by Jude Fisher
Persoa climbed higher up the ridge and stared out into the harsh landscape, shading his eyes. When he came back he looked mildly surprised, but he would not say why. ‘Let us ride on,’ was all he would offer. ‘I do not think we are in any danger.’
As they closed on the dust-cloud, Saro’s guts gave a tiny lurch – of fear, or anticipation? He did not know. But as the travellers ahead of them began to pull aside into a rocky defile to let them take precedence on the road, the dust cleared abruptly and he saw a number of great lumbering beasts pulling carts, shaggy-haired and long-horned. Yeka!
He turned excitedly to Mam. ‘They’re Wanderers!’ he declared with relief. ‘Nomad folk.’ So some of them had evaded his brother’s devices after all.
Mam made a superstitious sign. ‘Just keep riding,’ she said.
But as they drew level with the group, Persoa made a complicated genuflexion, called out something in the nomad folk’s lilting tongue and rode into the defile to speak with them. The men of the caravan had gathered at the front of the group as if to defend the rest. There were eight of them – five young men and three old men – all in billowing patchwork trousers belted with many-coloured braids. The red dust of the road coated their skin and clothing, and what little hair they had, for each wore only a top-knot confined with brass rings; silver dropped from their ears and jangled around their wrists. They were thin, but not starved-looking, and they watched the newcomers with wary caution, though none of them was armed. Behind the men, a number of women and children peered out from between the wagons with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. Saro stared. Surely it could not be . . . she looked older, a woman, rather than the child he remembered. He blinked and stared again. It was—
‘Guaya!’
Amidst the group a girl with enormous eyes and silver rings in her nose and eyebrow stared back at him, at first uncomprehending, then alarmed. She slipped behind an old woman with feathers in her hair as if she could not bear to look at him, or for him to look upon her. One of the young men said something in the nomads’ strange tongue.
‘Hvier-thi? Hvi konnuthu-thi Guaya?’
‘Rajeesh, minna seri,’ Saro replied, much to everyone’s surprise. ‘Ig heti Saro Vingo, di Altea de la. Ig reconnina Guaya sala Allferi. Hen ferthi . . .’ Here vocabulary failed him: he mimed a puppet dancing for them.
The men all laughed and nodded. ‘Mannetria! Ah, mannetria,’ said the oldest of the men. He made an odd little bow. ‘Ig heti Feron, periana Hiron. Guaya minna nestri es.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Katla demanded crossly, riding up to join them.‘Are you making some sort of bargain with them, trying to escape?’
Saro glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘The pretty girl by the second wagon – Guaya – is a friend of mine. I met her at the Allfair last year and was with her when her grandfather was killed in the rioting. The old man here is her uncle.’ He turned back to continue his conversation with the Wandering Folk.
Katla stared into the group till she found the one he meant. The girl stared back, unabashed by the Eyran’s interest. Katla was annoyed to note that she indeed merited the description Saro had applied to her, if not one even more fulsome, for she had an exotic, foreign beauty. ‘How do you know their language?’ she asked sharply, interrupting his discussion.‘I thought you were an Istrian, not a Footloose man.’
Now Saro turned around to face her and his expression was grim. ‘I travelled with the nomads last year before the caravan I was with was set upon by militiamen from Jetra. They killed everyone but me, my companion Virelai and a nomad woman called Alisha Skylark. It was a massacre; they didn’t stand a chance. They don’t fight, you see, these people you so rudely refer to as ‘the Footloose’: they believe in living peacefully on Elda, leaving as little trace of themselves as they may, taking no life, be it man or animal.’
Katla curled her lip. ‘Hasn’t done them much good, as far as I’ve heard,’ she said.
‘Alisha?’ said one of the other men suddenly, gripping Saro by the arm. ‘Konnuthu-thi Alisha Skylark?’
Saro leapt at the touch, abruptly assailed by a hail of images which left him reeling. As quickly as he was able, he peeled the man’s fingers away. ‘Donniari revenna,’ he explained softly, his head spinning. ‘Eldistan Hironi . . .’
