Thunder God by Paul Watkins Read Free Book Online

angrier.
    I worried they might draw the long, curved blades which they carried at their sides.
    Before that could happen, Halfdan strode right through them, pushing the men aside and treading on the carpet, which upset the piles of coins. He walked over to where I stood, grabbed my arm and hauled me away.
    The scattering of their coins distracted the brown-skinned men, who scrambled to gather up their money and immediately began to argue over which coins were whose.
    As he led me away, Halfdan paused for a moment to watch the brown-skinned men. I saw his fist loosen around the rope.
    I did not think about what I did next. The thought and the action came at the same time. I took hold of the rope and wrenched it out of his grasp. The cord slid between his palm and fingers, and Halfdan cried out as the rope burned his skin.
    I ran, hearing angry voices as I barged down the narrow, crowded street. I ducked into an alley and then into another. I sprinted through a slaughter yard. Beheaded animals hung upside-down from wooden crossbeams, bleeding into the mud. Huge piles of entrails, kinked and twisted like the rope around my neck, were being shovelled into waiting carts. I crossed another street. Not knowing where I was headed. Only to get away. I could not tell if he was following. The rope scratched at my neck. I gathered the loose end against my chest.
    A moment later, I slammed into a woman carrying a reed basket of green-and-black-backed mackerel. She was coming out of a house. The basket flew out of her hands, and the fish fell on the ground. Some of them were still twitching. The smell of freshly-caught fish, the colour of the woman’s hair and the way she had braided it shoved before my eyes a vision of my mother. For a moment, everything that had happened to me since Ileft Altvik took on the substance of a dream. I felt myself sliding through veils of sleep towards the instant when my eyes would open. I expected to wake, and for my mother to be there beside me, having somehow trespassed into my imagination. But then the woman screamed a crow-like cawing shriek which drilled into my head and I knew then it was no dream. I dropped the rope and with my next footstep I tangled in the coils and fell.
    When I looked up a moment later, Halfdan was standing over me.
    ‘Get up,’ he said. There was no fury in his voice, only a tired, fleeting patience.
    The woman began shouting at him about the fish.
    Slowly Halfdan brought his face close to hers. He whispered something in her ear.
    The woman’s eyes closed as he spoke. Her lips pressed tight together. Without another word, she picked up her empty basket and stepped back into the shadows of her house, leaving the fish where they had fallen.
    Now that I had a chance to see where I was, I realised I had run so blindly that I had come around in a circle and ended up back where I started.
    ‘Go on,’ Halfdan told me. ‘Run.’ He held out his hand, as if to show me the way home.
    I stared at him, and at the dirty faces which peered at me through half-closed doors, waiting to see what happened next, wide-eyed with the expectation of violence.
    Halfdan bent down, hands on his knees. ‘Where do you think you will go?’ he asked.
    I did not answer.
    ‘How far do you think you will get?’ he asked.
    I saw the brown-skinned men watching me, their mud-spattered hands clutching gold coins.
    Halfdan straightened up. ‘Where you and I are bound, noone will help you. No one will keeep you safe but me. Run again and I will not even do you the favour of killing you.’ He reached down with his reddened palm, picked up the rope and coiled it back around his hand.
    I had known before that I was lost, but I did not understand until that moment just how lost I was. I made no move to pull the rope away. Nor did he have to haul me to my feet. When he began to walk, I followed, treading in his footsteps, back towards the harbour.
    ‘Why did you not sell me?’ I asked.
    ‘They saw the colour