by Jude Fisher
The sails of the Eyran fleet were dense against the lowering sky and the whole great expanse of sea was covered by their hulls. The sight of them sent a chill through the heart of every Istrian ranged along the low cliffs that day.
‘By the Lady,’ one man murmured, ‘there must be a thousand ships coming against us.’
It was an overestimate by a frightened man, but Tycho Issian turned to the captain of the guards and his expression was anguished. ‘Is Cera’s castle the strongest fortification in the area?’
The captain looked back at him as if he was mad, but knowing the Cantaran lord’s reputation decided to mince his words. ‘It was, my lord. Upon a time. Until the flood took the great wall down.’
No one could fathom how the city walls could have succumbed so swiftly to the sudden access of water, nor whence the destroying force had come. There had been little rain; the rivers had been running low for some weeks: they had even had to irrigate the winter crops. The captain – a grizzled veteran of the last war who had languished cheerfully in the lower ranks of the local guard until his rapid promotion following the loss of his superior – had spent the last two days retrieving bodies from the water which surrounded the castle and giving them over to city officials for identification and burial. It had not been a pleasant task, made worse by the fact that several of his militiamen had lost friends and relatives in the flood. Finding your wife or mother bloated and swollen with riverwater, her head caved in by rocks, was enough to rob a man of his hope, his future, his wits. It was rumoured that some soldiers had deserted, even gone to join the Footloose; though given the paucity of organisation following the demise of the Duke of Cera, it had proved impossible to ascertain whether death or the urge for a new kind of life had overtaken those who were missing from their posts.
The rest of his men had been employed in engineering a new bridge to provide access and egress from the city. Trouble was, all the best carpenters were in Forent. The woodworkers of Cera specialised in pretty furniture and minor household repairs: all the larger trees had long ago been harvested, leaving the spindly behind, where the woods had not been entirely cleared for vines and other crops. Bridge-building was not their strong point. As a result, the structure they had erected had the shoddy, makeshift look of a very temporary solution. As they had ridden over it this morning, it had shaken and rattled beneath the horses’ hooves; if they were very unlucky, they’d be swimming home.
‘Then we must return to the city and muster our men.’ Instead of galloping straightaway to do just this, the captain hesitated. ‘Should we not station a company of men on the beach to drive back the invaders into the sea?’ he suggested tentatively.
‘Would you rather hang out flags along the shore to confirm our presence to them? With any luck they’ll sail on to Hedera or Forent and seek the Rose there, giving us the time we need to make our preparation. Besides, we lost enough good men in the flood: I’ll need every soldier we have left to us defending Cera’s citadel.’
The Lord of Cantara turned and caught his protesting horse and, after two awkward efforts, managed to remount. Behind him, the captain caught his brother’s sardonic eye and shrugged helplessly. This lord was not a man to take advice from anyone, let alone a lowly garrison man, not a man to admit his weaknesses to anyone.
He gave an ostentatious cough.
Tycho Issian fixed him with a gimlet stare. ‘What?’
‘Well, sir, I was wondering whether you and the lady would stand a better chance riding inland, to Jetra.’ The Lord of Cantara regarded this new speaker closely, but the guard returned a guileless face to him. The man had a point; but it would never do to admit it. At last, having apparently pondered the suggestion for at least twenty seconds, he said, ‘If you do not wish to fight for the honour of your nation and preserve its people and its ways from the barbarian horde, then you may die swiftly here at the end of my sword.’
And after that, no one made audible any word of dissent.
‘You,’ Tycho Issian declared, jabbing a finger at a young man on a good horse. ‘You stay here and watch their movements. Report back as soon as you see whether they are going to land or sail on. Understand?’
The young man nodded quickly, though he knew well enough he was not going to be waiting around here for the barbarians to find him. He would be riding hell for leather for his sister’s house at Calastrina just as soon as the southern lord had gone his way.
