by Jude Fisher
‘I thought there’d be whores.’
‘Dogo, you’re an idiot. There’s only whores here during the Allfair.’
‘How long do we have to wait for that, then?’
Doc rolled his eyes. ‘Somehow I don’t think there’s going to be one here this year.’
‘Why are we here, anyhow?’
Joz shrugged. ‘To fight? It’s generally what we do.’
Dogo stared around. ‘Who shall we start with, then? That bunch of matrons over there?’ He indicated a gaggle of women trying to drag their wagon out of the way before the track ran into a deep defile. Its back axle was broken, the wheels splayed apart. The column passed, stepping around it, no one stopping to help. ‘Or them?’ A crowd of old men, some nomads and children, yeka, horses, dogs, and what looked a pair of wolves. Surely not? He shook his head and turned back. ‘Now this lot look more promising.’
Doc shaded his eyes. ‘Isn’t that—?’
Joz Bearhand swore horribly.‘It’s that bastard Tycho Issian,’ he pronounced.
‘What, the one who’s been burning Footloose the length and breadth of Istria?’
‘The very same.’
‘Waste of good women.’
‘Women, men, children, Wandering Folk, herb wives, hillmen, healers, heretics – anyone whose face didn’t fit. An affront to human life, that one.’ Doc spat in the dust at his feet.
‘Waste of good spit, that. My throat’s so dry I’d roast a nomad myself if it’d earn me a decent ale – ow!’
Dogo’s chinstrap broke under the impact of Joz’s hand and the helmet went rolling off down the mountainside. The little man stepped to the edge of the trail to watch it bounce several times and come to a halt in the scrub grass at the bottom.
‘Ah well, it’s no great loss. Rubbish, these Istrian helmets are.’
He turned back to his companions, just in time to see the arrow lodge in Doc’s eye.
‘To me, to me!’ The Lord of Cantara’s voice shrieked over the whistle of arrow-flight, over the screams of injured horses and the cries of dying men falling around him. ‘Protect the lady!’
The Rosa Eldi stared around, eyes wide in bewilderment and horror. The ambush had been so swift— Her horse skittered suddenly as the man next to her howled in agony and fell sideways, half in and half out of his saddle.
‘Virelai!’ she cried.
But Virelai was gone, his mount taking flight in its terror, its rider flopping this way and that like a straw doll tossed into rapids. The Rose of the World kicked her own horse and the black and white lifted its head and took off after the bay.
When Tycho looked back, she was gone, already fifty yards away, the piebald horse a moving patch of light and shadow amidst the welter of bodies. Panic seized him. He drew his sword and flourished it wildly.‘To me!’ he cried again.‘Follow her!’
Direct progress was difficult: everywhere before them was chaos, as travellers and wagons, horses and dogs, wolves and goats and cats impeded both the Eyran attackers and the Istrian pursuers. Noncombatants scattered in all directions, screaming. Tycho hacked at them mercilessly.‘Get out of the way!’ His sword made brief, brutal contact and an arm flew overhead, spraying him with gore. The man to whom it had once belonged – an elderly nomad, separated from his small troop – watched it in puzzlement, then crumpled to the ground.
Blood was in the air, in the ground: you could smell it, the iron-sweet tang of it. The lady was close, but there was a heaving melee all around her. Beyond, he could see the southern lord battling his way towards her like a man possessed, with half the Istrian army at his heels. Aran Aranson assessed the situation swiftly. It had started as a reconnaissance mission, an advance scouting party sent on to see what they could see, return silently and report back; but when they had got to the top of the ridge they had been amazed to find the enemy almost upon them. An ambush had seemed too good a chance to miss, the defile a perfect situation for a surprise attack. All they had to do was to create sufficient confusion, separate the Rose from the Istrians and carry her off back to Ravn and make sail back to Eyra. Audacious and opportunistic, it might have made him the hero of the hour; but the situation was becoming more foolhardy by the second.
‘Back, back to the plain!’
