Evening the Sixth — The Freeing of the Bound and the Green Death

Hear now. The Broken Tusk stinks of goat-fat and old vomit tonight, and the rain has driven every rat in Sepermeru under this roof — so shove closer, you scowling dogs, and let me have the bench-end where the smoke does not find my one good eye.

You. Yes, you, with the empty cup and the face like a man who has swallowed a wasp. You were here when I sang of the shells that would not die, and of the burning mother and her cold-crowned king. Good. Then you need no reminder what manner of man I speak of when I say the Cimmerian.

Fill the cup and I will tell you what he did after.

Draw close.

There is a thing that lives in the red country beyond the last well, and the desert men will not say its name after dark. They call it the green death, or they call it nothing, and they walk the long way round the rocks where it suns itself.

Strabo walked the short way.

He came over a ridge of shale that slid under his boots like coin, and there it lay — a lizard longer than a rowing-bench, thick through the shoulder as a bull-calf, its hide the colour of an old bruise gone to moss. It did not run. That was the first wrong thing. Every beast that lives runs from a man's shadow, and this one only turned its head, slow as a door swinging, and put its black wet eye on him. Then the tongue came out. A ribbon of split meat, tasting the air, tasting him, learning the salt of him the way a butcher learns a hog.

His gut went cold before his mind caught up. That is how a man knows a true killer — the belly hears it first.

It came at him faster than a thing that fat has any right to move, low and boiling over the stones, and its jaws took him along the thigh. Not a bite to kill. A bite to mark. It let go and backed off three paces and simply waited, patient as a moneylender, because the green death does not need to win the fight. Its mouth is a grave. It bites you once and follows you for a day, and a day and a night, until the rot in your blood does the killing and it need only open wide.

The Cimmerian did not know that. Or he knew it and reckoned Crom had not asked his opinion either way.

He did not run. He went in — and that is the whole of him in four words. He came down on the thing's spine while its legs were still gathering, and he broke it there with iron and with weight and with a sound like a wet branch parting, and when it thrashed he rode it the way a drowning man rides a log, and when it stopped he sat in the shale a long while with his own blood going tacky in the sand and his leg swelling like a wineskin.

He lived. Do not ask me why. Ask Crom, and Crom will tell you nothing, which is His way and always has been.

And I will say this for the record of it — he met the green death twice. The second one, some days on, he opened before it had finished tasting the air.

Now here is the part I do not sing well, because it is not made of blood and my throat was built for blood.

There are camps out in that waste where men are kept on ropes.

You know them. You have all walked past one and looked at your boots. A pole, a line, and a row of folk squatting in their own filth with their wrists gone grey above the knots, and a man with a whip who is no braver than you but happens to hold the handle. The Black Hand keeps such poles. The Dogs of the Desert keep them. Men who call themselves Exiles, which is a fine joke, keep them too — as though a man who fled a chain would not gladly forge one, given rope and a hungry day.

The Cimmerian went to those poles.

Hear me — he did not go as a buyer. He went as a wolf goes to a sheep-pen, and he came away with no goods at all.

There was a Shemite first, a bowman, black-bearded and starved down to string, who had been kept because a good eye is worth feeding. Strabo cut the rope at his wrists with a knife that had lately been in someone else's business, and the Shemite did not thank him. He stood there rubbing the raw places and looking at the Cimmerian the way a beaten dog looks at an open gate — not with joy. With suspicion, which is the older and wiser feeling.

Go or come, Strabo told him. That is all. Two roads, no third.

The Shemite came. So did a wanderer with a broken nose who had been three months on the line and had forgotten the taste of water that was not warm.

You want to know why they followed him? I asked myself that on the road, and I will give you the answer I have, for the price of the cup you are already drinking.

Because he had worn it. There is a mark the rope leaves on a wrist and it does not fade with the season, and every man who has worn one can read it on another across a fire, in the dark, without a word spoken. They saw it on him. And a man who has worn the rope and then walks about cutting other men's — that is not charity, which the desert has no use for. That is a grudge. Men will follow a grudge to the world's edge. They will not follow kindness across a street.

He went back. That is the thing to hold onto. He went back, and he kept going back.

There came a day — a long one, the sun sitting on the sand like a hand pressing down — when he struck four sets of irons in a single turning of the light.

Athropiaei, who wept, and was not shamed for it, and never spoke of it after.

Ralf, who did not weep, and who picked up a hammer before he had picked up bread.

An armourer taken from the Black Hand's forge, a squat man whose palms were burnt smooth as river-stone from thirty years of other men's war-gear, who looked at the Cimmerian's notched blade and made a small disgusted noise in his throat, and that noise was the whole of his oath.

And a smelter from the Dogs of the Desert, who knew how to coax iron out of red dirt, and who walked out of that camp without once turning to look at it, the way you do not look at a snake you have decided to leave alive.

Four. In one day. And the fires on that ridge burned higher that night than they had any right to, and there was a stew in a pot, and somebody was singing something filthy in a Shemite dialect, and the Cimmerian sat outside the light with his back to a stone and let them get on with it.

That is his way. He does not sit in the middle of the warmth. He sits at the edge of it, facing the dark, so the rest can have their backs to something.

Later still he took two more — a Nordheimer from the Black Hand's forge, one of my own people, may Ymir keep whatever is left of him, and another wanderer off the Exiles' line. The Nordheimer had been kept for his hands and starved for his mouth, and I am told the first thing he did with his freed hands was hit the man who had held the whip. I am told the Cimmerian let him.

And all the while, between the cutting of ropes — the endless small grinding work of it. Stone hauled. Hides scraped. Wood dragged out of that miserable country a beam at a time. Thirteen loads in one day, and eleven in another, and eight in a third, and each load the kind of labour that puts a bend in a man's spine before his thirtieth winter.

You laugh. Do not. Every hold that ever stood was built by a man too stubborn to stop carrying things. Kings get the songs. Backs get the wall.

One last thing, and then I want more than air in this cup.

On the thirtieth day he came into a hollow under a shelf of rock where the air had gone strange — still and dusty and quiet in the wrong way, the quiet of a place where the flies have already been eaten.

He looked up.

It hung above him with its legs folded over itself, grey as ash, grey as a corpse's lip, and each leg longer than his forearm and jointed too high, the way no honest thing is jointed. It had been watching him come. It had been watching since the ridge, most like, and had simply waited to see whether he would walk beneath.

He walked beneath.

And every hair on the man's arms stood up before he had thought a single thought — the body knowing, the way it always knows first, the way yours knows now, listening, though there is nothing in this room but smoke and Nemedian wine and me.

That is where I leave him. Under the shelf, in the grey quiet, looking up.

The rain has stopped. My cup has not filled itself.

Come back and I will tell you what came down.