The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (241 page)

I sat down heavily on the pyre beside him. Rigor had kept his body in its defensive curl. I could do nothing about that. I wished that I could have smoothed the lines of terror and pain from his face before I sent him on his way. I pushed his golden hair back from his tawny forehead. ‘Oh, Beloved,’ I said. I bent and kissed his brow in farewell. And then, grasping the Tightness of that foreign tradition, I named him as myself. For when I burned him, I knew I would be ending myself as well. The man I had been would not survive this loss. ‘Goodbye, FitzChivalry Farseer.’ I took the crown in both hands to ease it onto his brow. I felt suddenly as if all my life had been funnelling me toward this moment. It seemed cruel that the strongest current of my life would propel me toward this moment of absolute end and loss. But there were no other choices left for me. Some things could not be changed. It was time to crown the king’s jester and send him on his way.

I stopped.

I halted my hands, and it felt as if by doing so, I stood alone against fate and defied the flow of all time. I knew what I was meant to do. I should crown my Fool and then drench the pyre with the remaining oil. A spark, at most two, would be enough for the summer dry tinder. He would burn away to nothing, his smoke rising on the summer wind of the land beyond the Mountain Kingdom. I would go back, through the pillar, to Aslevjal. I would
collect Thick and go back to the little bay and wait for a ship to come and fetch us. It was right, it was inevitable, it was the channel in which the entire world wished to flow. Life would go on without the Fool, because he had died. I could see it all so clearly, as if I had always known it would come to this.

He was dead. Nothing could change that.

But I was the Changer.

I stood suddenly. I lifted the humming crown high overhead in my hands and shook it at the sky. ‘NO!’ I roared. I still do not know to whom I spoke. ‘No! Let it be different! Not this way! Whatever you want from me, take it! But don’t let it all end like this! Let him take my life and give me his death. Let him be me and I be him. I take his death! Do you hear me? I take his death for my own!’

I lifted the crown to the sun. Through my flowing tears, it shone iridescent, and the feathers seemed to waver gently in the summer breeze. Then, with an almost physical wrench, I tore it out of time’s destined path. I clapped it firmly upon my own brow. As the world spun around me, I lay my body down on my funeral pyre, wrapped my arms around my friend and gave myself over to whatever awaited me beyond it.

She was the richest girl in the world, for not only had she a noble father, and many silk gowns and so many necklaces and rings that not even a dozen little girls could have worn them all at once, but she had also a little grey box, carved from a dragon’s womb. And inside it, ground to fine powder, were all the happy memories of the wisest princesses who had ever lived. So, whenever she got the least bit sad, all she had to do was open her little box and take a tiny bit of the memory snuff, and, kerchoo! She was as happy as a girl could be again.

Old Jamaillian tale

I missed a step in the dark. It was like that, that unexpected lurch.

‘Blood is memory.’ I swear someone whispered that by my ear.

‘Blood is who we are,’ a young woman agreed with him. ‘Blood recalls who we were. Blood is how we will be remembered. Work it well into the womb wood.’

Someone laughed, an old woman with few teeth. ‘Say that six times swiftly!’ she cackled. And she did. ‘Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood.’

The others laughed, amused at her tripping tongue. ‘Well, you try it!’ she challenged us.

‘Work it well into the womb wood,’ I said obediently.

But it wasn’t me.

There were five other people there inside me, looking out of my
eyes, running my tongue over my teeth, scratching at my beard with my unkempt nails. Breathing my breath, and rejoicing in the taste of the forest on the night air. Shaking out my hair, alive again.

Five poets, five jesters. Five tellers of tales. Five jumbling, tumbling minstrels, leaping and whirling in gratitude for their release, shaking out my fingers, limbering my voice, and already squabbling and vying for my attention.

‘What is your need? A birthday anthem? I’ve a host of them at my beck and call, and it’s no trouble, no trouble at all to adapt one to your recipient’s name!’

‘Hackery! Shameless hackery, this chopping and splicing of old relics, this dressing of bones anew! Let me have your voice and I’ll sing you a song to rouse your warriors and make your maidens tremble with new-born lust!’ This was a man, and he filled my lungs to bursting to roar out his words. Each set of words, each voice came from my own throat. I was a puppet for them, a pipe to be played.

