by Jude Fisher
Mam nodded. ‘If we’re to steal a ship and get ourselves out of here by morning, we’ll need all the help we can get.’
‘Steal a ship?’ Doc echoed disbelievingly.
The mercenary leader grinned. ‘Ah yes, hadn’t had time to expound my newly devised plan to you,’ she croaked. ‘We’re going down to the docks with – well, I was going to invest some of our own hard-won earnings in the venture, but since Sur has seen fit to provide us with an alternative source of cantari—’ she indicated the money-belt Doc held ‘—and a remarkably able navigator—’ she indicated the hillman ‘—it would be churlish not to make the most of our good luck.’
‘A navigator?’ Now it was Joz’s turn to be sceptical. ‘The man’s from the mountains: what on Elda does he know about crossing oceans?’
Persoa bowed his head. ‘I have . . .’ He paused. The admission he was about to make would get him stoned or burned in regular company in Istria. But Finna Fallsen’s mercenary troop hardly counted as regular company. He took a deep breath. ‘I have a certain affinity with rock and mineral.’
‘And what’s that when it’s at home? An affinity?’ Dogo waved a limp wrist at the hillman.
‘Among the hill-tribes of the Farem Heights there are those who are born with the magical ability to divine the land: folk who can “see” every aspect of it even when it’s hidden from the eye. They call them eldianni – “landseers”, and Persoa is one of the best. It means he can sense rock – below the water, across the sea, in the middle of a desert. He can follow a mineral vein a hundred miles with his mind; he can feel islands, continents, reefs,’ Mam declared with a certain proprietorial pride. ‘In Eyra, he’d be prized beyond worth; in Istria, he landed himself in trouble digging crystals and precious stones out of the Golden Mountains as a boy; got most of his tribe murdered or enslaved as a result.’
Doc gave the hillman a fierce look. ‘You stabbed Knobber in the back when he was weaponless. But if you can do what Mam just said and not give us any trouble, I’ll stomach you.’
Dogo grinned at the assassin. ‘Efficient, though, taking him out like that. I’ll be watching you.’
‘Knobber was a friend of mine,’ Joz Bearhand said quietly. ‘And there aren’t many who’ve earned that distinction. A man who kills my friend might by definition be regarded as my enemy: and my enemies rarely live long. You’d better prove yourself to be invaluable to our diminished team, or I shall personally rip your throat out.’
Persoa eyed the big man warily. Then he extended his hand. Joz nodded briefly, then engulfed the hillman’s wiry hand in his own great paw. ‘Welcome to our world.’
The world was red and full of pain, but when she opened her eyes, everything became a desperate, blinding white. She blinked and coughed, blinked again. Red; white; red; white; red. Her chest felt as raw as if it had been laid open to the winds and she was cold to the bone. When she tried to move, she found herself constricted and began to panic. She rolled and wailed and the world rolled with her.
‘Selen! Selen!’
Strong hands gripped her shoulders. A face came into view. It was a good face, strong-boned and healthy-looking: a man, with long hair and wind-darkened skin. His blue-grey eyes were anxious. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come out right. When she struggled again, the man bent and eased her bindings, put an arm under her and helped her to sit up. His shadow afforded her eyes respite. She looked around and realised she was in a small boat, which explained the rolling. It seemed very familiar, while at the same time bizarre in the extreme.
‘Thank Sur you’re alive! I thought you’d died for sure. I’ve never prayed for anything and meant it before. Perhaps there is a god, after all.’
She frowned. Sur? Who was Sur? Died? What was he talking about?
‘Who are you?’ The words came out as an indistinguishable croak. She watched his brow furrow as he tried to understand her. With an immense effort, she concentrated on what she could remember and came up only with the image of a dark man with a hooked nose coming at her with a leather strap and malice in his black eyes. He was not the man she saw before her now; but beyond that piece of information, nothing in the world seemed certain. She tried again. ‘Who am I?’ This time the words managed to separate themselves into distinct sounds, though why she had asked this particular question, she had no idea, since it was not the one she had originally framed; was not even sure whether she wished to know the answer.
