SIX

BLOODLINE

“I mean, ask yourself. Don’t you ever get to feeling, well, I don’t know… Like maybe it’s time to let go of all that – what shall we call it – weight? Father says this, Father says that. Your father’s not a god, after all. And he clearly doesn’t understand you like I do.”

Joram handed the girl another cup of Marin’s special brew and smiled. The girl, still uncertain, contemplated the drink like a divine missive, before eventually taking it from his hand and sipping.

“Oh, come now, you’re barely tasting it. Beauty like yours deserves to have its fill. Of all things.”

She drank more heartily, tipping her head back. She was a pretty girl for a Kivite, all milky pale skin and light freckles, and a thick dance of golden-red hair. Slender shoulders, a little bony, as were everyone’s in the Reach, the irremissible price of the barren lands they’d been born into.

Joram deftly hooked his finger into the fold of her twill smock as she emptied the cup, tugging the collar down her shoulder and letting his finger trace the length of her arm. It was always the way for him here Marin would say, and Joram couldn’t deny he had the truth of it – his tan skin, his dark hair and lashes, longer than was typical for a boy’s, and then there was the liquid hazel eyes too, all making for an alluring and exotic mix, at least to the mousy-haired, pale-skinned inhabitants of the Reach. He imagined it from the girl’s perspective, the way his eyes would be glinting tigerishly in the firelight cast by the casket flame sitting on the small table beside them in the tent. The way the warm glow would be bronzing his youthful skin, polishing it with a burnished sheen so smooth that even the most stoic of maidens’ breath wouldn’t be able to help but catch, like the girl’s now did as he moved his hand to cup her breast.

“You see?” he murmured softly. “Wasn’t so hard, was it? And don’t you feel so much better?”

She nodded slavishly, sighing as he leaned in, allowing his breath to brush her ear. She’d acquiesce now, to the softness of Marin’s rug beneath them, the balmy warmth of the air trapped within the thick skins of Marin’s tent, the dry, tart smell of the wine. He saw her eyes close as their lips touched, the girl letting go, tipping into herself, yielding to the surroundings and his touch and the strobic play of the firelight against the tent’s goatskin walls as he–

“Joram!”

Typical. Joram sighed heavily as Marin burst into the tent, panting. “We’ve found the perfect one. Perfect this time. Truly.”

Peeling his attention reluctantly away from the girl, Joram turned, glaring disdainfully at the interruption as Marin just stood there, dumbly taking up space, looking gleefully at Joram as though brimming with secrets to the meaning of life itself.

“I mean it, Joram. Perfect.”

“Marin, you say that every time. You said it last night when I and Isandra here were getting to know one another. You said it last week when we were by Irses’ Peak trading with those goatherders on the way back from Bataar. And then several times during last new moon, twice when I was very busy. As I am now, come to think of it.”

“But the thing is, this time–”

“Out, Marin.”

“But Joram–”

“Out.”

Marin lingered awkwardly by the tent’s entrance for a moment, filling the opening with his broad slumped shoulders and wide gut before eventually turning sheepishly around to walk away.

Joram just shook his head, sighed, then turned to the girl. “Sorry about that…” he reached out to cradle her face. “Now, where were we?” He leaned in and kissed her fully this time, showing her how. She was, if she’d been telling the truth, only two years younger than him at sixteen, but with the life Joram had lived, those two years may as well have been decades. Twelve years here among the Kivites, banished by his own father to dwell among a people who stubbornly refused to build houses or villages or cities, and who instead roamed the largely barren breadths of their ugly scarred lands herding their meagre numbers of cattle or goat or sheep. Such an exhausting and pointless way to live, Joram had always thought, forever beholden to the whims of the season and the paltry pastures that sprouted from Kiv’s cold and clayey earth. There were days he thought of going back south of the Reach, just for the sake of somewhere more habitable to live, and forgetting his hopes of becoming chieftain and raising an army to reclaim the Five Lands’ throne that had been stolen from him as a child. But those days were fleeting, buried by memories of that last night in Hanesda – being yanked screaming from his bed like a thief and tossed into a walled carriage, before watching his father, Helgon, stand by the city gates like some kind of stranger, receding into nothing as the cart’s wheels rolled Joram north along the grim rubbly road and into the night, away from everything and everyone he’d ever called home.