‘Lust is but a wet moment, a surge and a splat!’ she said disdainfully. She was a young woman, and she remembered freckles across the bridge of her nose. Strange to hear her words pipe from my throat. ‘You want a love song, don’t you? Something timeless, something older than the fallen mountains, and newer than a seed unfurling in rich soil. Such is love.’

‘Good luck!’ Someone exclaimed in dismay. He tinged his words with a fop’s disdain. ‘Listen. Fa,la,la,la,la,la – oh, hopeless! This one has the pipes of a sailor, and a body of wood. The finest song ever sung will be a crow’s croaking when it comes from this throat, and I’ll wager he never turned a handspring in his life. Who is this, and how came he by our treasure?’

‘Minstrels,’ I said dully. ‘Minstrels, tumblers and bards. Oh, Fool, this
would
be your treasure. A circle of jesters. There is no help for us here.’ I put my head down into my hands. I felt the rough wood of the crown beneath my fingers. I pushed at it, but it clung stubbornly in place. It had tightened to my brow.

‘We’ve only just arrived,’ the toothless crone complained. ‘We’ve no intention of leaving already. We are a great gift, a magnificent gift, only awarded to the one most pleasing to the King. We are a
chorus of voices, from all ages, we are a rainbow of history. Why would you refuse us? What sort of a performer are you?’

‘I’m not a performer at all.’ I sighed heavily. For a moment, I regained full awareness of my body. I stood by the funeral pyre. I didn’t recall getting up from it. Night was dark around us and chirring insects were tuning their voices. In the cooling air, I smelled the rich leaf mould of the forest. The Fool’s degenerating body added its own note of sweet rot. All his life, he had been the Scentless One to Nighteyes. Now, in death, I smelled him. It did not sicken me. There was still wolf enough in me that how he smelled was simply how he smelled. It was the change that gave me a pang, for it was irrefutable evidence that his body was going back to the earth and the natural web of rot and rebirth all around me. I tried to pause for long enough to take some comfort in that, but the five within me were too impatient for stillness. They turned me in a slow circle, lifting my arms, testing the spring of my feet, filling my lungs with air. I sensed how those within me lapped eagerly at the night, the taste, the smell, the sound, and the feel of the forest air on my face. They were avid for life.

‘What help do you need?’ the freckled girl asked me, and in her voice I heard sympathy and a readiness to listen. And under it, scarcely cloaked, lurked the hunger that all minstrels have for the tale of another’s woe. She wanted that part of life back as well. I did not wish to share mine.

‘No. Go away. You can’t help me.’ And then, against my will, I told them anyway. ‘My friend is dead. I want to bring him back to life. Can a minstrel help with that?’

For one respectful instant, they were silent as I gazed down on the Fool’s corpse. Then, the freckle-nosed girl said tremulously, ‘He’s very dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, he is,’ the bull-throated one declared, but added, ‘I can make you such a song as will have him remembered a thousand years hence. It is the only way ordinary mortals can transcend the flesh. Give me your memories of him, and I’ll get started.’

The crone spoke sense to me. ‘Did we know how to undo death, would we be what we are, feathers in a fool’s cap? We are lucky to have this much of life left to us. A pity that your friend did
not have the favour of a dragon, or perhaps he, too, could share this boon.’

‘What are you?’ I demanded.

‘We are sweet preserves of song, stored away so that in the winter of our deaths you can taste again the tang of our summers.’ It was the young man, so conscious of his imagery that he ruined it for me.

‘Someone else!’ I begged when the young man fell silent.

