Nobody’s Son Read online

  “Please!—Let me help,” Mark said quickly. O god: Henrietta stew. “I’ve cheese in my pack, and bread, and a bit of smoked pig.” Come to think of it, he’d feel safer eating his own food anyway. “I can’t pay much for my dinner, milady. Take this and make my heart easy.”

  Husk looked him over as he rummaged in his pack. “A smooth tongue in a rough face, i’ sooth!” Her curtsey as she spoke was deep and strangely graceful; an echo from some gentler life.

  Mark sighed with relief. Shielder’s Mark: squirrel-saver. The legend begins.

  Old Husk smiled at him her haggish benediction. “A forest-full of gentles have I known, most with more good i’ their faces and less in their hearts. But art tha not cloddish, i’ sooth?”

  “Er, what?”

  “Base! Churlish! Low!”

  “Oh. Am I common?—As dirt,” Mark said with a grin.

  “Not yet too fine to break bread with a toothless mazed old bitch, eh? Not like Serimus nor Flavian nor Stargad the Shrewd. Him I remember, crouched like a silk-swaddled toad afore my lintel thruff the whole night, and then sidles by at noon.”

  “You—you met Stargad? But that must have been halfway back to grandfather days!”

  Husk plucked Mark’s knife from his belt and began shaving slices of pig into the stewpot. “Time, tha knows: time’s foxy in the Wood. They all come by here, this Kingdom’s heroes: brave-braided all, with their medals bouncing to heartdrums’ beat.” She grinned at Mark. “Where are thy ribbands and favours, boy? What hast tha done that harpers sing? Cracked a kingdom? Drank dragon-blood?”

  “Uh, not exactly,” Mark admitted.

  “Climbed a mountain’s sun-spiring snowpeak?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Arm-wrestled oliphaunt?”

  “No.”

  “Diced with the Devil on a throw of bones?”

  Mark shook his head. “Not as such.”

  Husk glared at him. “Were ye nought then but breathing? Dost tha come armoured in air and girt with hoping?”

  “That’s me.” Mark fished a hank of haywire from his pocket to fiddle with, unable to meet Husk’s eyes. T’awd bitch is right. How can you expect to win where all the real heroes lost?

  Shade jumped up to Husk’s shoulder. Crone and creature gazed at Mark without enthusiasm. “Shade, Shade, Shade,” Husk muttered. She cut up the last of the smoked pig. “An hundred hundred nights and weeks and years I’ve waned beneath yonder Tower, boy. My weft is ravelled and ony warp’s left. But still I know the Red Keep is perilous; spell-webbed, fear-fangled. Old nuts rot and nothing green grows up from them: magic has withered since grandfather days. You come with no spell sheaf, no flight of impossibles. Many mighty men that were flesh and fearless i’ th’ sun are clay now: their soul-pots cracked and ground to dust.” Stroking Shade, Husk met his eyes. “What can tha do that they could not?”

  How many times had Mark asked himself the same question? “Maybe I can’t. Maybe I’ll die.” He twisted the haywire between his fingers, then stuffed it abruptly back in his pocket. “I go because I must. This is what has been given to me. This is my only gift. I am no general, no lover, no wizard nor duelist, no hero nor thief. I am only Shielder’s Mark, who waited all his life to go to the Ghostwood, and went.”

  Mark fell silent. The stewpot bubbled above the small yellow fire. Beside his boot, squirrel-pups mewled at their dozing mother’s side. Shade’s tail swished across Husk’s face and the old woman sneezed. Then she laughed. “Better to go with fate than wisdom. Odds be, tha’lt die with a shriek in thy throat, but perhaps not. Still, tha must be shrewd!” She dumped a ladle-full of stew into a wooden bowl. “Bend ear a while, and hear an old owl’s screeching.”

  “Gladly,” Mark said. “Tell me about Stargad!” The favourite stories of Mark’s boyhood had been about Stargad. Not so much the later triumphs, but the early days, learning bladework under his uncle’s stern, fair eye. Earning at last the famous sword that perished with him in the Ghostwood. “Did he have Sweetness? Did it sing, like the old stories say?”

  “Not singing, exactly: more whizzling, windsome: reedhollow. Witched the ear and made the heart drunk with a cider oozed from emptiness.”

