by CJ Arroway
‘Do you think we could catch them?’ Evie asked, looking up in the direction of the city gates as if to try to catch sight of them.
‘Even if we could,’ Luda said, shrugging, ‘what would we do? They’re off to fight the Sea People. We wouldn’t be much use to them and I don’t know about you, but if those people who came to the village are anything to go by I’m not sure I want to meet hundreds of them.’
Evie puffed out her cheeks in frustration. ‘That idiot I spoke to said they’d be back in a month. Maybe Rachlaw will find my mother when he kills those monsters. I hope he cuts them to pieces. I just feel I should be doing something, I thought coming here would help me find her.’ She kicked out at the dry debris of the road, sending up a cloud of dust and grit, then slumped down onto the flagstones to hang her legs over the sides of the riverbank.
Luda hopped up from the strut of the bridge where he was leaning and sat down next to Evie. ‘We’re probably best waiting here. Rachlaw will sort out the Sea People and find out where your mum is, I’m sure. We’ll need to be here when he gets back, not lost somewhere in the Mahl hills, or worse.’ He drew his finger sharply across his throat and grimaced.
‘Yeah. I know,’ Evie said, flicking a rusted, broken shoe nail off the stones and into the dark water. ‘I just feel frustrated. And hungry. And tired. And we’ve got no money.’
She put her hands to her face and rubbed, forcing out a guttural groan. ‘Maybe we should have taken Aldrwyn up on his offer?’
‘Stealing stuff? No thanks– I don’t fancy getting hanged very much.’
‘I guess we’d better find work then,’ Evie said, standing up. ‘You ever seen anyone making leather?’ Luda gagged. Evie smiled mischievously: ‘Well now might be the time to learn how!’
The Tannery
With men on foot and the baggage train, light as it was, progress was slower than Rachlaw would have liked. It was five days since they had left Wyrra and Lord Venner would have been at Riverhead Fort for half a week now. If Orlend had attacked, the fight might already be over and Venner’s men would meet them on the road, full of boasts of their valour and slurs at Rachlaw’s late arrival.
Whatever numbers Orlend had, they would not be enough. Riverhead, set on a rocky outcrop and protected by the cliff wall and river to the front and the steep mountain slope to the rear, could hold out for a month with 100 men against 20 times that number. There was no way to control the pass unless you took the fort, and no way to bring through an army unless you controlled the pass.
Orlend’s frustration at the sight of hundreds of swords waving from the fortress wall should be enough to send him home. And if not, the blood his men wasted on any futile assault would be. If Orlend’s army was still under the walls when the King’s Men arrived then their spirits would be broken at the sight of fresh troops in such number. Rachlaw would chase and harry them back into Myria where even that kingdom’s meagre army would make sport of the broken survivors. Perhaps, Rachlaw thought, Dawhl was right and he had been too hasty in wanting to raise the reserve – they would not be needed and their efforts were better directed towards growing the food and brewing the beer his men would need on their return to Wyrra.
That thought rested with Rachlaw for a moment, then the caution born of experience broke through. He’d faced the Sea People before, not as an army but in skirmishes against their coastal raiders as a young mercenary in Myria. But he’d seen enough to know they were not the kind to give in without a fight, whatever the odds. And if his intelligence had been correct, they now had numbers that would put the odds far more in their favour than had been the case in the past. There would be a fight, it would be hard, but he would win. Rachlaw reached to touch the hilt of his sword, an instinctive reassurance, and looked back to the lines of men following him wearily, stretched out in a loose formation that spoke of many miles still to go before battle would be joined.
‘What do you think your father’s doing right now?’ Rachlaw spoke to the tall, wiry warrior riding to his left. The man’s horse was a powerful charger, pure white with cobalt blue eyes– a rare and beautiful beast that marked the rider out as a man of high status.
‘Knowing him? Drinking the cellars dry while complaining how poor the ale is,’ the man laughed.
