by Jude Fisher
Leaning forward now, he cupped his hand around his wife’s head, feeling as ever the jolt of excitement run up through his hand and into the bones of his arm as he touched her. He spread his fingers wide, pressing her skull with the pads, but the bone felt smooth and even beneath his touch, and a moment later she jerked her head away.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked without expression.
‘Did you ever hurt yourself?’ he asked softly. ‘On the head?’
There was a pause, as if she was considering the meaning of this enquiry. Then: ‘No.’
This was said with such flatness that it brooked no further discussion, and as if to emphasise the end of the conversation, she pulled away from him and stood up out of the bed so that the top of her head brushed the roof of the tent and the taper on the deck illuminated only the smooth skin of her legs and the perfect ovals of her knees while the rest of her was cast into darkness.
‘I wish to go outside,’ she said, moving past him towards the door-flap, as naked as the day she was born.
In the past few days, Ravn had learned to be swift to his feet in these circumstances; he reached her before she could duck through the tent-flap, enveloping her in his cloak.
‘It’s cold out there,’ he said. ‘The wind off the sea in early morning can be remarkably . . . bracing.’ He had found himself unable to explain to her the unseemly interest the crew would take in the sight of her bare flesh, and, somewhere in an obscure corner of his mind he had no wish to acknowledge, he suspected that their scrutiny would in some perverse way please her.
Together they emerged out onto the open deck. It was true: the wind was sharp and chilly, invading fabric and flesh alike on its path to the bone, but the Rosa Eldi seemed to take no notice of it at all. Ravn’s own skin, tanned and weathered by years of exposure to the elements, was fast puckering to goose-flesh, but his wife’s naked feet and shins remained as smooth as Circesian silk. To the east, the edge of the sun had just crept above the horizon, so that a long low back of purple clouds was edged with deep gold, and streaks of deep red were smeared across the lower sky, like the mottled parts of a bad egg.
‘Storm later,’ the helmsman stated sourly, his eyes fixed not on his king but at the woman standing at the gunwale with her pale hair flying and her face thrust into the battering air.
Ravn grinned. ‘Faster winds to drive us home, Odd.’
The man laughed, throwing his head back to show an array of yellow teeth as curved and as sharp as a rat’s. The sound caught the attention of Egg Forstson who crossed the pitching deck warily to Ravn’s side, his face bearing the slightest tinge of green. In the past few years, his stomach had started to rebel against the oppressive rhythms of the ocean, urging him with a genuine gut-feeling to return to his steading and enjoy the peace of a life on land.
‘You should not encourage . . . your lady-wife to show herself,’ Egg said quietly to the King, unable to bring himself to use the strange name the woman had adopted. ‘It disturbs the men.’
It was not the first time on this voyage the Earl of Shepsey had made this warning, and indeed all around them signs of work had ceased and a curious hush had descended over the crew. A knot of them, who had been playing knucklebones amidships, had on the last cast lost interest in the game and were now all staring in the same direction as if they possessed only one set of eyes between them. Elsewhere on Sur’s Raven men had stopped polishing knife-blades, preparing the meal-porridge or gutting the morning’s catch; and two men who were adjusting the rigging off the yard allowed the tacklines to fall from slack hands so that they snaked out into the wind, catching a man who was engaged in patching his leather sleep-bag a wet crack across the face. His howl of outrage broke the Rosa Eldi’s spell and gave Ravn the chance to cross the deck to her, place an arm around her shoulders and draw her towards him.
At first, she resisted his hands, pulling instead towards the sea, but then something went out of her and she relaxed into his grip.
‘What is it that fascinates you so, my love?’ Ravn whispered into her fragrant hair. ‘Have you never seen the sea before this voyage?’
She seemed to digest this question, as if translating it slowly from the Old Tongue into some more complex language. At last she said, ‘It frightens me. The greatness of it.’
Ravn nodded slowly. He remembered his own first voyage, when he had been exhilarated to be on board one of the fine dragon-ships in his father’s presence, entrusted with duties and treated like any other member of the crew: a man at last. But when they had rowed beyond the natural harbour at Halbo, with its curving seawalls and protective cliffs, set up their sail and ploughed through the sheltered coastal waters off the mainland and out into the wilds of the Northern Ocean, he had felt the first buffet of the sea-winds, strong and inexorable, whipping the tops of the waves into angry white crests, making the timbers of the ship creak in protest. He had watched the land behind them diminish to a mere line of grey; ahead, nothing but rank after rank of high waves as far as the eye could see, and he had thought then, as he had tried not to do since, that there they sat in their tiny ship, like the cup of an acorn borne volitionlessly along in the spate of a flood, with nothing between them and the cold, sucking water below that stretched down and down and down until it reached the Great Howe on the ocean floor, where lay many of his ancestors amongst the bones of the drowned, except for a thin skin of clinkered wood, that might buckle and burst in the hand of the sea as easily as he might break a hazel twig.