  Mark glanced down at the sword belted at his hip. An excellent blade, won on a bet from a travelling duelist. But what was it, compared to Invincible, or Scalpel, or Sweetness?

  A name, Mark thought for the thousandth time. He needed a name for his sword. Protector? Valiant? Victor? But who wanted to be less valiant than his weapon? He imagined introducing himself: “Shielder’s Mark, good sir! And this is…Victor!”—Baring his scabbard with a swirl of cloak.

  Folk would think you mad.

  He tried to get Husk to tell him of the Red Keep, but she would only warn him not to stay longer than a day, then ask him of the outside world, for she was parched with a thirst only his tales of farm-hands and dull everyday chores could slake.

  Once she started up and touched his cheek, frowning. “Tha’rt like…I cannot filch it back to mind,” she murmured. “Did thy father come thruff the Ghostwood, once upon a time?”

  Sudden tightness clenched at Mark’s heart. “My dad were too great a coward to stick by his wife and child; I doubt he came here,” Mark said coldly.

  The crone glanced at him with interest. “Aye…there’s a coal that’s not yet embered,” she cackled. “But this is the Ghostwood, Shielder’s Mark. Here thy shadow throws tha: feet run not to the light ahead, but from the dark behind.” She barked again with laughter lean and tough as wire. “Well an’ well, little clod: I did not mean to hurt tha.” She laid a brittle hand on his arm. “A candle this night was, to an old hag drownt in shadows, Shielder’s Mark. I have summat for tha, if tha’lt take it.” From around her neck she took one of her wooden charms, pressing it into Mark’s hands with her dry old fingers. “No longer do I understand the meaning in this wyrm,” she said, tracing the pattern of the serpent with her fingers. “Mayhap ’twill serve tha for a luckpiece.”

  “You honour me,” Mark said soberly. He lifted the loop of cedar bark and placed it around his neck. The charm he tucked beneath his shirt.

  “Tha shalt come to the Tower soon, to the one black night in the heart of hell.” Wearily Husk pointed to a place by the fire. “Lay thy head down, boy. Mayhap a sleep by my fire will do tha more good than any charm I give tha.”

  All traces of Husk’s mad gaiety had fled. Mark felt cold and lonely and very small, not a hero at all. A young bloody fool, pissing away his last living day with a pack of squirrels and a motherly madwoman.

  Once more Husk stared at him with strange, frustrated almost-recognition. “Cloud of blossoms, such thinkings are,” she muttered. “The nightwind blows them all apart.”

  Under Shade’s cool gaze Mark laid his pallet beside the embering fire and laid down his head. Squirrels squeaked and scratched around him. Far into his dreams their rustles followed him, and the sound of tiny claws.

  He woke suddenly, gasping with fright, though he could not remember what had scared him. The fire was out. Husk and her squirrels were gone. He felt her talisman against his breastbone, a disc of carven cedar-wood beneath his shirt.

  What could it mean? Who was the old woman draped in cloaks she had stolen from murdered heroes? Would her charm really prove lucky? He’d never believed in that sort of rubbish before: such old-wives’ babble offended his common sense. But then what use is common sense in this cursed Wood, that God has framed with a crooked hand?

  God or Duke Aron anyway. How did the awd bugger lay the ghosts to end the Time of Troubles? You’d think he might have left instructions for the rest of us luckless bastards.

  He wondered uneasily if he would ever return to the time he knew. Maybe t’other heroes got this far too: handled the quest and all, turned heels an’ left the Ghostwood, only to find themselves—when? A world of winters gone, maybe; their kin nowt but a swirl of dust in the corners of an awd Keep.

  He shuddered, then spa
t. No fear, lad. You’ve no kin to worrit about you, he thought grimly.

  At least this was his hour: the dark before dawn. He’d lived years in this hour, teaching himself swordplay. Feinting, dodging, thrusting, cut and jump back, stumbling over molehills too small to see by moonlight, feeling his sweat turn cold as the dew on the stubbled fields. In this hour, while the rest of the village slept, he had hammered himself into the man who could dare the Red Keep.

  And now the Keep was before him, a granite giant hunkered on the hillside beyond the moat. Around him stood a grove of cherry trees, their gnarled branches poxed with pale blossoms.

