Wild Magic

by Jude Fisher

  Tanto smiled to himself. It had been a most satisfying morning so far: the best he could remember in months. To have engineered the situation of having his father order that Saro attend him through all the worst aspects of his sick state had been delicious in itself, but this new development was finer than he could ever have dreamed of: for now he would be able to drive Saro insane through a bond of fear and torture, rather than simply through the daily horrors of cleaning up after him and tending to his every need and whim. Of course, he could require Saro to carry out all those pleasant small tasks as well. With very little trouble on his own part (which was how he liked it) he could ensure that his brother’s life became an utter misery; and by the time he went away to be a soldier – a soldier! the very idea of Saro attempting to lead a troop to battle, to wield a weapon in anger at all was wonderfully absurd – he would be as mad and loagy as a late-summer wasp, all its sting drawn and its understanding of the world a bleary miasma. He’d die in the first engagement: probably fall on his own sword, and thank the Goddess for it!

  Making sure that his brother was not yet coming towards the house, Tanto slipped back to the bed and withdrew from beneath the pile of cushions there the belt-knife he had the previous day stolen – with his own hands – from Saro’s room. It would not do to have Illustria find it when she came to look in on him: it served his purposes well to have everyone continue to regard him as the bed-confined weakling they believed him to be. The knife weighed heavily in his hand. Making the bruise on his chest with its pommel had hurt considerably at the time, but the investment had paid off far more handsomely than he’d expected.

  Being able to wound Saro’s mind was so very satisfying that it outweighed by far the discomfort sustained in hurting his own body.

  He edged over to door and stuck his head outside. No one was in sight. Father and Uncle Fabel would most likely be engaged in the morning’s observances, kneeling on their prayer mats like the superstitious fools they were; the women – well, they would hardly dare report his movements even if they spied him: they had learned to their cost what was likely to happen to them if they crossed his will. Using the wall to keep himself upright, he made his way down the corridor with remarkable speed for an invalid; and took the stairs on his hands and knees like a gigantic cockroach.

  It had been, Saro thought, as the sun dipped in the west, the worst day of his life, and that was truly saying something. After returning to his brother’s room to clear away the filth from the bed, he had changed the sheets and been forced to wash them by hand; and while the servants brought Tanto fresh linen and a breakfast fit for a lord, he was sent out to the practice field with one of yesterday’s loaves and whatever fruit he could find on the way, and was there beaten black and blue on every part of his anatomy, ostensibly for his slowness and clumsiness by Captain Galo Bastido. ‘The Bastard’, as the captain was colloquially known by the young men he had flogged and beaten into some semblance of swordsmanship, was during time of war the leading officer of Altea’s standing army; but currently, during what still purported to be peacetime, even with the threat of conflict hanging heavy overhead like those anvil-shaped clouds which concealed the makings of storms within them, he held merely the position of overseer for the Vingo estates, and was responsible for managing the family’s work-force of hillmen and slaves in their lowly tasks around the fields and groves. Another man (Santio Casta) held the more highly regarded position of estate manager, and it was to Casta that he was forced to report (which he saw as a great slight, since Casta had been one of his subordinates in the last conflict with the North). None of this had made Bastido a pleasant man, and that without his natural tendency towards physical and mental brutality, his arrogance and boar-thick skin, all of which had served him well in his soldiering career. The demeaning task of working the land with slaves and riff-raff who barely spoke any Istrian but grunted away in their own incomprehensible languages had further engendered in him a complete disregard for the sensibility of others; except when they were clearly in pain. A sharp yelp, a low groan, watering eyes and an agonised grimace – these were the sort of responses he understood, and causing them in the course of teaching a skill seemed to produce quick and effective results.

  Being asked to turn his rough attentions to his master’s second and least favoured son appeared to have cheered him considerably, for whenever Saro fell face down in exhaustion or at the brunt of the Bastard’s huge training sword, he would bellow with laughter.

