Rose of the World (FOOLS GOLD)

by Fisher, Jude

  Jude Fisher is a pseudonym for Jane Johnson, publishing director of HarperCollins’ SF imprint, Voyager. She holds two literature degrees, specialising in Anglo Saxon and Old Icelandic texts, and is also a qualified lecturer. For the last twenty years, Jane has been the publisher of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and is the author of the official Visual Companions to Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. Find out more at www.judefisher.co.uk

  Praise for Sorcery Rising and Wild Magic:

  ‘This tale of magic, mystery, intrigue and feud works well, and the characters are so convincing (including a strong and appealing female lead) that I can’t wait to read the next instalment’

  The Times

  ‘My, but Sorcery Rising has a plethora of characters. There’s Katla, the rock-climbing swordmaker; Saro, the unwanted younger son; the lusty, vengeful Tycho; and dozens of others. The amazing thing is that author Fisher manages to make each of them integral to the plot. Fisher ultimately pulls it all together to form a compelling and intriguing whole that will have readers eagerly awaiting the next volume’ Starlog

  ‘A marvellous tapestry, deftly woven, with a masterfully colourful complexity. Sorcery Rising left me breathless and shouting for more’ Janny Wurts

  ‘Myth blows on the wind, spirit flows in the water, magic crackles in the fire, but the characters are so vibrantly earth-rooted as to be ourselves far away yet the merest moment ago’ Brian Sibley

  ‘I enjoyed Jude Fisher’s debut very much . . . a well-written work, leading the reader deftly on to fascinating scenes and unusual characters’ Anne McCaffery

  ‘An impressive debut’ Roz Kaveney, AMAZON.CO.UK

  Also by Jude Fisher in the Fool’s Gold trilogy

  Wild Magic

  Sorcery Rising

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2005

  This edition published by Pocket Books, 2006

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS company

  Copyright © Jude Fisher, 2005

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  Pocket Books & Design is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  The right of Jude Fisher to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  Africa House

  64–78 Kingsway

  London WC2B 6AH

  www.simonsays.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN: 978-0-74344-042-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-47114-145-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Bembo by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Polmont, Stirlingshire

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  Acknowledgements

  For their help and encouragement on this long and turbulent voyage, thanks are due to Emma, for brilliant feedback; to Russ and Danny, for seeing it through; to Suzanne for picking up the reins and discovering how exhilarating fantasy can be; and to John, who brought the saga full circle.

  Contents

  What Has Gone Before . . .

  Prologue

  One: Captives

  Two: The Wasteland

  Three: Stones

  Four: The Kettle-girl

  Five: The Master

  Six: The Heir to the Northern Isles

  Seven: Katla

  Eight: Alisha

  Nine: Foreign shores

  Ten: Smoke and Mirrors

  Eleven: Kitten’s Revenge

  Twelve: In the Desert

  Thirteen: Among the Houris

  Fourteen: Treachery

  Fifteen: Torments and miracles

  Sixteen: The Miseria

  Seventeen: Dreams

  Eighteen: Treason

  Nineteen: Erno

  Twenty: Adrift

  Twenty-one: Afterwalkers

  Twenty-two: The Pursuit

  Twenty-three: Katla and Saro

  Twenty-four: The melting pot

  Twenty-five: Invasion fleet

  Twenty-six: King of the North

  Twenty-seven: To Steal a Rose

  Twenty-eight: The Rose of Elda

  Twenty-nine: The Battle of Halbo

  Thirty: Aftermath

  Thirty-one: Travelling south

  Thirty-two: An unexpected encounter

  Thirty-three: Cantara

  Thirty-four: The Rosa Eldi

  Thirty-five: Cera

  Thirty-six: Messages

  Thirty-seven: Deceptions

  Thirty-eight: The Bone Quarter

  Thirty-nine: The Red Peak

  Forty: The War of the Rose

  Forty-one: Escape

  Forty-two: Between the living and the dead

  Forty-three: The Call

  Forty-four: Moonfell

  Epilogue

  What Has Gone Before . . .

