Sorcery Rising

by Jude Fisher

  ‘It is the best wine in the northern isles,’ Aran said stiffly.

  The second guard took a hefty swallow and choked. He wiped his mouth, shook his head, and laughed. ‘If this is the best liquor Eyra can produce, then you have my sympathy, friend. For that and for your idiot son.’ He turned on his heel and walked off. Light from the dipping sun shone suddenly, redly, into the tent and fell square upon Katla.

  The first official regarded her curiously. ‘Your hair is cut in a most barbarous fashion,’ he observed rudely.

  Katla swallowed. ‘Indeed. But it is the fashion in our islands, especially in the hot season.’

  The man continued to look at her. His eyes were dark and unblinking. Katla, used to the clear, light eyes of the men of the northern isles, found his gaze unnerving, but she held it all the same. At last he shrugged, then smiled crookedly. ‘For all that, you have a pretty face. If there is to be dancing at the Gathering, perhaps you will share a reel with me.’ Then he was gone.

  Katla stared after him, speechless.

  ‘Hot season!’ laughed Aran. ‘In Eyra? It’s a good job the man’s an idiot.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Tor. ‘Pretty face, indeed.’

  By the time Tanto Vingo returned to the family pavilion, he was no longer wearing the cerise tunic which would have marked him out so unmistakably from the other Istrians, but a doublet of midnight blue donated to him by Lord Tycho Issian in a gesture, Tanto felt, of true familial solidarity. Well, they were very nearly related now, and would be as soon as the Allfair was over and the bride-price paid over. Two good tunics lost in one day. Still . . . He fingered the fine silk. It was a rather sober garment for his taste, but it was excellently tailored and exquisitely finished. He imagined it in a lighter shade of Jetra blue, could see – as clear as day – how he would stroll through the Council chambers while the other nobles bowed and whispered their admiration. Lord Tanto Vingo, heir to the Cantara estates. It had a certain pleasing sound to it. Almost took his mind off the dull ache in his groin where that damned Eyran had kneed him so hard.

  ‘Father, Uncle—’ he greeted them with a wide grin, and was surprised to see them turn to him with anxious, strained faces. Oh Falla, he thought, they’ve heard about the old man. ‘It wasn’t my fault—’ he started.

  ‘Heavens, no, son, we know that. Not your fault at all.’

  ‘Come and sit with us, lad,’ Fabel said gruffly, patting the tapestried settle beside him. ‘Best prepare yourself for a bit of a shock.’

  Tanto frowned. Perhaps this wasn’t about the old nomad after all.

  His father leaned forward solicitously and touched him on the knee. ‘I’m sorry, Tanto. There’s been a bit of a setback. On the money front, you see.’

  Tanto stared at him. ‘What?’ A suspicion started to seep coldly into the pit of his stomach.

  Favio grimaced at his brother, then turned to his son. ‘The Council have called in the loan they made us last year. It was supposed to run for five; but something must be afoot . . .’

  ‘What your father means, Tanto, is that we don’t seem to have enough money for the settlement—’

  ‘We could perhaps trade him some more of the land, Fabel: perhaps the land west of Felin’s Bluff—’

  ‘But that would cut right into my breeding grounds, Favio—’

  ‘I know, brother, I know, but what else can we do? This is Tanto’s future we’re talking of here: the future of the Vingo family, the future of our name carried on through the generations to wealth and glory.’

  ‘You know as well as I do, brother, that it’s not the land he’s after, Lord Tycho: he’s up to his neck in debt – he owes the Treasury a small fortune from what I’ve heard: why do you think he’d trade his daughter to us so readily? He’s not just desperate to ally himself with our oh-so-aristocratic family: he needs the money! And if they’ve called in our debt you can bet on Falla’s tits they’ve called in his, too. If he doesn’t get the money from us, he’ll sell his daughter to the next bidder who comes along offering him ready cantari, not some poxy patch of pine trees.’

  ‘Excuse me, I am here: the subject of this rare discussion you’re having. Me, Tanto Vingo, your nephew, your son. So don’t keep on talking about me as if I don’t exist.’ Tanto glared at his uncle and father in turn. ‘Are you saying you can’t afford the bride-price for Selen Issian?’

  His father nodded dumbly.

