Chapter 12 Tavern Diplomacy

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 11. Subject reports that the Countess Elodie Vane visited his window at midnight "on business" and was removed by Mrs Ostry. I asked how. Subject says Mrs Ostry "just told her". I have no further notes. I do not think I could write any. H.Q.

The Countess's business, it turned out, was me.

She sat on my windowsill with her feet inside and her skirts outside and explained it to me, very fast, the way Fen talks about wool. She said there was something unusual in my blood. A tonic, or a humour, she wasn't sure which. It ought to be studied. In the interests of science she was prepared to offer me terms. A small amount, once a week, under proper conditions, with a fee. She named a fee. It was a lot of money.

"How much did you say?" I asked.

She said it again. It was still a lot of money.

I did think about it. That was the tax paid off in a season, near enough, and all I'd have to do was sit still once a week. But it didn't sit right. I couldn't have told you why, not then. It was something about the way she said science, and the way she didn't look at me while she said it, and the way her hands kept going to the silver case at her waist and back.

"I don't know, Countess," I said. "It feels a bit like selling the milk off a cow that's not mine."

She opened her mouth to answer that, and then the door opened behind me, and Widow Ostry was standing there in a nightcap with a candle.

"Mister Marsh," she said. "What is that."

"It's the Countess Vane, Mrs Ostry."

Widow Ostry looked at the Countess. The Countess looked at Widow Ostry. One of them was a hundred and eighty years old and could kill a man by looking at him a certain way. The other was a landlady.

"No guests," said Widow Ostry. "Of any kind. At any hour. Out."

"Madam," said the Countess, "do you know who I..."

"I know exactly who you are. I don't care if you're the Queen of the Saltfens. My house, my rules. Out." Widow Ostry pointed at the window with her candle. "The way you came in, if you please. I'll not have you tracking through my hall."

The Countess looked at me. I didn't know what to tell her. I've never won an argument with Mrs Ostry and I didn't fancy her chances either.

She went. Out of the window and down the wall, like a shadow going down a curtain, and gone. Widow Ostry shut the window, latched it, and looked at me over the candle.

"Twice," she said. "Once for the window. Once for my nerves."

"She didn't break anything."

"She broke my sleep," said Widow Ostry, and went back downstairs.

* * *

I'd paid Mrs Ostry for another week on the Wednesday, so that was seven silver gone, and I'd picked up a few odd jobs since, off the spectacled clerk and once off Miss Quill, who'd come down the Guild steps after me with a sheet she said was better suited. It was. A builder's yard with something living under the timber stacks, a few silver. A chimney with something living in it, a few silver more. A water butt with something living in it, which turned out to be an eel and paid nothing because the owner said eels don't count. Bits and pieces. When I counted it all up on the blanket the night the Countess came, I had twenty-four gold, give or take.

A hundred and seventy-six to go. Five weeks, if the frost was kind. I tried not to work out what that came to a week, and then I worked it out anyway, and wished I hadn't.

Two days after the window, Fitch sent his boy Wat up the hill to fetch me for supper.

* * *

The Drowned Man was the Weir's best tavern, which isn't saying much. It sat on the river wall at the bottom of a lane so steep there were steps cut in it, and it had a flood line painted on the inside of the bar at about the height of your elbow, with the year next to it. There were five more lines above that one, each with its own year. The landlord was a one-legged man called Hobb who'd lost the other leg to the river and seemed to hold it against the whole world.

Fitch had kept his word. Hobb put a plate of fish stew in front of me, and bread, and wouldn't take my money, though he looked like it hurt him.

"Fitch says you're good for it," Hobb said. "Fitch says you're good for anything. I say we'll see."

The stew was good. Wat sat next to me and talked about the sewer, which he'd gone back down the day before, which I thought was very brave of him, and I told him so, and he went red to the ears. Fitch sat across from us and drank his ale and watched the door. It was a busy night. River men, dock lads, a couple of off-duty Watch, Fitch's sewer crew at the end table. It was warm and loud and smelled of fish and wet wool, and I liked it better than any place I'd been in the city.

Then the door opened, and the noise stopped.

The first one through had to duck. She came in sideways, because she was too broad for the frame the other way, and stood up inside, and kept standing up for some time.

She was an orc. I'd never seen one, but you couldn't mistake it. Green-grey skin, a jaw like a plough blade, two short tusks coming up over her lip. She was a head taller than me and wider across the shoulders than Hobb's bar, and she had black hair in a hundred thin braids with bits of bone and iron worked into them. She wore leather and old mail and a great deal of scar. There was an axe on her back with a head on it the size of a cartwheel.

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Behind her came nine more, all big, all armed. None of them was as big as her.

She looked round the Drowned Man slowly, the way Duchess looks round a paddock she's thinking of breaking out of.

"I look for a man," she said. Her voice was deep and rough and carried like a bell. "A man with a cleaver. A man the golden knight could not lift against."

Every head in the room turned towards me.

I put my spoon down.

* * *

"That's me," I said. "Evening."

She crossed the room to my table in four steps. The floor shook under each one. Up close she smelled of leather and smoke and some sort of oil, and her eyes were yellow, like a goat's, and very bright.

"You," she said. "Small. I thought you would be bigger."

"Most people say that."

"I am Brakka Ironjaw," she said. "Warlord of the Ironjaw clan, of the Red Steppe. I have killed a war-mammoth with my hands. I have broken the Spearline at Hask. Four hundred years of my mothers looked down on me when I took the clan." She leaned on my table with both fists, and it groaned. "I am in this city for the Treaty talks, which are boring. And I hear in the market that the golden knight was made to look a fool by a farmer with a cleaver. The golden knight who rode up at Corrow Ford after my cousin Ugra and her shield-sisters had bled the wyvern half to death, and cut off its head while it lay there, and has had songs sung about it ever since."