That set them all talking excitedly, until Saro waved his hands exhaustedly.‘Please,’ he said in the Old Tongue, ‘I can’t understand you all at once.’
One of the old men came forward now. He bowed, first to Persoa, then to Katla, and last to Saro, whom he addressed. ‘We know Alisha Skylark,’ he said haltingly, ‘we see her a moon ago, not alone, on horse. We ask her join with us, she say no, place to go, very important.’
Saro’s heart raced. ‘A black horse?’
The man nodded. ‘Very fine, very fine.’
‘And she travelled with others?’
The old man turned to his companions and they conferred for a while, quietly but intently. Then he said, ‘With son, Falo; and some others we not know so well. Or not . . . recognise.’
‘Falo? But Falo is dead. I saw . . .’ He hesitated, the horrible image of that brave nine-year-old lying on the ground by the river where they had been ambushed, his arm hacked off, fingers still clutching his grandmother Fezack’s old knobkerry.
‘Had lost an arm,’ the old man added helpfully. ‘The boy: only one arm.’
Saro felt a chill run through him.
One of the women from the group called out something and the old man nodded. ‘She say he have no eyes, either, but I not see that for myself.’
Persoa turned to Saro, his face gaunt. ‘You saw the boy die?’
‘I did not see him fall, but I saw his corpse,’ Saro said. His heart felt like a lump of lead hanging in the centre of his chest. It thudded painfully against his ribs. ‘He was most certainly dead. No one could survive such a wound.’
Persoa closed his eyes. ‘So, it is true then, what I have felt. She has been using the eldistan to raise the dead.’
The old man’s face clouded and he said something rapidly to the rest of the group. The old women made signs to ward off evil. They muttered, ‘Ealadanna kalom, ealadanna kalom,’ over and over; then one of them pointed south and said, ‘Suthra ferinni, montian fuegi.’
‘Montian fuegi – the Mountain of Fire – the Red Peak?’ Persoa asked, stricken.
They all nodded.
‘And where are you going?’ Persoa asked. ‘To join her?’
The old man shook his head vehemently. ‘Only the dead can survive in that place. We go to Cantara.’
The hair rose on the back of Saro’s neck. ‘Why would any nomad go to Cantara? Its lord is a monster. He has killed thousands of your people!’
One of the young men said something unintelligible, but Saro caught the words ‘Tycho Issian’ amidst the rest; and the gesture he made – a finger drawn across the throat – was universal, though uncharacteristic of the gentle wayfaring folk.
‘His mother rule while he away. She good woman, good to us Lost People. Take in many, feed and care, very kind, very kind.’
‘Do you know,’ Saro asked anxiously, ‘anything about the folk who dwelled back there?’ He gestured towards Altea. ‘There was a lady, Illustria Vingo, my mother . . .’
But the old man shook his head. ‘People long gone.’
So that was that, then.
‘May we travel with you?’ Persoa asked. ‘To Cantara?’
At once a great smile wreathed the old man’s walnutbrown face. He nodded rapidly, shook the hillman vigorously by the hand. ‘Much honour,’ he said. ‘Eldianna mina, si beni eldianni.’
When they made camp for the night, Saro sought out Guaya. He sensed that misunderstanding and distrust lay between them and the way she had avoided his eye made him uncomfortable. He decided he would try to speak with her, if not to justify himself then at least to re-establish some form of friendly contact. After polite enquiries, he found her curled up in one of
the wagons, restringing one of her puppet-figures by candlelight. She looked up, alarmed, as he stuck his head in through the canvas doorflap. ‘It’s all right,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll go away if you don’t want to talk to me.’
Guaya said nothing, but she put the mannequin to one side with exaggerated care and drew her knees up to her chin. Saro took this as an invitation, or at least not a rebuttal, and climbed into the wagon to sit beside her. Silence fell. Guaya looked at her hands, then began to clean paint from under her fingernails in an absorbed fashion.
‘You look well,’ Saro said desperately after a while.
She made a face.
‘You also look older,’ he said, then put his hand to his mouth. ‘Sorry.’
