The Blacktongue Thief

53 The Oxbone Walls

One day later, we came to the walls that bordered and protected Molrova, called the Oxbone Walls for the whiteness of their stone, standing out against the darkness of the mountains they bridged. It was a sight to draw gasps, so gasp I did. The stones were massive, hinting at some feat of magic, engineering by the builders of Old Kesh—it was hard to picture Molrovans managing this. We were closer to giants than ever, so close I imagined a briny smell on the wind that could only be their sweat, or maybe it was iron in my nose, and that was their blood.

Our blood, I thought. It’ll be our blood on the rocks past those comely walls.

Don’t forget your shyte. One of those things steps on you, it’ll squeeze your shyte out one end and your supper out the other, imaginary Malk said in my head.

What are you, twelve years old with all your talk of giants in your pants and shyte out my arse? I asked him.

No, you are, he said. This is all your own invention. I’m fucking dead, aren’t I? You poor kark of a bastard orphan.

I laughed all by myself, looking into the middle distance.

We bribed our way through a small bronze gate guarded by a trio of joyless twats with bronze knives and cured sealskins, each of them hung with jewels they’d no doubt extorted from refugees heading east.

One of the men was black-handed and had scars on his lips that looked as though his mouth had once been sewn shut. The walls were so thick the gate was more a tunnel, dark as death, and when we got through, our breaths smoking out before us in the cold, we saw that the mountains we had just passed were only the first and largest of a great many before us, all pressing close to one another, lean and hard and snow-cloaked, promising choked roads and rockfall. Each of us swore in our several ways, then marched on, the brass gate grating closed behind us.

Several times while crossing the Bittern Mountains, we were forced to abandon the road to let pass streams of refugees, every one of them thanking their dearest gods they’d escaped the land we were striding boldly toward. The people of Oustrim were fierce fighters, the blond-haired, gray-eyed seed of the Gunnish raiders who sailed to Hrava and down the rivers of Oustrim in the years of Ash, just after the Knock brought earthquakes and city-killing waves to topple Old Kesh.

If the Gunnish learned to use the plow, they never forgot where they hung their swords and went right on worshipping Wolthan, Tuur, and Hrael, the martial gods of their sea-raiding ancestors. To see beaten caravans of them shuffling toward the scant hospitality of Molrova was a sad thing indeed.

None of us had enough of their language to trade news with most of them, but one group was led by a clan chief with a Holtish wife. Galva asked her if there was fresh word from Hrava, the capital.

“The city is broken. Kynd have abandoned it, and it’s too small for them,” the wife said. “They say it’s just bones and weeds, the people have gone up to the hills or down to the sewers. The giants pushed down into the valley and began to break the farms and eat our oxen. They mean to lay all our buildings flat and chase us all over the Bitterns. You’re Ispanthian, yae?”

Galva nodded hard once, the way they do.

“Then you’ll want word of the queen. It is said she lives, though I’ve not spoken to any who’ve seen her with their own eyes since Hrava fell. I hope she lives. I saw her once. She’s better than King Hagli.” She cut her eyes at the square-headed, square-bearded man frowning at her left. “The king was a fool, and I can say that because my lord and protector here hasn’t bothered to learn my tongue. He knows words like brave, though,” she said, drawing that word out and smiling warmly at him, earning a proud smile back, “and strong, he likes that one, too.” He poked his chin up a little. “But he was running like the rest of them when the giant kicked the house down. Have you seen one of them yet?”

Galva shook her head.

“Right, that’s why you’re going toward them instead of away. You’ll be following us soon. Or you’ll be dead. Got any beer?”

“No,” Galva said.

“Too bad, we’d’ve traded for it. If you’ve any whiskey, don’t say, he’s got a nasty temper with whiskey in him, but whines like a dry hinge when the beer’s gone. Ah, well. Good luck.”

It was at her signal that the refugees started moving, but Norrigal put her hand up.

“Wait. You said you saw the queen.”

“Aye, Queen Mireya. Before all this, of course.”

“Why do you say she’s better than her husband?”

“The king couldn’t be bothered with people in the country. Just wanted to keep to the capital and be fawned on. She loved the land, even if it wasn’t hers. She came to our town in the month of Ashers and made an offering of pigeons to Aevri, the rain-maiden, that dry summer three years back. Aevri must have liked the pigeons; she borrowed water from her mother Haelva-in-the-Lake, and rain came before the queen’s procession was even out of sight. They aren’t my gods, or they weren’t, but now I cut pigeons for Aevri, too. Rain years we’re rich, dry years we’re poor. We were rich. Then poor. Poorer, now. Guess I should’ve been kneeling before Tuur since killing giants is what we need, and no one seems very good at it. Do you lot expect you’re good at it?”

Galva opened her mouth as if to speak, but didn’t.

Norrigal said, “Your love for your queen does you honor.”

