Chapter 13 Orc Law

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 12. Subject is married. I have spent nine hours in the Treaty archive. I have read the Ironfold Accord in full, including the appendices, including the appendix to the appendices. Subject is still married. H.Q.

Brakka Ironjaw woke up a bit after midnight, on the floor behind the bar of the Drowned Man, with my coat under her head.

I'd stayed. It didn't seem right to leave, with her flat on her back and nine of her people kneeling in the glass. Hobb had wanted to throw us all in the river. Fitch had talked him round, more or less, and gone home with Wat. The Watch had gone off to fetch more Watch and not come back. So it was just me, sitting on an upturned barrel with a cup of Hobb's tea, and the warband, still on their knees, and Hobb behind what was left of his bar, glaring.

She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling for a while. Then she put her hand up and touched her cheek, where the mark of my hand had come up in a dark bruise.

She sat up. She looked at me.

And she smiled. It was the biggest smile I'd ever seen on anybody, tusks and all.

"Husband," she said.

"About that," I said.

* * *

We talked about it for a long time. Or I talked, and she listened, and smiled, and every so often touched the bruise on her face like she was checking it was still there.

I said I hadn't meant anything by it. I said it was a slap, not a proposal, and I'd only done it because she was about to tread on Wat. I said where I came from you had to at least ask a girl's father, and buy her a ribbon, and take her to the harvest dance, and I hadn't done any of those things. I said I was sorry about her face.

"Don't be sorry," said Brakka. "It is a good face. It is the best face I have ever had."

"I hit you."

"You laid me down." She said it like I'd given her a present. "One blow. Open hand. Do you know how many have tried, since I took the clan? Eleven. Eleven champions, and two of them were trolls. Not one put me on my back. Not one." She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. "You do not understand, little husband. Since I was fifteen I am the biggest. In every room. Every fight. Every fire. Nobody puts me down, so nobody stands next to me. You understand? Next to. Not behind, not in front. Next to."

I didn't say anything.

"It is very lonely," said Brakka, "being the biggest."

The one-eyed orc made a small noise and looked at the floor.

"I'm not going to make you do anything," I said. "Whatever the law says. You know that."

"I know." She grinned. "The law also says I may challenge you again. If I lay you down, the marriage is broken." She cracked her knuckles, which sounded like someone stepping on a bag of walnuts. "I will try every day. I will lose every day. That is my choice, and it is a good one."

"Try what every day?"

She looked at my cleaver, leaning against the barrel.

"First, that," she said.

She got up, went over to it, spat on her hands, and heaved. It didn't move. She heaved till her ears went dark green, then let go, and laughed, and turned to the one-eyed orc.

"Grosh. Write it. One lift. One fail."

Grosh got a little leather book out of his pouch and a stub of charcoal and wrote, very carefully, with his tongue between his teeth.

Behind the bar, Hobb cleared his throat. He'd been waiting a long time to do it.

"Lovely," he said. "Lovely, all of it. Very touching. And who," he pointed round at the post, and the bar, and the empty window frame with the river wind coming through it, "is paying for my fucking tavern?"

Brakka looked at him with mild surprise, like a bull looking at a fence post that had spoken.

"My husband," she said.

Everybody looked at me.

"We'll sort it out, Hobb," I said.

* * *

Miss Quill was waiting for me at the bottom of the Guild steps at the eighth bell.

She looked like she hadn't slept. She had a satchel of papers over her shoulder and her hair was coming down on one side, and the pen behind her ear had ink running down it onto her collar where she'd forgotten to put the cap on.

"Is it true?" she said.

"Is what true?"

"Pip is selling a broadsheet in the market. It has a drawing on it. The drawing is of you slapping an orc into the Weir."

"It wasn't into the Weir," I said. "It was over the bar."

Miss Quill closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she had the look she'd had in the measuring room, after the scale. Calm all the way through, like ice on a deep pond.

"Come with me," she said.

