“You will leave my property.”
A few rioters, sheepishly dropped wooden clubs and began backing towards the door, but a hooded woman strode into their midst, and in a voice, just as powerful as his, called out, “Enough of this farce!”
She looked up and Borquil felt a clammy hand close over his heart.
“I don’t allow Southerners into my house...” Apart from Irashtal, of course. He would have rid himself of her too if he didn’t need her so much.
The woman below pulled back her hood to reveal sleek black hair. It glistened so sweetly in the perfect sunlight of the Northern capital that a foreigner might almost think that this was the source of the insult “wethead” used to describe Southern refugees. Clever Borquil knew better, of course. He also knew that the best thing he could do right now was to fling himself head-first onto the cobbles before that woman or the four skeletal, gold-skinned men who had stalked in to flank her got their hands on him.
But he didn’t have the courage. “Irashtal. Here is my last order for you. Run now and fetch the poison behind the tapestry of King Frindop.”
“But—”
He could have invoked her oath again, but he had always preferred charm. “Run! And I swear I will free you before the end comes. I swear it.”
She obeyed even as the Southerners and their Talentless friends smashed their way into the lower floors of his mansion.
Poor Borquil didn’t want to die. He loved his life by the Farg river. Like the rest of the local aristocracy, he bought youth from starving—but healthy—young men whenever a wrinkle began to appear. A few coppers was all it cost him every time, and he’d raise a glass with his immortal friends to toast the foolishness of somebody who would sacrifice years of his life just to feed his children for another month. He had bought the ability to ride horses and skill with a hunting bow; he had once purchased three years of hard-won medical study from a student, ironically too ill to afford healing. Borquil had made himself one of the most Talented men in the land. But now he must end it. And quickly!
“Irashtal?” he boomed in the sergeant’s voice. “What’s keeping you? I hear them coming up the stairs already.” Did she want to be free or didn’t she, the silly old woman? Just when he thought she had been caught by the rebels and that he’d have to find the courage to jump over the balcony, after all, she slid into the room and locked the great mahogany door behind her.
She held the dark green bottle back from him for just a moment. “Remember, lord, you’ll only have a few seconds to free me...” She would serve him forever in the AfterWorld if he did not. No wonder she shook with fear!
“I won’t forget, Rashy. Hand it over.”
The cork popped out more easily than Borquil expected, but he forced the drink down. The poison was the first thing he had bought after he had signed that fateful deal with the Northern king and made his fortune. Even then, he knew his old compatriots would come for him one day. He hadn’t relaxed until the king had built the Great Wall to keep the wethead refugees out of the North. Even then, a few always made it through, and in the end, he had protected himself from assassins by banning Southerners from his presence entirely.
He had also bought a huge array of fighting skills, but like many of the idle rich, he left warfare to others and had allowed these Talents to wither. So now, as battering began at the door to his rooms, as harsh voices threatened him in a language he barely remembered, poor Borquil was reduced to suicide.
“Don’t cry, lord,” said Irashtal. “It will be over soon.”
She stroked him, as she had so many times over their years together, when the nightmares rotted his sleep. He wanted to ask her to sing for him one more time, for his final rest, but the door was already starting to give way.
He took two more swallows of the poison.
“It’s very like brandy,” he said, trying to be brave. Already, his mind was swimming with images from his past.
“The words, lord,” Irashtal urged him. “Free me!”
He put his arm around her withered shoulders. “I’m not sure, Rashy...”
“The words!”
“I need you. In the AfterWorld, you see? I have no family...”
“You lied to me!”
The door finally gave way. Three black haired men charged into the room. One of them ran straight for the window to block off the balcony. They must have feared he would still kill himself.
“You’re too late,” he said to them.
Irashtal spat in his face. He jerked back from her in shock. Then, she wrenched the bottle from his grasp.
“A drink, gentlemen?” she asked. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said in the Southern tongue, her words rusty. “It’s just brandy.” And to poor Borquil, “You’re not the only one who can lie, master.”
The black-haired young woman joined them in the bedroom. She too spoke Southern. Borquil got the gist of it. “Well, well, my king,” she bowed, winking at her accomplices. “Time we brought you home to your people.”
“I’m not the king! I gave that up.”
The woman answered him in Northern, her cold face twisting with the foreign words, “That’s not all you gived up.”
The filthy wetheads grabbed poor Borquil. Bony fingers circled him with rope. Then they bundled him through the splintered door.
“What about me?” asked Irashtal.
The leader of the kidnappers turned. “A dirty slave,” she said. “Disgusting.”
“But I helped you. He asked for poison and—”
“Who cares what you do? One like you?”
“I will come with you, then.”
Down the stairs they brought the trembling Borquil, Baron of Koreem, and past the merry looters until one burly Southerner took notice and cried, “Look! Them wetheads is tryin’ to rescue him!”
The woman kidnapper slid forward and punched a dagger into the man’s throat, but already his warning had spread and it followed the fleeing band out of the house and onto the roiling streets. Borquil saw heads on pikes: surprised faces of men and women he knew well, handsome and beautiful and young, all curled about with veils of smoke from their burning palaces.
