Authors: Jude Fisher
The sound of voices in the kitchen got louder and suddenly the Beast was in the pantry with him, its cool fur and hot breath pressed up against him. Shuffling backwards away from the thing, Virelai retrieved his pack and slung it awkwardly over his back. Then, after a moment’s thought, he reached up and took down two large bundles of the dried hemp and stowed them in the bundle as well. He had a feeling they might come in useful.
After that he unlatched the door. It opened outwards with barely a creak and suddenly they were out in the night. A cool breeze freighted with the scent of oranges engulfed them.
Good
, the Beast said.
Now we go south.
Virelai blinked.
‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘it is north we must go: north to Sanctuary; back to your master.’
Something tickled the inside of his skull. It felt like having a moth trapped there, a small presence, light and unthreatening. It was, he realised after a short space of incomprehension, a projection of the humour the great cat found in this pronouncement. As if to clarify the matter, it declared:
I have no master. I am the Beast.
Twenty-one
Signs and Portents
By noon the skies were strewn with thin clouds fishtailing high above the horizon. A sharp offshore breeze had sprung up: if it held, the
Long Serpent
would make an auspicious departure from Rockfall, skimming out of the harbour with a full sail, on a straight course north. While the men boarded and loaded the last of their goods and the two sturdy ship’s boats, Aran Aranson stood at the prow with his face turned towards the ocean, every line of his expression intent, inturned. One hand rested on some unseen object nestled inside the neck of his tunic; his pale eyes reflected the sky.
Behind him, his crewmen now jostled for position, seeking out the faces of their loved ones who had gathered along the seawall. Some of the wives cried; some stood stony. A gaggle of older women stood off to one side, their arms folded, their expressions resigned. They had seen many departures such as this down the years. Sometimes the sailors came home; sometimes they did not. There seemed little pattern to the luck doled out to such expeditions, and nothing any of them could do to influence the outcome, though in their youth they had, like the younger wives, cut and braided locks from their own hair and bound them with blood and saltwater and tied into them every knot they knew to bring fair weather and safe passage. The folded arms, the resigned faces posed an unspoken question: Why were men such fools, that they were never satisfied with the good lives they had? What drove them to spurn the ground beneath their feet, the daily round of farms and families: what compelled them to throw all aside and chase off across the whale’s path on some elusive quest?
They knew the answer, of course: it was precisely those things which drove the men away: the familiar patterns of a life in which the greatest excitement might be damage wreaked by an escaped ram, by visitations of storm, or sickness. The younger women took their men’s choice to leave as a personal slight: some marriages never healed from the rift, no matter what riches might be brought home, what tales of glory told around the fire. Bera Rolfsen had been aware of her own husband’s restlessness these many years; she had watched him quell his yearnings, put his shoulder to the plough and grimly commit himself to routine and hard graft, the only outlet for his trapped frustrations the annual voyage to the Allfair. She had known it would come to this one day: that his grip on the life they had made together would break apart in some needlessly dramatic fashion. So she watched him now as he stood at the prow of the vessel which had cost their eldest son’s life, and though she appeared dry-eyed and impassive, she clutched her mother’s hand so tightly that the tips of Gramma Rolfsen’s fingers turned purple, then white, then blue. But not once did the Master of Rockfall look back towards the steading; not once did his eyes seek out the face of his wife among those who lined the seawall. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the northern horizon, out past the distant cliffs and skerries where ocean and sky melded in a grey haze, and his profile was as hard and proud as carvings of the kings of old, stern men with cold eyes and jutting beards who had died heroic deaths and left nothing behind but their images in wood and stone.
Then his hand fell away from the object hidden inside his shirt and it was as if a spell broke, for he turned suddenly, and seemed to be a man once more. His eyes swept over the scene behind him – the milling folk on the quay, the waving arms, the weeping women – and settled briefly on the figure of Bera Rolfsen, wrapped in her best blue cloak, the hood down so that her fine red hair flew in the breeze. He saw her catch it back with her free hand and their gazes locked for an instant. Something passed between them which might have been acceptance, or at least some form of understanding, then he tore his gaze away once more and, turning his attention to the crew, shouted, ‘Yard up!’ and strode off down the ship.