Alren, Lord Venner’s second son, was an officer at the court of King Quist, and so rode with the King’s Men rather than with his father and brother who were now, he imagined, waiting for him at Riverhead with tales of new battles won.
Rachlaw grinned. ‘That does sound about right. Mind you, it’ll be good to see him in battle dress again rather than sat at Court with the old men, getting greyer and fatter. Wyrra never suited him. You won’t have ridden with him in battle will you?’
The younger man shook his head.
‘A great soldier – as you know. No doubt you’ve heard often enough the tale of how he cut a Myrian lancer and his horse clean in two with a single blow of his sword, at Crall’s Ridge?’
Alren’s face flushed, a son’s pride.
‘Of course the poets sing a lot of pretty battle songs to flatter those of us who keep them fat, and you must take them for what they are worth, but I swear I saw that one with my own eyes. As fine a man as I ever rode into battle with. You be sure to make him proud.’
‘I will, lord.’ The man punched his gloved hand to his mail-clad breast and nodded firmly, jaw clenched. Rachlaw smiled.
They were now approaching the northern limit of The Wyrran, and in an hour or so would be in the North Lands approaching the border with Myria. The foothills of the Mahl range were already starting to rise and the higher peaks – where they would find Riverhead and Orlend – could be made out on the horizon; hazy and confused with the distant clouds, so that it seemed they rose twice as high as they really were.
There were still days of travelling ahead of them, but their battleground was now in sight.
* * *
There were times when Evie found her powerful sense of smell to be a distinct disadvantage. And this was certainly one of them.
The reassurance of memory that had tempered the smell of the tannery earlier now disappeared, as the stench of each part separated from the whole to launch its own individual assault on her nose and throat. Luda looked green.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Evie reassured him. ‘After a few days, my dad said, you stop smelling it.’
‘That’s great,’ Luda replied. ‘But I don’t think I’ll ever stop smelling of it.’
The tannery was one of the larger buildings on the west bank of the Lyrr river. It sat just outside the main city boundary, strategically placed by the docks, north of the city centre, so that the regular south-west winds would blow the smell out into the Wyrran plains. That was the theory, but its smell rarely left the city – and to be right in the thick of it was an eye-watering experience for the uninitiated.
Hides of goats, cows and sheep were brought in by boat. Stinking of blood and fly-blown meat, they would be soaked in vast tubs with lime, salt water and urine to remove the filth and loosen the hairs for scraping. Ripe guano, collected from the city’s dovecotes or harvested from the eaves of buildings, was stored and fermented to be added to the foul broth to soften the skins.
After soaking for several days, the skins would be removed from the tubs and carried – still stinking and wet – to the scraping room. Stripped of hair or wool and cleaned, they were then taken to the dozens of dyeing pools that filled the wide courtyard of the wooden complex, opening up to the dockside where the finished leathers would be dried, packed and loaded.
The round pools were filled with water, each coloured by the stain of flowers, roots and lichen from the Wyrran forests, or exotic minerals and crushed shells – imported at great cost for the clothes and shoes of wealthy men across the river or in distant cities on the long trade routes. The colours were a startling contrast to the dull, greasy brown of the rest of the tannery buildings – circles of purple, red, and maroon in the main p
art, but with bursts of orange or blue, At the far end, a single well of bright yellow was reserved for the very finest skins.
For unskilled workers like Luda and Evie the job was simple but hard. They would haul the sacks and barrels of lime, guano and urine from the docks to the soaking tubs, then carry the treated leather back down to the scraping room. It was filthy, hot and tiring, but at the end of the day they had enough money for a place to stay and a warm meal.
‘I hope that friend of yours hurries up,’ Luda complained, as he and Evie wrestled to upright a heavy barrel that smelt strongly of urine. ‘I’m starting to wish we’d gone off with Aldrwyn now – I bet he doesn’t go to bed stinking of cow piss every night!’
