Rose of the World (FOOLS GOLD)

by Fisher, Jude

  Katla knew a little more about some of the seamier ways of the world than most of the other women on the ship. She knew, for instance, that in the port towns of the Northern Isles whores did a brisk trade in the alleys and slophouses around the harbour, especially when ships made landfall after several days at sea; but she also knew that for the most part that trade was their own: it was a course some women chose to follow. In Eyra the money such women earned they pocketed themselves and spent as much or as little of it as they chose. But from what she had heard about practices in the Southern Empire, they were more likely to be herded against their will into some cushioned den and kept there by threat and by violence to service the lecherous and depraved. You would have to be both desperate and indiscriminate, Katla considered, to subject yourself voluntarily to the attentions of most men who would seek to pay to tup a woman. She had seen a few inebriated and ill-favoured sailors and shoremen in her short life, enough to know that offering herself to them for a few coins would never be her choice of profession. But to be forced into such servitude, compelled to carry out who knew what bizarre perversions in an enemy city’s brothel . . . She wasn’t a particularly squeamish or moral girl, but she knew she would rather die.

  Erno Hamson sat with his feet dangling over the barnacled stones of the old wall, staring blindly out to sea, trying hard to control his frustration and hoping some ship – any ship – might come by. Pale sunlight struck down through the water in the inner harbour to where half a dozen wrecked boats lay drowned on the seabed, evidence of the raiders’ destruction. This exact spot had used to be his favourite place in all of Elda, and he had sat here on a hundred previous occasions, but never in circumstances like those in which he now found himself. For a start, this time there was no Katla Aransen at his side, her crabline disappearing into the lazy green waters below them as they bunked off some chore up at the steading. Indeed, he had very little idea of where Katla might be, except that she was not here at Rockfall, where he had so fervently hoped to find her. Above and behind him, the black smoke which had engulfed the steading on the hillside had disappeared, blown away on a stiff north wind which drove high clouds fast across a chill blue sky. The bodies which had lain scattered and defiled about the homefield had been buried, and anything useful which could be salvaged from the remains of the hall had been purloined by the rest of the mercenary troop of which he had, until the night before, deemed himself, if somewhat reluctantly, a member.

  There had appeared to be only three survivors of the raiders’ attack on the steading. Two were foreign women who turned out to be whores the Istrians had brought with them from Forent, then discarded. The third was Ferra Bransen. They had found her shut in a fish shed down near the harbour, but for the first two days she had been incoherent with terror, and appeared convinced that Persoa, into whose care she had been given, was one of the raiders, for she cowered away from even his gentlest touch, and wailed if he looked at her. Traumatised as Ferra was, she still could remember nothing useful of the events which occurred, nor any detail of the raiders or their vessel; but it had not taken much speculation to leap to the conclusion that since the shipmaker, Morten Danson, was no longer to be found on the island, he had been abducted for a second time, and was now bound for the Southern Empire.

  Erno had wanted to follow them immediately, of course, and rescue Katla. The stones of the steading were still hot from the fire when they had arrived, and the corpses strewn around the homefield had not yet begun to stink, so the raiders’ ship could not have sailed far. He felt sure that with a good wind, and their superior sailing skills, they could overtake them and save the prisoners they had taken. But Mam would hear nothing of his entreaties. ‘They are vicious marauders, and we do not know how many of them there are. Besides,’ she had added, showing him the gleaming points of her sharpened teeth, ‘if they’re reduced to stealing Rockfall women, they must be stony broke, and my troop doesn’t get itself into dangerous situations without we get well paid for it.’

  When he had started to shout at her, and call her an iron-whore and a coward, she had simply punched him very hard on the side of the head, thrown him over her shoulder, and deposited him in a pile of hay in the western barn.

  He had been left with a lump on his temple the size of a hen’s egg. It was difficult to believe that a woman (even one who looked like Mam) could deal him such a blow with her bare fist, but he suspected he could probably count himself lucky that she liked him sufficiently not to run him through with the sword he had accused her of being too gutless to wield and left him to die in his own blood. He doubted there were many men alive in the world who had insulted the mercenary leader; certainly, none alive and still in possession of all their parts.

