by Jude Fisher
She had forgotten its mysteries while they had been apart – or perhaps had pushed them away into the recesses of her memory for the sake of ease of mind – and then had been too enraptured by other functions of his anatomy to spend much time in examining it while they were in Halbo, but now, sated and curious at last, and with the fitful light thrown by the improvised candles across his skin, she found herself fascinated once again. Across the wide planes of his back the Farem Hills gave way to the classic conical mountains of the southern range, with their fans of volcanic ash and smoking fumaroles. Above them, dark clouds floated like an omen, punctuated by flashes of lightning and downpours of rain and golden hail, while down below, stretching across Persoa’s left flank and onto his belly, the scene of Falla’s flight from some unseen pursuer played itself out in gorgeous detail. She was about to roll the hillman over, when something caught her eye: the Red Peak looked different. She peered closer. The great mountain appeared to have split apart in some way, exhibiting a flaming crimson interior. He must have had the design touched up recently.
‘Nice work,’ she said softly. ‘Forent or Cera?’
For a moment there was no reply, then Persoa said dreamily, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Your tattoo, my wildman; your tattoo. Did you get the new work done in Cera or Forent?’
Persoa rolled onto an elbow and turned to face her, his expression bemused. Mam found herself confronted by the sight of his dark golden chest and a belly licked by flame; and then became thoroughly distracted by the sight of his thick, velvety cock twitching back to life. With a firm hand she pressed him back onto his front and held him down with consummate ease. The hillman turned his face to her over one shoulder, and the candlelight reflected in depths of his black eyes.
‘I am, as ever, all yours to do with what you will, my kitten.’
No one sane would ever think of calling Mam ‘my kitten’. Uncle Garstan had once tried to call her ‘my little cat’ while bending her over a haybale in the byre and fumbling with her smallclothes; and as if to bear out this nomenclature, she had twisted in his grip like a feral beast and scratched his face as hard as she could. He’d not had the opportunity to repeat this exercise: she’d kneed him in the groin, stolen his knife and a small pouch of silver and left his farm for good. But when Persoa spoke to her thus, it made her want to purr.
‘You’ve had your tattoo changed,’ she said matter-of-factly, trying to focus that fact, rather than the other entrancing thing she had seen. ‘The Red Peak is erupting.’
Persoa’s face was a picture in itself; and not just for the swirls of dark ink. ‘Erupting?’
‘There’s flames and smoke coming from it, and—’ She picked up the candle and held it closer to his buttocks. Two or three small drops of hot oil slipped lazily over the lip of the dish. Persoa yelped and bucked, but Mam was not to be shifted from her purpose. ‘And here,’ she said, tracing the track of hair that ran down between the two big muscles, ‘there’s something else.’ Leaning in, she spread his cheeks with the powerful fingers of her other hand and the hillman wriggled uncomfortably. ‘Hold still,’ she admonished him, ‘I’m not going to do anything unnatural to you.’ She paused, grinning. ‘Unless, that is, you wish it.’
Another drop of seal-oil spilled onto him and ran down into the crack.
‘I thank, you: no.’
‘Well, see here – ah, you can’t: well, let me tell you what I see. The Red Peak has split apart near the roots of the mountain and something has half-emerged from it – a figure, it might be, though it’s hard to tell in this light. Or in this position.’
‘A figure?’
‘All black and spiky it is – like a goblin or a sprite.’
Now Persoa mustered his not inconsiderable strength and, throwing off the mercenary leader, leapt away into the corner of the tent, his face contorted with horror. The soapstone dish went flying, hot oil flaming out across the dark space between them, and a line of fire immediately ran up the edge of the sailcloth. Seconds later, it had taken hold and their shelter was well and truly alight, but even so, the eldianna remained where he was, clutching his knees to his chest and moaning over and over, ‘The Warlord, the Madman, the Warlord, the Madman; Lady help us all . . .’
