by Jude Fisher
His eyes strayed to the group of southern women, seated calmly on the opposite side of the pavilion by the musicians’ dais, where they had been all night, their servants at their feet, their menfolk at their backs. He watched the way they daintily nibbled their pastries and sipped their wine: white hands and dark mouths, and no morsel else to be seen of them, and he felt his cock stir for the first time that day. Quiet, docile, and fiends in the bedchamber: so he’d heard. He remembered the tale one of his oarsmen had confided to him that morning, that he’d heard from a friend of a friend, a mercenary captain currently keeping the sea-wolves at bay off the Istrian coast: how one Empire whore had apparently brought off an entire crew of longshipmen – thirty at least and no callow youth among them – in no more than an hour, and yet still managed to give each of them such intense pleasure with her cool hands and hot mouth that when it came to his turn, the navigator had shrieked his climax and then lost his mind for the best part of three days.
He’d heard similar tales of the Footloose women, too. Indeed, he’d been planning to visit the nomad quarter in his guise as the Phoenix after the swordplay, had it not been for the damned wound the Istrian’s splintered dagger had afforded him. A shame, he thought to himself now, refilling his goblet from the flagon at his feet, for the Wandering Folk had a well-earned reputation for their creativity and imagination, even if it was not so many years ago that the south claimed to have burned the last of the true magic-makers. Sex with a sorceress: now that was a thought . . .
Still, they were all now rendered down to ash and bones in the name of the Goddess – entire tribes, they said, whole caravans gone to the salt-pits, their severed heads put out for the carrion birds – the lammergeyers and vultures of the far south. No wonder they had ceded those desert lands to the Lord of Cantara, he thought, recalling the dull schooling he’d received on the Empire and its provinces from Stormway and Southeye before this year’s Allfair: they must be crawling with the spirit-dead, with ghosts and afterwalkers, for as any Eyran knew, to sever a head from its body and consign them to different locations left the spirit free to wander. And burning was no good: you had to weight the body down well, whether on land or at sea . . .
He shivered, despite the closeness of the night, the thousand burning candles, the proximity of so much live humanity. His mind had been turning in such bizarre directions for the past half hour or more. It was not like him to ponder such matters: it made him feel uncomfortable, somehow outside himself. His hand went for a moment to the chain he wore about his neck, to the charm nestling in the hairs of his chest. Sur’s anchor wrought in silver, there to provide safe harbour for the souls that sailed life’s ocean.
‘You look perturbed, sire. Is there aught I can fetch you: another flagon of wine perhaps?’ Southeye was at his elbow, his grizzled old face anxious.
Ravn laughed. ‘I’ve already drunk enough to float a ship. Bring the girls on, Southeye: perhaps they will lighten my mood.’
‘Aye aye, my lord. The girls it is. Remember what we said.’
‘Just bring them.’
There were ten of them, he knew: an auspicious number in itself – exactly the crew of Sur’s own ship, the Raven, his chosen companions who rowed those who had died in the sea-god’s name to the Shores of Peace – ten for the god, so the saying went; so ten for the king had a splendid resonance to it. Perhaps he’d take them all: wasn’t there some record in the annals about randy old King Blacken taking fifteen wives? Ten was positively conservative.
Southeye stepped away to confer with Egg Forstson, who nodded, then threaded his way through the knots of folk to find the Earl of Stormway, who appeared to be entertaining with some grim tale or another a gaggle of Eyran girls in bright dresses and outlandish headgear. Ravn watched as Bran’s daughter, Breta, coloured and put her hands to her face. Silly woman: surely she knew her presentation was no more than formality? Egg touched heads with his grand-niece, and passed her on to Breta’s arm. The two girls gave one another petrified looks, then began to giggle.
