Authors: Jude Fisher
‘Have you reckoned on what to tell him yet?’ he asked, changing the subject, though judging by the mercenary leader’s expression, probably not for the better.
Mam snarled. ‘You think I should concoct some fiction that sounds less bizarre than the truth?’
Knobber shrugged. Certainly their employer, Rui Finco, the Lord of Forent, was not going to be a happy man; for while they had managed to successfully stow the shipload of good Eyran weaponry they’d been paid to fetch south, they had signally failed to bring aboard their main cargo, the man without whom all the rest would prove pointless, for unless the range of a bowshot arrow had improved dramatically since he’d last heard about it, there was still no weapon that could fly across the wide Northern Ocean from Istria to Eyra without a boat to carry it within striking distance.
When he and Joz had arrived at the shipyard, not only was Morten Danson missing, but most of his workers and the best timber had gone, too. No one they spoke to seemed to know where he was: some lame excuse about the mumming in Halbo had been offered; but that hardly explained the missing men and wood, and it seemed more likely to Knobber that one of the King’s rivals had decided to make a little investment of his own. When they had got back to Halbo and reported their failure, Mam had seemed already distracted, full of unfocused fury, and rather than stick around to find out exactly what had caused her famously volatile temper, they had blurted out their own disappointing findings and headed swiftly for the safety of an anonymous tavern.
It was not, Knobber thought, a situation he’d want to explain to the Lord of Forent. No ships meant no war. Correction: no
Eyran
ships; no war, for those coast-hugging little Istrian vessels were worse than useless in a heavy sea. So, no Eyran shipmaker, no Eyran ships. No war: no more lucrative work for them.
Perhaps
, he thought speculatively,
we’d be better off fermenting a civil war in the Southern Empire. Or
. . .
‘We could get the captain to turn around, take this lot north through the Sharking Straits and flog it to the Earl of Ness—’
‘This captain couldn’t find the Sharking Straits if it bit him in the arse. Besides, Ness has no money,’ Mam returned flatly, indicating that she had already considered and dismissed this possibility.
‘Erol Bardson?’
‘That man works by stealth, not open conflict. When he makes his move, it won’t be by force of arms, but by clever words and a knife in the back. War with Istria might suit his purpose well; but buying a shipment of arrows from us would be too obvious by far. No, Bardson has other plans, I’ll wager, though I’m not sure I’d take his coin even if he called me in.’
Knobber scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘That sounds choosy, Mam. You developed a soft spot for young Ravn?’
Mam snorted. ‘Our stallion? Poor lad hardly knows which end’s up at the moment. They’ll be needing a new king in Halbo soon, and not through any treachery Bardson might devise: that woman must have worn Ravn’s cock to the size of a worm by now, so she can’t be getting much satisfaction from him.’
Knobber regarded his leader askance. He’d heard some women did receive pleasure from the act of love, but he’d yet to encounter one who’d admit to it. Though that might have something to do with— He pushed the thought aside.
‘You think Bardson will try to take the throne?’
‘There’s enough would take his side. Ravn did himself no favours when he took to wife an unknown nomad woman over the flower of the Eyran nobility. And he pays no heed to his counsellors, even when he sits with them, which I hear is rare in itself. Spends most of his waking and sleeping hours in the arms of his new queen and lets the rest go hang. They say Stormway and Shepsey are doing what they can, but they’re old men now, and their hearts aren’t in it any more. They’ve got ambitious lords and greedy farmers yapping round their feet like feists.’
‘Southeye was the one could have held it together.’
‘Aye. Well, we did what we had to do, and got well paid for it – one way or another.’
After the debacle at the Gathering and King Ravn’s subsequent escape, it had proved quite difficult to persuade the Lord of Forent to hand over to them the rest of the money, even though, as Mam had pointed out in no uncertain terms, they had kept their side of the bargain by delivering the King, and it was his and Varyx’s stupid fault that Ravn had got away from them. Rui had been less than impressed at the ease with which Mam had switched sides when the odds had shifted but when it looked as if a rumpus might ensue he’d paid up, albeit with ill grace. It had come as something of a surprise to be offered a new commission from the Lord of Forent: but work was work, and not so plentiful that they could afford to turn a job away.