  Joz Bearhand had been the one to revive him with a cupful of cold water, half a chicken and a flask of stallion’s blood. The water Joz had dashed in his face, and when Erno had sat up spluttering and disorientated, the big man had poured a good measure of the bitter liquor down his throat and gifted him with the chicken and a piece of advice. ‘If you want to see Katla Aransen again, it would be best you do so in this life, and not in some freezing corner of Hel,’ he had opined sagely. ‘We’re mercenaries, boy. We follow our leader and go wherever the money sends us.’

  And when Erno had countered that he was not a mercenary, nor would he ever be one, Joz had simply grinned his fearsome grin and thrown a small well-stuffed pouch up into the darkness. When, on its way down, he had snatched it out of the air beside Erno’s ear, it had made a most tantalising chinking sound, as of several sturdy coins coming to rest.

  Erno, caught between a sudden desperate hunger – for the aroma of the cooked bird was teasing his nostrils mercilessly – and sharp curiosity, found himself a moment later asking rather indistinctly, through a vast and juicy mouthful, ‘What’s that for, then?’

  But Joz had disappeared into the night, money and all.

  Erno frowned: then the food and wine claimed his attention before these questions took firm hold, and by the time he had wolfed down the rest of the chicken, finished off the flask of stallion’s blood and drowsed off into a restless sleep as a result, night had fallen on Rockfall.

  The next morning, when he went to look for the mercenary troop he found they had gone, leaving him boatless and alone. Now, here he sat, drumming his heels on the seawall, waiting to see if it was by some odd practical joke that they had disappeared, and whether they would come back for him. Failing that, he reasoned, he was going to have to trek the length of the island – on foot, unless he could find and catch one of the Rockfall ponies which had been let loose to run across the wide moorland – and plead for the loan of a ketch from one of the northern shore families; if anyone there were left alive.

  ‘Thinking of becoming a fishy, are you? Going to swim your way to her?’ This was delivered in a bellow, followed by an unnerving cackle.

  Erno almost fell in the harbour from shock. He had heard no one approach: had thought himself the only living soul left in the area. He pushed himself to his feet, his hand already drawing his belt-knife.

  It was an incongruous sight which greeted him: a skinny, bent figure adorned in a half dozen mismatched skirts, with a fraying blanket for a cloak and wild grey hair reaching almost to the ground. The top of its head was bound with knotted, coloured cloths, making it entirely disproportionate to the tiny body above which it bobbed. The oddness did not end there, either, for behind the figure trotted a small white goat led along by a long piece of string.

  Bemused, he waited for this bizarre entourage to approach.

  ‘Fish or fowl? Foul or fair? What can be done with a handsome little drake left out in the sun? Take it home and stroke its pretty feathers, make its tail into a soup,’ the figure wheezed.

  Erno frowned, not sure what to say to any of this. No one knew what to say to Old Ma Hallasen: she was, and had always been, as mad as a bat. As a child he had crept up on her little bothy by the stream, usually with the other boys, and o
nce, when feeling particularly brave, on his own. She was a witch: she ate stillborn lambs and pigs’ eyes and put spells on animals and women who crossed her. She didn’t like children, and would chase them with a stick. To a ten-year-old boy, she had seemed a figure straight out of a tale: a troll-woman, or a roving spirit hungry for the flesh of the living. He had been terrified of her. But with the wisdom of his twenty-six years, Erno could understand why an elderly woman living on her own with only her goats and cats for company might not wish to be pestered by local boys throwing pebbles and worse at her when she sat out in her tiny enclosure, bothering no one. He forced his face into a hesitant smile.

  Old Ma Hallasen peered at him from under her strange turban and returned a massive gap-toothed grin. ‘Ah, my little pigeon, flown home have you, to find the coop all broken down and charry? Never mind, my pretty bird. Come back with Asta and me and we’ll make you comfy.’ She laid a clawlike hand on his arm and gave him a grotesque wink. ‘Ah, little Erni, little Erno.’

  Erno took an involuntary step backwards and found nothing beneath his heel but air. For a second he rocked precariously on the edge of the seawall, then the crone grabbed him with shocking strength and wrestled him to the ground. The goat nosed at him uncertainly, then started to chew his hair.

