The Dark Defiles
Page 76
She got up in silence, collected the ripped gown from where he’d left it on the floor the night before. She pulled it around her as best she could. Then she walked straight backed and silent still, all the way to the doorway and out. Left him alone with his food and the empty bed.
He stared after her for a couple of moments. Shook his head and snorted.
“She’ll come for me. Yeah, right!”
CHAPTER 69
thin, muffled keening comes from the Dispossessed Prince’s tent.
Outside, they exchange bleak looks. The last healer is long gone, thrown out in a flurry of screaming and tears. She went away with tear tracks on her cheeks herself. No one wants to guess the bad news, but it’s growing clearer by the minute. By now, Moss should have been out with his newborn held high in his hands, grinning like a loon.
But so far, they haven’t even heard his voice.
Haven’t heard a newborn’s cry, either.
“Hoy, who the fuck—”
“—said you can’t—”
Disturbance beyond the ring of flames from the campfire. They spin about, groping for what few weapons the troupe can lay claim to. An ax, a spear, an unused tent pole—
And freeze, as they see the figure in the firelight.
Tall and broad shouldered, wrapped in a patched and battered sea captain’s cloak, face shadowed beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Across his shoulder, the newcomer carries a broadsword, sheathed in a scabbard of woven metal that throws back the light in myriad glints of gold and purple and crimson red.
“I am here for Moss’s son,” the figure says. “You’d best let me through.”
They fall back, inches at a time, and he shoulders a path through the gap they’ve left. He reaches the entrance to the Dispossessed Prince’s tent and ducks inside. The volume of the keening rises briefly as he passes through, then grows muffled again. It’s not clear to anyone later whether he actually lifted the flap, or whether it flung itself back rather than be touched.
Inside, the father swings about at the new arrival. He’s a big, weather-beaten man, but his face is tracked wet with tears and his hands knotted up into trembling fists. His jaw is set, and he’s breathing hard through his nose. You can see in his face and stance just how badly he wants to hit someone.
“Who the fuck are you? I told Rif nobod—”
“Sit down,” says the newcomer coldly, and Moss drops into the chair by the bed like he’s had his legs cut out from under him. “Give me the child.”
The mother sits up in bed amid tangled, bloodstained sheets. It’s her mouth the keening comes from, through lips stretched taut across her teeth, as if she’s still straining through the clench and the pain of labor. But she isn’t. She’s curved over, rocking minutely back and forward, hugging a tiny bundle of limbs and skull and cord to her chest, as if that’s going to help. The sound coming out of her seems to fill the space inside the tent like freezing fog. She looks up at the cloaked and brim-hatted figure, the long arm it extends toward her, and she shakes her head numbly. Denial moans from her.
“… no, no, no, he’s not, he isn’t, no, he’s not …”
“Well, he fucking will be if you don’t give him to me.”
And just as her husband has slumped into the chair, so she opens her arms and mutely holds out the silent, unmoving bundle of blue-tinged, blood-streaked flesh she’s been hugging. The newcomer scoops the infant up in a single, gnarled hand and holds it there as if it needs weighing. His other hand brings the sword down off his shoulder and holds it up reversed by the grip. He looks from sword to unbreathing child and back again, and later the mother will say she heard him sigh.
Then he opens his mouth and bites down hard on the sword’s pommel.
The bereft mother gapes, stirred right out of her grief by the new shock. Beneath the brim of the hat, the muscles in the stranger’s jaws knot and contort. A snarling builds in his throat, the breath hisses in and out of his nose and mouth. There’s a sound of something splintering and a thin howl of pain. One more sharp breath drawn in.
The stranger spits out the pommel and with it some fragments that might be teeth or metal or both. Blood drips from his lower lip, black in the gloomy light, and where droplets of it spatter the bed, holes smolder in the sheets. The stranger drops the sword to the floor, holds the infant with both hands now, puts one finger into the tiny mouth and forces it open a crack. He stoops and places his lips over the gap.
Breathes softly out.