People ran past with stolen silks, or struggled under gilded furniture, or fought each other for candlesticks. A knot of men stamped and kicked at something on the ground while crimson rivulets spread onto the cobbles at their feet.
Borquil couldn’t hear himself think under the great human roar of the crowd. A few people tried to impede the wetheads moving through their midst, but every time, the woman would kill them. Young or old, it didn’t matter to her. Borquil watched her stab a child and knew then, in his heart, that he would get no mercy from the likes of her.
However, as they left the crowds behind and rounded the corner of Golden Street into Hallowed Temple, they came face to face with a barricade manned by pikemen. Their mismatched armour and the blue rag tied over their biceps stole any hope Borquil might have had of rescue. Their captain even had his dumpy wife and a pair of brats with him. She had brought him his lunch and he waved now at the approaching group with a heel of bread.
“Wetheads?” said the captain. “You’re next when we finish off the Talented. Run back to the Wall while there’s yet time.”
The Wall. Even the sound of the words sent shivers through Borquil’s body. These days, he never travelled within a week’s journey of his ancient homeland. He always made sure he had a “headache” when the Northern king invited him hunting near the border.
“It’s an amazing sight, baron!” the monarch had told him once.
“I don’t like to look South...”
“But you should see what you have accomplished, sir! You need to see it to understand.”
Borquil saw it all right, on bad nights when the dreams came. He couldn’t go back there now, he couldn’t! He elbowed one of his captors
in the belly and struggled free. “They’re kidnapping me! I’m one of you! The wetheads—”
Immediately, the Southerners surrounded him again and forced him to his knees. But the captain had dropped his bread and had taken a pike from the wall where he had left it leaning. His men muttered angrily, lowering their own weapons.
“Kill them, Erkil!” said the captain’s wife. “Thems is like rats the way they stream over the border to take what’s ours! Filthy slug-eating wetheads!”
The Southerner men drew swords from sheaths hidden on their backs and held them steady enough that the blond captain began to have second thoughts. “Just let the prisoner go, wetties, all right? No need for blood, but we can’t just have you walk off with one of ours.”
The murderous Southern woman stepped forward, her face beautiful as it was severe. She gestured to Borquil. “He is Talented. Look at his clothing. Look at the silk.”
“He should be killed then, like the others. The scum deserve it.”
“We have better idea, us,” she replied. “Take him over the Wall to be our slave.”
All of the soldiers grinned. “Do they really hate me that much?” Borquil wondered. “Is it my fault they are Talentless?”
He spoke aloud. “It’s true I am a noble.” Nobody stopped him climbing to his feet again. “But I am different from other members of my class in one vital aspect.”
“Oh?” said the captain. “And what aspect would that be, mighty lord?”
“I am Borquil, who changed the weather. I am the Sunshine Baron.” Their eyes widened and the Southern woman started to look worried. Any moment now and she would shut him up. He spoke quickly. “I am the one who made the crops grow so well.” He pointed at the stunning palaces surrounding Hallowed Market. “I made this land rich. I made all of you rich!”
A pause followed his words and then the captain laughed aloud.
“No, High One. You made the nobles rich as angels, and us poor as devils. You made them rich enough to buy what few Talents we had left. I myself was a fine hunter ‘til Lord Cossmal made me give it up to pay a fine. Them wetties is welcome to you.”
He signalled the men to part the barrier and the kidnappers pulled him through it.
5
Outside the city, the wetheads had stolen a covered wagon. They shoved fearful Borquil inside and allowed Irashtal to join him there. He wanted to plan an escape for himself, or a pain-free suicide. But his slave wouldn’t let him be, apologising for her betrayal and begging, begging that he say the words and free her before it was too late.
“You would die without me,” he said to shut her up.
“I could earn my keep in a tavern, lord. With my singing.”
“Sing now then, you crone, and I’ll think about it.” He felt more afraid than he had since he was a boy fleeing his father’s wrath. There’d been no Wall then. The border at that time had consisted of hills too poor to fight over. There’d been no refugees either. Only merchants and artists and travelling nobles.
Outside the wagon, the Southerners muttered among themselves. Rain began to patter against the fabric roof and he realised by the sound of it that midnight had come. Who could know it better than he? Borquil the lucky? Borquil the clever who had ensured that the only rain in the North came at night, only ever heavy enough to please the crops. He hated that sound more than any other, because nothing was more likely to bring on the nightmares.
But then Irashtal sang. Her voice had the breathy quality of a flute, designed by angels for lullabies, for the easing of hurts. Her singing rolled back years to when he’d been a child in bed with fever and the cool hand on his brow had been his mother’s. The words were the same as mother’s too, the only parts of the Southern Tongue he still understood well: “Sweet child,” Irashtal purred, “my heart’s nectar...” Each pure note, high as heaven, or earthy and low, slowed Borquil’s heart. The rain itself paused to listen, it seemed. Even the rough Southerners outside...
