Prince of Fools

  “Why don’t you sleep, Red March?” Snorri spoke from the darkness.

  “We’re in Red March, Norseman. It only makes sense to call someone by their place of origin when you’re a long way from it. We’ve been through this.”

  “And the sleeping?”

  “Women on my mind.”

  “Ah.” Enough silence that I thought he’d dropped off, then, “One in particular?”

  “Mostly all of them, and their absence from this riverbank.”

  “Better to think of one,” he said.

  For the longest time I watched the stars. People say they spin, but I couldn’t see it. “Why are you awake?”

  “My hand pains me.”

  “A scratch like that? And you a great big Viking?”

  “We’re made of meat just like other men. This needs cleaning, stitching. Done right and I’ll keep the arm. We’ll leave the boat when the river widens, then skirt the coast. I’ll find someone in Rhone.”

  He knew there would be a port at the mouth of the river, but if the Red Queen had marked him for death then it would be madness to go there seeking treatment. The fact that Grandmother had ordered his release and that the port of Marsail was a renowned centre of medicine, with a school that had produced the region’s finest doctors for close on three hundred years, I kept to myself. Telling him would unravel my lies and paint me as the architect of his fate. I didn’t feel good about it, but better than I would if he decided to trim me with his sword.

  I returned to my imaginings of Lisa and her sisters, but in the deepest part of the night it was that fire that lit my dreams, colouring them violet, and I saw through the flames, not the agonies of the dying but two inhuman eyes in the dark slit of a mask. Somehow I’d broken the Silent Sister’s spell, escaped the inferno, and borne away part of the magic . . . but what else might have escaped and where might it be now? Suddenly each noise in the dark was the slow step of that monster, sniffing me out in the blind night, and despite the heat my sweat lay cold upon me.

  • • •

  Morning struck with the promise of a blazing summer’s day. More of a threat than a promise. When you watch from a shaded veranda, sipping iced wine as the Red March summer paints lemons onto garden boughs—that’s promise. When you have to toil a whole day in the dust to cover a thumb’s distance on the map—that’s threat. Snorri scowled at the east, breaking his fast on the last stale remains of the bread he’d stolen in the city. He said little and ate left-handed, his right swelling and red, the skin blistering like that on his shoulders but not burned by the sun.

  The river held a brackish air, its banks parting company and surrendering to mud flats. We stood by our boat, the water now fifty yards off, sucked back by tidal flow.

  “Marsail.” I pointed to a haze on the horizon, a smear of darkness against the wrinkled blue where the distant sea crowded beneath the sky.

  “Big.” Snorri shook his head. He went to the rowing boat and made a slight bow, muttering. Some damn heathen prayer, no doubt, as if the thing needed thanking for not drowning us. Finished at last, he turned and gestured for me to lead the way. “Rhone. And by swift roads.”

  “They’d be swifter if we had horses.”

  Snorri snorted as if offended by the idea. And waited. And waited some more.

  “Oh,” I said, and led off, though in truth my expertise ended with the knowledge that Rhone lay north and a little west. I hadn’t the least clue about local roads. In fact, past Marsail I would struggle to name any of the region’s major towns. No doubt Cousin Serah could reel them off pat, her breasts defying gravity all the while, and Cousin Rotus could probably bore a librarian to death with the populace, produce, and politics of each settlement down to the last hamlet. My attentions, however, had always been focused closer to home and on less worthy pursuits.

  We left the broad strip of cultivated floodplain and climbed by a series of ridges into drier country. Snorri ran with sweat by the time the land levelled out. He seemed to be struggling; perhaps a fever from his wound had its hooks in him. It didn’t take long for the sun to become a burden. After a mile or three of trekking through stony valleys and rough scrub, and with my feet already sore, my boots already too tight, I returned to the subject of horses.

  “You know what would be good? Horses. That’s what.”

  “Norsemen sail. We don’t ride.” Snorri looked embarrassed, or perhaps it was the sunburn.

  “Don’t or can’t?”

  He shrugged. “How hard can it be? You hold the reins and go forwards. If you find us horses, we’ll ride.” His expression darkened. “I need to be back there. I’ll sleep in the saddle if a horse will get me north before Sven Broke-Oar finishes his work in the Bitter Ice.”

  It occurred to me then that the Norseman truly hoped his family might yet survive. He thought this a rescue mission rather than just some matter of revenge. That made it even worse. Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction. It made breaking whatever spell bound us an even higher priority. By the look of his hand, which seemed worse from one hour to the next, with the infection’s spread now marked by a darkening of the veins, any spell-breaking would need to be done soon. Otherwise he might die on me and then my dire predictions concerning the consequence for one of us if the other expired might soon be put to the test. I’d made the claim as a lie, but it had felt true when I spoke it.

