She met my eyes, still chewing. Her face was sort of . . . contemptuously tolerant, if that makes any sense. As if she pitied me, against her own better judgment. “You are really not all that smart, are you?”
“Hey. I can do math and stuff.”
“So can Latoya, and she doesn’t need someone else to help her bathe and put her trousers on.” She wiped greasy fingers on the napkin that hung over her shoulder, and nodded at the musicians’ gallery. “Stop pestering me. They’re playing your song.”
“They’re playing what? . . . Oh, bollocks on toast. Oh, son of a sabre-toothed doxy named Gretchen. Oh, no.”
She was right—it was “The Ballad of Red-Handed Darren.” I slid low in my seat. Hell, hell, hell.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like it when someone composes an epic song about me just as much as you do, I would think. And when a song celebrating your deeds becomes popular across eight realms and three continents, then you should probably just try to appreciate it, instead of pulling a face and going off to pout in a corner. But gods on high, if one song about me had to spread across the known world, why did it have to be that one? The damn thing goes on forever, and since people keep adding bits to the end, it gets longer with every performance.
Plus, some of the word choices are very questionable. I don’t care what anyone says: my name does not rhyme with “harem.”
I gritted my teeth and suffered through forty-two verses of torment, wishing all the while that I could get up and beat the minstrel into unconsciousness with his own lute without causing some kind of diplomatic incident. When the last wailing strains died away, I joined in the applause, mainly because I was so happy it was over.
There were whispers along the length of the table. A low voice—Konrad’s, I thought—said, “Go on, ask her.”
“Aunt Darren?” That was Hark, in his place of honour at Konrad’s side. “Will you tell us more about your voyages?”
I glanced around the room. They were all listening: priests at the high table, stroking their beards, servants darting sideways glances at me while they topped up the wine cups. Gangling boys and girls ogled open-mouthed. Even Jada showed interest, for maybe the first time all evening. The scene made me flash to a time in the Tavarene desert, when I found a nest of vipers in one of our caravan carts. When I looked in, countless red eyes winked at me from the dark, studying me with hungry fascination.
I blew out a breath. “What do you want to hear about?”
Hark’s eyes lit up. “Tell us about your duel to the death against Cathak. When Cathak’s men were torturing your best friend down in the hold of his ship, and you could hear him down there all bloody and groaning, and you carved your name in Cathak’s chest and then fed him to a kraken . . .”
Damn, again. Why did he have to start there? “That wasn’t me.”
Hark’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. I tried again. “I didn’t kill Cathak. I was up in the northeast that month. There was this town, see, and all of their young men and women had died in the war, and we needed to help the survivors get their crops in the ground before the rains. I spent a whole month up to my elbows in manure—”
Hark broke in, clearly not caring about my adventures in the field of agriculture. “You mean that the duel never happened?”
I almost regretted telling him. His round boyish face had gone soft and crushed, as if I had just announced that sunshine didn’t exist, or honey candy, or holidays.
“The duel happened,” I said. “I wasn’t the one who fought it, that’s all.”
“But then . . . who did?”
“Monmain. One of my captains. His ship, the Idiot Kid, ran down Cathak almost by accident during one of his dawn raids, and things sort of developed from there.”
“Is Monmain a great swordsman?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Not really. Fair to middling. For some reason, he’s better when he’s drunk, except that he loses his sense of direction and you have to sort of prod him towards the enemy.”
Hark stared in disbelief. “But then how did Cathak lose? He was a blademaster! One of the best warriors in Kila!”
I shrugged again, using the other shoulder this time for variety. “Even the best warriors in Kila can trip.”
“Cathak tripped?”
“Cathak tripped. See, when he lunged at Monmain, he didn’t notice that a loop of the anchor chain was lying on the deck between them. His foot got caught and the next second, he was lying full length on the deck, spitting blood and teeth. Cathak surged up roaring, but by then Monmain had his mace in position, and he bashed Cathak’s brains out. Not very heroic, I guess, but that’s how it happened.”
Hark’s face was getting longer and longer. “What about the kraken?” he asked, a little desperate now.
“Um. Well, Monmain did pitch the body into the water, so maybe it got eaten by something. It was pretty shallow water, though, so probably, uh, minnows or sunfish, rather than a kraken. So . . . not so much eaten. More nibbled on a bit. And before you ask, I don’t know whether Monmain carved his name into Cathak’s chest. He’s usually too laid-back for that kind of thing, but he’d just heard his best friend getting tortured . . . so. You know.”
Jada leaned forward across the table, eyes sharp. “What else about the ballad is wrong?”
“What about the ballad is right? I haven’t done a quarter of the things that people say I’ve done. How could I? I’ve only been at this for three years, and I’ve had to spend some time attending to a few minor details other than piracy, like eating porridge and changing my underpants and oh yes, that little thing called sleeping. And nothing was as dramatic as they make it sound. For example? When I’m about to stab somebody, I don’t stop to strike a pose and deliver a ringing speech. It’s just never a good idea.”
