The Rose of the World (41 page)

Ilyina smiled to herself. She knew her husband too well. He would be away from here in pursuit of the golden one as fast as he could, were his navigator awake and in any state to wield an oar. She was enjoying the subtle torture of delay she was inflicting on him. In the pretence of checking on the Eyran’s health, she bent over his pallet and ran a hand across his forehead.

‘How is it with you, Aran Aranson?’ she said softly, while her fingers tied privy knots in his hair that would bind him to sleep for another week at least. She had a promise to extract from Rahe before she would allow him to leave, but he was not yet sufficiently worn down by frustration that he would agree to it. Another week or so should do it, she reckoned. He had never been a patient man, the Master, despite the longevity of their kind, nor did he seem to be improving with age.

Make no move till I have smelled you well.

The voice rumbled in his head, inescapable as death, and so he stood stock-still, barely daring to breathe. To be all but naked in this fearsome place was grim enough; but now to suffer the perilous attentions of this fanged creature seemed a trial too far after the many hard miles he had travelled.

I know your scent . . .

A tenebrous shape prowled about him. Lit by a hunter’s moon, its vast muzzle quivered with curiosity and its vast amber eyes seemed to whirl in the darkness, as if the beast was sifting through all the scent-related information it had ever gleaned.

You smell like him, but you are not him,
it said at last into his mind.
Which is as well. For if you had been him, I would have had to eat your head.

There followed a brief pause, a lull before violence. Then there came another great rumbling which set his skull aquiver, made his heart beat fast and his legs tense for evasion, until he realised that the sound was not a growl which signalled murder, but the monster enjoying some private amusement.

In all his long life, he had not realised that cats had a sense of humour.

It did not make him feel any easier about his new companion.

Twenty-five

Invasion fleet

Rui Finco gripped the gunwale and stared out into unrelieved grey. Grey sky; row after row of grey waves, rolling relentlessly to a grey horizon. His expression was intent, his knuckles white. Not from fear of the unknown, for he had crossed this ocean before; not from seasickness, for he did not seem to suffer. No, his tension was caused by embarrassment at the scene which had played itself out on the quay the previous day, and from a certain fury at his own shortcomings.

He had, he had to admit, given too little thought to the practicalities of the voyage, too much to the wished-for outcome. He had visited the Forent shipyards only once in all the long weeks during which Morten Danson had been overseeing the construction of the invasion fleet, and that had been early in the process, when the ships were little more than curved, bare keels. He had nodded sagely, admiring the clean lines of the wood, the workmanship of the labourers, but his mind had been on other things. Dreams of grandeur and riches; dreams of power.

So when he had walked the length of the dock with the Eyran shipmaker yesterday in preparation for the embarkation, he had asked a very stupid question. ‘Where is my flagship?’ he had demanded brusquely, his eyes flickering dismissively over the troop-ships with their open rowing-benches and stacked crates of weaponry.

‘Why, here, my lord,’ Morten Danson had replied proudly. His extended hand indicated a longship, fine of prow, proud of line and entirely devoid of shelter or any sign of comfort.

‘That?’ He had stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth gaping. ‘Where are the cabins? Is there more of the vessel below the waterline that I cannot see?’

Twenty years ago, during the last war with the Northern Isles, he had crossed the sea in a vessel of solid, old-fashioned Istrian design, a three-decker galley with two hundred slaves chained to their oar-benches in the deepest compartment and the outer parts of the second deck around the comfortably appointed sleeping-quarters, chartroom and well-stocked kitchen used by the nobles and their officers. Only the lowliest members of the crew spent their time above decks in the teeth of the weather.

But unfortunately such vessels were constructed solely for bombast and close-range bullying: as serious ocean-going warships they were useless. Unstable in any but a mild sea, unmanoeuvrable in all but the widest and deepest of channels, the majority of the fleet had foundered before even reaching their destination.

Which was why he had gone to the trouble of acquiring a master craftsman from the Northern Isles to design a fleet which would weather the heavy seas of the crossing. Beyond that, imagination had failed him. And so he had not considered such things as living quarters and other quotidian matters.