‘We were favoured of dragons,’ a calm voice said. She was one who had not spoken before. Her voice was a deep calm pond, huskier than the voice of most women. I heard it in my mind even as my own throat rusted her words. ‘I lived by the river of black sand, in a little town called Junket. I went one day to fetch water from the river, and there I met my dragon. She was a young thing, just at the end of her first summer, and I was in the spring of my years. Oh, she was green, a thousand greens, with eyes like deep pots of melted gold. She stood in the river and the waters rushed by her. Then she looked at me, and my heart fell into her whirlpool eyes, never to surface again. I had to sing to her; speaking would not have been enough. So she charmed me and I sang to her, and charmed her in return. I was her minstrel and her bard for all the days of my life. And when my time to end was approaching, she came to me, with the gift that only a dragon may give. It was a sliver of wood from a dragon’s womb … do you know whereof I speak? The cradles they spin for the serpents to sleep in until they emerge as dragons? Sometimes, there is one who does not survive that stage, who dies in the sleep between serpent and dragon. Slow is the womb wood to erode, and the dragons forbid that humans touch any of it, save by their leave. But to me, fair Smokewing brought a sliver of it. She bid me wet it well with my own blood, and work the blood into it with my fingers, all the while thinking of a feather.

‘I knew what such a favour meant. It was rarely granted, even to minstrels who had served their dragons well. It meant I would take a place in the crown of minstrels, so that my songs and words and my way of thinking would go on, long after I died. The crown is the property of the Ruler of all the River Lands. The Ruler alone declares who may wear the crown and sing with the voices of minstrels long dead. It is a great honour, for only a
dragon can select you to become a feather, and only the Ruler can bestow the gift of wearing the crown. Such an honour. I remember how I clasped my feather as I died … for die I did. Just like your friend. A pity that your friend was not favoured of dragons, to have been granted such a boon.’

I was hammered by the irony of it. ‘He should have been. He died to waken a dragon, the last male dragon in the world, so that Icefyre might rise to partner Tintaglia, the last female. So that there might be dragons again in this world.’

The moment of silence told me that I had impressed them. ‘Now, here is a tale worth the telling! Give us the memories of that, and each of us will make you a song, for surely there are at least a score of songs in such an event!’ It was the crone who spoke, my mouth going soft with her words.

‘But I don’t want a song about him. I want the Fool as he was, alive and whole.’

‘Dead is dead,’ the bull-voiced man said. But he said it gently. ‘If you wish to open your memories to us, we will weave you songs. Even with your voice, they will be songs that will live, for true minstrels will hear you sing them, and wish to sing them as they should be sung. Do you want to do that?’

‘No. Please, Fitz, no. Leave it be. Let it be over.’

It was a whisper against my senses, scarce a breathing of the words. I shivered to it, wild with hope and fear.

‘Fool,’ I breathed, praying there would be some response.

Instead, there was a cacophony, the thoughts indistinguishable from one another, as the five feather minstrels all shouted a dozen unanswerable questions at me. At last, Bull-throat roared through them with a reply.

‘He’s here! With us. In the crown, of all places. He put his blood in the crown!’

But from the Fool, there was no reply. I spoke for him. ‘The crown was broken. He used his blood to mend it.’

‘The crown was broken?’ The crone was aghast. ‘It would have ended all of us! Forever!’

‘He cannot stay in the crown! He was not chosen. Besides, the crown belongs to all of us. If he takes it, we shall not be able to
speak, save through him.’ The young man was outraged at the Fool’s rash assumption of his territory.

‘He must go,’ the bull-voiced man concluded. ‘We are very sorry, but he must go. It is not right nor fitting that he be here.’

‘He was not chosen.’

‘He was not invited.’

‘He is not welcome.’

They gave me no time to express an opinion. The crown was tight to my brow and suddenly it became tighter. I lifted my hands to it, for they seemed to have retreated from my body into the crown, to do whatever they were doing now. For the nonce, my body was my own again. I tried to tear the crown from my head, but I could not get so much as a nail between it and my skin. In a wave of horror, I realized it was melding to my flesh, melting into me like a coterie seeping into a stone dragon. ‘No!’ I roared. I shook my head and clawed at it. It would not budge. Worse, it no longer felt like wood beneath my fingers. It felt like a band of flesh. When I queasily lifted my fingers to investigate the feathers, they flexed softly as cockerel plumes against my fingers. I felt sick.

Trembling, I went back to the funeral pyre and sank down onto it beside the Fool. I sensed no battle in the crown, only a concerted effort by the five minstrels. The Fool did not resist them; he simply did not know how to do what they demanded of him. I no longer had any voice in what they did. Theirs was a quarrel heard across the market, a conflict I was aware of but had no part in. They would force him out of the crown, and then he would be truly gone, forever. I could not stop it.