Authors: Jude Fisher
‘Yes, son, that’s King Ravn all right.’
‘He doesn’t look much of a king. Do they have no pride, these northerners, that they have their king wear the same old clothes they wear themselves: no crown, no chain of office – no cloak, even?’
Uncle Fabel laughed. ‘They set less store by trinkets, lad, that’s true; but he’s a kingly enough man, Ravn Asharson, as you’ll see. A striking fellow, and taller than most.’
Two men were hauling aloft the great steering oar at the stern as the lead ship came into the shallow waters of the Moonfell Bay. Others took down the sail, but no one made a move to take down the fearsome stempost, with its gaping dragon’s head. A deliberate insult, Saro wondered, or an oversight? His thoughts were interrupted by his brother’s insistent voice:
‘Why do they not ship their oars?’ asked Tanto. ‘They can surely come in no closer now.’
The answer came sooner than they had expected. The wiry-looking man in the stern whom Uncle Fabel had identified as the northern king now sprang lightly up onto the gunwale before the tiller and with a single word of command to his men ran down the length of the ship jumping nimbly from oar to oar until he had run all twenty on the steerboard side, his feet sure and true on each slippery rounded shaft. The crew of the raven-ship cheered and stamped at this feat of skill; but when their king reached the last oar, instead of stepping back over the side and down onto the deck, Ravn gave his men a wide grin, then skipped back onto the gunwale, and from there ran up the mighty stempost and vaulted powerfully from the top, legs and arms cartwheeling.
It was an enormous leap. Almost it was enough to take him to dry land. Almost but not quite: he landed in the shallows with a loud splash, in the process drenching the elderly Dystra brothers, and all those around them, with a huge white plume of water, and rose, shaking himself like a dog, laughing all the time as if at some hugely enjoyable joke.
From beside Saro there came a shriek of rage. He looked around, the spell of this strange landing broken. Tanto was hopping up and down, his face red and furious, his hands making small, ineffectual rubbing motions on the rich purple drapery of his tunic. ‘Ruined! By the bitch: it’s ruined! You can’t get salt stains out of silk velvet, everyone knows that. The bastard. He did that on purpose! Now what will I wear when we see Lord Tycho? I have nothing in my store that will not make me look a pauper, and an embarrassment to our family.’
It will surely not be your clothes that have that effect
, Saro thought drily. Meanwhile, Fabel and Favio, both equally dampened by the arrival of King Ravn, but smiling indulgently at one of Tanto’s familiar, if profane, outbursts of temper, each took one of his arms and pulled him away. ‘No point in shouting about it, lad,’ Uncle Fabel was saying. ‘We came for a bit of spectacle, and you can’t complain too bitterly if it comes a little close sometimes. Tunic’s an easy thing to replace, but you’ll not forget the experience in a while, eh?’
He caught Saro’s eye over the top of Tanto’s furious head and winked.
Saro, surprised, grinned back.
That was more like it, thought Katla, contemplating the world from behind the boards of her stall: a bit of entertainment to enliven the Fair, and from their own king, of all people. By the time she’d trailed back to the Eyran quarter in which their tents and stalls were situated, everyone had been joking about it – that old running-the-oars-trick; the sort of thing drunken seamen did late at night when the ale ran out, to impress the women or to win a bet, though she doubted many would have the grace of Ravn Asharson. She could see – almost – why poor Jenna had gone weak at the knees for him. And the drenching of the richly-dressed Istrians had not gone amiss, either. She’d been surprised at the level of ill-feeling towards the southerners that appeared to underlie the normal courtesies of the Eyrans. It was apparent in the knowing looks, in the roars of laughter; in their eyes, in their secret delight at the wicked provocation of the erect stempost. Perhaps Fent was right, after all: perhaps hostilities were never far away. She’d heard him and Tor ranting on about the enmities shared between the two countries; heard the complaints of land stolen and ancient massacres; the older men’s war stories, though her father said little on the subject. There had been peace all her life: it was hard to share the bitterness.
Ironic, she thought, to be laying out weaponry. But the pieces she had brought were such beautiful things! More like art, or jewellery, really, than the instruments of death and wounding. And indeed, when she was hammering the iron bars and folding the hot metal back on itself again and again, watching the fire turn it first to pulsing red and then to smoking white; when it cooled to sooty black and she could just make out the steely edges; when she polished it with the strop and watched the tiny bits of slag drop away; when she doused it and heated it and polished it again, with wood, then wire-wool and at last the sheepskin mitt; when she saw the secret patterns weaving their way across the metal as if they had always been there, under the surface, just waiting to be discovered by the hand which best knew the enchantment over iron; all she thought of was beauty, and balance, and a job well done – never of the killing thrust or the way a spearhead’s barbs would hold fast in their target. Never that.
