Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

by Lawrence, Mark

  “Garyus,” Taproot agreed, breaking a silence I’d not noticed.

  I shook off the memory. “He’s well enough.” None of your damn business, I wanted to say, but when you’re far from home and poorer than church mice it pays to curb your pride. Garyus was the only one of them I had time for, really. He couldn’t leave his room. Not unless someone carried him. So I visited. Possibly it was the only duty I’d ever kept. “Well enough.”

  “Good, good.” Taproot wrung his hands, squeezing out his approval, a pale wrestling of too-long fingers. “And Hauldr Snagason, how stands the North?”

  “Cold, and too far away.” Snorri set down his empty cup, licking his teeth.

  “And the Uuliskind? Still fair? Red goats for milk on the Scraa slopes, black for wool on the Nfflr ridges?”

  Snorri narrowed his eyes at the circus-master, perhaps wondering if the man was reading his mind. “Have you . . . been to the Uuliskind? The Undoreth would remember a circus, and yet I’d never heard of an effelant before today. And that reminds me. I must see this beast.”

  Taproot smiled: narrow, even teeth behind thin lips. He uncorked the rum again, moving to replenish our cups. “My apologies, but you can see how it is with me. I pry. I question. I devour travellers’ tales. I store each snippet of information.” He tapped his forehead. “Here. Watch me!”

  Snorri took the little cup before him in his good hand. “Aye. Red goats on the Scraa, black on the Nfflr. Though none to tend them, most like. The black ships came. Dead things from the Drowned Isles. Sven Broke-Oar brought this doom upon us.”

  “Ah.” Taproot nodded, steepled his fingers, pursed his lips. “He of the Hardassa. A hard man. Not a good one, I fear.” Pale hands shaped his opinion. “Perhaps the goats, the red and the black, have new herders now. Boys of the Hardassa.”

  Snorri drank off his rum. He set his poisoned hand upon the table, the knife wound a livid and weeping slot between the tendons. “Mend me and you’ll have to change that tale, circus-master.”

  “Of a certainty.” A quick smile lit Taproot’s face. “Kill or cure, that’s our motto. Watch me.” His hands moved around the Norseman’s, never touching, but framing it, following the line of the incision.

  “Go to Varga’s wagon. The smallest, with a red circle upon the side. In the grouping close to the gate. Varga can clean a wound, pack it, stitch it. Best poultices you ever saw. Watch me! Even a sour wound may yield to them.”

  Snorri stood, and I rose to go with him. It had become a habit.

  “You might stay, Prince Jalan?” Taproot did not look up, but something in his tone kept me there.

  “I’ll find you later,” I told Snorri. “Save you the shame of weeping before me when this Varga sets to his work. And watch out for that effelant. They’re green and like the taste of Vikings.”

  Snorri answered with a snort and ducked out into the blinding brightness of the day.

  “A fierce man. Watch me!” Taproot eyed the tent flap, swaying in Snorri’s wake. “Tell me, prince. How is it that you travel together? I didn’t imagine you as one for the hardships of the road. How is it that the Norseman hasn’t killed you for the pits or that you haven’t fled for your home comforts?”

  “I’ll have you know I learned a sight more about hardship in the Scorron Heights than—” Something in the slow regret with which Taproot shook his head took the bluster from my sails. I feared if I mentioned my heroism at the Aral Pass, he might laugh at me. That’s the trouble with men who know too much. A sigh escaped me. “In truth? We’re bound by some enchantment. A damned inconvenient one. You wouldn’t happen to have a—”

  “A mind-sworn wizard? A hidden hand that might separate you? Watch me! If I had such, this circus would be a gold mine and me the richest of all rich men.”

  I had expected him to laugh at my claims of enchantment, so to be taken seriously was a relief, though hearing how hard it might prove to be to undo the magic was less pleasing.

  Taproot finished his drink and put the little bottle back in the drawer. “Speaking of rich men, you might care to know about one Maeres Allus.”

  “You know—” Of course he knew. Taproot knew of the Red Queen’s secret brother, too broken for the throne. He knew about goats chewing on the slopes of distant fjords. He would hardly not know of Vermillion’s greatest crime lord.

