I stood beside Martus, and on my other side, Darin, returned from his love nest in the country. He’d brought Micha back with him to Roma Hall, apparently with a baby, though all I saw was a basket hung with silver chains and loaded with lace. Darin kept threatening to introduce me to my new niece, but so far I’d avoided the meeting. I’m not partial to babies. They tend to vomit on me, or failing that, to vent from the other end.
‘Hurrah … a parade…’ The autumn sun beat down on us while we cheered and waved from the royal stand. The watching crowds had been issued with bright flags, the colours of the South, and many waved the Red March standard, divided diagonally, red above for the blood spilled on the march, black below for the hearts of our enemy. Martus bemoaned the state of the cavalry and the fact he’d been left behind. Darin observed that winter in Slov could be an ugly thing and he hoped the troops were equipped for it.
‘They’ll be back in a month, you fool.’ Martus offered us both a look of scorn as if I’d had something to do with the suggestion.
‘Experience teaches that armies often get bogged down – no matter how dry the weather,’ Darin said.
‘Experience? What experience have you had, little brother?’ A full Martus sneer now.
‘History,’ Darin said. ‘You can find it in books.’
‘Pah. All history has taught us is we don’t learn from history.’
I let their argument flow over me and watched the infantry march by, spears across their shoulders, shields on their arms. Veterans or not few of them looked older than Martus and some looked younger than me.
Ten thousand men seemed a small force to challenge the might of Slov, though to be fair an army of well-trained and well-equipped regulars like the South can send five times its number of peasant conscripts running for their fields. Given Grandmother’s objective ten thousand seemed sufficient. Enough for a thrust, enough to secure the target area, and enough, when the Lady Blue was brought to ruin, to fight a retreat to defensible borders.
I wished them joy of it. My main priority remained unchanged. The pursuit of leisure – by definition a languid sort of a chase. I wanted to relax back into Vermillion and my newfound financial freedom, free from the threat of Maeres Allus and all those tiresome debts.
‘Prince Jalan.’ One of Grandmother’s elite guardsmen stood beside me, gleaming irritatingly. ‘The steward requires your presence.’
‘The steward?’ I glanced round at Martus and Darin who gave exaggerated shrugs, as interested as me in the answer.
The guard answered by pointing to the Victory Gate and raising his finger. There on the wall, directly above the gate, a palanquin, ornate and curtained, two teams of four men at the carrying bars to either side, guardsmen flanking them. Grandmother’s own.
‘Who—’
But the guard had already led off. I swallowed my curiosity and hurried after him. We threaded a path behind the crowd to one of the stairs leading up the inside of the city wall. After climbing to the parapet we made our way to the palanquin where the men ushered me along the treacherously narrow strip of walkway not occupied by the steward’s box. Drawing level with the curtains I ducked through, not waiting for an invitation.
I shuffled in, bent low to keep from scraping my head, and squeezed into the seat opposite. Garyus couldn’t sit in the seat but instead rested on a ramp of cushions heaped against it. ‘What the hell? Grandmother made you regent?’
He crinkled his face in a smile. ‘You don’t think I’m up to it, Great-nephew?’
‘No, well, I mean, yes, of course…’
‘A resounding vote of confidence!’ He chuckled. ‘Apparently she “stole my throne”, so I’m getting it back for a few months.’
‘Well, I never said… Well, maybe I did but I didn’t mean— I mean I did—’ The heat in that little box was oppressive and the sweat left me at such a rate I worried I might shrivel and die. ‘It was your throne.’
‘Treason, Jalan. You keep those words off your lips.’ Garyus smiled again. ‘It’s true that joined as we were, it was me that saw the light first. But I reconciled myself to the new order of things long ago. When I was a boy I’ll grant you it stung. We dream big dreams and it’s hard to let them go. I wanted to make my father proud – have him see past…’ He raised a twisted arm. ‘This.’ He winced and lowered his arm. ‘But my little sister has been a great queen. History will remember her name. In these times she has been exactly what our nation needed. A merchant king would have served us better in peace – but peace is not what we have been given.’ He twitched the curtain open a little way. Down below us the martial pride of Red March came on rank after rank, gleaming, glorious, pennants rippling above them in the breeze. ‘Which brings me to the reason for my invitation.’ He reached into a basket at his side and fumbled something out. It fell to the floor as he got it clear.