She frowned. ‘Times have been hard. There hasn’t been much to eat.’ She looked up at him then and he saw that there were shadows under her eyes and beneath her cheekbones, and felt an idiot.
‘I know.’ Another long silence fell between them, which Guaya seemed disinclined to break. Saro tried again. ‘I am glad your people travelled in a different caravan to Alisha’s.’
‘Why?’ she said, looking up at him accusingly. ‘Because you didn’t want to see me?’
‘No, no – because you have survived, whereas they . . .’
‘It is a very terrible thing,’ she said at last.
Saro nodded.
Her eyes searched his face. ‘And you were there when they were attacked?’
He nodded again. ‘I killed one of the soldiers,’ he said defensively.
She snorted.‘That does not recommend you to me. Taking yet another life by violent means hardly improves the world.’
Saro hung his head, wishing acutely that he had not come here. He had known all along that she despised him, as she despised all his kind. He remembered her furious diatribe against the Istrians, how the Empire had killed her mother and her father; and her grandfather, too. And since it had been his own brother who had taken the old man’s life, he couldn’t blame her for hating him and all his people.
Guaya saw that he had taken what she had said to heart. ‘Anyway,’ she said in a lighter tone, ‘just how old do you think I am?’
Confused by this abrupt change in subject, Saro floundered. ‘Er, thirteen . . . fourteen?’
Guaya looked thunderstruck. Then she laughed, her whole face suddenly alive with humour. ‘Ha! I am eighteen: I will be nineteen in three moons. Do I really look such a child to you?’
Saro was shocked: by his own stupidity as much as anything else, for now that he looked at her, he realised it was her fragility that had misled him, that and his ignorance of how women looked, so used to seeing them wrapped in their enveloping robes was he. ‘No!’ he said, more sharply than he’d meant to. ‘I don’t, no. I just hadn’t . . . really . . . thought about it much.’ And that just made it worse.
Now her lower lip protruded and a line appeared between her eyebrows. For a horrible moment he thought she might cry. Then he remembered that the nomads never wept tears, except for happiness. Or was that yet another myth?
‘So you have given me no thought at all since the last time you saw me.’
‘No – I have thought about you often, truly I have.’ But usually, he admitted to himself, it was more that he thought about how ridiculous and patronising he must have seemed in her eyes, the rich Istrian come to bribe her with blood-price for the old man’s death, as if a bag of cantari made everything all right again. Yet another proof, if proof were needed, of the Empire’s empty morals and money-grubbing ways.
Her eyes shone. They were not black, he realised, as he had first thought them, though in the dim light of the wagon her pupils were huge, but a rich, deep brown, like the water in an autumn stream, or the coppery eyes of a toad. That last thought made him laugh.
Guaya was taken aback. ‘What? Why are you laughing?’
He could hardly tell her about the toad. ‘I . . . er . . . because I have forgotten my own age,’ he improvised quickly. ‘I cannot remember if I am twenty-two or twenty-three . . .’ And even as he said it he realised it was true, and that he had forgotten his own birthday.
Guaya took his right hand firmly and laid it palm up on her lap where the glow of the candles infused it with a golden light. ‘I shall tell you.’ She bent over his hand and traced one of the lines there with a delicate finger. ‘Twenty-three,’ she said softly, a smile curving her lips. ‘And I see there is a great love in your life, though your ways have long been parted. But you are destined to be reunited, though the path is full of obstacles. See, here—’ But when she looked up again, she found that Saro’s expression had become momentarily slack with the impact of the touch, and she dropped his hand quickly.
Saro sat in a dream, bathed with warmth. Over and again he saw himself from the nomad girl’s perspective, taller than he thought himself, more handsome, more charismatic by far. He saw himself protecting her during the fight which had left her grandfather dead, felt himself gripped by his own strong hands, felt safe in his own embrace. He saw the way he tried to staunch the old man’s blood while the battle milled all about them, a vain attempt that appeared to Guaya both heroic and selfless. Images swirled, broke apart; coalesced. Now he saw himself seated rod-straight on a fine black stallion, a hero out of a lost age; then he felt the girl’s terror hammering at his own chest as he disappeared from view between pounding hooves. Again the scene changed; and now he saw himself walking through the fair with his head up and his jaw jutting: a determined man with fire in his dark eyes, and as Guaya he felt himself quail, felt the way her heart leapt when she saw him, felt panic and confusion carry away the words she had meant to say and transform them to words of accusation and anger. The last image which visited him was the way he had once appeared to her in a dream, a dream full of sweet touches and singing skin. And although it was another’s dream, he could not help the reaction his own body made to it.
