Half the World

‘Inauspicious,’ she grunted, peering up at the wheeling gulls. ‘Add to all that my unchallenged expertise in …’ she gave a suggestive wiggling of the hips, ‘the romantic arts and you can see, my doves, there are few areas of interest to the modern girl in which I am not richly qualified to instruct your daughter.’

Thorn should have enjoyed the rare sight of her mother rendered speechless, but was, for once, speechless herself.

‘Thorn Bathu!’ Rulf shouldered his way through the bustle. ‘You’re late! Get your skinny arse down the wharf and start shifting those sacks. Your friend Brand has already …’ He swallowed. ‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’

Thorn sourly worked her tongue. ‘Mother.’

‘Surely not!’ Rulf combed at his beard with his fingers in a vain attempt to tame the brown-and-grey tangle. ‘If you can suffer a compliment from a plain old fighting man, your beauty lights these docks up like a lamp at twilight.’ He glanced at the silver key on her chest. ‘Your husband must be—’

Thorn’s mother could suffer the compliment. Indeed she clutched it with both hands. ‘Dead,’ she said quickly. ‘Eight years, now, since we howed him up.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’ Though Rulf sounded, in fact, anything but sorry. ‘I’m Rulf, helmsman of the South Wind. The crew may seem rough but I’ve learned never to trust a smooth one. I picked these men and each knows his business. Thorn’ll be rowing right beneath my beard and I’ll treat her with just as soft a heart and firm a hand as I would my own daughter.’

Thorn rolled her eyes, but it was wasted effort. ‘You have children?’ her mother asked.

‘Two sons, but it’s years since I saw them. The gods parted me from my family for too long.’

‘Any chance they could part you from mine?’ grunted Thorn.

‘Shush,’ hissed her mother, without taking her eyes from Rulf, and the thick-linked golden chain he wore in particular. ‘It will be a great comfort to know that a man of your quality looks to my daughter’s welfare. Prickly though she may be, Hild is all I have.’

A lot of strong wind and no doubt not a little strong ale had rendered Rulf ruddy about the cheeks already, but Thorn thought she saw him blush even so. ‘As for being a man of quality you’ll find many to disagree, but as to looking to your daughter’s welfare I promise to do my best.’

Thorn’s mother flashed a simpering smile. ‘What else can any of us promise?’

‘Gods,’ hissed Thorn, turning away. The one thing she hated worse than being fussed over was being ignored.

Brinyolf the Prayer-Weaver had wrought murder on some unwitting animal and was daubing its blood on the South Wind’s prow-beast, red to the wrists as he wailed out a blessing to Mother Sea and She Who Finds the Course and He Who Steers the Arrow and a dozen other small gods whose names Thorn had never even heard before. She’d never been much for prayers and had her doubts the weather was that interested in them either.

‘How does a girl end up on a fighting crew?’

She turned to see a young lad had stolen up on her. Thorn judged him maybe fourteen years, slight, with a bright eye and a twitchy quickness to him, a mop of sandy hair and the first hints of beard on his sharp jaw.

She frowned back. ‘You saying I shouldn’t be?’

‘Not up to me who gets picked.’ He shrugged, neither scared nor scornful. ‘I’m just asking how you did.’

‘Leave her be!’ A small, lean woman gave the lad a neat cuff around the ear. ‘Didn’t I tell you to make yourself useful?’ Some bronze weights swung on a cord around her neck while she herded him off towards the South Wind, which made her a merchant, or a storekeeper, trusted to measure fairly.

‘I’m Safrit,’ she said, planting her hands on her hips. ‘The lad with all the questions is my son Koll. He’s yet to realize that the more you learn the more you understand the size of your own ignorance. He means no harm.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Thorn, ‘but I seem to cause a lot even so.’

Safrit grinned. ‘It’s a habit with some of us. I’m along to mind the stores, and cook, and watch the cargo. Fingers off, understand?’

‘I thought we were aiming to win friends for Gettland? We’re carrying cargo too?’

‘Furs and tree-tears and walrus ivory among … other things.’ Safrit frowned towards an iron-shod chest chained up near the mast. ‘Our first mission is to talk for Father Peace but Queen Laithlin paid for this expedition.’

‘Ha! And there’s a woman who never in her life missed out on a profit!’

‘Why would I?’

Thorn turned again to find herself looking straight into the queen’s face at a distance of no more than a stride. Some folk are more impressive from far off but Laithlin was the opposite, as radiant as Mother Sun and stern as Mother War, the great key to the treasury shining on her chest, her thralls and guards and servants in a disapproving press behind her.

