by Jude Fisher
‘Tee hee, tee hee!’ Ma Hallasen cackled, back in character once more.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said at last, his fingers moving wonderingly over the pommel. ‘Where did these things come from? Who are you? Why are you giving me this?’
The crone regarded him with her head on one side, as if she were assessing whether he was worthy of the truth. Then she said, ‘This sword was forged by Sur’s own hand and now belongs to my son. I believe you know him, though he’s as old as your great-grandfather would be now.’
Erno laughed at the old buzzard’s hyperbole. ‘My greatgrandfather has been in the ground these past forty years, but when he breathed his last he had reached the good age of six and eighty!’
Ma Hallasen gave him a delighted open-mouthed grin. It was not a pretty sight. ‘Ha! You do not believe me; nor have you guessed, then. Ponder on it, my handsome pigeon. The clue is in the sword.’ And with that she beckoned him to follow once again.
He went puzzledly, staring at the great sword in his hand, but unless he was being extremely stupid, it did not appear to offer any obvious answer. His arm-bones buzzed from holding it; but whether this was because of its great weight or for something intrinsic in the weapon itself, he could not tell. He concentrated on the feeling for a few second, but that only made his head buzz, too. At last he laid the great blade against the wall and looked around, his head clearer now than it had been while he had the weapon in his hand. They were back in the front chamber, and Old Ma Hallasen was opening a wooden chest Erno had not noticed before, and removing from it a large object wrapped in a piece of gorgeously colourful silk. For a moment, Erno’s heart stopped dead in his chest and hung there like a cold stone. Scarlet and orange flames licked the hems of the cloth: it looked identical to the gift he had bought for Katla Aransen at the Allfair, the shawl for which he had paid all his savings over to a nomad woman. But then he saw there were birds woven into the upper part of the fabric, and that although similar, it was not the same weaving at all. A great and inexplicable sadness came over him. Katla had had the shawl with her the last time he had seen her, on the strand of the Moonfell Plain, before he had done her bidding and left her behind to face her pursuers.
Ma Hallasen whisked the silk covering away. Beneath it stood a globe of polished stone. Kneeling on the floor with greater fluidity than a woman of her advanced age should have, she gestured for Erno to sit on the opposite side of the table from her. She placed one hand on either side of the crystal and peered intently into it. Then she looked up into his eyes. A spectrum of light chased across the sere old skin and hollow planes of her face. She looked otherworldly.
‘Think of her, the Kettle-girl,’ she urged. ‘I see your heart: it burns as brightly as if it were beating outside your shirt.’ She lowered her voice conspiratorially, though there was no one but the goats and cats to hear. ‘And I heard you weep for her up in the homefield as you and the sharp-toothed one walked among the bodies there.’
He gasped. ‘I did not see you there,’ he said accusingly, as if by some magic she might have been one of the crows he had disturbed, which had fixed him with eyes just as beady, before flapping guilelessly off into the trees.
‘People see me only when I wish them to,’ she said impatiently. ‘Now think of the Kettle-girl and put your hands on the crystal.’
Erno did as he was told. He thought of Katla in the forge, beating out a sword, her face fierce with concentration and sheened with sweat, the red lights from the flames shining on her arm muscles and making a nimbus of her hair. And then suddenly, there she was. Her hair was shorter and her face was thin and there was a huge bruise on her jaw; and she was in some dark place. Other women whom he recognised curved around her into the distorted plane of the crystal. Their hands and feet were clasped by iron shackles.
‘She’s alive!’ he cried, lifting his face to the gaze of the old woman. Immense relief flooded over him, followed immediately by a terrible despair. How would he find her? How could he even leave the island, let alone make his way to Istria?
‘Look in the stone again, pretty pigeon.’
When he did so, he saw a ship being rowed into Rockfall’s harbour. With its sail down in the still air, it took him a few moments to realise what he was looking at. Then a great surge of hope welled up in him. Even with her back to him, he knew Mam’s bulk and power. Besides which, it was impossible to mistake the identity of her oar partner, for a great ripple of coloured images swirled across his back. Paired with Mam on the oar was her lover and assassin: Persoa, the tattooed man. It was the mercenary ship: they had come back for him!