  ‘Water is for fishies,’ she reprimanded him severely, shaking a bony finger at him. ‘What use are you to me or the Kettle-girl if you drowns like a ratty-beast?’

  The Kettle-girl. In one of the ancient dialects, the word for ‘kettle’ was ‘katla’. He stared at the old woman kneeling over him, and felt a new kind of fear. Perhaps she wasn’t as mad as she made out; and perhaps, as was reputed, she had the Sight. How else could she possibly know his attachment to Katla Aransen?

  He pulled himself out from under the old woman and heaved himself upright, noticing as he did so the state of her attire. Some hems were stained, with mud, and blood and other unidentifiable fluids; two of the odd pieces of fabric were charred and holed. Understanding came to him, alongside a bitter fury. ‘You stole these clothes!’ he shouted at her suddenly. ‘You took them from the dead women at the steading.’

  Old Ma Hallasen leapt away with disturbing vigour for one so old. A great waft of smells accompanied this action, among them a strong smell of smoke. ‘So what if I did? They wasn’t no use to them up there!’ Her beady black eyes flashed angrily. ‘They was long past caring.’

  Not really mad at all, Erno decided. He took her by the arm and was alarmed to find that sticklike appendage as tough and corded as a tree root. ‘What do you know about what happened here?’ he demanded, shaking her a little harder than he’d meant to. ‘Where was the Master of Rockfall? Where were all the men? Why was no one here to defend the women?’

  The old woman screwed her face up and wrenched herself away from him. For a moment he thought she was going to burst into tears, then she pursed her mouth and with tremendous venom expelled a great wad of saliva and mucus onto the stones of the mole, where it spattered with a thick, wet slap. ‘Under the sea with Sur himself; or bound by ice in the roots of Hel, that’s where.’

  Erno rubbed his face in frustration. ‘Please tell me,’ he pleaded. ‘Tell me what has happened here.’

  The crone gave him a lopsided stare. Then she gathered her goat up under her arm and without another word turned back the way she had come.

  Erno followed her, feeling like a fool. What must they look like? he thought suddenly, Old Ma Hallasen bent almost double by age and the weight of the beast she carried, him tagging along behind as if led by the very string on which she had led her pet.

  He knew his way to the old woman’s dwelling-place, of course: the pathways of Rockfall were as familiar to him as the veins which tracked across the tops of his hands. It was a rundown little place, a turf-covered hummock shrouded by hawthorns and gnarled oaks by the side of Sheepsfoot Stream which came bubbling down out of the heathland at the foot of the cliffs to make a swampy mire out of what might otherwise have been a pretty upland meadow. No one else wanted it, or her. No one knew how old she was: it seemed she had always been on Rockfall; and so the ancient hovel at Sheepsfoot Bog seemed the perfect place for her. Like her, it had been around for as long as anyone could remember; no one could remember to whom it had once belonged. From the outside the place looked as dismal a home as any he could imagine, even with its little pen of multicoloured goats and the thin striped cat stretched out on the roof, eyeing him inimically. The hovel rose like a burial mound out of the scabby earth, and its door was a flayed sealskin stretched across a frame of willowwood. Leather ties held it closed against the weather. There were no windows. A chair fashioned from the stern of an old rowing boat had been propped in the sun on the south side of the mound, and a large stuffed sack draped atop it with a deep indentation in its centre, where the old woman habitually sat. Behind the house, a pair of beehives buzzed with activity.

  Why had she brought him here? Erno’s heart thumped uncomfortably as abruptly he lost sixteen of his hard-acquired years and became again a curious, frightened boy, peering from the cover of the hawthorn hedge at the witch’s hall, hoping and at the same time terrified that she would appear.

  As if reading his thoughts, Ma Hallasen dropped the goat, which immediately kicked up its heels, skipped over the makeshift fence, string and all, and ran to join its fellows, and turned to face him, her seamed old face alive with glee. She was enjoying his discomfort, Erno realised: she played up to her role.

  Then she grabbed him by the hand with those cold, knobbly fingers, undid the mangy leather door-thongs and led him into the mound.

