by Jude Fisher
‘What in Falla’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Fabel demanded, staring past his brother’s shoulder at the bizarre nomad woman. ‘You can’t bring her aboard.’
It was one thing to wonder at the Footloose from afar: to marvel at the yeka caravans wending their odd and colourful way to the Allfair, to buy trinkets and gifts for the womenfolk from them; even, in direst need, to worship the Goddess with one of their dexterous whores – so long as it was done only during the two-week bustle of the Fair; but to allow any woman to set foot on a ship was well known to bring bad luck, and to bring a nomad woman and her heathen magic on board was madness. Especially given the penalties against magic-peddlers and those who frequented them that had been announced by the Council following the events that brought this latest Allfair to a close.
‘She can save him: I know it!’
Favio bundled the woman up onto the gangplank and pushed her along in front of him, while she whistled and shrieked her protest. At the end of the plank she stopped dead and stared at Fabel, who stood blocking her way. Then, with a single, long-nailed finger she reached out and touched him on the forehead, and gabbled something high-pitched and unintelligible at him.
Fabel stood his ground, glaring at her. ‘Are you mad? She’s a Wanderer, Favio; a witch.’
‘So let her use her magic on Tanto.’
‘It’s heresy, brother!’
Favio thrust his jaw out. ‘I don’t care.’ He pushed the nomad woman in the back until she had nowhere to go but to cannon into Fabel, who stepped backwards quickly, making the superstitious sign of Falla’s fire to ward off her touch.
‘Would you damn his soul as well as your own, man?’
‘He’s not going to die. I won’t let him die.’
Stepping past the nomad woman, who was staring around the barge in bewilderment, Fabel put a restraining hand on his brother’s arm. ‘Favio, hear me: in the condition he’s in, it might be a blessing—’
Favio’s face blackened with fury. ‘He’s not one of your precious horses, to have his throat cut when he’s past performing.’ He shot Fabel a venomous look. ‘If it were Saro lying there, you’d not say such a thing.’
It was the nearest either of them had come to acknowledging the truth of Saro’s parentage. Fabel paled. Then, without another word, he pushed past the nomad healer and headed off down the barge, his back hard and straight, his legs carrying him across the deck in angry strides towards the pens where the horses were tethered. He was halfway there before realising that the subject of this last part of their conversation was standing quietly at the stockade, watching him with hollow eyes.
It was too late to turn back, Fabel thought, and now Favio would think he had deliberately set this course, as if aligning himself with the son he had sired. Well, there was nothing for it. He quickened his pace, feeling his brother’s eyes drilling into his back like awls.
‘The horses are quiet, lad,’ he said with forced cheerfulness.
Saro managed a wan smile. He’d had little sleep on this voyage, and the past few weeks had been amongst the worst of his life. He had tended his brother night and day as well as he was able, gritting his teeth against the agony and the seething hatred he could feel bubbling away like magma beneath the surface of Tanto’s consciousness every time he had to touch him – to turn him over to stave off bedsores, to change his foul bandages, to feed him; to clear his waste away. For some perverse reason, Favio had deemed it ‘good’ for Saro to undertake these tasks. After all, he had said, regarding with flinty eyes the lad whom he presented to the world as his second son, you owe it to your brother, for if it hadn’t been for your overweening pride and selfishness none of this would have happened.
Saro had never succeeded in drawing a fuller explanation from his father as to his guilt in Tanto receiving a knife-wound and the time when it might have been possible to discuss it in a civilised fashion had been and gone in the single look that had passed between him and Favio as they stood over Tanto’s sickbed that first night, before Favio, with a disgusted sigh, had broken the contact and left the room with his head in his hands. It was the clearest indication he could ever have had that his father wished it were Saro lying there instead of Tanto, the Vingo family’s pride and joy; Saro, who failed at everything his older brother excelled in; Saro who had the look of a young Fabel about him, who reminded him at every turn of his wife’s unfaithfulness, and of his own weakness in not revealing the adultery. And so he had endured the dual hurts of his father’s resentment and the horrible empathy that linked him more closely than they had ever been linked before with his dying brother, and every day felt less like living himself. And the dreams . . . He forced his mind away from that worst hurt of all.
