Brasti paused to glance back at me. ‘Why not?’
‘Because pirates are outlaws and we’re fucking magistrates, you twit.’
As he turned back to the climb, he added, ‘Sorry, my mistake. I must have forgotten about us being lawmen on account of all those years we spent, you know, running from the law.’
‘He has a point,’ Kest said from behind me.
‘I should have left you on the ship instead of Chalmers.’ I looked up the steep slope at the backs of the people dragging their intended victim to the top. ‘How far ahead of us would you say they are?’
‘About a quarter-cable,’ Kest replied.
I turned back to him. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘Sorry.’ He didn’t sound in the least bit sorry. ‘Roughly a hundred and fifty feet.’ He peered past me. ‘They’ll get to the top before we do.’
I gave Brasti a push. ‘Hurry up.’
He groaned in reply, even as he started jogging. ‘What damned good will it do, getting there faster, if we’re too shattered to fight when we reach the top? And anyway, who the hells goes to the trouble of dragging a man all the way up there just to hang him?’
As Kest had predicted, our quarry finished the ascent a few minutes ahead of us, which gave them more than enough time to alert those waiting up top to our presence, and we arrived to find ourselves facing a crowd brandishing boar-spears and pitchforks.
‘What in hells is going on?’ I asked no one in particular.
Having an angry mob ready to send us to our deaths wasn’t all that unusual for us, but your typical mob isn’t usually made up of some fifteen women and children.
‘You know what’s odd?’ Brasti said.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, unsheathing my rapiers.
‘This isn’t actually the largest group of women I’ve ever had try to stab me at once.’
CHAPTER TEN
The Magistrate of Vois Calan
A stand-off is a particularly important moment during a fight, though to an onlooker it might appear to just be two groups of angry people glaring at each other, shifting their feet, gripping their weapons and, of course, hurling insults. I’m usually quite partial to that last part, but this wasn’t my usual sort of angry mob.
I counted eleven women, none wearing armour or carrying themselves like trained fighters, two girls no older than ten holding rocks and two boys, even younger, hanging onto their mothers’ skirts. All of this presented a bit of a problem for me, not least because my usual repertoire of threats and insults included things like, ‘Drop that sword before I use it to cut off your balls and make you wear them like earrings!’ or ‘You’ve got until the count of three before I tell Brasti to fire an arrow right up your arse and out your cock!’ which struck me as particularly inappropriate things at this moment.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve fought – and been nearly killed by – any number of women, just not those who looked so utterly unprepared for violence. Somewhere nearby, a guitar played sombre chords, which was unusual, but not really my top concern right then.
‘Now, let’s be reasonable,’ I suggested, and that did the trick: the massed faces in front of me now looked completely comfortable with the idea of doing serious violence to me.
Brasti snorted. ‘Did you just ask a crowd of angry mothers facing off against three pirates to be reasonable?’
‘We’re not fucking pirates!’
‘Perhaps we should tell them that,’ Kest said as he lifted his shield up just a hair. One of the women had pointed her boar-spear at our faces.
She looked young to me, perhaps in her mid-twenties, although the years were already wearing hard on her body, if not her spirit. ‘You’ll not touch one scrap of what’s ours,’ she said defiantly, gripping her spear tightly in her hands. ‘Not our food, not our girls – so just you walk back down that cliff-path with your lives and count yourselves the richer for it.’
‘We aren’t pirates,’ I said.
One of the little girls peered at our coats. ‘Then why are you dressed as pirates?’
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but actually, our greatcoats didn’t look all that different from the one worn by an actual pirate I’d duelled years ago – though his had been a good deal more colourful, with a lot fewer pockets full of useful things, and luckily for me, a lot less effective in stopping a blade.
‘You see?’ Brasti said. ‘We’ve already got the ship and the clothes for it. The Gods themselves are practically begging us to take up piracy!’
‘The Gods are dead,’ I reminded him.
‘On this we can agree,’ said a new voice, and the crowd drew back a step and parted to make way for a white-haired older woman, likely well into her sixties, though still strong of body and with a posture that suggested she wasn’t anywhere near done with life yet.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘I am Olise, magistrate of Vois Calan, and you are interfering with a lawful trial.’ Rather than wait for any reply of mine, she turned and gestured to the two women who’d dragged the unconscious man up the cliff-path. ‘Prepare him for the noose.’
‘Brasti . . .’ I began.
‘Let me guess: shoot the first person who tries to put a rope around his neck?’
‘Exactly.’
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Kest said.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you look a little closer you’ll see he’s already dead.’
I looked past Kest’s shield to the body being dragged across the rocky ground towards the roughly made gibbets. Kest was right: the man in question wasn’t unconscious at all. His limbs trailed awkwardly across the ground, most likely because every bone in his body was broken.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked.
Olise looked at me as if I’d just asked why water is wet. She motioned to the gibbets and now I was studying them, I could see the rest of the occupants looked the same, as if their bodies had been crushed before being hanged.
‘He jumped off a cliff,’ she said.
A couple of the women gave dark laughs at that, and the guitar played a sad counterpoint to their grim mirth. But most of them looked stricken, and one of the children began wailing.
‘It is a bleak humour you have here,’ Kest said.
‘These are bleak times, and an even bleaker place,’ Olise replied. ‘I suggest you make for happier shores and leave us to our trials.’
I gazed at the bodies hanging from the gibbets. Every one of them was male. ‘And in all of these “trials” of yours, how many of the defendants were found innocent?’ I asked.
‘None.’
‘What madness has overtaken this place?’ I demanded. ‘You drag dead men up from the shore and hold pretend trials, only to find them guilty and hang them? This isn’t justice, it’s a sham!’
Olise glared up at me. ‘You’re damned right it’s a sham – and it is also justice. The only kind we can afford.’