Wild Magic (51 page)

With Joz Bearhand and Doc acting as guards to Erol Bardson and Dogo last seen dead drunk and borne up by two buxom floozies heading for the seamiest establishment on the docks and not heard of since, Mam and Persoa were left much in each other’s company. Erno watched them now across the smoky upper room of the Istrian’s Head – a slightly more salubrious establishment than the Enemy’s Leg, being some way further up the hill from the wharfside where, supposedly, the head had landed after King Sten’s famous retribution – and marvelled for the hundredth time at the mismatch they represented. Where the mercenary leader was powerfully built – for a man, let alone a woman – Persoa had the slight and whippy frame of his native hill country. Where she was blonde, he was dark; where her hair lay in a great profusion of matted braids threaded through with bones and shells, his was shorn close to his head but for a single tail, ringed top and bottom with thin gold bands, reaching halfway down his back. Where her features were broad and blunt, his were fine and sculpted; her eyes were blue, his black; and he was the most politely spoken assassin Erno had ever encountered. Whereas Mam . . .

Their heads were close together, and Persoa had his hand on the mercenary leader’s leg as he inclined his ear to listen to what she was saying above the general din. Erno couldn’t imagine any other man getting away with his life, let alone his fingers, after making such importunate contact with Mam’s thigh: but then, no one else was likely even to consider doing so. Fearsome, foul-mouthed and possessed of a terrifying set of sharpened gnashers, Mam was hardly likely to be any sighted, sober man’s first port of call when he was overtaken by lust; but Persoa seemed enraptured by her. The pair had taken to sharing the same room after a couple of weeks back in port and ever since Mam seemed always to be laughing or smiling, happy to share a joke or a pleasantry: which was, as Dogo put it, like watching a shark wink and grin at you before it bit your head off: bleeding disturbing and highly unnatural.

As if she felt the weight of his gaze, Mam looked up suddenly. She grinned and said something to the hillman, who threw his head back and laughed so that Erno felt disconcerted and vaguely annoyed: what had he done that they should laugh at him? Then the mercenary leader stood up, placed a hand on the heavy oak table which stood in her way and vaulted powerfully over the top of it, landing with such a thud that the floorboards creaked and flagons of ale on the surrounding tables trembled and spewed froth onto their owners’ hands. No one uttered a word of protest despite the general air of antagonistic boredom, except for one man who had been sitting with his back to Mam, who swore loudly and spun around with his fists balled for a confrontation. Erno watched as the man’s face registered his mistake, saw all the fight reflex ebb out of him and how he turned quickly back to apply himself studiously to the scattered knucklebones, as if the fact that his winning throw had been so rudely disrupted had merely served to create a new and fascinating pattern to be considered.

‘Can’t sit around here all day,’ Mam announced cheerfully. ‘Things to do.’

She winked at Persoa, tapped her eyebrow and then the side of her cheek. Erno watched the hillman nod once and make a complicated gesture, then head towards the back stairs like a snake weaving its way through grass. When he looked back, the mercenary leader was gone. It never ceased to amaze him that such a big woman could move so swiftly and silently: a great attribute to have during close-quarter assassinations, but rather less so when asking someone to follow you.

By default, he elected the door to the sleeping quarters, moving through the crowd with rather more circumspection than Mam employed. It was not that he was a small man – he was taller than most by half a head – but he was a sell-sword neither by heart nor nature, and he preferred to avoid a fight whenever he could. So it was that by the time he emerged through the far door, Mam was already waiting for him on the other side, wearing an impatient grimace and a lot of weapons. Before he could open his mouth to say a word, she slung his sleeping-roll at him. He stared at it like an idiot.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a job to do.’

Down at the docks they found the rest of the band gathered: Joz Bearhand, Doc, Dogo and Persoa; and about a dozen other mismatched men and one woman. They were loading up a couple of faerings with supplies and weaponry – a lot of weaponry, it seemed to Erno, for a small crew. ‘What’s going on?’ he said to Mam suspiciously.

The mercenary leader grinned at him. ‘Well, that would depend on who you were to ask,’ she replied cryptically.

‘I’m asking you.’

Mam made a face. ‘Tell you when we get on board.’

