Half a King

Yarvi blinked. He had never thought of his smiling uncle as a ruthless man. But Odem had sprouted from the same seed as Yarvi’s father, whose rages he still carried the marks of, and their drowned brother Uthil, at the memory of whose peerless swordsmanship old warriors in the training square still came over dewy-eyed. Sometimes calm waters hide fierce currents, after all.

“A curse on you!”

A woman had tottered from the line of slaves as far as the ropes would allow, bloody hair plastered against one side of her face.

“Bastard king of a bastard country, may Mother Sea swallow-”

One of the warriors cuffed her to the ground.

“Cut her tongue out,” said another, jerking her back by her hair while a third drew a knife.

“No!” shouted Yarvi. The men frowned at him. If their king’s honor was questioned so was theirs, and mercy would not do as an explanation. “She’ll fetch a better price with her tongue.” And Yarvi turned away, shoulders chafing under the weight of his mail, and struggled on towards the holdfast.

“You are your mother’s son, my king,” said Hurik.

“Who else’s would I be?”

His father’s eyes and his brother’s used to glow as they told tales of past raids, of great deeds done and grand prizes taken, while Yarvi lurked in the shadows at the foot of the table and wished he could have taken a man’s part in the man’s work. But here was the truth of it, and a place on a raid did not seem enviable now.

The fighting was over, if there had been any worthy of the name, but still it seemed Yarvi laboured through a nightmare, sweating in his mail and chewing at the inside of his mouth and startling at sounds. Screams and laughter, figures darting through the wriggling haze of fires, smoke scratching at his throat. Crows pecked and circled and cawed their triumph. Theirs was the victory, most of all. Mother War, Mother of Crows, who gathers the dead and makes the open hand a fist, would dance today, while Father Peace hid his face and wept. Here, near the shiftless border between Vansterland and Gettland, Father Peace wept often.

The tower of the holdfast loomed black above them, the noise of waves crashing on both sides of its foundations loud below.

“Stop,” said Yarvi, breathing hard, head spinning, face tickling with sweat. “Help me out of my mail.”

“My king,” frothed Keimdal, “I must object!”

“Object if you please. Then do as I tell you.”

“It’s my duty to keep you safe-”

“Then imagine your dishonour when I die of too much sweating halfway up this tower! Undo the buckles, Hurik.”

“My king.” They stripped his mail shirt off and Hurik threw it over one great shoulder.

“Lead on,” Yarvi snapped at Keimdal, struggling to fasten his father’s clumsy golden cloak-buckle with his useless lump of a hand, too big and too heavy for him by far and the hinge all stiff as-

He was stopped dead by the sight that greeted them beyond the open gates.

“Here is a harvest,” said Hurik.

The narrow space in front of the tower was scattered with bodies. So many that Yarvi had to search for patches of ground between to put his feet. There were women there, and children. Flies buzzed, and he felt the sickness rising, and fought it down.

He was a king, after all, and a king rejoices in the corpses of his enemies.

One of his uncle’s warriors sat beside the entrance to the tower, cleaning his ax as calmly as he might have beside the training square at home.

“Where is Odem?” Yarvi muttered at him.

The man gave a squint-eyed grin and pointed upwards. “Above, my king.”

Yarvi ducked past, breath echoing in the stairway, feet scraping on the stones, swallowing his surging spit.

On the battlefield, his father used to say, there are no rules.

Up, and up in the fizzing darkness, Hurik and Keimdal toiling behind him. He paused at a narrow window to feel the wind on his burning face, saw water crash on rock at the bottom of a sheer drop and pushed down his fear.

Stand like a king, his mother had told him. Speak like a king. Fight like a king.

There was a platform at the top, propped on timbers, a wooden parapet about the edge no taller than Yarvi’s thigh. Low enough to bring the giddy sickness flooding back when he saw how high they had climbed, Father Earth and Mother Sea spread out small around them, the forests of Vansterland stretching off into the haze of distance.

Yarvi’s Uncle Odem stood calmly watching Amwend burn, columns of smoke smudging the slate-gray sky, the tiny warriors bent to the business of destruction, the little ships lined up where surf met shingle to collect the bloody harvest. A dozen of his most seasoned men were around him, and kneeling in their midst a prisoner in a fine yellow robe, bound and gagged, his face swollen with bruises and his long hair clotted with blood.

“A good day’s work!” called Odem, smiling at Yarvi over his shoulder. “We have taken two hundred slaves, and livestock, and plunder, and burned one of Grom-gil-Gorm’s towns.”