by Jude Fisher
Jenna followed Marin’s gaze. There was certainly something about the young southerner on the far side of the enclosure. Like the man in the ring, he was well made and darkly complexioned, but his features had a less delicately chiselled look to them, and his hair was longer and less sleek. She marked how he moved carefully out of the way of the spectators, without ever once taking his gaze – black and intense – off Tanto Vingo. Perhaps they were lovers! She’d heard, from the sort of scurrilous gossip you picked up from the court-servants in Halbo, that in the southern states sometimes men lived with men as they would with wives. There was even a version of the story of the mage Arahai which told how he had quarrelled with his lover, himself a powerful magician, and been forced to entomb him beneath the earth, in a cave all of crystal and gold, and that every day for the rest of his life he had visited him there, and mourned; how his magic had fled him, leaving his heart like ashes. It was all very poetic, she thought. And then there were the ancient hero tales which told of how lovers would go to war together – both men and men, and men and women; and sometimes, unimaginably to Jenna, even women and women – fighting back to back, each protecting the other or dying in the attempt, but no one she had asked in Eyra would even speak to her of such things, as if it was in some way shameful, a subject to be avoided. She was visited by a sudden, wonderful vision of herself as a shield-maiden, like the Fyrnir of Slitwood, in shining mail and helm, a gleaming sword in her hand, standing back to back – she could almost feel the warmth of his sunny skin through the layers of cloth and leather and mail – to defend her lord and lover, King Ravn . . .
The clash of metal brought her sharply from her reverie, and suddenly the crowd came alive with shouts and whisdes.
The Phoenix, having made the first move, appeared to have driven the young Istrian back against the ropes to their left with his first charge, so that the lad was forced to step quickly away, turning and countering as he went, his feet dancing neatly over the ashy ground. As he came round to face them, Jenna saw that the southerner nevertheless was grinning wildly and his face was flushed with excitement. Her betted silvers seemed suddenly very safe. ‘Come on, Tanto!’ she called, and heard the shout taken up all around her. The desertman, for all his mystery and expertise, was not, it seemed, popular on this side of the ring.
Again, the turbaned man came at him, and again Tanto turned him. The thick northern sword the desertman wielded sliced through the air with all the finesse of an abattoir axe. Tanto caught it on the dagger he held in his left hand and flicked it upward, then ran beneath the man’s upraised arm and swept his fine Forent sword around in a gleaming arc, tapping the front of his opponent’s breastplate as he passed.
‘A hit!’ cried the arbitrator, and ‘A hit! A hit!’ echoed the crowd.
Jenna clutched Marin’s arm excitedly. ‘You see?’
The desertman watched Tanto withdraw to the opposite side of the ring. He scythed his sword from side to side, shouting as he did so, in some guttural version of the Old Tongue: ‘I’ll cut you down to size, pretty boy! I’ll take those purple legs home with me and feed them to my wolves.’
In response, Tanto flicked his dagger at the man in a gesture that in any culture was clearly insulting.
The Phoenix roared an oath and charged across the ring. Again, Tanto side-stepped; but when he tried the same manoeuvre that had won him the point, the desertman, quicker and lighter on his feet than Jenna could believe possible, feinted and dodged, so that Tanto over-balanced. A snaking foot helped him on his way, and all at once the young Istrian was face down in the dust. The desertman’s eyes became bright with feral cunning. His sword came rushing down as if – had the edges not been blunted in line with the competition rules – he would slice Tanto in half; but he pulled it short at the last moment, stepping back a half pace so that the flat of the blade smacked the Istrian sharply on the buttocks. It must have stung, for Tanto yelped like a kicked dog.
A hit!’ cried the desertman’s swathed supporters.
‘A hit,’ conceded the arbitrator.
Tanto threw himself upright. Every line of his body spoke of fury, and when he turned, the excited flush with which he had begun the bout had become an ugly, livid purple. Not so handsome now, Marin thought, feeling somewhat vindicated.
