by Jude Fisher
Brought back to herself by the fall, Selen lay there listening to the awful sounds the Eyran made and experienced a moment of genuine terror. Had he eaten something poisonous during his hours away from her? What if he died? She would be left here alone, without provisions or shelter, and with no one in the world to turn to for help . . . Could she row the wooden boat on her own, to some little coastal town where they had not heard of the Lord of Cantara and his missing daughter? It seemed unlikely.
The retching noises had turned to something else, she realised, while she had been thinking these selfish thoughts. She frowned. Was the northerner dying? He seemed to have gone very quiet, except for a series of soft gasps that might just have been the lapping of the sea. She held her breath and listened more carefully. He was sobbing.
She had never heard a man weep before and it made her even more afraid. She sat up, the shingle rolling and crunching beneath her, and the Eyran fell abruptly silent. Staring into the gloom, she saw a dark shape silhouette itself against the shining sea. Then the shape came upright and started to move up the beach away from her. She heard rather than saw the moment when the northerner left the beach, heard the sound of pebbles give way to sand beneath his boots, and then to the rustle of vegetation. For several minutes she stayed as still as stone, her arms clasped around her knees, listening to the small sounds he made in the woods, fearing to move again as if, hearing her, he might feel prompted to abandon her forever. And who could blame him if he did? she thought, suddenly ashamed of her outburst.
Then his footsteps sounded on the shingle again. There followed little noises she could not interpret, and then colour bloomed in the night and suddenly she was able to see the Eyran bending over a small cone of sticks sunk into a circle of stones, blowing until the small flame took hold of the kindling and burst into life.
‘Here,’ he said shortly, and cast something at her feet.
Whatever it was fell with a soft noise in the pebbles. Puzzled, she leaned forward, reached out and then drew back her hand with a sharp exclamation.
‘A dead animal!’ she cried in horror. ‘Why have you brought me a dead thing?’
‘You should eat.’
She stared down at the dark shape on the ground. It was small and furred. She prodded it gingerly with her foot and it fell sideways, the firelight revealing a white scut and long ears. A coney, its belly all bloody where the guts had been removed.
‘How can I eat this?’ she asked in disgust.
‘Skin it and spit it over the fire,’ Erno replied grimly. He turned away.
‘I don’t know how!’
‘Then eat it raw and furry for all I care.’
Her brow furrowed in dismay. For a moment she thought she would weep again; then she grabbed the creature up and took it into the light. ‘Give me a knife,’ she said angrily.
Erno regarded her warily, then tossed her his belt-knife. ‘Slip the blade between the fur and the meat,’ he said, more kindly. ‘Then pull the coat away. It’s not difficult.’ He watched for a moment while she wrestled awkwardly with the small corpse, then moved off into the shadows.
Tears of self-pity pricked Selen’s eyes and she blinked them away furiously. Damn him to the Goddess’s fiery hell, she thought: she would cook and eat the whole thing if he did not return, fur and all.
Some time later, she had managed to wrench most of the skin off the beast, though the touch of its slick, cool flesh made the bile rise in her throat, and cook it sufficiently to revive her appetite. When the northman did not return from wherever it was he had disappeared to, she gave in to her hunger and devoured as much as she could of the small thing, remembering only at the last that it was only propriety that she should save some part of the creature for him.
She sat and waited with the cooling remnant in her hands, waited until the fire burned low and the moon rose to its zenith. At last he returned and without a word sat down opposite her and gazed into the dying flames. He remained like this, inturned and uncommunicative, for several minutes until at last he foraged in his bag and took out a piece of coloured twine. This, he began to tie into intricate knots, chanting over them in the guttural Eyran language as he did so. He tied into one knot a feather, glossy and black; into another a shell with a hole in it. Finally, he reached inside his tunic and withdrew a small leather pouch. From it he took a length of gleaming red hair, charred at one end, and wove this into the last knot of all. He started a new chant for this most complex of knots, but after a little while his voice cracked and he stopped. Light from the embers gleamed in his downcast eyes as he turned the strange artefact over and over in his hands. She ached to ask him what it was and why he had made it, but she could not find the words. Erno, however, felt her eyes upon him.
‘I am sorry for what I said earlier,’ he said, looking up. ‘Or rather, for the way in which I said it.’
She had the sense that this was in some way an evasion, but she could hardly ignore the offering he had given her by making it. ‘Why did you not eat with me?’ she asked, but all he did was shrug her question away summarily. Then: ‘What is your name, northerner?’ she persevered.
This, it seemed, was more easily dealt with.
‘Erno Hamson, of the Rockfall Clan, who hail from the Westman Isles of Eyra,’ he said.
‘Then, Erno Hamson, the apology should be mine,’ she said softly. ‘In rescuing me from the wrath of my father, and the family of the man I killed, you risk your life. I had not thought there to be such nobility amongst the men they call our enemies, but I see that I have much to learn.’ She paused, seeking for the right expression. ‘The first thing I have learned is that an enemy is not always what he seems; nor a friend, either. And that the Goddess is less to be trusted than a tall, quiet northerner whose heart is broken.’
