by Jude Fisher
Katla watched as the great striped sail was taken down and furled as they came into the shallower waters. All over the ship, men leapt to their tasks. She saw her father take his customary position at the steerboard to guide them in through the reefs and the long, grey breakers and turned her face back to the new land.
The Moonfell Plain.
A place from legend.
It had taken hours, it seemed, to make camp. By the time they had unshipped the two skiffs and put in to shore, the Navigator’s Star was shining brightly in the sky. Lying on the strangely still ground, tired to the bone, Katla had been unable to sleep for the sheer novelty of it all. She’d heard about the Allfair for as long as she could remember – all the lads’ tales of horse-fights and boulder-throwing and swordplay; the gossip, the trading stories, the marriage-makings, the lists of extravagant-sounding names and internecine political allegiances. And she’d seen with her own eyes the intricate silver jewellery her father brought back for her mother when trading had gone well for him: and the monstrous, shaggy yeka-hides that covered their beds at home in the winter months – but this was her first Allfair and she could not wait for it to begin.
Wrapped in a sealskin with the pelt turned to the inside for warmth, she peered over the snoring bodies towards the distant campfires of the fairground and gazed again in awe at the great rock that rose steeply from the plain, illuminated by the flickering light. That was what she had felt, all those miles out at sea, she knew it now, twisting around to stare at its massive presence. It must be, she realised with a little thrill of excitement, Sur’s Castle: hallowed ground. It was here – according to her folk, the Eyrans, the people of the north – where their god Sur had first taken his rest (having fallen from the Moon onto the surface of Elda) and surveyed his new domain. And having contemplated the whole great vista and found it sadly wanting, he had waded into the sea, thinking that by following the track of the moonbeams on the waves he might somehow find his way back home. The Moon-path, Katla thought, remembering Fent’s verse. Poor Sur, lost and lonely in an empty land. The god had marched right across the northern ocean, skimming stones on his way to take his mind off the numbing cold (and of such great size were the stones that he cast about him that they formed the islands and skerries of Eyra) until at last he had disappeared into the fogs at the edge of the world of Elda. There, resigned to the fact that he would never find his way back home, he had raised a great stronghold beneath the waves, deep down on the ocean bed. This, the Eyrans called ‘the Great Howe’, or sometimes ‘the Great Hall’. Lost sailors shared the long table there with Sur, it was said: and once one member of your clan had drowned and gone to the Howe, it was well known others would soon follow.
Katla had heard that the Istrians had a different tale to tell. They had no love of the sea, and did not believe even in the existence of Sur, an appalling heresy in itself. Instead, they prayed to some fire-deity, a creature – a woman – rumoured to have come walking naked out of a volcano in the Golden Mountains, unscathed by the lava, leading a great cat on a silver chain. Falla the Merciful – that’s what they called her: a misnomer if ever there was one, since in her name the southerners burned unbelievers and wrongdoers by the thousand, sacrifices to appease her and hold at bay the molten heart of the world.
Sur’s Castle. Her fingers began to itch. She’d go and look at it first thing the next morning: there would surely be a route by which she could climb to the top. Fighting and jewellery and monster-skins – and a new rock to climb: truly the Allfair was a wondrous event, to encompass such diversity.
She lay there, smiling at this thought, until she became drowsy. When at last she closed her eyes, she dreamed that she could feel the pull of the great rock deep inside her, as if it was somehow a part of the Navigator’s Star and she nothing but a lodestone, drawn to it through a dark sea.
