The Rose of the World (81 page)

The group stopped in a space below the Rock and one figure stepped forward. It made an obeisance, then declared in a voice which carried far and wide: ‘We bring you Rahe the Mage, known by many as Rahay, King of the West. For all that he is our father, he has done wrong and must pay for his crimes against you and the world of Elda.’

The Goddess gazed down. ‘Thank you, Festrin,’ she said, for all to hear. ‘We are grateful to you.’ She regarded the mage, and as she did so his shining bonds fell away to nothing. ‘Step forward, Rahe, Master of Nowhere.’

Shuffling like the old man he was, the mage stepped clear of the group. When he tilted his head up at her, there was terror and loathing in his eyes. ‘Incinerate me, then!’ he goaded. ‘Burn me in your fires as you have burned the southern lord. Do it, and have done.’

Feya regarded him with her head on one side and said nothing, but Bëte snarled at the sight of him, and Sirio glared down.
He deserves burning, and worse. Why not hold him captive in the lavas of the Red Peak as he did to me all those centuries? Let him learn the true nature of the world’s torment
.

The Goddess smiled.
He shall learn the true nature of the world, she told him, that I promise
. ‘Rahe Mage,’ she said aloud, ‘you have taken what was not yours and used it in the pursuit of vainglory and power, and in doing so you have warped all Elda, but now I take back what little you have left from your thievery.’

With the tiniest movement of her hand it was done, the drawing back of her stolen magic. It shimmered in the air between the Three for the briefest of moments, then was gone. On the ground, the mage stared around, puzzled. He looked at his hands, touched himself through his clothes, frowned. ‘Alive,’ he muttered. ‘Still alive.’ He squinted up at the Goddess.‘What trick is this?’ he demanded.‘Stop playing with me.’

‘No trick, old man. Go now, and make the most of what little time is left to you in reflection and peace.’

And now Rahe began to feel the effect of the loss of the magic which had kept time at bay for so very long. His joints twinged and ached, his bones felt insubstantial, covered over by skin as frail as a whisper. When he breathed, he wheezed.

Tears of rage gathered, tears of self-pity.

‘Ah, that’s your game, is it?’ he quavered. ‘I’d rather you burned me.’

But they were not listening to him. Three had become One, an indeterminate form comprising all aspects of the deities it contained; and this single figure now flowed from the top of the despoiled Rock to the ground below, coming to rest before Virelai and Alisha Skylark.

The nomad woman quailed away, trembling. ‘I was wrong to hit the old man,’ she cried. ‘I know. All violence is wrong and that is why the seithers have brought me before you. Punish me if you must.’ She lifted her eyes beseechingly, then looked away again, hazed by the brilliant sight. ‘But he was going to kill Virelai, and I could not let him do it.’

‘Peace, child,’ the One said. A glowing hand touched her face. ‘You did nothing wrong, and you acted out of love. We perceive that you have suffered greatly and we are sorry for your loss. We would like to give to you a gift – the gift of faith – Alisha Skylark: faith in the future.’

Now the figure turned to the sorcerer.

Virelai gazed at the being in front of him, his face harrowed. If he had wished to be reunited with the mother he had but lately found, this was not she. Even so, ‘When Rahe ripped you from our belly before you had a chance to breathe, we begged him to save you,’ the One said. ‘But we never meant for him to make you his slave or to raise you in a wilderness, loveless and lawless. The stone has already reversed his deed; but now we heal the rest of you, and offer you a choice.’

Virelai felt a wave of warmth envelope him, felt it knit up the bones of his leg, close the wounds, salve the flesh. He closed his eyes, unable to do anything but luxuriate in the sensation.

When he opened them again, the One was regarding him curiously.

He looks like you.

No, he looks like you.

A peal of laughter.
He looks like both of us.

A rumble which lay somewhere between a growl and a purr.
At least he does not look much like me
.

‘Here is your choice, Virelai. You may come with us, into the heart of the world and dwell with us there in magic.’

‘Or?’

‘Or you may live here, in Elda. In love.’