Tanto ran at the Phoenix, sword arm as stiff as a spar. Even with the button on the point, Saro thought, disquieted, such a charge, met head-on, could run a man through; but the Phoenix merely brought his guard-hand up and pushed the slim Forent blade off his dagger as if it were a meat-skewer. Again, Tanto rushed him, and again the older man caught his sword and turned it neatly. This furious charging and rebuttal went on for some minutes, until the crowd were screaming themselves hoarse.
And then the tide turned.
The Phoenix, in the guise of passing off Tanto’s assault onto his dagger, now stepped smartly within the Istrian’s range and, allowing Tanto’s sword to pass harmlessly under his arm, turned, brought his shoulder up so that it met squarely with Tanto’s chest, and nicked the lighter man over and onto the ground.
Had Katla been watching, she would have recognised it as an Eyran wrestling manoeuvre, one of her favourites, designed to use an opponent’s weight and momentum against them, so that they hit the floor with twice the impact.
The crowd howled. ‘Unfair!’ screamed a woman to Jenna’s right.
‘Unfair!’ cried the Istrians watching.
The Phoenix stepped back with a shrug. He looked to the arbitrator, but the man’s mouth was pursed in disapproval.
Tanto, glimpsing his chance, vaulted to his feet and charged the desertman with all his might. Despite his exhaustion, Tanto’s training had not gone to waste. He crossed the ring in three vast, leaping strides, arm extended, and his swordpoint – button and all – drove itself between the discs on the older man’s breastplate before the Phoenix could even think of countering. The desertman roared and leapt backward, but Tanto’s blade was firmly lodged; as the man stepped back, he had no choice but to go with him. The brutal northern sword came sweeping down at Tanto’s head. It was a blow that – had it landed – would have split his skull in two: competition edge blunted or no – but Tanto’s reactions were extraordinarily fast. His left hand came up in a blur of motion, catching the big blade in a life-saving parry. There were sparks, the ear-splitting screech of metal on metal; and then Tanto’s dagger shattered. Pieces of it hurtled away from the impact like a shower of falling stars, raining out across the ring. One shard caught the desertman in the face, between the folds of the headcloth. Blood spurted, but Tanto, with his dagger hand numbed and his swordpoint still wedged in the other’s breastplate, stood shocked and motionless. The desertman hurled his own dagger away and brought his swordpoint up to Tanto’s throat.
‘A win!’ his followers bellowed.
‘A win.’
The arbitrator stepped in to separate the combatants, and the crowd erupted. It took two of the blue-cloaks to extricate the Istrian’s weapon from the overlapping iron rings of the Phoenix’s breastplate, and when it was released, Tanto tore it angrily away from them, slammed it back into its sheath and stormed from the ring without bothering to retrieve the jewelled hilt of the broken dagger. He did manage, however, to gracelessly grab the purse his second place had earned him. A Footloose lad, quick-eyed, slipped beneath the ropes while everyone else’s attention was still on the two contestants, and pocketed the hilt with a triumphant smile. A few moments later, a scuffle broke out between him and a big Eyran man, who was then confronted by a group of angry Istrians.
The Phoenix wiped blood from his eye-slit and, holding a wad of loose material against his face, claimed his prize and silently disappeared into the crowd.
Marin went to collect her winnings. Annoyed by Jenna’s manipulations, she had backed the desertman. The bet-collector paid out a stream of silvers into her hand. Behind her, Saro was the only Istrian in the queue. When he got to the front, the bet-collector regarded him curiously
, then tapped the side of his nose and winked at Saro. Saro had no idea what he meant by this, but he took the money the man paid carefully into his hand, pocketed it and made his way to the enclosure where he had left Night’s Harbinger. Now he would have to win the damned race.
As he was walking through the crowds, his eyes focused on nothing in particular, he was hailed by a familiar voice.
‘Saro, wait!’
When he turned around, he saw his uncle running to catch up with him. Saro’s heart sank, but he needn’t have feared for all Fabel said was: ‘I just came to wish you luck, lad.’ And he reached out with a grin and tousled Saro’s hair.