  • • •

  We trudged on through the heat of the day, forcing a path through a dry and airless conifer forest. Hours later the trees released us, scratched, and sticky with both sap and sweat. As luck would have it, we spilled from the forest’s margins directly onto a broad track punctuated with remnants of ancient paving.

  “Good.” Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. “I’d thought you lost back there.”

  “Lost?” I feigned hurt. “Every prince should know his realm like the back of . . . of . . .” A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. “Of something familiar.”

  The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.

  Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.

  “Horse?” Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.

  “Please.”

  “It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.”

  “We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.”

  “And fast,” said Snorri.

  The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. “Ayuh.” And he was past.

  Snorri pursed his blistered lips and walked on, until a hundred yards farther down the road something stopped him in his tracks. “That,” he said, looking down, “is the biggest pile of dung I’ve seen in my life.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve seen bigger.” In fact, I’d fallen in bigger, but as this appeared to have dropped from the behind of a single beast I had to agree that it was pretty damned impressive. You could have heaped a score of dinner plates with it if one were so inclined. “It’s big, but I have seen the like before. In fact, it’s quite possible that we’ll soon have something in common.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s quite possible, my friend, that we’ll both have had our lives saved by a big
pile of shit.” I turned towards the retreating old man. “Hey!” I hollered down the road at his back. “Where’s the circus?”

  The ancient didn’t pause but simply extended a bony arm towards an olive-studded ridge to the south.

  “Circus?” Snorri asked, still transfixed by the dung pile.

  “You’re about to see an elephant, my friend!”

  “And this effelant will cure my poisoned hand?” He held the offending article up for inspection, wincing as he did so.

  “Best place to get wounds seen to outside a battle hospital! These people juggle axes and burning brands. They swing from trapezes and walk on ropes. There’s not a circus in the Broken Empire that doesn’t have half a dozen people who can stitch wounds and with luck an herbman for other ailments.”

  A sidetrack turned from the road a quarter of a mile on and led towards the ridge. It bore evidence of recent traffic, and large traffic at that—the hard-baked ground scarred by wheel ruts, the overhanging trees sporting fresh-broken branches. On cresting the ridge we could see an encampment ahead: three large circles of wagons, a scattering of tents. Not a circus set up to entertain but one on the move and enjoying a rest stop. A dry-stone wall enclosed the field where the travellers had camped. Such walls were common in the region, being as much a place to put the ubiquitous chunks of rock that the soil yielded as they were a means of containing livestock or marking boundaries. A sour-looking grey-haired dwarf sat guarding the three-barred gate at the field’s entrance.

  “We already got a strongman.” He eyed Snorri with a short-sighted squint and spat an impressive amount of phlegm into the dust. The dwarf was the kind that resemble common men in the size of their head and hands, but whose torsos have been concertinaed into too small a space, their legs left thin and bandy. He sat on the wall cleaning his fingernails with a knife, and his expression announced him more than happy to stick strangers with it.

  “Come now! You’ll offend Sally!” I remonstrated. “If you’ve already got a bearded lady I can scarce believe she’s as comely as this young wench.”

  That got the dwarf’s attention. “Well, hello, Sally! Gretcho Marlinki at your service!”

  I could feel Snorri looming behind me in the way that suggested my head might get twisted off in short order. The little fellow jumped from the wall, leered up at Snorri, and unhitched the gate.

  “In you go. Blue tent inside the circle on the left. Ask for Taproot.”

  I led on in, thankful that Gretcho was too short to pinch Snorri’s backside or we might be owing this Taproot for a new midget.

  “Sally?” the Norseman rumbled behind me.

  “Work with me,” I said.

  “No.”

  Most of the circus folk were probably sleeping out the noon heat, but a fair number worked at assorted tasks around the wagons. Repairs to wheels and tack, tending animals, stitching canvas, a pretty girl practising a pirouette, a heavily pregnant woman tattooing the back of a shirtless man, the inevitable juggler throwing things up and catching them.

  “Utter waste of time.” I nodded at the juggler.

  “I love jugglers!” Snorri’s grin showed white teeth in the cropped blackness of his beard.

  “God! You’re probably the sort that likes clowns!”

  The grin broadened as if the mere mention of clowns were hilarious. I hung my head. “Come on.”

  We passed a stone-walled well beyond which, away down the slope, a scattering of headstones stood. Clearly generations had used this place to pause their travels. And some had never left.

  The blue tent, though faded almost to grey, proved easy to spot. Larger and cleaner and taller than the rest, it stood centrally and sported a battered painted sign outside on two posts.

  Dr. Taproot’s famous circus

  Lions, tigers, bears, oh my!

  By appointment to the Imperial Court of Vyene

  Since knocking is difficult with tents, I leaned in towards the entrance flap and coughed.

  “. . . couldn’t just paint some stripes on the lion?”

  “. . .”

  “Well, no . . . but you could wash them off again before that?”

  “. . .”

  “No, it’s been a while since I last gave a lion a bath, but—”

  My second, more theatrical cough, caught their attention.