Men leapt to their appointed tasks and Aran gave himself over to the practical details of the passage out of the harbour – to the trim of the sail, the setting of the mast, the arrangement of lines and shrouds, the draw of the steerboard. He watched his crew, noting those who moved neatly about the vessel and those who lumbered awkwardly, and hoped the latter would soon find their sea-legs.
As they passed beneath the tall cliffs, black in the shade and patched with guano and lichens, the sail caught the full strength of the wind so that they skimmed past the Hound’s Tooth in impressive style and the Master’s heart filled with pride. He did not notice the raven which overflew the ship, heading inland on a sure and steady course, its primary feathers spread like fingers. Nor did he realise that his daughter was absent from the ship until well after they had passed beyond sight of the great pinnacle on which she sat, fast-bound, even though her eyes bored down upon him from that rocky promontory and followed the vessel with a burning, tear-glazed intensity until it had sailed far out of mortal sight.
‘Did you see her?’ Fent nudged the blond man with a sharp elbow.
Marit Fennson bobbed his head. ‘Still there, as I told you she would be. My knots would hold a charging bull, let alone a little slip of a thing like your sister. Will you speak with Aran Aranson for me now?’
Fent looked pained. ‘Best wait a while. I don’t want him turning back for her, or casting you off.’
A shadow fell across them. Katla’s brother looked up and found himself staring into the ruined face of Urse One-Ear. The big man grinned. This was a horrible sight at the best of times, and Fent was already feeling nervous. To see a man with barely half a face smiling at you so that his exposed eye-teeth gleamed like tusks made him feel like a seal-pup at the mercy of a snowbear.
‘Where’s the girlie?’ Urse enquired sweetly. ‘I have not seen her aboard, though her father said she would be here.’
Marit made himself scarce. Fent watched as he picked his way deftly through the coils of rope, the kegs and chests and cooking implements, to his oar-place and took a seat there, and knew he would have to shoulder this burden alone. Composing his panic, he tried desperately to conjure the plausible excuse he had prepared for his father.
‘She felt unwell,’ he started, only to stop when he saw the big man’s eyes narrow dangerously. He coughed and then started again: ‘She thought it best to stay with her mother.’
‘There was no sign of her on the quay; though I saw the Lady of Rockfall and her dam standing side by side.’
Fent shrugged. ‘Who knows Katla’s mind? She is as changeable as the weather.’
There was a long, uncomfortable pause, then: ‘In some islands it is believed that newborn twins are joined by a single soul, and that Sur must decide which child shall own it. Where I come from, lots are cast. One babe gets to stay suckling at its mother’s titty. The other is given to the sea.’ Urse leaned down, placed one of his bearlike hands on the lad’s shoulder and squeezed until Fent winced. Ostensibly, the big man was still smiling, but his scar-rimmed eyes were hard as topaz. ‘I should like to know how you came ashore again, Fent No-soul. Maybe it is time for the Lord Sur to see his choice made good.’
He held the lad’s gaze for two heartbeats longer, then released him and walked slowly away. Fent felt a chill run through him. He would have to talk to his father now, before Urse said anything.
He found Aran Aranson seated on an upturned cask amidships. A square of crumpled parchment, or some other substance that looked similarly yellow and aged, was spread upon his knee. The Master traced a fingertip over a series of lines marked in the upper third of the parchment, every so often looking out to steerboard and then back down to the drawing, which he sometimes moved minutely down, or to the right, as if orientating what he saw in the world to its flat representation on the map.
Fent breathed a sigh of relief and approached. His father was obsessed with the map: whenever he handled it, it was as if it absorbed him so completely that he was unable to exercise will or temper. It would be the best possible time to make his lie about Katla.
‘Da,’ he started, but Aran Aranson waved a hand in the air as if waving away an irritating sand-fly, so he stopped again.
The Master of Rockfall sighted the position of the sun, fished in his pouch for one of several lengths of twine which he selected with some care, then ran his fingers up and down the knots thereon, his eyes shut tight as if for fullest concentration. When he opened them again, he adjusted the position of the map, made a small mark on the paper with his thumbnail and smiled at his son. ‘Kelpie Isle,’ he said, indicating a tiny, jagged outline on the map.
