Chapter 7 #4
No, I thought, surely not. The pony reared.
Its rider clung onto its mane, dropping his bow.
Svangerd picked it up, looked around for a spent arrow, found one and shot the rider.
Svangerd is strong for a woman, as I know to my cost, but she can’t draw a ninety-pound bow – I know, I was there on several occasions when she tried.
But she drew it easily, loosed smoothly, then bustled over to the dead man and flipped him over so she could pull the quiver off his shoulder.
Then she stood up and looked round for someone to shoot at.
She was spoilt for choice. Two shots, two kills.
Then a horseman shot her in the back, from five yards.
She turned round, nocked an arrow and loosed.
There’s an old saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, which is untrue unless you’re on foot and the target is right on top of you and on a horse.
It occurred to me that I was still alive, which was also quite wrong; I was a clear target, just standing there gawping, but nobody was taking any notice of me.
Understandable enough. The horsemen had all drawn up and were staring at her.
She picked one and shot him in the mouth.
He toppled backwards and slid to the ground.
It was like a pane of glass breaking; they scattered, barging into each other in their haste to get clear. She shot another two before they were out of range, missed one by a hair. Then she turned and looked at me. “Are you all right?” she called out.
“I don’t actually know if there’ll be scars,” she said. “I haven’t done miraculous healing for a long time.”
Svangerd’s body had been hit by seven arrows. “Look away,” she said, “I’m going to take my habit off. I don’t mind if you peek, but I expect you won’t want to.”
I screwed my eyes shut and turned my heels through ninety degrees. “How the hell—?”
“Oh, that. No big deal. It’s not raising from the dead or anything because she never actually died. If she’d taken one in the head or the heart it might’ve been touch and go. All right, you can look now.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, fully clothed, with her right hand tucked under her left armpit.
“Curious thing,” she said. “The arrows didn’t hurt a bit, but my fingers are killing me where I drew the bowstring.
Of course, I ripped all her tendons off the bone in both arms, but that’s an easy fix.
” She smiled at me. “That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got on your forehead. Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“No headache, dizziness, nausea?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “What did you just do?”
“Healed the sick,” she said. “Piece of cake when you know how. I can also walk across the sea and turn water into wine. Easy as pie. What’s not so easy is explaining to divisional command why I did it. They take a dim view of poaching the other lot’s parlour tricks.”
She’d also killed seven horsemen. “Yes, I know,” she said, “I’ve been a very bad girl. Only they were trying to kill me. And you. Come to think of it, I saved your life. I think the word we’re looking for is war. You should be used to it, there’s a lot of it about.”
Fair enough; it would’ve taken heavy plant to squeeze a tear out of me for the Flos de Glaia. “So let’s get this straight. You can’t be killed.”
“I wish.” Apparently I’d said something amusing.
“Chop my head off and I’m screwed. Normally fatal injuries, however, are a whole other ball game.
It’s technical. Lots of stuff about whether the soul actually leaves the body.
If it does, I’m crow food. If it doesn’t—” She shrugged.
“I got lucky. Fortuitously, the Flos are trained from childhood to aim for body shots. Like I said, if one of them had plugged me in the ear, we wouldn’t be having this chat. ”
I closed my eyes.
“The Order of Intercession,” she went on, “know all about this stuff. If they get me, I’m history. I hope there won’t be any scars. Svangerd would rather be eaten by bears than admit it, but she rather likes the way she looks. Secretly, deep down, where her conscious mind never goes.”
But you have. I didn’t need to say it. She looked at me and shrugged. “Anyhow,” she went on, “I’m hoping that Grimhild hasn’t got a Plan C and we can get to the coast without any more fuss. It’s a shame they killed all the dragoons, but at least we’ve got our choice of good horses.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her. “It’s true,” I said. “You did save my life. Is that because I’m needed, for the grand design? That’s what those creeps keep telling me.”
