Chapter 15: The Field

I would like to tell you I kept my head. I kept one hand on the post and one on the knot at my left wrist, and for about the length of three breaths I kept my head, and I want credit for those three breaths, because nobody else in that courtyard got any.

The heat went out from Sigrid in a ring, and everybody it reached stopped fighting. It didn’t knock anybody down. It went through them, and their weapons came down, and they stood where they were and breathed, and went red, and looked at whoever was nearest. Whoever was nearest was usually somebody they had been trying to kill a moment before. Nobody minded.

Ten paces from my post, the barbarian and the gnome who had stopped first were still standing there staring at each other. The barbarian was a bald giant with a split ear, and the gnome came up to about his knee. The gnome dropped his shield. The barbarian got down on his knees in the snow, which brought them face to face, and the gnome took hold of his beard with both hands and kissed him.

All over the yard, eighty-odd enormous Skullcrushers and a few hundred furious little gnomes were finding out, all at once and with great enthusiasm, that they had more in common than they had thought. Axes went into the snow. Spears went into the snow. Helmets came off, and belts, and then everything else, and the frogs hopped about between people’s feet. The fifty gnomes who had been climbing Bjorn to kill him kept climbing for new reasons, and he stood in the middle of the yard with gnomes hanging off his beard and his belt and his furs, with a look of enormous surprise on his face, and didn’t throw a single one of them over the wall.

My three breaths ran out.

The heat had already gone into my cock on the first wave, and on the second it went everywhere else. My skin went hot from my scalp to my heels, the cold stopped mattering, and my balls drew up tight. I had been on the edge for half an hour, ever since Felix walked away, and now it was as if somebody had taken all the edges in the world and put them on me at once. I gripped the post and pushed my hips against the fur on the sawhorse, which did nothing, and I groaned into my own arm, and I didn’t care at all who heard.

The Tome heard. The Tome had the best seat in the house.

Felix had set it on top of the magistrate’s abandoned lectern, at the foot of my post, with its cover open so it could see. Its eye was enormous, wet and shining and swivelling from one end of the courtyard to the other, and it was happy in a way I had only ever seen at my expense.

“LADIES!” it bellowed. “GENTLEMEN! GNOMES! Welcome, welcome, to the finest night of my eight hundred YEARS!” Its pages ruffled with joy. “I have been to the great revels! I was guest of honor at the wedding of a margravine of the southern coast, where the guests did not leave their couches for NINE DAYS!”

It was making things worse. It wasn’t content to watch. It ran the whole yard, shouting at people.

“YOU! The large one with the braids! The gnome on your LEFT has been staring at your ass for a FULL MINUTE! Bend OVER, woman, have some MANNERS!” The barbarian woman bent over. The gnome climbed a barrel. “And you two by the well, no, NO, you are doing it upside DOWN, the tall one goes UNDERNEATH, good GOD, has nobody in the north ever been TAUGHT?”

They did what it said. Everybody did what it said.

Felix was sitting on the sawhorse beside my hip. I don’t know when he had sat down. The field had got him too. His cheeks were pink and his lips were parted and his violet eyes had gone dark and wide, and he was breathing fast. He had his hands folded in his lap on top of my clothes, very tidily, holding them still so they wouldn’t do anything.

“Felix,” I said. “Untie me.”

“I don’t think so,” said Felix. His voice wasn’t quite steady. “If I put my hands on you right now I don’t think I would stop at the knots.” He looked out over the yard and swallowed. “And I really would hate to miss any of this.”

So I did the knots myself. I did my left wrist with my right hand, and it took forever, because every time I got my nail under the rope another wave of heat went through me and I had to stop and hold the post and breathe. After that I bent down over the sawhorse and did my ankles, one at a time, with my cock bumping the fur, groaning through my teeth.

The last rope came off my right ankle. I stood up.

It should have been a heroic moment. I stood up off that sawhorse in the middle of the courtyard, free, naked except for Bjorn’s collar, with my cock standing straight up in front of me in the cold air, slick at the tip, and my legs shaking, and I took in what was left of the battle of the Skullcrusher hold, and absolutely nobody noticed.

The first wave came in late.

I heard it before I saw it. It was a high, furious yapping from out past the gate, dozens of dogs all at once, and a thin little bugle playing a charge. Through the gate came the gnome cavalry at a full gallop, lances down, war cries squeaking, every one of them riding a chihuahua.

