No, this man was all wrong. But he was kneeling before me and I did have my sword resting on his neck and in a moment his head would go flying across the room and hit the wall with a pleasant thunk. I was looking forward to that thunk. I had dreamed about it through the endless miles and rain that had brought me here, on foot and half dead.
The man was about to say something, but then a small coughing fit overtook him and I felt it polite to wait a moment, since he looked rather undernourished and no doubt had a nasty cold. I also didn’t want any noise when I took his head off.
A moment later, the coughing stopped. ‘Before you kill me, would it be inappropriate to ask a question?’ His voice was thin and wheezy, and to my ears sounded half calm and half crazy, but I was a poor judge, being completely crazy myself at the time.
‘You want to know why I’m going to kill you?’ I asked.
‘No, I already know that,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering why you brought me here in the first place.’
I was confused by the question, and I really didn’t have much time for confusion since soon enough someone would decide to follow the trail of filth I had left behind me to the King’s chamber. So I decided to cut off his head and bring it with me and we could discuss the situation on my way home.
‘What I mean is,’ he said, interrupting my train of thought, ‘if my father had wanted me dead so that Dergot could become King, why go through all the trouble of having me brought here?’
‘You’re stupid,’ I said. ‘I have to kill King Greggor. You’re in his room and you’re wearing a crown. And I have this sword with me and the bag that the old woman gave me with food but the food’s all gone so now I need to put something in the bag and—’
‘You have reason to hate King Greggor?’
‘I do,’ I said. And then, if only because I had rehearsed it in my mind and it felt wrong not to tell someone, I recited the entire speech I had planned for the King, about what he had done to Aline and my life, and how the Duke, though he definitely deserved to die, would probably have let us alone if not for the King, and how I was going to kill him now and no God would embrace him or speak his name, and how I would make sure that his reign wouldn’t be remembered for anything but the fact that one night a filthy peasant had sneaked into his room and murdered him.
I had worked it out on the road, and it was short and not too badly composed, I thought, but then I kept going, and I talked about the walking and the rain and the men who had tried to kill me and the Duke’s head which was now buried in an old woman’s garden. I talked about what it felt like to not be a human being any more, not really, and to finally climb up a river of shit to kill a man who needed killing more than any other man who had ever lived, only to find that he’d been replaced by a scrawny man who said stupid things.
I told him all that and he just sat there on his knees and listened. And when I was done he asked, ‘Are you still going to kill me?’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘It’s really all I can think of doing right now.’
‘Can I tell you who I am first?’ he asked.
‘If I listen will you promise to stop talking so I can hear the thunk when your head hits the wall?’
The scrawny man thought about that for a moment. ‘Marked,’ he said.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Paelis,’ he said. ‘Paelis the Pathetic, twenty-two years of age, son and greatest disappointment of King Greggor and Queen Yesa. Deemed lacking in physical and moral fortitude and therefore removed by royal decree as first heir to the throne in favour of his three-year-old brother Dergot, who, as it turns out, fell out of a window when no one was watching him, some two hours after the King died yesterday.’
The scrawny man started coughing again and I wondered if his head would still cough once it was separated from his body. After a moment, he stopped coughing and went on, ‘Since the day, three years ago, my father finally managed to pull another son out of my step-mother’s womb he has kept me locked in a tower with no warmth, little food and only as much water as leaked through the roof to drink. He waited for me to waste away and die, for no other reasons than that my words displeased him. He didn’t want the Saints’ curse for spilling royal blood.
‘You are not the first man whose life was destroyed by King Greggor. You say your grief is worse than mine, and I accept that. You say you want to see his reign forgotten for all time? I say, I am your man. I have spent every day of my life dreaming – no, more than dreaming, planning – a way to rid this world of my father’s benighted touch. You want his kingdom destroyed? Then I say again: I am your man.’
‘I am your man.’ It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever sought to put themselves beneath me, and it had come from a King. I thought about what he’d said and about what I would do next and I said something, but I don’t remember what it was because that was when the crossbow bolt hit me in the back.
*
I awoke to the sound of what I thought was my mother’s sewing. She liked to use a stiff, strong needle and thick thread when she worked, and the soft pop of the needle through the fabric was inevitably followed by the snaking sound of the thread being pulled. I tried to stay in that moment as long as I could, but even hazy as I was I remembered that my mother was several years dead, that I was a twenty-year-old man, and that I had tried to murder a King.
‘You may as well open your eyes,’ a woman’s voice said, and when I did as she asked I saw an old woman sitting on a chair near my bed, sewing blue fabric with gold thread.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ I said.
She nodded, but kept on sewing.
‘In the cottage by the South Road. We – did we bury a head in your garden?’ I asked.
She snorted. ‘Probably best not to talk about that now, I’d say.’
I looked around the room. It looked like the same room where I’d tried to kill the King. In fact, I was almost certain it was.
‘I’m in his room,’ I said to her.
‘The maids tell me he wouldn’t let them move you. Figured you wouldn’t survive it, what with your wounds and all.’
‘The crossbow bolt. It hit me in the back,’ I said stupidly.
