Chapter 50 Friend Northman
Friend Northman
In the marketplace, someone roasted meat and fruit over an open flame.
Niel’s mouth watered, but he ignored the smell, working his way down the street.
Up ahead, two men unloaded barrels from a cart, moving slowly with their muscles straining as they lowered each one to the ground.
Niel wove through the crowd and jogged up to the cart.
“I work?” he asked in Ciranci, gesturing to the barrels. He put a hand on the cart’s bed to jump up, but the men waved him off quickly. One abandoned the barrel he’d started rolling to lunge at Niel, all aggressive bluster, as if he’d rather fight than give the job away.
That wouldn’t turn out well for either of them. He didn’t know what the Cirancians would do if he killed someone in a street fight, or even just broke the man’s arm, but neither prison nor a hanging would serve Ayla well.
Not that he was proving much use, as it was.
Niel backed away from the cart, hands raised, and turned to keep going down the street.
In their time in Laticillio, he’d had more luck in the marketplace than anywhere else in the city.
There were so many people here, all on the move, and some of them were willing to toss him one of the small, parchment-thin copper coins they had in Cirancia for a few minute’s work.
He’d already earned two that morning. Not that two was any achievement. A full day’s work at this rate would get him what? A single handful of grain?
The money he’d won in the pit would buy them some time, but it wouldn’t last, and he didn’t see how Ayla would let him fight again.
Without that, he was no closer to figuring out a real solution.
It ought to have been simple. But he wasn’t good enough with the language to figure out how to become a guardsman, or to find some wealthy merchant who wanted a trained sword as bodyguard.
He’d tried going to the lake, but the fishermen there had made it clear he wasn’t allowed to catch anything without one of the little medallions they wore, and that they'd fight him if he tried, and when he asked where to get one, he couldn’t understand their answers.
Without anybody to talk to apart from conversations in the market with people who were trying to get Niel to leave, his skill at the language wasn’t getting much better.
Or at least, the phrases he was learning—phrases that seemed to mean things like fuck off and get out of here—weren’t exactly things he could say to find employment.
He rubbed his forehead. He’d reached a part of the market where the stalls were only arrayed on the right side of the street for a stretch.
On the left was a stone wall so tall even Niel couldn’t see over it, surrounding a large house and trees that rose even taller.
He eyed the market stalls as he passed, looking for opportunity and finding none.
There was one more thing he could try, but the thought of it made him sick. He wasn’t sure how to tell Ayla.
There was no point in any of this, without her. But he was certain she could still live in Enar. And after everything that happened, Niel figured Corin probably would take care of her and the babe, or at least make sure they were safe. If his brother were still alive, at least.
They could use the gladiator money to put Ayla on a ship north.
He wouldn’t see her again, but someone would take care of her.
She didn’t need to live like this. It was his fault that she was struggling alongside him in the first place.
But if he sent her away, he… Niel paused to press the heels of his palms to his eyes, feeling cold all over.
If he loved her any less, he’d never consider it. But he loved her enough that he’d rather lose her than make her keep suffering. He didn’t want his child to grow up like this, either. The problem was, he doubted she’d agree to it. The situation felt hopeless.
“Northman! Northman!” someone called behind him, in the Enarian tongue. Niel whipped around. His hand went to his beltknife; the sword wasn’t allowed in the market. Two men ran towards him. The gate in the tall wall he’d walked past swung shut behind them.
“I work?” Niel asked in Cirani, as they drew close.
The man on the right was short and stocky, with a black beard trimmed into a thin line, and a red silk shirt. He wore rings on his fingers and had a keen look in his eye. This man opened his mouth and spoke rapidly at Niel, gesturing. Even focusing, Niel couldn’t pick out more than a few sounds.
“Work?” he repeated carefully.
The man on the left was taller, with dark gray clothing and an empty scabbard on his hip that marked him as a swordsman.
Niel had seen plenty of those in the market, young men swaggering about with a boisterous attitude and an empty scabbard on their hip, as if their entire reputation depended on Laticillo knowing they were swordsmen, despite the market place’s rules.
