The Rose of the World (3 page)

She had never travelled in the hold of a ship before and she did not like it. She was used to being up in the elements, watching the surf skim off the waves and the clouds scud across the sky, the sunlight spangling the water and the sail bellying out like washing on a line. She was used to standing lightly on the bucking timbers of an Eyran ship built out of the knowledge and love of generations of sea-goers and shipmakers, allowing her body to find its own centre, to move with the rhythm of the ocean, feeling the healthy tensions of wood and iron and water and, somewhere far below, the resonances of the rock of Elda, the veins of crystal and ores which spoke into her blood and bones. It was a mystical connection which gave her a deep faith of rightness in the world

Down here, with her wrists chafed by iron which had bitten into the skins of generations of slaves, amid the stench and the noise, it seemed she had lost the trick of it.

So, unable to do anything else, she gave her thoughts to the infinite number of ways in which she might kill a man; both quickly and slowly.

Baranguet, she thought murderously, I will start with Baranguet . . .

Two

The Wasteland

In this arctic region day differed little from night. The sun, when it heaved itself over the horizon, offered only a kind of milky twilight for a few brief hours before sliding leadenly back into darkness. Above this short-lived band of light, the sky shaded first to cobalt, then to violet and indigo, before becoming as black as a raven’s wing, and in that blackness – at least to Aran Aranson’s weary, snowblind eyes – the stars were simply too luminous to gaze upon for any length of time.

But even if he could not look upon it, he knew, as if there was a lodestone in his skull, that the Navigator’s Star hung directly overhead, and by its position he knew that they were as far north as it was possible to go – and yet it seemed as though the world of ice went on forever. Perhaps, Aran mused as he plodded grimly along the narrow isthmus that had opened out before them, they were already dead and this place was a world-between-worlds reserved for those men of ill-luck with whom the god did not wish to share his table. For there could be no doubt that he was an exceedingly luckless man. Even before he had embarked on this doomed expedition he had lost a son and a wife, and estranged his daughter; and now he was master of nothing. Since Bera had announced their marriage dissolved, Rockfall would return to her family, as was the Eyran way: he had no home. His beautiful ship, the
Long Serpent,
lay crushed by the merciless ice of the Northern Ocean. The best part of his crew he had lost to storm and sea, to murder and mutiny; and then to the teeth and claws of a snowbear. Some men had preferred to take their chances with the elements rather than accompany him on what they saw as a fool’s errand, and so he had left them behind with precious few supplies and little chance of survival. To his knowledge, the man who accompanied him, and the burden he carried, was all that was left of his glorious expedition.

He turned. The giant, Urse, with his ruined face and single ear, who had once been lieutenant to the lord of the mummers, marched stolidly behind him, his huge feet planted in his leader’s wake, head down, shoulders bowed under the weight of the third survivor of the expedition. Fent Aranson was wrapped in every item of clothing they could spare, yet still his skin was the delicate blue of a robin’s egg and the blood had long since stopped seeping from his severed hand, as if his heart had already given up the ghost.

Aran Aranson set his face into the wind once more and squinted against the glare. To his snow-hazed eyes it seemed there were spirits all around them in this eerie, silent place: wisps of spindrift twisting off the tops of the dunes and banks piled on either side of their passage, curling into the air like a host of lost souls. If anything, the lack of lamentation and wailing added to the impression he had of being in a transitionary zone. Maybe, he thought, as his feet continued their exhausted trudge, they were fated to wander this terrible, freezing nothingness for all time, never gaining on their goal, nor leaving the tempestuous world of men any further behind them.

Urse One-Ear placed his feet in the churned-up ruts made by Aran Aranson and wondered for the thousandth time whether he would ever place them on soft green grass, pebble beach or forest floor again.

As a child, growing up in the treeless wastes of Norheim – all bare rock and low scrub, grey horizons and sea-thrashed shores – he had possessed a powerful curiosity to see more of the world, believing that his homeland must surely be the most godforsaken place in all of Elda. He had seen some startling sights in his life, but these soulless tracts were the grimmest by far. Even in the semi-darkness, the gleam of the never-ending snow hurt his eyes, and the intense cold made his teeth and scars ache and brought vividly to mind memories he had rather leave buried. Many had asked him about the cause of the loss of his ear and about the furrows which ravaged that face, almost closing his left eye and lifting one corner of his mouth to expose a snaggle of teeth, so that he had come to resemble a farm cat kicked in the head by a bad-tempered horse; but Urse had never cared to volunteer the information. Over the years, these fearsome markings had caused no little speculation. Some surmised that he had been in one axe-fight too many, or had come to grief in some tragic nautical accident. The truth was worse, and still gave him nightmares.

