Emperor of Thorns

I hadn’t wanted to live in the palace Prince Orrin had built for Katherine. I spent a few weeks there after we had secured the allegiance of Arrow’s surviving lords. The building reminded me of Orrin, austere but splendid, high arches, pillars of white stone, it could have been copied from the ruins of Macedon where Alexander grew to greatness. I rattled around in its many rooms with the brothers as my guards, and my captains planning the capture of Arrow’s remaining conquests. The palace felt deserted despite a staff of hundreds, strangers all of them. In the end I’d been glad to ride out to secure Normardy, somehow a relief though it proved the bloodiest of that spring’s campaigns.

If life in the Haunt had left me too soft for a day in the saddle then I was wise to avoid the luxury of that palace. Better the mountains than the plains, better the howl of the wind about snow-clad peaks than the foul air blowing off the Quiet Sea laden with the stench of the Drowned Isles. Besides, in Ancrath and in Renar the blood of my line ran thickest. I might not hunger for the warmth of family but in troubled times it’s wiser to be surrounded by subjects who follow out of habit rather than out of new-found fear.

A gentle rain began to fall as the light faded. I pulled my cloak tighter and moved to one of the campfires.

‘A tent for the king!’ Sir Riccard shouted, catching the arm of a passing guardsman.

‘A little wet won’t hurt me,’ I told him. A good swordsman, Riccard, and brave, but rather too taken with his rank and with shouting.

Time spent around a fire, among the bustle of warriors, was more to my liking than watching the walls of a tent twitch and flap, and imagining what might lie behind them. I watched the guards organize their camp and let the aroma of the stew-pots tease my nose.

When you are a troop of more than three hundred, a small army by most reckonings, all the simple matters of the road require discipline. Latrine trenches must be dug, a watch organized on a defensible perimeter, horses taken to graze and water. Gone the easy ways that suited our band of brothers on the roads of my childhood. Scale changes everything.

A guard captain came with a chair for me, a piece of campaign furniture that would fold down again to a tight flat package with brass-bound corners to weather the knocks and bumps of travel. Captain Harran found me sat in it with a bowl of venison and potatoes in my lap, food from my own stores at the Haunt, no doubt. The guard expected to provision wherever they stopped – a kind of highway robbery legalized by the last echoes of empire.

‘There’s a priest wanting to see you,’ Harran said. I let him drop ‘King Jorg’ into my expectant silence. The captains of the Gilden Guard hold the Hundred in mild contempt and are wont to laugh at our titles behind their oh-so-shiny helms.

‘A priest? Or perhaps the Bishop of Hodd Town?’ I asked. The Gilden Guard have little respect for the church of Roma either, a legacy of centuries punctuated by vicious squabbles between emperors and Popes. For the emperor’s loyalists Vyene is the holy city and Roma an irrelevance.

‘Yes, a bishop.’ Harran nodded.

‘The silly hat gives them away,’ I said. ‘Sir Kent, if you could go and escort Father Gomst to our little circle of piety. I wouldn’t want him coming to grief amongst the guard.’

I sat back in my chair and swigged from a tankard of ale they’d brought me, sour stuff from the breweries of the Ost-Reich. Rike watched the fire, gnawing on a bone from his meal. Most men watch the flames as if seeking answers in the mystery of that bright dance. Rike just scowled. Gorgoth came across and elbowed a space close enough that the glow lit him. Like me he had a measure of understanding when he stared into the flames. The magic I’d borrowed from Gog burned out of me on the day we turned the men of Arrow from the Haunt – it was never truly mine. I think, though, that Gorgoth had wet his hands in what Gog swam through. Not fire-sworn like Gog, but with a touch of it running in his veins.

Grumlow alerted us to Bishop Gomst’s approach, pointing out the mitre swaying above the heads of guardsmen lined for the mess tent. We watched as he emerged, arriving in full regalia with his crook to lean on and a shuffle in his feet, though he had no more years on him than Keppen who could run up a mountain before lunch if the need arose.

‘Father Gomst,’ I said. I’d been calling him that since I could call him anything at all and saw no reason to change my ways just because he’d changed his hat.

‘King Jorg.’ He bowed his head. The rain started to thicken.

‘And what brings the Bishop of Hodd Town out on a damp night like this when he could be warming himself before the votive candles banked in his cathedral?’ A sore point since the cathedral stood half built. I still poked at old Gomsty as if he were stuck in that cage we found him in years back on the lichway. My uncle had over-reached himself when he commissioned the cathedral project, a poorly judged plan conceived the same year my mother squeezed me into the world. Perhaps another bad decision. In any event, the money had run out. Cathedrals don’t come cheap, not even in Hodd Town.

‘I needed to speak with you, my king. Better here than in the city.’ Gomst stood with the rain dripping from the curls of his crook, bedraggled in his finery.

‘Get the man a chair,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t leave a man of God standing in the muck.’ Then in a lower voice, ‘Tell me, Father Gomst.’

Gomst took his time to sit, adjusting his robes, the hems thick with mud. I expected him to come with a priest or two, a church boy to carry his train at least, but my bishop sat before me unattended, dark with rain, and looking older than his years.

‘There was a time when the seas rose, King Jorg.’ He held his crook white-knuckled and stared at the other hand in his lap. Gomst never told stories. He scolded or he flattered, according to the cloth of his audience.

‘The seas rise each day, Father Gomst,’ I said. ‘The moon draws on the deep waters as it draws on women’s blood.’ I knew he spoke of the Flood, but tormenting him came too easy.

‘There were untold years when the seas lay lower, when the Drowned Isles were one great land of Brettan, and the Never Lands fed an empire, before the Quiet Sea stole them. But the waters rose and a thousand cities drowned.’

‘And you think the oceans ready themselves for another bite?’ I grinned and held a hand out to accept the rain. ‘Will it pour for forty days and nights?’

‘Have you had a vision?’ A question rasped from scorched lungs. Red Kent had come to squat beside Gomst’s chair. Since surviving the inferno at the Haunt Sir Kent had got himself a bad case of religion.

‘It seems I chose well when making court in the mountains,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the Highland will become the richest island kingdom in the new world.’

Sir Riccard laughed at that. I seldom made a joke that didn’t find an echo in him. Makin twisted a grin. I trusted that more.

‘I speak of a different rising, a darker tide,’ Gomst said. He seemed determined to play the prophet. ‘Word comes from every convent, from Arrow, Belpan, Normardy, from the cold north and from the Port kingdoms. The most pious of the faith’s nuns dream of it. Hermits leave their caves to speak of what the night brings them, icons bleed to testify the truth. The Dead King readies himself. Black ships wait at anchor. The graves empty.’