"Is your cousin all right?"

"My cousin is dead. The wyvern did that." Brakka's lip went back from her tusks. "The knight only did the singing." She straightened up. "Show me the cleaver."

I looked at Fitch. Fitch looked like a man who'd very much like to be somewhere else.

I unslung it and put it on the table.

Brakka studied it the way a farrier studies a hoof. Then she spat on her palms, rubbed them together, took hold of the handle in one huge hand, and lifted.

The table creaked. The cleaver didn't move. She took hold with both hands, braced a foot on the bench, and heaved, and the tendons stood up along her arms like ropes and her tusks bit into her lip. Her warband had gathered round. One of them started to chant something low in their own tongue, and the others took it up, keeping time with her heaving.

Nothing. She stopped, and stood back, breathing like a bellows.

Then she threw back her head and laughed. It was a huge laugh, a joyful one, and it rattled the cups on Hobb's shelves.

"Good!" she said. "Good. It is real. The market is not lying." She thumped her chest. "Now. You will fight me."

"No, thanks," I said.

* * *

I'm not sure what else I could have said. I didn't want to fight her. I didn't know her. I'd just had a lovely bowl of stew and I had nothing against her at all, except that she was standing on my foot.

Brakka didn't take it well.

"You will fight me," she said again, louder. "I am Brakka Ironjaw. I do not ask twice."

"You asked twice just then."

Somebody at the end table laughed. Brakka swung round and looked at him, and he stopped. Then she turned back to me and her face had changed, and I knew the look, because I'd seen it on a bull once, just before it went through a fence.

"Then I will make you," she said, and picked up the table.

She picked it up with my stew still on it and threw it across the room. It went through the front window of the Drowned Man in a burst of glass and wood and fish stew and landed in the river with a splash. The whole tavern was on its feet. Somebody screamed. Her warband roared and drew their weapons, and the off-duty Watch drew theirs, and the dock lads picked up chairs, and suddenly there was a fight going on in every corner of the room at once and I couldn't see the door.

Brakka came for me with her fists. She didn't bother with the axe. I stepped back from the first swing and it went into the post behind me and the post broke. I stepped back from the second and it took the corner off the bar. Hobb was shouting, "My fucking bar! My fucking bar!" A bench went past my head. I kept stepping back, and she kept coming, laughing again, and every time she missed me something else in the Drowned Man broke.

"Fight!" she roared. "Fight me, little man!"

I didn't want to. I just wanted it to stop. I thought if I let her wear herself out she'd calm down, the way a bull does, if you give it room.

Then she took another swing, and I stepped aside, and behind me, right where I'd been standing, was Wat.

He'd been knocked down in the crush. He was on his back on the floor in the broken glass, between the bar and the bench, trying to get up. He was looking up at her with his mouth open. He didn't have room to roll.

And she wasn't looking at him at all. She was looking at me. Her foot was coming down.

I didn't think about it. You don't, with a cow. When a cow's about to kick a calf you don't stop to wonder what to do, you just smack her on the rump and shout and get her attention off it. That's all it is.

I stepped in and slapped her.

Open-handed. Across the face. Not hard. About what I'd give Duchess if she was being a pig about the milking.

There was a crack like a branch going in a storm.

Brakka's head went round. The rest of her went after it. Her feet left the floor. She went over the end of the bar in a long slow turn, like a sack of grain coming off a cart, and landed on her back on the boards behind it with a crash that shook the bottles down off the shelf. Then she lay there.

Out cold.

* * *

It went very quiet. Somewhere at the back, a dock lad said, "Bloody hell," very softly, and nobody told him to shut up.

I bent down and got Wat up by his collar and stood him on his feet and asked if he was all right. He nodded without saying anything. He was staring past me at the bar.

The fighting had stopped everywhere at once. The dock lads were standing with their chairs in the air. The off-duty Watch were standing with their swords out and their mouths open. Hobb was standing on his one leg with a bottle in his hand, frozen halfway to throwing it.

Behind the bar, Brakka Ironjaw lay on her back with her arms flung out, breathing slow and deep, and on her face there was a big red handprint, and a small, surprised smile.

I went over and looked at her. She was breathing fine. Her pulse was strong. I took my coat off and folded it and put it under her head, because the floor behind a bar is never clean.

"Sorry," I said to her, though she couldn't hear. "You were going to step on him."

Her warband had stopped too. They stood in the middle of the wrecked tavern in a ring, nine of them, big and scarred and armed, and they were all looking at me.

Then, one at a time, they started to kneel.

They knelt in the broken glass and the spilled stew, and they put their weapons on the floor in front of them, and they bowed their heads. The oldest of them, a grey-braided orc with one eye and a necklace of teeth, stayed kneeling longest, and looked up at me with that one eye, and said something in his own tongue. The others answered him, low, all together.

Then he said it in ours.

"By the law of the Ironjaw," he said, in a voice like gravel in a bucket, "and the law of her mothers and their mothers, the one who lays the warlord down takes her to wife." He bowed his head until it nearly touched the floor. "Hail to you, Husband of Brakka."

"Hail, Husband," said the other eight.

I stood in the wreck of the Drowned Man with no coat on and stew down my shirt, and looked at them, and looked at Fitch, who had his hands over his face.

"Hang on," I said.