Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

by Lawrence, Mark

  Snorri lay helpless, the last of his strength gone, his naked body entombed in snow, waiting for death, waiting for the strangling grip of dead hands or the teeth of ghouls or the axe of one of the Broke-Oar’s reavers. No matter what the Broke-Oar was being paid, he would want no witnesses to this night’s shame.

  A high shriek reached him, even through his cocoon of snow. Emy! Then Freja’s screams, her battle cry, a mother’s rage, the roar from Karl, his eldest, as he attacked. Every part of his mind howled for motion, every ounce of his will trying to force his arms to reach, legs to pump . . . but no piece of him moved. All that anger and desperation, yet only a sigh escaped the numbness of his lips, drooling into the blind white all about him.

  • • •

  The incessant tapping had woken him. The tap-tap-tap of rain. Rain pouring off the eaves, washing away the snow, taking the ice from his eyelids so he could open them to the day. He turned his head and the water ran from his eyes. The remains of the snow heap lay around him, a touch whiter than the marble of his flesh.

  Snow makes a soft bed, but no man wakes from it. That was the wisdom of the North. Snorri had seen enough drunks frozen where they slept to know the truth of it. A groan escaped him. This was death. His dead body would shamble after the corpse legions, his mind trapped within. He had never thought that good men might watch helpless from behind dead eyes, in thrall to necromancers.

  Still the water splattered across him, gushing from behind the fascia board, falling in a grey curtain all along the roof’s edge. It beat at his ear, ran across his chest, almost warm though icicles fringed the eaves, defying the thaw. He rolled clear across half-frozen ground. The motion took him by surprise, left him unsure whether he owned it or not.

  The raid! As if Snorri’s mind were thawing too, memory began to leak behind his eyes. In a moment he found his feet, rain starting to clean the mud from his side. He stood, unsteady, a tremble running through him, the cold reaching him for the first time. “Gods no!” He stumbled forwards, reaching for the wall for support, though his hands had no more sensation in them than his feet.

  The door lay flat, torn off its leather hinges, the interior beyond strewn with bed furs, broken pots, scattered corn. Snorri staggered in, searching through the furs with blunt fingers, seized by a shivering beyond his control, tossing the bedding aside, dreading to find nothing, dreading to find something.

  In the end he discovered only a pool of blood on the hearthstone, dark and sticky and smeared by feet. Against the whiteness of his fingers the blood regained its crimson vitality. Whose blood? How much spilled? Nothing left of his wife, of his children, but blood? At the door, a clump of red hair caught his attention, snagged by a crack in the support, made to dance by the wind. “Egil.” Snorri reached for his son’s hair with bloodstained hands. Convulsions overtook him and he fell back, thrashing and trembling amongst the hides of grey wolf and black bear.

  How many hours it took for the ghouls’ poison to leave him, Snorri could not have said. The venom that had preserved him in the snow, slowing his heart and drawing back life into the tightest core, now restored all sensation as it left his system. It put an edge on each of the senses, heightening the pain of returning circulation, making a misery of the cold despite being wrapped with many furs, even putting fresh barbs on a grief that already seemed beyond enduring. He raged and he shook and by slow degrees both warmth and strength returned to his limbs. He dressed, tying laces with still-numb fingers in an ecstasy of fumbling, pulled his boots on, crammed the last of the winter stores into his travel pack, dry hake and black biscuit, salt in a wrap of sealskin, fat in an earthenware jar. He took his travelling skins, seal in two layers, trapping the down of the cliff gull. Above it he wore a wolfskin, a grey beast that like the dark bears travel north with the summer and retreat before the snows. It would be enough. Spring had won her war, and like the summer wolf Snorri would strike north and take what he needed.

  “I will find you,” he promised the empty room, promised the dent in the bed where his wife had slept, promised the roof above them, the sky above it, the gods on high.

  And ducking the lintel, Snorri ver Snagason left his home to find his axe amidst the thaw.