Without a second thought, he leapt up from the table and strode toward the door.
‘A gift spurned is an enemy gained.’ The old woman’s voice was deep and resonant. It stopped him dead in his tracks. For a moment in the tricksy light of the howe, it looked as though her hair was a great cloud of gold, that her features were larger, younger, more commanding. She looked less like mad Old Ma Hallasen than— He pushed the thought away: it was ridiculous.
By the time she had pushed herself upright from the table and slowly retrieved the sword from where he had propped it, he had successfully dispelled the disturbing image which had visited him. He laid hands upon the great weapon ruefully. ‘I am sorry, old woman,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to spurn your gift, if gift it is.’
‘More loan than gift,’ she croaked, an ancient crone once more, bowed down by the weight of her years and the aching of her old joints. ‘And you have enemies enough if you follow the course you are set on without adding me to their number.’ Still she did not let go of the sword. Erno found himself gripping it awkwardly, not sure whether to wrest it from her or wait for her to relinquish it to him. His arms began to shake with the strain of its great weight; but in that fitful light it seemed that hers remained steady as rock. She stared him in the eye. ‘This sword must find its way back to its maker,’ she said cryptically, and then cackled as his arms dropped suddenly when she let his hands take the full weight of the weapon. ‘Or else all will fail.’
Then she hobbled into the darkness at the back of the chamber and merged into the gloom as if walking into a past time where he could not follow.
Blinking against the shock of the daylight outside, and bemused by his strange encounter and even stranger surmisings, Erno Hamson shouldered the great weapon and turned his footsteps down the path towards the harbour, feeling as if some distinct but undeserved doom had settled itself upon him. Quite how he would answer questions about the provenance of the sword, he did not know. By the time he had made his way to the sea wall, where the mercenaries were waiting, his mind was still an unhelpful blank. So he said nothing at all, though they all stared at him and the sword curiously, and when Joz Bearhand ran his hands appreciatively over the golden hilt and pommel, mumbled something about ‘an heirloom’, which was as close to the truth as he could manage without opening himself to more difficult discussions. That night, as they set sail for the Southern Continent in pursuit of the raiders’ ship, he slept with the weapon beside him, wrapped in his cloak, and dreamt about casting it into the ocean before the fate the old woman had spoken of could possibly attach itself to him, but in the morning it was still safely wrapped and he found he could not part with it. Besides, as Mam pointed out with her usual pragmatism, if the money which Margan Rolfson had pressed upon them for the rescue of their dearly beloved sister Bera and her daughter Katla, and the few silvers they had collected around the island from the other prisoners’ relatives ran out before they could accomplish the task, they could always sell the thing.
Erno did not respond by saying that selling the sword would be impossible; and Mam did not add that Margan had taken her aside and made her swear to put the women out of their misery by whatever means afforded to her if they had been too cruelly misused by their captors or others by the time the troop reached them.
And so each held to the secret things they knew as the ship sailed south.
Five
The Master
Aran Aranson had heard how sailors lost in arctic regions became prone to hallucinations, their eyes and minds mazed by cold, by exhaustion, and by the never-ending vistas of ice and air and ocean all melding together into a mutable, undependable landscape. They saw icebergs floating above the surface of the water like massive hovering palaces, fabulous castles towering hundreds of feet into the sky. Some saw the outline of their home islands situated in a new and impossible geography; others their wives or daughters limned by strange polar lights. Many of these men lost their wits entirely and were to be found muttering into their ale in seaport inns, wrapped about by this other, more miraculous world, a world they preferred not to relinquish. Unseeing, their eyes might skim past you to peer unnervingly over your left shoulder, their seamed old faces might break into a smile of welcome; but if you turned to look for the newcomer who had generated this ecstatic welcome, most likely there would be no one there.
