Authors: Jude Fisher
Fili was a smart lad: he could tie two-dozen knots and counterfeit every ragworm and sand-eel in the islands for bait. And he knew that if you came upon an afterwalker when the light was failing, you’d better be able to run as fast as a sprinting pony, for if it laid its big black hands upon you and got you down on the ground beneath its blood-swollen body, you’d soon be joining it in its nightly depredations and your family would sooner see your head off and buried a field away from your corpse before they’d welcome you in to sit by their hearth any more.
But the figure held his gaze, and as a cloud passed in front of the rising moon, he realised with a sudden start that the thing before him was not an afterwalker at all, but the daughter of the clan-chief, Katla Aransen. He laid the lamb down on the springy turf and dropped to his knees at her side. The first thing he undid was the gag; although when a stream of hoarse and filthy imprecations rent the air, he rather regretted not leaving it till last.
Katla boiled down into the steading, ready for a fight – with anyone, over anything – even though she was tired enough to drop. However, the atmosphere that met her inside the great hall was so bewildering, the fight soon went out of her. No one seemed particularly surprised that she had turned up now after disappearing so suddenly; no one seemed interested enough even to ask where she might have been. In fact, a heavy air of preoccupation hung over the few occupants of the place, deadening conversation, slowing action. Women stood around in huddles, talking quietly, their eyes large and worried. Tasks appeared to have been abandoned, or not started at all: where all would normally have been bustle and application – preparations for the evening meal, the stoking of the fire, folk coming in and out from their chores, the endless mending and making; even down to the tiny details like the refilling of the seal-oil in the soapstone dishes whose moss wicks lit the hall – all seemed to be held in abeyance as if waiting some pronouncement or event. The cook-fire was cold; the spit stood empty, the big iron kettle lay on its side in the dead embers.
Katla stared around her, bemused.
Most strange of all, perhaps, was that her father’s high seat was occupied. And not by Aran Aranson – but by his wife.
The Lady of Rockfall sat in the huge, carved chair with her elbows braced on its sturdy oaken arms, chin resting on her hands, gazing vacantly, but with an unsettling intensity, into space. Everyone kept a careful distance from her.
Katla frowned. It was an unspoken understanding, but had always seemed as binding as law, that no one sat in the high seat in the Master’s absence. It was a shocking transgression, and one so deliberate it must surely presage ominous tidings; she found herself approaching with uncharacteristic caution.
Her mother’s eyes never even flickered.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked, and her tone was flat and cold.
Katla blinked. ‘Tied to a chair,’ she said baldly.
If she had expected any reaction, any sign of surprise, she was to be disappointed.
‘At the top of the Hound’s Tooth,’ she went on. ‘By my beloved brother.’
Bera’s eyebrows shot up, but all she said was, ‘A raven came.’
‘A raven?’
‘From Halbo.’ Bera uncurled her right hand, her fingers splaying apart like the fronds of a fern. A twist of twine lay nestled in her palm, where it must have been close-furled for some considerable time. A series of complex knots had been tied into it, punctuated by the red-and-silver hitches clearly denoting the royal court.
Katla took it gingerly, stretched it out and surveyed the arrangement with astonishment. Then she turned the twine upside-down and looked at it from that angle, knowing with a terrible fluttering in her chest even as she did so that she had not been mistaken the first time. When she looked up, she found her mother’s eyes fixed on her face.
‘We must send a boat after them – there’s still time; we might catch them before dawn if the wind remains steady. I’ll take the
Fulmar’s Gift
and Fili and Perto—’ She racked her memory for any of the other Rockfall lads left behind from the expedition who might have been of some use in a boat.
‘No.’
Bera’s voice was stone-hard.
‘What?’
‘Even if you reach him and deliver the message, he will never turn back. He is as stubborn as a bull on heat, and has little regard for the King.’
‘Then what will we do?’
Her mother made an imperceptible movement that might have been a tiny shrug. ‘I shall marshal whichever men I can find in the isles and send them to Halbo. I shall make excuses and beg pardon, though it pains me mightily to do so. And I shall run this household as best I can until my husband returns.’