Aran gave the signal to disengage and those Eyrans within earshot or sightline took to their heels, dodging and weaving between the knots of travelling folk, the rocks and the enemy. They were agile, sinewy men, born to rugged country and harsh conditions, and now they were running for their lives. Desperation lent fuel to their muscles. Unencumbered by armour or horses, they slipped back through the narrow defile whence they had sprung and hurled themselves down the mountainside, surfing the screes, zigzagging between boulders, at a speed no Istrian could match. Even as targets for the archers they proved too fleet and unpredictable, bobbing and jagging like hares; in moments they were gone.
Istrian militiamen poured through the gap after them, frustrated and furious to see them escape, oblivious to the shouted commands for order from behind them. Down the treacherous trackway they plunged, their horses sliding, loose rock skittering beneath their hooves. One lost its footing and ploughed into two in front, which in turn slid sideways and tumbled, smashing unstoppably into a cadre of troops and spilling their shrieking riders down three hundred feet of broken ground.
Of the chaos ahead Tycho Issian was unaware: all he knew was that the Rose was within sight and apparently unharmed, just passing through the defile on her runaway horse. Spurring on his mount, he trampled a dying soldier underfoot and raced after her. The piebald was a wily beast. It sensed clear air on the other side of the gap, a chance to escape the mayhem on this side. Head down, oblivious to the pursuit and knowing only that its rider was anguished, it wove between knots of fighting men, terrified travellers and loose animals straight for the gap.
Tycho swore foully. She was getting away. ‘Stop her!’ he yelled, but no one heard him. He ploughed through the middle of a wagon train, scattering children and dogs, rammed through a contingent of his own soldiery and rode on, screaming imprecations.
An unhorsed Istrian tried to stop the piebald and was spun aside for his pains. Emerging through the gap in the defile, the Rosa Eldi’s mount slid to a halt. The path below was jammed with fighting men and dying horses; but when it turned to seek another way, the Lord of Cantara was upon it with a triumphant shout. He grabbed at its reins, drew it alongside with such force he cut the piebald’s mouth so that blood jetted from it, covering its rider’s skirts. But the Rosa Eldi did not seem to be aware of anything: she had her hands clamped to her head and was screaming, an ululating wail of terror and despair.
Tycho grabbed her with more force than he’d been aware he owned and tried to haul her from her saddle into his. Her screaming stopped abruptly, but if he had expected thanks for his rescue, he was disappointed. She struggled out of his grasp, slipped to the ground and stood there, her regard harrowed.
‘Death! Death everywhere! Stop it, stop it! I have lost Virelai. Where is my son?’
‘I have not seen him.’ This was a lie: he had seen the sorcerer’s horse go down in the melee.
‘Stop this bloodshed: find my son!’
Tycho stared at her. ‘For Falla’s sake, let me help you.’ He leaned down, reached out to catch her wrists, but she stepped away from him, wild-eyed, stumbled over a pair of twisted bodies.
She looked down and wailed again, muttering all the while, ‘Virelai, Virelai, where are you?’ Blood had begun to soak into the hem of the white robe; already the ermine trim of the cloak was sodden with it.
‘Are you mad? Do you want to die here?’
A soldier blundered up to her, stopped in his tracks at the sight of her and stumbled like a dreaming man into the path of a runaway horse. She covered her face with her hands.
Manso Aglio despatched the Eyran he had taken prisoner and looked to where his commander appeared to be in conversation with the White Woman in the midst o
f battle. He rolled his eyes, kneed his mount and grabbed her up. ‘No indignity intended, lady,’ he apologised, tucking her over his cantle. ‘This way, my lord,’ he shouted to Tycho. ‘We’ve got them on the run!’
A riderless horse came thundering over him. He rolled into a ball, his arms wrapped around his head and cowered into the neck of his own mount. Dying, the creature whinnied again and shifted its bulk minutely. He shoved at it, but to no avail; all it did was to settle itself even more firmly on his crushed leg. Panic and pain gripped him like a vice, putting all thoughts of magic to flight. He lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness, remembering the last time he had lain on a battlefield thus; but then the number of men involved in the fray had been a fraction of those involved in this chaos, even without the innocents and animals which had been caught up in the battle. He sucked in a breath, expelled it slowly, tried to gather himself. From nowhere, a spell came to him and he clutched at it gratefully and muttered it over and over. The mantra took his mind off the pain in his leg, which was as well, for it was the worst he had ever experienced. After a while, the carcase of the beast had lightened so that he found he could move it just an inch, then two; and at last he dragged himself out from beneath its bulk and heaved himself up.
