The Blacktongue Thief

31 A Galtish Love Song

The island we came to, if it deserves the name, was little more than a tilted pile of rocks, scabbed over with green moss and mad with seabirds. The breadth of it could be walked in a quarter hour, the length in twice that, though you’d want your worst shoes as nearly every hand-span of it had been shat upon by the many seabirds who nested there. Some walked and cried at us, some ignored us and flew off when we got too close, a few mock-dove at us when we came to their nests, but, as we later found out, could only summon the heart to shout when we stole their eggs and cracked them down our throats.

Puffins, which Galts and Norholters call cliff-chickens, were most numerous. Funny birds, puffins, fat little black-and-white things with orange beaks and sad, tiny eyes. There must have been two thousand of them on the island, but terns, gulls, and others I can’t put a name to had their own neighborhoods as well. That so many birds of different shapes agreed to share these windblown rocks told me we were far from land and this the only place to lay a foot for many miles. The tentacle-beaten oar-boat, which we had tucked in the shadow between two rocks, was in no shape for a long journey. In other words, we were well and truly buggered.

Myself especially. Reminded me of an old poem about lovers separated by war. She asks, he answers.

Meaning, not at all. They’ll bury me in a grave, dump me off the boat, burn me on a pyre, or leave me for carrion. It seemed to fit my present state, only I had no lover at home to ask. Only siblings, a mother, and a niece to suffer for my failure. And there were no crows to eat me here. Only fucking puffins.

I should have gone to war. Goblins would have killed me, sure, but they wouldn’t have gone to Platha Glurris to punish those I loved. The cat was drowned, and the killer he carried, and all my hopes with the twain.

It was already eleven days into Lammas month, I was supposed to get to Hrava by the first of Vintners—just shy of three weeks’ marking—and here I was with my feet nailed to a shyte-bedabbed island in the middle of the kraken-haunted Gunnish Sea.

“Fothannon help me,” I said with a glum face before I could stop myself.

I felt something on my chest and looked down to find a fine streak of gull shyte from my tit to my hip.

It was my own fault—you don’t ask that bastard for anything wearing a frown.

When Galva and the harpooner, an old Pigdenish named Gormalin, got their sight back, the first thing they did was engage in a lively argument about whether it was time for everyone to start drinking their own piss.

“I don’t care what the rest of ye do,” Gormalin said, “I’ll not wait ’til I am half a skeleton from thirst, for then’s too late, and ye might as well drink seawater and die of it. Ye start drinkin’ yer piss now, ye can keep alive a fair while.”

“Life is not so precious as to be bought at any price,” Galva said. “To drink my own piss is too expensive.”

“That’s as ye say now, woman. There’ll come a time ye’ll wish ye’d not been so proud.”

“This time will never come.”

Five heartbeats fell.

“May I borrow your mug?”

“No!”

“I’ll rinse it with seawater after.”

“There is not enough water in the sea.”

“Be reasonable.”

“Do not mention this unclean thing to me again.”

“As ye say.”

“If you touch my mug, I will kill you.”

“It’s yerself ye kill with pride.” The harpooner got to his feet and shuffled a few steps before stopping to take off a shoe.

“If you are going to do something bestial, please do it out of my sight.”

Gormalin grumbled and shuffled farther on, behind a stand of man-high rocks.

“We haven’t even checked the island for fresh water,” Norrigal said.

“Some people just want an excuse to be filthy,” Galva said, clearly still disgusted by the proposed violation of her wine- vessel.

It occurred to me to wonder if the harpooner had been shipwrecked before and if it had made a cannibal of him. I knew that was a bit of a reach, but it was just a feeling I got. I resolved to sleep lightly. On the subject of cannibals, I had a look at the bite-marks I’d put on Malk. I hadn’t given him anything disfiguring; my heart wasn’t really in biting anybody. He looked to be coming out of his blindness now, as Norrigal had assured him he would, and I thought about getting up so I wouldn’t be the first thing he saw, but I was too tired. He pinched his eyes and rubbed them with his thumbs, shaking his head, and finally, he squinted at me. I looked back at him impassively.

“You killed Menrigo, didn’t you?”

“He the poisoner?”

“I suppose you could say that of him.”

“Then I suppose you could say I killed him.”

“Why not me?”

“Seemed a waste.”

He nodded, staring at me the while, the blues of his eyes adrift in a sea of angry, insulted pink.

“So what do we do?” I said to him.

“You know as well as I what’s owed.”

