The Rose of the World (15 page)

Two camps were forming, for some of the other women went to sit down beside Kitten and Magla. They hugged their knees and glared obstinately at the Mistress of Rockfall – a woman renowned for her temper and her despotism – and her daughter, who was, they all knew, a wild hoyden, never happier than when involved in some dangerous and foolhardy venture and who had, for the Lord’s sake, slept with a mummer . . .

Unaware of their silent judgement of her, Katla sighed. Then she lurched down the tilting deck to where the second mast’s sail lay flapping in the ever-increasing offshore wind and with swift fingers detached two of the lines. These she then bound together with a sturdy double fisherman’s knot, then whipped the full length of rope into a coil, one end of which she passed around her waist and tied securely. Trembling with intent, she returned to the group of women; most of whom now sat passively waiting for some miracle to occur.

‘I’m going to try it,’ she announced. She attached the other end of the rope to a cleat, then beckoned to her mother. ‘If I don’t make it, you can haul my corpse back in, or cut the rope and let the fishes have me. If I do, you can make the crossing with the rope to hold onto. Even Magla – ’ she glared at the red-faced woman slumped on the deck ‘ – should be able to manage that.’

Bera nodded, though her face was ashen.

Then she addressed the big raider. ‘Can you swim?’ she asked.

He stared at her, frowning. She mimed her question, pointing to the land. He looked appalled, shook his head. ‘Ah well,’ Katla muttered. ‘Looks like I’m on my own.’

She made one more survey of the awful prospect ahead of her, heart thumping as if trying to escape the challenge by breaking free of her chest, then, before she could change her mind, she kicked off her boots, stepped up onto the steerboard gunwale and leapt off.

Before she had even had time to register the chill of the air which whistled past her, the sea had her deep in its embrace, and it wasn’t letting go. It was shockingly, cruelly, murderously cold. It made the marrow in her bones ache, her teeth chatter uncontrollably, her flesh go numb.
Winter
, she thought.
It’s even winter in Istria
. She hadn’t given much thought to that.
Better start swimming
.

She struck out in the direction in which she remembered seeing the shore, but for a long time the waves were too high to see over. Then at last one picked her up and carried her to its crest. What she saw made her heart sink. The line of rocks guarding the beach beyond looked unbroken, impregnable, the surf that dashed against this jagged barricade a uniform wall of angry white water. Then the wave she was on bore her down into a trough and she saw no more. On she swam, head down, arms fighting the sea’s resistance.

It was Halli who had taught her to swim when she was four years old. They were in White Stone Cove, and he had thrown her bodily off the rocks there and laughed as she rose to the surface bubbling like a farm cat and thrashing the water with all her might. ‘Like this,’ he had shown her, safe upon the shore, spreading his arms in graceful arcs. ‘And kick your feet.’ Then he had dived in, as graceful as a cormorant, and come up beside her as she went down for the second time. Two days later, she had been swimming as lithely as a seal. But that had been summer – an Eyran summer, yes; but still summer – and in a sheltered bay.

When the next big wave carried her up into the briny air, the shore was, however, far closer than she had expected. Details sprang into focus. The tidewrack lining the beach was very dark, almost black. Bladderwrack, most likely. It was all pebbles, pebbles and driftwood, rounded and smoothed by the rolling ocean. In contrast, the reef and cliffs which backed the beach were slanted and sharp, a glinting dark grey with great rows of sharks’ fins.
Slate
, she thought miserably.
Worst type of rock to get wrecked on; cut you to ribbons soon as look at you.

