Beggar's Flip

by Benny Lawrence

  “We had plenty of food. That was one saving grace. When you’re working in the cold, you crave fat more than anything, so we’d stocked masses of salt pork and lard. We served double rations every day we were up north, with fried biscuit and plum duff and as much soup or porridge as anyone could hold. After every meal, when the blood was properly pumping, we all went through the same routine: check your feet for frostbitten patches, wrap them in clean rags, then treat your hands with grease. Lips and ears, too.

  “After three days, we caught up with the Sons of Heaven.”

  Glad to be finished, I plunged my spoon into a fish-and-apple pie and started scooping out the contents. It took me a few moments to realize that people were still staring. I swallowed a barely chewed mouthful. “Um. Then we fought them and we won.”

  “But what happened?” Hark’s voice cracked again in the middle of the question, but he didn’t notice. “How did you beat them when you were outnumbered six to one? What did you do?”

  “What did I do? Killed a couple of people, I guess. I don’t suppose I was especially magnificent on the battlefield—my ulcer was giving me hell that day. Anyway, it really doesn’t matter what I did after I drew my cutlass. We won the fight before we even caught sight of the Sons of Heaven. There were a lot of them, but they were wrecked. They were hungry, they were limping because their feet were a mess of bloody blisters, and the skin of their hands was split and raw and weeping. We didn’t have any of those problems, and we went in and we thrashed them. That’s all.”

  There was a sag in the posture of the people around the table, a sort of letdown, and I wasn’t sure whether I should say anything more. To my relief, Ariadne let out a peal of silvery laughter and laid her white hand over Konrad’s tanned one.

  “My lord Konrad, I’m sure this conversation is fascinating to you and the rest of these clever people, but I really don’t understand these things. Could we perhaps discuss something other than military matters? I hear that you killed a wild boar single-handed in the last hunt, and I’m positively dying to hear about it.”

  For an instant, Konrad looked put out, but he quickly refocused. “Of course, my lady,” he said gallantly, and launched into what sounded like a very long tale.

  Ariadne, I happened to know, was bored to tears by hunting stories. Her first husband didn’t care about much except hunting, hunting dogs, and hunting horses, and during the little time they spent together, he talked about nothing else. For Ariadne, hunting stories ranked as a form of entertainment just below giant wasps and genital warts.

  I caught her eye and nodded my thanks. She flicked her fingers—it’s nothing, it’s nothing—then turned back to Konrad with a coy smile and eyes as vacant as a shallow pond.

  I HAD TO get away from it, all of the posing and the smiling and the flouncing and the faking, so I kicked my chair back from the table.

  The Great Hall was sweltering, packed wall to wall with bodies that reeked of strong sweat and cheap perfume. I stepped outside, but that was no escape. The kitchen fires took up half the courtyard, with at least a dozen cauldrons roiling away on iron tripods. Cooks jostled and bumped into each other as they poured and ladled and stirred. It was all heat and noise and hurry-hurry-hurry, and the cooks cursed the carvers and the carvers screamed at the pot-boys and the pot-boys kicked at passing dogs.

  I leaned against the rough-cut logs of the palisade and breathed deep, feeling every moment of that long day in the strain through my back and shoulders.

  So why exactly was I doing this, again? It would only take me five minutes to get back to the Banshee. In five minutes and five seconds, I could be back in my cabin, with Lynn sitting on my lap to explain exactly how annoyed she was that I was there. She’d chew me out for leaving Ariadne alone at the Keep, but that wouldn’t last long and then she’d use her mouth for . . . well. Other things.

  Plus, we still had a few jars of the lard-and-pine-oil mix kicking around in the Banshee’s hold, and, though I wasn’t about to explain this to my family, there was more than one use for that stuff.

  It would be so easy. I stared at the palisade gate, and my weaker self whimpered and snivelled, begging me to walk away. Mentally, I grabbed my weaker self by the scruff of the neck and gave it a kick. “Shaddup, you.”

  A servant boy glanced up. “My lady?”

  “Oh. Nothing. Nothing.”

  The boy ducked his head and went back to his task, spit-roasting chickens over a bed of glowing coals. The spits were rusty, and turned slowly in their forks, metal grinding in a painful sort of cadence. In time with the turning spit, the boy hummed a tuneless song. He was barefoot, about seventeen, with hair the colour of old straw. His shirt was mottled with stains from popping grease, and so threadbare that it was almost transparent. I angled my head and counted his ribs.

  I didn’t remember the servants being so thin when I was growing up. Then again, when I was growing up, there was a lot that I chose not to see.

  “Hey,” I said, on a sudden impulse.

  He fumbled, nearly dropped a chicken, caught it just before it fell in the fire. “My lady?”

  “I’m, um, looking for someone that used to work here. She was the washwater girl for the Torasan nursery, when I was a kid. Huge eyes. Thin face. I think her name was . . .”

  In the place in my mind where the name should have been, there was nothing but cobwebs and a thin layer of dust.

  “You mean Tavia?”

  That sounded right. “Yes! Yes, her. Is she still around?”