The Earl of Shepsey was now on his way to a group of tall men talking with a girl in a low-cut green dress and silver turban-affair, and as Egg arrived and said something, they all swivelled to regard the King. Ravn’s eyes narrowed as he marked the older man to be Aran Aranson, that arrogant bear of a man who’d been so rude to him the day before. He was pleased to see him looking away, slightly discomfited now, staring over the heads of those around him as if he’d lost someone. The burly, bearded man beside him Ravn recognised as the royal shipmaker, Finn Larson. So the big girl in green must be the daughter they’d mentioned. He sighed and lost interest at once.
On the far side of the pavilion, the robed women had begun to rise from their benches, their servants scattering before them. He watched as they glided across the floor in such a fashion as to suggest they had no visible means of conveyance, and it made him remember the old saw about swans: how you could see nothing but their grace above the water, while all beneath was frenzied flapping. Perhaps the same was true of the Swan of Jetra. Perhaps he would find out later . . .
The first to be presented, however, was the daughter of Lord Prionan. Ravn paid little attention to his flatteries and the overblown description of his overblown daughter, since the man had already tried to buy his favour earlier that night with a group of chained slaveboys, children so gaudily dressed that at first he had thought them a troupe of tumblers, until the Empire lord had clarified their purpose. It had been impossible not to show his disgust. The northern isles had no system of slavery, he had explained to the man; they found folk worked more effectively for decent treatment and some form of payment, rather than trained to perform unnatural acts in very fear for their lives; but Lord Prionan had clicked his teeth and shaken his finger at Ravn and said something unintelligible in his sibilant tongue. Now, Ravn waved him away impatiently: sheltered coastal lands or no, he wouldn’t ally himself to this man.
The Earl of Ness came promptly on his heels, trailing his daughter, Lian. The Earl was a tall, stick-thin man in his early fifties, and his daughter looked as spare as her father. No meat on her, Ravn thought irritably, imagining how her hipbones might grind beneath him, and dismissed the offer of men and the stronghold at Sharking Straits. The old fortress might hold a strategic position, but Ravn knew from his information network that it was in ruins, Sharking Straits overrun by brigands and outcasts. He smiled.
‘I thank you for your fine offer, my lord of Ness. I shall consider it further.’ He inclined his head to Lian, who dipped a low enough curtsey to confirm her lack of assets to his trained eye. Ravn sighed.
Earl Sten’s daughter, Ella, by contrast, was remarkably well-endowed, and remarkably plain, her face so freckled she looked mud-spattered. Still, at least she looked keen, Ravn thought. The beauties of the court were liable to take too much for granted: the plainer ones were often more eager to please.
‘Lovely girl, Sten,’ he said as cheerfully as he could manage. The Earl, one of his father’s closest friends, veteran of a hundred scraps, returned the smile with a gap-toothed leer. Clubbed hard on the head at some point, Ravn thought: not too many wits to spare.
The arrival of the Duke of Cera caused something of a stir. Ravn watched the crowd part fearfully before him in some bewilderment, until the cause of the hush made itself known: two huge-pawed beasts with fangs like scythes and fur of a delicate, heathery hue that gave way to a deep, stormy grey where the muscles moved in their giant flanks. Rosettes that were almost-purple in tone mottled their fine coats, and their eyes were as great and as gold as those of the snow owls that were sometimes to be spied in the far northern wastes. Around their necks they wore collars of solid silver studded with an unusual blue stone.
‘Mountain leopards, my lord,’ the duke pronounced proudly. ‘All the way from the Golden Mountains. They are the only pair in captivity in all of Elda. I caught them as cubs and raised them myself: they will eat from your hand; or run down prey for you faster and
more surely than any hound. Imagine hunting through your northern forests with such a pair! Nothing can withstand their swift grace and mighty jaws.’
