The Rose of the World

by Jude Fisher

  The Master laughed, and the sound ricocheted off the ice to echo crazily around them, the sound of a thousand madmen enjoying a fine jest. Poor Virelai, he thought, for the first time feeling a tinge of pity: he must have believed the whole story about the geas and the demons, or he would surely have killed me himself! It was a fine jest indeed, a jest he had himself made possible and engendered. And so Virelai, in fear for his worthless, non-existent life had created – and rather well – these fake maps and promised wealth beyond measure to the men who would take on flood and storm, ice and terror, in return for murdering a weak and weapon-less old man and stealing his gold!

  The only gold in all of Sanctuary was buried deep in the tunnels on the stronghold: tiny outcroppings of the stuff, glittering away in the seams of rock exposed in those dark corridors, a stuff as worthless as Virelai’s putrid soul – iron pyrites: fool’s gold; and here before him the very fool who had survived every pitfall thrown in his way for the privilege of helping himself to a heap of sham ore.

  When first he had deduced the magic of the maps, it had made him furious and vengeful; but now the Master laughed with every breath of air in his lungs: a massive, whole-hearted laugh that shattered icicles a thousand feet away and felled seabirds drifting on thermals high above the cliffs. Men were such stupid, faithless creatures: show them a glimpse of easy wealth and they would bargain body and soul, wife and child and lifelong comrades to its lure. His own dreams had been greater by far, and his achievements dwarfed their petty imaginations as a snowbear dwarfs an ant.

  He thought of his snowbear now as he examined the third member of this rag-tag expedition. It had been one of his better simulacra, he thought, though he had never meant it to take the boy’s hand. Madman though he was, the lad would surely require two to do the job he had in mind for him. That was the trouble with the already-living: they still carried some spark of self-will with them that might show itself at some inopportune moment, triggered by some long-buried natural instinct. It really was most inconvenient that the bear had reacted in such a way. He pondered on this for a few moments, lifting the boy’s sealskin hood away from his flaming red hair, perusing the ice-pale skin and delicate features beneath, peeling the stained and frozen wrappings from the cauterised stump. Near death, but still a flame of life burned brightly at his core. The remarkable thing about these poor, frail beings was that they were unable to perceive the futility of their tiny existences, they struggled to survive in even the most unpromising circumstances. They endured – what? thirty, forty, sixty years, if they were lucky enough not to succumb to sickness or bad weather, lack of food or violence. They barely had time to scratch the surface of the world before being taken back into it to nourish the next round of living things. And yet still they clung to that tiny, useless scrap of life force, as if their existences were in some unfathomable way significant, meaningful, valuable.

  The Master shook his head. He had come such a long way from his own origins that it was hard to empathise with the destiny of such as these.

  The Madman, the Giant and the Fool.

  He lifted his spell of stillness and watched as the Giant and the Fool stepped puzzledly back from one another. Then he shed his glamour and allowed the one to see him as in truth he was – as the other had already perceived him – as a man aged beyond all realms of possibility, with iron-grey hair which flowed in tangles over his shoulders and down his back, a beard stained with all manner of fluids and food-stuffs, dressed in a long blue robe with a ragged hem, and a pair of tapestried slippers through the toe of one of which protruded a horny nail as yellow as a ram’s eye.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said, cocking a finger at them, and the warmth of his tone belied the magical command which he embedded in the words. Even as he spoke, they found their feet shuffling toward him, and all other thoughts fleeing their heads. ‘Come into my home and warm your bones, for it is as cold as sin out here. Come with me into Sanctuary and you shall eat your fill of the juiciest meats and the sweetest pastries, and drink mulled wine and strong ales.’

  And so Aran Aranson, erstwhile Master of Rockfall, his sole surviving son Fent Aranson, and Urse One-Ear of Tam Fox’s mumming troupe followed the strange figure who had appeared before them in the midst of the wilderness through a surreal garden of ice, replete with sculpted statues and towering white pillars, elegant curving stairways and frozen lakes, into the confines of the stronghold of ice at the top of the world known in legend as Sanctuary.

  Six

  The Heir to the Northern Isles

  ‘Such eyes: did you ever see such eyes?’