  “No.” He wiped his nose with his sleeve. “She fell off a stool in the dairy, a few months back. Cracked her skull open.”

  Too late for any apologies, then. “Blast it.”

  He shrugged and returned to his cooking. He was basting the birds, brushing melted butter on the crisp and crackling skin. Starveling boy, golden chickens. What would happen if he pulled a drumstick off for himself? Lynn would know in painful detail, but even I could guess.

  “Have you had your supper yet?” I asked.

  He looked up, hooded eyes wary. “Not yet, my lady.”

  “I could get you something from inside. I mean, if you wanted.”

  There was a quick flash of irritation across his face, but he smothered it. “There’s no need, lady. They’re already bringing the leavings out, see?”

  He nodded to a table by the hall door. Servers were streaming out with half-empty platters and armloads of wooden trenchers—table scraps from the banquet. As quickly as the servers brought out the dishes, others went to work sorting the leftovers. They set aside all of the food that looked more or less decent, like joints of meat with plenty left on the bone, or apple pies only half scooped out. After wrapping the platters carefully in oiled muslin, they carried them back to the pantry, to be served up for breakfast the next day.

  Once they’d winnowed out the stuff that still looked edible, what was left on the table was a heap of mashed and broken fragments. There were crusts of bread and fish-heads, bits of bone and gobs of mutton fat, cheese rind and vegetable peel. Servants crowded around the pile of slop, and—I blinked—they were eating it. They turned over the scraps and raked through them, and picked bits out and put them down and picked up others. They stuffed their mouths with soggy wads of bread and fish skin, or they tucked handfuls of the mush into their pockets and down their shirt fronts.

  I’d eaten filthy food in my life, and rotten food, and infested food, but something about the raking and the pawing was too much. I took a step back, revolted, and from beside me came a soft snicker. By the time I looked at the kitchen boy, he’d smothered his smile and fixed his eyes on the ground, but there was still a sort of spiteful amusement in his face. Well, what did you expect?

  Most of the scraps were already gone. How could these people possibly get enough to eat? I hadn’t left much more on my own plate than a scrap of pastry and a smear of gravy, and . . . oh, hell, and various other words for hell. Ariadne. Damn it all, Ariadne had known.

&n
bsp; “Aunt Darren?”

  Hark eased his way between the steaming cauldrons, none-too-subtly hiking up the back of his ill-fitting trousers. “Everyone’s asking where you are.”

  Right. When you were an honoured guest at a banquet, you were supposed to stick around until dessert.

  “I’ll go back in a second,” I said. “I just need to brace myself first.”

  I took a few deep breaths, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot, waiting for me.

  “Everyone keeps telling me that I should beg you for advice,” he said. “About my maiden voyage, I mean.”

  “Do they?” I sighed. “I don’t know what I can tell you that would be of any use. There’s only one thing I remember from my first week at sea, and that’s puking so hard that I thought I was going to turn myself inside out.”

  His eyes widened. “You got seasick?”

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, Hark, but you will too, pretty definitely. Autumn winds mean high waves. And they don’t waste new ships on first voyages—you’ll be commanding some wretched old scow with the smell of rotten oysters oozing from every plank. And if you haven’t tasted salt pork before—no? Well, that’ll be a whole new adventure.”

  “Right.” He nodded, brow furrowed as he tried to look serious and mature. “I can understand that.”

  “You don’t understand anything yet. Do you really want advice? Then here’s what you do. First, you have to find the best sailor aboard your ship. You want the man who can steer one-handed through a hurricane, yawning all the while. Find him, then throw yourself on his mercy. Tell him that you’re green as grass and ignorant as hell—he’ll know that anyway, so it’s no good trying to pretend otherwise. Then tell him that you’ll run the ship exactly the way he tells you to run it, so long as he doesn’t try and fuck with you. Do say fuck. None of your crewmen will even begin to take you seriously until you learn how to swear.”

  His jaw was dangling somewhere around his naval. “But what then?”

  “Then you run the ship exactly the way he tells you to run it, so long as he doesn’t try to fuck with you. You’ll know if he’s trying to fuck with you. If he pulls any crap, then find the second-best sailor and go from there. Other than that, the best tip I can give you is not to take off your trousers during the voyage. Not ever, not once. No swimming, no whoring, no sleeping in the nude. Keep your trousers on and your belt buckled and you’ll stay halfway dignified.”

  I paused, suddenly overwhelmed. What advice could carry a chubby little boy safely through a hellscape?

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said haltingly. “I know it’s what they expect of you, but Hark . . . things are bad out on the water.”

  He was hardening now, his face stubborn and mulish. “You seem to cope.”

  “I’ve survived. So far. I’ve been doing this for years, I’ve won more battles than you’ve eaten hot dinners, and I’m still scared shitless half the time. And if you’re not scared shitless, then you’re not paying attention. If you insist on going through with this, then you’d better go to the temple now and light a whole fistful of candles and pray to every god whose name you can remember that the first murder you see won’t be your own. The seas are on fire. It’s no place for . . . for beginners.”

