by Jude Fisher
As they went, Saro tried to engage his companion in conversation, but he seemed preoccupied and distracted. It was only when they came upon a songbird lying flapping on the ground, one wing savagely torn – by Bëte, or by some other predator? – that he showed any sign of emotion, bending to examine the small creature with genuine concern.
‘We should put it out of its misery,’ Saro said quietly.
Virelai turned his face up towards his companion. Such pain was etched upon those white contours, it was as if he felt the bird’s agony for himself. Saro handed him a large stone, but the sorcerer winced away from him and would not take it, so in the end Saro firmed his jaw and did the deed himself. They both stood staring down at the tiny corpse, and when they straightened up, the light fell on Virelai’s eyes, which Saro realised with a start were glistening with unshed tears. ‘It was better that way,’ he said softly. ‘We could not leave it like that: it would be cruel.’
The sorcerer hung his head. ‘I know you are right, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have suffered enough hurt myself to wish to avoid deliberately inflicting it on another, no matter how right the cause.’ He paused, as if remembering something. Then he declared, ‘Every creature has the right to its own life, no matter how it came into this world.’
Saro was not entirely sure what to make of this. He agreed with the sentiment, of course, but it was disturbing to find himself in sympathy with this strange, pale man.
‘How did you come into the world?’ he asked at last.
‘I have not the least memory of that.’
Saro laughed. ‘Neither do I!’
The sorcerer cheered visibly. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I doubt many do.’
Virelai pondered on this for a while. Then he said, ‘The Master told me he found me as a baby in the southern mountains, left out on a rocky promontory under the stars to survive or perish as the spirits willed it. By chance it was he who found me and took me to his stronghold to raise me as his own.’ It was more of a recitation than a revelation, using almost the exact phrasing the mage had employed for its repeated tellings. It might have been graven in his head, but still it felt hollow and sham, a mere collection of sounds, for he had no pictures in his mind to accompany the words. And he had never discovered why the Master had been wandering those desolate wastes in the first place: Rahe had been most evasive about that. ‘I was travelling north,’ was the most he would say; but always changed the subject if his apprentice asked where his starting point had been.
‘That was a cruel thing to do.’
Virelai nodded. ‘I often thought so, especially when he treated me hard. It would have been best he had left me where he stumbled upon me and let the wolves and eagles take me to feed their own.’
Saro was shocked. ‘No, no! It was the hill-people’s cruelty I meant.’ Though having Tycho Issian as his master must surely be the reason the sorcerer was fleeing from Jetra in the middle of the night.
‘Ah.’ Virelai gave that a moment’s consideration. ‘I am told that albino babies are considered unlucky.’ He stood up, dusting off his grey robes and gazing disconsolately around. ‘Certainly, I don’t feel I carry much luck with me.’
‘Do you believe in luck?’
‘The Master always said a man’s luck was what he made it; and if that is so, I have surely been a poor craftsman.’
The cat, Bëte, reappeared through the trees in front of them. She seemed impatient with them, as if they were errant cubs who had failed to keep up properly. When she came to a halt beside them, she looked from one to another as if trying to ascertain what had passed between them; then she looked down at the bird, sniffed it to see how long it had been dead. Then with a swift paw she tossed it into the air. Feathers scattered as her jaws closed around it, and then it was gone and she was on the move once more.
Saro and Virelai exchanged glances, then shouldered their packs and fetched the horse.
On the third night, they spied a spiral of campfire smoke drifting out of the valley below them, at which point Bëte sat down heavily and began to wash her face with intense self-absorption, licking a paw and rubbing it across her cheek and forehead until her fur gleamed with spit and her whiskers bristled. Every line of its body spoke to Saro without any need for the unspoken communication which seemed to pass between Bëte and the sorcerer. It looked both prideful and nonchalant, as if it had done to satisfaction the task it had set for itself and was now leaving the simpler remainder of the job to its two witless human companions.
