The Liar's Key
In the midst of the Devouring Sea, as far from land as I had ever been, I sat amid the heave and the swell on Kara’s small wooden boat and, with little to fix my mind upon, focused on Snorri instead. I watched him, leaning into the prow now, the wind streaming dark hair behind him, eyes on the southern horizon. As fierce a warrior as I’d ever known, with no give in him, no fear in the face of sword or axe. I knew why I was bound south—to claim the comforts and privilege of my birthright and live to a disgraceful old age. I knew what drew Snorri and, despite what he’d said days before, I couldn’t marry his words to any kind of sense. I’d seen plenty of what came back from the deadlands and none of it had been pretty.
I’d also noticed that since my long sleep he wore the key on a piece of rusting chain—as if he’d read my mind when I considered tearing it free and tossing it overboard. I felt a little hurt by his mistrust, however justified. I considered broaching the subject but watching him there, hunched around the pain of his poisoned wound and the older pain of his loss . . . I let it lie. Instead I followed his gaze to the dark stain on the horizon that held his attention.
“That looks bad.” It looked worse than bad.
“Yes.” A nod. “Could get rough.”
The storm caught us half a day from the shores of Maladon. A cataclysmic war of the elements that even the Vikings called a storm. It made everything that I’d suffered on the sea before seem like mild discomfort. The wind became a fist, the rain its spears, gripped tight and driven into flesh. And the waves . . . those waves will haunt my dreams until the day something worse comes along. The sea changed scale around us. A man out on the ocean always feels small, but amid waves that could overtop and sweep away castles, you understand what it is to be a beetle among stampeding elephants.
The wind drove us, without sails, skidding across foam-skinned behemoths. Turn to face it and the rain made you blind, the wind filling you as you tried to scream. Turn away and it became a fight to snatch a breath, so unwilling was the air to pause long enough to be captured.
I guess Snorri and the others were busy. They certainly seemed to do a lot of shouting and throwing themselves about. What they were busy with though I couldn’t tell you. Nothing they did could make any difference in the face of that assault. For my part I clung to the mast with both arms, and at times both legs. No lovers’ clinch was ever as tight as the embrace in which I held that wooden pole, and despite waves that washed across me until my lungs hammered for a chance to breathe, I kept my grip.
Small boats are, it turns out, highly resilient to being sunk. They bob up again and again in defiance of reason and expectation. My eldest brother, Martus, when ten or eleven, used to go to Morano Bridge with his friends, and sometimes Darin and I would sneak along to watch. The older boys would swim in the shallows, or go onto the bridge and drop their lines in the Seleen. When they got bored with not catching any fish they’d start looking for mischief. Martus would lead them along the many-pillared bridge wall, and piss on passing boats, or taunt local boys, safe in the knowledge that Father’s guards would protect him. Father always sent four guards with Martus, him being the heir.
One fine spring morning at the Morano Bridge Martus decided on a naval warfare simulation. In practice this meant having his friends haul large stones from the riverbank up onto the bridge and then him dropping them on passing mother ducks and the long trains of ducklings following in their wake. The thing is that it’s quite hard to sink a duckling with a rock. Especially when they’re coming out from under the bridge. The delay between the spotters on the upstream side and the emergence of the targets has to be judged, along with the exit point and the drop time. So for the best part of two hours Darin and I watched from the riverbank as Martus dropped a hundredweight of stones, some larger than his head, on a stream of fluffy ducklings led under the bridge by ill-advised mother ducks. And despite enormous splashes on all sides, the sucking drag of drowning stones, and a tumult of sizeable waves, those fluffy little bastards sailed on indefatigably, unsinkable yellow balls of downy defiance that drove Martus into ever greater rage. He didn’t get a single one, and when he raced down to tackle the last of them mano-a-duckling in the shallows, an angry swan burst from the reeds, evaded all four guards, and broke his wrist for him with a savage peck. Best day ever!
Anyway, Kara’s boat was rather like those ducklings. It had to be a kind of magic, but whatever the storm threw at us, it kept on floating.
• • •
The storm didn’t end, just weakened by degrees, each time resurging as my hopes grew, until by dawn it was merely torrential rain driven by a gale. I fell asleep still hugging the mast, soaked and frozen, knowing the sun had begun its climb into the sky but unable to see it behind the storm wrack.