The Rose of the World (35 page)

Rockfall, white legs, Bera, Red Peak, Katla, earth-power . . .

Rockfall, pale skin, Bera, gold cave, Katla, the cat . . .

Rockfall, hot cunt, Bera, reborn, Katla, Dark One . . .

When the old man finally fell silent and dozed, Aran watched him and wondered whether that sliver of light below the eyelids meant the old man was still capable of observing him: for who knew how a wizard slept, or if he slept at all?

Rockfall, Bera, Katla.

An idea was skimming towards him through the fog in his mind. Like a ghostly tattered vessel, it parted the mists and sailed into clear view. He sat up straighter.

Rockfall, Bera, Katla.

Might he not tip the old man over the gunwale and have done with him? He could manage the craft alone, alone would probably make better speed. He shipped the oars and inched forward on his seat, and still the old man did not move. But when he tried to stand he found an invisible barrier between them. Down he sat once more. He stared out to sea, gathering his scattered thoughts, trying to recall how he had come to be here. He sat like that for an hour or more as the good wind pushed the vessel before it, salvaging odd fragments of memory – a sail whipping wildly in storm winds; a cloud of buzzing flies; white bones against silvered wood; a ship going down in the black water between plates of white ice; angry men’s faces; a snowbear with blood around its maw – and he shivered.

He had a sense that momentous things had happened, and that he was in some way responsible for them; but what they were, or why they had come about remained elusive. He set his jaw. All that mattered now was the future.

After a while a small island came into view. Aran stared at it, his memory jarred. The Navigator’s Star was at his back; the Leopard was rising to his right and the Dragon to his left: it was Whale Holm. He took up the oars again and carried on rowing: one more day at such speed would bring them not to Halbo, but to his home, his wife and his daughter.

It was late morning before the mage roused from his stupor. He came awake not like a man refreshed by a good night’s sleep, but more like a man surfacing from deep water, slowly and painfully, his eyes blinking against the light.

A gull skimmed overhead, its wail mournful. Aran smiled: he was in home waters now. In the small hours of the night he had navigated the vessel between Sundey and the Cullin Sey: it would not be long before he saw the stacks and cliffs of the Westman Isles. He could feel the draw of the land in his bones.

‘What makes you so happy?’ the Master asked suspiciously. He looked around at the ice-free water, the dancing, foam-topped waves. Then he closed his eyes and laid a palm against the vessel’s bare strakes. A moment later, his eyes snapped open. ‘You have altered our course!’ he accused. He leapt to his feet, too quickly, surely, for a man aged more than three centuries?

Aran gave him a straight look. In another world, his temper had been known to make men quail; but the old man was another matter. ‘I have,’ he admitted. He indicated a shadow on the far western horizon. ‘That is Rockfall, my home. We should reach it before sundown.’

The Master glared at him. How could he admit that the holding spell had failed? Offering weakness to such a one as sat opposite him was tantamount to handing him a weapon. Even though he was the most powerful mage in the world (which was probably not claiming much, given his current state) and the other a mere treasure-hunter, in truth they were just two men alone on an ocean in a small, unstable craft. It would not take a great deal for the other to unship him; besides, would it be such a disaster if the man was to see what was left of his home? Rahe had seen the devastation through the crystals in his viewing chamber. The shock of that discovery would likely break this obstinate man’s will, make him more malleable and less taxing to deal with. After all, he must reserve his powers for a time of real need. Which would surely come anon. He could not imagine that the King of the Northern Isles would give up his prize without a fight. At last he gave Aran Aranson a sly smile. ‘Well, then, we shall make a brief visit to your home, and see what hospitality awaits us there.’

Rockfall did not look ready to offer them much of a welcome, it seemed to Aran Aranson as their small craft rounded the Hound’s Tooth. There were no fishing boats bobbing at their moorings, no folk going about their business in the harbour, no smoke rising from the home fires which were usually kept burning all through the winter in these remote isles. He frowned, shaded his eyes.

Behind him, Rahe gave a secret smile. He reckoned they could be gone from here within an hour or two; at the very most by daybreak. He could picture the scene: he, magnanimous in his sympathy, would lead an unresisting Aran Aranson by the arm down the hill from his ruined steading. The erstwhile Master of Rockfall would be pale, nerveless, numb in body and spirit. To an onlooker it would seem an odd reversal: a frail old man guiding a powerful, virile man as tenderly as he might a lost child. He imagined this so clearly, it brought a tear to his eye.

