Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

And of course the maniacs roared their approval, and I banged my fist halfheartedly against the table and wondered how I could get the hell out of this mess. If Sageous hadn’t been lying, or wrong, then perhaps if Snorri fell in the assault and I lurked near the back I could run off once the spell had broken. Of course, with nine men there aren’t exactly a lot of ranks to hide behind, and this Black Fort sounded inconveniently far from any safe haven that a man might run to.

I decided the best policy for the now would be to drink myself insensible and hope the morrow had better to offer.

“The most important message here,” I said into a gap where the Norsemen were all momentarily silenced by their tankards, “is not to act too hastily. Planning is the key. Strategy. Equipment. All those things that Snorri missed out on the first time in his impatience.”

The longer we delayed, the more chance there was that this curse might wear off or some opportunity for escape would happen along. The important thing was for the Ikea not to sail before I’d exhausted all opportunities for me not to be onboard when it did. With a shrug I drained my ale and signalled for another.

Some hangovers are so horrific that it seems the whole world rocks and sways around you, the very walls creaking with the motion. Others are relatively mild and it just turns out that in your drunkenness a collection of Vikings have thrown you onto a heap of coiled ropes in their longship and set to sea.

“Oh, you bastards.” I cracked open an eye to see a broad sail flapping overhead and gulls wheeling far above me beneath a mackerel sky.

I sat up, threw up, stood up, tripped up, threw up, crawled to the side of the boat, vomited copiously, crawled to the other side and groaned at the thin dark line on the horizon, the only hint at the world I knew and might never see again.

“Not a sailor, then?” Arne Dead-Eye, watching me from a bench, his oar locked before him, a pipe in his hand.

“Vikings smoke?” It just looked wrong, as if his beard might catch light.

“This one does. You don’t get handed a book of rules, you know.”

“I suppose not.” I wiped my mouth and hung there on the boat’s side. The quins were doing complicated things with sail and rope. Tuttugu watched the waves from the prow and Snorri held the tiller at the stern. After a while I felt strong enough to lurch over and collapse on the bench beside Arne. Thankfully the wind carried his smoke the other way or we would have had a chance to see whether any of last week’s meals might reappear if I tried really hard.

“What other rules in this handbook that you don’t get have you broken?” I needed distraction from the heave and swell. We appeared to be weathering some kind of storm, despite the clearing skies and moderate winds.

“Well.” Arne puffed on his pipe. “I’m not really one for the mead-hall and the singing of all those songs. I’d rather be out on the ice doing a spot of fishing.”

“You’d think a man of your talents would want to be stalking prey that he could bring down with a shot rather than hook out of the water through a small hole in the ice.” I’d placed a fair measure of my hope for survival in Arne Dead-Eye. The great thing about a man who is deadly with a bow is that not much gets close enough to trouble him. Those are the sort of men I like to stand next to in a battle if events conspire to keep me from galloping off into the distance. “Hell! Where’s my damn horse?”

“Bits of it are probably all over the lower slopes of Den Hagen.” Arne mimed chewing. “Stew, sausages, horse-bacon, roast horse, tongue soup, liver with onions, fried horse, mwah. All good.”

“What? I-” My stomach had the last word of that sentence. A long word full of vowels and spoken mostly over the side at the rolling sea.

“Snorri took her up to the stockyard this morning and sold her,” Arne called at my back. “Got more for the saddle than the mare.”

“Hell.” I wiped more drool from my chin before the wind had a chance to decorate the rest of me with it. Back on the bench I rested a moment, head in hands. It seemed we were coming full circle. This nightmare had started with me being bundled into a boat full of Viking, and now here we were again. A bigger boat, more water, more Vikings, and the same number of horses.

“Dead-Eye, heh?” I hoped to cheer myself with the idea that Arne might keep me safe. “How’d you earn that title?”

Arne puffed out a cloud of vile smoke, which was quickly stripped away by the wind. “There’s two ways to hit a small target that’s a long way off. Skill or luck. Now I’m not a bad shot-I’m not saying that. Better’n average for sure. Especially now with all the practice I get. It’s ‘Let the Dead-Eye take the shot.’ ‘Give Arne the bow.’ But that day at Jarl Torsteff’s wedding celebrations. .” Arne shrugged. “Had men from all over come to take part in the contests. Axe-throwing. Rock-lifting. Wrestling. All that. Archery, well, it’s never been our strong point, but there were plenty willing. The jarl set up this coin, far too far out, and nobody could hit the damn thing. It was getting dark before they let me have a go. Took it down first try. Never heard the last of it. And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die-take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”

I groaned and lay back across the bench, trying to find some angle that brought it past the halfway mark on the line dividing “torture device” and “bed.” I would have just lain down between the benches, but each lunge of the boat brought foul-smelling bilgewater sloshing along the aisle in miniature imitation of the vast waves on which we tossed.

“Wake me when the storm’s passed.”

“Storm?” A shadow fell across me.

“You’re going to tell me that it’s always like this, aren’t you?” I squinted up at the figure, dark against the bright sky, sunlight fracturing around him to sting my eyes. A tall man, annoyingly athletic. One of the quins.

“Oh no.” He sat on the bench opposite, his good cheer like acid on my hangover. “It’s rarely as good as this.”

“Urrrg.” Actual words seemed insufficient to express my feelings on the matter. I wondered if Skilfar had seen that I was destined to fill a longship with vomit and drown in the resulting mess.

“Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” He started tugging up his sleeve without invitation. “I’m Fjórir, by the way-we can be hard to tell apart.”

“Jesus!” I winced as Fjórir unwrapped the soiled linen from around his forearm. The jagged tear went right down into the meat of him, with every shade from black to puce on show in the puffy flesh to either side. The stink of it told the story. When a man’s wound starts to smell wrong, you know he’s on a slow walk to the cemetery. Perhaps losing the arm might save him-I didn’t really know. Beyond adjusting the odds when betting on pit fights, my experience didn’t really concern such things. True, there had been similar unpleasantness on the Scorron borders, but I’d successfully discarded those memories. Or at least I had until a whiff of a Norseman’s putrid arm brought them all back in a flood. At least this time I made it to the side before retching into the dark swell of the waves. I spent a long time hanging there, holding a loud but wordless conversation with the sea.