, shouting that was swiftly strangled. Gradually they all fell silent, food for vultures and dogs. I wondered at and yet also took delight in how effective the poisons were.

  I stepped through the muslin of Harlain’s pavilion and over the bodies lying on the thick rugs of his opulent dining chamber. As I expected, I could hear only one other breathing.

  Harlain regarded me thoughtfully, the man of ten or so years before had grown thick about his arms and belly, the line of jaw once so clear was softened with luxury.

  “Agent of Alagar, your day goes well, you have achieved a great blow to my people. Know you would have been welcome, Kigan.”

  And so I knew my name again. It was a shock, like he’d hit me. In those moments he could have killed me, but I recovered; losing focus kills you, a lesson learned at the academy with sticks and stones and broken bones.

  “I am neither an agent of Alagar nor am I convinced of my welcome given what I need from you. You will tell me what happened to me last you saw me, Harlain. All these long years since then have been defined by my suffering as a slave, but the Droop took the memory of exactly who had betrayed me of our old crew. You were there at the tavern. I remember we had argued about my purse, to protect that old king’s children and escort them to Jua. Somebody poisoned me, sold me into slavery. If not you, who was it?”

  He tried to rise to his feet, but the poison was taking hold. His legs refused to take his weight.

  “My day goes badly, my allies’ healer brings only death. Your discourtesy in this place dishonours you, no greet and no wrong done?” He shook his head in disgust. “I heard nothing of you, Kigan. South you went to share the gold those snow-white children took from their people, this I believe, but you sit here older in the eyes and leaner with hard work than comes of sitting on pillows.”

  “Where are the others then? You tell me you believed I had left with the children? Lying to me won’t help you, not on this brew. You don’t have long, Harlain, the anti-venom is here and I would very much like to give it to you. I was betrayed and I need to know who poisoned me, who profited. You were there, you must have seen something.”

  He took a moment, his eye on the vial I placed on the rug before me.

  “You did not join my songs or share my jars when we drank to our own glory, or you would know my pity now, that you think this of me, an Ageh. We went well, Kailen, Moadd and Sho. I do not remember a farewell to the others. Gold flowered in our hands, the salted edge of life walked. Moadd’s great story was ended by an arrow. He fed the grassland of the Dust Coast. All our rivers cut the world’s face, until we slow into the lakes of our reckoning. Kailen had reached his lake, and so had I. We parted on the Day of Rains, which would be thirteen rains past.”

  Harlain caught his breath, sweat trickled over his forehead and cheeks, his hands beginning to tremble. He gestured to the dead around us.

  “Wine we would have put in your cup, Kigan, but you put poison in ours. Great hurt and trouble you bring to Tetswana, war blossoms from this poisoning and I have no story that would move the sons of these tribes to believe me otherwise. There was always so little of the spring in you. There is drought enough about this world to challenge our strength, what need therefore to add to it? What could have quenched your drought, Kigan? You must answer that yourself, for I think you will get no ease of thirst from Harlain of the Ageh.”

  I leaped to catch his hand but was a moment too late. He had drawn a knife firmly and quickly across his throat, falling backward and releasing a broad spray of blood over the chamber. I felt only frustration as I watched him dying, for I had tackled this badly.

  I placed the black coin in his hand, stood and packed what mansok I could, salting it for the weeks I would take a kamil east to the Sar. The wild dogs that sensed a feast showed little interest in me as I drove the kamil out of the camp, down through the Ironwoods and scrub towards the Eastmark star. As I rode I tried my name again, saying it over and over, hoping it was a key that would help me remember more, perhaps everything. It did none of that. Sand was as familiar and acceptable a name as Kigan, for all that it was the name of orphans or others that were nameless in the Midden lands about the world.

