TO MURDER A KING
I can’t say for certain what happened after I found Aline in that tavern. I remember some of it – fragments, pieces of eggshell that I put together in my mind. But the shapes they form are never quite right. I know I stood there for a long time. I think I may have buried her out back, though I can’t be sure.
There was a tavern master there and, though I don’t remember him talking to me, oddly, I can remember things he said. He told me he tried to stop them and I had no reason not to believe him, except that he was still alive. He told me his own daughter had been killed too, when she started screaming too loud. But I didn’t see his daughter’s body anywhere around. I’m not sure if I killed the tavern master or not. It’s hard to say. There were so many people to kill, after all. I think I asked him where Castle Aramor was, and he told me it was four days’ ride south. But I didn’t have a horse, so there was no easy way for me to get there. But I wasn’t thinking about horses or travel. I wasn’t thinking about anything except that it was very important to me to go to Castle Aramor and kill the King. I would have to kill the Duke, too, obviously, and all his men, and definitely Fost with the axe. But the King had to come first and, after all, I wasn’t likely to forget the rest of them.
I remember it was night when I left the tavern. Having no horse or money, I just started walking south. I don’t think I was going all that fast, but I did just keep going. I walked and walked, and when I couldn’t walk any more, I would just fall by the side of the road and sleep. Then I would walk again. I must have eaten at some point, because four days’ ride is at least twenty by foot, but I don’t remember that. I think I was attacked once or twice, but I couldn’t afford the delay so I killed them and moved on. It had to have been twenty days, but I only ever remember the nights.
Sometimes Aline would talk to me. She would tell me to stop and rest. She would say that if she just spread her legs for the Duke and his men one more time, they would leave us in peace and we would grow old together and laugh about it. I think history has proved her wrong on that point, but when she said it I laughed anyway, just to see what it would feel like. Sometimes Aline would tell me I had just killed someone and it wasn’t going to bring her back to life, and I would ask her if, now that he was dead, she was going to bed him in the Afterlife. That wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but I wasn’t thinking very clearly and I was just imagining her anyway.
So I kept walking. I must have encountered the Duke somewhere on the road because I was carrying a sack with me and his head was in it. I wondered how I had got past his men, but perhaps I had found him in an inn somewhere and killed him while they slept. I seemed to be pretty cunning then.
At one point there was an old lady who gave me something to eat. I didn’t have anything to give her in return, and when I offered her the Duke’s head, she told me to put it back in the bag, and we went outside together and buried it in her garden. She gave me more to eat then, and we put some food in a bag that I took with me.
Sometimes I wonder if some of the things I remember really happened at all. It seems unlikely that I would have run into the Duke on the South Road, and even less likely that I would have managed to cut off his head without anyone noticing. And the truth is, I don’t kill people very often, even when I’m angry. And Aline – she’s never talked to me since, so either I imagined that part or else I said something very bad and she’s still mad at me.
So I walked on, southwards, to Castle Aramor, where the King lived – at least for a little while longer. Sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn’t. The distinction didn’t feel very important any more. I didn’t really talk to anyone I encountered, except for the old woman, but she did most of the talking anyway. So I suppose that’s why, by the time I reached Castle Aramor and started my long, slow climb up the tunnel that carried away human waste and animal carcases, I hadn’t heard that the King was already dead. It wouldn’t have mattered much if I had: there would always be a new King, and that one would need to be killed too.
*
The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t as big as I’d remembered. In fact, he was just about the scrawniest individual I’d ever seen. And his hair was all wrong. King Greggor had short grey hair in a military cut. This man had long, stringy brown hair beneath a slight, ill-fitting crown. And he smelled bad, which is saying something since I had spent the better part of a day clawing my way up a narrow stone tunnel that carried refuse and human waste from Castle Aramor down to the gully that might once have been part of an effort to dig a moat.
No, this man was all wrong. But he was kneeling before me and I did have my sword resting on his neck and in a moment his head would go flying across the room and hit the wall with a pleasant thunk. I was looking forward to that thunk. I had dreamed about it through the endless miles and rain that had brought me here, on foot and half dead.
The man was about to say something, but then a small coughing fit overtook him and I felt it polite to wait a moment, since he looked rather undernourished and no doubt had a nasty cold. I also didn’t want any noise when I took his head off.
A moment later, the coughing stopped. ‘Before you kill me, would it be inappropriate to ask a question?’ His voice was thin and wheezy, and to my ears sounded half calm and half crazy, but I was a poor judge, being completely crazy myself at the time.
‘You want to know why I’m going to kill you?’ I asked.