‘I can’t sail an ocean in that! Where will I sleep? How shall I have any privacy? Besides – ’ as the true implications struck him – ‘I’ll be soaked, frozen!’

Morten Danson turned a bemused face to him. ‘The ship is what it is, my lord: one of the finest examples of my craft I could create under the time constraints. This is how the men of my country travel, both king and commoner—’ His eyes widened suddenly.

The Lord of Forent had turned to discover what had attracted the man’s attention, and found a long snake of servants making their way down the cobbled streets from the castle bearing all manner of goods with them. In their vanguard, six stumbling slaves struggled with a vast four-poster bed, complete with swaying silk hangings and a mound of coverlets.

Behind the Istrian lord, a bark of laughter was unsuccessfully stifled. Rui Finco had whirled around, his face accusing. Morten Danson amended his expression swiftly. ‘The men of Eyra will sometimes – if the weather is particularly bad, or if a lady is brought aboard – erect a tent for shelter. But usually they prefer to sail light and to sleep in bags made from sealskin sewn into a walrus hide—’

‘Seal? Walrus? We have no such creatures in the Southern Continent!’

The shipmaker looked thoughtful. ‘A sleeping roll made from bearskin or sheepskin would be warm, my lord.’ He paused. ‘If not particularly waterproof.’

Rui Finco groaned. He waved the stumbling servants away. ‘Take it all back to the castle, you fools. What place is there for such luxuries on a ship like this? Imbeciles!’

He caught Morten Danson by the upper arm and his fingers tightened mercilessly. ‘One word of this to anyone and your head shall adorn my prow,’ he warned. ‘Now go and sort out a tent for myself and another for the Lord of Cantara. The men will have fend for themselves. And you’d better do the same for each of the other ships’ captains, or there’ll probably be a mutiny.’

Now, he turned back from the rolling waves and surveyed his rolling ship. The sail was full: it sped along the tops of the waves like a mountain goat. He had to give the ship-maker credit for that, at least. Beyond their creamy wake, the rest of the fleet trailed away into the vanishing point. For the first time since the intense embarrassment of that scene on the dock, Rui Finco felt his heart swell with pride. Here he was, master of his own fate, leading an invasion force by craft and stealth into Eyra to avenge his family’s long-lost honour. He took in the leather tent in which he had smuggled on board his bundle of silk and wool covers, some wine, a lamp and his stack of diagrams and charts, and summoned a smile. He, at least, would be enjoying some measure of comfort on this voyage. Unlike the poor bastard amidships, heaving his guts up over the side. Grinning, now, he left the command of the vessel with his sea captain and sought a retreat beneath the leather shelter.

The ‘poor bastard’ was Virelai, who was finding the motion of the ship impossible to bear. It was strange, he thought, in a rare lucid moment between heavings, that he had not experienced this torture on his escape from Sanctuary in that tiny sloop, which had been even more at the mercy of the waves than was this great ship. He had already wished himself dead a hundred times since they had set sail the previous day. He who had rarely experienced physical extremes of any kind in his short existence was now subject to all-consuming nauseas, thumping headaches and tooth-grinding stomach gripes. He had never felt so mortal; not even when subjected to Tycho Issian’s attentions in Jetra’s dungeons.

The Lord of Cantara had had him racked in his quest for the killing-stone the dead stranger had spoken of. Tycho had obviously had a low opinion of his courage and willpower: for after only two hours of torture, during which Virelai had let his mind unfetter itself as his body could not and produced for the entertainment of the southern lord snippets of the songs with which Alisha Skylark had sung little Falo to sleep, lists of herbs, and the names of every yeka and the nomad with whom the sorcerer had ever travelled – all of which was as close to telling his torturer the whereabouts of the deathstone as he dared – Tycho Issian had given up and released him from the bonds without doing him any further damage. Had the Lord of Cantara owned any subtlety, he might have deduced some warped logic in all these ramblings, but the man was so obsessed, so impatient, that he simply could not be bothered to give it any thought, and had decided that the sorcerer knew nothing, that the stranger had been raving, and that Saro had brained him out of sheer personal loathing.