‘Good day, Uncle Fabel,’ he said now. ‘They’re happy that the barge has stopped moving; but Night’s Harbinger is off his feed.’
Fabel looked alarmed. They’d been forced to leave the Moonfell Plain before he could conclude the deal he’d been negotiating for the sale of the stallion. It had been a good deal, too, and luckily with a horse-breeder less than a day’s ride away from Altea town, so he was still hoping to close the bargain when he returned. After their disastrous Fair, it was the only bright prospect on the horizon.
He climbed laboriously over the stockade and made his way to the separate pen where the stallion was tethered. The horse rolled a weary eye at him, threw his head up and backed away.
‘Ho there, lad—’ Fabel reached out and touched the stallion’s arched neck. It felt warm and hard beneath his hand, but not unusually so. He made a face. The boy had an over-active imagination: the horse seemed fine. ‘Well, likely he’ll eat when he’s hungry,’ he called back over his shoulder.
Saro shrugged. ‘I don’t think he’s well,’ he persisted. ‘And one of the mares is wheezing, too.’
He pointed out a handsome chestnut to his uncle.
‘She’s drinking a lot of water.’
Fabel shook his head. ‘The horses get nervous on the barge, you know that, Saro.’
‘I saw Father bring the nomad healer aboard,’ Saro started tentatively. He had gone from animal to animal that day, touching them as he groomed them and listening to their silent thoughts, even though it distressed him to do so. They were hot and listless, which might just have been due to the change of climate as they moved further into the south of Istria; but he also picked up on a certain level of anxiety from the horses, separately and as a group, that spoke of sickness and fear, even though few obvious symptoms had yet expressed themselves. What concerned him most was that it might be the sickness that had swept through the livestock a couple of years past, immediately following an Allfair. It had seemed a mystery, a plague from the Goddess at the time he had thought, smelling the awful stench of burning horseflesh when their neighbour Fero Lasgo had been forced to slaughter all his livestock and incinerate them on towering great pyres whose greasy black smoke had drifted low across the fields on a stifling, windless day. As he recalled, that sickness had started as innocuously as what he intuited here today. Nomads were known for their clever ways with animals, and if it could be detected early, and treated . . .
‘I thought, perhaps, when she’s tended to my brother, she might take a look at—’
Fabel shook his head impatiently. ‘Your brother’s life is in Falla’s hands now, and it won’t do to anger her with heathen magic. If the Lady thinks we have no faith in her, she’ll take Tanto to her for sure, but your father won’t see reason. We must stop him, lad, but he won’t listen to me. You might try, though.’ He looked at Saro hopefully.
But Saro shook his head. ‘He won’t listen to me, either. But even so, I must speak to her.’ Superstition or no, he couldn’t see the horses sicken and die if such could be prevented.
Fabel looked dubious. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, lad: all she seems to be able to do is shriek and whistle. I doubt she understands a word of Istrian. But you might be able to remove her bodily from the chamber before she h
as a chance to do her mischief on him—’
But Saro was gone.
His brother’s chamber was as stuffy as a bread-oven; which was no wonder, with three people crammed into a room that barely contained the bed that had been set up there. At one end, Favio Vingo peered desperately over the bedstead as the nomad woman laid her hands on his son’s fever-ridden body and slowly shook her head.
‘Bad wound,’ she was saying in heavily accented Istrian. ‘The knife that . . . made this . . . hole . . . kalom.’
‘Speak Istrian, woman; or at least the Old Tongue, you illiterate old hag!’ Favio threw his hands up in the air and began pacing the three steps back and forth that the chamber’s dimensions allowed. ‘Can . . . you . . . mend . . . my . . . son’s . . . wound?’ he shouted, emphasising every word as if for the benefit of a deaf child. ‘Can . . . you . . . make . . . him . . . well?’
‘No, no . . .’ The nomad woman shook her head faster, her hands scything the air in her frustration. ‘Kalom ealadanna . . . strong magic . . . the oldest. Ealadanna kalom; rajenna festri.’
