We faced each other now, horses nose to nose, me waiting for some reply.
The silence stretched. “You’re right,” Snorri said at last, and nudged Sleipnir into motion towards the city. The sense of relief that washed over me as he passed by proved short-lived. It occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure who he was talking to. Me or his demon? I waited a minute, then shrugged and rode on after. Who really cared? I got what I wanted. A chance. After all, that’s all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance.
“Aslaug speaks of you,” Snorri said as I drew level on the road. “Says the light will turn you—set you in my path.” He sounded weary. “I doubt Loki’s daughter can utter anything that’s not half a lie, but she has a silver tongue and even a half-lie is half true. So listen when I say it would be . . . poor advice . . . that led you to try to stop me.”
“Ha.” I slapped him on the shoulder and wished I hadn’t, my hand crackling with painful magics. “Can you think of anyone less likely than me to listen to an angel, Snorri?”
• • •
Crath City opened her arms and invited us in. We drifted along the riverbank, enjoying the warmth of the night. Everywhere along the dusty path, inns lit the way from the right, barges from the left, moored and decked with lanterns. The city folk drank at tables, at barrel tops, standing in groups, lying on the sod, or on the decks of the barges. They drank from clay cups, pewter mugs, wooden trenchers, from jugs, bottles, kegs, and ewers, the method of delivery as varied as the brews poured down so many throats.
“A jolly lot, these Crathians.” Already the place had started to feel like home. Any wanderlust had wandered off the moment I smelled cheap wine and cheaper perfume.
A ruddy-cheeked peasant reeled backwards across our path, somehow maintaining his pint mug at an angle that spilled no ale, though he stumbled as if at sea on a stormy night. Snorri shot me a grin, the black mood Aslaug had left him with now lifting.
A crowd of men on the nearest beer-barge broke out into the chorus of the “Farmer’s Lament,” a bawdy ballad detailing in seventeen verses what amusement one can and can’t get up to with livestock. I knew it well, though in Red March it’s a Rhonish man who’ll have no peace till he grabs a fleece, not a Highlander.
“Must be a festival day.” Snorri breathed in deeply; the air came laden with the smell of meat a-roasting. That’s a scent that will set your belly growling after a long day’s travel. Snorri’s stomach practically roared. “It can’t be like this every night.”
“The lost prince is back. Didn’t you know?” A woman in her cups, passing by and reaching up to paw at Snorri’s thigh. “Everyone knows that!” She reversed direction and walked alongside Sleipnir, hand still exploring Snorri’s leg. “Oh my! There’s a lot of meat down here!”
A husband or suitor managed to snag the woman’s hand and pull her away, frowning all the while but hardly in a position to blame Snorri. Which was probably for the best, all things considered. I watched her go. Tempting as the roast in her own way, well fed, fat some might say, but jolly with it, a twinkle in her eye. She even had most of her teeth. I sighed. I had been entirely too long on the road.
“Lost prince?” Hadn’t Baraqel said something about a prince?
Snorri shrugged. “You’re a lost prince. They always seem to turn up again. Some prodigal son has returned. If it puts the locals in a good mood, then that makes life easier. We get in, take what we need, leave.”
“Sounds good.” Of course, we weren’t talking about entirely the same things—but it did sound good.
We crossed the Sane by the Royal Bridge, a fine broad construction sitting on great piles that must have survived the Thousand Suns. Crath City rose from the docks on the opposite bank, sprawling over gentle hills and reaching up to the walls of the Old City where the money lived, looking out over what it owned. The Tall Castle waited in the middle of it all, high above us. I let the gradient guide the way. It took us into an ill-lit quarter where the sewers ran rank and drunks staggered narrow paths along the middle of the alleyways, not trusting the shadows.
“We’ll find a place down here tonight,” I said. “Somewhere unsavoury.” Tomorrow I’d be a prince again, knocking on Olidan’s doors. Tonight I wanted to take full advantage of my anonymity and enjoy the benefits of civilization to the full. The benefits of a decadent civilization. If Baraqel was going to wake me up at cockcrow for a lecture on morality, I might as well make it worth his while. Besides, if I found a low enough dive and woke amidst as much sinning as I hoped to, he might just decide not to show.
