The Rose of the World (6 page)

When he turned to ask the old woman a dozen questions, he found them snatched away. She had removed the turban and frayed blanket and was now in the process of taking off her many skirts. Now Erno felt real anxiety. Had she brought him here to couple with him? The very idea was horrifying. He was about to push past her and duck out through the door, treasures or no treasures, when she blocked his way. She had stepped out of the last of the stolen rags, and now came at him in a simple plain black shift. Grabbing his arm, she hauled him with her deeper into the dwelling-place.

Beyond the front room lay another, and if the first had made his jaw drop, this second chamber stole his breath away.

Along one wall shelves were piled high with scrolls of vellum sealed with wax and tied with ribbon. Flasks made from some translucent substance lined another shelf. Erno could not help but reach out and pick one up. It was hard and cool, entirely smooth, and of a wonderful crimson hue. He held it up to the nearest candle, marvelling at how the light played through the object, sending flickering rays of red dancing across the room. Awed, he replaced it. The old woman laughed. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a bottle before, Erno?’ Her voice had dropped a note and mellowed. ‘A young rover like you: en’t you ever seen glass?’

He shook his head wordlessly and continued into the chamber. Another shelf revealed a pile of long yellow bones, and a skull with a single oval hole in the forehead, but where the eye sockets should have been in any ordinary skull, there was nothing but smooth, polished ivory. Erno shivered and made the sign of Sur’s anchor. The hair prickled up and down his spine. This was a place no living man should enter of his own free will. The Old Ones might claim his soul . . .

‘Don’t be afraid, Erno Hamson,’ said the mad old woman, sounding rather less mad now. ‘Come with me.’

She took him by the hand and he followed her bonelessly.

At the farthest end of the chamber, a mighty sword hung on the wall. Its pommel was of a sheeny, lambent yellow metal which looked as if it might be warm to the touch and ended in the perfectly formed head of a fox. The guard was intricately inlaid with horn and ivory and bone. The blade was long – Erno knew instinctively that if he were to lift it from the wall and stand it before him, its pommel would stand level with the centre of his breastbone, half as long again as his own weapon. It was broad at the hilt and tapered to a fine point; and it was pattern-welded to such a degree that the colours of the iron twisted and curled around and about like fabulous serpents chasing one another through a fog: if he narrowed his eyes, they came almost into focus, then were lost again, as if their forms were a trick of the light, or a rippling out of time. The tang was so elegantly crafted that it brought tears to his eyes: Katla Aransen would have striven all her life to make a sword like this. It had been forged by a master swordmaker and wielded by a hero from some lost age. His hands itched to hold it.

‘Take it,’ the old woman said, but Erno found he could not move. Old Ma Hallasen tsked impatiently. ‘A blade like that could take a dozen pirates’ heads in a single blow,’ she said gleefully, standing up on her tiptoes and reaching up to where the weapon hung on the wall. The sword was about as big as she was, Erno reckoned, but the crone removed it from its brackets with no apparent effort and seemed to stand as straight and tall as he was once she had it in her hands. When he took it from her grasp, he almost dropped it, surprised by its weight.

‘Tee hee, tee hee!’ Ma Hallasen cackled, back in character once more.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said at last, his fingers moving wonderingly over the pommel. ‘Where did these things come from? Who are you? Why are you giving me this?’

The crone regarded him with her head on one side, as if she were assessing whether he was worthy of the truth. Then she said, ‘This sword was forged by Sur’s own hand and now belongs to my son. I believe you know him, though he’s as old as your great-grandfather would be now.’

Erno laughed at the old buzzard’s hyperbole. ‘My greatgrandfather has been in the ground these past forty years, but when he breathed his last he had reached the good age of six and eighty!’

Ma Hallasen gave him a delighted open-mouthed grin. It was not a pretty sight. ‘Ha! You do not believe me; nor have you guessed, then. Ponder on it, my handsome pigeon. The clue is in the sword.’ And with that she beckoned him to follow once again.

