Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

by Lawrence, Mark

  “Thorns.” He shrugged. “It means nothing.”

  • • •

  The town boasted no wall, and nobody save a handful of sorry-looking merchants watched the entrance—not that there was an entrance, just an increase in the crowding of houses. After weeks of rough living and hard travelling, even a place such as Den Hagen has its appeal. Every piece of clothing on me still held its measure of rain from the storm that had lashed us for two days across the moorland fastness surrounding Skilfar’s seat. A man could have slaked his thirst on what he could squeeze from my trews. He’d have to be damnable dry to risk it, though.

  “We could pop in there and see if the ale tastes any better here?” I pointed to a tavern just ahead, barrels placed in the street before it for men to rest their tankards on, a painted wooden swordfish hanging above the door.

  “Maladon beer is fine.” Snorri walked on past the entrance.

  “It would be if they forgot to salt it.” Foul stuff, but sometimes foul will do. I’d asked for wine back in the town of Goaten and they’d looked at me as if I’d asked them to roast a small child for my meal.

  “Come on.” Snorri turned towards the sea, waving away a man trying to sell him dried fish. “We’ll check the harbour first.” A tension had built in him as we approached the coast, and when we first saw the sea from a high ridge he had sunk to his knees and muttered heathen prayers. Since the troll-stones he’d been walking with such purpose I had to nudge Sleipnir along to keep up.

  Several boats were tied at mooring points along the dock front, amongst them one that required neither loading nor unloading.

  “A longboat,” I said, spotting at last the classic lines that Snorri must have recognized from the coast road. I slipped from Sleipnir’s back as Snorri strode towards the vessel, breaking into a run over the last fifty yards. Even a landlubber like myself could see that the ship had been through rough times, the mast broken some yards short of its proper height, the sail ragged.

  Without slowing Snorri reached the harbour’s edge and dropped from sight, presumably onto the unseen deck of the longboat. Cries and shouts went up. I prepared myself for the sight of carnage.

  Making a slow advance and peering over the side, with the caution of a man not wanting a spear in the forehead, I expected to be met with a boat full of blood and body parts. Instead Snorri stood amidst the rowing benches grinning like a loon with six or seven pale and hairy men crowding around him, exchanging welcome punches. And all of them trying to talk at once in some godforsaken language that sounded like it needed to be retched up from the depths of a man’s belly.

  “Jal!” He glanced up and waved. “Get down here!”

  I debated the matter, but there seemed no escape. I slung Sleipnir’s reins over one of the ship lines and went off to find a means of descent that didn’t involve breaking both ankles on arrival.

  Disentangling myself from a rickety ladder of salty rope and rotting planks, I turned to find myself an object of study for eight Vikings. The most immediate thing to strike me was not the traditional Norse “fist of welcome” but the fact that most of them were identical.

  “Quins now, is it?” I counted them off.

  Snorri slung an arm about two of the five, white-blond types with ice-chip eyes and beards far more close-cut than the usual “big-enough-to-lose-a-baby-in” style of the North. “Sore point, Jal. These are Jarl Torsteff’s octuplets. Atta sits at Odin’s table now, in Valhalla, with Sex and Sjau.” He cast me a stern look and I kept my face a mask. “These are Ein, Tveir, Thrir, Fjórir, and Fimm.”

  My guess was that I’d just had a lesson in counting to eight in Norse, and simultaneously a look at the meagre state of Jarl Torsteff’s imagination. I decided to call them the quins in any event. Less morbid.

  “Also Tuttugu.” Snorri reached out to pummel the shoulder of a short fat man. A ginger beard fluffed out from both sides of the man’s head with great enthusiasm but failed to quite meet across his chins. Older this one, midthirties, a decade over the quins. “And Arne Dead-Eye, our greatest shot!” This last the oldest of them, tall, thin, melancholy, bad teeth, balding, grey in the black of his beard. If I’d seen him bent over weeds in a field I’d have thought him a common peasant.

