It had begun to snow again. The cold bled deep into Rol’s wounds and seemed to be seeking what warm spaces there were left about his heart. Under him, the handcart rattled and jumped over the rocky ground, and he was aware of people laboring all around, an exhausted mass of humanity. But it was all at one remove. In his mind there burned a memory of Rowen’s face. His poor sister, dead now, lying stark as a cut flower in the muck and mire of that stinking battlefield. At the end she had become a queen in truth, something larger than herself. Men had laid down their lives for her willingly, men who hardly knew her. And now he, who had loved her above all others-or so he had told himself-here he was, fleeing the scene of that crime.
A thing that had been Michal Psellos had once told him that he would never give away more of himself than he could afford. And that thing had been right. No matter how he might mourn his valiant, dead sister, he was glad not be lying next to her on that lost field, glad to be running with his tail between his legs. Glad to be alive.
It was a dream brought me here, he thought. A boy’s infatuation. Well, it is done now, and I saw it out to very near the end.
They were in the Fornivan Hills south of Myconn, that much he knew. If he sat up, he would be able to look down on the Imperial City, its walls scarcely a league away. Canker had taken possession of it after only the briefest of struggles at the Forminon Gate; the massive fortifications had proved irrelevant when there were no men willing to man them. Of their own passage through the city, Rol retained only an impression of chaos and screaming crowds, Gallico’s animal roar clearing a path for them as they trekked south through the city streets, accreting hangers-on as they went.
Canker had a fearsome reputation in Bionar, and though his heralds had ridden up to the city walls offering amnesties for all who threw down their arms, he was not entirely believed. Stark fear propelled a panicked horde out of Myconn into the hills, and many of those refugees had followed Gallico because he stood out, he had purpose, and perhaps also there was simply something reassuring about his blunt physicality. So now they were part of a streaming host of people: soldiers, commoners, nobles, criminals. Something for everyone, Rol thought muzzily.
In the back part of his mind the anger smoldered steadily. The promise that, one day, Canker would die under his hands.
Giffon was fidgeting with him again. It was dark-what had happened to the daylight?-and now the night was stitched with flapping campfires. A blanket had been pulled up to his chin and his breath had frosted it white. He tried to prop himself up on one elbow but the sharp pain that sent shooting through his arm stole the breath from his mouth. He fumbled with his right hand and found it swathed in neatly knotted linen. The rest of his body was cold, shivering, but under that mass of cloth something was radiating a putrid heat. His hand, or what was left of it.
“I had to cut off the rest of the finger,” Giffon said. The boy was kneeling beside him with a steaming bowl. “You were senseless at the time. There’s a fever building. If the rest of the hand goes bad I’ll have to take the arm off at the elbow. Skipper, can you hear me?”
“I hear you.” His mouth was dry. Giffon spooned watery lukewarm soup over his lips. Rol tasted wild thyme, some kind of game.
“Skipper, you must try to heal yourself.” Giffon’s attention never wavered. He wiped soup out of Rol’s rime-frosted beard. His moon-shaped face was drawn now; it seemed narrower. Rol had a glimpse of what Giffon would look like as a middle-aged man-if he ever made it that far.
“Like after Gallitras, when your wounds healed in a night. You must do that again, skipper, or you’ll die. Do you hear me?”
He heard him, but already Rol was drifting past the words and the meaning. One thing hauled him back to earth.
“Fleam,” he said.
“It’s beside you, on your left side.”
He touched the familiar hilt, and smiled at the warmth in it.
“Skipper,” Giffon was saying, tears coursing down his face. But Rol was already far away.
“I see you still carry that sword,” Rowen said.
“Fleam? Yes. She’s a fine weapon.”
“She?”
Rol shrugged. “All things are she to a man. Ships, cities, even kingdoms.”
Rowen knelt by the fire and stirred the logs with the iron poker. “Fleam, you call it. Not the most poetic of names.”
“She was made for the letting of blood.” Rol smiled and stood looking down on his sister, watching the firelight shine out a dark blood-brown from the lighter glints in her hair.
“I wielded it once,” Rowen said.
