by Jude Fisher
Aran Aranson loved a map. Maps were to him a marvel, with their rhumb lines and wind roses, their intricate coast-lines and stylised mountain ranges; their scattered islands and fantastically rendered monsters of the deep. But, most of all, he loved maps for all the promises they held out to him of journeys still to be made.
He walked briskly through the Eyran stalls, nodding to a man here, exchanging a greeting there, his eyes constantly watchful and intent: there seemed to be less sardonyx around this year – were supplies running low? It might drive the price up. On the other hand, the first two sardonyx stalls he passed – manned by Hopli Garson and Fenil Soronson – were deathly quiet. Halli might yet be looking elsewhere for the price of his longship, Aran thought ruefully. The third one, however, against the time and all the odds, was thronged. Aran craned his neck. Stacks of the dark, banded stone stood on each side of the display, ignored by the bystanders. Instead, they were almost falling over each other to lay hands on a small piece of glittering rock in the centre. Aran Aranson stood up on the balls of his feet. His heart skipped a beat. It was gold – or what looked like it – a great, gleaming lump of yellow ore. Gold: that rarest of all commodities. They had dug pits all over the Istrian plains in search of it on the flimsiest of rumours; they had opened mines into the roots of the Golden Mountains, only to find those dour peaks once more misleadingly named. In Eyra, men had gone mad skimming for it in glacial streams and moorland tarns. The only examples of the lovely metal had been gleaned by the brave and fortunate from the wrecks of ancient ships come long ago to grief on the treacherous skerries of the Eyran islands: ships that bore little relation to the simple vessels of either north or south, bearing gorgeously-crafted artefacts that spoke of a bygone age and a lost civilisation. He remembered the fabulous sceptre he had once seen in the palace at Halbo, massive and jewel-encrusted, so heavy it took two men to carry it, found generations ago in the shallow waters off South Island and now used for the investiture of the Eyran kings; and once at the Allfair six or seven years since when one of the Istrian lords had paraded around in a golden collar of bizarre design that made him stoop under the weight. The next day, the man lay dead down on the strand, his blood congealing into sticky pats that drew the attention of the flies and skuas. The collar, of course, was gone; and no one had seen it since; it had surely been broken up, Aran thought, broken up and melted down and incorporated in a hundred other pieces of jewellery and dagger-hilts, sold, and most likely worn, clandestinely.
He frowned. Surely no one would have the gall to display such unusual treasure so openly, unless he was the wealthiest man in all of Eyra; yet Aran did not recognise the man behind the stall; and in addition he was simply dressed, and the two guards who stood behind him were clearly not professionals: their gear was old and obsolete: the pommel of the first man’s sword finished in a rounded end, a style that had been out of fashion two generations or more. Neither did the weapon look so splendid that it would be a family heirloom, passed from father to son down the years. Still, you never could tell, and he knew well that appearances could deceive.
He watched proceedings at the stall for a time, while the onlookers touched the gold like a talisman and eventually filtered away to spread the word. No one bought any sardonyx. Aran approached the stall.
‘May I see?’
‘Of course.’ The man made an open-handed gesture, as if he was well-used to such requests.
Aran reached out and put the tips of his fingers to the rock. It was cold and rough to the touch, though it drew the sun’s rays to every shining, irregular plane of its surface as if it were a magnet. His fingertips buzzed and crawled at the contact.
He drew back: he had never touched gold before. The storytellers said that gold was warm and sensuous; but perhaps that was just the licence of their poetry. ‘Where did you come by this magnificent specimen?’ he asked, carefully flattering.
‘It was a trade I made, sir, a very fine trade.’
‘Might I ask with whom?’
‘A travelling man, and that’s all I’ll say, sir.’
A Footloose man, Aran thought. He felt a little shudder of excitement nicker through his chest. Uncle Ketil’s tales of magic and treasure reignited in his mind as if he were suddenly nine and at the old man’s knee once more.
‘And was this man openly offering gold, in the nomad quarter?’
