The Rose of the World (76 page)

As if she read his mind Alisha said suddenly, ‘The girl with the red hair, she is dying, is she not?’

Saro nodded miserably.‘I don’t seem to be able to do anything for her.’ He met her eyes. ‘And I will not use the stone.’

She held his gaze steadily. ‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘It is a terrible object, and it turns a weak hand to terrible deeds. But I am ready now to do the thing you asked of me. On the mountain.’

‘You will look at her wound?’

She spread her hands. ‘I do not have much with me, except my knowledge and a few simples I rescued from . . .’ She bit her lip.

With vivid clarity, Saro remembered the contents of the wagons strewn across the river plain, beside the torn and bleeding bodies left by the militia.

‘I am not sure they will be enough.’

But Saro was already on his feet.

Unwinding the last bandage from Katla’s abdomen, Alisha let out a great pent-up breath. The skin around the wound was livid and raised with heat. Closer in it was yellow and sticky and blood had dried black beneath the strange film of skin which covered the worst area, where the exposed gut could be seen purple and convoluted beneath. It was beginning to stink.

She listened to Katla’s heart and found a staccato beat. Her head came up from the girl’s ribcage quickly and her expression was pained. ‘Not natural,’ she said softly. ‘Not natural at all.’ She didn’t expand on this, and when Saro asked her what she meant she waved him away. ‘Boil me some water,’ she ordered. ‘Just a little. Boil it, then let it cool a while, and bring it to me then.’

He did as he was told, glad to have a simple task to take his mind off what he wished he had not seen.

When he returned, she had taken a few things from her pack: a mortar and pestle, some packets of linen tied with grass stems, a long pewter spoon. She sorted through the parcels, sniffing each in turn till she found the one she wanted, and this she opened up with careful fingers. Inside lay a bundle of dead plants, desiccated so that they crumbled at her touch. They looked like mint, Saro thought, his hope failing suddenly.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Common prunella,’ she told him, which meant less than nothing. ‘The nomads call it self-heal. Canny soldiers carry it with them to war: it is well known for helping the body to heal inner wounds. If I give it to her as a syrup it will cleanse the foulness out of her, and if I dress the surface with a paste of it, that will help, too. Once the infection’s dealt with, her fever should break of its own accord. Then there’s the goat’s rue.’

That sounded unpleasant. Saro watched her work, grinding the herb to a paste with a little of the water, then adding some berries from her pack. When the syrup was ready, she got him to sit Katla up, and while Mam held her head like a vice, spooned the liquid down. Saro held Katla’s nose and mouth closed till it was gone and she could not cough it up. The rest was cooled and applied to the wound. Alisha got Mam to bandage the girl up, claiming her own weakness. ‘I’ll never get them tight enough,’ she said. ‘And now I must address the lungs.’

She smelled her way through her simples again, looking dissatisfied. She opened one bundle, only to discard it with a muttered, ‘Too dry,’ and took up another with a sigh. ‘Harshweed,’ she told a curious Saro. ‘It is not what I’d choose, but the mullein’s gone to dust.’

Inside this packet was a tangle of dark stems and a pile of purple flowerheads. Saro picked one up and sniffed it. ‘I know this one!’ he said suddenly. ‘It grows on the hills near Altea.’

‘It’ll grow in most hilly pastures so long as there’s chalk underneath,’ she told him.‘I got this in Faurea before—’ She stopped.

Saro dropped his eyes.

This, she boiled up and strained, boiled and strained it again until it made a thick liquid of an indeterminate colour he would not have expected at all from the hue of the flowers. It smelled horrible. She gave the resulting decoction over to him. ‘You’ll have to sacrifice a waterskin to this,’ she said. ‘She’ll need a good measure of it three times a day for several days if it’s to make a difference. And that’s your job,’ she added tartly.

Saro watched her as she packed her things away again. ‘You don’t want to touch her, do you?’ he accused.

All she gave him in reply to this was a hooded look.