  I picked up caravan work in nearby Rhosidia, moving north to Limao and Handar, seeking word of the Twenty. The best drudhas in these squalorous seaports were no more than cookers running droop joints for the plant-soaked sailors, mercs and pirates that found haven on those coasts. I sought out those of the colour and peddled my mixes in stifling alleys and the backs of bars and whoredigs. With little serious competition for my artistry the mercs were soon seeking me out around the Bay of Alante, Limao’s main seaport, where the “unlicensed” found little trouble. It was six months before I heard the name “Milu”. I sat sipping rum with two lecherous soaks shipping horses, or “ganneys” as they called them, from Alagar, the ganneys no doubt to end up bearing the Post’s messengers on their web of routes through the Old Kingdoms. The two were paying a fine price from their apparently senile Maiol’s expenses purse for a mix I brewed to increase ardour, their cocks swollen at the sight of almost any girl with sufficiently prominent babs.

  The one mentioned meeting Milu, now working with a Maiol’s ganney stables, “Maiol” meaning “Lord” in Alagar, rectifying an apparent weakness in his trade book. They marvelled at Milu’s work, as I had when Kailen picked him up as a squire from a prince we had a purse with.

  I told them of my longing to see Alagar, perhaps to find a patron there. More rum cemented a promise that I would join them on their return from Issana.

  The stink of that bay, situated near the midden where the hours of night and day were equal, gave way to the increasingly lush plains of Alagar as I took my place in their returning caravan.

  There are few sights more capable of silencing a man than the herds of free horses, numbering many thousands, roaming the hills and plains of Alagar. The Maiols farmed this stock wisely for their stallions and mares, sought the world over.

  The caravan took me to within a hundred miles of the Maiol’s estate where Milu worked. I met nobody until I arrived at the estate, settlements forbidden on parts of the great plains over which the herds migrated. I was escorted in by scouts to meet with the men running the estate. I professed my intent to the stablemaster and quartermaster to earn my keep, wishing to learn a trade now my fighting days were done. Once more the rare opportunity to engage a drudha swayed their doubts.

  The stablers and fieldworkers were barracked away from the singers and masters. Two days after my arrival I had found where Milu worked. Suggesting I go hunting for betony, a salve of which was good for cuts and soothed the nerve of both man and horse, I headed out across a river and more wooded land to the yards of the warhorses.

  I heard his singing as I approached the whitewashed pits, paddocks dug into the ground to allow observers and customers a view sheltered by the grand wooden roof fanning out over the pit cluster, the walls of the pits providing amplification of the songs.

  He was alone, the other singers and stablers gone for the day. The air was sweet and dense with the rhythm of his melodic humming, almost chewing the sound with an impressively small songpiece, the same as that of our time in the Twenty. Every singer crafts their own piece, as unique as their face. The song filled the pit that the stallion stood in, its hoof worrying the ground as the drone filled its head. Milu brought his note up and down according to the shivering of the horse, his great cheeks and chest able to hold note
s for minutes at a time. Shortly, the stallion stepped towards him, the note lowering until my head pounded. Then he stopped. I didn’t realise my eyes were closed. He was looking up at me. He carefully led the stallion through a doorway beneath where I stood.

  I coated my lips with the barrier, then the poison.

  “Kigan?” He approached from a paddock a short walk away. The Roob brew he took was still a strong one, among the singers’ brews, his voice carrying profoundly across the air between us.

  “Milu. It’s been many years.” I smiled, holding my arms out.

  Like most of those I’d kill, he was fuller in girth, the skin muddy. His hair only grew in clumps, common with a horse-singer’s mix. His neck and cheeks, from the singing, were now a distorted, jowly bag, atop which his features seemed small, like islands clustered in an ocean.

  He smiled, we kissed cheeks, which was his way.

  “It’s good to find you, Milu.”

  “Kigan, I hope you are here to teach these cookers how to make a six properly. Where have you been all these years?”

  He rubbed his cheek and frowned. Harlain’s death was ill-conceived. This would be more instructive.

