by Jude Fisher
And old Gramma Rolfsen, too: maker of the best yellow-cakes in Eyra, owner of the sharpest tongue and the pithiest wisdom.
Suddenly he was ravenous. Saliva flooded his mouth. His belly grumbled. When had he last eaten? Try as he might, he could not recall. A feast! They would break into the best of the winter stores and show the old man what true Rockfall hospitality meant. Bera was not always the most welcoming of hosts, he knew, especially to unbidden guests, or those rumoured to have magical powers. Guiltily, he remembered how she had tried to turn the seither away, and the whole sequence of bizarre events that had set in motion. Strangely though, even though the days and nights surrounding the mummers’ visit came clearly into focus, the logical end of the sequence eluded him: something to do with a voyage, something . . . wonderful . . .
But the old woman made no move to rouse the hall. She just stood there on the broad stone mole watching him. The goat watched, too, its golden slotted eyes unblinking. Then her gaze moved to his companion and he watched her expression change.
He did not know Old Ma Hallasen well; no one did really. She was mad, that much was acknowledged, and acquaintance was best left at that, if you valued your own sanity. But even so, he felt he could read her face as if he had known her intimately. There was anger there, fear too; but most of all a deep, deep loathing.
In eerie silence, the craft glided up to the seawall. There, it halted as if of its own accord. It did not nose into the stone with the old familiar grating sound he was so used to, from returning as a boy from fishing expeditions in a tiny skiff, to captaining his first sailed boat, to bringing a longship in to moor for the first time. There was no bustle with lines and cleats, no yells and joyful whoops; not even the barking of dear old Ferg, come to greet his master home. Aran Aranson shivered. He set his foot on the incut stairs, noting even as he did so that they had been left to grow slimy with green weed. No one had used this mooring for many a week, months, more? All at once he felt like a character in an old folk tale: the boy who fell asleep in a fairy ring and slept for a hundred years. Waking, he had found himself in another world to the one he had left, and all the folk he had loved long dead and gone. His heart broken, he had gone back to the fairies, as they had known he would do, and given up to them his life and soul, for he had no more use for them.
The old woman’s shadow fell over him. She had drawn herself up to her full height: she seemed impossibly tall. Behind the silhouette of her bony form, the sky was red as blood.
‘Aran Aranson,’ she said, and her voice was low and powerful, a long way from the reedy babble he remembered. ‘You are a luckless man. Seeking treasure, you sailed away; but greater treasure you left behind. Seeking fool’s gold you have lost true gold. Chasing after an impossible dream, you have forged your own doom. Thus it ever was with men.’ Her words reverberated in the air between them, and as she shifted her burning gaze to the man behind him, the Rockfaller felt dread settle in his chest, as cold as iron.
‘And you, Rahe Mage,’ the madwoman went on, ‘are no better, for all your genius. Tricks and flimflam, coloured dust thrown into the air to maze the eye, to mask the ugly greed and lust that lies behind the clever hand.’
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘You hoped I was dead.’
Aran stared at the vagrant woman, then at the sorcerer. All they had in common was their apparent age, and a sort of extravagant shabbiness that suggested a faded grandeur. There was some mystery here which was beyond strange: but it would have to wait. With Rahe’s attention fixed on the old woman, the holding spell evaporated and Aran Aranson ran up the slippery steps in two bounds, pushed past Ma Hallasen, overleapt her goat and dashed along the harbour, his boots echoing on the cobbles.
Rahe and Old Ma watched him go. There was some shadow of sympathy on the woman’s face, but the Master was impassive.
‘I saw the smoke in my crystals,’ he said at last. ‘I take it they’re all dead?’
‘Dead or taken, and no thanks to you.’
‘Me?’ Rahe turned injured eyes upon her.‘I can’t see how any of this is my fault.’