Whatever Alisha Skylark had administered to Katla seemed to take effect a day later as they cleared the last dunes of the great desert and emerged into the wilderness of stone and scrub which bordered it. The patient was sleeping without taking the noisy, shallow breaths they had been accustomed to hear rasping through the night, and her temperature was lower. Mam, who had dressed a hundred battlefield wounds in her time, took to changing the dressings on Katla’s, and proclaimed that the lividity was paling and the swelling was down. ‘She might yet live,’ she told Saro with her characteristic unsettling grin.

The nomad woman regarded the Eyran girl with her head on one side and a small smile. She had been riding up and looking at her thus as much as seven or eight times a day, Saro noticed, and the smile seemed a sign of her professional pride in the results of her dosings. Working as a healer again seemed to have healed some hidden part of herself: she did not mention Falo again, though sometimes her eyes went cloudy and she allowed the stallion to fall back behind the others, lost in contemplation.

At night, the stars shone so brightly it was hard to look at them. Falla’s Eye beamed down: a beacon for their journey. They had been lucky with the conditions in the desert; but life had taught Saro too many hard lessons for him to trust that all would be well.

Forty-three

The Call

Amid the atrocity of war, as many of Cera’s inhabitants as could fled from the city, terrified for their lives, with no idea of where to go. Some wandered pathetically around the hinterland, sleeping in barns and outbuildings; some marched with hatred in their hearts and revenge fuelling their steps until they fell in with others of like mind, intent on a battle to drive the enemy from their shores for good and all.

But others heeded another call, a silent call which seemed to be borne on the air or in the stones of the ground; and these folk would stop in the middle of whatever they were doing and find that their thoughts turned to that strange ashy wasteland which lay to the north and west of Cera as the crow flies, which they could not. Nothing tangible could be offered at the end of such a journey, for nothing lived there, nor was it habitable: yet those who opened their hearts were filled with certainty that hope awaited them in that place where their nobles and merchants met each year to trade and to gossip, to arrange marriages and settle lawsuits. The common ground: the Moonfell Plain.

Where, as one heresy had it, the goddess Falla and her cat would sit upon her rock and sing to the Moon, whence the rock had fallen, to fetch them back; or, as another of the heresies told, where Falla and her husband–brother Sirio had come together in a mystical union with the great cat – Man, Woman and Beast: the Three as one – to defeat Death himself and bring magic into the world. So many folk had burned for speaking of that old tale that few now recalled it. Sirio had long ago been written out of the old legends of the south, transformed from seed-giver to warrior to minor deity and at last to oblivion; as Falla had in the north, each culture embracing one aspect and one alone.

To reach their destination these travellers were forced to head first south and then cut back sharply west and north around the deep incut where the Northern Ocean penetrated the Istrian mainland, for the Eyrans held the coastal sea, which offered the easiest route.

There they met other travellers, fleeing from Sestria and Ixta, from Hedera and Forent. Ahead of them lay the Skarn Mountains, at this season wild with blizzard and treacherous with avalanche. Yet none turned back.

From the Blue Woods they came, on horses, on mules, on yeka and wagons, and on foot. Merchants and factors, peasants and townsfolk, carpenters and fishermen, artisans and slaves, nomads and magic-makers, herb wives and healers. From Pex and Talsea and far Cantara; from Gila and Circesia; from Gibeon and Altea, Galia and the Eternal City of Jetra they came. They traversed the wide open spaces of the southern plains, they crossed deserts and scrublands, rocky hills and rolling fields. None made the journey in dread for their lives, though the hazards were clear and present; some spoke of dreams or omens; others merely smiled to themselves, as if they had received a visitation and their fate was no longer their own.

They all had odd stories to tell: of birds flying north at the wrong time of year, of bears and horses travelling in concert with wolves and hares; of the dead walking; of a golden giant accompanied by a huge cat striding across the horizon.

Farther south, some weary travellers coming north out of the Bone Quarter had the luck to fall into company with a pious merchant and his family who owned a goods barge on the Golden River and were heading with all speed and no cargo for the northern coast. Two of the band were fit enough to lend a hand with the lock system and the steering. Out of sight, the wife made the sign against the evil eye when she saw the nomad woman; but when the healer cured her warts, she was soon all smiles. The fourth member of this group lay like one dead; secretly, the merchant expected to pitch her over the side by Talsea, or Pex at the latest.

