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

by Segoy Sands

  “Can always smell princesses.”

  6 SKY METAL

  One thing about the Cora, every man had a mount. Maybe not a sweetheart or a wife, but at least a mount. Cole supposed that made them cavalry, or, going more on their ragtag looks, bandits. Orroch loved horses was all, and Orroch horses best of all, the Lungza, the Taki, and the Gur, all smallish native breeds with fury in their blood. They put to shame the taller horses, the Berelians, Tellurians, Orisan, Ferusiens, Sorraia, and Equiss brought over by the Grael, though he wouldn’t tell Burnt that. He prized the tall black Equiss he took off a Grael lord. More accurately, Burnt had taken the Grael lord off the horse, and pounded his brains into the mud, then named his new steed Nightmare, pointing out its tail whorls, white feet, and demon horns as signs of rare breeding. Fifteen gold coins he said it was worth, not a penny less. It was big alright, nearly seventeen hands, nimble and dignified, but it didn’t really have horns, more like protuberances, or fawn buds. The contrast was interesting, a tall, blond, fleshy, freckled man like Burnt, who rarely wore a shirt despite his pale skin, and hence his name, on an elegant jet black horse.

  Still, the horse sent a message. It wasn’t easy to take down a nobleman surrounded by shield guards, with the height advantage of their mounts and the defensive advantage of their armor. Even their horses had armor, sometimes. In all those grand paintings and banners, their heedless highborn knights faced the doughtiest foes at the dangerous heart of the battle, but in practice they made themselves hard to engage unless or until they had a decisive advantage. Seeing a big man with a hammer on a fine Equiss would irk them. It would irk them even more to see how well Burnt could make that horse dance. No doubt, back in the courts of Ganalon, they’d go on about uncouth natives and their disregard for the forms and codes of honorable battle. The truth was, forms and codes aside, the Grael couldn’t hold a candle to the Orroch, when it came to horsemanship. By the age of fourteen, an Orroch farm girl, if she wanted, could jump onto the back of a running horse, pick a dozen neat flowers at full gallop, and hit her mark with a bow seven times out of ten.

  The Orroch wouldn’t target horses in a battle like the Grael would, not only because it was unmannerly but because it was unthrifty. You could get rich selling the Grael’s fancy horses and gear right back to them, through middlemen. Everything, for them, had a brand and a seal and a crest, in which they put great stock, so they paid crazy sums sometimes to recover a mount or saddle or shield. Burnt could have pocketed a fine purse of gold, ransoming Nightmare back through the usual channels. Maybe he would eventually. The fact that he hadn’t done so yet was spit in their eye.

  Well, in the Cora, you could sell a horse, and fleece the fellow who bought it, if the mood struck you, but if you lost a horse, you were out of luck. Horse sellers would guess your predicament and make you pay double. Even in the thick of battle, if your horse went down it was your fault. Best you remembered what it was like to go on two legs for a bit. You ran, and you ran fast, to keep up with the band. Cole was running this morning. He’d lost his mount, Flicker, in the last skirmish with Risard’s middle son, Sir Guysen. They all liked to be called sir this, sir that, but, oddly enough, they died impolitely, cursing you for a vile dog.

  Ah, Flicker had been a pretty horse, a smallish sort of dapple, not even fourteen hands. They’d been together nearly a year, ever since Cole lost Glow in that bloody business with Sir Ian Hight-Clay. But then, if the Grael were losing border captains more often than he was changing horses, it had to be reckoned almost a fair trade. Not quite, though, even if he put luckless Guysen in the tally. Risard never should have let him out of the castle, where there were, no doubt, a steady train of chambermaids to challenge his steady lance. Instead, Guysen got it into his head that it was his proper business to flaunt his princely colors on the battlefield. That just made it easier to put an arrow in his neck. But the Grael didn’t blame Guysen. They blamed Cole for his lack of manners, his insult to their honor.

  Then there was Sir Tuck, the last captain on White Horse border. He died of the shits, as Grael lords were so famous for doing. Did that insult their prowess? And who got the prestige? As for Hight-Clay, the one before Tuck, Cole had cracked him like a duck egg. Now, that trade he didn’t count fair. He’d loved that bloody horse, and Hight-Clay was a sack of slippery suet poured into surface-hardened gilt armor. The man hadn’t been worth the maul he’d broken punching through into his shit-filled innards. Lucky thing he carried a maul that day, because it was pissing rain. Merb had taken one look at the rain, and at the field, and said, “Lad, you’ll want your maul in this muck.” Hight-Clay might have been suet, but his warhorse and sword were as heavy gauge as his armor, and things could have turned bad.

