King of Thorns

I learned a time ago that if you can’t get what you want by going in the front door, find a back way. I know a back way to that cemetery. Not by a path I wanted to tread, but I would take it even so.

When I was very young, six maybe, a duke called on my father, a man from the north with white-blond hair and a beard down his chest. Alaric of Maladon. The Duke brought a gift for my mother, a wonder of the old world. Something bright and moving, swirling within glass, first lost in the hugeness of the Duke’s hand and then in the folds of Mother’s dress.

I wanted that thing, half-seen and not understood. But such gifts were not for tiny princes. My father took it and set it in the treasury to gather dust. I learned this much from quiet listening.

The treasury in the Tall Castle lies behind an iron door, triple-locked. Not a Builder-made door, but a work of the Turkmen, black iron set with a hundred studs. When you’re six, most locked doors present a problem. This one presented several.

Of all memories, the first I have is of leaning from a high parapet into the teeth of a gale, with the rain lashing and me laughing. The next is of hands pulling me back.

If you’re determined, if you set your mind, there are never enough hands to pull you back. By the time I reached six I knew the outside of the Tall Castle as well as I knew the inside. The Builders left little for a climber to use, but centuries of tinkering by the Ancraths, and the House of Or before us, had provided plenty of footholds, at least plenty of ones deep enough for a child.

There is a single high window in the royal treasury, set in a plain wall a hundred feet above the ground, too narrow for a man and blocked by a forest of bars set so close as to give a snake quite a wriggle of it. On the far side of the castle, close to the throne-room, is a hole that leads to a gargoyle’s head on the outer wall. If the treasury door opens, then the movement of air through the castle makes the gargoyle speak. On a still day he moans and when the wind is up he howls. He will also speak if the wind is hard in the east and a particular window in the kitchen stores is left unshuttered. When that happens there’s a fuss and somebody gets whipped with rope and wire. Without the treasury’s high window the gargoyle would not speak and the king would never know when the door to his treasures stood open.

I left my bed one moonless night. William lay sleeping in his little bed. No one saw me leave, only our great-hound, Justice. He gave a whine of reproach then tried to follow. I cursed him to silence and closed the door on him.

Those bars look strong but like so much we depend upon in life they are rotten to the core. Rust has eaten them. Even those with steel left at the centre will bend given sufficient leverage. One night when my nurse lay sleeping and three guards on wall-duty argued over the ownership of a silver coin found on the steps at change-over, I climbed down a knotted rope and set foot amidst my father’s wealth. I brushed the rust from my tunic, shook great flakes of it from my hair, and set my lantern, now unhooded, upon the floor.

The Ancrath loot, robbed from almost every corner of empire, lay on stone shelves, belched from coffers, stood stacked in careless piles. Armour, swords, gold coin in wooden tubs, mechanisms that looked like parts of insects, gleaming in the lantern light and tainting the air with alien scents, almost citrus, almost metal. I found my prize beside a helmet full of cogs and ash.

The Duke’s gift didn’t disappoint. Beneath a glass dome that wasn’t glass, sealed by an ivory disk that wasn’t ivory, lay a tiny scene, a church in miniature set around with tiny houses, and there a person, and another. And as I held it to the light, and turned its surprising weight this way and that to see the detail, a snowstorm grew, swirling up from the ground until whirling flakes obliterated the view leaving nothing but a blizzard in a half-globe. I set the snow-globe back, worried for a moment that I had somehow broken it. And miracle of miracles, the snow began to settle.

There’s no magic to it now. I know that the right collection of artisans could make something similar in just a few weeks. They would use glass and ivory, and I don’t know what the snow would be, but as ancient wonders go, there’s little wonder in such things if you’re much past six. But at the time it was magic, of the best kind. Stolen magic.

I shook the snow-globe again, and once more the all-encompassing blizzard rose, chaos, followed by calm, by settling snows, and a return to the world before. I shook it again. It seemed wrong. All that storm and fury signifying nothing. The whole world upheaved, and for what? The same man trudged toward the same church, the same woman waited at the same cottage door. I held a world in my hand and however I shook it, however the pieces fell, in whatever new patterns, nothing changed. The man would never reach the church.