‘Oh, gods … I mean, forgive me, my queen.’ Thorn wobbled down to one knee, lost her balance and nearly caught Laithlin’s silken skirts to steady herself. ‘Sorry, I’ve never been much good at kneeling—’

‘Perhaps you should practise.’ The queen was about as unlike Thorn’s mother as was possible for two women of an age – not soppy, soft and circumspect but hard and brilliant as a cut diamond, direct as a punch in the face.

‘It’s an honour to sail with you as patron,’ Thorn blathered. ‘I swear I’ll give your son the very best service – Father Yarvi, that is,’ realizing he wasn’t supposed to be her son any longer. ‘I’ll give your minister the very best service—’

‘You are the girl who swore to give that boy a beating just before he gave you one.’ The Golden Queen raised a brow. ‘Fools boast of what they will do. Heroes do it.’ She summoned one of her servants with a snap of her fingers and was already murmuring instructions as she swept past.

Thorn might never have got off her knees had Safrit not hooked her under the arm and dragged her up. ‘I’d say she likes you.’

‘How does she treat folk she doesn’t like?’

‘Pray you never find out.’ Safrit clutched at her head as she saw her son had swarmed up the mast nimbly as a monkey and was perched on the yard high above, checking the knots that held the sail. ‘Gods damn it, Koll, get down from there!’

‘You told me to be useful!’ he called back, letting go the beam with both hands to give an extravagant shrug.

‘And how useful will you be when you plummet to your doom, you fool?’

‘I’m so pleased to see you’re joining us.’ Thorn turned once more to find Father Yarvi at her side, the old bald woman with him.

‘Swore an oath, didn’t I?’ Thorn muttered back.

‘To do whatever service I think fit, as I recall.’

The black woman chuckled softly to herself. ‘Oooh, but that wording’s awfully vague.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Yarvi. ‘Glad to see you’re making yourself known to the crew.’

Thorn glanced around at them, worked her mouth sourly as she saw her mother and Rulf still deep in conversation. ‘They seem a noble fellowship.’

‘Nobility is overrated. You met Skifr, did you?’

‘You’re Skifr?’ Thorn stared at the black-skinned woman with new eyes. ‘The thief of elf-relics? The murderer? The one sorely wanted by Grandmother Wexen?’

Skifr sniffed at her fingers, still slightly smeared with grey, and frowned as though she could not guess how bird-droppings might have got there. ‘As for being a thief, the relics were just lying in Strokom. Let the elves impeach me! As for being a murderer, well, the difference between murderer and hero is all in the standing of the dead. As for being wanted, well, my sunny disposition has made me always popular. Father Yarvi has hired me to do … various things, but among them, for reasons best known to himself,’ and she pressed her long forefinger into Thorn’s chest, ‘to teach you to fight.’

‘I can fight,’ growled Thorn, drawing herself up to her most fighting height.

Skifr threw back her shaved head and laughed. ‘Not that risible stomping about I saw. Father Yarvi is paying me to make you deadly.’ And with blinding speed Skifr slapped Thorn across the face, hard enough to knock her against a barrel.

‘What was that for?’ she said, one hand to her stinging cheek.

‘Your first lesson. Always be ready. If I can hit you, you deserve to be hit.’

‘I suppose the same would go for you.’

Skifr gave a huge smile. ‘Of course.’

Thorn dived at her but caught only air. She stumbled, her arm suddenly twisted behind her, and the slimy boards of the wharf smashed her in the face. Her fighting scream became a wheeze of shock and then, as her little finger was savagely twisted, a long moan of pain.

‘Do you still suppose I have nothing to teach you?’

‘No! No!’ whimpered Thorn, writhing helplessly as fire shot through every joint in her arm. ‘I’m keen to learn!’

‘And your first lesson?’

‘If I can be hit I deserve it!’

Her finger was released. ‘Pain is the best schoolmaster, as you will soon discover.’

Thorn clambered to her knees, shaking out her throbbing arm, to find her old friend Brand standing over her, a sack on his shoulder and a grin on his face.

Skifr grinned back. ‘Funny, eh?’

‘Little bit,’ said Brand.

Skifr slapped him across the cheek and he tottered against a post, dropped his sack on his foot, and was left stupidly blinking. ‘Are you teaching me to fight?’

‘No. But I see no reason you shouldn’t be ready too.’

‘Thorn?’ Her mother was offering a hand to help her up. ‘What happened?’

Thorn pointedly didn’t take it. ‘I suppose you’d know if you’d been seeing your daughter off instead of snaring our helmsman.’

‘Gods, Hild, you’ve no forgiving in you at all, have you?’

‘My father called me Thorn, damn it!’

