Ice Country(43)
“When will the king sentence us?” I slur to the guard who’s prodding us along with some sharp instrument from behind. A raunchy joke comes to mind, but I swallow it down with a wad of spit.
“Consider yerself sentenced,” the guard says.
I guess it was too much to hope that the king would personally attend to a couple of lowly tradesmen, but I figured it was worth a shot.
Through vision obscured by swollen eyes, I observe the palace. Despite his condition, I can tell Buff’s doing the same. We’ll compare notes later.
The guard marches us through a high archway, made of a kind of white stone that seems to glitter pink under the barest hint of summer sunlight infiltrating the cloud cover. The hallway beyond is grand, adorned with all manner of white and blue tapestries, which hang proudly along the walls, threaded with delicate scenes from ice country. Here a snowy slope, dotted with soft pines. There a mountain peak, blanketed with clouds. On my right a town teeming with people. Houses burning? People fleeing? Dark men on black horses chasing them, cutting them down with sharp swords. Men from bedtime stories.
I glance to the left and find a similar scene, except this one’s not in ice country, it’s in a land I’ve only heard tales about, a land far, far away, where they say the sun’s bigger than here. A land of endless water and deserts that go all the way to the sea. In the tapestry there’s a giant wooden vessel—they call them ships in the stories—bobbing on a wide splash of water, tied to a tree that looks curved and funny on the shore. Men are rushing from the ship, brandishing swords and torches, charging into an army of dark warriors on black horses, who are galloping toward them, legions of dark clouds and flashing lightning at their backs.
We trudge on and the tapestries are behind us, leaving only a burning memory.
I glance at Buff and he glances back, raising a bruised eyebrow.
(Yah, you can bruise your eyebrow, Buff proved it.)
He saw the depictions too. The violence. He remembers the stories told around warm hearths. Of the Stormers. A bloodthirsty people who conquer lands for one reason and one reason alone: to kill. To drink the blood of those who would oppose them. To ravage the women and enslave the children.
Riding crazed horses that live for the thrill of the battle, they’ve fought the water people, the Soakers, for many years, trying to destroy them and take control of the Big Waters.
But they’re not real, right? Just stories. The king’s walls are just an artist’s depiction of the stories. Surely.
We pass under a smaller multi-colored stone archway, and into an even larger corridor, wider than ten men and taller than five. There’s a voice booming from an open doorway on the right. “The oldest bottle I said!” the voice erupts. “This is the second oldest. Go back to the cellars! NOW!”
As we step by the opening, I look inside the room. It’s like no room I’ve ever seen before. Constructed on white marble pillars, the room’s so big it could fit a hundred of my houses. Two hundred of Buff’s. A long blue carpet extends like a ribbon from the entranceway, all the way across the sparkling floor, where it reaches a seat. Nay, not a seat—a throne. With clawed paws like a bear, the granite throne looms upward, big enough to seat a family of Icers. But in it, basking in the exuberant daylight streaming through a dozen massive windows, is one man. Although I’ve never seen him before, he can be only one person: the king!
I stop, feeling the sharp prick of the guard’s sword on my back.
Why would they take a common criminal past the throne room on the way to the dungeons? I ask myself. It makes no sense.
The king is a big man, old, maybe forty, maybe older, with a shaved bald head and a thin, neatly trimmed graying beard. He looks even bigger sitting on the raised throne.
A thin, white-clothed man scuttles down the blue carpet, away from the king and his booming voice, gone to fetch the oldest bottle of whatever drink the king desires. For a moment King Goff watches after him, almost amused, but then he looks past his servant, to where I stand. Our eyes meet and—
“Move along!” the guard barks, jabbing me harder. Unconsciously, my feet move forward, one after the other, like they have all my life, but my head is back in the throne room, facing Goff, the man who stole my sister. I’m so close.
Moments later, we descend into the dungeons. The air thickens and moistens and a nasty smell tickles my nose. Something’s died down here. Or someone. Many maybe.
The guard plucks a torch from a wall fixture and waves it near my face, burning me. I flinch away but don’t cry out. He laughs.
Sword at my back once more, he forces me forwards into an alcove. Seated on a squat wooden chair with a broken leg is a giant of a man, wearing a black mask with only mouth and eyeholes cut out. Across his lap rests a double-sided, double-edged battle axe. All four of its razor-sharp edges gleam under the firelight.