Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘What are you doing?’ Brom yelled. ‘Leave him!’

  Fith scowled. Brom knew better than that. It wasn’t that Fith wanted to drag the Upplander around, but that was the thing with omens. You didn’t invite them into your aett, but once they were in, you couldn’t ignore them.

  Fith could no more leave the Upplander lying there than the Balt could have refused to set out on the murder-make that midnight.

  Lern stepped up and helped Fith handle the injured man. The shelters of the aett were ablaze, and choking the pale dawn sky with fat rivers of black smoke. The Balt hadn’t finished cutting threads. Sharp screams of anguish and pain split the air like arrows.

  They ran along the edge of the scarp, stumbling with the burden of the injured man. Guthox and Brom followed them, snow-running with wide, splayed steps. Brom had got a spear from somewhere. A gang of Balt took off after them, chasing like hunting dogs across the snow, hunched and loping.

  Guthox and Brom turned to meet them. Guthox’s axe knocked the first one onto his back, and a jet of blood squirted out in a five-metre arc across the snow. Brom’s spear-tip found the cheek of another Balt, and tore it like cloth, digging out teeth that popped free like kernels of corn. Brom clubbed his victim dead with the butt of his spear-shaft as the man fell down holding his face.

  The Balt circled and danced away from Brom’s jabbing spear. Fith left Lern with the Upplander’s weight and turned back. He came past Brom in a screaming charge, and lopped off the top of a Balt’s skull with his circling axe. That shook things up. Spear or no spear, the Balt went for them. They tried to use their shields to get the spear out of their faces. One of them immediately took the spear in the breastbone. It made a dry-branch crack as the iron head went in, and the man puked blood. But the spear was wedged, and the Balt’s dead weight wrenched it out of Brom’s hands. He scrambled back with nothing but a long knife to guard himself.

  Guthox used his axe to break a shield, and the arm holding it, then felled the Balt with a neck wound. He turned to fend off a bearded Balt axe with the cheek of his own, but the Balt was big and strong, and drove Guthox onto his heels with a series of relentless knocks.

  Fith still had momentum. His charge ran down two more Balt, one of which he left bleeding to death, the other dazed, and he turned in time to rescue Guthox by burying the toe-point of his axe through the spine of the big Balt hacking at him.

  Fith jerked the axe out with a snarl, and the Balt collapsed on his face. Brom was finishing another with angry, repeated stabs. The Balt had wounded Brom on his first pass, but had then made the mistake of getting too close to the hersir’s long knife.

  They ran back to where Lern was toiling with the Upplander. Brom had recovered his spear, but he was leaving red snow behind him.

  The Upplander was panting with effort. Heat was steaming out of his loose, gasping mouth. Under his storm cloak, the Upplander wore garments made from fabrics unfamiliar to Fith or his kinsmen. The sky-fall had hurt the Upplander, broken some bones was Fith’s guess, though Fith had never seen an Upplander opened up to know if they worked the same way inside as Ascommani, or Balt, or any other aettkind.

  Fith had never seen an Upplander before. He’d never been tied up in an omen this bad. He wondered what had become of the aett’s gothi. The gothi was supposed to be wise, and he was supposed to use that wisdom to steer and safeguard the wyrd of the aett.

  Fine job he’d done. The gothi had not known what to make of the Upplander when the hersirs had first brought him in from the crash site, and he hadn’t known what to do after that, except shake his bone jangles and his rattle full of fish teeth, and beseech the spirits with the same old tired chants, pleading with them to come down from Uppland and take back their lost kinsman.

  Fith believed in the spirits. He firmly believed. He believed in Uppland above where the spirits lived, and the Underverse below, where the wights went. They were the only thing a man had to cling to in the changing landscape of the mortal world. But he was also a pragmatist. He knew there were times, especially when a man’s thread was pulled so thin it might snap, that you had to make your own wyrd.