  The interior of the witch-house made Erno’s jaw drop. From the outside, it appeared less than the size of a fishing boat; but the inside was huge, stretching back into shadows beyond the unsteady light cast by candles ranged around the walls. Someone (surely not the old crone herself?) appeared to have hollowed a great cavern into the hill. Huge timbers, smoothed by age and use, supported the roof, and the floor had been dug deep into the ground to lend the room sufficient height for a tall man like Erno to stand upright without danger of thumping his head. Elaborately worked hangings flared out of the candlelight, colours more rich and varied than Erno had ever seen, for the dyes of the Northern Isles tended toward the simpler shades of nature – browns and greens and soft heathery purples and blues; such rare essences which gave these vibrant hues could be afforded only by the wealthiest lords. There was a large wooden settle spread with furs and heaped high with cushions embroidered sumptuously in reds and golds, a carved table with dragon claws curled in fabulous detail around balled feet, thick sheepskins on the floor; a fire roaring away in a decorated iron grate, with an ingenious flue which led who knew where?

  When he turned to ask the old woman a dozen questions, he found them snatched away. She had removed the turban and frayed blanket and was now in the process of taking off her many skirts. Now Erno felt real anxiety. Had she brought him here to couple with him? The very idea was horrifying. He was about to push past her and duck out through the door, treasures or no treasures, when she blocked his way. She had stepped out of the last of the stolen rags, and now came at him in a simple plain black shift. Grabbing his arm, she hauled him with her deeper into the dwelling-place.

  Beyond the front room lay another, and if the first had made his jaw drop, this second chamber stole his breath away.

  Along one wall shelves were piled high with scrolls of vellum sealed with wax and tied with ribbon. Flasks made from some translucent substance lined another shelf. Erno could not help but reach out and pick one up. It was hard and cool, entirely smooth, and of a wonderful crimson hue. He held it up to the nearest candle, marvelling at how the light played through the object, sending flickering rays of red dancing across the room. Awed, he replaced it. The old woman laughed. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a bottle before, Erno?’ Her voice had dropped a note and mellowed. ‘A young rover like you: en’t you ever seen glass?’

  He shook hi
s head wordlessly and continued into the chamber. Another shelf revealed a pile of long yellow bones, and a skull with a single oval hole in the forehead, but where the eye sockets should have been in any ordinary skull, there was nothing but smooth, polished ivory. Erno shivered and made the sign of Sur’s anchor. The hair prickled up and down his spine. This was a place no living man should enter of his own free will. The Old Ones might claim his soul . . .

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Erno Hamson,’ said the mad old woman, sounding rather less mad now. ‘Come with me.’

  She took him by the hand and he followed her bonelessly.

  At the farthest end of the chamber, a mighty sword hung on the wall. Its pommel was of a sheeny, lambent yellow metal which looked as if it might be warm to the touch and ended in the perfectly formed head of a fox. The guard was intricately inlaid with horn and ivory and bone. The blade was long – Erno knew instinctively that if he were to lift it from the wall and stand it before him, its pommel would stand level with the centre of his breastbone, half as long again as his own weapon. It was broad at the hilt and tapered to a fine point; and it was pattern-welded to such a degree that the colours of the iron twisted and curled around and about like fabulous serpents chasing one another through a fog: if he narrowed his eyes, they came almost into focus, then were lost again, as if their forms were a trick of the light, or a rippling out of time. The tang was so elegantly crafted that it brought tears to his eyes: Katla Aransen would have striven all her life to make a sword like this. It had been forged by a master swordmaker and wielded by a hero from some lost age. His hands itched to hold it.

  ‘Take it,’ the old woman said, but Erno found he could not move. Old Ma Hallasen tsked impatiently. ‘A blade like that could take a dozen pirates’ heads in a single blow,’ she said gleefully, standing up on her tiptoes and reaching up to where the weapon hung on the wall. The sword was about as big as she was, Erno reckoned, but the crone removed it from its brackets with no apparent effort and seemed to stand as straight and tall as he was once she had it in her hands. When he took it from her grasp, he almost dropped it, surprised by its weight.