  He lunged at me then, understanding what had happened immediately. I stepped back, catching his arm and helping him to the ground as he began choking. We were against the wall of the pit, out of sight.

  “The paste you felt on your cheek will not kill you, Milu, but it will prevent you from lying to me. Now you’re going to tell me what happened at Snakewood, the night I was enslaved? You will tell me if Galathia and Petir were killed.”

  He held his throat, breathing hoarsely, then mumbling. The Weeper was taking hold. He sputtered as he tried to lock his jaws and press his lips shut between words.

  “Nothing, I’m not going to… Mirisham, Mirisham carried you out with Valdir. But you were speaking, you spoke wrong of Kailen, always–fuck you–always knew better…” He tried to burst from my arms, frenzied and spitting with fear, but had nothing of his former strength. I held him tight, legs around his, squeezing him still.

  “Where is Mirisham?” I whispered. “Did he plot to get rid of me?”

  “I, I saw nothing of them, you were drunk, they helped get you somewhere to sleep.”

  “Where are the others?”

  He looked at me as I held him, pleading through gasps.

  “The Prince is a partner in the Quartet. Kh… Kheld is… Kigan, you cocksmoking fucker… Kheld is a Handar shipwright. He’s a good man, you don’t need to do this.”

  “Of course I do. While I lost my memories for a long time after that poison, I’ve recovered many, enough to remember your revulsion, Kheld’s too, to my services, my research. You all took my mixes and all too readily yet when it came to burning the bodies of those that helped me refine them, not one of you apart from Ibsey and Bense offered to help except when Kailen instructed you to do it. My fightbrews and poisons gave you the life you have, and at the end, for that, when my final purse became known, there wasn’t one of you stood up for me.”

  “Is it gratitude? Is that all it is, Kigan?” He was struggling to speak.

  “No, it is what the lack of respect cost me and cost those children, that is what you are paying for now. I cannot let you live, Milu, not while there is a chance a warning from you would reach The Prince before I find him.” I punched him, his nose, quickly enough he could not react, stupefied for a moment. In stopping him from breathing through his nose he opened his mouth and before he could react I took a thumb of poison from my belt and pressed it to the inside of his cheek. I then took a black coin and put it in his hand as he shook with a creeping paralysis. Now dying, it was only moments before he stopped breathing. All manner of regret escaped him in those last breaths, some girl here at the stable he seemed lost on, memories of his father also, who beat him until he found peace in the singing.

  I saddled up the horse he had sung to and left the estate, riding east in the dark. Handar was close, but I shortly discovered the Quartet was closer.

  The Quartet was a venerable trading guild that offered the Post its only serious competition on the main Rhosidia to Jua shiel runs. As a Partner, The Prince would be somewhere near its heart, his family connections of high value in the seduction of the nobles and quartermasters that ran such trade across the Sar.

  I waited, hiding up in Port Bronso, listening, living off some plain, decent mixes that wouldn’t get me noticed.

  I dyed my skin and got some more respectable robes for access to the merchants and the officers off the Post and Quartet ships. Beyond a sweltering summer that brought disease and sickness to the streets, the autumn shiel harvests were cut and pressed. On the docks it was the Grandhouse Findel’s sigil that adorned much of the cargo for the sloops and junks, and I learned that it was at Findel’s estate the Quartet would house its harvest celebration, inviting their fleet’s officers and other worthies to a feast.

  I trailed a number of the Grandhouse’s servants and workers as they left the estate. Of them, the most accessible was a popular old cook, a drinker and card player.

  He played cards well, an endless list of tales and jokes of the most lewd kind, fleecing some gilded lordlings and sailors alike while they laughed at a large table in a busy quayside droop joint for those fresh off the boats. I took a seat with a bottle of brandy and spun the yarn of my travels while he took my money. As the evening wore on and the cups took their toll his pile diminished before him, better players out in the night. I had done little to persuade him of my worth in the Findel kitchens until his son walked in, rescuing his father from his familiar vice. His son had river blindness, one eye enough to get him by, the condition giving him a stooped demeanour, as though he needed to get closer to the road to see his way along it.

