Arcanum (73 page)

Exasperated, Felix got up and kicked his chair away. “What do you suggest then? Are you going to lead your neighbours up to Simbach and rout the earl?”

“Felix, I don’t have to. How many men does this Fuchs have? A score? Two? How many men – and women – in Simbach are fed up with his pillaging? They don’t need an army. They need hope and a leader. That’s it. That’s all.” She bent down and righted his chair, pushing it back under the table.

Felix felt she was missing the point. “Simbach is in Bavaria—”

“There is no Bavaria, Felix! It’s gone. Even Byzantium is coming to you for help: if they can’t kill enough slaves, they’ll go the same way as Rome did. You spend hours staring at that map when you know it’s meaningless.” She reached across and snatched it up, shaking it at him. “Carinthia is only real because the people who live in these inky scratches are happy to call themselves Carinthians.”

“And not because I’m their prince?”

She lowered her arms, put the map back down on the table and smoothed out some of the creases she’d caused. “What made us – most of us – turn to you rather than Eckhardt?”

Felix was prince because his father had been prince, and his father before him, all the way back to Alaric. Yet Sophia was asking why people followed him.

“I … don’t know.” His high dudgeon was burst like a pig’s bladder. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she said, “which is why you’re going to do something about Simbach. You can offer them something better than they have now. If they want to get rid of Fuchs, you’ll help them. It’s your nature.”

“What can I offer them? Honestly?”

She put her back to him for a moment and reached into her bodice. When she turned again, she was holding out a piece of parchment. “I kept the original,” she said. “This. This is enough. You could raise an army in a valley bottom or on a mountaintop with this.”

He took it from her – it was warm from the heat of her body – and opened it. The words he’d written almost casually, carelessly, stared out of the page at him. All those who call themselves Carinthians will be subject to the same laws, the same taxes and the same freedoms granted by Carinthia, without favour. At the stroke of his pen, he’d upended a thousand years of the privilege of wealth and land and status. His own included. It hadn’t seemed like that at the time, but it was still the right thing to have done.

“You really think so?” he asked.

“Yes. That and a bargeload of weapons. We can take Simbach in a single night, and not lose a man – if you’re prepared to extend that guarantee across the river. Tell them you’ll divide the earl’s lands among them. Appoint a mayor. No more Fuchs, and no more homeless townspeople drifting into Carinthia.” She took the paper back, and turned away once more to stow it inside her clothing.

“Just tell me it’ll work.” He had no idea. But she was convinced, and that counted for a lot: for everything, in fact.

“If it doesn’t, we can try something different. Perhaps a more …” Sophia considered her words, “usual response.”

“Well, I suppose we should call for Master Ullmann,” said Felix. “As for those Bavarian families: let’s see if they have the stomach for a fight.”

What would have happened if she hadn’t followed Frederik Thaler up Goat Mountain? Would they all be dead by now? Would Eckhardt still be feeding his appetite with Jews, or would he have run out of them and moved on to other game? Had her decision been a whim or had she been guided as part of a greater plan? Was her meeting with the prince, and the fine dresses and unaccustomed authority that had followed, an accident, or had the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had used her to save His people?

Sophia thought that some sort of sign might have been appropriate: a burning bush; a pillar of smoke; an angel; a still, small voice. A talking ass, even. It wasn’t much to ask. Instead, all she had was the indisputable fact that, when she spoke, people listened, including all the men who’d previously only ever frowned at her for being too intelligent, too well-read, too opinionated, to make a good wife: exactly those qualities that made her useful – necessary even – to Felix.

She had plenty of time to entertain such thoughts on her walks between the fortress and the town, but at least she no longer had to worry about her father: since falling in with Thaler, and losing some obscure bet with him, he was mostly out of trouble and more or less content.

She was at the quayside, to talk to the bargemasters, who were taking their sudden unemployment badly. It was still early, but if she could find one of them sober, she’d count herself lucky.

Most of them were rumoured to be found in the beer cellars at the bottom end of Wheat Alley, and beer cellars weren’t somewhere that Jewish men ever went, let alone good Jewish women.

And yet, and yet.