  “Ah,” I said, hoping we wouldn’t have to mix blood or spit in each other’s hands. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  Seven Vikings looked at me as if I might be some kind of hitherto unseen fish they’d just landed. “Run into trouble?” I pointed at the broken mast, but unless the thirty or so additional men required to fill the rowing benches were up at the Swordfish enjoying tankards of salt-beer, then the trouble had entailed much more than a shortening of the mast and some ripped sailcloth.

  “Drowned Isles trouble!” A quin, possibly Ein.

  “We don’t have a settlement on Umbra any more.” This another quin, directed at Snorri.

  “Call them the Dead Isles now.” Tuttugu, jowls wobbling as he shook his head.

  “Necromancers chased us onto our ships. Storms chased us south.” Arne Dead-Eye, looking at the calluses on his hand.

  “Got wrecked on Brit. Took months to repair. And the locals?” A quin spat over the side and a remarkably long way out to sea.

  “Been hopping along the coast ever since, trying to get home.” Arne shook his head. “Dodging Normardy’s navy, patrol boats off Arrow, Conaught pirates . . . And Aegir hates us. Sent storm after storm to beat us back.”

  “I was expecting sea serpents next; a leviathan, why not?” Tuttugu rolled his eyes. “But we’re here. Friendly waters. Few more repairs and we can cross the Karlswater!” He slapped a random quin across the shoulders.

  “You don’t know?” I asked.

  Snorri’s brow furrowed and he moved to the side of the boat, leaning out to stare north across the open water.

  “Know what?” From many mouths, all eyes on me.

  I realized my mistake. Don’t board a man’s ship bearing bad news. You’re likely to leave again swiftly and by the wet side.

  “We know there’s no word of the Undoreth in Den Hagen.” One of the quins, Ein with the scar at the corner of his eye. “No longships docking. Tales come from the Hardanger ports of raids along the Uulisk, but no detail. We’ve been here four days and that’s all we’ve discovered. You know more?”

  “Snorri’s the one to tell it,” I said. “My stories are all from him and I’d not trust myself to remember them right.” And that turned all those pointed stares Snorri’s way.

  He stood, towering above us all, grim, a hand on his axe. “It’s a thing that must be told where we can toast the dead, brothers.” And he walked to the harbour wall, climbing quickly up a series of jutting stones that I’d missed on my way down.

  • • •

  Snorri led us to a dockside tavern where the drinking tables would afford a view of the longship. I didn’t judge it worth stealing, but perhaps he was wise not to put that to the test. After all, a place like Den Hagen would make anyone frantic to leave after a short while, so there might have been men there desperate enough to sail off in any untended vessel, even a leaking tub like the one that brought the Norsemen to harbour.

  I walked along at the rear of the group with Tuttugu. “I thought longships would be, you know, longer.”

  “It’s a snekkja.”

  “Oh.”

  “The smallest type.” Tuttugu managed a grin at my ignorance, though his mind must have been on what Snorri would tell. “Twenty benches. Skei carry twice as many. Ours is called Ikea, after the dragon, you know?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t, but lying is easier than listening to explanations. I wasn’t even that interested in their boat, but it looked as though I might be trusting myself to it, and sooner than I wanted to. Twice the size of their snekkja still didn’t sound like a big ship—but the strength of the North had always been in swift boats
, and many of them. I had to pray that with all that practice the damn things were at least seaworthy.

  We drew up stools around a long bench, several locals wisely deciding to relocate to other tables. Snorri called for ale and sat at the head of the table, looking out across the length of it at the snekkja’s sails flapping above the harbour wall. The sky behind them held a complex mix of dark and moody clouds, some trailing rain, but all lit by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun.

  “Valhalla!” Snorri swiped the first foaming tankard off the tray as the serving women brought them out.

  “Valhalla!” A pounding of the table.

  “A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.” Snorri had their attention. He paused to drink deep and long. “I didn’t fight at Einhaur, but I heard the tale of it from Sven Broke-Oar, if any straight word can come from his crooked tongue.”

  The crew of the Ikea exchanged glances at that, muttering amongst themselves. The tone of the snatches I caught made it clear they shared a low opinion of the Broke-Oar.