A bizarre mix of sensations flowed through the skin of Saro’s scalp: anxiety and despair; concern that he would lose the race, for it was hard to have confidence in the lad, who was not a natural athlete, and not hard enough on the beasts, and Night’s Harbinger, which had little respect for anyone, would surely just kick up its heels and send the boy sailing out over the ropes in seconds; fear that they would never raise the bride-price if he failed; and Falla knew what Tanto would do then, for the boy was clearly unstable, for all his handsome looks and physical abilities; and Favio, Favio would be disappointed, too, and he bore enough guilt not to wish his brother further cast down. All this Saro felt in the time it took for the flat of Fabel’s hand to ruffle his hair, and withdraw; and as the fingers abandoned his head, he was left with a single, discomfiting image: a woman’s eyes, widened with surprise and some delight as a man mounted her. He heard her voice, like a whisper through time: ‘Oh, Fabel, Fabel.’
It took him all the time from arriving at the enclosure, to saddling Night’s Harbinger and leading him into the starters’ pen, to realise – through the low-level nervous anticipation of the horse – that the voice he had heard had not been his aunt’s, but his mother’s.
‘Fezack! Fezack! Look – I can see the horserace!’ The boy was gleeful, his grin stretched from ear to ear. ‘Look, Gramma, in the rock.’
‘Child: don’t be foolish, the race is not to run for an hour or more.’ Fezack Starsinger was weary: it had been one long round of customers today: men wanting potions to give them prowess they were unable to earn by other means; women wanting beauty they could never naturally achieve; those who sought knowledge of the future, interpretations of omens and dreams; a blight on a neighbour or competitor. These last she turned away angrily. ‘The Wanderers never do harm: it is not our way, know you better than to ask!’ The last two customers to have knocked on the sun-and-moon door were those who had bought charms from her that had inexplicably worked too well, and were now seeking another potion to reverse the effect of the first. The girl, she had remembered, though her poor chest was unrecognisable. It had been a chastening experience, for both of them.
The old woman came to stand over her grandson, though she was barely taller than he was. She peered over his shoulder at the crystal, but could see not a thing. The child was not usually fanciful, but it was true that there had been a number of odd occurrences at this Fair. And not just at the Allfair, either, she corrected herself. No: she had noticed something – something intangible, like a tension in the air, a stirring in the blood – some weeks before, as if the fundamental nature of the world was undergoing some strange and subtle metamorphosis . . .
‘Look: see there, in the midst of that great cloud of dust, two horses fighting – a brown horse with a big man on its back and a dark one, ridden by the boy who saved Guaya – oh! see, the chestnut horse has blood on its teeth and the dark horse has a wound on its shoulder—’
Fezack frowned. She pushed her grandson gently aside and leaned over the great polished rock – a piece of pinkish grey crystal that had been excavated with some difficulty from a cave in the western mountains, at that juncture where the Golden range met the sweep of sharp volcanic peaks known by the hill peoples as the Dragon’s Backbone. It had been her parents who had dug it out, with great exclamations of delight at its purity and size, for it was a valuable piece, and they believed still in the old magic, that such rocks channelled the earth magic that had waned almost from memory, all but inactive these two hundred years and more. Time blurred so much for her now: but she could remember that day with remarkable clarity – how they had been travelling away from a gathering of the hill tribes, celebrating their victory over an Istrian lord and his soldiers who had tried to take them into slavery, all of whom now lay shattered and dead beneath the boulder-fall the hill-women had engineered as their men led the unsuspecting enemy below the cliffs. The Wanderers did not condone such violence; but neither did they believe in the enslavement of others, so they had joined the celebrations without too many misgivings, and yet it had been with a sense of dread that Fezack had headed up into the mountains the next day with her parents and the other nomads, and the finding of the crystal had done nothing to alleviate her sense that there was something out of kilter. And indeed, they had met a troop of Istrians later that night as they came down through the col; soldiers who had found their slain comrades and heard tales of nomads who had caused the rockfall with their magic. Her parents were both killed; as were seven of the men. The women who survived were raped. Her daughter, Alisha, had been one result. She had no love of the southern peoples.