‘Selen. Selen Issian,’ the man said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
She shook her head, coughed again. Her throat felt like hot ashes.
Almost as if he read her thoughts, the man offered her a skin of liquid. She took a mouthful and found it was fresh water. She had never tasted anything so marvellous in her life, whatever that life might have been. She laughed. The man looked surprised.
‘Selen Issian,’ she repeated. ‘What a ridiculous name!’
It really wasn’t the best day to be trying to make a swift escape from Forent City with a longship stolen from the dangerous lord of that province and a depleted crew of thugs and ne’er-do-wells, though the sun beat down and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. But there wasn’t a breath of wind to be had and therefore they had had to row the whole damn way until they were out of sight of any likely pursuers. They had, judging by the height that merciless bright gold disc had now attained, been rowing without pause for over three hours, and still the outline of Forent Castle could be seen in the distance behind them as a vague and geometric extension to the tall black cliffs. Mam’s arms – as brown and gnarled as old oak – burned with the effort. Her back ached. Her palms felt raw. On the back of her neck – above the bandage – she could feel the hot breath of a man whose presence had once made her knees go weak with desire, though she would never, ever admit to it, to him, or to anyone else. A man, moreover, she reminded herself, who had just caused the death of one of her troop and sent one of his own to dispatch her and Joz. ‘Couldn’t do it, myself,’ he’d said to her softly, head slightly cocked in that confiding way of his that she remembered so well. ‘Too many pleasant memories.’
She had nearly killed him on the spot for that insolence alone.
‘Over there! See, over there to steerboard—’
Mam jumped, nearly lost her grip on the oar.
The man who had called out was a swarthy sailor who hailed originally from the foothills of the Golden Mountains and had been pressed into service some twenty years before by a predatory Istrian merchant in need of new crewmembers following a disastrous voyage through the infamous storm zone of the Gilan Sea. He had a sore head from the skinful of wine he had drunk at the mercenaries’ expense in the Skarn Inn the night before; it made his thickly accented Old Tongue even more impenetrable.
‘What?’
The man made an impatient gesture. He was less than pleased to have woken aboard this purloined northern vessel, pressganged onto an oar yet again, but there was coin chinking in his purse and more promised once they reached Eyra and while his new employers were a ramshackle team – a group of Eyran mercenaries and an eldianna from the Farem Heights – at least they owned no whip-man like that bastard Oranio. He said something unintelligible in his native language and pointed out across the sparkling water.
Mam shaded her eyes and peered where he pointed. ‘A small boat,’ she said after a while. ‘I think it’s a small boat.’
‘It’s a faering,’ Doc said, from the crossbench to her right. ‘An Eyran faering.’
‘Long way from any shore for a faering,’ Joz noted. ‘Let alone from Eyra.’
‘Take her alongside,’ Mam instructed the rowers. ‘Quickly now.’ Quite what she was expecting to see in the tiny vessel that pitched awkwardly up and down on the gentle swell she did not know; but it certainly was not what they found.
Inside the faering was a big man whose blond hair had at some point been inexpertly dyed black: for in contrast to the parti-coloured locks on his head, the new beard that was
sprouting on his chin was so pale as to be white-gold. And beside him sat a black-haired girl in a tattered red dress with huge eyes and a proud neck.
‘I know you,’ Mam breathed, staring at the man. ‘I do: I know you.’
The big man bowed his head, then looked her in the eye. ‘Erno Hamson,’ he said at last. ‘Of the Rockfall clan.’
Joz Bearhand laughed. ‘By Sur, life has a habit of making strange knots sometimes!’
‘And you?’ Mam asked his companion.
‘My name matters not,’ the dark-haired girl said in a rather stilted form of the Old Tongue. ‘I am a free woman, and I shall make my future for myself.’
Mam grinned. ‘Good girl. Still,’ her eyes dropped to the soft curve of the girl’s belly where the red fabric had dried plastered tight against her skin, ‘it looks as if someone else had other ideas about allowing you a free hand with your own life.’
