Authors: Jude Fisher
‘I was thinking of the luxuries that await us in the rich southern lands,’ he said, smiling. ‘When you are the lady of the palace, and I the court mage.’ Though he knew this was not the only reason; and that she would be lady there for only so long as it took for him to put his plan into motion. It would be strange, at the very least, to return to the land of his birth, perhaps even to see folk from the hill tribe who had left him out according to the Master’s tale – an unlucky albino baby – in the caves above their settlement for three cold nights in the hope he would die. He supposed he should be grateful to Rahe for saving him, but it was hard to feel gratitude after nearly thirty years of torment.
She regarded him expressionlessly, though he could have sworn that the colour of her eyes had changed since last he saw her. She sat up and swung her legs from the divan, so that the cat was displaced. With a yelp of protest, it jumped down onto the floor, dodged past Virelai and shot out onto the steps, where it started washing itself vigorously, as if this had been its plan all along. When Virelai looked back, he found himself gazing at a long expanse of smooth white flesh where the Rosa Eldi’s robe had parted, as if by accident.
‘Why is it that you wish to give me to the southern lord?’ she asked curiously, though her intonation did not rise with the question.
Virelai stared at her legs so hard that it seemed to him as if her skin shimmered. ‘I have my reasons.’ It was a phrase he had picked up from Rahe, when the Master did not wish to explain himself, which was most of the time. He strode past the woman to the medicine cabinet on the top shelf of the wagon, and took down his cache of powdered brome. When he turned back to fetch some water with which to mix it, he found that the Rosa Eldi had spread her legs so that he could see every detail of her female parts. Rose of the World, indeed. One of her eyebrows quirked at his anguished expression.
She leaned forward, and the silk of her robe slipped down from her shoulder. Virelai bit his lip until the pain drove his hopeless desire underground.
‘Cover yourself,’ he said roughly, flinging the shawl at her. ‘I know your game.’
In response, the Rosa Eldi merely stood and drew the robe up over her shins and thighs, all the while engaging his eyes. When she pulled it up further to reveal her hips and pudenda he found he could not bear not to look, and when he did, he was lost. She was hairless there and as white as milk, save where the central fold was pinkened by a blush of blood and slightly parted, as if she, too, was filled with desire—
Even though one part of his brain reminded him monotonously of the futility of the venture, the animal part of him could not help but pull off his clothes. By the time her robe had reached her breasts, he stood naked from toe to waist, exposing to her merciless view his recalcitrant member, as uninterested now as it might be if confronted by a pitcher of milk or a summer moon.
She leaned to kiss him, enfolding his lips in her own as he had seen her do with the southern lord. Fires ran through him at her touch. No wonder, he remembered thinking incongruously in the midst of this embrace, no wonder the southerners worship a woman who makes them burn. Perhaps this time, he thought, it would be different. Perhaps a miracle might occur and his unwilling part might suddenly unfurl itself, push its way upwards like the head of a fern growing into the light, so that he might at last penetrate the heart of her mystery and know the truth of her.
But he knew even as the thought left him that no such miracle had his name on it, and he felt his heart wither inside him.
Even so, they lay together and he took some comfort from the touch of her cool hands upon his overheated skin. After a while she said: ‘Will you take me with you to the Gathering tonight?’
Virelai sat up, shocked. The sedative he had administered earlier must be wearing off. He stared at her suspiciously, but her pupils were as wide and black as ever, her whole face languid and composed. ‘Why would you ask me this? You know it cannot be.’
The hands never ceased their rhythmic caresses and soon he lay back against her, hypnotised as the cat had been. For some minutes the Rosa Eldi said not a word, then she shifted so that her face came looming over his. Just the rim of her eyes flared with that extraordinary sea-green, but golden stars flecked the black. He watched them dance and stream, like sunlight on deep water, for an unknowable length of time and when he came to himself it was many hours later, the wagon was in darkness and the Rosa Eldi was gone.