Of his mother and the Lord of Cantara there was no sign. The movement of the battle, if movement could be discerned amidst the melee, was away from him, towards and beyond the gap in the cliffs ahead. True fear struck him now. What would happen if she were to be broken and battered down as he was, before she came into the full extent of her powers? What hope would there be for the world? What hope for him?
‘Help me,’ he moaned and tried to make a shout of it. The sound vanished into the general noise without a trace.
He tried to stand, found his leg would not do anything he asked of it, fell back down.
Suddenly, rough hands were upon him, lifting him up. He gazed around and found himself confronted by a giant of a man with an Eyran beard and steely eyes. He had no quarrel with the North; but how to convey that before the man slit his throat?
‘You’re the lord’s sorcerer, aren’t you?’ the man said in the Old Tongue.
Virelai did not know whether to assent to this or not. He looked from the big Eyran to his companion, a small round man with a shock of black hair standing up in spikes sticky with sweat, or blood, or who knew what else?
‘Got to be,’ opined the little man. ‘We’ll get a reward for him.’
‘Aye, but from which side?’
‘Does it matter?’
The big man raised his eyebrows. ‘I suppose not,’ he said, and threw Virelai over his shoulder.
‘We saw her, sire. We got as close as we could, but we could not capture her. She seemed unharmed, though distressed.’
Ravn Asharson’s face was alive with calculation. ‘How many of them?’
‘Hard to say.’ Aran frowned. ‘Some thousands, though they are ill-disciplined and broke ranks at first blood. And there are a lot of ordinary folk – not soldiery – heading this way on foot, and in wagons. It’s as if they’ve been drawn here, just like those in the boats.’ He gestured down at the strand where vessel after vessel was putting in.
‘War is often a curiosity to those who have never fought,’ Ravn said dismissively. ‘Perhaps now they’ve seen some of its horror at first hand they’ll turn back. Where’s Stormway?’
‘Overseeing the arrival of the rest of the fleet.’
‘Get down there, hurry them on. We’ll carry the battle to them while they’re in disarray. If we let them regroup down on the plain their numbers will overwhelm us.’
Manso Aglio roared commands up and down the Istrian lines. He chivvied, he swore, he whacked stragglers with the flat of his sword, he bullied them into some sort of order. Partway down the track to the wide plain, he drew them up behind a wall of rough lava which made a fine natural defence, the closest thing to a battlement you’d find in open ground. He was pleased with this strategic bent of mind he’d discovered in himself, pleased that he’d got it in him to command an army, pleased, too, in a way he didn’t quite understand, that he’d saved the woman. It wasn’t that he wanted her as a prize of war; no, it was something more . . . noble than that, though that seemed the least likely epithet he would ever apply to himself. She had seemed so vulnerable, so fragile, in the midst of the violence, so out of place, that he had been filled with what he could only think of as compassion. That had surprised him. He’d thought himself beyond finer feelings after serving in the Miseria all those years.
He looked for her now, safely back in the Lord of Cantara’s custody, saw where the southern lord stood with his arms around her. It seemed, at first sight, as though they were locked in an embrace, but when he looked again it was clear that she was trying to pull away. For a moment, he felt compelled to help her; then he remembered who he was and laughed at this unwonted chivalry, then took himself off to do what he was good at: ordering soldiers around.
Tycho Issian wrestled the woman around so that she faced the plain. ‘Look, we can see the Rock from here: will this not do?’
She turned to look at him in disbelief. ‘Of course not.’
Desperate now, his erection so hot and hard he thought it might burn away the clothing that thwarted him, he pressed himself against her pelvis, felt the bones grind beneath him.
‘It may be as close as we can get.’
She pushed at him in disgust, thrust her head back and looked him in the eye, her gaze like ice. ‘I shall claim you on the Rock, or nowhere.’