So he held the woman closer and said, ‘We are all at Sur’s mercy, out here, that is true. But I have a stout ship and a fine crew and home is no more than a day’s sail away now; and then we will be in my capital, and you will be welcome into my keep, where my mother will cherish you and her maids will cosset you, and you will never have to journey out over the heart of the sea again.’
At this, the Rosa Eldi merely frowned. A tiny line appeared between her gossamer brows, where no line had been before.
‘Sirio?’ she said.
Ravn quirked an eyebrow at her. ‘Sirio? Forgive me, lady: I do not know what you are saying. Our languages are very different, I believe.’
‘Ah,’ she said. Then: ‘Sur,’ she repeated; and: ‘Sirio.’
‘You have another name for our god?’ Ravn asked, amazed.
The frown deepened. ‘God?’ she echoed. ‘What is a god?’
‘Don’t you know?’
In reply she merely shook her head.
Ravn rubbed a hand across his face. If pressed, he would have to admit that he found these conversations a little trying. It was like interpreting the world for a child, and a foreign child at that; and children were fine for games of rough-and-tumble and for surprising with gifts or sweetmeats – but being forced into explaining religion to them was not something he felt comfortable with. But, he reasoned, this lady was his wife now and knew nothing of their northern ways, and he had chosen her above all others, so he must do his best. He cleared his throat.
‘A god is one we pray to for his favour and his aid: for fair winds when we make a voyage, or a farmer may pray for good weather when he brings in his crops.’
‘What is “pray”?’
He stared at her in disbelief. ‘You must pray to your own deity, surely? Everyone has a god, even the damned Istrians have their bitch-goddess, their fire-demon, Falla.’
She shrugged. ‘My life has been very . . . enclosed.’
‘Egg?’ Ravn beckoned his first lord closer, sensing that the conversation was beginning to teeter too dangerously close to a discussion of metaphysics for his liking. ‘You’re better at explaining these things than me. Make her comfortable out of the way of the crew and tell her about Sur and how we make our worship in the north, there’s a good man. Can’t have her shocking my devout lady-mother with her odd nomad ways, can we? By the time we dock at Halbo, I’ll expect her to be able to recite the Mariner’s Prayer backwards. Meanwhile, I must check our bearings with the navigator!�
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He clapped the Earl of Shepsey on the shoulder and with a grin bounded away towards the bow, stepping lightly over braces and thwarts, between bales of cargo and casks and outstretched legs until he reached the fabulously-carved prow and the stern-faced man stationed there. Egg watched him go with a sinking heart before turning back to the pale woman.
‘My lady,’ he said, bowing politely. ‘Please come with me and I will answer your questions as best I can.’
When she smiled at him and placed her hand on his arm he felt an unaccustomed warmth in the pit of his belly and a few moments later caught himself grinning back inanely like a green lad of eighteen. He patted her hand, then carefully removed it from his arm, feeling at once the sensation in his loins recede and clarity returning to his mind. Almost, he thought, he could see why Ravn had selected this creature as his bride; almost, but not quite. A king had to be able to think with more than his cock, especially when making a strategic decision that affected not only the matter of which woman would warm his bed, but how, as a result of his choice, the rival factions surrounding him would line up their swords: before him and in clear sight, on bended knee or in antagonism; or behind him, with poisoned edges and whispered plans. To have chosen this unknown nomad woman was quite the worst choice Ravn could have made, and typical, Egg thought, of this wild, untutored lad. Sur knows, they had tried with him, he and Stormway and Southeye—
He shook his head to dispel the image, but he knew it would come back to him again in the night as these things did, no matter how many wars he fought or deaths he witnessed, along with the sight of severed limbs and the burning woman; and this strange young wife wandering untouched amidst the violent crowd as if she belonged in entirely another world.
‘Have you hurt your head?’ the woman asked, reaching up and spreading the pads of her fingers over his skull exactly as Ravn had touched her earlier.
Startled by the intimacy of this gesture, Egg jerked away from her hand. He felt hazed, confused, curiously violated.
‘Many times,’ he whispered. ‘Both inside and out.’
‘Inside?’ She closed her eyes for a moment, rocking slightly on the balls of her feet, in perfect rhythm with the pitching of the boat. Quite the natural sailor, he thought disjointedly, for all her closeting. When she opened them again, the extraordinary green of her irises seemed to swirl and clear, like clouds moving across a sunlit sea. And then she laughed.
He found himself laughing, too, feeling a little stronger now that the connection between them was broken. But was it? Out of nowhere, it seemed, rose a clear vision of his own wife, just as she had been all those years ago when he had sailed away to war, a beautiful fair-haired girl of twenty-five with flushed cheeks and merry eyes, their two small children hiding behind her skirts, unsure what to make of their father in all his mail and leather, with his great helm under his arm and his father’s sword slung across his back; and how Brina’s belly was well swollen with their third, the child he had never seen . . .
