Brute (3 page)

Darius frowned. “Nobody. Just one of the workers.”

Prince Aldfrid laughed. “He looks more like several of the workers.” As the Geddings and their lot looked on askance, the prince strode over until he was standing a few feet in front of Brute, looking him up—and up—and down again.

Brute didn’t know what to do. Was he supposed to bow? Should he say something? He felt twice as huge as usual, and three times as ugly. He ended up just standing there like a dimwitted statue.

“Who are you?” the prince asked, his head cocked slightly.

“I-I-I’m—”

“Brute,” Darius finished for him. “He’s nobody important, Your Highness. He carries things. Now, if you’d care to speak with one of our masons—”

“I’d like to speak with Brute,” the prince interrupted. “I’m assuming he is capable of human speech.” His words were teasing, but Brute saw only good humor in the pale blue eyes, not cruelty.

“I can talk. Your Highness.” Brute hoped that was the proper way to address him.

“Speaking and carrying things. A man of many talents indeed. And on hot days you can provide shade for all the mere mortals around you.”

Prince Aldfrid was smiling, and Brute couldn’t help but grin back. “And shelter when it storms, Your Highness.”

He had a nice laugh, Brute thought. Loud, as if he was used to having an audience, but it seemed genuine. And it was by no means a jeer. He laughed at Brute’s small joke the way friends laughed together in the tavern, the way Osred laughed when Osric did his imitation of Darius. He even clapped Brute familiarly on the arm. “Have you ever given thought to joining the Royal Guard?” he asked.

“The Royal Guard?”

“We’d hardly need to train you. Just stick a battle-axe in your hands and post you by the palace entrance. Nobody nefarious would even think about trying to get by you.”

Brute had a brief image of himself, resplendent in uniform and shield, proudly guarding his prince. He would probably even have boots, black ones that shone. “I, um—”

“He’s just a beast of burden, Your Highness,” Darius interrupted. “Doesn’t have the brains for anything else. Besides, he’s not the type you’d want guarding anything. His father was hung as a thief, and his mother was a poxy whore. It’s why he turned out looking like that.”

“She wasn’t,” Brute said in a near whisper.

The prince rolled his eyes at Darius before turning back to Brute. “We’ll speak some more when my tour is finished, all right?” He didn’t look disgusted at what the foreman had said.

“Of course, Your Highness,” Brute murmured. Prince Aldfrid touched his arm again before allowing himself to be led away.

The brightly dressed crowd followed the prince and his men up the path, chattering loudly the whole way like a flock of excited chickens. Brute stood as a large stone was placed in his back sling. He could almost forget the complaints of his muscles and the lingering ache in his chest, so long as he pictured the friendly way the prince had spoken to him, the kindness in the prince’s eyes. Prince Aldfrid saw him as a wonder, as a potential asset, not as a freak. Brute smiled and hummed as he began to climb the hill.

The bridge didn’t seem like such an engineering marvel to him, but then, what did he know? It certainly seemed to capture the prince’s attention for a long time. Brute made a half dozen trips up and down the hill as Prince Aldfrid inspected the supports, which were nearly complete. Soon the construction of the wooden deck would begin, but Brute would not be part of that enterprise. Instead, he and the rest of the crew would turn the narrow pathway into a proper road, and when the bridge was complete, they would construct the road on the other side of the river. According to gossip in the White Dragon, once the project was finished, travel time between coastal Tellomer and the inland city of Harfaire would be reduced by nearly a day. Not only that, but many more travelers would pass through the little village. The Geddings family was doubtless already counting the money they would earn.

As he completed his seventh trip up the hill, Brute saw that the prince had abandoned the bridge itself and now stood at the edge of the cliff, gazing out over the river. He looked very regal, Brute thought. He looked like a man who could handily conquer the world.

The villagers stood a short distance away, talking to the men who’d accompanied the prince—the royal financiers, perhaps. The men had the shrewd-eyed look of people who counted coins for a living. Brute had a vague idea that the crown had funded most of the costs of the construction, and he wondered how the Geddings had convinced the king to have the bridge built here, instead of at one of the villages downriver, closer to Tellomer.

Maybe Prince Aldfrid didn’t care about financial matters. He seemed to be ignoring the conversation, anyway, taking a few steps farther from his companions until his toes hung over the edge of the cliff.

And then the soil crumbled.

Thinking about that morning much later, Brute concluded that the ground had been softened by the rains, and that the runaway timber had weakened the edges even more. Probably somebody should have thought of those things while the prince was standing there. Darius should have warned him to stand back a little more. But Darius didn’t, and the earth gave way. Prince Aldfrid shouted with alarm and disappeared from sight.

For what seemed like hours, the Geddings and the prince’s men and the workers and Brute all just stood there, mouths hanging open in shock. And then somehow, Brute was the first to move. His long legs covered the ground very quickly, and although other people were closer when the prince fell, Brute reached the edge before they did. Heedless of whether the ground would hold his weight, he peered over the edge.

Prince Aldfrid had fallen about forty feet and was sprawled facedown and motionless on a small outcropping of rock, one of his legs twisted at an unnatural angle. The rock was small enough that one of his arms hung over the edge. If the prince rolled only a few inches to the side, he would fall again, probably landing on the sharp rocks in the river below.

Brute mumbled a few words to the gods—he didn’t know any real prayers—and clambered over the side of the cliff.

He’d been an ordinary-sized child until he was nine or ten, maybe even a bit on the small side. He’d still been ugly, however, still the orphaned son of a thief, and the other boys had hounded him mercilessly. He’d taken more than a few beatings, just because the other children knew nobody would protect him. He spent most of his days running errands and mucking out the stables where his great-uncle worked, but when he had a little free time, he would escape to the river, climb up some rocks, and hide in a small cave. Sometimes he even spent the night in the cave, when the weather was warm and his great-uncle had been drinking enough to start reaching for his cane. The great-uncle had died just about when Brute began his freakish growth spurt, so Brute had stopped climbing the rocks and visiting the cave and had begun earning his keep for real.

