The Rose upon the Rood of Time (Dark Spiral Book 1)

by Segoy Sands

  Tonight, when Hog and Bu barged into his uncle’s stables to get him drunk off his rocker, as a man should on his seventeenth, or any other birthday, he’d been carried away by their hi-jinxes.

  “I’m joining the next round,” he blurted.

  That unfortunate boast set them on the forced march up the scrotum freezing highroad, to an astonishingly repetitive stock of ribald refrains about Nesso nightgirls: with end rhymes like number tattoo and nether loo-loo, painted eyes and pink surprise, wild hips and under lips. Now, with the time run out for second guessing, and too drunk to care, he was being ushered by Bu and Hog past the silent, stolid guards. His groc-altered senses registered the signatures of a Nesso warrior: the spicy smell of simmondsia oil, the whorls of number tattoos on tough sinews and high-boned cheeks, the long black strands of tightly braided hair, the polished bonewood hilts of sheathed blades.

  “Watch it!” Bu’s smack kept him from stumbling over a huddle of mongrels, just as one of them leapt up, ribs jutting through mangy, patchy fur, growl filled with a primeval will to survive. These were dogs from Neverre, and had crossed the black sea with the Nesso, a fact that reminded him once again that he had stepped into a territory that both was and wasn’t Aina Livia. The town seemed circular, or labyrinthine, with lantern-lit curving lanes. At regular intervals, alleys shot off, radial arms connecting to other curving lanes, and presumably those lanes traced tighter and tighter circles, until they reached the center, the Arcanum of the Blakes, though the Jorro Blake lived above Neserre itself, in the black finger of Tor Cael above the white cliffs.

  It was nothing like the Orroch towns he was used to, sprawling, with several large taverns, and places of business that announced themselves loudly, blacksmith, miller, tanner, with cows and goats roaming free. No, here, both sides of the street were lined with three story buildings of polished simmondsia wood, merchant stalls at ground level, two tiers of rooms above. They were built so close together, they almost seemed connected, and many of them used paper-paneled sliding doors. He was feeling good from the groc, and it all looked magical, with the paper lanterns hanging from the third story railings, some of them on poles that hung out of over the street. All that talk of sorcery and demons gave a person the wrong impression of the Nesso, he thought, grinning and gazing up at the lanterns and the crowding stars, which put him in mind of the Nesso nightgirls. If they were as elegant as this place, then they weren’t that expensive, really. He clapped Bu on the back, reeling, happy.

  “So, which way now, Bu-man?”

  Hog’s cutting glance seemed ungenerous. It wasn’t like he couldn’t handle his drink, but who could drink on an empty stomach while practically racing three leagues uphill? They hadn’t given him time for grub, but clearly had some stalwart mutton sticking to their ribs. Come to think of it, he was starving. Whatever streetgirl they were taking him to see, he hoped she had something to eat.

  “Didn’t bring a wee nibble did ya?” he asked, hopefully.

  Hog rolled his eyes. “You understand where we are? In, past the gate.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Lower Tor Cael. Unsafe for children.”

  He tried to turn around to see if they were being followed, but Bu’s hand went to his back, directing him forward. Suddenly, the unlit shops and balconies looked menacing, the curved streets claustrophobic. When they finally stopped before a narrow red door, inlaid with tiny blue-glazed tiles, Dillan felt the same mixture of excitement and dread as at the black gate. Amber-black tiger’s eyes sifted and soughed in the night air as Hog led the way through a second beaded door into an antechamber of oiled floorboards. They passed single-file through a curtain of pearls, then a curtain of amber, into a dark room with ornate plush rugs and low cushions: a pleasure den, dim-lit, dreamy, lulled by the slow ripple of water drums. Three dancers moved at its center, with oiled bodies that seemed to drink in the firelight. One was covered with small dark ciphers that seemed to swarm in shifting patterns over her thighs and belly and breasts.