She still had her hand under her armpit. “It hurts,” she explained. “Presumably there must be something different about finger injuries. I expect they mentioned it in the lectures but I wasn’t paying attention.”
I still had the warrant, of course, and there were three war galleys in the harbour.
They’d been sent to escort a convoy of grain freighters across the pirate-infested straits, but the contents of my little brass tube changed all that.
A war galley and two escorts: not enough, because when you’re dealing with someone like Grimhild the word enough has no meaning, but decidedly better than nothing.
“Three is different,” I explained. “To get the better of three galleys you’d need at least ten Sherden pirates, and no single Sherden family in these parts has more than eight ships, and Sherden families don’t cooperate.
Three galleys means nothing on earth can touch us, except obviously the Sashan royal navy, but that’s not going to happen. ”
“We should find a small fishing boat,” she said. “Come on, you agreed.”
“That was before there were three galleys.”
“You do realise I can see into the future. If we do this—”
“No, you can’t.”
“All right, I can’t. But this is stupid. I know it is.”
That worried me. But three galleys: even Grimhild didn’t have the clout to get hold of a dozen Sashan warships.
Did she? No, of course not, I persuaded myself.
Put yourself in her shoes. Do I go to all the trouble and expense of suborning the Sashan navy, or do I let them cross the sea and arrange a welcoming committee when they reach the other side? Simple common sense.
It takes a night and two days to cross the straits, unless the wind’s acting up, in which case you could end up anywhere. But galleys have oars as well as sails. “I don’t care if you have to row all night and all day,” I told the captain. “This is about national security.”
The captain was a tall, thin man, missing one ear. “In that case,” he said, “we’d better let the wind carry us across to Staness and then work back up the coast to Brachen. That’ll be quicker in the long run.”
“Fine,” I said. “Better still, let us off at Staness. It’ll confuse the hell out of anybody waiting for us on the dockside at Brachen.”
Plans, I’ve found over the years, are like socks: it does no harm to change them from time to time.
Predictable, she’d called me, and that set me thinking, in a rare moment of freedom while Svangerd’s body was lying down because it didn’t like the motion of the ship, and I could think without being eavesdropped on.
The essence of my strategy was that it’d be much more efficient to intercept us when we landed, rather than trying to hit us on the high seas in three galleys.
But Grimhild had the imagination to conceive of the possibility of me doing what I’d just done, or of the wind blowing us halfway to Brecher Point, oars or no oars.
Therefore there was no guarantee of where we’d land; therefore, the only safe way to be sure of getting us was to attack the galleys.
I found the long-suffering captain and demanded that he send someone up to the masthead to watch for approaching ships.
He pointed upwards, and I saw a man huddled in a pathetic excuse for a crow’s nest, one arm locked round the swaying mast. “Very good,” I said, “carry on.”
Places you’ve known for years look quite different when you approach them from the sea rather than overland.
I’d never been to Staness on a ship before; even so.
You know it’s Staness because there’s a tall hill high above the town, with six tall pine trees, like the last remaining hairs on a bald man’s head.
“Why aren’t we stopping?” I asked one of the officers.
“Can’t,” he told me. “Wind’s from the south-east. So we carry on to the Lax estuary and tack back up the coast. Shouldn’t add more than a couple hours.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Drop us off at Lax.”
He thought about it for a moment. “We can do that,” he said. “I’ll tell the skipper.”
The Lax estuary is unmistakeable, regardless of how you approach it.
The river drains into a salt marsh, and under the empire there was a huge salt pond there, supplying a third of the northern provinces.
All that was washed away centuries ago but there’s the stub of a huge round tower on one of the outer islands.
They still make salt at Lax, scraping the crust off the rim of the last remaining pond; ten or twelve bushels in the summer season, as opposed to the forty thousand bushels the imperials harvested per annum.
“We can’t land, obviously,” the captain told me, “because of the backwash. So I’ve signalled for a boat to come out and take you off. You’re sure you want to—?”
“Yes,” I said. “This’ll do fine.”