Or maybe not.
They didn’t even send a girl to his table to pour his wine. He got a stale-faced old criminal with a leer. He waved for another.
‘Pay first,’ the man said, accenting his Archaic for the meanest understanding.
Mortirmir wore an Alban jupon, boots, and a sword. Hence he was a barbarian and had to be treated like a fool.
He looked down into the cup of dark red wine. Better wine, in fact, than he would ever have at home – a wine to which the wines of Alba were mere shadows of the true form.
He cursed. He had all the theories down pat. He just couldn’t do the deed.
The Plague.
He’d had it as a child, or so they said – and the medical magister, who took the most interest in him, had said with terrible finality that the plague sometimes caused lesions on the brain that killed the ability to channel power.
He ordered a fourth cup of good wine and decided – again – to kill himself. It was a mortal sin and his soul would burn in hell for eternity. He thought that was fitting, because by doing so he’d hurt God. God who desired that sinners repent and come to him. Take that, you fuck!
It was a tribute to the duality of human nature as his philosophical masters taught it that on his fifth cup of wine he could see the terrible, stupid flaws in his own theology.
And then, of course, there won’t be any more wine.
At which point the evening took a turn that surprised him.
A lovely young woman – older than him and more worldly, but well dressed and obviously prosperous, paused in front of his booth. She looked around nervously, then with more annoyance.
Drink bolstered him. He rose and bowed – feeling more graceful than usual. ‘My lady? May I be of assistance?’ he asked in his best High Archaic – which seemed even more fluid than usual. His greatest accomplishment at home in Harndon had been his ability to read and write the true High Archaic, and here even the criminals spoke it. In the Morea, it was their native tongue.
She turned, and her smile beamed like the light from a bullseye lantern. ‘Ah, sir, my pardon.’ She blushed. ‘I am not used to speaking to a man in public,’ she said, and her fan came up and covered her face, but not fast enough to cover the cavalry charge of colour that swept over her neck and-
He looked around. It was hours since he had walked in – he’d ignored the summons to evening prayer, and so had some of the other patrons, but his stomach suddenly suggested that he needed to temper his new-found hobby of drunkenness with some food. Even if he planned to jump off a bridge later. Falling on his sword was out – it was too long.
He found himself sitting again, rather like a dream. In some corner of his head, a voice said I guess I’m pretty drunk. He had, in fact, been drunk before – twice. But not like this.
‘You could sit with me?’ he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
She peeped, with just her eyes, from behind her fan. ‘Really, I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting for my father – who is late – by the Virgin Parthenos, there is no place here for a lady to sit.’
He thought she was perhaps nineteen, but his experience of ladies – most especially – of Morean ladies – was extremely limited. There were the nuns in his philosophical classes, but all of them wore full veils, and he knew nothing about them beyond their voices and the speed with which he annoyed them.
He couldn’t tell whether she was beautiful or plain or ugly as wretched sin, but he already enjoyed her blush and her courtesy. ‘Please – sit with me, and I will not trouble you,’ he said. He stood up – wondering when he’d so rudely sat down. ‘Sit here, and I will wander the room until your father comes-’
He suited action to word, and her fan shot out and pressed him back into his seat. ‘You will do nothing so foolish, although your offer is gracious for a barbarian,’ she said. She pushed him lightly and he was sitting again, and she was sitting, too.
It was like leafing through an illustrated Bible. He had to guess at the parts that were missing – when had she sat down? Had she been graceful?
‘How do you come to be in our fair city?’ she asked.
Mortirmir sighed. ‘My mother sent me to University,’ he said, with a little too much self-importance, he could tell.
‘You must be very intelligent!’ she said.
He smiled bitterly. ‘Very intelligent,’ he muttered.
The taverner was suddenly there – the old bastard was nearly spherical, with no hair on his head and he was pouring something from a pitcher, and the girl giggled and thanked him and the room spun a bit. ‘I am,’ he agreed. ‘I’m so smart that . . .’ He searched for something to say.
You are so smart that you answer every single question in any class even when you know it annoys your peers, so smart you don’t understand humour, so smart that you can’t talk to a girl, so smart you can’t work the simplest phantasm.
She flicked her fan. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked rhetorically. The sober, analytical part of his mind noted that she didn’t look around when she said it. He theorised that she was used to being waited on, and probably couldn’t take care of herself. She smiled. ‘Are you from a good family? And what is a good family, among barbarians?’
She was funny. He laughed. ‘My father is a lord,’ he said. ‘Well – he was. Then he died. It is complicated.’
She sighed. ‘What’s complicated? I’m not in a hurry, especially not if you continue to serve me Candian wine and malmsey.’ The fan flickered. It seemed to flick at a different rhythm, so that, although she ended hidden, he saw the whole of her face for a moment. He was thrilled.
I’m talking to a Morean noblewoman! he thought.
He tried to shrug off his excitement because he was determined on self-destruction. But few things interested him more than talking about himself, and wine did not inhibit him in any way. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m bastard born, but my father had no other children, so even though he never married my mother I’m probably his heir.’ He sat back. ‘He wasn’t a great noble, but there’s a castle and a town house in Harndon. My mother lives in the town house.’ He shrugged.
The girl laughed. ‘It sounds just like our court. You are not in the Church, I guess?’
He spread his hands. ‘No – I’m a private scholar.’ He said it with too much pride. He saw that she was amused and he resented her superiority and his own inability to make conversation without arrogance.
‘And you are rich?’ she asked. She poured more wine into his cup.
‘Oh, no,’ he said.
‘In that case, she’ll have nothing more to do with you,’ said a deep, scratchy voice. The Morean noblewoman turned, and Morgan raised his head – surprised at the effort – to confront the palest blue eyes he’d ever seen, in a moon-shaped face as big as a soldier’s breastplate. ‘Eh, Anna?’
She whirled and spat, fan flying. ‘Go away! You son of a mongrel dog and plague-stricken streetwalker, go swim in a sewer!’
Mortirmir rose unsteadily. ‘Is this man-’
The giant beamed. ‘Oh, Anna, only a crack as well travelled as your own is big enough for my member-’
Her fan slammed into his temple with the sound of lightning flashing close by. The giant didn’t even flinch.
‘-troubling you?’ Mortirmir managed, unreasonably proud to have dragged the routine phrase out of his pickled noggin. He reached for his sword.
He wore a sword. He was much mocked for it at the University, because student philosophers didn’t need swords, and by wearing one he made himself seem even more barbaric. But his failure to perform the least spell, the slightest phantasm, combined with a strong sense of adolescent stubbornness and some pride in his training at the art of arms left him with the most important sign of his noble status – in Alba – strapped to his side despite many warnings, some threats, and a great deal of ridicule.