Ma Hallasen sighed. ‘Your sort never can. What do you think is likely to happen when you go and disturb the natural order of the world? Human nature is neither benevolent nor peaceable, left to itself.’ And when Rahe maintained his air of wounded innocence she put her hands on her hips and thrust her chin at him. ‘What I am saying, husband, is that if you will go and steal the soul of the world and use her magic and her body—’
‘I—’
‘Do not even think to deny it, for I know exactly why you had to have her, you with your failing powers both as a sorcerer and as a man. You are all the same, puffed up with ego and vanity and ready to sacrifice anything to make yourselves feel powerful again. So you set me adrift on the ocean, and off you go and steal the Rosa Eldi to make her your whore! And what happens? This!’ She gestured behind her with a fierce sweep of the hand. ‘Rapine and murder and disgrace. On a small scale, or a large, it is all the same in the end: remove the checks and balances which maintain Elda’s equilibrium and chaos ensues. It doesn’t take very long for humankind to drift back into their old ways: they make tribes, they fight one another, steal each other’s land, and set about doing it over and over again until there’s no one left to fight. Then they split into factions and it all starts again. And we women are picked up, used, bred from and cast aside as we get old. It’s the same in every world.
‘Yet Elda has a goddess, the Rose of the World, a woman with some real power to make things better, and what happens? A man – a sorcerer, supposedly wise and powerful in his own right and doing very nicely with a lovely kingdom of his own, and an exceptional wife – gets all carried away at the sight of a pretty – oh, all right, an exquisite – face, kills her husband, knocks her over the head and carries her off to his stronghold, abandoning his poor old wife along the way. At least you cast me off for a goddess, and not some brainless little chit. I suppose that’s some small consolation—’
Rahe said something indistinct.
‘What? Don’t mumble!’
‘I didn’t kill him,’ he enunciated sharply.
Old Ma Hallasen, intrigued now, sat down on the edge of the mole, her feet dangling, and gathered the goatling to her, so that it settled into the crook of her arm and began to gnaw contentedly at her sleeve. He noticed that she wore multicoloured, many-holed leggings beneath the eccentric layers of skirts, and a pair of slippers patched together out of a dozen bits of old tapestry. Rahe tucked his own ragged shoes beneath his robe: it was uncomfortable to see Ilyina again: they had always been too much alike.
‘So what did you do to him?’
‘I buried him under a mountain.’
She whistled then gave a great cackle. ‘Your skills must have improved after you tupped the poor girl! Under a mountain, eh? That’s impressive.’
‘Not just any mountain. The Red Peak.’
‘You buried the Warrior inside the Great Volcano? Then why is he not dead?’
Rahe shook his head. ‘I don’t know. He should be. I thought he was. Nothing can survive the heat of that thing: it’s the very furnace of Elda down there. But he’s not.’
The old woman’s eyes went big and round in mock horror. ‘If he’s not dead he’ll be trying to escape his prison. And when he does, then he’ll be wanting his wife back; and your guts for bootstraps! Oh, dear me: I wouldn’t be in your breeches, husband, not when Sirio comes looking for you.’
The old man grimaced. Then he shrugged. ‘Well, I have that in hand. Though I wish now I hadn’t put his damned sword in the boat with you. It would have been fitting to give the boy that mighty weapon to deal death to the Warrior—’
Now Ilyina threw back her head and gave a full-throated laugh. ‘And I thought the fine sword was a gift you’d left me for our son – I even named the boy for it! But no, you filled that ridiculous ship with all those trinkets and treasures to make it look to any who found me
like some ancient ship burial, rather than plain murder!’
‘Our son?’ Rahe looked thunderstruck.
‘Husband, there was not just one life at stake when you gave me the sleeping potion and sent me off into the mercy of the ocean’s embrace, but two. When I awoke, months later, it seemed I had crossed more seas than any alive now know to exist and my belly was as large as a whale’s!’
‘But—’ Rahe stammered. He frowned. ‘I hardly touched you in all those months after I first glimpsed the Goddess—’
‘Well, someone molested me in my sleep, then!’ the old woman declared huffily. ‘And that someone had your wild red hair, for the lad inherited it from his father, not from me!’
Rahe grimaced. ‘I was never very good with children, anyway.’
