It was thirty feet to the ice. Mischa had struck three of her assailants as she landed. They lay on the ice, broken bodies bent at angles they could not have achieved in life. She had landed on her back, facing upwards, her neck twisted impossibly far. Her eyes were open, and they stared up at him, large and green and beautiful, and quite, quite empty. The rest of her hair had shaken loose from its bun and lay like a halo around her head, stuck tight where the spreading pool of blood glued it to the surface.
“Mischa!” Marius screamed at her, battering his body against the unforgiving bricks. “Mischa!” She did not respond, did not move, simply lay like a discarded marionette. Marius leaned further, gauging the distance, preparing himself to jump down, looking for a safe landing, no idea in his head about what he would do other than that he had to be with her, to touch her one more time, and cradle her head into his chest the way she had done for him.
Then a body hit the wall next to him and tumbled past, and the spell was broken. Marius turned and ran, and fought his way out of the battle.
Somehow he found his way home, avoiding the pockets of fighting that had yet to be quelled by the guard. His father found him in the front courtyard: filthy; bleeding from half a dozen wounds; clutching a lady’s kerchief to his eyes and sobbing a single name into it over and over. He had carried his weeping son into the house and ordered his wife to run a bath. Later, after Marius had bathed and had his wounds dressed, his father persuaded him to remove the scrap of fabric from his clenched fist so that his hand could be wrapped in a fresh bandage. Then he sat before Marius in his study’s deep leather armchair and requested an explanation. His mother came in from the parlour, and settled herself on the couch, her needlework lined up on the cushion next to her. She folded her hands into her lap, waiting. Marius stood before them, twisting the kerchief round and round his fingers, and slowly, hesitantly, told his story.
His mother had berated him for a thug and a visitor to whores. She had risen in a fury and snatched the kerchief from his grasp, throwing into the fire that roared in the hearth. His father had said nothing, merely shaking his head in disappointment. Marius had been banished from their presence, sent to his room to consider the behaviour, and the company, expected of the only son of an ambitious merchant. Marius had dried his tears and left them. It was not until he threw himself onto his bed that he gave his emotions full reign once more, promising unutterable things to the dark and to the memory of Mischa’s fall.
His mother had come to him, later, after the evening meal, to apologise. Fear born of worry, and anger born of fear, and she had not meant the things she had said. He was her son, her good boy, and she knew he would have nothing to do with that type of person. She was just glad that he had escaped harm. She had kissed him, and held him in her arms, and left him to his sleep.
But harm had been done to him, and his mother was never again the hearth of his home.
The dead lay on the ice wherever they fell, and nobody made any move to collect the corpses and see them to a burial. After the dogs had eaten their fill, and the birds, and the lizards that crawled out of the sewers in search of easy meat, the spring had come. The iced had thawed, and the bodies slipped beneath the surface of the swollen river, to tumble out into the harbour and provide a bounty for any fish that had survived the winter. But Marius was already gone, apprenticed to a Tallian court scribe recruiting entertainments for the Emir’s summer palace. As soon as it was safe to escape the scribes’ clumsy attempts at seduction he had done so. Later, upon his first return to the city, he had asked around, and found out the truth about Mischa.
She’d been in her late thirties, at least as old as his mother, as far as anyone could tell. In the capital they’d have called her a courtesan, and confined her to the richest end of town so that she’d never have to sully her perfect white feet with the dirt of the common quarters. In Borgho she was known by a more prosaic title, and she worked where the most money resided, among the ambitious merchants and those who fancied themselves so important, that a drab late thirtyish wife was no proper accompaniment when being seen among other ambitious merchants. Marius understood, then, exactly why his father’s name had been so familiar. He did not think badly of her for it. People made worse compromises every day. He never discussed it with his father. No matter how often he had returned to Borgho in the intervening years, he had crossed the river by other bridges.
Marius would have cursed his subconscious for bringing him back to the spot, but in truth, it fit his mood perfectly. The tossing water mirrored his thoughts, and he stared at it as if it could provide some sort of answer. But the water was just water, and his thoughts remained turbulent, and no beautiful green eyes stared back for him to dive into, and in the end, all he could do was turn his back on the water, and take the ninety-first step across the bridge.
The wharfs on the north bank were a mirror to those on the south, although the overall impression was of, somehow, a better class of dockyard. It was cleaner; more orderly. The ships seemed in better condition, and the wharfies and navvies who bustled about wore the livery of whatever stock supply company they represented, rather than the dusty, careworn leathers favoured by their brothers over the bridge. Clear lines of progress could be seen through the crowds, as each individual ship was served by its own orderly queue of human worker ants. Marius threaded his way through, an object of complete indifference to those around him. On the south bank he guarded his hidden money pouches with a combination of secret pockets, attitude, and careful scrutiny of his surrounds. Here he felt at ease enough to stride through the mass of bodies with his concentration solely devoted to identifying the ships he passed. It wasn’t difficult – even from a distance, the Minerva stood out against the backdrop of hulls and masts, a hulking monster looming over its surroundings.
Marius had been no more than a child when Mad King Nandus had received possession of his flagship, the Nancy Tulip. The north side docks had been created to cope with the construction, and they maintained the gloss that comes with living under a monarch’s auspices, even an insane one who built his castle on an ancient, crumbling bridge, and commissioned a five hundred-tonne clinker-built warship for the sole purpose of waging war on the Gods of the ocean. Marius remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders at wharf-side, as the ship slowly made its way from its berth a mile away on the opposite shore to the Magister Bridge, where it pulled alongside the single door and balcony built onto the palace’s outer side. As soon as it had pulled up, Nandus appeared and gave a great speech about liberty, equality, and the need for giant clam slaves, then stepped directly from the balcony to the poop deck of the great ship, thirty feet above the water. The Nancy Tulip and its four hundred-strong crew of sailors, soldiers, and gunners, as well as Littleboots, the horse he had appointed to the Borghan Senate – which had surprised most citizens, who weren’t aware Borgho had a senate – wobbled its way down the river and out onto the open sea, where the horizon swallowed it for all time.
The Nancy Tulip had been a massive ship. No clinker-built vessel had been commissioned that even approached its measurements. Marius had heard estimates of one hundred and forty feet in length, and its height was part of folklore. It had been so large that available technology had been unable to complete the task. New ways of manufacture had been invented: the nails were eight times as large as previously necessary, necessitating a whole new way of manufacture; hull planks were longer, wider, heavier, needing new methods of harvesting and cutting; the sails alone weighed as much as some small ships, and hoisting them by traditional methods would have broken any normal winch. Marius remembered gazing up at the side of the ship as it had passed by on its way downriver, seeing a nail head the size of his father’s fist go by a few feet from his face, feeling a sudden chill as the sheer bulk of the ship blocked out the sun and a wall of shade engulfed the wharf. In all his years of travel he had never felt so overwhelmed by a structure as that day, when the Nancy Tulip seemed like the biggest object in the entire world, and its movement made him sick with vertigo.