Erno’s head went back as if she had lashed out at him again. ‘How can you know that?’ he demanded. ‘Are you a seeress, able to peer inside a man’s soul and pick out his most private thoughts?’
‘I saw the way you kissed her, on the beach.’
He rubbed his hand across his face.
‘And how you watched for her, all that time, till you knew she would not come. And then I saw the light go out of your eyes.’
‘It was dark.’
She smiled sadly. ‘It was darker after that moment.’ A heavy pause hung awkwardly between them, until at last Selen’s curiosity got the better of her. ‘And that last thing you tied into your length of knots is a lock of her hair, isn’t it? I noticed the colour, where the dye had not taken, and I sense a story there, too. Tell me, are you a magician? Do you seek to draw her back to you by making this charm?’
Erno’s hands clenched convulsively over the weaving he had made for Katla. She saw his knuckles whiten.
‘When I left you I made my way across the hills to the town we passed on the coast four or five miles back, but it seems news travelled more quickly than we did. Already guards had come from the Fair, seeking a band of marauding northerners and a stolen Istrian lady. And they brought news, too. Katla Aransen – they were most specific about the name – is dead. She was captured when she drew them away from us. She had upon her the dagger you dropped and they did not believe her story. The man you say you killed rose up miraculously from the dead, it seems, and accused her himself. Then they burned her, your civilised people. Burned her like meat. Burned her till there was nothing left in the fires but a finely woven shawl, a shawl imbued with magical properties; a shawl, they say, which was far too expensive and far too fine for a barbarian daughter of Rockfall to have owned. They say she must have stolen it from you during the attack.’
His blue eyes had gone as hard and black as flint. Selen’s gaze dropped to the remaining haunch of the coney in her hands, then with a shudder threw the thing away from her. It lay between them on the cold shore like an accusation.
‘I bought her that shawl,’ he said flatly, ‘and now she is dead, and here are you and I, alive and free. We are murderers, you a
nd I. I have killed the woman I loved more than life; and you, who thought you had killed one, have, it seems killed another—’
His voice cracked. He pushed himself heavily to his feet, turned the weaving over in his hands once more, his thumb caressing the thin lock of bright hair; then he tossed it into the embers, and walked away up the beach. He cast himself down on the shingle in the lee of the boat, but though she watched him for an hour or more, he did not once stir.
Eighteen
The Queen of the Northern Isles
Ravn Asharson, King of the North, lit a candle and looked down on the sleeping form of the woman he had taken as his wife. In truth, their union had not yet been formalised by all the rituals required by law – their departure from the Allfair had been accomplished so swiftly that there had been no time for such trivialities – but they had taken meat and salt together (the one for the earth, the other for the sea) and he had bedded her two dozen times and more, and that in a period of just a few days, and with only the shelter of a leather tent between themselves and the rest of the curious crew. In another day, with the wind set fair, they would see the hazy outline of the cliffs of the Tin Isles; and from there it was less than half a day’s sail to his stronghold at Halbo. Then the law-speakers could indulge in as many of their dull and pointless ceremonies as they wished.
He brought the taper closer so that its circle of light illumined the curve of the woman’s cheek, the long, straight line of her nose against the pillow, the way a lock of her hair had tangled itself during their exertions and now lay criss-crossed about her throat and one exposed white shoulder: she looked like a mermaid caught in a golden net. And such a magical catch, too.
He found he was holding his breath for fear of waking her, and he smiled to himself: the wide, lazy smile of the cat that has been locked in the fish-store. He was, he thought, the luckiest man alive.
Before he could help himself, he had taken hold of the snow-bear fur and moved it down a hand’s breadth to lay bare the aureole and nipple of her left breast, as pale and demure and flower-like as the sea-pinks on the mainland’s western cliffs, and remembered how in the throes of lust it had flared to a deep and carnal red. Even now, spent and weary as he was, he felt a spasm of hot desire lance his groin and felt faintly ashamed of himself for it, stricken by the contrast between the vulnerable, sleeping creature before him, who looked barely more than a child, curled in on herself like this, and the wild temptress who had ridden him to oblivion in the late hours of the night, her hair snaking around her head and the sweat running down her belly.
He had known a lot of women in his life, but none like this one. The women of Eyra were often beautiful, whether dark or fair, or with the distinctive red hair of the Westman Islands; long-limbed and slender, or with bodies as sleek and sturdy as their highly-prized mountain ponies: he had loved them all. He had never needed to seek out sexual pleasure – somehow it had always found its way to him. It was good to be the King, for certain; but well before his crowning and in times when the succession seemed chancy there had still been all sorts of girls and women offering themselves with such a free and cheerful grace that he could not bear to show them such discourtesy as to send them away unsatisfied.
Ravn loved women, and women loved Ravn. For his part, in his early years he found each of them fascinating, an undiscovered country to be mapped and explored. They all smelled different; they all felt different; they had different ways about them. And when they talked, late at night or early in the morning, shut away in his bedchamber, reclining amidst bearskins and otterskins, fox-furs and rabbit-pelts, he had listened to them and learned more than he had ever expected to learn from the talk of women; more, often, than in the company of other men, for the women gleaned snippets of knowledge here, there and everywhere, like little pied-crows gathering shiny objects for their nests, and then fitted them together into intriguing shapes, making stories out of the most unlikely collection of incidents and observations.
