CHAPTER 1 · The Town Before the Oars
Before Andrew came with a cross, before Edyth learned the weight of a foreign hand on her name, before Sambat became a word men could argue over, there was a northern town that did not know it was preparing founders for a city it had never imagined.
It was not much of a town by the standards of those who enjoy stone, straight streets and officials with seals. It had houses leaning into the wind, sheds that smelled of fish and tar, a shore beaten flat by boots and waves, a hall large enough for boasting and too small for the truth, and a market that appeared whenever enough men arrived with things they had not honestly produced.
No one ruled it completely.
This must be understood at once, because later people, sitting near clean windows with ink and certainty, like to ask who was king, who was prince, who was subject, and where exactly the border ran. The north laughed at such questions by not answering them. A man ruled where his kin would stand behind him, where his boat could reach, where his knife was remembered, and where his debts had not yet gathered enough friends to kill him.
Hrolf Stone-Hand ruled more than most.
That meant men listened when he spoke, complained when he turned his back, cheated him only in ways they thought survivable, and praised his judgement most loudly when his sons were near. It did not mean that the town became orderly. Order in that place was like a hen in a storm: visible for moments, offended by everything, and constantly in danger of being carried away.
The morning began with smoke lying low between the roofs. Smoke was the town’s true citizen. It entered every house without permission, sat in every cloak, seasoned every pot, cured every fish, and gave every child the eyes of an old prophet by breakfast. Women moved through it with buckets and curses. Dogs followed them with the professional optimism of creatures who believe all human labour eventually produces something edible.
Near the shore, boats rested on their bellies, dark with tar, salt and expectation. Men scraped them, patched them, cursed them, stroked them, and struck them, which is how northern men expressed tenderness toward anything that could drown them.
Kiy stood beside one of the long ships before the sun had fully lifted.
He was already counting.
He counted oars, rope, spare blades, sacks of grain, hooks, hides, drinking horns, men who could row while wounded, men who would boast until the first storm and then become religious, men whose debts might make them unreliable near silver, and men whose courage depended too heavily on witnesses.
Kiy had the unpleasant habit of seeing the shape inside things. A boat was not a boat to him. It was hunger arranged into wood. A hall was not a hall. It was rank, memory, marriage, insult and fire held under one roof. A village was not a village. It was a body with doors for mouths and storehouses for stomachs.
This made him useful and irritating.
— You count like an old woman, Shchek said.
Shchek had arrived with an axe over one shoulder and a chunk of cold fish in his hand. He was not eating breakfast. He was defeating it. Even at rest he looked like a man waiting for the world to make the first mistake.
Kiy did not look at him.
— Old women know what remains after young men finish proving themselves.
— Men follow courage.
— Men follow food until courage is required.
Shchek considered this and took another bite.
— Food does not break walls.
— No. It decides how long a man can stand before one.
Shchek grunted, which in his language meant the argument had annoyed him by not being stupid.
Across the yard Khoryv had already begun his morning by offending three species and one relative.
He was trying to teach a small boy to insult a gull properly.
— You cannot simply shout at it, Khoryv said. Gulls are born from shouting. You must wound its dignity.
The boy stared upward with solemn attention.
— Say: «Your mother courted a bucket.»
The gull screamed.
— See? It understands lineage.
Old Asa, passing with a basket of dried herbs, struck Khoryv on the back of the head without stopping.
— Teach children knots, not nonsense.
— Nonsense keeps them alive when knots fail.
— Your nonsense has never kept a pot from burning.
— Pots are a cruel audience.
Old Asa did not smile. She had lived long enough to know that smiling at Khoryv encouraged him, and encouraging Khoryv was like feeding a fire to make it consider moderation.
She was old in the way a winter door is old: battered, useful, unembarrassed by noise, and very difficult to move without permission. She had buried a husband, two sons, one daughter, three goats she had liked better than several neighbours, and most of her illusions about men. She did not rule Hrolf’s house. That would have sounded too simple. She remembered it into obedience.
Every woman in the town knew where Old Asa kept extra salt, which girls she believed too sharp for early marriage, which widows she secretly helped, and which men she expected to die foolishly because their mothers had failed to strike them often enough.
Lybid followed her that morning with a wooden sword dragging in the mud.
