Half the World

‘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.