The two sell-swords stared morosely over the side at the endless procession of grey rollers and contemplated their ill-fortune. But while Mam inwardly cursed her tardiness and lack of foresight in the matter of abducting the shipmaker, Knobber found himself wishing he was back on the little island a day’s sail east of the Galian Isles on which he had once fortuitously been washed up – the result of no shipwreck this, but an unfortunate altercation with some Circesian pirates – where the sun had shone day in and day out, and the light striking down through the gentle inshore waves was the identical cloudy, opalescent green of a stone pendant he had once scavenged from a mortally wounded southern warrior in a small skirmish in the foothills of the Golden Mountains when they’d found themselves caught on the losing side and had quickly switched allegiance. He’d put the thing around his neck and given its owner a quicker death than he deserved and thus regarded the stone as a good-luck charm, a symbol of his personal survival, though sometimes when he took it off and studied it he could swear that it appeared to change colour. He had lain on that painful, glorious, shining beach of crushed white seashells, with the sun beating down on his back, drying his shirt into stiff, salty folds, and stared into that softly polished stone as it shifted from grey to aqua-green in front of his eyes just like the flow of a sea, or the tide of his life— He was blasted out of this gentle memory as a particularly large wave struck the ship such a hard broadside blow that the timbers creaked and a bone-shaking rattle shuddered through the vessel’s frame and transferred itself deep down into his poor mortal bones.
‘Sur! Give an Istrian captain an honest, Eyran-made craft and he’ll still do his damnedest to sink it. Don’t they have the least understanding of seamanship? It’s a miracle we’ve not capsized a dozen times already. If we were closer to land, I’d drown the blasted man myself and take the helm!’
Another wave hit them hard. Mam groaned. Then she grabbed the gunwale and heaved desperately over it once again.
‘Whoo, that was a big one! Rough, isn’t it?’
A small, round man had appeared at Knobber’s elbow, grinning from ear to ear. His cropped piebald hair stood up in stiff little peaks – partly from an accumulation of airborne brine, partly because it had not seen clean water for – well, Knobber couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Dogbreath bathe any part of his anatomy, let alone anything so frivolous as his hair. Dogo claimed that washing took off a much-needed layer of skin: and since there was so little of him in the first place he could hardly risk losing any more.
‘What’s the matter, Mam? Something you ate? Was it the hogfish last night – that smelled a bit off to me – or that rather ripe crab soup this morning?’
The sound of retching reached a crescendo, became more productive, then ceased abruptly. Mam shot upright, grabbed the little man by the throat in a single fluid movement and hoisted him until his feet dangled.
‘Why don’t you go and play in the rigging, Dogbreath?’ A shake accompanied each word. ‘Keep out of my way and don’t mention food in my presence, or you’ll find yourself making close acquaintance with the keel!’
When she put him down again, Dogo dodged swiftly behind Knobber. ‘Joz sent me to get you,’ he rasped, rubbing his sore neck. ‘Bird’s arrived from Forent.’
‘Damn me.’ Knobber made a superstitious sign. ‘How in seven hells do those pigeons find a single boat in the middle of a bloody ocean?’
‘I get paid to fight and steal; not fill my head with arcane knowledge. That’s Doc’s province. Why don’t you go ask him? Myself, I think we’d better go and find out the worst. I knew we should have throttled that sneaky bastard pigeon Lazlo claimed was his pet bird before he got the chance to send word of our little disaster to Rui Finco. Pet bird, I ask you. Whoever had a pet bird on board a ship? Get roasted the second day, it would, on any boat of mine—’
‘Sur did,’ Dogo interrupted.
‘What?’
‘Sur had his raven, came everywhere with him.’
Mam fixed the little man with a grim stare. ‘Shut up,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘Get ready to threaten that little weasel of a captain if it sounds bad. He’s got the balls of a mouse, that one: he’ll tell tales on us as soon as blink.’
‘I could spit him for you, Mam,’ Dogbreath added cheerfully, from the safe shelter afforded by Knobber’s broad back. ‘I could run him right through the gizzard and be away so fast he’d think a fly had bit him!’
‘Likely that’ll be the way your women feel when you’ve bedded them, little man.’ The troop leader adopted a bewildered, mimsy air and a gratingly high-pitched voice: ‘Ooh my, was that a tiny wee gnat gnawing on my privy parts, or have I just been visited by the mighty Dogo?’ Mam leered at the little man. ‘Don’t spit Lazlo, you numskull: he’s steering the ship: I just want him threatened, and that only if we have to. Let’s cross the bridge before we cut the ropes, eh?’
The pigeon had now made itself comfortable on the rakki above the wide sweep of the sail and was refusing to come down.
Two of the mercenaries – Joz and Doc – and a motley group of sailors from half a dozen Istrian provinces had gathered in a little knot at the foot of the mast and were gazing upwards. In their midst, a short, worried-looking man in expensively tooled leather was directing a thin, dark child from the Empire’s southern mountains, a boy they referred to as ‘the Monkey’, for his climbing skills, and for the legendary creature of the Far West, to shin up the mast to fetch the pigeon down and the boy was protesting, sensibly enough, to Mam’s mind, that as soon as he got within a body-length of the bird, the thing would take fright and fly off elsewhere, maybe to another ship entirely. And then where would they be? For this, Monkey received a sharp clip around the ear and a stream of abuse from the captain.