  • • •

  “And did you find it?” I asked, imagining his father’s axe lying there in the melting snow, and Snorri lifting it with awful purpose.

  “Not first.” The Norseman’s voice put so much despair into just two words I couldn’t ask him to speak more and held my peace, but a moment later he spoke on unprompted.

  “I found Emy first. Discarded on a midden heap, limp and ragged, like a lost doll.” No sound but for the crackle of the fire beside us. I wanted him to keep silent, to say nothing more. “The ghouls had eaten most of her face. She still had eyes, though.”

  “I’m so sorry.” And I was. Snorri’s magic had reached into me again and made me brave. In that moment I wanted to be the one to stand between the child and her attackers. To keep her safe. And failing that, to hunt them to the ends of the earth. “Death must have been a kindness.”

  “She wasn’t dead.” No emotion in his voice now. None. And the night felt thick around us, the dark deepening into blindness, swallowing stars. “I pulled two ghoul-darts from her and she started to scream.” He lay down and the fire dimmed as if choked by its own smoke, though it had burned clean enough when set. “Death was kind.” He drew a sharp breath. “But no father should have to give such a kindness to his child.”

  I lay down too, no care for the hard ground, damp cloak, empty stomach. A tear made its way along the side of my nose. Snorri’s magic had left me. My only desire lay south, back in the comforts of the Red Queen’s palace. An echo of his misery rang in me and confused itself with my own. That tear might have been for little Emy—it might have been for me—it probably was for me, but I’ll tell myself it was for both of us, and perhaps one day I’ll believe it.

  TWELVE

  On the morning after Snorri’s tale of horror in the North, we neither of us spoke of it. He broke his fast in a sombre mood, but by the time it came to ride on, his good humour had returned. Much of the man was a mystery to me, but this I understood well enough. We all practise self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There’s not enough room in a man’s head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on. Snorri’s demons might have escaped into a quiet moment the night before while we sat watching the stars, but now he’d harried them back into some cellar of his own and barred the door once more. There’s tears enough in the world to drown in, but Snorri and I knew that action requires an uncluttered mind. We knew how to set such things aside and move on.

  Of course he wanted to move on to daring rescue and bloody revenge in the North whilst I wanted to move on to sweet women and soft living in the South.

  • • •

  Another day’s travel: damp, muddy, grey skies, and a stiff wind. Another roadside camp with too little food and too much rain. I woke the next morning at dawn, disappointed to find myself beneath the same dripping hedge and wet cloak I’d shivered myself to sleep under the evening before. My dreams had been full of strangeness. At first the usual horror of the demon from the opera stalking us through the rain-dark night. Later, though, my nightmare became full of light and it seemed a voice addressed me from a great distance at the heart of all that brilliance. I could almost make out the words . . . and finally as I opened my eyes to the first grey hints of the day it seemed I saw, through the blurry lash-filled slit of my eyes, an angel, wings spread, outlined in a rosy glow, and at last one word reached me. Baraqel.

  • • •

  Three more days riding through the continuous downpour that served as a Rhonish summer and I was more than ready to gallop back south towards the myriad pleasures of home. Only fear bound me to o
ur course. Fear of what lay behind and fear of what would happen if I got too far from Snorri. Would the cracks run through me from toe to head, spilling out light and heat until I crisped? Also fear of his pursuit. He would know the direction I took, and though I trusted my riding skills to keep me safely ahead in the chase I had less faith in the city walls, town guard, and palace security to keep the Norseman out once I’d stopped running.

  Twice over the next three days I saw a figure, half-imagined through miles of rain, on distant ridges, dark against the bright sky. Common sense said it was a herder following his flock or some hunter about his business. Every nerve I owned told me it was the unborn, escaped from the Sister’s spell and dogging our heels. Both times I urged my gelding into a canter and kept Snorri bouncing along behind me until I’d outrun the worst of the cold terror the sight put in me.