I had never seen a chihuahua. Nobody in Willowbrook had. They were tiny shivering dogs with huge eyes and huge ears, like rats that had been told something shocking, and they had little saddles on, and red plumes on their heads, and they were all yapping as hard as they could and going faster than I would have believed. There must have been sixty of them. They came through the gate in a tight wedge, aimed straight at the middle of the yard, and charged directly into the field.

They hit it at a dead run. The wedge went to pieces. The chihuahuas stopped yapping, sat down in the snow all together, and started licking each other. The riders went sailing over their heads into the crowd, lances and plumes and all, and landed among the barbarians, and the barbarians caught them, and the riders gazed up at the barbarians who had caught them and forgot all about the charge.

The second wave came in over the north wall a few minutes later, and it was worse.

There was a horn first, a long deep northland horn, and the north wall shook. A trunk came over the top, then a head, then three mammoths one after another, shaggy and brown, with howdahs full of Skullcrushers roaring with their axes up, breaking the top off the wall as they came. It was a war band home from a hunt, come at a run to save their chief.

The mammoths walked into the field. They stopped. The first one lowered its great head and put its trunk round the second one’s neck, slowly, and the men on top of them looked down at the yard, and at each other, and dropped their axes over the side, and started taking their furs off.

“TWO WAVES,” the Tome shrieked. “TWO! I could WEEP!”

I was watching the chief by then, because on the other side of the yard the chief’s family was coming apart, or together, and I didn’t want to miss which.

Grimble had fallen off Bjorn. The field had taken his gnomes off Bjorn one by one, and Grimble had fallen off the bottom of the beard into the snow and sat there with his hat crooked, all alone. On the other side of the yard, at the foot of my post, Sigrid had let go of Helga’s throat. She was kneeling up in the snow with her ring hand held out in front of her, staring at it, with the heat still pouring off her. Helga lay where she had been pinned, bleeding.

Helga sat up. Across the whole width of the yard, through all the bodies and the chihuahuas and the mammoths, she saw Grimble sitting in the snow with his hat crooked.

Grimble saw her.

They looked at each other. That was all. Neither of them said a word. Helga got up, and walked across the courtyard, stepping over people, and Grimble got up and walked to meet her, and they met in the middle, by the well. She picked him up. He put his arms round her neck. Neither of them looked at anybody else, and nobody else looked at them.

Bjorn watched them go by. He was standing in the middle of his courtyard, covered in gnomes, with his beard pulled loose and his chief’s furs half off, and he watched his wife walk past him carrying the gnome king, and I watched his face very hard for what was going to happen next.

He didn’t go after them. He stood there, breathing, with a gnome on each shoulder, and stayed very still for a long time. After a while he sat down on the edge of the well, right next to them, close enough to touch.

I heard Kaniz before I saw her. Everybody always does.

It came from out past the gate, over the yapping and the moaning and the mammoths: the clank of chain, iron on iron, coming at a gallop. I knew that clank. I had heard it on the stairs at the River Bell every night for a month. My heart went up into my throat and stuck there.

She came through the gate on a big grey horse, leading a brown one on a rope, in her short linen shift and nothing else against the cold, with the iron collar at her throat and the braces on her wrists and the ankle chains ringing at every stride. Her dark hair was wild from the wind. She had ridden three days on her own to get here, and she looked like she would kill anything that stood between her and me.

“MASTER!” she shouted, across the whole yard. “I have brought horses! Come! Quickly!”

I don’t know how she found me so fast. I was standing naked by a post in the middle of an orgy with my cock in the air, and maybe that narrowed it down.

She never got to me. She never got ten paces into the yard. Just inside the gate there was still a knot of gnomes who had been fighting at the edge of everything and hadn’t been caught by the field yet, and they saw two big healthy horses come through the gate with nobody on the second one, and a gnome is a gnome. Thirty of them got onto the brown one in about a heartbeat and turned it round and kicked it out through the gate. Another twenty swarmed up the grey one’s legs, and one of them cut the bridle, and Kaniz went sliding off the back into the snow with a crash of chain, and the gnomes rode the grey off after the brown, cheering.

They were the only ones who got out of that fortress with anything that day. I have always respected them for it.

Kaniz got up out of the snow. She hunted round for the horses, and saw them going away into the trees covered in gnomes, and her mouth opened to shout after them.

The field reached her.

I watched it hit her. Her mouth stayed open. Her eyes went wide and dark, and her whole body shivered from the collar down, and the chain at her ankles rang with it. She forgot the horses. I saw her forget them. She turned her head and looked at me across the yard, at me standing naked by the post, and I don’t think she had ever looked at me like that, and she has looked at me in a lot of ways.