‘She is alive,’ the nomad woman said, and the smile she gave him was dazzling. ‘She is older than she is in your head, but it is her all the same. Her hair is red now, and short, beneath the veil.’
‘Brina, alive?’
‘Her name is Brina? I have not heard that name before. This is the woman, yes?’
Her fingertips brushed him lightly on the forehead. At first he saw only the outline of a woman wearing an Istrian sabatka in a shade of blue that was almost black, and then it was as if the veil she wore became transparent to him and he could see her, his wife of so long ago, his Brina, stolen by the raiders. Her face was lined and her mouth dragged down by age and hard experience, but her eyes were still the bright blue he remembered – the startling blue of a periwinkle – and her hair, as the woman had said, was no longer plaited into long golden braids, but had been dyed a dark red and cropped close to her scalp . . .
‘How . . .’ he started.
He backed away from the pale woman, his hands instinctively making the sign of Sur’s anchor to root him safely to the earth in the face of this wild magic, his mouth working silently, as if the words that boiled up inside him – fakery – witchcraft – the worst kind of sorcery, to steal and twist a man’s memories so – could find no sound to carry them beyond his lips and out into the cold air whence he could never take them back.
Then he turned on his heel and ran from her, stumbling over the obstacles his King had avoided so agilely but a few moments before, and reaching the gunwale on the steerboard side, vomited noisily and urgently into the churning waters below.
This brought a chorus of raucous cheers and catcalls from the crew. Ravn, turning from his conversation with the navigator, stared at his first lord in disbelief. For near on fifty years the Earl of Shepsey had been sailing, and in far stormier conditions than this. If he could not handle a clear dawn sea with barely more than a chop to it, how would he manage in the storm the helmsman was predicting? It was time the old man retired to his steading, Ravn thought, not for the first time; before he became a laughing-stock and worse; before he made a laughing-stock of his king. Meanwhile, he could see that in abandoning his post Egg had left the Rosa Eldi alone at the rail, where she stood now, her chin jutting into the wind like the fiercest of figureheads, her hands resting lightly on the top plank. With her feet apart and her knees slightly bent, she rode the pitch and roll of the waves like a seasoned shipman; except, that is for the royal cloak billowing away from her white, white skin . . .
Without a word to the navigator, he was away down the deck like a stag, taking the cauldrons and kettles, the paraphernalia of the morning meal; the mast-fish and bodies and casks in his stride, until he was at her side, clutching the soft folds of wool close about her.
‘Come with me back to the shelter of our bedchamber, my love,’ he said, ‘and I will bring you a bowl of porridge and a fine, fresh mackerel to break your fast.’
‘Do you not wish to take me again?’ she asked, her face as innocent as a child’s, but her hand, less chaste, reached down to cup his genitals.
Ravn shivered. ‘Not now, my lady, no: for I have other duties to attend to.’
‘Later, then, my lord.’ The hand, unerringly, closed upon the hardening stalk of his cock.
Despite the rapture that rose in him, he reached down and prised it loose.
‘Later, indeed.’
Nineteen
Nightmares
Quarter-sun came and went and still Tanto did not regain consciousness. Healers came and went, too, sucking their teeth and shaking their heads – crowlike men with bald heads and flapping black robes; wizened physics with beady eyes, who departed with more gold than they’d arrived with, and left the patient in no better shape, despite their tinctures and leeches, their herb-soaked swaddlings and heated cups. And then at last a chirurgeon had been found, and what he had had to do in order to save the patient’s life had been shockingly brutal.
Through it all, Tanto sweated and groaned. His eyelids fluttered, so that Favio Vingo’s heart fluttered with them, but then rolled up to reveal only the pained white corneas beneath. In the third week after the chirurgeon had cut away what was left of Tanto’s manhood, his hair began to fall out as his father combed it; and then the hair from his chest and legs, his armpits and groin followed suit, leaving him at last as pale and smooth as a girl, except where the wound he had taken from the dagger, and then from the surgeon’s knife, was swollen and inflamed. Foul-smelling pus and other noxious fluids leaked incessantly into bandages that had to be changed three times a day. The cost of fresh linen and medicines was becoming astronomical. As the barge forged its way slowly down the Golden River, Favio Vingo sold his best cloak, his jewellery, and two of his stud-horses to finance Tanto’s treatments. By the time they had passed beneath the city of Talsea, its great stone buildings rising on their ancient ochre columns into the mercilessly blue sky, and into the trading-post of Pex, he found that not only had he little left to trade, but a
lso that he had lost all faith in traditional medicine. At Pex, then, the nondescript riverside town in which it was common to break one’s journey on the Allfair run between the Moonfell Plain and the southern provinces, Favio ordered the barge be moored downstream of the five-arched bridge and jumped ship.
An hour before sunset, when Fabel Vingo and the crew were beginning to get restive, he returned, dragging behind him a screeching woman with feathers in her hair, three or four long braids of shells clattering down her back and a huge black bag bumping against her thigh.