It wasn’t sinking in. All the diners at the table looked blank, except for Jada, who now sat arrow-straight, staring at me with intense but opaque eyes.
Hark jumped in again. “Did you murder the mad vizier of Tarsus?”
Verse five. “No. That was Corto, my quartermaster. And it was self-defence, not murder, and the vizier wasn’t mad, just an asshole. I guess that ‘asshole vizier of Tarsus’ doesn’t sound quite as poetic, but he really was a raging dick. See, he was supposed to marry—”
“What about the wrestling match in Erudon?”
“That was my bosun, Latoya.”
“The time you held up the collapsing temple so the priests could escape?”
“Latoya again.”
“The cattle stampede? The stallion breaking? The time when you strangled a bull shark!”
“Latoya, Latoya, Latoya. Let me help you out here. Anything involving a feat of superhuman strength was Latoya. Also anything involving a feat of superhuman mathematical talent, but the math-related stories don’t make it into the ballads very often. Which is a shame. You know, she once figured out that—”
Konrad interrupted. “What about the battle with the Sons of Heaven?”
I paused before answering. The constant flow of questions was making me feel testy and crowded, but there was no point in lying.
“All right,” I admitted. “That one was me.”
The sudden hush at the table was startling. I groped for my cup.
“Is it all true?” Konrad demanded. “All of it? You took a single ship up north, attacked their stronghold, and defeated seven boatloads of heretics, all armed with battle fire?”
“Well . . . yes, pretty much, yes, all that’s true. I mean, one of their boats was kinda small, but . . .”
I didn’t get to finish. There was an electric hum in the air, excited whispers, buzzing talk. A fat man several seats away pounded on the table, his silver rings clinking. “I knew it!” he proclaimed happily—and boozily; there was a definite whiff about him. “They said it was impossible when we heard about it down here. You know what I said to that? I said balls. Nothing’s impossible when you have the glory in your blood. Lady, lady, you’re a real chi
ld of Torasan!”
“That was a compliment, Darren,” Ariadne murmured beside me. “Smile, don’t wince.”
She was right, so I tried to smile—didn’t do it very well, but that didn’t seem to matter. A rowdy throng of people surrounded me, all of them trying to clap me on the shoulder or wring my hand. It was very friendly, but after a few minutes of sweaty handclasps and wine breath, I began to think that a nice duel to the death would be a better way to spend an evening. It was a relief when Konrad intervened, good-humouredly ordering everyone back to their seats.
“All right, now,” he said, leaning back. “Confess. Let’s hear all about it.”
“Oh . . . heck. You don’t really need to hear it, do you? We just sat through an entire ballad, and all.”
“That’s not the same as hearing it straight from the source. Come on, indulge us. You have to learn to bask in your success.”
I glanced at Ariadne, who, so far as I could tell, thought that I spent quite enough time basking. She grimaced, but gave a permissive little wave.
Where to begin? I combed my fingers back through my hair, destroying the coiffure that Ariadne had so carefully arranged, and then, almost at random, said, “I need a war board.”
I’d hoped that the request would give me time to think, but the board arrived at the table what seemed like mere seconds later. It wasn’t one of the big, elaborate sets that would occupy centre stage in a lord’s war room, but a simple pasteboard model, the kind of thing I used when I studied navigation and tactics as a child. The islands of Kila were painted crudely on the base in blobs of green paint. The figurines of ships and soldiers were carved from wood, and stained either dark or light. Some were pocked with teeth marks, showing where bored students had absent-mindedly chewed on them.
I picked up one of the toy soldiers and sighed. That was the first problem, right there. When you’re shoving battalions around a war board, one little wooden man is exactly the same as another little wooden man. That’s not good enough. To be really useful, the board would have to show you how well each little wooden man was trained, how good a breakfast he’d eaten, whether his clothes were crawling with lice, whether his guts were putrid with dysentery, and whether he trusted the little wooden man at his elbow.
With my index finger, I prodded seven ships into position at the top edge of the board and slid another solitary ship to face them: the Banshee soaring into battle. The noise at the table softened to an eager hum.
“I guess you’ve all heard about the Sons of Heaven,” I began. “They were the regular sort of brutes, doing the regular sort of brutish things—raping, pillaging, marauding—except they thought that the gods had told them to do it. So, you know, divine raping, sacred pillaging, holy marauding. I never understood much about their theology, except that they apparently believed that the gods were all horrible dickheads.”
I felt for my cup and took a quick swallow. It didn’t do much about the dryness in my throat. “They kidnapped some of their recruits, but a lot of boys joined willingly. Hard to blame them. The poor bastards wanted to be holding swords instead of dying on them. Thing was, the Sons of Heaven always put their youngest in the front lines when they expected hard fighting. And when I say young, I mean young: a lot of those boys were nine, ten, eleven. The Sons of Heaven—stupid name—kept their blood up by dosing them with something they called Sun Sweat. Really, it was a little bit of dajiki root in a whole lot of rum. It rotted the life right out of the boys if they drank it too long, because it killed their appetites and it kept them from sleeping. In the short run, though, it made them demons. Dancing, howling little skeletons, with eyes like red glass lamps.”
