by Glenda Larke
Kept taut by his weight, the ropes passed in front of his ankle. He was left hanging precariously upside down, midway between the two masts, high above the deck. Below, courtiers scattered and screamed.
As Juster was both silent and unmoving, Saker guessed he’d blacked out. The thought of having the most vulnerable part of his anatomy sawed into at speed by a hard, tar-covered rope had Saker shuddering.
He glanced around. Ropes everywhere, and he had both his own dagger and the lascar’s. He loosened the cover on the sheath to his own knife, his thoughts racing. If Juster struggled, if the wind blew, if the ship heeled – the result didn’t bear thinking about. The end of the spar he was on was directly over Juster’s body, but how to reach him? He dared not use the same rope. The slightest movement of the stay and Juster’s ankle could slip out of the V.
Using the footropes just below the furled sail, he edged his way to the end of the yardarm. Once there, he seized the ropes dangling from the end. A cursory glance told him that one had something to do with the sail; the other held the spar in place. His hands were sore and bleeding where he’d skinned them, but he swung under the yard and began to let himself down the ropes, grabbing both with his hands and hooking his feet around one. Agony stabbed through his fingers. He ignored it. He halted when he was level with Juster, who was groaning as he regained consciousness. “Don’t move, my friend,” he said calmly. “Don’t even open your eyes.”
Juster said nothing. His breath was ragged. Grimacing in pain, Saker switched his hold to only one of the yardarm ropes he’d descended, twisting a foot into its slack. He tried not to think about how precarious his hold was. Breathing deeply, he groped for his knife and began sawing at the other rope, now hanging loose. After an age, the bottom half dropped to the deck, and the dagger fell with it as he lost his hold on its handle. From the end of the piece still dangling from the spar, he made a noose with a slip knot.
When he looked down, he saw that courtiers had scrambled out of the way of the falling rope and blade. Sailors swarmed up the shrouds towards the crow’s nest. Good: he’d have help soon.
His hands were slippery with blood, and the pain grew worse as the hemp fibres ripped deeper into his fingers and palms. An agonising ache dragged at his arms and legs as he swung himself to and fro, until one arc of his swing brought him close to Juster.
Va’s teeth, I hurt.
Holding the loop of the cut rope, gripping his own rope with his legs and his other hand, he tried to flip the noose over Juster’s free leg. He missed the first time and had to swing back to try again. Pain brought tears to his eyes as his bloody hands slipped and he was forced to grasp even tighter.
This time the noose slid over Juster’s foot and he pulled it tight around his ankle.
Juster was now groaning louder than ever. Saker’s action had spread-eagled his legs, hardly the most comfortable position for a man who had just had a rope sawn across his genitals. He jerked and muttered, with more coherence this time. “What the flaming fucking hell…”
“I wouldn’t suggest you do too much moving, Juster.”
“Saker?” The word was as much a squawk of pain as anything else.
“Yes.”
“I fucking hurt!”
“I know. Try not to move.”
Prompted by his agony, Juster screamed invective at him.
He ignored the words and grabbed hold of the nobleman’s belt. He looked up, wondering just how long he could hold on himself. Every muscle was screaming. He twisted his other foot tighter into the rope, trying to take more of his weight from his arms and shoulders. It would be ridiculous to crash to the deck now.
The first of the sailors arrived above him, on the yardarm. They seemed to know what they were doing, and when he felt the rope he’d attached to Juster begin to rise, he let him go. Pulled from above, Juster’s trapped foot came free and he swung upwards suspended by his other leg, still upside down, uttering a number of imprecations about Saker’s parentage as he went.
Relieved and exhausted, Saker sagged against the rope for a moment. Up, or down? Up was closer, but he doubted he could haul his body weight upward. He headed for the deck, hand over weary hand.
He was the hero of the moment. The Prince clapped him on the back, others crowded around to praise him.
It was Mathilda who noticed his bleeding palms and torn fingers. “Oh! You’re hurt!” she said. She raised her face to look at him in concern and beckoned to the grey mouse. “Celandine – you must bind his hands. He’s bleeding! Tear up your kerchief.”
