Authors: Jude Fisher
‘You monster!’
Freed from his brother’s touch, Saro had backed himself against the wall, out of reach of grasping hands. His chest heaved. His face was flushed. He felt contaminated by what he had just been witness to: he felt filthy. He had been aware of enough of Tanto’s less-than-praiseworthy characteristics prior to this point: had seen with his own eyes the slyness, the cheating, the lying, the random cruelty to the villa’s cats and dogs, his deliberate roughness with the horses; the way he hit the servants, once to the point of rendering poor little Deno blind in one eye. And he had heard Tanto brag about his escapades with women, but had closed his ears to such claims, dismissing them as at best unlikely and empty boasting and at worst as his brother’s fantasies as to what he would like to do to them, had he the opportunity. To know the full extent of Tanto’s depravity was nauseating.
In response, Tanto just grinned. He pointed below Saro’s waist.
‘Not such a milksop, after all, I see. Perhaps I may call you “brother” after all.’
Saro stared down and was horrified to find that his body, possessed by Tanto’s wicked thoughts, had betrayed him, for his tunic was tented out by the stiffness of his own erection.
With a cry of despair, he hurled himself from the room and out into the harsh light of the courtyard.
Tanto listened with malicious satisfaction as his brother threw up noisily into the marigolds outside the window.
That will teach him
, he thought.
If he thinks he’s so perfect and I’m so unnatural
.
The sound of retching continued unabated. Tanto Vingo threw back the counterpane and swung his great, soft legs over the side of the bed. He put his weight on them gingerly, then levered himself upright. The tiling was cold beneath the soles of his feet. Taking up the washcloths that Saro had discarded, he scraped the worst of the waste he had made off his own skin and onto the sheet and wiped himself down as best he could, grimacing at the smell and the stickiness of it all. Then, sweating and trembling with the effort, he staggered over to the window and peered out. There was Saro on the other side of the courtyard, leaning against the wall. Every line of his body spoke of defeat and despair: his shoulders were slumped, his head hung down, his hands were splayed against the sun-warmed stone as if they were the only things keeping him upright.
Tanto smiled to himself. It had been a most satisfying morning so far: the best he could remember in months. To have engineered the situation of having his father order that Saro attend him through all the worst aspects of his sick state had been delicious in itself, but this new development was finer than he could ever have dreamed of: for now he would be able to drive Saro insane through a bond of fear and torture, rather than simply through the daily horrors of cleaning up after him and tending to his every need and whim. Of course, he could require Saro to carry out all those pleasant small tasks as well. With very little trouble on his own part (which was how he liked it) he could ensure that his brother’s life became an utter misery; and by the time he went away to be a soldier – a soldier! the very idea of Saro attempting to lead a troop to battle, to wield a weapon in anger at all was wonderfully absurd – he would be as mad and loagy as a late-summer wasp, all its sting drawn and its understanding of the world a bleary miasma. He’d die in the first engagement: probably fall on his own sword, and thank the Goddess for it!
Making sure that his brother was not yet coming towards the house, Tanto slipped back to the bed and withdrew from beneath the pile of cushions there the belt-knife he had the previous day stolen – with his own hands – from Saro’s room. It would not do to have Illustria find it when she came to look in on him: it served his purposes well to have everyone continue to regard him as the bed-confined weakling they believed him to be. The knife weighed heavily in his hand. Making the bruise on his chest with its pommel had hurt considerably at the time, but the investment had paid off far more handsomely than he’d expected.
Being able to wound Saro’s mind was so very satisfying that it outweighed by far the discomfort sustained in hurting his own body.
He edged over to door and stuck his head outside. No one was in sight. Father and Uncle Fabel would most likely be engaged in the morning’s observances, kneeling on their prayer mats like the superstitious fools they were; the women – well, they would hardly dare report his movements even if they spied him: they had learned to their cost what was likely to happen to them if they crossed his will. Using the wall to keep himself upright, he made his way down the corridor with remarkable speed for an invalid; and took the stairs on his hands and knees like a gigantic cockroach.
