LITMIR.BIZ

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was just a name to me, Qalasadi filled my thoughts. The numbered man.

      Grandfather laughed in his chair, the whale-ivory back of it spreading above him like the spray of a breaking wave. ‘Would you hunt down every man who wronged you, Jorg? However far-flung? However long they run? Seems to me a man like that is a slave to chance, always hunting, no time for living.’

      ‘They would have seen you die screaming while the poison ate you,’ I said. ‘Your wife too. Your son.’

      ‘And would have had you take the blame.’ He yawned wide enough to crack his jaw and ran the heels of both palms across the grey stubble of his beard.

      ‘Poison is a dirty weapon,’ I said. Not that I had been above its use in Gelleth. I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

      ‘We play a dirty game.’ Grandfather nodded and watched me from his wrinkles with those dark eyes so like Mother’s.

      Perhaps it wasn’t the poison that irked me. Or setting me up for the fall – a chance inspiration surely and none of Ibn Fayed’s doing. I recalled Qalasadi in that courtyard the only time we met, his assessment, his calculation as he considered the probabilities. Maybe that lack of malice had made it so personal; he reduced me to numbers and played the odds. Fexler’s ghost had been constructed by reducing the true man to numbers. I found I didn’t like the process.

      ‘They struck at my family,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I’ve built a kingdom on not allowing such acts to go unpunished.’

      He watched me then, with the sunlight streaming around me from the sea window, making me a shadow cut from light. What went on beneath that thin circlet of gold, I wondered, what calculations? We all make them. Not so cold-blooded as Qalasadi’s but an arithmetic of sorts nonetheless. What did he make of me, this watering-down of his seed, beloved daughter mixed with detestable Ancrath? Nothing but a name to him a month ago. No child to remember, no soft toddling innocence from years past to blunt the sharp angles of the young killer before him – blood of his blood.

      ‘How would you do it? The Caliph of Liba lives in lands that are not like ours. You would be a white man where almost no white men are. A stranger in a strange land. Marked at every turn. Reported from the moment you set foot on the Afrique shores. You’ll find no friends there, only sand, disease, and death. I would gladly have Ibn Fayed and Qalasadi die. Fayed for striking at me in my halls, the mathmagician for his treachery. But if a lone assassin, especially a lone white assassin, could have accomplished it I would have dispatched one. Not in answer to Fayed’s raids – as a man of honour I meet war with war – but in response to his assassin.’

      All men of ambition must pray to be pitted against men of honour. Although I pitied my grandfather at that moment, also it made me happy to know that at least somewhere in the mix from which I sprung there lurked a dash of such a man.

      ‘You’re right to say it would not be easy, Earl Hansa.’ I bowed. ‘Maybe I’ll wait until it becomes easy … certainly I need to learn more, consider more.’

      Grandfather came to a decision. I saw the change as his face hardened into it. He would make a terrible player of poker.

      ‘Leave Ibn Fayed and his creatures to me, Jorg. They struck at Morrow, at me and mine in the Castle Morrow. The vengeance is mine to take and I will take it.’

      The old man had weighed his odds. In one hand the life of an unknown relative, tainted by bad blood, in the other the chance of destroying an enemy. Whether ‘unknown relative’ had grown into ‘Rowan’s son, my daughter’s child’ and outweighed the gain, or whether he judged my chances of success so feather-light as to be outweighed by any claim on kinship, I didn’t know.

      ‘I will leave them, then.’ I bowed again. The lie came easily. I chose to believe he saw me as his daughter’s son.

      I provisioned well, loading my mule with water-skins and dried meat. I would find fruit on the way: on the Horse Coast in high summer you had only to stretch out an arm to find an apple, apricot, plum, peach, pear, or even an orange. I packed a tent, for shade is a rarity in the dry hills behind the coastlands, and without the sea breezes the land bakes. I’m told the Moors have held the southern kingdoms time and again, Kadiz, Kordoba, Morrow, Wennith, Andaluth, even Aramis. They find it not so different from the dusts of Afrique.

      ‘So the Iberico, is it?’

      I finished cinching the load-strap beneath my mule and looked up.

      ‘Sunny!’ I grinned at his scowl. Months back I chose the name for the guardsman after he did his best to keep me out of the castle that first day when I arrived incognito.

      ‘Minding my own business I was and up comes Earl Hansa. “Greyson,” he says. He likes to know all the men’s names. “Greyson,” he says, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Young King Jorg is making a trip and I’d like you to go along with him.” “Volunteering”, he called it.’

      ‘Sunny, I can’t think of a man I’d rather have with me.’ I stood and patted the mule’s haunches. It seemed a sturdy beast, shabby but strong. The ostler said he was forty years and more, and wise with it. I thought it good to have at least one greybeard in the party.

      ‘This is revenge for making you drink from the horse trough, ain’t it?’ Sunny said. He had a sour look to him that made me think of Brother Row.

      I waggled my hand. ‘Little bit.’ In truth I hadn’t known I was getting an escort, let alone picked the man. ‘In any case, you’ll enjoy getting out and about,’ I said. ‘Surely even the Iberico Hills beat a day standing guard at the Lowery Gate?’

      He spat at that, strengthening his resemblance to Row still further. ‘I’m a wall guard, not a house flower.’ A stretch of his arm showed off the sun’s nut-brown stain. House guards are never so tanned.

      With the mule’s tether in hand I set off for the gate. Sunny followed. His packhorse stood outside the castle wall in the shade of an olive tree, high laden as if we were bound for a crossing of the Aups.

      However reluctant the show Sunny put on, my mule had him beaten. I had to haul the beast past the horse trough. I named him Balky and encouraged him with a stick. In the end I had my way, but the fact that Balky did not want to go where I led was never in doubt. I guess he really was the wise one after all.

       5

      Five years earlier

      Castle Morrow, like the Haunt, is set apart from the region’s main town. Both castles are placed for defence of their occupants. In the Hundred War the conquering of kingdoms is the business of avarice. The Hundred want their new lands to be rich and plentiful, full of taxpayers and recruits. Most attacks will aim to kill the land’s ruler so the aggressor may claim his throne and take the kingdom unharmed. Wars of attrition where the peasantry are slaughtered, cities burned, crops destroyed, are less common and happen most often when the two sides are evenly matched, both struggling to gain the advantage required to assault the foe’s castles.

      The city of Albaseat rests on fertile plains maybe fifty miles inland from Castle Morrow. It took Sunny and me three days to walk the distance, having started late on the first day, and pausing for frequent stick-based negotiations with Balky. The River Jucca feeds the surrounding farmlands. We approached the city along the Coast Road, which for the last few miles leads along the riverbank, past orchards of every sort, through vineyards, along the foot of slopes thick with olive groves. Turning for Albaseat’s gates we walked between tilled fields heavy with tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, cabbage, potatoes, enough food to feed the world.

      The walls and towers of Albaseat shone in the southern sun.

      ‘Makes Hodd Town look like a pile of offal,’ I said.

      ‘Where?’ Sunny asked.

      ‘Capital city of the Renar Highlands,’

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