Twelve
Temptations
S
aro had known the whip was coming at him before the man made to strike, for when the other rider had caught him by the shoulder he had ‘seen’ his cruel intentions as clearly as if watching them played out in front of his eyes. And Night’s Harbinger, intuitive beast that he was, knew too. The two of them had swerved deftly away leaving Saro’s attacker out of balance and flailing wildly. The switch came down hard into thin air, carried through its vicious trajectory and struck the man’s own horse so sharply that the chestnut stallion reared with a shriek and pitched the man to the ground. Other riders came racing past them, kicking up a great storm of dust, and Night’s Harbinger, his blood up, his whole frame vibrating with adrenalin and fury, charged after them, ears flat and his neck outstretched. Saro was reduced to hanging on for his life to the bay’s knotted mane as Night’s Harbinger forced his way between a pack of horses just behind the leading group, blood and sweat streaking off him in pinky-white suds.
A big Eyran with his long blond hair and beard flying out behind him, mounted on a huge dappled grey beast, was contesting the lead with an Istrian on a magnificent black and the desertman on one of the famous golden horses of the southern plain. The two southerners appeared to have formed some sort of pact, for they seemed to be trying to cut the Eyran off, wedging him between them, trying to foul his mount’s legs with a discarded cloak. The Eyran snarled and raised his arm to retaliate, and the man on the golden horse reined in hard. As he did so, Night’s Harbinger lurched forward into the gap. The Eyran looked puzzled as this unfamiliar horse and rider surged into view; then he swept his fist down like a hammer into Saro’s side, and the next thing Saro knew was a deathly pain under his ribs, the scream of a horse that he knew to be Night’s Harbinger, a great rush of air and finally the uncompromising impact of the ashy ground. Hooves thudded all around him. Instinctively, he drew himself into a tight ball and waited for the race to pass him, his heart beating as loudly as the hooves as he took stock of his injuries. A broken rib, maybe, from the Eyran’s fist; a pain in his right knee where a hoof had caught him a glancing blow; aches in his hip and arm from his fall. An unknowable time later, the sounds of horses and riders faded; distant cheers could be heard from the crowd. The worst pain Saro felt was that of keen disappointment. All his plans were in ruins; and now he would face his brother’s wrath, too.
He sat up, every bone and muscle complaining. At the far end of the field, a dark horse, garlanded with braids of safflower, was being paraded around the victor’s enclosure. Of its rider, there was no sign. Saro stood and shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun. The horse was dancing around in an agitated state, throwing its head up in protest at being handled by the race officials. The horse was a bay, and on its forehead it bore a white star . . .
Saro frowned. Had someone managed to vault onto Night Harbinger’s back in the midst of the chaos and ride him to victory? It was unthinkable. Was it another horse entirely? He began to run; but with each step he took, the stallion came into better definition: finely boned, with a long, arching neck, the wound upon its left shoulder barely visible between the winner’s garlands.
Now, belatedly, he remembered his uncle’s tales of previous Allfair races. He had pushed them from his mind, with all their grim details of ripped flesh and broken limbs, horses that were so badly damaged in the course that they had to be destroyed. But it was the
horse
that was feted in this race, not the rider: you rode the beast to keep it on course, stop it fleeing the whips and goads – but if the animal came in ahead of the field without its human burden, it was still the worthy winner; regarded by purists as the best win of all, for it required a horse with spirit and aggression to prevail without the urging of a rider.
Saro grinned. He ducked under ropes of the enclosure and a moment later found himself accepting the heavy bag of cantari and the compliments of the race officials as if he were in a dream. In fact, it was rather like being in a dream, this bizarre state he found himself in as he walked through the gathered crowd with people thumping him on the back and clutching his arm, touching his hand for luck and in congratulation. It was like walking down an endless dark tunnel onto which a hundred doors opened at random, offering him flashes of others’ existences, sometimes visual, often inchoate, all blending together in the end to a sea of colour, floating faces, jumbled emotions. The pain had subsided where the Eyran had struck him, so he concluded the rib was bruised, not broken, by another stroke of luck. By the time he made it back to the Vingo family pavilion, having hobbled Night’s Harbinger and paid one of the slaveboys to groom and feed him, he felt as wrung out as an old rag, and he ached from top to toe.
