The Rose of the World (11 page)

‘Got you.’

A shocked silence floated out across the hold as if everyone was holding their breath; then Fat Breta started to scream and scream. Curses, shouts, howls of pain and fury rent the air. Women shrieked and men bellowed. Katla grabbed up the fallen cutlass from behind the still corpse of Galo Bastido and stared wildly about, trying to decide on her next course of action. She scanned the hold and its mass of bodies for sight of her mother, but in the midst of all the chaos it was hard to make out one filthy, half-starved Eyran woman from another.

There came a sharp crack, then a shout, followed by another and another. Little by little the noise and movement seemed to subside, all except the incongruous keening noise of a trapped seagull, or a tortured cat. One moment, all was chaos; the next a space was clearing in the middle of the hold and people were breaking off whatever they had been doing to watch something.

Baranguet had Simi Fallsen by the hair and his pet whip – now disentangled from the sword Katla had stolen from the giant – in his hand. Three women lay in front of him, red welts on their bare arms. Of these, in the gloom, Katla could recognise only Kit Farsen, whose face was turned up pleadingly, tears washing cleaner tracks down her grime-engrained cheeks. The keening sound went on and on, then stopped abruptly as the whipman wrapped his fist one more turn around Simi’s lank brown locks and yanked hard. Simi was a big woman – taller than the whipman by several inches, and even wider across hip and shoulder – but his hard muscles showed in corded swells down both arms as he bore her down until her throat bowed backwards. A moment later there was a resounding crack, and Simi slumped to the deck at his feet, her head skewed at an unnatural angle.

‘By the Lord,’ Bera Rolfsen was heard to say.

Thin Hildi made the protective warding sign of Feya’s cradle.

Kit Farsen began to howl.

Baranguet laughed. ‘That one was very ugly,’ he announced to those assembled in the Old Tongue, his eyes alight with unholy glee. ‘And very noisy, too.’ He paused. ‘She must be descended from – what are those great ugly beasts you northern people believe in? That dwell in dark places, in caves and under bridges?’ He looked around. No one said a word. Ferociously, he kicked Kit Farsen hard on the arm. She shrieked and backed away from him, but he came after her. ‘What do you call these creatures?’ he persisted. He caught up to her, whip raised.

At once, Kit’s wail subsided into gulped sobs. ‘Tr-tr—’ She took a deep breath, then wailed again as the whip cut through the gloomy air with a whistling sound and landed with a crack, catching her across the face. Blood leapt out of the cut. Tears sprang from her eyes. ‘Tr-tr—’

Kit had always stammered when she was nervous. The boys had taunted her for it when she could not repeat her lessons, until Katla had punched them till they promised not to do it any more. Everyone was forever picking on little Kit Farsen.

‘Trolls!’ The word blasted out across the hold. ‘But there’s not a troll in all of Eyra as ugly as you. Your mother must have been a yeka and your father a warthog.’

His attention distracted from the shuddering creature at his feet, Baranguet turned to fix his basilisk gaze upon Katla Aransen.

Katla stared back at him, fierce with fury. There was no weapon in grabbing distance and nowhere to run. She stuck her chin out and waited. Why was she always fighting others’ battles for them? Halli would have warned her to keep quiet and seek an advantage, rather than rushing thoughtlessly into the breach. But she never seemed to learn. It was not even that she was friendly with little Kit Farsen, who was far too much a milksop to sustain Katla’s boisterous company for very long; and she had hardly known Simi Fallsen; but no one deserved to die so needlessly, nor be hurt for the entertainment of a sadistic brute. ‘You are a coward and a murderer,’ she growled. ‘May you burn in the fires of that bitch-goddess you call Falla.’

She put her fists up. It was, she had to admit, a pathetic gesture, but maybe if she could catch the tongues of the whip as it came at her, she could drag Baranguet off balance and that might at least give her a chance to run for a blade . . .

A few paces away from Katla, Baranguet cocked his head on one side and looked her up and down, clearly unimpressed. ‘Not much loss to us if you follow the ugly one. I can’t see you fetching much, anyway,’ he grinned unpleasantly. ‘Where I come from we like a girl with some flesh on her, not some skinny little fox’s runt.’ He raised his whip.