The voice of command entered his soul: there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Turning to the gathered troops, he yelled: ‘Forward! To the Rock! To Falla’s sacred Rock!’
Manso Aglio watched in dawning horror as his beautifully arrayed troops broke rank yet again and charged like the rabble they were down the slopes, screaming like souls in the torment of the Goddess’s fires.
Mounting, Tycho Issian turned and grabbed up his prize. ‘Death or the Rock!’ he cried again. ‘I will not be denied!’ Forcing a kiss upon her, he saw in consternation that at his touch her eyes rolled up in her head.
The press of vessels trying to put into the ashy strand was absurd, but the merchant had some little while ago transformed from the plumply ineffectual, nervous fellow whom his wife bullied mercilessly about what he should or should not say, eat or do into an expert steersman with a glint in his eye. Smaller craft saw the barge coming and got out of the way.
Mam was up on the prow like the worst kind of figurehead, roaring at obstacles like a sharp-toothed troll: that encouraged those competing for the same piece of beach to change their minds, too. She scanned the scene ahead and turned back to report, ‘If there’s a goddess in amongst that lot we’ll have a job finding her.’
Saro craned his neck. The sight which offered itself was alarming. He didn’t know where to look first, for the entire vista was teeming and fraught. In the foreground seasoned Eyran warriors shoved their way up from their beached vessels through a crowd of what appeared to be mere spectators, as if people had forgotten there was a war on and had turned up early to do business at an Allfair and were milling about in a purposeless way.
Farther up the strand, where only last year his family had pitched their booth, the melee deepened as a thick wave of fighters pressed its way up the slopes. Ahead of this, a line of Eyran spearmen held off the hapless cavalry of an enemy he could only suppose to be Istrian militia. It was a short defensive line, already dented in places, the Istrians flowing around the broken parts like surf around skerries.
Beyond the spear-line, more chaos.
Everywhere he looked, something odd snagged at his attention: a group of Eyran matrons in breeches made of sailcloth wading ashore from their anchored fishing smack; what appeared to be a herd of wild pigs dodging in and out of the crowd; Istrian women in robes without veils; mixed bands of nomads and townsfolk staring in bewilderment up the slopes as if they had expected somet
hing else here entirely. Amongst all this disorder, the great rock rose like a castle, massive and foursquare, its shoreward face rosy in the sunlight.
As if she sensed his attention, Katla Aransen turned her own face to the rock, known for generations in her land as Sur’s Castle, even if the southerners dedicated it to their goddess. Its proximity called to her above the cries and howls of the mass of humanity that washed around its foot as an ecstatic shudder in her bones, her skin; a shudder which flickered in her belly like the promise of life.
‘Saro—’ It was barely more than a whisper, but he turned at once, so attuned was he to her needs. ‘Saro, the Rock. You must take me to the Rock.’
He gazed down at her in dismay, then back out into the melee.
She tugged at his sleeve. ‘Please, I know it’s where I must be. I can feel it . . .’
He shook his head. ‘We would never be able to get you there, and even if we did—’
Her eyes were febrile and bright. ‘You must. It’s a place of power. Even if I die, I must die on the Rock.’
The word caught at Saro’s heart, gripped it painfully. He wrapped his fingers over hers. ‘All right,’ he said softly. ‘I promise, though I’m not sure how we’ll manage it.’ He wondered why he had promised this as he disengaged himself gently and went to find Alisha Skylark.
The nomad woman was sitting down in the hold with her arms around her knees. She did not look up when he lowered himself down beside her.
‘Will you look at Katla again, Alisha? She asks that we take her to the Rock but I’m sure she’s not strong enough to survive the attempt. Is there something you could give her, maybe even a draught that would put her to sleep while Mam and I carry her? I worry about the pain – it could be too much for her to bear.’
Alisha shook her head. She was pale, he could see, paler than usual and her knuckles were white where she gripped her knees. ‘It is wrong,’ she said. ‘It is all wrong. Something terrible is here. I can feel it, but I do not understand it. It should be wonderful, but it is all wrong.’ She paused. Then: ‘Death is here,’ she whispered. ‘Death’s shadow lies over everything.’