Wild Magic (62 page)

‘No time for niceties,’ she declared, grabbing up an iron bar from the bench. A moment later she was prying unceremoniously at a massive oak chest which served as the steading’s weapons store. Two moments later, the wood around the lock splintered apart. She stared into its dark interior.

‘Sur’s teeth!’ she swore loudly.

Thin Hildi’s hands flew to her mouth. She had never heard the Mistress of Rockfall curse: she was such a genteel woman, always punctiliously polite even when furious.

‘Sur’s giant prick and bollocks!’ Bera went on, delivering a vicious kick to the box.

The chest was empty apart from a couple of rusty old knives and a handful of arrows with loose heads. Someone had taken everything they stored there against just such an emergency, but whether all the weaponry had been dealt out to Aran’s expeditionary force, or whether someone else had helped themselves to the contents, she could not imagine. Strangest of all was why anyone having rifled the contents so thoroughly would then go to the trouble of relocking the chest. Unless they wished the theft to go unnoticed.

There was no point in further conjecture. She looked around determinedly. On the shelf below the bench was the beautiful sword Katla had promised Tor Leeson’s mother, and the two daggers she had been making as show pieces. The latter were awaiting Katla’s fine niello work, and were as yet dull and unadorned. As ornamental daggers they would win no prizes; but the points and edges were forged as sharp and true as any warrior’s blade.

Three weapons, no matter how well forged, would hardly see off a band of ruthless raiders. Bows and arrows, spears and javelins were what they needed: they must hold the visitors at a distance or they’d be lost entirely, for she’d give long odds against their chances if they had to fight hand to hand with strong, trained men.

At least there were throwing spears, a dozen or more, racked along the eastern wall. Bera grabbed up the knives and sword and thrust them at Hildi. Then she took down spear after spear and pushed them into the girl’s arms until she could carry no more. ‘Take these and run back to the steading!’ she said urgently, and spared no time watching the girl’s staggering gait as she trailed awkwardly back towards the hall.

The barn, Bera thought suddenly. Aran and the boys always kept their bows in the barn.

Running swiftly across the courtyard, and praying that they had not been taken on board the
Long Serpent
(for what? her mind questioned ironically: shooting gulls in dull moments between fending off icebergs and stormwaves?) she had a clear view between the trees and noted that several of the women were now in sight at the top of the hill, and that down in the harbour, the raiders had disembarked onto the quay and split into two groups. One group had fanned out to the east and were running into the defile that led up past the Hound’s Tooth. They would have little joy in that direction, she thought with a bitter smile. Unless they had a penchant for goats and cats. You did hear odd things about pirates and raiders; anything was possible: Old Ma Hallasen’s beasts had better be prepared to defend their virtue. The rest were pursuing the fleeing women, and had almost gained on Ferra Bransen, whose skirts were impeding her progress.

Nothing to be done there. Setting her jaw, Bera ran the hundred yards between the smithy and the barn and found – thank Sur! – Aran Aranson’s long hunting bow hanging where he always kept it, and a fine sheaf of arrows wrapped in oilcloth below it. She unwrapped the cloth with a swift flick and counted a couple of dozen ash shafts fletched with swan’s feathers. Good, but not good enough. These arrows were made for long flight; she would also need some sturdy yew shafts for use at closer range. A quick scout of the tack room offered further hope: three more shortbows and a bucketful of shafts of varying types and age. Many were black and pitted with age and pocked with rust, and some had barbs which had broken off in some unfortunate prey; but Bera Rolfsen did not give a rat’s arse for their condition: what was to come was hardly likely to be a contest with points awarded for skill or precision.

Scooping this trove into her arms, the Mistress of Rockfall hared across the hard-packed ground between the barn and the hall as fleetly as a girl of eighteen. By the time she reached the door, the first of the raiders was clearing the top of the hill. There was no time to waste.

‘Bar the doors!’ she cried, hurling her harvest of bows and arrows to the floor, where they spilled with a great clatter.

‘Ferra is not here yet—’ someone started.

‘We cannot wait for her!’ Bera slammed the wooden door shut and dragged the iron latch and lock across it. ‘The benches!’ she shouted. ‘Barricade the door with benches!’

