by Jude Fisher
Virelai shook his head vigorously. ‘N-no, lord,’ he stammered. ‘I am exhausted.’
‘We should slit her throat, as the old woman suggested; the babe, too,’ Bardson said viciously. ‘It has to be done at some point anyway . . .’
At this, the Rose of Elda turned her compelling gaze upon him and the Earl of Broadfell snarled like a cornered wolf and made the sign of Sur’s anchor; which had no effect on her at all, for all she did was to smile at him: a smile of immense compassion and understanding.
‘Don’t use your spells on me, you witch! Where I come from, we would place a sealskin bag over your head and stone you to death.’ He backed away from her.
She stepped forward and reached out to him. But instead of succumbing to the gentle suggestion she tried to lay upon him, Erol Bardson lashed out furiously. His fist connected with an inexorable snap on the hinge of that exquisite jaw. For a moment she swayed where she stood; then those mesmeric green eyes rolled back in her skull and the Queen of the Northern Isles – part woman; part goddess – crumpled till she lay, white skin, white robe and white fur, upon the white, white snow.
Rui Finco was aghast. ‘In Falla’s name, what have you done?’ He stared at the Eyran traitor. ‘You’ve killed her! By the Lady, you’ve killed our only bargaining piece!’ He turned and grabbed Virelai by the arm. ‘You – get down there and bring her back to us: I need her alive!’
The sorcerer quailed. ‘I— she’s . . . She—’
‘She’s what? Dead? Well, at least make her seem alive. She’s no good to us like this. Do whatever you have to do!’ The Lord of Forent hauled him by the collar and slung him down roughly beside the prone body.
She’s the Goddess. She cannot die . . .
Virelai felt the words he had been about to blurt out hammering around his head. The freezing slush soaked through the knees of his breeches, but he didn’t feel it at all. His fingers quested out towards her, faltered. It would be the first time he’d touched her since the Moonfell Plain, and he had known so little about her then. He was ashamed, frightened. Even unconscious, she terrified him now that he knew her true nature; and if he were to touch her, surely she would know his? A man who had sold her the length and breadth of the Istrian coast; who had harboured unclean desires for her himself, desires which had remained unfulfilled only because he had not been capable; who had agreed to sell her to the man who had launched a false war to steal her back. Surely, given the untapped and hidden power he sensed inside that frail exterior, she would rip his soul apart?
Trembling, he reached out and brushed her neck. A voice sounded in his head, as if from a very great distance: and what it said shocked him. He jerked back, as if burned, and scrambled to his feet so quickly his head spun.
‘She— I—’ He rubbed his face with hands that no longer felt like his own. ‘She’s . . . alive, my lord. She’ll come round, given time.’ He averted his eyes, both from the Istrian lord, and from the woman on the ground.
Rui Finco glared at him, then decided further argument would gain him nothing. He turned to the Earl of Broadfell. ‘Carry her,’ he ordered brusquely, and when the man demurred, he drew a dagger and made his determination clear. ‘We’ve got to get her onto a ship and away from here!’
Tycho Issian strode up and down the vessel, sword in hand, shrieking orders and imprecations. The rowers rowed hard, expecting to be spitted at any moment. You only had to take one look at the man to know he had gone completely off his head. He hadn’t even stopped to take the sail down, so here they were in darkest night, picked out as clear as day with thirty square yards of undyed white canvas flapping about above them, as large a target as any archer could ever ask for. But why Cera and Prionan and the others had so witlessly followed him into this peril, who could say? Everyone knew that the harbour at Halbo had some sort of special defence system – some said magic, others that it was some kind of mechanical device. They waited for some disaster to befall, cringing as they came in under the towering black cliffs.
As they sailed in abreast of the Sentinel Towers some of the rowers from the hilltribes of Farem began to get agitated. They cast down their oars and dragged at their shackles, jabbering incomprehensibly in their native tongue and pointing at the water. Tycho took the lash from the whipman and whipped them himself. Torn between their terror of the mad lord and of the unknown magic lurking around them, they buckled to the immediate threat to their flesh and took up their oars again: their souls were lost, no matter what they did now.
