The Rose of the World (54 page)

Katla set her jaw and stalked off into the gathering darkness in the opposite direction, feeling both faintly humiliated and at the same time oddly amused. From what little she had been able to make out in the fading light, the nomad had been young and handsome and the wine she had drunk was making her skin buzz so that the touch of him stayed with her, full of heat and promise. Abruptly she recalled another night such as this, one which had also involved too much wine and firelight a long way from home.

She groaned. More sensible by far to find her own sleeping-pack and lie down away from all this unwonted conviviality. Giving up the idea of trying to find the Istrian, she turned to set a path back to where her horse was tethered, and almost tripped over a small dark shape, which skipped out from under her feet and began to trot ahead of her, purring hugely.

It was Saro’s kitten.

‘Out for a walk, are we?’ Katla said, amused. ‘Well, let us walk together for a little way, then, eh?’ Obviously the creature had remembered her scent on the meat.‘Fickle little beast, aren’t you?’ she added after a while, as the cat gave no sign of abandoning her. ‘Why aren’t you with your master?’

As if in response, the kitten ran up to one of the wagons and started rubbing its head against the wooden steps leading up to it. Then it looked back at her expectantly.

‘What? You want to go in there?’ Seeing the silhouetted shapes candlelit from within, Katla grinned. ‘I do not think these good folk need your company, little cat.’

But the kitten was undeterred. On it went, clambering up the tall steps with remarkable gracelessness, and when it reached the door-flap at the top, it stuck its head inside, followed by the rest of it, until there was just a tip of black fur left waving around on the outside.

Katla ran up the steps after it and grabbed the disappearing tail. Instead of giving its ground like a well-behaved animal, the kitten dug its claws in to the floor of the wagon, yowled with fury and dragged itself out of her grasp. Katla watched it disappear inside with annoyance. Then, she went after it.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the wagon’s dusky interior, but when they did, she wished she had not followed the cat, had never seen the blasted thing, nor the entire nomad encampment. Inches away from her, Saro Vingo sat stark naked on the bed with the candlelight burnishing his sweat-sheened skin –
all
his skin: and beside him, her dark eyes brimming with laughter, her dark-tipped breasts rising and falling with merriment, was the nomad girl he had called Guaya. Between them both sat the kitten, looking most proud of its rude discovery.

Katla’s mouth fell open.

This just set the girl to laughing aloud. Katla glared at Guaya, just as she had at the nomad girl’s cousin scant minutes before, then transferred her furious attention to Saro. The Istrian gazed back at her, startled, then grabbed at the bedclothes, which promptly slithered off onto the floor, leaving him even more exposed than he had been before. A new gust of delight shook the nomad girl, and all at once Saro found that for all his mortification he was laughing too, for the situation was just too ridiculous for words.

Katla looked from one to another in rising fury, sensing they deliberately mocked her. Then she flung herself out of the wagon, jumped to the ground and took off at a run. Having no wish for further awkward encounters, she dashed head down through the encampment, skirting the fire and the musicians without any response to their cheerful invitations to join them, until she found herself back where the horses were tethered and all was quiet. There, she grabbed her pack, a purloined cloak and a flask of wine someone had carelessly left lying around and set off grimly into the scrubland. Finding a soft dune in the lee of some thorn bushes, she cast herself down with a hefty sigh.

Overhead, the Navigator’s Star shone down impassively, the brightest point in a sky spangled with a thousand specks of light, the only constant thing, it seemed, in all the world.

‘You’re huffing and puffing like an old dog, Katla Aransen,’ came a voice out of nowhere. ‘Has someone stolen your bone?’

Katla sat bolt upright in shock and stared in the direction of the voice. A moment later moonlight shone on a silver-blonde head cresting the rise.

‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Same as you, it seems,’ Mam growled.

Katla drew her knees up to her chin as the mercenary leader came crashing down the dune in her huge boots, deluging her in an avalanche of sand. She came to a halt beside the Rockfaller, her sharpened teeth gleaming in the dusk.

‘So,’ she cajoled, ‘why aren’t you down there having it away with one of those pretty Footloose boys?’