  Tanto was outraged. ‘By the bitch, how dare you put me in this position?’ He plucked hysterically at the silk doublet. ‘My future father-in-law has just given me this fine item of clothing as a token of goodwill, and you’re telling me there’s no money?

  His uncle lifted his arms in what was meant as a placatory gesture, but Tanto turned upon him as if to strike him. Fabel, a good hand’s breadth shorter than his nephew, cowered away. ‘We’re very sorry, Tanto: really. If there was anything else we could do—’ he shrugged.

  Tanto lowered his fist. ‘Well that’s tupped it then, hasn’t it?’ he said viciously. ‘No bride, no tide, no future, all because of your total, useless bloody incompetence.’

  At this ill-timed point, Saro entered the pavilion.

  Tanto whirled around, eyes bulging. ‘What do you want, you little bastard? Come to gloat, have you?’

  Saro stared at him, uncomprehending. The last time he had seen his brother he had been wiping an old man’s blood off his Forent blade, as if cleaning horse-shit from his shoe; but this argument did not sound like an interrogation of his brother as a discovered murderer; rather it seemed to be Tanto who was filled with righteous anger against their father and Uncle Fabel.

  Favio took a step towards him. ‘Best go for a walk, son, till we’ve finished this discussion,’ he said, ushering Saro outside again.

  Canvas was a poor barrier to sound: clearly it was for the sake of propriety and to prevent further outbursts of his brother’s evil temper that he had been shooed away. From outside the tent, Saro could hear perfectly well what was going on, and he could not help but smile. Not enough money to complete the bride-settlement, an embarrassing situation indeed. There was a sudden lull between the raised voices, then the doorflaps were flung outward and Tanto emerged, his face red and his eyes bulging with fraught emotion.

  Saro sat quickly down and gave his attention to a broken strap on his shoe. Uncharacteristically, his brother pitched himself down beside him.

  ‘Incompetent fools! Do they have no financial foresight at all?’

  Saro glanced up, but the remark seemed to have been cast into the air, rather than at him. Tanto tugged with preoccupied fingers at his choker of sardonyx and added: ‘There’s seven thousand cantari still to be found, so now I shall have to win the swordplay, and you, brother, will need to ride that colt as if your life depended on it.’

  Saro stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘The yearlings’ race. There’s a big prize resting on it, and I’ll need the money.’

  ‘But—’ Saro’s thoughts raced faster than any horse. Night’s Harbinger certainly stood a fine chance: he was fleet and well-schooled, but rather than race him they had planned to breed him, so his schooling was for treading imperiously round the ring with his head held to show off his best points, rather than for fighting it out with a field of other stallions. He’d heard tales about the races they held at Allfair, too: horses dead of stampede, wounded from gouges and bites; riders with broken limbs and crushed ribs – not that the riders mattered in such a race; it was the horses that were counted victors. He shook his head. ‘Sorry, Tanto. If you want to race him, that’s your business – you can discuss it with Father.’

  He had expected bullying bluster at his refusal, but instead Tanto’s tone was wheedling. He craned his neck up at Saro and made his voice like honey. Saro had seen him use the same trick, over and over, on the slavegirls. Sometimes it worked.

  ‘For me, brother, please, for all of us. The future well-being of our entire family rests on this one alliance. Think how proud mother
will be, how delighted to see me married and with estates of my own—’

  He reached over and grasped Saro’s arm. All at once, Saro found himself infused with emotions not his own: rapacious greed, a barely-quelled fury, a seething unarticulable, childish violence, and something darker still, and deeper buried. He looked away from his brother’s handsome, intent face and his glance fell to the object he still clutched. The moodstone glowed in his palm, an unperturbed and steadfast golden-green. He shook Tanto’s hand away and stood up before his brother could spy the gem.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he found himself saying, and was surprised at his own decision. ‘But only in exchange for a promise.’

  ‘Anything, brother.’

  ‘If I win the prize for you, you may take one half of the money for the bride-settlement. The other half you must take yourself to the old nomad woman whose husband you killed and give it to her as blood-price.’

  Tanto stared at him in disbelief. His mouth fell open. Then he began to laugh. ‘You cannot be serious, brother. For that old man? A blood-price, as one would pay for a fallen warrior? For some wizened old beggar with no family name? I’d be a fool.’