  “Come!”

  And so I ducked, Snorri ducked lower, and we went in.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the blue gloom within the tent. Dr. Taproot I judged to be the skinny figure seated behind a desk, and the more substantial form leaning over at him, hands planted firmly on the papers between them, must be the fellow objecting to bathing lions.

  “Ah!” said the seated figure. “Prince Jalan Kendeth and Snorri ver Snagason! Welcome to my abode. Welcome!”

  “How the hell—” I caught myself. It was good that he knew me. I’d been wondering how to convince anyone that I was a prince.

  “Oh, I’m Dr. Taproot, I know everything, my prince. Watch me!”

  Snorri passed me and snagged an empty chair. “Word gets around. Especially about princes.” He seemed less impressed than I was.

  “Watch me!” Taproot nodded, birdlike, a sharp-featured head on a thin neck. “Message-riders on the Lexicon Road carry gossip along with their sealed scrolls. And what a story! Did you truly jump an arctic bear, Mr. Snagason? Do you think you could jump one of ours? The pay’s good. Oh, but you’ve injured your hand. A hook-knife, I hear? Watch me!” Taproot’s chatter came so rapid and moved so fast that without your full attention the flow of it would hypnotize you.

  “Yes, the hand.” I latched onto that. “Have you a chirurgeon? We’re light on funds”—Snorri scowled at that—“but I’m good for credit. The royal coffers underwrite my purse.”

  Dr. Taproot offered a knowing smile. “Your debts are the stuff of legend, my prince.” He raised his hands as if trying to frame the enormity of them. “But fear not, I am a civilized man. We of the circus do not let a wounded traveller go untended! I shall have our sweet Varga see to the matter presently. A drink, perhaps?” He reached for the desk drawer. “You may go, Walldecker.” He shooed away the scar-faced man who had stood in silent disapproval through our conversation. “Stripes! Watch me! Good ones. Serra has black paint. See Serra.” Returning his attention to me, he fished out a dark glass bottle, small enough for poison. “I have a little rum. Ancient stuff from the wreck of the Hunter Moon, dredged up by scallop men off the Andoran coast. Try it.” He magicked three tiny silver cups into being. “I’m always one to sit and chat. It’s my burden. Watch me. Gossip runs through my veins and I must feed the habit. Tell me, my prince, is your grandmother well? How is her heart?”

  “Well she’s got one, I suppose.” I didn’t like the man’s impertinence. And his rum smelled like the stuff the herbmen rub on chilblains. Now that I had a chair under my arse and a tent about me and my name and station recognized, I began to feel a little more my old self. I sipped his rum and damned him for it. “Don’t know anything about how it’s ticking, though.” The idea of my grandmother suffering any frailties of the flesh seemed alien to me. She’d been carved from bedrock and would outlast us all. That was how Father had it.

  “And your elder brothers, Martus, isn’t it, and Darin? Martus must be coming up to twenty-seven now? Yes, in two weeks?”

  “Um.” Damned if I knew their birthdays. “They’re well. Martus misses the cavalry, of course, but at least he got a damn chance at it.”

  “Of course, of course.” Taproot’s hands were never still, plucking at the air as if snatching scraps of information from it.

  “And your great-uncle? He was never a well man.”

  “Garyus?” Nobody knew about the old man. I didn’t even know he was a relative for the first few years after I took to visiting him in the tower where they kept him. I cl
imbed in through the window so nobody saw me come and go. It was Great-Uncle Garyus who gave me Mother’s picture in a locket. I must have been about five or six. Yes, not long after the Silent Sister touched me. The blind-eye woman, I called her back then. Gave me a lepsy. Fits and shakes for a month. I found old Garyus by accident when I was small, clambered in before I noticed the room wasn’t empty. He scared me, hunched on his sickbed, twisted in ways a man shouldn’t twist. Not evil, but wrong. I feared catching it, that’s the honest truth. And he knew it. Good at knowing a man’s mind was Garyus, and a boy’s.

  “I was born this way,” he had said. Not unkindly, though I had stared at him as if he were a sin. His skull bulged as if overfilled, misshapen, like a potato.

  He lay propped up in his bed, a jug and goblet on the table close at hand, lit by dusty sunlight. No one came to him in this high tower, just a nurse to clean him, and sometimes a small boy clambering through the window.

  “Born broken.” Each sentence gasped between breaths. “I had a twin, and when we were birthed they had to break us apart. A boy and a girl, the first joined twins that weren’t both boys or both girls, they say. They broke us apart. But we didn’t break even. And I got . . . this.” He lifted a twisted arm as if doing so were a labour of Hercules.

  He had reached out from his sheets—a grave shroud, that was what those sheets made me think—he had reached out and given me that locket, a cheap enough thing but with my mother’s picture inside, so fine and real you’d swear she was looking right at you.