Wild Magic (7 page)

Saro was appalled. To have to train for soldiering, and give himself up to the untender mercies of Captain Galo ‘the Bastard’ Bastido was bad enough, for the man was a brute, and a sadistic one at that; but to have to touch his brother with his bare hands now Tanto’s thoughts were no longer cloaked by a miasma of his unconsciousness was truly the most horrible torment Saro could imagine.

It was with leaden steps that he made his way upstairs.

Three

Halbo

Lit from landward by the crimson rays of the fallen sun and from the sea by the ghostly light of the newly risen moon, the King’s capital of Halbo appeared between the silhouettes of the Pillars of Sur like a mirage. Amid the swells and folds of land which rose steeply from the narrow inlet, tiny amber lights twinkled in strings and clusters, and a large fire appeared to be burning down near the shore, illuminating the dark water and several dozen ships bobbing at anchor in the inner harbour.

Then the Pillars themselves hove into full view, stretching three hundred feet into the black air and Katla gasped in amazement. Contrary to first impressions it seemed that these two great sentinel towers were no mere natural feature of the landscape, for as they closed upon them a myriad of tiny lights were revealed inside the rock, one upon another, to the height of maybe ten longhouses. Tiny figures moved past the lights at various junctures so that from a distance the lights seemed to jump and skitter; then a web of stairways and arches came into focus, running from the waterline to the summits, winding around and about the towers and into the cliff-face on either side of the inlet.

It was a miracle of architecture: Katla stood there, hands on the gunwale, staring up into the night sky until her neck cricked, until she felt the touch of a finger drawn lightly down the line of her chin, which made her leap away with a shout. ‘Sur’s nuts! Keep your hands off me!’

‘Much better without the beard, my dear, if I may say so.’ Tam Fox was at her shoulder, his keen eyes boring into her, his white teeth gleaming in the silvery light. ‘And you really should be much more grateful that I did not cast you off in the faering and send you back to your Da.’ He took another step towards her, but Katla dodged away.

‘You’re a randy old goat,’ she said with a grin. ‘Go find yourself a nanny to tup.’ She stared back up at the pillar.

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? A work of genius, or madness, if you believe the tales.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she said, and it was true: the houses of the Westman Isles were sturdy and constructed low to withstand the fierce winds off the Northern Ocean, and all she had seen on her visit to the Allfair had been pavilions and tents and simple booths; nothing made to last or serve any function beyond that of temporary accommodation. She had heard, though, that the great cities of Istria – Jetra and Cera and Forent – were built around magnificent castles which mazed the eye and took the breath right out of your lungs.

‘The Pillars were hollowed out in the time of King Raik Horsehair, when the Eyrans were first driven north to these islands. He fortified the city in many cunning ways, and when he fell in the battle of the Sharking Straits, his wife carried on his work. They say it’s impregnable, you know. Much like you—’

Katla rolled her eyes at him. ‘I know,’ she said crossly, ignoring his inference. ‘It’s what the city’s name signifies –
Hal-bau
– “safe house” in the old form, and no enemy has ever sneaked past its defences.’

From the watchtower, a man shouted something that she could make neither head nor tail of, though the sound carried clearly in the night air; and after a moment Tam shouted back, ‘White Rose!’

Katla looked at him.

‘The password,’ he said with a shrug. ‘It changes every few weeks; but since the King returned with the nomad woman they’ve all had to do with her: Rosa Eldi; the Rose of the North; Heart’s Desire; the King’s Rose.’

‘And what would happen if you didn’t know the password?’ Katla asked, puzzledly.

Tam grinned. ‘Look there,’ he said, pointing to the rocks on which the tower was founded. A rim of white surf marked its seaward edge. ‘And there.’ He indicated the opposite pillar at the same level.

Katla strained her eyes in the darkness. ‘I can see nothing.’

‘Just beneath the surface of the water there lies a chain forged of iron and blood and
seithers
’ charms,’ the mummers’ chief explained. ‘It’s attached at either side to two great winches in the towers. Our ships are shallow-draughted enough to skim the chain but any southern vessel that by some miracle made it across the Northern Ocean would ground upon it – one word from the watchmen and up it goes, tipping them over into the Sound. And then—’

‘What?’