He was much taller now and many times heavier. But his hands and bare feet remembered how to grip into the smallest cracks and fissures, and he was much, much stronger, so his arms could easily hold his weight when he couldn’t find a foothold. He made his way down the bluff, only glancing up once to see the alarmed faces staring down at him.

It took very little time to reach the small outcropping, but he had to be careful not to jostle the prince, not to send them both tumbling over the edge. He knelt beside the prone body and was enormously relieved when the prince shifted a bit and moaned.

“He’s alive!” Brute called to the people above. And then, more quietly, he said, “Don’t move, Your Highness. Please don’t move.”

Prince Aldfrid moaned again and rolled his head a little. His eyes fluttered open. “Brute?” he rasped.

Brute was strangely pleased that the prince had remembered him. “You’ve fallen, sir. I’ll… I’ll help you back up.”

The prince moved, just a little, and groaned as Brute grabbed his shoulders. “Don’t!” Brute said. “You’re… really close to the edge.”

“I’m… oh. I think my leg’s broken.”

Only then did Brute notice that dark blood was staining the rock beneath them. A lot of dark blood. “Uh, Your Highness?”

“For the gods’ sake, stop calling me that, at least until you’re done rescuing me.”

“Um, okay.” Brute glanced up again, but none of the bystanders were offering any assistance. “If we can get you into my back sling, do you think you can hold on while I get us back up?”

“I’ll damned well try.”

The prince’s voice sounded a little stronger, which gave Brute more hope. He shifted the prince very cautiously, still eliciting a choked cry from the stricken man as the injured leg was moved. “Such a damned fool,” the prince mumbled.

“Sorry!”

“Not you! Me.”

Brute really couldn’t argue with that—the prince should have been more careful. So without saying anything, he continued to maneuver Aldfrid as gently as possible, all the while very aware of the closeness of the precipice. The prince assisted as best as he could, and soon he was seated in the back sling, his arms wrapped around Brute’s neck.

“Don’t strangle me,” Brute warned.

“That would be counterproductive.”

Climbing up was a lot more difficult than climbing down. The prince’s weight on Brute’s back not only added to the strain on his arms but also altered his center of gravity. Prince Aldfrid’s rasping, hot breath on the back of his neck would have been a terrible distraction if Brute wasn’t so worried about losing his grip, sending both of them to their deaths.

As they reached the halfway mark, Darius belatedly decided to shout directions. “Grab that rock over there! No, not that one, idiot! Watch where you’re putting your feet!”

Brute ignored him until the prince mumbled, “What an ass.” Under other circumstances, Brute would have laughed in response. But the prince’s voice was thready and his grip was weakening. If he lost consciousness, he’d fall, most likely dragging Brute with him.

“Almost there,” Brute lied. His arms and shoulders burned, his back was one huge cramp, and his legs felt like Cecil’s over-boiled noodles. The bruises he’d acquired the day before were like sharp blades digging between his ribs. If he survived the climb, he was going to have to take the afternoon off again, and Darius had damned well better pay him for the full day this time.

He was perhaps fifteen feet from the top when his left hand slipped. His body began to slide down the rock, Prince Aldfrid groaned in pain, and the audience gasped. For an endless moment Brute was positive he was going to fall. But his right hand gripped its hold just a little more tightly and his feet jammed deeply into a crack, and his left hand was able to regain contact with the cliff.

Brute let out a long breath and kept on climbing, foot by agonizing foot.

He couldn’t feel his fingers and toes anymore. He couldn’t see anything but gray stone in front of his nose, and all he heard was the prince’s ragged breathing. He tasted salty sweat on his lips and longed for a tankard of cool ale. “Almost there,” he repeated, but this time it was the truth. And just moments later, when he’d risen another arm’s length, hands reached down and grasped him. Brute scrabbled against the rock with his feet as he and the prince were hauled up and over the edge.

He lay there with his face in the trampled grass, his lower legs still hanging over the edge. It seemed to him that the prince continued to try to hang on, even as the bystanders pulled him off Brute’s back. The sudden removal of the extra weight wasn’t as much of a relief as he had expected. He wanted to know how badly injured the prince was, but was too weak to make his throat work to say the words. Likely nobody would have answered him anyway: all the Geddings and workers and members of the prince’s retinue seemed to be jabbering away at once, all of them nearly hysterical over the prince’s plight. None of them were paying attention to Brute.

Which was perhaps just as well, because when the ground crumbled again, nobody but Brute was close enough to the edge to fall.

For one single moment, he felt as if he were suspended in air, floating over the river like a cloud on a windless day. He felt as if, with only a bit of effort, he would fly—away from the cliff, away from the village. Just away. But instead he fell, the breath stolen from his lungs as he plummeted. His shoulders banged against the stones, then his lower back. Something cracked, but there was no pain. His head thudded against something hard and sharp, and his world went black.

H
E
DIDN
’
T
know whether his mother really had been a whore, but he knew she had loved his father. And his father loved her. They lived in one of the tiny stone and timber huts near the edge of the village, and his parents would sing together. They probably drank a good deal as well—Brute remembered the scent of ale and spilled wine—but they were happy. They laughed all the time. And when Brute was very, very small, so small that the entire world seemed enormous and out of his reach, they would sometimes let him sleep between them on their warm, soft bed, and they would tickle him and tell him that someday he’d amount to something wonderful. Possibly they believed that. Probably they were drunken fools.