FOR QUINCE
Prologue
London, 1272
IN THE EVENING, as darkness falls, I return to the fortress. A guard lifts a lantern to my face, and at once I’m blind, blinking against the flood of sudden brightness. A jingle of chain mail, the clank of a sword . . . The lantern moves aside, and dusk flows back, save for the specks of phantom light that swim through the air before me. I hear the great iron bolts scrape in their housings; I hear the rusty thunk as they break free. Then the high western gate clears its throat and rasps open to admit me.
One of the guards peels off from the others to lead me; they all know where I am going. Our footfalls clunk hollowly on the wooden bridge across the moat. A second gate heaves open; we enter the corridors of the outer bailey, wading through eddies of light and shadow cast by the guard’s swinging lantern. The leather harness is familiar in my hand. The rope is heavy on my shoulder; its great, thick coils creak softly as we walk. By and by, I pick up the dusty scent of feathers, a whiff of matted fur, the earthy perfume of dung. I hear a shifting of hooves, a snort, a growl, a yawn . . . and then a deep, familiar chuff of greeting.
The bear is waiting, pressed up against the bars, her old nose twitching. She always smells me coming, though how she does so is a mystery, for now the reek of her is filling me up with a deep, sharp, musky odor that leaves no room for other smells. The key grates in the lock; the guard ducks behind me; I slip within the cage.
The bear snuffles me all over and then presents her great wide head for me to scratch—her left ear with the notch from where the pirate slashed her; her snout with the arrow’s pitted scar. I set down the harness and dig all ten fingers deep, clear down to the black of her skin, the way she likes. Her fur is thick and coarse. I bury my face in it and breathe the still-wild scent of her. She makes a sound, then: a low, rumbling sigh that tunnels up from the heart of the earth.
I slip the harness over her head and buckle it at her chest. I take the rope from my shoulder and fasten it to the harness ring. I lead her out of her cage, beneath the trees of the Tower Green, toward the water gate.
She is an old bear now. Her coat is dull, most of her teeth are gone, and her hip bones jut like fins above her back. She shuffles behind me, stiff with age, and limping—docile as one of the lambs on my stepfather’s steading. She no longer craves escape; at long last, she seems content.
But it was not always so. Once, she struck fear into the hearts of hardened sailors, swam for leagues in the sea without stopping, withstood a hail of arrows, waged battle against pirates, rescued a boy who had come to love her, and was flaunted and prized by kings. Once long ago . . . when she and I were young.
PART I
NORWAY
CHAPTER 1
Thief
Bergen, Norway
Spring, 1252
IT WAS THE smell of roasting meat that roused me.
A small rain had begun to fall, and though I had curled up beneath the eaves of a cobbler’s shop, the ground soaked up the damp and wicked it through my cloak and tunic, into my shirt. Now a wave of talk and laughter met my ear, but I knew that wasn’t what had wakened me.
No, it was the smell.
It teased me, growing stronger and then fainter—so faint I thought, for a moment, that I had dreamed it. But then it was back again, a rich, deep, meaty aroma that set all the waters in my mouth to flowing. I rose to one elbow and breathed it in, imagining tearing into a hunk of my mother’s roasted mutton, feeling the warmth of it going down and the heavy, drowsy ease of a full belly.
I straightened my cap on my head, hitched my knapsack to my shoulder, and wobbled to my feet. It had been two days since I had finished the last of my provisions, and hunger had made me weak.
The voices dimmed and then swelled again. It was dark; even the stars had vanished. The crowds had thinned, and the men who passed me now seemed somehow sinister, their faces distorted by the shadows of the lanterns that had begun to flicker to life. Beyond the quays the shops and houses of Bergen stood resolutely shoulder to shoulder, solid and prosperous, leaving no room for a starveling waif such as I.
I crept down the street and rounded a corner into an alley, where I spied an inn before me, light blazing from its windows. The rich fragrance of meat assailed me more powerfully than before, flooding my nose and mouth and throat. I told myself that it was fruitless to torture myself with tantalizing aromas. That, without coin, I would be unwelcome in a place such as this. That I might even find myself in peril.
