The Rose of the World (36 page)

The old man grimaced. Then he shrugged. ‘Well, I have that in hand. Though I wish now I hadn’t put his damned sword in the boat with you. It would have been fitting to give the boy that mighty weapon to deal death to the Warrior—’

Now Ilyina threw back her head and gave a full-throated laugh. ‘And I thought the fine sword was a gift you’d left me for our son – I even named the boy for it! But no, you filled that ridiculous ship with all those trinkets and treasures to make it look to any who found me like some ancient ship burial, rather than plain murder!’

‘Our son?’ Rahe looked thunderstruck.

‘Husband, there was not just one life at stake when you gave me the sleeping potion and sent me off into the mercy of the ocean’s embrace, but two. When I awoke, months later, it seemed I had crossed more seas than any alive now know to exist and my belly was as large as a whale’s!’

‘But—’ Rahe stammered. He frowned. ‘I hardly touched you in all those months after I first glimpsed the Goddess—’

‘Well, someone molested me in my sleep, then!’ the old woman declared huffily. ‘And that someone had your wild red hair, for the lad inherited it from his father, not from me!’

Rahe grimaced. ‘I was never very good with children, anyway.’

‘It didn’t stop you sowing your seed far and wide, though, did it? All those damaged children, with one eye, or overly long bones or second sight, or strange powers, or cursed longevity—’

‘They didn’t all have one eye,’ Rahe retorted defensively, forgetting he had always denied the illicit forays of which she now accused him. ‘Festrin did, yes; and Colm Red-hand; but some of them were very handsome.’

Old Ma’s eyes grew misty. ‘Ah, he was that, our Tam.’

‘Tam?’

‘Tam Fox: as fine a hero as ever strode Elda. In his time he’s killed dragons, scaled mountains, swum seas, crossed deserts, found untold treasures, defended the weak and fed the starving; and then what does he do? Instead of taking power into his hands, he gives it all up to become a mummer. Comes to me one day with the sword wrapped up and asks me to keep it for him, saying: “Mam, I am renouncing the ways of men: I shall travel the world making mock of their violence and folly, for Sirio knows that force of arms has availed me nothing.”’ She laughed. ‘He rather took against the Rose of Elda after I told him the tale of how you cast me off for her. His troupe made quite hilarious sport of her at the last Winterfest here, long gold hair of straw, great big tits and all—’

‘She doesn’t . . .’ Rahe’s voice trailed off as another thought struck him. ‘Then he knows I am his father?’ He looked suddenly aghast. ‘Why did he not come to seek me out in all these years – these centuries?’

Ilyina regarded him with a sardonic eye. ‘He was not overly eager to make your acquaintance. In fact, it is as well he put aside his warrior ways and entrusted his sword to me, for were he here now, I believe his anger would likely overcome his scruples and he might well demand satisfaction of you on behalf of his dear old mam.’

‘Where is he, then?’ Now Rahe was seriously alarmed. It was one thing to know his enemy trapped inside a volcano and many thousand miles distant; but it was quite another to have spawned such a dangerously disgruntled son, and one who seemed to have eluded his omniscience.

The old woman gave him a horrible yellow-toothed grin and tapped the side of her nose. ‘They thought he was dead, but I have seen him in my crystal—’

This explanation was interrupted by a terrible, keening cry.

Aran Aranson had discovered the fruits of his own folly.

The scrap of red fabric caught in the roots of the old hawthorn at Feya’s Cross almost stopped him in his tracks, for it was the same bright colour of the handfasting robe that Katla had worn at the Gathering; then logic caught up with his racing fears and reminded him the dress had long been lost. He had just quelled his beating heart when he rounded a corner and came upon a mouldering heap on the side of the path. Long yellow bones protruding through a dry mat of grey hair curled in on themselves to form a starkly elegant shape. An intricate arrangement of claws and paw bones hid the end of a familiar muzzle.

Ferg.

His heart pulsed so hard it felt as if it would break out of his ribs. Their beloved old hound had lain down here to die; and no one had bothered to bury his carcass. Now he knew something was terribly wrong.

It took him three minutes to sprint up the steep hillside, through the old plantation, across the sheep pasture, over the drystone wall, and into the homefield.

