Nobody's Son (28 page)

Mark knew it well.

The cherry trees were bare. No scent of them lingered in the air; dead leaves, damp with dew, sank beneath Mark’s feet as he walked through the barren orchard.

The mere was gone and in its place a ditch. He stumbled through margins rank with skullcap. Underfoot long grass tangled around bits of bone and metal, rusted swords, rotten shields, stilled hands, tongues long silenced by a drink of black water.

Mark crossed the ditch. Once he felt something give beneath his foot with a wet crunch, felt it splay and drag across his ankle. It could have been a twig.

The Red Keep was empty. No sentries walked its crumbled battlements, no guards looked down from atop its rusting gate. Inside, no horses clopped slowly home to rest, no voices chattered and sang from within the great hall. All the busy life was gone, and even the ghosts had fled. Where once the Keep had been thick with memories, there now lay only dust.

How old it is, how terribly old. Men lived here once, and married and fathered children and died here too, generations of them, and now they’re nowt but dust beneath your feet. All their proud voices quiet now, dark their eyes, cold their hearts that laughed once and loved and struggled through their lives. Gone, gone, down into dust and ashes.

O God O God the world’s a slaughterhouse. Every cobble in the street could be pressed from human bones; every pot on the fire could be made of human clay.

In the kitchen a little fire still burned, sunk almost into embers. Before it sat the Old Man, stirring in the ashes with a blackthorn staff.

Mark watched him for an hour, or a day, or a week, before at last he spoke. “Where are they?” he said. “There were princes here and lovers; grooms, soldiers, clothiers, dyers, cooks, scullions, chambermaids, ostlers, maidens. Little boys. Where have they all gone?”

The Old Man turned then. His skull bore a long white scar, his face was hard and white as bone: his eyes were black. “That was long ago,” he said. “Now even their ghosts have grown old and died.”

Mark asked, “Who are you?”

The Old Man turned back to the fire. “I am Nobody,” he said. “My name is dead.” He stirred the ashes with his stick, staring at the patterns he made as if they revealed some deep and terrible mystery. “And dost tha cum to give back what tha stole?”

Mark’s hand strayed to his hip where the dagger lay. “It was you!” he whispered. “Your awd scar: that’s where I clubbed you when I took the dagger! You were the Prince.”

“Am still,” the Old Man said, with a spasm of hatred. “Hedrod my father taught me nought of ruling: I could not hold what I had taken. Even in death he must be King.”

Slowly Mark drew the black dagger and held it out to the Old Man, who took it, laughing with a sound like bone splintering. “And wherefore cum tha, whelp?”

“I do not know.”

“Then tha must learn.”

“Yes.”

“I warn tha, ‘tis nae, always easy for boys to learn what old men teach. It will go hard for tha.”

“I can learn,” Mark said. Gently, fearfully as a lover, he approached the Old Man’s turned back. “I promise I can learn your teaching.”

Suddenly the staff whipped back and caught Mark a staggering blow on the side of his head. “Tha mewls,” the Old Man said. “Tha’rt soft.”

Mark’s head rang, yet he barely felt the blow. “Aye. Aye, I’m grown too soft,” he whispered, feeling himself like a pool of black water, a teardrop, barely able to hold his shape, breaking around the blackthorn staff, lapping around the pain in his head, his hand.

And he thought suddenly that evil was the same as emptiness, and the dread that lay upon the Wood was made of darkness, wind and water. It was emptiness that crept through the stones of his fine house, emptiness that ran into him through the wound in his hand.

And a great fear came over him, that he would be empty forever. He craved filling as he once craved light and air. He had lost his edges in the darkness and he had to have a shape. “I am too soft,” he said. And he wanted to beg the Old Man to fill him up, to give him shape, to teach him how to be a man.

He had never had that. Never had a man to show him what a man should be. Never worked at his father’s side, never rambled in the woods with him. Never learned to ride and shoot and hunt with Duke Richard, never learned swordplay from Sir William.

He’d taught himself as much as he could, but something had gone wrong, terribly wrong: now his dreams were dust and his love was ashes and his fine castle lay abandoned behind him. But he dared not beg the Old Man for his teaching, for fear of showing how soft he was.

At last the Old Man said, “Cum then: look into my fire and tell me aught you see.”