  Still, Cole would have Glow back if he could. That lousy tactician could still be leading the Grael, for all he cared. In fact, as he kept saying though no one would listen, what they should have done was given that pimple and profiterole popper a few minor victories so Risard would place even more misguided trust in him. No one liked that idea because exactly whose neck, and perhaps more pointedly whose pride, did Cole want them to sacrifice?

  At any rate, Hight-Clay and Guysen were feeding the worms, Cole was down a couple of horses, and today, again, he was running. Having been up most of the previous night, he wasn’t in a jovial mood. Flicker had never been in the best of moods much either, to be truthful: a very pretty dapple but decidedly cantankerous. Peevish. So maybe it was a fitting tribute. Maybe he should revel in the misery, and listen to himself gripe to his heart’s content.

  He wasn’t exactly running, anyway. This morning the whole band was snailing it on the banks of the Smoky Tourmaline, hot dry ravine country where the river ran, all the same, as if the skin-cracking aridity didn’t bother it. Magic. How water did that, he’d have liked to know. Merb had been hollering since they left the Myrrwood, over a week ago, that this stretch of the Tourmaline was the perfect place to be waylaid between cruel slopes and crueler currents. Still, no one was in any hurry. Everyone knew that the Redwolf and Dagda were up north. There wasn’t a Cora band within ten leagues of Jökullinn, but, hell, maybe that was the point. Risard was going to have to break the truce and send a force into Ochre, the north country, if he wanted to hurt the Cora, and there’d been no reports yet of any such force.

  Maybe Risard was mustering other means. Scouts were spreading word of small marauder Skårsan bands, and of ferals, too, and it wasn’t just scouts saying it. A group of freedom fighters, led by Nora in Tign, claimed they’d seen a druk in plain sight. Well, men who spent time hiding in the forests said lots of things. They’d mine stuff out of drinking songs about the coming of the Lady to help the Orroch in their darkest hour, when beast hordes gushed out of the Nog. They never mentioned what they’d been drinking or smoking. Only, Nora and her riders were Rhiannon, women devoted to Rionma. There was some plant they ate, for sure, but they didn’t smoke it or drink it, as far as he knew. It made them see the rainbow and gave them peculiar ideas.

  Nora once told him that the most dangerous thing was to see the humanity in others. When the vision came, it was not that she suddenly experienced a sense of power. Just the opposite. She would see every living creature as the burning rainbow. It didn’t make her superior to, or different from, others. It made her humbled and awed by others. That was what real power was like.

  The Rhiannon were all sure the Rionma would incarnate to lead them to victory, and they’d even thought, some years back, just after the Ten Rivers Truce, that they’d found her. But whoever it was, some half crazy girl, let them down. They met with dire defeat and their leader, Saoirse, was taken by the Calyx. They hadn’t ceased to exist, but almost all had withdrawn from battle, watching and waiting, seeking some sign from the protectress in whom they still had such abiding faith. The men in the Cora, ramshackle though they were, wanted what the Orroch had always wanted, to defend land, honor, freedom. But the women fought for the Rionma, and maybe for their magic rainbow, n
ot the Orroch.

  “Headed towards Rune those streakers were,” Merb was saying. Cole was huffing along between Merb, mounted on Tansy Ragwort, a sway-backed nag, and Burnt, barrel-chested and flax-bearded on Nightmare. Merb hadn’t shut his mealy mouth since the sun cleared the jagged line of the Grey Crown.

  “Always said that’s the best ground for finding sky iron, sure as day. We follow those streakers from last night,” Merb went on, “and we’ll find sky iron just come from the Zambuling. Mebbe one of them as you got, Cu’lan Dunlan,” he pointed to Cole’s dirty wool tunic. “Now there’s a thing worth the scrounging.”

  Cole could feel the talisman wheel joggle under his tunic as he ran, cold against his chest, a dense spoke-disc about half-a-hand wide.