Celandine gave a bobbing, graceless curtsey of acquiescence to the Princess before coming across the deck to him, already untying the linen kerchief from around her neck. When she did speak, her tone was matter-of-fact, lacking any of the artifices he’d come to expect from Mathilda’s entourage.
“May I see your hands, witan?” she asked. Around them, the courtiers turned their attention to what was happening above. Sailors had safely hauled Juster on to the yardarm.
“There’s no need to sacrifice your ke—” he began.
“Are you about to question the decision of the Princess?” she interrupted. “I’m sure you would not want me to be scolded for failing to obey my mistress.” With her strong, long-fingered hands, she was already tearing the linen into strips.
He wondered if she was making fun of him, then decided that was unlikely. He’d never seen her laugh, and her smile was never more than a tight upturn of her lips for the sake of politeness. She snatched a flagon of wine from a passing servant, and with scant concern for the expensive quality of the alcohol, poured it over his torn palms.
Pox and pustules, that hurts!
“There is tar in the wounds,” she remarked, picking out the largest pieces.
“From the ropes,” he said, looking up to distract himself from the pain. Juster was now being lowered safely to the deck in a sling.
“Have someone pick out the small bits when you return to the palace,” she said as she began to bind his hands.
He let out the breath he had been holding as Juster reached the deck and the courtiers cheered and crowded around. “I will. I’m sorry about your kerchief,” he said, returning his attention to Celandine. “I’ll buy you a new one.”
He half expected her to simper, or protest. She did neither. “That would be kind. I certainly cannot afford to buy another.” A statement of fact, said without rancour or inflection, but odd nonetheless. Not the type of comment one usually heard from a court lady, but then Juster had told him she was from a shrine-keeper’s family, not an aristocratic one.
Her hands were deft, and she soon had her linen strips neatly tied in place. One long piece of cloth dangled. “I think I’d better cut this off,” she said. “May I borrow your knife?”
Without waiting for a reply, she reached for the kris and pulled it free of its sheath. She sawed at the loose end until it parted and fell to the deck. For a moment her fingers lingered over the kris, stroking the blade with interest. Then she raised her gaze to look at him. Her eyes were a deep, dark blue, the colour of spring gentians, and quite, quite beautiful. Why had he never seen that before?
No, wait. He had noticed her eye colour. Grey. To match the rest of her. Well, they weren’t grey now. Something shifted, even as he watched; a subtle blurring, as if he was looking through gauze. No, more as if there was a reflection of a woman imposed on the features of the real person. One was strong-featured, not beautiful, but certainly memorable. The other was grey and sallow, unattractive at worst, boring at best. He couldn’t decide which was real, and which was false.
A tremor ran through the hands that held his, and then her eyes changed again as she panicked. She dropped the kris, her face an image of appalled shock. Clumsily he caught the blade with his bandaged hands, wincing. She stumbled away, a hand clamped across her mouth as if to hold back a scream.
Disorientated, unsure of what he’d just seen, he blinked and shook his head to clear his confusion
. He called after her. “Mistress Celandine!”
She half turned, but didn’t look at him. The grey mouse once more, she was reluctant to meet his eyes. She had her trembling under control as she replied in a whisper. “Witan?”
“Thank you.” He lifted his hands to indicate her bandaging.
She inclined her head in acknowledgement and joined the Prince and Princess and the rest of the courtiers still crowding the quarterdeck to see how Juster was.
He watched for a moment, relieved to see the nobleman, still prone and ashen-faced, accepting a drink. No one was looking his way. He thought wryly that his moment of glory was over; a lowly witan was of no interest to the average courtier. Deciding it would be better to disappear, he pulled on his robe and shoes, checked that his purse was safe, then walked to the railing to call a wherry over to the ladder.
“The palace dock?” the riverman asked when he dropped down into the boat, grimacing as he used his hands to steady himself.
“No – the tide is coming in, isn’t it? Take me to the shrine upriver instead.”
