Free The Iron Ship by K. M. McKinley Page B

“Marvellous! A finer level of idiot here this evening. Well done. See lad, I didn’t make this story, I’m only telling it.” He frowned and shouted at a man at the back. “Hey, you, yeah you. Are you paying attention?”
    The man nodded quickly, eyes wide as a rabbit’s before the hawk.
    “Good.” Eliturion sprawled back. His gut forced the table across the floor with a wooden groan. “We could of course take another path back, to whatever muddy little ball the ancestors of men first dragged themselves up onto two feet, or to when the ancestors of the ancestors of men swapped flippers for feet, gills for lungs. That happened, incredible though it may sound to you. Your lot will figure that our eventually, and I’ll be long gone by the time you do. Go back. Back to the birth of the world. This one, or that one, doesn’t matter. Or that time when the stars the worlds turn about first burst into light. Back, back, back, back, back, all the way to the one and only real beginning there is, when there was nothing. When there was only thought without will and all was formless and then light and fury and then... Oh! There was something. A whole lot of something.” He gazed thoughtfully over the heads of the crowd. A gulp of beer brought him back. “That’s not for the telling. It’d take as long as the universe is old, perhaps longer, what with a few embellishments and all.”
    Through the window, people bustled about the square and the narrow alleys of the Off Parade, intent on pleasure. Inside the Nelly Bold, all had fallen quiet. “You have to take a stand! You have to pin them down! Stories! They’re not alive as such, but they have the seeming of it, and that’s as dangerous as alive, if not more. Think on this, how do you kill something with the semblance of life, but which is not alive? Eh? Eh? Got you there, haven’t I? I digress. You have to square up to your story. You have to say, ‘This is where my story begins’—well, it’s not my story, you understand...”
    “You already said that!”
    “Hush now, so I did. You don’t have the patience for my story because it’s longer to tell than the time you have. Do you have four lifetimes to hear it? No. I’m not sure I do any more either.”
    He drained his cup.
    “So, not my story, but I do get to decide where it starts.” He leaned forward, his face aglow with divine mischief and beer. “And it starts with a hanging.”

 
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
    Eliturion’s Story
     
     
    T HE MAN ON the gallows was trying to be brave, although he wasn’t, and trying to be noble, which he once thought he was, but found himself, in dismay, to be a coward.
    “I am not afraid to die,” he shouted, which was a lie. “I have done nothing wrong,” which was another. Nobody heard him. He had a reedy voice at the best of times, and now was the worst. Fear strangled it into a warble that failed him completely. He was the last to be hanged in a long line of men. The crowd’s bloodlust had run out long before this man’s last seconds ran out. They talked over him, not caring for his testimony, or for him, or his death.
    The evening was drawing in. A poet would make some comparison there. The little extra life he had enjoyed during his wait was a concession to his former station. This station had not been exalted, but it was higher than the run of the herd of men, not quite a goodfellow, this man, but more than a goodman. And so he had breathed a few hours more. At the last, as the clocks prepared to chime the sixth bell and twilight approached, his breathing time was finally done. How quick time goes, more quickly even for gods than for men.
    “I do not regret what I did,” he said. Another lie, for he would not have been where he was had he not done what he did. He had been found guilty, quite rightly, and had no one to blame for his predicament but himself.
    His mendacity mattered as little as his crime. The crowd paid little attention to this quivering man in