It had been, Saro thought, as the sun dipped in the west, the worst day of his life, and that was truly saying something. After returning to his brother’s room to clear away the filth from the bed, he had changed the sheets and been forced to wash them by hand; and while the servants brought Tanto fresh linen and a breakfast fit for a lord,
he
was sent out to the practice field with one of yesterday’s loaves and whatever fruit he could find on the way, and was there beaten black and blue on every part of his anatomy, ostensibly for his slowness and clumsiness by Captain Galo Bastido. ‘The Bastard’, as the captain was colloquially known by the young men he had flogged and beaten into some semblance of swordsmanship, was during time of war the leading officer of Altea’s standing army; but currently, during what still purported to be peacetime, even with the threat of conflict hanging heavy overhead like those anvil-shaped clouds which concealed the makings of storms within them, he held merely the position of overseer for the Vingo estates, and was responsible for managing the family’s work-force of hillmen and slaves in their lowly tasks around the fields and groves. Another man (Santio Casta) held the more highly regarded position of estate manager, and it was to Casta that he was forced to report (which he saw as a great slight, since Casta had been one of his subordinates in the last conflict with the North). None of this had made Bastido a pleasant man, and that without his natural tendency towards physical and mental brutality, his arrogance and boar-thick skin, all of which had served him well in his soldiering career. The demeaning task of working the land with slaves and riff-raff who barely spoke any Istrian but grunted away in their own incomprehensible languages had further engendered in him a complete disregard for the sensibility of others; except when they were clearly in pain. A sharp yelp, a low groan, watering eyes and an agonised grimace – these were the sort of responses he understood, and causing them in the course of teaching a skill seemed to produce quick and effective results.
Being asked to turn his rough attentions to his master’s second and least favoured son appeared to have cheered him considerably, for whenever Saro fell face down in exhaustion or at the brunt of the Bastard’s huge training sword, he would bellow with laughter.
‘“Treat him hard” your father said to me,’ Bastido had informed Saro cheerfully, standing over him after flooring him for the third time that morning. Despite being half a head shorter than Saro, he was a good twice his width and sinewy as dried mutton. ‘“He’s lazy and unwilling and shows little aptitude with a blade. Make a man of him” he said, “a soldier the Vingos can be proud of” – and that’s exactly what I’m being paid to do.’
So now, with every inch of his skin, as it seemed, raw with grazes and cuts, every fibre of every muscle throbbing with bruises, Saro dragged his feet back up the stairs to his chamber, aware that once he fell upon his bed he would likely fall into a sleep so welcome and so deep that he would probably never make it back down again to the kitchens in time for any hot food, and that if he did not, he stood less chance than ever of withstanding the Bastard’s tender mercies the next day. But at the moment he could not find an iota of energy or will in himself to do anything more than collapse in the privacy of his own chamber. He was no more heedful than a beaten cur, no more intelligent than a mauled wolf, returning to its den. Tomorrow was tomorrow. With luck he might not live that long.
He shouldered open the heavy wooden door, fell inwards with it and staggered in. He managed to kick off his boots and begin to struggle out of his dusty tunic. Arms and head still wrapped in its neck and sleeves, he fell backwards onto the bed. His exhausted brain registered the existence of something cold and hard beneath the aching muscles of his back. Rolling over, he stripped the swaddling tunic away and cast it onto the bedside chair. His right hand closed over a familiar object. He retrieved it from beneath himself and held it up. In the dying light of the day, he found he held his own belt-knife, which he had been unable to find that very morning. Its hilt was shit-smeared and foul.
With a shudder of repulsion he dropped it on the floor, where it lay, shining dully, its blade as red with the sunset as if it had been freshly dipped in blood.
And he knew, with a sudden fierce, instinctive knowledge, just where it had been in the time it had been absent from him, and how it had returned here.
He slept no more that night.