  “Watch me.” Taproot laid a slim finger alongside his slim nose. “Maeres has secrets that even I don’t know. And he is not best pleased with you.”

  “Perhaps a journey north would be good for my health in any case, then,” I said.

  “True enough.” And Taproot waved me out, fluttering his hands as if I were a tumbler come to beg more sawdust for the centre ring and not a prince of Red March. I let him do it too, for when a man who knows too much knows not to waste his manners on you, it’s best to be moving on.

  NINE

  The pregnant woman, done for the moment with her tattooing, led me to Varga’s wagon. She waddled ahead of me looking fit to pop at each step, though she said her time lay weeks ahead.

  “Daisy,” she told me. Her name, or perhaps what she planned to call the whelp if it proved female. I hadn’t been listening too hard. We’d passed a wagon where a woman in tight silks sat with her ankles crossed behind her head, and my attention had wandered.

  “Daisy? A fine name.” For a cow.

  I spotted the elephant, corralled by a fence that it could swat aside, tethered to a thick post by a length of chain. A number of circus men, showing off lean and muscular bodies, lounged around a bar made of two barrels and a plank, watching the elephant and whatever else might pass. Behind them a well-laden beer wagon provided shade. Circuses always came amply provisioned with ale for the audience. I guess it must be easier to impress a drunken crowd.

  Further on we passed a shabby tent stitched with moon and stars, symbols of the horoscope dotted amongst the faded heavens. An ancient sat outside on a three-legged stool, snaggle-toothed and liver-spotted.

  “Cross my palm, stranger.” I couldn’t tell if the creature was man or woman.

  “Don’t humour her.” Daisy increased the speed of her waddle. “Cracked, that one is. Everything’s doom and gloom. Drives the punters away.”

  “You’re quarry.” The old woman called after us, then coughed as if a lung had burst. “Quarry.” I couldn’t tell which of us she’d aimed the words at.

  “Save it for the peasants,” I called back, but it left a chill. Always does. I expect that’s why prophecy sells.

  We walked on until the hacking cough faded behind us. I laughed, but in truth I had felt hunted since we left the city. Though by what I couldn’t say. More than the Silent Sister, more than Maeres’s terrors even, it was the eyes behind that enamel mask that watched me from my quiet moments. Just a glimpse at the opera, just a glancing encounter, and yet it haunted me.

  “Varga.” Daisy pointed at a wagon much as Taproot described. She drew in a deep sigh and started to waddle off, back the way we’d come. I offered no thanks, distracted now by the small crowd of scantily clad young women clustered around the open end of Varga’s wagon. Dancers, by the litheness of them and the snatches of silk they wore.

  “Ladies.” I approached, flashing them my best smile. It seemed, however, that a tall blond prince of Red March was less interesting than a huge dark Norseman bulging with muscle as if his arms and legs had been crammed with boulders. The girls pointed into the gloom beneath the awning, giggling behind their hands, exchanging appreciative whispers. I leaned around and stepped up onto the buckboard.

  “You didn’t need to take his shirt off,” I said. “It’s his hand that needs removing.”

  Snorri offered me a dark look from the sloping couch he’d been arrayed upon. He really did have an alarming topology, his stomach ridged and divided by muscle, his chest and arms bursting with power, veins writhing across him to f
eed blood into the engines of his strength, all tensed now against the pain Varga’s investigations were causing him.

  “You’re blocking my light.” Varga turned from the messy work in hand. She was a woman of middling years, tending to grey, with a homely face of the kind that supports compassion and disapproval in equal measures.

  “Will he live?” I asked, my interest genuine though self-motivated.

  “It’s a nasty wound. The tendons are undamaged but one of the small bones of the hand has been broken, others displaced. It will heal, but slowly, and only if the infection is contained.”

  “A yes then?”

  “Probably.”

  “Good news!” I turned back to the girls outside. “That calls for a celebration. Let me buy you fine ladies a drink and we can afford my companion a little privacy.” I stepped down amongst them. They smelled of greasepaint, cheap perfume, sweat. All good. “I’m Jalan, but you can call me Prince Jal.”