She steeled herself at the top of the cellar’s steps and gathered her coat around her. The windows were brown and streaked. Above the door was a complicated rope knot, bent and spliced and intertwined. She had no idea what she would find inside. Drunk Jews celebrating Purim was one thing: drunk Germans despairing for their livelihoods was another.

If she was scared, she shouldn’t show it. Like most things in her life at that moment, if she could act the role, she was the role.

She walked down below street level, and opened the door. The smell was – distinct and unpleasant. Everybody in Carinthia smelt more than they used to – the lack of running water had seen to that – but this was a different level of odour.

Those men still conscious turned to see who it was who dared disturb their maudlin reflections.

Most just turned away again. A handful kept on staring, and two stood up – not out of deference, but in a belligerent, resentful manner. The cellar’s host put down the mug he was cleaning and flicked a damp cloth over his shoulder.

“Mistress Morgenstern? You’re welcome, of course, but this isn’t a place for the ladies.”

“I’m looking …” she said, surprised at how small her voice sounded, “I’m looking to hire a boat and its crew.”

“Fuck off back to Jew-land,” said one bargemaster, and he put his back to her, his tattooed face twisted in a sneer.

Sophia hadn’t come unprepared. To the consternation of the drinkers, she parted her coat up to her waist and drew her sword. The sound was unmistakable, the soft slither of iron against the leather and brass of the scabbard, and the man who’d insulted her stiffened.

She rested the tip of the blade on his broad shoulder so he could feel the weight of it. “That’s ‘Fuck off back to Jew-land, my lady’ to you.”

She had their attention.

The bargemaster reached slowly for his mug and took a long pull. “Do you expect me to apologise?”

“An apology would go a long way to helping me forget your face and not bother to find out your name. What’s it to be, bargemaster? A day in the lock-up or a grudging admission that I have a point?”

“Do you have balls under that skirt as well as a sword?”

“Not yet, but I can always cut yours off and wear them as a trophy.”

Someone laughed. It gave permission to others to guffaw and snigger, but it wasn’t her they were mocking. This was no harmless sport, though: reputations were being made and lost.

She held her nerve. The bargemaster finished his drink and brushed the sword-point from his shoulder. She held the weapon level. He got up, slowly, and showed her just how tall and wide he was, how bloodshot his eyes were and how yellow his teeth.

If he laid so much as a finger on her, Felix would have him pressed. He knew it. She knew it. The sword was superfluous, the law an extravagance. Had she judged the situation wrongly after all?

No. Apparently not.

“My lady,” he said, dragging the words out of somewhere deep inside and refusing to look at her. His line to the door was far from straight, but it sufficed. The door closed. He’d gone. There were still two dozen or so bargemasters and bargees, and she rather hoped she wouldn’t have to face down every single one of them.

She lowered her sword, and looked around the room. Several of them were still smirking, but none gave any indication they might want to talk to her. That was, in her opinion, stupid. She had coin, and it wasn’t like any of them were going anywhere soon. Quite where they found the money for drink escaped her.

A few grins started to slip. She wasn’t going anywhere either, they realised. They started to glance sideways at each other, to see who would break first.

Finally, a grey-haired man with a cross-shaped tattoo on one cheek and a spiral on the other ousted the clean-skinned bargee off his seat at the end of a table. He raised his eyebrow at Sophia and nodded towards the empty chair.

She could poise and swagger as well as the next man, but something told her that this bargemaster wouldn’t be impressed by that. She laid her sword lengthways along the beer-soaked tabletop and, gathering up her skirts, sat down.

“Thank you,” she said, “I’m—”

“I know who you are, my lady.” The man had the look of a Frank about him, right down to his thin but long moustache. “Vulfar.”

“And you own a barge, Master Vulfar?”

“Used to ply it from Ulm all the way to the Black Sea, and, gods willing, I will again. The thing is … you’ll know by these marks” – Vulfar turned his cheeks and pushed up his sleeves – “what I can’t do any more.”

Sophia felt herself colour up. “I wouldn’t be hiring you if you could.”