In his head, Ravn could see the scene clearly, could hear the hunting horns and the sound of horses’ hooves muffled by the snow. He could see himself running out ahead of his men with these glorious beasts on their long leashes, pursuing the stag he had missed last winter. It was seductive, the picture it made; but in the end he found he did not have the necessary surfeit of vanity for two wild cats to sway the balance: besides, to transport them back to Eyra on a longship would likely cost the lives of crew, if not the beasts themselves. He thanked the duke profusely then graciously refused the offer. The palace at Halbo was no place for such wild creatures, he declared: it would be like confining eagles in an aviary. The Duke of Cera shrugged. He did, in fact, have several eagles in his collection, so he was not entirely sure what the northern king might mean by this. Secretly, though, he was relieved the bid had failed; it had been the Council who had prevailed upon him to offer his beloved Caramon to the barbarian king, sacrilege or no. At least, he’d thought, if the northerner had taken her, she’d be protected by the finest examples of the Goddess’s sacred beasts he could find.
Lord Sestran offered jewels and casks of wine and a share in his prosperous spice fields, but his daughter stood at less than half Ravn’s height and was almost as wide, a fact undisguised by the cerise sabatka she wore.
Two elderly Empire men in deep-red brocade, with identical sagging jowls, tufted grey eyebrows and elaborate chains stepped forward next: the Lords Dystra, joint heads of the Istrian Council. And behind them stood a slight woman in deep blue silken shrouds.
‘My lord of Eyra—’ one started, and,
‘—we bring you greetings,’ continued the other;
‘—our terms are generous.’
The first lord flourished a scroll, from which the pair proceeded to read in turn, voices so eerily similar that if Ravn closed his eyes, he’d have thought them one and the same. He had little need to pay attention to their bizarre double-hander: he knew what they offered was what the north needed – passage through the Circesian Straits via the wide Golden River, passage for barges of grain and ore and wood; all they were beginning to lack in the northern isles. But now came the interesting part.
‘—we are honoured to present—’ the first declared,
‘—the most fabled beauty of the Empire—’ the second continued;
‘—the Swan of Jetra—’
Ravn sat forward, his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands and surveyed the swathed blue shape they ushered forward. These damned robes, he thought; here’s one that looks worth examining and I can see nothing of her but that demure little mouth and those pretty hands. How on Elda they could possibly claim her to be a fabled beauty when none could assess her charms, he could only imagine. But the mouth was exquisitely shaped and lacking in those fine downturned lines he had learned denoted sourness and bad temper: Ragna Fallsen seemed to be developing such day by day.
‘My gracious lords; my Lady of Jetra; a very fine offer and one I must think on further, if you will bear with me.’
The old men nodded and smiled and bowed, and nodded and smiled and bowed again, and took away with them into the crowd their most prized possession, the fabled Swan.
And now he must politely embrace his treacherous cousin, Erol Bardson, as he presented his ward. Erol avoided his eye; but for her part, the girl gazed insolently back at Ravn, completely unawed. Her pupils were a dark violet, fringed by long, fair lashes. It was an unusual combination in that pale, finely-boned face. Her chin came up as he regarded her in unspoken challenge. A bit of spirit there, he thought. She’s angry that her guardian should parade her like this, and not afraid to show it. Erol had played his gamepieces well, Ravn thought, grooming this girl to the occasion and presenting her thus; even so, the offer was far too dangerous to consider, for all Erol’s inherited power and influence. Once the girl had spawned a boy, they’d find a way to dispose of him and set the babe on the throne, with Erol, his protector, as the effective king. Stormway had been most insistent on the necessity to avoid this pitfall.
Breta Bransen knew even before her father presented her that Ravn wouldn’t choose her. She’d loved him since she was seven, even after he’d pushed her in the horse-trough to see if she’d drown. ‘Your mother was a sorceress!’ he’d taunted her cruelly. If my mother was a sorceress, she remembered thinking, even then, she’d have done better to make me in her image, pale and dark and willowy; and gone from this place. So now, when he smiled at her and praised her dress, Breta smiled wanly and at once made way for her prettier cousin.
‘Sire, I have the honour to present to you my grand-niece Filia Jansen, a girl of seventeen summers and most accomplished with a needle. She has made a fine tapestry for your hall, in token of the honour in which she holds Your Grace.’
