The Rose of the World (50 page)

Saro had no answer to that, for Katla or for himself. He felt stupid, lethal; irredeemably responsible.

He tried to let the sway of the mule stay his thoughts; but no matter how much he hated himself, he survived: he ate what food he was given, drank water, continued to breathe; and when he slept, the nightmares came. But despite it all, it seemed that the Goddess must have some requirement of him, that she was so stubborn in keeping his shade on this side of her fires.

One night the hillman came over to where their prisoner was tied and took the gag from Saro’s mouth.

‘Katla has just told me exactly why it was that you killed her kinsman,’ he said softly.

Saro hung his head. ‘I am worse than a fool,’ he tried to say, but his mouth and throat were parched.

Persoa untied Saro’s bindings, then took the stopper from his waterskin and held it out to the lad. ‘Drink as much as you wish,’ he offered kindly, ‘there’s more where that came from.’

Saro swigged until his belly felt fit to burst. Then he looked about. ‘Not around here,’ he said, frowning. All that could be seen in any direction were thorn bushes silvered by moonlight, dry sand, gritty soil: a half-dead landscape rendered more lifeless still by night’s harsh monotones.

The hillman smiled.‘It’s further underground than it would usually run, but I can divine it. Like this.’ He squatted, laid the palm of one hand flat upon the ground and cocked his head consideringly. Then he came upright again, grinning, his teeth startlingly white in the darkness of his face. ‘Over there,’ he said, gesturing south and east, ‘maybe half a mile; there is a spring running below the limestone.’

Saro regarded him askance. ‘How can you know that?’

‘I am eldianna,’ the hillman explained, and watched as Saro’s eyes became round with surprise.

‘I thought they existed only in the old tales,’ he said. ‘The legends of the south.’

Persoa shrugged. ‘It is an ancient skill, that is true.’ He lifted his head for a moment as if listening to something far away, then came and sat down close to Saro, his long legs folded neatly. ‘I understand why you killed poor Erno,’ he said at last. ‘To stop him speaking of a great and dangerous mystery.’

‘I should have killed the Lord of Cantara,’ Saro said, his jaw clenched with shame. ‘But I panicked.’

‘You killed him to stop him speaking of a deathstone.’

Saro nodded. ‘Katla thinks me mad. She will not listen to me.’

Persoa took one of the lad’s hands and pressed it between his own and Saro felt a jolt of energy fly up his arm, followed by a suffusion of heat and a strong sense of well-being. The touch of the hillman, instead of filling him with the usual torrent of intrusive images and unpleasant insights, offered him the vision of a still pond, clear and calm, an oasis in a troubled world. ‘I do not think you mad,’ the eldianna said, ‘for my people know of the existence of deathstones and what they may do. Tell me what you know and I promise I will listen to every word and then trade you my own knowledge.’

And so, with the cool night breeze whispering through the thorns, Saro Vingo told the hillman of all he knew – of the moodstone which had come to him in such violent circumstances at the Allfair; of the unwanted gift of empathy which had accompanied it; how the thing had come to lethal life in his hands when the pale woman had touched it and how he had killed without thought by wielding the stone; how he had discovered the real identity of the pale woman from the nomads with whom he travelled; how one of those nomads had taken the stone when it had fallen in the skirmish and used it on his friend, the sorcerer Virelai, who was now such a changed man. Then he told him how the Lord of Cantara was so wrapped by lustful obsession that he sought to take the Goddess as his own; how he had engineered a holy war to steal her back from the North, which was ironic in the extreme, given that the man had no knowledge of her true nature; and then, with his eyes averted and his voice hoarse with horror, he told the eldianna of the terrible vision which had overtaken him in Jetra’s Star Chamber when the lord had clutched his shoulder – of Tycho Issian wielding the murderous rays of the deathstone against a milling, screaming horde; and how he knew that this devastation was but a beginning, for the man was deathly and mad, and would suffer no living thing to survive if it stood in his way.

Through all this, the hillman said not a word. His dark eyes scanned Saro’s face earnestly and with such an expression of acceptance and understanding that by the end of his account, Saro could not help but sob like a child forgiven an all-consuming misdemeanour.

‘Not all such visions are true sight, my friend; some show the worst possible future. But I understand why you did what you did.’

