by Jude Fisher
Saro took a breath. ‘Alisha, we need your help. Katla may die otherwise.’
She looked up then, and her eyes were sunken and hollow. ‘We are all going to die, Saro Vingo, every one of us.’
And after that she would say no more.
When he went miserably back to the brig, he found Mam kneeling on the planking beside Katla. ‘It’s not looking good,’ Mam said briskly. She beckoned to Saro. ‘Here, you feel. Her pulse is very fast.’
Filled with dread, Saro flung himself down beside the Eyran girl and placed his fingers on the side of her neck. The pulse there was weak and fluttering, twice its normal speed. He made up his mind before he could allow panic to set in. ‘You and I must get her to Falla’s Rock,’ he said to the mercenary leader. ‘Now.’
The merchant and his wife were at the gunwale, surveying the scene nervously. ‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ the man said. ‘I thought it was a pilgrimage. I thought everyone would be on their knees, praying; that the Goddess would walk amongst us.’
His wife smiled suddenly, her doughy face – pale from years of being hidden from the sun beneath a veiling sabatka – suddenly beatific. ‘She is amongst us. I can sense her presence. If you pray, you can feel her.’ She put her hand out to Saro. ‘Pray with us,’ she said.
Saro shook his head gently. ‘I’m sorry. I wish you well, and I thank you for our passage, but now we must leave you.’ He paused, remembering Alisha’s words. ‘I hope you find the Goddess,’ he finished, and squeezed the matron’s shoulder.
Somehow, they got Katla to the shore. She murmured at the jolt as Mam handed her down to Saro, but after that made no sound at all, nor did she open her eyes. The mercenary leader raked the way clear with the flat of her sword, growling at anyone who dared to impede her. Behind this great battering ram of a woman, Saro struggled along with Katla in his arms. He could not see where he was going, could see hardly anything at all but the tangled white braids of the mercenary leader’s head bobbing and weaving in front of him, that and the looming silhouette of the Rock an impossible distance away through all the conflict and confusion.
By now, the fighting had spilled down onto the plain itself. Black dust rose into the air, kicked up by the crazed passage of feet and hooves, by the charge of the living, and the fall of the dying. No way ahead seemed easier than any other; and Mam was soon forced to use both point and blade. A miasma of blood sprayed around Saro. He could feel it every time he breathed in; feel it, too, on his skin and in his hair. Katla moaned and twisted in his arms and opened her eyes.
Katla Aransen had never been one to shrink from bloodshed, never one to shirk a fight. If she were truthful about it, she had felt most alive at those times when she had had a sword in her hand and an enemy at the other end of it. She had lost count of the number of men she had killed, and felt no shame about any part of that. She had fought because she must, to defend herself or her kin, she had fought when the cause was clear and needs must. But as she gazed upon the scene before her now, waking suddenly out of what seemed a dream of pain and torture into something far worse, she felt a powerful repulsion at what seemed a vista of random violence. It was as if the whole world had run mad. Everywhere she looked, something terrible was happening. It was not just that man fought man, or that Istrian fought Eyran: she took that much for granted. It was the extraordinary mixture of folk entangled in the conflict, for clearly not all of them were combatants. There were women, cowering out of the way of the men and their horses, women in traditional Istrian robes, nomad women, women in Eyran dress, women without veils. And children, too. Who in Sur’s name would bring a child to this place of horror? she wondered, appalled.
Just as she was thinking this, a scrap of red, small, low down, caught her eye. It vanished between the feet of an Eyran spearman, then reappeared behind him in a yard of open space. She focused on it, frowning, then it was obscured again.
A fox. She had just seen a fox, in the middle of a battlefield.
Saro jumped suddenly sideways and came down with a thud which jolted her wound painfully. She closed her eyes. Perhaps she was already dying and her failing mind was offering her flickers of memory, interposed with the reality of the battle. That must be it. She dared another glimpse, but the fox was nowhere to be seen.
There was, however, a pair of wolves. Grey-coated, hoary around the muzzle, their golden eyes puzzled and yet determined, they threaded their way between the stamping feet. Overhead, a skein of swans flew, honking.
