Awakening (28 page)

Slew also noticed that the busiest times in the Library were when it was raining outside. On such days pilgrims with a scholarly turn of mind, who might otherwise be tempted to carouse with their friends al fresco, or make the trek up Waseley Hill, wandered in to get out of the rain and browse a little.

The librarians dreaded such days, for these occasional readers took up much more of their time than the regular ones. Indeed, at such times a certain ‘us and them’ mood took over. Slew saw that this too offered opportunities.

While he studied these procedures under the guise of scholarship this daily chore of simply being there bore fruit. He rapidly became a fixture in the place, his passage to and from his lair downstairs being greeted by familiar nods, even from Master Brief himself.

On more than one occasion, too, people said, ‘Going well is it? Finding what you need?’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ murmured Slew, ‘a scholar’s work is never done, even on a sunny day like this!’

It was true enough; the Summer was a good one and the rainy days too few and far between for Slew’s taste. What he needed was a period of prolonged rain and for the Library to get busy and Master Brief and his more senior colleagues to be preoccupied with other things or away.

Meanwhile his extra-curricular activities in Brum continued. His quarters next to Bedwyn Stort’s house were comfortable and provided him with ample nightly respite from scholarship in the arms of Evelien and her cousin Machtild.

The truth was he was beginning to grow weary of the demands of the younger wyf, a fact that caused Machtild much amusement. For her part she resisted Slew’s demands, or rather kept it to sensual nocturnal conversation of a kind for which Slew had met his match: playful, intelligent, suggestive and witty but nothing more.

The male members of the family, their protectors as Slew presumed them to be, remained astonishingly ignorant of these routine goings-on. They liked their mead, in which habit Slew encouraged them, as did his two consorts, and so they were either out drinking or abed sleeping it off.

On his first arrival in Brum, Slew had been noticeable for his height and obvious strength. Some days into their sojourn there a large group of pilgrims from Norseland, some as tall as himself, arrived. They were the kind to pick a fight.

It was they who first approached him, in the Muggy Duck, asking if he or his forebears came from their country. He immediately saw advantage in associating with them. They looked like they enjoyed a fight and he had not been able to give time of late to stave practice in the way he normally did. The Norseners to a hydden carried staves, and big ones too.

Ma’Shuqa did not allow staves in the Muggy Duck because their presence led to fighting when the mead was flowing, so the group left theirs on the wharf outside, placed upright and together as a visual declaration of their combined might and a message to others that to mess with one of them was to risk having to deal with the whole lot.

But Slew knew the type, there were plenty such in Thuringia, always ready to test the mettle of those they met and, if they could, humiliate them. So when they asked publicly and insultingly about his bloodline he lied and said he had heard it was true: he had Norse blood in him.

‘But you are a monk!’ one of them said, ‘and we Norseners do not make good monks!’

‘Come to think of it,’ said another, ‘we don’t
like
monks.’

Slew looked at them dismissively.

Ma’Shuqa, who had an ear for trouble and a fight, said, ‘You gennelmen can steam down a little if you please. He’s a solitary monk and he’s of the Mirror, you’re twelve and you’re stewed.’

‘Pickled I’d say,’ said Slew, ‘like a dozen filleted fish all in a row. Eh?’

He raised his mead in mock salute.

‘Now then . . .’ said Ma’Shuqa warningly.

One of the Norse stood up, furious. The Duck’s clientele fell quiet. They liked a good fight once in a while, and were glad when strangers such as these ignored Ma’Shuqa.

‘If you weren’t in a habit, my friend,’ he said, ‘I’d throw you over the wharf outside.’

Slew reached across the table with such speed and strength that no one knew what had happened before it did. He grasped the Norseman’s jerkin in such a way that he began to choke.

‘Shall I throw him out?’ he asked Ma’Shuqa, ‘or shall I just throw him?’

He did not wait for an answer.

He stood up, still holding the enormous troublemaker with one hand, hauled him effortlessly across the table and cried out, ‘Open the door!’ which one of the regulars did, and he heaved his would-be foe outside.

‘Now close it,’ said Slew, ‘so the smell doesn’t creep back in!’

It was all done so swiftly that the other Norseners were barely able to move before Slew sat down opposite them once again, smiling.

None of them, nor any of the regulars, had ever seen the like. As for Ma’Shuqa, she was speechless for once.

‘Well then,’ she said eventually, ‘if you want to fight each other do it outside.’

‘We will,’ said Slew, his eyes narrowing, gazing darkly at the other Norseners one by one, ‘won’t we?’

It was, by any standards, one of the best stave fights the clientele of the Muggy Duck were ever witness to.

Ma’Shuqa might discourage fighting in-house, but right outside it was good business. If she could see a fight was on the way she had trellis tables of mead set up, deputed a couple of her sturdier wenches to serve, and ordered that the flares along the wharf be lit.

Slew took his time, appearing to drink mead to gain courage but in fact barely touching a drop.

Eventually he said loudly, as if the worse for wear, ‘My stave if you will, landlady, for I’m off. I have business outside with some folk who claim their whore’s blood is purer than mine!’

As insults went it was a poor one but it was enough.

The Norseners piled out after him, along with everyone else; mead was served aplenty, and a book started on how long the monk would last and the number he would put down before he himself was felled.

It was never Slew’s intention to win the fight, which for a Master of Shadows would not have been very hard. His real aim was to win some friends and gain some sparring partners. Such hydden as those were not to be dismissed just because they drank too much. Get them sober, train them to be as disciplined as he was, and he would have a fighting force which in time might be useful for one whose youth precluded him from being accepted by some senior members of the Fyrd, even though he was Master of Shadows.