But even as despair set in, her head and fingers started to tingle. Something drew her, diagonally, to the left. Too tired to resist – or even question – the instinct, and too weak to maintain a steady breaststroke, Katla found herself paddling like a dog now. The tingling became an insistent buzz which travelled down her spine, radiated up into her skull. Exhausted, Katla gulped a mouthful of seawater, choked and sank, thrashing. A moment later she was somehow
above
herself, looking down on a sorry scrap of battered flesh at the mercy of the elements, its dark hair plastered flat to its scalp, its pale limbs flailing pathetically. She felt sorry for it; then nothing at all. The land was more interesting from this new perspective. Powerful and vibrant, humming with energies, it had endured for thousands upon thousands of years; would go on for thousands more, giving to and taking back from the sea in an eternal exchange of matter, each element nurturing the other. Millennia ago the cliffs had been a part of the great ocean, rocks from the northern wastes ground down to dust and held in suspension in the heart of the sea, to be laid down in minute layers, one upon another and another and another, compressed by the movements of vast plates of rock floating around the molten centre of Elda, crushed into solidity and shoved up into rucks and outcrops. Alternately sharpened and smoothed by the erosive powers of air and water, they were ever mutable, ever-changing, their forms part of the constant chaotic relationship between weather and world. And Katla, too, felt herself inherent in this never-ending stew of life, a tiny crystal of light and spirit held in trust between air, earth and water; a quickened atom of being who owed her existence to them all, and would at some not-too-distant point in time return her constituents to them. For now, though, they let her be; more, they offered her their essential natures, their configurations and their secrets till she was brimming with them and at last, weighed down by this new freight of knowledge, she fell back into her body again, now all cold and forlorn, stranded halfway between the land and a sinking ship.

But the knowledge was still with her. Fuelled by the generosity of Elda, Katla struck out once more with renewed strength and purpose. There was, she now knew, a small gap in the reef, a gap floored with sand and fringed with kelp. Two more big waves picked her up and drove her forward and she let them take her where they would. Then, with the buzzing suffusing her entire body she dived through the crashing rim of surf, down below the chaos into serene green depths, like a seal, like a seal. A few seconds later she had glided in between the dark fangs of rock on either side of the gap and was lying panting on the pebbled shore, waves lapping at her feet.

From the ship they saw a tiny figure skipping out a complex and compulsive victory dance, then waving madly at them.

‘She’s a marvel,’ Bera Rolfsen cried, breathing for what seemed the first time in an age.

‘Katla! Katla!’ the women shouted. ‘Well done, Katla!’

But Kitten Soronsen sat and glared. ‘I don’t know why you’re all celebrating. We’re here and she’s there. Who’s to say the draw of the tide won’t break our bodies on the rocks? Who’s to say the rope won’t break? Or that we won’t die of cold before we’re halfway there?’

At her words, several of the women quieted, suddenly sobered.

‘I’m not risking it,’ Kitten finished. ‘You lot can do as you please; but I’d rather trust to the Lady Feya and the Lord Sur than to any plan of Katla Aransen’s.’

‘Well,’ said Bera coldly, ‘you can stay here alone and go down with the ship. And be it on your own head; empty as it is.’ She pointedly turned her attention away from the blonde girl as if dismissing her from her thoughts, and shaded her eyes to watch Katla shinning up a rock to attach the rope around a rocky spike there. Even though it was now held up at either end, the middle of the rope dipped into the sea; but it was still the best lifeline available to them. ‘Come on,’ she said briskly to Kit Farsen, ‘you go first: you’re shivering. No point in getting any colder waiting around here.’

At the older woman’s bidding, Kit Farsen got to her feet a trifle unsteadily – she’d never been one to think much for herself – and allowed the Mistress of Rockfall to lead her to the steerboard gunwale. There, she quailed.

‘You have to jump in,’ Bera pointed out. ‘There’s no other way. Just grab the rope when you bob up again.’

Bera made it sound perfectly straightforward, but Kit baulked. The next thing she felt was a firm hand on her back, and then she was in the sea. ‘Feya save me!’ she wailed, before a wave crashed over her. A moment later she bobbed back up, disorientated and spluttering, her eyes out on stalks. Galvanised by her predicament, she kicked herself around in a circle, spotted the line hanging overhead and grabbed hold as if it was the only thing between salvation and chilly death; which, of course, it was. Then, without any further need for instruction, she hauled herself along it, hand over hand, through the churning waves, until she was through the surf, between the arms of the reef and safely on firm ground.

Amazed and filled with new hope, the women cheered; all but Kitten Soronsen, who had always hated to be proved wrong.

Then they followed, one by one by one: Thin Hildi, Fat Breta (who looked as if she surely must drown until she finally slumped ashore like a beached walrus), Forna Stensen, and the rest. Eventually there was only Bera, Kitten and the big Istrian left on deck.