  The world of Elda has three deities: the Woman, the Man and the Beast. Their magic has long been lost, though legends abound. Some say the god Sur is held captive beneath the crust of the world, awaiting his recall. The goddess Falla and her great cat have not been seen for centuries; but it does not stop the people of the southern continent – the Istrians – from turning their worship into a fanatical religion.

  Despite tensions, the people of Elda gather every year on the volcanic waste known as the Moonfell Plain, there to arrange marriages and trade alliances. This year is a special occasion, for the King of Eyra, Ravn Asharson, has come to choose himself a bride. All are outraged when he chooses not a wellborn Eyran woman nor a noble Istrian beauty swathed in her veiling robes; but an unknown nomad woman whose merest glance fires men with desperate lust.

  For Katla Aransen, daughter of the Rockfall Clan, sword-maker, tomboy and climber, it is the first visit to the Allfair: the first, and almost the last. From the Moonfell Plain there rises a great rock, called by the southerners Falla’s Rock and by the northerners Sur’s Castle, for their respective deities. Katla does not realize when she scales the Rock that it is a sacred place – all she sees is a perfect climb – but by committing sacrilege she manages to set the spark for a mighty conflagration. Both Eyra and Istria claim the Rock as their own: and Katla is caught in the middle of a furious debacle.

  Even her family cannot save her, it seems, from the fires to which the Istrians are determined to consign her. Her dour and obsessive father, Aran Aranson, is distracted by dreams of gold, having bought what purports to be a treasure map. Nor can her brothers Halli and Fent, or her cousin Erno Hamson, who loves her dearly.

  For Saro Vingo, too, it is his first visit to the Allfair. He is here with his family to trade horses and see his brother Tanto affianced to the Lord of Cantara’s daughter, Selen. Selen’s father is Lord Tycho Issian, a man of cruel lusts and fanatical beliefs. He must sell his daughter to clear his debts; but when the deal falls through Tanto, as handsome on the exterior as he is corrupt and cruel within, is determined to have Selen by any means. But as he rapes her, she stabs him and flees, only to be found and rescued by Erno Hamson, who had been engaged in helping Katla escape her pursuers: now she is left
to face them alone.

  In the end it will be young Saro Vingo who saves Katla. He saw her on the first day of the Fair and was enthralled by her; with the aid of a precious stone which has taken on terrifying magical powers, he wades into fires to free her.

  A great conflict erupts as the Rockfall Clan escape the Fair with their injured kinswoman and Ravn Asharson flees with his beautiful new bride to his ship for the long voyage north to Halbo.

  Unbeknownst to all, including herself, this extraordinary creature, known only as the Rosa Eldi, is the lost goddess Falla, abducted by a mage hundreds of years ago. Rahe, a great king and sorcerer, defeated her brother Sirio (known by the northerners as Sur) and imprisoned him beneath the Red Peak; then stole Falla away to his secret kingdom – Sanctuary, an island of ice at the top of the world – and there extracted all her magic and her memory and used it to gain power over all the world and make her his bodyslave. Until his apprentice Virelai – a strange, tall, pale man raised by Rahe since he was a child – unwittingly steals her away and brings her back to the world.

  The Rosa Eldi, Rose of the World, will feel her memory and her magic returning, fragment by fragment: but still she remains in the power of men. In Ravn’s kingdom, she will find herself the subject of intense scrutiny and suspicion. Ravn needs a child to secure his succession: but the Rosa Eldi is not mortal and cannot conceive his child, no matter how hard she tries.

  When Selen Issian, now travelling as Leta Gullwing having been rescued by Erno Hamson and a band of mercenaries under the tender care of Mam, arrives at the northern court heavily pregnant with the unwanted child of the man who raped her, it seems the new Queen of Eyra’s wishes have been answered.