The mother gapes. Moss struggles in his chair against limbs turned soggy and numb. The stranger lifts his hat-shadowed face away.
Mewling cry, just the one, scarcely loud enough to believe. The infant’s fist lifts at the end of a stubby arm. The head twitches and turns. A second cry, louder now. The mother shrieks and reaches for her child. Moss’s lower lips quivers and he starts blubbering like a small child himself. The infant is crying hard now, not wanting to be left out.
The stranger hands him gently to his mother.
“Fucking mortals,” he mutters under his breath. “It ends in tears, it starts in tears. Why the fuck do I even bother?”
He stands back and lets Moss shamble to his shaky feet, gestures for him join his wife and son on the bloodied bed. Then he reaches around inside his mouth, grimaces and tugs something loose, spits on the floor, and bends to gather up the sword.
“Time you were in a fucking museum,” he tells it.
At the tent flap, he pauses and looks back. The infant is already at the breast, fastened on and suckling hard. The mother’s still weeping, right onto his upturned puffy features. Moss looks up from his family, snatched suddenly out of grief, sees the dark figure still standing there like some hangover from a bad dream. He wipes at his eyes, suddenly self-conscious. Sniffs and gasps, gets himself under some sort of command.
“I—we—this is a great debt.” He swallows. “Who? Who are you?”
The stranger sighs. “Give it some thought. It’ll come to you in the morning, probably. But it’s not important.” An arm raised, a gnarled finger pointing. “He’s important. He’s got things to do, further down the road. You look after him, you keep him safe.”
“But …” The mother looks up from her feeding child. She’s getting it together a lot faster than her husband. “If we do not know your name, how can we honor you with his?”
“Oh, that.” The shadowed figure shrugs. “Well, all right. Call him Gil.”
Then he’s gone, through a gap that might be just the entrance flap of the tent, and might not. A tiny chill comes in and walks around the bed, then warms slowly away. The mother gathers her son closer to her.
“Gheel?” she asks her husband blankly.
Moss shrugs. “Hjel. I think.”
“Hjel, then. Good. It is a strong name. I like it.”
And the two of them huddle together around the new spark of life they’ve been handed by a bad-tempered, broken-mouthed god gone away.
The Dark Defiles is for Daniel.
I’ll be there for the seaweed, mate
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As perhaps befits a quest narrative, The Dark Defiles has sheltered under a number of different roofs on the long journey to its completion. Thanks are due to the following gracious hosts, unsung heroes and friends to the quest:
To Roger Burnett and Inka Schorn for lending me not just one but two places in the sun from which to work, and for supplementing the loan throughout with bright company, kind words and emergency pasta.
To Gilbert Scott and Luisa Termine for giving me workspace right up until day of sale, and for searching out a beautiful oak table for me to work on when the existing one evaporated under family pressure.
To my wife Virginia for buying, fitting and accepting with good grace the shiny new lock on my office door, even when it rendered her a de facto single mother for days at a time, time and time again.
To my son Daniel for solemnly accepting at less than two years of age that no, he couldn’t come t
o work with me, even if it was only in the next room.
To Simon Spanton and Anne Groell for Understanding well beyond the Call of editorial Duty.
To my agent Carolyn Whitaker for patience, calm and good advice as ever—even if I did end up ignoring the latter almost entirely. I would not have reached journey’s end without you.
By Richard K. Morgan
Takeshi Kovacs Novels
Altered Carbon
Broken Angels
Woken Furies
Market Forces
Thirteen
The Steel Remains
The Cold Commands
The Dark Defiles
About the Author
RICHARD K. MORGAN is the acclaimed author of The Cold Commands, The Steel Remains, Thirteen, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Woken Furies, Market Forces, Broken Angels, The Steel Remains, and Altered Carbon, a New York Times Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award. Morgan sold the movie rights for Altered Carbon to Joel Silver and Warner Bros. His third book, Market Forces, has also been sold to Warner Bros and was the winner of the John W. Campbell Award. He lives in Scotland.