Aran could no longer bear the tension. He grabbed up unnecessary oars, even though the craft was gliding with magic-filled sails, and started to row with frantic haste.

‘Calm yourself, dear boy,’ the mage urged gently. ‘Save your strength.’

But now a figure came into view; two. For a moment it was hard to make much sense of them, but as the vessel came in sight of the harbour wall they resolved into a tall old woman leading a goat on a string.

‘Old Ma,’ Aran breathed. A smile wreathed his face, sudden light breaking through thundercloud. All was well: if an elderly creature like Ma Hallasen could survive a hard winter with the men gone, someone must have looked after her and her beasts.

He shipped the oars, stood up and waved his arms. The craft rocked perilously. ‘Tell my wife I have returned!’ he cried as soon as they were within hailing range.

Even as he voiced the words, he knew something to be amiss. Something about Bera, about the way they had parted. Probably an argument. He dismissed this hazy anxiety. He and Bera were always exchanging hard words about something or other: she was that sort of woman, never satisfied to do what she was told, to see his point of view. Her contrariness had always attracted him: it was one of the things he most loved about her, even as it infuriated him to the point of madness. And their daughter was the same, if not worse. His smile broadened. His beloved Katla, most headstrong of daughters. Soon they would be trading words again and she would show him the latest artefact she had forged, a new pattern-weld, a refinement of a classic design.

And old Gramma Rolfsen, too: maker of the best yellow-cakes in Eyra, owner of the sharpest tongue and the pithiest wisdom.

Suddenly he was ravenous. Saliva flooded his mouth. His belly grumbled. When had he last eaten? Try as he might, he could not recall. A feast! They would break into the best of the winter stores and show the old man what true Rockfall hospitality meant. Bera was not always the most welcoming of hosts, he knew, especially to unbidden guests, or those rumoured to have magical powers. Guiltily, he remembered how she had tried to turn the seither away, and the whole sequence of bizarre events that had set in motion. Strangely though, even though the days and nights surrounding the mummers’ visit came clearly into focus, the logical end of the sequence eluded him: something to do with a voyage, something . . . wonderful . . .

But the old woman made no move to rouse the hall. She just stood there on the broad stone mole watching him. The goat watched, too, its golden slotted eyes unblinking. Then her gaze moved to his companion and he watched her expression change.

He did not know Old Ma Hallasen well; no one did really. She was mad, that much was acknowledged, and acquaintance was best left at that, if you valued your own sanity. But even so, he felt he could read her face as if he had known her intimately. There was anger there, fear too; but most of all a deep, deep loathing.

In eerie silence, the craft glided up to the seawall. There, it halted as if of its own accord. It did not nose into the stone with the old familiar grating sound he was so used to, from returning as a boy from fishing expeditions in a tiny skiff, to captaining his first sailed boat, to bringing a longship in to moor for the first time. There was no bustle with lines and cleats, no yells and joyful whoops; not even the barking of dear old Ferg, come to greet his master home. Aran Aranson shivered. He set his foot on the incut stairs, noting even as he did so that they had been left to grow slimy with green weed. No one had used this mooring for many a week, months, more? All at once he felt like a character in an old folk tale: the boy who fell asleep in a fairy ring and slept for a hundred years. Waking, he had found himself in another world to the one he had left, and all the folk he had loved long dead and gone. His heart broken, he had gone back to the fairies, as they had known he would do, and given up to them his life and soul, for he had no more use for them.

The old woman’s shadow fell over him. She had drawn herself up to her full height: she seemed impossibly tall. Behind the silhouette of her bony form, the sky was red as blood.

‘Aran Aranson,’ she said, and her voice was low and powerful, a long way from the reedy babble he remembered. ‘You are a luckless man. Seeking treasure, you sailed away; but greater treasure you left behind. Seeking fool’s gold you have lost true gold. Chasing after an impossible dream, you have forged your own doom. Thus it ever was with men.’ Her words reverberated in the air between them, and as she shifted her burning gaze to the man behind him, the Rockfaller felt dread settle in his chest, as cold as iron.