Favio frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
Saro, drawn by an urge he did not fully comprehend, took a step through the doorway. Finding himself inside the room, and at a loss as what to do next, he placed the palms of his hands together and bowed to the healer in the polite nomad way he had learned from Guaya and later observed, but this time without the error he had first committed. ‘Rajeesh, mina konani.’
The healer’s eyebrows shot upward like lark’s wings. She smiled delightedly and then rattled out a great stream of nomadic gibberish: ‘Felira inni strimani eesh-anni, Istrianni mina. Qaash-an firana periani thina; thina brethriani kallanish isti – sar an dolani fer anna festri. Rajenna festri: er isti festriani, ser-thi?’
Saro waved his arms frantically. ‘No, no,’ he said quickly in the Old Tongue. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying—’
But the old woman was not to be stopped in mid-flow. ‘Serthi, manniani mina? Brethriani thina ferin festri mivhti, morthri purini, en sianna sar hina festrianna. Rajenna festri en aldri bestin an placanea donani. Konnuthu-thi qestri jashni ferin sarinni?’
Without thinking, Saro put his hand on the healer’s arm to stop her words and all at once was overwhelmed by her horror at the wound that would not heal, could never heal. For the blade that had made the wound had been forged with the old magic – ealadanna kalom; rajenna festri – the earth magic had returned; ill to those who do ill – and the blade knew: his brother had done an evil deed, he had murdered innocence, and so the wound the blade had dealt would fester and boil and never be brought to health until the evil his brother had done was atoned for and forgiveness given by the one who had made the wound.
Konnuthu-thi qestri jashni ferin sarinni?
Did he know the knife that had made the wound?
How could he? But somehow he had his suspicions: the dagger that . . . she, the beautiful swordmaker . . . had given him had disappeared on the night of the Gathering, and he had not seen it since. But he remembered the way it had shivered in his hand, the magical sense of it he had imputed to his feelings for its maker, rather than to its true nature. Saro believed in magic now: oh, yes he did: was he not haunted by it day and night?
Wide-eyed, he turned to his father. ‘I think she is saying that my brother’s wound has festered because the knife that made it judged him evil.’ It sounded mad even as he said it, and Favio Vingo looked as if he might explode at the very idea, but still Saro persisted. ‘I believe the blade that made the wound was the one the Eyran girl—’ he could not bring himself to say her name ‘—forged. She made a gift of it to me at her stall when Tanto and I were looking at her weapons, but Tanto must have taken it . . .’ He faltered, for something here was wrong: he had not thought through the implications.
Favio looked triumphant. ‘I knew it! I knew it! She tried to kill him with her witchery, the Eyran whore. She poisoned the blade against him: no wonder my poor boy will not heal!’ Perversely delighted to have a solid reason for Tanto’s persistent fever, he grinned wildly. ‘That little Eyran witch: it was she who did this to my lad; not Selen as she lied. I knew we were right to feed her to the flames. She poisoned him with her foul magic and then tried to poison him further with her words. Damn it, boy—’ he reached over and shook Tanto by the shoulder as if to share this wondrous knowledge with him ‘— she went to the fires, and thank Falla for it! Now all we need is for this Footloose witch to give you a spell that will counter the Eyran’s vile sorcery—’
Saro looked back at the healer in desperation. How could he make his father understand the truth of it? But the nomad woman was backing away now, her face distorted with terror. For a moment, Saro thought Favio’s lunatic happiness at the death of the knife-maker had upset her; but then he realised with a cold jolt that her eyes were fixed on him, eyes that were so wide with shock that he could see the yellow of her corneas all around her great black pupils. It was him she was terrified of, not his father, nor his wicked, unhealable brother: no, it was the touch of him that had brought about this change in her.
But why?
‘Don’t fear!’ he cried out in anguish. ‘Please: I mean you no harm.’
She would have to pass him to leave the room: they could both see that. It was why she was staring wildly around for another exit as a frightened cat, confronted with a snarling dog, might desperately seek an escape route that would take it even through flood or fire out of the path of its enemy.