The seller looked suspiciously at Aran. ‘There’s no point in your going to find him: this piece was all he had,’ he said quickly.
Too quickly, Aran thought. He bade the man farewell and walked swiftly to the nomad quarter, taking no notice of the rest of the Eyran stalls, the livestock pens, or the slave market. It would have been easy for a lesser man to have been distracted from his purpose, but Aran ignored the temptations that surrounded him. There would be more time to dally, to choose at least a small gift for Bera, later in the Fair. Now, his impatience drove him on, and while his face bore outwardly its usual stern expression, inside he was grinning like a child. Gold: he felt then that if he could take with him even the smallest ingot, it would be the talisman he was searching for in his life, the turning point that would take him from the drudgery of the farm, sailing into an endless blue horizon . . .
The map-seller took some finding, and he discovered him, eventually, only by asking a tall woman with feathers in her hair. She had cupped her hands to her ear and bent towards his question, which he repeated slowly, making signs with his hands to indicate a man unrolling a parchment. Then he showed her his windrose, the one he had got from the chandlery in Halbo, of the latest and most advanced design. She took it from him, then laughed raucously as if she had understood his purpose, and started to stow the windrose in her money-pouch. When she took him by the hand and patted his tunic where it covered his genitals, he realised in some horror that she thought he had offered it in exchange for her services. Hastily, Aran shook his head and retrieved the precious windrose. She stared at him in bemusement as he began to trace a design in the black sand – a coastline: he mimed a ship bobbing up and down to show her the wavy lines he had drawn indicated a sea. After some moments of this charade, she had smiled, showing off a mouthful of filed stumps – a prostitute, then, indeed; and one who had clearly once been owned by a slavemaster from the south – and clapped her hands together. She said something unintelligible, and then, realising he could not understand her, had walked with him for a way, her arm linked through his. Aran was beginning to think she had entirely mistaken his meaning and was about to pull away, when she drew him between two covered wagons to another all of wood, larger than most, with a lean-to stall in brightly-painted colours that had been erected on one side, and shaded with an awning. Beneath the awning stood a tall, thin, pale man, and before him, spread upon a gaudy cloth, was a pile of parchment scrolls. A pulse beat at Aran’s temple and he felt his heart begin to race. He pressed a coin into the nomad woman’s hands, and she bowed and smiled and walked on.
He was about to approach the stall when his attention was caught by a slight movement in his peripheral vision. On the steps of the wagon sat a black cat with slanted green eyes. A hand rested upon its neck, startlingly white against the black fur, the fingers tapering to pearl-pink nails in perfect ovals. Of the owner of this hand, no more could be seen; just the fingers moving rhythmically, hypnotically against the creature, whose purr he could hear from where he stood.
Almost, he could not tear his eyes away from the sensuous stroke, the beautiful hand. Almost: but the lure of the maps was too strong.
As soon as he turned back towards the stall, the tall man raised his head. Their eyes met and Aran felt a powerful jolt of reaction, but whether it was of anticipation or even of revulsion, he could not tell. The man, so pale as to be colourless, his features wide and flat, was a strange-looking creature, Aran thought, though he was not usually a judgemental man. He was of indeterminate age, the skin of his face entirely unmarked by the usual lines that life inflicted; but his eyes were not those
of a young man. Nor could he place his provenance.
‘May I look at your maps?’ he asked quickly in the Old Tongue.
Without a word, the man dipped his head in what Aran took to be assent. Aran picked up the first scroll that came to hand and unrolled it carefully. Something about it – his own anticipation most likely – made his fingers itch and burn. It was, curiously enough, a map showing the islands just to the east of his own, meticulously detailed and divulging every reef and outcrop of rock that revealed themselves only at the lowest tide. Fishing areas had been marked with shoals of beautifully drawn mackerel; and whales spouted in the deeper seas to the north. A useful tool, to those who needed such. Aran knew his fishing grounds. He smiled and rolled the map away again.
