The major had to admit that the last hundred miles had made quite a difference in more than just the Espani weather. On the road from Toledo he had seen the land swelling with color, if not with life. As the snow thinned, the warm browns and cool grays of the mountains struck dark outlines against the overcast sky and the pines and firs stood in bright greens up and down the hills. What little moisture fell from the sky was mostly sleet and left pale slush on the road that was equal parts hard ice and watery puddles. Both were treacherous, but both were easier to walk through than snow.
Syfax paused to consider the line of roofs and steeples on the horizon and the handful of round windmills standing out in the fields. “Any idea what this place is called?”
Kenan trudged past him, hands shoved in his pockets, face half-nestled in the upturned collar of his borrowed coat. “Ciudad Real.”
Syfax started walking again. “We’ll stay here tonight. Dry out and get some warm food. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“I feel fine.” The lieutenant sneezed, leaving a long shining trail of slime hanging from the stubble on his chin. He wiped his face and rammed his fist back into his pocket.
“Come off it. You’re as sick as a dog.”
Kenan glanced up at him. “Just so long as we stay somewhere really quiet and out of the way. That mess back in Toledo was a little too close.”
“Nah, it was all right. No one got shot. Hell, those guys wouldn’t have shot us anyway. We learned that back in basic training. Espani don’t like shooting folks anymore than I do. They think knives and swords are more honorable or holy or something.”
Kenan sneezed again. “I don’t even remember basic.”
Syfax grimaced. I’m sure you don’t, kid. There was a good reason I took you with me when I went over to the marshals. Any longer in the army and you would have met a Songai arrow with your name on it.
Just outside Ciudad Real, Syfax paused to ask an old woman where they might want to stay the night. She described two places. The first was a large inn near an even larger church. The second was a small tavern near another, larger tavern. The major steered his subordinate to the larger tavern with a grin.
It was late in the evening when they found the Red Swallow, and they found the dining room overflowing with travelers and laborers who were already quite drunk. Two young men in the corner were abusing a pair of guitars and the lyrics of an old ballad between glasses of lager and most of the tables were rustling with piles of coins and stained playing cards.
After cramming some hot food into the sniffling lieutenant and depositing him in a bedroom in the back of the building, Syfax returned to the dining room to see if he could turn one handful of Espani reales into two or three handfuls. He found a table of stone masons who were all too happy to invite a stranger into their game. They were just dealing the first hand when a tall figure stepped up the table and said, “Good evening, gentlemen. Would you mind if I joined you?”
Syfax looked up, stone-faced. It was the Italian woman, Nicola DeVelli. She peered down at the table with a smug little smile and two of the men made room for her. But to the major’s relief, the woman never once made eye contact with him, never once gave any hint that she recognized him at all. They played monte for over an hour, the deal rotating around the table with every hand. And the hands were quick as the masons showed little care in placing their bets and only slightly more care in losing them. Syfax struggled to break even. There was no skill, no bluff, no real playing at all. Only the bet and the flip of the gate, and the sweeping of the coins this way or that.
By the time most of the men were ready to leave, the largest pile of reales sat in front of the tall woman from Italia. Syfax watched the masons leave the tavern before he leaned across the table and said, “You’ve got some stones on you, lady. What the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you with Ziri and the others?”
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.
“What’s your name, big man?” The one-eyed woman jumped down and sauntered across the room toward him. “I noticed you and those big arms of yours the minute I came in, but you didn’t even come over to say hello.” She wrapped her wiry arms around his waist.
He looked down at her, relieved to be looking at a woman at the correct angle, and the firm pressure of her breasts against his ribs more than made up for the eye patch and scarring on the side of her face. He smiled as he slipped his arm around her. “What say you and me find something to lie on?”
She grinned wickedly.
As they stomped down the back hall, slightly off balance, Syfax had a brief moment of distracted thought in which he wondered where the Italian woman had vanished to when his new companion had appeared. And as relieved as he was by his change of admirers, he couldn’t help but wonder whether he might have gotten both of them to come back with him together.
They entered a room, kicked the door shut, and crashed onto the bed in the dark, her lips already pressed hard to his, her tongue furiously exploring his mouth as her hands whipped her shirts off and went to loosen her belt. He raced to keep up, hurling away clothes and kicking off boots, which clattered against the walls wherever they broke free. His belt hit the floor like a rock, the sheathed hunting knife landing edge up. Syfax kicked it under the bed and heard the steely clangor of more knives hitting the floorboards as the woman climbed out of her pants and tackled him onto the rough wool blankets.
