Nicola swept her winnings into her pocket and unbuttoned her coat, folding down the high collar and moving her hat from her lap to the table. “Major, I never intended to ride off into the north and disappear into some church with a group of zealots and lunatics when my best chance for leaving the country was heading south to the coast. I left them on the first evening. I had thought I’d be able to catch up to you on the road rather quickly, but you moved quite quickly yourself, especially after Toledo, and I have found the weather to be uncommonly disagreeable.”
“Toledo? What do you know about Toledo?”
“Just what I was told. That two Mazigh spies matching your description had fought and escaped from the soldiers. In fact, if my Espani accent wasn’t so well-practiced, I might have ended up in a cell myself. They were interrogating everyone leaving the city. Thank you very much for that, major. It was one more delay on my journey south to find you.”
“Not my problem, lady. You’re Ziri’s passenger, not my charge. She made that pretty clear.” He rolled his empty cup between his fingers. “But I guess you’re going to keep following us anyway, and you’ve got a nice little pile of money there, so I suppose I’ll let you tag along.”
“How generous, major.” She smiled awkwardly. “Can I buy you a beer?”
“Nah, I don’t touch the stuff. Tastes like piss to me.”
“I’m intrigued at your choice of comparison, though I don’t want to know how you came to that particular conclusion. Do you drink at all?”
“Not at home. It’s illegal in Marrakesh.”
“But you travel a great deal. Surely outside your country…?”
Syfax shrugged. “I do like sweet liquors. And I had something called mead once. Made from honey. Better than beer, but not by much.”
“What about vodka?” Nicola flagged down the barkeep and had him fetch a bottle and a pair of glasses. She poured the clear liquor.
“What is it?” Syfax sniffed his glass and the vapor stung his nostrils.
“It’s from the land of Rus originally, but now you can find it everywhere in the north. They make it from potatoes, if you believe that. It’s not sweet, but I think you’ll warm to it.” She swallowed her glass in one gulp.
Not to be outdone, Syfax imitated her and almost choked on the burning in his throat, but he held it back and managed a grin. “You drink this for fun?”
“No, I drink it to get drunk, major. When you live in a climate like this, some nights are best spent with your brain on fire, burning your blood from the inside out. Another?” She had already refilled her glass.
Syfax nodded. Soon the bottle was half empty and the major felt his skin burning and his head swimming. She was right about one thing, he thought. This is better than being wet and cold in a hellhole like this. He thumped his glass and the Italian woman poured him another. She was smiling almost constantly now, and she had shifted her chair a bit closer to his to lean over the table toward him.
At the far end of the room, a woman with a husky voice yelled out, “Whoever thinks he’s man enough to lie between my legs can line up right here, right now!”
Syfax leaned over sharply to see who was making the offer, but his blood cooled rather quickly at the sight of the woman by the door. She was tall enough and trim enough, but too ugly, even to his weak eyes. A wide mouth, a jagged beak of a nose, and an eye patch surrounded by twisted, scarred flesh. Syfax had never thought himself very picky when it came to women, but he was feeling picky now at the sight of her. Still, a knot of drunken Espani soon formed around her and she herded them off to a corner, and within a few minutes men were queuing up to arm-wrestle each other for the privilege of bedding the hatchet-faced woman.
Syfax shared another shot with Nicola, and another after that. Through a gap in the crowd, he saw the one-eyed woman had taken off her coat to reveal her muscular shoulders and scarred arms. Suddenly she looked a bit more appealing, and the longer he studied the line of men trying to prove their strength and stamina for her, the more he started to think he ought to be in that line himself.
Who cares if she only has one eye? I bet she’s a demon in the dark.
Still, he knew he was drunk and tired and had to deal with a sick, whiny lieutenant in the morning as well as this leering Italian woman who was looking more and more like his dead uncle with every sip of liquor. Nicola edged forward. He edged back.
The feats of strength in the corner evolved from arm-wrestling to gut-punching to all-out fighting in just a few minutes and Syfax grimaced at the three men at the center of the brawl. Big fellas. Gonna be trouble. And I’m drunk, damn it. He didn’t want to deal with them. He hoped they didn’t move any closer to…
The tangled fighters stumbled into the table right in front of the major, shoving Nicola back in her chair and destroying the table top, vodka bottle, and glasses. But they missed Syfax’s knees by an inch, leaving the major to sit, unperturbed, looking down at the two men grappling on his boots.
Nah, I’m not that drunk.
He leaned forward and smashed his fist through the closer man’s jaw, sending him to a quiet oblivion. The second man stared down at his unconscious opponent in confusion, and then looked up at the major just in time to get a knee in the chest. Syfax slipped out of his chair, shocked at how fluidly the entire building seemed to be sliding to his left, but when he focused on the gasping man in front of him, the tilting room disappeared. Syfax grabbed the man’s shirt and smashed his forehead through the other man’s nose. Done properly, there should have been very little pain. He did it sloppily, yet came away as clear as bell. The other man collapsed, dead to the world.
Syfax lurched up on his rubbery legs and noticed Nicola tugging insistently on his sleeve. He wrenched his arm away. “What? What? What? Get off me, lady. It’s over.”
Nicola pointed across the room. “I’m not sure that it is, major.”
Syfax followed her pointing finger. Oh, right. The third guy.
The third man wasn’t as obviously drunk as the first two, which was probably why he had the good sense to the let the other two beat each other bloody so he could claim the evening’s prize. The prize in question was standing on a chair with one boot planted on a table, her scarred arms crossed under her breasts, a cruel smile on her wide black lips. Seeing her there, proudly watching her suitors fight like mad dogs just to lick her boots, Syfax found that she wasn’t nearly as ugly as she had been a short while. He didn’t even mind that she only had one eye or the scars around the patch.
He was still admiring her leg mounted on the table top when the third man plowed into his belly and slammed him against the wall. The room whirled and crashed onto its side and Syfax felt something cool and wet sloshing in the back of his throat, but when his skull bounced off the wood panel of the wall, everything snapped back into focus. He swallowed the remains of his liquid supper and brought both fists down on the man still trying to crush him against the wall.
It took two hammer blows to the man’s back to get him to let go, and then Syfax shoved forward, driving the man off balance over the broken remains of the table and the two men lying on the floor. With a wide-eyed look of surprise, the third man slipped and fell back over the other two and his head landed on the shattered vodka bottle. He clutched his bleeding scalp and rolled away toward the bar. After a moment of hissing through clenched teeth, he staggered up to his feet, cast a few dirty looks at Syfax, and shoved his way out the door.
“Major, that was fantastic.” Nicola was suddenly standing very close to him.
Standing side by side, he realized that they were exactly the same height. He also realized that he had never looked directly into a woman’s eyes without looking down before. The novelty of the moment made him queasy. The lady’s square jaw and small eyes didn’t help.