Taken aback by the uncanny accuracy of Mam’s aim, Katla went on the offensive. ‘Why aren’t you?’

Mam shrugged. ‘One southerner at a time’ll do me.’

It was the most romantic thing Katla had ever heard her say. ‘Aren’t you worried he’ll be availing himself of their vaunted hospitality?’ she asked, too sharply.

A stillness fell between them.

‘Aye, well. It’s what they’re known for, the Footloose. Might as well be called Quim-loose or Cock-loose,’ she said with a bitter laugh.

Katla bit her lip, remembering the tableau which had met her eyes inside that candlelit wagon. ‘And men are faithless beasts,’ she said at last.

In the darkness, Mam raised an eyebrow. ‘Found the Vingo lad, did you?’ she said after a while.

Katla stared at her, bridling. ‘I . . . I wasn’t looking for him,’ she said defensively.

‘But you found him.’

‘In the arms of a little nomad whore.’

‘Men’s pricks are like divining rods: they twitch and rise at the slightest hint of a damp hole.’

Katla choked on her wine.

‘Besides,’ Mam went on, thumping her on the back, ‘since when did you give a damn about where Saro Vingo was poking his rod?’

‘I don’t!’ The denial came out as a splutter half of outrage, half of coughed-up wine. She turned away from the mercenary leader and spat heavily into the dirt. ‘Anyway, if you think Persoa’s lying with a nomad woman, why don’t you go down there and root him out?’ she said nastily.

‘What Persoa does is his own business. I do not own him and he does not own me.’

‘If I ever have a man I shall never share him,’ Katla said fiercely.

This time both eyebrows shot up. ‘I thought you said you would never take a husband, Katla Aransen?’

The conversation was not going at all to Katla’s liking.

‘Who said anything about husbands?’ she said crossly, shoving herself to her feet and grabbing up her belongings.

She stomped off into the night, found a spot between some boulders, wrapped herself in the cloak and tried to use the last of the wine to dull her thoughts. But they were not to be stilled. Round and round they went, buzzing like a hive of bees; and by the time dawn light tinged the sky, she realised she had slept not a wink.

Thirty-three

Cantara

For twenty-three years Cantara, the southernmost inhabited town in Istria, had been the domain of Tycho Issian, a bone tossed by the Ruling Council into the path of a barking dog to keep it quiet. It was little loss to them: other than the title which accompanied the prize, Cantara had had little to recommend it. Perched precariously on towering sandstone bluffs in the lee of the great mountains presided over by the Red Peak, the town had been poor, crumbling and disease-ridden, the population a rag-tag mix of those too poverty-stricken or lethargic to up sticks and leave for a better life elsewhere. Mountebanks and ne’er-do-wells avoiding warrants on their heads from all over the Empire rubbed shoulders with escaped slaves and women who had been condemned to stoning for adultery, indecency or merely for raising a protesting voice, women whose relatives had managed to smuggle them south beyond the eye of their accusers; and a mass of shanty-dwellers with nomad or hill-blood, eking out a hard living from the arid allotments bordering the desertlands.

To this Goddess-forsaken place Tycho Issian had come, and soon the folk of the region began to realise that the grim existences they had lived till now had been days of wine and roses compared to the time which was to follow. Before long, the gibbets lining the road from the north bore swollen, rotting fruit: it was said that when the wind blew from the south, you could smell Cantara’s justice as far away as Gibeon and Pex.

The able-bodied gathered their scant belongings and headed for the hills; the slower either perished from famine, or were put to the labour of scratching out a citadel for their new lord from the very rock itself. Many perished from exhaustion and accident. Four hundred lives were lost in the creation of Cantara’s castle: the foundations were reputedly built not of rock and sand, but blood and hair and bone.

When the lord travelled north – which was blessedly often – the town breathed a collective sigh of relief and handed itself over to the more tender mercies of the lord’s mother, the redoubtable Flavia. This lady had taken it upon herself to succour the needy, to take in refugees and wayfarers and even to offer hospitality to nomads as they passed through the Issian lands.

Which was why, for want of any other option, the caravan had been heading for Cantara.

