Chapter 6
Salé, Morocco
The snekkja finally came around the last headland and into the river mouth at Salé. Her hull was scored and salt-stiff and carried the evidence of everything the Atlantic had tried on them. Every man aboard still breathed. Torstein stood at the helm and looked at the quayside and felt overwhelmed.
He had first noticed it as a change in the air.
The nearer they drew to this coast the more it grew, a low resonance in him he could not explain.
He was not a man who believed in the fates.
And still he could not shake the sense that he was drawing closer to something that had been waiting for him, something he could only bring himself to call destiny in the privacy of his own mind, and even then with contempt for the word.
He breathed the air of this place and it was as though a note that had been sounding somewhere behind his ribs his whole life had finally found the thing it was answering to.
The route had been difficult to navigate but the fastest by far: down past Land's End into the open water of Biscay, that long dangerous stretch, then a landfall off Galicia and the slow southward crawl as the bite went out of the air.
They had put in at Lisbon for water and supplies, traded a little amber without drawing attention, and left two days later.
Word moved south faster than ships. It always did.
Ajani. Torstein thought of him now. A royal guardsman to Jarl Thorfinn's offspring, Kato and Zala, he had met by chance in Scotland several years prior.
It was Ajani who had first spoken to him of Morocco, about desert and spices and kingdoms, so intriguing until the place had taken root in Torstein and refused to be dug out again.
And now, after all of it, he was about to set his own feet on the ground Ajani had described.
The thought was almost too huge to contain.
He remembered Brother Aiden's words as well: "Salé is a nest of vipers, but one we must charm if we hope to secure safe passage."
Torstein put the thought away and braced himself, and began, deliberately, to put on his charm and his grace the way another man might wear his armor. He went to change his clothes.
He dressed at the stern before they moored, the deep blue kaftan over his tunic so he looked less like a warlord and more like a trader.
Leif watched him without comment. That was Leif's way.
He watched and said nothing until he had something worth saying, which was one of the many reasons Torstein had sailed with him for fifteen years.
It was for that steadiness, and for a command of Arabic well beyond any other man aboard, that Torstein had already decided Leif would stay at port and hold the ship and the twenty who guarded her.
His tongue would serve them better on the quayside.
Njal and Mathias would ride inland at Torstein's side with the remaining crew. Every man he took was hand-picked, the most trusted of a trusted crew, chosen as much for the trouble they would not cause as for anything they could do. A quiet man was worth three loud ones this far from home.
The harbor master came down to meet them with two guards and a translator who had nothing to translate. Torstein stepped off the gangplank onto stone quayside that smelled of salt and spice and warm dust.
And the ground took hold of him.
He had not expected it. He set his boot on foreign stone and something broke open in him that he had no name for and no defense against, a wave of feeling so complete it stopped his breath.
It was not relief and it was not triumph.
It was closer to joy. For one appalling moment he, who had not wept since he was a boy, was nearer to weeping than he had been in over thirty years.
He could not have said why. He stood very still until it passed.
He pressed his right hand flat against his heart.
"As-salaam-alaikum." His accent was thick but his words were right, and the words were what mattered. "We come from the north seeking peaceful trade in Fez. We bring whale oil, furs, and amber, and we hope to exchange them for leather and copper."
The harbor master's brows lifted. A brief silence, the good kind.
"Wa-alaikum-salaam," he replied. He gestured toward the customs house set back from the dock. "You are expected. Word came down from Lisbon of a northern ship."
Merchants talked. They always did.
"Welcome to Salé," the harbor master said with ease, no doubt he had greeted many foreign arrivals and intended to do it correctly.
Torstein thanked him. "We are twelve who will make the road to Fez. The rest remain here to guard the ship. We will need beds, a place to wash the sea off us, and provisions laid in before we go inland."
The harbor master nodded as though he had expected nothing less.
"There are inns near the customs house that take foreign traders and keep clean water.
I will send a man to show you. For provisions you have chosen a good season.
" He named a street where the muleteers kept their yards and a merchant who dealt fairly in dried goods and grain.
"Fez is four days inland," he went on. "The Emir's city is worth the journey. The road is safe this season."
They took rooms that afternoon and spent two days in Salé washing the crossing out of their clothes and skin and lightening the load.
Twelve men would ride and twenty would stay behind under Leif to hold the ship and keep the supplies in order, and the numbers meant a longer train than Torstein had first reckoned.
Where he had thought four mules would carry them, the guide only laughed and put the true count nearer a dozen once you added the water, the trade goods, and the feed for the animals themselves.
They left the coast on the third morning, twelve men and their mules and a guide who knew the road, the sea already gone from sight before the first rise.
Four days of dry hills and light that sat differently on the earth, the silence of the road broken only by the guide's occasional word about loose stone or the pace before nightfall.
On the fourth day they came over the final ridge and the valley opened below them.
Fez lay across the valley floor, walls the color of pale sand, smoke rising in slow threads from a hundred rooftops, and beneath all of it, faint and constant and carrying clean across the distance, the call to prayer.
Torstein sat his mule at the top of the rise and was quiet for a long moment. He had spent years imagining some version of this. The thing itself was something else entirely.
Behind him, he heard Mathias draw a slow breath and let it out.
"Merchants," Torstein said, and rode down into the valley.
***