“Go with Marin,” the voice whispered, tickling at the nape of Joram’s neck as he tasted the girl. “You have the pearl now,” it continued. “Everything is possible.”

Which was also true. He pushed Isandra from him gently and sat back. The girl stared at him, flushed and blinking.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No. Nothing. It’s not you, it’s…” Joram flinched at the absurdity of his feeling the need to explain. “I have to go,” he said simply, and then rose to his feet, tugging the collar of his skins back across his chest as he went to the door of the tent, and then stepped out into the cool dark.

Outside was twilit, leaving a gentle blue-green reef over the horizon to the west, out beyond the glow of the tribe’s campfires. They’d been camped here for nearly a week now, the herdmen making the most of the pastures by the Kivite borderlands before the season turned, and making the most of the craggy shelters offered by the Seat of Saramak too – a broad and exalted stone plateau at the edge of the world, filled with caves and tunnels and marking the southernmost brink of the Reach.

To the north the Sahadi range spread for miles – great copperstone peaks, capped here and there by batches of green on the rocky inclines too steep for goats to graze. To the south, empty grassplains rolled away to the Wetlands and then, beyond them, the northernmost outskirts of the Sovereignty, and beyond that, the still smouldering ashen rubble that used to be the city of Geled. Which was something Joram hadn’t expected – for the smoke to still be there, nearly a moon since the city’s destruction. On a clear day you could just catch the vague edges of smog, a tiny smoking pillar in the distance, lifting from the ruin as though from a logger’s campfire. Soon he would see it for himself – the ruins the voice had told him of in his dreams – just as everyone would if Marin’s claim, this time, turned out to be true.

Joram found him sitting with Djuri and Ola by their campfire, sulking, as Marin was sometimes prone to do. He perched on a small stool, his wide bearish shoulders hunched up to his ears and his vast back, as he faced away from Joram, bending toward the warmth.

“You well, Joram?” Djuri said, glancing up as Joram arrived. “You’ve an ill look.”

Joram sat down by the campfire next to Marin, lifting his palms to the flames.

“Don’t alarm yourself, Djuri,” Ola said, smiling. “It’s his way. Ill as a fish is Joram, shivers in summer, with never a day you don’t think him feverish. After a while you grow used to it.”

“The beggar calls his scraps a meal,” Joram replied. “And you people call five days without rain, summer.”

“You see that?” Ola said, leaning toward Djuri sitting next to her as she chewed a piece of dry bread. “That’s how you can tell he’s salty. Always starts with the riddles and sayings when he’s salty, doesn’t he.”

“You know, I noticed that. Salty or hungry. Always one or the other.”

Ignoring them, Joram turned to Marin, flicking the big man’s shoulder. “Well? I’m here, like you wanted. So, where’s the man you spoke of?”

“Oh, so now you’ve time for us? Now that you’ve had your fun with the girl?”

“Come, Marin. It’s cold. And I can see you want to tell me.”

Marin grunted, not bothering to turn from the fire, refusing to answer even though Joram could see he was bursting to, doing that thing he often did whenever nervous or excited – of bouncing his thick knees in a rapid rhythm as he sat there and tried to hold it in. Ola, sitting opposite by the fire and leaning back with her feet propped on a whetstone, spread her hands in disavowal as Joram’s gaze swung back toward her.

“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I was the one told him to wait till you came out from the tent.”

“You were, Ola,” Djuri put in. “But too excited, wasn’t he.”

“He was. Too excited.” She glanced back to Joram. “But I will say with good reason from what I can tell. Marin pointed the man out to me earlier. From what I could see he was carrying the mark.”

“You’re sure?” Joram said.

“As I can be.” She took the mug Djuri, beside her, had offered without looking and swigged. “How’s it work anyway, Joram? Seems so simple when you do it. You touch a man, whisper some words, and then just like that he’s yours, obeys you like a child.”

“Better than a child.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“Spooky if you ask me,” Djuri said. “Unnatural.”

Which was typical of him. Cautious about everything, unlike the ever-curious Ola sitting next to him.

“You touch them first, Joram,” she asked, “or do your funny whisper?”

“It’s the whisper, I think,” Djuri offered. “Did the same to Kareena, probably. Why she doesn’t mind being laid up in his tent while he borrows Marin’s and works his way through every girl in the clan. How far along is Kareena now anyway? Five months? Six?” He leaned away as he caught Joram’s look, mirroring the same open-palmed gesture of innocence Ola had thrown up a moment before. “I’m just asking is all, Joram.”