The Duke of Cera had been a man with limited military experience and much vanity. As a result, the garrison at Cera were possessed of exquisite uniforms, precise parade formations and precious little fighting skill. They were decent men, on the whole, but life had been too easy for too long in this prosperous city. Given five years of hard schooling under ruthless mercenary leaders, those men left standing after the flood would make a halfway decent castle guard; but as a force to hold back barbarian invaders they were so much chaff in the wind.
As Tycho Issian inspected the motley force ranged up in the great courtyard, he regretted his decision to sail for the luxurious comforts of Cera rather than returning to Forent, where the libidinous lord had at least retained sufficient ambitious self-interest to maintain a tough fighting squad. And for the first time since Rui Finco’s unfortunate demise, he regretted, too, the loss of a man who might have had enough strategic thinking to make some sense of the perilous situation which faced them now.
Sestria was the closest town, but it was barely more than a marketplace and a few weavers’ sheds; and beyond that lay Ixta, but given the dissolute character of that city’s lord, a man who was clearly far more interested in parting perfumed harlots from their diaphanous clothing than in maintaining a well-drilled soldiery, he hardly dared hope for salvation from that quarter. Calastrina had never been fortified; and Alta was no more than a fishing port. It would take men from Forent several days, even if force-marched, to reached Cera; but given the loss of their lord, would they come? And could they hold out that long if the Eyrans did attack?
In truth, if he admitted it to himself, the South was not in a state of readiness for anything which approximated a full-scale war. Most of the Istrian aristocracy, after long years of affluent peace, had no experience of war, and no instinctive love of it either, their fathers having either perished in the last conflict with the old enemy or succumbed to the excesses which had created an empire founded on slavery and hedonism. But neither did they ennoble more deserving men or entrust them with positions suitable to their skills. As a result, the man to whom responsibility for recruiting, training and maintaining the country’s standing army had fallen following the sad deaths of Hesto and Greving Dystra had turned out to be a lily-skinned wastrel who had lined his own coffers handsomely from the army fund and failed to check on the rigour of his delegated officers. They in turn, knowing that their superior was not interested in their success or otherwise in turning out a well-schooled militia, had drunk most of the proceeds and done little to curb the excesses of the uniformed rabble which called itself the Istrian army. Half of them would have been criminals, had the law been properly applied, and the rest had been rousted out of prisons, brothels and drinking houses at the call to arms. He had known this, all of this, and turned a blind eye; or rather, blind faith, believing that passion like his own would carry the day.
In addition, building the invasion fleet had consumed a great sum of money and much of their manpower. He had won what he had gone for; but what good had it done him? He pictured the Rosa Eldi – still unconscious, her mind as closed to him as a locked vault, her apparently lifeless body spread-eagled as he had left her – and knew with a sudden biting insight that she would never succumb to him as she had to Ravn Asharson, knew that her unconsciousness was her last form of defence against him, the ultimate retreat.
This knowledge came to him with the force of an epiphany.
A lesser man might have cut his losses and made for the safety of his southern home with all speed; but Tycho Issian’s obsession
was a grand and towering force. Disappointment and obdurate pride made him all the more determined to hold on to his prize.
He would make a stand at Cera, send out messenger birds for reinforcements and see Ravn Asharson truly dead, this time.
Anger burned in him, a grim and steadfast flame.
First he had the pigeon master summoned from his tower. Then he went in search of Virelai.
‘Any sign, lookout?’
‘Nothing, sire.’
‘What say you, Stormway: if you had stolen a king’s wife and had an entire fleet in pursuit of you, where would you head for?’
The old retainer stroked his beard, his forehead knotted. ‘Well, Cera is the closest and finest of the cities on this coast, as I recall; but Forent is better fortified, and Jetra safest of all. But if I were the abductor and you on my tail, I’d be heading as far and as fast inland as my horses could carry me.’
Ravn Asharson frowned. If the southern lord had made for Jetra it lengthened both the odds of their success and the time before he would see his wife and child again.
‘Damn it. We’ll have to send out scouts.’ He kicked the strakes viciously. ‘Another wasted day.’
‘More if we’re unlucky.’
Ravn fixed the Earl of Shepsey with a forbidding glare. ‘We won’t be unlucky. We are in the right: the god will smile on us.’