“There?” Snorri pointed down a thoroughfare broad enough to host taverns, the houses stacked three storeys high, each stage heavy-beamed and overstepping the one below so they crowded out into the street as they rose. Snorri’s thick finger directed me towards one of several hanging signs.
“The Falling Angel. Sounds about right.” I wondered what Baraqel would make of that.
With the horses given over to an ostler and stabled, I followed Snorri into the bar. He had to duck low to avoid the lanterns over the street door, and when he stepped aside the place lay revealed to me. A dive indeed, and populated by a collection of the most dangerous-looking men I’d laid eyes on outside a fighting pit . . . and quite possibly inside one too. My instinct was to execute a rapid reversal of direction on one heel and find a less intimidating venue, but Snorri had already secured a table, and having seen him demolish Edris’s crew in the mountains I felt it might be safer to stick close to him than try my luck alone outside.
The Angel had that reek to it: sweat, horses, stale beer, and fresh sex. The serving girls looked harried, the three barkeeps nervous; even the whores were keeping to the stairs, peering down between the railings as if no longer sure of their chosen profession. It seemed as though the bulk of the customers crowding the place from front wall to back weren’t regulars. In fact, as I slid along the bench to sit beside my Viking I noticed that the night’s clientele looked every bit as far-flung as a Norseman and a native of Red March. The Nuban close by the hearth had perhaps travelled farthest. A powerfully built man with tribal scars and a watchful gravitas about him. He caught me staring and flashed a grin.
“Mercenaries,” Snorri said.
I noticed as he said it that almost every man in the place carried a weapon, most of them several weapons, and not the civilized man’s poniard or rapier but bloody great swords, axes, cleavers, knives for gutting bears, and the biggest crossbow I’ve ever seen occupied most of the table before the Nuban. Several of the men wore breastplates, grimy and battered as if from hard service; others old chain-mail shirts or quilted armour stitched with the occasional bronze plate.
“We could try that place down the street, the Red Dragon,” I suggested as Snorri raised his arm for ale. “Somewhere a bit less crowded and”—I raised my voice to compete with a cheer from the next table—“noisy.”
“I like this place.” Snorri raised his arm higher. “Beer, woman, beer! For the love of Odin!”
“Hmmm.” I saw cards and dice aplenty, but something told me that winning money off any of these men might be a short-lived pleasure. Beside Snorri an old and toothless man supped his ale from a saucer, still managing to spill most of it over the grey stubble of his chin. A young fellow sat next to the elder, this one not quite old enough to shave, slim, slight, unremarkable save for a fine quality to his features that might make him handsome in the right light. He shot me a shy smile, but the truth of it was I didn’t trust either of them to be what they seemed. Keep the company of brigands such as filled the Angel and you had to have some iron in you, probably a whole parcel of wickedness too.
Our ale arrived, smacked down in earthenware cups and frothing over the sides. They were poorly fashioned, made in a hurry for the lowest cost, the sort of cups that expected to get broken. I sipped from mine—bitter stuff—and wiped away the white moustache. A
cross the room, through smoke and past the to-and-fro of bodies, a huge man was giving me the evil eye. He had the kind of blunt weapon of a face you could imagine breaking through a door, and he sat head and shoulders above the men beside him. To the giant’s left a man who seemed too fat to be dangerous but somehow managed to look scary anyway, with a patchy beard straggling down over multiple chins, piggy eyes assessing the crowd whilst he chomped the meat off a bone. To the right was the only normal-sized man of the trio, looking somehow ridiculous in their shadow, and yet I’d be giving him the widest of berths. Everything about him said warrior. He ate and drank with an intensity that unnerved me, and if a man can unnerve you across a crowded room just by cutting his beef, then you probably don’t want to see him draw steel.
“You know, I really think we’d be better off at the Red Dragon down the street,” I said, putting down my cup half-empty. “This is obviously a private party . . . I don’t think it’s safe here.”