  At last my old enchantment started to work. Even the sculpted magnificence of Snorri ver Snagason had a hard time competing with the magic word prince.

  “Cherri. Pleased to meet you, Your Highness.” Some doubt in her voice, but I could tell she wanted to believe her prince had come.

  I took her hand. “Enchanted.” And she smiled up at me, pretty enough with a snub nose and wicked eyes, fair hair, curled, streaked with blond.

  “Lula,” said her friend, a petite wench with short black hair, pale despite the summer, and sculpted as if to satisfy a schoolboy’s dream.

  With Cherri on one arm, Lula on the other, and a clutch of dancers following behind, I led the way back to the beer wagon. Snorri let out a sharp gasp from under Varga’s awning. And life was good.

  • • •

  The afternoon passed in a pleasant haze and parted me from the company of my last silver crowns. The circus men proved remarkably tolerant of my pawing their women, as did the circus women, and we sprawled on cushions before the beer wagon drinking wine from amphorae, growing louder as the shadows lengthened.

  Annoyingly, the dancers kept asking me about Snorri, as if the hero of Aral in their midst weren’t quite enough to hold their attention.

  “Is he a chieftain?” Lula asked.

  “He’s so big.” A red-haired beauty named Florence.

  “What’s his name?” A tall Nuban girl with copper loops through her ears and a mouth made for kissing. “How is he called?”

  “Snorri,” I said. “It means wife-beater.”

  “No?” Cherri, all round-eyed.

  “Yes!” I faked sadness. “Terrible temper—if a woman upsets him he cuts her face.” I drew a line across my cheek with one finger.

  “What’s the North like?” The Nuban girl wasn’t so easily deflected.

  I tipped the amphora to my mouth, gulping wine while I held my hand out at a steep angle. “Like that.” I wiped my lips. “Only icy. All the northmen slip to the coasts, where they congregate in miserable villages smelling of fish. It gets very crowded. Every now and then a bunch more come sliding down from the hills on their arses and the only place for the ones closest to the shore is on a boat. And off they sail.” I mimicked a ship’s progression across the waves. I gave Lula my amphora. “Those horns on their helms?” I made myself two horns, a hand to each side of my head. “Cuckold’s horns. The new arrivals are bouncing abed with the wives left behind. Terrible place. Don’t ever go there.”

  A small girl and small boy came out to sing for us, a remarkable pair with high clear voices, and even the elephant moved closer to listen. I had to shush Cherri to hear uninterrupted when the children sang “High-John,” but I let her giggle through their rendition of “Boogie Bugle.” Without warning their voices soared into an aria that drew me back to Father’s opera. They sang it sweeter and with more heart, but still the world seemed to close about me and I heard those screams in the fire. And beneath those screams my memory ran a deeper sound, something heard but at the time not understood, a different kind of howling. The roar of something angry rather than scared.

  “Enough.” I threw a cushion at them. It missed and the elephant snagged it from the ground. “Scram!” The little girl’s lip wobbled for an instant and they both fled.

  “. . . ‘give them what they want, dears.’ That’s all he says. With Taproot it’s all hips and tits. There’s no art in it for him.” Lula looked up at me over her clay goblet, seeking affirmation.

  “Well, to be fair, Lula, you are mostly hips and tits,” I said, a slight slur to my words now.

  They giggled at that. The combination of a title and freely flowing wine will have people laughing at anything you offer up as funny, and I’ve never once complained about it. A sharp oath rang out from the direction of Varga’s wagon. I put an arm around Cherri, another around Lula, and drew them close. Enjoy the world while you can, I say. A shallow enough philosophy by which to live, but shallow is what I’ve got. Besides, deep is apt to drown you.

  The first evening stars watched me being taken for a guided tour of the dancers’ wagon, supported on either side by Cherri and Lula, though who was doing the most supporting would be hard to say. We tumbled inside and strange to say that in the dark nearly everything we wanted to do required three pairs of hands.

