by Jude Fisher
Alisha craned her neck. All she could make out was a swirl of movement in the globe, and a flash of light, as if she were glimpsing a bright fish swimming in the depths of a murky pond. She frowned and placed her hands one on either side of her son’s. The great stone felt warm to the touch, and at first she thought this was due to the transferred heat of Falo’s hands; but then the crystal began to buzz, so that the bones of her forearms juddered and throbbed. She narrowed her eyes, forced her mind open to the stone. And then she was falling into its centre . . .
A great, green-gold eye held her gaze. Its pupil was vertical, a shining black slit amid all that luminous colour. Under its rapt inspection, Alisha felt herself go hot, then cold. The eye blinked, once, then withdrew as if to allow her to gain perspective and she found that she was staring into the face of a cat. It was no small domestic creature this, though: no family pet that had wandered into the vicinity of another far-seeing stone and pressed its curious muzzle at the crystal as it might on seeing its reflection in a puddle. No, this was another order of cat entirely. It towered over the crystal globe on the carved wooden table before it as an eagle might loom over a mouse, and its eyes were ancient and intelligent. Its fur was as black as night and when it opened its mouth to roar, the interior of its maw appeared as hot and fiery as the heart of a fire.
No sound emanated from the crystal, but deep in her head, like the ghost of an itch, Alisha heard a voice.
Alisha, it said.
It knew her name. Alisha found that she was trembling.
Alisha, hear me. We are all Three in the world, it said. The Power is here, but divided. The Lady is taken north; the Lord lies in his prison of stone. And I, who am full of the Power, find myself drained for petty trifles and cruel play. She does not know herself; he cannot free himself, and I am in the hands of incompetents, fools and those who walk upon the surface of Elda when they should have passed beyond—
The voice ceased abruptly and the perspective in the globe flickered and slid sideways.
When the cat appeared again it was tiny, and it seemed agitated. Behind it, a large shape moved in shadow.
Jetra, the voice came again in her mind, and its timbre was the same as when the cat had been vast. They are taking me to the Eternal City—
The crystal in the chamber moved, rose into the air. A hand appeared around it, then a face. Alisha cried out and took her hands off the stone.
‘Amma? Amma?’
Falo was staring up at her, his eyes huge and round.
‘It’s all right, my sparrow,’ she said shakily. ‘It’s all right.’
She sat there with her arms around him and waited for her pulse to stop racing. The crystal sat glowering on the table before them, its surfaces gone opaque and unreflective once more.
‘Did you see the cat, amma?’ Falo asked excitedly. ‘Did you hear it talk? I did not know that cats could talk. Can I have a talking cat?’
Alisha jerked upright. ‘You heard it speak?’ she asked unnecessarily.
Falo nodded. ‘It wants us to go to Jetra,’ he said cheerfully. He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps we can get a talking cat in Jetra.’
His mother smiled, though anxiety gnawed at her.
‘Perhaps,’ she said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.
Eleven
From the Depths
Katla turned her face into the wind and felt the airborne brine thrown up by the charging waves sting her skin. Her chin-length hair – too short to tie back out of her eyes – whipped her cheeks painfully, but her eyes were sparkling and her hands gripped the good wood of the Snowland Wolf’s prow more for thrill than for safety. She had begun to notice that she could feel the connection between the land and the ancient oak planking through the motion of the sea. It was not something she could ever have explained to anyone else without having them think her mad, but it was oddly exhilarating. She had never felt so alive. A good easterly filled the sail so that the wolf depicted there seemed swelled with pride at the capture of his prey: a great writhing red dragon, its tail looped extravagantly in and out of the wolf’s legs and all around the border of the oiled cloth. They would be home in four days – less, if this big wind persisted – but she wished they could just keep sailing until they fell off the edge of the world.
