by Jude Fisher
South and further south they went, into lands long abandoned to the desert. They passed wells whose leather buckets had crumbled away to join the dust of the well bed a hundred feet below and Alisha brushed a little precious liquid from her last waterskin across her parched and blistered lips and clutched the saving eldistan tighter to her chest. They passed the tumbled-down walls of ancient dwellings outcropping like natural features from the dunes; they trudged through the demarcations of enclosures, stables, barns, grainhouses, all now awash in sand. They walked unknowing above the remnants of gorgeous mosaic pavements, bathhouses and arenas, through shards of pottery, the shattered bone remains of livestock and domestic pets, over once-cobbled streets and gardens, between the stumps of trees mummified by the blazing air. They passed fallen statues with their features eroded into blind and pitted planes and once, carved out of the soft rock of a great red sandstone cliff, a primitive depiction of the Goddess herself, age upon ages old, no more than a collection of squat spheres, a head, a full-breasted torso and a vast belly, the vestigial legs open wide across a dark chasm as if the figure were giving birth to the entire world. Alisha scanned that eyeless, pitiless, rose-red face and felt the deathstone pulse in her hand. The power inherent in the likeness lifted the hairs on her spine.
Twenty-two
The Pursuit
Bera Rolfsen had been despatched to the stronghold at Cantara, Fat Breta to some town in the Blue Woods; Thin Hildi and Leni Stelsen had been purchased by a merchant bound for Cera; Magla Felinsen by a brothelkeeper in Gibeon (which made her weep and wail fit to wake Sur himself, full fifty fathoms below the Northern Ocean); Kit Farsen and Forna Stensen had been taken by a man from Ixta who had made a sudden fortune selling ropes and rigging for the new fleet. Of Kitten Soronsen there had been no sign at all. Clearly the Lord of Forent had taken a liking to her; but Katla Aransen did not envy her that dubious honour one bit.
Neither was her own fate clear.
After the bitter humiliation of the slave-blocks, Katla had been bundled into the back of a closed wagon with eight other women, all Istrian. Some of them might also have been on the slave-blocks alongside her: in their uniform dark robes, it was hard to tell. For the first hour of the journey, she listened to them talking softly in their soft lilting voices, and after a while, worn out by the events of the past days and soothed by the sound of the women and the rhythmic swaying of the wagon, she put her head down and tried to sleep, there being nothing else she could do. She had never felt so tired, so defeated, so bereft of ideas.
Sleep came slowly. When it finally stole over her, it brought her a dream.
She was wandering through the streets of an unfamiliar city. Its walls were all of warm colours – ochre and pink and terracotta – and wells of dark shadow fell slanting between the houses. Cats lay in these shadows avoiding the sunlight; creatures not much like the sturdy farm cats of home, with their shaggy coats and tufted paws and ears, but sleek and tawny with long tails and faces as precise as axe heads, more like foxes than cats. They twined around her legs, and around those of her companion. She turned to smile at him and found that she could not see his face, for the hard light made it too luminous to focus upon. He took her hand in his own and drew her close to him, and she felt the contact as a buzzing of energy which ran up her arm and into her chest and skull. There, it met the surge of power which rose through the soles of her feet and filled her legs and torso with endless possibility and delight.
When she awoke it was with such a sense of loss and regret that she felt sick with it. In the dark, the other women were either sleeping or talking quietly, a sussurus of foreign sound. The tears, when they came, threatened never to stop.
After a while a hand touched her suddenly on the knee, patted gently, and withdrew.
‘You all right?’ said a concerned voice in the Old Tongue.
Katla stifled a sob and pulled herself together, a little shocked that the woman had spoken. She nodded rapidly, hoping to avoid any further enquiry.
‘Tell me,’ the woman who had touched her leaned forward, ‘are you the one they speak of, the fire-head from the North?’
Katla was not feeling much of a fire-head at the moment but, ‘From Eyra,’ she agreed at last, ‘yes.’