Casto Agen made no move to save himself, so Bera took off her shoes and stepped to the gunwale. ‘Coming?’ she asked Kitten Soronsen.

But Kitten, eyes glinting with unshed tears, stuck her chin in the air and stared off into the wide grey sky.

With a shrug and a last glance at the statue-like raider, Bera Rolfsen stepped off into thin air.

She thought the cold would stop her heart: nothing had prepared her for the shock of it. She could not breathe, could not see for what seemed whole minutes. Then her head was up above the killing waves and she was sucking air into her lungs as if she could never get enough of it. Then she laid hold of the rope and dragged herself along it as fast as her frozen muscles would allow. Waves washed over her, pulling her down, but she never let go. ‘Thirty-eight, thirty-nine,’ went the mantra in her head. ‘Forty, forty-one . . .’ One for each bone-chilling haul. When she reached fifty-two, she found herself amongst the breakers and boiling surf; at fifty-five, her trailing feet stubbed against sand; at fifty-seven, her knees struck the ground, and then she stopped counting.

Immediately Katla was at her side, chafing her arms and legs. ‘Get up, Mother,’ she said urgently. ‘Get up and start walking or you’ll die of the cold.’

Bera sat upright. There in front of her spread out across the stony strand were the other survivors, all marching doggedly about like the remnants of some particularly doomed and tattered army, rubbing their thighs and stamping their feet for all they were worth.

She looked back to the
Rose of Cera
. From here the imminence of its demise was clear. It was nose-down, its stern sticking out of the water at a highly unnatural angle. There was no sign of Kitten Soronsen, nor of the big raider. Frowning, Bera shifted her gaze. About midway between ship and shore was a great splashing shape. The Istrian, it seemed, had decided to take his chances with the sea.

But as the titanic splashing which marked Casto Agen’s progress approached the shore it soon became apparent that the Istrian had not left Kitten to the fate she deserved: for there she was, clinging to his back, her face a perfect mask of fury. She couldn’t say she was happy to see Kitten Soronsen again, but Katla could not help but grin at the thought of the indelicate treatment she had endured in the course of this unwished-for rescue.

As soon as the raider cleared the surf, Kitten launched herself off his back and hared up the beach, meeting no one’s eye. Veering away from them all, she hurled herself down into the sand on the other side of the tideline and gave all her attention over to wringing out her hair and rags.

Katla turned to her mother, eyebrows raised; but it was Bera who spoke first. ‘Leave her be. There is already enough bad blood between you. Feya knows our situation won’t be helped by adding to it.’

Then, before Katla could protest that she had had no intention whatsoever of baiting Kitten further, Bera marched over to the big Istrian and said loudly and formally in the Old Tongue: ‘Thank you. It was good of you to grant my request.’ She bobbed her head at him in a particularly old-fashioned gesture, and then turned back to meet the questioning gaze of her daughter.

‘You asked him to bring Kitten Soronsen?’ Katla was aghast.

Bera shrugged. ‘I could hardly leave her to drown.’

‘It might have proved better for all of us if you had,’ Katla muttered indistinctly.

They spent a miserable night on the beach, which rendered up no shelter, food or water. Katla had been all for exploring their new surroundings but her mother had been adamant. ‘We stick together, those few of us who are left,’ she declared. ‘When the sun comes up, then we shall decide what to do.’

Katla couldn’t sleep. She could feel the cliffs pulling at her, just as she had felt Sur’s Castle calling her to climb when she first reached the Moonfell Plain. The rock in this southern continent tugged at her in ways she could not fully fathom, as if it were speaking to her in a foreign language in which she knew but a few words. But there was something urgent in its attraction, something elemental and strange. All night she seethed and fretted. And it was damned cold, too. Disliking most of her companions too much to put aside her pride and bed down with them for the warmth, she had made herself a hollow place in the sand, lined it with the drier of the bladderwrack and lain there, assailed by its rank and salty smell, watching the stars roll overhead, trying to ignore her various hurts and discomforts. If she looked north, back over the ocean, she could see the Navigator’s Star shining bright and constant, and she thought about her father and her twin and wondered where on Elda they might be now. Were they faring any better? She could not imagine they were any warmer, wherever they were; if indeed they were still alive. Which was but small consolation.