‘Oh, your father, yes, him you’ll forgive anything—’

‘Maybe because he’s dead.’

Thorn’s mother’s eyes were already brimming with tears, as usual. ‘Sometimes I think you’d be happier if I joined him.’

‘Sometimes I think I would be!’ And Thorn dragged up her sea-chest, her father’s sword rattling inside as she swung it onto her shoulder and stomped towards the ship.

‘I like that contrary temperament of hers,’ she heard Skifr saying behind her. ‘We’ll soon have that flowing down the right channels.’

One by one they clambered aboard and set their sea-chests at their places. Much to Thorn’s disgust Brand took the other back oar, the two of them wedged almost into each other’s laps by the tapering of the ship’s sides.

‘Just don’t jog my elbow,’ she growled, in a filthier mood than ever.

Brand wearily shook his head. ‘I’ll just throw myself in the sea, shall I?’

‘Could you? That’d be perfect.’

‘Gods,’ muttered Rulf, at his place on the steering platform above them. ‘Will I have to listen to you two snap at each other all the way up the Divine like a pair of mating cats?’

‘More than likely,’ said Father Yarvi, squinting up. The sky was thick with cloud, Mother Sun barely even a smudge. ‘Poor weather for picking out a course.’

‘Bad weatherluck,’ moaned Dosduvoi, from his oar somewhere near the middle of the boat. ‘Awful weatherluck.’

Rulf puffed out his grizzled cheeks. ‘Times like this I wish Sumael was here.’

‘Times like this and every other time,’ said Father Yarvi, with a heavy sigh.

‘Who’s Sumael?’ muttered Brand.

Thorn shrugged. ‘How the hell should I know who he is? No one tells me anything.’

Queen Laithlin watched them push away with one palm on her child-swollen belly, gave Father Yarvi a terse nod, then turned and was gone towards the city, her gaggle of thralls and servants scurrying after. This crew were men who blew with the wind, so there was only a sorry little gathering left to wave them off. Thorn’s mother was one, tears streaking her cheeks and her hand raised in farewell until the wharf was a distant speck, then the citadel of Thorlby only a jagged notching, then Gettland fading into the grey distance above the grey line of Mother Sea.

The thing about rowing, you face backward. Always looking into the past, never the future. Always seeing what you’re losing, never what you’ve got to gain.

Thorn put a brave face on it, as always, but a brave face can be a brittle thing. Rulf’s narrowed eyes were fixed ahead on the horizon. Brand kept to his stroke. If either of them saw her dashing the tears on her sleeve they had nothing to say about it.

THE SECOND LESSON

Roystock was a reeking spew of wooden shops, piled one on the other and crammed onto a rotting island at the mouth of the Divine River. The place spilled over with yammering beggars and swaggering raiders, rough-handed dockers and smooth-talking merchants. Its teetering wharves were choked by strange boats with strange crews and stranger cargoes, taking on food and water, selling off goods and slaves.

‘Gods damn it I need a drink!’ snarled Odda, as the South Wind scraped alongside her wharf and Koll sprang ashore to make her fast.

‘I might be persuaded to join you,’ said Dosduvoi. ‘As long as there are no dice involved. I have no luck at dice.’ Brand could have sworn the South Wind rose a few fingers in the water when he heaved himself ashore. ‘Care to join us, boy?’

It was a sore temptation after the hell of hard work and hard words, bad weather and bad tempers they’d been through on the way across the Shattered Sea. Brand’s hopes for the wondrous voyage had so far proved a great deal more wondrous than the voyage itself, the crew less a family bound tight by a common goal than a sackful of snakes, spitting poison at each other as though their journey was a struggle that could have only one winner.

Brand licked his lips as he remembered the taste of Fridlif’s ale going down. Then he caught sight of Rulf’s disapproving face, and remembered the taste of Fridlif’s ale coming back up, and chose to stand in the light. ‘I’d best not.’

Odda spat in disgust. ‘One drink never hurt anyone!’

‘One didn’t,’ said Rulf.

‘Stopping at one is my problem,’ said Brand.

‘Besides, I have a better use for him.’ Skifr slipped between Brand and Thorn, one long arm hooking each of their necks. ‘Fetch weapons, my sprouts. It is past time the education began!’

Brand groaned. The last thing he wanted to do was fight. Especially to fight Thorn, who’d been jostling his oar at every stroke and sneering at his every word since they left Thorlby, no doubt desperate to even the score. If the crew were snakes, she was the most venomous of the lot.

‘I want you all back here before midday!’ yelled Yarvi as most of his crew began to melt away into the mazy alleys of Roystock, then muttered under his breath to Rulf, ‘we stop overnight we’ll never get this lot started again. Safrit, make sure none of them kill anyone. Especially not each other.’