‘Stop complaining,’ Evie snapped. ‘At least we get paid, and it won’t be for long. I’ll pay for you to spend a day at the baths when we’re done if you stop your moaning.’
‘If you did less talking and more lifting you wouldn’t be so far behind!’ The voice bellowing from across the courtyard sent a shiver down Luda’s spine. He was used to being worked hard by the Gadds, but Felim, the foreman of the tanning rooms, had proved vindictive in a way they never were – especially when he had found out they were Daw.
‘You two lazy little Jackdaws – I might have known you’d be slacking off. If you don’t get the rest of those barrels in store by sundown I’ll dock your pay, so I would be getting a proper shift on if I was you. Less talk, more work.’
Luda’s fists clenched around the rim of the barrel as he hauled it angrily up and into place. Felim waved his hazel rod, taunting them as he strolled past without taking his eyes off the two of them. He was not officially allowed to beat the workers – the tannery owners disliked the hours lost to injury – but he would give a sly stinging slap to the back of the legs of those he took a particular dislike to – and that was certainly the case with any Daw.
‘I am so sick of this place already, Evie,’ Luda said, spitting at the ground where Felim – now safely out of sight – had walked past them. ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. Not with him.’ He drew out the last word with venom as he glared at the door through which the foreman had disappeared into the scraping rooms.
‘Just ignore it, Luda. My dad said to just keep quiet and work hard. If you rise to it, they just enjoy it more.’
The anger re-energised Luda and he and Evie quickly caught up with their workload. As the sun began to disappear over the low rooftop of the tannery building, they surveyed the empty loading bay with bitter satisfaction and walked together down to the yard where Felim handed out the day’s wages from his small wooden stall.
‘You caught up then in the end I see? Didn’t nick anything today did you?’ Felim sneered, and a handful of the men standing around the stall snorted approval as he looked around for an appreciative audience.
Luda and Evie said nothing, but picked up their small fragments of coin from the stall top and headed for the gates that led back to the riverside and their boardings.
As was common with itinerant workers at the tannery, they’d bargained a place to stay among the hut dwellers whose ramshackle dwellings grew out of the damp ground stretching along the port side of the river.
The hut was small, even by the standards of the houses in Uish, and Evie found it hard to believe a family of 12 lived in this cramped single room. They had moved out to a hut that housed some other branch of the family, so that they could give the space over for their guests, and she wondered how many there might be crushed together in that hut now.
Evie assumed their absence meant she and Luda must be paying more than was usual for accommodation here – but she was happy to pay it. The thought of squeezing into this tiny space with a dozen dock workers, mothers, children and babies after a day at the tannery was not something she would have relished.
Even with just the two of them, the space felt cramped. When the family moved out they took all they had that might provide comfort – even the beds. Much of the floor was so damp they were huddled in one corner of the hut, trying to keep warm and dry using reed thatch they had gathered from the fallen roof of a neighbouring hut whose back wall had been claimed by the marsh.
Luda pressed his palms into his cheeks and looked up to the low ceiling above. ‘Oh, I’ll be so glad when we get out of this place!’
Evie pushed some of the musty-smelling reeds underneath herself to try to make the cold floor more bearable. ‘It won’t be too long. Imagine having to live here and work at that place all your life. Makes me realise we didn’t have it too bad in Uish after all.’
Luda nodded. ‘Yeah, I mean at least my hut was dry. Most of the time.’
‘And we didn’t have to put up with being called Jackdaw every five minutes,’ Evie added.
‘I dunno,’ Luda said, shrugging, ‘maybe you, but I got plenty there as well.’
Evie squinted at him. ‘What? People called you Jackdaw in Uish?’
‘No – the opposite,’ Luda said, kicking up the reeds at his feet and crossing his legs. ‘Everyone said I was People, they said my dad must have been People and they were always calling me half-breed or bastard.’
‘I never knew that! You never told me. I’d have said something if I’d known.’
‘It’s not your fault. You ever wonder why I didn’t have any friends apart from you?’
‘We had friends,’ Evie insisted.