Suddenly the contact was broken. All those snatched moments fled away.
‘I forgot. I am sorry . . . I forgot—’
Guaya sounded distraught, but Saro was still too wrapped in sensation to respond in any useful way. Instead, he gazed at her, feeling a little drunk, a little giddy. He had, indeed, it seemed, received a gift on that fateful day when he had visited the moodstone-seller’s stall, despite all the horror that had followed. He turned this new idea over in his mind. After all that had happened to him, all that he had done, it seemed impossible that anyone should care for him.
‘Guaya . . .’ he whispered, but she would not look at him. He reached out and touched her cheek, and the skin was hot beneath his fingers. ‘Guaya,’ he repeated, and now she met his eye, her cheeks burning.
‘I forgot,’ she said again. ‘I forgot you could see my thoughts.’ She ran a hand across her face as if she could erase them.
‘I thought you hated me,’ Saro said softly.
‘Hate you? I could never hate you, though it would be easier for me if I could.’
‘If you knew what else I had done—’
In response to this, she reached out and stopped his mouth with her hand. ‘No words,’ she said. ‘Not now.’ Then she leaned across and sealed his lips with her own.
Saro closed his eyes and let himself fall into her, and when she enfolded him he felt the embrace from inside and out: a most bizarre and intense sensation. Too intense. He pushed himself away and stared at Guaya, panting.
She blinked at him. ‘What? What is the matter?’
Saro shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It isn’t . . . it isn’t right.’
‘There is no right here,’ she said softly. ‘There is only us, and love and comfort.’ She cupped his cheek in her hand, a gesture of infinite tenderness; then she drew him against her again, and he found that not only could he not resist, but that he did not wish to.
How they both became naked he did not know – it was all too fast and too confused, for as long as they touched, he was both the nomad girl and himself and it was hard
to tell where one finished and the other began. Was it his hands who unlaced her thin dress, or her own? Was it her hands who found the ties that held his breeches up and unknotted them, or his? He didn’t know: was beyond caring. In the end, it hardly mattered, for suddenly they were skin against skin. Then her legs were around him and he was inside her and they were both engulfed by a sea of beating blood and hot breath. For a few seconds he felt he was drowning and fought to separate himself, as if he feared he might lose himself forever in this hot tide; then a reckless insouciance which he knew was not his own picked him up like a great wave and hurled him into the current and he had no choice but to give himself up to it and allow it to carry him away.
It was impossible to tell how long they rocked together, drifting in and out of one another’s minds. He felt the penetration he made as a welcome invasion; then was back in his own skin, feeling how the girl beneath him clenched and pulsed. He felt great waves of affection wash around him, through him, over him. There came a moment when sea became flame, greedy and insistent; and then a coruscating wildfire which devoured everything in its path. He felt himself burned up, all he had been and all he had done reduced to ashes and cinder so that he found himself in a howling wasteland, devoid of emotion, devoid of sensation. Little by little, he became aware of details: how the juddering candlelight illuminated a strip of brightly woven blanket; how the grain of the wool was rough against his knees; how one of Guaya’s hands lay softly about his neck; how she looked up at him expectantly.
And suddenly he was back in himself again. And Guaya, though they still lay entwined, felt as separate to him as if they were two islands in an ocean.
He gazed at her, confused. Something of great magnitude had just taken place, something beyond their physical joining.
‘Well?’ Guaya lifted an eyebrow and one corner of her mouth quirked upward.
It was not the expression of an innocent, but of a knowing and powerful young woman.
Saro, out of his depth again, sought for the right words. ‘That was . . . wonderful, amazing.’