‘Ay-ra.’ The woman spoke it thoughtfully, weighing each syllable. ‘You have caused quite a stir in my lord of Forent’s castle.’
‘I have?’ Maybe that blow to his parts had done more damage than she’d thought.
‘With all your talk about your way of life, the way the women of Ay-ra live. Is it true, that you do what you please, that you have your own money, and marry as you will? Or not marry at all?’
And before Katla could reply, another figure leaned forward. ‘We hear you tell men what to do!’
That made Katla laugh. ‘Well, maybe not quite that.’ She thought for a moment, and then she told them what she had told Mela and the other women in the castle. While she spoke, the first woman translated with surprising speed from the Old Tongue into Istrian. They asked her question after question: How did one divorce a man? Was it really as easy as announcing it before witnesses? Wouldn’t such a disgraced man’s family catch her and have her burned? How did northern women spend their days? Were they allowed to teach and be taught? What if a woman didn’t want babies, was she shunned away? And, very quietly and shyly: what if a woman preferred other women?
Katla answered them all, surprised by the liveliness of their curiosity, the sharpness of their intelligence. She chided herself for her own thoughtless use, and abuse, of what they saw as such freedoms; she chided herself for thinking of them as less than herself, because they wore their veils and thus seemed to have no individuality, because they let the men of the Empire treat them as they did, because they seemed so submissive, complicit in their captivity.
Suddenly they were all talking at once. Night fell, but the wagon rolled on. They came to a halt and still the women talked. A man banged angrily on the side of the wagon and yelled at them through the slats. In response, one of the women ripped off her veil and stuck her tongue out in his direction. The other women laughed raucously. Then one by one, they all followed suit, some uneasily, others with defiance.
Katla slowly took off her own veil. There was a moment’s silence, then a plump little dark woman pointed at her and giggled.
The woman who had tapped Katla on the knee laughed and translated. ‘She says you look like a bread stick taken out of the oven too soon!’
But as they approached their destination, all the women quietly donned their robes once more.
‘If you had done as you were told, we’d have saved them all!’
‘If you’d told me your plan, maybe I’d have trusted you!’
‘If I’d told you the plan, you’d have coshed me over the head and taken all the money to save Katla Aransen!’
They had been raging at one another like this for hours, Mam and Erno. In the end, they had failed to rescue any of the women: Erno’s ill-considered bid for his sweetheart had inflated the price of all the other Eyran women beyond what they could afford; and since they were all divided amongst the crowd, it had not even been possible to pool their resources and save one or two. In the end, they’d had to call it a bad day and slip away to lick their wounds and consider their next move.
‘I don’t understand why you will not let me go after her alone!’
Mam sighed. ‘It’s for your own good. How far do you think you will get, alone in a foreign country? You don’t even know where she is!’
Erno thrust out his chin. ‘I’ll find out. I’ll buy the information – someone must know!’
‘With what?’
‘With a fair share of the money you’ve conned out of her uncle!’
The mercenary leader shook her head. ‘You’ll not get a silver until we’ve had a proper chance to think this through.’
‘You don’t care a damn about any of them: you’re just going to divvy up the spoils and sell your
swords to the next poor sucker who happens by!’
It was a long night, during which it transpired that no one knew or had been able to find out exactly where the merchant who had bought Katla was from, or where he was going.
Infuriated, Erno leapt to his feet from where the hillman had knocked him down the last time he had erupted. ‘If you won’t give me any money, then I’ll bloody well beat the information out of someone!’
Joz Bearhand placed himself silently in front of the only exit, massive arms crossed. ‘Sit down and cool off,’ he warned Erno. ‘Getting yourself killed isn’t going to help anyone.’
