Evening the Twelfth — The Horned King, the Stone-Eaters, and the Ghosts That Would Not Lie Down

Draw close. Aye, you — the one who came in wet and has been steaming by the fire like a bad sausage. Push the bench. There is room if you have coin, and there is more room if you have two.

You know the shape of me by now. One eye, one throat, and a thirst that outlives both. Twice already I have opened my mouth in this reeking hole and let the Cimmerian walk out of it: the bull that broke like a barrel in the dark, the wolf-kings in their cellar, the crowns of the scorpions, the thing on the throne that was more crown than king. I will not chew that meat again. Old songs are old bread.

Tonight is new. Tonight there is a beast with a horn on its face like a grave-marker, there are stones that open eyes, and there are dead men in a dead city who had not been told that dying was the end of the argument.

Fill it. Good. Now hear.

The Horned King, and the Man Who Would Not Move

There is a thing in the low grass south of his hold. You have seen its lesser kin — the grey mountains that walk, that graze with their heads down and think nothing at all, and will still turn a horse and rider into wet cloth if the mood takes them. This was their father. Or their father's father. A rhino gone king, hide gone grey as old scar-tissue, and the horn on its face was not a horn any longer but a standing stone, worn smooth at the point by everything it had ever broken.

And here is the part that curdles me still: it grazed within sight of his gate. Close enough that a man on the wall could count the flies on it.

Most men would move the gate.

The Cimmerian moved the beast.

He went down through the dew with the morning still grey, and the grass wetted him to the knee, and he did not go quiet, because quiet is for men who mean to leave. The king raised its head. There was a moment — you know the moment, you have had it with a bad dog and a worse creditor — where the world holds still and something older than either of you does the deciding.

Then the ground came apart.

I do not know how to tell you what it is to have that much meat aimed at you. The air goes ahead of it, and the air alone can knock the breath out of a man's chest. He took it on the shoulder of his shield and it lifted him off the earth like a leaf off a table and set him down eight paces back, and he skidded, boots plowing two black furrows through the wet, and he came up spitting grass and blood in equal parts and laughing — laughing, the mad northern dog — because he had learned the thing he came to learn.

It could not turn.

All that weight, all that stone, and it steered like a barge. So he made himself a post. He stood, and he let it come, and he stepped a half-pace at the last breath, and the horn went past his ribs close enough to shave him, and his steel went in behind the shoulder where the hide thins. Then he did it again. And again. Eight times, ten. Each pass a little slower on its side, a little redder on the grass.

At the end it did not fall like a beast. It sat, like an old man lowering himself into a chair, and the great head came down last, and the horn drove into the mud and held the skull up out of the dirt as though it were still deciding.

He left it standing that way. A marker at his door, for anyone who came asking whose ground this was.

The King in the Green Water

Push west and south and the land goes soft, and then it goes rotten. The swamp there does not smell of death; death is clean by comparison. It smells of patience. Of a thing that has been digesting the same meal for a hundred years and has all the time it needs.

By the great road — the one the caravans use when they are brave and the one they weep on when they are not — the water rules itself. There is a king in it. I have heard him called by other mouths and I will not repeat the names, because names in a swamp are a way of being answered.

He waded in to the waist to meet it.

Think on that. Not on the bank. Not from a boat. He went into the black water where he could not see his own feet, where every step is a guess and the mud takes hold of the ankle like a hand that wants to keep you, and the flies came up off the reeds in a sheet and got in his mouth and his good eye — I mean his eyes, he has two, unlike some of us — and the stink went into his lungs and stayed there for a week after.

And the king came for him under the surface, so that all he saw was the water humping up and moving, silent, the way a wave moves when there is no wind to explain it.

The blows in that fight made no honest sound. Steel on wet hide in deep water — it is a slap, a dull wet slap, like a fishwife killing supper. No ring, no song. He was hit so hard the water went white around him and closed over his head, and there was a long moment — I have this from a Zamorian who was up a tree and had gone very religious about it — a long moment where there was nothing on that water but green scum settling back flat.

Then a hand came up out of it. Then a shoulder. Then the whole grim length of him, streaming, with the mud sucking at him and refusing to let go, and he dragged his own body back onto its feet by the roots of a dead tree.

Crom sends no help, you understand. That is the whole of the Cimmerian creed, and it is a miserable creed, and I have come to think it is the only honest one in the world. Their god gives a man strength at his birth and then turns his back forever. No prayers. No mercy. No answer. Just the strength, and what you do with it, and the silence afterward.

He did enough with it.

The king died in the shallows and the water went a colour I will not describe over ale.

The Stone That Was Hungry

Now — you there, with the empty cup and the face like a wet Sunday — this next one is for you, because it is the one that frightens me and I am hard to frighten.

In the western middle of the world there are stones that eat.

I had heard it as a boy's tale. A rock is a rock. But he found the truth of it, and through him I have it: there are things out there shaped exactly like the boulders they sit among, and they have no face until they decide to have one, and then the seam of the mouth opens where no seam was, and the little bright eyes come up out of the grit like beetles surfacing.

He met their whole ugly family. Some are the white of old bone. Some carry ice on their backs so cold it smokes, and one was black ice, which is worse, because you cannot see where it ends. And one — Crom, this one — was crystal, so that the sun came through its hide and threw a light on the ground that moved when it moved.

And in the middle of the brood there was a monstrous one, big as a hut, that had been sitting so long that soil had gathered on its back and grass had grown there and a small tree had made an honest life of it.

He walked past it once. Did not know. Nothing to know.

Then the hill behind him coughed.