“I wonder you were willing to give her up. Or did Psellos take her away from you?”
Rowen looked up quickly. “The sword hated me.”
It took a few seconds to digest this. Then Rol asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know. I was not meant to have it, I think. Nor was Psellos, or else he’d have kept such a weapon for himself. There’s something alive in that blade, Rol, something trapped there that’s been waiting a long time.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For you.”
Another place, the years whipping backward like the leaves of a book. Michal Psellos cradling a glass of wine between both hands, the white fingers vivid against the scarlet, he sniffing the fragrance of the liquid and smiling with lupine humor.
“You must try this, Rol. Bionese-Palestrinan, in fact. A little far north for fruitiness. This is dry, a thing to roll along the teeth. Come, boy, drink.”
Rol did as he was bidden. All along the heavy table, bottles stood glowing in the light from the tall windows beyond. Spring rain thrashed at the glass, shot through with sunshine. The wine warmed him, a sour thing in the mouth, a taste he had not yet become accustomed to.
“It’s bitter.”
“To begin with, yes. You must learn to savor the taste, Rol; the best wines demand a little patience, a little knowledge. One does not swill them as though they were beer. They are like life itself; one cannot have sweetness all the time, else it would become cloying.” Psellos set down his glass. He ranged up and down the other bottles on the table, a lean figure all in black. His silver eyeteeth gleamed. He looked like a great sable spider done up in velvet and satin and silk. Rol’s attention drifted. He edged closer to the great windows, and looked down. In the cobbled yard fifty feet below, Rowen was saddling her black mare. She had thrown back the hood of her cloak, and the rain was shining in her hair so that it was slick as a seal’s back. Rol watched her lips move as she talked to the horse.
“A gentleman,” Psellos went on, “must have discrimination when it comes to wine; his tastes betray him as surely as do the contents of his library, or the quality of his women. There is the stuff of everyday use”-he lifted a bottle and held it up a moment-“and then there are the finer vintages, to be enjoyed sparingly.” He caressed the neck of a bottle whose label was darkened with dust, yellow with age. He strolled to the windows, looked down a second, and smiled. “One cannot expect to continually enjoy the best of what life has to offer. That would be stultifying. There must be bitterness amid the bliss. A man must learn that, if he is to become much of a man at all.”
Psellos’s curious eyes darkened. “Drink the wine, Rol. Savor the taste. And when you are served up something inferior in your glass, drink it also. Taste everything, but do not forget those times when what you have tasted has been sublime.”
When Rol came to himself again he found that tears had run in frozen tracks down the sides of his head, and his eyelashes crackled as he blinked. Daylight again. They were still on the move, the handcart trundling stubbornly onward beneath him, the air thin and cold. A mist hung heavy about him, and out of it shrouded shapes appeared and disappeared like wayward ghosts.
One of those ghosts walked by the side of the handcart, muffled and hooded. A gloved hand gripped his. “You’re back! Can you speak?” The shape dropped a scarf from around its face, and it was a girl under all those ragged folds, dark-eyed and sallow-skinned.
“I know you,” he said, the cold air clicking in his throat.
Her fingers tightened around his. “The night of the ball; we spent it together.” Some color crept into her face. “You don’t remember.”
“Your name is Rafa. I remember. Why are you here?”
“I did not want to be a slave anymore.”
“You were going to be freed. I remember.”
“The Queen was going to free me, but she’s dead now. This new King will do different things.”
Elias Creed appeared out of the mist like an old memory. His badger-striped head was more white than black now. He used a spear as a staff. “You decided to rejoin us, then.”
The handcart halted, and Gallico was there, too, a looming giant with green lights that blinked in the mist. “How do you feel?”
“I feel-I-” Rol sat up. Relinquishing Rafa’s hand he began picking at the massive bandage on his own. It was loose now, hanging flaccid as a cobweb. He was able to rip it off without undoing any of Giffon’s neat knots. Below the stained linen there was his own flesh, yellow-white and smelling of old cheese. He flexed his fingers and studied in some wonder the stump where the ring-finger had been. It was closed over, a ripple of scar-but he could still feel the missing digit move as he opened and closed his fist.