‘Ah, gods . . .’ The Master glided to a halt beside them. ‘You do not seem able to help yourself from invoking these arbitrary beings, my lord king.’ He smiled benignly. ‘Instead of following my advice and trusting to the services of those you can see and touch. Like myself . . .’
Egg Forstson, who had taken a thorough and instinctive dislike to this old trickster, grimaced and looked away. His eyes sought out the Rockfaller, Aran Aranson, seated in the stern of the ship, idly turning a piece of frayed rope over and over in his fingers. He seemed distracted, out of sorts, not at all the same man with whom Egg had stood back to back in battle all those years ago. Skirting the rowers and their gear, the Earl of Shepsey made his way avast and touched Aran on the shoulder. The Rockfaller started, as if woken out of a dream. His hazel-grey eyes blinked, disorientated.
The king’s adviser shook his head. ‘Aran, Aran . . . You look as if you are in another world.’
The Rockfaller grunted, rubbed a hand across his face. ‘A world of grief, Egg, that I am.’
‘Grief?’
The piercing eyes searched his face. ‘Tell me, Egg, and tell me true: have you heard word of the women of Rockfall and what befell them?’
The Earl of Shepsey shook his head, mystified.‘What befell the women of Rockfall,’ he echoed. ‘No. Is it a riddle, my friend?’
‘It is that,’ Aran said, hugging his knees. ‘A most terrible riddle. What happens when a wolf leaves his den to hunt, and his cubs are left defenceless?’
Egg shrugged and laughed uncomfortably. ‘Well, he must hope that no foe happens by . . .’
Aran Aranson nodded morosely. ‘I am that wolf, Egg. I left the women of Rockfall without a hope when I sailed thoughtlessly on my quest for gold.’
Now Egg Forstson’s eyes gleamed. ‘Gold?’
Aran waved his hand impatiently. ‘It’s not the gold that’s important in this story, Egg: it’s the people. I’ve learned that lesson well, and too late.’
‘What has happened to your family, Aran?’
‘Taken by raiders.’ Aran laughed bitterly. ‘While I was indulging an obsession.’ He tied another knot in the string, then gazed out at the sea, his eyes dull.
Egg Forstson tightened his grip on the Rockfaller’s shoulder. ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place to search for them,’ he said gruffly. ‘We’ll find them, Aran: we will.’
‘Like you found Brina?’
The Earl of Shepsey’s hand came off the other man as if he were a hot kettle. ‘That’s unkind, Aran. I looked for her, as well you know; and the babes. Illa and Kiri. We never had time to decide on a name for the unborn one. Sur knows what she called her.’
‘Her?’
‘I always thought it would be a daughter. She’d be twenty summers old now; more. And Brina in the autumn of her years.’
‘If they’re not dead.’ Aran stated it flatly, with a singlebrowed frown.
‘They’re not dead.’ The White Queen had touched him and told him Brina was alive; and though he had been afraid at the time and thought it trickery, he had come to believe her all the same.
‘Perhaps it might be better if she were. Bera, too. Katla, I am quite sure, would never submit to them.’
Egg looked shocked. ‘You truly think it better they die than survive – what – rape? Humiliation? Surely our women are worth more than that? You speak as if they are market goods, which lose value if bruised or dirtied. If you weigh them so lightly, you might as well be Istrian yourself.’
Aran bristled. ‘Careful now, old man. Your king is too enraptured by the beguiling words of the mage to pay much notice to the splash you’d make going over the side.’
‘Ah, yes: the mage. Now how was it again that you came to be travelling with him?’
Aran sighed, looked skywards. He had no wish to rehearse that sorry tale again. Then his eyes narrowed. ‘What’s that?’
Egg squinted. ‘My sight isn’t what it was. Looks like a bird to me.’
‘It is.’
‘So? It is the air, birds fly in the air: show me a fish flying up there and I might be deflected from my question.’
‘It is a messenger pigeon, I would wager on it.’