  Hog pulled Dillan from the doorway, and settled him on a cushion in a corner. A middle-aged man – bald, stocky, and clean-shaven – came and sat with them. A water bowl was brought by two younger men. The feeling was not obtrusive but oddly relaxed, less a ceremony than a minor ritual, the kind so often repeated that it became second nature. A kind of trust and respect was being established. The squat proprietor offered the pipe first to Hog, then Bu, and finally Dillan. The smoke was thick and musky. When he hesitated, the bald man gave an expressionless nod of encouragement. So, he drew on the pipe. It was as mellow as it smelled, smoother than arachuan, but still set him coughing. He wondered if he should feel embarrassed, but when he passed the pipe to the Nesso to his left, they coughed twice as loudly as he had.

  The bald man tested the weight of Bu’s pouch of coins, made a slightly skeptical face, then slipped it into his vest. Everyone in the room was in a world of their own, an introspection that seemed strange until he began to feel the effects of the water pipe. Drums pounded like soft puma feet, the women gyrated, and the smoke worked deep into his blood, relaxing the tight whorls at his core. The host had moved on to another table, and three dark-haired girls had arrived with a quiet stir of sarrbas to sit with them among the cushions.

  One had taken a seat at Dillan’s side, her arm lightly brushing his. He could see from her face that she was somewhere near his own age. There was a small black mole on the left side of her nose, which he found as beautiful as her lips.

  He didn’t dare do more than glance, because her eyes were an invitation to wit, which, admittedly, he had a better chance of approximating in his present condition than normally. But she already sensed all sorts of things about him, probably. His heart began to pound. What scared him most was that she would know he was scared, which meant she was going to laugh at him later with her friends. They were pretty too, he noticed, one of them with a high brow and high cheeks, the other a bit older and incredibly at ease with, apparently, all things under (and not under) the sun. They were breathtaking, actually, but the girl next to him interested him most.

  For a moment he found himself smiling at her, actually maybe grinning, and her smiling back, but that was moon-howl crazy, so he got a grip on himself. He was sure she didn’t notice him shudder. He was alcohol, he was smoke, he was manliness, perfectly at ease watching the three dancers on the floor, not fazed at all by the fact that Hog and Bu were each slipping away with one of the other two. He wasn’t avoiding her eyes. No, but the women on the floor moved their hips with such soft ritual instinct. The one at center, hair beaded in a hundred strands, moved like water, the ciphers on her skin almost alive.

  He realized that the girl beside him was proffering a cup to his lips, and he drank, and then drank again. It wasn’t a drink he knew, but it was smooth and good. He was smoke, he was alcohol. He was an adult in the night. Things had taken on a submarine rhythm; in fact things were spinning more than they should as she took his hand and tugged toward the back, into a hallway, guiding his hand beguilingly on her hip, her head turned toward him with a smile. He could stop and drown in that smile, only they were moving, coming to the hallway’s end, where a bead-curtain led into a room just big enough for a straw-filled mat.

  In semi-darkness, she lit a candle and set crackling flame to an herb, dry and mellow-scented. She took off his tunic and loosened her sarrba so that it fell open down to the waist. She wasn’t a narrow stick of a girl. Her breasts could fill a man’s hands. Her smooth belly surged into lissome hips. Her oiled hands were on his chest, on his ribs, on his back, massaging him, cool and small, deft and sure and cat-like, finding where he ached, where he hurt. He soon learned that he hurt in many ways, in many places, as his body absorbed the medicine of practiced hands. In the magic silence of the room, his blood pounded, to water drum, to pipe weed, to liquor. At some point, surrender turned into smolder. He was slow oil that had touched flame. He was on her, drinking that sweet-tasting mouth, looking into her copper, tattooed f
ace. She had three moles, he saw, one just above her right eyebrow, the second on her left nostril, and the third just under her left jaw. They made a kind of line. He was hard and didn’t try to hide it from her, even when she grabbed him in her hands. Two or three oiled braids lay across her dark eyes.

  He smiled, like the intoxicated man that he was, and she smiled back. Tummo girls looked at him that way, once in a while, and it always made him feel like a nest of fire ants had crawled into his clothes. Ina, especially, was always trying to get under his skin. This girl’s face was more like Ina’s than he would have expected. Lively, inquisitive. Only, he could never imagine actually being this close to Ina, or feeling this happy about it.

  “You have good friends. They paid Zodo gold.” Her eyes traveled down speculatively to where his hands were moving.

  “Them? Gold? I don’t think so.”

  “You should give me a gift, if you like me.”

  “Was I supposed to? No one told me anything…”

  “It’s customary. A stone is best.”

