The Rose of the World (58 page)

On she went, touching a slave here, a crewman there.

She saw children neglected and abused; women consigned to no life but chores, to brothels and hard service, to death in childbed or from exhaustion and despair. She saw all manner of animals sacrificed in the name of religion – to appease
her
! She saw men killing other men, raping women, enslaving tribesfolk; sending Wandering Folk to the pyres to ‘cleanse’ their souls.

And each man she touched knew for the first time the wrong he had done.

So this is Elda
, she thought.
This is my world: a place in which greed and power and ill-intent brings suffering and death to the poor, the weak and the oppressed. This is the world from which I was stolen: but it is a world I do not recognise or recall. Is it my memory which is at fault, I wonder; or have I been absent for so long that all the good in it has drained away
?

And then, at last, she came to Tycho Issian.

They stood there face to face, the Rose of the World and the Lord of Cantara; but he gazed upon her boldly with shameless eyes, eyes which burned with heat and lust, and this time it was she who turned away. This man she could not touch: there was something about him which terrified her still, Goddess or no. When he reached out to put his hands on her, she gave herself up to a dead faint and she crumpled at his feet.

When the great waves and the howl of wind passed over them without taking their ships into the depths of the Northern Ocean, King Ravn Asharson sank to his knees and gave up his thanks to Sur.

‘Surely he is watching us and willing on our pursuit,’ he cried triumphantly to Rahe, never noticing that the old man was white with exhaustion and terror, nor that his knobbly hands had acquired a new tremor.

The mage roused himself with an effort and looked Ravn squarely in the eye.

‘Summon no gods,’ he said sternly. ‘Put your trust instead in the good oak of your ships, the strength of your men, and in my good offices, for powerful sorcery will stand you in better stead by far than calling on some unpredictable and wanton being.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Ravn nodded enthusiastically. ‘Now tell me, Lord Rahe, can you not make our ships go any faster? We must gain upon them and overtake them before they make landfall, or we shall have a hard time of it.’

But the mage shook his weary head. ‘Have I not given you fair passage so far, young man?’ he demanded, claiming good weather that had never been his to bestow. ‘There is only so much I can do for you without attracting unwanted attention.’

Ravn narrowed his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

Rahe extricated himself from the gimballed chair and leaned in close to the barbarian king. ‘The use of magic permeates far beyond its intended sphere, young man,’ he said softly. ‘Every time I use my powers on your behalf, it leaks down through the waves to the very seafloor. You cannot imagine what lurks down there, unseen except by those whom disaster takes. Monstrous creatures, many-limbed horrors with beaks and teeth; tentacled terrors as large as the greatest whale. If the magic touches them, they feel compelled to seek it out; and when they do, it is not gently.’

The King of Eyra regarded him sceptically, though he well remembered the eruption of the creature which had caused such havoc in his own harbour. Monsters he cared nothing for: monsters could be despatched or evaded; but if the Istrians made safe landfall he would lose his advantage, and lose his best chance to reclaim his beloved wife and child. He felt the urge to take the old man by his scrawny chicken neck and force the magic out of him. But instead, taking a deep breath, he said with the diplomacy he had learned so hard these past months. ‘Very well, lord mage. Let us reserve the best of your abilities for the battle ahead.’
And if you fail me then, I shall personally feed you to whatever monsters inhabit the Istrian home waters
.

Then he turned and walked away to speak with his steersman: if the mage would not help him then he must indeed trust to good men and good oak.

Rahe, watching after him smiled in his turn, congratulating himself yet again on his own quick-wittedness and subtlety.

A sea battle would not suit his own plan well at all. No, let the Istrians make land and then he would have them all: Goddess and apprentice, beast and brother.