  ‘“Treat him hard” your father said to me,’ Bastido had informed Saro cheerfully, standing over him after flooring him for the third time that morning. Despite being half a head shorter than Saro, he was a good twice his width and sinewy as dried mutton. ‘“He’s lazy and unwilling and shows little aptitude with a blade. Make a man of him” he said, “a soldier the Vingos can be proud of” – and that’s exactly what I’m being paid to do.’

  So now, with every inch of his skin, as it seemed, raw with grazes and cuts, every fibre of every muscle throbbing with bruises, Saro dragged his feet back up the stairs to his chamber, aware that once he fell upon his bed he would likely fall into a sleep so welcome and so deep that he would probably never make it back down again to the kitchens in time for any hot food, and that if he did not, he stood less chance than ever of withstanding the Bastard’s tender mercies the next day. But at the moment he could not find an iota of energy or will in himself to do anything more than collapse in the privacy of his own chamber. He was no more heedful than a beaten cur, no more intelligent than a mauled wolf, returning to its den. Tomorrow was tomorrow. With luck he might not live that long.

  He shouldered open the heavy wooden door, fell inwards with it and staggered in. He managed to kick off his boots and begin to struggle out of his dusty tunic. Arms and head still wrapped in its neck and sleeves, he fell backwards onto the bed. His exhausted brain registered the existence of something cold and hard beneath the aching muscles of his back. Rolling over, he stripped the swaddling tunic away and cast it onto the bedside chair. His right hand closed over a familiar object. He retrieved it from beneath himself and held it up. In the dying light of the day, he found he held his own belt-knife, which he had been unable to find that very morning. Its hilt was shit-smeared and foul.

  With a shudder of repulsion he dropped it on the floor, where it lay, shining dully, its blade as red with the sunset as if it had been freshly dipped in blood.

  And he knew, with a sudden fierce, instinctive knowledge, just where it had been in the time it had been absent from him, and how it had returned here.

  He slept no more that night.

  Five

  The King’s Shipmaker

  They slept that first night in the King’s city in the loft above a fletcher’s with whom the mercenaries had business. When Katla asked what this business might entail, Dogo had pulled an idiot face and girned at her horribly and Halli had shaken his head. So Katla had desisted from asking more until she and Halli had parted from the sell-swords the next morning and they were on their way to Morten Danson’s shipyard to carry to him Tam’s ‘royal’ invitation to the mumming – no common knotted string this, but a fine parchment of goatskin inscribed with fish-ink in Tam’s careful hand. For authenticity, Katla had donned a quartered tunic in green and red borrowed for this very purpose before they had left the ship from Silva Lighthand, one of the tumblers; and Halli was looking most uncomfortable crammed into a ridiculous suit of gold and green, its garishness partly mitigated by an all-encompassing cloak in sober grey on which the Snowland Wolf and its serpent enemy were picked out in neatly stitched red silk. Surprised though she had been by his skill in writing, Katla had been rather more amazed to discover that Tam Fox had sewn this piece himself. It was hard to think of those great, hairy hands engaged in anything much beyond wielding knives, hauling sail or squeezing women, let alone something so delicate, or so traditionally feminine, as embroidery, but the leader of the mummers had been unconcerned when she had la
ughed at him. ‘Mumming’s not all fun and games,’ he had said. ‘You’re on the road all the time. It can get very boring, especially when some pretty lordling’s decided to keep you waiting for a day or three while he hunts some mythical dragon or swives his latest piece to death. Besides, we can’t afford to keep a seamstress, a cook or a laundress, so we all have to muck in. We make and maintain all our own costumes, men and women alike: my troupe need to be as proficient with a needle as they are with batons, balls and knives.’ And Katla had to admit the workmanship on the clothes they had borrowed far exceeded her own. If she had to produce her own costumes, the audience would be entertained by rather more than they had bargained for, she thought wryly.

