The Rose of the World (57 page)

He had been most punctilious on the voyage home: had barely laid eyes on his prize for fear he would be unable to master his passions and fall upon her, grunting like a hog. Which would never do. No: first he must have her shriven and purified, have the priests release her from the foul taint of the northman’s touch. Have the bonds of that most barbaric marriage slaked away by blood sacrifice and have himself joined to her, flesh to flesh in place of that rutting, stinking stallion.

Clearly the Goddess smiled upon his venture, for their passage home had been swift and safe. There had been no sign of pursuit: he had had a lookout posted on the rakki and the stern throughout their voyage south, and neither had seen anything more threatening than a breaching whale. Could a war be won so quickly? It could, he breathed: it was a holy war, a true cause.

His Rose had been returned to him.

And soon he would unfurl those precious petals and plunge himself into the heart of that tight bud. His fists clenched at the effort it required not to tear off every scrap of his clothing, to rip down the shelter which veiled her presence from him, and hurl himself upon her here and now. Breathing heavily, he took himself off to the bow, where the bucking sea and lashing spray would cleanse his skin, and his thoughts.

Selen Issian rinsed out her bloodied linen in the pail, rubbing till her knuckles were raw. Nothing would shift the stains: it was as if the salt in the water was setting the blood there like a dye. Trying to remove it was as futile as trying to erase the memory of her past. Hidden from her for so long by some trick of the mind, or by some foul sorcery, her entire history had returned to her in vivid flashes following the shock of Ravn’s death. Yet again she cursed her lot. Better that she had died at Tanto Vingo’s hands; or if not during that assault, then in the waves when she had plunged into the sea after Erno Hamson.

The child, as if aware of her negative thoughts, fixed its violet eyes upon her and wailed: a malevolent, baleful presence.

She glared back at it, forcing a new hard-heartedness.‘Stop your noise,’ she said sharply, as the volume of its roar increased, though her breasts ached and she longed to pick him up. ‘Do not look to me to feed you: she has claimed you as her own, and she can have the care of you.’

She wrung the cloths out with vicious hands, as if wringing the neck of one of the chickens she had never dared to kill when the Eyran had brought them to the beach.

‘What good can come of a child born of such a deed?’ she mourned. ‘You even look like him: you have his eyes.’

The baby waved its fists at her and kicked its feet. It screwed its face up and let forth a howl of utmost rage.

The Rosa Eldi, lying with her eyes closed and her hands crossed on her chest, like a stone statue in the Halls of the Dead, stirred. She brushed the tips of her fingers across her face like a woman emerging from the depths of a dream and sat up slowly. Her sea-green eyes, not yet quite focused, swept over the screaming child, the strewn clothing, the pail of water. At last they came to rest upon the woman she knew as her bodyservant, Leta Gullwing. Her gaze was infinitely sad, infinitely gentle. Selen looked aside, feeling the hatred she nursed so carefully slipping away.

‘Will you not feed the child, Leta?’ the Rose of the World asked.

‘I have no milk.’

It was no less than the truth. Her milk had dried up abruptly; and just as that flow had ceased, so her moon-blood had returned for the first time since the birth, returned with griping aches which made her tense and wretched.

‘Ah.’ The first frown Selen had ever seen on the Queen’s face now creased her forehead. ‘I am sorry: I have been remiss. There have been too many other things to think about, too many requests for my aid.’

It was Selen Issian’s turn to frown. All the woman had done was to lie silent and motionless on the couch for the past few days. She had not risen, even to wash or to use the pail; she had eaten not a morsel. She had thought her sick or dying. Now it seemed she was deluded.

Anger made her blunt. ‘Why take my child if you cannot feed or care for him?’

A cloud passed over the Rosa Eldi’s face and for a long time she spoke no word. Then, ‘For love,’ she said simply.

Selen stared at her, feeling the bile rise up.

‘If you loved him so much, why not give him a child of your own, unless you feared to mar that perfect body, that pretty skin? If you loved him, how could you foist another man’s baby upon him?’