When the Rose of the World came back to consciousness, she was no longer on a ship, that much was clear. Her eyes swept her surroundings with curiosity. She was in a chamber like none she had ever known, in this life at least. The walls shone silver as if by some magic men had managed to make a paint from metal and sheathe stone within it. Bright tapestries hung from carved wooden poles, replicating all manner of wonders. Tumbles of red and pink roses cascading over the forms of naked women, each breast another flower among so many, each areola a swelling bud. Gryphons and unicorns battled one another; serpents and knights were bound in unholy congress; a many-legged creature rose up from a churning ocean to claim a pale ship. A fire blazed in a vast inglenooked hearth; sconces bore a hundred candles; pots of burning incense and bowls of safflower stood on every table. Across each massive piece of furniture – of which there were many – lay the hide of some poor dead beast. She looked upon each one and recognised them all: spotted cats and striped horses, minks and ermines and fox pelts. From the centre of the polished stone floor the head of a snowbear stared back at her, its intelligent black eyes replaced by balls of silver which mirrored blankly the dancing candlelight. Its claws had been removed, but its ivory fangs gleamed in an eternal humourless grin.

‘Poor beast,’ muttered the Rosa Eldi. ‘I hope you bit the one who killed you before he took your life and reduced your rich existence to this piece of motheaten, meaningless carpet.’

She rose up on the bed on which she lay and found that, too, covered with skins of dead animals. The ermine-lined cloak Ravn had given her lay draped across the chair beside her. She regarded it sadly. How strange that she should never till now have regretted those tiny lost lives it represented, strange that some lost part of her had now returned to burn with a vengeful fire. ‘My creatures,’ she whispered. ‘You are all my creatures and each of you deserve the chance to live and die as you choose.’

She thought about this for an unknowable time: and while she thought the candles burned lower, and some guttered and went out.

How was she to take back this world of hers without causing such death and suffering as she had witnessed in the minds of her subjects? But take it back she must; for all around was evidence of cruelty and hurt, and if she did not act to save it, then she was complicit in that wickedness.

Then another thought occurred to her. If there was such evil in the world, where had it come from, if not from those who created Elda in the first place? And if that was the case, then did she have the right to interfere at all? The last time she had acted, it had been without thought, without weighing the consequences of her actions, and that day many men had died. She remembered, too, the boy at the Allfair, the boy with the eldistan. She had not meant to let her powers run rampant that day, either; had not even known then who or what she was.

Such a choice: to wield her powers and cause possible devastation; or to sit idly by and watch the world pass into rack and ruin? She needed her siblings, the Man and the Beast. Without them, she felt frail and fallible, certain to choose the wrong course and have all eternity to rue it.

She lay there all that long night, listening to the sounds of this new place, to the men and women coming and going, here within its walls, and far below, down in the parklands and the byways which surrounded the castle; she listened to Tycho Issian being laved and anointed by the slavegirls in his adjacent chamber; listened as, against all natural odds, he succumbed to sleep rather than to his ravening urges; and then she listened to the voices which crowded into her head.

Some were prayers and some were curses and some were pleas; but some were more direct and came to her with purpose and intent.

‘We are coming!’ they declared.‘Our Lady, we are coming to you.’

Thirty-five

Cera

At first light she rose from the bed, which she had stripped of its animal pelts, leaving just a crumpled covering of white wool, and crossed the chamber to the window. She pulled back the velvet drapes which shut out the sun and blinked as it flooded in like water through a breached dam.

Down below, far below, was a crowd of people. They were not milling around in the usual way of folk going about their daily tasks: none pushed carts or carried baskets or drew mules by their halters. They were not moving towards the market square to buy or sell goods; they were not queueing at the baker’s for bread nor the vintner’s for wine, nor did they seem to be on their way to labours elsewhere in the city. Instead, they had gathered at the foot of the tower in which she was held captive, or as close to the foot as the steep mound on which the castle was constructed would allow them to stand, and they were all gazing up, motionless and silent, their faces – where she could see them – rapt with hopeful expectation.

She, in turn, gazed back at them. The majority were women, many of whom wore the outlandish garb and silver piercings she had come to associate with the Wandering Folk with whom she had spent so many months while travelling with Virelai. But most of the rest were veiled and she knew them to be Istrian.

