The man who’d flicked me was exclaiming something to Dania.
The man with the painted lids laughed and spoke to me.
“Vigdis says you’re not allowed to keep your cups covered.You must only block when the egg is coming.If you block when there is no egg, you drink.So, you must drink now.Eydis reminds Ivar you’resoten, so he can’t flick you, he must add to the doll.Ivar chastises me for not telling you not to cover your cups because you’re a foreigner from the Land of Mud and Mist and high walls, so of course you would think to hide your cup.”
“The doll?”
“Yes,” Dania grinned evilly and then turned to someone across the hall, shouting.They threw a cloth doll, which the man with the painted lids—Vigdis—caught and presented to her.
“It is our Fell doll.Look, he even has Fell’s tattoos.See?”
The doll was crudely made, but there were a few features that made it resemble Fell.Sort of.Tied to its clothing were little torn shreds of cloth.
“Every time someone wants to hit you and Fell isn’t here to be hit on your behalf, they tie a scrap to the doll to remind them when Fell comes back.”
“Surely I have not upset this many people,” I said.There had to be at least nine scraps tied to the doll.
“Look, look, Vigdis is adding now because you’re taking too long.”
“That’s cruel!I’m just learning the game.I will drink.”And I did.I drank a big enough gulp that no one could accuse me of skimping.And then I picked up the egg and tossed it, almost without thinking.Vigdis caught it and returned it.I drank (because I had been nowhere near quick enough to stop it before it landed in my cup), and then I threw it toward the cup of the man who’d flicked me—Ivar—and that is how I began to play, in earnest, my first drinking game.
Both of my cups were empty in no time.
We played two more rounds.
Heat.
Aliveness.
A blurring of the world.
“Reedman!”I was shouting in the way drunken people shout, like the drink has covered our ears.A man had entered the hall, and he was my favourite of the musicians in King Arik’s court.He played an instrument that looked like a reed to me, perhaps a cattail.So, in my thoughts, I called himReedman.
Dania laughed so hard she nearly fell over.“What?”
“Reed-Man,” I said, over-enunciating each sound.“The man who plays the reed.Reedman.”
She shouted at him, and he came to our little group quickly.Like most Norsern, his head was shaved on the sides.His knuckles were blue with faded tattoos.
“I tell them your name for him.They say it is a grand name.It is what they will call him from now on.”
“Sole!” I said to him.“Sole… the one… it goes, ch-ch-ch-uhmmmm, chch-ah—” I threw my hands around as I made my request, raising my fingers high for high notes, low for the low ones.“Ch-ch-ch-uhmm-m?—”
He understood.He hummed along with me.
“Yes!”I said, pointing at him, loving the sensation of being understood; it was so rare for me in those early days in King Arik’s court.“Sole, sole, sole!Please.”
“Ha!Soten—” And then he said a whole slew of things I didn’t understand.
I had no awareness of men in a romantic sense back then, but I do recall feeling a shift in the way he looked at me.I had singled him out and given him a name.I had noticed him, and this made him notice me.
Reedman played and then joined us in our games as people began to ask after my names for other Norsern I had met.I told them.They laughed drunkenly, enthusiastically.
“It is not so funny,” I said, leaning forward with exasperation, looking at everyone while I talked as if they could actually comprehend me.“You all have odd names for things, too.You call Jorn, ‘The Calm,’ is this not?—”
Dania’s cheeks were red from drink.“Ouu.I tell them you do not know why Jorn is called this.They are all trying to tell the tale.And for each of them, it is a different story, but I am the only Islish speaker, so you will hear what I have heard.Haha!It was told to me that The Bard King had sought many soothsayers in the past.That he would love one’s readings but later find falsehood in them and rage at the readers.He got rid of each soothsayer who gave false readings, including Vaeyra with the crystal in her skull—a very famous reader.She had a crystal embedded into her forehead.She held it there as her skin healed around it—that’s not important, just interesting, don’t you think?
“So many soothsayers were ruined or chose to forget their art for fear of the king’s rage that it became known that soothsayers were always worried… But then!On a raiding journey, The Bard King found Jorn, and Jorn read for him calmly and was taken assoter.Everyone waited for it to go wrong, and some even warned him that The Bard King would cut him apart one day soon, but Jorn stayed calm and kept reading.It has been more than ten years and Jorn has not been slain.”