  The King of Eyra peered wonderingly into the crib, then turned to regard his lady wife as she sat on the edge of their bed after her evening bath, one slim white shoulder slipping seductively out of her gleaming ermine-trimmed robe.

  ‘I swear they are purple. Such a colour I have never seen in any child of our line; though the line of the brow is surely kingly. And he watches me so steadily, so boldly: he is surely a warrior born. He is a marvel, my love, a marvel! And so are you.’

  Ravn Asharson’s own flint-grey eyes were alight with fervour, but it was a fervour born of pride as a parent, rather than out of desire for her. Once more, the Rosa Eldi felt a little cold shiver inside her. Ravn’s intense involvement with the child drew his attention away from her, and thus she felt less loved. The Queen of the Northern Isles shifted her position an iota and the robe dropped lower, revealing the curve of one glorious breast to remind him of his priorities.

  ‘He is certainly a very lusty and noisy babe.’

  She could barely stifle the edge that came into her voice. The baby seemed to command Ravn Asharson’s adoration more than she did even when she exerted her will upon him. She never should have withdrawn the blanket of sorcery in which she had wrapped the King of Eyra all these long months. It had started as an experiment designed to test the extent of his love for her, and for a while nothing had seemed to change: he remained obsessed, his eyes seeking her when he could not be near her, his hands upon her whenever he was. But once the child was born, everything was different. If she had thought the behaviour Ravn had displayed towards her before the birth was love, seeing the way he was with the child had made her reassess her whole world. Perhaps it was the way his expression changed when he looked upon little Wulf; as if someone had lit a sconce behind his eyes so that the hard planes of his face softened and affection shone out of him. Seeing him like that caused her physical pain: pain of loss, pain of abandonment. Power, which had seemed to be flooding back to her, now ebbed away.

  And yet the child owned not the least part of her or of Ravn in its making; not even in one finger of its tightly curled fist.

  Mastering her rising panic, as she was slowly learning to do, she added more smoothly, ‘Truly, he is a fine heir to your throne, my love: a child of whom you can be truly proud.’

  Still he did not look up, but reached into the cot and stroked little Wulf’s face with a finger far gentler than any he had laid on her. For a moment she felt a terrible despair. She – who could divert rivers with a thought, could call life from the frost-bound earth, heal a dying animal – could yet not win this battle for a mortal man’s attention over a mewling child.

  Something ignited in her then. Before she knew it she had uttered his name in a tone of command he was powerless to ignore.

  ‘Ravn!’

  At once, his head came up and swivelled in her direction and she cast him a glance lustrous with sorcery from beneath her thick black lashes. She watched the swift dilation of his pupils, making his already dark gaze blackly intense. Holding that gaze so that all his thoughts of the babe fled away, she patted the pelt-covered bed beside her, and when he joined her there – walking like a man in a dream – she covered his mouth with her own. From that moment on he was defenceless: she owned him body and soul, and with each movement of her body reminded him of this both consciously and subliminally. She knew he would dream of her even as he slipped from h
er, desire slaked and flesh exhausted; she bound him to her that tightly. Such exertions of magic made her feel both more and less than she was: a powerful sorceress; but also a woman who could barely command the attention of her own husband.

  As it was, even without the child, she saw less and less of Ravn, for he was often bound up with councils and stratagems, summoned by his clamouring lords and chieftains to sit endlessly around chart-strewn tables, discussing war. What did she care for such matters? It did not touch her heart, brought no threat, except this dull loss of her husband’s presence. She could sense the great expanse of the Northern Ocean that separated this rocky outpost from the distant shores of Istria. The beginnings of it could be glimpsed below the stout castle, beyond the harbour’s sentinel towers and the sorcerous traps which lay beneath the dark sea there. When she reached out to it with her mind, all she felt was a vast and limitless void, for little moved upon its treacherous waters. No army could cross that ocean without her knowing it: yet she hugged that knowledge to herself and waited for the time to share it with her love.

