"Problem," Azuyia asked him as they all stared at the plain leading up to the fabled crossroads of three holds.
"Nooo," Wystan said, staring out over the busy road, "but I don't remember any highways ever being this crowded." In town later, he stopped in the wide boulevard and pushed his cloak out to both sides with hands rubbed with a delighted smirk across his belly.
"Heyyyy ... looka herrre," his expression turned impish.
Azuyia and Denthryd were still chewing at the smoked wild turkey legs wrapped in paper they had gotten at the first stand inside the festive quarter.
"Whatph?" Azuyia asked him, eating.
Denthryd went to a short queue at an ale stand right there. The object of Wystan's gaze was a coil of folks pushing to get in line to one of the buildings where drums and flutes could be heard each time the door was opened by a tall Breton woman in field leather with a studded quarterstaff in her hand. The head of the line stood several paces away from the door, approached each time by a fantastic, tanned Nord woman in an aquamarine body wrap, dangling ruby and silver earrings. Her bleached blonde hair was pulled into an intricate stylistics full of rings and ties, and she wore many silver bangles on each wrist, scarlet and orange dyed calfskin boots that reached her thighs. The door to the otherwise not notable town building had been hung on either side with ribbons of the same scarlet and orange at iron rings set into the front wall.
"Di-belll-as," he said precisely.
Denthryd walked back up with a tankard of dark ale to his mouth, holding two more out to his observing fellows. Azuyia took one, Wystan didn't even notice. The Bosmer pitched her turkey bone into the nearest rubbish pile, pushing a short distance through the crowd to the opposite side of the wide drag, and back. Denthryd was standing there looking all around, turning his head here and there.
"Yyyeahh," Azuyia said, standing right next to him, "where's our brother," she asked slyly.
"Oh, in line," he answered, distracted by the boulevard.
"Uh-hum, yes, and is good sir going to go for a tour, hm?"
Denthryd remembered the first time his parents had allowed him to the Windhelm docks when he was fourteen. Up until then he'd been told to stay around the village, do his chores, and stay out of trouble. Life growing up until then was Snowmill, Snowmill, Snowmill. They didn't own a horse, and trips to the nearest village Rock Creek at least ten miles away were only for the humble feasts their locality could put out for First Seed in the spring and Heartfire in the fall, tables of pickled cabbage, smoked salmon, and jars of the two villages' only product to make it on cargo manifests shipping all over the country— sealed jars of smoked sprats in vegetable oil. Man, he thought, I never thought I'd get the smell of that stuff off me before I left. He had been amused when Azuyia came bounding into commons one night after study with a loaf of fresh bread and a jar of, yay, smoked sprats in oil so they could have a luxurious midnight snack of northern seafood.
He had been dying for some exposure to anything, anything beyond the firs, the same stretch of river when he was growing up, and he'd never forget the day mom and pop told him to put on his cloak because they were taking him on their walk to the city. They stopped two nights on the way at folks' homes for shepherd's pie and warm conversation. The adults, too, seemed relieved to be away from the Snowmill monotony. It was the late morning of that third day when Windhelm came into view as they walked on the road up the bank of River Yorgrim. Down the long drawbridge, past the check by two guards with questions, he laughed remembering his mother trying to hold his hand as they pushed through the crowd, shaking it off, being a man of fourteen, blitzed with the instantaneous change in scene as they walked through the city gate into the ancient hold capital. He followed his parents as they made no stops until walking down the wide alleys to the dockside.
Wow, and that was a sight upon sights that day. Hundreds of ships, some with prows carved into strange creatures two stories high, spread out in both directions at the pilings and boardwalks. Folk he had never seen before, the man-sized Khajiit with their feline heads and claws, Argonians with scales and gills, Dunmer elves with skin the color of slate, all dressed in the widest variety of colors and styles.
After a couple hours' business his parents conducted signing inventories and manifests for sprat and salmon orders, they took a break and ate at a long dining stand there by the water. They sat on stools and watched the crowd, smelled the pungent spices on frying seafood.
"What's that he's making," Denthryd had asked his mother, pointing at the nearest bartender who was packing fried crabcakes into split half loaves of bread and drizzling the meat with a light brown sauce.
She had smiled wistfully. Crabcake po'boy, son, like they make them in the southlands.
He had excitedly asked her when she and dad had been there, never hearing word one of any travels they had undertaken, ever. They had looked at each other, and his father snapped his fingers at the bartender and then raised three with a nod. His father had pushed a tankard of mead in his hand, and he remembered the way the two of them hit the bar with the edge of their tankards, downed a sip, and then clanked the tips together. That, too, they had never done in front of him. He's old enough, his father had said, turning to look out at the docks and lean against the bar as three of the savory plates were delivered behind them. His father put his arm around his mother. That's when they told him about their service in the Great War.
His parents had made the hard ride with others all the way to the Pale to be volunteer auxiliaries with the Solitude Blues medium line, a full Legion in a permanent fortress stationed there since Riften had been burned in an uprising two generations prior. Not that General Tullius and the Blue Palace cared much for the extreme southeastern province of Skyrim known best for drug smuggling and infestations of the frostbite spiders able to singly take an entire century, no, it was more a strategic placement of trusted eyes and ears should the need arise. When war came from southern Cyrodiil, the entire garrison was called east and then south to a corps assembling for campaign over the border in the Cyrodiilic mountains. It was to be a terrible, four-year engagement with Thalmor raiding parties.
Denthryd had gone into town three years later to sign a cargo slip for them, happy to see the Crusty Crab diner was still operating, and sat down for a po'boy and some ale. He noticed an unusually smiley group of the roughshod lords and ladies off these sailing ships lining up outside of a door way down the docks. It had the scarlet and orange streamers flying high. Hey, what're they doing, he had asked the kneeshaking Dunmer sailor next to him.
She snorted her ale and clapped him on the shoulder. It's a little beyond your coin, lad.
"Den ... Den?" he heard her say.
"Yeah?"
"Wells," Azuyia joked and raised both hands palms up at him, "you going in, too, or not?"
Dibellas, dear reader, is the slang use of the goddess name for female employees of an expensive cathouse, licensed by towns populous enough to tolerate the open marketing of an otherwise discreet business. Both women and men worship her beauty and zest, yet only women become devotees introduced to her mysteries. It was curious to some of a more conservative Nordic bent how one of the nine divines had come to be associated with, well, you know ... but this going on thirty years of recession and strife a major swathe of the population could care less. It wasn't like every major field unit didn't have a traditional camp following that included the sanguine services, and some enlightened burghers and public functionaries actually listened to the Kynareth priests and priestesses, those of another divine who managed the hospitals. Licensure and good management, the staunch guild class realized, might be connected to fewer cases of the Dibella's rattles.
He snapped out of it. "Nooo, Zuyyiaaa."
She laughed and crooked his elbow, and they walked arm in arm swigging, stopping up the boulevard to stand in line for tickets to Tasha's Troupe the following evening.