At first light the next morning, Katla kicked off the sealskin and crept away from the camp like a fox from the coop. In this area of the shoreline, no one else stirred. Up the shore she went, as fast as she could, the loose black ashy ground loud beneath her feet. In the shadow of Sur’s Castle, she stared up. The great rock reared over her, enveloping her in its chill shadow, seeming higher, suddenly, from here – and steeper, too – than her first assessment of it from the beach. Dark clouds had gathered above it, promising rain: she’d have to be quick. Her stomach fluttered and her heart gave a little thump: a familiar reaction before she attempted a climb, but a useful one, she’d found: anxiety tended to sharpen her concentration. Above her stretched a vertical chock-filled fissure – the most obvious line of ascent as far as she could see. It looked wide enough in places to jam a knee for balance, narrowing down to a crack that should accommodate a fist above the halfway mark. On either side of the line, little rugosities could clearly be seen where the crystals in them caught the early light: useful footholds, Katla thought. She reached up and found her first handhold: a jagged flake just inside the crack. It felt cold and a hole damp beneath her fingers: sharp, too, but solid. As she took hold of it, a line of energy ran through her hand and jolted up her arm. For Katia, this had become a familiar sensation: this magical connection with rock and stone and the minerals they bore. She waited until the burst of energy had charged through her chest and up into her head, waited for the disorientating buzz to die away, and then gave herself to the rock. Letting the hold take her weight, she swung a foot up into the crack.
The move off the ground was always the hardest. Once established in the fissure, she readjusted her balance and went easily upward, hand over hand, methodical and careful, occasionally stepping outside the crack for better stability when the angle became too steep. The texture of the stuff reminded her of the sea-eaten cliffs back home: all pitted and sharp-edged from the corrosive appetite of the waves, and as painful on the skin as barnacles. She could feel it biting into the soles of her feet even through the leather. Sur knew what her hands would look like by the top, even though she’d been placing them with more consideration than usual. It was not that she was a vain girl – far from it: but there would be awkward questions to answer if she came back covered with cuts and scrapes.
The sheer pleasure of the climb soon erased any sense of worry: past the halfway mark it started to rain; but the angle of the rock eased so that she was able to stand in balance and look around, taking in the brightly-coloured tents of the other Fair-goers, their wax-treated surfaces repelling the drops of water that pattered down upon them. She had never before seen such vibrant shades: in the islands the only eye-catching dye you could produce was a rather putrid yellow that appeared to have been obtained by soaking your clothes in pig’s urine but actually derived from an innocuous-looking lichen, scraped painstakingly and in vast quantity from the granite cliffs that formed the bones of her homeland. (Though it had to be said that even then, you did actually need a bit of urine to fix the colour so that it didn’t bleed down your leg in the first storm. It didn’t smell for too long. Only a week or so.)
It was among these granite cliffs where Katla had first learned the magic that lay in the veins of the rock. It was there she had started to clamber around in such a casual fashion, barely conscious of the yawning gulf beneath her feet, the sucking maw of the ocean; the bone-shattering consequences of a fall. There, she’d collected gulls’ eggs in late spring; samphire in the summer. She’d fished from precipitous ledges and pulled line after line of iridescent mackerel out of secret zawns. And sometimes she’d just scaled the cliffs for the sheer pleasure of being somewhere no other person had set foot.
Two more moves and she had her hands on the flat summit: using a sharp incut for her right foot to gain more height, she pushed down hard till her arms could take her whole weight, skipped her feet up the remaining stretch of rock; and suddenly she was on top of Sur’s Castle, on top of the world.
Sitting there, with her feet dangling over the edge, with the Moonfell Plain stretching away below, a glorious sense of wellbeing descended upon K
atla.
So she was surprised and not a little dismayed when someone started shouting, apparently at her.
‘Oi, you there!’ The second shout was in the Old Tongue.
She looked around.
At the far western edge of the rock, a couple of elderly gentle men were climbing, haltingly and with great puffs of effort, a line of carefully-chiselled steps. Someone had thoughtfully arranged a pair of taut hemp handrails on either side of the stairs, and the grey-hairs were hanging onto these even as they bellowed at her. They both wore long dark-red robes with elaborately-worked brocade facings; even from her perch seventy yards away, Katla could see the silver thread glinting in the weak light. Rich men, then, she thought. Not Eyrans; at least like none she’d ever seen. The northerners could never afford clothes like that – they’d be worth a ship’s cargo apiece – and even if they could, they’d never climb a rock in them . . .
‘Get down from there at once!’
The first of the old men had reached the top step and, lifting his voluminous skirts, was picking up speed.
She cupped her hand to her ear and shrugged: the universal gesture for ‘can’t hear a word you’re saying’.