Even at six I knew the Hundred War. I marched wooden soldiers across Father’s maps. I saw the troops return through the Tall Gate, bloody and fewer, and the women weeping in the shadows as others threw themselves at their men. I read the tales of battle, of advance and retreat, of victory and defeat, in books I would not have been allowed to open if my father knew me. I understood all this and I knew that I held my whole world in my right hand. Not some play land, some toy church and tiny men crafted by ancients. My whole world. And no amount of shaking would change it. We would swirl against each other, battle, kill, and fall, and settle, and as the haze cleared, the war would still be there, unchanged, waiting, for me, for my brother, for my mother.

When a game cannot be won, change the game. I read that in the book of Kirk. Without thought I brought the snow-globe overhead and smashed it on the ground. From the wet fragments I picked out the man, barely a wheat-grain between my thumb and finger.

‘You’re free now,’ I said, then flicked him into a corner to find his own way home, because I didn’t have all the answers, not then, and not now.

I left the treasury, taking nothing, almost defeated by the rope climb even so. I felt tired but content. What I had done seemed so right that I somehow thought others would see it too and that my crime would not follow me. With aching arms, and covered with rust and scratches, I hauled myself back over the parapet.

‘What’s this now?’ A big hand took me by the neck and lifted me off my feet. It seemed that the wall guards had been less argumentative over my coin than I had hoped.

It didn’t take long before I stood in my father’s throne-room with a sleepy page lighting torches. No whale oil in silver lamps for this night’s business, just pitch-torches crackling, painting more smoke on the black ceiling. Sir Reilly held my shoulder, his gauntlet too heavy and digging in. We waited in the empty room and watched the shadows dance. The page left.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Though I wasn’t.

Sir Reilly looked grim. ‘I’m sorry too, Jorg.’

‘I won’t do it again,’ I said. Though I would.

‘I know,’ Sir Reilly said, almost tender. ‘But now we must wait for your father, and he is not a gentle man.’

It seemed that we waited half the night, and when the doors boomed open, I jumped despite the promises I made myself.

My father, in his purple robe and iron crown, with not a trace of sleep in him, strode alone to the throne. He sat and spread his hands across the arms of his chair.

‘I want Justice,’ he said. Loud enough for a whole court though Reilly and I were his only audience.

Again. ‘I want Justice.’ Eyes on the great doors.

‘I’m sorry.’ And this time I meant it. ‘I can pay—’

‘Justice!’ He didn’t even glance at me.

The doors opened again and on a cart such as they use to bring prisoners up from the dungeon came my great-hound, mine and Will’s, chained at each leg and pushed by mild-faced servant named Inch, a broad-armed man who had once slipped me a sugar-twist on a fete day.

I started forward but Reilly’s hand kept me where I was.

Justice trembled on the cart, eyes wide, shivering so bad he could barely stand, though he had four legs to my two. He looked wet and as Inch pushed him nearer I caught the stink of rock-oil, the kind they burn in servant’s lamps. Inch reached into the cart and lifted an ugly lump hammer, a big one used for breaking coal into smaller pieces for the fire.

‘Go,’ Father said.

The look in Inch’s mild eyes said he would prefer to stay, but he set the hammer on the floor and left without protest.

‘There are lessons to be learned today,’ Father said.

‘Have you ever burned yourself, Jorg?’ Father asked.

I had. I once picked up a poker that had been left with one end in the fire. The pain had taken my breath. I couldn’t scream. Not until the blisters started to rise could I make any sound above hissing, and when I could I howled so loud my mother came running from her tower, arriving as the maids and nurse burst from the next room. My hand had burned for a week, weeping and oozing, sending bursts of horrific pain along my arm at the slightest wiggle of fingers. The skin fell away and the flesh beneath lay raw and wet, hurt by even a breath of air.

‘You took from me, Jorg,’ Father said. ‘You stole what was mine.’

I knew enough not to say that it was Mother’s.

‘I’ve noticed that you love this dog,’ Father said.

I wondered at that, even in my fear. I thought it more likely that he had been told.

‘That’s a weakness, Jorg,’ Father said. ‘Loving anything is a weakness. Loving a hound is stupidity.’

I said nothing.

‘Shall I burn the dog?’ Father reached for the nearest torch.

‘No!’ It burst from me, a horrified scream.

He sat back. ‘See how weak this dog has made you?’ He glanced at Sir Reilly. ‘How will he rule Ancrath if he cannot rule himself?’

‘Don’t burn him.’ My voice trembled, pleading, but somehow it was a threat too, even if none of us recognized it.

‘Perhaps there is another way?’ Father said. ‘A middle ground.’ He looked at the hammer.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to.

‘Break the dog’s leg,’ he said. ‘One quick blow and Justice will be served.’