Evening the Eleventh — The Scorpion Crowns, the Wight-Harrow, and the King Beneath

Rain again, and the roof of the Broken Tusk keeps none of it out. Shove up, make room — no, the wet bench, you've a fat arse and no manners. There. Hjalti's throat is dry as a Stygian's promise and the tale is long tonight, so somebody set a cup where my hand falls, and set another behind it, because a man who stops to ask twice tells it worse.

You had the reeds from me. You had the bull below and the wolf-kings' cellar. Forget them. Tonight the Cimmerian went out among crowned things.

Hear now — there is a place where the water lies flat and warm and green as an old wound, and out of it the pools whelp their young. Frogs, you'd think. It is not frogs. The hunters who worked that country say a thing walked out of there that had eaten the country clean — no deer, no jackal, no bird, not so much as a rat turd on the stone for a day's walk in any direction. That is how you know. Not tracks. Silence and no dung. He waded in with the mud sucking at his knees and the stink of it in his back teeth, and what came for him came slow, the way only a thing with nothing left to fear comes slow.

He killed it. Then he went home and slept.

And here is the part that curdles a man's belly: he went back. Twice more, across the turning of the days, he walked that same green water and killed that same crowned thing, because the pools do not learn and neither, Crom help him, does he.

Draw close, you with the empty cup. Nearer his own hearth there was worse.

A scorpion the size of a war-dog is a bad hour. A scorpion the size of a hay-wain is a bad life. There were two of these — a king and a queen, and they had made their court within sight of his own gate, which is a thing no man suffers twice. He learned their lesser kin first: the middling ones that go sideways in a rattling scuttle like a bag of knives falling downstairs, and the great ones whose claws close with a sound you feel in your jaw before your ears report it. He learned the silver-crusted rocknoses too, dull stones that stand up and are angry. And in the dead city where the sand has eaten the roofs, he met the bone-men — skeleton fighters with rust in their ribs and no eyes to plead with, who fight on cheerfully with an arm off because there is nothing in them that minds.

But the queen. The queen he took at the noon of a white day. Her sting came over her back like a fisherman's cast, and he stepped inside it, and the barb went into the sand beside his boot deep as a tent-peg. Then the king. Then, months later — again. Three times those two crowns rose beside his hold, and three times he broke them, and each time he carried the carcass home and made something useful of it. Nineteen things shaped in one day alone, hide and chitin and iron. The grey hills bred no man who wastes a corpse.

Now the sweeter part, and you'll not sneer at it or I'll stop.

The Black Hand keeps prisoners. Everyone on that coast keeps prisoners. Strabo went in among them and came out with three, and here is the thing that made the exiles' tongues wag from Sepermeru to the river: he came out with them walking, not dragging. A priest of Set — a Hyrkanian, gaunt as a heron, hands still shaped to the serpent's blessing. A rough one called Sully with a broken nose set crooked twice. And a woman, Georgina, who had been on that rope longer than a woman should be and who spat blood on the deck when the iron came off her wrists and then asked for a blade.

He has worn a rope himself. That is the whole of it. The Cimmerian looked at the shackle and did not see a purse; he saw a morning he remembered, and the hammer went down on the pin, and that was that. Later a tanner of the Votaries came to him the same way, and a Nordheimer smith of the Heirs of the North — my own people, and I'll say it plainly, the man asked where he wished to go and the smith said with you, and picked up his tongs and came.

And beasts, too, though "beast" is a poor word for what walks at his shoulder now. A mammoth, grey and slow and terrible, who will lean on a stone wall until the wall changes its mind. A brown she-bear and a great old bear the freed ones took to calling Papa. A wolf. And a horse — a plain, thick-necked, ugly horse named Roach, who has more sense than half of you and does not drink her wages.

Hear now, and put the cup down. This is the black one.

He went west, into the middle country where the ground goes yellow and the wind carries grit that finds the corner of your eye every time. He met the beasts of that place and named them by killing them: the hooved kudo that screams like a child, the jaguar, the lion, the striped tiger out of the reeds, the grey rhino, and the great pale wolves of my own snow-country running far from home. He broke a rhino king there, and a locust queen of the desert — yellow, wet-winged, big as a foal, and when she died the whole singing cloud of her brood went quiet at once, and that quiet was worse than the noise.

And then the wights.

They are the old dead of that country, and they are graded in wickedness the way ale is graded in strength, and he went through them like a man walking a fence-line. Fifteen times in one day the rot went down. Fifteen. The lesser ones first, then the middling, then the tall grey ones that come with frost on them in a land with no frost, and his arms went numb to the elbow, and he changed his grip and kept walking. A brown bear came out of the scrub in the middle of it and had to be killed as an interruption.

At the bottom of that day there was a king beneath — down where the air is old and tastes of pennies, and the light he carried showed him the ceiling and never the far wall.

What was it? Ask the wall. He does not describe things. He came up at dusk with his shield split and his beard stiff and a lump of something in his fist, sat down by his fire, and mended his gear before he ate. Two more days he spent digging the earth for what he needed and hammering it into shape, and then he went and killed the rhino king a second time, because it had come back, and he had the time.

So. That is where he stands tonight, this Cimmerian.

A hold with two shattered scorpion-crowns rotting in sight of the door. A green pool to the east that keeps making the same mistake. Freed men and freed women asleep under his roof who chose that roof, and a mammoth breathing in the dark outside it like a slow bellows, and an ugly horse that comes when he whistles.

Crom gave him strength at his first breath and has said nothing since. He does not seem to expect more.

Fill it again. Next time I'll tell you what came up out of the pools the fourth time — and why the man who saw it would not sit with his back to the water after.