The women did as they were told without another word of protest. Otter Garsen ran to the pile of weaponry, swiftly selected a whippy long-bow of elm and ran to the far end of the hall where a ladder led up into the loft-space. There, she climbed stiffly up into the eaves and with her belt-knife began to dig away at the turf from the underside. ‘Help me!’ she called down, and one of the Seal Rock women caught her meaning and came running and together, they began to excavate a hole in the roof.

‘Who amongst you can use a bow?’ Bera demanded loudly.

Her question seemed to fall on deaf ears. No one made any response. She looked from one woman to another, saw how they looked away shamefaced, perceiving a lack in themselves they would never have perceived as a lack before. At last Tian Jensen said, ‘My eyes are not what they were but in my younger days I stuck a few rabbits.’

Bera picked up a long-bow and a dozen swan-flighted arrows and handed them to her. ‘You’ll find your targets may make up for your eyesight,’ she said, ‘for these men are somewhat larger than rabbits and may not run so quick, either.’ She turned to Morten Danson, sitting so quietly in the shadows at the back of the hall that it was as if he were trying to melt away into them altogether, and fixed him with a sharp look. ‘And you, sir shipmaker, which would you rather – a hunting bow to take them out from the roof or a sturdy shortbow for closer range?’

The shipwright held her gaze. ‘I have no quarrel with these men,’ he said.

Bera laughed bitterly. ‘Ah, but do they know that?’ she said, almost to herself. She selected a shortbow of yew and horn and threw it to him. He fumbled, then caught the bow before it hit the floor and stared at it as if it were a conger eel and he had no idea which end to hold to stop it biting him. The arrows which followed it clattered around down him. He sat there for a moment, looking bemused, then gathered them up and made his way to one of the windows.

Bera assessed the meagre weaponry they had accumulated. Then she marched around the hall, doling them out: a spear for the young and fit, who might stand some chance of using it; a dagger for all those but the most arthritic, who could not grasp one anyway. Kitten Soronsen she came to last. ‘Spear or dagger?’ she asked softly. The pretty girl’s face was pale, smeared with blood from the thorns and stained with tears. Her eyes were as large and round as an owl’s.

With shaking hands, Kitten took up one of the showpiece daggers. ‘I never thought I would say such a thing, but I wish now I had trained with Katla when she asked me to,’ she said softly.

Gramma Rolfsen took an elm-shafted spear with a cruelly barbed head. ‘Any man running onto this,’ she announced, ‘will not be going far.’

The sword that her daughter had forged for Tor’s mother, Bera kept for herself. It felt beautifully weighted in her hand, surprisingly light and powerful. Her palm buzzed from the contact as if with a live thing. She executed a few assessing twists and turns with the blade, remembering the only lesson she had ever had from her husband almost twenty years before when he had sailed out with his father to war against the Southern Empire. ‘Eyran weapons are for stabbing and slashing,’ Aran had told her. ‘Do not be too delicate with the blade: try to take an attacker on at elegant swordplay and you are lost. Put all your weight behind a stroke and you can take a man’s leg or arm off, shearing straight through the bone. And once you have done that, you need no longer worry about him.’

She shuddered and sheathed the blade. With luck it would not come to that. Picking up a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows, she ran up the ladder and swarmed up through the ragged new hole in the roof to join Otter and the Seal Rock woman, there to greet the visitors.

The wind was fair from Far Sey. Erno stood at the helm and felt the sting of the salt wind as it whipped his hair across his face. The only way they might sail faster was if the ship were to sprout wings, which seemed unlikely, since in all of Elda only Sur’s own ship, the
Raven
, a vessel possessed of rather special powers, had been known to have done so. But with the sun shining down and an unseasonable warmth encouraging the grey seals to bask in the waters around the islands, he had the inalienable sense that all was well with the world and that Katla Aransen – despite the strange history between them – would soon be in his arms. It had, he reminded himself for the thousandth time, been on her command that he had sailed away from the Moonfell Plain; though why she had urged him to do so still remained hazy. It was only in his dreams now that memories of the Istrian woman returned to him, and when he caught the fleeting tails of such dreams, he thought her dark hair and gentle eyes a figment, a concoction of his senses, and felt the guilt roll over him like a stormcloud.

‘We’ll see Rockfall harbour by dawn tomorrow,’ came a voice at his shoulder.