Fent had never seen the map up close before: his father was possessive of the object, had kept it jealously to himself. It was, he had to admit, a beautiful, mysterious thing; if you were interested in pieces of paper – or whatever it was made of – which purported to show you the world. Fent preferred to see and experience the external evidences of Elda at first hand: the abstract held little hold over for him. Even so, he craned his neck dutifully and watched Aran trace his fingers lovingly over the map.
A windrose sat in the top righthand corner, its southern arm pointing diagonally down towards a missing lefthand corner. Around its decorated frame he could make out a number of strange words. Some he could make no sense of at all; which was hardly surprising, given how little time Fent had given to his studies; but the words ‘Isenfelt’, ‘Oceana’ and ‘Sanctuarii’ were clear enough: icefields, ocean; Sanctuary. It made it all sound so simple; especially if it was possible to pinpoint an island as small as Kelpie from these inky squiggles. He blinked, looked up; compared the lines on the map with those etched against the horizon, reached no conclusion. It was an island, and there seemed to be an island marked in approximately that position on the parchment, and that was all he could comprehend. As one of the crewmen – Kalo, the quiet, dark oarsman – threaded his way past them, Fent watched his father’s hand curl protectively around the map, rolling it closed against his body and felt a momentary doubt. Could such a pretty, insubstantial object really render up a safe passage to a place of legend? Or had it cast some strange spell over the Master of Rockfall?
Red light was lining the piles of dark clouds gathering on the horizon as the sun went down: the air had taken on an unmistakable chill.
‘Da,’ he said again. ‘About Katla . . .’
The preternaturally good weather that had blessed the Westman Isles these past months had resulted in a succession of unseasonable lambings as ewes mated and birthed quite out of the normal pattern of such things. Even before Aran Aranson had taken most of the good men with him on his expedition to Sanctuary, the flocks were proving more than a handful for the two shepherds charged with their welfare and management. Fili Kolson and his ageing dog, Breda, had finally succeeded in penning all of his sheep in the shieling below the Hound’s Tooth; apart from one errant lamb which had taken exception at the sight of a particularly low-flying gull and had bounded away up the rocky pinnacle in complete panic. Breda had snapped at the beast’s heels for all of thirty feet, and had then as the ground had steepened unremittingly, had given it up as a lost cause, trotting back to Fili with her tongue hanging as loose as a flag. All Fili could do was to shake his head: when Breda decided she’d had enough neither flood nor fire could intervene. His limbs already woefully tired from a week spent in the uplands, he sighed and pursued the lamb: most likely with the Master gone no one would even notice the loss of a single animal, but he could not help but take pride in the task he had been allotted: even if no one else were to know the difference, the lamb would haunt his dreams.
The creature was maddeningly stupid: every time he came within grabbing distance of its tiny hooves, it danced away in terror, darting ever further up the rocks. By the time dusk approached, it had brought them to within spitting distance of the summit, and Fili was quite ready to fulfil the little beast’s worst fears and to strangle and eat it still kicking.
He watched it leap onto a granite outcrop on which the rosettes of lichen glowed gold in the lowering light and vanish from sight. A moment later it was bleating its head off.
‘Sur’s nuts,’ Fili swore fervently.
He gathered his breath and hurled himself up the last few feet of the pinnacle, past the outcrop and into grassy space. The lamb stood there, its sides heaving, its eyes gone round and solemn. Silent bleats issued from its dark little mouth. Fili gave it no quarter, and launched himself at the beast. Grabbing the lamb by the scruff of the neck, he whipped it up and under his arm before it could utter a sound. Oddly compliant at last, it hung there as limp as a dead thing: except that its head swivelled urgently behind his arm, seeking something on the headland. Fili had hobbled its legs and straightened up before he even noticed the focus of its intent gaze. When he did, he almost dropped the beast in shock: for there was a strange shape in the midst of the gloom: it looked like a huge chair, though that made not one whit of sense; and there was rather more to it than that. Some figure appeared to be bound in the seat, its eyes gleaming alarmingly in the half-light.