Page 53 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

“Where you fight goblin?” he said to me, and while my cheeks were going beet with shame that I’d slipped the army muster to learn thieving, Galva said, “He fought them on an island also. Also not in Gallardia.”

I could have kissed her, if I were in the habit of kissing planks of wood.

“He put two arrows in a goblin mage,” she added. “He is no coward.”

Now the man clapped me hard on the shoulder.

“I believe this! He is almost putting one in me!” he said, nodding to demonstrate how he’d put his hat between my arrow and his chest. My arrow wobbled in the hat, as did the several silver chains and pewter pins he’d hung on it. One of these pins showed a winged cock shooting lightning bolts. The randomness of life usually makes me laugh, but sometimes makes me tired.

After he told us his name was Szymnal, he fell to telling us of the battle of Braxos, with the goblins stacking up against charges and flinging poison bolts and eating us raw in the field; all the horrors one heard about the Third Goblin War. Except that on the sun-washed Beltian islands, the fortresses held because the ground’s so damn bony and rocky and their little bastard miners couldn’t pull their huge white walls down from under. Besides which, the Wostrans and Istreans came to help, and not in small numbers. So the biters went to Beltia asking questions, got answers they didn’t like, and, always adaptable, withdrew their Beltian army and poured it into Gallardia. Good for fucking Beltia, I suppose.

Gallardia was a butcher’s field.

But that’s sad-bastard stuff, and you want to hear about the party, for I don’t know what else you’d call it. It started, as things often do, with music. It seems every one of these karks had a small drum, the kind you beat with your hands, and they set about spanking these goatskins like the arses of children who’d had their fingers in the batter. Then came the flutes and then the singing. Mostly western stuff—Beltian, Wostran, even Molrovan, plus a song or two whose language I couldn’t place, but, when I asked, was told Old Kesh, from before the Knock. And I say I asked, because I was allowed to ask. For, aside from the cold iron of our bonds, we were treated more as guests than prisoners, and I’ll never forget these karks. There was a tattered opulence about them, a kind of stolen dignity I’d seen a trace of on Pigdenay pirates or certain bands of highwaymen—though not the ones I’d been with when I met the Spanth. Those were mere brutes. But these? High-livers in low places. They called themselves the Free Traders of the Fig and Dagger. Yes, they were slavers, and we their chattel, but these Free Wankers of the Twig and Berries were a curious kind of slaver, as you’ll see.

And they didn’t feel the need to be unpleasant about it.

I was curious as to why.

“Pardon me,” I said to the fellow who was clearly their leader, though he was sitting on the ground like the rest of them, three geezers down the circle to my right. The only way I knew it was that people kept coming up to ask him things, and at his command, this or that happened. He caused the wine to be brought out, for example. It was at his word that the camels were led away and watered. He had clapped and asked a question, to which all had nodded just before the drums came out.

He would have been an ordinary-looking fellow, of ordinary height, except that some condition of the skin had left him with a gravelly look, and that he had misplaced his nose somewhere. Where his real nose should have been, a brass one had been secured by leather straps buckled somewhere to the back of his sandy mop of hair.

“Tae, ajaerh?” he said back to me, Galtish for Yes, brother? which took me by surprise.

“So you sing the blacktongue song?” I asked him in Galtish. For in my part of Galtia, we don’t say we speak Galtish but sing it, so strong was the bardic vein along our rivers before our Holtish masters sent us to the mines and made us learn to play the pick and shovel.

This speaking of Galtish here even got Galva’s notice, where she sat to my left, and she stopped looking like a trussed-up, beaten-down, pissed-off statue long enough to raise her considerable eyebrows and turn her not-swollen-shut eye to look at us.

“I sing the songs of many stepped-on tribes. I speak Angrani, and Ekésh, and yes, some words of the Galts.”

“Why?” I said, knowing how hard it is to learn a language, and wondering why in the name of Haros’s horned turd anyone would want to talk Angrani, when all those muddy karks were made to learn Molrovan. Or, worse, why beat your brain to learn Ekésh, which meant the tongue of Old Kesh from a thousand years ago, when much-changed Keshite had replaced it? Or my language, when we blacktongues all spoke Holtish? But he reminded me of something I had lately learned and, in my wonder to hear my mother’s tongue from his lips, now forgot.

“The true giants are the second-greatest power in these lands, and though their dialects are many, most of them speak Arvisk. Of which your tongue is an old form.”

Arvisk.

Elvish.

He was saying my language was fucking elvish.

But I had to pry my mind’s fingers from this stone as he threw more at me.

“I speak Ekésh for the beauty of it, and so I could read the old empire’s philosophy, and their comedies, and their daylong poem-plays. Their learning truly made ours look like the games of children. And some of it survives. But I am tired of talking around these two, and they are tired of being talked around.”

So saying, he got up, and in Wostran said some cordial variant of move your arses to the two between us. These did exactly that so he could squat beside me, lowering his arse to his heels like a man who’d never met a chair.

“I am Bazl,” he said. “I am the chief-elect of this clan, the Free Traders of the Fig and Dagger.”

They weren’t precisely a clan, but it was the Galtish word that most fit.

I wanted to tell him my own name, so much I liked this geezer, but dared not.

“Call me Foxfoot,” I said.

He nodded, knowing the game. “Foxfoot it is.”

“Are you gonna sell us, Bazl?” I said.