Safrit was in the midst of buckling on a knife only just this side of a sword, and a well-used one at that. ‘A man bent on self-destruction will find his way there sooner or later.’

‘Then make sure it’s later.’

‘Don’t suppose you’ve a notion how I do that?’

‘Your tongue’s sharp enough to goad a tree to movement.’ Which brought a mad giggle from Koll as he knotted the rope. ‘But if that fails you, we both know you’re not too shy to stick them with your dagger instead.’

‘All right, but I swear no oaths.’ Safrit nodded to Brand. ‘Try and keep my Death-flirting son off that mast, will you?’

Brand looked at Koll, and the lad flashed him a mischief-loving grin. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve a notion how I do that?’

‘If only,’ snorted Safrit, and with a sigh she headed into town, while Rulf set a few who’d drawn short lots to scrubbing down the deck.

Brand clambered onto the wharf, firm boards seeming treacherous after so long on the shifting water, groaning as he stretched out muscles stiff from rowing and shook out clothes stiff with salt.

Skifr was frowning at Thorn with hands on hips. ‘Do we need to strap down your chest?’

‘What?’

‘A woman’s chest can make trouble in a fight, swinging about like sacks of sand.’ Skifr snaked her hand out and before Thorn could wriggle away gave her chest an assessing squeeze. ‘Never mind. That won’t be a problem for you.’

Thorn glared at her. ‘Thanks for that.’

‘No need for thanks, I am paid to teach you!’ The old woman hopped back aboard the South Wind, leaving Brand and Thorn facing each other once again, wooden weapons in hand, he nearest to the town, she with the sea at her back.

‘Well, children? Do you await an invitation by eagle?’

‘Here?’ Thorn frowned down at the few paces of narrow wharf between them, cold Mother Sea slapping at the supports below.

‘Where else? Fight!’

With a growl Thorn set to work, but with so little space all she could do was jab at him. It was easy for Brand to fend her efforts off with his shield, pushing her back a quarter-step each time.

‘Don’t tickle him!’ barked Skifr, ‘kill him!’

Thorn’s eyes darted about for an opening but Brand gave her no room, easing forward, herding her towards the end of the wharf. She came at him with her usual savagery, their shields clashing, grating, but he was ready, used his weight to doggedly shove her back. She snarled and spat, her boots scraping at the mossy boards, flailed at him with her sword but the blows were weak.

It was inevitable. With a despairing cry Thorn toppled off the end of the wharf and splashed into the welcoming arms of Mother Sea. Brand winced after her, very much doubting this would make a year of rowing beside her any easier.

Kalyiv was a long, long way off, but it was starting to seem further than ever.

The crew chuckled to each other over the result. Koll, who’d shinned up to the South Wind’s yard as usual in spite of his mother’s warnings, whooped from above.

Skifr put long finger and thumb to her temples and gently rubbed at them. ‘Inauspicious.’

Thorn flung her shield onto the wharf and dragged herself up by a barnacle-crusted ladder, soaked to the skin and white with fury.

‘You seem distressed,’ said Skifr. ‘Is the test not fair?’

Thorn forced through her clenched teeth, ‘The battlefield is not fair.’

‘Such wisdom in one so young!’ Skifr offered out Thorn’s fallen practice sword. ‘Another go?’

The second time she went into the sea even faster. The third she ended up on her back tangled with the South Wind’s oars. The fourth she beat at Brand’s shield so hard she broke off the end of her practice sword. Then he barged her off the wharf again.

By now a merry crowd had gathered on the docks to watch. Some crew from their ship, some crew from others, some folk from the town come to laugh at the girl being knocked in the sea. There was even some lively betting on the result.

‘Let’s stop,’ begged Brand. ‘Please.’ The only outcomes he could see were enraging her further or going in the sea himself, and neither particularly appealed.

‘Damn your please!’ snarled Thorn, setting herself for another round. No doubt she’d still have been tumbling into the sea by the light of Father Moon if she’d been given the chance, but Skifr steered her broken sword down with a gentle fingertip.

‘I think you have entertained the good folk of Roystock enough. You are tall and you are strong.’

Thorn stuck her jaw out. ‘Stronger than most men.’

‘Stronger than most boys in the training square, but …’ Skifr flopped one lazy hand out towards Brand. ‘What is the lesson?’

Thorn spat on the boards, and wiped a little stray spit from her chin, and kept sullen silence.

‘Do you like the taste of salt so much you wish to try him again?’ Skifr walked to Brand and seized him by the arms. ‘Look at his neck. Look at his shoulders. What is the lesson?’

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