Exhausted, Katla closed her eyes again. If you’re going to torment me like this, she told the god in her head, then just get on with it and let me die. I’m in no mood for your games.
The Man and the Beast gazed down on the carnage below.
We are too late, it seems, the cat said.
If we had not meandered about collecting up your comrades, we would have been here long before her.
It is as much their right as any other living being’s to witness what will come. They must remake the world, too. It is not just for your humans, you know.
Sirio pursed his mouth. Even so, look at it down there. I should have kept the sword, he conveyed with regret. Where is our beloved?Something must be amiss: she would surely never allow such carnage unless she were out of her wits or . . . He paused, suddenly afraid. Your senses are finer than mine: can you scry her out amongst all that chaos?
The cat lifted its head and stared down at the heaving plain. It sniffed the air. Its ears twitched. Its whiskers bristled. Its tail flicked in an agitated manner, coiling and darting like a snake. At last it said, I have called her but she does not answer. Virelai hears me, though he cannot see her either, and his leg pains him too much to concentrate properly. It paused. The other is down there, too, the Thief. I look forward to dealing with him. And it showed the Man its fangs.
But the god had a faraway look on his face. They are all praying, he declared with satisfaction. They call on me and my beloved. It is good to know we are not forgotten, even if they do invoke us mainly as they die.
There was a lull in the battle as they neared the Rock, as if folk were afraid to fight in its shadow. Mam stared up. ‘It’s damned tall,’ she judged. ‘And bloody steep, too.’ She glared at Saro. ‘Now what?’
‘There are steps carved into it, around the other side,’ he wheezed.
Mam took in his gritted jaw, the strain in the corded muscles of his neck and shook her head. ‘You’re about as strong as an Eyran chit,’ she said sadly, clicking her teeth. ‘Here, you take the sword and guard my back while I carry her up.’ She fixed him with a steely gaze.‘If anything happens to me, it happens to Katla Aransen: remember that.’
They made the exchange gingerly, and in Saro’s case with some regret. It was not just that he missed the touch of the girl against him; but that carrying her made him feel they were inextricably bound; that if one failed, so would the other, for he did not, he realised with sudden force, want to live without her. Neither did he much want to use the sword, even in their defence.
As Mam set her foot onto the first of the steps the ancient elders of the land had carved into the Rock, Katla revived a little from her daze. She reached out her hands. ‘Let me touch it,’ she begged.
Mam twisted a little sideways, but kept climbing. Katla trailed her palms over the rough surface, allowed the jangle of sensation it threw off to travel up her arms, into her skull, down through her spine.
‘Ahhhh,’ she sighed.
Below her, climbing awkwardly with his back to the steps, Saro looked up and felt, out of nowhere, the sharp sting of jealousy.
Wherever the Rose of the World was, the fighting was fiercest, as if men were drawn to her presence.
Aran Aranson watched in sorrow as the Earl of Stormway fell to an Istrian spearman and suddenly found himself fighting at Ravn Asharson’s back. They were deep inside the Istrian ranks now, surrounded on all sides, but nothing seemed to deter the Eyran king. His sword arced and thrust like the blade of a
n avenging god. ‘For Sur!’ he yelled as he decapitated an opponent and spun to gut another. ‘For Sur and my love!’ He sounded, Aran thought, as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself. He gritted his teeth and parried an inept blow from an Istrian lad young enough to be his son. He had some of Halli’s dark look, too: an intense black regard from under the brim of his ill-fitting helmet. Yelling something unintelligible, he swiped at Aran again, but the Rockfaller found that when it came to it, he could not bring himself to kill the boy. Pulling back on his stroke, he spitted the lad neatly in the shoulder and passed on, hearing him howl. He’d recover; which was more than could be said for poor Halli.