‘When Erno offered to tell him where it might be found, all I could think was to shut him up—’

‘And so you bashed his head in with a paperweight.’

Katla Aransen materialised between the stunted trees as if detaching herself seamlessly from one of their gnarled branches.

‘Katla, Katla,’ the eldianna said admonishingly.‘You are too rigid, too judgemental: you should acquire some tolerance.’

‘Tolerance! Tolerance is what allows our enemies to murder our own and get away with it. Tolerance lets them take our land and enslave our women.’ She thrust out a belligerent jaw. ‘You say I should be tolerant; but the Empire has no understanding of tolerance – it burns those who disagree with its stupid religion or any who don’t fit in with its laws or its society. Cold iron is all that Istrians understand, and that I can provide them with.’

Her sword was halfway out of its sheath. Saro cringed.

Instead of leaping to his feet to ward off whatever unpredictable violence might flare up, Persoa offered Katla his angular, lopsided grin. Then he reached out and touched her arm, gestured for her to sit down. Remarkably, she released the sword’s hilt and sat, though she watched them both with suspicious eyes.

‘I know what you are thinking,’ Persoa said easily. ‘That in truth we are both Istrians, Saro Vingo and myself; both tainted by centuries of bloody warfare with your people and by the worship of a deity very different to your own. You think we may be in league, no?’

Katla shrugged. She looked sullen, a girl bored by a school lesson. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

The hillman inclined his head.‘That is always a good place to start.’

‘What I do know is that he killed my cousin, for no good reason.’

‘I am sorry—’ Saro started, but Persoa waved a hand to curtail the apology.

‘What is a “good” reason to kill, Katla Aransen?’

Katla laughed. ‘You, a paid assassin, ask me this?’

The hillman grimaced. ‘I am good at killing, that is true; but I am not proud of that skill. Maybe my long proximity to death has made me more aware of the cost of taking a life. Tell me, Katla, how many have you killed?’

‘Twelve men,’ Katla said proudly and without hesitation. She’d kept count. ‘If you include the guard whose arm I took off in the lord’s chamber. Can’t imagine he survived that.’

‘Twelve men. And what have you learned from those deaths?’

‘That a dead enemy does not rise. And the more of them you kill, the fewer of them there are to do you or your family harm.’

Persoa’s mouth pursed, but he made no retort. Instead, he turned to Saro. ‘And you, Saro Vingo. How many deaths are there to your name?’

Saro paled. Tears sprang to his eyes. He bowed his head, ashamed that the bold northern girl should see him so affected. ‘Six men,’ he said quietly. ‘Including my own brother.’

Katla’s eyebrows shot up. She remembered his braggart brother mauling her knives at her stall. ‘Well, that’s no great loss,’ she snorted. ‘Still, six men, that’s not bad for a milksop like you. What did you use, poison?’

Saro’s head came up sharply. Eyes which glittered silver in the moonlight fixed her with a fierce, if damp, stare. ‘One you saw me kill with iron; one, I will not speak of; four died from the power of the deathstone I told you about, three of those as I tried to save you from the pyres.’

‘What?’

‘They got in the way. I thrust the stone at them unthinking. I had no idea it would kill them: all I could think was that they were going to burn you unless I could reach you first.’

Katla looked away now, not knowing how to respond to this new information, which ran so contrary to her own memory of events; besides, how could you kill anyone by touching them with a little stone? Sharp iron was another matter. How she itched to be away from all this, in her own forge, doing what she knew best.

Persoa stared intently at the lad. ‘You risked your soul,’ he said.

‘And how many have you killed?’ Saro asked bitterly.

‘One hundred and ninety-three men, and four women.’

‘So how’s your soul, then?’

‘I have killed for many reasons: in self-defence, in hatred and out of compassion,’ the hillman admitted. ‘But mainly I have killed for money, for the skill I have in taking a life swiftly. I dedicate each death to Elda. The Lady must weigh my soul when I walk through her fires. I think it is feather-light by now and I am not proud of that.

‘But you are two young people whose souls are not yet beyond redemption.’ Persoa glanced at Saro and then at Katla: both looked thoroughly unconvinced. He rubbed a hand across his face. ‘I am no orator or bard,’ he said at last. ‘And people are happier to listen to a song of war than a song of peace; but I ask you to hear me out.