  “It’s all in the balance of buje and becheen, or what some call Urra and Arru. That’s what governs the stars and causes a man to live or die, be whole or harmed, think what you may. A thokcha’ll protect you on a day when you’re weakened by becheen. But a thokcha wheel, now, that’ll make ya mighty. It’s better than tri-plated armor and the red-eyed horse of Mac ne Mab.” Merb kicked a stirruped foot in Cole’s direction. “I stay close to him.”

  “Aye,” Burnt remarked. “And never take a scratch.”

  “You noticed,” Cole said.

  “See a codger on the field old as this one, steer the hell clear. Too ugly, too canny, knows too many nasty tricks. Best let time take its natural course.”

  “He is canny,” Cole couldn’t help but agree.

  “Course he is,” Burnt shrugged. “That’s an old timer.”

  This brought cackles from Merb, who turned right back to the subject, “Riding up north to Rune wouldn’t be a day wasted. And trust me, by the looks of it,” he squinted sourly at the slow-moving procession, “this day wants to waste itself.”

  “I don’t have a horse,” Cole reminded him. “And we’re marching south toward Welen.”

  “Heh,” Merb stuck out his grey-tufted lower lip, “crawling, a few inches south. Well, it’s hot enough, but at least it ain’t cold like up in Jökullinn, eh?”

  “Aye,” Burnt said, “freeze off your toes, your fingers, your nose, then your balls.”

  “I don’t know why Dagda doesn’t ride on us,” Merb scowled. “I’ll ride on us, just to show Hayden what an easy target he’s making. You two fellas wouldn’t fight back, would ya? That would be wrong. Orroch fighting Orroch.”

  “Never stopped us before,” Burnt noted.

  “Aye, aye,” the old timer gave a short wheezing laugh, “but in klaast rings, or in taverns, over a few cows or a border or a Miller’s daughter. Ever licked a Miller’s daughter? It’s just like licking a spiced bun.”

  “I think you mean the Carpenter’s wife,” Burnt winked, “who let you kiss her arse through the window, only you thought it was her puckered lips.”

  “Better an arse-kisser than a boot-licker,” Cole put in, before the two of them could go off into cradle-crick tales.

  “Bootlicker, aye! That one’s no Orroch,” Merb hawked up a glistening white glob and spat it at the ground under his horse. “I’ll put a hot poker up him, so he cries, ‘Water!’ And the whole Graelish lot of them go running back to their wooden washtubs for fear of the flood. Find me a sky-iron and I’ll drive them out of fair Aina Livia in such unmanly haste they’ll never muster another bone to bury in our warm mistress earth.”

  “And I’d like to see that,” Burnt nodded, “But up toward Rune, all we’ll get today is baked brains. There’s no cnuching water.”

  “Well, put on a shirt, then!” Merb pshawed, “We’d three be up and back before this sorry lot is halfway to Welen.” He looked at Cole, afoot, then at Burnt. “Talk to Hayden.”

  Cole gazed up ahead, to where Hayden was riding with his dozen, along the riverbank. Hayden was just a Cora captain for all that he strutted about with the three rays on his back. The thing Cole liked about Merb and Burnt was that neither of them wanted to ride with that lot. Hayden was one of the best, and Cole had much in common with him. They’d both been groomed by the bund for the Great Klaast, and they’d both gotten sick, in the meantime, of being fighting cocks in the ring. But it was odious sometimes, watching men fawn over him. If anyone should be riding with him, it was his three best - screw eye, hammer, and minstrel - not Usul and Dirk, but who cared?

  Merb stopped Tansy Ragwort, as ugly a nag as Cole ever hoped to see. “What do you think? Should we have us a little adventure today, or let the herdsmen keep us trudgin’ and drudgin’?”

  Cole shrugged. He looked at the sun, angry from the moment it rose that morning.Staying near the river seemed wise. It was going to be a scorcher. “I’m for the scree,” he said, throwing caution to the wind. “Little luck, we might have a bit of goat.”

  “Little luck?” Merb made a twisted face. “You’ve an arm and eye blessed by the Si.” He looked at Burnt and cocked a cankerous old eye. “What’d you say to a little goat, eh, Burnt?”

  “We needn’t go beggin’ Hayden,” Burnt said. “Squire’ll give Cole a ride.”

  That set the two of them laughing like mud ugly fools. Cole rolled his eyes. Most would take Squire for a lass, the way he wore his hair and decorated himself, not to mention the way he talked, walked, and flirted. He was quickly becoming near as good with the bow as Cole, though, and they were often the object of heated wagers.