There was no one there. He weighed the prize money in his hand – five thousand cantari: a huge sum; and along with the two thousand Tanto had won as his second prize and the money his uncle and father had managed to pool together, just enough to buy Tanto his bride, his castle, his alliance with Lord Tycho Issian. And he, Saro, would at last have the family villa to himself, and all his father’s attention, too . . . He put the pouch down on the table and sat crosslegged on the silk floor cushions regarding it. No doubt Tanto and their father were even now wandering the early evening stalls together in a jubilant mood, looking for more gewgaws to add to their already-gaudy costumes for the Gathering that night: he knew they had seen him win, for he had seen them in the crowd as he led the bay on its victory lap, though there had been no sign of Uncle Fabel.
He had pushed the unwanted glimpse into his uncle’s consciousness down to the deepest, darkest part of his own mind for the duration of the race; but now it came shooting back up to him, as brightly coloured, as clearly focused, every scent and moan as tangible as if it were he participating in the horrible act of incest, and not his father’s brother. Mother! he thought, anguished. How could you do this? She had not been forced, that much he knew as truth; and not only from the desire in her eyes.
Impossible to know when the act had taken place, or whether it were an isolated incident or a long-running affair. Casting his mind back, he tried to remember an occasion when they had been in public company with one another, whether there was a clue to their deception in the way his mother had watched Uncle Fabel, or if his uncle had gravitated to her when others were not looking; but he could recall nothing that would impeach their honour. Had he perhaps made a terrible error, to believe his own mother to be capable of such a thing? To sleep with another man was a burning offence: surely his mother, that silent, deferent woman, would never risk her life so?
But he knew the image had come to him unbidden, entirely independent of his own buried thoughts. It was a form of true-sight, a sort of magic, to be able to see into men’s hearts like this; and if anyone knew of it, he was liable himself to be subject to the Goddess’s fires.
It was clear he didn’t know the first thing about his mother, had merely built up a picture of her in his mind, a picture made up like a child’s piece-puzzle of goodness and compassion, meekness and compliance: all those traits the Istrian men so valued in their womenfolk. Valued, or enforced?
For a moment, Saro felt almost as disgusted with himself for his stupidity as for his mother’s transgression; but the moment soon passed and with it came anger and a sense of betrayal, and at the same time the notion that this knowledge now placed him somewhere outside the very family whose hidden drama he had been witness to; that this very act of discovery had somehow set him apart from them forever. Who was he now, if not his father’s son? A Vingo, maybe; but a Vingo tainted with sin and deceit.
Something nagged at him. Was he, in fact, his father’s son? Or was he a product of the liaison he had observed? Part of him was already working on a frantic calculation: for surely it was twenty-one years ago that his father had been called away to war, leaving the estate in his brother’s hands. What more perfect opportunity? Saro had even been born while his father was on the campaign to hold the northern ports against the Eyran foe, hadn’t even seen his youngest child for a year and a half after he was born. This had been the reason, in Saro’s mind, why his father had never loved him as well as he loved Tanto. It all fell into place, the child’s puzzle, with a terrible inevitability. At last he knew, with a certainty that made his heart as cold and as heavy as iron, that it was all true: Fabel Vingo was his true father, and, moreover, Favio Vingo had known it all along, and had decided to lay his disappointment and animosity at Saro’s feet rather than his beloved brother’s. Rather than lose his wife to the fires. It explained a lot about his father’s bitterness, Saro thought; but it was hard to forgive him his coldness even so.
An outsider
, he thought again.
I have been made an outcast from my own family; have been one, indeed, for over twenty years: a cuckoo in the nest
. He picked the bag of coins up and tipped the coins onto the tabletop. Then he counted them, stacking them in two separate piles: one for Tanto, as he had promised; and one for Guaya – an outsider, like himself.
Tanto would have to scrape together the shortfall in the bride-price as best he could, or go beg Lord Tycho’s indulgence for the rest. He would, he knew, never have persuaded his brother to make the apology he’d said he would; but making him promise had at least been a small satisfaction in itself. He shovelled the coins he had piled up for the nomads back into the pouch, rose and fetched a parchment, quill and inkpot and left his brother a note to accompany the depleted pile of money that remained on the table. Then he wrapped himself in a cloak, attached the pouch securely to his belt, and left the pavilion. What would be would be.