“I knew it!” This was Giffon. He barged between Creed and Gallico and took Rol’s hand in his own, face shining. “I knew you could do it, skipper. You’re healed. You’re going to live.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Rol said mildly. He felt slightly absurd sitting there on the handcart, one hand gripped again by the girl Rafa, the other by the boy Giffon. Creed and Gallico beamed at him like a pair of simpletons.
“Get me off this damned cart. My legs need a stretch.”
“It’s been five days,” Elias Creed said. “You’ve been raving for three of them, a fever like I’ve never seen. We were all set to dig you a hole here amid the rocks, but Giffon never lost hope. He and the chambermaid-that lovely dark wench-they’ve been fussing round you day and night, doing things a mother would quail at.”
“Rafa can wipe my arse anytime she likes,” Gallico said.
“We’re maybe eighteen leagues from Myconn, up in the high foothills to the northeast of the Fornivo Pass. There’s been no pursuit that I can see.”
“Canker is busy with other things,” Gallico said.
“Indeed. And just as well. We’ve gathered quite a mob around us. The column stretches two or three miles; thousands of people, many of them noble. Where in hell they think they’re going is anyone’s guess.”
“We must get back to Ganesh Ka,” Rol said. He was leaning on Creed’s arm, his legs still rubbery, still remembering what it was to bear his weight. The thin air had him gasping. “How high up are we?”
“Some ten thousand feet,” the halftroll said. “The Fornivan Hills rear up pretty steep to the north, but then come together in a kind of plateau-we’re on the lip of it now. There’s a wide, broken plain of sorts to the south and east of us, until you hit the Myconians themselves; they rise up like a wall, another five thousand feet.”
The breath plumed out of his wide nostrils in two jets, and in his chest it rattled through mucus: an awful sound.
“Gallico, I thought you were healed.”
“So did I. I told you, it’s the cold.” The halftroll frowned.
“How far are we from the Ka, you think?”
Gallico’s bright eyes narrowed. “As the crow flies, I’d put it at some seventy-five leagues, but not even crows fly over the Myconians in winter. There’s the pass at Fornivo, some forty miles southwest of us. It leads through to the Goliad, and is studded with Bionese fortresses. It’s the only way across the mountains that I know of-in this part of the world, at least.”
“Canker will have thought of that. I’ll bet the Fornivo garrison has already come over to him. That’s why there’s no pursuit; he thinks us trapped.”
They trudged along in silence for some time after this, until at last Elias Creed said, “Then what are we to do?”
Rol raised his head, but could see nothing through the caul of mist. “We must find another way through the mountains,” he said.
“One cannot simply put one’s head down and charge blindly at the Myconians like a bull at a gate,” Gallico said.
“Can’t one? It’s what one will have to do, all the same. Gallico, there must be a way.”
“Not for these people.” The halftroll gestured to the disparate throng that disappeared into the mist behind them.
“If they were desperate enough to follow your lead out of Myconn, then they’re desperate enough to attempt the mountains.”
Desperate indeed. At night the straggling column coalesced into an amorphous huddle, like that of herd animals seeking protection amid their fellows. While Gallico and Elias Creed went through the crowds, noting their names and station and physical capabilities, Rol gave a series of little speeches. Short and to the point, they informed the refugees of his plans and gave them three choices. They could follow him over the mountains, they could turn back for Myconn, or they could break off for the southwest and attempt the Fornivan passes, hoping that the garrisons there would not be against them.
As choices went, none of them were particularly appealing, and Rol did not try very hard to woo anyone to his own course. Those who followed him would walk the hardest road, and they would either come to Ganesh Ka in the end, or they would perish along the way. There would be no turning back, and the weak would be abandoned. He made this very clear, and saw blank fear in the faces of all who listened to him. His wounds had made him less pretty than he had been. He was short a finger and part of an ear, and had a white scar that wriggled from one eyebrow into his hairline. He looked older, a fearsome captain of privateers every bit as ruthless as rumor had made him. And his eyes were colder than the white mountains ahead. Many looked upon that face and found themselves quitting the host for fear of what was in those eyes as much as the dangers of the road they would follow.