‘And you, Rahe Mage,’ the madwoman went on, ‘are no better, for all your genius. Tricks and flimflam, coloured dust thrown into the air to maze the eye, to mask the ugly greed and lust that lies behind the clever hand.’

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘You hoped I was dead.’

Aran stared at the vagrant woman, then at the sorcerer. All they had in common was their apparent age, and a sort of extravagant shabbiness that suggested a faded grandeur. There was some mystery here which was beyond strange: but it would have to wait. With Rahe’s attention fixed on the old woman, the holding spell evaporated and Aran Aranson ran up the slippery steps in two bounds, pushed past Ma Hallasen, overleapt her goat and dashed along the harbour, his boots echoing on the cobbles.

Rahe and Old Ma watched him go. There was some shadow of sympathy on the woman’s face, but the Master was impassive.

‘I saw the smoke in my crystals,’ he said at last. ‘I take it they’re all dead?’

‘Dead or taken, and no thanks to you.’

‘Me?’ Rahe turned injured eyes upon her.‘I can’t see how any of this is my fault.’

Ma Hallasen sighed. ‘Your sort never can. What do you think is likely to happen when you go and disturb the natural order of the world? Human nature is neither benevolent nor peaceable, left to itself.’ And when Rahe maintained his air of wounded innocence she put her hands on her hips and thrust her chin at him. ‘What I am saying,
husband
, is that if you will go and steal the soul of the world and use her magic and her body—’

‘I—’

‘Do not even think to deny it, for I know
exactly
why you had to have her, you with your failing powers both as a sorcerer
and
as a man. You are all the same, puffed up with ego and vanity and ready to sacrifice anything to make yourselves feel powerful again. So you set me adrift on the ocean, and off you go and steal the Rosa Eldi to make her your whore! And what happens? This!’ She gestured behind her with a fierce sweep of the hand. ‘Rapine and murder and disgrace. On a small scale, or a large, it is all the same in the end: remove the checks and balances which maintain Elda’s equilibrium and chaos ensues. It doesn’t take very long for humankind to drift back into their old ways: they make tribes, they fight one another, steal each other’s land, and set about doing it over and over again until there’s no one left to fight. Then they split into factions and it all starts again. And we women are picked up, used, bred from and cast aside as we get old. It’s the same in every world.

‘Yet Elda has a goddess, the Rose of the World, a woman with some real power to make things better, and what happens? A man – a sorcerer, supposedly wise and powerful in his own right and doing very nicely with a lovely kingdom of his own, and an exceptional wife – gets all carried away at the sight of a pretty – oh, all right, an
exquisite
– face, kills her husband, knocks her over the head and carries her off to his stronghold, abandoning his poor old wife along the way. At least you cast me off for a goddess, and not some brainless little chit. I suppose that’s some small consolation—’

Rahe said something indistinct.

‘What? Don’t mumble!’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ he enunciated sharply.

Old Ma Hallasen, intrigued now, sat down on the edge of the mole, her feet dangling, and gathered the goatling to her, so that it settled into the crook of her arm and began to gnaw contentedly at her sleeve. He noticed that she wore multicoloured, many-holed leggings beneath the eccentric layers of skirts, and a pair of slippers patched together out of a dozen bits of old tapestry. Rahe tucked his own ragged shoes beneath his robe: it was uncomfortable to see Ilyina again: they had always been too much alike.

‘So what did you do to him?’

‘I buried him under a mountain.’

She whistled then gave a great cackle. ‘Your skills must have improved after you tupped the poor girl! Under a mountain, eh? That’s impressive.’

‘Not just any mountain. The Red Peak.’

‘You buried the Warrior inside the Great Volcano? Then why is he not dead?’

Rahe shook his head. ‘I don’t know. He should be. I thought he was. Nothing can survive the heat of that thing: it’s the very furnace of Elda down there. But he’s not.’

The old woman’s eyes went big and round in mock horror. ‘If he’s not dead he’ll be trying to escape his prison. And when he does, then he’ll be wanting his wife back; and your guts for bootstraps! Oh, dear me: I wouldn’t be in your breeches, husband, not when Sirio comes looking for you.’