by Jude Fisher
Down below, a larger than average wave crashed onto the jagged rocks at the base of the keep with a roar, sending up a great geyser of white water. Flecks of spume eddied up into the damp air. The sea retreated, leaving behind it a sucking vacuum.
Virelai shuddered – an instinctive reaction to bad memories and the chilly air; but when he felt the hairs on the back of his neck start to rise, he knew the cause was more tangible. Bëte had returned.
Ever since the bizarre vision he had been afforded back in Cera, he had been wary of her. He turned now quickly, unhappy at the thought of the beast’s eyes on his unguarded back.
She sat in the doorway as neat as a statue of Bast, Falla’s feline companion: head up, paws together, tail tucked seamlessly around her feet and regarded the sorcerer with a merciless green gaze. There was no love lost between the two of them: Virelai had the strange feeling the cat blamed him for its separation from the Rosa Eldi. A whole continent away from the hypnotic hands of the woman who had been able to reduce it to a dribbling, purring pet and now forced to eject spells at another’s whim, the cat was developing a nasty temper. Not that it had ever been of a particularly pleasant disposition (and his hands and forearms carried enough thin white scars to testify to that fact). Watching it carefully out of the corner of his eye, Virelai crossed the room and sat down upon his bed to allow the animal to pass unchallenged. He had given up trying to stare it down. Ever since he had thought he saw it grown vast and demonlike in that room in Cera, he was trying to avoid the sort of confrontation that might suddenly bring on the same manifestation. He had almost managed to persuade himself that his vision of it in that monstrous state, and the echoing voice that accompanied that vision, had been brought about by his fevered mind, a mind subjected to unbearable stress by the Lord of Cantara.
Almost, but not quite. There had been the small matter of the dead hound he had found at the threshold of the room the next morning, its throat agape, its wiry grey coat all matted with gore. The hound was one of the Lord of Cera’s hunting pack and was a huge beast in itself: how much larger and more savage, therefore, must be the predator which had taken its life and dragged it to the topmost tower-room?
‘Well now, my Lord of Cantara, I can well see why you are late to table this morning.’ Rui Finco, Lord of Forent, leaned casually against the door-jamb surveying the contents of the bedchamber with some amusement. Tycho Issian, that hard-faced hypocrite, pushed the woman who sat astraddle him roughly aside, drew the covers up to his chest and glared at his host.
‘Is nowhere private to you?’
‘Nowhere in this castle.’ Rui watched regretfully as the woman gathered her sabatka more decorously around her and glided away into the dressing-chamber. She had a good shape, if a little slender for his tastes: he could tell that much quite easily even though she was swaddled in the all-encompassing robe: you developed an eye for such things if you had bedded as many women as had the Lord of Forent. It was his right and his privilege, after all, as lord of the domain, and he’d spent much of his time, income and effort on acquiring the finest seraglio in the Empire. Was it Raqla? he wondered. The height and the size of her hips and breasts looked slighter than he remembered them under that rich blue sheeting, but then she might have suffered from the wasting sickness which had taken hold earlier in the year. Raqla had been a favourite of his: a tireless girl, given the right encouragement, who had been happy enough to climb aboard and ride him so that he could watch her breasts sway and jounce with her efforts. None of this sabatka nonsense for him behind his closed doors: he liked the way a woman’s body was made, could not understand how it could possibly be more holy to worship the Goddess’s image through some holes in a robe rather than to appreciate the whole glorious creation in full sight. But he could have sworn he had glimpsed a strand of pale blonde hair caught for a moment in the mouth-slit of the sabatka; and Raqla was so dark to be almost ebony-haired . . .
Curious. He could not place the woman amongst the hundred or so he kept in the castle seraglio; had the Lord of Cantara possibly have had the temerity to spurn his host’s more than generous hospitality and had a girl from the town smuggled in to service him? It seemed unlikely, especially given the network of informers he paid well to keep their eyes on Tycho’s comings and goings; but the southern lord was strange indeed, and obsessed enough to try anything.
‘If your lordship is sufficiently rested, perhaps we might continue our discussion?’
