“This way.” Jeirran walked around a corner to a wooden barn with an array of discarded horseshoes nailed on its wall. “I thought we’d ask in here.”
A wiry man, clothes dusty with chaff, was holding the head of a fretful pony while a well-built girl carefully picked inside a hoof resting in the lap of her calico apron.
“Good day,” the man said cordially. “Your mules are keeping well. Are you here to check on them or maybe looking for a day’s hire? We’ve two well-rested saddle horses ready for work.”
“No.” Jeirran waved a dismissive hand. “We want to know where to go for the bull-baiting.”
“All that goes on down by the Southgate. The baiting will be at the slaughter yards and the best bird-pit is at the Hooded Crow, just by the gate-house,” answered the horse trader readily enough. “Fair festival to you,” he called out but Jeirran and Teiriol had already turned their backs on him. The girl looked up to share a resigned glance with her father.
Jeirran strode out with a confident step. Teiriol followed rather more slowly, looking all around at the gaudy effigies set above the shopfronts.
“I can understand a cobbler hanging out a boot,” he said, amused by a vast, gaudily stenciled and improbably high-heeled offering, “but what under the sun is that supposed to tell anyone?” He pointed out a brazen eagle frozen in mid-stoop.
“Who cares,” said Jeirran, eyes fixed on the middle distance. He kept up the same brisk pace all the way down through the city, unwavering even when a clash of shoulders sent some passer-by stumbling into the gutter with an outraged oath. Neither was showing any sign of exertion when Jeirran finally halted. They looked up at the forbidding redstone bulk of the gate to the southern road. It loomed over the ramshackle houses run up against the city walls on either side, a vast three-story affair, parapets and embrasures alert in all directions, the gates below of black and ancient wood bound with straps and bolts of hammered iron. In the gloomy maw of the entrance, the sharp teeth of a portcullis showed like a hound’s warning snarl. An ill-defined space opened before it, patches of cobbles here and there, a crumbling wall all that remained of a fallen building, all useful bricks looted. From the empty niches still visible, it looked to have once been a shrine.
The bustle of the city was drowned out by a rising discord of bloodlust. Jeirran and Teiriol tried in vain to see past taller men as the commotion rose to a new pitch of excitement. Sharp yelps rose above vicious growls and the lower bellows of an enraged bull. The last agonized roar of the tormented animal was lost beneath a great cheer and the comparative silence fell, broken only by the frantic whimpering of an injured dog. The men drifted away in small groups, exchanging opinions, settling wagers, heading for ale at the rough and ready taverns doing a brisk trade all around the long rank-smelling lines of slaughtering sheds.
“We missed it,” lamented Teiriol, crestfallen.
A grim-faced man was unbuckling the studded collar of a brindled mastiff. The dog struggled vainly to rise, hind legs limp and useless in the foul mire of blood and dung. Its owner rubbed a roughly tender hand over its ears before lifting its muzzle. The dog’s eyes were trusting and warm, the man’s red and squinting as he slit its throat with one swift stroke of his belt-knife and stepped back from its final throes.
“Good day to you,” said Jeirran, raising his voice above the frenzied snarls of the rest of the pack, now ripping into gory hunks of their late adversary. “Will there be another baiting today?”
The man looked up, brutish face doleful. “No, not today, well, not with my dogs, anyway.” He looked over at the powerfully built animals, tan, black and brindled, tearing into their meat, and his expression lightened a little. “Artel! Show them the lash or you’re going to lose a hand. Talagrin’s teeth, don’t you know anything?”
He moved rapidly to snatch a dog whip from a nervous-looking lad who was only too happy to step back from the insistent demands of the mastiffs. The dogs crowded around their master, bloodied all over their blunt faces and down to their massive shoulders.
“Those are impressive hounds,” commented Teiriol, tucking his hands through his belt. One of the mastiffs caught his eye and rambled menacingly deep in its throat.
“Which drinking house is the Crow?” Jeirran asked.
“Yonder,” the lad replied. “I could show you, if you like—” He looked uncertainly at his master.
“You go on.” The man brought an errant dog back with a sharp whistle and growled a command that had all the heavily jowled heads looking up obediently.
“Come on,” said the boy Artel. He led them toward a tavern with an open frontage of rough-sawn deal, none too recently painted over with pitch. Pushing the men drinking idly around the threshold, he left Jeirran and Teiriol to pick their own way to the counter past broken stools and tables, the sawdust on the earthen floor many days old and clumped with spills of beer and blood.
“Two, here,” Jeirran raised a hand to an overworked tapster by the row of casks behind the trestle. “We were told this was the place for a cockfight?”
A leather flagon and two horn beakers were shoved toward him. “Out the back, that’s three copper.” The man didn’t even look at Jeirran’s face, taking his coin and turning to the next thirsty customer.
“Come on,” Teiriol tried to keep from slopping the ale down his shirt as he was jostled. “We should see some sport here, shouldn’t we?”
The rear door opened onto a deafening scene of heated anticipation, shouted conversation and a powerful smell of ale, sweat and chicken coops. Men and women crowded around the broad wooden steps rising all around the sunken round of the cock-pit, eyes bright. Newcomers waited for their chance at a place as those who’d already cheered themselves hoarse went in search of ale or wine.
Jeirran leaned forward to hiss insistently in Teiriol’s ear. “We’ve got to sell those pelts or your mother will be flaying the both of us.”
The thrill in Teiriol’s eyes dimmed a little and he sipped his ale. “This isn’t half bad,” he said with some surprise.
“So you can addle your wits till you can’t tell a cock from a hen,” Jeirran told him scornfully, drinking deep from his own cup nevertheless. “The innkeeper takes a margin on the betting, I’ll warrant.”
“Shall we have a wager?” Teiriol stepped forward eagerly as two birds were being readied for the pit. Jeirran pushed his way through to the rail. A strutting cock with scarred wattles and glossy copper plumage was already coming up to scratch while its smaller speckled opponent was still having brightly polished spurs fixed to its scaly legs.
Jeirran smoothed a reluctant hand over his beard. “Better not. If we lose any more money, Eirys’ll save your mother the bother and skin us herself!”
Teiriol gave Jeirran a sharp look but the two birds were released to fly at each other in a flurry of dust and feathers. Boastful crowing shrilled above the rising murmur of the onlookers and the fight was joined. The speckled bird made up for its lack of size with startling ferocity, launching itself upward, wings flapping and spurs raking forward at its opponent’s head and eyes. The bigger cock was driven backward, its handler hurriedly getting clear, but it crowed defiantly before charging back into the fray, wings wide and baiting as it clawed and pecked. The little cock, feathers ruffed around its neck, moved nimbly to avoid the copper cock’s vicious beak. It darted in to stab its head forward and scatter orange feathers beaded with scarlet drops of blood onto the raked sand. Not so deft on its feet and heavier in build, the bigger bird was soon on the defensive, vainly trying to protect itself from increasingly frenzied assaults.
Jeirran looked on as the smaller cock, comb proud and defiant, left its opponent crestfallen and dragging one crippled wing in the scuffed and bloodstained circle. People laughed as it went strutting and crowing its triumph before its handler could retrieve it. The defeated bird was carefully examined before being swathed in a soft cloth bag and taken away by its scowling owner.