Then, the fastenings of the wagon were ripped open to reveal the female leader of his kidnappers. She had tears on her sharp cheek bones.
“How?” she asked.
The prisoners stared at the newcomer, confused.
“A dirty slave... How?”
Irashtal sat tall. “I am not dirty. I gave myself to him. When we were both young. As a present.”
The kidnapper’s upper lip curled.
“We were in love,” said Irashtal. There’d been more to it than that and Borquil was grateful the slave held back from the full story. Some of those memories were thorns to his heart. He wished the women would shut up.
“They why not he give himself to you? If proper love? Why?”
Borquil had forgotten how much his people despised slaves. Selling Talents was something only the desperate did, because you always lost more than you expected on the deal. Selling the ability to fight, might leave a soldier’s arms completely paralysed. Selling a few years of youth, had been known to stop the seller’s heart sometimes. But only a fool would hand over her eternal soul without a similar commitment from her lover.
Happy Borquil had agreed to a full exchange of vows back in those heady days of youth, sixty years past now. It was this promise that persuaded Irashtal to run away North with him, with less than a purse of silver to their names.
“You are a fool,” the kidnapper told the old woman. “You will sing again.” She sat next to Borquil and closed her eyes.
Every day the wagon travelled farther south, and every evening the black-haired woman returned, to listen to the singing and to weep. Was she thinking of the child she had killed in the streets of the capital? Borquil felt sure her nights were haunted by even worse crimes than that. At the end of each session, she would stumble out of the back of the wagon in a daze.
At dawn, three days travel from the border, they dragged the trembling Borquil into the light.
The sun was rising on yet another perfect day in the North. All around lay the gigantic estates of the Talented. Field upon field of hemp or wheat and not a servant to be seen, although a column of smoke rose to the east where a village or a castle might be burning.
“You look the wrong way, traitor king,” said the Southern woman.
“I’m not your king.”
“You must look.”
They had to force him to turn around, to face south. The woman herself pried open his eyelids, her rough nails biting his skin. His vision began to blur almost immediately, but it was too late. The Wall, built fifty years before to keep out the wetheads, was little more than a dark line on the Southern horizon, but above it...above...
Borquil fell to his knees, careless of pebbles on the roadbed. He choked and cried out. “I’m not a bad man! I’m not!” His words died away.
The real Wall, not the one made by the Northerners, the real one, was built of ferocious black clouds. It extended far into the sky, boiling and spinning; fizzing with lightning. It shifted colour constantly: a rainbow of blacks and greys and sudden white cracks.
The woman knelt to whisper in his ear, quietly, gently. “We are still three days away. Imagine what is like, you, to live under it. Inside it.”
He tried to jerk away, weeping, but none of them would let him. “We were millions when you left, your majesty. Now we are thousands. One day, none. You sold our weather.”
“I was king. It was my right! And the rebels would have hunted me down anyway. Cut my head off!”
“Nobody will cut your head, your majesty. We just want you to live with us. Forever, if possible. Volunteers will give years of their youth just to keep you in our midst. I will be first among them.”
“Please,” said poor Borquil. It really wasn’t his fault. He’d been young. He had wanted to get back at the rebels who had killed his family. And wealth, of course, he had wanted that too. Anybody would have done the same.
“I can pay,” he said. “I have Talents. I can make you a great speaker. A faster runner. You...you could be blond. I’d give that up. You could live here and nobody would know you for a wethead.”
“You have nothing I want, your majesty.”
But at that moment, Borquil heard another sob behind him. Irashtal had seen the Wall too. Borquil realised then, that he possessed one thing the kidnapper wanted and for the first time in days hope took root in his heart.
That night, the Southerners made no camp, preferring to keep moving towards their drowning homeland. Their chief climbed in anyway, through the back, and eased herself next to the baron.
Irashtal opened her lips, but Borquil stopped her. “By your vow, I command you not to sing.” She closed her mouth with a snap.
“She must,” said the kidnapper.
“She cannot,” Borquil replied.
The woman shrugged as if it were of no import.
Borquil leaned forward against the ropes that held him. “It is in my power to give her to you. As a gift.” Irashtal tried to protest, but once again, her master silenced her with the words of command.
The kidnapper snarled. “Is this how you think to buy me? How like a Talented. I would not own a slave. It is filthy.”
Borquil licked his lips. “You don’t have to take her soul. Her Talents are also mine to dispose of.”
Irashtal gasped.
“What do you mean?” asked the woman.
“Her voice. Her ability. I can command her to give it up. To give it to you. She would have no choice.”
Both women stared at him. The wethead’s features seemed to ripple as tendencies fought for control of her heart. “No,” she said finally, hoarsely. “No,” she stood too quickly, falling backwards, as though he had offered her a scorpion. “You must be punished for what you did. You must live as we do. I won’t. I can’t accept.” She moved to escape.
Clever Borquil was too quick for her. “Sing, Irashtal,” he ordered. “By your oath, I command you to sing!” And, weeping, the slave opened her miraculous throat.
5
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