  The moat itself was thirty paces wide and clotted with drifting petals. A clammy, sour-sweet odour rose from it. Couldn’t be a drawbridge to cross a pool that wide; must be a floating bridge, built in sections like the one down below the Mill at home. Pulled up on t’other side each night, no doubt. By the light of the bright, thin moon he saw a white marble path leading from the water’s edge to a small door in the Red Keep’s outer wall.

  Mark squatted and reached a finger toward the black water, but a sick dread came over him and he snatched back his hand. Something was waiting there, under the drifting blossoms. That time they dredged Mad Tom up from the millpond, his patch-pockets full of stones.

  Water spilling from his slack mouth like a tipped canteen.

  Mark shuddered and wiped his hands off on his pants. He swore softly to himself. This place was wrong, wrong as summer snow. God, a manor seemed enow, before you came here, didn’t it? But to walk through this horrible Wood is worth a barony at least. Two score servants, a stable and a pack of hounds with a sweet-toned bitch to lead the chase. “All right,” he whispered. “What’s sowed is grown: now comes the reaping.” He would have to cross the moat, get through the outer walls, scale the Tower, and—well, he didn’t know what would happen then. He would deal with the Tower when the time came.

  Strength on craft, craft on strength, he reminded himself. And if you’re fighting fear? Jump in: water’s cawdest before you dive. Don’t let the fear blunt you like a lead axe.

  Well and right. He could do that. Many a time he’d held his fear like a frog caught in his clenched fist and refused to let it loose. He was a master at controlling his own weaknesses.

  First he had to get across the water. He groped in his pack until he found a sweet, withered apple and tossed it into the moat. It fell with a thick plop. A moment later, a swell heaved up the drifting cherry blossoms and rolled oozily onto shore; Mark scrambled back before it touched his boots. The mere sighed, a dank breath of rotting blossoms.

  “Oh shite.”

  Quickly he started to his right, threading between the cherry trees. One break, he thought. Just give me one piece of luck now and I swear to do the rest.

  Luck was with him. On the bank he found a rowboat, with two oars stored neatly inside.

  He sighed with relief…

  …Wait. Husk said lots of heroes had come this far. So they must have wondered how to get across the moat. Maybe some poor bastards tried to swim—uggh!—but surely others would have found this little tub and rowed across. Yet no hero ever returned from the Red Keep. So how came the boat to be back on this side?

  Mark swallowed, thinking of the apple he had tossed in, the moat’s dank sigh. Maybe nothing waited beneath the sick black water of the mere: but he was taking the damn boat.

  He studied it as best he could for leaks or snakes or spiders, then finally stepped into the bow, careful not to wet his boots in the dreadful mere, and sat down quickly as the little rowboat wobbled under him. Hunkered in the stern he planted both oars against the shore and shoved mightily, driving forward.

  It was almost daybreak; a crimson light seemed to smoulder in the Red Keep, as if its stones were embers waiting to kindle at the sun’s touch.

  Mark’s little boat glided bravely across the mere, cutting a dark wedge through the cherry blossoms. Hello, he thought, drifting into nightmare. I’m back. The red stone ahead, the weirdly glowing cherry blossoms, his own thick forearms that rested on the thwarts: he recognized them all, drifting into memory, visiting a place he’d lived in as a boy, but forgotten every morning when he woke. Once, when he was seven, he’d been lost here for many weeks, running a terrible fever, blind to daylight. I’m here again in dreamworld, he thought, surprised. This is where I went. Behind his back his childhood shuddered like a shadow thrown from a growing flame.

  He always thought he’d had a happy childhood, living with his Ma, but he had forgotten what the nights were like, forgotten the bitter world of dreams. Here everything was weightless and uncertain: a breeze could make his heart flutter like a leaf, could sculpt the granite Keep like a heavy crimson cloud.

  His boat began to slow. The ripples spreading out from her bow were heavy and smooth. Reluctantly Mark unshipped his oars, held them high above the water, then suddenly brought them down and pulled with one powerful stroke.

  Something caught on the right oar, skewing his course. Cursing Mark jerked it free; from the corner of his eye he glimpsed something sliding off the blade, a pale blur like a clutching human hand.

  He let himself drift. He had enough speed to make the far shore, and he didn’t dare touch the thick black water again.