Joz Bearhand sighed and shook his head. These people had a tendency towards histrionics and impracticality that he found extremely irritating. He took a couple of steps backwards, reached around behind him, took aim. A moment later, the bird fell to the deck, twitching. In the middle of the stunned silence that followed, Joz retrieved the pebble (one of his favourites – a seawashed round of white quartz he’d taken from a beach in the Fair Isles), put it back in his pouch along with the catapult, pick up the limp form of the pigeon, untied the message scrip from its leg and handed it to Mam.
She unwound it carefully and started to read its odd combination of dots and dashes.
‘That message is for me!’
The Istrian captain came at her furiously with his hand extended, palm up, fingers flicking imperiously.
Mam gave him her ghastliest smile, making sure every single one of her pointed teeth were visible to him.
Imagine what it would be like if I were to bite you
, that look said.
Imagine what it would feel like if I bit you, down there . . .
Then she handed the scrip to him with a nonchalance that spoke volumes. Joz caught Doc’s eye and was rewarded with a wink. Dogo looked disappointed: he’d been looking forward to showing his little blade to the man.
The mercenaries melted away, to regroup up by the stempost. ‘So?’ Knobber asked impatiently. ‘What did it say?’
‘Sadly it seems the captain’s last bird didn’t make it through,’ Mam grinned. ‘The Lord of Forent is most displeased with the lack of information he’s received thus far and is demanding news of the whereabouts of the shipmaker by return.’
Joz grinned. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said laconically. ‘He won’t be making old Lazlo very happy when we get back and he’s still received no word of Danson.’
Lazlo, the captain, appeared to be rather unhappy already.
Mam looked suddenly and unaccountably delighted. ‘We may not get our pay for this one, but for my part I’m really quite looking forward to seeing his lordship’s face when I tell him his precious shipmaker’s been kidnapped by the Rockfall clan!’
Joz and Knobber exchanged glances. Here was an unexpected snippet of news. There were times when they suspected that the way Mam managed them so efficiently was by withholding crucial information from them. After all, as she kept pointing out, knowledge was power, and somehow she always seemed to have more knowledge than the rest of them.
Erno rose before the dawn, every muscle stiff with the anticipation of what he must do that day. He ducked out into the grey light of a world balanced precariously between night and day and as quietly as he could, given the crunching of the pebbles under his boots, made his way across the little shingle beach and down to the water’s edge. It was a chilly morning. In it he could sense the leading edge of winter: something he had never previously experienced in the southern continent. It would be a lot milder here than it was at home, he mused, watching his breath ghosting out into the air. They probably had no snow at all in this area; even sleet would melt away as soon as it touched ground that had been charmed by the sun all summer long. Whereas in the Westman Islands the snow came down in flurries, tumbling out of the sky in a great swirling chaos as if Sur himself had upended a gigantic sack of eider feathers all over the world, and settled itself determinedly across the land for a whole season at a time. As a child, fostered by Aran Aranson at Rockfall, Erno would be the first to rise in the mornings before any of the rest of the household were stirring, always knowing with some inexplicable primal instinct when snow was in the air. He loved to stand out in the enclosure with his face turned up to meet those first spiralling flakes, to feel them brush the warm skin of his cheeks and gather like moths on his hair and cloak. Winter was when Rockfall was at its most beautiful, when snow covered the fields and the uplands in a perfect, clean, enveloping swathe of white that shimmered and sparkled in the early light and ice bound both land and water, turning lakes and ponds and even the fringes of the coastal sea into a churned, wrinkled, translucent solid that would bear the weight of gulls and geese and seals and even, if you were lucky, the weight of a boy moving quickly on long wooden shoes bound with hide and greased with walrus-oil. The purity of a Rockfall winter had never ceased to amaze him, even living with it as he did every day, surrounded by others who complained about the bitter cold and the smoky hall and the dried meat and salted fish that became their sole diet in those hard months and spun yearning tales around the fire at night of lands where the sun shone constantly, things called pomegranates grew on trees and the wheat came as high as your shoulder. But for Erno, nothing could match the sight of the sky above the Blue Peak as the sun set on a Last-Moon afternoon: how it gave way from a luminous pale blue that mirrored back the white of the snow at the crest of the mountain to the delicate purple of budding heather and thence to a rose-pink so fragile that the bowl of the sky looked as though it might shatter like an ice skin if even the smallest bird flew across it. Once, feeling foolhardy, but driven by some inner compulsion he could not name, he had climbed up onto the slopes of the Blue Peak just as the sun was finally dipping out of sight, even though he had known he would have to make the long, dangerous descent in the dark. Seated on a granite boulder, as close to the top of the world as he had ever been in his life, he had taken out one of the skeins of twine he carried with him for such purposes and tied into it the knots that would forever remind him how smoky trails of scarlet streaked the blue sky; how the low bank of cloud that hung over the western end of the island was limned with a deep, firecrest gold; how plumes of vapour from the hot springs below him had streamed out across the frozen peat-hags and ancient, laval outcrops like the spirits of the island, released into the darkening air.