Unwrapping another piece from its protective waxed covering, she smoothed her hand down the length of its gently tapering blade. It really was fine work.
‘A beautiful piece.’
Katla jumped, but it was only Tor.
‘You startled me. What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be earning your keep elsewhere?’
In response, Tor shrugged a shoulder. He bent to the stall and ran his hands over the sword she had just unwrapped. ‘Pretty thing, very pretty.’ His fingers traced the patterns the overwelding had made in the metal. She watched them, wordless. His fingers were long, the tips broad and blunt; the knuckles covered with little coils of hair of a bright silvery-gold. ‘Just like snakes, or tiny dragons, see: they swim the length of the blade ready to give their victim a nasty dose of venom.’ He laughed, and with a single fluid motion, hefted the blade above his head and brought it swishing down to within an inch of Katla’s head, but she stared him straight in the eye, determined not to flinch. His mouth quirked in what might have been fleeting disappointment at such a lack of reaction; then, still maintaining eye contact, he lowered the sword and ran his thumb down one of the edges. As the blood began to well, he gave her a feral grin. Katla found abruptly that she could not hold his gaze. Looking down, she watched the thin line of crimson flare across the ball of his thumb.
‘Quite an edge on it,’ he said approvingly. ‘Take a man’s leg off nicely, I’d say.’
She raised an eyebrow.
‘You sound as if you have someone in mind.’
‘I might.’ He held the bleeding thumb out to her, leering. ‘Kiss it better, won’t you, Katla?’
Disgusted, she pushed his hand away.
‘They say if a virgin tastes a man’s blood, she’ll be bonded to him forever.’
‘Oh they do, do they?’
‘Aye.’ He laid the sword down with exaggerated care, then quickly turned and caught her by the chin. Furious, Katla sprang back, her eyes flashing, but Tor hung on, his fingers clenching on her jaw, trying to angle his head for a kiss.
When she dropped her head for a moment as if in defeat, Tor closed upon her. Under her spiky new fringe, Katla smiled wickedly. He obviously hadn’t been paying too much attention to her wrestling bouts. She brought her head up sharply and dealt him a hard crack on the chin.
‘Ow!’
His hands flew to his mouth. Blood was spurting from a split lip where he appeared to have bitten himself.
‘Looks as if you’ve bonded with yourself there, Tor. Never mind; they say there’s no better love than to love oneself, and I’m sure you’ve already had plenty of practice at that.’
Tor wiped his hand across his face, smearing blood grotesquely into his beard, then stalked off between the booths, Katla’s laughter ringing in his ears.
How his brother could possibly claim to have ‘nothing to wear’, Saro could not imagine, standing in front of the enormous carved wardrobe the slaves had erected in Tanto’s tent. He had never seen so many rich clothes – tunics and cloaks in fabulous brocades and plush in every colour of the rainbow; trimmed with silver; with copper wire; fine linen undershirts, soft leather boots in a dozen different styles; even a pair of jewel-encrusted slippers in what some exploitative Ceran designer had dubbed to be just like those worn by the lords of the Far West (though since no living man had set foot in that legendary land, let alone some fat merchant who could barely even walk up a flight of stairs, it was hard to see how anyone could have come by such arcane knowledge) and were now all the rage throughout the richer Istrian social circles. Personally, Saro thought they looked ridiculous, with their restrictively narrow toes and uncomfortable concretions of gems – it would surely be like wearing some gaudy crustacean on your foot – a cooked lobster, maybe, or a spidercrab.
Still, these slippers, plus a cerise tunic studded with pearls, a pale-green shift and a pair of pink hose, were what he had been sent to salvage, once his brother had calmed down enough to despatch him imperiously on this errand. Saro tossed the clothes down onto a goose-down quilt with disgust. Clearly, Tanto had no intention of helping with the horses today.
There was a short burst of swearing outside the tent and the sound of skin striking skin: clearly a slave had inadvertently stepped in Tanto’s path, and then:
‘Idiot boy: you’d think he’d gone blind in his other eye for all the care he was taking . . . Ah, excellent, brother: not quite as fine as the purple, but it’ll have to do. Now help me out of these stinking rags: I am determined to make the best possible impression.’
