Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

"Get your arse out of our boat, wild-man," the crewman said.

His accent was strange to the young man's ears, and the order and sometimes the endings of the words he used, but comprehensible— many tribes distantly related to the Keruthinii folk had settled across the salt water in Alba, the White Isle. That didn't mean they were his friends; the opposite, if anything.

The seaman also scooped up the horsehide bundle that held Blood Wolf's goods and threw it on the planks of the dock. Two more grabbed the youth by the belt of his wolfskin kilt and half-carried, half-threw him out on worn oak-wood. That done, the crew ignored him as he crawled up the splintery surface toward his goods. Gradually the shaming weakness left him, and he could sit, then stand, spit some of the vile taste out of his mouth, begin to feel like a man once more. He had crossed the Channel to Alba; beyond Alba lay the Summer Isle, and beyond that the River Ocean, and the Island of Wizards, Nantucket.

First he looked to his weapons: round shield, spear, a light bronze-headed axe, and his precious steel knife, bought from Alban traders. Then he swung his pack onto his back and walked landward as he gazed around, trying hard not to gape at the magical city of Southaven. The shore tended north and south here, but little of it could be seen; great piers of timber framework filled with rock stretched out into the water. Beside them lay ships, more than he could count on fingers and toes both, many times more, their bowsprits looming over the broad cobbled harborside street thronged with folk and beasts and wagons. There were more folk here than in his whole tribe—six or seven tens of hundreds.

The ships' masts were taller than trees, their rigging and yards a spiky leafless forest, but that was nothing beside the ones out on the water with chimneys of iron sticking up from their middles and belching black smoke, and great wheels on either side churning up foam.

"True wizardry," he murmured to himself, grinning.

And in the tales, didn't the great warrior always come off well from his meeting with wizards? Either gaining their friendship and battle-luck, or overcoming and plundering them. He snuffed deeply—silt, fish, salt water, horse-manure, odd sulfur-tinged smoke, but less sweat and ordure stink than you'd expect—and looked along the street. At the thronging folk dressed more richly than great chiefs or tribal kings and more strangely than his eyes could take in; everything from homelike kilts and shifts to shameless string skirts on bare-breasted cloaked women, long embroidered robes, with the odd-looking trousers and jackets and boots that the majority favored, making a dun-colored mass. And at the nets of cargo swinging ashore, laden with sacks and bales and kegs of the Gods alone knew what unguessable wealth; at buildings of baked brick, some five times a man's height, with great clear windows of glass—and remembered the price the Keruthinii chieftains paid for a single tumbler or goblet of it . . .

His belly rumbled. It had been more than a day since he'd eaten, and that had gone to the Channel fish. It was a cool brisk day with a strong wind under scudding cloud, enough to awaken any man's appetite.

"Stop, thief! Stop him!"

Kreuha's head whipped around. The cry had been in En-gil-its, the tongue of wizards and wizard traders; he'd learned a little of it. And the call was repeated in half a dozen other languages, two of them close to his own:

"Kreuk! Kreuk!" That was the ancient call to raise the hue-and-cry after one who stole by stealth.

A man came pushing through the crowd, vaulted a pile of barrels, leapt and scrambled over a four-wheeled wagon piled with bales of some dirty-white fibre; that gave him space to pick up speed, heading for the frayed edge of town south of the small-boat docks. He was holding a sword in his hand; Kreuha's eyes narrowed at the sight. The blade was like none he'd seen, slightly curved and as long as a man's leg, with a round gold-chased guard and a hilt made for two hands. Sunlight glittered on the bright metal, picking out a waving line in the steel a little back from the cutting edge.

Kreuha laid his pack and spears down and ran three bouncing strides to put himself in the man's way. The thief stopped, sweating and snarling; he was a few years older than the newcomer, shorter but broader, with a shock of dark-brown hair and beard. The arms below his sleeveless singlet were thick with muscle and lavishly tattooed. But there was something about the way he stood, the sweat and desperation that made him blink—

"Give me the sword," Kreuha said, crouching slightly and spreading his hands so the man couldn't dodge past him. "And I will return it to the owner." And be richly rewarded, he thought. He'd heard of such weapons. The lords among the wizard-folk wore them. This one is no warrior, only a thief.

"If you try to strike me, I will kill you and take it," the Keruthinii tribesman continued calmly.

The man hesitated for an instant and then cut desperately, a sweeping two-handed roundhouse blow at waist level. It was clumsy, and Kreuha could see the prelude coming a full three heartbeats before the steel began to move, but it was hard enough to slice him to the spine if it landed—the more so as the blade looked knife-sharp. Kreuha leapt straight up as the sword moved, and it hissed like a serpent as it passed beneath the calloused soles of his feet. One long leg smashed out, and his heel slammed into the thief's breastbone with a sound like a maul hitting a baulk of seasoned oak and a crackling noise beneath that. The man was shocked to a halt, staggered backward with his face turning dark purple, coughed out a spray of bright arterial blood, and fell bone-lessly limp.

Kreuha landed on his feet and one hand, then bounced erect. The sword spun away, landing on the cobbles and sparking as steel struck flint-rich stone. The tribesman winced at the slight to a fine weapon and bent to retrieve it, marveling at the living feel it had in his hands. He was considering whether he could take the head when a party of strangers came up, breathing hard from their run.

"Oh, hell," Lucy Alston-Kurlelo said, looking down at the body of the dead thief. He was extremely dead, and stank. "I knew I shouldn't have hired him."

She turned to glare at the Southaven policeman. He spread his hands, including the one holding a revolver: "I offered you hands from the lockup willing to sign up rather than work off their sentences here. Ardaursson was a brawler and a drunk and a thief, and this looks li ke a clear case of self-defense. I didn't say anyone you bought out of lockup would be any good."

Lucy shrugged. That was true enough; there simply weren't enough deckhands to go around, with demand so high; more so as the Pride was going far foreign, a long high-risk voyage, not schlepping back and forth across the Pond between Alba and Nantucket. The thief had been a fisherman by trade, worth any dozen farmers or dockside sweepings . . . if he'd been honest.

"No charges?" she said.

"No charges. Plain enough case of taken-in-the-act; I'll file the report."

And you did supply this -piece of garbage yourself, she thought to herself. Instead of arguing with the peace officer—officials in Southaven had gotten very assertive since the local Town Meeting was admitted to the Republic two years ago, and though young, the policeman came of a prominent local family—she looked at the kilted youngster who'd kicked in the luckless thief's chest.

Pretty, she thought. In a chisel-faced blond athletic way. And he was obviously fresh off the boat from the European mainland. No east-Alban tribesman would still be carrying bronze-headed spears, even in the backwoods of the north; hell, most of them were in trousers these days, some building themselves brick houses and sending their children to missionary schools.