Tam shook his head. ‘Won’t speak of that,’ he said, making a superstitious gesture. He looked past her into the channel ahead. Behind them, the oars dipped and rose quietly and the steerboard man made delicate adjustments to their approach, so that the
Snowland Wolf
slipped into the lee of the eastern pillar and was swallowed by the cold shadow cast by the rising moon.

There was a low grating noise, then the soft sound of water parting cleanly, and a moment later they were inside the inner harbour. Here, they changed course so that the ship angled to hug the land ever more closely – though as far as Katla could see, the middle way into the docks was wide and clear – so closely that Katla could see the gleam of green weed, swathes of limpets and barnacles, splashes of white guano on the rocks. They rounded a small headland, and suddenly Halbo spread itself before them. The hills rose sharply from the water, so that street after street of little low-built stone houses seemed to have been piled one on top of the other. Candles glowed in windows. Curls of cooking smoke spun up into the night air. In the midst of all this domesticity and order rose the pale walls of Halbo’s fortress, the High Castle, home of the Eyran kings since they first made the mainland their home. Squat and bleak, it was not beautiful, to Katla’s eye at least: but there was no denying that it was imposing. Thick turrets rose at the corners of the building, and the walls were pierced through with eyelets so that archers might lay waste an approaching enemy from the safety of the interior. The battlements were crenellated, and a steep bank rose up to the foot of the castle walls: it looked a difficult stronghold to overcome. Rows of barracks led away from the castle down to the harbour where they met a jumble of wharves and jetties and a harbour full of vessels. On the far western strand a great bonfire had been constructed to light the work of a hundred men, all of whom were stripped to the waist and covered from head to toe in the sheeny red of something that must surely be blood. Before them on the beach lay a huge shape from which protruded great white staves amid dark and glistening slabs of meat. Even from here, the stench was appalling.

‘By Sur,’ Katla whispered, ‘they look like the goblins that brought down the Giant Halvi to end the Battle of the Sun.’

Tam laughed. ‘Haven’t you seen men butcher a whale before, Katla Aransen?’

‘A whale? But it’s vast! No whale that I have seen has been a quarter the size of that monster!’

‘Ah, the Westman Isles, where even the whales are as minnows! Sur was not smiling on your ancestors when he blew their settlement ship in to Rockfall, my dear.’

Katla shot him a furious look.

‘Towering cliffs, windy uplands and women bred between wildcats and trolls; Rockfall’s speciality. Just the way I like them.’

Tam Fox grabbed her by the waist and crushed her against his chest. Katla promptly spat in his eye and at the same moment brought her knee up hard into his groin, but the mummers’ chief had been manhandling women all his life and knew himself an expert in such matters. Swivelling his hips, he evaded the main threat and took the wad of saliva on the cheek where it hung for a moment like cuckoo-spit, then bubbled off down his chin. Then he grinned from ear to ear.

‘They say that a bit of resistance gets the blood up,’ Tam said cheerfully. ‘But I’d rather you came to me of your own free will.’ When she started to struggle he said, ‘Hear me out!’ and imprisoned her arms in a time-honoured wrestling manoeuvre executed so neatly that Katla could not help but experience a brief moment of admiration. ‘I have a place close to the docks where we can go and get better acquainted,’ he added, nuzzling her neck. Katla’s teeth came close to catching his ear; but the mummer craned his head away with a laugh. ‘It’s not luxurious, but you’ll not notice once we’re started. I’ve been waiting all week for this, little troll. Did you not think I’d see through your disguise in seconds? I could spot you in a crowd of a thousand other women, all naked and with bags over their heads!’

Katla stopped wriggling and stared at him. ‘You have a most bizarre imagination, Tam Fox,’ was all she could say.

The mummers’ chief laughed. ‘Aye, it is quite creative. You should make the effort to discover its horizons for yourself . . .’

‘Take your hands off her!’

The speaker’s voice was pitched low and soft, but his tone was menacing. ‘If you don’t take your hands off her at once I’ll prick out your kidney and feed it to the gulls.’

Katla spun around and saw that her brother, Halli – who had killed two men in all his life and was still suffering nightmares as a result – had appeared as silently as a stoat and had a belt-knife pressed into the small of the mummer’s back.

She laughed and extricated herself without too much difficulty from Tam Fox’s grasp. ‘It’s all right, Halli. No harm done.’