Virelai, in the relative safety of his chamber that last night in the Eternal City, with his arms and legs regaining their sensation in the most painful manner possible after blessed numbness, had been surprised by his fortitude in not giving away what he knew. He had, over the days which followed, congratulated himself on his loyalty to Saro and to Alisha, for all her madness, on his integrity and his strength: never qualities he had considered that he owned. And then – just as he was getting used to seeing himself in this more flattering light – he had found himself in the middle of an ocean on this vile, pitching ship, throwing his new-found pride up over the side along with his lunch, his breakfast and yesterday’s dinner.

‘I tell you, it should be me who fetches her out, not you!’

The Lord of Cantara was puce in the face now, a colour evident even in the unsteady light of the guttering candle. He had pushed his way into the Lord of Forent’s private shelter without any query or acknowledgement and demanded to be the first to set foot on foreign soil.

When Rui Finco had explained, with considerable care and patience, that the first part of his plan required only himself and Erol Bardson, Tycho Issian had erupted.

‘You mean to take her for yourself! I know it, I know it! You want to steal her and fuck her, right under my nose!’

Quieting him down without demolishing the makeshift tent had required determined effort, followed by a sharp, breath-stealing punch under the ribs. At this, the Lord of Cantara had subsided into all the lush bedding, where he had stared around, still wordless from lack of air, with growing suspicion, taking in the other man’s fine clothing, the elegant silver circlet with which he held back his long dark hair, and the extravagant surroundings.

Finally he accused: ‘If you do not mean to have her, then why all this luxury?’

It was a fair sneer; but Rui Finco was neither a fair nor patient man. ‘Look at you!’ he returned. ‘This is a mission which requires stealth and secrecy, not hot blood and irrationality. Given one glimpse of the lady in question you would surely be lost to carnal appetite, and then where would we be? Our heads must rule our hearts – and all other bodily aspects – or this whole venture will come to naught. Besides I have been to Halbo before and have some knowledge of its geography—’

He did not add that this single occasion had been twenty years before when taken prisoner by King Ashar Stenson himself, only to be released when – to avoid the fate of the other lord and their sons (that of being quartered and flung to the four winds by the Eyran king’s infernal machine) – he had ignobly claimed to be a common seaman pressed into service with the Istrian navy, and set free on one of the few surviving ships to carry a message to the southern empire.

‘And I by one means or another extracted from the Lord of Broadfell certain intelligence on the subject of the secret ways into the northern capital. Further duplication of such labour and effort would be pointless indeed; besides, I am not entirely sure you are pretty enough to persuade his lordship to divulge his hard-won information to you.

‘But I promise I shall hand the Rose of the World into your care as soon as ever I can. I have no interest in her myself. None at all.’

‘You swear you will not lay a finger on her?’

‘I swear.’

‘By all that is holy? By the Lady Falla herself.’

‘By Falla’s fiery cunt, I swear it.’

Tycho Issian regarded him furiously. ‘Take that back, blasphemer!’

Rui Finco raised an eyebrow. ‘The entire oath?’

Gritting his teeth, the Lord of Cantara flung himself upright and bundled his way out of the tent with such violence it seemed he would take the whole structure with him.

‘Given my antipathy for sorcerers, you may wonder why I insisted on your presence aboard this vessel.’

Desperately nauseated, Virelai dared not open his mouth to answer the Lord of Forent for fear of what might spew out of it if he did. Instead, he bobbed an assent and tried hard to look as if he was interested in what the man had to say.

Rui Finco stuck his head swiftly out of the doorflap, satisfied himself that the crew were otherwise occupied, then ducked back in and secured the fastening. He turned up the wick on the lamp. Instantly, it seemed, the air inside the tent became close and warm. Virelai’s head swam.

‘I gather from the Lord of Cantara’s reports that your skills have improved considerably since our last encounter.’

Virelai looked even more uncomfortable, if that were possible.

Rui Finco watched him closely, his black eyes narrow with calculation. ‘I have heard that you have perfected your ability to . . . change the nature of things . . . even people.’ Head on one side, he waited for the sorcerer’s response.