Chapter 16: The Feast

Nobody killed a mammoth. It turned out they didn’t have to.

The hunting band had been dragging a mammoth home on a sledge when they heard the fighting. Twenty barbarians and about two hundred gnomes hauled it in through the broken wall, singing two different songs at once, and by sundown it was turning on a spit over a fire pit where the battle had been.

The field had left everyone in that fortress starving, and the smell of that much meat cooking went through the whole hold, and people came out of every tent with their noses up, still half naked, still holding hands with whoever they had come out of it with. A gnome and a barbarian argued for a quarter of an hour over how a mammoth should be carved, and settled it, and carved it together, and they were both wrong.

Bjorn had his high table carried out of the long-house and set up at the head of the yard, facing the fire, and he sat down at the middle of it with his family. I watched them do it.

Helga sat on his left. She had washed the blood off and wrapped her bitten hand, and she had a fresh red dress on, and her braids down. Grimble sat on Bjorn’s right, on a pile of cushions so his chin cleared the table. Sigrid sat between Grimble and the end of the table, with Brynhild beside her and her left hand bare. Nobody had told any of them where to sit. Nobody at that table said a word about the morning.

The Tome had the place of honor. Bjorn set it on a silver platter in the middle of the high table, propped open against a skull cup, and the Tome looked out over the feast and the two armies drinking together, and it was so happy it couldn’t speak for almost a minute.

When it got its voice back it didn’t stop until dawn.

“PEOPLES OF THE NORTH!” it boomed. “And PEOPLES OF THE SWAMP! I am honored! I am MOVED! I, the Tome of Wanton Desecration, have been the guest of emperors and the despair of high priests, and I declare this feast OPEN!” The whole yard cheered it. “Let there be DRINKING! Let there be GAMBLING! And under the sacred law of this hold, let there be TAKING!”

That was where I came in.

Under Drink, Gamble, and Take, Bjorn explained to the yard, a chief who wins a prize at a feast shares it with his hall at the next one. It was a good law, and the reason the Skullcrushers loved their chief. And tonight, he said, after the battle and the field and the alliance with the gnomes, there was only one prize in the hold worth sharing.

Two of his men came and fetched me from my bench, where I had been eating my third plate of mammoth with Kaniz asleep against my shoulder. They were very nice about it. They lifted me up, still naked except for Bjorn’s collar, because nobody had ever given me my clothes back, and they carried me over their heads to the first table, and put me down in the first lap.

It belonged to the bald giant with the split ear, who still had the gnome’s plaits in his beard. He held me on his knee and fed me mammoth off his knife and asked me, very politely, whether I had enjoyed the field, and squeezed my ass while I answered. After a while he passed me to the woman next to him. She was the one the Tome had ordered to bend over, and she remembered it, and she was in a mood to return the favor, so she pinned me face down across her thighs and spanked me, hard, for every bite of meat she fed me, and the whole table counted.

All week I had fought. I had fought Bjorn and I had fought Helga and I had fought the gnome law and the cold and my own cock. And somewhere around the third lap, being passed from hand to hand down a table of drunk barbarians with my ass stinging and my mouth full of mammoth, I stopped fighting. I leaned in. I leaned back against chests and spread my knees on laps and let myself be fed and fondled and handed on, and I enjoyed it, every lap of it. My cock went up on the giant’s knee and stayed up the whole length of the table. Brynhild got me for a while, and held me on her lap facing out, and worked my cock in her fist while she talked to Sigrid about axes over my shoulder, and didn’t stop until I came all over the edge of the table, and then wiped her hand on my chest and passed me on. A gnome table got me, and couldn’t work out how to hold me, so ten of them lay me across their laps all together, end to end, like a plank, and took turns.

From one of those laps, about halfway down the yard, I could see the high table clearly. I saw Bjorn look at his wife.

He had been talking to Grimble, about the gnome catapults, as far as I could tell, with a lot of throwing gestures. He stopped in the middle of a gesture, because Helga had laughed at something the Tome said. It was a real laugh. I hadn’t heard her laugh all week. Bjorn turned his head and looked at her while she did it, and he didn’t look away when she stopped. He looked at her the way he had at the hearing, but this time he wasn’t worried about what he saw. He reached over and took her good hand in his, on top of the table, in front of the whole hold.