Mam stood up and with her bare hands ripped the burning sailcloth from its makeshift frame and hurled it away from them. It roared through the night air like a comet, attracting the attention of the rest of the crew.
‘Gods blind me,’ Joz Bearhand muttered, looking up from his throw with the sheep’s bones to take in this bizarre tableau. He had never seen his leader unclothed before; and had never had the least wish to do so, and now he knew why. If truth be told, he liked his women well-formed, but not on such a scale. He found himself wondering what in the world she did with them to keep them out of her way in a fight and then remembered seeing the yards of stiff linen amongst her things he’d taken all this time for bandages. And bandages they were, in their way, though not for your regular sort of wound.
‘Take a look at the pair on that,’ Doc breathed in awe. ‘Have you ever seen such monstrous— Ow!’
‘Have some respect,’ Joz chided him. ‘If Mam knows you’ve been gawping at her tits, she’ll be wearing your bollocks on a string round her neck before you can say “Feya’s sweet box”.’
After that, they all shut up.
Oddly, no one said a word about the episode for the rest of the night; nor indeed when they set sail again the next morning; and no one dared ask why the eldianna went about his tasks with the staring eyes of a man in shock, or why the tent had gone up in flames in the first place. As one of the younger Halbo sell-swords confided to Erno: ‘She’s a strong woman, Mam. The last time I saw a man rendered such a gibbering wreck was after he took on Three-handed Ketya and her sisters at the Sailors’ Relief. Poor man never walked the same again.’
A knot of girls had gathered on the quay to wave and call out their greetings to the approaching ship: from her vantage point on the landward path down from the Hound’s Tooth, Katla could just about make out the forms of Kitten Soronsen, Magla Felinsen and Thin Hildi – who appeared to have made a miraculous recovery from her collapse – out on the mole, along with Forna Stensen, Kit Farsen and Ferra Bransen and some old women who might be part of the Seal Rock clan, or were possibly Old Ma Hallasen and her friend Tian: at this distance it was hard to tell. What she could see, however, was that in the few seconds it had taken for someone to report the sighting of the sail and the general scramble from the hall down to the harbour, Kitten had somehow contrived to change her overdress and was now wearing her best scarlet silk tunic, which set off her hair and eyes so well. She was likely to attract rather more attention than she’d bargained for, wearing that, Katla thought grimly. And not from some good, honest northern sailor, either. She had given up trying to shout to them: all their concentration was towards the sea and no one was looking in her direction at all. Squinting, she could see Fat Breta wheezing her way down the steep path from the steading in the company of Marin Edelsen, and behind them Otter, Magla’s mother, in company with the Mistress of Rockfall, Bera Rolfsen herself; and behind her came old Gramma Rolfsen leaning on her sturdy stick.
Gritting her teeth as a blackberry runner snagged hard across her shins, Katla redoubled her efforts. The ship was within striking distance of the sound now: surely anyone with eyes to see could tell that this was no Eyran vessel, let alone her father’s elegant new ice-breaker? But the girls knew next to nothing about ships and the old women, who had seen southern vessels before in these waters twenty years and more before, were hazy of vision in these latter days. Katla cursed them all for their stupidity and their age. ‘It’s not the Long Serpent!’ she wailed for the hundredth time, even though she knew that rather than carrying to the Rockfallers down below her voice would be wafted away into the rising heat of the air like the cry of a gull. Could she make it down there to warn them in time? It was a long way from th
e top of the Hound’s Tooth down to the harbour; even by the easy path, which was three miles and more from summit to sea level, it would take a good half hour; and the easy path debouched in a more northerly part of the cliff from where the top of her ascent route had brought her out. This descent path was more direct, but it was far steeper, pocked with rabbit-holes which would happily swallow your foot and snap your ankle, and studded with boulders and outcroppings of granite hidden beneath wild flurries of brambles and gorse and bracken. If she did not watch every step she made, she was like to break her neck and die unseen and undiscovered and no use to anyone.