I bent to retrieve it. ‘A message?’ I lifted a scroll-case, ebony chased with silver, set with the royal seals.
‘A message.’ Garyus inclined his head. ‘You’re the Marshal of Vermillion.’
‘Fuck that!’ My turn to drop the scroll-case as though it were hot. ‘…your stewardness.’
‘“Highness” is the correct form of address when the steward is of noble birth … if we’re being formal, Jalan.’
‘Fuck that, your highness.’ I sat back and exhaled, then wiped the sweat from my brow. ‘Look, I know you meant well and all. It’s nice that you wanted to do something for me by way of thanks for the key – but really – what do I know about defending cities? I mean it’s soldiery – there must be dozens of better qualified people—’
‘Hundreds I should think.’ Garyus said it a little too enthusiastically for my liking. ‘But since when was a monarchy about rewarding individual merit? Promote from within, is our mantra.’
He had a point. The Kendeths’s continued rule depended upon the carefully constructed lie that we were innately better at doing it than any other candidates, and also the idea that God himself wanted us to do it.
‘It’s a nice gesture, Great-uncle, but I’d really rather not.’ Being marshal sounded as though it might involve far more work than I was interested in – which was none at all. My plans involved mainly wine, women, and song. In fact, forget the song. ‘I’m hardly suited.’
Garyus smiled his crooked smile and looked toward the bright slice of the outside world visible between the curtains. ‘I’m hardly suited to being steward now am I? Ruling Vermillion – all of Red March in fact – yet hidden away lest I demoralize our troops with my physical imperfections. But here I am, by your grandmother’s command. Which, incidentally, is where your appointment comes from. I’m not so cruel as to separate you from your vices, Jalan.’
‘Grandmother? She made me marshal?’ The last time I’d seen her she seemed so close to ordering my execution that the headsman probably had his whetstone out.
‘She did.’ Garyus nodded his ponderous head. ‘There’s a uniform you know? And you’ll be in charge of your brother Martus.’
‘I’m in!’
10
The uniform turned out to be a baton of office and an ageing sash of yellow silk with a number of worryingly bloodlike stains on it. Over the course of the next few days I came to appreciate the cruelty of Grandmother’s revenge. After the initial joy of informing Martus that he was now my subordinate came an endless round of official duties. I had to inspect the wall guard, deal with engineers and their tiresome opinions about what needed repairing or knocking down, and officiate over disputes between the resident city guard and my brother’s newly arrived infantry.
I would have told them all to go hang, but my assistant, Captain Renprow, proved annoyingly persistent, an example of the ‘raised on merit’ class of energetic low-born types that the system needs in order to function but who have to be watched closely. Additionally, continued reports of rag-a-maul and ghouls in the poor quarter acted as an added incentive. If there’s one thing that will get me to do half an ho
nest day’s work it’s the conviction that doing so will make me safer.
‘What are rag-a-maul, Renprow?’ I leaned back in my chair, my feet in their shiny boots on my shiny marshal’s desk.
Renprow, a short dark man with short dark hair, frowned, favouring me with a stare that put me uncomfortably in mind of Snorri. ‘You don’t know? I’ve passed you a dozen reports … you attended that strategy meeting yesterday, and—’
‘Of course I know. I just wanted your opinion on the subject, Renprow. Humour me.’
‘Well.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Some kind of malicious ghost. People describe them as miniature whirlwinds raising rags and dust. Whirlwinds so full of sharp edges they can flay a man, and when the wind drops the victim is possessed and runs around on a murderous rampage until they’re put down.’ He puffed out his cheek and tapped two fingers to it. ‘That about covers it.’
‘And these incidents are peculiar to Vermillion?’