  “Or maybe bring ‘em both,” Merb chuckled. “Twice the goat.”

  “Oi,” Burnt laughed, “a horny one.”

  “A horny one!” shouted the old timer.

  An hour later, Cole, Merb, and Burnt crossed a stretch of the Tourmaline just deep enough to force the horses to swim a few spans, and then broke out of the trees, to climb into the Scree. Squire had actually wanted to come along, riding double on Maidenhead, but Merb pointed out she was a maiden, after all, and it would be unseemly to ride her so hard, seeing how bad the Scree was for bone spavins. That almost made Squire say no altogether. He didn’t want Maidenhead going lame, but Merb talked him into submission.

  Riding into those rolling ancient yellow hills of crumbly stone, it was hard to believe that a few leagues southeast lay the most lush and productive land in Ololon County, the Silt River Valley between Riverrun and Halfmoon Bay. People said the whole scree had once been filled with steam vents, and bubbling pools of viscous sun blood, that, like a heart choked with anger, sometimes spouted and spewed.

  Sól blóð, it was called, or laava. It came into the earth in the war of the Ellieri, when the Urra cast the Arru out of Beulah into the nether deep. The Arru had tiny droplets of liquid sunfire even in their very pores, enough to overflow the world, though the earth goddess, Bhümi herself, formed of her own mineral being a sevenfold iron mantle. The mantle rippled still, a wild play of colors, on cold nights in the north, but it had not been enough to contain those countless flames of mental fire, the Arru, whose energy was denser than the matter of the middle world, the Erwon. That calamity was the birth of every living thing that wanders this tree-shaded world, for thus was Bhümi impregnated. The Arru opened the fabric in many places to the bliss of ásu. So the Orroch venerated bubbling springs as places of ásu, and believed the scree was one of those places where the Arru actually fell. Cole could well believe it, gazing out over that weird, undulant, corrugated expanse, and Merb seemed to read his mind.

  “That rotten egg smell’s sulfurum. See the yellow-green color of the shale? Any hotter out here and it would melt to brimstone, evil and red. Demon stuff, vomited straight out of the Ignis. And it’s how the metallum is produced. The Morans burn sulfurum into vitriol, and vitriol dissolves the chthonic ores into pure metallum. Oh, there’s metals in the earth that best belong in the sun, and good riddance to them, some plentiful, some a thousand times rarer than gold.”

  Merb paused to hawk out another thick globule of mucus. The sight of it, quivering on the ground where it landed, turned Cole’s stomach.

  “A Bede once gave me a learned lecture o
n metals, how they’re made of quick particles that leap from them, some positive, some negative, too quick to stay matter. People are like that, too, some of us weak in our bonds and attachments, some of us strong. Living things can’t see those quick sprites, can’t feel them, but they burn us, get inside us, and riddle the fabric of flesh and blood. But then there’s plenty of metals in our bodies, too, more than you’d imagine. Salt’s an impure metal. Bone’s made of metal. Blood’s full of iron. There’s tin in us and copper. Oh, and sulfurum, too. We couldn’t live without them flowing and interchanging inside us.”

  “You talk to too many Bedes,” Burnt said.

  “I talk to Blakes, too,” Merb gave a gap-toothed grin. “Not only do them Blakes know an awful lot about the metallum, but they have the art of the cipher blade. The Bedes and their aurelii lost the Rood but the Blakes, no such luck. They still have their Book of Numbers, and if that don’t scare you, you’re dumber than a deadman. Them Blakes talk less about particles than numbers, though the idea’s not much different, positive and negative flowing in directions, spins, patterns, and elements. Hodos ano kato, they call it, the upward-downward path, the ceaseless transformation of one into the other, the turnings of fire into water, earth, and air.”

  Burnt told Merb to shut up, but as they rode up into the scree, he just rambled on, quieter and faster, telling Cole how an ordinary person couldn’t wield metallum, because it poisoned all it touched. In Mora, he said, vast metropoli spread from horizon to horizon, cities of black metal where children were born deformed and few lived to see their first gray hairs. The Moretti wore special clothing for handling the metallum, lined with plumbum.

  “Through seventy thousand subtle nodes of the body, the ásu flows, and metals affect them all. Some augment the life force, others deplete it. So that’s what I mean about that thokcha around your neck. It’s sky iron, a splinter of the stake that pins the Urra pattern, and it’s mighty rare and vivifying.”