He took a step towards her and was horrified to see her cower away from him. Crossing the floor between them in two swift strides he caught her by the shoulders, thinking to reassure her, but as soon as contact was made it was he who was swept away by the sensation. No reassurance here: nothing but sheer, mindless terror: for in front of her, touching her, was one who carried a fabled death-stone around his neck as thoughtlessly as one might wear a silver trinket. Yet all he had to do to carry her soul away into the howling wastes between the stars was to take the death-stone from its leather pouch and hold it in his hand; just the merest touch would rend body from soul, as had happened to the others. She could feel their deaths on him. Men, all of them, and fighters, to be sure; but what was to say he would not scruple to take a defenceless woman’s soul, too, in his dangerously unaware state? He had already taken three – or was it four? – lives without understanding what he did. It was hard to tell, for the ghosts of their tortured souls seethed and blurred in the dark aura that surrounded him; an aura that smelled sharply of fire and smoke, of burning clothes and hair. By the Twins, the burning times were back again, as they had heard, and surely they would all perish . . .
‘Aieeeee!’
With a shriek, the nomad woman wrenched herself away from Saro’s hold. In the stunned moment that lay between them, as Saro fought against the deluge of images that had tumbled out of her mind and into his, she took advantage of his bewilderment and ducked past him and out of the door, careful despite her desperation not even to brush his clothing as she did so.
The sound of her bare feet slapped on the wood of the stairs and the deck above them, then echoed away into the distance.
‘Well, go after her, then!’ Favio roared.
But his idiot son had collapsed onto the floor, holding his head and sobbing like a child.
For the rest of that day, and through the night and the next morning, Saro took to his bed and would not be roused, despite his father’s threats, or lately – and in some panic (for to lose one son to a wound; then another to madness was more than Favio could bear) – his entreaties. He drank the wine and the water the slaves brought and ate the bread, the spicy meats and dates they left at his side as if in a kind of daze. All the while, the images reaped from the nomad-woman spun through his head like the bright shards of a broken mirror: fractional memories that would not fit into any shape that he could make sense of, no matter how he tried to reorder them. He saw the faces of three men he did not recognise:
an Allfair guard with fierce dark eyes and a tall, crested helmet; a blond northerner with plaits in his hair and a long, forked beard, his nose as hooked as a bird of prey, his pale eyes spitting cold fire; an Istrian man with a jowly face, sword raised and mouth open in a cry of fury which turned suddenly, and for no cause Saro could name, to fear.
He saw his own hand reaching out, touching the first man lightly on the forehead, saw how the guard’s eyes flared briefly to silver, then to empty black space. He saw the other two, who seemed to be fighting each other, drop dead, for no apparent reason, at his feet.
He saw himself staring down at the stone which he held in his palm; saw how it went from the red of a glowing ember to a white heat that made the bones glow through his skin as he closed his fingers over it.
Try as he might to connect these disparate images, nothing – except the thing that made his mind skitter sideways every time he approached it – could knit them together into any coherent shape.
And finally, again and again and again, from many different angles, as if he were in more than one place at once – somehow approaching from the right, then the left, and once, disconcertingly from above – he saw the Eyran girl (Katla, Katla, Katla, his broken heart echoed piteously) bound to a stake. He saw the smoke from the pyre billowing in great black clouds into the air. Then he was back in himself, graced with a single viewpoint that was recognisably his own, so that he was able to see with a terrible and unwanted clarity how the toes of her leather boots crisped and bubbled; how the bonds cut deep into her bare skin; how her eyes filled with hatred as she saw him coming towards her through the lung-scorching fumes; how her mouth opened and closed on a stream of words he could blessedly no longer hear.
After that he had seen nothing else; and even now, despite the nomad healer’s touch, he could still recall nothing more beyond these events until he had woken up the day after Katla’s burning in his own bed in the Vingo family pavilion with a sense of awful doom, a foreboding of cataclysm. When his uncle had entered the chamber at noon (he had known it was, for he heard the priests calling the observances, their cries falling loud and haunting into what seemed even then to be unnaturally still air) to check on his well-being, he had clutched Fabel by the arm and demanded to know what was happening; why he sensed imminent disaster. Why it was so quiet out there.