by Jude Fisher
‘Poor beast,’ muttered the Rosa Eldi. ‘I hope you bit the one who killed you before he took your life and reduced your rich existence to this piece of motheaten, meaningless carpet.’
She rose up on the bed on which she lay and found that, too, covered with skins of dead animals. The ermine-lined cloak Ravn had given her lay draped across the chair beside her. She regarded it sadly. How strange that she should never till now have regretted those tiny lost lives it represented, strange that some lost part of her had now returned to burn with a vengeful fire. ‘My creatures,’ she whispered. ‘You are all my creatures and each of you deserve the chance to live and die as you choose.’
She thought about this for an unknowable time: and while she thought the candles burned lower, and some guttered and went out.
How was she to take back this world of hers without causing such death and suffering as she had witnessed in the minds of her subjects? But take it back she must; for all around was evidence of cruelty and hurt, and if she did not act to save it, then she was complicit in that wickedness.
Then another thought occurred to her. If there was such evil in the world, where had it come from, if not from those who created Elda in the first place? And if that was the case, then did she have the right to interfere at all? The last time she had acted, it had been without thought, without weighing the consequences of her actions, and that day many men had died. She remembered, too, the boy at the Allfair, the boy with the eldistan. She had not meant to let her powers run rampant that day, either; had not even known then who or what she was.
Such a choice: to wield her powers and cause possible devastation; or to sit idly by and watch the world pass into rack and ruin? She needed her siblings, the Man and the Beast. Without them, she felt frail and fallible, certain to choose the wrong course and have all eternity to rue it.
She lay there all that long night, listening to the sounds of this new place, to the men and women coming and going, here within its walls, and far below, down in the parklands and the byways which surrounded the castle; she listened to Tycho Issian being laved and anointed by the slavegirls in his adjacent chamber; listened as, against all natural odds, he succumbed to sleep rather than to his ravening urges; and then she listened to the voices which crowded into her head.
Some were prayers and some were curses and some were pleas; but some were more direct and came to her with purpose and intent.
‘We are coming!’ they declared.‘Our Lady, we are coming to you.’
Thirty-five
Cera
At first light she rose from the bed, which she had stripped of its animal pelts, leaving just a crumpled covering of white wool, and crossed the chamber to the window. She pulled back the velvet drapes which shut out the sun and blinked as it flooded in like water through a breached dam.
Down below, far below, was a crowd of people. They were not milling around in the usual way of folk going about their daily tasks: none pushed carts or carried baskets or drew mules by their halters. They were not moving towards the market square to buy or sell goods; they were not queueing at the baker’s for bread nor the vintner’s for wine, nor did they seem to be on their way to labours elsewhere in the city. Instead, they had gathered at the foot of the tower in which she was held captive, or as close to the foot as the steep mound on which the castle was constructed would allow them to stand, and they were all gazing up, motionless and silent, their faces – where she could see them – rapt with hopeful expectation.
She, in turn, gazed back at them. The majority were women, many of whom wore the outlandish garb and silver piercings she had come to associate with the Wandering Folk with whom she had spent so many months while travelling with Virelai. But most of the rest were veiled and she knew them to be Istrian.
Some of the men she recognised. There, a dozen or so folk away from the front to the far left, was the north-coast fisherman whom she had touched on the ship which had brought her here. And beside him was the erstwhile priest of Falla. They had shaved their heads and rubbed ashes into their pates: an ancient symbol of penance. Other men she did not know by name or face, but by type: there were nomads with braids and top-knots and bright scarves, hillmen marked with the facial tattoos of their clans, slaves from the galleys which had followed in their flotilla.
And there were children: a hundred children and more, some holding their fathers’ hands, some staring upward with their mouths open, some hiding their faces in their mothers’ skirts.
She looked down upon them, bare-headed and bare-faced and after a while there floated up to her a murmur. As if possessed by a single compulsion, the Istrian women cast off their veils, their eyes seeking hers without the shielding fabric.
The Rosa Eldi smiled; and as if she greeted each of them personally, every man, woman and child in the crowd smiled back.
So engrossed was she by this sight that she did not hear the chamber door behind her open nor her visitor enter: at that moment every shred of her awareness was poured outward and downward into the silent crowd, into the shining rope of their connection.
So when the visitor’s hands encircled her waist, for a moment she did not know it. When his fingers tightened their hold and he began to draw her away from the window, she was for a moment confounded. Then she spun in his grasp and found herself gazing not into the smiling face of a well-wisher, but into the dead black eyes of the Lord of Cantara, and what she saw there was not love or hope but a lust which would let nothing stand against it.
At once old memories rose up and she was lost, the goddess in her fled away through the fog of her fear, leaving her a vulnerable woman like any other vulnerable woman in the hands of an attacker. But still his hands were on her clothing, albeit her thin shift, and not her skin; so she was not privy to the full darkness of the mind which lurked behind those black eyes.