Ravn Asharson, King of the Northern Isles, stared out of the map room window in disbelief. ‘They have lost their minds,’ he croaked.
Stormway was at his shoulder at once. He screwed his eyes up. All he could see out there through the swirling snow were white sails, which made no sense at all. White sails? No northerner worth Sur’s good salt would carry white sails, yet the ships were undoubtedly Eyran in appearance, low in the water, with curving stemposts and the sleek lines of predators. The moon lit them so that they looked like some spectral force, sailing out of history, their oars manned by afterwalkers from ancient battles. At the sight of them his stump itched and with the superstitious instincts of his ancestors he found himself making the sign of the anchor to ward off ill luck and evil spirits, until Ravn saw him doing it and laughed.
‘Do you think they’re ghosts, old man, come back to haunt you? Maybe they’ve come to bring you back your hand!’
‘More like to take the other,’ Egg Forstson said sourly, girding on his swordbelt. ‘It seems Istria has made good at last on its long promise to carry a holy war to the North.’
‘They shall carry their “holy war” to the seabed, damn them! When the first ship comes in range, give the signal to the towers to winch up the chainwall,’ Ravn told his grizzled lieutenant.
Egg paused.
‘What?’ said his king sharply. ‘There’s no time to waste, man: get to it!’
‘The chains may not work, sire.’
‘They’ve been maintained with absolute care: I know – I’ve inspected the mechanisms myself.’
The Earl of Shepsey grimaced. ‘They were designed to stop bigger vessels than these, lord. The sort of ships the Istrians have always built. But from what I can see, the ships coming in are more like our own fleet in design, shallow-draughted. I’m not sure they won’t sail right over the chain.’
The King digested this unwelcome piece of information stern-faced.
‘The Nemesis, then, lord?’ Stormway asked reluctantly.
Ravn stared at his old adviser as if he were mad. It was well known the creature was quite mythical. ‘Damn. Just raise the chains anyway, Egg, and take the archers with you, pitch and brands: I’ll not trust to luck. Stormway, with me – we’ll take the boats out and meet them head on!’
Down through the castle they hurtled, two old retainers and their king, raising the alarm at every turn. Men came stumbling out of bedchambers in various states of disarray; with goblets in their hands, naked with swords. Voices were raised in confusion and urgency. Torches were lit against the heavy darkness of the night. The hollow echo of booted feet rang in every stairwell. Women screamed. Servants ran to fetch chainmail and weaponry; to rouse any who still slept; to convey wives and children to the safe places in the keep; or out into the town to carry orders to the forces gathered in the inns, the barracks, the stables, the warehouses and fish sheds. From stillness and calm, suddenly all of Halbo was a chaos of activity.
Down in the courtyard below the keep, Ravn Asharson came upon a great crowd of men milling restlessly about, with one young man running around in front of them trying not very successfully to keep order.
‘Guthrun?’
His ship’s navigator spun around. For some reason he seemed puzzled by the sight of his monarch. ‘Sire?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘What you ordered, my lord. I’ve gathered them all here, but it’s been hard to get them to obey. They all want to get down to the quays—’<
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Ravn frowned. ‘Where’s Hogny?’
A huge yellow-bearded man stepped out of the ranks, his face puce with irritation. ‘Here, sire. This young whipper-snapper seems to think that you put him in charge—’
Ravn rolled his eyes. There had been talk of madness in the Hart clan, but now was not a good time for it to emerge. ‘For the gods’ sake, man, what were you thinking?’
The big man became mulish. ‘He says you gave him your sword as a token of the command.’
Ravn laughed, patted his hip. ‘Trollbiter is exactly where it ought to be, at my side. Let’s see this mighty weapon, then, Guthrun.’
The young man looked as though he might burst into tears. He swept the sword in question out in front of him, as if offering it back to its rightful owner. Where there had – he could have sworn – been a decent workaday Eyran blade, there now lay across his palms a wicked-looking curved sword of clear southern origin.
