The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (21 page)

       
"Civilization," he said, promising himself a hot fire, a mug
of ale and a meal of something good and nourishing.

       
Hope kept him going.

       
As he staggered on,
buffeted by the wind, he passed an old herbalist who was gathering gypsywort,
horehound, vetch, chickweed, bistort, bracken and sea-cranny. The old man bent
to his work, regardless of the weather, ignorning him.

       
"He must be
mad," said Togura.

       
This clinical judgment,
though made by a rank amateur, was entirely accurate.

       
The weather, if anything,
was getting worse. The tumbled sea was wrought into great spumes and fraughts
by the gale. The avalanching waters, afroth with yellowish foam, sent sleets of
water spuming over Togura's shore path.

       
Ahead, Togura could see
D'Waith's marginal harbour, where several ships were rocking at anchor, a
beleaguered hebdomad which, until a disaster earlier in the day, had been an
octet. The waves were roaring in over the mole which attempted to guard the
anchorage: the tides were even threatening some of the low-slung buildings
scattered around the foreshore. There would - surely - be a road from here to
the city on the hill.

       
"If I'd built
D'Waith, I'd have built it by the harbour," muttered Togura.

       
This being so, it was
fortunate that he had not built D'Waith, as the boggy ground would have
swallowed it. He found out just how boggy it was as he sank to his waist in the
marshy ground. He struggled to firmer ground and plugged on relentlessly until
he came to the nearest building. A wave from the sea foamed around the building
and tugged eagerly at his ankles.

       
Soaking wet, shivering,
stung by the pelting rain and driven by the wind, Togura hobbled to the door.
He opened it. The door swung inwards, opening to a roar of conversation, laughter
and thumping tankards. Togura, peering into the gloom of beards, voices and
storm lanterns, wondered if he was hallucinating. Three fires were blazing in
three separate fireplaces, three rousing drinking songs were competing against
each other; gusts of noise, heat and communal stench billowed out, together
with smells of drink and food which set him reeling with giddy hunger.

       
"Come in!"
roared the landlord, who had the head and the horns of a bull.

       
Embarrassed, Togura
hesitated. He could imagine what he looked like, soaking wet from head to toe,
mud from waist to foot, his hair in tangled dreadlocks, his body clad in mouldy
old sealskins, an unkempt feathery moustache clinging to his upper lip just
beneath his notched nose, and an unkempt straggly growth - a boy's excuse for a
beard - sprouting from his chin.

       
"Come in before I
break out in half," bellowed the landlord. "In boy, and shut the
door."

       
A wave, chasing round
Togura's feet, swarmed through the door to join the waters inside, which were
already knee-deep. He went in, closed the door with effort, descended a couple
of steps to the floor level, and stood there in the knee-deep water, gawping.

       
"Here!" yelled
the landlord, thumping the bar. "You paralysed, boy?"

       
Togura waded to the bar,
which was a vast slab of battle-scarred oak. Behind it stood the landlord, a
towering figure who really did have the body of a man but the head of a bull.
His eyes were fierce, burning, red. His horns, their ivory polished to the
brightness of the moon, grazed the ceiling. There was a heavy gold ring in his
nose. Ranked up behind him were casks, barrels, stone jars, stone bottles,
wineskins and tobacco holders. Helping the landlord at the bar was a motherly
woman of middle age who looked perfectly normal except that her hands were the
paws of a cat.

       
As Togura reached the
bar, a drunk, bleeding badly from a recent knife fight, embraced him and gave
him a kiss. Togura shook him off. The drunk fell backwards to the water, where
he floated with a seraphic smile on his face, singing incoherently.

       
"Here we have us a
hungry little man," said the landlord to Togura. "Hungry. Pinched,
even. Yet honest, all the same. I pick you for an honest man."

      
 
"How can you
tell?" said Togura.

       
"I can't,"
said the landlord. "But I was born and raised politely." This,
apparently, was a joke, for he laughed uproariously, his merriment deafening the
storm. The patrons took no notice; they were used to it. "Come on now,
boy. Will you eat? Answer me!"

       
"I won't deny my
hunger," said togura. "But I have no money. Have you any work that
needs doing?"

       
"None, but there's
plenty in town. Here, have a bowl of polenta," said the landlord,
shovelling great gollops of steaming porridge into a huge wooden bowl.

       
"At what
obligation?"

       
"None."

       
"What do you mean,
none?"

       
"I mean this is
free, gratis, given for nothing. Come on, boy, don't look so startled! Eat!
Eat! It's hot. It's good. Oatmeal, maize, chestnuts, barley. Here, have some
hot milk with it. Now eat. No, not with your fingers! Were you born in a
barn?"

       
"Yes," said
Togura, in all honesty.

       
"Then here's a
spoon regardless. No slobbering fingers here. This is a respectable house, you
know. We have standards to maintain!"

       
And the landlord laughed
again.

       
"Well, thank
you," said Togura, sampling the food.

       
It was hot, it was good,
it tasted like youth and wild honey, like nectar and sunlight, like hot bread
and kisses, like pollen and potatoes, like the strength of life itself. The
first mouthful cleared his head; the second mouthful warmed him; he took a
third, then remembered his manners.

       
"Thank you,"
said Togura. "Thank you."

       
"Thank me later,
boy. Thank me when you come swaggering back to town with gold in your pockets
and silver in your socks."

       
"That may be
never."

       
"What a dirge!
Come, boy, why so grim? Have you not arms and legs and balls and a cock the
girls will greed on? Have you not eyes and ears and nose - well, nose of a sort
- and a good stout stomach within?"