She took me up to her office, which was small and very tidy and smelled of ink and old paper, and sat me down, and asked me to tell her everything, in order, from the moment I walked into the Drowned Man. I told her. She wrote it all down. When I got to the bit where the orcs knelt, she stopped writing and put her forehead on her hand for a moment, then went on.

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Then she went to the Treaty archive in the palace, and she was there all day.

I sat on a bench outside the archive door for a lot of it. Not because I had to, but because she'd asked me to wait, and because Brakka and her warband were sitting on the steps of the palace annexe across the square, and every time I went anywhere they got up and came too. It was easier to sit still.

Around noon Grosh came across the square on his own, carrying a meat pie wrapped in a cloth, still hot. He gave it to me with a deep bow and went back without a word. It was a four-copper pie. I ate it anyway, and it was not as good as the Hound's, and I didn't tell him.

It was the middle of the afternoon when Miss Quill came out. She had dust on her coat, and a big leather book under one arm, and she sat down next to me on the bench without saying anything for a bit.

"The Ironfold Accord," she said at last. "Signed forty years ago between the Crown of Aldmere and the orc clans of the Red Steppe. It ended the border wars. Under the Accord, orc delegations in Aldmere are governed by their own law in matters of honour, kinship and personal custom." She opened the book on her knee. "Marriage is personal custom."

"So it's legal."

"It's legal."

"Can I get out of it?"

"There are two ways." She ran a finger down the page. "One. She lays you down. She's told you she'll try. Do you think she'll manage it?"

"Not if she keeps lifting with her back."

"Two." Her finger stopped. "The husband may renounce the wife, publicly, before her clan. The marriage is then dissolved."

"That's easy, then."

"It's not." She looked up. "If a husband renounces a warlord, the warlord is shamed in front of her clan. To restore her honour, she must kill the husband, or die trying." She shut the book. "Since she can't kill you, she would die trying. Repeatedly. Until it took."

I sat with that for a while.

"No," I said. "I'm not doing that."

"No," Miss Quill agreed. "I didn't think you would."

Across the square, Brakka saw us looking and waved. It was a big wave. It knocked the hat off one of her warband.

"There's one other thing," said Miss Quill. She sounded tired. "Under the Accord, in matters of property, a husband is answerable for his wife's debts within the city. Any damage done by her, or by her household, is billed to the head of the household."

"She hasn't got any debts."

Miss Quill looked at me.

"She threw a table through the window of the Drowned Man," she said. "Into the river."

"Ah," I said.

* * *

Before I left, she took a folded paper out of her satchel and gave it to me.

It was a Guild draft, on thick cream paper with a blue seal. It said that the job at Old Sewer Junction Four had been reviewed and reclassified, on the basis of evidence received, from a Copper-rank vermin clearance to a Gold-rank threat removal. It said that under the Guild's own fee schedule, the statutory payment for a Gold-rank threat removal by a single member was ninety gold crowns. Less six silver already paid. It was signed H. Quill, Senior Auditor, and countersigned by somebody whose name I couldn't read.

I read it three times. I didn't understand it the first two.

"Miss Quill," I said. "I can't take this."

"It isn't a gift."

"It's ninety gold."

"It's what the job was worth." She was looking at her satchel, doing up the buckles very carefully. "The Guild underpaid you. The Guild's records were wrong. I'm correcting an error. That's what auditors are for, Mister Marsh. That's all."

"Won't you get in trouble? With Ashby?"

The buckle stuck. She worked at it.

"The fee schedule is the fee schedule," she said. "I didn't write that one. But I've read it more carefully than anyone alive. Cash it at the Guild counter. Today. Before anyone thinks to look."

She got the buckle done, and stood up, and pushed her hair back with her inky hand. It left a smudge on her forehead. I didn't tell her.

"Thank you," I said.

She didn't say anything to that. She just nodded, quick, and went back up the steps.