‘It didn’t stop you sowing your seed far and wide, though, did it? All those damaged children, with one eye, or overly long bones or second sight, or strange powers, or cursed longevity—’
‘They didn’t all have one eye,’ Rahe retorted defensively, forgetting he had always denied the illicit forays of which she now accused him. ‘Festrin did, yes; and Colm Red-hand; but some of them were very handsome.’
Old Ma’s eyes grew misty. ‘Ah, he was that, our Tam.’
‘Tam?’
‘Tam Fox: as fine a hero as ever strode Elda. In his time he’s killed dragons, scaled mountains, swum seas, crossed deserts, found untold treasures, defended the weak and fed the starving; and then what does he do? Instead of taking power into his hands, he gives it all up to become a mummer. Comes to me one day with the sword wrapped up and asks me to keep it for him, saying: “Mam, I am renouncing the ways of men: I shall travel the world making mock of their violence and folly, for Sirio knows that force of arms has availed me nothing.”’ She laughed. ‘He rather took against the Rose of Elda after I told him the tale of how you cast me off for her. His troupe made quite hilarious sport of her at the last Winterfest here, long gold hair of straw, great big tits and all—’
‘She doesn’t . . .’ Rahe’s voice trailed off as another thought struck him. ‘Then he knows I am his father?’ He looked suddenly aghast. ‘Why did he not come to seek me out in all these years – these centuries?’
Ilyina regarded him with a sardonic eye. ‘He was not overly eager to make your acquaintance. In fact, it is as well he put aside his warrior ways and entrusted his sword to me, for were he here now, I believe his anger would likely overcome his scruples and he might well demand satisfaction of you on behalf of his dear old mam.’
‘Where is he, then?’ Now Rahe was seriously alarmed. It was one thing to know his enemy trapped inside a volcano and many thousand miles distant; but it was quite another to have spawned such a dangerously disgruntled son, and one who seemed to have eluded his omniscience.
The old woman gave him a horrible yellow-toothed grin and tapped the side of her nose. ‘They thought he was dead, but I have seen him in my crystal—’
This explanation was interrupted by a terrible, keening cry.
Aran Aranson had discovered the fruits of his own folly.
The scrap of red fabric caught in the roots of the old hawthorn at Feya’s Cross almost stopped him in his tracks, for it was the same bright colour of the handfasting robe that Katla had worn at the Gathering; then logic caught up with his racing fears and reminded him the dress had long been lost. He had just quelled his beating heart when he rounded a corner and came upon a mouldering heap on the side of the path. Long yellow bones protruding through a dry mat of grey hair curled in on themselves to form a starkly elegant shape. An intricate arrangement of claws and paw bones hid the end of a familiar muzzle.
Ferg.
His heart pulsed so hard it felt as if it would break out of his ribs. Their beloved old hound had lain down here to die; and no one had bothered to bury his carcass. Now he knew something was terribly wrong.
It took him three minutes to sprint up the steep hillside, through the old plantation, across the sheep pasture, over the drystone wall, and into the homefield.
At first he did not notice the hastily raised mounds, the stacks of broken and discarded weapons, the strewn rags or scattered bones, for his gaze was riveted by the sight of the great hall of Rockfall itself, the steading he had renovated with his own hands, the home where he had loved his hard-won woman and where they had raised a family and guided the affairs of their retainers and allies, now unrecognisable. Proud and austere it stood, brooding and ruined, a blackened relief against a backdrop of pink-lit, snow-covered mountains: an eloquent reproach, an untimely reminder of his madness.
The ground felt suddenly unstable beneath his feet. Legs buckling, he came crashing to his knees. The shock of contact with the rock of his home unhinged something in his mind – whether it was the careful guards which he had himself placed on his thoughts, or the cloaking spell in which Rahe had wrapped his memories – and at last it all came flooding back to him: the Allfair, the map, the dream of gold, the loss of his son Halli on the return voyage from the raid on the Halbo shipyard, the making of the Long Serpent, the estrangement from his wife, the bad blood with which they had parted, the desperate expedition through the arctic seas and all its consequent disasters; and the realisation that in taking every able-bodied man out of the island on a mad, obsessive whim he had left his home and his family – all he truly cared about in this world – at the mercy of every unprincipled, bloodthirsty raider who could sail a boat or wield a weapon.