It was not that she dreaded the return to Rockfall – as another disobedient daughter might have done; but then, Katla had never really regarded obedience as a major priority – but that the prospect of a winter on the land, with no excitements to look forward to at least until the spring and the launch of the new ship, was becoming a grim thought. In the last half year her life had been a dramatic round of triumphs and disasters. It had been a life in which nothing could be taken for granted. It was, she reflected now, rather like the business of cliff-climbing: there was always some unexpected obstacle, some lurking peril, some lucky hold to be found, while beneath you the sea roared and paced back and forth like a hungry wolf waiting for you to make an error and fall into its maw. She suspected she was becoming rather addicted to the edginess of this sort of existence; the delicious scariness of not knowing what would come next was so much more fun than the endless round of winter chores and cooped-up company that awaited her at home.
But at least work on the expedition ship could be started, the ship that would carry her out of home waters and into the icebound seas of the far north. Now that would be an adventure. She would have to be patient and carry out her dull duties well enough that her father would have no excuse for leaving her behind. He would surely, she thought, be delighted with the ease and success of their mission. Every time she thought about their wonderfully skilful abduction of the shipmaker, the swift departure, the amazing lack of pursuit, she laughed aloud and hugged herself with glee. She could just envisage the excitement that reports of their return from the lookouts posted on the Hound’s Tooth would elicit, could picture her father’s delight when he saw the Snowland Wolf round the ness and sail triumphantly into the harbour, followed by the two great barges from the shipyard stacked high with the finest oak to be had in all of Eyra. The barges made heavier weather of the passage than Tam Fox’s vessel; even shading her eyes now, she could barely make them out in the distant haze behind them; but they were seaworthy and strong and sailed by two competent captains Tam had with his usual foresight taken on in Halbo, men who knew their way through the treacherous channels that led into Rockfall and could be depended on to set a fair course even in a fog.
She turned around to survey their captive. Morten Danson huddled uncomfortably amidships, his knees drawn up to his chin, his eyes closed against the world, his arms gripping the massive mastfish against which he pressed his cheek as if it were the only solid place that he could imagine in all this churning, rolling, inconstant universe. Since they had left Halbo, he had refused to take a single bite of food from anyone. Katla presumed that Danson meant his gesture to be taken as a noble protest at the ignominy of his abduction; but she suspected that it had rather more to do with the fact that he had neither sea-legs nor a sea-stomach, since even the water he drank so sparingly seemed to come back up again with regular monotony as a thin, pale trickle of vomit. Ironic really, she mused, that a shipmaker could be so profoundly unsuited to life on the ocean.
Morten Danson was not the only one suffering. Beside her, there came another muffled groan followed by a disturbing gulping sound. Katla found herself grinning uncharitably.
‘Oh Jenna, poor Jenna – I thought it was only your hair turned green!’
The Snowland Wolf hit another swell and her friend grimaced horribly. Jenna Finnsen had been holding back the contents of her stomach these past few days: Katla had never seen anyone so determined not to spoil their clothing; but it was a wasted effort, since Jenna’s fine blue robe – the only thing of her own she now possessed since being spirited away from the feast at Halbo with only the clothes she wore on her back, despite her complaints – was already spotted with salt-stains from the inevitable spr
ay caused by the passage of the ship. What Jenna did not yet know, since there were no mirrors on board the vessel, and since no one had mentioned it, was that a very fine dollop of gullshit had streaked its way down the back of the garment, adhering itself to the weft of the velvet all the way from the shoulder to the hip. Sur knew what the bird had eaten that had disagreed with it so: it was a truly prodigious amount. Still, Katla reasoned, it was Jenna’s own fault, since she had refused the loan of any of the suitable gear that Katla and others among Tam Fox’s crew had offered her when she set foot on the ship, exclaiming in horror at the unflattering cut of the breeches, the salt-and sweat-stiffened shirts, the serviceable leather jerkins. ‘I can’t wear that!’ she had cried when Katla shook out a crumpled, but relatively clean, tunic of pale green linen. ‘It’d make me look so washed out!’ It would, Katla reflected, have gone rather well with her complexion at the moment.
Katla knew why Jenna behaved so. It was out of vanity, yes; but not a vanity that was born of an overweening sense of her own beauty, but rather more out of anxiety, an anxiety that seemed always to revolve around some man or another; at the Allfair, when she had foolishly taken the nomad woman’s hair-charm that had turned her golden tresses into the unfeasible likeness of a cornfield, mice and all, it had been born of her obsession with Ravn Asharson; now, Katla had more than an inkling that her brother lay at the vortex of Jenna’s thoughts. Their reunion had not been quite the happy event she had hoped for.