Infuriated, the grey-hair waved his stick.
‘The Council and the Allfair Guard—’
‘Of which we are on the ruling committee—’
‘Indeed, brother. Of which we are on the ruling committe, have declared Falla’s Rock as sacred ground!’
Falla’s rock?
The second had almost caught up with his fellow. He was shaking his fist at her. ‘You’ll pay for not showing the due observances, young man!’
Young man? Katla’s mouth fell open in amazement. Young man? He must be blind. She stood up, and with aggressive haste unbound her hair. She always tied it into a tail when she climbed: otherwise it could be a damned nuisance. Unconfined, it fell around her shoulders in tumbling waves. At the same moment, as if to emphasise the point, the sun came out, so that the slanting rain became a shower of silver and Katla’s hair a fiery beacon.
The second old man cannoned into the first.
‘Oh, Great Goddess, Lady of Fire, it’s— a woman!’
They looked extremely unhappy.
Katla, deciding not to find out exactly what it was that pained them so badly about the situation, made her excuses and left, reversing with considerable alacrity and no little skill the crack-line she’d just ascended.
There was a saying that the old women had in the north (they had a saying for everything in Eyra: it was that sort of place): the heedful outlive the heroes. Like her brothers she’d always thought it cautious nonsense; but it was possible in this particular case that they had a point.
Saro Vingo emerged, blinking, from his family pavilion into the light of a day still making its mind up whether to rain or shine. His head hurt as if someone had trampled on it in the night. For some reason his father had decided that Saro’s first visit to the Allfair should be marked by a major araque-binge, and his uncle and cousins and older brother, Tanto, had all conspired to line up glass after glass of the vile smoky stuff for him and watched him down each one in a single swallow until every flask was dry. They had matched him glass for glass; but they had had a lot more practice. He had left them all sleeping it off, tumbled on the floor amid the dogs and the vomit; collapsed upon silk-strewn couches, snoring their heads off in the pile of rich tapestries and shawls they’d brought as a gift for the northern King at this, his first Allfair. Though why the people of the Empire should bother to flatter a barbarian, he could not imagine. Falla knew what he’d make of the gorgeous Istrian fabrics, now reeking of araque and bile. Still, the Eyrans were known to be very unsophisticated people: he’d probably think it had something to do with the dye-process.
Saro was curious to set eyes upon the women of the north. All the lads whose first Fair this was were equally fascinated; it had been their major topic of conversation on the journey here from the southern valleys. King Ravn Asharson was coming to the Allfair, it was said, to choose himself a bride; so the Eyran nobles would surely be bringing their daughters and sisters in the hopes of making a royal match. As far as Saro was concerned, it was the focal point of the Fair: not for him the dull complications of deal-making and point-scoring with a load of fat old merchants who knew exactly what game they were playing with one another and made him feel a complete fool for not being a party to their subtly coded rules and haggling. The women of Eyra were rumoured to be amongst the most beautiful women on Elda, and that was interesting. Although he would be the first to admit that he had no real idea of what a woman looked like; let alone how to assess her beauty. At home, the women were hidden away for most of the time: since the time he’d turned fifteen and had been initiated into the sexual world, he had barely even seen his mother.
He thought of her now; how, swathed from head to foot in a fabulously-coloured sabatka, she would flutter silently from room to room, with only her hands and mouth showing, like some wonderful, exotic butterfly.
A moment later, and he was remembering the encounter that had brought him to manhood: how his father had paid for him to enter that darkened room in the backstreets of Altea; the smell of the woman inside it – musky and rank; the feeling of her cool hands and hot lips upon him; his uncontrollable climax, and the shame that followed.
Yet it was rumoured that not only did the men of the northern isles allow their women to wander freely, but also that they showed off not just their hands and mouths, but their entire faces, and occasionally even their limbs and chests. The thought of such sacrilege made Saro’s heart palpate. And not just his heart.