“You speak the north tongue, yes?” the taller man said, in accented words that Niel could understand perfectly.
Niel hesitated for a moment. It flashed through his head that these could be assassins, trying to determine he was their target before they put a knife between his ribs. But the shorter man in the silk was too ostentatious.
“Yes,” Niel said, in his native tongue.
The tall swordsman gestured to his companion in red.
“Doan Paolo speaks that you made war well in the arena. He wished to speak, but you have left before he can leave his seats.” The words were awkwardly phrased, but the tall man had far better command over Niel’s language than Niel did of his.
“Ah,” Niel said. Did they want him to fight again? Worse odds for a better prize? He couldn’t do it. “Sorry, but I’m not going in again. Only once.”
The swordsman translated this. The shorter man said something else, gesturing. Niel blinked at him.
“He does not want you in the arena, northman. Doan Paolo says fortune favors that he saw you walk by here. You see, my friend, he runs a very distinct school, where the children of the bag-men—” Niel frowned.
He did not know what a bag-man was— “learn the art of the sword, and this northman style, it is very distinct, and he says you are quite good at it, the best, perhaps, Doan Paolo has seen, and my friend, Doan Paolo has seen many men fight. Please, you will come,” the swordsman finished, and gestured back towards the door in the wall the men had emerged from.
Niel hesitated. The suspicious part of him was well aware that they could be trying to get him to a back-alley, where nobody could intervene with a murder.
What they were saying was too good to be true, which meant it probably wasn’t.
He was sure he could take the little fancy one in a fight, but the tall man with the empty scabbard who knew Niel's language was an unknown. He moved with a warrior's grace.
Still. Niel needed work, and there wasn’t any here. Niel approached the wall slowly and paused outside the gate. The tall swordsman opened it and Niel peered through from the street.
Inside, on a gravel training yard, a dozen children aged ten or so formed two lines and drilled slowly with wooden practice swords, the weapons clacking sharply as they practiced thrusts and parries.
The nimble-footed style seemed composed primarily of jabs, not cuts.
A wall of trees to the children’s left cast shade on a small area beside the training yard.
There, a group of older youths lounged around a stone table, laughing.
One stretched against a tree, working her calf muscle.
“This is a school?” Niel asked in disbelief.
A tall, spidery man walked behind the row of sparring children, calling commands, and pausing once to correct a pose by poking at the child’s feet with a long stick, not touching him.
The man was dressed in trim, well-tailored finery, hardly clothing Niel would have chosen to fight in.
“Please, friend northman, Doan Paolo wishes you to enter.”
Niel stepped inside. He could see the ground to the right of the training yard now. A long table held ceramic cups and jugs of water and two racks of weapons held wooden practice blades. Beyond that, a covered arcade walkway lined the side of a large multi-storied building.
“A whole school for teaching the sword?” Niel asked again.
“Is it not done thus, in the northlands?”
“No,” Niel said absently. “We train at home, and then we apprentice to a master. Some have sword tutors. But not…” a peal of laughter sounded from the older youths, behind the screen of the trees, at some joke between them.
Surely, combat could not be taught in a place as happy as this. It wasn’t brutal. The air didn’t smell like fear. He didn't see blood or anybody nursing an injured limb.
The man in red said another rapid flurry of words.
“There is nobody here now to teach this northman style. And the bag-men, they prize for their children to know many styles.”
Did they want him to teach? Would it pay well, or at all?
He didn’t know the first thing about it.
The techniques Niel’s teachers had used were ones he’d never inflict on anyone.
But surely, he’d be better suited to teaching the sword than he was to loading boxes into a cart. And if it paid, he’d do anything.
“What’s a bag-man?” Niel asked, studying the form of the sparring children. He wasn’t familiar with the style here, but he could see one of them was getting awfully sloppy.
“Er… a man who… buy and sell many things? Many goods? Who makes a great wealth from trade.”
“Merchant,” Niel said.