There was nothing he could do but simmer furiously and wait for Mam’s seemingly interminable decision. Doc and Dogo were for giving up the entire business, pocketing the fee they’d so far received and finding themselves a better-paying job; the others argued that they’d accepted a commission and were therefore honour-bound, which made Dogo laugh so hard he almost wet himself, then promptly did when Mam thumped him in the crotch. Eventually, after Mam and the hillman had a short conversation which it seemed was not going to be made privy to anyone else, the mercenary leader declared that the group would travel south to Cantara. It was, after all, Margan Rolfson who had put up the largest sum for the safe return of his sister Bera; in typically pragmatic fashion, Mam had deemed the rest would have to fare as best they could. Protest as he might, Erno had no choice but to go with them.
They left Forent in the middle of the night, on horses liberated from a livery yard on the edge of town. The fox-handled sword was slung across Mam’s back: she knew if she let Erno carry it he was more than likely to decide to go it alone, to gallop into the nearest market, flog the princely weapon for whatever he could get for it, draw far too much attention to himself in the process and get them all tracked down and killed. Besides which, it was a handsome piece and she’d taken quite a fancy to it. Mam was not a woman much given to vanity, but somehow it fitted her hands in a way that made her feel she might be the fastest, most dangerous fighter on the face of Elda. She knew all this because on the night when she and Persoa had collected their belongings from the ship, unable to resist its seductive spell, she had unwrapped it and practised long, graceful swings and lunges, short and deadly stabs, by the light of the moon. The look on the eldianna’s face had been most gratifying. He had looked completely petrified.
They made good time, stopping only to water the horses and steal food. Twice, they came off the main road south to avoid other travellers. The first was a well-armed baggage train; then as the sun hit the zenith, they spotted a large band of men heading north. From the undergrowth, with the animals hobbled well back from the thoroughfare, Joz and Persoa spent almost twenty minutes watching them pass. Neither of them remarked on this to the other: there was no need. It was Erno who asked the obvious question.
‘Soldiers?’
Joz nodded. ‘Aye. Over a thousand of them.’
Erno frowned. ‘Why so many? Are they come to reinforce the coastal towns?’
Mam looked pityingly at him. ‘They’ll sail against Eyra before next full moon, mark my words. Crazy bastards.’
‘But—’
‘All they needed from Morten Danson was his expertise,’ Doc explained. ‘Once they have templates from him for the vessels, they can turn them out at speed. They have quite a remarkable operation in the Forent dockyards – teams of men set to fashioning the same piece of ship again and again; one team for the keel, one for the mast, one for the crossbeams, one for the strakes, another for the mastfish and so on. The construction is carried out in dry dock with labourers hammering together the component parts under a foreman’s supervision, then the body of each ship passes on to the next crew who raise the mast and set the rigging. Very efficient process: very quick.’
‘You sound as if you admire them!’ Erno was shocked.
Doc shrugged. ‘Such functionality has its own attraction.’
Joz shook his head. ‘Even with the best design in the world, I wouldn’t reckon much to Istrian workmanship, let alone seamanship! Even if they do make it across the Northern Ocean they’ll never take Halbo: the harbour defences are too well fortified. And what’s the point of harrying farther afield? That’s not the Istrian way. The whole thing’s a wild-goose chase.’
Mam laughed. ‘Aye, and the Rosa Eldi’s the goose.’
‘I prefer my birds with a bit more meat on ’em,’ chortled Dogo. ‘Nice bit of breast, eh, Erno? Oh, I forgot, your girl doesn’t have much in the way of breasts—’
This remark was followed by a shout and a crash and Erno and the little man disappeared with a flurry of fists and kicks into a bramble thicket, during which the hillman stole a kiss from Mam and ran a hand appreciatively down her rump. They grinned at one another. They had a wild-goose chase of their own to pursue: it was what they enjoyed best.
On the third day, Persoa slipped from his horse to interrogate the road. He knelt on the ground, fanned the dust off the bare rock beneath and pressed his palms to it. Then he got to his feet, brushed his hands on his breeches and informed them that the wagons bearing Katla Aransen had passed this way less than an hour ago. A bright light of hope burst in Erno’s skull. Then he frowned.
‘How can you know that?’
The eldianna gave him a wry smile. ‘The road speaks to me,’ he said enigmatically. ‘And so does the stone.’