  “The battle at Eight Quays I fought in. A massacre more than a battle. My survival shames me every day.” He drank again, and told the story.

  The sun dropped, shadows stretched, the world went by, but unnoticed. Snorri held us under the spell of his voice and I listened, sipping my ale without tasting it, even though I had heard it all before. All of it until he reached the Black Fort.

  • • •

  When Snorri first saw the black spot he thought it part of dying, his vision failing as the wilderness claimed him. But the spot persisted, kept its place, grew as he staggered on. And in time it became the Black Fort.

  Built of huge blocks carved from the ancient basalt fields beneath the snows, the Black Fort sat in squat defiance of the Bitter Ice, dwarfed by the vast and rising cliffs of the ice sheet just five miles to the north. In all the long years of the fort’s existence the ice had advanced, retreated, advanced again, but never quite reached those black walls, as if the fort stood as man’s final guardian against the dominion of the frost giants.

  Strengthened by the sight, Snorri journeyed closer, drawing his sealskin cloak all about him, white with snow. An east wind picked up, scouring across the ice, picking up fine dry snow and driving it in eddies and streams. Snorri leaned into the teeth of the gale, the last scraps of warmth stolen away from him, each step threatening to end in a huddle from which there would be no rising.

  When the fort’s bulk blocked the wind, Snorri almost toppled, as if his support had been snatched away. He hadn’t seen that he was so close, or truly believed that he would ever reach his goal. Nobody watched from the battlements. Each narrow window stood shuttered and snow-clad. No guard waited on duty at the great gates. Numb of hand and brain, Snorri stood, uncertain. He had carried no plan with him, just the desire to finish what had started in Eight Quays and what should have ended there. He had outlived two children. He had no desire to outlive Egil or Freja, only to battle to save them.

  Feeble as he was, Snorri knew that he would only grow weaker waiting in the snow. He could no more scale the walls of the fort than he could climb the cliffs of the Bitter Ice. He took Hel in both hands and with his father’s axe he beat upon the doors of the Black Fort.

  After an age a shutter high above broke open, scattering ice and snow upon Snorri’s head. By the time he looked up the shutters had closed once more. He pounded the door again, knowing his mind clouded with the slowness and stupidity that cold brings, but unable to think of an alternative.

  “You!” A voice from on high. “Who are you?”

  Snorri looked up and there in wolf furs, leaning out for a better look, Sven Broke-Oar, face unreadable in the red-gold swirl of his hair.

  “Snorri . . .” For a moment Snorri couldn’t summon his full name to numb lips.

  “Snorri ver Snagason?” the Broke-Oar boomed in amazement. “You vanished! Fled the battle, men said. Oh, this is most fine. I’ll be down to open the doors myself. Wait there. Don’t run away again.”

  So Snorri stood, white hands tight around his axe, trying to let his anger warm him. But the cold had wrapped around his bones, sapping strength, sapping will and even memory. Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery.

  The scraping of the doors shook him from his reverie. He startled backwards. The grunting of men at labour as the two great slabs of timber juddered back over icy stone. If they had simply left him waiting he might never have moved again.

  Ten yards back, beyond the thickness of the walls, standing in the open courtyard, Sven Broke-Oar waited, axe in one gloved hand, his small iron buckler across the other.

  “I could have finished you with a spear from the walls, or let the snows have you, but the champion of the Iron Fields deserves a better end than that now.”

  Snorri wanted to say that a man concerned with honour, or with the rights and wrongs of how a warrior dies, should have come to Eight Quays in the daylight, sounding his horn across the fjord. He wanted to say a lot of things. He wanted to talk of Emy and of Karl, but ice had sealed his lips and whatever strength remained he would use to kill the man before him.

  “Come then.” The Broke-Oar beckoned him in. “You’ve come this far. It would be a shame for fear to keep you from the last few paces of the journey.”

  Snorri made a shambling run, his feet too frozen for speed. Sven Broke-Oar’s laugh—that was the last thing he remembered before the club struck the back of his head. The men who had drawn open the doors simply waited behind them and brought him down once he’d passed by.