‘Feeling poorly, missy?’
It was Urse again, Tam Fox’s lumbering great deputy. He seemed to have taken quite a shine to Jenna, and although on the first day she had squealed at the sight of his ravaged face, she seemed to have got used to its bizarre contours and was not doing a great deal to discourage him. Katla watched her now as she simpered and protested that no, she was fine – just a little tired and chilled – and the big man offered her his cloak, saying that it was a shame to hide such a pretty form, but that he couldn’t stand to see her shiver.
She rolled her eyes. Jenna could be a flirtatious little minx.
Halli Aranson scooped up the knucklebones in his huge fist, closed his fingers over them and shook them together so that they rattled hollowly. He was trying to concentrate on the game, but his mind kept wandering away from it like an errant lamb. He had already lost eight cantari to Tam Fox and he knew he should stop, since the mummers’ leader was a proficient cheat who owned not a shred of conscience in his dealings with friends or foes; but to stop meant getting up off the sack of grain he was sitting on and moving past Jenna Finnsen, who was standing just a few feet away at the gunwale, smiling up at some huge bear of a man; and he just did not know what to say or do.
He had been shocked rigid to find his erstwhile sweetheart on board the Snowland Wolf: it was, quite literally, the last place on Elda he would have expected to find her, and not just because of the rumours of her forthcoming wedding in the capital. Jenna, for all she was the daughter of the King’s dead shipwright, hated the sea and would never voluntarily set foot on a vessel unless it were under the most exceptional circumstances. As he had steered the first barge up along the coast from Halbo, on his way to the rendezvous with Tam Fox’s ship, he had been in a sombre mood. Here he was, he thought, stealing timber and men and tools – the theft of any of which might land him in an unpleasant lawsuit – so that his father could take him on some damnfool expedition which was likely either to kill him or make him a man rich beyond his most extravagant imaginings. And if the latter were the case, it would all be for naught, since his heart’s desire would be wed to another.
So when he had seen that unmistakable flag of golden hair blowing in the wind beside his fox-maned sister, he had thought he was suffering from a sea-dream, one of those strange miasmas that steals over a sailor’s soul when he has been on the ocean for too long without sleep or sustenance. Except that he had both eaten and slept perfectly well and against all the odds.
On board, Katla had run to meet him, bubbling and fizzing like Old Ma Hallasen’s mad cat, dragging her friend reluctantly behind her. ‘Do you see who I have here, Halli? Pretty Jenna – do you see? I saved her! I rescued her from being married to that stinky old goat!’ She had capered around them until Halli’s head spun. ‘She’s all yours, brother, to have and to hold, stolen right out from under the nose of the King (not that he’d notice if you stole his throne from under him, the way he looks at that pale nomad queen of his) and some thin, rich old buzzard of a suitor! I improvised – I think that’s the word Tam Fox used, after he used a whole load of ruder ones – dropped her down a hole in the floor of the Great Hall down into the cellars, and then we were away, and here she is! Don’t say I never give you anything!’
Halli had stared from Katla’s shining eyes to Jenna Finnsen’s sweet, upturned face and felt his heart expand and thump painfully. He had opened his mouth to say something, then been unable to utter a single word. And Jenna, mistaking his confusion and silence for something worse, had dropped her eager glance from him and stepped away as if scalded, blushing to the roots of her hair. In the end, he’d managed to greet her gruffly, then had made his escape, mumbling something about having to find Tam Fox and report in. And ever since, though all the fine words he knew he should have said to her had he not been caught so horribly unawares tumbled through his mind over and over again, he had not been able to bring himself to address her at all.