The host began breaking up the next morning, in small groups and large, by dozens and scores and finally hundreds. They trekked away in solemn companies through the snow, heading southwest, or north. Rol and his friends remained encamped all that day while the desertions went on, and as the night swooped in on them again, there were barely four hundred left out of all those who had followed them into the hills.
“We keep to the valleys, so far as we can,” Rol said, warming his hands at the guttering campfire. “We stay as low as the terrain allows. There’s forests on the flanks of the mountains, and scrub higher up still; we’ll need firewood if we’re to survive the nights. The main worry is food. We’re still a fair crowd. Did anyone bring provisions out of Myconn with them?”
“All eaten a day or two back,” Elias Creed said. “These are city-dwellers. They brought gold and trinkets when they should have packed warm clothing and food.”
“There are reindeer herds in the high valleys, or so I’ve been told,” Gallico said. “We have quite a few firearms among us. We must hunt every chance we get, anything from deer to foxes. And if we run short, we’ll eat the dead.”
He was half smiling, but the group around the campfire looked at him in grim silence. Giffon’s eyes were wide as plums in his pinched face, and Rafa had buried her head in her knees. Rol touched her black hair.
“So be it,” he said. “Gallico, what’s our course?”
“South-southeast.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Even here, Rol, I know in which direction lies the sea. There are times, when the wind is in the east, that I think I can even smell it.”
“Then your nose is our compass, Gallico, and may it be as sharp as you say it is.”
Their daily marches were short, by necessity, as part of each day had to be given over to gathering firewood and hunting for game. Within a few days the company fell into a routine, and within it each of them found some niche to fill. Some preferred to gather firewood, others to trek out from the main body in small groups to hunt, while yet more grubbed for other forms of food in the frozen landscape around them. In the twilit hours after each day’s march they foraged like their flint-using ancestors, desperate to recoup some of the day’s expended energy. They collected tens of thousands of pinecones, roasted them in the embers of their fires, and ate the nuts within. They tapped silver birch, while those still grew about them, and heated the sap with water to make a sweet, hot drink for the weaker among them. They dug under the snow for any form of tuber they could find, and all went in the communal pots. They set overnight snares for rabbits and martens and any other beast with warm blood that might chance by, and the hunting-parties brought down a family of elk, which fed them all for three days.
But it was not enough to keep the pinch of hunger out of their bellies. The flesh began to melt from them, and the cold dug deeper into their marrow. Within a week, they had the first deaths, from cold and exposure. They stripped the dead of all their clothing, though they were not yet hungry enough to prey on the meat of the corpses themselves.
The company began to ascend the flanks of the mountains proper, and around them the thick pine woods receded like the ebbing tide of a quiet sea. Firewood became harder to come by, and often the campfires puttered out in the dark hours whilst around them hundreds lay in chaste embraces and shared their body’s warmth for want of something better.
Two weeks. Every morning there were more stiffened corpses amid the huddled crowd. The cold intensified, though mercifully the days remained calm and clear, snow blowing in powdery banners from the peaks of the mountains, but down below a windless silence, an abeyance of life. They began to dream about food, and it was discussed endlessly round the fragile campfires. The splendor of past dinners, the constitution of ideal menus, the listing of favorite delicacies. Their mouths watered on memories.
Some went blind from the glare of the sunlit snow. They tore strips of cloth from their thinner clothing and tied them about their eyes, staring out at that terrible whiteness through frayed silk or cotton or linen, stumbling myopically on numb feet. Those among them who prided themselves on their skill at stalking no longer had the strength to fare far afield in search of game. Gallico alone continued to hunt most nights, and it was rare he did not bring in a deer in the morning, its neck broken and dangling. As they climbed higher they dared not shoot the arquebuses anyway for fear of bringing down an avalanche on their heads. Some resisted this stricture, until Gallico rounded on them, eyes blazing amethyst, gaunt flesh drawn back from his great fangs. What game he brought back was sliced up and shared out with the meticulous care a miser might show to his hoard of gold. If they had no wood, the meat was eaten raw, bloody gobbets washed down with handfuls of snow.