The hot press of men stamped their way through the volcanic dust, sweating, hacking, groaning. They stumbled over the dead and the dying, never knowing whether it was a man they knew on whom they trampled, for to look down was to risk death oneself. Boys not yet able to grow even a stubble fought men with beards twisted into braids and threaded through with string and shells, ribbons off their wives’ shifts, bits of bone and horn; lads coming to their first battle with an ache of suspense in the guts found themselves in deadly combat with grizzled veterans; new officers intent upon proving their worth battled anxiously against Eyran warriors who knew too many dirty tricks to let them fight the way they had learned in a practice square. Despite the disparity in numbers, the advantage was never held for more than a few minutes by either side.
On and on they fought, and above them the sun climbed past the zenith and began its slow downward descent. The battle wheeled around and soon, where they had been fighting uphill, Aran found himself moving downward with his king. Ahead of them, he thought he could for a moment glimpse the walnut-brown features of the Istrian lord whose theft of the Rose had caused this entire conflict; then he was gone away into the chaos and a dozen men had filled the gap between them.
Aran fought in a dream. He hacked and parried, hacked again, turned, found enemies all around. His arm ached; his body ached. In a brief moment of reflection, he found that his soul ached, too. Much as he had chafed at the boredom of the round of seasons at Rockfall rolling like a wheel on a flat road, each with its allotted tasks, the only unpredictability the weather; much as he had longed for adventure, for a chance to prove himself a man – a hero – this needless, brutish slaughter was not what he had sought; just as, in the end, he had not wanted the treasures of Sanctuary. He felt weary unto death. It would be so easy to let the next man take him down and stop the wheel entirely.
As he thought this, an image entered his mind: a vision of his wife, thinner than he remembered her, tougher-looking, in the company of other women he did not know. She stood on a knoll on the slopes above him, the peaks of the Skarn Mountains flaring away into the distance, their snow red with sunlight.
He blinked, brought back his focus just in time to see a man in a greasy goat-hide corslet coming at him with a short spear. Without conscious thought, he jabbed out hard and fast. In horrified fascination he watched the tip of his sword slipped neatly between the rusty iron plates stitched into the leather, watched the blade shear through the goat hide as if it was cloth and penetrate the man’s chest without a sound. Blood welled through the hole, bubbled out over the tang of the blade, stuck in the goat hairs still visible on the leather, and trickled down the useless, ancient armour. The Istrian’s knees buckled slowly; then he was down, his final scream echoing in Aran’s head.
When he turned to look again, Bera was still where he had glimpsed her, gazing down into the melee. He knew she could not make him out amongst the chaos; even so, he felt as if their eyes met across that killing ground, and he felt ashamed.
‘Hurry – he’s just ahead!’
‘Where’s he going?’
‘Sur’s Castle, by the look of it; and with the woman, too.’
‘He can’t be meaning to go up the Rock, surely?’
Joz made a face. ‘Safest place, amidst all this. And if you were commanding an army, where would you rather be – down here slipping around in the blood and guts, or up there with a clear view of the battlefield?’
‘True.’
‘You’ve got to stop him – he’s got my mother.’
It was the first thing they’d heard the sorcerer say since Joz had picked him up.
‘Your mother?’ Joz was incredulous. ‘What, the White Lady?’
‘The Rose of the World, the Goddess, yes.’
‘Goddess?’ Even as they ran, Dogo snorted contemptuously. ‘She’s a looker, right enough, but I wouldn’t go that far—’
‘If she’s a goddess,’ Joz said evenly, ‘then how come she’s let him sling her over his shoulder like a sack of turnips?’
‘Yes,’ sniggered Dogo. ‘And if you’re the son of a goddess, how come you’re letting Joz do the same?’
‘Why doesn’t she just strike him dead and stop it all?’
‘She can’t, it’s not in her nature, she makes things grow, she heals—’
Dogo howled. ‘What’s the point of being a god if you can’t kill people?’
So saying, he rammed his short sword through the back of the man in front of him, stepped aside to let him fall. Life was cheap: especially if you weren’t getting paid for the job of taking it.
But by the time they reached Sur’s Castle, the Lord of Cantara was halfway up the stairs. Arrows bounced harmlessly off the rock all around him. Two paces below, an ugly man in the boiled-leather harness of a seasoned soldier followed, a limp figure in white draped over his shoulder.