Placing her hands on either side of the great crystal, she felt its power thrum through her: a faint tingling in the palms and wrists, a slight numbing of the arms. She was used to this feeling, this faint hum of energy the rock generated – enough to cure a mild headache, to absorb the pain from a sprain or bruise. Far-seeing had always seemed beyond its capability though: so it was with some amazement that she felt the crystal take hold of her, reach through her, seeking its outlet. Waves of warmth began to travel up through her bony arms. She felt them suffuse her chest, her neck, reach up through the bones of her skull, where it powered through her like a pale white light. Where it burned the backs of her eyes. She saw: a chaos of fighting horses, their hooves churning the lava of the plain up into swirling dark clouds of dust; the terrified face of a man, not much older than a boy, his dark eyes wide with panic and something else – a knowledge, a horror – as another man, bigger, older, bearing a wicked-looking whip, reached out and caught him by the shoulder and brought the whip around in a swingeing blow. Other riders charged by in a whirl of movement and when their dust cleared she looked for the dark boy again but could see him nowhere. The man with the whip was on the ground, getting trampled by his own horse. She tilted the stone for a better angle, but as she did so, the scene blurred and changed and then everything went dark and she smelled the tang of blood.
She shrieked and withdrew her hands from the crystal.
‘You must not touch the stone,’ she said to her grandson with unaccustomed severity. Her voice was shaking, and not only her voice. She took down a woollen blanket from the shelf where she stowed her sleeping things during the day, wrapped the crystal tightly in its folds, hefted her burden and staggered down the steps of the wagon.
When she reached her daughter’s wagon she called her name.
‘Alisha!’
There was some commotion in the confines of the wagon, muted voices, a hurried rustling of fabrics. Then came the sound of footsteps and the door came open by half a foot. Her daughter stuck her head out. Her shoulders were bare down to a hastily-wrapped sheet; her cheeks glowed, and her hair was in disarray.
‘Mother?’
Fezack took in Alisha’s state of undress, the sudden conscious silence in the wagon, and smiled thinly.
‘Think you I would criticise your choice of man that you look so guilty, daughter?’ she asked gently, arms and back sagging beneath the weight of the great rock.
‘You might. He’s not one of us.’
‘Who he is, I know well.’
They both fell quiet. Then Fezack groaned. ‘Daughter: will you leave me struggling with this thing?’
Turning the end of the bedsheet tightly into the band she had made above her breasts, Alisha padd
ed barefoot down the wagon steps and carefully transferred the weight of the crystal into her own arms. The sheet trailed behind her like a train as she followed her mother behind the wagon to the place where the low eating table was set up.
‘The crystal has begun to work, suddenly and with no warning. Falo used it to far-see. And then I looked, too. A shock, it was, Alisha: truly. I do not think I can bear to look again at what I saw there, and I know not whether my vision is true-sight, or false. Another opinion I would welcome.’ Gingerly, she unwrapped the rock, allowing the corners of the blanket to fall back over the table-edges. The crystal glowed still, even without a human touch, its gleaming facets still milky with the remnants of the vision.
Alisha pulled a face. ‘I have never seen it like this before. I’m not sure I want to have anything to do with it. Anyway,’ she folded her arms, looking mutinous, ‘I’m sure I don’t have the art.’
‘My mother, her sister, my grandmother and great-grandmother, and her mother before that, they all had the art. It was said that Arnia Skylark could true-see across two continents with the aid of a crystal far smaller than this one.’
‘Tales and nonsense, Mother! That sort of magic hasn’t worked for centuries.’
‘Something has changed. Please look, for me, Alisha.’
With a sigh, Alisha hiked the sheet up about her and sat crosslegged before the table. At the little round window in the back of the wagon there was a movement as a drape was twitched and Fezack glimpsed a white face and a shock of pale hair before the figure disappeared. Alisha, too, stared at the window, then looked away quickly as her mother’s attention came back to her. Dispassionately, she grasped the rock with both hands. And then her expression changed. Her eyes widened. The blood began to drain from her face and she started to shudder.
When she finally dragged her hands away from the crystal, she was shaking all over.