Half the World (Shattered Sea, Book 2)

THE FIRST LESSON

The South Wind rocked on the tide, boasting new oars and a new sail, freshly painted and freshly provisioned, lean and sleek as a racing dog and with minister’s doves gleaming white at high prow and stern. It was, without doubt, a beautiful ship. A ship fit for high deeds and heroes’ songs.

Sadly, her new crew were not quite of that calibre.

‘They seem a …’ Thorn’s mother always found a pretty way to put things, but even she was stumped. ‘Varied group.’

‘Fearsome is the word I’d have reached for,’ grunted Thorn.

She might well have tripped over desperate, disgusting or axebitten on the way. All three seemed apt for the gathering of the damned crawling over the South Wind and the wharf beside it, hefting sacks and barrels, hauling at ropes, shoving, bellowing, laughing, threatening, all under Father Yarvi’s watchful eye.

Fighting men, these, but more like bandits than warriors. Men with many scars and few scruples. Men with beards forked and braided and shaved in strange patches and dyed hair chopped into spikes. Men whose clothes were ragged but whose muscled arms and thick necks and calloused fingers glittered with gold and silver ring-money, proclaiming to the world the high value they put on themselves.

Thorn wondered what mountain of corpses this lot might have heaped up between them, but she wasn’t one to be easily intimidated. Especially when she had no choice. She set down her sea-chest, everything she had inside, her father’s old sword wrapped in an oilcloth on top. She put on her bravest face, stepped up to the biggest man she could see and tapped him on the arm.

‘I’m Thorn Bathu.’

‘I am Dosduvoi.’ She found herself staring sharply up at one of the biggest heads she ever saw, tiny features squeezed into the centre of its doughy expanse, looming so high above her that at first she thought its owner must be standing on a box. ‘What bad luck brings you here, girl?’ he asked, with a faintly tragic quiver to his voice.

She wished she had a different answer, but snapped out, ‘I’m sailing with you.’

His face retreated into an even tinier portion of his head as he frowned. ‘Along the Divine River, to Kalyiv and beyond?’

She thrust her chin up at him in the usual manner. ‘If the boat floats with so much meat aboard.’

‘Reckon we’ll have to balance the benches with some little ones.’ This from a man, small and hard as Dosduvoi was huge and soft. He had the spikiest shag of red hair and the maddest eyes, bright blue, shining wet and sunken in dark sockets. ‘My name is Odda, famed about the Shattered Sea.’

‘Famed for what?’

‘All kinds of things.’ He flashed a yellow wolf-smile and she saw his teeth were filed across the front with killer’s grooves. ‘Can’t wait to sail with you.’

‘Likewise,’ Thorn managed to croak, stepping back despite herself and nearly tripping over someone else. He looked up as she turned and, brave face or no, she shrank back the other way. A huge scar started at the corner of one eye, all dragged out of shape to show the pink lid, angled across his stubbled cheek and through both lips. To make matters worse, she realized from his hair, long and braided back around his face, that they would be sailing with a Vansterman.

He met her ill-concealed horror with a mutilated blankness more terrible than any snarl and said mildly, ‘I am Fror.’

It was either bluster or look weak and Thorn reckoned that no choice at all, so she puffed herself up and snapped out, ‘How did you get the scar?’

‘How did you get the scar?’

Thorn frowned. ‘What scar?’

‘That’s the face the gods gave you?’ And with the faintest of smiles the Vansterman went back to coiling rope.

‘Father Peace protect us,’ squeaked Thorn’s mother as she edged past. ‘Fearsome is a fair word for them.’

‘They’ll be the ones scared of me soon enough,’ said Thorn, wishing, and not for the first time, that saying a thing firmly enough makes it so.

‘That’s a good thing?’ Her mother stared at a shaven-headed man with runes stating his crimes tattooed on his face, laughing jaggedly with a bony fellow whose arms were covered in flaking sores. ‘To be feared by men like these?’

‘Better to be feared than afraid.’ Her father’s words and, as always, her mother was ready for them.

‘Are those life’s only two choices?’

‘They’re a warrior’s two choices.’ Whenever Thorn traded more than ten words with her mother she somehow ended up defending an indefensible position. She knew what came next. Why fight so hard to be a warrior if all you can win is fear? But her mother only shut her mouth, and looked pale and scared, and piled guilt on Thorn’s simmering anger. As ever.

‘You can always go back to the house,’ snapped Thorn.

‘I want to see my only child on her way. Can’t you give me that? Father Yarvi says you might be gone a year.’ Her mother’s voice took on an infuriating quiver. ‘If you come back at all—’

‘Fear not, my doves!’ Thorn jumped as someone flung an arm around her shoulders. The strange woman who had watched Thorn fight Brand a few days before thrust her grey-stubbled skull between her and her mother. ‘For the wise Father Yarvi has placed your daughter’s education in my dextrous hands.’

Thorn hadn’t thought her spirits could drop any lower, but the gods had found a way. ‘Education?’

The woman hugged them tighter, her smell a heady mix of sweat, incense, herbs and piss. ‘It’s where I teach and you learn.’

‘And who …’ Thorn’s mother gave the ragged woman a nervous look, ‘or what … are you?’

‘Lately, a thief.’ When that sharpened nervousness into alarm she added brightly, ‘But also an experienced killer! And navigator, wrestler, stargazer, explorer, historian, poet, blackmailer, brewer … I may have forgotten a few. Not to mention an accomplished amateur prophet!’

The old woman scraped a spatter of fresh bird-droppings from a post, tested its texture with her thumb, smelled it closely, seemed on the point of tasting it, then decided against and wiped the mess on her ragged cloak.

‘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.