  With dwindling resources we ate mean fare in small portions, cooked by peasants I wouldn’t trust to feed my horse. We spent two more sleepless nights huddled beneath lean-to shelters of branches and bracken that Snorri constructed against the hedgerows. He claimed it to be all a man needed for slumber and proceeded to snore all night. The downpour he proclaimed to be “fine damp weather.”

  “North of Hardanger the children would run naked in warm rains like these. We don’t sew our bearskins on until the sea starts to freeze,” he said.

  I nearly hit him.

  I slept better in the saddle than I had in his shelter, but wherever sleep found me, dreams came too. Always the same theme—some inner darkness, a place of peace and isolation, violated by light. First bleeding through a hairline fracture, then brightening as the crack forks and divides, and beyond the thin and breaking walls of my sanctum, some brilliance too blinding to look upon . . . and a voice calling my name.

  “Jal . . . Jal? . . . Jal!”

  “Wh-what?” I jerked awake to find myself cold and sodden in the saddle.

  “Jal.” Snorri nodded ahead. “A town.”

  • • •

  The sixth night out from Pentacost saw us in through the gates of a small, walled town named Chamy-Nix. The place sounded vaguely promising but proved to be a big letdown, just another wet Rhonish town, as dour and worthy as all the rest. Worse still, it was one of those damnable places where the locals pretend not to speak the Empire Tongue. They do, of course, but they hide behind some or other ancient language as if taking pride in being so primitive. The trick is to repeat yourself louder and louder until the message gets through. That’s probably the one thing my military training was good for. I’m great at shouting. Not quite the boom that Snorri manages, but a definite blare that comes in handy for dressing down unruly servants, insubordinate junior officers, and of course as a last-ditch means of intimidating men who might otherwise put a sword through me. Part of the art of survival as a coward is not letting things get to the point where that cowardice is exposed. If you can bluster your way through dangerous situations it’s all to the good, and a fine shouting voice helps immensely.

  Snorri led us to a dreadful dive, a low-roofed subterranean tavern thick with the stink of wet bodies, spilled ale, and woodsmoke.

  “It’s a touch warmer and slightly less damp than outside, I’ll grant you.” I elbowed my way through the crowd at the bar. Local men, dark-haired, swarthy, variously missing teeth or sporting knife scars, packed around small tables towards the back in a haze of pipe smoke.

  “At least the ale will be cheap.” Snorri slapped what might be our only copper on the beer-puddled counter.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez boire?” the barkeep asked, still wiping someone’s spit from the tankard he intended to serve in.

  “Kesquer-what?” I leaned in over the counter, natural caution erased by six days of rain and the foul mood that torrent had exposed. “Two ales. The best you have!”

  The man favoured me with the blankest of stares. I drew breath to repeat myself rather more loudly.

  “Deux biéres s’il vous plaît et que vous vendez repas?” Snorri answered, sliding his coin forwards.

  “What the hell?” I blinked at him, talking over the barkeep’s reply. “How—I mean—”

  “I wasn’t raised speaking the Tongue, you know?” Snorri shook his head as if I were an idiot and took the first full tankard. “When you’ve had to learn one new language you develop an interest in others.”

  I took the tankard from him and eyed the beer with suspicion. It looked foreign. The floating suds made an island that put me in mind of some alien place where they’d never heard of Red March and cut princes no slack. That put a bad taste in my mouth before I’d even sipped it.

  “We of the North are great traders, you know?” Snorri continued, though what sign I’d given that I might be interested I could not imagine. “Far more comes in through our ports on Norse cargo ships than in the holds of longboats returning from raids. Many a Norseman knows three, four, even five languages. Why, I myself—”

  I turned away and took my foul-tasting beer off towards the tables, leaving Snorri to negotiate the food in whatever mangled tongue was required.

