‘You placed too much faith in those who told you what you wished was true, and ignored those who tried to tell you what was true.’
In his mind, Kaspar shouted, ‘But I was a force to be feared!’ The words came out an inarticulate grunt.
‘Fear is not the only tool of diplomacy and governance, my son. Loyalty is born from trust.’
‘Trust!’ shouted Kaspar, his voice a ragged gasp as the word seemed to scrape along the inside of a parchment-dry throat. ‘Trust no one!’ He stopped, nearly falling over, as he pointed an accusing finger at his father. ‘You taught me that!’
‘I was wrong,’ said the apparition sadly and it vanished.
Kaspar looked around and saw he was heading in the general direction of where he had seen the reflected shimmer. He staggered along, lifting one foot and putting it down before the other. Slowly he halved the distance, then halved it again.
His mind continued to wander as he relived events from his childhood, then the downfall of his reign. A young woman whose name he could not recall appeared before him, walking slowly for a minute, then vanished. Who was she? Then he remembered. The daughter of a merchant, a girl he had found fair but whom his father had forbidden him to see. ‘You will wed for reasons of state,’ he had been told. ‘Take her to your bed if you must, but leave aside foolish thoughts of love.’
The girl had wed someone else.
He wished he could remember her name.
He stumbled along, several times falling to his knees, only to rise once more on will alone. Minutes, hours, days passed, he had no way of knowing which. His mind was turning in on itself as he felt his life begin to wane.
He blinked, aware that the day was fading and he was now in a small gully, heading downwards.
Then he heard it.
A bird call. Slightly more than the peep of a sparrow, but a bird call.
Kaspar forced himself out of his lethargy and blinked. He tried to clear his swimming vision, and then he heard the call again. Cocking his head, he listened, and then a third call came.
He staggered towards the sound, mindless of the treacherous footing. He fell, but caught himself on the walls of the deepening gully.
Tough grass appeared beneath his feet and his mind seized on this one fact: if there was grass, there must be water below. He looked around and could see no sign of it, but he could see a stand of trees ahead. He pushed himself forward until he had no strength left, and fell to his knees and then onto his face.
He lay panting, face down on the grass; and he could feel the moisture of the blades against his face. Weakly, he dug at the grass and his fingers clawed up the loose earth. Below it he felt dampness. With his last shred of will he pulled himself to his knees and drew his sword. The odd thought came to him that should his old swordmaster see him use a blade this way he would be up for a beating, but he ignored the whimsical thought and plunged the blade into the soil. He dug. He used the blade as a gardener would a spade and he dug.
He ripped and pulled with the last of his strength and forced a hole into the ground with near-hysterical purpose, tearing the dirt aside as rapidly as a badger digging a burrow. Then he smelled it. The damp smell was followed by a hint of gleaming moisture on the blade.
He plunged his hand into the hole and felt mud. He tossed aside the sword and dug with bare hands, and then plunged his fingers into water. It was muddy and tasted of clay, but he could lie on his stomach and pull up a meagre handful at a time. He filled his cupped hand, raised it to parched lips and drank. At some point he rubbed some water on his neck and face, but over and over he raised his cupped hand to drink. He had no idea how many times he did this but eventually he collapsed, his head striking the ground as his eyes rolled up into his head and consciousness fled.
The bird scratched at the seeds, as if sensing danger nearby. Silently, Kaspar watched from on his stomach behind a depression a few feet away, masked by a line of thorny brush, as the bird – some sort of sage fowl he didn’t recognize – pecked at the seed, then picked it up in its beak and gobbled it down.
Kaspar had recovered from his ordeal enough to pull himself into the shade that morning, leaving it only to drink what he could dredge up from his impromptu well. The water came harder each time, and he knew this little reservoir would soon be exhausted. He had decided near mid-afternoon to venture deeper into the gully, to see where it led, and to find another place to dig for water.
Near sundown he had found the tree. He had no name for it, but it bore a tough-skinned fruit. He had cut several down and discovered that once the skin was cut with a blade, the meat was edible. It was also pulpy and tough, and the flavour was nothing to delight a hedonist, but he was desperate. He ate a few bites, despite being consumed by hunger, and waited.
It seemed they weren’t poisonous. He ate several before cramps gripped him. They might not be poisonous, but they were tough on the stomach. Or perhaps three days without food had caused his stomach to act more tenderly.
Kaspar had always possessed a healthy appetite and had never known hunger more pressing than skipping a midday meal because of a hunt or sailing off the coast. Others in his father’s household had complained bitterly when he pressed on, and he laughed silently to imagine how they would react in his current circumstances. The laugh died as he realized they would all likely be dead by now.
The bird came nearer.
Kaspar had placed seeds in a line leading to a snare he had fashioned from the materials at hand. Painfully he had woven tough fibres pulled from the bulb of a strange-looking cactus; it was a trick shown him by his Keshian guide. He had ripped off the end of the bud and yanked hard, producing a sharp tip attached to a long fibre. ‘Nature’s needle and thread,’ the guide had said. He had struggled, but in the end he had produced a line twice the length of his arm. His hands and arms were covered in cuts and puncture wounds, testament to his determination to fashion a snare from the thorn-covered branches of the local plants.
It took every ounce of will for Kaspar to remain silent and motionless as the bird approached his snare. He had already started a small fire, which was now banked and waiting to be fanned back into flame, and his mouth positively watered in anticipation of roast fowl.
The bird ignored him as it worried at the seed, attempting to break though the tough outer husk and get to the softer inner kernel. As Kaspar watched the bird finished the tiny morsel and moved to the next seed. For an instant, Kaspar hesitated as a pang of doubt seized him. He felt an almost overwhelming fear that somehow the bird would escape and he would slowly starve to death in this isolated place.
Genuine doubt almost paralysed him to the point of losing the bird. The fowl tossed the seed in the air and it landed just far enough from where Kaspar had placed his snare that he felt sure it would escape. However, when he yanked his line the trap fell exactly where he had judged it would land.
The bird fluttered and squawked as it tried to escape the thorny cage. Kaspar endured punctures from the iron-like points as he lifted the small cage to reach under and seize the bird.
He quickly wrung its neck and even before he had returned to the fire he was plucking its feathers. Using the tip of his sword to gut the bird proved a messy prospect. He wished now he had kept the dagger instead of using it to warn off the nomad chieftain.
Finally the bird was dressed and spitted and he was turning it over a fire. Kaspar could hardly contain himself waiting for the bird to cook. As the minutes dragged on, the cramps in his stomach were from anticipation more than anything else.
Throughout his life Kaspar had developed a strong self-discipline, but not eating undercooked bird was the toughest test he could remember. But he knew the dangers of eating undercooked fowl. One bout of food poisoning as a young man left an indelible memory.
Finally he judged the bird finished, and with disregard for burned lips and tongue he set to with a frenzy. All too quickly he was finished, having eaten every shred of meat and the tiny bit of