Weeping tears of gratitude Mark drew near, and crouched beside the Old Man’s stool, and stared into the fire. “I see nowt,” he said at last.

The Old Man beat Mark with his staff, beat him with an old man’s wiry strength, and Mark did not resist. Then he bade Mark lie amongst the cinders, beside the fire, and go to sleep. And this he did.

Another day passed this way, and then another. Each morning, just before dawn, the Old Man would ask Mark to stare into the fire and tell him what he saw; when Mark said he saw nothing, the Old Man beat him and would not speak to him again. The day would break and the shadows would fade from the room. Sometime in the morning he would point outside and Mark would go to gather firewood, and then return. Shafts of sunlight crept across the floor, now slender, swelling, now long and wide, now slanting, narrower, gone. At twilight the Old Man would pull a chestnut from the fire and crack it open with his teeth, and give it to Mark to eat. Mark was never hungry, but he ate what he was given, though the nuts were often rotten, or burned and hard.

As time went by his mind grew hungry. He looked for firewood everywhere: in the stables, the Hall, the palace. He peered through every window and opened every doorway: all except the door to the Tower, which the Old Man forbade him ever to pass. Soon he knew the whole ruined Keep by heart, every passage and every room, every tree in its orchard, every skeleton in the ditch around its walls. At last, when he had explored the buildings and the grounds and the woods around, he gave up his journeys. He gathered a great store of brash into the main courtyard, and did not leave the castle any more.

He dreamt of the morning he would see something in the fire, and the Old Man would be glad, and speak words of praise to him, and begin his teaching. But as the days wore on Mark grew more desperate, feeling the Old Man must soon weary of his stupidity, his ignorance. At last in desperation he lied, and claimed to see a crown of flame hidden in the fire.

The Old Man beat him, but no worse than usual.

Mark began to think that with luck he would guess what the Old Man wanted him to see. He spent each day absorbed in speculation, imagining and discarding one possibility after another, testing each out in his. mind, sneaking glances at the Old Man, trying to guess what he was waiting for.

At first he tried simple things: after the crown a throne, a sword, a goblet, a maiden, a white charger, a castle, an army with banners. Soon his imagination grew: he saw dragons, devils, horrors out of nightmare, elfin feasts, scenes of the past and future. He told elaborate stories that grew from one day to the next, thinking that perhaps the Old Man was looking for a tale, an image, a legend of long ago. He made up songs and claimed to hear them in the hissing flames, the popping embers.

One night, heart almost stopping, he saw Gail in the flames.

The Old Man beat him, as always.

He saw Valerian then, and Lissa, and Sir William and Duke Richard and Deron and Astin and Vultemar and Anujel and Lord Peridot and his mother and so on through all the people of his life; and as he saw each one, they seemed to drop from his memory, consumed like moths by the fire.

Finally he could see no more. In three days he had moved only to bring in brush for the fire; when the Old Man beat him he lay in his spot by the grate and did not flinch. “Cum,” the Old Man said, with a voice like a coal popping, “look into my fire and tell me aught you see.”

Mark stared dully, unmoving, from his place by the grate. “Ashes,” he said.

The silence lengthened and no blow fell. A wild hope flared in Mark’s heart that he had passed the test at last, that his days (weeks? months?) of stupidity would be forgiven.

The Old Man turned his back on Mark. “Cum,” he said coldly. “Tha hast work to do.”

The Old Man led him to a forge. “Tha hast worked a smith before. Here be fire and water, an anvil and iron. Each day tha’lt cum here and light the fire until it blazons. Then shalt tha beat oncet on the iron. An I hear a second stroke, I’ll heave tha from hence and teach tha nought.”

“What am I making?” Mark asked.

The Old Man’s voice was hard as December. “A sword.”

“One stroke a day! How can I ever—”

The blackthorn staff leaped out and struck him in the stomach, so hard it made tears spring to his eyes. He could not speak for days; he carried the ache much longer, like a rat that gnawed his belly.

Each day he came to the forge and lit the fire. Then he pulled upon the great bellows until the flames roared and the iron began to glow, like a red serpent in black skin. And each day he hammered down a single stroke.

The days passed very slowly. The fire’s heat toughened his skin, and his broad shoulders grew broader from pumping the great bellows.