Tycho waved an impatient hand. Beneath the walnutbrown tan his face appeared sallow and unhealthy. It looked as if he had not slept in a week, rather than spent a pleasurable night locked in some lusty courtesan’s embrace. ‘Give me a few minutes and I’ll attend you presently, Rui. Is there no door that locks in this damned place?’
Rui Finco did not bother to answer this naive question. Of course no door but that to his own chamber – and the stronghold below – bore a lock. How effective a politician would he be if he did not know the comings and goings of every visitor to Forent Castle? With a humourless smile and a nod of barest politeness, Rui left the room, swinging the oak door closed behind him.
Tycho pushed himself out of bed and stormed across the room to the mirror that hung over the stone basin and ewer there. Framed by the exquisite mosaic of the frame, his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks haggard and his chin was dark with stubble. The lines that ran across his brow and beside his nose were more deeply incised than ever, and a whole forest of wrinkles had appeared around his eye-sockets. Rather than the forty-three years he owned to, today he looked closer to sixty. He was not, in truth, getting much sleep; and not just as a result of his exertions with the whores he required Virelai to bring to him night after night, for they were mere distractions, an attempt to exorcise the demon that had his soul in its thorny grip. He had not been sleeping properly now for— He made a mental calculation: he had come from Cantara, via Cera, to Forent around Harvest Moon and the Allfair had taken place at Quarteryear – so it was now over four moon-circles since he had been thus afflicted. It was enough to turn any man’s wits, and his health, too. Before his fateful encounter with the woman they called the Rose of the World he would have called himself a rational man: one given rather more to consideration of the outcome of his actions, one who could always be counted on to choose the best course to progress his own fortunes and status. More than that, in many areas of the Empire his name was a watchword for piety and patriotism: he was known as an orator and upholder of Falla’s laws. A man of shining reputation. True, his heritage was obscure – and he intended to keep it that way – and he had owed the Council a large sum of money (now repaid, with interest); but in all other ways he had worked hard through his life to show to the world a man of great character, a man who lived well but purely; a man who was known to be hard on sinners and the causes of sin, but had himself an unblemished record. And now? All he could think about, at every hour of the day and night was the Rosa Eldi – her milk-white skin, the long golden hair that would tangle silkily around him, the slender waist he could encircle with his hands, the full breasts that would surely spill over his palms, the heat of her softly hairless—
He caught himself up, appalled for the thousandth time at the potency of the image, at the profoundly physical effect it had on him. He had never, he reminded himself now, seen even a glimpse of the nomad woman’s naked flesh; but somehow that one kiss he had shared with her in the map-seller’s wagon at the Fair had been all it had required for her to enspell him, body, thought and soul: she had, he was sure, gifted him with a full understanding of how it would be to know every crevice of her in that single encounter, and he had been haunted by this insatiable hunger for her ever since.
Not only was he constantly exhausted, but his wretched cock was eternally hard. It was – apart from being a potentially desperate embarrassment – a practical horror, and no matter what he tried, nothing seemed to reduce the size or insistence of his erection. Cold baths, cold compresses, hours of prayer: nothing
worked. So instead he had turned to the professional efforts of the castle’s seraglio: for surely women such as these must have come across problems worse than his in their lustful careers. The whores wore him out and made him sore with their exertions, but still he could not ejaculate. Even this latest experiment did not seem to be doing the trick.
He took a new length of linen bandage and bound himself tightly, wincing at the discomfort. It is my punishment, he thought savagely, for allowing the Rosa Eldi to be taken into heathendom. I must bear it until I can liberate her from that foul barbarian and his wicked, heretical followers. I must take her and purge her thoroughly; rinse her through with my own sacred libations. Together we shall worship the Goddess from whence we all came; I shall cover her flesh from the view of the lustful; I shall show her the true and steady Way of Fire: I shall lead her back to the paths of the righteous . . .
He was beginning to believe the words he cried out in town squares, the words that brought people crowding around him, calling for a holy war against Eyra: a war to end all wars.