  It’s no place for children, was what I’d wanted to say, and maybe he knew that, because colour surged to his face. “You think I can’t handle it?”

  “I know you can’t handle it. You’re not a captain or a leader or a sailor, not yet. During your maiden voyage, your crew carries you—or they don’t, and you’re screwed. I barely survived my first voyage, and back then, only most of the people I met were trying to kill me.”

  He stepped back, shoulders rigid.

  “I regret that you have any reason to think me unworthy of my command, my lady,” he said stiffly. “By the grace of the gods, I hope to prove you wrong.”

  “Oh, bollocks roasting on an open fire—I’m telling you this because I want you to be smarter than I was! If you go through with this, it doesn’t prove that you’re worthy of your blood, or whatever the hell. It means that you’re just as much of a coward as all the rest of us. Hark! Come back here!”

  But he was already marching away, head high. For the first time, I understood why Lynn always laughed at me so hard when I tried to act dignified.

  Well, I’d tried. Now I’d had enough of guilt and confusion and hollow-cheeked servant boys and self-destructive nephews. It was time to get drunk.

  As I headed back to the hall, the boy at the spit began to sing again, in that same tuneless voice. This time, he wasn’t the only one. A few of the pot-boys took up the melody, maybe one or two of the cooks, as the song spread across the yard.

  I didn’t think much of the song. Not that I had the right to an opinion on the subject. Who was I to judge these hungry, grimy people, and the things that they did to get through the day? Still, the song struck me as dismal. It didn’t have much of a tune, just a heavy, repetitive kind of beat. And anyway, why in hell would anyone make up a song about killing chickens?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lynn

  LATOYA SAID, WE’RE going to the tavern on shore. I said, have fun. Don’t drink anything with dead things floating in it and don’t kill anyone unless it’s an emergency or you really, really want to.

  Latoya said, you’re coming with me. I said, the hell I am. Latoya said, you want to walk to the tavern, or you want me to put you over my shoulder and haul you there? I said, what the hell do you think my mistress is going to do if she sees you carrying me down the gangplank? Latoya said, she’ll cry all night, then offer to back out gracefully so the two of us can find true love together. I said, well, exactly.

  Latoya said, seriously, you’re coming. I said, knock it off. Latoya said, you’re coming, put on some damn shoes. I said, I don’t have any damn shoes and why are we still talking about this? Latoya said, I mean it, come on. I said No she said Come on I said No she said Come on. I said, Latoya. What. The. Fuck. You know me better than this. Why would I go on shore when there’s a perfectly good boat right here? Latoya said, I’m drinking tonight and I want company. Latoya said, I don’t give a good goddamn if you hate spending time on dry land; you’re coming, even if I have to nail wheels to your ass and drag you along behind me like a wagon. Latoya said, I’m done arguing, you have five seconds to move.

  I held out for four seconds. Then I moved. She had a look in her eye that usually led to someone limping around and saying ow a lot in a meek and subdued tone of voice.

  There was only one tavern in the village. Inside, it was dark and cave-like. The walls were grimed with soot, the dirt floor spongy underfoot with spilled drinks. Latoya ordered supper and four pints of ale, and told the barman to keep the drinks coming as long as we were conscious.

  The food was a gritty, salty mash of something hard to identify. Probably boiled peas with a bit of fish oil, and sawdust for bulk. It tasted rancid but it was hot and I hadn’t had to cook it, so there was that. I ignored the flavour and worked my way through the bowl spoonful by spoonful. It helped that it was too dim to see what I was eating, especially when bits of something stringy got caught between my teeth. The ale was better, but not by much. I swigged, wiped my mouth, sighed, and hated everything around me.

  Before I met Darren, I used to spend a lot of time around taverns, because if you were looking for men who had money and wanted to spend it, that was the place to go. But I rarely went inside. My spot was the front stoop, just outside of the circle of faint firelight that spilled through the doorway. There was usually a cluster of women out there, all ages: girls like me, with matted hair and no fixed address; mothers who couldn’t earn enough on the fishing skiffs to feed their children; half-senile wrecks who tried to cover the lines on their faces with a thick coat of plaster or white clay. It was a cutthroat kind of place to work. There were so many women looking to pick up a trick that if you expected to attract attention, you had to be
better-looking than anyone else, or cheaper than anyone else, or have fewer limits than anyone else. And I’m not especially good-looking and I was never cheap when I could avoid it.

  There were no women around this tavern. Which meant there were no men in the tavern who had the money to spare for a whore.

  There was no garbage in town, either, and that was a bad sign too. Garbage means you’re in a place that hasn’t yet hit bottom. In a really desperate village, no one throws anything away. Anything that you can eat, you eat; anything that you can burn, you burn; anything that will cover skin, you wear; anything else is used as fertilizer or turned into a fishhook. In my wandering days, whenever I entered a new town, I always felt relieved if I could see garbage. That, and rats, because rats meant that there was something around to eat. If nothing else, you could eat the rats.

  The beer got worse as I neared the bottom of the cup. I squinted into the murky brew, trying to figure out whether there was a surprise waiting for me down there.