‘Do you think it’s them?’ Saro asked Virelai as they made their way down the steep hillside as noiselessly as a dark night and an unmarked path would allow.
‘If it’s not,’ Virelai said moodily, ‘and the damned creature has led us three days out of our way out of some perversity of humour then I’ll skin it myself and sell its pelt at the first market we come to.’
It was, however, a nomad encampment: a ramshackle collection of carts and wagons were huddled together under some scant trees like a bunch of old women sheltering from a rainstorm. In the clearing, a group of yeka – the shaggy plains beasts who drew the vehicles – cropped uncomplainingly at a tiny patch of withered grass while the folk of the caravan sat clustered a little distance away around the remains of a fire whose embers glowed a dull bluish red.
‘They have tried to disguise their fire with magic,’ Virelai whispered. ‘But they could do nothing about the smoke. They must be exhausted, or weakened in some way.’
Even so, he approached warily: no one easily received unannounced visitors at such a late hour, and if they did have any magic defences in place he did not wish to run headlong into them. Before they had gone more than a few yards into the clearing, a figure detached itself from the group and came running towards them. It was a child, Saro noticed with a start; and then with an even greater shock recognised it as the child he had cannoned into at the Allfair when he had taken Tanto’s money to Guaya.
‘Falo!’ Virelai said, himself much surprised. ‘How did you—’
The little dark boy laughed. ‘I have been watching you for three days now. Nothing is hidden from me,’ he boasted. ‘Where is the cat?’
Virelai and Saro exchanged a glance, but before either of them could say a word Falo was looking past them and grinning from ear to ear, his eyes as round as plates. A huge black shape hove into view and a vast hum rumbled through the air like thunder.
‘Bëte!’ the child cried, falling to its knees to embrace the creature. ‘Bëte, you have come back!’
As the boy made this apparently mad and sacrificial gesture, a woman arrived, shrieking. ‘Falo, Falo, come away! By Elda what are you thinking of ?’
She managed somehow to insert herself between her child and the figure of the monstrous black beast, which made no move to eat either of them, but looked from one to the other with an apparently magnanimous golden gaze.
Falo squirmed clear of his mother. ‘It is Bëte,’ he insisted, as if she were being deliberately obtuse. ‘See, Bëte and Virelai are back.’
The woman gave the cat one more suspicious glance, then as if deciding there was no immediate harm to be had from it, turned to examine the newcomers.
‘Alisha,’ said the sorcerer, spreading his hands in supplication. ‘I’m sorry, we had nowhere else to go. The cat led us to you.’
The nomad woman regarded him expressionlessly as if assessing the veracity of this statement, but if she viewed any evasiveness therein, she decided not to pursue it. Instead, staring fearfully at the beast she asked the question Saro had been itching to ask for the past several days. ‘How can this great monster be the little black cat I knew as Bëte? What magic is this, Virelai?’
The sorcerer hung his head. ‘I do not know how she does it, or why,’ he admitted. ‘I have no control over her at all.’
The nomad woman said nothing in response to this, and when he looked up again he found she was staring at the beast, her mouth hanging open in astonishme
nt, her eyes all hazed and inturned.
‘Alisha—’ He made a move towards her, concerned she had suffered some kind of seizure, but she put out her hand, fingers splayed at the end of a straight arm. Even though she uttered not a word, the gesture was clear: Stay back, do not touch me!
The air between the three of them was charged with something at once hieratic and at the same time quite ordinary, as if a perfectly normal conversation were going on just out of earshot. A moment later the spell broke. Alisha rubbed a hand across her face as if recovering from a blow, and staggered a pace back into Virelai’s arms. Saro noticed how the sorcerer’s embrace tightened on her, and that she did not immediately pull away. There was obviously some relationship between the two of them, but what its exact nature was he could not have said. Something more than friendship and less than trust was the best he could manage, but even this seemed insufficient.
