Talus and the Frozen King (6 page)

Added to what Talus had discovered under the dead king's fingernails, it might mean their trip here had been worthwhile after all.

His patience gone, Mishina shoved Talus outside. Talus sprawled on the icy ground, cursing not just because he'd fallen, but because he'd left it too late to act on his discoveries.

Bran helped him to his feet.

'I'm glad I don't have to go back in there again,' he said.

Talus brushed flakes of snow from his robe. 'It is interesting that you say that,' he replied.

Gantor was a great boulder of a man. He wore a long cloak of grey caribou hide, shaped and leather-stitched to fit his robust body. White stoat pelts ran around the collar and down the sleeves.

It was a fine garment. Footwear in Creyak ran to simple fur-lined moccasins similar to Bran's own; for some inexplicable reason, Gantor went barefoot.

This shoeless guide guided Bran and Talus back through the labyrinthine trenches. As he had in the island's defensive maze, Bran soon lost all sense of direction. Not that he was really paying attention. He was still recovering from being inside the cairn.

Actually, the experience hadn't been as bad as he'd thought. The cairn in his home village of Arvon had been a poor, dead place, just a cold hole carved out of the earth. But the Creyak cairn was different. Rich, and somehow alive.

Not that Bran had any intention of setting foot in it again. Nor of staying on Creyak for a single breath longer than he had to. He'd made up his mind. As soon as an opportunity presented itself, he was leaving.

Gantor led them to a narrow dead end. Directly in front of them was one of Creyak's ubiquitous door-stones. Beside it was a gap in the trench wall; it looked out on a wide, shallow pit piled high with rough stones and lengths of whalebone. Thick ropes were wrapped around the stones, preventing the piles from collapsing under their own weight.

Gantor was so broad he practically filled the passage behind them, cutting off any possibility of escape. Bran briefly considered taking the blunt end of his axe to the back of Gantor's head. With the big man insensible, he and Talus could make a run for it. But Talus showed no sign of wanting to run anywhere. Besides, Gantor's head—not to mention the rest of him—looked extremely hard.

Gantor set his shoulder to the door-stone and heaved. It moved smoothly on a track of polished granite to reveal an interior resembling that of the king's house, only on a much smaller scale. It was clearly unoccupied: there were no beds in the alcoves and the stone shelves standing opposite the door were bare. The hearth was empty.

'I build houses,' said Gantor. 'This one is new. You will stay here now. At sunset I will take you to eat with the people.'

He adjusted his cloak and straightened the stoat-fur pouch at his waist. He frowned and rummaged inside, but came out empty-handed.

'Lost something?' said Bran.

Gantor turned his back and folded his arms. Bran loitered, trying to devise a way of carrying on the conversation. Perhaps if they could gain his trust ...

Talus seized Bran's arm and dragged him through the open doorway.

'The first thing we must do,' said the bard, 'is get a fire going.'

'What you mean,' Bran replied, 'is you want me to get a fire going.'

But Talus, like Gantor, had already lost interest. And the thought of a fire was attractive: the act of building one was almost as warming as sitting in front of its flames. The sooner he started the sooner he'd shake off the cold.

And keeping busy might stop him thinking about death.

After a brief search, Bran found a stack of peat bricks and a bundle of dry willow bark in a pit in the floor, similar to the shellfish pond in the king's house. He hefted three of the bricks over to the hearth and propped them one against the other, leaving an open space beneath. Into this space he placed a handful of bark strips. Finally, he reached into the small pouch he carried under his bearskin, but not before throwing an uneasy glance back at the door.

Gantor's body blocked most of the fragmented light filtering down through the passageway's woven roof. The big man stood motionless, showing no interest in anything they might be getting up to.

From his pouch, Bran extracted a blunt block of grey flint and a shiny nodule of a heavy substance Talus called pyr. Kneeling, Bran held the chunk of pyr as close to the bark as he could and struck it with the flint. There was a faint chink. A spark leaped from the pyr to the nearest twig, which immediately started to smoulder. Bran puffed air gently over the bark. After a few breaths, a tongue of orange flame sprang into life. Soon all the bark was alight; shortly after that the peat bricks began to smoke, filling the house with swampy fumes that wound their way slowly towards the hole in the roof. There the whalebone rafters came together in an artful spiral that drew the smoke effortlessly into the sky.