Selen blushed. ‘You have sharp eyes.’ She placed a hand on her belly and sat there for a moment, considering. ‘This child shall also choose its future,’ she said at last.
‘Is it yours?’ The mercenary leader asked Erno curiously. ‘The baby?’
He looked horrified. ‘No . . . no, of course not.’
Mam laughed. ‘I like a mystery. And at least you look strong enough to manage an oar. If we don’t get some wind soon, we’ll be rowing all the way to Halbo. If you’ll row with us while the wind fails, we’ll offer you passage.’
It was a tough bargain. Erno’s heart thumped. This was the chance he needed to return to his homeland, but if it rested on Selen Issian’s uncertain temper, they might both be lost, abandoned to the sea once more. He waited for her usual outburst of indignation at the idea of having to carry out any task she might regard as beneath the standing of the daughter of an Istrian noble. If skinning a rabbit was something she would barely deign to do, even to feed herself, how she was likely to react to the idea of being taught to man an oar on a merchant vessel, of being treated like a common crewmember, and in her delicate condition, he didn’t dare to imagine. He felt the breath stand still in his chest, heard the mournful wail of a loon as it slid past overhead in search of better fishing grounds, caught a sudden sharp odour of brine and sweat off the clinkered boat that rose above them, and waited.
Selen said nothing. Instead, she got gingerly to her feet, steadied herself with a hand on Erno’s shoulder and waited for the faering to stop rocking. Then she stepped to the gunwale, took Mam’s extended hand and clambered up onto the merchant ship. For a moment she surveyed her new surroundings blank-faced. Then she grinned. The expression felt unfamiliar to her; but it was as if everything in the world was unfamiliar to her now. She turned back to the mercenary leader.
‘I’ve no idea how to work an oar, but I’m sure you will teach me. My name is Selen Issian, and I can see that this will be the start of my new life.
‘I hope you have something more practical that I can wear.’
Ten
The Three
They had had to take a long detour to avoid Gibeon, and now their provisions were running low. Alisha Skylark passed a weary hand across her face, tucked a frond of curly hair behind her ear, took hold of the stone again and tried to concentrate. The crystal was being more than usually uncommunicative this day, the interior it offered to her sore eyes being as streaked and dark and blurry as a rainwashed sky.
‘What do you see, amma?’
She almost jumped, Falo had crept in so quietly. What sort of seer was she, that she could not even intuit the comings and goings of her own child?
She held an arm out to the boy, caught him to her and buried her nose in the fragrant black fuzz of his hair. ‘Nothing, my honeybee. Nothing at all.’
And that was the truth, and the curse of it. Ever since the old woman, her mother, Fezack Starsinger, had passed on during their journey over the Golden Mountains, howling out something unintelligible about the Three even as she toppled from the wagon, it had been as if the crystal had swallowed her essence and made of it a cloud between Alisha’s vision and the far-sights of Elda. As the caravan’s scryer, she was proving to be of remarkably little use. The insights the stone afforded her were fragmentary and unsatisfactory: partial glimpses so fleeting that sometimes she could not even determine the town or even the region she was being shown. Not that any of the company had criticised her for this failure: but Alisha found herself burdened with doubts and fears and a growing lack of faith in the world’s providence. She suspected that this mistrust might in some part stem from her parentage; for misgivings were uncharacteristic in one of the true Wandering Folk, who knew with the utmost certainty that their place in the world was unique and ordained, that they each fitted into Elda’s fabric like a single perfect stitch in a vast tapestry. But the Istrian soldier who had taken her poor mother by force on the fateful day after her grandparents had unearthed the great crystal was likely a man racked by guilt and unworthiness, qualities his seed had carried into Fezack’s womb and thence into the soul of her only child. Or perhaps it was not her fault that the stone was recalcitrant; perhaps it was true what they said: that the really great seeing-stones yielded themselves fully only to those with whom they bonded in life, and that with the death of the principle seer, the gift of the crystal dwindled and dimmed.