Since children are rarely the respecters of intimate moments, it was Falo who interrupted the silence. ‘Mama, you see? I was right, wasn’t I?’ But if she knew what he meant by this, she offered no response, save to wave Virelai and Saro ahead of her and to whistle for the horse which had slipped loose of its tether and come quietly down the hillside after them, as filled with curiosity as Saro himself. Saro watched amazed as the stallion – known for its chariness, its unpredictable temper and sharp teeth – nuzzled the nomad woman’s hand and followed them all through the clearing toward the burnt-down campfire and the expectant faces which awaited them there.
The nomads gave them food – a hot stew, flavoured with wild thyme and sage, of maize and root vegetables and something chewy but unidentifiable as anything other than an item of plant origin, served with rounds of the hard, flat bread they baked between stones placed beneath the fire. Saro was surprised to find it delicious, raised as he had been on a diet of rich meat and soft breads. He could not in fact recall the last time he had eaten a meal which did not centre around meat – cuts of lamb and mutton, legs of chicken and geese, pâtés of pressed ducks’ livers, slabs of beef hung till it was ripe and tender, gamefowl and deer, rabbits and hares, succulent fish from the Marka River, blood sausages thick with pigmeat and garlic.
When he said as much to Alisha she laughed and said something in the lilting Footloose language which made the rest of the group laugh too. Saro looked from one to another of the nomads, unsure as to whether they were sharing a joke at his expense or merely joining in the general gaiety. They were a diverse band – not quite the wild and exotic caravan of performers and entertainers he’d secretly been wishing for; and Guaya was not amongst them. Indeed, there were no children other than the boy, Falo. There were instead two old men with heads like pickled walnuts and rings in their ears and a gaggle of women so generic in appearance as to surely be sisters, their ages ranging anywhere between fifty and eighty-five – he was not used to looking at women’s faces and therefore found it hard to judge. They were all equally dark of skin, wrinkled and sun-marked, and intricately adorned with beads and chains and inked patterns and piercings – in their ears, their noses, their lips, their brows, and the Lady knew where else. They wore tiny scraps of many-coloured fabric, feathers and shells in their white hair, and they all whistled and clacked their teeth when they laughed, which was often. They spoke no word of the Old Tongue. They were utterly alien to Saro; but he liked them immensely, though he could not say why.
Alisha was the youngest woman. When she smiled at him he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly envious of Virelai. She had a generous face – wide-cheeked and wide-lipped – and eyes an extraordinary green-blue, very startling against her dark gold skin, which was several shades lighter than the complexions of the rest of the group.
‘We do not eat our fellow creatures,’ she replied to him at last. ‘We share the world equally as comrades and neighbours, and it would be strange to eat your friends, do you not think?’
She used the word ‘strange’, rather than ‘wrong’, Saro noticed, as if not passing judgement on him but rather offering up an observation, inviting his own consideration of the matter. He had never thought about it much, he realised, beyond the brief sympathy he experienced for the rabbit or the deer in its death-throes from the hunt when he was out in the hills with his father and brother and present at the kill: if he did not see where his meat came from, he ate it and enjoyed it and gave its provenance no consideration, and for this now he felt ashamed. He liked animals, and was good with them: the villa’s cats came to him and rubbed their cheeks against his legs, reared up to his hand for caresses; the dogs ran around after him, bumping him with their noses; the colts followed him around the enclosure whether he carried horse-nuts with him or not. And because the cooks never served him dishes featuring cat or dog or horse, he thought nothing of what it might be that he was eating. The idea of an animal suffering to supply him with a meal was suddenly terribly uncomfortable. Inside his tunic, the moodstone started to glow a deep and purplish red like a second heart, pulsing through the pouch and the thin fabric of his shirt.
As if alerted by a sound, everyone stopped talking. The old men regarded him curiously; the old women bent their heads together and signed to one another.
‘Eldistan,’ someone said into the quiet.
Alisha narrowed her eyes as if remembering something difficult. ‘I saw you!’ she said at last. ‘At the Allfair—’ She clutched her hands to her mouth, trying to stop the words coming out.