Forstson urged the girl forward. Timidly, and peeping up at him all the while with her pale-green gooseberry eyes, she unrolled the tapestry. By any standards, it was a fine piece of work and she had clearly laboured on it for a goodly time: the figures were intricately stitched and artfully coloured. The scene portrayed, though, was one from a story he had always hated: the Black Mountain. A tragic tale, it told the story of good Queen Fira, whose beloved husband, King Fent, had been captured by trolls and taken into the Black Mountain. Every year they demanded tribute – barley and corn; cows and sheep; whales and herring – and every year they reneged on their promise to release the King, until, fifteen years later the kingdom faced famine and there was no tribute spare to pay. So the Queen had gone herself to the Black Mountain and begged for her husband’s life. Out they had come, the trolls, tall as a ship’s mast, wide as a sail, each tooth a cairnstone; and they had laughed at her plea.
‘We ate the King fifteen years ago, woman. We toasted him with honey and played jacks with his bones: so if there is no more tribute forthcoming, we must make do and mend.’
And then they had roasted and eaten poor Queen Fira: the lesson being, as the Earl of Shepsey had delighted in explaining to the young Ravn he dandled on his knee, that it pays to be pragmatic, to take what you can rather than to wait on empty promises. Ravn had always thought it a stupid story: if it had been his father the trolls had taken, he’d have carried fires and an army to the mountain and razed it to the ground. He waved Egg and the grand-niece away wearily. He was bored now. The mountain leopards had provided an interesting distraction, but he could feel his choices narrowing to the inevitability of the Empire’s Swan or the shipmaker’s daughter.
He nodded to Finn Larson; and when he did so, Jenna thought she might faint.
‘Sire,’ Finn swept as low a bow as his great belly would allow, ‘I give you my only daughter, Jenna, whose attributes are all you could ask for.’ And the burly little man had the temerity to wink at his king.
Ravn, caught somewhere between irritation and amusement, cast his eyes over this last wench. He knew the advantages the match brought: the priceless new fleet to take the Ravenway by storm, the convenient political neutrality – but the girl was more of a surprise: big but as well-structured as one of her father’s ships; her face shining with heat and wine (so at least she took a drink).
Jenna stepped forward. She had rehearsed this moment for months – how she would curtsey low to afford the King the best possible view of her bosom, then look up at him through her lashes while she seductively undid the headcloth and let down her sheet of golden hair – her best feature, she knew, and sure to win his heart.
His dark eyes upon her now, with their heavy, sensual lids, made her so weak and foolish that untying the infinity knot she had made for luck became problematic; but at last she fumbled it free and the fabric slipped at last from her head.
The crowd gasped.
Wave upon wave of shining hair tumbled from the confines of the silk, transformed by the nomad charm even as it escaped its
bindings. ‘If you really want him to notice you,’ Fezack Starsinger had said, ‘you must wait till his eyes are upon you and you have his sole attention.’
‘I want it to look like a sea of corn,’ Jenna had said, imagining a cascade of gold, a gleaming, textured sea.
Now that phrase came back to plague her.
Had she stipulated ripe corn, it might at least have ameliorated the colour; but she had not paid sufficient thought to the wording of her wish: green it was, her hair; as green as any new crop. And the magic had not stopped there. Out of the sheeny green tumbled fieldmice and bees; earthworms and loam. People close to her swatted at their faces, picked up their feet. A lark burst from her mane and soared up among the mast-pillars, where it trilled in panic.
The King began to laugh, until he realised this was no mere prank designed for his amusement, for the girl was shrieking hysterically and beating her head with her fists.
And then a tall woman stepped out of the throng. She wore a long pale robe and a dark-green shawl covered her head. Her skin, when she stretched out her hands towards the girl, was as white as milk, the fingers long and fine; the nails as pink as nacre. She touched the shipmaker’s daughter’s head and as she did so the illusion – if illusion it was – ceased abruptly. Jenna sank into her father’s arms, her long hair – blonde, inanimate once more – covering her shame. Of the creatures that had fallen from her, there was no sign.