Katla ran at him, but it was an unequal and very swift contest. A moment later the many-tongued whip lashed out and though she caught two of the flails with one hand, the rest wrapped themselves tightly around her neck. Baranguet began to pull, and they tightened again. As she sank to her knees, gasping for breath, Katla heard her mother’s roar of protest, then the sound of a fist connecting with flesh and bone.

A blizzard of black snowflakes filled her vision; then everything went fuzzy and dark and she heard and saw nothing more.

Eight

Alisha

It was dawn when Alisha Skylark raised her head from the cold mud in which she lay, a chilly, grey dawn in which the sun made its presence known only by a bloody tinge to the easternmost clouds, as if it had little wish to examine the sights offered by the grim world below.

She was alive. She hurt, but she was alive.

For a few seconds a sharp buzz of elation revived her enough to look slowly from side to side, taking in her surroundings; then harsh reality overtook optimism. The dead lay all around, oozing out the last of their reluctant fluids into the cheerless air. Dead horses, dead men. All scattered across the ground as if some gigantic hand had reached down out of the sky, scooped them up, mashed them for a moment in its fist, then thrown them down again at random.
As if the gods were playing knucklebones with lives
, she thought.
We mean nothing to them, nothing at all
.

The Wandering folk believed that some measure of goodness was innate to everything, that every life had its own unique place in the world, that every person was a tiny, colourful stitch in Elda’s great tapestry; that the Three watched over all and together determined how such threads should be woven to make the most of every gift and skill, every act and outcome. But Alisha owed only half of her parentage to the gentle nomads: the other half came from a soldier who had raped her mother in the mountains where they had been ambushed. There had been rather too many times in her life when she thought she owed rather more than half her inherited traits to the former than to the latter. The nomadic people met every challenge with hope and cheer, believed the best of everyone they met, took each day as it came and gave little thought to the future. To Alisha’s mind, this made them impractical folk, vulnerable to the greedy, the exploitative and the violent; it meant they shored up nothing for the next day, had no thought at all of the days after that, and became everyone’s victim. She found herself a strange anomaly amongst these happy-go-lucky folk, constantly anxious, constantly looking for some control over her circumstances. It was a fruitless attitude, but it had meant that when her mother – the healer Fezack Starsinger, who had led the caravan for as many years as Alisha could remember – had died, the other members had at once looked to her to take the old woman’s place and lead them safely on their great journeys across the southern continent. How could they, who had no concept of responsibility, understand just how heavily this had weighed on her? Their expectation that all would be well she would have found daunting at the best of times; with persecution, hostility and distrust around even the safest-seeming corner in this intolerant, fanatical empire, the burden she found herself carrying was terrifying, absurd. Moving into her mother’s old wagon, with its symbolic stars-and-moon door and its shelves full of healer’s potions and scryer’s crystals, had made her anxious: worse, she had felt like an impostor, a charlatan claiming gifts and a history not her own. When she looked in a glass all she saw were the peculiarly light eyes and wiry red-brown hair of a woman who fitted into no clear social niche anywhere in this world. She hardly even seemed related to her own son, for Falo was the mirror image of his nomad father with his sharp, neat features, his dark skin and black eyes; his laughing carefree belief that if he fell, the world would catch him. If anything, his close fit with the Wanderers enhanced her own sense of alienation, excluded her further from their warm, tight mesh. And now even that link was severed. For Falo – beautiful, lively, gifted little Falo, who had barely seen out eight winters in the world – was gone from her, chopped down like sere grass by the careless back-hand sword-stroke of an Istrian soldier. The rest of her sadly depleted troupe had soon followed.

And she – Alisha Skylark, daughter of the most powerful scryer of all the Wandering Folk – had not even been able to see the faintest echo of this huge and cataclysmic event coming towards them, despite all the hours she had spent poring over her mother’s great crystal.

So much for responsibility; so much for anxiety; so much for control. So much for magic . . .

