By the time the fire had died down to coals and they could begin cooking, the two had worked up a sweat.
Later, after they had eaten, Olav said, “Tell me, boy. What do you think of thieves?”
“When I am grown, I will kill them all!” Nahal’s scowl was so fierce that Olav had to turn away to keep from laughing. “They will beg for mercy and I will show them the mercy they gave my family!”
“Hmm. That’s too bad. Because we’re low on coin and there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to find honest work in Kheshem.” Olav did not add that no man is more than three meals away from brigandage—the boy would someday discover that on his own—nor that it had been sheer chance that he had come upon the hares and great good fortune that the stones he threw at their heads had found their marks.
“You could sell Bastard.”
“But then how would we travel?”
Nahal said nothing.
“I put the question to you because the greatest danger to a thief is treachery. If you’re going to tell anyone about my activities, then I’ll drop you off at the city gate to make your own way in life, and practice my thievery elsewhere. But if you wish to stay with me, you’ll need to keep silent.”
Sullenly, Nahal said, “I’ll do what I have to in order to survive.”
“So do we all, boy. So do we all.”
At night, they shared the bedroll, fully clothed save for their boots. As he was drifting off to sleep, Olav felt the boy’s chest moving with suppressed sobs. He pretended not to notice.
With sleep came dreams: Olav and Nahal were sitting by a campfire at the verge of a dark and moonless wood. There came a crackling noise in the underbrush. “Who’s there?” Nahal cried in a panicky voice. Olav felt not particularly concerned because he had a sword and knew how to use it better than most.
Mocking laughter echoed through the forest—deep as oak, hard as steel, supple as a stream bouncing down a rocky mountainside. It was like nothing Olav had ever heard before, and it filled him with supernatural dread. Bastard, his steed, whinnied in terror, and would have bolted if he hadn’t been hitched to a tree.
Olav seized a brand from the fire and was on his feet. “Show yourself!” he cried.
“Ahhhh, Olav,” rasped an inhuman voice. “Thinkst thou I am afraid of thy little man-spark? I, who have walked unshod in the furnaces of the earth?”
If Olav had been blinded by the murky darkness of the forest before, he was doubly so now, with the flaming brand held before him. Nor, with the stench of smoke rising from the brand and that of a hundred campfires permeating his clothing, was his sense of smell of any use. But his hearing was still good, and he thought he knew roughly from whence the voice came.
“If you’re not afraid of me,” he growled, “then why are you hiding?”
“Beware such questions,” said the voice in the darkness. “For now I come!”
With a howl, the creature charged. And in that same instant, Olav flung the brand into the brush before him. The weather had been dry, and the brush went up in a flash of flame.
Swiftly, then, Olav leaped atop Bastard, pulling Nahal up after him. With a sweep of his knife, he cut the reins. His horse reared up and then ran, fleet as the wind, with the fire to his back. Though it left him without gear, Olav abandoned his camp to the spreading flames without a second thought. For, as Bastard was rearing up in the air, he had felt grasping claws trying to seize his leg, and as they leaped away, he glanced back to see a misshapen form, black against the fire, still striving to reach him.
He rode through the night, with all the world burning behind him, as fast and furious as ever he could, and awoke in the morning beside the cold campfire, aching and sore.
The port of Kheshem curved about its harbor and sprawled up the mountain slopes, a labyrinth of golden-roofed temples and high, slender, ivory-tiled towers intermingled with low mud-and-wattle tenements, the walled pleasure gardens of the wealthy, sturdy stone warehouses, public squares, guildhalls, and the occasional shipyard, lime kiln, or knackery, all of it laced together by wide, granite-slabbed avenues and narrow alleys that smelled of spices and tar and camel dung. On his first day in the city, Olav took a great chance and played the cutpurse in a crowd that had gathered, ironically enough, to watch the public evisceration and beheading of a thief. The day’s haul was such that he bought the two of them a rich meal with wine and then a long soak in hot water at the private baths. When Nahal, face slick with grease, fiercely declared himself in no need of such fripperies, Olav lifted him, struggling, into the air and dropped him in the bath. Then, wading in (himself already naked), he stripped the wet clothes off the boy.
Which was how Olav discovered that Nahal was actually Nahala—a girl. Her guardians had chopped her hair short and taught her to swear like a boy in order to protect her from the rough sorts with whom traveling merchants must necessarily deal.
The discovery made no great difference in their relationship. Nahala was every bit as sullen as Nahal had been, and no less industrious. She knew how to cook, mend, clean, and perform all the chores a man needed to do on the road. Olav considered buying cloth and having her make a dress for herself but, for much the same reasons as her guardians before him, decided to leave things be. When she came of age—soon, he imagined—they would deal with such matters. Until then, it was easier to let her remain a boy.
At her insistence, he continued the lessons in weapons use.
Nahala despised her new master. But merchants, however young, must be pragmatists. She knew that there was no good alternative. Few orphaned children survived to adulthood in the city and the common fate of those who did and were female was whoredom, which did not appeal to her. Also, Olav never beat her and only cuffed her with reason; as masters went, he was a good one. So there was that.
Most of all, Nahala was learning to fight, and this, she knew, would be invaluable to her when she was old enough to return to the desert and cleanse it of the vermin who had killed her family.
Sometimes, however, Olav had nightmares and Nahala would have to leave her pallet to shake him awake. Possibly because of those nightmares, he was drinking a lot. But what worried Nahala most was his spending. So one day, instead of wandering the city in order to learn its winds and ways (the higher up, for example, the richer the houses; the lower, the filthier the water), the prices food could be haggled down to, the rates charged by the money changers, and suchlike, she sewed together a bag out of discarded scraps of cloth and headed downhill toward the pebbled strand at the edge of town.
She was halfway to her destination when a ragged boy placed himself in her way, hands on hips, and jeered, “Hey, Stick!”
Nahala fell easily into a balanced stance and slid her hands so that her staff was in a defensive position. “Yah?”
“Seen you around a lot lately, strutting like a rooster. I guess that thing means you think you can fight?”
“Try me.”
With a war yell, the boy ran at her, fists wild.
One end of Nahala’s staff dipped almost to the ground. She thrust it between the boy’s legs, then hopped to the side while simultaneously shoving the upper end forward, as if the staff were a lever.
The boy went facedown in the dust.
When he tried to get up, Nahala rapped one knee with the staff. Then a hand. Then the other knee. They were gentle blows, though she knew from experience how they stung. They would not break any bones. If you have to fight, fight to kill, Olav had told her. Or else just give your enemy a little warning. All that stuff in between only makes your foe meaner.