At first he did not notice the hastily raised mounds, the stacks of broken and discarded weapons, the strewn rags or scattered bones, for his gaze was riveted by the sight of the great hall of Rockfall itself, the steading he had renovated with his own hands, the home where he had loved his hard-won woman and where they had raised a family and guided the affairs of their retainers and allies, now unrecognisable. Proud and austere it stood, brooding and ruined, a blackened relief against a backdrop of pink-lit, snow-covered mountains: an eloquent reproach, an untimely reminder of his madness.

The ground felt suddenly unstable beneath his feet. Legs buckling, he came crashing to his knees. The shock of contact with the rock of his home unhinged something in his mind – whether it was the careful guards which he had himself placed on his thoughts, or the cloaking spell in which Rahe had wrapped his memories – and at last it all came flooding back to him: the Allfair, the map, the dream of gold, the loss of his son Halli on the return voyage from the raid on the Halbo shipyard, the making of the
Long Serpent
, the estrangement from his wife, the bad blood with which they had parted, the desperate expedition through the arctic seas and all its consequent disasters; and the realisation that in taking every able-bodied man out of the island on a mad, obsessive whim he had left his home and his family – all he truly cared about in this world – at the mercy of every unprincipled, bloodthirsty raider who could sail a boat or wield a weapon.

Now the details leapt out at him: the spent arrows, the fire-licked stones, the tumbled walls, the charred and collapsed turf roof. All these told the same inescapable story – of assault, resistance, a heroic stand; a tragic failure. Before him lay a mound bearing a knotted string which swung pendulously in the evening’s light onshore breeze. He did not have to move far to read the tale of those knots: ‘Here lies Hesta Rolfsen, giver of wisdom, brave of heart, dead of fire’.

He gave out an unearthly cry. It started as a low, guttural grunt of agony, rose in pitch to an agonised bellow, then broke the bounds of all humanity to become the howl of a broken animal.

Twenty-one

Afterwalkers

A continent away, another had breached the boundaries of humanity.

Alisha Skylark, astride a great black stallion, led a ragged army deep into the dead lands of the Bone Quarter. It did not matter to them that the sun beat down like a hammer on an anvil, that the sparse oases had run dry, that the scouring desert winds blew their freight of sand into dunes before them, revealing in their wake the rocky bones of Elda or the skeletons of the long deceased; it did not matter that wide-winged vultures circled curiously overhead or that monsters erupted out of the ground and fled before them: they were all beyond life here. But for the woman who had raised them it was a different matter.

Since she had brought Virelai back to himself with the power of the deathstone and wakened Night’s Harbinger in the midst of that scavengers’ feast, Alisha had reanimated soul after soul on her journey into the badlands. She had begun with her son, Falo.

It had been easy enough to retrace her steps back to the site of the vicious ambush by the Jetran bountymen, for it was as if something ineffable drew her south through the night and the day, something which obviated the need for navigation or a lodestone: and there by the river’s edge on that wide apron of soft grass beneath the trees she had found his corpse where she had seen him fall. These past weeks, in the heat and the damp of the glade, Falo’s body had not fared well. His skin was soft and mottled and swollen with the eggs of flies, and carrion birds had taken his eyes; his severed arm lay at a distance from the rest of his pathetic remains, its blackened fingers still curled around the wooden knobkerry with which he had attempted to defend her.

Driven beyond reason by grief, madness and the possession of the eldistan, she had knelt beside his noisome corpse and pressed the stone upon his forehead with a prayer to the life-force of the world, and in a blinding white light through which she could see only the black shadows of his bones knitting themselves together into some semblance of order up he had got; stiffly, mutely, but inexorably. He was still one-armed and blind, but the stone had gifted him with some kind of new skin accommodating neither maggots nor decay. He recognised her: of that she was sure, for he turned his head towards her when she spoke his name, inclining one grey ear delicately in her direction as if straining to catch the far tones of her voice; but it seemed that he would not speak, nor do anything unless she willed it. Her heart filled with a wildfire of scouring love which burned away the nagging questions. Her son was returned to her: that was all that mattered.