  Finding a space proved problematic. The first burly peasant I approached refused to move despite my obvious station, instead hunkering over his huge bowl of what looked to be shit soup, but smelled infinitely worse, and ignoring me. He muttered something like “murdtet” as I moved off. The rest of the ill-mannered louts kept to their seats, and in the end I had to squeeze into place beside a nearly spherical woman drinking gin from a clay cup. The soup man then proceeded to give me the evil eye whilst toying with his wicked-looking knife—an implement generally not required for the consumption of soup—until Snorri came up with his beer and two plates of steaming offal.

  “Budge up,” he ordered, and the whole row of locals edged along, my neighbour wobbling like gelatine as she undulated to the left, leaving sufficient room for the new addition.

  I eyed the plate before me. “This is what any decent butcher removes from the . . . what I’ll generously assume was a cow . . . before sending it to the kitchens.”

  Snorri started tucking in. “And what you leave will make a meal for someone who’s really hungry. Eat up, Jal.”

  Jal again! I would have to sort that out with him sometime soon.

  Snorri cleared his plate in about the same time it took me to decide which bit of mine looked least dangerous. He took a stale hunk of bread from his pocket and started scraping up the gravy. “That fellow with the knife looks like he wants to stick it into you, Jal.”

  “What can you expect from this kind of establishment?” I tried for a manly growl. “You get what you pay for, and soon we won’t be able to pay for even this.”

  Snorri shrugged. “Your choice. If you want luxury, sell your locket.”

  I restrained myself from laughing at the barbarian’s ignorance—all the more puzzling, as you would think a man accustomed to the business of loot and pillage would have a better eye when it came to appraising which valuables to carry off. “What is it with you and my locket?”

  “You’re a brave man, Jal,” Snorri said, apropos of nothing. He poked the last of the bread between his lips and started chewing, cheeks bulging.

  I frowned, trying to figure out why he’d said that—was it some kind of threat? I also tried to figure out what the thing dangling from the end of my knife was. I put it in my mouth. Best not to know.

  Finally Snorri managed to swallow down his huge mouthful and explained. “You let Maeres Allus break your finger rather than pay your debts. And yet you could have paid the man off at any time with that trinket of yours. You chose not to. You chose to keep and honour the memory of your mother over your own safety. That’s loyalty to family. That’s honour.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Anger got the better of me. It had been a rotten day. A rotten week. The worst ever. I whipped the locket from its hiding place in a small pocket under my arm.
Better judgment warned me against it. Worse judgment warned me too, but Snorri had worn both away. Snorri and the rain. “This,” I said, “is a simple piece of silver and I’ve never been brave in my—”

  Snorri tapped it out of my hand and it went sailing in a bright and glittering arc that set it splashing down in the soup man’s dish, splattering him with a generous helping of brown muck. “If it’s not worth anything and you’re not brave, then you won’t be going over there to get it back.”

  To my astonishment I found myself most of the way across the intervening space before Snorri had got past his third word. Soup man rose, bawling out some threat in his gibberish: “murdtet” featured again. His knife looked even more unpleasant up close, and in a desperate attempt to stop him sticking it into me I caught hold of his wrist whilst punching him in the throat as hard as I could. Sadly his chin got in the way, but I knocked him back and as a bonus the wall smacked him round the back of the head.

  We stood there, me frozen in fear, him spitting out blood and soup through the gaps left by missing teeth. I clung onto his wrist for dear life before realizing that he wasn’t making any effort to stab me. At that point I noticed that my dinner knife was still clenched in the fist I had wedged under his chin. A fact that he had already registered. I stared expectantly at his knife hand and he obliged by opening it to let his blade fall. I released his wrist and snagged the chain of my locket from the edge of his bowl, bringing the trinket dripping from the soup.

  “If you have a problem, peasant, bring it up with the man who threw it.” My voice and hand shook with what I hoped would be considered suppressed manly rage but was in fact cold terror. I nodded towards Snorri.