‘Yeah, had – when I was six or seven. Sometimes I think you still see me as a kid. I have changed a bit since we first met, you know.’ Luda pulled his legs in closer to his chest.
Evie gave an ambiguous grunt of acknowledgement. ‘I’m sure not everyone thought that Luda – most people aren’t like that.’
Luda raised an eyebrow. ‘You could have fooled me.’
‘Well there’s always some like that,’ Evie said. ‘I remember when I came here with my dad one time – there was this man who accused him of cheating him over something he’d sold him. It ended up with about 20 men all gathered around our boat, and I could feel my dad was really scared, although he was trying to hide it from me. They were calling him all sorts, saying how Daw are all thieves and so on.’
Luda shrugged. ‘See.’
‘Yes, but then the captain of one of the big boats came over and he told the men to leave us alone. He said none of them would work on his boat if they didn’t leave my dad alone. And then some other people came over to make sure my dad and me were alright. So not everyone is like that – I just think those people make the most noise.’
Luda shook his head and gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe the people who aren’t like that need to be a bit noisier?’
Evie sat back and pulled more straw over her legs. ‘Maybe. Anyway let’s just get through the next day or two and I’m sure Felim and the others will get bored with picking on us and find someone else to bother.’
If Evie and Luda had been hoping for an easier day, the next morning was a rude awakening.
‘Oh that stinks, that really stinks!’ Luda coughed. Evie had dipped a cloth rag into one of the scented dye pools and wrapped it around her nose and mouth, but it did little to stop her eyes watering.
They’d been put on dockyard duty, and were now hauling in that day’s delivery – skins that had come downriver from the northern markets of The Borders, cut from the wiry sheep that graze in the high mountains where the wild tribes live. While they had been preserved with salt before being loaded, a bad job had been done of cleaning them. By the time they had been carted through The Borders and loaded into the hot belly of the boat to Wyrra, each had become home to a thousand squirming maggots. The stench was enough to turn even the most hardened stomach.
They carried three hides at a time between them, holding the skins where the back or front legs would have been. They tried to keep the hides wool-side-up, to avoid looking at the remains of rotten flesh still clinging to the underside, dripping a trail of maggots and coagulated blood behind them.
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It took more than an hour to unload the boat, and the rest of the morning to carry the stinking cargo to the soaking tubs. It was well into the afternoon before they had time to sit down and eat the small pieces of bread and preserved fruit they had bought at the market the previous day.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever look at a sheep the same way again,’ Luda said as he and Evie scrubbed their hands with lye soap at the water trough.
Evie shook her hands dry. ‘How do you normally look at sheep?’ Luda pulled a face and Evie flicked her fingers at him, sending a small spatter of water that forced his hands up. She put her arm around his waist as he wiped his face. ‘Could be worse – you could be the sheep.’
They sat down on an overturned half-barrel and silently started on their meal, relieved just to have the chance to rest at last.
‘Mind if I join you?’ A heavy-set, dark-faced man with a thick, greying beard held his hand out to indicate the one remaining space on the barrel edge.
‘Mmmm,’ Luda mumbled, his mouth full of bread – enough to indicate that was fine with him – and the man sat down, his weight tipping the barrel away from Luda and Evie momentarily.
‘I see you got the top job this morning, lucky you,’ he said dryly, as he opened his own food from a grey, folded cloth.
‘Yeah – feeling great about it, as you can see,’ Luda said, holding out his arms to show the dark stains of half-dried blood that covered his sleeves.
The man chuckled lightly. ‘You must be new here if you’re getting jobs like that. Where you from?’
Evie swallowed after finally finishing a slightly-too-large mouthful of bread she’d bitten off. ‘Up in the Black Hills. We’re only here for a bit.’
‘Black Hills, hey? Never been up that way myself. What you doing here?’
‘We’re here to see Rachlaw. He’s a friend of ours,’ Evie said, glad someone at the tannery had finally asked.