But she sensed there was more to it than that. She had begun to find herself uncomfortable in the presence of the great stone, as if it were indeed haunted by Fezack’s spirit, or by something worse . . . Ever since the incident in the mountains, Alisha had been plagued by the sense that they were being pursued, that somehow Fezack’s death into the crystal had opened a doorway somewhere and had allowed something both powerful and possibly malevolent access into the world. But since Falo never showed any fear of the great stone, she was learning to take comfort from that.
‘Let me see, amma.’
Falo clambered up onto her lap. He was getting too big to be doing this, she thought, as his hard little feet dug painfully into her thighs, and when she made a small noise of protest, the boy turned his shining face to her and smiled. It was a smile of extraordinary, sunny charm, and at once she was cast back into painful memories of his handsome, charismatic father. Long gone now, of course. Their liaison had been shortlived, and she regretted that. You were not supposed to regret such things, as a nomad, she knew, and took it as further evidence of her mixed heritage.
She watched the boy grasp the crystal with a confidence born of long hours watching his mother and grandmother at their scrying, saw how odd gleams and shadows chased across the planes of his skin like a glamour. Sometimes he looked younger than his six years, eager and wide-eyed and opened out to life. She hoped it would last. She hoped he would have a chance to experience the best that being one of the Wanderers had to offer before he experienced the worst.
‘Can you see anything, Falo?’
The lad’s expression was one of intent concentration. The tip of his tongue protruded from his mouth; his eyes were round. He shook his head impatiently and shifted his grip on the stone, raising one shoulder slightly against her, as if to exclude her.
Alisha settled back against the wall of the wagon and let the rhythm of the passage lull her. After a moment she closed her eyes. She must try to decide what they should do next, where they might safely go to trade for food. Gibeon had been their best chance; but there had been red streaks in the sky in the morning and Elida had dreamed of buzzards alighting on a corpse. When she had interrogated the crystal, it had offered up a brief glimpse of flames and a woman running, her mouth stretched in a soundless scream; then had gone dark and uncooperative, showing nothing more than a shower of red sparks shooting through its interior like a swarm of fireflies. Three bad omens, she had decided; and they had taken the cattle road to the south of the slave-town and passed into the hills that would take them through to the Tilsen Plain and the villages where their magic samples were less likely to be regarded with superstitious horror. They were likely to go h
ungry before they reached them, though: all the supplies they had bartered for at the Allfair were long gone. The only member of the caravan they had recently lost to this lack was the ancient yeka, One Eye Brown One Eye Green, who had released her spirit as they threaded their way back down through the steep Skarn Mountains, and there they had buried her; for the Wandering Folk did not eat their own, nor any flesh.
Their caravan had been constantly on the move for nearly four moon-cycles now, rarely staying more than one night in the same place, skirting the towns and villages, trading warily and selling no charms. They had stopped in Cantara for a while, since its notorious lord was away in the north, and the people of the town seemed more relaxed about trading with nomads in his absence. Some of the dancing women did good business there, for the town had no whorehouse and the sight of a naked female face was a great novelty to those younger men who had not yet made the annual journey to the Allfair, and many of them had stayed, reducing the caravan further. They ate well in Cantara, and received generous gifts from the lady at the castle, too, from the lord’s elderly mother, Constanta Issian. This benefactress had sent out spiced wines and savoury rice dishes to them, a great basket of freshly baked sweet-cakes and pastries full of dried fruits. It was interesting, Alisha thought now, that she had selected the food so thoughtfully. She had sent out no killed meat, no fish or game. It was possible that the Lady of Cantara spent her time in the library, reading of their customs in one of the ancient books that told of such things, but Alisha had seen her briefly, in the crystal, and she suspected the lady’s knowledge came from other origins entirely.
‘Oh!’
The child’s exclamation brought her sharply from her reverie.
‘What is it, Falo? What can you see?’
‘Look, amma: look there.’ Falo marked the spot with a careful finger.