  Three bow shots away from the aett, the Ascommani kept a basin for their boats. It was a little ice crater open to the sea on the north head, and they had better than ten boat in it. Most were up on blocks, hoisted from the ice, so the men could labour in daylight hours to remove the rigs ready for the spring waters. But one was the aett-chief’s boat, ready to run at a moment’s nod. It was called ‘keeping it nocked’. You nocked the cleft of an arrow against a bowstring ready for tension, ready to fly. The chief’s wyrmboat stood on its runners on the hard ice, its sails ready to drop and fill, checked only by the anchor lines.

  ‘Into the boat!’ Fith ordered as they scrambled down the slope to the basin edge.

  ‘Which boat?’ asked Lern.

  ‘The chief’s boat!’ Fith snapped.

  ‘But it’s the chief’s boat…’ Guthox said, wary.

  ‘He’s not going to be needing it,’ said Fith. ‘Not as much as we do, anyway.’

  Guthox looked at him blankly.

  ‘The chief’s sleeping on the red snow, you arsehole,’ said Fith. ‘Now get in the boat.’

  They got into the boat, and laid the Upplander down in the bow. The Balt began to appear at the crest of the slope. The hersirs heard the air-buzz of the first arrows.

  Fith dropped the sea sails, and they filled in an instant. The canvas cracked like thunder as it took the world’s breath. There was a hard snow-wind that morning, and he’d barely noticed it. The anchor lines creaked and strained as the wyrmboat mithered on the ice, impatient to slip.

  ‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled out.

  Guthox looked at him from the stern, where the wind-pull was chaffing the taut lines against the rail.

  ‘He’s really not coming?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The chief. You saw his thread cut?’

  ‘He’d be here if he was coming,’ said Fith.

  They heard cracking sounds like green wood spitting in a fire. The iron heads of arrows were smacking into the ice around them, drilling up puffs of ice dust or cracking punctures into the blue-black glass of the crust. Two arrows hit the boat. One went into the main mast as deep as the length of a man’s forearm.

  ‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled.

  Guthox and Lern cut the lines with their axes. The wyrmboat took off like an escaping animal, its sails bellied out full and as rigid as iron. The lurch shook them on their feet. The bladed runners of the ice rig shrieked as they scratched across the marble ice of the basin.

  Lern took the helm. He was the best steersman of them. He draped his armpit over the tiller, loading it with his weight to drive the blade of the sternpost rudder into the ice, and balanced the tension of the ropes coming from the quarter rudders, one in each fist. Steering a rigger was a battle of muscle and wit. One bad judgement, one over-light feathering of the quarters, one heavy-handed dig of the main blade, and the combination of polished ice and raw wind shear could tumble even the biggest wyrmboat, and knock it into kindling.

  They left the basin. They went through the sea-cut in the granite lip that let out onto the open water. But it wasn’t water. It was long past the great year’s glacial maximum, and time was turning, but this stretch of sea along the shadowed inlet remained the sky’s looking glass. In some places it was grey-green like an old mirror, in others blue like uncut sapphire, in others bright and clear like fine crystal, but everywhere it was thick to a depth two or three times the height of a man.

  As soon as they were clear of the basin, and the boat’s runners were shrieking across the surface of the mirror sea like the baleful voices of the wights of the Underverse, the cold hit them. It was the open cold, the cold of the dull, iron-hard end of winter, the blunt cold of the open ice range. All of them gasped at the shock of it, and immediately laced up their collars or wrapped up scarf bindings to protect their mouths and noses.<
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  Fith looked at the Upplander sprawled in the bow. He was panting from a combination of pain and exertion, and the breath heat was steaming out of him in great spectral clouds that the wind was stripping away.

  Fith moved down the vibrating wyrmboat towards him, walking with the practised, rolling gait of an experienced ice-mariner.

  ‘Cover up your mouth!’ he shouted.

  The Upplander looked up at him blankly.

  ‘Cover up your mouth! Breathe through your nose!’

  ‘What?’

  Fith knelt down beside him.

  ‘The heat’ll bleed right out of you, with your mouth open like that. Breathe through your nose. Conserve it.’

  He opened one of the woven-grass coffers tucked in under the boat’s rail, and pulled out a blanket and some furs. They were all stiff with cold, but he shook them out and swaddled the Upplander in them.