‘No, I already know that,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering why you brought me here in the first place.’
I was confused by the question, and I really didn’t have much time for confusion since soon enough someone would decide to follow the trail of filth I had left behind me to the King’s chamber. So I decided to cut off his head and bring it with me and we could discuss the situation on my way home.
‘What I mean is,’ he said, interrupting my train of thought, ‘if my father had wanted me dead so that Dergot could become King, why go through all the trouble of having me brought here?’
‘You’re stupid,’ I said. ‘I have to kill King Greggor. You’re in his room and you’re wearing a crown. And I have this sword with me and the bag that the old woman gave me with food but the food’s all gone so now I need to put something in the bag and—’
‘You have reason to hate King Greggor?’
‘I do,’ I said. And then, if only because I had rehearsed it in my mind and it felt wrong not to tell someone, I recited the entire speech I had planned for the King, about what he had done to Aline and my life, and how the Duke, though he definitely deserved to die, would probably have let us alone if not for the King, and how I was going to kill him now and no God would embrace him or speak his name, and how I would make sure that his reign wouldn’t be remembered for anything but the fact that one night a filthy peasant had sneaked into his room and murdered him.
I had worked it out on the road, and it was short and not too badly composed, I thought, but then I kept going, and I talked about the walking and the rain and the men who had tried to kill me and the Duke’s head which was now buried in an old woman’s garden. I talked about what it felt like to not be a human being any more, not really, and to finally climb up a river of shit to kill a man who needed killing more than any other man who had ever lived, only to find that he’d been replaced by a scrawny man who said stupid things.
I told him all that and he just sat there on his knees and listened. And when I was done he asked, ‘Are you still going to kill me?’
I thought about it for a moment. ‘It’s really all I can think of doing right now.’
‘Can I tell you who I am first?’ he asked.
‘If I listen will you promise to stop talking so I can hear the thunk when your head hits the wall?’
The scrawny man thought about that for a moment. ‘Marked,’ he said.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Paelis,’ he said. ‘Paelis the Pathetic, twenty-two years of age, son and greatest disappointment of King Greggor and Queen Yesa. Deemed lacking in physical and moral fortitude and therefore removed by royal decree as first heir to the throne in favour of his three-year-old brother Dergot, who, as it turns out, fell out of a window when no one was watching him, some two hours after the King died yesterday.’
The scrawny man started coughing again and I wondered if his head would still cough once it was separated from his body. After a moment, he stopped coughing and went on, ‘Since the day, three years ago, my father finally managed to pull another son out of my step-mother’s womb he has kept me locked in a tower with no warmth, little food and only as much water as leaked through the roof to drink. He waited for me to waste away and die, for no other reasons than that my words displeased him. He didn’t want the Saints’ curse for spilling royal blood.
‘You are not the first man whose life was destroyed by King Greggor. You say your grief is worse than mine, and I accept that. You say you want to see his reign forgotten for all time? I say, I am your man. I have spent every day of my life dreaming – no, more than dreaming, planning – a way to rid this world of my father’s benighted touch. You want his kingdom destroyed? Then I say again: I am your man.’
‘I am your man.’ It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever sought to put themselves beneath me, and it had come from a King. I thought about what he’d said and about what I would do next and I said something, but I don’t remember what it was because that was when the crossbow bolt hit me in the back.
*
I awoke to the sound of what I thought was my mother’s sewing. She liked to use a stiff, strong needle and thick thread when she worked, and the soft pop of the needle through the fabric was inevitably followed by the snaking sound of the thread being pulled. I tried to stay in that moment as long as I could, but even hazy as I was I remembered that my mother was several years dead, that I was a twenty-year-old man, and that I had tried to murder a King.
‘You may as well open your eyes,’ a woman’s voice said, and when I did as she asked I saw an old woman sitting on a chair near my bed, sewing blue fabric with gold thread.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ I said.
She nodded, but kept on sewing.
‘In the cottage by the South Road. We – did we bury a head in your garden?’ I asked.
She snorted. ‘Probably best not to talk about that now, I’d say.’
I looked around the room. It looked like the same room where I’d tried to kill the King. In fact, I was almost certain it was.
‘I’m in his room,’ I said to her.
‘The maids tell me he wouldn’t let them move you. Figured you wouldn’t survive it, what with your wounds and all.’
‘The crossbow bolt. It hit me in the back,’ I said stupidly.
‘The bolt? Sweet ugly Saints, boy, you were bleeding from a dozen festering wounds by the time they found you. I think they only kept you alive to figure out which God made that deal with you.’