The summons – if summons it was – travelled well beyond Istria. Far to the north, on the isles of the kingdom of Eyra, old men laid down the nets they were mending and listened intently, as if there was a voice on the wind, or in the mist roiling in off the sea. Children stopped playing and cupped their ears, or lay on the ground as if in a dream. Women hanging out the washing or breaking down grain with mortar and pestle closed their eyes, brows faintly wrinkled, as if they were concentrating.

A group of women from the villages between Ness and Blackwater put out to sea in the fishing vessels which had been beached while their husbands were at war. ‘We are promised a fair passage,’ Hesta Aralsen answered mysteriously when her cousin Merja queried the wisdom of traversing the Northern Ocean without a navigator or even a man aboard. ‘We will know the way.’

Elderly merchants found themselves dreaming of the old crossing between Halbo and the Moonfell Plain, the pattern of stars clear in their heads, the urge to voyage still with them when they woke. Some acted on this urge; others did not. Families drew lots as to which members would sail and which would stay behind to care for the stock and the farms, the children and the old. An extraordinary flotilla left Eyra’s mainland: grand old trading barges and knarrs; fishing boats with worn, patched sails, ketches and skiffs: no craft seemed too mean or too small to join the call. Even some of the ships that had recently returned from the Southern Empire with their holds stuffed with goods unloaded at the docks, took on provisions and turned south again.

Not everyone made their way to Moonfell buoyed up by anticipation and hope. For as many who heard and heeded the call in both Eyra and Istria, there were those who closed their hearts and clung to long-cherished beliefs and hatreds which made a sure and undeniable framework for the world, beyond which all was chaos and unreason. These girded on their swords, took up spear and shield and mounted horses, or marched or sailed to confront the old enemy.

By the last days of Elda’s winter, almost thirty thousand people were converging on the Moonfell Plain.

Forty-four

Moonfell

Virelai gazed at the serried ranks of peaks that stretched away from them, losing clarity in the distance to merge with the sky in a dreamlike haze. He felt much the same way himself, someone with a foot in two worlds, neither of which claimed him fully. He was a man, raised by a mage as a servant; but it also seemed he was a son to gods. What did that make him? He did not know, and found that the concept would not bear long or sane scrutiny.

Ahead, beyond the long column of army which marched in front of them, a distant col announced the start of the steep defile which would lead them down onto the Moonfell Plain.

The last time he had travelled this route across the Skarn Mountains it had been in the joyous company of nomads on their way to the Allfair. With the Rosa Eldi and her cat – two of Elda’s most powerful entities, had he but known it – stashed in the back of his wagon. Much of that leisurely time he had spent with Alisha and known the comfort of human warmth, of skin against skin, and had truly thought himself free of the destiny from which he had escaped. How different were things now.

They had stopped for no more than a few hours since they had set out on this journey. He ached from head to foot; but even his mount did not seem to wish for rest. Ears pricked, head constantly fighting his hand on the reins, it seemed eager for their destination. Or perhaps, Virelai considered, the horse felt the draw of the Rose of the World as did the men who rode beside him, their eyes fixed to the length of that slim back and the way her slight haunches sat the sturdy pony which bore her.

Every so often she would turn in the saddle and survey them and the army which straggled behind them with an unfathomable expression which lay, to Virelai’s mind, somewhere closer to satisfaction than to any other emotion he could name. Her green eyes, so startling in that pale oval, would skim over them and she would smile minutely before turning her face to the northern horizon once more, her silver-gold hair rippling like a waterfall down her back. And when Virelai glanced sideways he would find Manso Aglio’s ugly visage stretched in the most gormless grin; and Tycho Issian’s straining with impatience.

But there a came a time when she turned to them and her eyes shone with an excitement which seemed to crackle off her frame.

‘He is coming!’ she breathed. And she threw her head back and laughed, a sound which rang off the rocky peaks like an echoed shout of triumph.

Manso Aglio turned to the Lord of Cantara. ‘Who does she mean?’ he whispered, not knowing why he lowered his voice so.

Tycho gritted his teeth. ‘Who do you think, you fool? Ravn Asharson, of course. The bloody Stallion of the North.’