“Well, as I see it, the charter of the Suepka Buryey is dissolved. We owe each other no duel.”

“That doesn’t pay for cunny-all.”

“I’m not saying it does. I’m only suggesting we suspend our hostilities until we make proper land in a proper country.”

“My quarrel with you is not finished.”

“My quarrel with you is not finished,” Galva said, pointing at Malk.

“Screw you sideways, you Spanth … nutter.”

Galva didn’t need to put her hand on her sword to show how close things were. It showed on her face. Malk had likely saved his own life by choosing nutter instead of the bitch that his lips had pursed to utter.

“You sound like a pack of jackasses,” Norrigal said. “Fighting over who’s to kill who when thirst and hunger are like to do for us all. We could be a year on this rock.”

“She’s got a point,” I said and was ignored.

Galva said, “The only way to end our quarrel is for you to swear not to harm my companion. And to apologize.”

“I don’t apologize to no man nor dam,” Malk said.

“Hee-haw, hee-haw,” said Norrigal.

“I need no apology for myself,” said Galva.

“What the spiny devils are you talking about?”

“I’m for making the old man captain,” Norrigal said. “The lot of you ought to piss in your shoes and drink it, that makes more sense than this karkery.”

Galva said, “Malk Na Brannyck, you will apologize to Death.”

Malluk Na Braneek was how it sounded, and if you know how not to laugh at that, please let me know, too; I’m the fellow sniggering behind his fist.

Malk peeped open an eye.

“Apologize to fucking Death? You’re serious?”

“I have never been so serious in my life.”

One thing a killer’s good at is knowing when he’s talking to another killer, and also knowing when killing is close. “Fine, you mad Spanth shyte-pot. I’m sorry if I offended Death, though you can go fuck yourself.”

“This is acceptable,” Galva said.

Nice bit of whale boat diplomacy, that; my fellow Galt did what the Spanth asked and saved face at the same time. And so a vulgar little truce was hammered out where it might have been us killing Malk and wanting his arm on an oar if the boat was our only way out, which it likely was. Such is the grease that keeps the wheels of civilization turning. And here came the old man waving his foul shoe at us and wiping his lips with his sleeve as if to show us how much smarter he was, and maybe he was.

We did find fresh water; rainfall had collected in a sort of rock bowl not too far from a gnarled tree. It was a bit mucky, which the embarrassed harpooner was more than eager to point out, but Norrigal assured us it would serve if we could find something to boil it in. I couldn’t restrain myself from saying, “Of course, those of us who prefer drinking urine are under no obligation to stop.” That earned me a loveless sideways glance from old Gormalin, but Norrigal’s snort more than made up for that.

Our next discovery was a queer one. Norrigal and I had gotten off by ourselves to scout the sunward side of the island. Up in the rocks, in a cleft between two greenish-gray boulders that offered some shelter from the wind, I noticed what looked like a bit of rusty old metal. If the sun, what there was of it, had not been shining at just the right angle into the fissure, I never would have seen it. I four-legged down between the boulders into a sort of loose cave and started pulling weeds and smaller rocks away from the metal.

Soon, I uncovered a helmet belonging to a head belonging to a dead man. Not that we had suffered from any shortage of those—three crewmembers from the Suepka had washed up since the wreck, one of them the treacherous Menrigo—but this man was dead of long vintage. Just a bearded skeleton, really, decorated here and there with arrows.

These waters were Gunnish, and though there were still enough of the fierce northern raiders to trouble shipping, they held just a shadow of their former strength. I’d read that ancient Gunns loved spirals, and this musty old corpse had three of them etched into his rusty steel breastplate. Should have spent the etcher’s money on three more inches of plate, because the arrow that lunged him looked to have missed the armor by the breadth of a finger. Whether he’d crawled down here to hide or die, he’d done both—he still had silver in his pouch, which I relieved him of. I wondered whose arrows were in him. Probably other Gunns’.

Every once in a while, the northern clans banded together under some great king and came south, as they’d done when they conquered what would become Oustrim, the giant-ridden land we were currently trooping toward, but it was said they never fought southerners with quite the fury and passion they saved for one another. In order for a great king to rise in Gunnland, he has to kill an astonishing number of lesser ones. Really, to be a Gunnish king was no great distinction. Beardy-bones here was probably the third holy king of cliff-chicken island, the gods watch his soul. One thing about the Gunns, though, they threw in on the Goblin Wars with every ship they had and wrecked their strength doing it. Now the Molrovans held the greatest northern fleet, though Holt was rising fast.