“And that’s how you won?” Konrad asked. “Because you were fighting children?”
“No. They had a few boys when I fought them, but even leaving them out of the picture, the grown men outnumbered us six to one. This is what happened. The Sons of Heaven had just knocked over a market town and fled north with their loot. It was winter and they were running straight into the teeth of a storm. They were insane to do it and they must have believed that no one would be insane enough to follow them. But I talked it over with . . . I mean, I thought about it for a while, and eventually we agreed . . . I mean, I decided that it was a risk we had to take. The storm would kill off some of the brutes, but the survivors would sweep south as soon as the weather cleared. Plus, there were the children to think about. Boys who joined the Sons of Heaven never lasted long. So we chased them north to the point of Accra. But before we did that, we prepared our secret weapon.”
I paused there to take another drink. I hadn’t meant to leave the question hanging, but guests all around the table piped up with guesses. “Battle fire . . . crossbows . . . caltrops . . .”
The people around the table couldn’t have been to war. At least, not in winter.
“Poison!” Hark blurted out, his face blotchy red with excitement. “A fast-acting one. Like blackroot or wolfsbane or . . .”
I managed to suppress my snort, but it was a near thing. Hadn’t Alek taught his son anything?
“You never use poison for close combat,” I said, stating the obvious. “It’s too easy to get scratched by your own blade. And battle fire looks impressive, but only a madman would bring it onto a wooden ship.”
“So?” Konrad leaned in. “What was your weapon?”
“Hand cream.”
There was silence, broken only by a disbelieving titter from a woman swathed in silk and lace, until Hark asked, “What?”
“Cream for my sailors’ skin. Oh, nothing fancy. It was mainly rendered fat, with a few other things—pine oil, honey—and it smelt like a muck heap in hell, but it did the trick.”
“What trick?”
“It protected my sailors’ hands. Kept them from drying out.”
The tone around the table had changed, the carnival air replaced by a suspicious, almost offended hush. Konrad sputtered out a laugh. “This is a joke, isn’t it?”
I glanced at the soldiers who flanked the door. Both of them were smiling, faint faraway smiles. They knew. But how could I describe it to Konrad? For him, cold was a thing that vanished when you went inside, a detail that gave extra relish to your hot supper and your evening wine. He didn’t understand real cold, the ripping tearing kind.
I held out my right hand, letting them all see the roughened skin on my palm. “Sailors’ hands are tough, but they aren’t made of leather. A few days in the cold and wind can dry out the skin until it cracks. Imagine your skin splitting apart all over your hands, until it feels like you’ve been raking at yourself with an iron spike. Imagine having hands like that, and hauling on a rope—a rough, tarry rope, studded with crystals of ice. Lose your grip for a second, let the rope slide, and it’ll flay your palm to a bloody rag. Then imagine having to take up a sword in that hand, the steel so cold that your own bleeding flesh could freeze to the metal. Now does the idea of hand cream make sense?”
Some of the guests shifted in their seats, and Hark looked almost sick as he rubbed his own soft pink fingers. Good. I was tempted to tell him a few more home truths about a sailor’s life, the kind of things they don’t tell you during the lectures on honour and glory. Like the way scurvy can make your gums swell until they seal over your teeth and black blood oozes from the crevices. Or how, after a few months at sea, the ship’s biscuits start to feel light and powdery, and you break them in half to find them furrowed with endless squirming tunnels, maggots and weevils boring into the bread.
But of all the small bodily insults of life at sea, being wet and cold might be the worst. When you’re really cold, it’s hard to think about anything except not being cold anymore, and all your primal instincts shriek at you to huddle into a ball somewhere away from the wind. When your hands are covered in red-blue sores, cracked and oozing blood and serum, swollen and throbbing with an ache that doesn’t lessen even when you’re asleep, life isn’t pleasant. I learned early in my sea-going career to keep a jar o
f pig-fat handy to treat chapped hands. Lynn’s lard-and-pine-oil concoction was a big improvement, though. The first time I tried it out, I seriously considered proposing marriage—either to Lynn or to the hand cream, I wasn’t sure which.
I waited another few seconds to be sure that the message had sunk in properly. Then I helped myself to another dollop of raisin-studded frumenty and continued the story with my mouth half full.
“It was blue cold around Accra that week, the kind of cold that reaches beneath your shirt, closes its fingers around your heart, and grips. Sun so low in the sky that it seemed almost sunk in the ocean. Where the light touched the water, it didn’t give heat, just sent clouds of mist rising, thick and grey. It was a terrible place. You heard strange sounds through the mist from every direction. Bells clanging all empty and hopeless, and ropes creaking, as if ghost ships were sailing past.
Beggar's Flip Page 18