  The first half hour of the walk through Halbo city had been an entertainment in itself for Katla. She could not help but exclaim at every turn – Look, brother, windows with glass! – See that woman, her hair is purple! Oh, ’tis a headdress! – What sort of person lives in such a house? – Why are there bars on the door and spikes on the wall? – What are those marks there like burned tar? Oh, they are burned tar. From the war? – But why would an Eyran lord fight his king? A woman? Surely not – and so on, until Halli had threatened to knock her cold and leave her in a ditch for the next beggar to find. Then, nearing the outskirts of the city, they had witnessed a veritable cavalcade trotting smartly towards them: mounted men in fine cloaks and shining helms, their long hair braided and their beards knotted with brightly coloured fabric, pennants fluttering from spears that gleamed as if they had never been put to any other use; women peering out of covered wagons pulled by the sturdy ponies of the Northern Isles whose manes and plaited tails had been all threaded through with ribbons. One of the wagons, bearing a group of giggling girls combing out each other’s long hair, passed so close to Katla and Halli that they were forced to leap out of the way; but when Katla leapt back, shouting furiously and waving her fists, Halli grabbed her by the arm.

  ‘Don’t!’

  She stared at him incredulously. ‘They could have killed us—’ She stopped. Halli’s face was pale and strained, his eyes dark with some unreadable emotion. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  But he just shook his head and started walking again, head down, wrapped in grim thought and Tam’s fine cloak, and said not a word more all the way to the shipyard.

  Morten Danson’s yard lay encircled by the arms of a wide lagoon, beyond which the hills of the firth rose into the wide blue sky. Once, this vista must have been one of the most beautiful in the Northern Isles, for the land would have been forested as far as the eye could see with native oak, ash and pine, and the waters of the firth would have mirrored in its clear surface a dozen shades of green, the dark, serrated mountain peaks, the high white clouds scudding across bright northern skies. Now not even tree-stumps were visible in this place, for the forests had been replaced in the shorn uplands by a dense tangle of bracken and bramble and bilberry or by blackened mats of burned roots, producing a forlorn-looking landscape that was of little use to man or beast. Down on the river plain, ramshackle buildings had colonised the open areas – sheds of weathered planking with rusting tin roofs, structures of stone and turf, log cabins and warehouses, temporary shelters made from hide and poles – a miserable-looking shanty town. The hulls of a hundred vessels in various stages of completion lay amid all this chaos, their staves and stems poking up into the air like the skeletons of butchered whales. It looked, Katla thought, as if a great sea battle had been fought here millennia since and the waters had retreated, leaving in their wake the carcasses of the slain as a warning to others.

  In the lagoon a great litter of vessels lay scattered, most of them stationary, some slowly weaving a line in and out of the dozens of moored pontoons, barges and rafts of timber. Clearly the local area had been stripped of every suitable tree for miles around, and demand for new ships ensured that Morten Danson had to source his materials from rather further away. The largest of the logs must surely have come from the sacred Barrow Plantation, since the trees which had been cut and stripped of their branches to provide this timber must once have towered to over a hundred foot in height, ancient giants now laid low.

  A tributary stream of the river that flowed into the southern end of the lagoon had been diverted from its original course, which now lay abandoned, marked only by a line of darker grasses and a bed of dry pebbles through which tall weeds protruded, so that it now ran between culverts of stone right into the heart of the yard. Men ran from the stream to the steaming sheds with great leather buckets brimming with this diverted water, and so much vapour billowed up from these sheds into the air of the valley that from a distance it seemed that the manufacture that went on in this valley was not that of ships but of clouds: a weather-factory such as only Sur himself could possibly command.

  Katla and Halli made their way down the road leading into this well of industry and stared in amazement. Even Halli, who had travelled more than his sister, to Ness and Fairwater, and once, after an Allfair, as far as Ixta in the north of Istria, had never seen such evidence of man’s will exerted over the natural world.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ he breathed, taking in the great swathe of activity below them.

  ‘It’s awful,’ said Katla. ‘I think I’ll never take sail again.’