He had joined Tam Fox’s mummers’ troupe nearly twenty years ago when he was barely more than a lad. At that time, the troupe had owned a bear – a great black shambling fellow from the forests of central Istria – which Tam Fox had rescued from hawkers on the docks of Halbo who were using it to generate themselves a nice little income by soliciting bets on how many dogs could take it down. To cover their risk, they would privately goad the beast for an hour before the bout, taunting it with meat, beating it off with sticks and cudgels until it was murderous. As a result, it had carried more scars than Urse did now – obvious ones, around the paws and muzzle – but more, far more, invisible to the eye. They were much of a size, Urse and the bear; and in one of the old languages their names corresponded, so he had come to feel a common bond with the poor creature and had taken over its care for the mummers’ troupe. Then, one day, he had moved awkwardly, or his shadow had fallen across it in some way which recalled to it a past torment, and it had turned upon him with such terrifying ferocity that he knew his life was over. It had his head engulfed in its noisome, furnacelike mouth and was bearing its jaws down upon him when Tam Fox had intervened, hurling himself upon the bear and blowing all the time on a high-pitched whistle which Urse could hear only in the vibrations it made in the bones of the creature’s great skull. With a roar, it had spat him out and pulled away, only to be speared by Min Codface and the contortionist, Bella; but not before it had raked the mummers’ leader thoroughly with its wicked claws, and taken Urse’s ear and half his face with it. It was a miracle that he had survived his injuries; a miracle, and Tam Fox’s patience and near-magical skill with herbs and ointments.

He had told Aran Aranson that he wished to join his expedition to the island of gold because experience had taught him he was unlikely to engage the affections of a woman sufficiently for her to agree to be his wife without the lure of a good farm (which he could never afford without a large windfall); but the truth was that when the mummers’ leader was lost with the wreck of the
Snowland Wolf
, some significant part of Urse One-Ear had gone down to the seabed with him. Tam had seemed almost supernatural in his energies and grace; that a life like his could be snuffed out in such an arbitrary fashion had made him lose faith in his own worth and survivability. It seemed a fitting bargain to offer himself up to the god to do with as he wished by taking a place on this madman’s quest. Through one ordeal after another he had endured; but when they had finally encountered the snow-bear in these nameless realms, he had been ready to surrender his life to it, deeming it a fitting end, since his life was already forfeit to a bear; but by typically random chance it had chosen Pol Garson over him, and then Aran’s son Fent. That it had not taken him was perplexing: like Aran Aranson, he sensed they had crossed over into some mythical place where men paid the dues they had tallied up in life, and had resigned himself to wait for whatever judgement would fall. Now he was not sure whether to feel relief or to brace himself for the next onslaught.

So when the great bird skimmed suddenly above them it seemed like a portent. Yet, in front of him, Aran Aranson continued his oblivious trudge: he had seen nothing.

‘Albatross!’ Urse cried, hollowing his hands around the word. Aran turned like a man in a dream, and Urse repeated the observation, pointing overhead.

He watched the bird circle them and frowned. Something about it seemed unnatural. He could not determine why he thought this, only that its presence made him uneasy. Something, perhaps, about the way it had appeared to hover over them so effortlessly before wheeling away again. What was it about the creatures of this ice-world? The snowbear had seemed too intent upon them for mere hunger, its mean black eyes as flat as a shark’s, dual-natured, as if driven by another’s will.

He marked the bird’s passage as it vanished beyond an ice cliff which rose like woodsmoke in the distance and then, there being nothing else in this white world to distract him, returned his regard to the monotonous placement of foot beyond foot.

Many hours later they reached the ice cliff and prepared themselves for another endless white vista; but once they rounded its western shoulder another world lay before them: a landscape composed all of ice: but what remarkable ice it was! Walls and buttresses curved like vast ships rose out of a frozen sea. Great towers swept skyward, aquamarine at their base to ethereal green and translucent pink-white at their mist-wrapped summits. Battlements and terraces ringed these towers around, and into them were carved not only eyelets and arched windows, but fabulous beasts like those in the ancient tapestries of Halbo Castle – winged gryphons and prancing unicorns, grinning trolls and fearsome dragons, gigantic hounds and monstrous eagles; or perhaps their eyes were playing tricks upon them and the whole was no more than some ice-madness, a snow-blindness of the mind; an extravagant
fata morgana
induced by their avid desire for some mark of man on this endless wasteland.