Five
The King’s Shipmaker
They slept that first night in the King’s city in the loft above a fletcher’s with whom the mercenaries had business. When Katla asked what this business might entail, Dogo had pulled an idiot face and girned at her horribly and Halli had shaken his head. So Katla had desisted from asking more until she and Halli had parted from the sell-swords the next morning and they were on their way to Morten Danson’s shipyard to carry to him Tam’s ‘royal’ invitation to the mumming – no common knotted string this, but a fine parchment of goatskin inscribed with fish-ink in Tam’s careful hand. For authenticity, Katla had donned a quartered tunic in green and red borrowed for this very purpose before they had left the ship from Silva Lighthand, one of the tumblers; and Halli was looking most uncomfortable crammed into a ridiculous suit of gold and green, its garishness partly mitigated by an all-encompassing cloak in sober grey on which the Snowland Wolf and its serpent enemy were picked out in neatly stitched red silk. Surprised though she had been by his skill in writing, Katla had been rather more amazed to discover that Tam Fox had sewn this piece himself. It was hard to think of those great, hairy hands engaged in anything much beyond wielding knives, hauling sail or squeezing women, let alone something so delicate, or so traditionally feminine, as embroidery, but the leader of the mummers had been unconcerned when she had laughed at him. ‘Mumming’s not all fun and games,’ he had said. ‘You’re on the road all the time. It can get very boring, especially when some pretty lordling’s decided to keep you waiting for a day or three while he hunts some mythical dragon or swives his latest piece to death. Besides, we can’t afford to keep a seamstress, a cook or a laundress, so we all have to muck in. We make and maintain all our own costumes, men and women alike: my troupe need to be as proficient with a needle as they are with batons, balls and knives.’ And Katla had to admit the workmanship on the clothes they had borrowed far exceeded her own. If she had to produce her own costumes, the audience would be entertained by rather more than they had bargained for, she thought wryly.
The first half hour of the walk through Halbo city had been an entertainment in itself for Katla. She could not help but exclaim at every turn –
Look, brother, windows with glass!
–
See that woman, her hair is purple! Oh, ’tis a headdress! – What sort of person lives in such a house? – Why are there bars on the door and spikes on the wall? – What are those marks there like burned tar? Oh, they are burned tar. From the war? – But why would an Eyran lord fight his king? A woman? Surely not
– and so on, until Halli had threatened to knock her cold and leave her in a ditch for the next beggar to find. Then, nearing the outskirts of the city, they had witnessed a veritable cavalcade trotting smartly towards them: mounted men in fine cloaks and shining helms, their long hair braided and their beards knotted with brightly coloured fabric, pennants fluttering from spears that gleamed as if they had never been put to any other use; women peering out of covered wagons pulled by the sturdy ponies of the Northern Isles whose manes and plaited tails had been all threaded through with ribbons. One of the wagons, bearing a group of giggling girls combing out each other’s long hair, passed so close to Katla and Halli that they were forced to leap out of the way; but when Katla leapt back, shouting furiously and waving her fists, Halli grabbed her by the arm.
‘Don’t!’
She stared at him incredulously. ‘They could have killed us—’ She stopped. Halli’s face was pale and strained, his eyes dark with some unreadable emotion. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
But he just shook his head and started walking again, head down, wrapped in grim thought and Tam’s fine cloak, and said not a word more all the way to the shipyard.
Morten Danson’s yard lay encircled by the arms of a wide lagoon, beyond which the hills of the firth rose into the wide blue sky. Once, this vista must have been one of the most beautiful in the Northern Isles, for the land would have been forested as far as the eye could see with native oak, ash and pine, and the waters of the firth would have mirrored in its clear surface a dozen shades of green, the dark, serrated mountain peaks, the high white clouds scudding across bright northern skies. Now not even tree-stumps were visible in this place, for the forests had been replaced in the shorn uplands by a dense tangle of bracken and bramble and bilberry or by blackened mats of burned roots, producing a forlorn-looking landscape that was of little use to man or beast. Down on the river plain, ramshackle buildings had colonised the open areas – sheds of weathered planking with rusting tin roofs, structures of stone and turf, log cabins and warehouses, temporary shelters made from hide and poles – a miserable-looking shanty town. The hulls of a hundred vessels in various stages of completion lay amid all this chaos, their staves and stems poking up into the air like the skeletons of butchered whales. It looked, Katla thought, as if a great sea battle had been fought here millennia since and the waters had retreated, leaving in their wake the carcasses of the slain as a warning to others.