“Thanks for the silver,” I said.

Norrigal looked down the hole at me, her eyes bright in the sun.

“Who’s your friend?” she said.

“It’s my brother,” I said. “No wonder we haven’t had a letter. Want to meet him?”

“You just want a snog,” she said, making me smile to think of our warm kissing in the dark before my duel.

“Sure, and I do,” I said. “Maybe more.”

“What, with him watching?” she said, nodding once at the dead fellow.

I stripped my shirt off and flung it over the dead man’s head, lying back and smiling as sweet a virgin-killing smile as I had in my quiver.

She laughed and said, “You’re a cad. You get your way despite your ill manners, not because of them. It’s that sweet head above your neck and nothing more.”

“Something more,” I said, knowing full well the salt’s what brought the thirst. “Come down here with us.”

“Cad,” she said, laughing. “You’ll not have more than a snog, and you’ll not have it now.”

“If you know a beach-side inn, I’ll pay,” I said.

“I know a beach.”

We settled on a meeting that night, on the far beach from the camp, after the harpooner started to snore. He was always the last one to snore, but he meant it more than the rest. Galva wasn’t sleeping much, but she’d not care what the girleen and I were about. She would watch the fire and think her goblin-haunted thoughts or maybe imagine herself dying at last and running with her skinny woman to far beaches crashed on by waves of black Ispanthian wine.

It would be a long day waiting for that night to come, what with the promise of Norrigal’s lips and not unpleasant young-dog breath. She was a smart one, and I suspected even smarter than she let on. I was more than half-sure she saw through my rakish nonchalance; the truth was I was growing fond of that greening witchlet, and if she knew her dance steps, she’d soon be binding me round whatever finger she chose. And the harder I tried not to be glad of it, the gladder I was.

Now that we had water, it turned out filling our stomachs wasn’t so hard. We had eaten our eggs raw before I found the dead man’s cleft, but now I built a little fire and fried some gull eggs on the breastplate of the dead northerner, whose conical helmet also served as a boiling pot for water. Galva seemed uncomfortable dishonoring the tools of war with such mundane treatment, but I did notice she ate her eggs hot like the rest of us.

As our second day on the island turned to night, I listened to the cries of birds, and to the hush of the surf, and I listened to Malk and the harpooner under their little driftwood lean-to, talking about this port town and that, laughing gruffly in a way particular to soldiers and sailors. Together, they had caught a fish in the shallows, a big, handsome silvery devil that they’d gutted, cleaned, and cut, setting on sticks to slow-cook over the fire all night and which we were all looking forward to eating for our breakfast. The clouds had gone and given way to a rare splay of stars, bright and cold as ice chips in the black. I thought, not for the last time, how good it would be to play a slow, sweet reel on my drowned fiddle just then. Old Gormalin must have felt me wanting music, for he wandered over next to us and said, quite out of the blue, “Hey, lassie, why don’t you sing us a Galtish love song.” Malk followed after him and sat. Galva sat a bit off, but well in earshot.

“Oh, I’m for singing love songs, am I?”

“Better you than me. A maiden singing love songs is cheery. From old men, it’s for tears.”

“Gods and you’ve convinced me. Here’s as cheery a song as ever you’ll hear this maiden sing.”

She cleared her throat with some ceremony, then began, in her sweet, high voice.

“Pish,” said Gormalin. “That’s a war song!”

“That song’s illegal!” he protested, and right he was. It’s the very song that got Kellan na Falth hanged. “You can’t sing about men killing men since the Goblin Wars! Especially not a song against a proper king of Holt, even an old, bad king!”

Now, of course, I joined in.

No Coldfoot guard was going to be left out of an illegal Galtish rebel song, so Malk picked up the next verse with us, his strong, confident baritone suddenly making the whole insurrection seem credible.

The silence that followed was only broken when Galva said, “This is a good song.”

Another hour passed before sleep stole upon the camp. When at last I saw Malk curl up facing away from us and heard the thick breathing of the harpooner give way to fatty snores, I checked on Galva. We hadn’t set formal watches, because she normally kept vigil most of the night, stealing her sleep back from the day in pieces, so I was surprised and a little put off to see her chin against her chest. I poked Norrigal with a stick of driftwood, meaning to point out the drowsy Spanth to her, but damned if she wasn’t sleeping as cozy a sleep as the rest. Well, I’d be doing neither Fothannon no mischief nor Haros no rutting this cold night. I sighed and settled in to a sleep I was glad to have after all.

I woke to the sound of shells.