Saro gazed at her, dismayed. ‘What did you see?’
Something about the anguish of his expression must have touched her, for she said more gently: ‘I was with my mother – Elda take and restore her soul. We were watching the events of the Fair in our great crystal. It is not always a perfect viewing device and sometimes seems to have a mind of its own, but on that day it was offering us far-sight rather than giving us visions of past or future, and we saw you, in the midst of the melee, walking about like a blind man. You were making your way toward the girl on the pyre, the one so full of lifeforce that the only way the men of the Empire knew to extinguish it was to try to burn her up. Your hand was on the moodstone you wore around your neck and it blazed through your fingers like a fire; but then—’ she paused, her brows knit in confusion and the effort of recalling distant details ‘—there seemed to be a defraction in the crystal: we could not quite see how this came about; but it was as if you came into contact with something, other, something magical, and then the eldistan came into being. White light shone from it, a killing light . . .’
‘I did not mean to kill them,’ Saro said simply, remembering his nightmares which had shown him the three men he had touched with the stone falling white-eyed at his feet. ‘I did not even know what I was doing . . .’ He stopped, frowned. ‘What do you mean, “the eldistan came into being”?’ He looked once at Virelai, from whom he had first heard the term, but the sorcerer shrugged his incomprehension.
‘The majority of moodstones have few powers in their natural state,’ Alisha said softly. ‘But some have far greater properties. Of those, most lie dormant, never to fulfil their potential. And a killing-stone—’ she took a breath. ‘It is said only the Goddess can make a killing-stone. It becomes the repository for her wild magic.’
Saro stared at her, his mouth dry. ‘The Goddess? Falla?’
‘Falla, the Lady, One of the Three, the Mother – she has many names.’
‘But how could a goddess – the Goddess – be wandering about the Allfair and nobody know it?’ Saro cried, suddenly angry. ‘It’s all just tales for children.’
Beside them, the great cat stretched its vast jaws into a yawn which then turned into a high-pitched yelp, sounding unnaturally close to humour. Alisha reached out and ran her hand over its ears and brow. It leaned its head back into her palm, closed its eyes till they were golden slits and purred. When she looked up again, her eyes were as golden as the cat’s.
‘We are all such children in this world,’ she said softly. ‘We understand so little.
I have understood so little. Until now.’ She looked at Virelai, and her gaze was softened by affection and sympathy. ‘My dear,’ she said huskily, ‘you were blessed, did you but know it, for the woman you travelled with is the Rosa Eldi, the Rose of the World indeed: she is the flower at the heart of Elda, the Lady herself.’
Virelai blinked. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish fighting for air, but no words came out.
‘And Bëte—’
Saro gasped as a revelation struck him. ‘Of course: Bëte – it is the old word for “beast”! I read it in one of the books in my father’s library. It derives from “Bast”, which was the name of—’ His heart thumped, once, hard against his ribcage, as he understood the full import of what Alisha was telling them. ‘You mean the cat is also one of the Three? And the woman—’ He saw again Tycho Issian’s obscene image of her, legs spread . . .
All the nomads began to speak at once then. The old women came forward and began to pet the great cat, which rolled on its back and wriggled its spine in delight. Saro felt disorientated, displaced. How could any of this be true? The entire world felt infinitely mutable and undependable, as if someone had told him his true home was the moon, or that he might sprout wings and horns and begin to speak in tongues. Transformation and magic. These were not concepts which underpinned the world in which he had been raised, a world in which it was more important to bargain a man to a good price for a piece of horse-flesh and carry out due observances to a deity no one ever expected to see or, Lady forfend, actually touch.
It seemed that Virelai was having an equally hard time assimilating the idea. ‘She is a goddess?’ The term had little currency for him. In the tiny world which was Sanctuary, Rahe had been the sole lord and master, deity of all he surveyed. There was no room in such a world for a goddess.