       
"I've had a hard
time," said Togura, a little offended to find this stranger dismissing his
rightful claims to pessimism without even hearing them out. "I've
suffered."

       
"Suffering?
Piffle!"

       
"I tell you -
"

       
"Don't tell me,
boy, eat. Slop down the food, it's good for you. Priorities, boy, priorities!
Food first then friends. And a drink withal. That's the making. Dox! Dox, my
good man. Buy the young man a drink. A drink for a boy born in a barn, and, by
the looks of him, not yet recovered from the shock. Dox! Don't pretend you
can't hear me. You hear me all right, you cheese-faced stoat-shagging tobaccanalian.
Come on, Dox, you idle son of a shit-shoving whoremaster, bring out your
silver."

       
A disfigured man with a
clay pipe wedged between his naked gums waded to the counter. He smelt heavily,
but not unpleasantly, of tobacco.

       
"Cold potato
twice," he said, laying his bronze on the counter.

       
"Hard spirit for
you, Dox," said the landlord, passing him a beaker of a clear and
odourless fluid, "but ale for the boy."

       
And he drew a tankard of
thick, nourishing dark-stained ale and passed it to Togura. It was cold; Togura
preferred his beer warm - preferably at blood temperature - but he accepted it
with a good grace nevertheless.

       
"Come," said
Dox.

       
Togura, food and drink
in hand, followed him to a crowded table, where they found buttock-space on a
creaking bench jammed with men in rags, furs, flax raincoats, fighting
leathers, feather capes, canvas coveralls or businesslike sea gear. Wile men
eyed him and summed him, Togura ate and drank, bewildered by the landlord's
hospitality, which was so unlike what he had learnt to expect from the world.

       
"Who are you?"
said Dox, suddenly, without any preliminaries.

       
Dox, the toothless pipe
smoker, had a hoarse and rasping voice, and had an ulcer the size of a fist on
one side of his face. He was missing his ears and his nose. Togura,
disconcerted by his appearance, and even more disconcerted by the free food and
drink, concealed his own identity with an untruth of some cunning.

       
"They call me the
Forester," he said. "Before certain misfortunes, I was part of a
party searching for Barak the Battleman, also known as Togura Poulaan."

       
"Ah! After the
reward, no doubt. But you have no sword about you. So how would you take
him?"

       
"I have my
hands," said Togura, restraining his astonishment.

       
"Hands, yes. Lovely
things! Strangulation, hey? Yes, of course. That's the story! Squeeze them till
their eyes pop. I love it. Take him when he's sleeping, eh boy? But find him
first. The reward's worth having, nay-so? Did you hear Cromel's doubled
it?"

       
"His name isn't
Cromel," said another man, a hard-faced villain with pietra-dura eyes.
"It's Cromdarlarty."

       
"No," said a
third, a sallow-faced consumptive windlestraw with a thin, piping voice.
"Cromarty, that's the name. I met him face to face in Keep myself. We
argued belly to belly. He told me himself, the reward's now set at a hundred
crowns. A hundred crowns for the head."

       
"That head's
probably done and deep rotted by now," said another voice, slurring out of
an alewashed face which was one part tattoos, one part scars, one part burns
and one part syphilis sores.

       
"What do you
mean?" said a big, brawn-voiced one-eyed man with a beard dyed green and
yellow.

       
"I mean that the
oath-breaking father-killer is probably dead and buried. What do you think,
Forester?"

       
Togura, spooning down
his polenta, said nothing, waiting for Forester to answer.

       
"Forester!"
said Dox, seizing his elbow and banging it on the table. "Are you
deaf?"

       
"Somewhat,"
said Togura, remembering, as he rubbed his elbow, that he was Forester.
"What was the question?"

       
"He claimed a death
for Barak. You agree?"

       
"The last rumour
that came my way," said Togura, lying as sweetly as a poet, "held
that Barak had been to Estar and back. Lately he happened on the road for
Chi'ash-lan, or so it was told, but then I met a man who swore he'd turned to
D'Waith."

       
"That's
wrong," said a hoar-skinned fellow with sausage-shaped lugs of ulcerated
flesh spilling down his cheeks and his neck. "He's at Larbster Bay for
certain. What do you think - "

       
The rest of the question
was drowned as a huge wave, larger than all the rest, pounded into the building.
The storm-lanterns hanging from the roof beams were set to swaying. As see-saw
shadows and gutteral light swung back and forth across the haggling card games,
the helpless drunks, the boozing syndicates, the wrist-wrestling bravos and a
gaggle of pipe-smoking ancients, an even larger wave slammed against the
seaward wall, bursting shutters open. A torrent of water poured inside,
scattering a game of dragon chess. The participants shouted in dismay, but the
rest of the tavern broke into drunken cheering.

       
As hands laboured the
shutters home to close out the wind, the door was flung open and a woman
entered. She was tall, she was blonde and she was build like a butcher's block.
The cry went up.

       
"Mary!"
"It's Mary!" "Why bless your heart and spit on it!"
"Mary, my doxy, come kiss me quick."

       
"Silence," she
roared.

       
The building shook with
her voice, which could have shouted the landlord himself right down to nothing.
Every jargoning mouth in the whole building quailed down to zero. Even the sea
seemed muted.

       
"That's
better," said Mary. "Now stay your cheek and rattle your plins.
There's pirates wrecked on the coast. West of us, three leagues. Get up off
your shit and get moving."