  “A stone?” He smiled sheepishly. “There’s a few in my boots, I bet”

  She straddled his chest. “I think maybe you’re a liar.” She held up the silver chain around his neck, scrutinizing his whitestone: the delicately carved figure of L’Ávana, kneeling, the kiste and kalathos crossed in front of her. Apart from the workmanship, the amulet was very valuable for the whitestone itself and the inlaid rubies.

  “Who gave you this?” she pouted, pretending to be jealous.

  “It’s not really mine,” he said. “I’m supposed to give it to my sister.”

  “Who is your sister? And who gave it to you to give her?”

  “No one. My mother gave it to me to give her. I know it’s really stupid.”

  She was up on her elbows, breasts in his face, studying it. “It is vakan,” she said. “Do you know?”

  He shook his head and tried to kiss her again.

  “Then you need a teacher,” she said archly, and let him taste her sweet tongue, which seemed to affect his brain. Were the drums still beating in the other room? Suddenly his body was giving him definitive commands about exactly what to do, like it knew a great deal more than he had ever given it credit for knowing. One of the first things he learned living with his uncle was to ignore his appetite. Ignore those urgent signals and they would finally give in and go away. Deprivation. He’d tried that, not eating a morsel of food for a whole week. It made him feel light, like he could float away. “Lay on your belly.”

  “On my belly?”

  “That’s usually how it’s done,” he shrugged.

  She looked long and deep into his eyes, then, with serene aplomb, turned on her belly. “You have very big hands,” she giggled, even before he began pressing. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on what she might be feeling as his hands glided over her. “And so quick to learn,” she sighed, relaxing into his strokes. “A Nesso man would be angry if I touched his vakan object.”

  “I bet,” he grunted, rubbing her supple back.

  “Yes,” she said, dreamily exhaling, a strangely arousing tightness in her voice, “you have very, very, very big hands.” A few moments later, he realized by the rhythm of her breathing that she had fallen asleep.

  As she slept, he lay gazing at the low ceiling. Beeswax dripped down the side of the candle, trickling and congealing. He wondered what he would do if someone came to steal his amulet, but dismissed the fear as childish. His eyes grew heavy and fell into a dream. A woman, one of the dancers, glided in through the bead curtain and sat beside him. Number patterns shifted subtly on her face, on the backs of her palms, at the base of her neck. She relit the herb in the copper bowl. Slow curls of smoke wound toward the ceiling. A soft nimbus formed around her. She touched his cheek. “La’mo is right. Your face has good numbers.”

  5 BURNT OUT DA TEARS

  In the crescent bay known as Thalassa’s Cove along the white sand shores of Paidrin, the shallowest of waves sheered landward over golden sandbars, a perpetual foaming frill of sea lace. Children, hair tousled by fine spray, cried out their joy above the roaring air, hunting ankle deep for bright green sea turtles no larger than their hands, and arrow fish, and rarer creatures yet, such as the lamia, bright and many-hued as the Coral reef itself. The children all believed fervently in the legends of the reef’s legion of spiny coroneted seahorses, with Thalassa, the Sí queen of the Tír fa Thonn, mounted at their head on a leafy jade sea dragon, but they dared not wade too near the reef edge teeming with strange fauna, such as royal crabs in red carapaces that lurked ready to seize unwary human children for conscripts in the seahorse infantry.

  On the powder white shoreline, when the tide was in, Paidrin’s children spent hours scouring the sand for miniature pink conch shells to make love charms for each other. Such memories were like sea fog, a film on the mind. Memories of her childhood, long ago, before the birth of the woman beside her, blowing into the red embers under a pot of gruel. There were no children now in Thalassa’s Cove. In a wicker chair, Oona rested her old bones.

  “Na, me na dead,” Oona crooned. “La Teine na let me die, so long the child be sealed. Me must bear da heat, long after me teeth fallen out, dugs widdr’d ta salt prunes. Even in da icy wind squallin’ offa’da’sea, I bear da heat.”

  She let out a long ululating sigh.