  In Istria, Selen’s father Tycho Issian, accompanied now by the sorcerer Virelai and a black cat, fans the flames of fundamentalism in the south, whipping up hatred and bloodlust against the old enemy. But his true motive is not religious, but profane in the extreme. At the Allfair, he glimpsed the Rosa Eldi, and was engulfed by desire for her. Now he will not rest until he can take her for himself. He will launch a holy war against the North to quench this lust, and burn a thousand nomads and heretics to assuage his torment.

  Forces gather in both realms as the shadow of war creeps ever nearer. But Aran Aranson, safe home at Rockfall, his daughter miraculously recovered from her wounds, has no thought for the coming conflict. All his thought is bent on adventure: a voyage into arctic waters to seek for the legendary island of Sanctuary, where his map tells him there is untold treasure for the taking.

  Katla sails with the mummers’ leader, the charismatic Tam Fox, to Halbo and there steals away the North’s best shipmaker, Morten Danson, to fashion a fine icebreaker to sail into the treacherous waters of the far north.

  The ship is built; the crew selected. All the able-bodied men in the area will accompany Aran, leaving the women of Rockfall unprotected. It is not long before raiders from the southern continent sail into Rockfall waters. News of the theft of Morten Danson has reached the warmongers of Istria: if they can abduct the finest shipmaker in Eyra they can fashion a fleet with which they can carry the war to the Northern Isles. And taking a few comely Eyran women prisoners to sell in the slavemarkets of Istria can only add to their profits.

  As fate would surely decree, Aran Aranson’s voyage is disastrous: struck by storm, by ill omen and mutiny Aran, his murderous younger son Fent and the last remaining member of the crew, Urse One-Ear, will find themselves adrift in the weird and hostile landscape of an island which may be the famed isle of Sanctuary, somewhere between the world of men and the world of legend . . .

  Prologue

  Where am I?

  Who am I?

  Neither question gave up a simple answer, though the ‘where’ might be easier to determine than the ‘who’. Stars wheeled overhead in a clear night sky. Out of all that silver-speckled blackness the constellation known as Sirio’s Ship, with its three aligned stars forming a single straight mast, leapt immediately to the eye. Orienting himself by this, he saw where the Fulmar flew ahead, north toward the Navigator’s Star, the brightest light in the sky. Turning, he located the Stallion and the Twins, showing between high silhouetted peaks, and to the west of them the complicated patterns of the Weaving Woman and the Archer. A sliver of new moon lay between the paws of the Great Cat; soon it would drop and the stars would turn and dawn would reveal the particularities of his location.

  He already had a suspicion of where he found himself. He had navigated too many ocean crossings, studied the heavens for too many years ever to be completely lost in this world of Elda.

  And thus he knew himself to be somewhere in the depths of the southern continent. Even if the unusual configuration of the stars had not offered that evidence, there were other signifiers available. Volcanic sand crunched beneath his bare feet. The air was dry and smelled of sulphur. It whispered against his skin, soft as a woman’s caress. Frowning, he dropped a hand. Why was he naked? Naked and in an Istrian desert, somewhere below tall volcanic mountains?

  He searched his memory, which yielded tiny, precious details.

  Dread and fear; fury and hopelessness. Freezing salt water which burned the throat and nose, and a terrible crushing, a searing pain in the chest, which spread through his entire body like wildfire through sere grass. From nowhere, or from everywhere, came a voice which rumbled through all that choking darkness, reverberating through the bones of his chest and skull so that it was almost as if the voice were his own, an internal command made massively manifest. Then, a sensation of great velocity, a roaring, tumbling, rushing through different elements – water, earth, air – or maybe it was himself flowing, merging with his surroundings in some bizarre metaphysical union.

  The gap between ‘then’ and ‘now’ remained impossible to bridge. He felt hollowed out, scoured like a pot ready to be refilled. Bewildered and a little afraid, he shook his head, and the beads and bones woven into the long braids of his hair chinked lightly against the bare skin of his shoulders.