Death. Love abandoned me and so I made my deal with Death.
‘Are you a seamstress?’ I asked.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Seamstress is what you call the person who fixes your dress, boy. I’m a tailor. The last real tailor, in fact.’
I had the feeling that it would be impolite to inform her that every city in the world had a dozen tailors. ‘Fine, a tailor then. What are you doing here?’ I asked.
She didn’t bother looking up this time. ‘Well, a good tailor knows which way the threads are moving. After you left, I thought about it for a while and reckoned they might have need of my skills here.’
‘The King doesn’t have his own tailors?’ I asked.
She looked at me as if I was an idiot. Which is fair, I suppose. ‘I told you, boy, there ain’t any other tailors left. Besides, there ain’t no one else knows how to sew what I’m making.’
‘Which is?’
Someone knocked at the door and I thought the woman would say something, but she just kept sewing. After a moment the knocking repeated.
‘It’s your damned bedroom,’ the woman called out. ‘Whose bloody permission are you waiting for?’
The door opened and the man from the night before – the King, I guess – entered the room. ‘Now if only I could get all my loyal subjects to treat me with such respect,’ he said jovially. ‘Most of the ones I encounter just want to kill me.’
He had changed his clothes and bathed and looked a lot more kingly to my eyes. He looked like he’d eaten better, too. That thought woke me up. ‘How long have I been unconscious?’ I asked.
‘You’ve been mostly dead for twelve days,’ the King said.
‘Twelve days? How is that possible?’
He coughed a bit and then walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, which struck me as rude, but then I remembered it was technically his bed.
‘You were in Death’s embrace, remember? You hadn’t slept for Saints know how long and you probably hadn’t eaten for a week.’
I was feeling irritated now, which told me I still wasn’t quite right in the head. ‘So how come I didn’t die of hunger if I’ve been unconscious for the past twelve days?’
The Tailor warned me off. ‘Best not to ask. It wasn’t very pretty. Involved a cloth tube and some sticks.’
The King ignored her. ‘Don’t worry, my strange friend. You had the best of care.’ The Tailor snorted but the King went on, ‘I took care of you myself, with the help of the royal doctors.’
I found that hard to believe. ‘You took care of me yourself? Washed my wounds and changed my sheets?’
‘And wiped your arse,’ the Tailor chimed in happily.
‘Well,’ the King said, ‘it was only fair. It was my man who shot you in the back, so I thought it a fair trade. The world should be fair, you know.’
The world should be fair. For some reason that started me laughing and I thought about all the things that had happened and I just kept laughing over and over, and then suddenly the laughter turned to something else and I heard great wracking sobs pouring from my mouth and my eyes were bleeding tears and I swear I thought I would drown in them because for some reason I just couldn’t stop.
The King whispered in the Tailor’s ear and she got up and left, and then he did something very strange. He reached over and took my head in both his hands, just the way Aline sometimes did when she needed me to listen, the way she had done that day at the cottage. And the King said this: ‘A wise man would tell you she’s gone, friend, and that you must let her go because nothing will ever bring her back. But I’m not a wise man – not yet, anyway. So I promise you this: I will bring her to you. I swear to you, friend, that some day, somehow, through whatever influence a King may have on Gods and Saints, I will bring her back to you. They say everyone faces Death alone, but I will break that law if that’s what it takes.’ He let go of my head and his hands dropped to his sides.
He coughed and wiped something from his mouth. ‘But not today. Today, I need your help. I need to change the world, because the world won’t last the way it is much longer. I can do this – I know in my heart and in my mind that I can do this, but I need someone like you. I need someone who can walk for twenty days and nights and fight through every hell on earth to get justice – but not just justice for himself, justice for others.’ He let the words hang there for just a moment before he said, ‘I will bring you to your wife one day, but today I need you to bring justice to my people.’
He sat back and his shoulders hunched and he was the weak, skinny man I’d almost killed once again. I had stopped crying, though I knew I would start again soon. This little King was mad, as mad as I was, but there was nothing else left. I knew what he said was true. Even the Gods, as feckless and fickle as they were, would not long suffer a world of King Greggors and Duke Yereds to survive.
‘I’m not ready,’ I said.
‘You have to be. It has to start now.’
I choked on my own spit for a second. When they take the last good thing from your life, how do you answer?
‘How does it begin?’ I asked.
The King got this little smile on his face, small, almost unnoticeable. I would learn this was one of his most defining characteristics. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Falcio,’ I said. ‘Falcio val Mond.’
‘Falcio,’ he began, ‘when you were a boy, did anyone ever tell you stories about the Greatcoats?’