  She had other concerns to absorb her time. Maintaining the veils of illusion around the child and its nurse required her effort by day and night, more so now that the seither had gone. Festrin One-Eye had vanished as mysteriously as she had come, and none had seen her leave. After the safe birth of the babe and the formal acceptance of the court of the little red squalling thing as the heir to the Northern Isles, the seither had woven yet another set of mazing spells around the King, his sceptical old mother, the Lady Auda, and all his scheming enemies. She had even tried to stifle the natural mother’s memory of her ties to the creature, first with a decoction of herbs designed to soothe away the distress of traumatic events; and when that did not work, with a strong enchantment.

  She had left the Rosa Eldi to maze the eyes of her beloved: there was, as she pointed out, no one better equipped to address that problem.

  But after the seither had gone, her influence had waned, and only a seven-night later, the Rosa Eldi had heard two ladies of the court discussing her relationship with the child in less than favourable terms.

  ‘You never see her cradle it,’ one said.

  ‘Poor little thing,’ acceded the other – a tow-headed woman with a massive figure which suggested she had brought a longship crew into the world in her time. She shot a swift glance across the flame-lit room at the subject of their conversation, apparently fully engaged with filling her husband’s wine cup. ‘No maternal instinct, that one.’

  Her companion had nodded, thinking her position out of the pale queen’s view; but the Rosa Eldi had a fine awareness of her surroundings, could see and hear with as great an acuity as any feline. She knew the first speaker as Erol Bardson’s daughter, the one Ravn had spurned at the Gathering on the Moonfell Plain. She was a sharp-featured girl; sharp-tongued, too.

  ‘I have heard of mothers who cannot love their offspring,’ the older woman went on, ‘particularly if the birth was hard.’

  ‘But she spawned the child in moments!’ the other spat triumphantly. She lowered her voice, ‘Or so they say . . .’

  The pause had drawn itself out into greater significance than any words could offer. Then the matronly woman said, ‘Queen Auda does not believe the child is hers, you know.’

  ‘You’d better not let the nomad woman hear you call her that; nor the King, either,’ her friend said hastily. Then, intrigued: ‘So, whose can it be, then?’

  The other shrugged.

  ‘The nurse is a pretty thing,’ the Erolsen girl mused, ‘and very foreign-looking, too. And they do say Ravn would not choose himself an Eyran bride at the Allfair because he had had his fill of northern women.’

  ‘Like yourself, you mean, my dear.’

  She gave the matron a keen look, her dark eyes like pebbles. ‘You are well aware of why he would not take me,’ she said angrily, a flush starting on her cheek.

  The large woman smiled knowingly, then patted her on the hand. ‘Of course, my dear: your father. Of course. But now you say it, I wouldn’t be surprised. He always had a prodigious appetite for female flesh, our Ravn: how long could such a wan creature like our new queen think to contain the lusts of the Stallion of the North?’

  ‘There is no substance to her. Hold her up to the light and I reckon you could see right through her,’ the girl said spitefully.

  ‘Perhaps she is just a glamour, a spirit sent by the South to suck the very soul from our king, rendering him as helpless as that poor babe. And then they will sail upon us and put us all to the sword. So Auda says, and that woman has seen much of war and sorcery.’

  This exchange confirmed for the Rosa Eldi that not only had the seither’s enchantments lost their force, and that the Lady Auda was proving as hostile as ever before, but also that the suspicion with which she was regarded had spread far and wide through her new home. And it planted another, more poisonous, seed in her mind, too.

  That mere gossip-mongers should conjecture about the provenance of the child was distressing enough, but that they should make such ignorant judgements of her nature was insupportable.

  Cradling her sleeping husband as he lay exhausted upon her breast, she cast her mind back to all she could remember.

  First, and for a very long time, there had been nothing but a void in her memory, an absence of self. Such, perhaps, had been necessary for survival when she had lived as a slave, trapped in the chamber of the mage in his ice-castle, then in the hands of his strange apprentice, who had sold her body over and over again, to tens, maybe hundreds, of men, during their travels. But even that time had surely been easier to bear than this, with its disturbing dreams and bewildering emotions.