Staring at the apparition now floating towards him, Aran felt himself in imminent danger of joining their mad ranks.
To his snow-hazed eyes, the figure looked to be a woman arrayed in robes which rippled and flowed like a sea; and like a sea, her long hair undulated in silver-gold waves around her bright face. Electricity crackled in the air between the two of them, igniting suddenly into streams of pale fire. Aran felt it play about his skull, felt an eerie tingling lift the hair on his head, then down his neck and spine. His eyes, when he closed them, replayed crazed images in harsh zigzagging configurations so that he could find no respite from them.
To Urse’s eyes, the figure was male: an old, old man with a bitter cast of expression and a thousand wrinkles dragging his features down into a myriad of tiny sagging folds which bespoke not only advanced age, but also a vast and uncontainable disappointment with the world.
Fent Aranson said and saw nothing; but in the moment in which the apparition materialised, he twisted once on his bearer’s back and gave voice to a small, inchoate cry.
The blue fire surrounding the figure crackled and darted, then abruptly dispersed out into the night air, leaving behind only the faintest luminescence. Then the apparition stilled and it sank slowly to the ground.
‘Welcome,’ it said; and to Aran the word was redolent of summer fields and ripe grain, of harvest time and willing women; of warmth and comfort and the nostalgia of his lost youth. To Urse One-Ear, however, it was the utterance of a trickster; a quavery voice striving for reassurance. ‘Welcome to the hidden stronghold at the tip of the world. Welcome to Sanctuary.’
Aran Aranson felt his knees give way. He sank to the ground as if the last of his strength had failed him now that his objective was attained. It was Urse who demanded, ‘What sort of man are you that you appear to us in this bizarre manner, rather than striding out on your own two feet?’
At this, Aran called to the giant, ‘What are you saying?’ And even as he asked this, the image came clearly to his mind of the woman he had glimpsed at the Allfair the last summer, the one sitting quietly behind the mapmaker’s stall, with a sheet of shining hair and those hypnotic sea-green eyes, full of come-hither promise. Blood rushed to several chilled and forgotten parts of his anatomy. His pulse quickened. Embarrassed in case his discomfiture should suddenly show itself, he turned away from the apparition to confront Urse One-Ear, his face contorted. ‘How can you be so unmannerly to such a gracious lady?’
Urse laughed, showing his snaggle teeth. ‘Lady? This is no lady. The ice must have blinded you. It is a venerable old man who seems to be carrying a world of trouble on his shoulders.’ He frowned. ‘But even if your eyes were mistaken, surely your ears can tell the difference between the cracked and reedy voice of a greybeard and a lady’s soft tones?’
Aran felt the lust which had infused his veins turning to blind fury. He took a step towards the giant, his hands balled. ‘Put down my son and put up your fists, Urse One-Ear; and I shall even up your features for your insulting behaviour!’
‘No!’
This word of command flew through the air between them to hang like an invisible shield, and to Aran Aranson it was a mellifluous pleading which could not help but melt his anger, while to Urse it was an order he had no choice but to obey.
As unmoving as the frozen landscape around them, the two men stood facing each other, while the third lay slumped and insensate. The Master hovered around this tableau, scratching his beard. Both men were supposed to be visited by the same image – that of the most alluring of women: the Rosa Eldi, Rose of the World, whose gaze could fell a man with desire and bind him to her will. He shook his head. Was it his age, or the long sleep he had endured which was diminishing his powers so? With both men rendered temporarily inert as stone, the Master cancelled the flying glamour and came down to the ground with a thud, his knees buckling with the sudden impact. Even such simple magics were becoming problematic. Something in the potion Virelai had administered must have drastically weakened his abilities if it took such effort to maintain a miserably basic deception. What if the effects were progressive? What if his capabilities should deteriorate further? He shuddered. He should never have filled the damned cat with his spellcraft; but how could he ever have guessed that his inept apprentice should have the gall and the wit to carry out such an audacious plan? He cursed again his lack of foresight and judgement, that he had created his own downfall. Had he bothered to scry his own future just once, he might have averted the disaster which had befallen him, would never have had to resort to such convoluted means of regaining what should never in the first place have been lost.