He felled five with seemingly increasing difficulty before he let himself be buffeted to the ground, laughing, making a jest of it, turning anger to japery and jollity with his charm and strength.

‘Drinks on the house!’ called out Ma’Shuqa, bringing to a halt further unpleasantness, ‘and a flagon of mead to the fair winner of a round robin of bouts!’

This was an invitation for an instant competition whose rules of time and handicap all knew and which, the evening being young and the weather warm and thirsty-making, would increase her business still more and extend it.

It was this latter turn of events that brought Brum’s stavermen hurrying, in case the peace needed to be kept. With them came Mister Pike, who had been having an enjoyable supper with Master Brief, who came too for the exercise.

When he saw that Slew was of that rough, carousing company, Brief pulled back into the shadows, not wishing to be seen.

He’d had his doubts about Brother Slew from the beginning, but there had been nothing to put a finger on and instinct was not proof. Slew’s credentials were not in doubt, nor his intelligence, nor his knowledge of the scholarship of the Seasons and Summer.

‘I cannot very well stop him studying, Mister Pike, but I don’t like him!’ Brief had said not an hour before to his friend. Now there he was, mixing it with a rowdy group of stave fighters from the North and, from what they soon learnt, the cause of all the trouble.

So Brief kept out of sight while Pike, intrigued, went forward to listen and learn what he could.

It didn’t take him long to learn something very remarkable, not by word but by a brief deed.

It happened that the bouts of the competition had reached such a point that it was impossible for everyone there not to be more or less involved, especially the monk, as he was generally referred to, and the Norseners, now his friends.

Folk called for them to take on a fair bout as well, one by one of course, and Slew could not get out of fighting one either.

Alerted by Brief, Pike watched that particular bout with care. Slew’s opponent was the Norsener he had originally thrown out. He had a sore head and wanted to recover respect. Pike knew a good fighter when he saw one, and from the moment the Norsener took the ring he could see from the way he held his stave he was very good.

The monk on the other hand looked curiously incompetent for one who, Pike had learned, had earlier done so well.

‘It be the booze,’ said a regular he knew, ‘and this be a needle match for all it’s meant to be friendly. You might have to step in and stop it, Mister Pike, if the monk goes down.’

It was obvious from the first that the monk was going to lose, but it needed an expert staverman like Pike to see what was really going on. Losing a fight can sometimes require more skill than winning it, if the ‘loser’ is not to get seriously hurt. It was obvious to all that the Norsener wanted his revenge and that given half a chance he was going to take it.

So Pike watched carefully and readied a couple of his colleagues to go in fast if real hurt was going to be done.

The fight started, the monk took a few blows, weakened, briefly came back strong again, his movements rather more fluid to Pike’s eyes than they should have been for one meant to be the worse for wear. He weakened again, fell back, his attacker saw his chance, closed in and made an expert feint, the kind that it is hard for the other not to respond to if they are feigning tiredness and defeat. So Slew responded, opening himself to a swift and brutal end to the bout. Perhaps he knew that the staverman would step in, perhaps not, however it was one of the other Norseners who stuck out his foot to make Slew’s fall all the worse, his brief humiliation greater. It was the way of things, of fighters: honours even, honour satisfied, all friends together on the morrow, cuts and bruises and broken ribs and all.

It didn’t happen like that.

Pike did not see the foot stuck out, nor his friends, and nor apparently did Slew. Had he shown he had done so he might have given his game away.

So already disadvantaged he stumbled on the foot and began to fall in such a way that it was surely irrecoverable. He was going to get hurt.

It was an old Norseners’ trick.

It always worked.

Teach a foe a lesson, gain respect, no harm done.

Except that the Norsener wielding his heavy stave wanted to cause harm and on Slew, now lying in shadow on the edge of the wharf, that was not going to be hard.

Only Pike saw what happened, and he had never seen the like in his life. One moment Slew was in the shadow and the next, for the briefest of moments, he
was
shadow and the Norsener’s stave thumped not into his ribs, to break a few, but into the cobbles of the wharf, putting him off balance and jarring his arms.

Even as that happened the shadow that had been Slew manifested back into something solid but elsewhere by a few inches. His hand shot up, it grasped the stave and held it, and with a strength and skill Pike had never witnessed, slowly toppled the Norsener to the ground.

It was better even than that.

He might easily, Pike saw, have had his foe into the water, but that he did not do. He brought him down upon himself, let himself be winded yet held on to the other’s stave throughout.

Then, he rose, yielding the bout, laughing and gasping for breath at the same time.

Honours even.

No harm done.

Brief saw it too and saw something else.

Something dark and dangerous.

A shadow that put a chill deep into him.

‘He’s not what he claims to be,’ said Pike later, ‘and he’s dangerous.’

‘I don’t doubt that, Mister Pike, but the question is, what is it he’s doing in my Library?’

The question was rhetorical and in any case Pike never quite heard it. For as Brief spoke the heavens opened with a crackling crash of thunder and lightning and the muggy evening became one of torrential rain.

The trellis tables were hauled inside, the imbibers followed them, along with the wenches, the Norseners and the rest of the company.

But for one, who lingered outside, his monk’s habit turning dark as it grew wet, and shiny. He stood staring at the lights inside and the flares dying in the rain and he watched two figures who hurried away: Mister Pike and Master Brief.

He followed them, he studied them, he assessed their likely strengths and weaknesses, and that done, and well satisfied, he made his way to his lodgings and, for once, slept in his own bed all the night through.

27

P
ALEY’S
C
REEK