Rui Finco tarried in the hallway outside until he heard the water running in the ewer and the lord bidding the whore leave by the secret way; then he ran swiftly down the stairs and entered the elaborate Galian Room below. Behind the vast freestanding bed, with its plush hangings and massively carved posts, he located the panelled door and slipped into the narrow staircase beyond. His great-grandfather, the notorious Taghi Finco, had constructed this neat little maze of secret passageways in the castle walls. In the last century social mores had been strict and congress with a woman not one’s Goddess-given wife a crime punishable by castration. Taghi was a man of enormous appetites, his wife a sickly creature who refused to bed him after the birth of their only son, or to have the Goddess-given good grace to fade away and die. Via the passages, Taghi had smuggled women into the Galian Room and had there pleasured himself and them through many a torrid night. He had, it was rumoured (though never in polite company) fathered half a hundred bastards. Rui blessed his forebear daily: it was not just the castle he had inherited from Lord Taghi Finco.
He heard a click above him and then the sound of feet on the wooden steps, and a moment later a lithe figure in a dark robe emerged, barefoot and in a hurry, from the room above.
‘Aha, my lovely!’
Stepping out of the shadows, Rui caught the girl in his arms and propelled her with him through the doorway into the Galian Room. Even before he unveiled her, he knew by the touch of her alone that it was Raqla. With a practised hand he flipped the sabatka over her head until it fell to the floor in a shimmer of silk.
‘Bast’s teats!’
If he were blind, and working solely on the shape and feel of her, he would still have sworn it was Raqla. But the evidence of his eyes told him otherwise. The woman standing before him with one hand over her breasts and the other modestly concealing her hairless crotch, was pale and blonde – a rare colouring in the southern lands, where men and women tended to dark skin and darker hair. He stared and blinked, suddenly lost for words.
Then something occurred to him.
‘Turn around!’ he ordered the woman suddenly.
She looked alarmed but turned a shapely shoulder to him and presented him with her elegant back and rounded buttocks, on the right of which a large brown mole was displayed in sharp contrast to the milky skin. He traced it with a finger and felt the woman tense. He knew that marking: he had caressed it often enough after the throes of their lovemaking. Rui felt a ripple of superstition tremble down his spine. He made the sign of the Goddess, bent to retrieve the fallen robe and threw it to the woman.
‘Clothe yourself.’
The girl caught the fabric, shook the robe out into its proper form with swift efficiency and shrugged her way in it. She was about to adjust the veil that covered the face when the Lord of Forent took a step towards her.
‘No, wait.’
Inserting his hands into the mouth-slit, he tore the headpiece in two with a single, violent gesture and stood there, assessing her face. Then he caught her chin, angling her head this way and that. The girl’s eyes were as big and as black as coals: and he knew them well. Was the hair a wig? He wound its silky length around his finger and gave a sharp tug. The woman exclaimed in pain. Not a wig, then.
‘Why have you dyed your hair?’
The woman stared at the ground, unable to meet his gaze. She had performed acts with this man that would bear favourable comparison to those of the famous lovers in the forbidden erotic book, Cestia’s Journey; she had seen every part of him in the most intimate detail, had watched him at his most vulnerable while he slept or when he lost himself in ecstasy; but still she could not look him in the face. It was truly a shameful thing she had done, shameful and punishable by death . . .
Rui’s tone was softer than she had expected as he asked, ‘Who has done this to you, Raqla?’ but when she answered, her voice barely above a whisper, she saw his jaw clench and his eyes go hard.
‘Stay still. No, don’t stand like that: I need the light on your face—’
This one was difficult. Her jawline was too pronounced, and she had an overbite. He had managed the hair with much less effort this time, but it seemed there was always some aspect of the remaking that would compensate for the easier bits. And the eyes – he could never quite get the eyes to change. He had read in one of the tomes in the Master’s icy library how one of the poets so favoured by the Southern Empire had referred to the eyes as ‘the windows to the soul’ and had then had no idea what nonsense the man had meant by this; but finding they were immutable, immune to the most powerful magic he could extract from the cat, he was beginning to wonder whether there might not be some truth in poetry after all.
