Emperor of Thorns

While I waited and ate my fruit a man joined me at the barrel-stack, just opposite the gangway. A man stranger than any on the quay, though by no means the furthest flung.

‘Sir Jorg of Conaught.’ I sketched him a bow. ‘And you’ll be a Florentine?’

He nodded, a curt motion beneath the tall cylinder of his hat. No part of his flesh showed, save his face, a plump and pasty white beneath the two-inch brim of that hat. How it didn’t burn scarlet I don’t know.

‘I’ve not met a modern before.’ I hadn’t liked the curtness of that nod so I spat out any politeness with the tough skin of the pineapple chunk I’d been chewing on.

He had nothing to say to that and looked away to where two men struggled with his luggage, a large trunk, covered with the same black fabric his frock coat, trews, waistcoat, and shirt appeared to have been cut from. A symphony in black with only his white cotton gloves and, of course, his pale face, to sour it. Sweat trickled along the side of his nose, his coat looked thick with it, shiny with human grease.

‘A Florentine banker bound for Afrique with not a bodyguard in sight?’ I asked. ‘I’ll keep the footpads off you for a few days if you have the coin.’ I thought I might attract less attention as the guard to a man even more out of place than myself.

He glanced my way, failing to keep his distaste hidden. ‘Thank you, sir, no.’

I shrugged, yawned and rolled my head. I imagined the wideness and wildness of the world must be a shock to any of the banking clans after the swordless peace their clockwork soldiers maintained in Florence. The next piece of pineapple glistened on the point of my dagger – gone in one noisy mouthful.

‘Your name, banker,’ I said.

‘Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South.’

‘Well good luck, Master Marco.’ I turned my back on him and followed his trunk onboard. He would probably need all the luck he could afford, but reason demanded that he must have something to him or he wouldn’t have survived to get this far from the counting tables of the Florentines.

On the bleached white decks of the Keshaf I spent hours watching the swelling sea from the prow and discovered that though the south had stained me I would never be so dark that the sun couldn’t burn me that bit more. The second half of the voyage found me skulking in the sails’ shade.

‘My lord?’ The captain’s boy with water in a leather mug.

I took it. Never refuse water in dry places – and there is no place more dry than the seas off Afrique. ‘My thanks.’ Thirst made me grateful.

I travelled as a down-at-heels knight rather than a king, with letters from my grandfather to ease passage where needed. Losing the weight of my title made life far more simple. I sipped the water and leaned back against coiled rope, more at ease that I had been in an age. I had had enough of formality in Albaseat, even if I did escape the threatened receptions. Better to learn the ways of empire incognito, from the streets, from the sewers if need be, than amongst the fountains and scented shade of the rich.

At times like these, finding peace in anonymity, I could only wonder, if I gained such pleasure in slipping the bonds of kingship why I kept repeating my claim to a greater throne, a heavier crown? With the creak of timbers about me, the flapping shade of the sails, and a cool sea-breeze to take the sweat away, replying to such questions came hard. My fingers found the answer. A copper box, thorn-patterned. Even here, in the wide blue sea, driven by restless winds, the child would find me, and though the box might hold the worst of my crimes, enough of them still roamed free, such that if I ever lingered too long, however bright a paradise I may have found, the past would catch me up, rise around me in a dark tide, and devour peace.

If you must run, have something to run toward, so it feels less like cowardice. And if you must run to something, why not make it the empire throne? Something suitably distant and unobtainable. After all, getting everything you wish for is nearly as dire a curse as having all your dreams come true.

Yusuf Malendra came to stand beside me at the ship’s rail. A tall man, slim, the wind billowing his loose cottons around him. Captain Akham introduced us as I boarded, the only other passenger other than Marco and me, but since then he’d hidden himself away – a difficult feat on a small ship. The modern, Marco of the long title, had thrown up over the side almost before we left harbour, nearly losing that fancy hat of his. He vanished below decks soon after. Perhaps Yusuf had been hidden down there too.

‘Impressive is it not?’ He nodded toward the Rock – Tariq’s Mountain, miles behind us yet still huge.

‘Very. This Tariq must have been a great king,’ I said.

‘Nobody knows. It’s a very ancient name.’ He gripped the rail in both hands. ‘All our names are ancient. The Builders wrote their names in machines and now we can’t read them. The suns burned all that was written on paper except the oldest of writings, that were stored in deep vaults, did you know that? The writings we found were the most precious, valued more for their antiquity than the secrets they held. When the lands became habitable and men crept back to them most of the records they recovered were the works of Greeks and Romans.’

‘So we’re behind the Builders in all things, even names?’ A short laugh escaped me.

For a while we watched the gulls wheel, listened to their cries.

‘You are visiting a relative in Maroc?’ he asked. ‘Getting married?’

‘You think your ladies would like me?’ I turned my burns toward him.

Yusuf shrugged. ‘Daughters marry who their fathers tell them to.’

‘And are you getting married?’ I lifted my gaze from the slim and curving sword at his hip to the dark mass of his hair, an expanding confusion of tight curls, imprisoned with bone combs.

He threw his head back and laughed. ‘Questions for questions. You’re a man who’s spent time at court.’ He let the swell lean him back into the rail and shot me a shrewd look. ‘I’m too old for more wives, Sir Jorg, and you perhaps think yourself too young for the first?’ Dark lips framed his smile, darker than the caramel of his skin. I guessed he might be thirty, certainly no older.

I shrugged. ‘Surely too young for any more. And to satisfy your curiosity, Lord Yusuf, I am merely travelling to see what the world has to offer.’

A wave slapped the hull sending up an unexpected spray over both of us.

The Marocan wiped his face. ‘Salty! Let’s hope the world has better to offer than that, no?’ Again the grin, teeth long, even, and curiously grey.

I grinned back. An odyssey would have been all right with me, barring the drifting wreckage and the consumption of urine. One day at sea was too few. Besides, entering a new world deserves a journey of consequence, not just a hop across a thirty-mile channel.

‘You will come and stay with me, Sir Jorg. I have a beautiful home. Come with me when we disembark. Let it not be said Maroc offers a poor welcome. I insist. And you can tell us what you hope to find in Afrique.’

‘You honour me,’ I said.

We stood without speaking for a time, watching the gulls again and the white flecked waves, until at last the distant mist and haze offered up the mountains once more, the jagged coast of a new world. I wondered what I would tell my hosts when they asked at table what brought me there. I could give away my rank and speak of Congression, of how the provost of Albaseat put into my mind that in Vyene the empire throne might be won in a different kind of game, with less bloodshed and more lying. And that to play in this new game I needed to know more about the key figures in the Hundred, more than they chose to show before the Gilden Gates. I could perhaps speak of the Prince of Arrow. Of how, more than the wind in the Keshaf ’s sails, his derision drove me to see the borders of empire for myself, to know what I would own, to give me better reasons for wanting it. And at the last, if foolishness took hold, I might speak of Ibn Fayed and of a mathmagician named Qalasadi. I had spent years in pursuit of revenge against an uncle who killed my mother and brother, and here was a man who would have slain all my mother’s kin in one night and left me holding the blame. Surely he deserved no better than Uncle Renar got?