Prince of Fools

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 forward. 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 further 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 toward the retreating old man. ‘Hey!’ Hollered down the road at his back. ‘Where’s the circus?’

The ancient didn’t pause but simply extended a bony arm toward 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 a herbman for other ailments.’