I pushed open the door. I stepped within.
The inn was dim and crowded, rank with the commingled odors of sweat and sour ale and wet wool and mud. But the smell of warm meat wafted all about and underneath the other smells, and it lured me in deep. A serving maid brushed past me bearing a tray above her head. She slapped it down on a table: a mound of roasted rabbit sitting in a puddle of gravy and blood. Men in blue, sailor’s garb thronged in about it, digging in with hands and knives. The meat vanished from the platter so quickly it was hard to credit, until a single leg joint lay there alone.
I didn’t think; I moved.
I slipped between two seamen who were reaching for it, snatched up the rabbit haunch, and ran hard for the door.
A shout: “Hey! You, boy!” Then more shouts, and curses, and a scraping of benches behind me. “Halt, thief!”
Someone seized my cloak from behind, nearly toppling me. I twisted round and laid eyes on him—a blond, brawny sailor of maybe fifteen years; maybe three years older than I. I kicked his shin and then tore myself away. I scrambled up onto a table and stumbled toward the other side, knocking over a row of flagons and a pitcher of ale.
“Hey!”
Hands reached for my legs. I dodged, stumbling into a trencher full of meat, then leaped from the table and made for the door. I pushed it open. Knocked into a man coming in. Slipped and fell to the ground—all without releasing my grip on the rabbit haunch. I scrambled to my feet and headed into the darkness, praying that the sailors behind me would be too lazy or too drunk to follow.
CHAPTER 2
Feral
I BOLTED DOWN the street, skidded round a corner, and turned into an alley. I could hear them coming—heavy footsteps, the clink of something iron. I cast a quick look over my shoulder and saw that one of them had a lantern.
I crossed a grassy lane, hurtled around another corner, found myself at a crossroads, spotted another alley, and ducked into that.
Ahead, I saw a wide door standing ajar. A blue-clad seaman and a woman huddled together a little way down the alley, the man’s head bent toward the woman’s hair. I heard the woman giggle, then I slowed to a walk so as not to call notice to myself. I looked behind me. I could still hear footsteps, faintly, but couldn’t tell where they came from, and I didn’t see the men who had been following.
I slipped through the doorway.
Even darker, here. Some kind of warehouse. It smelled strongly of fish, but an odd, animal smell wafted in to me, as well. Not horse, not sheep, not cow, but . . . My toe knocked against something hard. I reached down and felt the rounded surface of a barrel. I crept a little way within so that I couldn’t be seen from the door.
Then I crouched and began to eat. I tore at the rabbit haunch with my teeth, the juices running down my chin, into my tunic and shirt. Meat! Still warm, and—
Voices. Two men burst into the room behind me. I scrambled to avoid the skinny one with the lantern and slammed straight into the other. I recognized him—the blond boy-man from the tavern. He took me by the scruff of my cloak. “I’ll teach you to steal from me, you—” I felt a tug at my knapsack. “Well, what have we here?”
A certain tone in his voice reminded me of my
eldest stepbrother, Edvin, when he wanted something that was mine. I tried to twist away, but the sailor held me fast.
A low rumble sounded from a dark corner of the warehouse. Hair rose on the nape of my neck; the man froze.
“What’s that?” the one with the lantern asked. He seemed young, not much older than I.
“Don’t know,” said the other. He seized my wrist—hard. “Why don’t we find out?”
“Let’s flee this place, Hauk,” the lantern boy said. “You can rough him up in the alley.”
“Stop your sniveling,” the one called Hauk said. “I want to see what’s what.”
Another rumble, and the shuffling, scraping sound of a heavy footfall. The prospect of being roughed up in an alley was beginning to sound good. My stepbrothers roughed me up all the time. I was expert at being roughed up. I kicked Hauk’s shin—twice—but then he belly-punched me, and I doubled over from the pain. He moved deeper into the warehouse, dragging me behind. The animal smell grew stronger—feral and sharp with musk—a smell that boded ill.