‘The bolt? Sweet ugly Saints, boy, you were bleeding from a dozen festering wounds by the time they found you. I think they only kept you alive to figure out which God made that deal with you.’
Death. Love abandoned me and so I made my deal with Death.
‘Are you a seamstress?’ I asked.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Seamstress is what you call the person who fixes your dress, boy. I’m a tailor. The last real tailor, in fact.’
I had the feeling that it would be impolite to inform her that every city in the world had a dozen tailors. ‘Fine, a tailor then. What are you doing here?’ I asked.
She didn’t bother looking up this time. ‘Well, a good tailor knows which way the threads are moving. After you left, I thought about it for a while and reckoned they might have need of my skills here.’
‘The King doesn’t have his own tailors?’ I asked.
She looked at me as if I was an idiot. Which is fair, I suppose. ‘I told you, boy, there ain’t any other tailors left. Besides, there ain’t no one else knows how to sew what I’m making.’
‘Which is?’
Someone knocked at the door and I thought the woman would say something, but she just kept sewing. After a moment the knocking repeated.
‘It’s your damned bedroom,’ the woman called out. ‘Whose bloody permission are you waiting for?’
The door opened and the man from the night before – the King, I guess – entered the room. ‘Now if only I could get all my loyal subjects to treat me with such respect,’ he said jovially. ‘Most of the ones I encounter just want to kill me.’
He had changed his clothes and bathed and looked a lot more kingly to my eyes. He looked like he’d eaten better, too. That thought woke me up. ‘How long have I been unconscious?�
� I asked.
‘You’ve been mostly dead for twelve days,’ the King said.
‘Twelve days? How is that possible?’
He coughed a bit and then walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, which struck me as rude, but then I remembered it was technically his bed.
‘You were in Death’s embrace, remember? You hadn’t slept for Saints know how long and you probably hadn’t eaten for a week.’
I was feeling irritated now, which told me I still wasn’t quite right in the head. ‘So how come I didn’t die of hunger if I’ve been unconscious for the past twelve days?’
The Tailor warned me off. ‘Best not to ask. It wasn’t very pretty. Involved a cloth tube and some sticks.’
The King ignored her. ‘Don’t worry, my strange friend. You had the best of care.’ The Tailor snorted but the King went on, ‘I took care of you myself, with the help of the royal doctors.’
I found that hard to believe. ‘You took care of me yourself? Washed my wounds and changed my sheets?’
‘And wiped your arse,’ the Tailor chimed in happily.
‘Well,’ the King said, ‘it was only fair. It was my man who shot you in the back, so I thought it a fair trade. The world should be fair, you know.’
The world should be fair. For some reason that started me laughing and I thought about all the things that had happened and I just kept laughing over and over, and then suddenly the laughter turned to something else and I heard great wracking sobs pouring from my mouth and my eyes were bleeding tears and I swear I thought I would drown in them because for some reason I just couldn’t stop.
The King whispered in the Tailor’s ear and she got up and left, and then he did something very strange. He reached over and took my head in both his hands, just the way Aline sometimes did when she needed me to listen, the way she had done that day at the cottage. And the King said this: ‘A wise man would tell you she’s gone, friend, and that you must let her go because nothing will ever bring her back. But I’m not a wise man – not yet, anyway. So I promise you this: I will bring her to you. I swear to you, friend, that some day, somehow, through whatever influence a King may have on Gods and Saints, I will bring her back to you. They say everyone faces Death alone, but I will break that law if that’s what it takes.’ He let go of my head and his hands dropped to his sides.
He coughed and wiped something from his mouth. ‘But not today. Today, I need your help. I need to change the world, because the world won’t last the way it is much longer. I can do this – I know in my heart and in my mind that I can do this, but I need someone like you. I need someone who can walk for twenty days and nights and fight through every hell on earth to get justice – but not just justice for himself, justice for others.’ He let the words hang there for just a moment before he said, ‘I will bring you to your wife one day, but today I need you to bring justice to my people.’
He sat back and his shoulders hunched and he was the weak, skinny man I’d almost killed once again. I had stopped crying, though I knew I would start again soon. This little King was mad, as mad as I was, but there was nothing else left. I knew what he said was true. Even the Gods, as feckless and fickle as they were, would not long suffer a world of King Greggors and Duke Yereds to survive.
‘I’m not ready,’ I said.
‘You have to be. It has to start now.’
I choked on my own spit for a second. When they take the last good thing from your life, how do you answer?
‘How does it begin?’ I asked.
The King got this little smile on his face, small, almost unnoticeable. I would learn this was one of his most defining characteristics. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Falcio,’ I said. ‘Falcio val Mond.’
‘Falcio,’ he began, ‘when you were a boy, did anyone ever tell you stories about the Greatcoats?’
THE GATES OF RIJOU
‘And I swear to you, your Ladyship, you don’t want any part of Rijou,’ I shouted back. ‘They don’t call it the “City of Strife” for nothing.’
The voice in the carriage was even, but I could hear an edge of anger as she said, ‘And I have told you, my tatter-cloak, that we have business with Jillard, Duke of Rijou, and we will enter the city tonight.’