She came straight across the yard. She didn’t walk round anybody. She stepped over them, and the chain at her ankles dragged across a pair of gnomes and a barbarian woman and they didn’t notice. When she got to me she went down on her knees in the snow at my feet, with the iron collar at the height of my cock, and lifted her chained wrists, and held the chain up to me.

“Master,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “The rescue can wait. I want to serve you. Now. Here. Command me.”

“Kaniz,” I said, “the horses…”

“The horses are gone,” she said. “Fenwick lent them. He asked me to say they are on your account.” She pushed the chain into my hand and closed my fingers round it with both of hers. “The bond hurt past the river. It hurt like a knife, so I came. It doesn’t hurt now. Now I want you to use me, and if you make me ask again I will be very angry with you, Master.”

All week I had been owned. Bjorn owned me, and the gnomes owned the debt on me, and Felix had made me groan in the middle of a battle and walked away. And here was Kaniz on her knees in the snow, putting her own chain in my hand and telling me to take her, and the field was roaring in my blood, and I wanted her so badly my teeth hurt.

I said, “Open your mouth.”

She did, at once, and I wrapped the chain round my fist and pulled her forward onto my cock.

I don’t remember all of it. I remember her mouth, hot after the cold, and her hands on my thighs, and the chain pulled tight between her wrists and my fist so every time I tugged it she came forward and took me deeper. I remember Felix on the sawhorse beside us with his hands knotted in his lap and his eyes enormous, watching every second of it, and the Tome on the lectern shouting, “YES! YES! The SLAVE knows how it is DONE! Look and LEARN, you barbarians!” I remember that I lasted almost no time at all, after half an hour on the edge, and that she held my hips and wouldn’t let me pull back when I tried to warn her, and swallowed all of it with her eyes shut, and then looked up at me and said, “Again.”

So I did it again. I pulled her up by the chain and turned her round and bent her over the same sawhorse I had been tied to that morning, and pushed her shift up over her hips, and the snow was melting all round us from the heat of the field. She was wet and ready and pushed back onto me the moment I touched her. I took her hard, with one hand on her hip and the other wound in her collar chain, and she rode it back at me, shouting “Master” at every stroke, so loud that a whole row of gnomes on the long-house steps stopped what they were doing to look. She came with her fingers dug into the fur and her chains rattling against the legs of the sawhorse, and I came again right after her, and fell forward over her back, and lay there.

It was the best moment of the whole week, and I had it over the sawhorse where a gnome had failed to fuck me that morning, which I suppose is what people mean by justice.

Sigrid took the rings off.

I saw her do it from where I lay. She was still kneeling in the snow where she had pinned Helga, alone now, with her ring hand held out in front of her, and she had been staring at it the whole time, all through the chihuahuas and the mammoths and Helga walking away. She had worked it out. I don’t know how. Maybe it was the hum, or the steam coming off the stones. She took the rings off one at a time, the amber one first, with her teeth set, and dropped them into her other palm, and closed her fist on them.

The heat didn’t stop. It went down, slowly, like a fire you stop feeding. The next wave that came off her was weaker than the last, and the one after that was weaker again, and the snow stopped melting round the sawhorse, and the cold came back into my skin a little at a time.

It took a long while. Across the yard, people came out of it one by one and pair by pair, and blinked, and checked who they were lying on, and minded that even less. The bald giant with the split ear sat in the snow with his gnome in his lap and his beard full of plaits the gnome had put in it while he wasn’t paying attention. The mammoths lay down by the north wall and went to sleep. The chihuahuas went to sleep on top of the mammoths.

Kaniz turned over under me on the sawhorse and put her arms round my neck and held on and didn’t let go, and I didn’t try to make her. She was warm and her chain was cold against my back. Felix let his breath out next to us, a long one, and unknotted his hands, and said, “Well. That was very educational,” in a voice that still wasn’t quite steady.

The Tome sighed, enormously, on its lectern. “Nine days,” it said. “The margravine’s wedding lasted NINE DAYS, and they never came close.”

Bjorn was the first one to speak. He was still sitting on the edge of the well, with Helga on one side of him and the gnome king on the other, and the three of them hadn’t said a word to each other, or needed to. He lifted his head and looked round his whole wrecked courtyard full of naked barbarians and naked gnomes and sleeping mammoths and frogs, and he roared, in a voice that shook the snow off the walls:

“Somebody kill a MAMMOTH! I am STARVING!”

Everybody laughed. Barbarians and gnomes, both. Somebody started a song. And over in the snow, Sigrid stood up with the rings in her fist and walked to the well where her father was, and stood in front of the three of them, and stopped there.