“King Oak? That’ll cost you, master. Two coppers and a brass bit.”
He nodded and counted out the coins, too tired to bargain. He wanted peace, a quiet time to calm himself. For the first time in years, he desperately needed to pray at a shrine, needed it the way a thirsty man needed water.
As the boatman pushed away from the ship’s side, Saker looked up. Celandine stared down at him from the railing. The grey of her dress and coif framed her face like a shroud. An aura of sorrow clung to her like mist. Her grey eyes regarded him with a troubled gaze and she wore her dignity in a way that was utterly foreign to the grey mouse he’d thought her to be.
Yet he’d seen her with blue eyes. A skewing of the world around him, creating a lie. The lascar’s dagger to blame, of course, this time catching an innocent woman in its wanton magic, scaring her witless. She’d not deserved that. His anger at the thought of its arbitrary power roiled inside him.
Halfway between the ship and the shore, he took it out from its sheath. He turned it over and over in his hands. It had witchery, and it was Va-forsaken.
As he felt the smooth polish of the bone handle, he thought of Ardhi. For a moment he felt his presence there, at his side, as if any moment the lascar was going to drop a hand on his shoulder and say something to mock him.
In that moment, he had no doubt whatever that the man was alive.
He bit his lip. I don’t want this.
Without another thought, he dropped the dagger over the side into the water. With luck, it would sink to the bottom of the estuary, and disappear forever in the mud. See if you can return from this, you misbegotten twist of metal.
Buoyed by the handle, it floated. He stared at it as the wherry drew away from where it bobbed in the water, handle uppermost, the sun glinting on its silver inlay. Then, slowly, it slid beneath the waves.
If someone else finds it, he thought, it’ll be their problem, not mine.
He’d finished his prayers and was about to leave the shrine when Penny-cress, the shrine-keeper, entered. She glanced at him, then came forward to rest her hand on the fissured bark of the oak, the living pillar that pierced the centre of the otherwise unpretentious building. From the base of the trunk, roots crawled over the earthen floor and burrowed beneath the shrine’s stone walls.
Penny-cress was old, rough-skinned and as crenulated as the trunk she touched. For a moment he had the fanciful idea that she and the oak merged into one entity.
“Witan Saker Rampion,” she said. “A sight for my rheumy eyes. Too rare, your visits. Your connection to what’s true grows as weak as an old man’s pizzle.” In spite of her age, there was nothing frail about her voice.
“I visit the palace chapel twice a day, you know.” He sounded as defensive as a schoolboy and almost laughed at himself.
“Pah! Y’think to sup on truth up there in the palace with its dead stone an’ rotting wood? This” – she slapped the flat of her hand to the bark of the tree – “is where the real power is. Wild power.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. When I say wild, I don’t mean pretty ’n’ green. True oaken power is savage. It comes from the wild of nature and rips ’n’ tears the heart out of you, if you was brave enough to use it.”
“I don’t have a witchery.”
“Yet. Listen, witan. You ’n’ me, we know we go back to the land when we die. We’ll be there, part of it, lookin’ on the world for all eternity. If we live well, we’ll get to choose what part of the land we become at our rest. Me, I want to be right here, with my ancestors, my essence in a tree like this, shining in the leaves in summer, sleeping away the winter…”
He resisted a desire to tell her he did know the basic tenets of the Way of the Oak.
“But town people?” she continued. “That don’t mean naught to them. So they don’t care. They just want to lead grand lives. So they cut down them woods, catch them hares, cage them birds, tame them lakes ’n’ shores.”
“That’s why there are shrine-keepers and witans. To protect the land.”
He suspected that no matter what he said about the need for people to have wood to burn, she wasn’t going to believe in anything that implied the necessity of the death of a single living tree. She’d freeze to death rather than kill an animal for its skin to make a coat.
Lord, he was tired! I need to go back and sleep.
“T’aint enough, I’m thinking. There’s summat nasty afoot. Why y’reckon there are them as want us gone?” She paused for dramatic effect, then waggled a bony finger at him. “’Cause they want the wealth of slaughtered forests, of dug-up mines, of hollowed-out quarries.”