She firmed her jaw and her chin came up until the tendons stood out on either side of her neck. For the first time, Katla saw how gaunt her mother had become of late, how dark shadows circled her eyes, how hollows had grown beneath the pale rose of her cheeks and lines fanned out from her eyes, gouged her forehead and carved deep grooves which ran down from the corners of her mouth. She was ageing fast; and Aran Aranson’s departure ahead of this devastating news had aggravated the process beyond retrieval.
‘If he ever does.’ Such a bitter tone.
Katla could think of nothing to say, either in her father’s defence, or to make her mother feel any better. Her fingers wandered back to the message one more, disbelieving, time.
‘We are at war with Istria,’ she read there. ‘You are commanded to render up to your king all men and ships in the Westman Isles and dispatch them to Halbo forthwith. Any who fail to comply with this decree shall be deemed men of Eyra no more and their goods and lives declared forfeit to the crown. By order of Ravn Asharson, Lord of the Northern Isles.’
The wind held all night, changing strength and direction by only the smallest of increments, which Aran used to his advantage, tacking across the path of the waves and slipping neatly off them, so that the
Long Serpent
skimmed and flowed like the mythical creature after which it had been named. At times it felt just as if the great vessel was airborne: with the night sky so deep and black and the stars mirrored silver in the black water, it was impossible, at a glance and in a drowsy state, to know which element it moved in.
Fent came off his watch two hours after high moon, but he found it impossible to sleep; and not just because of the disturbing motion of the ship or the noisy cracking of the sail overhead. He would begin to drift into an uneasy doze and hear a voice, too close, too loud. Sometimes it seemed to be that of a woman, low, deep and foreign; sometimes it transformed itself into the tones of Urse One-Ear. Once, he felt the big man’s breath on his neck, so that he sat bolt upright in panic. There was no one there; no one but Gar Felinson, snoring through his open mouth; and, awake, Fent knew it was unlikely that Tam Fox’s lieutenant would carry out his threat, here, on board his father’s vessel, in full view of the rest of the crew.
Ah, yes, but at night, in bad weather
, his traitor-mind taunted him.
Who would notice then?
As it was, Aran had accepted Fent’s excuses for his sister’s disappearance without a word, had seemed barely even surprised, let alone angry or disappointed. Instead, he had applied himself to the map once more, picking out on its surface the northern coast of Stormness as they passed its tall sandstone cliffs, glowing an uncanny fire-orange in the low spectrum light, the shadows of albatrosses cast in romantic relief against their sheer faces; frowning slightly at the absence of any marking for the series of long reefs there, jutting out through half a mile of surf and turbulence. This failing on the part of his treasure had preoccupied the Master for an hour or more. He glowered; he frowned. His eyebrows joined into the single forbidding line that warned against interruption or comment. He yelled a criticism at Sten Arnason for some apparent misdemeanour with the lines which caused the blond man to glare back, his cheeks flushed. He barked an unnecessary order at Urse, who looked quizzical, but held his tongue. He’d seen enough eccentric captains in his time; unless they were truly mad, these little shows of temper blew over like ocean squalls.
And indeed, a few minutes later, Aran Aranson was beaming. He hit his fist against his thigh. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed delightedly. ‘Of course! This is no map designed for mere adventures, but for seasoned sailors who know their hazards. Why mark on it every rock and skerry? Let the fools come to grief; let their ships founder; let them fail!’
After that, he had rolled the parchment with infinite care and tucked it away in his tunic, close to his heart. Then he went to sit at the stern, propped up against the skiff, watching the night sky and the ever-steady Navigator’s Star as if by his unswerving attention and his will he could hold the ship on its course. Whenever Fent looked aft through the dark hours, there his father sat still and unblinking, the moonlight slicking his eyeballs. And while this night-long vigil might have generated confidence in the crew of another captain, Aran’s eerily stonelike watch made the men uneasy. Some of them made warding signs against demonic possession; others turned to their oar-companions and sought solace in shared words.
‘Does he never sleep?’ Marit enquired of Flint Hakason, a northern islander with a braided beard and scarred hands who purported to have known the Master of Rockfall for twenty years, and to have seen the edge of the world, though none believed him. It was well known Flint saw most things of this nature in the bottom of an empty goblet.