Indeed, Aran Aranson began to rub his sore eyes with the back of one frozen hand, as if to dash the bizarre vision away; but when he focused them again, it was to see a figure approaching, a figure which did not trudge as they did across the snow, nor churn up the ground as it went, but which seemed to skim the surface of the ice without touching it, and this observation convinced him finally that he had lost his mind.

Three

Stones

In the midst of the mayhem that followed, someone ripped the bag from Saro’s head.

‘That’s the Vingo boy!’ he heard a man cry triumphantly, and then there came more noises of chaos: the shriek and grate of sword upon sword, the urgent scuffle of feet and hooves, the thud of arrows finding their mark and mingled cries of agony and battle fury.

When his eyes had adjusted to the sudden blast of light, Saro looked about him, disorientated by this strange turn of events. It seemed the troop who had overtaken the nomads and captured Virelai, Alisha and himself had themselves been overtaken by other militia. All around, his captors were either locked in hand-to-hand combat with men wearing similar gear, or lay dead upon the ground, stuck with arrows. He saw, amidst all this horror, Virelai darting awkwardly amongst the milling horses, bent almost double at the waist, his hands reaching blindly in front of him. In other circumstances he might have looked almost comical, but with the bag still securely bound over his head it seemed a miracle that he should avoid the flying hooves.

‘Virelai!’ he shouted, and at once regretted it.

The sorcerer stopped his weaving trail and stood stockstill, his bagged head swivelling wildly, trying to pinpoint the speaker’s whereabouts. As the horse came at him, Saro saw Virelai’s bound hands come up instinctively, and entirely ineffectively, to ward it off; then he was down on the ground and the great beast was trampling him in its own panic and fear. When the melee passed over him, Saro could see that the sorcerer had been left lying upon his back, as unmoving as a stone. The force of the blow had driven the bag off the pale man’s head: his white hair streamed around him, except where it was trodden into the mire.

Saro slipped awkwardly off his mount, ran to where the sorcerer lay and knelt beside him. Virelai’s eyes were closed. Colourless lashes lay still upon colourless cheeks. His mouth was open, but no rasp of breath issued from it. Saro saw where a purple bruise and a mess of open flesh marred the white temple. But when he examined the area more closely there appeared to be no blood, though the wound was clearly deep and damaging. In fact, the opening appeared not bright scarlet but a strangely livid grey. This detail disturbed Saro even more than if the wound had been gouting cascades of gore. He leaned over the body, laid his ear to Virelai’s thin chest.

Nothing.

Panic rising, Saro got to his feet and started yelling. ‘Help! Here! This man’s stopped breathing. Help!’

No one took the slightest notice. As time slowed around him like a bad dream, Saro saw where dwindling groups of men fought one another, while others lay dead or dying, their feet drumming weakly in their death throes. Usually inordinately sensitive to the woes of the world, Saro was surprised to find that he felt remarkably little about these violent demises. The soldiers who had taken them had been brutal and coarse. In order to apprehend Virelai and himself, they had murdered defenceless old men and women, and poor Falo, and just for Tycho Issian’s reward money. They had raped Alisha and joked while they were about it. They had boasted of the atrocities they had carried out against other nomads – whom they referred to derogatorily as ‘the Footloose’ – and those they had witnessed by other militiamen as though they were mere entertainments and the victims less than beasts. In one notable conversation he recalled, a pair of his captors had discussed with some glee a new device which had just been created by a young nobleman from the south, a hero now confined to a wheeled chair after his brave attempt to rescue an Istrian woman from northern barbarians at the Allfair. You could, it appeared, contain two dozen or more heretics and magickers in this great sphere of wrought iron and cook them slowly over a fire. It prolonged the agonies of the unbelievers and brought them to the Goddess more perfectly than the traditional stake-and-pyre method. The Lord of Cantara was especially pleased by this innovation: he had taken to charging a viewing fee from the public for such events to fund the war effort and it was proving most profitable. They planned to attend the next such burning on their return to Jetra, and looked forward to it with some relish.