As if sensing her terror, Tycho Issian smiled. He had waited for this moment for the best (or worst) part of a year. He had been prey to wild desire, unruly obsession, desperate measures. Visions of her had driven him to distraction; to torture and murder and war. He had dreamed of the beauty he held now every day, every night, whether asleep or awake; he had pictured this very scene a thousand thousand times, although the details had differed in large ways and in small. In some dreams, she had come to him willingly, her arms open, her eyes longing, her robes cast to the floor. In others she had cowered before him and he had forced himself upon her in a gratifying tide of fire.
He had never imagined what would happen once he had doused this fire, once he had ravished the object of his desires. And he did not think about it now, as he tore away the thin shift she wore, took it by its delicate embroidered yoke and ripped through seventy-four hours of painstaking work by the finest seamstresses in all of Eyra and watched it crumple to the ground.
The Rosa Eldi made no attempt to extricate herself from the tangling cloth but stood there as still as stone. The Lord of Cantara found himself looking down upon her ankles – pale, delicate, exquisitely sculpted. Then he dared to raise his eyes further. Sleek calves rose to knees of perfect symmetry, above which slim white thigh muscles rose in taut, defined relief. And above these . . .
Tycho Issian felt his own legs give way beneath him as if the cartilage and ligaments, the network of tendons and muscles which kept him standing had turned suddenly to chill water. His breath caught in his throat; his chest felt suddenly constricted. Musk enveloped him, exotic, undeniable. On a level now with that naked pudenda, he gazed and gazed with his heart in his mouth.
A pair of soft velvet petals, tinged with rose pink.
Smooth, fleshy petals, inviting him to press them apart.
White petals . . .
Now that it came to the moment he had dreamed of, he found he could not lift his hands, could do nothing but stare and tremble and breathe noisily through his mouth like any randy hound.
And then she stepped out of the ruined shift and moved away from him and he cried out in pain and fe
ar and looked up and found that her sea-green eyes were bent upon him. And he whimpered. He could not help it, could not even stop his mouth with his knuckles.
That small sound girded her courage. Her chin came up. Her eyes flashed. The sun spilled across her skin, igniting it with a pale fire. Suddenly where before she had been all vulnerable, frail temptation, now she stood as straight as a spear and her beauty shone like armour. Where before she had been warm and soft and yielding, now she was as cold and terrifying as an unsheathed blade.
It was as if she taunted him with her nakedness. Tycho Issian blinked, looked away from her shining presence, and found he could clench his hands into hard fists.
‘I know what you are doing,’ he said furiously, all the compressed, thwarted frustration of these several months now raw in his voice. ‘You are trying to face me down. And I will not have it!’
‘Indeed, you will not.’
He was not mistaken: she sounded amused. She was suppressing a laugh – he was sure of it – a laugh generated by his trussed-up erection, his pitiful devotion, his pathetic, subservient posture.
‘How dare you! You, for whom I launched a fleet into the dread seas of the Northern Ocean: you, for whom I dared all, brought war – roused an entire nation, just for you: you, whom I have personally delivered from the hands of barbarians, whom I have saved from perversions and disgrace!’
‘I did not need saving.’
He risked a glance at her; but it helped him not at all, for she stood there, more relaxed now, her weight shifted slightly onto one foot, one leg angled out so that he could glimpse a fraction more of the mystery which obsessed him so. And now he could not look away.
‘How could you? How could you let that barbarian touch you? You let down your defences for him, you let him invade your sacred body.’
‘I loved him. It was no invasion.’
Tears burst out of Tycho Issian’s eyes then, tears of rage and horror.
‘Love? How could it be love? No one could love you the way that I love you. All he wanted was a child to secure his succession!’
She tilted her head to look at him curiously. ‘Ah yes, the child.’
‘You gave him a child.’ His face was a mask of misery, horribly contorted as he struggled to stop the shaming tears.
‘I gave him a child,’ she echoed. ‘Unfortunately, it was not my child to give.’
‘I saw you, with my own eyes, in the crystal. I saw you, all swollen and proud and bursting with it. I saw you standing there beside him, with your hands folded so primly and protectively on top of your great belly. I saw you!’ he bellowed.
A tiny line appeared between the Rosa Eldi’s fair brows.
‘The child was not mine. It was your daughter’s.’
Silence fell between them, silence except for the ragged breathing of the man crouching on the floor like a beaten dog. Then: ‘My daughter’s?’ he echoed plaintively.
‘Selen Issian. Whom I knew for a time as Leta Gullwing. She is with it now.’
Now the Lord of Cantara was entirely perplexed. ‘How can that be? I gave it into the . . . care of the Duke of Cera’s seneschal. To be . . . looked after.’
The Rose of the World closed her eyes and now Tycho Issian found that he could both move and breathe. He got to his feet and stood there, swaying slightly, as if drunk, or faint.
Selen had a child? The thought of which brute northerner might have fathered it upon her was too foul to approach. Then another thought occurred to him. He groaned. ‘They are together? The . . . child . . . and my daughter?’ He paused as the calamity of this struck him. ‘By the Lady, are they both dead, then?’
‘Dead?’
‘The seneschal . . . his orders . . . were to kill the child.’
‘This does not surprise me,’ she said slowly. ‘For I know you have killed many children. Many women, too; many men. What could one more death mean to you?’ She paused. ‘Unless it were your own.’
Now the Lord of Cantara went sickly pale.
