Dave Duncan – The Living God – A Handful of Men. Book 4

“Next three all show a white bear with red paws,” Gath added. ”I’ll show up if I look farther.”

“Try it,” said Thewsome.

Gath stretched his prescience another few moments. “Two ships with a red shark. Three with raiders holding axes. Oh, Gods! A bloody phallus!”

“Yes, you’re showing! Well done! You’ve got it now.” Like all the rest of the crew, the two of them were leaning on the gunwale and waving obscene gestures at the shorebound audience—the lanky boy and the enormous Thewsome. He was the largest man aboard, bigger even than Red. His arms and shoulders bulged like pillows, his fists were the size of horses’ hooves, misshapen from innumerable fights. Not even another jotunn raider would ever pick a quarrel with Thewsome—which was why he looked that way.

“About five minutes is safe, then?” Gath said.

The giant nodded, and smiled. His eyes were a pale foggy gray, surprisingly gentle. He turned back to studying the passing shore, spray shining like diamonds on his flaxen hair and beard.

To Gath’s great relief, the wind had held for the journey from Gark. The crew had not been required to row. After Afgirk and Kragthong’s departure, Thane Drakkor had been remarkably merciful in administering punishment to the upstart atheling—a single punch that had laid him flat on the floor and left a purple bruise that still showed in the middle of his chest. When Gath had somehow wobbled to his feet and managed to raise his fists again, Drakkor had roared with laughter, thumped him on the shoulder, and told him to go board Blood Wave. Furthermore, that embarrassing rebuke had been delivered in the privacy of the thane’s own quarters, with no bystanders present to mock. All in all, Gath had been let off amazingly lightly.

His relief had turned to alarm when the longship had sailed without the skald aboard. A few cable lengths from shore, his prescience had inexplicably returned. Even then, he had not guessed.

For an island so famed in legend, Nintor was a dismal sight. It was low and grassy, and so small that few charts would show it. Thewsome had explained that it had no water, so nobody lived there. He meant that no one would bother to fight over a place so worthless and thus it could safely be decreed sacred, but even he would not go so far as to put that cynical thought into words. It was a barren strip of dark green under the milk-blue arctic sky, backed by the ragged peaks of Hvark beyond it to the north. Longships flanked the shore like a row of teeth. Gath. had not realized that there were so many jotnar raiders in the world. Fifty men to a keel; he had lost count at eighty-some, and still they kept coming into view.

“There!” Thewsome said, pointing an arm as thick as a flayed goat carcass. “See?”

A few upright stones showed on the skyline. There were no other rocks in sight, and those were too regular to be natural. “The Place of Ravens?” Gath shivered. “Is that where the thanes meet?”

The giant chuckled. “That is where thanes die! The Moot is held at the Moot Stow, which is being a hollow on the south side.”

“There won’t be any Reckonings this year, though, will there?”

The fog-pale eyes turned to stare at him disbelievingly. “You think that all thanes are accepting Drakkor as leader without argument?”

Gath said, “Oh!” and nothing more. He tweaked his prescience again: another red fist, two crossed axes . . . Thewsome muttered, “Careful!”

It had been several hours after Blood Wave set sail that Gath had realized Twist was aboard. He had not noticed the extra crewman—nobody had. The others knew him, of course, for he had sailed with them before. They had paid him no special heed. They seemed to have no realization that he only appeared once a year, on the Nintor jaunt, and was never seen around the thorp.

Gath had been sitting in the bow, being inconspicuous, when the great tattooed giant had settled down beside him and smiled at him with Twist’s pearly eyes. Even then Gath would not have known him, had he not been allowed to.

“Is being traditional,” he had explained. “I told you—not all of us are skalds. Some are women, some priests. So we are always coming in disguise. For Longday Moot, I am Thewsome. Is a good name, right?”

Gath had wondered how it felt for a despised cripple to be a whole man for a few days each year. Thewsome claimed that his excessive size was designed to avert challenges. To brawl would require him to use sorcery, which a jotunn regarded as cheating. But he could have diverted a challenge with sorcery just as easily, so his fearsome appearance probably had another explanation—it must feel good, too.

Having established his identity, Twist had set to work teaching Gath how to control his prescience. It was not conspicuous, but it could be detected, he had said, and there would certainly be Covin spies at the moot. Lessons from a sorcerer were like no others, involving adjustments to the pupil’s brain, but now Gath was able to reduce his range all the way to zero if he wanted, as if he were turning off a spigot. He had even started to extend it, to two hours or more, and Twist-Thewsome said he might be able to raise it farther when he had more time to practice—but not to try that at Nintor.

Still the shore curved away ahead. Still the longships lay like basking sharks on the shingle just above the weeds that draped the high tide mark. Here and there groups of half-naked jotnar sprawled on the grass beyond, apparently asleep in the unending summer sunshine. Others were tending kit and weapons, or clustered around fistfights, hooting and jeering. Cooking fires smoked, but as Blood Wave went floating by them, the crews abandoned all other pastimes to run down to the water and cheer Thane Drakkor.

Drakkor himself held the steering oar and mostly ignored the applause. Once in a while he would raise a hand in salute to someone ashore, but he did not join in the vulgar gesturing. His babyish face was expressionless. As far as Gath was aware, he had not exchanged one word with his brother on the journey.

Gath glanced to his right to make sure his neighbor there was engrossed in other matters, then turned back to Thewsome. “There is a sorcerer for every ship?”

The skald spat over the side. “Oh, no. One for every thane, more like. But this year every thane is bringing all the ships he can muster. I have never seen so many.”

War moot! Fire and slaughter. Gath tried to imagine all these men charging brandishing swords and axes, howling in bloodlust. He couldn’t imagine it, but he could come closer than he wanted to. He had decided he was not as much a jotunn as he had thought. He wasn’t even enough of a jotunn to want to be that much of a jotunn.

“And where is the Commonplace, where the secret moot is held?”

Thewsome pointed a finger as thick as a dagger hilt. “North. You can’t see it from here.”

The end of the line was near. It would come into sight in another few minutes. Then Drakkor could beach his ship. The cheering swelled as Blood Wave swept past some allies.

“Nobody’s booing,” Gath said. “Your brother seems to be the popular favorite.”

“Do not be calling him my brother!” the giant growled. “Not here!”

“Sorry.”

“And they will cheer his killer if he dies. But Drakkor is not the only one in danger, I am thinking.”

The wind was chill and laden with salty spray. Clad only in breeches like everyone else, Gath was already having trouble persuading his teeth not to chatter, but the implications of those words made him feel much colder.

“You, you mean?” he asked hopefully.

Thewsome chuckled ominously, still studying the island. Boards and ropes creaked . . . “Where is my world expert in sorcery? Are you not being aware of the problem?”

Gath had been thinking of little else but the problem for days now. The danger was much like the danger he and Mom and Warlock Raspnex and the imperor had faced in Dwanish, but there were differences. The trickery that Mom had dreamed up then would not work twice. He hoped Twist could think up an equally effective strategy, because he couldn’t.

“You mean the Covin sorcerers are going around turning all the others into votaries like themselves? Ganging up on them? You may be enslaved as soon as you step ashore!”

And him, too.

Seeming deep in thought, the giant scratched a dragon tattoo half hidden by the hairy mat on his chest. “Is not happening that way, though! I am not hearing any sorcery at all—which is why I keep reminding you not to use your prescience. The island is quiet as a grave.”