‘We’ve had reports far and wide, but we do seem to have a higher incidence in the city. Perhaps just because the population is so much larger.’ He paused. ‘My father’s people know them too. But they call them wind-stick devils, and they’re very rare.’ Renprow had a heritage that began far south of Liba, giving him command of many odd facts.
‘Well.’ I swung my boots off the desk and glanced around the room. The marshal’s manse was a spacious building but had been unoccupied for so long that most of the furniture had wandered off. ‘If that concludes our business for the day?’ The sun had passed its zenith and I had a flame-haired beauty to visit, a sweet girl named Lola, or Lulu, or something.
Renprow’s mouth twitched into a shortlived smile as if I’d been attempting a joke. ‘Your next appointment is with the menonites in the Appan suburb. They’re proving resistant to the idea of disinterring their cemeteries. After that—’
‘We still have dead in the ground?’ I stood up fast enough to knock the chair over. ‘Have the guard do it for them!’ I’d seen what happened when the dead come clambering back from where they’ve been put. ‘Better still, have Martus’s soldiers do it. I want every corpse burned. Immediately! And if they have to make more corpses to do it … that’s fine. As long as they burn those too.’ I shivered at memories I’d been trying to bury – like the Vermillion dead they weren’t buried deep enough.
Renprow picked up a weighty ledger from the shelf by the door and held it across his chest like a shield. ‘The menonites are unruly at the best of times and numerous. Their sect venerates ancestors to the ninth generation. It would be better if we could negotiate.’
And there went my afternoon, just like the three before it. Smiling and performing for peasant stock, a bunch of ingrates who should be falling over themselves to obey my commands. I sighed and stood. Better to cajole the live ones than have to contend with the dead ones later on. The live ones may smell bad and have irritating opinions but the dead ones smell even worse and hold the opinion that we’re food. ‘All right. But if they don’t listen I’m sending the soldiers in.’ I found myself still shivering despite the heat of the day, visions of the dead crowding in, patient, silent, waiting … until the Dead King woke their hunger.
‘Jalan!’ The door burst open without a knock and Darin stood there, pale and serious.
‘My dear brother. And how have you decided to brighten my day? Perhaps some overflowing sewers need my attention?’
‘Father is dead.’
‘Oh, you liar.’ Father wasn’t dead. He didn’t do that sort of thing. I took my cloak from its hook. The day outside looked grey and uninspiring.
‘Jalan.’ Darin stepped toward me, a hand reaching my shoulder.
‘Nonsense.’ I brushed his arm aside. ‘I’ve got menonites to see.’ A coldness sat in my stomach and my eyes stung. It made no sense. Firstly he wasn’t dead, and secondly I didn’t even like him. I walked past Darin, aiming for the doorway.
‘He’s dead, Jalan.’ My brother’s hand settled on my shoulder as I passed him and I stopped, almost at the door, my back to him. For a moment visions of a different time replaced the square outside and rooftops beyond. I saw my father young, standing beside Mother, bending down, a smile on his face, arms open to receive me as I raced toward them.
‘No.’ For reasons wholly beyond explanation the word stuck in my throat, my mouth trembled and tears filled my eyes.
‘Yes.’ Darin turned me around and folded his arms about me. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to press the foolishness back where it came from. He released me and with an arm around my shoulders he steered me out into the day.
The cardinal died in his bedroom, alone. He looked small in the wideness of that bed, sunken, old before his time. If he’d been drinking then the maids had removed the evidence and tidied him up.
He’d gone into a decline following his trip to Roma. The pope’s scolding was a thing to behold by all accounts, and accompanying Reymond Kendeth back to Vermillion, along with a heavy burden of shame, came the pope’s own man, Archbishop Larrin, whose only job appeared to be making my father do his. Some men thrive on old age, others feel the world narrow around them and see no point in the path before them. A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us – a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.