Gantor's head swivelled on his squat neck. He cast his baleful gaze over the flames, then turned away without comment.

Bran stowed both flint and pyr back in his pouch. He'd journeyed far enough with Talus to know that every tribe had its own unique relationship with fire. Some conjured it with tools like the ones he carried. Others used bows to spin pointed sticks in wooden bowls. Some appointed guardians whose sole task it was to prevent the tribe's precious heartfire from ever dying out, so that every new fire they made was seeded from the flames of the one, true original.

Until he'd met Talus, Bran had been of the bow-and-stick persuasion. He'd once asked Talus where he'd learned to use the pyr, but the bard had refused to tell.

'Far from here, a long time ago,' was all Talus had said. This was his usual answer to such questions. 'There is a hard, cold substance hidden inside the rock and that is what makes the fire flow.'

Half an explanation, Bran supposed, was better than none. Where Talus was concerned, he'd learned to be grateful for what he got.

They sat in silence, warming themselves before the flames. A gust of wind blew across the smoke hole, sucking away the fumes. Bran breathed deep, enjoying the clean, warm air. The fire warmed his heart too, reassuring him the world around him was vital and real. It also reminded him just how tired he was. Well, it had hardly been the most restful of nights.

The wind strengthened and the whalebone rafters began to creak. The creaking was joined by the dull spattering sound of fresh snow falling on the roof. Before long, the gusts had all joined into one and Bran and Talus found themselves sitting underneath a winter storm.

'I'm not happy about being a prisoner here,' said Bran, stifling a yawn. Outside, Gantor had raised his fur hood against the wind stealing through the passage roof. He looked like a stone blocking a mountain pass. 'We could get away, you know, if we really wanted to.'

'Tharn's caution is natural.' Talus was rubbing his hands before the flames. 'But he and the others will come to trust us soon.'

'How do you know?'

Talus delved into one of the many pouches he carried. He took out his hand and opened it to reveal a scattering of tiny red flakes, almost dust, dark against the bard's pale skin.

'Is it blood?' said Bran.

'That is one wrong guess against you. Instead of guessing, Bran, try to look.'

'I'm too cold for your games. Just tell me.'

'A low temperature is no excuse for lazy thinking. Look, but with more than just your eyes.'

Bran shuffled round the hearth until he was sitting right next to Talus. The storm battered against the roof. He sniffed the red flakes, but all he could smell was the peaty aroma of the fire. He licked the end of his finger, dabbed it into the little pile and touched it to his tongue.

He'd been so convinced it was blood that what he actually tasted surprised him. 'It's just mud. Dried mud.'

'Better,' said Talus. 'Now it is your turn to ask me a question.' Bran spat and wiped his finger clean on his bearskin. What he really wanted to do was lie down and sleep. But Talus wasn't going to let this rest.

Actually, Talus was good company when his curiosity was aroused. Bran had lost count of the number of times his friend had involved himself with the affairs of strangers like this. And the bard had a knack of finding his way to the truth.

It was the part of Talus he was going to miss the most when they parted.

'Where did it come from?'

'Excellent! I found it beneath the fingernails of the dead king. I should have seen it when I first examined his body in the arena.'

'Why didn't you?'

'It was a difficult situation.'

'You mean the great Talus actually overlooked something?'

'I knew we would learn more by visiting the cairn.'

'You're not answering my question.'

'Not all questions deserve an answer.'

'All right, never mind. What does the mud tell us?'

'Something, perhaps. The king may have struggled with his assailant before his death.

Clawed at his attacker, for example. If so, it is possible that is where this mud came from. Or perhaps it simply came from the ground.'

'The shaman paints his face with mud,' said Bran. 'Talus—surely you don't think he did it?'