It had been surprising to Ravn just how often these stories had proved to be true, in part or in whole, when the sources from which they had been patched together had been so diverse. A missing button found in an unusual location (a passing comment from Janka, who bathed him); a sly look between two unconnected courtiers – noticed by Therinda Rolfsen – and a plain wife sent away across the mainland on a wild-goose errand, as reported by Kiya Fennsen, suddenly added up to the rumour of a lustful affair between one of the highest ladies of the northern court and one of the King’s handsome but poor land-managers; while away, the man’s wife dies from a fall from her pony, crossing the treacherous Wildfell Moors; and some weeks later the previously impecunious land-manager finds himself elevated to the position of steward at the Earl of Jorn’s hall. Within less than a year, when her husband, Earl Jorn, has been lost at sea, Lady Garsen and the steward become man and wife. From a small carved button of whalebone to two unwitnessed deaths: from such details Ravn had learned to take notice, when he could be bothered, of the smaller things of the world; and so he wondered, gazing down at the Rosa Eldi, how it was that a nomad woman who travelled for months on end across mountains and plains and the wide southern deserts at the mercy of the sun and the wind, could possibly possess a skin of such surpassingly pure whiteness. It was as if the world could make no mark on her; or as if she were not of the world at all.
He had not asked her much about herself for they had spent little time talking, in truth. But the few questions he had asked her, when they lay together in the night, with the wind cracking in the sail overhead, the roar of the sea all around them and the muffled voices of the night-watch at steerboard and bow, had not been altogether informative. Sometimes she had gazed at him as if she could see right through him, through the hull of the ship and into the deep, dark waters below; sometimes she merely gave the smallest of smiles and reached out to touch him on the face or the arm, and then every word he had been preparing to speak to her flew right out of his head, like starlings out of a tree.
As if she felt his eyes on her now, the woman stirred. Other women, Ravn had noticed over the years, came awake in stages, with a flutter of eyelids, a roll, a stretch, a yawn; momentary disorientation. The Rosa Eldi, in contrast, seemed to sleep as lightly as a cat, going from drowsy stillness to full alertness in the space of a moment.
‘Where am I?’
She sat bolt upright, blinking against the candlelight, and the furs fell away from her in a drift of white.
For a moment he was rendered speechless by the sight of her naked body revealed in all its sudden perfection, then he lowered the taper and knelt beside her. ‘Where you were yesterday, and the day before that, my love: safe aboard my ship, crossing the ocean to my kingdom.’
Each time she awoke it was if sleep had washed her memory clean: each time her first words were to question him in this way. Now, she followed the first question with a strange second:
‘Who am I?’
The first time she had done this, he had thought that she toyed with him, that it was a game in which she liked to indulge as if seeking extravagant compliments, and so he had replied, then and since: My heart’s desire; and My wife and my queen; or: The loveliest woman alive, the most perfect creature in all the known world, but each time she had persisted, her eyes mysterious in the first light of dawn that stole through the doorflap: My name: tell me my name.
And so he had crooned to her: You are the Queen of the Northern Isles, now; the Lady of Eyra; but she would shake her head in wild frustration until he told her: The Rosa Eldi: you are the Rosa Eldi, Rose of the World . . .
‘You are known to me only as the Rosa Eldi,’ he said again. ‘You are the Rose of the World. It is all I know of you, since you will tell me no more.’
‘The Rosa Eldi. Rose of the World.’
She repeated it over and over, like a prayer; or as if she were committing it to memory. On this, the fifth day he had spent with her, she repeated the information only four times. On the first day s
he had told her name to herself a dozen times or more; so at least there seemed to be some improvement in the situation. He had wondered whether being cast alone into a strange ship with people whose language she did not know had made her understandably nervous and unsure of herself; or whether, and this was harder to accept (especially after her fearless and uninhibited demeanour in the night) she was afraid of him. But now, like a revelation, there came to him a recollection of a man at the Halbo keep, one of his father’s counsellors who had inadvertently been struck by an ox-bone hurled across the hall by a member of the King’s Guard in the midst of a rowdy brawl at the winter feast. It had been a large bone, he recalled; a thigh-bone, or perhaps the jaw, and it had caught the man squarely on the side of his head and knocked him instantly unconscious. The next day he had been up and about, with a swelling on his temple the size of a gull’s egg; but he had no recollection of what had happened to him; or even his own name. The guards had thought this a fine game, and had managed to persuade the counsellor – a mild-mannered, courteous man who would hardly dare to look a chicken in the eye – that he had brought the damage upon himself by goading one of the serving girls too far with lewd suggestions of what she might like to do with him later, and she had given him a good whack with her ladle. The counsellor, horrified at himself, had even gone so far as to seek out the girl in question and apologise abjectly to her for his behaviour, which had merely added to the guards’ mirth. The counsellor had regained his memory eventually, as Ravn recalled, though he never did remember the events of the night on which he’d lost it.