He went puzzledly, staring at the great sword in his hand, but unless he was being extremely stupid, it did not appear to offer any obvious answer. His arm-bones buzzed from holding it; but whether this was because of its great weight or for something intrinsic in the weapon itself, he could not tell. He concentrated on the feeling for a few second, but that only made his head buzz, too. At last he laid the great blade against the wall and looked around, his head clearer now than it had been while he had the weapon in his hand. They were back in the front chamber, and Old Ma Hallasen was opening a wooden chest Erno had not noticed before, and removing from it a large object wrapped in a piece of gorgeously colourful silk. For a moment, Erno’s heart stopped dead in his chest and hung there like a cold stone. Scarlet and orange flames licked the hems of the cloth: it looked identical to the gift he had bought for Katla Aransen at the Allfair, the shawl for which he had paid all his savings over to a nomad woman. But then he saw there were birds woven into the upper part of the fabric, and that although similar, it was not the same weaving at all. A great and inexplicable sadness came over him. Katla had had the shawl with her the last time he had seen her, on the strand of the Moonfell Plain, before he had done her bidding and left her behind to face her pursuers.

Ma Hallasen whisked the silk covering away. Beneath it stood a globe of polished stone. Kneeling on the floor with greater fluidity than a woman of her advanced age should have, she gestured for Erno to sit on the opposite side of the table from her. She placed one hand on either side of the crystal and peered intently into it. Then she looked up into his eyes. A spectrum of light chased across the sere old skin and hollow planes of her face. She looked otherworldly.

‘Think of her, the Kettle-girl,’ she urged. ‘I see your heart: it burns as brightly as if it were beating outside your shirt.’ She lowered her voice conspiratorially, though there was no one but the goats and cats to hear. ‘And I heard you weep for her up in the homefield as you and the sharp-toothed one walked among the bodies there.’

He gasped. ‘I did not see you there,’ he said accusingly, as if by some magic she might have been one of the crows he had disturbed, which had fixed him with eyes just as beady, before flapping guilelessly off into the trees.

‘People see me only when I wish them to,’ she said impatiently. ‘Now think of the Kettle-girl and put your hands on the crystal.’

Erno did as he was told. He thought of Katla in the forge, beating out a sword, her face fierce with concentration and sheened with sweat, the red lights from the flames shining on her arm muscles and making a nimbus of her hair. And then suddenly, there she was. Her hair was shorter and her face was thin and there was a huge bruise on her jaw; and she was in some dark place. Other women whom he recognised curved around her into the distorted plane of the crystal. Their hands and feet were clasped by iron shackles.

‘She’s alive!’ he cried, lifting his face to the gaze of the old woman. Immense relief flooded over him, followed immediately by a terrible despair. How would he find her? How could he even leave the island, let alone make his way to Istria?

‘Look in the stone again, pretty pigeon.’

When he did so, he saw a ship being rowed into Rockfall’s harbour. With its sail down in the still air, it took him a few moments to realise what he was looking at. Then a great surge of hope welled up in him. Even with her back to him, he knew Mam’s bulk and power. Besides which, it was impossible to mistake the identity of her oar partner, for a great ripple of coloured images swirled across his back. Paired with Mam on the oar was her lover and assassin: Persoa, the tattooed man. It was the mercenary ship: they had come back for him!

Without a second thought, he leapt up from the table and strode toward the door.

‘A gift spurned is an enemy gained.’ The old woman’s voice was deep and resonant. It stopped him dead in his tracks. For a moment in the tricksy light of the howe, it looked as though her hair was a great cloud of gold, that her features were larger, younger, more commanding. She looked less like mad Old Ma Hallasen than— He pushed the thought away: it was ridiculous.

By the time she had pushed herself upright from the table and slowly retrieved the sword from where he had propped it, he had successfully dispelled the disturbing image which had visited him. He laid hands upon the great weapon ruefully. ‘I am sorry, old woman,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to spurn your gift, if gift it is.’

‘More loan than gift,’ she croaked, an ancient crone once more, bowed down by the weight of her years and the aching of her old joints. ‘And you have enemies enough if you follow the course you are set on without adding me to their number.’ Still she did not let go of the sword. Erno found himself gripping it awkwardly, not sure whether to wrest it from her or wait for her to relinquish it to him. His arms began to shake with the strain of its great weight; but in that fitful light it seemed that hers remained steady as rock. She stared him in the eye. ‘This sword must find its way back to its maker,’ she said cryptically, and then cackled as his arms dropped suddenly when she let his hands take the full weight of the weapon. ‘Or else all will fail.’