From this stance on the seaward face of the headland, the path now began to curl away from the coast, following a rock-filled gully down into the valley behind the harbour: she would not be able to see either ship or her folk for several minutes; and her cries would be masked by the landscape. Nothing for it now than to run and run and hope she could reach the women before the crew of the ship were able to disembark. And if these are raiders, then what? A voice nagged in her head. None of them bears a weapon, nor knows one end of a sword from the other: what hope for them, if that is the case? Perhaps, the voice insinuated, it would be best if you were to cut your losses. After all, what more do they deserve after all they have said to you, the way they have treated you? Run inland and save yourself, slip around to the back of the steading and fetch your sword and belongings: make good your escape while the visitors are fully occupied down at the quayside . . .
Katla growled softly. She had given up trying to understand whence such voices came, whether they were internal dialogues she held with herself or from some other source entirely. Shut up! she told this one sternly. I cannot listen to you and run as hard as I must.
Head down, the breath tearing raggedly through her chest, Katla ran.
The Long Serpent was indeed far, far away from its home port at Rockfall, and one could say not simply in terms of geography. The mists had cleared from around her mast and the men were rowing again; but they rowed through icy seas in mutinous silence, and their number was much diminished. Since the disappearances of Bran Mattson and Tor Bolson, three more men had gone missing, despite the constant watch set by the ship’s captain. Aran Aranson had not slept for four days. His eyes were sore and red-rimmed, the sockets deeply outlined by thin skin as dark as a bruise. He was not always attentive to what was said around him, and when he did listen, he was short-tempered. He ate what Mag Snaketongue put before him, but without relish or comment; he declined to drink hard wine or ale; he consulted his map often. Most of the men avoided him; some gathered in small groups when their shift was done and spoke of losing one other man overboard and then turning the ship for home. None would know the truth of it, they said softly; but though they almost believed it, no one would volunteer to make the first move. Urse watched them and knew their thoughts. He gave Emer Bretison, their ringleader, a hard stare, saw how the big lad held it for several seconds before wavering away into confusion and knew they would not act on their conspiracy. He did all this not out of some misplaced loyalty to Aran Aranson, but because it was his view that they had of their own free wills joined the expedition, and that by setting foot on board the Long Serpent they had accepted all consequences of that initial act of greed and risk. The mysterious loss of his shipmates, however, fell somewhere outside this covenant: he did not know what to make of that enigma at all, except that, like his captain, he refused to give credence to tales of afterwalkers and spirits.
Once, in the depths of the night, he had heard a faint cry and a splash, but cloud had lain before the moon and he could see nothing. In the morning Jad the tumbler had been missing, though none save himself had seemed to mark the boy’s absence; when they had, Fall Ranson had muttered darkly about the lad being exhausted by the rowing and in despair about reaching any destination other than Sur’s Great Howe, until Flint Hakason had quieted him with ‘And would you be next?’
Now the ice became thicker and harder to navigate. Great white sheets of it spread northwards away from them through the near-constant half-light, split by snaking black leads and channels. The Long Serpent plunged into the first of these with Urse at the tiller, roaring directions to a crew mesmerised by their sudden new surroundings. The farther they penetrated into this freezing maze, the more bizarre the formations became. At first, there were merely small scatterings of hardened ice bobbing in the dark water like jewels. When these struck the hull it was with a noise quite out of proportion to their size, and the timbers rumbled and creaked as though they might burst apart at any moment. For hours on end, Aran lay half over the prow, fending off the larger lumps with a long gaff, but still a thousand of the smaller balls hammered into them, denting and scraping the hard oak of the strakes.