Helga went red. It wasn’t the hearing red, the blotchy, frightened kind. It went up her throat slowly, and she didn’t look away from him either.

On Bjorn’s other side, Grimble poured mead into a thimble, and Bjorn picked it up with two huge fingers, and they drank to each other.

I saw all of that from a gnome’s lap, upside down, with a gnome’s little hand on my cock and three more on my ass. I remember thinking that I had come to this fortress to steal three rings, and that somewhere along the way I had watched a family get put back together, and that I had never once in my life been in a better position to see something important.

Felix had been safe the whole time.

He had been safe all week. He had sat at the edge of every disaster with a cup in his hand and watched me take it, and pointed, and walked off with my clothes, and all of it had slid off him. At the feast he found a dice game at a gnome table and sat down at it and started winning, the way he always does.

I watched him from my laps for a while. He was winning off the magistrate.

The magistrate had taken his spectacles off for the feast. He sat on his stool with a cup of mead the size of an egg, and played dice with Felix in complete silence, and lost, and lost again, and wrote each loss down in his folio in pencil. Felix was smiling his money smile. He pushed his whole pile into the middle of the table.

“Double or nothing,” he said. “Everything on the table.”

The magistrate looked at the pile, and at Felix, and made a note.

“The court has nothing left to wager,” he said, “but a thief.”

He pointed with his pencil, across the whole courtyard, at me, lying across ten gnome laps with my legs in the air.

Felix laughed. “Done. And if I lose?”

“Then the court takes the wagerer,” said the magistrate, “under the law of this hold.”

Felix rolled. I don’t know what he rolled. I know the magistrate rolled after him, without any expression on his face at all, and the gnomes round the table shouted, and Felix sat there looking at the dice for a long moment, and for the first time since I had known him, I saw him go pale.

“The court notes the wager,” said the magistrate, and wrote it down.

They took him off his stool before he could stand up. He went from gnome table to barbarian table to gnome table, and all along the way they stripped him, and I watched every bit of it from my laps and laughed so hard I fell off one of them. They took his cloak and his boots and his beautiful shirt, and his trousers, and the little knife he keeps in his left boot and the other one he keeps where I won’t say. They passed him down the long tables exactly the way they had passed me, and fed him, and spanked him, and felt him all over, and Brynhild got him for a while and held him facing out the way she had held me, and I lay there on the ground where I had fallen and watched Felix Skotos get handled by half the north, and I have never been so happy in my life.

He took it well. I will give him that. He leaned back into the hands the same way I had, because he isn’t stupid either, and the whole time he was being passed down that table he was looking for me, and when he found me he smiled at me with his hair coming loose and his cheeks pink and said, across three tables, “This is not what I meant by watching.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

Somewhere late in the night Bjorn decided his two prizes should be displayed together. His men took us both to the post in the middle of the courtyard, the same post, the same one I had been tied to that morning, and chained us to it, back to back, with our arms over our heads and our wrists in a single long chain round the top. We were both naked. Felix had a handprint on each cheek of his ass, and so did I, and we stood there pressed together back to back and the yard cheered us, and somebody threw a mammoth rib at us for luck.

On his way back to his table, the magistrate stopped at the post. He had his spectacles on again. He looked me over, slowly, from my sore ass to the marks on my thighs to my face, which was flushed and stupid and very happy, and he opened his folio and wrote.

“The court notes,” he said, “that the thief has now been seen, by the witnesses of both nations, to be satisfied.” He wrote a little more. “The debt is discharged.”

He closed the folio and walked away. I stood there with my mouth open.

“Did he just,” I said.

“I believe he did,” said Felix, behind me. “Congratulations. You’re free of the gnomes.” His wrists moved in the chain against mine. “Unfortunately you’re still chained to a post.”

After that, the feast forgot us.

It got louder, and drunker, and filthier, and spread out from the tables into the snow and the tents and the long-house and up onto the walls, and in an hour nobody was paying attention to a post with two naked southlanders chained to it. A mammoth woke up, ate a table, and went back to sleep. Somebody fell into the fire pit and was pulled out laughing. Felix and I stood there back to back, chained, naked, forgotten, and every so often one of us would start laughing and set the other one off.

“For the record,” Felix said, a long time later, “this is your fault.”

“You bet me on a dice game.”

“The magistrate bet you. I only accepted.” His head tipped back against mine. “It seemed rude not to.”

Sigrid came past near dawn.