He was, on the other hand, quite proud of what he had achieved with the form of the woman. The hips were almost right – lean and slight as a boy’s, with just a swell of flesh at the haunch; and the breasts were perfectly shaped. It had been a pleasure to cup them himself, even though he risked dire punishment if discovered.
He brought the cat up level with the girl’s face and watched as her eyes widened at the struggling beast’s snarl of protest. Tightening his grip on the thick skin at the back of its neck, he closed his eyes, focused his mind carefully on the clean, taut line of the face he recalled so perfectly from memory, and repeated the refining spell.
‘Stop this travesty now or you will shortly be making a sharp downward exit from this window.’ The voice was dangerous and cool. ‘The sharks have had a thin summer this year: a paucity of storms has meant that there have not been the usual number of shipwrecked sailors for them to feast on; and they do so enjoy the taste of human flesh—’
Virelai’s eyes shot open. He had not heard the footsteps, nor the door come open; and so to see Lord Rui Finco standing on the threshold, his keen face taut with controlled anger, and the girl he had worked on so successfully yesterday on her knees before him with the veil of her sabatka ripped away was a surprise indeed. Even so, he could not prevent his gaze from wandering between the faces of the two women and noting with some satisfaction that Balia’s jaw was closer to the template than his earlier attempt on Raqla had been. His skills were improving all the time.
‘Whatever in the fiery pits do you think you are doing?’
Virelai came back to his predicament with a guilty start. He had not seen the Lord of Forent angry before and he suspected of those who had faced his fury, not many had survived.
‘My lord— I—’
Rui shut the door behind him silently. Virelai did not like that. When Tycho was angry he had a tendency to scream his displeasure and lay about him with his fists. He’d received a myriad of bruises as a result of the Lord of Cantara’s temper; and once a whipping, but no worse. The Lord of Forent, on the other hand, looked as if he might well be quietly true to his word about feeding him to the fishes, and probably the two girls as well. And no one would hear – and even if they did, it was the lord’s own cast
le they were in: who would dare to question him over the loss of one poor nomad?
‘Sorcery. I can smell it.’ Rui Finco’s face twisted in disgust. ‘I knew there was some perversity in the air, some filthy practice between you and your master.’ He looked down at the black cat, currently gone uncharacteristically limp and quiet in Virelai’s hand. ‘And let that poor creature go, for Falla’s sake!’
Virelai released his hold on Bëte. She fell on her feet, gave him an unforgiving look which promised that she would add this latest degradation to her ongoing tally, and with the teeth-setting sound of claws on wood, leapt up the tall chest of drawers on the opposite side of the room and took up position there where she might view proceedings in safety.
‘We burn magic-makers in this realm,’ Rui said softly, his eyes never leaving Virelai’s face.
‘I know, my lord.’ Virelai could feel a quaking begin in his knees, as if the bones there were liquefying.
‘Do you know when the nomads started to be persecuted in earnest in this country?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘In my late father’s time. He had cause to believe a nomad sorcerer had betrayed him by casting a glamour over his enemy. I shall not burden you with the entire sordid tale, but suffice it to say that I have a brother in this world who is not truly my brother, and my father was less than happy that those who trod Istrian soil should dare to bring disgrace on his house in so foul a manner. He took against the Footloose peoples from that day forward. He must have burned—’ Rui cast his eyes ceilingward and began to count ‘—let’s see, there were two, three, four hundred – no, no, what am I saying? – a thousand of them. There were several dozen in that first caravan of travellers – men, women and children: that made a considerable bonfire, I can tell you, Master Virelai. As a child of eight, I was brought out onto the viewing platform and forced to watch. I think my father considered it some form of punishment for me, that I had been at home and not protected his hearth and his wife as a true Istrian warrior should; but truth to tell, I was most morbidly fascinated to hear their wails and to watch the way their skin crisped and blackened, and boiled off their bones like tallow candles. Do you know that when you burn a human creature the smoke that billows up from them can coat the buildings for the distance of half a league or more with a very unpleasant sticky black fat?’