‘What stone?’
Mam shook her head at him. ‘Something to do with Knobber’s moodstone,’ she said with a grimace. ‘Don’t ask me. Some weird hill-magic.’
This confused Erno greatly. He had never met Knobber, and knew him only to have once been a member of the mercenary team; but he knew what moodstones were – he remembered a stall selling them at the Allfair the previous year. But when he asked Persoa to tell him more, the eldianna looked dazed and uncomfortable, as if in pain, and changed the subject.
They kicked their horses into a gallop and gave chase. After twenty minutes of hard riding they caught sight of a caravan of wagons far ahead. Erno’s heart leapt into his mouth. Was Katla in one of those wagons? His palms began to sweat. Nothing would stop him rescuing her this time. Nothing . . .
As they began their descent into the steep little valley, the sun slipped behind a cloud and a chill fell across the landscape. A moment later when the cloud had passed, sunlight caught something bright on the top of the hill which the wagon train had crested and then a myriad of bright reflections blazed out. Erno shaded his eyes. The hilltop was bristling with shield-bearing soldiers.
‘Falla’s tits!’ Mam swore.
There was no question of continuing their route past official militiamen. Forced to abandon the main road south, they found themselves on backwoods trails, following tracks through unfrequented scrubland and rocky wilderness. Settlements were few and far between, food and water hard to come by. One of the horses broke a leg in a marmot burrow; but at least they ate well that night. The next day another went lame and had to be abandoned. Dogo doubled up with Doc on his nag, and Persoa ran lightly and apparently tirelessly ahead of the group; but they could not keep up the pace necessary to head off the merchant’s wagons before he reached the safety of Jetra’s rose-red walls.
Not even his first sight of what was reputed to be the oldest city in all of Elda – the tranquil blue of the lake, the elegance of the soaring towers or the brightly tiled minarets – could alleviate Erno’s gloom. He glared from under his hood at the ferryman who took them across the lake to the hidden eastern gate so hard that the poor man shook as he took Mam’s coin; he glowered at the doves roosting under its sandstone eaves. He cared not a whit for the ancient carvings or the fabled statues Persoa pointed out. When they passed beneath the rank entrance into the poor quarter, his nose did not even wrinkle at the stench unleashed by the free-flowing sewers there. He paid scant attention to the few uniformed guards left to keep order in the streets and less to the extravagant fashions of the city’s denizens. He paid no mind at all to Ma
m’s instruction to keep his mouth shut, his ears open and his weaponry out of sight. When they split up to quarter the area and make their enquiries he stalked about impatiently in the hillman’s wake, catching him by the elbow whenever he fell to making pleasantries in order to hurry him along. His grasp of Istrian was good enough to understand the unhelpful answers given by the hawkers and servants Persoa queried; but not so fluent that he could form his own questions. His blood was beginning to boil.
By sunset they seemed to have discovered nothing of use. There was no slave market in Jetra, for there was no one, it seemed, left in the city to buy slaves: all the lords and landed men had been called north to answer the muster. A strange lassitude hung over what was usually a bustling hive of commerce, and those still in Jetra were scraping whatever living they could off each other. The lords of the city – Greving and Hesto Dystra – had passed into endless night, carried off by a flux, leaving the governance of the place in the hands of a lesser noble. Many of the winter inhabitants of Jetra had dispersed to their rural retreats to hoard supplies and avoid the tax collectors. And there were no Wandering Folk to be seen anywhere – usually the best source of information since they moved across the continent from town to town gathering news and gossip as a magpie gathers shiny objects: with little practical application for them, but with a certain gleeful fascination.
But when the streets had cleared of their daily traffic and the city fell quiet Persoa tried his next line of enquiry – from the very fabric of the Eternal City. He ran his hands over walls and wells and statues. At one point he got face down on the ground in the middle of an abandoned square and lay like a dead man. The failing light of the sun gleamed redly off Mam’s sharpened fangs when Erno asked the inevitable question.