“Very pragmatic of you, Mistress Morgenstern.” He sat back and tweaked the end of his moustache. “I think we might have had dealings with your father in the past. Indirectly, of course.”

She looked at the rest of his crew, and wondered if these men didn’t feel the loss of magic most keenly of all. One day, the open river and a thousand miles to navigate; the next, tied up on the quayside of a single town.

“The trip will be downstream only, Master Vulfar. We’ll try and get your boat back here afterwards, or we’ll buy it outright if that’s what you want. And there’ll be pay for you and your men. I don’t believe in chiselling every last red penny, so I hope we can come to a fair price.”

“A fair price for what work, exactly?” Vulfar examined the bottom of his empty mug.

“Something we should discuss in private, perhaps,” said Sophia. She didn’t know how much cellar beer cost, so she guessed, counting three shillings from her purse and placing them on the table in front of her. “I’m sure your crew can drink to the prince’s health while we’re talking.”

She closed her purse and pulled her sword back along the table. Vulfar’s men watched its steel simplicity withdraw and then pounced on the coins.

Vulfar led the way back outside and, with a wary look around at the street, waited for Sophia to join him.

“You don’t think I should have crossed that other bargemaster, do you?”

“He was your enemy before you entered the cellar, my lady. Why should it be any different now?” He had a club at his belt, far more effective in a bar brawl than her own weapon. “I do think you shouldn’t be walking the streets of Juvavum without a guard, no matter how proficient you are with that pig-sticker.”

“Pig-sticker?”

“You know what I mean, my lady. I might not share either your religion or your country, but the prince’s mother shared mine and I’ve more than a passing interest in his well-being.” The bargemaster smoothed his moustache again with a pinch of yellow wax produced from a silver container. “The boy leans on you, and you need to be more careful.”

She pulled her coat aside to sheath her sword. “I’ve lived here all my life, Master Vulfar. I know the risks.”

“Do you?” He stopped for a moment. “Do you really? I was on the quayside the day your priests chased you into the Town Hall. They took a pounding from our bottles then, and ever since, whenever I’ve seen them, they’ve been in armour, and always in company. Far be it for me to point out who learnt what that day.”

He carried on and made for one of the barges tied up, nose pointing upstream towards the bridge.

Sophia folded her arms and regarded the length and width of the vessel. “You’re probably right. You’re not the first person to mention it either.”

“Oh, they’re not going to take on Felix. The boy’s got a good arm on him and fights like a Jötun. And he’s a son of Carinthia, no matter that he’s a Frankish prince too. You? The magic might have gone – if just for a season – but there’re many that accuse you of witchery.” He jumped aboard with practised nonchalance. “You’ve got away with it so far by being proud and fierce. It won’t always be enough.”

“Thank you for your concern, Master Vulfar.” She held out her hand, and he steadied her as she stepped up. The boat wallowed under her. “You’ve a cargo already?”

“Salt. That can go back on the quay if you need the space. What’s the job?” Vulfar sat astride the covers of the cargo deck and stretched his legs ahead of him.

“I need you to go to Simbach, arriving at night somewhere upstream of the town, and unloading men and cargo there. Can you navigate that far without your river-magic?”

Vulfar’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve heard the gossip. Are you planning to kill the rogue earl?”

“No,” she answered mostly truthfully. “Although if he ends up dead, then so be it. We want to give the people of Simbach something to fight with, and something to fight for. What happens after that is up to them. We’re not going to mass an army and march it across the river, but neither can we ignore what Fuchs is doing.”

The bargemaster drummed his heels. “If it goes wrong, I’m stuck on the Bavarian side of the river in the dark, with angry earl’s men wanting to separate my head from my neck.”

“If it goes wrong, you can swim the half a stadia to the other bank,” countered Sophia. “I’d recompense you for the loss of your boat.”

“Still a risk. I’ll be straight with you, my lady; while trade isn’t what it used to be, and being laid up for such a long time is hurting my purse as much as the next man’s, that’s no reason to throw caution to the wind and take on a job that might end up with us drowned or hacked to pieces.”

“Master Vulfar, stop building your part up and name your price. We can take it from there.” She looked away to the north, down the river and the steep-sided valley that contained it.