His fair cheeks were still flushed from these unclean thoughts when he heard a shout. Turning around he saw in the near distance how two of the Istrian elders who sat upon Istria’s ruling council of city states – Greving Dystra and his brother, Hesto – were laboriously climbing the stairs to the summit of Falla’s Rock. They seemed to be waving their arms around and calling out. Intrigued, Sara made his way between the pavilions grouped below the rock, and, shading his eyes, stared up. Atop the rock sat what appeared to be a young man dressed in a homely brown tunic and long boots, who even now had scrambled to his feet, clearly embarrassed at being caught in this serious act of trespass. Greving was shaking his fist at the intruder and Hesto was just clearing the last stair, when the young man turned to confront them and with an impatient – indeed, rather extravagant – flick of the wrist pulled loose the cord that held back his hair. The light struck suddenly off a face revealed to be too finely structured for any boy’s, framed by a flamboyant fall of blazing red, and Saro found that he could not get his breath. Even at this distance he felt the shock of seeing a girl – with bare legs and arms; and not just any girl, but a barbarian creature in defiance of all observance and decency, on top of the sacred Rock – like a physical blow. Quite unexpectedly, his knees became unreliable, and he sat down hard upon the ashy ground.
When he looked up again, she was nowhere to be seen.
If Katla had hoped to sneak back amongst the Rockfall clan unnoticed, she was soon to be disappointed. Cresting the ridge of the shore, she stared down across the dark and gritty sand to where the faerings and their snoring crew had lain like beached whales only an hour before; only to find everyone up and about and as busy as ants, under the watchful eye of her father.
‘Sur’s nuts,’ she cursed softly. ‘Now I’m in trouble.’
The Fulmar’s Gift lay anchored a hundred yards offshore, bobbing in the pale light of the newly risen sun. At this distance she looked graceful and sublime, her clinkered hull as elegant as any swan’s breast. But close up, Katla knew, she was a more impressive sight by far, the fine oak of her strakes marked by years of voyaging in rough northern waters; her gunwales gouged and split by rocks and collision and the violent grip of enemies’ axe-heads; the soaring neck of her ornamented prow culminating in the fearsome shape of a she-troll’s head, mouth agape and every tooth sharply de
lineated with loving, superstitious skill. But of course they’d taken down the provocative figurehead before entering the neutral territory of the Moonfell waters and laid it in sailcloth alongside the lowered mast. It would hardly do, Aran had said, to remind their old foe of worse times when you were preparing to fleece them blind.
A dozen or more of the crew swarmed over her, manhandling great wooden chests and barrels from their stowage places and lowering them one at a time into one of the narrow faerings, which shuddered and rocked under the weight of the heavy cargo.
The second of the ship’s boats was even now beaching in the shallows. Four men in the bows leapt out in a flurry of surf, stark white against the black of the land, and hauled the little boat up the gentle rise as if it were as light as a mermaid. Katla could make out her elder brother, Halli, and her twin, Fent; the second pair comprising Tor Leeson and their cousin, Erno Hamson.
‘That’s all I need,’ she groaned. ‘An audience.’
Chin up, she strode resolutely down the volcanic dune to face the inevitable chastisement, the ashy sand crunching unhelpfully underfoot. Before she had got within even ten feet of him, her father turned around and regarded her grimly, his gnarled, weather-beaten hands on his hips.
‘Where have you been?’
Aran Aranson was a big man, even by Eyran standards. His wife, Bera, often joked that before they were married, whenever her mother had spotted him riding up to their farm to pay court on his sturdy little pony (his feet so close to the ground despite its zealous efforts that it seemed that the pair of them might at any moment trip each other up and fall in an undignified heap) she would say, ‘Here comes Aran Aranson, that great ogre of yours again, Bera. If you have children – hear what I say – they’ll turn out trolls and you’ll be split in two like a piece of firewood!’ And then she’d cackle fit to bursting and fuss over him till the poor lad turned red, knowing that somehow he was the butt of her teasing yet again. She still had a robust sense of humour, Gramma Rolfsen: and her laughter could often be heard on a smoky night pealing out from the steading at Rockfall; but her son-by-law had never quite learned the trick of such humour, and as he stared at his errant daughter, he showed not even the trace of a smile.