King of Thorns

Of all memories, the first I have is of leaning from a high parapet into the teeth of a gale, with the rain lashing and me laughing. The next is of hands pulling me back.

If you’re determined, if you set your mind, there are never enough hands to pull you back. By the time I reached six I knew the outside of the Tall Castle as well as I knew the inside. The Builders left little for a climber to use, but centuries of tinkering by the Ancraths, and the House of Or before us, had provided plenty of footholds, at least plenty of ones deep enough for a child.

There is a single high window in the royal treasury, set in a plain wall a hundred feet above the ground, too narrow for a man and blocked by a forest of bars set so close as to give a snake quite a wriggle of it. On the far side of the castle, close to the throne-room, is a hole that leads to a gargoyle’s head on the outer wall. If the treasury door opens, then the movement of air through the castle makes the gargoyle speak. On a still day he moans and when the wind is up he howls. He will also speak if the wind is hard in the east and a particular window in the kitchen stores is left unshuttered. When that happens there’s a fuss and somebody gets whipped with rope and wire. Without the treasury’s high window the gargoyle would not speak and the king would never know when the door to his treasures stood open.

I left my bed one moonless night. William lay sleeping in his little bed. No one saw me leave, only our great-hound, Justice. He gave a whine of reproach then tried to follow. I cursed him to silence and closed the door on him.

Those bars look strong but like so much we depend upon in life they are rotten to the core. Rust has eaten them. Even those with steel left at the centre will bend given sufficient leverage. One night when my nurse lay sleeping and three guards on wall-duty argued over the ownership of a silver coin found on the steps at change-over, I climbed down a knotted rope and set foot amidst my father’s wealth. I brushed the rust from my tunic, shook great flakes of it from my hair, and set my lantern, now unhooded, upon the floor.

The Ancrath loot, robbed from almost every corner of empire, lay on stone shelves, belched from coffers, stood stacked in careless piles. Armour, swords, gold coin in wooden tubs, mechanisms that looked like parts of insects, gleaming in the lantern light and tainting the air with alien scents, almost citrus, almost metal. I found my prize beside a helmet full of cogs and ash.

The Duke’s gift didn’t disappoint. Beneath a glass dome that wasn’t glass, sealed by an ivory disk that wasn’t ivory, lay a tiny scene, a church in miniature set around with tiny houses, and there a person, and another. And as I held it to the light, and turned its surprising weight this way and that to see the detail, a snowstorm grew, swirling up from the ground until whirling flakes obliterated the view, leaving nothing but a blizzard in a half-globe. I set the snow-globe back, worried for a moment that I had somehow broken it. And miracle of miracles, the snow began to settle.

There’s no magic to it now. I know that the right collection of artisans could make something similar in just a few weeks. They would use glass and ivory, and I don’t know what the snow would be, but as ancient wonders go, there’s little wonder in such things if you’re much past six. But at the time it was magic, of the best kind. Stolen magic.

I shook the snow-globe again, and once more the all-encompassing blizzard rose, chaos, followed by calm, by settling snows, and a return to the world before. I shook it again. It seemed wrong. All that storm and fury signifying nothing. The whole world upheaved, and for what? The same man trudged toward the same church, the same woman waited at the same cottage door. I held a world in my hand, and however I shook it, however the pieces fell, in whatever new patterns, nothing changed. The man would never reach the church.

Even at six I knew the Hundred War. I marched wooden soldiers across Father’s maps. I saw the troops return through the Tall Gate, bloody and fewer, and the women weeping in the shadows as others threw themselves at their men. I read the tales of battle, of advance and retreat, of victory and defeat, in books I would not have been allowed to open if my father knew me. I understood all this and I knew that I held my whole world in my right hand. Not some play land, some toy church and tiny men crafted by ancients. My whole world. And no amount of shaking would change it. We would swirl against each other, battle, kill, and fall, and settle, and as the haze cleared, the war would still be there, unchanged, waiting, for me, for my brother, for my mother.

When a game cannot be won, change the game. I read that in the book of Kirk. Without thought I brought the snow-globe overhead and smashed it on the ground. From the wet fragments I picked out the man, barely a wheat-grain between my thumb and finger.