  A blazing heat woke him. Heat in his arms, stretched above him. Heat in his extremities, as if they burned. Heat across his face. And pain. Pain everywhere.

  “Wh—”

  The breath that broke from him plumed the air. Fragments of ice still clung to his beard, water dripping to his chest. Neither so hot as it felt then, nor so cold as it had been.

  Raising his head brought the wound at the back of his skull against the rough stone wall, and half an oath burst from his cracked lips. The hall before him housed a dozen men, crowded before a small fire in a cavernous hearth around the far end of a long stone table. Broke-Oar’s men, Red Vikings from the Hardanger, even less at home so close to the Bitter Ice than the Undoreth, who kept to the Uulisk shores.

  Snorri roared at his captors, bellowed his rage, uttered dire curses, shouted until his throat grew raw and his voice weak. They ignored him, sparing hardly a glance, and at last sense prevailed over his anger. No hope remained to him, but he realized what a pathetic figure he cut, tied there on the wall and issuing threats. He had had his chance to act. Twice. He had failed both times.

  The Broke-Oar entered the hall from a doorway close by the fire and warmed his hands there, exchanging words with his men before walking the length of the table to inspect his prisoner.

  “Well, that was foolish.” He rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger. Even close up his age proved elusive. Forty? Fifty? Scarred, weathered, raw-boned, huger even than Snorri, his mane of red-gold hair still thick, crow’s feet at the corner of each dark eye, a shrewdness in his gaze as he weighed his man.

  Snorri made no reply. He had been foolish.

  “I expected more from a man trailing so many mead-hall tales.”

  “Where is my wife? My son?” Snorri made no threats. The Broke-Oar would laugh at them.

  “Tell me why you ran. Snorri ver Snagason has been shown to be stupid and I’m not greatly surprised. Though I expected more. But a coward?”

  “Your creatures’ poison bro
ught me down. I fell and snow covered me. Where is my son?” He couldn’t speak of Freja before these men.

  “Ah.” Broke-Oar glanced back at his men, all of them listening. There could be scant entertainment in the Black Fort. Even the coals they burned must have been hauled in by sled at great effort. “Well, he’s safe enough, as long as you carry on being no threat.”

  “I didn’t tell you his name.” Snorri tugged at his ropes.

  The Broke-Oar merely raised a brow. “You think the son of the great Snorri ver Snagason hasn’t been telling anyone who’ll listen how his father will storm our gates with an army to rescue him? Apparently you’ll take all our heads with an axe and roll them across the fjord.”

  “Why do you have them?” Snorri met the man’s gaze. His pain helped distract him from thoughts of Egil’s trust in a failed father.

  “Ah, well.” Sven Broke-Oar pulled over a chair and sat with his axe across his knees. “Out at sea a man’s a small thing, his ship not much bigger, and we go where the weather wills. We run before the storm. We rise and fall with the waves. Skinny fisherman off the Afrique coast, big Viking with a hundred kills to his name out on the Devouring Sea, it’s all the same—we’re driven by the wind.

  “Here’s the thing, Snorri ver Snagason. The wind has changed. It blows from the Isles now and there’s a new god making the weather. Not a good god, not a clean one, but that’s not ours to change. We’re at sea and we bow our heads to our tasks and hope to stay afloat.

  “The Dead King holds the Isles now. He broke Jarl Torsteff’s strength there, and that of the Iron Jarl, of the Red Jarls of Hardanger. All driven back to their ports.

  “Now he comes for us, with dead men, our dead amongst them, and monsters from beyond death.”

  “You should fight them!” Snorri found himself straining, useless against the ropes’ strength.

  “How is that working out for you, Snorri?” A hardness around his eyes, something bitter and difficult to read. “Fight the sea and you drown.” He hefted the axe on his lap, finding comfort in its weight. “The Dead King is persuasive. If I brought this wife and son of yours here, to this room, held a hot iron to their faces . . . you might find me persuasive, no?”