‘I do not know what you mean,’ he rasped. His brow wrinkled horribly. ‘How can you know these things? Are you a witch?’
‘I see many things.’
‘You have seen my death?’
‘How quickly the concern for your daughter and her son is eclipsed,’ the Goddess mused, ‘by the prospect of your own demise.’
She stood there, her lips quirked in a cold smile, and he felt a shudder run through him and he looked away, for if he stared longer he felt sure he would see his death reflected in those jade eyes.
The Rosa Eldi watched the man tremble, watched the sweat bead his forehead and his gorge rise with the bile of terror. At last she said, ‘Your daughter is with her son. In the kitchens of this castle where she is even now giving him warmed milk to stop his crying. The seneschal had . . . a change of heart.’ And was even now standing with the crowd below the window, gazing upward, wishing for miracles. Like the others, he had been touched by a blessing in the night, had heard the voice of Falla and been assailed by the scent of musk and roses.
‘Thank the Lady,’ he breathed, though he hardly dared believe it.
‘I wish no thanks from you.’
This puzzled him further. He blinked. Then: ‘Stay here,’ he ordered, unnecessarily.
He sped past the door-guards, took the stairs three at a time and arrived, dishevelled and perspiring, at the kitchens in a faster time than even the most terrified slave could have achieved. Flinging open the double doors – doors designed to allow egress for the massive banquet trays for which Cera had, in the time of its dead duke, been famed throughout the empire – he burst in and stared wildly around. In shock at this unannounced interruption, someone dropped a cooking pot with a clang which reverberated off the stonework, and this was followed by a frenzy of activity as someone else was burned with hot soup, someone was trodden on, the hounds started baying, and a baby started to wail its head off.
Tycho Issian’s head swivelled like a striking snake towards this latter noise. There, in the corner of the room, seated on a tall stool at the peeling table, was the woman he had once thought of as his daughter, brazenly bare-headed and cradling a brat with a bright red, roaring face.
‘Selen!’
Everyone fell silent. A pair of the Duke of Cera’s hunting hounds slunk through the doors to the yard, followed by the stableboy, who shouldn’t have been in the kitchens at all, and two veiled dairy maids. The kitchen staff backed away, trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. All of them knew the Lord of Cantara’s cruel reputation.
‘She said you would be here: you have conspired against me, I see; and though I do not know how you have contrived this reunion, believe me when I say I shall find it out. And wearing no veil, you shameless trollop: that, too, will be remedied shortly,’ he raged. ‘Is that your child?’
Selen Issian stiffened as if she felt already the kiss of her father’s lash. Intrigued by the sudden change in his mother’s demeanour, Ulf stopped his wailing and turned to regard the shouting man with his unnerving violet eyes.
‘It is.’ Selen’s arms went tighter around the wriggling bundle.
Tycho crossed the room and gave his daughter a hard look. She held his gaze defiantly so that at last he was forced to stare down at the baby instead.
‘It looks little like the usual run of Eyrans to me.’
‘Why should he look Eyran at all?’
He regarded her as if she were half-witted. ‘Why, for his parentage, of course. And because the . . . Queen . . . passed him off as her own.’
Selen’s jaw firmed. ‘She took him from me.’
‘Ravn is, I suppose, dark, so she may have got away with it, for a time.’ He cocked his head and scrutinised the bundle. Then he looked up sharply again. ‘Is it his child?’
Selen flushed. ‘No,’ she said, very quickly. ‘It is not. Though better it had been. This child was got upon me by Tanto Vingo when he ravished me in my booth at the Allfair last year.’
>
That made her father’s mouth drop open. ‘Tanto Vingo? Surely you are mistaken: the boy fought off a host of Eyran brigands, and took a terrible wound . . .’
‘I am not mistaken. Not in the least. And it was I who stabbed Tanto Vingo, in my own defence. I hear it carried him near to death,’ she finished with some satisfaction.
‘Death came to him,’ the Lord of Cantara said grimly. ‘But it was not from the wound he took.’ He leaned in closer.
The baby screwed its face up and howled again, louder than ever before. But rather than recoiling, Tycho Issian reached over and lifted him out of Selen’s clasp and held him at arms’ length, so that his feet kicked in mid-air.
At once, Little Ulf stopped crying. He wriggled in his grandfather’s arms and stared up at him. Then he reached out and grabbed at his lord’s chain, the great ornament of office Tycho had donned that morning as he prepared to impress himself upon the Rose.
The Lord of Cantara grimaced. ‘He has a good eye for silver! And what a grip.’ He tried to prise the little creature’s fingers off the chain, but Ulf was not letting go. ‘So, you would take it from me, would you, little man? You think to inherit my title and my wealth, do you? You think to wheedle your way into my affections and steal what is not yours?’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘I shall be lord of this whole empire before long. I cannot have grasping little bastards dogging my steps, trying to take what is mine. Not when my own son will soon be born.’
‘Your son?’
He raised mad eyes to Selen.
‘I shall marry the Rose of the World and beget many sons upon her,’ he declared.‘She shall carry one after another after another till I have made a ruler for every province in Istria, and they shall all answer to me, and me alone.’