Tundra

‘So, if I get more with the same number on them, I get your stake.’ Eiron sat cross-legged in the dust, his thighs as thick as tree trunks and covered in bands of tattoos. Beside him, the fish-man looked up tentatively, his huge eyes even more swollen with confusion. His thin fingers clutched two tiny wooden cubes.

‘My stake?’

‘Whatever you’ve bet,’ the Seafarer explained, patiently. ‘We play for money, but I’m sure that when you get back home you can play for shiny bits of coral or whatever you have.’

‘We couldn’t play this in my home,’ Aais objected, in his innocent manner. ‘The dice would float away…’

‘Three, three, three, four, one. Beat that, fish-man.’ Uncertainly, Aais rolled the dice, releasing them from his slimy, webbed hands. They came up twos. Seeing the result, I whispered underneath my breath, and the pieces flipped over to reveal straight sixes. Drawing myself a place by this other hearth, I gladly interrupted. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I played that as an undergraduate.’

Eiron looked up with interest. ‘Were you any good?’

‘How can one be good at this?’ Aais asked. ‘Surely it’s random?’

‘Well, I used to cheat.’

He fanned his fins. ‘You cheated your friends?’

‘They were doing the same thing,’ I mumbled, casting looks around until one connected. ‘Eiron,’ I said, I’ve been meaning to ask you, that thing on your back, what happened to you?’

‘It’s a jellyfish sting,’ said Aais.

Eiron frowned. ‘It’s not a good story.’

‘It’s a venomous sting,’ the fish-man explained. ‘You’re lucky to be alive with a mark that big.’

Eiron threw his arms up. ‘So be it,’ he spat. ‘When I was much younger, a child, I was given the job of standing watch over a stretch of coastline while my father was away raiding.’

‘Isn’t that a big job for a child?’ I asked.

‘Not really. All I had to do was sit up a tree and keep an eye out for ships, and blow a horn if I saw one. It was a little boring, but that’s all there was to it. Anyway, one evening, some of the older children of the band, boys and girls on the edge of being warriors themselves, turned up at my tree. They were going to go and look in rock pools for the treasures that the tide washed up and they wanted me to come with them. Now, I knew that I should have been keeping watch, but I hadn’t seen any ships for at least a week, so I thought I would be fine, and I wanted them to like me, so I went along. When we got out there, the rock pools were lit up with hundreds of tiny stones and fluorescent jellyfish. Everything glowed green. We hunted through the pools for hours, and I found a piece of petrified wood that had broken off an earlier incarnation of the Cleaved Tide longhouse. I picked it up and straightened up, and as I did so, I saw a ship on the horizon.’

Aais’ fins fluttered again. ‘So, what did you do?’

‘I had left my horn behind. I went scrambling back across the rocks to get it, but it was dark and they were slippery, and I fell into a pool of jellyfish. Before my companions fished me out, one of them stung me quite badly.’

I shuffled my legs uncomfortably on the hard, packed ground. ‘So what happened?’

‘One of the other sentries saw the boat and sounded the alarm. There was a fight, which we won– it was embarrassing, but nobody died. The only thing that happened was my father was furious with me. It wasn’t that I’d wandered away from my post, although he wasn’t happy about that either. It was that, when he asked me about it, I told him I’d left my post because the other children had wanted me to. That set him right off. ‘You’re the Karl’s son,’ he said. ‘You are a leader. Everything that happens is your responsibility. Your role in life is to make all the decisions, and when things go badly, you must take responsibility for them. No-one else, just you.’ The scar is there to remind me that, in the end, it’s all down to me.’

‘But that’s not true,’ I reminded him. There’s nothing wrong with letting someone else carry your burdens if you can’t do it yourself. Look at us– Hackley and I do most of the planning, true, but it’s always you that carries out our plans.’

The Seafarer grunted. ‘I told you it wasn’t a good story.’