Joram glanced to Ola. “Perhaps if we were to find a suitable man, as Marin here claims to have done, I’d show you how it works. Or perhaps Marin here realises he made a mistake, and failed to find a suitable man after all, but doesn’t want it to be known.”

“I didn’t fail,” Marin protested.

“Then show me. Show me the man. Show me his priestmark.”

“That’s the other thing,” Ola said. “Why’s it only work on priests?”

“You’re not helping, Ola.” “You’re the one promised to teach me.”

“If you helped me get into Magadar.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m helping.”

“You call this helping?”

“Moral support,” she quipped, taking another bite of her bread. “And besides, I still don’t get this whole Magadar thing. I mean, let’s say you manage to get in there, even with those bare arms of yours; now, let’s be true about the thing – you’re not exactly the greatest fighter, Joram. And Uruq, well, he’s an animal when he puts hands on a man. You find a way in there he’ll just take that scrawny neck of yours and snap it in two.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

Ola swallowed her morsel of bread, flicking back her boyish flop of hair as it fell into her eyes. “What friends are for.”

“Well, friend, how about you persuade Marin here to move things along – you know, actually help, like you promised. Perhaps you’ll see for yourself how I’ll beat Uruq and become chieftain.”

Ola thought about it, twirling a finger through the drab brown strands of hair near her neck, and then she shrugged and leaned toward Marin sitting opposite her by the fire.

By the time they reached the pit most of the herdmen were already drunk, cheering and singing songs as they watched the wrestling contests in the makeshift arena they’d arranged themselves around in a clearing of dirt and shrubs further in from the cliffside.

Joram had wrestled too as a boy, just as every Kivite had, only it had gone harder for him because of his darker skin. He could still remember how people would throw things at him from the crowd, lazily tossing rotten vegetables when they were in a jovial mood, knee-buckling rocks when they weren’t. Not that it had mattered; with no family of his own, the wrestling contests had been the only way to earn his first ink markings, of which he now had several, covering his right shoulder and the beginnings of his upper arm – a wolf for the time he’d beaten the firstborn son of Uruq, the chieftain of Shurapeth, to earn admittance to the tribe. Then there was his moon for his win at a summer new moon gathering a year later, when tribes from other parts of the Reach had come together to pit their men and boys against each other for sport and trade. There’d been several lesser victories after that, marked by the neat geometric lines radiating from the moon on his shoulder like rays of light, and then, by his wrist, a small and mysterious ink mark he’d had for as long as he could remember: just five small dots, equidistant from each other, marking the angles of an invisible pentagon just beneath the base of his thumb. It was the only mark he wasn’t able to remember when or how he’d gotten it. But then Joram’s memory had always been sketchy even at the best of times, and besides, his markings were meagre pickings anyway, and in no way impressive when compared to Marin’s.

As he often did, Joram stared enviously at the brute’s ink as the big man walked ahead of him through the scrum, leading the way. It was almost sickening really, the way Marin’s markings covered both arms like sleeves, leading from his hands all the way up to his untidy and frizzled beard to record his many victories along with the story of his blood. Among the tribesmen of the Reach, Marin’s was an old and illustrious line. As a child, most of his right arm had already been covered, tracing a history of victories before he’d ever set foot in his first contest – there, at the top of his shoulder: fights won by his father and grandfather, then lower down around the thick meat of his upper arm, a waterhole his great grandfather had discovered during a drought to preserve the tribe. By his elbow, a battle between rival tribes an earlier forefather had helped to win, claiming good pasture during a time of famine; all of it sketched out across Marin’s skin like an elaborate tapestry to commemorate the exploits of his blood from start to end.

It irked Joram sometimes to look at them, knowing the rich history of the lineage he’d been divorced from, and knowing how utterly redundant it all was here in the Reach. No Kivite would be inclined to believe that he – a brown-skinned beggar who’d managed to somehow make himself more – could be rightful heir to the Five Lands Sovereignty to the south. Which was just as well. Anyone who did would have cause to slit his throat on sight. But that, if all went as planned, would change soon. Soon everything would be different.