‘For centuries your people have fought one another, northman against southerner, each time heaping aggravation upon aggravation. But in all that time, their weapons have been crude and limited in effect. Now a new element has entered Elda, and it is growing in strength day by day; for a deathstone draws its power not only from the hand which wields it, but also from the life-force it takes, or that which it drags back; and someone has been wielding it often of late: soon its power will be devastating. Already, the balance of the world is out of kilter, for hate far outweighs compassion as its people prepare to go to war again. If the Lord of Cantara lays hands upon this stone and uses it as a weapon, the destruction will be unimaginable, and soon there will be nothing left on Elda but hatred and despair.

‘So I ask you, Katla Aransen, not to add to the burden of hatred which drags us all down into darkness. Saro did not kill your kinsman for no reason: he did it in an excess of terror, not for himself, but for the world, and though his aim may have been displaced, his intention was not. Katla, forgive him for this death.’

Several seconds of silence stretched awkwardly between them. Then, instead of answering the hillman’s plea, the Eyran girl looked squarely at Saro. ‘Did you really try to save me at the Allfair? I thought you were ploughing your way through the mob to kill me.’

There was an expression on her face which Saro had not seen before. Even so, he held her searching gaze steadily.

‘I tried to reach you, but I failed. The men I killed got in my way: saving you was my only thought. I did not mean to kill them.’ He paused, his face a mask of anguish.‘I thought you were dead, all this time—’

‘You risked your life for me.’

It was a simple statement of fact. Saro nodded, suddenly out of words.

Katla gazed away over his head and seemed to mull this over for a long time. No one said anything. At last, she sighed.

‘Erno’s death is not mine to forgive, but his own. You should ask forgiveness of him, not me,’ she said stiffly. Then she braced her hands on her knees and rose, joints cracking. It looked as though she might say something more, but then she shook her head and strode away into the darkness, wrapped in thought.

Saro watched her go, his eyes full of misery. The hillman patted him on the arm. ‘She is proud and her people have been harshly treated by the South. They cradle their vengeance, the Eyrans, with as much care as they would cradle an infant. Give her time, my friend: she will come round.’

But of that, Saro was not so sure.

The farther south they rode, the drier and hotter the land became. Rocky streambeds were exposed for the first time in centuries, and the reeds and bulrushes which normally lined their lush banks were sere and brown. No birds sang. The only life they saw were lizards skittering from under the horses’ hooves into the lee of boulders, a striped sidewinder which weaved swiftly away into the roots of a dead tree, and occasionally the shadow of a vulture fell over them as its owner circled overhead on a fruitless search for carrion.

This, Saro could see with his own eyes, for the hillman had prevailed on Mam to let him ride the mule, rather than be slung across it, and Katla, rolling her eyes, had not demurred.

‘Don’t even think about trying to escape,’ the mercenary leader leered. ‘You won’t get far: that beast can hardly be bothered to walk, let alone gallop, and if I have to break a sweat retrieving you, I can promise you’ll regret it.’ And she flashed her sharpened teeth at him just enough to underscore the threat.

There was, Saro thought gloomily, nowhere to run to, even if he had a decent mount: all that could be seen for miles around was scrubland and thorns and a pitiless blue sky.

Two days later they crossed a ridge and came down into the plains which had once provided the grain which fed all of Istria. No more: land that had once been sown with wheat and corn offered ranks of lifeless stubble, between which the topsoil had become so light and desiccated that it had blown elsewhere, leaving a skim of sand over bedrock. They passed parched irrigation ditches and empty ponds, orchards of orange and pomegranate trees now reduced to leafless twigs herded together by drystone walls.

Even with all the men called to war and no one left to tend the crops, the change seemed drastic to Saro, whose homeland this was. There had been dry years before, years when they dug deep wells and passed leather buckets from hand to hand to keep their fruit trees alive; years when scouring winds blew great channels between the crops and no rain fell between Fifthmoon and Harvest Moon, but he had never seen anything like this.

If the plains of Istria were reduced to desert, how much worse would it be farther south, near his home in Altea? Panic gripped his heart. With his uncle dead, his father with the army and no sons to care for her, how would his mother fare? The mercenaries might receive precious little for the return of the heir to the Altean estates; precious little, or nothing at all . . .