Priest of Gallows by Peter McLean

Author:Peter McLean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, MAM
ISBN: 1529411319
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Published: 2021-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

I had thirty-seven, maybe thirty-eight years to me at the time, and I had never seen the sea before.

Varnburg was magnificent. The city was walled, the harbour fortified with great arms of stone that reached out into the bay and sheltered the various tall ships and little boats that bobbed calmly at their moorings within its comforting embrace. Beyond, the sea was a wild animal of greys and greens and white. A fierce wind was blowing from the north and the water hurled itself against the harbour walls, throwing great plumes of foaming spray twenty feet and more into the air. It was very, very cold.

We were standing on the high cliffs within the city itself, looking down past the round towers with their bristling cannon that guarded this vital port from the constant threat of invasion, and over the roofs of the dockside wharves and warehouses. The smell of salt was strong, the air singing with a freshness that I had never known before in my life. We were so far from the piss-reek of Ellinburg’s tanneries and the death stench of Abingon that I could have wept for joy.

‘Thought you’d want to see it, boss,’ Beast said quietly beside me, and all I could do was nod.

‘It’s incredible,’ Anne said quietly, and on instinct I reached out and took her hand.

She squeezed my fingers in her callused palm for a moment, and I knew we were feeling the same emotions. After how we had both grown up – in different places and different ways, perhaps, but with no happier an outcome – after all we had been through together in Messia and in Abingon, the sea was a revelation.

It was cleansing, somehow. Awe-inspiring. Wondrous.

It went on forever, stretching out to the distant curve of the horizon where the sky met the endless water in a haze of silver light. The waves rushed in, rolling curls of foam chasing each other one after another after another like it would never end, like the very edge of the world.

‘What’s out there, Papa?’ Billy asked me.

‘I have no idea,’ I said, and I smiled at him. ‘Sea monsters, perhaps. Strange lands, stranger gods. It could be anything, lad.’

‘Skania is out there, beyond the horizon,’ Rosie said.

I gave her a look. Aye, she was right, of course she was, but couldn’t she let me have this one moment of wonder with my son? No, no, of course she couldn’t. We were Queen’s Men, and wonder is a luxury not permitted to us. We deal in facts and suspicions, not wonder and joy. There is no place for joy in the Queen’s Men.

‘Aye,’ I said, and I swallowed the bitterness in my heart with the salt tang of the air. ‘We’ve work to do.’

Anne let go of my hand at once, and I felt the loss of her touch as keenly as a pang of guilt. That moment was over, just another thing the Queen’s Men had taken away from me. I turned to Beast.

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