The men on the fringes of the crowd glanced at Marin’s height and the markings on his arms and allowed him through, parting as he led Joram, Ola and Djuri to the front to watch the contest. There were men here from Pelag, Joram noticed. Red-haired and white skinned, paler even than those of Shurapeth. And there, standing by an untidily erected shelter of cowskins and thatching on the far side, some men of Bataar from the western Reach, probably here to barter with Chieftain Uruq, as many often did, for access to the metal mines beneath the Seat of Saramak’s cliff.

Joram tapped Marin on the arm. “You see him?”

“He’ll be around here somewhere,” Marin said, scanning the gathering. “Shouldn’t be too hard to spot. He was big like; the way we wanted.”

“And you’re sure he had a priest’s mark.”

“Sure as sure can be. It was that winged one you showed me once, with the coin that looks like an eye, and those funny patterns around it.”

“The sigil of Armaros? You’re certain?”

“Yeah, that one. Looked that way. But it was small like.” He lifted his thumb and forefinger to demonstrate.

“They all are,” Djuri remarked. “No one really follows gods anymore do they? Best to leave skin for other things.” He then leaned in toward Joram’s ear, whispering, “We sure we want to do this, Jorry? Now? Here?”

Joram glanced aside to consider him – the slim hawkish nose, the narrow bony jaw, the inquiring eyes peering out from beneath the white-gold fringe of his hair, watching Joram carefully, as was his habit with everyone. Always careful, Djuri. Like the hunter he was. “You losing your water, Dju?”

“Uruq won’t be happy, if he discovers us.”

“And if we succeed, and I am able to enter Magadar, what Uruq is or isn’t won’t matter much will it. Nothing will matter then.”

“So you say.”

“So I know.”

“It’s a risk is all.”

“Heat makes the blade, Djuri. Can’t have one without the other.”

“See?” Ola said, nudging Djuri’s elbow. “The sayings again. Like I said. Salty.”

Djuri held Joram’s gaze for a long moment before he finally acquiesced. “Alright then. If you’re sure…” He nodded, pointing with his eyes beyond the far side of the circle. “I think that’s Marin’s man there, across the clearing, standing by the cookfire with a mace.”

Joram followed Djuri’s gaze. “Keen-eyed as ever, Dju.” He nudged Marin beside him and nodded toward the man. Marin smiled to confirm. “Well, alright then,” Joram said, and began to work his way through the crowd of jeering, shouting spectators that lined the clearing of dirt the men were continuing to grapple in.

The man, nearly as big as Marin, stood before a barrelled cookfire, his shoulders hidden beneath the thick white pelt of a snowfox to mark his origins – a tribesman of Gabbai, a son of the Northern Reach – leaving no way for Joram to check the man’s sigils for himself. He greeted Joram with a dead-eyed mix of boredom and scorn as he approached, jutting his chin questioningly.

Gesturing to Marin at his shoulder, Joram smiled. “My man here tells me you’re quite the wrestler.”

The man acknowledged Marin with a nod, eyeing the ink on his arms. “I’m not doing any more tonight,” he said. “I’ve had three already, and the gambling’s low now. But if your man wants it, he can have it tomorrow. If his clan’s name is good it’ll be best to wait anyway, make an occasion of it. I’ve an old name myself. Be a treat for the people, two old clans this far out from winter.” He favoured them with another nod to send them on their way, which was polite at least, happy at the prospect of a prize worth having. So Joram stepped in and decided to return the courtesy.

“You misunderstand. I wasn’t asking for good Marin here. I’d like to wrestle you myself.”

The brute’s dull eyes darkened, staring down on Joram as though he’d just asked for his mother’s hand. “You?”

“I understand your being scared. Who’d want to lose to a man half his size in front of this many people?”

The man glanced to his companions, then to Ola, Djuri and Marin standing behind Joram, and then broke into abrupt laughter, long and hard, his companions with him, guffawing so hard spittle began to lodge in their beards. And so Joram decided to laugh too, joining with them. It was a pleasant evening after all, a little cool for his taste, as they always were in the Reach, but pleasant.

“You had me, little man, I’ll give you that. Had me good. Clever one, bringing your man here over with you to set it up. Clever.”

Joram nodded, waiting for the man and his companions to recover before stepping closer. “Is that a no then?”

The man squinted, then waved him off. “You carry on back to where you came over from, little man, before you overstep with your wit there. It’s easily done.”