The world had been harsh to him. In it, he had been beaten and tortured, maligned and debased. He had witnessed atrocity and experienced more hurt than he knew could exist. He looked away from the shining being and found Alisha Skylark’s eyes upon him, large with hopeless hope.

The choice tugged at him, unequal, unbearable.

‘I cannot leave,’ he said softly.

‘Oh, Virelai.’

No one had ever spoken his name with such affection. He gazed into her eyes and saw himself reflected there, not as he thought of himself, but nobler and finer by far. He reached out a hand and cupped Alisha’s ravaged face, watched in wonder as the area around his hand changed. The nomad woman’s skin began to lose the appearance of sun-hardened leather, filled out, became as smooth and soft as he had remembered it.

He took his hand away, amazed.

A voice said:
Farewell then, Virelai. It is good that we leave someone behind us to help to heal the world
.

When he looked away from Alisha, it was to catch the spark of a bright light fading and the One was nowhere to be seen. He turned his face up to the sky; but all he found there were clouds. A gentle rain began to fall. It pattered onto his face like a blessing. Closing his eyes, he let it wash over him, felt it soaking his hair, his clothes, and when he looked down, it was to find green shoots sprouting in the black ash, tendrils and budded leaves. Daisies pushed their blind heads out into the light; clover and grasses came next, running like a vivid green fire out across the plain. A herd of wild horses followed the line of green, their hooves dashing up clouds of dust which fell back to earth as a rich loam.

Alisha Skylark gazed around in awe and delight. Overhead, a cloud of swallows soared and dived, their aerial turns as fast as a thought. Doves roosted now on the broken ledges of what had once been Falla’s Rock. Vines crept up its southern slope.

While she watched, something on top of the Rock moved. She shaded her eyes.

She breathed a name, and Virelai turned to stare where she stared.

It was Saro Vingo.

Virelai watched as he stumbled to the edge of the shattered outcrop and stood there with his head in his hands, as if he were debating whether or not he would leap off. Something about the set of his shoulders told of absolute despair.

‘Saro!’ he called. He had never thought to see his friend again.

Dust covered Saro’s face and hair, but tears had streaked his cheeks. His eyes were haunted. The gods were gone, and miracles were all about him; but the most important miracle of all had not occurred.

‘Virelai . . .’ It was barely a whisper, but the sorcerer heard it as clearly as if Saro was at his side. ‘Virelai, I have lost Katla.’

Katla Aransen drifted in the darkness. New pain revived her briefly, then retreated like a sea. The wound in her belly had opened: she could feel its wetness and the rawness of the interior exposed to air. She dragged in a breath and felt how it rasped and bubbled. Something was pressing down on her, crushing her chest and legs. She took another breath, shallower than the last, and it knifed through her. She coughed and twisted, and that racked her again.

Be strong, Katla.

There seemed to be a voice in the darkness with her, a voice that was so close it seemed almost inside her head, a voice she recognised but could put no name to. It comforted her to know she would not die alone in this darkness. Unless, she thought suddenly, she had merely dreamed the voice as a last comfort, and was talking to herself. Just like Old Ma Hallasen, cackling away to her goats and her cats on all matters of philosophy. Mad as a bat.

This is no dream, Katla. And I’d rather you didn’t defame my old Ma.

Katla frowned. Everyone knew Old Ma had no children: now she really was going mad. Deciding to test her theory, she asked aloud, ‘Where in Sur’s name am I?’

Inside the Rock. It split apart when the gods erupted through it and you fell in.

Apart from the bit about the gods, she could have worked that out, if she could remember anything leading up to these latest events. The last thing she
could
remember was being at sea with everyone talking across her and the waves rocking the barge so gently that they took her away from all that disturbing chatter and rocked her to sleep. Weariness rolled over her now, promising to steal her away to a place where there was no pain, or anything else at all.

Stay awake, Katla. I can’t afford to let you die.

Her eyes snapped open. ‘What?’

If you die, I die. So don’t die.

That seemed fair enough, if she could only make sense of it. She tried to find a more comfortable position in which to have this strange discussion, but that just caused another wave of red agony to engulf her, so she stopped and lay there, panting. Now that her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, she could make out the rough shapes of boulders all around. Behind her, a splinter of light shone through the fractured rock, illuminating tiny details here and there. It seemed impossibly far away, no more than a tantalising promise. She reached out with her right hand and felt about her. There were rocks jammed onto her chest and legs, but her head was in open space.

