of men made their way towards him, tacking across the square as if they were on a ship together. One man stumbled and bumped another; the second one swore, pushed back, put a hand to his axe. A third intervened, and took a punch to the shoulder for his pains. He ignored it like an insect bite. Another big man. They were all, ibn Bakir thought sorrowfully, big men.
It came to him, belatedly, that this was not really a good time to be a stranger on Rabady Isle, with the governor (they used an Erling word, but it meant, as best ibn Bakir could tell, something very like a governor) dead and his funeral rites marred by a mysteriously missing animal. Suspicions might fall.
As the group approached, he spread his hands, palms up, and brought them together in front of him. He bowed formally. Someone laughed. Someone stopped directly in front of him, reached out, unsteadily, and fingered the pale yellow silk of ibn Bakir’s tunic, leaving a smear of grease. Ofnir, his interpreter, said something in their language and the others laughed again. Ibn Bakir, alert now, believed he detected an easing of tension. He had no idea what he’d do if he was wrong.
The considerable profit you could make from trading with barbarians bore a direct relation to the dangers of the journey—and the risks were not only at sea. He was the youngest partner, investing less than the others, earning his share by being the one who travelled … by allowing thick, rancid-smelling barbarian fingers to tug at his clothing while he smiled and bowed and silently counted the hours and days till the roundship might leave, its hold emptied and refilled.
“They say,” Ofnir spoke slowly, in the loud voice one used with the simple-minded, “it is now known who take Halldr horse.” His breath, very close to ibn Bakir, smelled of herring and beer.
His tidings, however, were entirely sweet. It meant they didn’t think the trader from Al-Rassan, the stranger, had anything to do with it. Ibn Bakir had been dubious about his ability, with two dozen words in their tongue and Ofnir’s tenuous skills, to make the obvious point that he’d just arrived the afternoon before and had no earthly (or other) reason to impede local rites by stealing a horse. These were not men currently in a condition to assess cogency of argument.
“Who did it?” Ibn Bakir was only mildly curious.
“Servant to Halldr. Sold to him. Father make wrong killing. Sent away. Son have no right family now.”
Lack of family appeared to be an explanation for theft here, ibn Bakir thought wryly. That seemed to be what Ofnir was conveying. He knew someone back home who would find this diverting over a glass of good wine.
“So he took the horse? Where? Into the woods?” Ibn Bakir gestured at the pines beyond the fields.
Ofnir shrugged. He pointed out into the square. Ibn Bakir saw that men were now mounting horses there— not always smoothly—and riding towards the open town gate and the plank bridge across the ditch. Others ran or walked beside them. He heard shouts. Anger, yes, but also something else: zest, liveliness. The promise of sport.
“He will soon found,” Ofnir said, in what passed here in the northlands for Asharite.
Ibn Bakir nodded. He watched two men gallop past. One screamed suddenly as he passed and swung his axe in vicious, whistling circles over his head, for no evident reason.
“What will they do to him?” he asked, not caring very much.
Ofnir snorted. Spoke quickly in Erling to the others, evidently repeating the question.
There was a burst of laughter. One of them, in an effusion of good humour, punched ibn Bakir on the shoulder.
The merchant, regaining his balance, rubbing at his numbed arm, realized that he’d asked a naive question.
“Blood-eagle death, maybe,” said Ofnir, flashing yellow teeth in a wide grin, making a complex two-handed gesture the southern merchant was abruptly pleased not to understand. “You see? Ever you see?”
Firaz ibn Bakir, a long way from home, shook his head.
He could blame his father, and curse him, even go to the women at the compound outside the walls and pay to have them evoke seithr. The volur might then send a night-spirit to possess his father, wherever he was. But there was something cowardly about that, and a warrior could not be a coward and still go to the gods when he died. Besides which, he had no money.
Riding in darkness before the first moon rose, Bern Thorkellson thought bitterly about the bonds of family. He could smell his own fear and laid a hand forward on the horse’s neck to gentle it. It was too black to go quickly on this rough ground near the woods, and he could not—for obvious reasons—carry a torch.
He was entirely sober, which was useful. A man could die sober as well as drunken, he supposed, but had a better chance of avoiding some kinds of death. Of course it could also be said that no truly sober man would have done what he was doing now unless claimed by a spirit himself, ghost-ridden, god-tormented.
Bern didn’t think he was crazed, but he’d have acknowledged freely that what he was doing—without having planned it at all—was not the wisest thing he’d ever done.
He concentrated on riding. There was no good reason for anyone to be abroad in these fields at night—farmers would be asleep behind doors, the shepherds would have their herds farther west—but there was always the chance of someone hoping to find a cup of ale at some hut, or meeting a girl, or looking for something to steal.
He was stealing a dead man’s horse, himself.
A warrior’s vengeance would have had him kill Halldr Thinshank long ago and face the blood feud after, beside whatever distant kin, if any, might come to his aid. Instead, Halldr had died when the main crossbeam of the new house he was having built (with money that didn’t belong to him) fell on his back, breaking it. And Bern had stolen the grey horse that was to be burned with the governor tomorrow.
It would delay the rites, he knew, disquiet the ghost of the man who had exiled Bern’s father and taken his mother as a second wife. The man who had also, not incidentally, ordered Bern himself bound for three years as a servant to Arni Kjellson, recompense for his father’s crime.
A young man named to servitude, with an exiled father, and so without any supporting family or name, could not readily proclaim himself a warrior among the Erlings unless he went so far from home that his history was unknown. His father had probably done that, raiding overseas again. Red-bearded, fierce-tempered, experienced. A perfect oarsman for some longship, if he didn’t kill a benchmate in a fury, Bern thought sourly. He knew his father’s capacity for rage. Arni Kjellson’s brother Nikar was dead of it.
Halldr might fairly have exiled the murderer and given away half his land to stop a feud, but marrying the exile’s wife and claiming land for himself smacked too much of reaping in pleasure what he’d sowed as a judge. Bern Thorkellson, an only son with two sisters married and off the island, had found himself changed—in a blur of time—from the heir of a celebrated raider-turned-farmer to a landless servant without kin to protect him. Could any man wonder if there was bitterness in him, and more than that? He’d loathed Rabady’s governor with cold passion. A hatred shared by more than a few, if words whispered in ale were to be believed.
Of course no one else had ever done anything about Halldr. Bern was the one now riding Thinshank’s favourite stallion amid stones and boulders in cold darkness on the night before the governor’s pyre was to be lit on a ship by the rocky beach.
Not the wisest action of his life, agreed.