The Queen’s eyes darkened, became misty. Her lower lip appeared to tremble for the briefest second, then firmed itself so swiftly Selen thought she might have been mistaken. Her voice was steady when she spoke again. ‘He needed a child. For his throne.’ Dully, she repeated the words she had heard so often. Still the ways of men seemed incomprehensible to her. Succession, inheritance, bloodlines: what mattered such things if there could be love and trust and comfort? ‘But I could not give him the baby he craved. There is no life in me. None at all.’ She looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap. Even though her skin was ivory-pale, the knuckles showed whiter than the rest.

A barren woman, then: nothing more than that. Still Selen was not satisfied. ‘So you and that woman . . . that
seither
. . . cut my child out of me and you took it as your own, presented it to him as his heir?’

The Rose of the World nodded slowly, but would not look up.

‘And then you hazed my mind, took away my memories and all that made me who I was?’

Again, the barest of nods.

‘A second theft, just as heinous as the first! What made you think you had the right to do such a thing? I had been poorly enough treated before ever I met you, but thought I had found some place of safety in the northern court; and yet when I came to you, you stole my child and my mind!’ Selen Issian stormed on, and there was no stopping the torrent of her fury now. ‘And all for something you call “love”.
You
, who have no idea what the word means! If you loved him, as you claim, why have you come unresisting to the Lord Tycho Issian, a terrible man: a cruel man, as I too well know, for he is my father! If you loved Ravn, as you claim, why have you not wept at the loss of him?’

And at this a single fat tear dropped onto the back of the Rosa Eldi’s hands and slid off onto her silk under-robe, leaving a dark, wet mark like a wound.

Her face, when she lifted it, was ragged with emotion. She moved her mouth as if to form words, then threw her head back and that mouth became a maw, a sea-cave into darkness. The wail that issued from it enveloped Selen with such force that she subsided with a thud onto the floor. So powerful was it that it shocked even the child to quietness.

It was a cry like the wail of death itself, and it spread swiftly across the entire ship.

Beyond the leather shelter, men stopped coiling ropes, bailing bilgewater, stowing gear, gutting fish. The lookout, a thin dark boy, balancing precariously on the rakki above the sail, abruptly lost his grip and came plummeting down to hit the deck with a crash and a cry of his own. Virelai, crouching unhappily amidst the wounded men, wrapped his arms about his head in a vain attempt to shut out the noise. At the helm, Tycho Issian, spun around with a curse halfformed on his lips and stared down the length of his ship, bewildered, his ears painful, an echo of the noise hurtling around the inside of his skull.

Seabirds in the vicinity veered sharply from their onshore course. And beneath the waves, where no normal sound travels, the basking sharks of the pelagic waters dived into colder, darker zones than was their wonted habitat, and found there shoals of pollock and mackerel, sardine and ling fleeing away into the regions frequented by deep-sea fish – the redfish and rabbitfish and halibut – which rarely crossed their paths.

The Rosa Eldi’s sorrowful cry travelled on like a seismic wave.

North, it flew, whipping the sea to a frenzy in its path. By the time it reached the ships of the pursuing fleet, the waves it brought were almost sixty feet high.

In the leading vessel a man sat amidships in a gimballed chair he had fashioned for himself to reduce the worst effects of the passage. He wore a vast robe which repelled all weather; his wild hair and beard were trimmed, and in his hand he held an ivory staff. Rahe had decided to make a certain effort with his appearance in the eyes of the king, investing himself with might and nobility, which should at least dissuade Ravn from tipping him overboard if the going got rough and he failed to live up to expectations. But even he was not prepared for this.

As they closed with the southern fleet he had been feeling his magic deserting him moment by moment. She was doing this to him: he knew it. She was draining his magic out of him, drawing it back to herself. He felt weaker with every day that passed: he was beginning to wish he had never left the safety of the place he had for good reason named Sanctuary.

As the unearthly cry flew over him, every hair on his ancient body rose at the sound of it, an instinctive reaction, like that of a wild dog suddenly alerted to the presence of a predator. And then the first of the giant rollers came sweeping down upon them and even as the ship mounted its steep bank he was engulfed; not by chill water, but by a terrible despair, and while he knew it not his own, still he could not withstand it, but opened his own mouth in turn and wailed with all his might, a wail that was echoed by that of Ravn Asharson and Aran Aranson and of every other mortal aboard, a sound which was then buried by the breaking of the first massive wave.