The next one he picked up was of the Istrian mainland, centring on the Golden Mountains and the lakes and rivers that drained off them. Barges had been drawn at various points to indicate the best navigable routes to the sea.
The third map he examined was sketchy in the extreme. Mountains had been drawn like marching triangles across the eastern quarter and stick-like yeka walked the empty area from there to the sea. ‘Terreta prion’ he read, the words that spidered the centre of the map, his fingers tracing their path. The desert lands. Fascinating; but he was a sailor, not a horseman; nor had he ever even sat upon a yeka. Disappointed, he put this map, too, away from him.
‘Are you seeking something specific?’ the man asked in unaccented Eyran.
Aran’s head came up sharply from his reveries. He shook his head. ‘Not really.’ He paused, then said softly, so that no one else might hear: ‘Though a friend of mine mentioned a map he had seen of a certain treasure-filled island. And another man I met showed me some of that treasure.’
The man smiled without revealing his teeth, so that his long, pale lips stretched across his face. The smile did not reach his eyes, which seemed as cold and pale as those of a squid.
‘Show me your hands.’
Aran stared at him.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your hands.’ There was, unless he was mistaken, a slight impatience in the man’s voice now: a touch of adamant.
Slowly, Aran held out his hands. The map-seller took hold of them, turned them palm-up and began to scrutinise them silently, running the tips of his fingers lightly up and down their seamed surfaces. Aran felt intensely uncomfortable. No man had ever touched him like this before: he hoped no one he knew would walk past and see this odd display. After several long moments, he could bear it no longer.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
The man did not lift his eyes. ‘I see that you are a seafaring man, and have been so for some long while. It takes no great hand-reading skill to know this, for your hands are roughened by salt and rope, and you have rowing callouses across the pads of your palms and fingers. However, you also work the land, though maybe less willingly. And here—’ he turned Aran’s right hand over, to indicate a long white scar down the brawny, tanned wrist ‘—here is where you took a wound from a thin sabre of Forent steel, fighting Istrian enemies, maybe nineteen or twenty years since.’
Aran found he was holding his breath. He let it out in a great rush. ‘That’s remarkable,’ he said at length. He found he was grinning at the man. ‘What else do you see?’
‘You have an adventurous streak, currently frustrated by your circumstances; but if you follow your instincts, and make use of those long years of hard-won skill, you will be afforded the chance to overcome the obstacles in your path and gain the treasure you seek, though it may be necessary to shed a little blood in exchange for such good fortune.’ His finger traced a transverse line on Aran’s palm, and where he touched his skin, Aran felt the cold of sea-ice in his veins. ‘Another’s blood. And the fortune is truly great.’ The map-seller looked up, and was rewarded by a flare of light in the Eyran’s dark eyes. ‘For the right price,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I might be able to help you take the first step towards such a fate.’
‘Yes?’
The map-seller cocked his head. ‘Can you be trusted, I wonder, with such a secret?’
‘Trusted?’
‘I have in my possession the fragment of an ancient map, a map to a long-hidden island called Sanctuary, the fastness of a great magician who lies in a dream, wrapped around by sorcerous sleep. In this fastness is a fortune – in gold and silver, gems and coins; rare artefacts and magical implements. If I were to let you have this fragment, it would be for the price of my asking.’
Aran drew back, suddenly dubious. ‘I have heard of this place: but only in stories. It is surely a figment of fairytale and fireside romance?’
The man grinned. From beneath the counter he produced a lump of the same bright, glittering ore Aran had seen on the sardonyx-seller’s stall and placed it on the flat of the Eyran’s still-outstretched hand. Then he pressed Aran’s fingers down tightly over it. The ball of metal sat heavy in his palm. It was too large to close his fingers on. Aran opened them and raised the ore to his face. Facets of it sparkled in the sun, shot light into his eyes. His palm felt as though it cupped a hot coal.
‘Gold!’ Blinking, he lowered it back to the stall.
‘Keep it,’ said the map-seller. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from.’
‘The fastness?’