  You are a fool. The thought went unspoken, but all the same Saro knew it to be true. A cruel, wilful and selfish fool: he had seen the turmoil of his brother’s mind, all focused on a single, shallow intent.

  ‘Even so, this is my price for riding the race for you.’

  Tanto’s eyes narrowed. His little brother, whom he had bullied successfully for so many years, standing up to him thus, all steely faced? It was insupportable. His mind made furious calculations. Two and a half thousand for the swordplay; one and a half for the archery, if he won both events. Take only a place, and he was in trouble. Falla damn them all, he needed the little bastard to win the horserace, and to have three of the four thousand that prize afforded. To the fires with the old man’s family . . .

  Tanto Vingo looked his brother directly in the eye and grinned.

  ‘I promise,’ he lied.

  Lord Tycho Issian lay upon his cushion-strewn couch, staring up into the heights of the coloured taffeta hangings. A glass of cloudy araque lay on the carved wooden table beside him, untouched. Eyes opened or closed, that woman’s face was always before him now, pale and delicate, her mouth as full of promise as a flower bud. Her hair, the fairest gold. Her hands, those long, tapered fingers, would feel so silky and cool upon his—

  The fires flooded through him again.

  He had tried prayer, to no avail whatsoever: each time he conjured the goddess into his mind, it was with the nomad woman’s face, and sacred turned disturbingly, heretically profane. He had tried cold baths: but even the rough towel had raised his passion again; even the air evaporating off his skin became in his inflamed mind the brush of her mouth upon him. He had never known such torment.

  At last, he flung his cloak over him, and, without a word to the slaves who stood guard at the door, strode out into the darkness and headed for the nomad quarter once more.

  King Ravn Asharson reclined upon his sea-chest, his head resting uncomfortably against the frame of the booth and listened to his earls bickering. His men were out in the field, helping to erect the great pavilion ready for the Gathering. He had much rather be with them, hauling ropes and calculating angles than bored out of his wits by politics. Succeeding to the throne after the death of his illustrious father this last year had provided little in the way of benefit and much of tedium and what others referred to as ‘statecraft’, in which he found himself barely interested and not at all gifted.

  ‘But I tell you we cannot trust the word of these Istrian lords,’ the Earl of Stormway was saying heatedly. ‘They have reasons for selling their daughters to the King – and that in itself is strange enough, and entirely against their own custom, for they regard their women so highly it is the men who pay the bride-price in Istria. Something’s going on, mark my words. My theory is that they’re after using us to forge a passage to the Far West: they need us only to brave the seas and chart the navigations for them, then they’ll turn upon us like dogs. An empire’s a hungry beast to feed: no doubt they’ve burned all their spare slaves to their bitch-goddess by now. Ravn needs a good Eyran wife, a strong, straight-speaking woman like Queen Auda, not some tricksy southerner.’

  ‘The Lord of Jetra’s offer is very fine, though,’ countered Earl Forstson. ‘Bales of silk, and gems, and those fine ceramics—’

  The Earl of Southeye laughed. ‘What a woman you are, Egg. Fine ceramics! All beakers shatter when thrown in the fire, say I.’

  Egg Forstson, Earl of Shepsey, rubbed his bald head miserably and applied himself to the wine. It was foul stuff, in comparison with the mellow reds of the south, but it was all they had. Money was tight in the northern court: he had better supplies in his own tent, having come to the Allfair largely to savour the luxuries Istria and the travelling folk had to provide: it took a lot to persuade him to undertake that sea-crossing these days.

  ‘I notice none of them are offering Forent steel as part of their trade,’ observed Stormway.

  ‘Aye: keeping that for themselves, as ever.’

  ‘I’d welcome another chance to show them what a bit of iron can do,’ said the Earl of Stormway dourly. ‘Only a spring lad, I was, when Forent steel took this.’ He hefted his left arm, which ended in a stump of leather. ‘Always keep an eye out for the man who wielded that blade.’