And each day, as he woke in the darkness before dawn, he saw his father again, bending, leaving, gone. And the Old Man kept his back turned, and he never spoke.

Until one day he said, “Art tha yet eager to ‘prentice on me? Dost tha wish to be more swift about thy making?”

Mark spoke the truth, waiting to be beaten. “Aye.”

“Fair enow. Now mayst tha strike the iron thrice each day; but tha must never step out o’ doors. From now will I gather wood.”

And though many days (weeks? months?) had passed since Mark had felt the world’s wind on his cheek, it galled him that the Old Man should take away his right to go outside. But the dark drive to make his sword was greater than his thirst for light and air. From that day forth he never felt the wind; but his anger rolled from him like sweat as he pumped the bellows and struck his iron. Slowly, slowly, the iron’s shape began to change, but Mark knew it would never be a sword within his lifetime.

Then one day the Old Man said, “How goes thy making? Wouldst tha crave to go more swiftly still?”

“How much swifter?” Mark replied bitterly. “Five strokes? Ten?”

“Tha mayst labour at forge as tha will—an tha oath to never see the sun. Tha’lt sleep here, aface of forge, waking ony in darkness, walking ony in shadow: no light to thine eye but embers and hot iron.”

A sudden fierce desire blazed up in Mark to see sunshine, hear birdsong, smell grass wet with dew. If he agreed to the Old Man’s terms, his world would hold only darkness and fire, iron and ashes. He knew he could not live like that.

Yet hunger drove him. “I’ll do it,” he said.

From that day forth he woke at night and slept through the day. He closed the forge door; there were no windows. He woke without knowing morning: slept without seeing sunset. His world was the stink of hot iron; the roar of flame; sweat; the taste of ashes. He knew no more than what the iron knew, felt nothing but what it felt. He worked fiercely, day after day; his chest deepened and his strong arms grew stronger still from hammering. And with every stroke he beat hate into the iron: hate for the Old Man who kept him penned in a lightless prison. When he woke, he burned with rage: when he slept, he dreamt of murder.

He made the pommel first. When it was almost done he put it in the flames until it began to smoulder with a dull red glow. With tongs he swiftly plucked it out, and scored it all around with the black dagger, leaving a single line spiralling from the butt up to the pommel’s top. This was the grip, the striving of his life, circling ever upward without rest.

Then he made the hilts, a plain iron bar to keep his hands from sliding up the blade, and keep a foe’s weapon from sliding down. Grimly he laughed at the joke: he was Shielder’s Mark; yet his father had left him no shield. The hilts on his sword would be all his protection.

The blade he fashioned last, long and straight and black. When he was done he smashed it against the anvil and it shattered. He picked up the pieces, and began again. The next time the blade was stronger, and did not break against the anvil, but the black dagger cut his sword in half as if cutting cheese. A third time he fashioned the blade; and this time the dagger could not mar it.

Then he worked to give the blade an edge. When he was done, he tore a strip from his shirt. It only took the lightest pressure against the edge to make the cloth split, but Mark was not satisfied, and went to work again. The next time he merely dropped the strip of cloth onto the upturned blade. It fell cleanly into two pieces and fluttered to the ground. Still it was not enough. The third time he dropped a strip of cloth upon the blade it fell in one piece to the floor. Only when Mark squatted to pull on one edge with a finger could he tell it was in two halves.

He fitted the blade in the pommel, the hilts across them both, and joined all parts together. Then he called the Old Man, and said that he was done.

“Give me the dagger,” the Old Man said. “Now name thy blade.”

Mark held the weapon into his hand: a thing of darkness, made of iron, sweat, and bitter hate; the cruel hiss of coals, the bellows’ dragon-breath. “Its name is Ashes,” Mark said, for this was the teaching the Old Man had given him.

The Old Man plucked Ashes from his hand, and dropped it with a clatter to the floor. “It’s not enough,” he said, turning for the door.

Mark boiled with rage. Ashes was his child, his life for an endless term of hell. It was all his darkness: pure as rage, strong as hate, sharp as grief.

The next thing he knew he was standing with Ashes in his hand, its point at the Old Man’s bald head, just where the white scar seamed his ancient scalp. “It is enow,” Mark hissed.