The Wheel of Osheim

‘My father…’ Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. ‘He never loved me. A cold man.’

‘My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been … sharp.’ The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.

Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.

‘I was just a boy … I saw him do it … killed them both. My mother, and my…’ I choked and couldn’t speak.

‘A sibling?’ he asked.

I nodded and drank.

‘I saw my mother and brother killed,’ he said. ‘I was young too.’

I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.

‘I still have the scars of that day!’ I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.

‘Me too.’ He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.

‘Jesus!’

‘He wasn’t there.’ The stranger pulled back into the shadow. ‘Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.’

I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. ‘Drink to forget.’

‘I have better ways.’ He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.

I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it – but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.

Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.

‘Drink to dull the pain, my brother!’ I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. ‘I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.’ I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. ‘I could show you a camel footprint but…’ I waved the idea away.

‘I’ve a few bruises myself.’ He lifted his own shirt and the moonlight caught the hard muscles of his stomach. The thorn scars patterned him there too, but it was his chest that caught my eye. In exactly the spot where I have a thin line of scar recording the entry of Edris Dean’s sword my drinking companion sported his own record of a blade’s passage into his flesh, though the scar was black, and from it dark tendrils of scar spread root-like across his bare chest. These were old injuries though, long healed. He had fresher hurts – better light would show them angry and red, the bite of a blade in his side, above the kidney, other slices, puncture wounds, a tapestry of harm.

‘Shit. What the hell—’

‘Dogs.’

‘Pretty damn vicious dogs!’

‘Very.’

I swallowed the word ‘bastard’ and cast about instead for some claim or tale that the bastard wouldn’t instantly top.

‘That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed…’

He looked up at me, again just the one eye glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. ‘Yes?’

‘Well she’s not properly dead. She’s in Hell plotting her return and planning revenge.’

‘On who?’

‘Me, you.’ I shrugged. ‘The living. Mostly me I think.’

‘Ah.’ He leaned back into the cushions. ‘Well there you’ve got me beat.’

‘Good.’ I drank again. ‘I was starting to think we were the same person.’

The boy came back, refilling my cup from his jug and moving the lanterns closer to us to light our conversation. The man said something to him in the desert tongue but I couldn’t follow it. Too drunk. Also, I don’t know more than the five words I learned in my year living in the city.

With the lamplight showing me the fellow’s face I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. I’d seen him before – possibly recently – or someone who reminded me strongly of him. Pieces of the puzzle started to settle out of my drunken haze. ‘Prince you say?’ Every other rich man in Liba seemed to be a prince, but in the north, where we both clearly came from, ‘prince’ was a richer currency. ‘Where from again?’ I remembered but hoped I was wrong.

‘Renar.’

‘Not … Ancrath?’

‘Maybe … once.’

‘By Christ! You’re him!’

‘I’m certainly someone.’ He lifted his flask high, draining it.

‘Jorg Ancrath.’ I knew him though I’d seen him just the one time, over a year ago in that tavern in Crath City, and he hadn’t sported such a burn then.

‘I’d say “at your service”, but I’m not. And you’re a prince of Red March, eh? Which would make you one of the Red Queen’s brood?’ He made to put his flask down and missed the ground, drunker than he had seemed.

‘I have that honour,’ I said, my lips numb and framing the words roughly. ‘I am one of her many breeding experiments – not one that has best pleased her though.’

‘We’re all a disappointment to someone.’ He swigged again, sinking further back into his cushions. ‘Best to disappoint your enemies though.’

‘These damnable mathmagicians have put us together, you know.’ I knew Yusuf had let me go too easily.

Jorg gave no sign of having heard me. I wondered if he’d passed out. A long pause turned into midnight, as it often does when you’re very drunk. The distant hour bell jolted him into speech. ‘I’ve made plenty of seers eat their predictions.’

‘Got their sums wrong this time though – I’m no use to you. It should have been my sister. She was to have been the sorceress. To stand at your side. Bring you to the throne.’ I found my face wet. I’d not wanted to think about any of this.

Jorg mumbled something, but all I caught was a name. Katherine.

‘Perhaps … she never had a name. She never saw this world.’ I stopped, my throat choked with the foolishness too much drink will put in a man. I drained my cup. There’s a scribe who lives behind our eyes scribbling down an account of events for our later perusal. If you keep drinking then at some point he rolls up his scroll, wraps up his quills, and takes the night off. What remained in my cup proved sufficient to give him his marching orders. I’m sure we continued to mutter drunkenly at each other, King Jorg of Renar and I. I expect we made a few loud and passionate declarations before we passed out. We probably banged our cups on the roof and declared all men our brothers or our foe, depending on the kind of drunks we were, but I have no record of it.

I do remember that I confided my problems with Maeres Allus to the good king, and he kindly offered me his sage advice. I recall that the solution was both elegant and clever and that I swore to adopt it. Sadly not a single word of that counsel remained with me the following day.

My last memory is an image. Jorg lying sprawled, dead to the world, looking far younger in sleep than I had ever imagined him. Me pulling a rug up across him to keep off the cold of the desert night, then staggering dangerously toward the stairs. I wonder how many lives might have been saved if I had just rolled him off the roof’s edge…

Many men drink to forget. Alcohol will wash away the tail end of a night, erasing helpful advice, and the occasional embarrassing incident, whilst trying to weave a path home. Unfortunately if you’ve developed a talent for suppressing older memories, accumulated while depressingly sober, then alcohol will often erode those barriers. When that happens, rather than sleep in the blessed oblivion of the deeply inebriated you will in fact suffer the nightmare of reliving the worst times you’ve ever known. A river of whisky carried me back into memories of Hell.

‘Jesus Christ! What was that thing?’ I gasp it between deep breaths, bent double, hands on my thighs. Looking back I see the raised dust that marks our hasty escape from the small boy and his ridiculously vast dog.