A remarkable stoicism pervaded them. Though there might be arguments over the sharing out of food, in the main the Bionese accepted their meager portions with good grace. They were a hardy people, Rol realized. He had seen this in their soldiery, but he realized now that it pertained to all, old and young, male and female.
Of course, many of those who had followed him thus far were not Bionese at all, but, like Rafa, were foreign slaves fleeing their new master back in Myconn. These, too, were uncomplaining folk, and they trusted Gallico implicitly, for in the halftroll they sensed a great compassion for their lot in life. In the beginning, the company was divided along the lines of slave and free, but as time went on these distinctions became forgotten, and nobleman huddled up beside thrall, the distinctions of their former lives forgotten. The only differences now were between the weak and the strong, those who could stay with the column and those who were destined to fall by the wayside.
Three weeks. The dead continued to slough off from the living, their corpses turning up every morning, stripped and stiff as wood. Many of these bodies now were carved up in the dark hours of the night, and each dawn lay eviscerated, whittled down to the bone, barely human at all. None admitted to doing it, but nearly all partook of this ghastly sacrament. The anonymous meat was passed around the campfires and eaten without comment. Rol had his share of it, as had Creed, Giffon, and Rafa, but oddly enough Gallico refused to partake with them. “You must eat, and keep your strength,” Giffon told him, but the halftroll smiled and set his massive clawed hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I have more meat than most on my bones; my body can eat itself for a while yet.”
Four weeks. The weather broke at last, and the wind picked up through the peaks, the stars crowded out of the sky by a blank furious whiteout of hurling snow. The company went to ground in the sparse shelter of some contorted spruce and juniper and squatted there hour after hour as the snow piled up around them, finally muffling all in a merciful white roof that gathered inch upon inch as the hours went on, and lengthened into a day, then two. At first they took turns sitting on the outside of the tight-packed circle, for those unfortunates had it worst. But as more and more of these died, their corpses were propped up as a kind of horrible windbreak behind which the living sheltered and shivered. Drifts built up around them, and finally covered them.
They were entombed, and within their white sepulchre they feasted on the dead openly and without shame, fighting beyond rationality to keep the life in their gnawed-down souls. Some staggered out into the blizzard to end it all, hoping to find death in a place where their corpses would be left in peace, but most died in silent surprise, or drifted off into a warm sleep and left the world with meaningless smiles on their gray faces. The world slowed. Their cocoon of snow became a small, fetid space of numbing cold and butchery, a dwindling circle of faces in which only the glitter of the eyes gave any clue of life remaining. They were five days like this.
The wind fell, and they tunneled their way out of their white tomb to find a barren world in which all color had disappeared except for the violent, cerulean blue of the sky above them. Waist-deep in snow, many gave up then and there, and crawled back into the blue-dark of the cave that had built up around their bodies in the preceding days. Others stared blankly at the pitiless mountains all around, knowing they would never walk out of this place, never see grass again or hear running water. Their hearts still beat, their eyes still blinked, and the blood still pushed its stubborn way through their veins, but they were dead men all the same. The Myconians had killed them.
Gallico took Rol aside while the others crawled about the blank landscape like old men. “They are all going to die, Rol, unless we do something.”
Their eyes met in perfect understanding. “It cannot be everyone,” Rol said. “And it must be done discreetly. We’ll make a day’s march, and those who are still with us at the end of it shall partake.”
“That’s consigning half of them to death.”
“It can’t be all of them, Gallico; that would be our own end.”
The halftroll considered, then nodded at last. Broad though his shoulders were, his head appeared too large for them, and his face was a mere fanged skull with green skin stretched taut across it. Only in the eyes was there any remnant of the humanity that Rol knew still bulked large in Gallico’s heart.
“How far is left, do you think?” Rol asked.
“My nose is not what it was,” Gallico said with a wry smile, “but we’re over the spine of the mountains. I smell trees below, a whole forest of them. Another week or two, and we’ll be in the Ganesh Highlands. Remember them, Rol?”
“How could I forget?”
“It was only a year ago, or a little more.”
“Is that all? It seems like a different age of the world.”