Some of the men she recognised. There, a dozen or so folk away from the front to the far left, was the north-coast fisherman whom she had touched on the ship which had brought her here. And beside him was the erstwhile priest of Falla. They had shaved their heads and rubbed ashes into their pates: an ancient symbol of penance. Other men she did not know by name or face, but by type: there were nomads with braids and top-knots and bright scarves, hillmen marked with the facial tattoos of their clans, slaves from the galleys which had followed in their flotilla.

And there were children: a hundred children and more, some holding their fathers’ hands, some staring upward with their mouths open, some hiding their faces in their mothers’ skirts.

She looked down upon them, bare-headed and bare-faced and after a while there floated up to her a murmur. As if possessed by a single compulsion, the Istrian women cast off their veils, their eyes seeking hers without the shielding fabric.

The Rosa Eldi smiled; and as if she greeted each of them personally, every man, woman and child in the crowd smiled back.

So engrossed was she by this sight that she did not hear the chamber door behind her open nor her visitor enter: at that moment every shred of her awareness was poured outward and downward into the silent crowd, into the shining rope of their connection.

So when the visitor’s hands encircled her waist, for a moment she did not know it. When his fingers tightened their hold and he began to draw her away from the window, she was for a moment confounded. Then she spun in his grasp and found herself gazing not into the smiling face of a well-wisher, but into the dead black eyes of the Lord of Cantara, and what she saw there was not love or hope but a lust which would let nothing stand against it.

At once old memories rose up and she was lost, the goddess in her fled away through the fog of her fear, leaving her a vulnerable woman like any other vulnerable woman in the hands of an attacker. But still his hands were on her clothing, albeit her thin shift, and not her skin; so she was not privy to the full darkness of the mind which lurked behind those black eyes.

As if sensing her terror, Tycho Issian smiled. He had waited for this moment for the best (or worst) part of a year. He had been prey to wild desire, unruly obsession, desperate measures. Visions of her had driven him to distraction; to torture and murder and war. He had dreamed of the beauty he held now every day, every night, whether asleep or awake; he had pictured this very scene a thousand thousand times, although the details had differed in large ways and in small. In some dreams, she had come to him willingly, her arms open, her eyes longing, her robes cast to the floor. In others she had cowered before him and he had forced himself upon her in a gratifying tide of fire.

He had never imagined what would happen once he had doused this fire, once he had ravished the object of his desires. And he did not think about it now, as he tore away the thin shift she wore, took it by its delicate embroidered yoke and ripped through seventy-four hours of painstaking work by the finest seamstresses in all of Eyra and watched it crumple to the ground.

The Rosa Eldi made no attempt to extricate herself from the tangling cloth but stood there as still as stone. The Lord of Cantara found himself looking down upon her ankles – pale, delicate, exquisitely sculpted. Then he dared to raise his eyes further. Sleek calves rose to knees of perfect symmetry, above which slim white thigh muscles rose in taut, defined relief. And above these . . .

Tycho Issian felt his own legs give way beneath him as if the cartilage and ligaments, the network of tendons and muscles which kept him standing had turned suddenly to chill water. His breath caught in his throat; his chest felt suddenly constricted. Musk enveloped him, exotic, undeniable. On a level now with that naked pudenda, he gazed and gazed with his heart in his mouth.

A pair of soft velvet petals, tinged with rose pink.

Smooth, fleshy petals, inviting him to press them apart.

White petals . . .

Now that it came to the moment he had dreamed of, he found he could not lift his hands, could do nothing but stare and tremble and breathe noisily through his mouth like any randy hound.

And then she stepped out of the ruined shift and moved away from him and he cried out in pain and fear and looked up and found that her sea-green eyes were bent upon him. And he whimpered. He could not help it, could not even stop his mouth with his knuckles.

That small sound girded her courage. Her chin came up. Her eyes flashed. The sun spilled across her skin, igniting it with a pale fire. Suddenly where before she had been all vulnerable, frail temptation, now she stood as straight as a spear and her beauty shone like armour. Where before she had been warm and soft and yielding, now she was as cold and terrifying as an unsheathed blade.