The Rose of the World (4 page)

Saro had retched and groaned inside the stifling confines of his bag, and had earned a clout across the shoulders for his troubles. Now, scanning the ravages of the battlefield, it appeared that those men were either dead or dying along with the rest of their troop. He grimaced. Less of their ilk on the face of Elda must surely be a blessing in itself.

A little distance away, Saro saw where the captain of the troop who had captured them lay moving feebly in a pool of his own blood, the handle of a knife sticking up out of his belly. Night’s Harbinger, the fine stallion Saro had stolen from Jetra’s stables to make his escape, lay nearby, his neck all hacked and gouged. At once, a red wash of anger raged inside him: no animal deserved such ill-treatment, let alone such a beauty as this one had been. Flashes of the race the stallion had won at the Allfair came rushing back at him, the race Tanto, his brother, had forced him to ride in order to win enough money for the settlement to buy his marriage to the Lord of Cantara’s daughter. Deprived of the daughter, now Tanto had wedded himself to the father, it seemed. Tycho Issian and Tanto Vingo: a truly unholy alliance! And yet their vile pairing had only just begun. Saro clenched and unclenched his fists like a man ready to take on the world.

What on Elda would they be capable of if either of them were to lay hands upon the deathstone?

The deathstone
. Even the possibility of Virelai’s death meant little in the face of this danger. He must find it; perhaps even use it to drive off the remaining militiamen, but even through his ebbing anger the thought of wielding it again was repugnant. He remembered with super-real clarity the guard who had fallen lifeless at his feet at the Allfair; the soldier he had seared from his horse in defence of the nomads. The coruscating detonation of the stone he remembered like a physical entity, a pain at the back of the eyeball, a vibration down the sternum, a weakness in the legs. The dead haunted his sleep; he had little wish to add to their number. Yet he knew it was better that a handful of men died here than a multitude perish in some future time as a result of his misplaced moral fastidiousness.

Steeling himself against cowardice, Saro squared his jaw. He shut his eyes and
listened
.

Even when they were separated, it seemed he could not be entirely free of the stone’s influence. The simple pendant he had been gifted with by the old moodstone seller had, with the touch of the White Woman – the Goddess, as he now knew her to be – become the most dangerous object in the world; and just as Tycho and his brother appeared to be wedded in some fateful union so, it seemed, he was paired with his own nemesis. His sense of relief when the death-stone had been taken from him by the soldiers had been short-lived; for although it no longer hung around his neck in its soft leather pouch, he had been able to
hear
it. It called to him by day and night, a thin keening which scraped at the bone on the inside of his scalp like nails on rock. No one else appeared to be aware of this vile sound: it was the stone’s love song and lament for him alone, a babe wailing for its parent.

He closed off the other sounds around him, opened his eyes and focused grimly. It took only a few seconds to locate the thin call, some way distant and to his left, moving slowly, backwards, forwards, sideways. The captain’s horse was an impressive bay with a fine arched neck and powerful chest, and just now it was stepping nervously out of the path of a grey with its rider dangling half-dead from its back. As soon as his gaze alighted upon the leather saddlebags it still carried, the noise in his head increased, became a buzzing as of many flies.

Saro closed the space between himself and the horse in a few short strides. The bay eyed him suspiciously and skittered away, eyes rolling. Knowing what would follow the action but making it anyway, Saro caught at the flailing bridle and laid a hand firmly on the beast’s neck. At once he was assailed by the horse’s experience of its world. Blood. Salty and sweet and tangy. Freshly shed blood, men’s blood. Horses’ too. Blood and churned earth, human shit. The reek of it clung to the roof of the mouth, making the tongue sticky and rough. The gelding wanted to flee, but could find no clear path in which the scent was not strong. Its skin crawled with apprehension; its heart beat wildly. Saro took his hand off the horse’s slick skin and in seconds the terror faded. The bay snorted and threw its head up, but it stopped its neurotic dance and its breathing came more steadily.

The deathstone was in the nearside saddlepack. He unlatched the buckle, felt inside. As if working the stone’s will rather than his own, his fingers closed around a wrapped package. He drew it out and peeled away the layers. There it was, in its nest of fabrics. Caged in silver wire, threaded on its leather thong, the moodstone looked like the trinket it once had been, the simple piece of jewellery he had thought to purchase as a gift for his mother. He closed his fingers over it convulsively and shuddered at the familiar dull vibration which travelled up his arm. But at least the noise had stilled. He breathed a deep sigh, somewhere between relief and resignation, and started to unwind the thong to replace the deathstone around his neck.

