by Jude Fisher
‘You’re right,’ she said suddenly, grasping at the tendril of conversation they had begun. ‘She’s not coming.’
Erno bowed his head, a gesture of defeat and resignation. ‘I know,’ he said at last. ‘I know.’
She watched him retrieve the oars with a grimace. He slotted them into the rowlocks with exaggerated care as if eking out every possible last second; then with a last miserable look back towards the shores of the Moonfell Plain he began to row purposefully out from behind the moored ships into the ocean. For a long time there was nothing to hear but the slap of water against the sides of the little faering and the splash the blades made as they dipped and rose, and Erno’s breath soughing rhythmically into the night air. Selen closed her eyes. Sleep, she thought. Yes, sleep would be good . . . She let the small noises of their passage wash over her and began to drift away from herself, out into the night.
Perhaps it was the sound of the man’s laboured breathing, perhaps the salt smell of the ocean, or the rocking of the boat that tricked her, but what seemed only moments after she had slipped into a doze, panic rose in her like nausea. Images of her attacker assailed her again and again. She opened her eyes wide and stared out at the sea, but his lust-swollen face reasserted itself over the black waves, and the pattern of moonlight on the crests reconfigured into the splash of blood flowering on Belina’s white shift . . . The horrible invasion enacted itself again and again, each time with the addition of a new and vivid detail; the grasping of his hands, the bulge of his eyes, the feel of the shaft of the knife in her palm; how she had curled her fingers around it and improved her grip as reflexively as she might have picked up a hairbrush or a spoon; the way his body had stiffened and his mouth gone slack as the knife went into him the first time; the gush of his blood on her hands . . . The shock of the hot liquid on her skin, the easy parting of his flesh, had terrified her so much that her mind had fled away, leaving her in the grip of a revulsion so powerful that all she could do was to withdraw the blade and strike at him over and again until he, too, fell away.
No, she thought fiercely. I will not think this. If I let myself dwell on this, I will go mad. She willed her mind to blankness and stared determinedly past Erno’s shoulder, out to sea. All she could see beyond the northerner was a featureless stretch of dark water, merging at some imperceptible point with the featureless dark sky. My future, she thought with sudden fear: my future, as empty and mysterious as the night.
As they rounded the first headland to the east of the Plain, Selen turned in the little wooden seat and watched until the lights of the torches and glowing fires of the Allfair faded to no more than pinpricks and were then eclipsed by tall cliffs stacked with silent seabirds, their ledges gleaming white in the light of the moon.
Erno rowed through all the hours of darkness. At some point Selen fell into an exhausted sleep that was blessedly unvisited by dreams. She awoke to the feeling of warmth upon her face, and when she opened her eyes, it was to see the red rim of the sun creeping above the horizon. It was the banners of light streaming out across the sea that had touched the skin of her cheeks and forehead and brought her to consciousness. Right in front of her, too close for comfort, was a figure in the stern of the boat, its outline limned with the weird dawn light, its face no more than a shadow to her against the fiery glow of its hair. Startled, she fell backwards off her thwart. ‘Karon!’ she cried out, and shielded her face with her hands. In her terror she did not know what to do, where to go. Wildly she looked around. There was nowhere to go. It was Karon, come to fetch her, for she was dying; or dead, and now the Goddess would take her heart and weigh it against a spent coal . . .
The figure leaned forward into the light and was transformed to the big northman who had rescued her on the Moonfell Strand. It was the first time she had seen him by daylight, and she couldn’t help but stare. He was striking, she thought with a shock, in a bizarre sort of way; his hair and beard as blond as silver, and braided up in that barbaric fashion the northerners had, with bits of bone and shell, faded rags of cloth; the planes of his face as hard and chiselled as carved oak; and his eyes—
‘Your pardon, my lady?’
Selen came back to herself with a gasp. In the shock of seeing the face of her rescuer she had forgotten the lack of the customary veil between the two of them. Flustered, she dropped her eyes from his intent gaze, focusing instead on the strange and intricate knotwork in his beard. ‘I woke from a dream,’ she lied, for she could not imagine having to explain her error to a foreign man. ‘I did not know where I was.’