By the dim glow of the lantern, I made out a large, pale form in the gloom. An animal . . . in a cage.
A bear. An ice bear, from the north.
It paced from one end of its cage to the other and then back again, shaking its head with an impatient twitchy restlessness, a restlessness I knew well, the kind that hums and jangles loud inside, until every sinew in your body is coiled spring-tight and craves only to run, run far away.
“Hauk,” the lantern boy said, “let’s go.”
But Hauk was dragging me toward the bear. I saw what he intended to do now and struggled to get loose. I yelled, I kicked, I beat at him with the rabbit haunch. He tore my knapsack from my shoulder, then grasped both of my arms and pinned them behind me.
The bear let out a long breath, a sort of moan.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do it. I’ll give you back your meat, I’ll—”
But Hauk turned me sideways and began to stuff me between the bars. At first I thought I wouldn’t fit, but then my shoulders slipped partway through, and then my head, and then my hips. I staggered into the cage and, tripping, slammed my knees against the floor.
When I looked up, the bear had gone still at the far end of the cage. It was staring straight at me.
CHAPTER 3
Ice Bear
ITS EYES, SMALL and dark, were alert, curious, aware. I felt the faint stirring of its breath against my cheeks. I drew in the rich, ripe scent of bear until I seemed to sink down below the surface of it, drowning. From somewhere far away I heard Hauk and the lantern boy arguing, but the sounds fell away behind the throbbing of my bloodbeat in my ears and the thrill of the running-hum in my limbs.
The bear rumbled deep in its throat.
I rose to my feet, stepped back, and felt the iron bars press cold against me. I kept my eyes fixed on the pale, wide face, as if the force of my gaze could prevent the bear from lunging at me with its enormous jaws or raking me with its claws—claws that I could see out of the corners of my eyes, massive claws, claws from a nightmare of monsters.
Twitching. The big black nose was twitching, snuffling, searching. There was a thrumming in the air that came to lodge within my bones and sang there. Slowly, the bear’s head reached toward me, and I saw there was something loose and flapping off one shoulder—a harness. And then the dark eyes shifted away from mine to peer at the center of my chest. I looked down and saw my fingers clutched round the rabbit haunch. That’s what the bear was sniffing. Carefully, I moved the meat away from my chest. It seemed that I might just hold it out and offer it, as you would hand a dropped thimble to your mother. But the bear took a step closer, and I felt a spasm of fear jolt through me. I tossed the haunch as hard as I could, off to one side. It smacked against the bars and hit the floor of the cage with a splat.
For the merest instant, the bear’s expression shifted. The great head swiveled to gaze straight into my eyes with something like reproach—seeming to say that it hadn’t been necessary to throw the food, that that had been beneath the bear’s dignity and mine.
Then it turned, snatched up the rabbit leg in its great jaws, and snapped it in twain.
I let out my breath in a rush. I felt behind me with one foot and slipped it between the bars. I could hear voices, but nobody stopped me. The bear was making a terrible racket, cracking bones, gnashing and slurping. The haunch wouldn’t last much longer, and then . . . Slowly, I pushed backward until my hips slid through, and I was in the midst of trying to squeeze my chest and shoulders between the bars when a new, deeper voice called out, “You there! Boy!”
The bear lifted its head and roared. I tried to shove my shoulders backward between the bars, but I was doing it amiss; I was stuck. Then someone was pulling me, pulling on my hand. I popped between the bars, but too fast—I hadn’t turned my head—and I cracked my chin against hard iron. “Hurry!” the new voice said. I swiveled my head and slipped it through just as the bear came down against the side of the cage with a crash that made the bars shudder and quaked the very floor beneath my feet.
The bear roared again, throwing my thoughts into a dim and galloping confusion. I felt the hand release mine; I heard a scuffle behind me; I heard shouts. The roar ceased. I blinked, looked about me, and began to slip away toward the door—but then a hand closed around my arm, and the deep voice boomed in my ear:
“Have you taken leave of your senses? What were you doing in there?”