The hairs stood up on the back of his neck. “Who wants us gone?” he asked.
“Folk died of the Horned Death up in Shenat country. That’s A’Va. A’Va is always at the back o’ things. But A’Va has a human face, never forget that.”
The idea was appalling.
What if she was right? Right there: the reason he and Juster had not considered because they’d been thinking too small. Rid the Faith of those who protected the natural world, and who would benefit? Those who were greedy – on a huge scale. Those who wanted not one tree, but an entire forest. Those not hankering after a few stones from a single quarry, but planning to dig up a whole hill. Mine-owners, shipbuilders, landowners, merchants. Not all or even most of them, of course. Pain gripped his heart. But some of them. Or a single someone planning the end of the Way of the Oak…
Fox?
Oh, sweet Va. The ledgers behind the banner in his sitting room. Mi.For.Okwd. So obvious. Middle Forest, Oakwood. The headings were the names of all Ardrone’s finest forests. And the lists recorded the tree species, their number and their monetary value. Fox had been using his clerics to catalogue the natural wealth of Ardrone.
Nothing wrong with that …
Not if your motives were pure.
Oblivious to his seething thoughts, she said, “What if us shrine-keepers, us with the knowledge and witchery to protect the sacred heart of the wild, what if we all die of the Horned Death? Do y’think them forests have stood sacrosanct through the ages all by themselves?”
He caught the horror that tinged her voice, and slowly, oh so slowly, all the hair on his body rose. No. No, it can’t happen, surely?
Her hand shot out without warning to grab his wrist. “Who marked you?” she asked.
He didn’t understand. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your hand.”
He looked down. Celandine’s bandages were still neatly tied across his palms so that only his fingers were visible. “I scraped the skin off…” he began.
But she was pointing to the fingers on his right hand. They were blackish, as if he’d smudged them with ink. He frowned, puzzled. They hadn’t been like that when he’d left the ship. Tar, he supposed. Even his clothes had picked up the horrible stuff from the rope. “It’s only tar,” he said.
“No. A servant of A’Va touched you.”
“No, it’s just—” he began with a smile at her superstition, preparing to argue the point.
“I can prove it. It shows only when you’re in the shade of a shrine oak.” She pushed him towards the entrance. “Go outside, till the tree no longer shades you. Look at them fingers there.”
He shrugged and did as she asked. In growing horror, he watched the black marks fade and disappear as he stepped away from the oak. For a long while he stood in the sunshine and stared, shocked, at his clean fingers. He tried shading them under another tree, but his skin remained unstained.
He looked back to where Penny-cress watched from the doorway. He thought he read pity in her eyes.
As he returned to the oak-shaded building, it was an effort to put one foot in front of the other. He fixed his gaze on his right hand and watched as the oak tree canopy cast its shade on them, and blackness rippled and smudged across his fingertips.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t tar.
Cold fear shivered him, and he remembered the man with the plague in Ustgrind, the way he had gripped his hand with his disease-ridden fingers…
“The Horned Death,” he whispered. “Sweet Va, I have the Hor—”
Penny-cress patted his arm in comfort. “No, no. That’s not any pestilence! He has marked you as a danger. A’Va’s servant on earth. Followers of A’Va can see or feel that mark any time, ’n’ know you as a danger. You must take care, witan. The evil has its eye on you.”
Inwardly he groaned. “Mistress Penny-cress, I’m just a lowly witan.”
She tapped his fingers. “You best ask yourself why you are seen as a danger to him. To us, this mark’s only visible when you enter a true oak shrine. But to those who follow him, they see it any time. And it leaves a taint behind wherever you go.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“Maybe not, but any ageing shrine-keeper’ll tell you the truth of it. So who could’ve left that mark on your fingers?”
“Lately?”
“It fades in time. That’s been done, oh, in the past year or so. Course, if you could be sure your hands were unmarked the last time y’entered a shrine…?”