Erno smiled: another revelation, for it transformed his whole demeanour. Where before, by darkness, he had seemed dour and forbidding, his face set in grim and watchful planes, the smile brought a warm light into his blue eyes and loosened the tense muscles in his jaw.
‘You called me “Karon”,’ he smiled. ‘I have good ears. Is he not the boatman who brings unfaithful souls through the fiery river for Falla to judge and chastise?’
Selen stared at him, dumbfounded.
Erno’s smile widened. ‘We are not all such barbarians in the north, you know. Some of us own parchments. Why, one or two of us can even read. I have made my way through the whole of The Song of the Flame, translated into the Old Tongue, and even parts of Strictures for a Life of Devotion to the One in the original. I cannot say I understood much of either, but I liked some of the poetry a lot.’ He paused. ‘“And Karon lifted her body into the black craft, and with the black sail furled as tight as a crow’s wing, he sculled silently into the black smoke that issued forth from the Kingdom of Fire”. I can’t manage it in your own language, though, I fear: too many strange sounds for a poor Eyran to master.’
‘I thought you northerners scorned such fancies,’ Selen said, taken aback and therefore with a sharper tone than she’d intended.
‘You thought all we do is to sail and fight and rape our captives? Well, I hate to disappoint—’
Selen’s eyes went wide then, much to her horror, filled with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ Erno said quickly, furious at himself. ‘By Sur’s raven, you are right,’ he added bitterly. ‘All I’m good for is swords and oars; I should leave pretty speeches to others. Lord knows, it’s never done me any good in life.’
The Istrian woman wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, blinking rapidly. ‘Please don’t say another word,’ she said and watched his face fall still and hurt.
Silence hung between them, and into it fell the mournful call of a gull, far away over the land. Selen turned to watch it sweep across a green-edged bay and out across hills that rose and fell in gentle undulations punctuated by crescents of cliffs and wave-washed platforms of rock. When she looked back the way they had come, she could see the serrated tops of the Skarn Mountains, their snowy caps gleaming gold in the rarefied new light.
Three hours after the sun had climbed to its highest point they rounded a headland and found themselves confronted by the distant vista of a harbour in which a myriad of vessels bobbed close to shore and a hundred or more houses climbed the sides of the forested hills. A stone keep with a tall watchtower crowned one of the hills. The little town looked as small and peaceful as an answered prayer. Selen licked bone-dry lips and felt the gnaw of her empty stomach. Curious, that the body should make such simple but urgent demands even in the most dramatic circumstances.
Her companion pulled the oars in, shaded his sun-reddened eyes and gazed at it wordlessly. After a while he dropped his hand. ‘I’m sorry to break our vow of silence,’ he said reluctantly, ‘but do you have any idea where this place might be?’ He frowned against the bright light.
Selen looked at him in disbelief. ‘Why should I know?’ she asked. ‘The Moonfell Plain is the only place I’ve ever travelled to in all my life. I come from Cantara.’
As if that explained everything.
‘I thought you might be familiar with a map of your own country,’ Erno persisted.
‘Geography is not som
ething they teach the women of Istria,’ Selen said tartly. ‘It is not thought to be useful to those of us who never have the freedom to travel any further than between house and garden, or to make the one trip required to sell us to a husband. In such a life, can you imagine the temptations the sight of a map might offer? We might realise the world is a much larger place than we had thought and feel even more confined than we already do; we might be seduced by exotic names and the call of faraway places. We might consider crossing the will of our fathers, who know so much better than we do the best course our lives should run. We might even run away to sea.’
Erno noted the glint in her eye and her acrid tone and was surprised to realise that this quiet, dark, southern woman could remind him of Katla in one of her more contrary moods. He nodded, not knowing quite what to say in response. He himself had seen a dozen maps of Istria, and now he wished he had paid rather more attention to them. Still, he considered, what difference did the name of the town make to them? It was a foreign port, as all ports here were foreign. He dug the oars into the water with even greater alacrity and pulled swiftly past the harbour.
‘What are you doing?’ Selen demanded with alarm.
Erno regarded her solemnly. ‘What does it look like?’