  • • •

  In the dead of night a commotion interrupted proceedings within the dancers’ wagon. At first we ignored it. Cherri was making her own commotion and I was doing my best to help. We ignored it until the wagon’s rocking stopped dead, moving Cherri to draw breath. Until that point I’d heard little above her exclamations and the creaking of axles and supports.

  “Jalan!” Snorri’s voice.

  I stuck my head out through the flaps into the starlight, far from pleased. Snorri stood with one thick arm gripping the wagon bed, arresting its motion. “Come.”

  I hadn’t the breath to tell him that was what I was trying to do. Instead I slipped out, lacing up what needed to be laced. “Yes?” Not keeping the temper from my voice.

  “Come.” He led off between the nearest wagons. I could hear weeping now. Wailing.

  Snorri followed the field’s gradient, letting it lead us a little way out from the wagons and carts encircling Taproot’s tent. Here several dozen of the circus folk huddled before a bright fire.

  “A child died.” Snorri set a hand to my shoulder as if offering comfort. “Unborn.”

  “The pregnant woman?” A foolish thing to say—it had to be a pregnant woman. Daisy. I remembered her name.

  “The babe’s buried.” He nodded to a low mound in the dirt out past the fire, snug between two old grave markers. “We should show our respects.”

  I sighed. No more fun for Jal tonight. I felt sorry for the woman, of course, but the troubles of people I don’t know never reached that far into me. My father, in one of his rare moments of coherence, declared it to be a symptom of youth. My youth, at least. He called on God to visit compassion upon me as a burden to be carried in later life. I was just impressed that he’d noticed me or my ways this once, and of course it’s always nice for a cardinal to remember to call on God every now and then.

  We sat a little apart from the main group, though close enough to feel the fire’s heat.

  “How’s the hand?” I asked.

  “Hurts more, feels better.” He held out the appendage in question and flexed it slightly, wincing. “She removed a lot of the poison.”

  Thankfully Snorri omitted greater detail. Some folk will seek to entertain you with the gory details of their ailments. My brother Martus would have painted each glistening drop of pus for me in one of his woe-is-me monologues for which the only remedy is a swift exit.

  The night held enough warmth, combined with the fire and my recent exercise, to leave me pleasantly sleepy. I lay back on the ground, without complaint for the hardness of it or the dust in my hair. For a moment or thr
ee I watched the stars and listened to the soft weeping. I yawned once and sleep took me.

  Strange dreams hunted me that night. I wandered an empty circus haunted by the memory of the eyes behind that porcelain mask but finding only the dancers, each sobbing in her bed, and breaking into bright fragments as I reached to touch them. Cherri was there, Lula too, and they broke together, speaking a single word. Quarry. The night fractured, cracks running through tents, wheels, barrels; an elephant bellowed unseen in the darkness. My head filled with light until at last I opened my eyes to keep from being blinded.

  Nothing! Just Snorri’s bulk, seated beside me, knees drawn up. The fire had fallen to red embers. The circus folk had gone to their beds, taking their sorrow with them. No sound but for the whirr and chirp of insects. My heart’s pounding slowed. My head continued to ache as if it were cracked through, but the blame for that lay with a quart of wine gulped down in the heat of the day.

  “It’s a thing to make the world weep, the loss of a baby.” Snorri’s rumble was almost too deep to make sense of. “In Asgard Odin sees it and his unblinking eye blinks.”

  I thought it best not to mention that technically a one-eyed god can only wink. “All deaths are sad.” It seemed like a good thing to say.

  “Most of what a man is has been written by the time his beard starts to prickle. A babe is made of maybes. There are few crimes worse than the ending of something before its time.”

  Once more I bit my tongue and made no complaint that this was exactly what he had accomplished at the dancers’ wagon earlier. It wasn’t tact that held me silent so much as the desire not to get my nose broken yet again. “I suppose some sorrows can only truly touch a parent.” I’d heard that somewhere. I think perhaps Cousin Serah had said it at her little brother’s funeral. I recall all the grey heads nodding and exchanging words about her. She probably fished it from a book. Even at fourteen she was scheming for Grandmother’s approval. And her throne.