Then she had raised the rest of her erstwhile companions. One by one, the nomads had clambered to their feet – the two old men, followed by Elida and her sisters. Set in their new ashy skins their decorative piercings twinkled and rang; stones and beads rattled in their braids; feathers and scraps of coloured fabric swung jauntily as they moved.

From a distance they looked lively and energised. But up close an observer would have shied away from the emptiness of the dark eye sockets, the grimacing jaws, the clutching hands.

Driven by the one who had woken them, they walked without tiring, without food or sustenance, by the light of the moon or the pulverising heat of the day. But when Alisha took her attention from them they came to a halt in mid-stride and stood like puppets hung from a peg waiting for the puppetmaster to animate them again. Often, caught up in a prolonged daydream in which her mind slid sideways into blessed nothingness, stupefied by the sun and the swaying gait of the stallion, she would forget to drive them and turn to find them strung out one by one in the sands behind her in various stages of puzzlement and oblivion and would have to shoo them back into line, impress her will upon them, send them ahead so she could keep an eye on them.

South and further south they went, into lands long abandoned to the desert. They passed wells whose leather buckets had crumbled away to join the dust of the well bed a hundred feet below and Alisha brushed a little precious liquid from her last waterskin across her parched and blistered lips and clutched the saving eldistan tighter to her chest. They passed the tumbled-down walls of ancient dwellings outcropping like natural features from the dunes; they trudged through the demarcations of enclosures, stables, barns, grainhouses, all now awash in sand. They walked unknowing above the remnants of gorgeous mosaic pavements, bathhouses and arenas, through shards of pottery, the shattered bone remains of livestock and domestic pets, over once-cobbled streets and gardens, between the stumps of trees mummified by the blazing air. They passed fallen statues with their features eroded into blind and pitted planes and once, carved out of the soft rock of a great red sandstone cliff, a primitive depiction of the Goddess herself, age upon ages old, no more than a collection of squat spheres, a head, a full-breasted torso and a vast belly, the vestigial legs open wide across a dark chasm as if the figure were giving birth to the entire world. Alisha scanned that eyeless, pitiless, rose-red face and felt the deathstone pulse in her hand. The power inherent in the likeness lifted the hairs on her spine.

Twenty-two

The Pursuit

Bera Rolfsen had been despatched to the stronghold at Cantara, Fat Breta to some town in the Blue Woods; Thin Hildi and Leni Stelsen had been purchased by a merchant bound for Cera; Magla Felinsen by a brothelkeeper in Gibeon (which made her weep and wail fit to wake Sur himself, full fifty fathoms below the Northern Ocean); Kit Farsen and Forna Stensen had been taken by a man from Ixta who had made a sudden fortune selling ropes and rigging for the new fleet. Of Kitten Soronsen there had been no sign at all. Clearly the Lord of Forent had taken a liking to her; but Katla Aransen did not envy her that dubious honour one bit.

Neither was her own fate clear.

After the bitter humiliation of the slave-blocks, Katla had been bundled into the back of a closed wagon with eight other women, all Istrian. Some of them might also have been on the slave-blocks alongside her: in their uniform dark robes, it was hard to tell. For the first hour of the journey, she listened to them talking softly in their soft lilting voices, and after a while, worn out by the events of the past days and soothed by the sound of the women and the rhythmic swaying of the wagon, she put her head down and tried to sleep, there being nothing else she could do. She had never felt so tired, so defeated, so bereft of ideas.

Sleep came slowly. When it finally stole over her, it brought her a dream.

She was wandering through the streets of an unfamiliar city. Its walls were all of warm colours – ochre and pink and terracotta – and wells of dark shadow fell slanting between the houses. Cats lay in these shadows avoiding the sunlight; creatures not much like the sturdy farm cats of home, with their shaggy coats and tufted paws and ears, but sleek and tawny with long tails and faces as precise as axe heads, more like foxes than cats. They twined around her legs, and around those of her companion. She turned to smile at him and found that she could not see his face, for the hard light made it too luminous to focus upon. He took her hand in his own and drew her close to him, and she felt the contact as a buzzing of energy which ran up her arm and into her chest and skull. There, it met the surge of power which rose through the soles of her feet and filled her legs and torso with endless possibility and delight.