Ravn took it from him, plainly angry now: too angry and confused, too, to notice the blur of the edges, or the waning buzz of hasty magic the metal still bore. ‘I haven’t got time for this nonsense. Take him away,’ he said to one of the other guards. ‘Lock him in one of the fish sheds till this is over: he’s obviously lost his wits.’ Then he raised his voice so all could hear.
‘Men of Eyra: this enemy force has the gall to enter our home waters with brazen white sails, so confident are they of their success. They come to storm our capital, to raid our city, put our defenders to the sword and carry off our women! We have fought this enemy for three hundred years and they have driven us further north with every successive attack. Now they dare to come against us in the heart of our homeland, as if they begrudge us even this and would drive us into the arctic seas.
‘They call us barbarians: but it is not we who cry heresy and burn those who disagree with our madness. They call this a holy war: yet they send against us slaves, mercenaries and pressed men! They call us savages; but without copying our ships they would barely have made it out of their own ports! And if their own women are willing and hot-blooded, what do they want with ours? I know that every good Eyran man has twice the brains and the brawn of any feeble southerner—’
At this a cheer rose.
‘—so let us meet these lily-livered, ranting wife-stealers with hearts of iron and fire. Many of you will have lost fathers and grandfathers in the last war: now is the time for revenge. Let us go forth and do deeds they will sing of in the days to come! Let us carry the fight out to our enemy and show these Istrian bastards what good Eyran men are made of!’
Swords aloft, calling on the name of their gods, their ancestors and their loved ones, the defenders of Halbo ran down to the docks and began to launch every ship moored in the harbour, every vessel laid up in dry dock, and every skiff and ketch and tub besides.
Twenty-nine
The Battle of Halbo
For worshippers of the fire-goddess, Falla, there can surely be no worse fate than death by drowning. To be swallowed by an antithetical element is terrible enough: the men of Istria believe their souls must be ferried through the Lady’s fires if they are to enter her paradise and gain the rewards for which they have striven all their mortal days; but to be lost to the realm of the enemy’s sea-god is tantamount to everlasting damnation. In addition, the southerners’ hatred of water is so pronounced that few Istrians learn to swim, even those who can stand little chance of life in water of temperatures barely above freezing, let alone with the chaos of battle all around them. Certainly, the commanders of the invading force had given little consideration to such matters: their mission was sacred; the Goddess would certainly smile on their endeavours.
For the men of Halbo, the city’s very survival was at stake. Decisions taken in haste might mean the difference between the sacking of their town and ultimate victory. Yet the timing of the raising of a chainwall is a delicate matter. The choice facing the defenders was whether to prevent all invaders from entering home waters – by baulking their progress forcing them either to sail away disappointed (an optimistic wish) or to wait outside the wall, effectively laying siege to the city by letting no ship in or out; or of splitting the invasion force by allowing the first ships in the line easy access, before cutting them off from their fellows.
For reasons of expediency as well as out of bloodlust, the Eyrans opted for the latter stratagem.
The first ship, sailing some distance ahead of the rest, passed by the Sentinel Towers unscathed. Seeing the flagship’s success, a number of other vessels followed swiftly in her wake before the winches took the strain. Slowly, the chainwall was raised, stretching half a mile across the dark harbour just below the surface of the sea to the winding rooms hollowed out in the feet of the two towers. The twelfth ship to thus gain access suffered a lucky escape: only her steerboard grating on those vast links of iron, said to have been forged in the ancient days with a mixture of blood and seithers’ charms. Rudderless now, the Pride of Hedera stumbled in behind the rest. The next vessels in the line were less fortunate. Experienced skippers might have avoided the hazard by the expedience of a simple tacking manoeuvre; but the captains of the Southern Wayfarer and the Sestria ploughed their vessels deep into the wake of those in front, the bows tilting dangerously low. The chainwall caught them fair and square.
