Half the World

DAMN THEM

Thorn’s nose twitched at the smell of cooking. She blinked awake, and knew right off something was odd. She could scarcely remember the last time she had woken without the tender help of Skifr’s boot.

Perhaps the old witch had a heart after all.

She had dreamt a dog was licking at the side of her head, and she tried to shake the memory off as she rolled from her blankets. Maybe dreams were messages from the gods, but she was damned if she could sieve the meaning from that one. Koll was hunched at the water’s edge, grumbling as he washed the pots out.

“Morning,” she said, giving an almighty stretch and almost enjoying the long ache through her arms and across her back. The first few days she’d hardly been able to move in the mornings from the rowing and the training together, but she was hardening to the work now, getting tough as rope and timber.

Koll glanced up and his eyes went wide. “Er …”

“I know. Skifr let me sleep.” She grinned across the river. For the first time, Divine seemed an apt name for it. The year was wearing on and Mother Sun was bright and hot already, birds twittering in the forest and insects floating lazy over the water. The trailing branches of the trees about the bank were heavy with white flowers and Thorn took a long, blossom-scented breath in through her nose and let it sigh away. “I’ve a feeling it’ll be a fine day.” And she ruffled Koll’s hair, turned around, and almost walked into Brand.

He stared at her, that helpless look of his splattered all over his face. “Thorn, your-”

“Go and die.” Half the night she’d been lying awake thinking of harsh things to say to him, but when the moment came that was the best she could manage. She shouldered past and over to the embers of the fire where the crew were gathered.

“Eat well,” Rulf was saying. “Might be later today we’ll reach the tall hauls. You’ll need all the strength you’ve got and more besides when we carry … the …” He trailed off, staring, as Thorn walked up, grabbing a spare a bowl and peering into the pot.

“No need to stop for me,” she said. They were all staring at her and it was starting to make her nervous.

Then Odda chuckled, spluttering food. “She looks like a brush with half the bristles plucked!”

“A lamb half-sheared,” said Dosduvoi.

“A willow with half the branches lopped,” murmured Fror.

“I like that one,” said Odda. “That has poetry. You should speak more.”

“You should speak less, but things are as they are.”

A breeze floated up from the river, strangely cold against the side of Thorn’s head, and she frowned down, and saw her shoulder was covered in hair. She touched one hand to her scalp, afraid of what she might find. On the right side her hair was muddled into its usual incompetent braid. The left was shaved to patchy stubble, her fingertips trembling as they brushed the unfamiliar knobbles of her skull.

“You sleep on your right.” Skifr leaned past her shoulder, plucking a piece of meat from the pot between long thumb and forefinger. “I did the best I could without waking you. You look so peaceful when you sleep.”

Thorn stared at her. “You said you wouldn’t make me do it!”

“Which is why I did it.” And the old woman smiled as though she’d done Thorn quite the favor.

So much for the witch having a heart, and the fine day too. Thorn hardly knew then whether she wanted to weep, scream, or bite Skifr’s face. In the end all she could do was stalk off toward the river, the crew’s laughter ringing in her ears, clenching her teeth and clutching at her half-tangled, half-bald head.

Her mother’s most treasured possession was a little mirror set in silver. Thorn always teased her that she loved it because she was so vain, but knew really it was because it had been a gift from her father, brought back long ago from the First of Cities. Thorn had always hated to look at herself in it. Her face too long and her cheeks too hollow, her nose too sharp and her eyes too angry. But she would happily have traded that reflection for the lopsided mockery that peered from the still water at the river’s edge now.

She remembered her mother singing softly as she combed Thorn’s hair, her father smiling as he watched them. She remembered the laughter and the warmth of arms about her. Her family. Her home. She gripped the pouch she wore and thought what a pitiful thing it was to carry your father’s fingerbones around your neck. But it was all she had left. She bitterly shook her head as she stared at her ruined reflection and another appeared behind her-tall and lean and colorless.

“Why did you bring me out here?” she asked, slapping both reflections angrily from the water.

“To make allies of our enemies,” said Father Yarvi. “To bring help to Gettland.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve no touch for making friends.”

“We all have our shortcomings.”

“Why bring me, then? Why pay Skifr to teach me?”

The minister squatted beside her. “Do you trust me, Thorn?”

“Yes. You saved my life.” Though looking into his pale blue eyes she wondered how far one should trust a deep-cunning man. “And I swore an oath. What choice do I have?”

“None. So trust me.” He glanced up at the wreckage of her hair. “It might take a little getting used to, but I think it suits you. Strange and fierce. One of a kind.”

She snorted. “It’s unusual, that I’ll grant you.”

“Some of us are unusual. I always thought you were happy to stand out. You seem to thrive on mockery like a flower on dung.”

“Harder work than it seems,” she muttered. “Always finding a brave face.”

“That I know, believe me.”

They stayed there, beside the water, for a while, in silence.

“Would you help me shave the other side?”

“I say leave it.”

“Like this? Why?”

Yarvi nodded over toward the crew. “Because damn them, that’s why.”

“Damn them,” muttered Thorn, scooping up water with her hand and pushing back the hair she still had. She had to admit she was getting a taste for the idea. Leaving it half-shaved, strange and fierce, a challenge to everyone who looked at her. “Damn them.” And she snorted up a laugh.

“It’s not as though you’ll be the only odd-looking one on this crew. And anyway,” Yarvi brushed some of the clippings gently from her shoulder with his withered hand, “hair grows back.”

That was a tough day’s work at the oar, fighting an angry current as the Divine narrowed and its banks steepened, Rulf frowning as he nudged the ship between rocks frothing with white water. That evening, as the sunset flared pink over the forested hills, they reached the tall hauls.