I wish I could lend you my strength, but another stole that from me
, the voice told her. Which made no sense at all.

She managed to get a knee bent up so that her foot found some purchase and pushed feebly backwards. A trickle of dust slithered down onto her face, making her cough, but she shoved herself an inch or two into the space behind her. It hurt, horribly, but she did it again, then again. The boulders shifted dangerously.

Be careful, Katla; be slow
.

Being slow or careful had never come naturally to Katla Aransen, but she gritted her teeth and pushed again until her head touched solid rock. The jolt it gave her was shocking, disorientating. She reached up and felt it, allowing the natural energies it gave off to run down her arms, charging her muscles, filling her with heat.

Inside her, the voice sighed and fell abruptly silent.

Above her head she found a small ledge. It was sharp with rugosities: the best sort of hold. Her fingers curled over it and she pulled with what little strength she had left to her. For what seemed an age nothing happened, then she felt her hips slide against the ground. The crushing weight of the boulders above her shifted minutely. Again she heaved and they ground together with a rumble, raining dust down over her. A moment later there was a crash, and suddenly her legs were free. She drew them up in a galvanic heave and rolled sideways, feeling even as she did so how she tore herself. Noise and pain shattered her; she screamed out, and it seemed to her then that she screamed with two voices. Gasping and sweating she lay there as the world turned and changed and flowed, aware of nothing but the blood beating around her damaged body for long moments until silence fell.

Saro Vingo had never moved so fast in his life. When he heard the scream he had swarmed down the broken planes of the Rock as if he had been climbing all his life. He swung down from the top on one hand, scrabbled his feet onto a ledge, braced himself against the widening crack, jammed his body sideways, and bridged down the chasm without a thought in his head except that the voice he had heard had been Katla Aransen’s, and that meant she was still alive.

He transferred his weight and jumped down the last section, landing in a heap at the bottom. All around was a jumble of rock, and in the back of the cavern a splash of deep red picked out by a patch of sunlight.

‘Katla!’

She blinked, tried to focus and gave up.

I’m sorry
, she said to the voice inside her, recognising it now.
I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can hold on any longer. I wish I could have saved you, but it seems I cannot even save myself.

But there was no response, none at all. Exhausted, she closed her eyes.

‘Katla!’

Nothing.

Something died in Saro, then. He felt his throat swell. A hand fell on his shoulder.

He turned. It was Virelai, and beside him was Alisha Skylark – not the haggard, demonic figure they had found crouching over the pitiful remains of her son, but Alisha Skylark as he remembered her when they rode with the nomad caravan beside a gentle river, who told him about the properties of plants and the patterns of the stars. She caught him in her arms now and held her face to his shoulder, rubbing his back as if he were a child.

‘Hush now, Saro,’ she whispered. ‘Hush now.’

The pale man knelt in the dust beside the dying girl. He straightened Katla Aransen’s limbs, then bent and lifted her, grunting with the effort of it. Then out he walked, into the light, with her body in his arms.

Epilogue

‘Tell me again about the Far West.’

‘I have only been there the once, and it was long ago. What I remember most particularly was the colour of the place: golds and ochres, reds and a blue deeper even than Jetran pottery. They built tall there, towers and spires, minarets and the like. It was a very pretty place. There were fountains in the squares, and tumbles of flowers from every sill. Doves roosted in the shadow of the eaves and cooed by day and night. I would fall asleep listening to them; except when the cats fought in the street outside.’

‘And the women. Tell me again about the women.’

‘You surprise me!’

‘I am just curious: am I not allowed to be curious?’

‘Ah, the women.’ A long sigh. ‘It really was a very great time ago.’ The speaker paused. You could sense the smile that spread across his face almost as a change in the air. ‘But they would be hard to forget. Some were dark-skinned with hair burnished to a sheen like polished bronze, while others had skin of ivory and hair the colour of this snoring beauty here, as red as fire, down to their knees. There was one I knew would tie you up with it—’