  ‘This place provides the lifeblood of Eyra, sister. How else can we master the oceans? Did you think the Fulmar’s Gift was whittled by our grandfather on an idle day from a couple spare branches from his favourite oaks?’

  Katla looked unhappy at his jibe. ‘I don’t know. It’s just—’ She spread her hands to take in the view. ‘There’s nothing . . . given back.’ She frowned. ‘I can’t explain what I mean. It’s all so grim.’ She stopped, at a loss. When she worked her metals in the forge she could feel the power of Elda flowing up out of the heat, through her and back into the ground. It was a kind of blessing, a bargain with the world. But this—

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The man who addressed them was small of stature and richly dressed. He was beardless in the southern fashion, but had a thin moustache neatly cut to reveal thin, chiselled lips and his sideburns had been trimmed to a sharp line accentuating the shape of his jaw and cheekbone. His collar was knife-sharp and edged with expensive brocade quite out of place in these surroundings; his under-tunic such an improbably perfect white that it must have been donned new today. Katla thought she had never seen a man who presented himself with such conscious effort at precision and contrived elegance. His voice, though, gave away his origins: an accent from the poor far east of the islands, flat and harsh, had yet to be turned out to quite the same level of perfection as the rest of him.

  ‘We have come to see Morten Danson, the owner of this yard,’ Halli said.

  The man looked him up and down, then turned his attention to Katla. She felt his eyes travel across her, taking in the ravaged hair, the outlandish costume, the smallness of her breasts. ‘More beggars and ne’er-do-wells no doubt come to seek employment,’ the man sighed. ‘We have enough pig-ignorant labourers here without casting about for the likes of you. Take your motley and thievery elsewhere and good day.’ He turned on his heel.

  Halli opened his mouth to reply, but Katla was quicker.

  ‘Never mind, brother,’ she said loudly enough that her words would reach the retreating figure. ‘If this gentleman wishes to prevent us from delivering an invitation to Morten Danson on behalf of the King then that’s up to him. I’m sure a mere shipmaker will hardly be missed among such an august crowd of nobles and men of influence.’

  The small man turned in a flurry of silks. ‘An invitation? To me? From the King, you say?’

  So this strutting cockerel was Morten Danson himself. Katla felt a keen stab of dismay. How could such an overweening and snobbish fool be the finest shipmaker in Eyra? His hands, pale and smooth as a lady’s, looked as though they had held no tool – at least not one used in the pursuit of carpentry – in decades. It made no sense at
all.

  Halli reached into his bag and removed the roll of goat-parchment, tied with a silken band. He held it out to the shipwright, who took it avidly, his long fingers playing up and down the shaft of the roll as if in a paroxysm of excitement. Then he unfurled it with shaking fingers. Katla watched how his eyeballs flickered up and down the unfamiliar markings and his brow knit in consternation. He cannot read, she thought delightedly. It means nothing to him at all; so much for pig-ignorance. She coughed delicately and took the parchment away from the shipmaker deftly.

  ‘You know we were instructed to declaim the invitation properly, brother,’ she said to Halli, extending the paper to him. ‘’Tis hardly polite to expect a gentleman to do his own reading—’

  Halli’s face became carefully bland, although behind his smooth expression she could sense his mind working furiously. ‘Ah yes,’ he said after a bare moment’s hesitation. He held the parchment out at arm’s length. ‘The King – Lord Ravn, son of Ashar, son of Sten of the Northern Isles – requests the presence of his most loyal and esteemed shipmaker, Morten Danson, to an evening of entertainment on Halfmoon Night by the world-famous mummers under the chieftancy of the great Tam Fox at Halbo Castle to celebrate his marriage to the beauteous Rose, Queen of his heart.’

  ‘An entertainment? Tomorrow night? At Halbo Castle? By Tam Fox’s mummer troupe? Invited by King Ravn himself?’ The shipmaker’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘You are invited to attend the feast, and to enjoy the King’s hospitality overnight in the guest chambers.’ Halli finished loudly. He furled the parchment back into its roll and proffered it to Danson who took it from him greedily.