I thought about it for a moment. ‘It’s really all I can think of doing right now.’
‘Can I tell you who I am first?’ he asked.
‘If I listen will you promise to stop talking so I can hear the thunk when your head hits the wall?’
The scrawny man thought about that for a moment. ‘Marked,’ he said.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Paelis,’ he said. ‘Paelis the Pathetic, twenty-two years of age, son and greatest disappointment of King Greggor and Queen Yesa. Deemed lacking in physical and moral fortitude and therefore removed by royal decree as first heir to the throne in favour of his three-year-old brother Dergot, who, as it turns out, fell out of a window when no one was watching him, some two hours after the King died yesterday.’
The scrawny man started coughing again and I wondered if his head would still cough once it was separated from his body. After a moment, he stopped coughing and went on, ‘Since the day, three years ago, my father finally managed to pull another son out of my step-mother’s womb he has kept me locked in a tower with no warmth, little food and only as much water as leaked through the roof to drink. He waited for me to waste away and die, for no other reasons than that my words displeased him. He didn’t want the Saints’ curse for spilling royal blood.
‘You are not the first man whose life was destroyed by King Greggor. You say your grief is worse than mine, and I accept that. You say you want to see his reign forgotten for all time? I say, I am your man. I have spent every day of my life dreaming – no, more than dreaming, planning – a way to rid this world of my father’s benighted touch. You want his kingdom destroyed? Then I say again: I am your man.’
‘I am your man.’ It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever sought to put themselves beneath me, and it had come from a King. I thought about what he’d said and about what I would do next and I said something, but I don’t remember what it was because that was when the crossbow bolt hit me in the back.
I awoke to the sound of what I thought was my mother’s sewing. She liked to use a stiff, strong needle and thick thread when she worked, and the soft pop of the needle through the fabric was inevitably followed by the snaking sound of the thread being pulled. I tried to stay in that moment as long as I could, but even hazy as I was I remembered that my mother was several years dead, that I was a twenty-year-old man, and that I had tried to murder a King.
‘You may as well open your eyes,’ a woman’s voice said, and when I did as she asked I saw an old woman sitting on a chair near my bed, sewing blue fabric with gold thread.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ I said.
She nodded, but kept on sewing.
‘In the cottage by the South Road. We – did we bury a head in your garden?’ I asked.
She snorted. ‘Probably best not to talk about that now, I’d say.’
I looked around the room. It looked like the same room where I’d tried to kill the King. In fact, I was almost certain it was.
‘I’m in his room,’ I said to her.
‘The maids tell me he wouldn’t let them move you. Figured you wouldn’t survive it, what with your wounds and all.’
‘The crossbow bolt. It hit me in the back,’ I said stupidly.
‘The bolt? Sweet ugly Saints, boy, you were bleeding from a dozen festering wounds by the time they found you. I think they only kept you alive to figure out which God made that deal with you.’
Death. Love abandoned me and so I made my deal with Death.
‘Are you a seamstress?’ I asked.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Seamstress is what you call the person who fixes your dress, boy. I’m a tailor. The last real tailor, in fact.’
I had the feeling that it would be impolite to inform her that every city in the world had a dozen tailors. ‘Fine, a tailor then. What are you doing here?’ I asked.
She didn’t bother looking up this time. ‘Well, a good tailor knows which way the threads are moving. After you left, I thought about it for a while and reckoned they might have need of my skills here.’
‘The King doesn’t have his own tailors?’ I asked.
She looked at me as if I was an idiot. Which is fair, I suppose. ‘I told you, boy, there ain’t any other tailors left. Besides, there ain’t no one else knows how to sew what I’m making.’
‘Which is?’
Someone knocked at the door and I thought the woman would say something, but she just kept sewing. After a moment the knocking repeated.
‘It’s your damned bedroom,’ the woman called out. ‘Whose bloody permission are you waiting for?’
The door opened and the man from the night before – the King, I guess – entered the room. ‘Now if only I could get all my loyal subjects to treat me with such respect,’ he said jovially. ‘Most of the ones I encounter just want to kill me.’
He had changed his clothes and bathed and looked a lot more kingly to my eyes. He looked like he’d eaten better, too. That thought woke me up. ‘How long have I been unconscious?’ I asked.
‘You’ve been mostly dead for twelve days,’ the King said.
‘Twelve days? How is that possible?’
He coughed a bit and then walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, which struck me as rude, but then I remembered it was technically his bed.
‘You were in Death’s embrace, remember? You hadn’t slept for Saints know how long and you probably hadn’t eaten for a week.’
I was feeling irritated now, which told me I still wasn’t quite right in the head. ‘So how come I didn’t die of hunger if I’ve been unconscious for the past twelve days?’
The Tailor warned me off. ‘Best not to ask. It wasn’t very pretty. Involved a cloth tube and some sticks.’
The King ignored her. ‘Don’t worry, my strange friend. You had the best of care.’ The Tailor snorted but the King went on, ‘I took care of you myself, with the help of the royal doctors.’
I found that hard to believe. ‘You took care of me yourself? Washed my wounds and changed my sheets?’
‘And wiped your arse,’ the Tailor chimed in happily.
‘Well,’ the King said, ‘it was only fair. It was my man who shot you in the back, so I thought it a fair trade. The world should be fair, you know.’
The world should be fair. For some reason that started me laughing and I thought about all the things that had happened and I just kept laughing over and over, and then suddenly the laughter turned to something else and I heard great wracking sobs pouring from my mouth and my eyes were bleeding tears and I swear I thought I would drown in them because for some reason I just couldn’t stop.
The King whispered in the Tailor’s ear and she got up and left, and then he did something very strange. He reached over and took my head in both his hands, just the way Aline sometimes did when she needed me to listen, the way she had done that day at the cottage. And the King said this: ‘A wise man would tell you she’s gone, friend, and that you must let her go because nothing will ever bring her back. But I’m not a wise man – not yet, anyway. So I promise you this: I will bring her to you. I swear to you, friend, that some day, somehow, through whatever influence a King may have on Gods and Saints, I will bring her back to you. They say everyone faces Death alone, but I will break that law if that’s what it takes.’ He let go of my head and his hands dropped to his sides.
He coughed and wiped something from his mouth. ‘But not today. Today, I need your help. I need to change the world, because the world won’t last the way it is much longer. I can do this – I know in my heart and in my mind that I can do this, but I need someone like you. I need someone who can walk for twenty days and nights and fight through every hell on earth to get justice – but not just justice for himself, justice for others.’ He let the words hang there for just a moment before he said, ‘I will bring you to your wife one day, but today I need you to bring justice to my people.’