It would, Alisha admitted to herself now, in the midst of yet more carnage, be easy just to lie down and die and sever that last tenuous link with Elda. Indeed, for a long time she laid her head back down on the damp, churned earth and wept hot tears into it at the memory of her son’s terrible death, undeserved, unwished-for, untimely. She cried until no more tears would come and she felt entirely emptied out of all emotion, all individuality. Then she lay there and waited for oblivion to take her, but all that happened was that time passed and the sun rose higher, and vultures began descending from the skies and trees and settling on the battlefield. But as they set about their grisly feeding, Alisha found she could no longer wish herself into oblivion. It was impossible to close her ears to the sounds around her – the shrieking and ripping and tearing, the challenges of one carrion bird to another, the aggressive bluster of wings; so much greedy life among the dead.

Before she even knew what she had done, she was on her feet and yelling at the vultures, waving her arms, cursing in fury, and they were lifting in a great flurry of discontent and flying off to settle in their roosts to wait their chance to return for more delicacies once this annoyingly alive madwoman was herself dead.
We can outwait you
, their avid, beady eyes promised.
We will still be here when all other living things have passed into the fires
.

Alisha Skylark, returned in some measure to herself by this inimical challenge to her humanity, drew her eyes from the vultures and instead began to stare around at the battlefield. Even with their now-empty orbs gazing sightlessly into the hot air, she would have recognised many of those lying there, their uniforms soaked and stiffened by their bodily fluids, their limbs all contorted in their death-throes. She should, she considered, feel some satisfaction that the men who had dealt out barbaric deaths to her loved ones and then defiled her had themselves met with such a violent and ignominious fate. But she just felt hollowed out, barely even human.

She began to wander randomly about the place, examining each corpse she passed with a dispassionate eye. Some of the cadavers were those of men she did not recognise, men who wore a different uniform from those who had annihilated her caravan, and this puzzled her, until she scanned the scene with a more focused and curious intent, and realised that young Saro Vingo was not among the dead. From his absence she deduced the men had come for him, no doubt spurred on to their atrocious deeds by the likelihood of some generous bounty. She began to pace about now, searching for a sign to corroborate her theory. There were bodies all around – fifteen? Twenty? More? She could not bear to count, even if most of them were enemies, it was such a waste of life.

Her eyes scanned the scene, around and around, so that one detail blurred with another – a hand twisted, palm up, as if to implore mercy; a face with one eye shut and the other missing as if making an obscene wink at death; a man wearing odd boots; a horse’s teeth, yellow and attenuated, stained with blood. And then suddenly, a sharp stab of recognition.

Virelai, Virelai!

The strange pale man with whom she had shared so many intimate embraces, with whom she had at one time thought she might spend the rest of her life, lay maybe thirty paces away from where she stood near a tangle of carved-up men and beasts, his body contorted so that one arm was bent beneath him while the other was splayed out, and his knees were drawn up tight to his chest as if to ward off further attack.

Oh, Virelai . . .

Alisha’s heart began to hammer against her ribs. Each breath she drew transferred little shockwaves of pain through her entire body, a reminder – though she hardly needed it – that the essence of being alive was to be vulnerable to hurt. Some dried substance had matted in the long white hair near the nape of his neck, and a wound gaped at his temple, an awful bled-out grey. His head was twisted away from her, but she could still see how his eyes were screwed tightly closed, though his mouth was stretched wide in a savage grimace. A blow to the side of the head appeared to have brought about the sorcerer’s demise, a blow of disproportionate force, judging by the size of the wound, for it was hardly as if Virelai had ever been much of a physical threat to any man, let alone any armed soldier. That he should meet his death by such simple brutality, when he had been so superstitiously terrified of the demons his master’s curse would unleash upon him seemed pathetically ironic. And that he should be able to die at all, given his true nature, was further proof of the arbitrary nature of the universe.

Suddenly, Alisha found her well of tears had not entirely run dry.

Overcome by this new and unexpected grief, she let the tears fall as they would. For a while she watched them drop, one after another, onto the ground between her feet. At first they made a small puddle there, then began to seep away into the earth. She blinked and blinked, but they would not stop.