desperance

Okay. I have a day and a half, before I have to start the next novel.

In the meantime, I have this - story? novelette? novella? - set somewhere that is not Alexandria, which is why we call it the Alexandria story; and I would dearly love to see it finished.

So. A day and a half.

I have comfort foods in quantity: all uncooked, but that's my breaks. The oven's on.

I have more wine than I can drink, and whisky too. And coffee, and indeed tea.

I have Zokutou, back at last! The 15K target is purely notional, but this is where we are at the moment:

9,421 / 15,000
(62.8%)

I don't, apparently, have a plot: only Tasks and Attitudes and Revelations. But hey, we can make bricks without straw.

I have purpose: to report at regular intervals, through the next thirty-six hours. Be prepared.

Because we are all about content in context, you can has chunks as we go. I can't show you the opening because it doesn't have one, any more than it has a title; but it has a beginning, oh yes.

Rulf had sent us, raucous above a coffin in his high rede-hall. That was a memory to cling to, appalling and wonderful: torchlight on silver, shadow on bone. Rulf - Lord of the Seamarch, Kingslayer, the Iron Hand - weeping into his beard, roaring for mead, rejoicing and cursing and spitting for luck, lamenting this death above any, that left him with no enemies worth the name.
The coffin had come from Skander by way of a dozen other ports, fetched in to us at last with a shipload of Rothland horses, breeding mares that had waited out the winter storms in Landrëas. Rulf had a fancy to be Lord of Horses too, to ride and rule the land as he did the waves, to stretch an empire beyond his fleets’ reach, beyond the sea’s. It was mad, and so I told him - which might perhaps be a reason why he screamed my name above the coffin when it was opened, and named me for this embassage.
“Croft is dead,” he said, thrusting a torch into the dark casket of strange woods with silver bindings, the better to show me the bones. “Take a ship to Skander for me, and bring me back the boy.”
There was so much wrong with this, it was almost more stupid than his notion of turning sea-harriers into horsemen. I started with the simplest, the most obvious of objections: “How can you know that this is Croft? All I see is bones.” Bones with the meat boiled off them, ingeniously wired together as flesh and tendons should have held them, in the figure of a man.
“Bones and hair,” he said, showing me the long plait that he held, that he must have snatched from the coffin as a prize. That was coarse, blond gone to white: it might have been Croft’s. Or mine, or his own. Any northman’s.
“His name is on the lid,” he said. It was: in silver inlay in a strange corrupt Southern reading of our own strong runes, as though it spelled out his name in a lisp.
“Anyone can write a name on a box and put bones in it.”
“And then ship it a thousand miles to me? Why would they?”
“To make you believe, of course, that Croft was dead.”
“But he is,” Rulf said simply, wafting his torch again. “He is here.”
“You cannot know that.”
“And yet I do. See his legs?”
I saw what he showed me, as he lowered the torch: how twisted the leg-bones were, how they had been shattered and brutally mis-healed.
“I did that,” he said, as if I hadn’t known it, hadn’t been there. “These are the ways, the places that I had the bones broken and then tied up to be sure that they would set so bent that he could never stand or walk again. Three months he screamed in the cess-pit, before I was sure they were beyond any man’s doctoring.”
I remembered. Three months, while Croft lay in shit, he had made sure that we lay in all the sounds of his pain and loss and failure. I had thought that almost his victory, rather than Rulf’s.
And then he had been washed and dressed - by the women and in a woman’s skirt, because those dreadful legs would never wear trousers again - and set in a skiff with the boy for deckhand and servant, and he had sailed into the sun’s setting on his way to exile and death.
Eventual death. It was twenty years before his twisted bones came back to us.
Without the boy.
I said, ”Why do you want the boy back now?”
“Harlan, I have no heir. They tell me it is the gods’ curse on my blood, for what I did to his father. What I took from him. Some of that, at least, I can restore.”
“He will claim the kingship.”
“He is welcome to it, when I’m gone. I can adopt him, train him, make him a better man than his father ever was.”
“Rulf, you gave him to Croft. All of that has been done already: except that he will have been trained to despise you and all of yours. Will you make a gift of yourself, to a young man who is right to hate you?”
He shrugged ruefully, confused perhaps by his own sudden penitence. “Harlan. Fetch him back.”