There was a strange village at the shore where no two houses were the same. Some built of timber, some of stone, some from turf like the barrows of dead heroes. It was home to folk of the Shattered Sea who had stopped on the way south, and folk from Kalyiv and the empire who had stopped on the way north, and folk from the forest tribes and the Horse People too who must have stuck on journeys east or west. Seeds blown from half the world away and chosen by some weird luck to put their roots down here.

Whatever their clothes and their customs, though, however sharp they had grown at spinning coins from passing crews, Father Yarvi had the Golden Queen’s blood in his veins and knew the best way to fleece them. He bargained with each in their own tongue, baffled them now with charming smiles and now with stony blankness, until he had them bickering over the chance to offer him the lowest prices. When he finally rented eight great bearded oxen from the village’s headwoman, he left her blinking down bewildered at the few coins in her palm.

“Father Yarvi is no fool,” said Brand as they watched him work his everyday magic.

“He’s the most deep-cunning man I ever met,” answered Rulf.

There was a graveyard of abandoned timber by the river-rollers and runners, broken masts and oars, even a warped old keel with some strakes still on it, the bones of a ship that must have come down off the hills too damaged and been broken up for parts. The crew busied themselves with axes and chisels and by the time Father Moon was showing himself they had the South Wind ashore with good runners mounted alongside her keel and all her cargo packed on two rented wagons.

“Do we train now?” asked Thorn, as she watched the crew settle to their usual evening merry-making about the fire, Koll causing waves of laughter by copying one of Odda’s less-than-likely stories.

Skifr looked at her, one eye gleaming in the fading light. “It is late, and there will be hard work tomorrow. Do you want to train?”

Thorn pushed some wood-shavings around with her toe. “Maybe just a little?”

“We will make a killer of you yet. Fetch the weapons.”

Rulf kicked them all grumbling from their beds at the first glimmer of dawn, his breath steaming on the damp air.

“Up, you turds! You’ve got the hardest day of your lives ahead of you!”

There had been no easy days since they set off from Thorlby, but their helmsman was right. Carrying a ship over a mountain is exactly as hard as it sounds.

They heaved groaning at ropes, dragged snarling at oars switched about to make handles, set their shoulders to the keel when the runners snagged, gripping at each other in a straining, stinking, swearing tangle. Even with four of the oxen yoked to the prow they were soon all bruised from falls and raw from rope, whipped by twigs and riddled with splinters.

Safrit went ahead to clear the track of fallen branches. Koll darted in and out below the keel with a bucket of pitch and pig fat to keep the runners sliding. Father Yarvi shouted to the drovers in their tongue, who never used the goad but only crooned to the oxen in low voices.

Uphill, always uphill, the track faint and full of stones and roots. Some prowled armed through the trees about the ship, watching for bandits who might wait in the woods for crews to ambush, and rob, and sell as slaves.

“Selling a ship’s crew is much more profitable than selling things to a ship’s crew, that’s sure.” Odda’s sigh implied he spoke from experience.

“Or than dragging a ship through a wood,” grunted Dosduvoi.

“Save your breath for the lifting,” Rulf forced through clenched teeth. “You’ll need it.”

As the morning wore on Mother Sun beat down without mercy and fat flies swarmed about the toiling oxen and the toiling crew. The sweat ran down Thorn’s stubbled scalp in streaks, dripped from her brows and soaked her vest so that it chafed her nipples raw. Many of the crew stripped to their waists and a few much further. Odda struggled along in boots alone, sporting the hairiest arse ever displayed by man or beast.

Thorn should have been watching where she put her feet but her eyes kept drifting across the boat to Brand. While the others grumbled and stumbled and spewed curses he kept on, eyes ahead and wet hair stuck to his clenched jaw, thick muscles in his sweat-beaded shoulders working as he hefted all that weight with no complaints. That was strength right there. Strength like Thorn’s father had, solid and silent and certain as Father Earth. She remembered Queen Laithlin’s last words to her. Fools boast of what they will do. Heroes do it. And Thorn glanced across at Brand again and found herself wishing she was more like him.

“Yes, indeed,” murmured Safrit as she held the waterskin to Thorn’s cracked lips so she could drink without letting go her rope. “That is a well-made lad.”

Thorn jerked her eyes away, got half her mouthful down her windpipe and near choked on it. “Don’t know what you’re speaking of.”

“Course not.” Safrit pushed her tongue into her cheek. “That must be why you keep not looking.”

Once they even passed a ship being hauled the other way by a crowd of sweat-bathed Lowlanders, and they nodded to each other but wasted no breath on greetings. Thorn had no breath to spare, chest on fire and every muscle aching. Even her toenails hurt.

“I’m no great enthusiast … for rowing,” she snarled, “but I’d damn sure rather … row a ship … than carry it.”

With one last effort they heaved the South Wind over a stubborn brow and onto the flat, the runners grinding to a halt.

“We’ll rest here for now!” called Father Yarvi.

There was a chorus of grateful groans, and men tied their ropes off around the nearest trees, dropping among the knotted roots where they stood.

“Thank the gods,” whispered Thorn, pushing her hands into her aching back. “The downslope’ll be easier. It has to be.”

“Guess we’ll see when we get there,” said Brand, shading his eyes. The ground dropped away ahead but, further on, indistinct in the haze, it rose again. It rose in forested slopes, higher, and higher, to a ridge above even the one they stood on now.

Thorn stared at it, jaw hanging open in sick disbelief. “More and more, crushing with stones seems like it might have been the less painful option.”

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” said Father Yarvi. “We may be short of comforts out here, but I’m sure we can find stones.”