Death by drowning is said by some to be a peaceful way to leave the world; but to those men flung without warning into the chilly waters of Halbo’s harbour, the black sea closing over their heads so that even the moonlight was blotted out, with – in the case of the rowers – iron shackles binding them to links set into the splintered deck, the fate which took them was far from pleasant. Arms thrashing in vain, legs pumping, lungs filling with scouring brine, body growing more numb and heavy and saturated by the second, down they went, and down they stayed.
Now came the fire the souls of those thus lost might have welcomed: fire on the heads of arrows shot from the arrow-slits of the Sentinel Towers; fiery balls of pitch cast from ballistas atop the defences, the undyed sails a perfect target amidst the darkness of water and air. The Cockerel caught alight and blazed like a torch; but it was less of a blessing than the southerners had wished for. Now men who had sent nomads and magic-makers, adulterous women and heretic men to bubble and crisp in the cleansing pyres of the Goddess learned the reality of that hot embrace. Those who were able to jump overboard found abruptly that they welcomed the proximity of the freezing waters; but the slaves were consigned to burn where they were chained, screaming in agony.
The Lord of Cantara stood at the prow of Falla’s Mystery and stared fixedly through the smoke and snow, oblivious to all but his own obsession. Behind him all was destruction and death; before him the citadel in which lay the woman he adored. Grimly, he willed the ships onward.
But now there were other vessels moving in the gloom: shadowy hulks with no masts raised; small skiffs and fishing boats; smacks and ketches and dinghies, coming towards them full of armed men, fighting men . . .
Tycho Issian was not a fighting man, by nature or by inclination, though he wore a sword as a symbol of his role as joint commander of the invasion. As the edge of the rising sun pierced the cloud layer on the eastern horizon, it presaged the advent of the first Eyran ship and limned the defenders in bloody crimson. Thus haloed, these huge, shaggy men looked suddenly more terrifying than any nightmare conjuration. Tycho wrapped his fists around the unfamiliar pommel of his weapon and clenched his jaw.
I will avenge your dishonour, my rose, he swore silently.
He turned to his men: ‘Kill them!’ he roared. ‘In the name of the Goddess, kill them all!’
Then he ran back down the ship and took cover behind the huge Galian mercenaries he had personally picked as his bodyguard; and battle commenced.
From their vantage point on the rocks below the east of the towers, it was impossible to tell which way the battle was going. Judged on numbers alone, it seemed that the Istrians must hold sway, for the chai
nwall had indeed failed to prevent access to the shallow-draughted ships, and now the harbour was crammed with invading vessels. But the Eyrans fought grimly and with a skill, determination and discipline which their opponents could not match. Men in tiny boats weaved a daring passage in and out of the longships, hurling spears and other missiles at the enemy, sometimes flaming torches, sometimes themselves. They fought, Rui thought, almost admiringly, like wolves; but wolves with a plan. To be in the midst of that onslaught would be daunting indeed. He wondered how Tycho Issian was coping with the responsibilities of his role; if he was in fact still alive.
He waited, and he cursed the southern lord who had put them all in peril; and still the Rose of Elda lay like one dead.
The dead, for their part, washed in against the rocks, battered and bloody and weed-covered; some horribly wounded, stuck through with spars and wood-shards, spears or arrows; hacked and mutilated, their heads and limbs cloven, others merely pale and drowned; or black and burned. Istrian and Eyran alike, reduced to wreckage and tidewrack. Flotsam came bobbing in to join the dead with each successive wave – smashed kegs, broken strakes and splintered oars; fragments of charred sail and mast; discarded fishing nets, floats, crab pots and buoys cut loose from commandeered vessels.
In all this time, the Rose of the World made no move, nor sighed nor spoke; but as she lay unconscious, glistening tears rolled unchecked down that smooth white face.
Behind her, the serving woman fed the royal child, which seemed to care not one whit for all the drama which surrounded it, nor for the cold, as long as it had a tit to suck and warm milk dribbling down its chin. Lucky brat, Rui thought, scanning the melee with a sinking heart.
It was some time before the Lord of Forent spotted an opportunity; and the chill which gripped him like an ague may have played a part in addling his wits. ‘Bring the boat in,’ he told Bardson wearily. ‘We’ll have to take our chances.’