Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 1 of 619

Huge Ajax slammed his gold chain down on the tavern table and told the room he was riding north at dawn to build a warhouse of his own. Nobody laughed. Nobody stood up either. The hearth cracked, a dog scratched under a bench, and every man in Southern Oak kept his eyes on his cup. Ajax was a big man, bare-chested, hairy, a fur loincloth belted at his hips. He had killed a boar last winter and a horse thief in the spring, and neither story had traveled past the town gate. Beyond these walls he was nobody. He needed six sworn men by sunrise, or he rode alone into country that ate lone men. He went table to table. He named the pay. He named the land he meant to hold, a stretch of coast where an old stone stronghold stood empty above the surf. He described the walls, the towers, the sea gate. The farmers looked at their hands. A fletcher said his wife was pregnant. Two brothers who had drunk with Ajax all winter suddenly remembered a debt in the next village. "You've never led anything," the innkeeper said, not unkind. "Boys don't die for strangers." Ajax set coin on the bar for the ale and walked out. Before dawn he saddled his horse in the yard behind the smithy. He tied on a bedroll, a hatchet, a sack of oats. His hands were steady. His jaw was not. He had told the whole town and the whole town had stayed in bed. A boot scraped stone behind him. Grayson Ale stood in the gate with a spear across his shoulders and a leather roll at his feet. Blonde, bearded, a silver chain catching the last of the moon. Ajax knew him only by reputation, a hired blade who had ridden with three different captains and buried all three. Not a friend. Not anyone's friend. "Heard your speech," Grayson said. "It was bad." "You came anyway." "I came to watch you get killed. Then I thought, might as well get paid." He spat into the straw. "One condition. I don't kneel. I ride beside you or I ride home." Ajax looked at him a long moment. A sellsword was not a brotherhood. One man was not six. But one was more than none, and Grayson's name carried where his own did not. "Beside me," Ajax said. They clasped forearms. Grayson's grip was dry and hard and told Ajax nothing about loyalty. They rode out through the north gate as the sky went gray. Two men, two horses, a coast full of stone and salt waiting somewhere ahead. Ajax had wanted a war band. He had a witness with a spear. It would have to be enough to reach the walls. What waited inside them, and who already slept there, he did not yet know.