‘You’ve just rowed past the town.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But we need food, and water, and rest—’
‘You may take some rest, and welcome,’ he replied shortly.
She turned back to watch the town dwindle behind them. ‘I don’t understand. Why aren’t you putting in there? Do you have any idea where it is?’
‘In the end it is an Istrian sea port, and here am I, an Eyran sailor, alone at sea with a stolen Istrian noblewoman wearing nothing more than another’s dress; a woman, moreover, who has blood on her face, and bruises on her arms.’
Selen’s hands flew to her face. ‘Blood?’ Tanto’s or her own? The thought of the Vingo boy’s blood on her face was too horrible to contemplate. Convulsively, she leaned over the side of the faering and stared into the opaque green waves, but the chop of the water was too strong to give back a smooth reflection. Instead, she scooped a handful of it up and washed her skin vigorously, gasping at the chill, then mopped it dry with a corner of the red robe.
‘Gone?’ she asked at last, presenting her face to Erno as imperiously as a spoiled child might to its mother. Her skin, refreshed by the cold saltwater, glowed with vitality and her eyes were as dark and liquid as a seal’s. For just a moment he glimpsed the beautiful and untroubled girl she must have been only a day ago; then, almost as if she drew back into herself under his scrutiny, the tense wariness had returned, and so had the dark shadows that lay in crescents beneath her eyes, and the lines that drew down the corners of her mouth.
It was as if he had been allowed to see too much. Suddenly he felt uncomfortable in her presence. ‘Gone,’ he affirmed quietly, and applied himself to his oars. He could feel her watching his face as he rowed and sensed the way she turned his words over in her mind, but for a long time she said nothing and he almost forgot she was there as he lost himself in the movement of the waves and the oars, the oars and the waves.
At last the open coastline gave way to more broken terrain: little firths and coves where the trees came right down to the water. Reefs broke the surface to the entrance of the first two bays they passed; but the third offered what appeared to be a clear passage to shore. Skewing the boat around with a single oar, Erno made for the land. He rowed in to what gradually revealed itself as a wide shingle beach fringed with birchwoods. The hull grated on the pebbles and Erno leapt over the side. He dragged the boat clear of the waves, lifted the Istrian woman out, and then hauled the faering up onto dry land.
Selen stumbled away from him up the beach, her legs feeling weak and cramped. Swaying slightly where she stood, with the shingle pressing painfully into the soles of her feet, she stared around at these unfamiliar new surroundings. Behind her, she could dimly hear the rise and fall of the Eyran’s voice; but already her demons were calling her, and so she pushed his voice away with them and applied her attention to careful scrutiny of the shoreline. Birch trees; ferns; brambles. (Tanto’s hands, his mouth . . .) Rocky outcrops through the leaves; dark shadows beyond. (The blood . . .) To either side of her pale shingle stretched to cliffs at one end of the beach, and beyond a low headland at the other. (Knife blade grating against gristle and bone . . .) Amongst the tidewrack, driftwood; swathes of hard black seaweed; a dead fish, buzzing flies. Her heart sank. There was no shelter here, no sign of habitation at all, and the sun had begun its slow fall into the west. What was the northman thinking of? She turned back, only to find him gone. She spun around, feeling the panic in her rising again, but there was no sign of him – not on the beach, nor in the sea, nor, as far as she could tell, amongst the trees. The faering lay where he had pulled it up, canted onto its side, the bilgewater glistening away into the shingle. His pack had gone from beneath the thwart. She opened her mouth to call out for him, and then realised she had not even asked his name.
She ventured a little distance beyond the edge of the woods in search of him; but she had never been anywhere beyond a tended garden in her life, and then always in the company of the family slaves. Here, there were bramble-thorns that snagged greedily at the voluminous red dress, and loops of ivy to catch an unwary foot, and everywhere a silence that made the skin crawl along her shoulders and spine. A little further onward the silence was broken by the rustling of some creature in the undergrowth, which proved entirely too much for her unsteady nerves, and so she had made her way with haste back to the beach, wrapped herself into the woollen cloak and waited for him to return. And if he doesn’t, I shall no doubt starve or freeze to death, she thought grimly, and then he will have to bear the unwished-for burden of me no longer.