“Of course it isn’t.” Snorri gave me that same worrying grin he had offered on the mountain. “That’s why I like it.” He raised his cup, coming dangerously near to splattering another of the band with foam, this one a moustachioed fellow with an unlikely number of knives bound about his person. “Meat! Bread! And more ale!” I could imagine him now in the mead-hall of his jarl at a gathering of the clans, grasping a drinking horn. He looked more relaxed than I’d seen him since the blood pits in Vermillion.
I caught sight of the ugly giant throwing me another dirty look. “I’ll be back.” I struggled up between bench and table and went out the front to relieve myself. If my admirer across the tavern had stood and come over to make trouble I probably would have wet myself, so getting out of his eyeline to answer nature’s call seemed a good move.
The Falling Angel turned out not to be entirely without class. They had a decent purpose-built wall to piss against and a little gutter running down into the street gutter to carry away the used beer. Although the fact that someone was lying facedown in the street gutter and leaking blood into it did detract somewhat from the otherwise pleasant scene of life flowing through the less salubrious arteries of Crath City. Beyond him, bravos and labourers, goodwives with their goodhusbands, vendors of food on sticks, all came and went, glimpsed in the light of one lantern, lost, then seen again in the light of another, passing by the purveyors of affection on the street corner and lost again never to return.
I finished up and went back in.
“—think that but you’d be wrong.”
I’d been outside for two minutes, three at the most, and returned to find Snorri flanked by mercenaries and swapping stories like old friends. “No,” Snorri continued, back half-turned to me. “I’m telling you he’s not. I mean, you might think it to look at him, granted. But I hauled him out of this place, they had him tied to a table, wanted some information and the knives were out. And we’re not talking a gentle jabbing here—they were about to cut off the kind of bits you’d miss.” Snorri drained off the last of his ale. “Know what he said to them? Roared at them he did. I heard it out in the corridor. ‘I won’t ever tell!’ Shouted it in their faces. ‘Get the pincers out if you like. Heat them in the coals. I ain’t talking.’ Now that’s the kind of man who’s got fire in his belly. Might look like there’s nothing behind the bluster, but you can’t trust your gut with this one. Brave man. Charged an unborn all by himself. Thing must have been twelve foot of grave-horror, had me disarmed, and in came Jal swinging a sword—” Snorri glanced my way. “Jal! I was just talking about you.” He gestured across the table. “Make a hole!” And they did, two mean-eyed thugs sliding apart so I could wedge in. “These fine fellows are Brother Sim”—he pointed out the slight lad—“Brother Elban, Brother Gains . . .” He indicated the old man and a tow-haired bully. “Well, they’re all brothers. It’s like a holy order of the road, only without any ‘holy.’” He waved his half-gnawed bone down the line. “Brothers Grumlow, Emmer, Roddat, Jobe . . .” The knife-man, a stern close-shaved fellow, and two younger men, both sallow, one scar-cheeked, the other pockmarked. “More beer!” And he thumped the table hard enough to make everything on it jump.
Somehow Snorri’s loudness had broken the tension and the Angel came alive. The staff relaxed, the girls came down off the stairs to ply their trade, and laughter ran more freely. I may have been the only man there still miserable. It’s in my nature to absent myself from danger whenever possible, and relaxed or not, this brotherhood we’d fallen in with sweated danger from every pore. Besides, Snorri’s magic hadn’t reached all corners of the room. I could still feel the giant’s hostile gaze searing across the back of my neck. I snatched up the ale set before me and knocked it back, hoping to deaden the sensation.
Relief came in the instant. An inviting softness squeezed against my neck to replace the feeling of being stared at, hennaed curls flooded over my shoulder, narrow hands massaged my upper arms, and the ridges of a whale-boned corset pressed the length of my back.
