A Burning Sea Theodore Brun (ebook reader that looks like a book .txt) 📖

tunic will do,’ added the newcomer. ‘The smell round here is bad enough.’

One of the sailors took a knife to Erlan’s tunic – at least the rags that were left of it – and a moment later he stood naked to the waist. The redbeard came closer, looking him over with careful brown eyes. He had a half-amused air about him, as if this were all just a game he liked to play. Erlan flinched as he prodded at various scars, some old, some more recent.

‘What about his ankle?’

Ramedios shrugged and ordered that he be made to walk, which he did after some goading from the guard’s spear-butt.

All the while, Ramedios and the bidder were conversing in Greek, too fast for him to understand. At last the buyer pulled his hand down the length of his beard and rummaged in the folds of his robe till he produced a fat leather purse and dumped it on the table. Erlan saw no scales. Instead of weighing out silver, the man counted out a number of small round pieces of gold.

Thirteen of them. Erlan knew not whether to be flattered or insulted, only that it was an oddly precise number to be valued at. But Ramedios scraped the gold into his own leather pouch, apparently satisfied. There was another quick exchange. This time Erlan caught the word spathí.

Sword.

Erlan’s heart rose in his chest when, a moment later, Wrathling was produced from somewhere. The newcomer looked it over for barely a few seconds, affecting indifference to the intricate metalwork of its hilt. He nodded, then tossed it to a big man standing nearby and threw down another three gold pieces on the table.

Ramedios gave a flick of his hand. ‘You’re his now.’ The sailor gripping his chain tossed it to the oversized servant, who gave it a tug. Erlan didn’t move.

‘Watch your back, Ramedios,’ he growled. ‘One day I’m going to be there.’

Ramedios gave a derisive snort in reply. ‘You brainless barbarian. You think you’re the first man I’ve sold who’s threatened me? But I’m still here, aren’t I?’ He spat at Erlan’s feet. ‘Devil take you, cripple.’

And with these words, it seemed his fate was sealed.

CHAPTER TEN

By Lilla’s count it was four weeks since they had left Dunsgard and every day she wondered whether she had made the right decision. But right or wrong, she didn’t regret leaving Osvald behind, nor his offer. And now other words filled her thoughts. The king of kings. Miklagard. . . Erlan.

Perhaps they were nothing but phantom hopes she was chasing which would mock her in the end. But she refused to settle for the mediocrity of Dunsgard and its slithering lord. If there was a greater alliance to be made with a greater king, she would find it. After which, she would return, and her revenge on Thrand would be cold and furious.

‘You’ll come back here, vagabond queen,’ Osvald had jeered when she gave him her refusal. ‘There’ll always be a place here among my bed-slaves when you do.’ She had swallowed the insult and made her choice.

Valrik, on the other hand, had proved a gift from the gods. A sea-skipper, he had two things she needed: experience and a willing crew. Their service cost her half the gold in Einar’s sea-chest, but if it delivered what she hoped, it was worth every ounce. In a few days they were ready and set a course upstream in defiance of the spring meltwaters rushing out of the Dagava valley.

Defiance was a fuel that burned hot and burned long. But after four weeks even Lilla had to admit she’d had no notion of the scale of their undertaking. On and on they had rowed into a vastness of strange landscapes and stranger people. Valrik told her that to reach the Dnipar, they must cross the uplands not of the Dagava, but of a tributary river named the Kaspja that turned south. Beyond lay a portage of several days over which they would have to haul not only Valrik’s ship but also the cargo which he had insisted on assembling before their departure. But once they made the Dnipar, he assured her, their voyage would become easier.

When they had taken the fork up the Kaspja river, the weather had improved. The wet, gloomy end of winter had warmed into a mellow spring. The air filled with willow blossom and dandelion seeds. The floodplain meadows spilled like green ale-froth over the pale muddy banks, wafting the scent of blooming flowers across the water. Those were good days, breaking with golden dawns and burning away under blazing sunsets.

Valrik had named his ship Fasolt after one of the jötnar twins said to have built Valhalla, the great Hall of the Slain. It was long and sleek and shallow-bottomed – his own design, he said, made for just such a river voyage. And as they had pushed upstream, many times the keel scraped the river bed and Lilla thought they could go no further. But somehow Valrik had coaxed Fasolt onward for a few more leagues.

To Einar’s disgruntlement, he found himself pressed into service at the row-bench. After many days of hard toil, his fat belly was melting away, revealing the first traces of hard muscle beneath.

‘I’ll have to change my name if this damn river goes on much longer,’ he complained one day.

‘No river is that long, my friend,’ Gerutha had laughed in reply.

And she was right. Because at last, after four weeks, Fasolt could go no further.

Valrik’s men emptied the ship of every object that wasn’t nailed down – every bale of skins, every sea-chest, every oar, every pot, every rope, every yard of sail. Even the mast came down. Lilla watched as the pile of goods and gear on the floodplain grew, until only the bare hull remained, dragged halfway out of the water onto a silty bar and flopped on its side. She wondered whether Erlan really had passed this way. Perhaps he was