Half a King

“Building temples comes close behind.” Rulf nodded up at the skeleton of a huge building showing itself above the nearest roofs, so covered in a ramshackle web of scaffolds, hoists and platforms Yarvi could hardly make out its shape.

“That’s the High King’s temple?”

“To this new god of his.” Rulf spat out of the rowlock, missed, and spattered the timbers instead. “A monument to his own vanity. Four years in the building and still not halfway done.”

“Sometimes I think there can be no such thing as gods at all,” mused Jaud, stroking thoughtfully at his pursed lips with a fingertip. “Then I wonder who can be making my life such hell.”

“An old god,” said Yarvi. “Not a new.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Rulf.

“Before the elves made their war upon Her, there was one God. But in their arrogance they used a magic so strong it ripped open the Last Door, destroyed them all and broke the One God into the many.” Yarvi nodded towards that giant building site. “Some in the south believe the One God cannot ever be truly broken. That the many are merely aspects of the one. It seems the High King has seen the merits of their theology. Or at least Grandmother Wexen has.” He considered that. “Or perhaps she sees a profit in currying favor with the Empress of the South by praying the same way she does.” He remembered the hungry brightness in her eye as he knelt before her. “Or she thinks that folk who kneel to one god will kneel more easily to one High King.”

Rulf spat again. “The last High King was bad enough, but he ranked himself as first among brothers. The older this one gets the more he’s taken with his own power. He and his damn minister won’t be happy ’til they’re set above their own One God and all the world kneels before their withered arses.”

“A man who worships the One God cannot choose his own path: he is given it from on high,” mused Yarvi. “He cannot refuse requests, but must bow to commands.” He drew up a length of his chain and frowned down at it. “The One God makes a chain through the world, from the High King, through the little kings, to the rest of us, each link with its right place. All are made slaves.”

Jaud was frowning sideways. “You are a deep thinker, Yorv.”

Yarvi shrugged and let his chain drop. “Less use than a good hand to an oarsman.”

“How can one god make all the world work, anyway?” Rulf held his arms out to encompass the rotting city and all its people. “How can one god be for the cattle and the fish, and the sea and the sky, and for war and peace both? A lot of damn nonsense.”

“Perhaps the One God is like me.” Sumael sprawled on the aftcastle, propped on one elbow with her head resting on her bony shoulder and one leg dangling.

“Lazy?” grunted Jaud.

She gave a grin. “She chooses the course, but has lots of little gods chained up to do the rowing.”

“Pardon me, almighty one,” said Yarvi, “but from where I sit you look to have a chain of your own.”

“For now,” she said, tossing a loop of it over her shoulder like a scarf.

“One God,” snorted Rulf again, still shaking his head towards the quarter-built temple.

“Better one than none at all,” grunted Trigg as he stalked past.

The oarslaves fell silent at that, all knowing their course would take them past the land of the Shends next, who had no mercy on outsiders, and prayed to no god and knelt to no king, however high he said he was.

Great dangers meant great profits, though, as Shadikshirram informed the crew when she sprang back aboard, holding high her rune-scrawled licence, eyes so bright with triumph one might have thought she had it from the hand of the High King himself.

“That paper won’t protect us from the Shends,” someone grunted from the bench behind. “They skin their captives and eat their own dead.”

Yarvi snorted. He had studied the language and customs of most of the peoples around the Shattered Sea. The food of fear is ignorance, Mother Gundring used to say. The death of fear is knowledge. When you study a race of men you find they are just men like any others.

“The Shends don’t like outsiders since we’re always stealing them for slaves. They’re no more savage than any other people.”

“As bad as that?” muttered Jaud, eyeing Trigg as he uncoiled his whip.

They rowed east that afternoon with a new licence and new cargo but the same old chains, the Tower of the Ministry dwindling into the haze of distance beyond their wake. At sunset they put in at a sheltered cove, Mother Sun scattering gold on the water as she sank behind the world, painting strange colors among the clouds.

“I don’t like the look of that sky!” Sumael had swarmed up one of the masts, legs hooked over the yard, frowning off towards the horizon. “We should stay here tomorrow!”