Now the details leapt out at him: the spent arrows, the fire-licked stones, the tumbled walls, the charred and collapsed turf roof. All these told the same inescapable story – of assault, resistance, a heroic stand; a tragic failure. Before him lay a mound bearing a knotted string which swung pendulously in the evening’s light onshore breeze. He did not have to move far to read the tale of those knots: ‘Here lies Hesta Rolfsen, giver of wisdom, brave of heart, dead of fire’.
He gave out an unearthly cry. It started as a low, guttural grunt of agony, rose in pitch to an agonised bellow, then broke the bounds of all humanity to become the howl of a broken animal.
Twenty-one
Afterwalkers
A continent away, another had breached the boundaries of humanity.
Alisha Skylark, astride a great black stallion, led a ragged army deep into the dead lands of the Bone Quarter. It did not matter to them that the sun beat down like a hammer on an anvil, that the sparse oases had run dry, that the scouring desert winds blew their freight of sand into dunes before them, revealing in their wake the rocky bones of Elda or the skeletons of the long deceased; it did not matter that wide-winged vultures circled curiously overhead or that monsters erupted out of the ground and fled before them: they were all beyond life here. But for the woman who had raised them it was a different matter.
Since she had brought Virelai back to himself with the power of the deathstone and wakened Night’s Harbinger in the midst of that scavengers’ feast, Alisha had reanimated soul after soul on her journey into the badlands. She had begun with her son, Falo.
It had been easy enough to retrace her steps back to the site of the vicious ambush by the Jetran bountymen, for it was as if something ineffable drew her south through the night and the day, something which obviated the need for navigation or a lodestone: and there by the river’s edge on that wide apron of soft grass beneath the trees she had found his corpse where she had seen him fall. These past weeks, in the heat and the damp of the glade, Falo’s body had not fared well. His skin was soft and mottled and swollen with the eggs of flies, and carrion birds had taken his eyes; his severed arm lay at a distance from the rest of his pathetic remains, its blackened fingers still curled around the wooden knobkerry with which he had attempted to defend her.
Driven beyond reason by grief, madness and the possession of the eldistan, she had knelt beside his noisome corpse and pressed the stone upon his forehead with a prayer to the life-force of the world, and in a blinding white light through which she cou
ld see only the black shadows of his bones knitting themselves together into some semblance of order up he had got; stiffly, mutely, but inexorably. He was still one-armed and blind, but the stone had gifted him with some kind of new skin accommodating neither maggots nor decay. He recognised her: of that she was sure, for he turned his head towards her when she spoke his name, inclining one grey ear delicately in her direction as if straining to catch the far tones of her voice; but it seemed that he would not speak, nor do anything unless she willed it. Her heart filled with a wildfire of scouring love which burned away the nagging questions. Her son was returned to her: that was all that mattered.
Then she had raised the rest of her erstwhile companions. One by one, the nomads had clambered to their feet – the two old men, followed by Elida and her sisters. Set in their new ashy skins their decorative piercings twinkled and rang; stones and beads rattled in their braids; feathers and scraps of coloured fabric swung jauntily as they moved.
From a distance they looked lively and energised. But up close an observer would have shied away from the emptiness of the dark eye sockets, the grimacing jaws, the clutching hands.
Driven by the one who had woken them, they walked without tiring, without food or sustenance, by the light of the moon or the pulverising heat of the day. But when Alisha took her attention from them they came to a halt in mid-stride and stood like puppets hung from a peg waiting for the puppetmaster to animate them again. Often, caught up in a prolonged daydream in which her mind slid sideways into blessed nothingness, stupefied by the sun and the swaying gait of the stallion, she would forget to drive them and turn to find them strung out one by one in the sands behind her in various stages of puzzlement and oblivion and would have to shoo them back into line, impress her will upon them, send them ahead so she could keep an eye on them.