* * *

By the time I got back to Candle Lane there was a queue.

It started at Widow Ostry's front step and went down the lane and round the corner. It was orcs. There must have been thirty of them, not just Brakka's lot but others, with different braids and different paint and different-coloured leather, from the other clans at the Treaty talks. They were standing in line very patiently, talking low in their own tongue. Some of them had brought their children.

At the front of the queue, on an upturned crate, sat Pip, with a tin box on her knees and a sign propped against her leg. The sign said: LIFT THE LEVEL ONE'S CLEAVER. 1 COPPER A GO. ORCS 2 COPPER (BIGGER). NO REFUNDS.

"Pip," I said.

"You need to put it on the step," she said, not looking up. "They've been waiting since noon."

"Pip."

"Ten percent," said Pip. "To you. That's generous. I'm doing all the work."

I looked at the queue. The queue looked back at me. A very small orc child, about knee high to her mother, waved.

I sighed and unslung the cleaver and put it on Widow Ostry's step.

They came up one at a time. Each of them paid Pip, and spat on their hands, and took hold, and heaved. Some of them were enormous. One was a war-chief of the Bonecutter clan with arms like tree trunks, and he heaved so hard he sat down on the cobbles afterwards and didn't get up for a while. Nobody moved it. Nobody came close. After each one failed, the rest cheered, and the one who'd failed went away looking pleased, the way people come away from a shrine. Grosh sat on the wall with his leather book and wrote every one of them down.

One of the Bonecutters tried to get back in the queue for a second go without paying, and Pip told him to bugger off, he'd had his turn, and he went. The small orc child had a go too. Pip let her try for nothing. She hung off the handle and kicked, the way Pip had, the first day, and when she let go she was laughing so hard she fell over.

Widow Ostry came out at sunset.

She stood on the step above the cleaver with her arms folded, and looked down Candle Lane at thirty orcs and a girl with a tin box, and her eyebrows went up into her hair and stayed there.

"Mister Marsh."

"Sorry, Mrs Ostry. They'll be gone soon."

"That one is not gone." She was looking at Brakka, who was sitting on the low wall opposite with her axe across her knees, watching the house like a dog watching a gate.

"That's my wife," I said. "Apparently."

Brakka stood up. She crossed the lane. She stood in front of Widow Ostry, who came up to about her belt buckle, and looked down at her.

"I am Brakka Ironjaw," she said. "Warlord of the Ironjaw. I sleep where my husband sleeps."

"Not in my house you don't," said Widow Ostry. "No guests. Of any kind. At any hour."

They looked at each other for a long moment.

Then Brakka nodded slowly, with great respect.

"This woman is a warlord," she said to me.

"She is, a bit," I said.

Brakka slept on the step that night, outside Widow Ostry's front door, with her axe across her knees. Grosh and the rest slept against the wall across the lane. In the morning, Widow Ostry brought her a bowl of porridge and said nothing, and Brakka ate it and said nothing, and Grosh wrote something in his book.

* * *

There was a note under my door when I went up. Black-edged paper, very thick, smelling faintly of roses and something older.

Is it TRUE that you are MARRIED? E.V.

I didn't know how to answer that, so I put it under the bed with the Countess's calling card.

Then I sat on my short bed and counted everything out on the blanket.

Twenty-four gold, and the ninety from the Guild counter, less the six silver I'd already had. A bit over a hundred and thirteen gold. I'd cashed the draft at the counter that afternoon, like Miss Quill said, and the clerk with the cold had looked at it, and at me, and stamped it, and counted it out in gold crowns so heavy I'd had to carry them home in my hat.

A hundred and thirteen gold. Pip's ten percent came to four copper, which I put on top.

Eighty-seven to go.

I sat there and looked at the stacks for a long time. It was the first time since the Crown rider came up the track that I'd looked at the money and thought: you know, I might actually do this.

Outside on the step, my wife was snoring. It sounded like a bullock in a barrel.