  Apple falling as if in mud; slow heavy swell. A sigh of rotten flowers.

  With a gentle bump he fetched up on the far bank. Stepping out he turned and looked back at the moat. His stomach felt cramped to the size of a walnut. He grinned tightly. He had solved Husk’s riddle and crossed the dreadful water. “Ower two stiles and not even breathing hard,” he murmured.

  Well, actually your heart’s hammering like a mad smith and your ears are pricked like a scared cat’s: but then that’s why the King is going to owe you a barony, ain’t it?

  Before him the greensward sloped twenty paces up to the Keep’s outer wall, a great barrier of thick red granite blocks, close-mortared: a difficult climb, but not impossible. He had come a fair ways east of the white path. On his right, the Scarlet Tower rose into the night, jutting from the eastern wall like a bloody spearpoint. A thin quarter moon drifted overhead, a pink petal on dark blue water.

  How did the boat get back to t’other shore?

  Mark paused. Even if he broke the enchantment on the Keep, he’d have to return over the moat. He looked around, but saw no pontoons for a floating bridge. Drawn up behind the walls no doubt; probably too heavy for you to muck wi’ anyhow.

  His nerves screamed for speed, but instead he settled down to watch the rowboat, ready to grab it should it start to drift of its own accord.

  A sudden tramp of footsteps came from behind the door at the top of the white path. Mark loped quickly into the shadows at the foot of the outer wall. A set of keys jingled, turned. The door opened and a flicker of rushlight leapt out.

  Two men in livery walked through, carrying torches. Behind them came a great lady, swathed in black satin. She walked proudly, but her strong face was drawn with fear. Behind her, another liveried man swung the door shut. His sword was drawn.

  Ghosts! Ghosts or devils or some damn thing you better hope doesn’t notice you, Shielder’s Mark.

  Although…they look pretty solid, he thought, trying to ignore his racing pulse.

  “Cursed scow’s drifted again,” one of the torch-bearers complained.

  “Fetch it up, Donkle,” said the man with the drawn sword.

  “Safe passage.” Even in fear the great lady’s voice retained a tone of cold command. “The Prince my son hath bade tha make my passage safe, boy.”

  “Harler am I clept, milady, and a man. I am no woman’s ‘boy’ any more,” Drawn-sword answered softly.

  The lady’s hands twisted around a silk purse at her belt. “Gold have I, and silver too, and colour-glass to grace thy lady’s throat. Thy heart’s desire in gleam and gew-gaws have I, if you only set me free: I swear it. I’ll make no trouble, cause no stir: marry, walk will I with spider’s feet, and talk with fis
h’s tongue.”

  Harler laughed unpleasantly. “Mice is ever kind to cat, milady. Thy son must also fear thy influence, should his father…pass away.”

  The Queen’s eyes darted frantically around her, but there was no place to run. She drew in her breath as if to scream, but quick as thought Harler had his sword-point at her throat. “’Tisn’t dawn,” he whispered. “No birds yet sing, Majesty. Roost a while longer, or I’ll put a last stop in thy flute.”

  The Queen turned, whispering fiercely at the other two men. “And ye? A second brace of cuckoos bent alike on killing the Queen who holds in bond thy honours and thy lives?” Donkle shrugged uneasily, dragging the boat over to where the others stood. The third guard smiled, drew his knife, and cut the silk purse from the Queen’s belt.

  “Art tha answered, i’ faith?” Harler asked.

  The Queen nodded, and her proud head faltered. “Answered, yea: but not in faith.”

  So the servants mean to slay their Queen, half for gain and half to protect her son. Does he mean to slay his father, the King? She’s been a raspish mistress, you can bet: they look like rats turning on the crippled cat.

  Still, can’t hold wi’ traitors, especially when they’re about to filch your damn boat. Besides, a proper hero’s always on the lady’s side: let’s see if we can’t add a Queen to our list of rescued damsels, Mark thought, stealthily drawing another apple from his bag. “One squirrel” hasn’t much of a shine to it.

  He tossed the apple in a high arc toward the moat and waited for the thick splash. He rose as all three guards whirled to look into the water.

  “What was that?” Donkle hissed.

  “Nought!” Harler said. “Trout gawping at fly, belike.”