As she sat astride him, writhing and battering at his hips, he had a brief moment to congratulate himself on his good fortune. In the dark, he could bare see her face at all, but her bare breasts hung smooth and firm in his hands, and that was all that really mattered. She rode him hard, grunting sharply with every thrust, sometimes sitting up straight and sometimes falling forward with her hands planted on his shoulders, her nails digging into his skin, her teeth biting into her wide bottom lip.
Syfax arched his back, straining to keep up with her, straining to stay in control, but she had taken control from the moment they fell into bed and he was only there to be ridden until he couldn’t be ridden anymore.
His climax lasted a long moment, and he pulled her hips tight against his to make it last as long as he could, but then it was over and his attention quickly shifted to a sharp pain in his back. But she wasn’t done. She grunted louder and there was something angry about the little half-words she was spitting out with each crash of her sex onto his. Syfax cupped her breasts and tried to relax and wait for her to finish, but the pain in his back was growing sharper and the noises she was making were more disturbing than arousing.
She snapped upright, grabbing his arms and pressing her sharp, broken nails deep into his wrists as she shuddered and gasped. “Nnnn!” Then she let go his arms and rolled off beside him.
Syfax rubbed his wrists to make sure he wasn’t bleeding and then rolled onto his side to massage the twisted muscle in his lower back. As he lay there, face to face with the one-eyed demon, he started to wonder where she had come from and who she had been thinking about just a moment ago. Whoever she was, she was no prostitute or farmer’s wife. She was something very different. Hard. Angry. Dangerous.
She shoved her head up onto his shoulder, eye closed, and said, “Still with me, big man?”
“Mm hm.”
“Mind if I stay a few hours?”
“Nope.”
“Good answer.”
He pulled a lock of black hair away from her face and stared at the deep shadows around her long nose and wide mouth. The eye patch and the scars were turned away from him, hidden.
She’s not so bad. And she’s not Espani. Too bad we’re in the middle of all this crap or I’d ask her name. She’s definitely one of a kind.
Syfax passed out.
He awoke with a blinding ray of sunlight in his eyes and a foul scummy feeling on his teeth. The sheets felt cold and clammy, and slowly he realized it was because the wool blanket was gone. A sharp metal clank snapped his eyes open and he saw the blanket trailing from the foot of the bed to the woman standing by the door, pulling on her clothes and stamping on her boots. A long knife had fallen to the floor and she was sliding it back into its sheathe. She straightened up and grinned at him. “Morning, big man.”
He sat up slowly, his head pounding. “Morning.” He looked up at the light streaming through the window, then dropped his gaze and saw the other little bed against the opposite wall. Holy shit, this is my room.
Kenan was still snoring and one of his arms had slipped out of his blankets to hang near the floor. A puddle of drool darkened the pillow beside his open mouth.
“Cute friend,” the woman said.
“Nephew.”
“Really? I don’t see it. You’ve both got that southern coloring though.”
Syfax snorted. “Yeah, we’re not exactly locals.” He froze as he realized what he had just said. Slowly, he relaxed his grip on the edge of the thin mattress and tried to remember what he’d done with his knife.
The woman was watching him as she slipped into her coat. A tiny smile flickered across her wide, black lips. “Mazigh?”
The major frowned and shrugged. “Who isn’t? Probably somewhere on my mother’s side.”
“If you say so.” She backed into the door, her eyes gliding back and forth between the two men on the beds. “Be seeing you, big man.” And she slipped out.
Damn.
“Kenan, get up. Now!” Syfax clawed up his clothes from the floor and yanked them on in no particular order. “Kenan! Time to get moving, kid.”
The lieutenant grunted and opened his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Time to get the hell out of town. I think we’ve got about a quarter hour before this place is crawling with soldiers.”
“What?” Kenan sat bolt upright, blinking hard and rubbing his eyes, and then he grabbed up his boots. He’d slept in the rest of his clothes. “Why? What happened?”
“Something stupid.” Syfax grabbed his belt and knife from under the bed. “Something really damn stupid.”