  “Ya na know a ting. I na need food. Water, brine, dat be enough. Still, was me saved your skin, chil’,” she cackled, toothlessly. “Dem come, dem Skårsans. Dem know the door to the Red Flower be sealed, so dem come, and I been waitin’, for Snorri himself, but he be too smart for that. Him knows I still burn with da heat. Hili dem took, and Rina. Febe dem took, and Corel. We de ones who stayed, the last ones. The others I already done scattered to da four winds, for dat day when La Teine be born out da fire.” She spat and cackled louder than before. “I must be gettin’ old, girl, old, old, old as can be, got no teeth, got dese lizard claws for hands now, ‘cuz La Teine na let me die, not yet now. Me, is the thing that survives, the part of life that ain’t life at all. I kept you safe, chil’. She may need you yet. But Hili, Rina, Febe, Corel, they shoulda done fought harder for deyselves. Now dey slave-wives and das a shame.”

  Ootha fell silent, rocking slightly in the chair, clicking her tongue, popping her toothless gums, sighing. The wind howled through the door and through the gaps in the old cob hut.

  “Did I save da village, neither? Na. Na. Na. Skårsans, dem come, drunk on soma, plunder, take women an’ chidders, force men into blood clans. Dem dat resisted fed the cold maw o’ gull and crow. Dem Skårsans, dem left da village a clean-picked carcass. Who’d I save?” Ootha spat. “You, chil’, ony you, tho’ you coulda saved ya’self, and wouldn’t. I got no heart for killin’. Let men go round killin’, caught in the blood wheel. Blood. Blood. Blood gets blood. Mebbe I shoulda done some ‘ting. But we a long suffering people. We be good at pain. We good at it! Pah! Some of us more human than others. Pah! Some of us got the human burned out of us, even burnt out da tears. La Teine na let me die. You another story, chil’.”

  Erete turned away from the open door where she looked out into the sea-wind that blew day and night. There was nothing to say. There were those that wanted them dead. They would have to come themselves now, if they dared. The Skårsans went up and down Paidrin’s shores, but gave a wide berth to this stretch of sand. They knew Ootha’s hut. They’d seen two big, lusty men shrivel into black little corpses in her old hands.

  So, they lived, sentinels on the childless shore, waiting for the seal on Ashe to fail.

  “Ah, ah!” Ootha cackled. “Me na dead yet.”

  *

  “You won’t be needing that blade, princess,” the slump-shouldered, ursine leader growled. A dozen shifty, mangey riders surrounded her in a loose circle. She’d never seen Skårsans. She’d expected them to be tall men, long-armed, grim-faced, bearded, pale, nothing so surly and skulking, not even the deserters. Even their mounts were
stunted and ill-favored. The leader’s voice was guttural and his long teeth stained. “We’ll be your escort, an’ it please you.”

  His cohorts chortled.

  She said nothing, calming Perle, holding her ground.

  One of them said, “Maybe her highness don’t like being called princess.”

  “Pardon an old bearcat, princess,” the leader offered a slight flourish. “It’s just a manner of speaking.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and grinned. “Pretty as a princess.”

  Boinn’s blood pounded in her ears. She might not be anything remotely like a princess, but she knew lowbred vermin when she saw them. These had her cornered. No one was going to come to her rescue at midnight in the middle of the Myrrwood. No one was going to know what happened to her. She’d kill as many of them as she could.

  “Oh, she’s got claws, this one. Wants our blood,” the leader sniffed the air. He pulled a rough hood off his head, but beneath it his black matted hair was no less rough. His eyebrows were thick and matted, his ugly mouth oddly whiskered, the hair on his cheeks dense and grizzled. His black eyes, beady and calculating, worried her most. Out of his cloak, he pulled a long coiled cord. Before she could flinch, he flicked his wrist. The cord darted like a serpent, coiling around her, pinning arms to ribs so tight she couldn’t breathe. Her blade thudded on the forest floor. “Forget about escaping. We bearcats, we’re special-trained. Smell you for miles.”

  For the first time, she noticed his broad, furrowed, pelted nose. There were several ways she hoped never to die, and most had always seemed well enough outside the scope of probability that she tended to rest easy at night. Being buried alive was one of them. Being pawed at by ferals was another. She struggled against the whip coil, and Perle reared, neighing, so that the tension in the cord pulled her out of the saddle onto the muddy ground. The pack gave barking laughs. The leader drew near, squatting down to her, tilting his head.