  Before she had departed, Festrin had tried to help with the dreams the Rosa Eldi suffered, those sudden flashes of bizarre places and folk and snatches of narrative, as of distant song, which made daily and nightly incursions into her skull. In the day the seither had dosed the Queen with worm-root and in the evening with sun’s eye, and for a while the dreams had receded into some deep, lost part of her so that to the eye of others it seemed that she dozed; though the Rosa Eldi could never remember a time when she had truly been in any state which could be called sleep. These stolen moments of oblivion she could pass off as tiredness caused by the greedy demands of the child, and no one questioned her. But the worm-root left her dry in the mouth and with strange pains in her limbs, and the sun’s eye made her feel leaden and barely alive, and so eventually she had had to stay Festrin’s hand and try to deal with the dreams as best she could.

  Once or twice she had felt some force enter her to meld with the shreds of a dream so that she was gripped by the sudden belief that she might rise from where she sat, apparently meek and quiet, and grow until she towered over Halbo’s great stronghold, and stepping over its fortified, crenellated walls, bearing all their scars of old battles and the lichens of a thousand years, as if they were no more than a child’s toy, stride – vast and unassailable – out of this chilly kingdom, with its foolish king and wailing heir, its rough lords and chattering courtiers, its rocky promontories and wet grey skies – out through the wide ocean, across another continent filled with annoying, insect-like folk running here and there on their unfathomable errands, their heads stuffed with their tiny, idiotic concerns, to a place where bright sun shone on pantiled roofs and predatory birds with massive outstretched wings glided on hot-air currents high above golden towers, where another being – equally vast and unknowable, complex and powerful – awaited her return.

  She found herself drifting to this place in her mind now. When she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the heat of the sun on her skin – a warmth not felt in these harsh climes; smell some heavy fragrance, as of flowers far more generous in size and scent than any that grew this far north in the world. It was an ancient place: history permeated the golden stone of the buildings around her, investing every brick in every wall, every plank in every door, every trodden paviour in the road
with significance born of great events; and, more than any of these things, it felt like home. But somehow it withheld itself from her, it kept its secrets. And something in her recognised that wherever this golden place might be – if it even existed as anything other than a dream – it must be a long way away from Eyra, and so she might never visit it. And that caused her such sorrow it was almost a physical pain.

  The baby’s meaty wail burst into the night air and continued at full bore until the chamber seemed stuffed with noise. The sound broke into her reverie: it was so disorientating that for a moment she thought it must have broken from her own lips. Gone from sleep to wakefulness in a second, Ravn sat bolt upright, alert as a mother cat.

  ‘Something ails him!’ he cried, clutching his wife by the arm so hard that she felt each of his fingertips as a separate pressure. ‘He is unwell.’

  Distracted from her idyll, the Rosa Eldi pulled away from him. ‘It is nothing. He is hungry,’ she said, then added sharply. ‘Again.’

  Rising from the bed, she went to the inner door of the bedchamber, opened it quietly and signalled to the woman seated beyond.

  This figure rose at once to her command and moved silently into the royal bedchamber, her eyes averted.

  She was short and sleekly dark, the girl known as Leta Gullwing, a slave rescued from the Istrians by merchants, was the tale Festrin had put around, who had lost the child she was bearing to stillbirth, leaving her with milk to spare. The Queen had taken pity on the poor child, it was said, had become quite fond of her – another stranger in a strange land – and had made her the baby’s wet-nurse. It was just close enough to the truth to seem plausible.

  She was a pretty thing, Ravn thought assessingly, with her black hair and doe eyes and that soft and rounded body. In an earlier life he would surely have bedded her by now and discovered for himself all the fragrant, secret curves he suspected lay beneath the demure robe she wore; though in the presence of his wife – so lithe and svelte, so long-limbed and graceful – she seemed just a little coarse and graceless. Not that that would ever have put him off in those lusty days of yore. When you inhabit an island kingdom possessed of limited bloodstocks, it is necessary to lower your standards from time to time. Besides, he had often found it invigorating to punctuate rich fare with plain. This foreign girl intrigued him more than he would have cared to admit. Perhaps it was her genuine care for their baby which stirred him so. He watched her now as she took the child from his cot and encircled him in her arms, then with a practised hand slipped one of her lush breasts – its areola so dark against her olive skin that in the half-light it looked almost black – from beneath the folds of her shift and presented it to the child’s howling mouth. At once, two things happened: the baby’s wail dissipated to a loud sucking noise; and Ravn experienced a pleasant flutter of sensation in his lower abdomen. A moment later, his cock was as stiff as a stick.