And finally, the voice stirred, its sibilant whisper brushing along the hairs of Joram’s neck like a warm feather – it was excited, he could tell. Alert. To the point Joram almost became distracted by the sheer thrill of it, the voice of a fallen god fizzing along the nerves within him. “Son of a dead whore,” it murmured eagerly.

Which, looking the man over, Joram didn’t find hard to believe; so he smiled, no need for coarseness after all. Truths can be as sharp and damning without it, and the man, as things go, hadn’t been all that rude. Not yet. “So, I hear you were the son of a whore,” Joram said gently, “which is why I understand your worry. Makes sense you’d be itchy about being shamed in a contest.”

“What did you say?”

“I said–”

“Joram, perhaps–”

Joram shrugged Djuri’s hand from his shoulder, his eyes still on the man. He was just being honest after all. Polite and honest. “–I said I’m sympathetic. I can see how your being the son of a whore might make you a little fragile about being shamed in a contest by me.”

Joram heard the breath go out of Djuri behind him like something deflating.

Opposite him, the big northerner’s face had drained of colour, sick with rage, glaring across the warm light of the cookfire.

“He’s hard of hearing perhaps?” Joram added, glancing to the man’s companions as though they’d have an answer. “Can happen, I’m told. All that rubbing on the ears when grappling, bound to damage something.”

Marin was moving forward as the man came around the fire’s barrel, bringing him to a halt with a gentle bump of his palm against the chest. “A contest is all he wants.”

The man looked past him to Joram, who was still smiling as he stood calmly out of reach, no longer bothering to pretend he wasn’t enjoying the man’s ire.

“A contest the little rat wants,” the man growled. “A contest he’ll have.”

The man stalked away, stripping off almost immediately, yanking his furs from his shoulders and tossing them to the side. He strode toward the clearing of dirt, shoving his way through the crowd whilst a match between two younger skinny boys was still going on. He pushed the youngsters aside and turned to the gathering.

“New contest,” he announced, then pointed to Joram waiting on the fringes. Men sidled out of the way of his pointing finger like parting drapes to reveal Joram, standing there like a waiting aide in some mocked-up drama, gazing serenely back. He shouldered his way out of the beaverskin coat he’d gambled off a Pelagite last month, then pulled the woven shift beneath it over his head to reveal his torso. He watched as the crowd’s gaze weighed him from the fringes, appraising his narrow chest, his meagre waist, the relatively bare arms with their sparse inkings.

“Oren, he’s just a kid,” someone said.

“The boy says he wants a scrap,” the man boomed. “We’re having a scrap. Set your wagers.”

The man who’d protested nodded timidly and waved Joram into the ring before turning to the crowd to take the bets.

“The sigil,” the voice intoned. Joram could feel its presence within him now, thrumming comfortingly between his shoulder blades, soft and warm and busy, like wingbeats trapped in his spine. “Touch the sigil once,” it whispered, “and with a still sha, and it shall be done. He’ll be yours.”

Joram was nodding, eyeing the small coin of an eye on the man’s upper arm as the announcer set them in their places, positioning them opposite one another in the middle of the dirt-floor arena. Joram could smell the stink of the other man’s breath now, and the stale waft of his sweat as he towered over him, glowering down with so much hatred that Joram, for a moment, wondered whether the poor man was going to choke.

“Breathe, Oren,” Joram smirked, “it’s a much-underrated thing, you know. Calms the soul, lightens the senses.”

And that was enough. The man dispensed with the decencies and shoved the announcer out of the way, taking hold of Joram by the throat and lifting him bodily from the ground, legs kicking. And then it was mayhem, Marin and Djuri rushing in, other men racing forward on the upended announcer’s behalf, others on behalf of the transgressed ritual itself, whilst others still came for the pure thrill of the fight, punching and kicking and grabbing and grappling as somewhere in amongst the melee, as fists swung and noses bloodied and men screamed, Joram managed to work the knuckle of his forefinger onto the big man’s arm and press against the ancient priestly sigil of his clan, stilling his sha amid the chaos as men tussled and stamped and cried out around him. He pressed the knuckle in, felt the man’s sha slacken within, felt him yield to his touch like the click of a lock, and knew that he’d be his now – half awake, half asleep, and as obedient as a slave, just as the voice had promised. Just like all the ones before.