  Then, putting the Navigator’s Star behind him, he began to walk towards his destiny.

  One

  Captives

  ‘Do you believe in magic, Tilo?’

  ‘Sergeant to you.’

  ‘Do you believe in magic, Sergeant?’ This last was uttered with sarcastic emphasis: he and Tilo Gaston had grown up in the same rat-run of Forent’s alleys, behind the shipyards where the whores and the destitute lived and where the air owned a permanent miasma of urine, salt and tar; but even though they’d signed up for the militia on the same day the dark man had managed to bag himself a rank Gesto could only dream of. He found it hard to believe merit had had anything to do with it.

  Tilo Gaston ran a hand through his hair and stared at the figure in front of him, swaying awkwardly to the rhythm of the packhorse he was tied onto. They had placed a bag over the pale man’s head because Isto had insisted that a sorcerer could sear you dead from the inside out with his gaze; but Isto had never been the brightest coin in the bunch. There had been little resistance from the lanky albino creature, who seemed more like a dying eel than a magicker: clammy and languid, he had said not a word since his capture, let alone tried to lay on them curses or enchantments. The other one, though, the lad – he was a different matter. Eyes like a man three times his age: a man who had seen far too much. You could believe a fair bit about a boy like that. But magic?

  He shrugged. ‘Lot of strange things in the world. I’ve seen flowers bloom in the Bone Quarter and chickens with two heads. I’ve seen fish fall out of a clear sky and a stone bleed. I’ve stood on ground that shook beneath my feet and heard voices where there could be none. Unnatural phenomena: that’s what they are.’

  Gesto tried to look interested and failed. He hated it when Tilo played the sage: it was just another way of reminding his old friend of the gap that had opened up between them. You wouldn’t think that bearing a rank would make such a difference, but somehow it did: you got the pay, the cho
ice of billet and the best women too. But why it encouraged Tilo to think it endowed you with a more valid experience of the world, he had no idea. He wished he had never bothered to ask his question.

  If Tilo was aware of his comrade’s irritation, he gave no sign of it. Unfazed, he continued, ‘I’ve seen travelling players disappear in a cloud of green smoke, only to pop up right behind you out of nowhere; and I once saw a Footloose woman produce a whole swathe of silk flags from out of her cunny; but that’s illusion, that is: tricks and mirrors. But whatever it was you saw the boy do with that necklace thing the captain’s got wrapped so careful in his saddlebag, I can’t believe it was magic. Some sort of new weapon, I’d guess; or maybe just a shiny gewgaw that gave Toro’s horse a fright so it tossed him off and broke his silly neck.’

  Gesto bristled. Besides himself, three men in the troop – seasoned soldiers too brutalised to have any imagination left to them – had sworn they had seen the boy blast Toro off his horse; and he had been right there when it happened! He might have been in pain from where that damned big cat had raked his leg, but there had been nothing wrong with his eyes, for Falla’s sake! And he had seen the body. There hadn’t been a mark on it, the only sign of Toro’s precipitous demise being an expression of astonishment and upturned, shocked, white eyes.

  ‘Well, I saw what I saw,’ he declared mulishly, and let his horse drop back in order to end the conversation.

  His leg throbbed dully in the heat of the day, and his throat was parched. They had been riding steadily since dawn and it was now past lunch time, but the captain showed no sign of stopping. Sand swirled up around them and got into the most unbelievable nooks and crannies. Trust the Goddess, he thought, in a moment of sheer heresy, to design a man to have so many awkward places in which sand could embed itself and irritate you so. To take his mind off these discomforts, he turned to survey the rest of the troop and saw where the boy rode in the company of Isto and Semanto halfway back down the line. Like the pale man, the boy’s head was also swathed, his hands bound to the cantle in front of him. He sat his piebald pony with a complete indifference to its uncoordinated gait, so that he was thrown around each time the pony lurched. Shoulders slumped, feet limp; every line of his body carried the same message: that he did not care whether he lived or died.