He turned to find Joz Bearhand there. The giant of a man was barely a knuckle’s length taller than he was: they stood almost eye to eye. The older man’s grey eyes were shrouded and watchful.

‘Aye,’ nodded Erno. ‘At last.’

‘I hope we shall be in time to find the shipmaker there.’

‘Where else would he be?’

‘If he’s been stolen to make Aran Aranson a ship, out on the ocean main, I’d think.’

‘I’d heard Morten Danson was a landman,’ Erno grinned. ‘Never set foot on a ship that wasn’t firmly anchored in a safe harbour.’

Joz shook his head. ‘I do not understand how such a man can build ships which can withstand the strictures of an arctic storm.’

Erno thought about this for a moment. Then he said: ‘Katla Aransen has never to my knowledge been to war, yet she forges the finest weapons this side of the Northern Ocean.’

Joz Bearhand patted his sword hilt fondly, then gave a concessionary shrug. ‘Ah, she is an exceptional woman, I’ll give you that.’

‘I’m going to wed her,’ Erno said firmly.

A great gale of laughter burst out of the huge mercenary.

Erno regarded him fiercely. ‘Why do you laugh so?’

The older man wiped a hand across his eyes. ‘Lad,’ he started, ‘you have a great deal to learn about the world if you think your life will progress so simply. Women are odd and contrary creatures,’ he paused, to consider this statement, then continued. ‘And Katla Aransen is, I have to say, one of the odder of the breed. She is of such a character that it does not lead me to imagine she will come to you like a meek little heifer led on a gilded rope.’

This conjured in his mind a somewhat unlikely image. ‘I know it,’ Erno said fervently, remembering her feisty nature and odd turns of humour; her pigheaded opinions and her unconventional views about marriage and children. Then he remembered her wild hair and her laughing eyes, and the way she had kissed him outside the King’s tent at the Gathering. Suddenly his heart felt high and clear.

What could possibly go wrong?

Katla Aransen was certainly at her wildest now. Having scaled a granite outcrop above the path out of the harbour she had taken up a stance there, shielded by a dense bank of gorse. She had allowed a dozen of the men to pass her without mishap: there was nothing in this direction for them anyway but Ma Hallasen’s bothy and the tumbledown ruins of the old fishing community at Seal Point, before the Great Storm had drenched that part of the island and the survivors had moved away. Her concentration was bent on the stragglers. She had one sighted down the shaft of her arrow between the grey fletchings, her eyes following his movements as keenly as a falcon’s might the progress of a shrew in the grass. The first of the stragglers was dragging an unwilling Ferra Bransen along the path, while a second man cut her dress from her back in measured sweeps of his elegant sword so that strips of the linen fluttered in ribbons to the ground. They were having a high old time of it, laughing and joking in their pretty southern tongue. Ferra’s face was bruised where they had hit her and one eye was swollen shut and crusted with blood. Katla waited until their companions had disappeared around the bend in the path, then drew back her hand until she felt the perfect tension in the string, and released it with a whisper.

The arrow took the first man so cleanly that he did not even have the chance to utter a sound. Nocking another shaft in an instant, Katla sighted on the second man with a gleeful grin. It was the first time she had ever knowingly killed another human being and it felt remarkably satisfying.

The second man stared about him in confusion, unable to fathom what had just happened. His companion had pitched face forward onto the path, with the arrow – a short, sturdy quarrel fashioned by Katla’s own hand from yew and iron and designed for rabbit-hunting – buried so deep in his eye that his head was resting at a relatively normal angle for a man asleep, or suddenly unconscious. Meanwhile, Ferra Bransen (who had the brains of a sheep, Katla thought) instead of legging it for safety as any sound-minded person would have done under the circumstances, stood rooted to the ground in open-mouthed horror, her hands batting madly about as if she was swatting flies. With a sigh, Katla shot the second man as realisation of the ambush struck him. The shaft took him neatly in the centre of the chest with a thud, and he fell over backwards into the brambles.

It seemed almost too easy. Easier than shooting rabbits, certainly.

Katla waited to make sure no one was going to double back to find two of their number dead and look for the culprit, then she swarmed down the earthy bank at the back of the outcrop and emerged onto the path a moment later with her bow and quiver swung over her shoulder and a short sword in her hand, just in case.