Within minutes, the cold of the beach-stones began to seep its way up through the fabric.
It was many hours and full dark before the northman returned. Selen heard footsteps crunching on the shingle behind her and scrambled to her feet. ‘Where did you go?’ she cried angrily. ‘You left me without a word. I thought you had gone for good and left me to my fate.’
Erno threw a bundle to the ground, where it landed with a rattle, a clank and thud, as if the cloth that swaddled it hid items made from many different elements. ‘Almost I wish I had!’ His voice was grim, his usual courtesy gone.
Shocked by the vehemence of his tone, Selen waited.
A few moments later he added: ‘Besides, I told you quite clearly that I was going to determine the lie of the land. And I also said that when the water had drained from the faering, you would be best for warmth and comfort to take shelter inside it and wait for me there.’
Now Selen remembered the vague murmur of his words and how she had ignored them, and felt her face flush in the darkness, partly out of an embarrassment that did not come naturally to her; partly in angry reaction. ‘How could you think I could stand to be in that filthy little tub a moment longer!’ she stormed. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I had stayed at the Allfair and trusted my fate to the judgement of civilised folk rather than perish due to the neglect of a barbarian.’
There was a moment of silence in which she could feel his eyes upon her face. Then the northman laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. ‘Civilised folk! If I did not mistake your words when Katla and I came upon you, you feared that your so-called civilised folk would burn you for your crime.’
‘My crime?’ Selen’s voice rose to shrill indignation.
‘You killed a man, or so I believed you to say.’
‘He was a pig, a vile creature. He killed my slave. He . . . he . . . attacked me. I was defending myself.’
‘I choose to believe you,’ Erno said stiffly. ‘Others – more barbaric than I – might not.’ He started to undo the knot in the huge bundle on the ground.
‘How dare you treat me so, as if you do me a favour by taking my word?’ Rage over
came both cold and shock. ‘I am the Lady Selen Issian, only daughter of the Lord of Cantara!’
Erno took a deep breath. Something in him had changed and hardened in the course of the last few hours; something that had made his jaw tight and his temper short. ‘Yesterday, Selen Issian, you may have been the daughter of a noble Istrian house with slaves to bully and money to burn; but today you are outcast and alone in the world, unprotected by the law or by your family. I do not see that there is much between us in that respect, save that at least I own the clothes on my back.’
Her mouth fell open in incredulity. And then she flew at him. Her fists, small and hard with her fury, pummelled at his chest, his arms, his neck. One blow caught him painfully on the underside of the chin, so that his jaw snapped shut, jarring his teeth. He stepped back, appalled at the violence in her, appalled that he was responsible for unleashing it. She came after him, shrieking in the southern tongue, which sounded entirely unmellifluous in these circumstances, but all he caught was the Istrian word hama for ‘man’, over and over again. She scratched his neck and bit his arm. She tried to kick him between the legs, but he saw the red robe flap in the moonlight and dodged away. It was as well, he considered, that she had no knife this time. At last he managed to pinion both her wrists in one hand, then with the other he pulled her toward him and held her clasped against his chest so that she could do no further damage. They stayed locked together in this manner for some minutes until he felt the fight go out of her. And still he held her, thinking as he did so that he had never held a woman for so long before, other than his mother as she was dying, and she had been as thin and as fragile as a little bird as she reached the end, quite unlike this dervish of an Istrian woman. And then he thought of Katla, and how he had kissed her outside the Gathering, how her lips had felt beneath his own; how her hands had grasped his shoulders, how she had angled her jaw so that their noses would not clash, and how he had wondered that she knew just what to do to inflame his desire. And then he remembered the smell of the charm as it ignited – the acrid, nostril-scorching stink of the burning hair and suddenly he had to push the Istrian woman away from him. He did so with more force than he had meant, for she fell heavily to the ground, but in his desperation he did not even notice. He ran down the shingle to the edge of the water and there, with his eyes stinging and a white heat in his head, he vomited noisily into the surf again and again and again, retching and heaving until there was nothing left inside him to expel.