The square-bearded man grumbled something at his wife, and she hissed back at him in Gunnish.

“Knew he’d want beer,” she said. “It was good to speak Holtish with you. Luck fill your larders.”

“And yours,” Norrigal said.

They went out of sight.

We weren’t out of the mountains yet, but we were in Oustrim now.

One thing you’ll remember about Oustrim if you ever go is the light. It’s more golden somehow, and not just because we were into Vintners month. The trees were starting to splash yellow; not all of them, mostly one sort I’d never seen before whose leaves seemed to rattle and flicker in the wind. Not birch but like birch; its bark was easy to strip and came off white like expensive paper or not-so-new linen.

It was while we were coming down from the last of the Bitterns, camping near a stand of these trees, that Yorbez nearly killed one of the musicians.

It was the seventh night of Vintners, and I was on watch, doing the best I could to keep myself awake by getting up and walking every once and again, flapping my arms, or running in place to stir the blood. It had seemed altogether likely that it would snow before we quit the mountains, cold as it was, but the nights had stayed clear. The stars here were extraordinary in their brightness, and I was amusing myself trying to sort out the constellations. I had already traced the horns of the Bull and spotted the Axe-and-Lamb, but those were easy. I was just finding the thigh of the Summer Maiden, who wouldn’t be coming much above the mountain before she dipped back down for her winter of coupling with the Happy Man, whose arms were up in good cheer or, as some cynics said, surrender.

“Get your chodadu hand from my pack, bercaou!” Yorbez said, and I looked to see her roll to her feet and unsheathe her bullnutter. I ran toward them, ashamed to have been caught stargazing, but it was all over before I got there. She moved so fast that I didn’t see the blade until it stopped. Bizh yipped and danced in pain, his hands moving up to his nose. He took them away to gawk at the dab of blood that spotted one palm. I saw that the very tip of his nose was gone. He put his hand back up and painted a second dab on his palm.

“That is right!” she said to me. “That is right for thief so all may see his thieving when he comes. He steals from me bread.”

Bizh made no attempt to deny it, just moaned a pitiful, sorry moan. Nazh and Gorbol came up now and put themselves between him and the angry Spanth, who seemed set to gut the drummer if he so much as looked up at her, which he wisely did not. The other two musicians were careful to move slowly and keep their hands in view.

“That true?” I said. “Did you steal from one of your journey-mates?” Galva had gone to stand near Yorbez, her Calar Saram, and Norrigal walked up behind me. How quickly we divide ourselves by nation, whatever nation the musicians were from—I still had no inkling about their accent and never heard them talk else but Holtish.

Nazh spoke for Bizh while he went oh oh oh. “He probably did steal, but it is not his fault. She left her pack open at the top so he could see the bread, and he can’t help himself when he sees bread. None of us can. We love bread.”

“Who doesn’t,” I said, remembering the bear man saying, “Braathe ne byar!” and wondering if he was yet dead or in a cage.

“I’m soooooo sorry,” Bizh said through the shirttail he had up to staunch his bleeding nose. His white, skinny belly shone in the starlight. When the shirt came briefly down so he could find a fresh spot to stain, I noticed crumbs in his sparse beard. He looked thirty, but that beard belonged on a lad just fourteen.

“Well, will you do it again?” I said.

He nodded pitifully. “Y-y-yessss. Unless she closes her paaaaaaaack,” he said, crying the last bit.

Nazh and Gorbol folded their arms protectively around him. Galva deferred to Yorbez in this matter. The older swordmaster looked back at Bizh, and I thought sure she was about to stick him liver-deep, but she flicked a drop of blood off her spadín in contempt, then wiped and sheathed it. I had nothing to say.

It wasn’t like I never stole anything.

“Fucks to you,” she said, pointing at the sobbing drummer. “This time I only close my pack.”

The next day, when we stopped near a stream that cut across the foothills just west of the Bitterns, four of us walked a bit away from the three newcomers who were arguably musicians. They had played a couple of times, and it had been so awful, we threatened them with stoning on the first occasion and decapitation on the second. We still had not the first idea why we were to tolerate them. Whether or not to continue this policy was a matter of some contention, and it seemed the more one profited from the use of magic, the more tolerant that person felt toward the trio.

“I think the old man was playing us a joke. These are useless, and he know it. He laugh at us to take them, it save him the rope to hang them,” Yorbez had said.

Galva was of the same mind. “I do not see what they do for us besides eating our food and slowing us down.”

Norrigal crossed her arms and said, “If any of you are sensitive to magic, you’ll know these bunch raise the hairs on your arms. There’s something to them. I think we leave them back or harm them at our peril, and I’m against it. I say we keep them.”

“Besides which,” I said, “their playing drives the scavengers away.”

Even Galva laughed at that.

And so they stayed.

For the moment.