“Where’s your smile, my handsome?” She leaned around me, bodice offering her goods for display. Pale hands ran down across my chest, over the flatness of my stomach. I’ll admit that weeks of unwanted exercise and privation had stripped me of any padding. “I’m sure I could find it.” Her fingers slid lower. Years of experience in such situations kept my attention divided between the twin distractions of breasts served up on the bodice and the location of my own valuables. She leaned in and husked into my ear, “Sally will make it all good.”
“My thanks, but no.” I surprised myself. She still had her youth, and the good looks she’d been born with. Those had yet to be stripped by the bitter wind of experience that blows through the backstreets of such places. But I’m not at my best in a cold sweat, and every coward’s instinct I had told me I should be running. Under such circumstances my ardour grows softer.
“Truly?” She leaned in, breasts swaying, breathing the word into my ear.
“I’ve no money,” I said, and in an instant the warmth fell from her expression, her eyes dismissing me to seek out other opportunities. Snorri caught her attention, of course, but he was well wedged into his corner and attacking a slab of beef on the bone with such ferocity that Sally perhaps doubted she would be able to compete. In a swirl of skirts she was gone. Nervous or not, I still turned to watch her retreat and found myself the study of two veterans, grey heads, but lean and tough like old leather, the same dispassionate speculation in their eyes that I’d seen when Cutter John took my measure. I turned back to my plate, lacking appetite. Someone had called those two Brothers Liar and Row. I had no desire to find out how they came by their names. A roar of laughter from Snorri overwrote my fears, though I did flinch when he slammed his axe down on the table.
“No. That’s an axe. What you’ve got is more by way of a hatchet.”
As Snorri held forth about longboats, axe design, and the price of salt-fish, I glanced around with as much surreptitiousness as can be achieved over the rim of a beer mug. Aside from the trio of huge, fat, and deadly behind me, one other table seemed set on matters more serious than the emptying of barrels. In an alcove across the room, two men debated over a table. The few pieces of armour they still wore were far better quality than anything the Brothers had. Both were tall, both with long dark hair, one straight, one curled, the elder maybe thirty, a generous face perhaps not given to its current sombre look, the other young, very young, maybe not yet eighteen, but dangerous. If the rest of the Brothers set off my warning bells, this sharp-featured boy rang them off their mountings. He cast me a look the moment I found focus on him. A thousand-yard stare that told me to turn away.
Ale continued to flow and gradually my appetite returned, followed by my good humour. Ale has a way of washing away a man’s fears. Sure enough he’ll find them the next day, sodden and wrapped around his ankles, with a couple of new ones thrown into the mix and a headache fit for splitting rocks, but in the moment ale is a fine
substitute for bravery, wit, and contentment. Before very long I was exchanging tales of wenching with the taciturn Brother Emmer wedged beside me. A fairly one-way exchange, truth be told, but I do warm to the subject once my tongue’s been loosened, as do most young men in good health.
By the time the next whore approached I was ready with a quite different answer to the one I’d given Sally. Mary had pared the corset-and-gown ensemble down to just corset, and the combination of her long dark hair, mischievous eyes, and the ample portion of recklessness the ale had lent me had me getting to my feet. At which point I noticed that the giant—the Brothers called him Rike—was inbound, his face heaped up over raw bones into a fearsome scowl. I sat immediately and suddenly found the bottom of my cup to be fascinating.
Relief sighed out of me as the giant’s shadow passed over us and moved on. The man was taller than Snorri by at least a hand’s width, his arms lacking the Norseman’s well-defined muscle but thicker than my thighs. Brothers scattered out of his way as he closed on Snorri: Young Sim literally slid under the table to avoid being caught between them—slippery that one, as I suspected. Mary also vanished with commendable speed. Snorri himself seemed unconcerned, placing his ale mug on the next table along and wiping the beard at the corners of his mouth to clean away any of the larger detritus from his meal.
Generally, even when a fight is inevitable, both parties take a short while to warm to the idea. A disparaging remark is aimed, the reply ups the stakes, someone’s mother is a whore, and an instant later—whether the mother was in fact a whore or not—there’s blood on the ground. Brother Rike favoured a shorter path to violence. He simply let out an animal roar and closed the final three paces at speed.