  ‘Through your nose,’ he reminded. ‘Don’t you know that? Don’t you know the cold?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why the hell would you come to this land, if you didn’t know all the ways it would try to kill you?’

  The Upplander had no answer. He couldn’t summon the effort. Renewed pain was gripping him, and it was extraordinarily comprehensive. It pinned his thoughts, and refused to allow him even a small reserve of mental power to use for other things. He’d never known pain like it, except perhaps once.

  He could hear a clavier playing. The keys were ringing out a cheerful music hall melody that he could just pick out above the screaming of the runners and the roaring of the brutish crew.

  He could hear a clavier playing, and he knew he ought to know why.

  The Balt came after them. Lern shouted out as soon as he spotted them, and pointed astern. Wyrmboats were skating out from around the spithead. They were black-sail boats, rigged for a murder-make by night. The Balt were resolved to see the make through to its bloody end. Fith had hoped the Balt might give up once the main raid on the aett was over.

  But no. The Balt had to be terrified to keep up the pursuit. They weren’t going to rest until everyone was dead.

  What had their gothi told them, Fith wondered? What interpretation had he spouted that night when the broom star had sliced the sky, a ribbon of light that had left an accusatory glowing scar directly over Ascommani territory. How had he explained the land fall, the noise-shock of the star hitting ice?

  What had he told his wide-eyed hersirs, his chief, the Balt womenfolk, the children woken up and crying because of the noise?

  Fith had seen the Balt gothi once, three great years back, at a time when the Balt and the Ascommani had been on trading terms, when they could visit aett to aett for a barter-make with cargoes of pelts and grass-weave and smoked meat, and exchange them for preserved herbs, lamp-oil, whale-fat candles and ingots of pig iron.

  There had been a formal meeting of the chiefs, with an exchange of gifts, a lot of bowing, a lot of long-winded rehearsal of lineage and bloodline from the skjalds, and a lot of blowing of the Balt’s bronze horns, which made a sound half like a sea-cave echo and half like a muffled fart.

  The Balt gothi had been skinny, ‘taller than a warbow and twice as thin’ as the saying went, with a heavy jaw like that of a mule-horse or a simpleton. There were so many metal piercings in his lips and nose and ears, he looked as if he had been plagued with boils and cold sores.

  He had a wand made of a bear’s arm blade, and a silver torc. Someone had braided seabird feathers into his long, lank hair, so that they made a white mantle around his bony shoulders. His voice was thin and reedy.

  His name was Hunur.

  He spoke sense, though. During the barter-make, Fith had come to the gothi’s shelter, joined the listeners sharing the fire, and listened to him talk. The Balt gothi knew how the world worked. He talked plainly about the Verse and the Underverse, as if he had been told their secrets by the wights themselves.

  The Ascommani gothi was a crazy brute. He had fits, and he smelled like a sea-cow, both of which factors had probably led to his election as gothi. He was good with stars, Fith had to give him that. It was as if he could hear the noise their rigs made as they skated around the glass of the sky. But the rest of the time he was foul-tempered and raving.

  His name was Iolo.

  At the barter-make, Iolo and Hunur had squared up to one another, sniffed and growled like rutting bull seals, and then spent the whole time trying to steal one another’s secrets.

  But it had also been as if they were afraid of one another. It was as if, in trying to steal one another’s secrets, they were afraid that they were risking infection.

  That was how it went with magic. Magic had an underside. Magic could transform a man’s life, but it could corrupt it too, especially if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t watch it and soothe it and keep it sweet. Magic had a nasty undercurrent that could infect a man if he wasn’t paying attention.

  Magic could turn nasty. Magic could turn on you, even if you were the most exact and painstaking practitioner or gothi.

  The worst magic of all, that was sky magic, and it was sky magic that was riding in the bow of their wyrmboat.

  Fith wondered what the Balt gothi had said to his people to get them so fired up.

  Lern swung them west, down the mirror-throat of the inlet, under the shadows of the spithead cliffs and out onto the ice field, the apron of the great glacier.

