Death of Kings_ A Novel - Bernard Cornwell [98]
‘You’re looking for women?’ one of the traders asked. ‘Or for girls? Something young and tender? I have just what you need. Unspoilt goods! Juicy and precious! Gentlemen?’ He bowed, gesturing us towards a crude door inserted into a Roman arch.
I looked at Father Cuthbert. ‘Take the grin off your face,’ I snarled at him, then lowered my voice, ‘and go and find Weohstan. Tell him to bring ten or a dozen men. Quickly.’
‘But, lord…’ he began, wanting to stay.
‘Go!’ I shouted.
He fled. ‘Always wise to lose the priests, lord,’ the trader said, assuming I had sent Cuthbert away because the church frowned on his business. I tried to make a friendly response, but the same anger that was seething in Finan was now curdling my belly. I remembered the humiliation of slavery, the misery. Finan and I had once been chained in a dank building exactly like this. The scar on my upper arm seemed to smart as I followed the trader through the low door. ‘I brought a half-dozen girls across the water,’ he said, ‘and I assume you’re not wanting dairymaids or kitchen drabs?’
‘We want angels,’ Finan said tightly.
‘That’s what I supply!’ the man said cheerfully.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Halfdan,’ he said. He was in his thirties, I guessed, burly and tall with a head as bald as an egg, and a beard that reached to his waist where a silver-hilted sword was strapped. The room we entered had four guards, two armed with cudgels and two with swords. They watched a score of slaves who sat chained in the floor’s sewage-stinking sludge. The back wall of the hut was the city-side of the river rampart, its stones green and black in the small light that came through chinks in the rotting thatch roof. The slaves watched us sullenly. ‘They’re mostly Welsh,’ Halfdan said carelessly, ‘but there’s a couple from Ireland.’
‘You’ll take them to Frankia?’ Finan asked.
‘Unless you want them,’ Halfdan said. He unbolted another door, then rapped on its dark wood and I heard a second bolt being drawn on the further side. The door was pulled open to reveal another man waiting there, this one with a sword. He guarded Halfdan’s most valuable merchandise, the girls. The man grinned a welcome as we stooped through the doorway.
It was difficult to see what the girls looked like in the gloom. They huddled in a corner, and one appeared to be sick. I could see that one girl was very dark-skinned while the others were fair. ‘Six of them,’ I said.
‘You can count, lord,’ Halfdan said in jest. He bolted the door that led back into the larger room where the men slaves were kept.
Finan knew what I meant. Two of us and six slavers, and we were angry, and we had not been given a chance to fight anyone for too long, and we were restless. ‘Six is nothing,’ Finan said. Ludda sensed an undertone and looked nervous.
‘You want more than six?’ Halfdan asked. He banged open a recalcitrant shutter to let in some light from the street and the girls blinked, half dazzled. ‘Six beauties,’ Halfdan said proudly.
The six beauties were thin, bedraggled and terrified. The dark-skinned girl turned her face away, but not before I saw that she was indeed beautiful. Two of the others were very fair-haired. ‘Where are they from?’
‘Mostly from north of Frankia,’ Halfdan said, ‘but that one?’ He pointed to the cringing girl, ‘she’s from the ends of the earth. The gods alone know where she sprang from. Could have dropped from the moon for all I know. I bought her off a trader from the south. She speaks some weird tongue, but she’s a pretty enough thing if you like your meat dark.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ Finan asked.
‘I was going to keep her,’ Halfdan said, ‘but the bitch won’t stop crying and I can’t abide a weepy bitch.’
‘They were whores?’ I asked.
‘They’re not virgins,’ Halfdan said, amused. ‘I won’t lie to you, lord, if that’s what you want then I can find some for you, but it might take a month or two? But not these girls. The dark one and the Frisian were put to work in a tavern for a time, but they weren