He was horrified. As king, Hashath would have been a living vessel for the spirits of all the tribe's ancestors. To strike out at such a man was to strike out at every Creyak villager who had ever lived and died, all the way back to the first dawn. Actually killing a king wasn't just murder. It was genocide.

No tribesman would have been more aware of this than Mishina. As shaman, he was in constant contact with the ancestors. He would know better than most the consequences of such a desperate crime.

Those consequences were simple and stark. When the king's murderer eventually faced his own death (for all men must one day pass beyond the smallest door and enter the everlasting dream) he would be immediately seized by the twice-killed ancestors and trapped in a place of torture. The ancestors would send blizzard-wolves to tear out his liver. They would send storm-eagles to rip out his eyes. They would set flood-fires to drown him with flames. His heart they would throw to the giant carrion crows who lived in the black walls of night-ice bounding the wilderness that lay beyond the afterdream's furthest borders. The murderer's soul they would keep for themselves, pinned out for all the spirits to see.

Despite such dire punishments, king-killers were not unheard-of. But usually they were men who'd lost their wits, or who for some reason didn't comprehend the appalling fate that awaited them.

Mishina was not such a man. As shaman, he simply couldn't be.

'The pigment on the shaman's face is blue and yellow, not red,' said Talus. 'But colours can be changed. We cannot discount him yet. Nor is the only inhabitant of Creyak to hide behind a mask of mud—did you not see the many faces watching us from the houses earlier?'

'Well, whoever this man is ...'

'Or woman.'

'You think it was a woman?'

'I do not know enough to think that. But we have learned from Tharn that the king outlived his wife. Perhaps he found another woman to love. Love is like a moon, Bran, waxing with passion and waning with hate. Most murders are driven by love. I have said this to you before. Yet there are other forms of love than that between a man and a woman.'

'And you're the expert on love?'

Talus threw him an inscrutable look and blew the flakes of mud into the fire, where they flashed and vanished. 'All this talk has made me tired. I will conserve my strength now. I will be needing it tonight.'

'What for? Anyway, you never get tired.'

'Gantor said we would be eating with the rest of the villagers. It is likely to be a large gathering. Knowing I am a bard, they will want me to tell stories. This I will do, not only because it is what I do, but also because it will help us gain their trust.'

'Do you think so?'

'It will also help in another way.'

'And what's that?'

'It will distract them.'

'From what?'

'From you.'

'Talus, what do you ...?'

'I will explain, but first I have an important question to ask you.'

If he'd been less tired himself, Bran would have let his temper loose on his unfuriating friend. For some reason his temper was nowhere to be found. 'Then ask me,' he sighed.

'Ever since the day your wife died, you have been afraid of death.'

'Well, is it any wonder when ...?'

'Please, let me speak. When we entered the cairn today, you looked like a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. Because of that, the task I have for you ... Bran, this is not something I will tell you to do. I will merely ask it. Because I believe it will be very difficult for you.'

Bran swallowed. As always, the mention of Keyli had tightened his gut and stabbed needles down the length of his spine. Despite the fire's heat, he felt as if he'd plunged through a fishing hole into ice-cold water.

'Just tell me what it is you want me to do,' he said.

'I want you to go back into the cairn. I want you to go to its end, all the way to the door that opens on the afterdream.' Something had sucked all the breath out of Bran's lungs. 'What then?'

'I want you to open it.'

Shortly before sunset, Gantor stirred from his post at the door. He clapped his hands together, then beckoned Talus and Bran outside.

The passage roof was clogged with fresh snowfall. Talus could see its white blanket through the cracks in the rafters. The willow rafters rattled in the wind and some of the snow filtered through. Gantor himself was sufficiently dusted with the stuff that he resembled one of the white northern bears Talus had heard of in legend.

'It is time to eat,' Gantor said.

Their guard marched them down a long, curving passage so low they had to bend double.

Bran kept glancing around; Talus had no doubt he was checking for escape routes. Well, the task Talus had planned for him would give Bran the perfect opportunity to use one.

The question was, would he take it?

At the end of the low passage was a large open space: another arena. Its perimeter was sheltered by a circular whalebone canopy that hung with no apparent means of support.