‘Coroman Piedbird and Redita Fullmoon say the lady has emptied out her grainstores and cellars and bade her seneschals carry loaves and cheeses to the poor,’ Persoa explained as they rode. ‘As far away as Galia the Wandering Folk honour her name; and from all over the Empire they have come now at the hardest of times when there is nowhere else to turn.’

They passed no soldiers on the road, nor any other travellers. Everyone, it seemed, had already gone north, in preparation for battle. Two days brought them within sight of the town. At first glimpse it was an impressive sight. A turreted fortress spanned the breadth and depth of a great tongue of red rock which thrust itself out from the hills behind it and towered up into the pitiless blue sky. Below sprawled the town itself, a great ramshackle collection of dwellings carved into the myriad sandstone pillars which littered the plain, and hundreds of meaner buildings of baked mud and wood filling the gaps between the pillars and creeping up the side of the outcrop. The entire place was teeming with life: it was like riding into a termite mound.

Women, children, old folk, dogs, chickens, cats, geese and goats crammed the streets and filled the air with their noise. No one seemed much surprised by the appearance of another group of travellers, even one so motley as to comprise both sellswords and Footloose.

Saro stared about in amazement. Despite its proximity to Altea, he had never visited this southern town, nor wished to, while its lord was in residence. The Cantara of his imagination and his studies was a far different place to the Cantara he found before him: for far from being the miserable frontier town where only the desperate and defeated fetched up, this was a thriving hub. And something seemed very foreign about it, something he could not quite define. He stared about at all the activity, at the people hurrying here and there on errands, at the traders and their stalls, at the stacks of baked bread and rounds of cheese, the baskets of dried fruit and the panniers of grain; at the children playing catch-frog and where’s-the-wolf, and then it came to him with a sudden shock that was almost physical.

The women went unveiled.

Saro was not the only member of their troop to notice this. Mam caught Persoa’s arm and said something in a quiet voice which made the hillman shake his head and look disconcerted. For her part, Katla stared frankly about with her mouth open. A small flame of hope beat suddenly in her chest.

No one challenged them as they rode into the castle’s courtyard. Indeed, there seemed to be no guards in sight in this inner sanctum; only a great many women and a few old men. The old men looked up sharply from their tasks as if caught in the performance of an illicit act. The majority of the women sat in concentric circles around the smaller group in the centre. Some wore robes of fine silk and satin, others the plain black sabatka of the slave class. The eyes which turned to survey them were outlined with kohl so that their regard was bold: but their lips were pale and unpainted. Some of the women had let their hair fall loose about their faces, as if compensating for the missing veil, but others had defiantly braided their hair tightly across their heads, the better to be able to view the objects they held in their laps.

Books. Books and parchments, old and new. Tablets and styli and quills.

Mam frowned. ‘What is this?’

Beside her, the hillman grinned in sudden comprehension. ‘A class,’ he said softly. ‘The women of Cantara are learning to read and write.’

Katla Aransen looked mightily unimpressed. Reading had never been her strong point: she knew enough knots to get by in a tavern or a market, and no one had ever managed to introduce her to the arcane art of writing.

Abruptly something caught her eye; and at the same moment Saro Vingo gasped.

‘Mother!’ they exclaimed in one breath.

In the second row of women, a head turned sharply. Illustria Vingo locked eyes with her second son. Her hands flew up to her face like two white doves, pressed themselves over a mouth which could suddenly form no intelligible words.

And at the heart of the circle, a tumble of red hair streaked with grey flew wildly as Bera Rolfsen leapt to her feet.

The two women of the Rockfall clan regarded one another across the sea of faces, eyes wide with disbelief. Behind Bera, a tall white-haired woman rose gracefully from the stool on which she had been seated, a small leatherbound volume in her hands.

‘None enters this place bearing weapons,’ she declared in a voice which carried clearly through the dry desert air. ‘Speak your names and your business. If you come in goodwill you are welcome to our hospitality; if not, I can assure you there are no riches here left to rob.’

Mam strode to the front of the group. ‘Mercenaries, my lady. On our own business, and with no violence in mind, if we are left to ourselves. We come to ransom Saro Vingo to his family, or what is left of it.’