The next thing he knew, something sharp prodded him in the back.

‘Thought you’d do a little looting, did you, laddie?’

A dagger point was digging into his chest, held by a slabcheeked man whose eyes glinting balefully.

‘Gissit here!’ he insisted, gesturing with his chin at Saro’s hand, which had at the interruption closed instinctively into a fist.

‘You don’t want it,’ Saro said desperately. ‘Truly, you don’t.’

‘That’s for me to decide,’ the big man said, scowling.‘Open yer hand or lose it.’

Saro’s fingers unfurled like the petals of some lethal flower. The soldier stared at what he held there and his scowl deepened.

‘Bit of tat,’ he opined.

Saro smiled weakly.‘It is. Yes. Just a moodstone. Not worth much . . .’

The dagger bit deeper. ‘Even so,’ the man snarled, ‘it’s winner’s takings. Some gormless bugger’ll pay me a cantari or two for it. Gissit here!’ He snatched at the boy’s hand, but Saro’s reflexes were too slow to prevent what happened next.

As the soldier’s grip closed over the moodstone three things occurred with such apparent simultaneity that it would have been impossible to say which occurred first. The flesh of their two hands seemed to fuse; the stone glowed silver-white like metal heated to liquid; and Saro felt the man’s soul flee his body in a bewildered rush of regret and utmost terror. As his grip faltered and failed, the soldier’s eyes rolled up into his sockets and he dropped to his knees, his mouth stretched wide in a soundless rictus.

The moodstone, as grey and lifeless as the man it had killed, fell silently to the ground. Saro watched it tumble the few feet into the mud as if down the endless length of the most vertiginous cliff. He blinked: once, twice; wondered whether he would ever find the will to pick it up again. Then voices were shouting at him and rough hands spun him around. Two men: one was fat and grizzled; the other scrawny and pimpled. Both were garbed in boiled leather and chainmail; both had bloody swords.

‘That’s the one!’ the skinny one said.

‘What, him?’ The fat one was disbelieving. ‘He’s killed a hundred men and has to be approached with caution?’ He laughed. ‘That one couldn’t strangle a rabbit!’

‘No, it is: it’s Saro Vingo,’ Pimple declared hotly. ‘I seen him in Jetra with his family and his brother – you know, Tanto, the one in the wheeled chair.’

Fat Man looked ruminative, then a little anxious. ‘Get him quick, then,’ he said to his companion, taking a step back.

Pimple glared at him. ‘Lost the use of yer arms, have you?’ He turned his attention to Saro. ‘Put yer hands out,’ he said, brandishing his sword. Saro offered them slowly, and as he did so, he covered the moodstone as unobtrusively as he could with his left foot, then pressed down, treading it carefully into the muck. If he could just distract their attention for a moment or two . . .

Pimple lofted his blade and tucked it in under Saro’s throat. Then he undid his belt with his free hand, whipped it expertly around Saro’s wrists and pulled it tight. ‘Right,’ he said to the older man. ‘I’ll have the reward on this one, and you, you lazy git, can fuck right off.’

Fat Man snarled. ‘I saw him first.’

Pimple sneaked a look to left and right to see if anyone else had spotted his prize, but no one appeared to be looking in their direction. In one fast and fluid movement, he spun around. A powerfully driven and precisely placed elbow caught Saro just below the jaw, while with his forward lunge he landed the bloodied swordpoint deep in his companion’s belly. The Fat Man’s eyebrows shot up in sudden surprise, almost reaching his receding hairline. Then with a deep sigh, he sank to his knees.

Pimple let his sword arm drop along with the man. When his victim had stilled, he twisted the hilt with a flourish and ripped the blade upward. At once a great festoon of guts tumbled out over the steel in a noisome, steaming heap to land with a wet slither and slap around the older man’s feet. Fat Man looked sorrowfully. ‘You kept saying it was about time I lost some weight.’

Pimple wrinkled his nose at the horrible stench. ‘Faw! I said that hotpot at the Limping Cockerel was off,’ he opined; but the fat man had at last passed beyond any interest in his diet. The thin man placed his right foot on top of his fallen comrade’s, put his weight on it and levered his sword back out into the light. Then he cleaned the blade on the dead man’s tunic with fastidious care before resheathing it at his hip.