  Ice was better than water; the same area of sail could invest you with ten times the speed. But the effort was mighty. Fith knew they’d have to change steersman in another hour, or stop to let Lern rest, because the concentration was so intense. Already, Lern’s eyes looked drawn, what Fith could see of them over the lip of his collar.

  They cut up across a long strayke of ice field the colour of grey fish-scales, and passed through the collar ridges where glacial moraines of broken rock pushed up through the ice of the glass like extrusions of deformed bone.

  The Balt boats were steadily falling behind. A good Balt boat was one thing, axe-carved from ocean-wood and whale bones, but a good Ascommani boat was quite another, especially a fine rig built for an aett’s chief.

  They might live yet.

  It was a fragile thought, and Fith hated himself for even thinking it and thus jinxing it. But it was real. They might yet outrun the Balts’ murder-make and find sanctuary.

  The Hradcana, they were the best hope. The Hradcana were a major power in the west, with several aetts along the jagged backbone of the ice field, less than a day away. More important, a peace-make understanding had endured between the Hradcana and the Ascommani for the lifetimes of the last six chiefs. Most important of all, the Hradcana and the Balt had quarrelled and made red snow on and off for ten generations.

  When Guthox saw the first Hradcana sails ahead, Fith’s spirit lifted. Some beacon look-out had seen them raking in across the ice field and sent a horn-blast down the chain, and the Hradcana chief had ordered out his wyrmboats to greet and assist the Ascommani visitor.

  Then he realised, with a sinking feeling, that the explanation didn’t fit the facts.

  ‘We’re too far out,’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’ Brom asked. He was trying to sew his cut up with fishing wire and a bone needle. The work was too fussy for gloves, but the windchill was too severe for bare hands to function with any finesse. He was making a mess of himself.

  ‘We’re too far out for any Hradcana lookout to have spotted us yet,’ Fith said. ‘They’re coming out because they knew we were coming.’

  ‘Crap!’ Brom snorted.

  Fith looked at the sails of the Hradcana boats. Sails were the most distance-visible aspect of a boat, so they were often used to declare intention. A straw-yellow sail invited trade and barter. A purple sail indicated aett-mourning, the cut thread of a chief or a queen. A white sail, like the one dragging Fith’s wyrmboat, proclaimed open approach and embassy. A black sail, like the ones the Balt had come in under, was a treacherous sail,
because it hid its declaration in the night, and thus defied the convention.

  A red sail was an open announcement of the intention to murder.

  The Hradcana sails were red.

  Fith settled down in the rattling bow of the wyrmboat beside the Upplander.

  ‘What are you?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What have you done? Why have you brought this on us?’

  ‘I did nothing.’

  Fith shook his head. ‘Red sails. Red sails. Gothi has spoken to gothi through the Underverse. The Balt came at us, now the Hradcana come at us too. Who else? Have you turned the whole Verse against us, or just against you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the Upplander said.

  ‘Did you make it your destiny to die here?’ asked Fith.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well,’ the hersir replied, ‘you certainly seem to have put some effort into making it happen.’

  It was an exalted place.

  Even on that pestilential day, with the tail-end of the six-week campaign to take the Boeotian citadel chattering and booming in the distance, there was an odd stillness in the shrine.

  Kasper Hawser had felt it before, in other places where mankind had focussed its worship for unnumbered generations. A cathedral in Silesia, just the shell of it, brittle as paper, rising above the fuming, white rubble and slag of the atomic dustbowl. The deep, painted caves in Baluchistan where a closed priesthood had concealed precious cellulose scrolls inscribed with their sacred mysteries, and thus preserved the essence of their faith through the Age of Strife. The high, monastic refuges in the Caucasus where scholars and savants fleeing Narthan Dume’s pogroms had hidden in exile, forlorn, ascetic outposts perched at such an altitude, you could see the expanding hive zones of the Caspian Bloc to the east and the nano-toxic waters of the Pontus Euxinus to the west, and the voice of some forgotten god lingered in the wind and the thin air and the bright sky.