The Ice Sea Pirates by Frida Nilsson

Author:Frida Nilsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gecko Press
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

27

The Shops in Seglen

My heart ached as I left Einar. He wasn’t the same boy he’d been during those days in the shed when the two of us had worked at taming his chick. Now that I knew his motives, he seemed a very different person. But for all that, I was still sad we had parted in anger.

I wasn’t used to walking on cobbled streets and my feet skidded about. What was I going to do now? I had no idea where to go or who I could turn to for advice. I didn’t even know which direction my nose was pointing. Everything was new and unfamiliar.

At least the cottages looked the way cottages usually do. Huddled and gray with blackened window frames. They had little curtains at the windows and behind the curtains were little, gray, old women with hairs on their chins. Pigs snuffled around the backs of the cottages, licking at the frozen, gray puddles of slush. The sky was gray and even the children I met had gray eyes.

The closer I came to the water, however, the less gray everything was. The shops had opened their shutters and almost every one sold ammunition for guns. One shop had rows of silver foxes hanging upside down, their stomachs slit open and cleaned out. The owner was selling fox-fur hats. The shop next door had combs and boxes and dice carved from whalebone. And a walking stick made from the tusk of a narwhal. Another shop sold octopuses, five or six squashed together in a wooden tub. They were still alive, winding and crawling over each other to find room.

Then came copper and silver pots, shoes made of salmon skin, and sealskin boots, jewels made of teeth and jewels made of gold; you could even buy snowy owl eggs as ornaments. In fact, everything you could possibly desire was available in Seglen.

A man in white wolf skins came along the street. My eyes locked onto the two pistols in his belt. I held my breath in sheer terror as he passed. He didn’t even notice me.

A little later I passed a woman who stank so strongly of dead birds I had to hold my nose. Looking closely at her coat I saw it was made of the skins of great auks and decorated all over with their curved black beaks. Great auks were easy prey because their wings were too small for flying. The worst sort of people didn’t even bother to kill the birds before skinning them, and I’d heard of people who cooked them alive for a quick meal. They just tossed the lovely bird in the pot and lit the fire.

Next, I came across a woman wearing a jacket on which were two lines of knives hanging on straps. She had a hat on her head and warts around her eyes.

Could you tell if someone were a pirate? Did a pirate look meaner than other people? Or was it the other way round? Maybe the most cunning pirates were those who could trick people into believing they were nice.

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