The scarred man laughed. ‘Tis my belief he has two sets of eyes like Sada’s mother, so he may keep watch by day and night!’
‘If you have the virtue of a goddess to set guard over, such may be of great value; but a ship in fair waters and a half-decent crew to place your trust in while you catch a nap?’
‘Half-decent, aye. Some of these lubbers haven’t sailed beyond Rockfall Sound in their entire lives. Which, in the case of some of these lads, is barely as long as my thumb.’ He cast a meaningful glance to the larboard side, where Gar Felinson and the tumbler Jad were engaged in a quiet but intense game of black-pebble-white-pebble. ‘We had best pray our luck with the weather holds: Sur help us if we hit a storm.’
But the weather held for several days more, a brisk south-westerly driving them from navigation point to navigation point as if Sur himself had blessed their venture and was easing their passage through the Northern Ocean with all the grace he could muster. The sun shone, the air was sharp and clear: by day, landmarks could be discerned for many sea-miles all around them; by night the stars offered up their configurations in a great celestial map. They passed Whale Holm and there was still no ice. Two days beyond that far landmark, they came upon islands no one on the vessel had ever seen or heard of before: islands which rose up out of the blue waves in great, sheer cliffs, the faces striated with regular bandings of red and black and white. The largest of these it took the best part of an hour to sail past so that the crew exclaimed in wonder and urged Aran to put in in order that they might discern the true nature of the rock – for it looked remarkably like pure sardonyx, and if these were truly islands formed from that prized semi-precious stone, was there any need to seek their fortunes farther north in uncharted waters crammed with ice and who knew what other perils? But the Master of Rockfall turned his face from the islands and continued his northerly course without the slightest appearance of interest, which left the men whispering mutinously until Haki Ulfson pointed out that the islands would be relatively simple to find when they returned from the Master’s expedition, and that if they were made up of sardonyx there was clearly more than enough there to make each and every man present – aye, and his wife, sons and dogs and chickens – as rich as King Rahay.
Now the first of the ice began to show itself, floating harmlessly on the surface of the waves in frazil clumps and plates which were opaque and dirty-looking, filled with little bits of detritus and frozen sea-scum. Fascinated, Fent leaned overboard and retrieved a passing disc. Its cold burned his hands so that he yelped and the more seasoned crew laughed at his naiveté, but their laughs soon changed to cries of amazement as he held the disc up to the pale sun to reveal the shapes of tiny shrimps trapped inside the ice. ‘You keep fishing those out, lad,’ the cook, Mag Snaketongue, told him, ‘and we’ll have no lack for my broths. But next time, try to find me something a little larger to work with, eh?’
The days continued so mild and fair that they passed seals basking on their backs in the open sea, soaking up the unseasonable winter sun, and so peaceful and contented did they look that no one had the hard-heartedness to disturb their slumbers with harpoon or spear. After all, there was more than enough to eat for many weeks on board, and savouries more tempting to be had from Bera Rolfsen’s stores than even the fattest seal-meat. Seabirds circled the ship all day long, so that they got used to the sight of fulmars and kittiwakes, awks and mers: a plenitude of food if ever they were in short supply.
By Aran Aranson’s reckoning – by sun and star and the wondrous map – they were within two weeks’ sailing of their destination, having negotiated over one third of the voyage with the greatest speed and in the finest conditions any mariner could wish for. Even Fent – never previously happy on board a ship – began to think he could get used to a life on the high seas: there was little work to do when the wind held (for he was not skilled enough to man the lines); the temperatures were extraordinarily pleasant for the depth of winter, when sheltered Rockfall could succumb to the bitterest cold, and Mag Snaketongue had proved to be a better cook than his name or grim aspect suggested, a cook, moreover, who had brought enough herbs and spices away from his own Allfair trip to render even the blandest meats delicious. He became quite expert at knucklebones and the pebble game, and soon most of the crew owed him considerable sums which they promised, with remarkable good humour, to render up to him on their return to the isles. After all, with all that sardonyx to be mined, no one would miss a few cantari, or even their finest livestock. No matter what the outcome of the expedition at their destination, there would be bounty for all one way or another. They were, they told themselves, the luckiest of men.