Tanto tore at the wet tunic, ripping the fine lace at its neck in his haste to be rid of it. Twenty-five minutes later, after much prinking and preening and poor Saro running around to find warm lavender-scented water and the right jewellery, Tanto stood ready.
Saro surveyed him with ill-disguised amazement: did he really want to look like a stuffed flamingo in front of his future wife?
‘Should make a fine impact, eh, brother?’ said Tanto, seeing Saro’s slack-jawed expression.
‘Ah, yes, indeed. Not one she’ll forget in some time, I’d say.’
‘She? What do I care what the girl thinks? It’s her father I want to impress, not some silly trollop.’
‘Are you ready, son? We should be on our way.’
Tanto strode confidently out of the tent. If Favio thought his appearance a little unusual, he said nothing; but the one-eyed slaveboy who accompanied him gawped like a simpleton and almost dropped the pannier he was carrying.
Lord Tycho’s pavilion was as far from the Eyran quarter as it was possible to be; clearly his people had arrived early at the Moonfell Plain with strict instructions, and had established the great tents on a grassy rise that gave a fine view of the fairground, and of the shining sea beyond. Here, too, the air was a little fresher; even a little cooler: down amongst the stalls and stock pens the midday sun had made for stifling conditions. None of this had improved Tanto’s mood, which had been blackening steadily ever since they had set out. First of all, an Eyran urchin in a stained leather tunic and carrying an armful of knives had laughed openly at his appearance, and had called out to a rather plump girl with a towel wrapped about her head to come and see what the mummers were wearing this year; then a thin blond man with plaits in his hair and beard had run past them and stared at Tanto so hard he had run into a group of mercenaries and fallen over; they in turn had pointed and guffawed, and a small fat one had run along behind them for a while, aping Tanto’s stiff-backed stalk; then, to crown it all, Tanto had lost one of the stupid slippers in the loose sand while they walked up the slope to Lord Tycho’s tent, and Saro had had to scrabble around on his knees to retrieve it for him and when he had tried to refit the thing, Tanto had merely stuck his foot out, all resistant and obstructive like a spoiled brat. By the time they reached the pavilion, Tanto was scowling and silent: never the best of signs.
A slave in perfect white linen with the Lord of Cantara’s mark on his cheek stepped smartly out of the shade of the pavilion’s awning and ushered them wordlessly inside. Within, it was silky-cool. Two more slaves stood unobtrusively to the sides of the main room, wafting great fans; while an ingenious flap in the top of the pavilion had been opened to allow both the through-flow of air and a shaft of bright sunlight, which fell, as though by intent or supernatural power, upon the Lord of Cantara himself: a neat man of middle-height with darkly burnished skin, a hooked nose, and an impeccably understated style of dress.
‘Welcome, my lords Vingo,’ he said, bowing politely to each of them in turn. Tanto nodded back with the barest minimum of courtesy, and hurled himself down onto the nearest cushion-strewn bench, legs splayed wide.
Saro waited to see what the Cantaran lord’s reaction to his bizarrely dressed and ill-mannered brother would be, but if Tycho Issian noticed anything out of the ordinary in Tanto’s behaviour or appearance, he gave no sign of it.
There followed niceties of small conversation and the serving of several goblets of attar-flavoured araque, which Tanto and Uncle Fabel took straight, and which tasted sumptuous and powerful, though like nothing Saro had ever previously encountered. He noticed, however, that Lord Tycho watered his serving down almost to nothing and, having seen this, Saro placed his own glass down on the table, hardly touched.
At last, Favio said, ‘We have considered the terms we would wish to offer, my lord, for this excellent match. To keep such matters plain and above board, my scribe has made a note of them for your scrutiny,’ and handed the Lord of Cantara an extravagantly ribboned scroll.
Tycho pulled the bindings apart with long, careful fingers, unrolled the scroll slowly and cast his eyes down the thick black figurings within. ‘Twenty thousand: very generous; and the bloodstock, too. Also the fort and lands at Altea, in exchange for the castle at Virrey. An interesting location, if a little . . . remote . . .’ He perused the rest of the document silently, his sharp eyes flicking across the complex marks and columns. Then looked up. ‘There’s no mention here of the land bordering the Golden River at Felin’s Bluff,’ he said softly.