  Egg Forstson frowned. Talk of the old war was agitating, the memories still ached like a fading bruise. He’d been wedded only two years when the call-up had come: two years and two bonny babes, a third on the way (for what good Eyran would wait for the marriage rites before bedding his maid?) and he’d been off onto the high seas with the old King’s warfleet. He’d survived sea-sickness and starvation, storm and shipwreck; arrow and spear and sword and a dozen minor wounds, and had returned to Eyra four years later feeling fortunate to be alive. Fortunate, that was, till he’d arrived back at the steading to find it long deserted, the roof all burned off and the skeletons of slaughtered animals littering the farmyard. They’d never found his wife and children: gone for slaves in the southern markets was the favoured opinion, and ever after the uneasy truce had been agreed he had scoured the slave blocks each year at the Allfair in the hopes of finding his beloved Brina again. But how to tell, when the women were all so swathed? And the children would now be fully grown, if they still lived. He imagined his baby girls as adult women, but the image slipped away. As for the third child, he had not even known its sex. Yet at every Allfair, his eye would be drawn by a chance movement, a sway of hip, a gesture of hand, a tilt of head, and his heart would rise; every year his hopes would be dashed. He imagined, over and over, how they might live now, in a foreign country with a warm climate and fair houses, away from the storm-wracked strands of the north with its turf-roofed houses and sturdy keeps, and over the years as the pain passed to memory he came to look upon the trappings of Istrian living with a proprietorial eye, rather than that of a man who had lost all he loved. Had Brina touched this plate, this glass? Had she marvelled at the fine blue glaze of Jetra’s pottery as he did? Did his children retain any memory of Eyra at all, or did they speak like natives of Istria, all lilting accents and soft sibilance? He wondered what he would do if he did find any of them, remote though that possibility now seemed. Would he bargain politely with the blockmaster, haggling for the best price? Or charge into the fray in a bloodlust, to take back what was his own by main force? Or, he sometimes pondered, would he simply close his eyes on the sight, and walk away?

  ‘—Egg?’

  It was the King’s voice. His head came up with a start.

  ‘What think you to the daughter of Earl Fall Herinson?’

  ‘A very comely maid, my lord.’

  Ravn laughed at this careful avoidance. He knew Egg’s opinion already: that Ragna was a pretty, opportunistic little minx, and that he, Ravn, bore poor comparison in either character or potential to hi
s deceased father, King Ashar Stenson, and was a fool when it came to the wiles of women. ‘Aye. She is that. Still, it wouldn’t do, I suppose?’ Ragna’s father, Fall Herinson, was an ineffectual drunk who had pissed away his noble inheritance and was unlikely to create difficulties, but equally unlikely to have anything more useful to offer than his daughter’s maidenhood. And that was long lost . . . He looked hopefully around the gathered lords. Stormway looked as grim as ever. Ravn knew he still harboured hopes for his own daughter, a twenty-three-year-old brute of a girl unfortunate enough to be saddled with the square chin and beetling brow of her father, but he hadn’t had the heart to tell Stormway he had rather wed his prize mare than take the old man’s daughter to bed. There were other nobles jockeying for position, he knew that well enough – his cousin Erol Bardson, for one, hoping to marry his blood back into the royal line; his dead father’s adviser, Earl Keril Sandson for another, a man with eyes too close for comfort; and any number of others who’d no doubt present their warm and willing daughters and dowries to him at the Gathering in exchange for some preferment or advancement at court. It was a dangerous game, this marriage business. Dangerous, yet dull: all the women – at least, all those he had not yet had – were sows; their male relatives rutting boars waiting to tusk him at an opportune moment and take the throne for themselves.

  ‘No, sire,’ Southeye said firmly. ‘The coffers need filling. Bed her if you must; but wed her, no.’

  Ravn sighed. This was going to be a tedious process. Not helped by the fact that the Istrian women were so wrapped about with fabric that you could barely tell whether they were fat or thin, keen or chaste. He liked the touch with the lips, though, all painted up to high heaven: that slash of colour in the midst of all the sombre robes. Did the Istrians have any idea how suggestive was that gesture, how lewd in its implications? He doubted it: they were a dull lot, too, more interested in commerce and their grim religion than the real pleasures life had to offer. Their women could probably do with a taste of the north: a bit of rollicking good fun, instead of the pained, pretentious pawings of their insipid husbands. He hadn’t yet bedded a southern woman: it was almost worth taking one to wed just for the novelty value . . .