‘On board what? And who says I have any intention of leaving the city at all, on foot, horse or blasted ship!’

‘Not much going on in Halbo, unless you want to watch a load of overdressed, over-ambitious and overbearing lords and fortune-seekers all trying to pussyfoot around our beloved, besotted King and his knackered old advisers.’

He raised an eyebrow. There was clearly a fine distinction to be made between fortune-seeking and free-booting.

‘Besides,’ she went on. ‘I thought you’d rather go to Rockfall and see Katla Aransen than hang around here.’

Erno stared at Mam so hard his eyes ceased to focus. For several heartbeats her face swam in front of him, became thin and tanned, one wicked grin becoming another, more beguiling by far. Flame-red hair, tousled and boyish, replaced the twisted blonde braids. He felt dizzy, then hopeful; then terrified she was playing some appalling trick on him. Finally, fear became fury. He rounded upon her. ‘Katla Aransen died at the Allfair. I loved her, and if I hadn’t left her she would still be alive. And yet you taunt me like this! I have always known you to be a hard woman, Mam, but I never thought you were a cruel one!’

The mercenary leader was taken aback by this outburst. Erno had always been both quiet and biddable, a polite young man, who looked as if he might well be handy with a sword if push came to shove, but who was unlikely to answer back, let alone hit you in the face. Now, however, his face was flushed and his eyes were wild with unreadable emotions: it looked as though he might well let fly. Mam took a judicious step back: her watchword was to avoid the avoidable, and it would hardly improve her authority if one of her crew were to smack her in the face in full view of the rest, let alone the new recruits. She’d have to wound him, for sure; but the delicacy required to deliver a non-critical flesh wound had never been something she excelled in: provoked, she was more likely to deprive a man of an arm or leg . . .

‘Hold fast!’ She stuck out a hand, fingers splayed. ‘Who said Katla Aransen was dead? She got a little singed, for sure; but the last time I saw her she was as sparky as a shore-sparrow, sinking Old Bilgewater with the best of us in the Enemy’s Leg.’

That stopped him.

‘How?’ he said, and, ‘When?’ This last with deep suspicion.

Mam made a brief calculation, then waved her hands. ‘Came to Halbo to see relatives is what she said, though I knew that for a story. Strangely enough the King’s shipmaker went missing shortly afterwards. A couple of moons ago, does it matter?’

Erno’s eyes became as round as a lost child’s. He began to tremble. For an instant Mam thought he might even weep. Then: ‘She’s alive,’ he breathed. ‘Alive.’

‘Put some back into it!’

The whip cracked down once, twice and the man shrieked. When the lash curled back, tiny red droplets spiralled lazily off into the air before coming to rest on the planking, where they became indistinguishable from their surroundings. Captain Galo Bastido’s father’s galley had been kitted out for war in the finest old traditions, and that included painting the floors a deep red ochre since it was said that if men could not see blood washing down the decks in battle, they were less likely to panic or surrender. The Bastard secretly wished he could have left the wood unfinished: in his experience, maintaining discipline could only be improved by the sight of a little spilled blood.

Even with liberal use of the whip, they had not made as swift a time as he would have wished. The weather had been against them: mild and fair, where strong southerlies would have suited them better, they had been forced to row for days now, and he kept the men working through the nights, too. They had lost only two so far: one who had somehow freed himself of his manacles and leapt overboard as they passed north of Ixa, and the second who had fallen prey to some foul illness which made him retch and spew and shit. Him they had tipped over the rail on the fourth day when it came clear he was getting no better and was likely to infect others. Being two men down was not ideal: Bastido had thought about putting into Cera and pressing a couple of drunks into service; but that would have meant losing the best part of another day and the draw of the adventure and the rest of the Lord of Forent’s money was too hard to resist, let alone the acclaim and advancement which would surely be his on the successful completion of his mission. So instead he had wielded the cat himself at one end of the galley and entrusted the region from the stern to the midships to Baranguet, a small, squat man with the hairy, muscular arms of a Gilan ape and a bad temper; a dangerous combination in other circumstances. When he smiled at you, it was to display the curved yellow teeth of a rabid wharf rat. Baranguet made his own whips and had several terms Bastido had never encountered elsewhere for the different strokes one might apply with them. He was a vile man, but a useful one.