At last he turned to deal with his prisoner.

Four

The Kettle-girl

Katla Aransen had little chance to work her murderous fantasies. When the weather got rougher, the Istrians chained their captives’ feet as well as their hands and left the women to fend for themselves as best they could whilst they fought the elements aloft.

None of the crew appeared to be seasoned sailors, as was to be deduced from the desperate lurchings of the ship as great waves broadsided her, or from the shouts of panic as water crashed down and timbers splintered. Katla itched to be up on deck, trimming the sail and angling the bow into the pitch of the waves. She loved a storm; but only if she could see something of it. Down here it was as dark as sin, and what had already been an oppressive prison now became a reeking pit, filled with a more noisome stench than she could ever have imagined could be created by a dozen women of good Eyran stock. Less, now. A dozen of them had been taken from Rockfall but only ten of them were left: Katla and her mother, Magla, Kitten, Hildi and Breta; Simi Fallsen, a big dark girl from the north of the island who’d had the misfortune to be visiting the steading at just the wrong time, her friend, Leni Stelsen and the cousins, Forna Stensen and Kit Farsen. The other two had died, either from the wounds they had taken or from sheer terror. And it would be a miracle if the others didn’t follow.

They had no dignity, and little humanity, left to them. Some had lost all or most of their clothing as the raiders manhandled them down to the shore. Some had been raped, before Galo Bastido had stopped his men from further damaging his potentially valuable goods. Some ranted; others hunched silently, curled in on themselves, giving way to misery and death. They all sat or lay in their own filth. Many had been seasick and were now too weak, or too empty, even to vomit. It had been four days since they had had any food other than bread so hard Thin Hildi had broken a tooth on it, three since the Istrians had brought them fresh water. Katla suspected the raiders had miscalculated their supplies; or maybe they had meant only to capture the shipmaker, and the women had merely been a bonus cargo. They had been at sea for sixteen days; so she reckoned they were either lost or were heading farther down the Istrian coast than she had expected. She thought about what she knew of the southern continent, which was not much. The men of the north charted only their own waters – sketchy, diagrammatic scribbles with rough charcoal on cured lambskin, showing treacherous reefs, safe channels and fast currents; where fish shoaled in spring, where ships had been wrecked; the best passage for Halbo’s harbour, or the rich fishing waters around the Fair Isles. So she had never seen a map of the enemy’s lands, not even of how to reach the Moonfell Plain where the annual Allfair was held: the route for that sailing was a piece of near-legendary nautical wisdom passed from father to son and uncle to nephew down the male line of Eyran families. And although she had travelled with her own family to the Allfair the previous year, she knew only that the Moonfell Plain stuck out into the Northern Ocean like a thumb of land, and that beyond its ashy volcanic wastes, mountains rose to the south and a great sweep of coastline curled away out of sight to the east and the Istrian mainland. Where this ramshackle vessel and its pirate crew might be headed, she had little idea, other than the mention of the word ‘Forent’, which appeared, from the context in which it had been used, to be a port city and the centre of the south’s incipient shipbuilding industry. She deduced from this that Forent must be their destination. They had certainly gone to a great deal of trouble to lay hands on Morten Danson: now he would surely be pressed into service to make ships for the Istrian war against her people. If the vile little vessel they were on was the best the wrights of the Southern Empire could produce, it was no wonder they had been forced to sail all the way to Rockfall to find themselves a half-decent shipmaker.

And what of her own fate, and that of her companions? Weak as they were from sickness and lack of sustenance, death and disease could not be far away. They were hardly going to be an enticing sight by the time they made landfall, if they ever did. She looked around through the murk of the hold. Even the prettiest of them, Kitten Soronsen, looked about as alluring as a leprous beggar, with her glorious pale hair lying lank and dirty over her shit-stained shift and her face all red and swollen. Bera, already a gaunt woman, looked as thin as one of Old Ma Hallasen’s cats; even Magla Felinsen, with her loud mouth and capacious bosom, was greatly reduced. Their captors were going to have some work to do to make them presentable enough to fetch more than a cantari or two, Katla thought with a certain grim satisfaction. They might go as slaves; but as whores? Any man desperate enough to desire any of them would have to be as blind as a mole and possessed of no sense of smell – even their captors had stopped pawing at them.