The Master shook his head, and his grey, unkempt locks tumbled about his shoulders in just the fashion Urse One-Ear had so truly perceived. He walked between the two still figures and peered up into the big man’s mangled face. Even bowed beneath the weight of the boy, this monster towered over him.
He was no beauty, and probably never would have been even had the grim accident which had befallen him never taken the ear and made such a hash of his cheek and jaw. The Master smiled with satisfaction. The Giant, without a doubt.
He turned his attention to the man called Aran Aranson. This man looked like one of the heroes of old, Rahe thought, with his sharp cheekbones and sunken, fanatical eyes; with his tangled black hair, his grey-shot beard and jutting chin; his single great eyebrow running in a furious dark line across a forehead as dark as seasoned oak. Even the salt-stained sealskins and ratty furs could not disguise his athletic build; and even the ravages of the journey which had brought him from the relative comforts of his island farm to this fabled land – through the worst of the world’s elemental forces, through weeks of poor fare and bad sleep, through exhaustion, fear and despair – could not extinguish the fire that burned within him: a fire fuelled by ambition, a craving for wild experience, for things and places unseen by other men. Rahe could smell it on him like a glamour. He sniffed. A vague scent of musk and cinnamon came to him, even though it was so cold that even the stink of a rotting beast or a frightened man’s sweat left little trace.
With a sure hand he plundered the warmth beneath Aran’s sealskin jerkin. Between the skin – warm, hairy, the heartbeat a slow, sure pulsing thud – and the linen tunic the Eyran wore beneath the outer layers, Rahe found what he was seeking. Sealed in a soft leather pouch tied closed with a knotted thong was a roll of parchment, creased and flaking from overuse. With fingers trembling as much from fury as anticipation, Rahe unrolled this artefact, clutching it between fingerpads gone white from applied pressure as any effect of the cold.
It was elegantly done, this so-called map, he had to admit. At first glance it looked authentic – accurate and carefully drawn by someone who knew the outlines of the coasts familiar to the seafaring men of the Northern Isles – and had been expertly antiqued by a touch of the Ageing spell he had himself stowed in Bëte, having no immediate use for it himself. That was the musk – he would recognise that wretched creature’s odour anyw
here. The spice smell he put down to the maker’s own signature: rot-sweet and musty.
He traced the swathe of white space in the northernmost quarter of the map with the invented word ‘isenfeld’ scrawled across it in his faithless apprentice’s best calligraphy hand. ‘Icefields’ indeed – or rather ‘ice’ plus an old word for ‘pastures’, but in a tongue so ancient no such concept could possibly have existed, for in those days there had been no kingdom of ice in this world, no floes and bergs, no uncrossable ocean: those failures of climate had come much later to Elda, when the care of the world had been neglected, allowing it to fall into the disrepair which had allowed him to create this hidden island, indicated by the traitor’s hand beneath the heart of a gorgeously drawn windrose in the far right-hand corner, a word beginning ‘Sanct—’.
The Master’s lip curled. Virelai. The little runt! The ignominy of the situation was unbearable: the greatest mage in the world of Elda laid low by one of his own spells, stolen and applied by his lowly and despised apprentice.
He clutched the map tighter, felt the greed and uncertainty eat into him. Visions of yellow metal, of glinting ores flashed behind the orbits of his eyes. Gold! Ah yes: he had glimpsed it before, but now he saw clearly. Gold: that was the draw. Sanctuary’s fabled treasure halls. Virelai had promised the adventurers gold to sail through unknown horrors to Sanctuary. He could imagine the scene at the Allfair, all the greedy shipowners crowding around – or, no – Virelai would have to have seen them one by one, have to have made each man feel special, singled out for glory. Entrusted with a secret mission, which no other must know about for fear of them beating him to the prize. All you need to do is remove the old man, help yourselves to his treasures, a simple task. Remove the old man.