CHAPTER 4
This One We’ll Keep
I COULDN’T SEE him well in the flickering gloom, but I sensed a squareness, a firmness, a solidity about this man. His hand clamped onto my arm, like a ring of iron, and I knew it would be useless to try to escape. “What have you to say for yourself?” he demanded.
I looked about me and found Hauk, whose hands, I saw, had been bound behind him. A tail of rope led from Hauk’s wrists and into the clenched fist of the seaman I’d seen with the woman outside. He must be a guard—one who’d been distracted from his duty.
“He pushed me into the cage,” I said, pointing at Hauk. “I was just going about my business, and—”
“He stole my supper!” Hauk said.
“Did not!”
“Did so!”
“Did not!”
“Did so! I have witnesses!”
The man who held me turned to Hauk. “I suppose your witness would be the boy who got away?” he asked.
“That’s Ottar,” Hauk said. “Go to the inn, the Brass Dwarf. They’ll know where to find him. And others saw too. They’ll tell you, same as me.”
I swallowed, recalling how I had jumped up onto the table, kicking over flagons and trampling food. Yes, there were witnesses aplenty.
“But,” the man said to Hauk, “you broke in here, where you don’t belong, and beleaguered the bear—”
Beleaguered the bear? What about me?
“I didn’t break in,” Hauk said. “The door was open. And he came here first.” Hauk jerked his head in my direction. “I was just following.”
“And you thrust him into the bear cage for his trouble?”
Hauk shrugged. “I let him out again, didn’t I?”
“He could have been killed. Very nearly was—or at least”—the man turned to regard me with curiosity—“that’s my thinking at present.”
“I was. I was almost killed,” I said. “And he stole my knapsack!” I pointed to where it lay on the floor. “And he didn’t let me out, he—”
“And did you steal his supper?”
My face grew warm. For a moment it had begun to seem as if the man might take my part. What did they do to thieves here in the city, I wondered. Lock them up? Banish them? Cut off their hands?
The man’s grip tightened. “Did you?”
“I didn’t know it was his,” I mumbled.
“But you stole it!” Hauk said.
“I was hungry. Somebody robbed me, took all my coins!”
“Hmm.” The man
eyed me for a moment, as if calculating the length of rope he would need to hang me.
“What do you want me to do with this one, Doctor?” the guard asked, giving Hauk’s leash a yank.
Doctor. I had deemed him a constable or some other high-ranking official.
“You stay far away from here,” the doctor told Hauk. “I don’t care what the other one has stolen. If I catch you anywhere near the bear again, you’ll be very sorry indeed.”
“What about him?” Hauk demanded, glaring at me.
“Never mind about him. You stay away. Understood?”
Hauk shrugged.
“Is that understood?”
“Yes.” It came out grudgingly, between clamped teeth.
“Wait,” the doctor said. “You said the Brass Dwarf. You’re a seaman?”
Hauk shrugged again. The guard yanked hard on the rope. Hauk stumbled, bleated out, “Yes!”
“Where are you bound?”
“Why do you want to—”
Yank.
“London.”
London. I had tried to get hired on that ship, but they wouldn’t have me.
The doctor said nothing for a moment. Then: “Release him,” he said.
“But—” the guard protested.
“I doubt he’ll be back.”
The guard whipped out a knife and sliced through Hauk’s bindings, then gave him a quick boot to the backside. Hauk disappeared into the darkness.
“And this one?” the guard asked, nodding at me.
“Oh, this one,” the doctor said. “This one we’ll keep.”
CHAPTER 5
The Brass Dwarf
HE TOOK ME to the inn, the Brass Dwarf, the same one as before. He returned my knapsack and promised to feed me—said he wanted to talk to me. I feared he might round up Hauk’s witnesses and then turn me over to the constabulary to . . . what? Put me in the stocks? Blind me in one eye? Draw and quarter me? I considered giving him a shove and trying to break out of his grasp, but his grip tightened around my arm, as if he could sense what I was thinking, and I knew that for now I could not escape.
Journey of the Pale Bear Page 1