As the last echoes of her scream died away, the Goddess emerged into the light. The sun, which till that moment had been blanketed by a heavy white layer of mist, now burned its way clear, striking incandescent rays down upon the ship and the surrounding sea. Blinded by this sudden brightness, men shielded their eyes and gazed upon the woman they thought of as the Queen of the Northern Isles.

But in that sudden brilliant sunshine she seemed more than any woman; more than a mere queen. In that sudden brilliant sunshine she stood tall and proud, and her long hair shone silver-white like a waterfall. So, too, did her pale skin shine, luminous and flawless. And every man among them longed to reach out and touch her, just to lay his fingers against her arm, to cup her face in a gentle palm, to pin back that fall of hair to the nape of her delicate neck, to kiss a fraction of that extraordinary skin. But none could look for long upon her, for her visage was too bright, too perfect, and the gaze which fell upon them from those sea-green eyes lanced them like quarrels shot from a bow. They had to look aside, and as they did so, each felt a hot wash of shame overcome them: shame not for looking upon this perfect woman, but shame for every cruel or wanton deed they had in this life performed. Shame for every man they had struck, whether in bar brawl or in war; shame for every woman they had wronged. She walked to the nearest man – a northcoast fisherman with the weatherbeaten skin and white crowsfeet of a man who spent his time squinting into the sun – and placed the tips of her fingers on his brow. At once, he closed his eyes, his senses assailed. Images tumbled around his skull: the time he had hit his small sister, blackening her eye; how he had lied to his mother and the way her pale mouth, exposed by the unadorned slit in her plain blue sabatka, had pursed with disappointment, but she had said nothing: for no Istrian woman was ever allowed to criticise any man; the baker he had struck in an alley after an argument about a game of stones; the knife he had stolen from a fellow crew member; the whore he had used before making this voyage, the way she had moaned when he pushed her down on the bed; the coldness he had shown his wife when she dared to ask where he had been; the man he had killed in the battle for Halbo, stabbing him through the eye as he waved for help in the churning waters . . .

When she withdrew her hand, he fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face. She passed to the next man, a Jetran who had spent eight years in the Eternal City’s militia, then a further six as a bountyman. The lightest touch of her fingers sent his eyes rolling back in his head.

Inside this man’s mind she saw: the sister he had sold to a man from Galia who gave him a good horse and a pair of boots in return; the knees of a nomad girl forced apart, how he had thrown a rag over that defiant face to stop her looking at him; Footloose men slung, beaten and bloodied, across a string of mules like so much baggage; stoking the fires in a chambered room filled with choking smoke and screaming people.

‘Forgive me, Lady, forgive me!’ he cried.

The Rose of the World found that she did not wish to grant such easy absolution: inside her soul a vein of iron stood fast and cold.
Let them suffer,
she thought,
as those they have harmed have suffered. Let them feel torment and distress
.

This thought came to her with a small start of surprise: for all those who had sent their prayers to her had prayed to one who was gentle and forever merciful, one who would pardon and forgive their every wrongdoing. Was it her time back in this world which had hardened her so; or had they always been deceived as to the nature of this goddess they so blindly worshipped?

She left him moaning and moved on.

The third man had been a priest for a time, had called the observances and strewn the safflower in the fires. He had made new prayers for the worshippers from Ixta and Cera; he had blessed children in the name of Falla and presided over marriages. But when she laid her fingers on his brow she saw no pacific benevolence there, but the rolling eyes of a ewe as the sacrificial knife bit into her bared throat; the way a booted foot kicked an unconscious Footloose man into the pyres; how he bound three nomads and their children to the stakes as the other men built up the stacks of wood and oil around them.

The next man she touched was a slave at his oar, a man captured in the southern hills. She saw: a girl-child put out on a moonlit mountainside to live or die, as pleased the Goddess; a man brained with a rock, silver coins spilling from his hand; a weeping woman, a bawling child; an old tribesman trampled underfoot in a headlong escape.