I have asked him what that was like. He is a Cimmerian; he gave me eleven words and most of them were "then it bit me." So I will tell you what eleven words cannot. He fought a thing that could not be cut. Steel skidded off it and threw sparks into the grass and the shock of every blow went up his arms and into his teeth until his jaw ached and his hands stopped feeling like hands. He broke weapons on it. He broke the land on it — chipping at it the way a mason chips, chunk and chunk and chunk, and the pieces came off it and rolled away and it kept coming, patient as weather, and its mouth closed on his thigh once and he had to beat it about the eyes with the pommel until it let go, and it took a piece with it when it went.

He killed it by finding where the shell had a seam. There is always a seam. That is his whole philosophy and it is worth more than most temples.

And there was another sort out there in that season, a guardian thing, red-stoned and set to keeping — a thing that stands over what it was made to stand over and does not know that its makers are dust. He put that one down too, and I will say only this of it: some things are not evil. Some things are just still obeying. There is no pity in the world quite like the pity you feel with your boot on the neck of a faithful thing.

Between these, in the dry ground, the scorpions came at him — the big ones and the bigger ones, tails held up like question marks over their own backs. He had learned scorpions the season before, and a lesson learned is a lesson that stops being a story. They died quickly, and I will not spend your ale on them.

The City That Would Not Be Buried

And then he went north. And then he went east of north. And this — hear me now, all of you, even the ones pretending to sleep — this is the part I tell last because it is the part that follows me home.

There is a city up there that has been dead so long its name has gone out of every mouth but the wind's. Broken towers. Streets under sand. And it is garrisoned.

He came to the gate and the gate had a keeper. Not a man. A shape at the arch, standing where it had stood while whole peoples were born and forgot themselves and died, and when he stepped into its ground it moved with a slowness that was not weakness but certainty — the way a man reaches for a cup he has reached for ten thousand times.

He broke it. He went in. And at the far side of that place, days later, there was another one, an identical patience at another arch, and he broke that too — and I want you to sit with what that means. He did not sneak through the dead city. He did not go around. He came in through the front and out through the back and he unmade the doorkeepers at both ends, so that the place stood open behind him like a mouth with its teeth knocked out.

Inside, the legion.

Silent, they are called, and the name is a joke told by someone who never met them. They are silent in that they do not speak. They are not silent when they move. Armour that has not been oiled since before your grandmother's grandmother — every step a shriek of rust, every arm-swing a scream of metal that has forgotten how to be metal. They came at him in ranks. In ranks, mark you. Dressed. Ordered. Some captain's drill still holding a thousand years after the captain's tongue rotted out of his skull.

And with them the poorer dead — the ragged ones, the ones with no armour left and no flesh left and a bow still in the finger-bones, loosing arrows out of the dark from a hundred paces with the patience of things that will never tire and will never miss twice.

He fought them by torchlight in corridors where the ceiling wept.

And there were four he took that I will name for you as I would name kings, because in that place they were kings:

The commander — who still had the plume on his helm, and who fought with a soldier's tidiness, no rage in it, only the terrible economy of a man who was good at this before he died and did not stop being good at it.

The warmaker — and this one was not tidy. This one was a smear of light and hate in the shape of a man, and it burned him. Not with fire you could bucket. With a cold that goes past the skin and gets in behind the breastbone and makes the heart stumble. He went down on one knee against that thing. I know he did, though he never said it, because when he described it to me he stopped in the middle and drank, and Cimmerians do not stop in the middle.

The archivist — Crom, the archivist. A ghost that had been a keeper of writing. It came at him surrounded by its own pages, and I have this image and it will not leave me: the parchment turning in the air around it, unburnt, unrotted, covered in a hand that no living man can read, telling the whole truth of who these people were and why they fell — and every page of it swirling in the dark like leaves, and no one left in the world who could read a word. It fought him. He killed it. The pages went down like snow.

That is the loneliest thing I have ever put in a song.

And the priest king — further north still, in the cold. The one that had been prayed to. And when he broke it, it did not scream. It made a sound like a great hall exhaling, and the light went out of it in one long breath, and the crown it wore fell and rolled on the stone and rang, and rang, and rang, and would not stop ringing, until it wobbled down flat and the silence came in behind it like water.

He stood in that silence for a while. He told me that. It is the only piece of it he told me unasked.

The One He Struck Free

Now let me put one warm thing in you before I put you out into the cold.

In the middle of all that killing, down in the season of the horned king, he came upon a bound one. Athropiaei. Roped. Taken. Being walked somewhere by people who had opinions about where.

You know what he does. You have heard it enough nights now that you say it with me: he has worn the rope himself. There is a mark on that man's neck that no beard will cover, and he does not talk about it, and he has never once walked past a rope without doing something about it.

So the ropes came off. He struck the irons and he stood back, which is the whole of the thing — he stood back — and he did not say come with me, and he did not say you owe me. He let there be a long moment where the road went two ways and both of them were open.

Athropiaei chose the road with him on it.

They all do. That is not luck. That is what a man is worth, measured in the only scale that never lies: who walks beside him when they are free to walk away.

So there he stands, as I have him tonight.

A hold with a king's skull propped at the gate on its own horn. A road south where the swamp has no ruler. A western country where the stones have learned to keep still when he passes. And a dead city in the north with both its doors hanging open and its garrison lying in pieces in its own streets, and somewhere in the rubble, a thousand pages of a language nobody living can read, settling slowly into the dust.

He does not know what was written on them. Neither do I.

But there was more of that city than he walked. There were stairs going down that he did not take — he told me that too, and he said it the way a man mentions a debt.

Down is where the north-country dog is looking now.

My cup is dry, and a dry skald is a liar. Come back and I will tell you what was at the bottom of those stairs — if he lives to tell me, and if you live to buy it.