Joz swore. ‘Now what?’
‘Take him to the King?’
‘If I know anything about Ravn Asharson, he’ll be wherever the fighting is worst.’
‘To the ships, then,’ Dogo suggested, hamstringing a man who was showing too much interest in Joz’s burden.
‘Aye,’ said Joz. ‘Wait it out. Not our fight, after all.’
Dogo grinned. ‘Could just nick the ship. Nice piece of work, the Sur’s Raven, as I recall.’
Joz Bearhand gave no response to this thought. He was staring up at the Rock intently.
‘By all the devils of the sea . . .’
Dogo followed the line of his gaze. There, on top of the Rock, was their erstwhile leader and the young man they knew as Saro Vingo, kneeling over someone who looked a lot like Katla Aransen.
‘Katla, Katla—’
‘I don’t think she can hear you, lad.’
‘But she said it was a place of power . . . I thought it would save her.’
Mam placed a hand on his shoulder. There were tears in her eyes: she blinked them away quickly before Saro could look up and see them, the memory of Persoa’s passing brought back to her sharply by the sight of Katla Aransen fading into unconsciousness.
Below the Rock, the fighting was more savage than ever: a desperate heave of men and weapons all converging around its base, as if for some reason it had become the focal point of the battle. As she looked, a movement snagged her eye: someone was coming up the carved stairs—
At once her sword was out and she was moving, calling back to Saro to beware, knowing even as she did so that he would not hear her, and that even if he did, he would not care.
A dark head appeared over the edge, but whoever it was, he was looking down below him, snarling at someone to hurry, hurry and did not see the danger about to befall him. Mam’s eyes narrowed as she recognised the intruder. She balanced her blade and waited, her grin one of grim satisfaction. Here was the leader of the Istrian force at her mercy: she could have his head for nothing or present it to the Eyran king and earn herself a fortune. None of it made up for the tragedy of it all: but she recognised a professional opportunity when it presented itself.
‘Ha!’ she yelled at him. ‘Come up quietly, my lord of Cantara, or go swiftly to your death.’
Tycho’s head snapped up. In the seconds in which he had to live, he gazed upon the mercenary, took in her fearsome aspect, the raised sword, the menace in her expression. His face contorted int
o a mask of repulsion.
‘A woman!’ he shrieked. ‘You’re a woman! A woman: on Falla’s Rock!’
Mam was taken aback. She laughed. ‘A woman, yes! A woman who’s going to cleave your head from your shoulders!’
Fury and pent-up frustration lent him horrible speed. Faster than Mam could ever have expected, the southern lord had hoisted himself up and over the edge of the Rock and was on his feet, his sword waving wildly in front of him.
‘Get your filthy carcase off this sacred place!’ he howled.
Mam knocked his weapon away as if it had been a wet stick.
‘The only carcase here will be yours,’ she growled, and brought her sword down in a vicious chop.
The blade described a mighty arc, bright silver like a leaping salmon flashing in the sunlight . . . and stopped dead, a hair’s breadth from the skin of his exposed neck. Mam stared at her sword, nonplussed, tried a second stroke, which also failed to make contact.
A second figure appeared at the top of the steps, a second figure slipping from the hold of a third.
‘You cannot kill him,’ said a voice distinctly, and suddenly there was a goddess standing in the light, a goddess with her hair in disarray and blood all over her robe, but a goddess nonetheless. She seemed to absorb all the available light, so that where before the day had seemed bright, now it seemed dull and lacklustre. Mam could not take her eyes off her. She felt the marrow in her bones grow cold.
‘Why not?’ she croaked.
The Goddess smiled. ‘Because he is mine.’
At this, Tycho Issian’s expression became ravenous. ‘And you are mine, beloved.’
Manso Aglio shook his head. He did not understand what was being played out here: it seemed despite all her protestations and histrionics the pale woman would have the Lord of Cantara after all. He shook his head sadly. Women, he would never understand them.