Then she hobbled into the darkness at the back of the chamber and merged into the gloom as if walking into a past time where he could not follow.

Blinking against the shock of the daylight outside, and bemused by his strange encounter and even stranger surmisings, Erno Hamson shouldered the great weapon and turned his footsteps down the path towards the harbour, feeling as if some distinct but undeserved doom had settled itself upon him. Quite how he would answer questions about the provenance of the sword, he did not know. By the time he had made his way to the sea wall, where the mercenaries were waiting, his mind was still an unhelpful blank. So he said nothing at all, though they all stared at him and the sword curiously, and when Joz Bearhand ran his hands appreciatively over the golden hilt and pommel, mumbled something about ‘an heirloom’, which was as close to the truth as he could manage without opening himself to more difficult discussions. That night, as they set sail for the Southern Continent in pursuit of the raiders’ ship, he slept with the weapon beside him, wrapped in his cloak, and dreamt about casting it into the ocean before the fate the old woman had spoken of could possibly attach itself to him, but in the morning it was still safely wrapped and he found he could not part with it. Besides, as Mam pointed out with her usual pragmatism, if the money which Margan Rolfson had pressed upon them for the rescue of their dearly beloved sister Bera and her daughter Katla, and the few silvers they had collected around the island from the other prisoners’ relatives ran out before they could accomplish the task, they could always sell the thing.

Erno did not respond by saying that selling the sword would be impossible; and Mam did not add that Margan had taken her aside and made her swear to put the women out of their misery by whatever means afforded to her if they had been too cruelly misused by their captors or others by the time the troop reached them.

And so each held to the secret things they knew as the ship sailed south.

Five

The Master

Aran Aranson had heard how sailors lost in arctic regions became prone to hallucinations, their eyes and minds mazed by cold, by exhaustion, and by the never-ending vistas of ice and air and ocean all melding together into a mutable, undependable landscape. They saw icebergs floating above the surface of the water like massive hovering palaces, fabulous castles towering hundreds of feet into the sky. Some saw the outline of their home islands situated in a new and impossible geography; others their wives or daughters limned by strange polar lights. Many of these men lost their wits entirely and were to be found muttering into their ale in seaport inns, wrapped about by this other, more miraculous world, a world they preferred not to relinquish. Unseeing, their eyes might skim past you to peer unnervingly over your left shoulder, their seamed old faces might break into a smile of welcome; but if you turned to look for the newcomer who had generated this ecstatic welcome, most likely there would be no one there.

Staring at the apparition now floating towards him, Aran felt himself in imminent danger of joining their mad ranks.

To his snow-hazed eyes, the figure looked to be a woman arrayed in robes which rippled and flowed like a sea; and like a sea, her long hair undulated in silver-gold waves around her bright face. Electricity crackled in the air between the two of them, igniting suddenly into streams of pale fire. Aran felt it play about his skull, felt an eerie tingling lift the hair on his head, then down his neck and spine. His eyes, when he closed them, replayed crazed images in harsh zigzagging configurations so that he could find no respite from them.

To Urse’s eyes, the figure was male: an old, old man with a bitter cast of expression and a thousand wrinkles dragging his features down into a myriad of tiny sagging folds which bespoke not only advanced age, but also a vast and uncontainable disappointment with the world.

Fent Aranson said and saw nothing; but in the moment in which the apparition materialised, he twisted once on his bearer’s back and gave voice to a small, inchoate cry.

The blue fire surrounding the figure crackled and darted, then abruptly dispersed out into the night air, leaving behind only the faintest luminescence. Then the apparition stilled and it sank slowly to the ground.

‘Welcome,’ it said; and to Aran the word was redolent of summer fields and ripe grain, of harvest time and willing women; of warmth and comfort and the nostalgia of his lost youth. To Urse One-Ear, however, it was the utterance of a trickster; a quavery voice striving for reassurance. ‘Welcome to the hidden stronghold at the tip of the world. Welcome to Sanctuary.’