‘My Lady … he’s not completely wrong about this.’ Even Feltock was with me on this one, and he never contradicted the Lady. Rijou was a city with nineteen noble houses, all of which fought with each other in endless cycles of intrigues, assassinations and occasionally outright war. The Duke of Rijou did nothing to stop the violence and everything to encourage it, not least because the murders kept those vying for his position in check and the wars kept their private armies small and manageable.
But, for everyone else, Rijou was an awful place. From a distance it gleamed. I don’t mean it shimmered, nor did it shine; it gleamed, the gleam of oily skin on a corpse, or the gleam in the eye of a man who fancies he can kill you without consequence. The city might be rich and opulent, but it was treacherous for anyone without a sheriff in their pocket and an army at their back. In Rijou there was nothing to stop a landlord from changing the terms of a lease anytime he wanted, so long as he could get authorisation from the sheriff. The King had sent Brasti and me there once to hear a jeweller’s dispute with his noble landlord. In this case he had changed the terms to allow himself to set the jeweller’s prices. We heard the case and passed judgement in the jeweller’s favour, only to find him dead the next morning. The Duke paid the fine without question, and the smile on his face told us we were welcome back anytime we wanted to see someone else killed. I had sworn then that one day I would come back and bring justice to this shithole. But I had failed in that, as I had in so many things since. How much justice could I hope to bring to an entire city if I couldn’t even keep one old man alive?
‘My Lady,’ I tried one last time, ‘no one can promise to protect you once we are inside the city gates.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘We have ten good men with us and you’ve done an admirable job so far of fighting off brigands.’
‘But you see, we can’t take the whole caravan into the city. The Duke’s men won’t allow it. And if you try to enter with more than two or three men-at-arms, someone will think you’re starting a house war and you’ll be killed.’
I waited as she considered this behind her curtains. Finally she said, ‘Very well then. Feltock, take this tatter-cloak and two others and follow my carriage into town so that I may conduct my business with the Duke.’
It was my turn to pause as I tried to find the right words. ‘My Lady, it’s unlikely the Duke will agree to see you. I have no doubt that in your home of Orison you are a person of great consequence, but in Rijou you will be nothing more than another target.’
‘Nothing more?’ she said from behind the curtains of the carriage. The tone of her voice didn’t bode well for me. ‘Feltock?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Tell your pistolman to put a steel ball in that man’s head if he does not immediately mount his horse and lead us down into the city.’
Feltock didn’t hesitate to signal the little man who carried the pistol. He turned to see what I would do. He liked me better these days, and he probably agreed with me about Rijou, but he was a military man and he followed the orders he was given.
Kest was standing by my left shoulder. I couldn’t see Brasti, so I assumed that he had hidden himself, his bow at the ready, behind one of the trees that lined the road into the city.
‘I think I might be able to stop the ball from the pistol,’ Kest said matter-of-factly. ‘Using the angle of the barrel, I should be able to figure out roughly where the ball should hit.’
‘Roughly?’ I asked.
‘It’s never been done before. You’ve got to take a few chances with this kind of thing.’
‘For what it’s worth, my advice is let’s not die right now and save that idea for another day,’ I said, and mounted up on my horse.
I looked around and saw Brast
i resting on top of some blankets on one of the open wagons.
‘That’s some fine cover you were giving me there, Brasti.’
He yawned and patted the bow that rested against his leg. He had ten arrows arrayed in front of him so I suppose I should have been grateful for that.
‘I have every confidence in your diplomatic skills,’ he said, ‘especially when it involves following orders. But you’re crazy if you think going back into Rijou is better than trying to parry pistols. Don’t worry. I’ll stay here and guard the caravan.’
‘Get off your ass, boy, you’re comin’ with us,’ Feltock growled. ‘Since you all appear to know so much about it, I’m sure you’ll do a fine job of guarding the Lady’s dignity along with your own skins.’
‘The three of us could always kill you and leave once we’re away from the rest of the caravan, you realise,’ Kest said.
‘True,’ Feltock said. Then he started laughing. ‘But then you’d still have no money and no employer and, from what little I’ve heard, Duke Jillard don’t waste a lot of sentiment on tatter-cloaks now, does he?’
‘I may just kill you on principle if you keep calling us that,’ I said, but Kest, Brasti, Feltock and I led the carriage along the wide, tree-lined avenue that leads from the caravan route, past the first gates and into the city proper. Rijou isn’t exactly a fortress town, but it does have three sets of iron gates. The first we passed through looked unguarded, but the trees that grew alongside the road provided excellent hiding places for the half a dozen guards with crossbows. If you don’t look suspicious enough to be shot on sight and no one has paid the guards to kill you, you can carry on to the second gates, where the men are armoured and the gates run on a sliding track between stone pillars. When the lever is pulled, the gates can come down in a second, instantly impaling anything caught in their way. The guards of the second gate have this great joke: you don’t need to ask permission to enter Rijou; you just walk under the gate. If they decide to drop it on your head, that means admission is denied and you should come back tomorrow and try again. Well, it makes them laugh …
Traitor's Blade (The Greatcoats) Page 9