‘Indeed. Would you know more?’
‘Let me see the map.’
The man turned away. As he approached the steps, the cat retreated, lips drawn back, fur on end, then shot into the recesses of the covered wagon. There was a scuffling commotion, followed by the sound of conversation, muted and brief, then the map-seller reappeared, clutching a leather bag. From this he extracted a folded sheet that seemed more supple than paper, though darkened by age, and one part of it was torn away. The side that came to light was unmarked. Slowly, the map-seller turned it over.
Aran gazed at it avidly. Though partial, it was clear that the map-maker, whoever he might have been, had lavished some care upon the draughtsmanship. A windrose sat in the top right-hand corner, with its southern arm pointing diagonally down towards the missing lefthand corner. Around its decorated frame, where the directional points would usually be indicated, Aran could just make out the words ‘Isenfelt’, ‘Estrea’, ‘Eaira’ and ‘Oceana prion’. The core of the rose bore the circled lettering: ‘Sanctuarii’. He took a deep breath. The spellings were antique: even he knew that much. Intersecting lines had been ruled across the entire surface, radiating out from the points of the compass, and someone had marked in a different hand figures and illegible notations, as though calculations had been made for navigation. Aran bent closer, suddenly recognising a complex squiggle of coastline.
‘Whale Holm! And there: the mainland of northern Eyra!’ He scanned the map more closely, skewed it sideways and looked again. Cross-hatchings and erasings obscured a number of details in the top right quarter.
‘This is amazing! What do you want for it?’ He started to open his money pouch, but the man’s hand shot out as swiftly as a striking snake.
‘No money, sir navigator. No money.’
Aran frowned. ‘What, then? I have good quality sardonyx, if you wish to trade; and my daughter makes the finest knives in all of Eyra—’
‘Nor those, either. What I ask is far more precious. What I ask, sir adventurer is, can you be trusted? For if you can, I have a task for you, and if you swear to me you will carry out that task, then the map is yours, and yours alone.’
‘I can be trusted: I am known as a man of my word.’
‘Then come inside sir and seal the pact, and the map shall be yours.’
It was with a certain self-disgust that Lord Tycho Issian discovered he was eyeing the Footloose women with interest. There was no question that they were handsome creatures, under their stained and patterned skin; beneath their feather and bone trinkets, their odd braids and bizarre clothing; but the sight of so much naked, unconsecrated flesh was hard for a man of his convictions to bear
.
He wandered between the carts, the wagons and the stalls in a kind of daze. Jugglers danced round him; boys tried to press sticks of sweetsmoke upon him; musicians begged for coins; a female acrobat walked towards him on her hands, her bare breasts, revealed through strands of amber and coloured beads, balanced precariously above the ground, were covered with the volcanic plain’s fine black dust. This detail stayed with him, unwanted but persistent, as he weaved between jewellery stalls and fortune-tellers, hair-braiders and charm-pedlars. He was just trying to sidestep a tall dark man coming away from a map-seller’s stand with a roll of parchment clutched in his hand when he saw her, ducking her head out of a gaudily painted wagon to watch the dark man leave.
It was only a glimpse, but it was enough. A pair of sea-green eyes framed by a sweep of dark lashes; a long, straight nose; skin as fair as a swan’s wing, and a pair of lips so pink and pale, they might have been a child’s. The eyes, though, belonged to no child; and to no innocent, either. He felt his heart rise up; and not just his heart.
And then she was gone.
He pushed his way towards the wagon into which she had disappeared, only to be met by a man of middle years, who stepped out in front of him, making the odd little nomad bow.
‘Rajeesh. Can I help you, my lord?’
He spoke with little intonation: certainly not an Eyran accent, that; nor Istrian either. He was too fair-skinned to be a desertman, despite his mannerisms; too wan and light-eyed to have come out of the mountains. His hair and brows and lashes were so pale as to be colourless. He looked like a plant kept too long out of sunlight, that has grown etiolated and weedy in some cold, dark place. Tycho regarded him curiously.