  I told the cook I could cure that blindness, for I had learned of such plant in the Hanwoq. He became serious for the first time, taking my arm for an oath that his son’s sight would mean a job at the Findel house.

  Later that night he staggered against his sober and serious son as they followed me to a lodging I had with the family of a Watchman. I pressed out the alka in which the compound was suspended and with a warning I put a thumb’s worth of it on his eyes and held him while he screamed out. They were to return the next morning, which they did, the son knocking at the house door early at dawn, half dressed, stood tall and hysterical with the clear sight he’d gained on waking. The cook wept and took me with him to the Findel estate and its astonishing marble palace.

  The work in the kitchens was surprisingly hard, but after five weeks there I learned a great deal about the Quartet and the living arrangements for the principal merchants’ retinue. I knew where The Prince would be from the moment he arrived and had much time to plan that it was I who would take him his meals, persuading the usual maidservant to switch our duties.

  The Prince took a balcony room overlooking a central oval courtyard dominated by an obsidian fountain that could take forty men bathing; grand lawns and giant potted shrubs surrounded it, sheltered alcoves along the walls beneath the rooms for the discretion of guests doing business.

  His fish and wine were tasted at the door, as I suspected.

  The room, like the skin of the palace, was of fine white marble, blood red rugs over the floor, olika wood chests and a simple bed. He was gazing from the open shutters out to the aqueduct that fed the huge lawns and groves sheltering the view of the palace from the arid hills beyond.

  “Your fish, Prince.”

  It took a moment, then he remembered.

  “Kigan! By Sillindar. How are you here bringing me this food? I was promised a most delicious maid.”

  He made no move to approach me, gesturing me to sit at a small table, where I placed the tray of fish and wine. We sat. I showed him the brand I was given back at Snakewood.

  “I gained my freedom when I was shipwrecked, I have had a testing few years since last we met. I work here now. I heard you were visiting so asked to see yo
u.”

  “Slavery? How awful.” He took his time pouring the wine into a glass before offering it to me. He was buying time to think. He was still handsome, still no hair troubling his chin and lip, typical of his people. He left his colour as it would be, the scarlet and green of the old fightbrews gone muddy like Milu’s. The oiled hair and embroidered robe, coupled with his scrubbed hands and painted nails, was perfectly of the Rhosidian nobility he had come to court for his merchant. His frame had shrunk with the lack of work, but his voice had a hearty, peaceful sound still. He poured some wine and drank.

  “I have had appalling news, Kigan, of the massacre of a number of Tetswanan leaders at a gathering, fifty or more men dead, including our own Harlain.”

  “He went back to Tetswana then?” I said.

  “Indeed. He and Kailen continued on for a while after Argir. I think he lost his ‘flint’ as we used to say.” He smiled and picked at the skin of the fish I’d brought. “But more interestingly, I heard a few days ago through a Maiol we’ve invited to this feast that Milu has also been killed.”

  “Milu as well? Killed, not just, well, dead?”

  “Yes, it is strange, and Digs also. He went back to the Ten Clan and was found dead there as well. I understand black coins were found on their bodies, Milu and Harlain’s anyway.”

  “A black coin, a betrayal?” I was buying time and wondered if he knew it, for I had no idea who would have hunted and killed Digs for a purpose so similar to my own.

  “Yes. It’s as well I found you, a great drudha serving me fish. You should be careful.”

  “I have been brought low. Whatever had been used to subdue me to make me a slave has taken my memories, an ephedra mix of some sort. I can no longer cook. What happened to me, Prince? Do you recall? At Snakewood I was betrayed by one of us, poisoned there and put to slavery.”

  “I was not there, Kigan, indeed I’m rather overwhelmed to see you here. I’ll not say a word of your escape to our host.”