They bullied and cajoled and cursed the survivors of the company to their feet, and Gallico led the way, burrowing through the drifts and forging a passage for those who came behind. The halftroll carried Giffon on his back, for the boy could no longer walk, and Rol and Creed took it in turns to carry Rafa. The chambermaid was in a bad way, with frostbite in pale patches on her face and her feet blackened with it. The less fortunate had to make their own way in the furrow that Gallico’s great body carved through the drifts, and when Rol looked back later that day, he saw the black shapes of their bodies dotting the snow like drops of ink on a blank page. They were above him now; the company was indeed descending.
That night he took Fleam and nicked a vein in his wrist, then one in Gallico’s. One by one those who were still able came to suck upon their blood, a few drops each, no more. Fewer than a hundred of them were still alive, but by the time it was over both he and Gallico were barely conscious. Someone had found enough wood for a single, solitary campfire, and they were laid down beside it whilst Creed, Giffon, and Rafa shared the meager heat of their bodies under piles of dead men’s clothes, the five of them in a tangled heap, their hearts beating together and the welcome flames flickering across their faces.
In the night, Rol rose without disturbing his fellow sleepers, his body as light as a breeze-borne scrap of thistledown. All around him the savage heights of the Myconians dreamed placidly under their mantles of snow, and above them the stars glittered bright and blue, windows to another world. He stood in some indeterminate space, looking down on the sleepers below with serene detachment.
“I died,” he said, wondering.
“Not dead, but dying,” a voice said. “Each day you leave behind more of this husk you inhabit, and come closer to what is at the heart of your existence.” The speaker was a dark shape, no more, an impenetrable shadow in which two green lights burned for eyes-like Gallico’s eyes, but with none of the halftroll’s compassion. No humanity.
“What are you?” Rol whispered.
“The last remnant of an older world. I am part of your conception. You and I both are only pieces of a bigger plan which even I cannot foresee entirely. You are my son, the child of my blood. I have remained upon this earth far beyond my time, waiting out uncounted centuries merely to see you born. That was my doom.”
“Who are you?” Rol repeated.
“What’s in a name? At one time I was called Cambrius Orr. In this age of the world I am known differently. Men call me the Mage-King. You are my son, blood of my blood, but it was not I who brought you into being.”
“Then who did?”
“Perhaps it was Umer herself. Perhaps Ran. I don’t know. I know more of the world’s history than any other thing now living, and I do not have the answer to that question.”
“Perhaps it was God.”
“There is no God. He has forsaken us. There is no heaven, and there is no hell except that which we make for ourselves here on earth. I know only that you were brought into this life for a purpose. And this: there is nothing human in you, nothing at all.”
“I’m a man; look at me. I-”
“I don’t know the full story of your heritage, and if I do not, then no one does. But I can smell your blood. Look at your hand.”
Rol did so. His scarred hand, a mark put there by something that might have been Ran himself, god of storms, ship-killer. The lines that whorled upon his palm seemed more prominent now, and more than ever he thought that there was a purpose to their sinuous geometry.
“It was put there for a purpose, like everything else. One day soon you will read it clearly, and when you do, it shall show you where to go. These beggars in the snow, those beggars of the sea who await you; they are all part of it. It will come to you, in time.”
Rol raised his head. “I don’t want any of this.”
“No matter. It is your fate, and cannot be outrun.”
A strung-out, staggering company, they trudged on, and about them the air began to lose the thin gasp of the high places. The trees returned, dark forests of silent pine and spruce and fir. The company were walking downhill, always downhill, back into color and life and a world they had thought lost forever. But it was too late for many.
They buried Rafa under a cairn of stones just below the snow-line, and when they had clicked the last rock on top of her somber marker, the rain came sweeping in from the east to drench them. Not snow, rain-which they stood shivering under and let run in and out of their mouths like simpletons.
Simpletons, and starveling scarecrows. Despite Rol and Gallico’s gift of blood, they continued to die in ones and twos. By the time they finally felt green grass underfoot there were barely four score of them left. They were in the Ganesh Highlands, scant leagues away from Ganesh Ka itself, and they had crossed the Myconian Mountains in a little over six weeks.
Nineteen