Under a chill pewter sky, smoky wisps of vapour curled up around the passage of the ship like gasts, hovering in the twilit air as if waiting their moment to coalesce and take their fearsome night-time shapes. They wreathed themselves around the form of the Master of Rockfall, silhouetted as he was out on the prow, as though they might insinuate themselves into his very being and take his body for their own. As the pewter gave way to the rose and violet of the arctic sunset, they entered another territory altogether; one which promised imminent sight of the mythological, for it was more bizarre than anything any of them had ever seen. At first they came upon bergs which towered around them like sentinels or giants or fabulous castles, the smooth planes of their ancient ice tinged with gold and vermilion and purple. As they passed, the ship’s wake rolled out down the leads like tidal waves, and when these collided with the bergs it was with a sound like distant thunder.
‘My god,’ Mag Snaketongue breathed, his dark eyes dimly reflecting the sights before him, ‘it looks like the end of the world.’
But things were only to get stranger.
As the light faded, they heard what sounded, freakishly, like a voice in the distance.
‘Terns?’ Jan asked, looking toward Flint Hakason.
The dark man cocked his head, like a dog listening to something beyond normal hearing range. ‘Maybe kittiwakes,’ he said after a pause. But he did not look convinced.
‘It’s too dark.’ Aran Aranson declared, his face stern, ‘and we’re too far from land.’
‘Fulmars,’ Urse asserted. ‘Sounds like fulmars to me.’
The rest of the crew listened. For several moments there was nothing to be discerned except the swirl of air over the surface of the floes, and the eddying of ice crystals which brushed their faces and caught in their beards. Then the noises came again, high and cracked and broken by both distance and wind.
For several moments the men of the Long Serpent strained towards the sound, their bodies frozen in stasis. ‘By the Lord Sur,’ Pol Garson said at last, and his voice was low with dread, ‘it’s a song.’
Now they could all hear it: the pitch and roll of notes on the wind, too rhythmic for nature, too melodic for chance; and too far from civilisation to be expected; yet still too distant from the ship to be anything but elusive and baffling to the ear.
Mag grasped his captain’s arm. ‘Let us turn back,’ he urged, his fingers digging into the other man’s biceps like claws. ‘Let us go away from here before it is too late.’
‘Aye, Captain, let’s take to the oars at once!’ cried Gar Felinson, his grizzled head nodding fervently with his request.
Urse One-Ear concurred. ‘I do not like the sound of this at all.’
Now all the men were talking and moving at once, panic making their movements fast and jerky. Several ran to their rowing seats, set their oars in position and looked expectantly at their captain; others ran to the gunwales and stared fearfully into the darkness with their hands on the hilts of their daggers. Flint Hakason marched to the mastfish and unlashed one of the harpoons he kept there, his face set in the grimmest of expressions.
The noises got louder, resolved themselves into distinct and horrible particularity. Whatever it was out t
here in the darkness, it seemed to be experiencing some difficulty in carrying the tune, for the notes wavered reedily, or were swallowed away into the gathering gloom of the night. But despite all this, the lyric soon made itself apparent as belonging to a song all too familiar to every man present, it being The Seafarer’s Lament:
‘A maiden fair and free was she
A maiden fair and free
She gave herself so joyfully
She pledged herself to me
But I did travel far away
Across the oceans blue
Beyond the islands where she lay
My own dear love, and true
While over stormy seas I sailed
A-dreaming of my lover
Her love for me withered and failed
She betrayed me with another
Many a friend has gone from me
As I have sailed the stormy sea
And now the icy depths do call
My path leads to the Lord Sur’s hall
For nothing keeps me here today
All I care for has passed away
My love, my heart, my youth and breath
I wish for silence, peace and death.’
As the last notes died away, an apparition soughed into view: a battered boat with a tattered sail which flailed like rags in the breeze. It was a small faering; last hope of the storm-wracked and shipwrecked. Its timbers were damaged and weather-bleached, and of its parent ship there was no sign. The men of the Long Serpent made the sailor’s sign against disaster and clutched their silver anchors as if the pendants had the power to ward off every evil in Elda. They craned their necks for sight of the singer, and for a long while the darkness obscured their view.