The Earl of Shepsey yelled up to the lookout, who twisted on his perch, followed the old man’s pointing finger, then turned back gesticulating excitedly.
‘Messenger pigeon!’
The cry went up. Archers scrambled for their bows, wrapped away against the warping power of salt waves in waxed cloth at the bottom of their sea chests. Furs and sleeping bags of sealskin were strewed across the deck, followed by tools and knives and whetstones, lamps and wicks and flints.
‘Allow me, my lord.’
Rahe stepped to the gunwale and with a hieratic gesture drew from the depths a glimmer of silver, silver which then shot out of the ocean and into the air as swift and straight as any arrow. Suddenly the pigeon plummeted, spiralling wing over wing. A moment later, two creatures, unnaturally joined, hit the deck: a pretty Calastrian racing pigeon, heart-pierced by the bony proboscis of a gleaming wet garfish.
Attached to its tail was a long white ribbon of silk. Ravn knelt and untied it, flattened it carefully across his knee. He frowned, turned it over, then back again.
He looked back at the mage questioningly.
‘There’s nothing on it,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all – not a word, not a knot.’
Rahe raised his eyebrows. ‘May I?’ he enquired, taking up the message ribbon before Ravn had even had a chance to respond. He held the fluttering silk up in front of his face, shook it, sniffed it. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, I see. How interesting.’ He smiled at the Eyran king. ‘Very crafty.’
‘How can you have found a message in this bit of rag?’ Ravn asked, balling his fists. ‘It’s unmarked, I swear it.’
‘To the untrained eye, perhaps,’ the mage said. ‘Ah, Virelai, Virelai . . .’ He winked, then breathed upon the ribbon.
Letters flowered suddenly as if seeded in the silk. Those close enough to have witnessed both the fish-arrow and this latest miracle made the sign of Sur’s anchor and whispered to one another. A seither, the word went around, the King has a seither at his beck. That was good news, in their circumstances, surely? Some were less sure. Remember the Nemesis, said one; magic can be a dangerous ally.
‘Read it, then, man!’ Ravn demanded, his face flushed.
‘Enemy ships in sight. Send Forent and Hedera men to Cera at once.’
Ravn took a deep breath, closed his eyes.
‘Cera,’ he said softly. ‘Cera: now I shall have you.’
One third of Ravn’s fleet was sen
t east under the command of the Earl of Ness to harry the coastal towns of Forent and Hedera, which would not be expecting attack. By nightfall, the rest of the Eyran force had been deployed and a stealthy invasion was well underway. Two dozen ships were left to blockade the river’s mouth to prevent any sudden breakout from Cera. The crews of the Forest Cat and the Eagle’s Flight hauled their ships up onto the strand where earlier that day Tycho Issian and his captains had watched their approach and made their way stealthily inland to observe the city and report movements back to their king. They took with them three ravens and the Filasen twins, known for their fleetness of foot and fell-running agility.
A force of vessels sailed south and west to secure the coastline from Ixta to Cera. Satisfied that he had blocked reinforcements from reaching the Lord of Cantara and would shortly have cut off all possible escape routes, Ravn led the rest of his navy up the wide river mouth. There was no wind in this sheltered valley, so they took down the sails and rowed silently, their faces and beards limned with silver, their eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Each man the King had chosen to accompany him harboured a loathing for the Southern Empire: each man had lost a relative – a grandfather, a father, a wife, a daughter – and they were eager for retribution.
Aran Aranson sat beside his scull-partner, Odd Barnason, a man who had watched helplessly from another ship as his son burned to death during the battle for Halbo. Together they pulled their oar sleekly through the water, putting their backs into the movement, driving the ship determinedly forward. Thoughts of Bera and Katla accompanied the rhythm of each stroke, making his own expression grim. One glimpse showed that Odd was thinking the same. What he had said to Egg earlier that day had been no more than hollow, bitter words: he could not imagine an existence without his wife and his daughter, no matter what travails had come to them. They might even, it occurred to him, be here in this very city. And if they were alive, he swore he would rescue them. After that they must decide for themselves whether they wished his company or no.