• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 704 0

followed her map. It was a good map, and very soon she was walking through the old brick archway that led into the Traders’ Market Palace, where she made straight for the Traders’ Office. The office was an open hut with a sign above it saying HANSEATIC LEAGUE AND NORTHERN TRADE ASSOCIATION INCORPORATED. Inside the hut were a long trestle table, two sets of scales with assorted weights and measures, a large ledger and a wizened old Trader counting the money in a large iron cash box. Suddenly Snorri felt nervous, almost as nervous as when she had entered Sally Mullin’s. This was the moment when she had to prove that she had a right to Trade and a right to belong to the Association. She swallowed hard and, head held high, strode into the hut.

The old man did not look up. He carried on counting out the strange coins that Snorri had not yet become used to: pennies, groats, florins, half crowns and crowns. Snorri coughed a couple of times but still the old man did not look up. After a few minutes, Snorri could bear it no longer. “Excuse me,” she said.

“Four hundred and twenty-five, four hundred and twenty-six . . .” said the man, not taking his eyes off the coins.

Snorri had no choice but to wait. Five minutes later the man announced, “One thousand. Yes, miss, can I help you?”

Snorri put a crown on the trestle table and said fluently, for she had rehearsed this moment for days beforehand, “I wish to buy a license to Trade.”

The old man looked at the girl in her rough woolen Trader dress standing before him, and he smiled as though Snorri had said something foolish. “Sorry, miss. You have to be a member of the League.”

Snorri understood the man well enough. “I am a member of the League,” she told him. Before the man could object, Snorri took out her Letters of Charter and put the roll of parchment with its red ribbon and great blob of red sealing wax in front of the man. As if humoring her, the old man very slowly pulled out his glasses, shaking his head at the impudence of youngsters today, and slowly read what Snorri had given him. As his finger moved along the words, his expression changed to one of disbelief, and when he had finished reading, he held up the parchment to the light, searching for signs that it was a forgery.

It wasn’t. Snorri knew it wasn’t and so did the old man. “This is most irregular,” he told Snorri.

“Ir-regular?” asked Snorri.

“Most irregular. It is not usual for fathers to pass their Letters of Charter on to their daughters.”

“No?”

“But all appears to be in order.” The old man sighed and rather unwillingly reached under the table and pulled out a stack of licenses. “Sign here,” he said, pushing a pen over to Snorri. Snorri signed her name and the old man stamped the license as though it had said something extremely personal and rude.

He pushed it across the table to Snorri. “Stall number one. You’re early. The first one here. Market starts at dawn two weeks from Friday. Last day is MidWinter Feast Day Eve. Clear out by dusk. All trash to be removed to the Municipal Rubbish Dump by midnight. That will be one crown.” The man took the crown from where Snorri had laid it on the table and threw it into another cash box, where it landed with an empty clatter.

Snorri took the license with a broad smile. She had done it. She was a Licensed Trader, just as her father had been.

“Take your samples to the shed and leave them for quality control,” the old man said. “You may collect them tomorrow.”

Snorri left her heavy bag in the sample bin outside the shed, and feeling as light as air, she danced out of the marketplace and bumped straight into a girl wearing a red tunic edged with gold. The girl had long dark hair and wore a gold circlet around her head like a crown. Beside her stood a ghost dressed in purple robes. He had a friendly expression in his green eyes and wore his gray hair neatly tied back in a pony-tail. Snorri tried not to look at the bloodstains on his robes just below his heart, for it was impolite to stare at the means by which the ghost had entered ghosthood.

“Oh, sorry,” the girl