The rest of his crew were Forent men for the most part, loaned for the task by Rui Finco himself. They were north-coasters in origin, big, dark men more used to guard-duty and street enforcement than life on board a ship. It was as well the weather had been calm; half of them had been incapacitated for days with sea-sickness – even the slaves had laughed at them, until he had let Baranguet loose. Now a group of them sat louchely around the foredeck, gambling with the red and white stones used in the popular game of mares-and-stallions; the others, he imagined, were taking turns with the two whores they had smuggled aboard. Bastido disapproved – not of the whores, obviously, but of the lapse in discipline this unauthorised initiative represented – and had considered casting the girls overboard to discourage any further backsliding until it became apparent he’d likely have a mutiny on his hands if he did.

He knew all their names now: Pisto, darkest of them all, who rarely spoke and bore a cruel scar down the side of one cheek which raised the corner of his mouth into a sneer; Clermano, who wore his greying hair cropped to his skull and had a notch cut into his forearm for every man he’d killed; Nuno Forin and his brother Milo, who seemed to spend more time belowdecks with the women than anyone else and who chattered away to one another in a dialect no one else could follow; big Casto Agen, a seemingly mild-mannered man who had reputedly won a thousand bare-fist fights before being recruited into the Forent Guard; three sea-wardens, Gaido, Falco and Breseno, who were supposed to know something about ships and sailing, but who had succumbed to the rolling waves quicker than any of the others; a pair of swordsmen from Forent Town, who regarded themselves as the elite among the crew and kept themselves apart; and Gasto Costan, whose wife had left him for his brother. He had taken his case to the priests of the Sisters, and the pair had subsequently been found and burned, a fact that seemed to please Gasto enormously. ‘Every year on the same day I roast a pig,’ he had boasted cheerfully on the first day aboard. ‘It reminds me of the smell.’ The others had roared with laughter. Galo Bastido, self-styled bastard, had been surprised to find himself somewhat disgusted by their levity, and even more so by his own gut-reaction, which was to remove Gasto Costan from the ship as swiftly as possible.

But it was hardly nursery maids he needed for the task in hand. Turning his eyes to the far horizon, he scanned for any sight of the Eyran islands, and found none. Eight days was already longer than he had spent on any kind of water before now, let alone this vast expanse of nothing. It was easy to believe in the existence of a god whose element this was, a god of storms and tides and winds; a god who populated his kingdom with souls drawn from wrecks and out of the mouths of sea-creatures. Where was the Goddess when you most needed her? And what good could fire and ash and a horde of elegant, sharp-toothed cats do you in a place like this?

The Bastard shuddered, feeling the limitless depths of the Northern Ocean sucking away beneath his feet, and raised his own whip again.

It was good to feel the sharp air of the Northern Ocean on his face again, good to feel the blood racing through his veins; good to feel his heart beating with anticipation. They could not cast off from Halbo docks fast enough for Erno Hamson: he paced the deck and tutted loudly when some of the crew spilled a sack of grain they were trying to manhandle aboard, struck his forehead with the heel of his hand when a rain of knives clattered out of that sack alongside the golden barley, and almost vaulted over the side of the ship to help retrieve whatever illicit cargo this might be.

‘Keep your hair on!’

He looked around, saw no one; looked down. The little round man, Dogo, stood beside him, grinning widely.

‘You can’t chivvy the wind,’ the mercenary told him sagely. It was not a saying Erno had heard before, and he’d thought his grandmother used all the epigrams there were to know, indeed, had probably originated half of them herself. ‘She won’t go stale, you know.’

Erno fixed the little man with a stern eye. ‘What do you know about it?’ he asked churlishly.

Dogo tapped the side of his nose. ‘If there’s something I don’t know about women, it’s not worth knowing,’ he declared modestly. ‘Anyhow, who else’d want a girl as thin as a stick, with hair like a bogbrush and the temper of a cornered mole?’ And dodged Erno’s furious palm with a nimbleness that belied his rotund shape.

‘How does everyone know?’ he asked Mam plaintively that night after the Istrian coast had disappeared from sight and the Navigator’s Star beckoned them north amid the clearest of winter skies.