The fire had burned down to embers and most of the yard was asleep in heaps. I heard her before I saw her, the crunch of her boots in the frozen snow, and she came round the post and stopped in front of me. She was alone. She had a fur round her shoulders and her hair loose, and her face was clean, and her nose was still swollen from Helga. Her hands were empty and still.

She looked at me for a while, chained to the post with my arms over my head and everything I had out in the cold. She didn’t look at all of it. She looked at my face.

She reached up, put her closed fist into my chained hand over my head, and opened it.

The rings dropped into my palm. All three of them, iron and knotwork, blue and grey and amber, and they were cold this time, with no warmth in them at all. She closed my fingers over them with hers, and held my hand shut for a moment, and let go.

“You read the room,” she said.

I looked at her for a long time. I had a lot of things I could have said to that, and I was too tired and too cold and too happy to make any of them sound good.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

The corner of her mouth went up, on the side where her jaw had been broken once, and it was crooked, and it was the first time I had seen her smile at me without wanting to hit me. She didn’t say anything else. She turned round and walked off across the yard to the long-house, where her father was asleep at the high table with his head on his wife’s shoulder and the gnome king asleep in his lap, and she went inside and shut the door.

“Well,” said Felix, behind me, low, “I take it all back.”

“All of what?”

“Whatever I said about you being slow.”

I held the rings in my fist over my head. They were cold. They would stay cold now. I had what I had come for, and I hadn’t stolen it.

I heard the chain before I saw her. I always do.

Kaniz came across the yard from the direction of the high table, stepping over sleeping barbarians, with a ring of iron keys in one hand and the Tome under her arm. She had eaten, by the look of her, about half a mammoth leg, and slept under the high table, by the look of the straw in her hair. Her collar and her braces and her ankle chains clinked at every step, the way they always do, and nobody in that whole sleeping fortress so much as turned over.

“Master,” she said. She held up the keys. “The chief keeps these on his belt. He did not notice. He has a gnome in his lap.”

The Tome was complaining under her arm in a muffled voice. “My PLACE of HONOR! Unhand me, girl!”

“You were asleep on a platter,” Kaniz said, and put her hand over its eye.

She unlocked the chain at the top of the post. Felix’s wrists came down first and he rubbed them, and said, “Thank you,” to her very politely, with his hands over himself. My wrists came down after. My arms had been over my head for hours, and they fell to my sides like dead fish, and I kept hold of the rings.

Kaniz looked at the collar round my neck.

She looked at it for a long moment, at Bjorn’s collar, with his clan mark painted in red on the leather, and her face went still and very serious.

“This one is not yours,” she said. She reached up with the keys and found the right one on the first try and unlocked it, and took it off me, and dropped it in the snow. She put her hand flat on my bare throat where it had been, warm, and left it there for a breath, and nodded once.

Her own collar stayed on. So did her braces and her chains. They were hers.

She had found two furs somewhere. She gave one to me and the other to Felix, and Felix wrapped himself up in his as if it was the finest cloak in Ashbourne. She put the Tome in my arms, still complaining. She took my free hand, the one without the rings in it, and led us across the yard, between the sleeping barbarians and gnomes, past the cold fire pit and the mammoth bones, through the gap where the north wall had been broken, and out.

Nobody saw us go. Nobody woke up. Behind us, the Skullcrusher hold slept off the biggest feast in its history, and somewhere in it the chief of the Skullcrushers was snoring with his head on his wife’s shoulder and the gnome king in his lap and his daughter asleep in the long-house, all of them together, and none of them needing anything from me anymore.

Out past the wall, with the snow creaking under our feet and the rings cold in my fist, it finally came together.

“Somebody wanted the rings gone,” I said, “so the girl had nothing holding her blood down, and the whole clan would come apart around her.”

Felix pulled his fur tighter and didn’t even look round. “You say that like it isn’t half the jobs we take.”

Whoever had paid for it had wanted a berserker loose in the Skullcrusher hold. What they’d bought was the chief asleep on his wife’s shoulder with the gnome king in his lap. Rogues don’t do politics, Ashara always said. Rogues do contracts. I had the rings. The job was done anyway.

The Tome stirred under my arm. “That one,” it said, “is going to matter, boy.”

I didn’t ask which one. “Shut up,” I said.

I didn’t look back. I had done that once already this week, and look where it got me.