Tam shrugged and stepped away. ‘Your loss, little wildcat.’ He winked. ‘We’ll see what your Da says when we get back to Rockfall, eh?’ And with that he moved smartly past the pair of them and made his way between the curious rowers to where the tillerman stood shouting out his instructions. A few moments later the crew shipped their oars as the
Snowland Wolf
entered the inner harbour and then everything else was subsumed by the bustle of landing and unloading.

It was close to midnight before Katla and Halli were able to step into the last of the faerings, as if Tam Fox’s punishment for the insult to his pride was to delay their discovery of the city as long as he possibly could.

Fretting with impatience, Katla craned her neck over the others in the boat, avid for every detail. There were ships everywhere – merchant ships, wide-bellied and short-ribbed; knarrs and longships and fishing vessels. They rowed so close to the
Sur’s Raven
, the King of Eyra’s own ship, that she was able, by leaning out as far as she could and with Halli holding her legs and the rest of the crew egging her on, to brush the very tips of her fingers against its elegant strakes. ‘It’s so beautiful!’ she cried, looking back at the swell of its bow, the clean lines of the stempost, the roaring dragon’s head.

A moment later they passed a ship of oak so dark and weathered it was almost black. Its stempost boasted an ugly figurehead, roughly carved and of grim aspect, a great round head of no recognisable creature on Elda, mouth wide open as if to devour the world. Katla stared at it, fascinated. As they skimmed past it, the moonlight struck the single lump of glass that had been set as its eye, and a memory clicked into place. A moment later, she cried out, ‘It’s the
Troll of Narth
!’

Everyone laughed good-naturedly at her wild enthusiasm: many of them were Halbo-born and bred, and none but Katla first-time visitors. They had seen the
Troll
a hundred times and more: it was a way-station, a landmark, a dull piece of ancient history.

Katla, however, was transported back to winter firesides and her father’s tales of the old war, the war before the one he had fought in, the one in which his grandfather had been killed. Those times and their artefacts had taken on almost legendary status for Katla. While the other females in the steading had put their hands over their ears and groaned at the bloodthirsty tales that Aran Aranson told, Katla had been enraptured. She stared back at the great black hulk. So this was the ship in which Ravn’s grandfather, King Sten, had escaped from the Battle of Horn Bay by sheer brio and superior seamanship, outrunning a dozen Eyran vessels which had been captured by the enemy and were now crewed by mercenaries and slaves under Istrian command. The
Troll
was already an ancient ship then, but Sten had worked on it all his life and he knew every vibration of its rudder, every gradation in the tension of its lines and sheet and so, confident in his knowledge of his ship and on home territory, he had steered a dangerous course right through the middle of the Bitches, that treacherous range of reefs that lie like sharks’ teeth off the eastern coast. Eight of the pursuing ships, sure of their prize, had come straight after him; six had foundered on the invisible rocks. The remaining ships, surrounded by chaos, had altered course and lost the wind, and by the time they had found it again, the
Troll
was gone, vanished into the labyrinth of islands up the coast. Sten had rejoined his fleet off Wolf’s Ness and together they had turned back and fallen upon the Istrians in their borrowed ships. It was a short battle, for the enemy were outnumbered and at a loss in these tricky waters. Forced to choose between the Bitches and the mercy of the northern king, many Istrians made the fatal error of choosing the latter; for although Sten ordered that the survivors be saved and taken back to Halbo, it was only the slaves he freed, and they had wept with gratitude. Many had stayed in Eyra, for there was nothing awaiting them in the south, and worked on farms and in nobles’ houses until they could afford their own piece of land. Many took ship to the Eastern Isles where land was cheap, which accounted for the preponderance of dark-haired folk, and for a slightly disdainful attitude towards the easterners from the wealthier Eyrans. The mercenaries Sten had brought back into his own service, for he appreciated good fighting men and had no illusions about loyalty and patriotism; but the Istrians he hanged and quartered on the very docks which they had planned to sack; and then catapulted their bodyparts across the lower half of the city. ‘As a message to the others,’ he had famously informed the single Istrian he had spared – a gangling, black-haired boy from Forent, who had wisely not revealed himself as the heir to the lord of that city. And now, as the tale played itself to an end in her head, another thought struck Katla: she had encountered that man’s son at the Allfair. Rui Finco, Lord of Forent, had presided over her trial, pronounced her guilt, sentenced her to burn. She made the sign of Sur’s anchor to ward off evil, and focused her eyes on the town ahead.