He had seen how other men had no such inhibitions. He had watched Tam Fox make her giggle, had listened grimly while Tam’s huge, ruin-faced lieutenant clumsily paid her compliments about her hair and her hands and her pretty shape; and had clenched his jaw and cursed himself for being a fool for saying nothing. But it was as if some old witch-woman had laid a curse on him: gone was the confident, cheerful young man who had courted Jenna at the Allfair and teased her for kissing the image of Ravn Asharson in the mirror he had given her; and in his place was the tongue-tied lump she had once accused him of being.
He threw the bones and watched them both land, unsurprisingly, on their lame side.
Tam Fox laughed. ‘Ten cantari!’ He reached down and picked up the bones, tossed them into the air and caught them neatly. As he jiggled them around his palm, his big square fingertips caressed the polished brown curves and jags as if he were imbuing them with magic. Perhaps, Halli thought, he was. He had never seen the mummers’ leader lose at knucklebones, and though it might just be that he had a knack for throwing them so that they always landed nose-up, somehow Halli doubted it. There was more than met the eye with Tam Fox. He was as crafty and as elusive as his namesake and his luck was supernaturally good, whether it was in the matter of games, stratagems, or women. Katla was probably the only one who had ever knocked him back, Halli thought.
‘Ten cantari, my man!’ Tam grinned, his teeth sharp and white amidst the complex braids of his beard. ‘What’s the matter with you today? It seems a gull’s got your luck, a cat’s got your tongue and a bear’s got your girl!’
Halli smiled ruefully and made to reach into his money-pouch to settle the debt.
‘No, wait!’ The mummers’ leader gripped him by the arm. ‘I have a better idea. Let’s make it double or quits.’
Halli shook his head. ‘I’ve no skill for this game, nor any wish to lose more to you.’
Tam Fox laughed. ‘I have something different in mind.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘It’s more a bargain than a game of chance.’ He leaned close to Halli and said something in a low voice.
Halli blinked in surprise and his brows became a single black line of furious concentration. For a moment it looked as if he might hit the mummer; then his face brightened. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re on.’
Katla left her friend to Urse’s tender mercies. Despite his size, he wasn’t harmful: besides, what could anyone get up to under open skies on the Snowland Wolf ? The only shelter was the ablutions tent, and that was hardly conducive to romance. Behind her, she heard Jenna’s laugh tinkle like a ewe’s
bell and watched her brother’s head come up sharply out of his conversation with the mummers’ leader and his dark gaze fix itself hungrily upon his sweetheart.
Poor Halli.
Match-making was not Katla’s forte; but it was just plain irritating to see two people who clearly cared for one another behaving so stupidly. She resolved to do whatever she could during the voyage to bring them together. The idea of spending the winter in close quarters in the steading at Rockfall with the pair of them trying to avoid one another was too ridiculous to imagine; although it had to be admitted that spending the winter with the two of them making eyes at each other and whispering secretly in corners might be even worse.
She stepped over a coil of rope lying on the deck like a sleeping serpent, grabbed up an empty bucket, tipped it upside-down and sat on it, grinning like an imp.
‘Lost again, have you, brother?’
Halli glared at her.
‘It’s only a game.’
‘Ah, it wasn’t the knucklebones I meant.’
‘How’s my favourite sharp-tongued troll today?’
Tam Fox leant back against the side-planking, stretched his long legs out luxuriously and surveyed her coolly. He was dressed in layers of cream wool and linen, with a fine brooch of silver and some shining blue stone holding his huge fur-lined cloak closed at his throat. Beads of brine glinted in his abundant sandy hair and on the shells and bones he wore in it. His eyes – the silvery-green of a forest pool – appraised her minutely. Katla became abruptly aware of the tightness of her tunic (she had borrowed it from Bella, who was smaller than she was, while her own recovered from the latest dunking she had given it to get rid of the last of Fent’s smell) and it was stretched uncomfortably across her breasts; and the gaping hole in her breeches where an expanse of tanned flesh showed through.
She watched his gaze drop to the torn leather as if he had read her thoughts. When she spread her fingers to cover the hole, he looked up and scanned her face guilelessly, his expression as bland and benign as a child’s. Then one side of his mouth curved upward into a wicked grin that bared a single sharp incisor. Tilting his head, he gave her a slow, provocative, assessing look which made her feel naked to his gaze.