The funeral took place three days later, Father’s corpse under guard until then while the most pious of the faith filed past to honour the office if not the man. We gathered in the Black Courtyard, a sizeable rectangle between the Poor Palace and the Marsail keep, generally used for exercising horses but traditionally reserved for gathering with the coffin before the slow walk to the cemetery, or the church, depending on the deceased’s station in life. Today, under a sullen and blustery sky, there was to be a cremation. Split logs of rosewood and magnolia, selected for fragrance, had been stacked into a pyre taller than a mounted man. Father’s coffin lay perched atop the wooden mountain, polished, gleaming, chased with silver, a heavy silver cross placed upon the lid.
The entire palace turned out. This was the Red Queen’s youngest son, the highest cleric in the land. In the tiered seating for the royals Garyus’s palanquin sat highest, with Martus, Darin and me in the row beneath, our cousins arrayed before us one row lower. Father’s elder brother, Uncle Parrus, remained in his holdings in the east. The message hadn’t had time to reach him, let alone allowed time for him to return, and in any event with Grandmother’s thrust into Slov it would hardly be the time for the grandest lord in the east to abandon his castle on the border.
I had reports demanding my attention – disturbances in the outer city that morning – but I couldn’t begrudge Father his due. Somehow, after Mother’s death we never had anything to say to each other. I should have fixed that. You always think there’s going to be time. Put things off. And then suddenly there’s no time left at all.
‘Here he comes.’ Darin to my left, nodding down at the courtyard. A crowd of the aristocracy emerged from the Adam Arch, chattering brightly despite their sombre blacks and greys.
‘Grandmother’s only been gone ten days and he thinks he owns the place.’ Martus on Darin’s far side.
I could make out my father’s eldest brother, my Uncle Hertet, at the centre of the crowd, not because of his height – which was modest – but by virtue of the shirt of brilliant yellow-and-green silk showing through the wide gap in his mourning robe, all of it stretched to contain an ample belly. His entourage swept before him, the phoney court he maintained as practice for when the throne would supposedly be his. To watch him you might imagine that he considered his mother gone for good – not merely on campaign but to her grave.
/> Hertet’s sons, Johnath and Roland, peeled off to the lowest row to sit beside our other cousins along with the lords and barons. Their father, sweating in his finery despite the cool breeze, lumbered up the timber steps to the highest tier where he wedged himself alongside Garyus’s palanquin. The heir-apparently-not gave no hint of a bow nor acknowledged his uncle’s presence in any way other than that forced on him by having to squeeze in beside the curtained box.
‘Hurry it along.’ Hertet raised his voice behind us. I turned to see him brushing a hand up through the damp straggles of his grey hair, plastering them back over his forehead. With sagging jowls and bloodshot eyes he looked a far more likely candidate for the reaper’s scythe than my father ever had. ‘Reymond kept me waiting long enough in life with those damned masses of his. Let’s not have him waste any more of our time.’
Seeing Hertet’s waving arm the archbishop down in the square began to read aloud from the huge bible held open for him by two choirboys.
‘Damned nonsense all this pyre business.’ Hertet continued to grumble behind me. ‘Got better things to do with my morning than sit and smell Reymond cook. Should put him in the crypt with the rest of the Kendeths.’
Since our family name passed down through the monarch we were all Kendeths despite Grandmother’s three sons having three different fathers. I’d always taken pride in the name before, though sharing it with Hertet soured that pride somewhat there on the tiers. I hoped his opinions on cremating the dead didn’t escape the palace. It was proving hard enough convincing Vermillion to exhume and burn her dead as it was, without Hertet Kendeth declaring it foolishness.
At length we were done with the Latin and the lies. Archbishop Larrin closed the huge bible with a thump that echoed around the Black Courtyard, and the finality of it sent a chill through me. Father’s seal hung around the man’s neck, catching the light. A minor cleric handed Larrin a burning brand and he duly tossed it into the kindling heaped at the pyre’s base. The flames took hold, grew, crackled, found their roar and started to devour the logs above them. Thankfully the breeze blew from the south and carried the smoke away from us, drifting in grey clouds across the Marsail keep, over the palace walls, and out across the city.