by Jude Fisher
There was an expression on her face which Saro had not seen before. Even so, he held her searching gaze steadily.
‘I tried to reach you, but I failed. The men I killed got in my way: saving you was my only thought. I did not mean to kill them.’ He paused, his face a mask of anguish.‘I thought you were dead, all this time—’
‘You risked your life for me.’
It was a simple statement of fact. Saro nodded, suddenly out of words.
Katla gazed away over his head and seemed to mull this over for a long time. No one said anything. At last, she sighed.
‘Erno’s death is not mine to forgive, but his own. You should ask forgiveness of him, not me,’ she said stiffly. Then she braced her hands on her knees and rose, joints cracking. It looked as though she might say something more, but then she shook her head and strode away into the darkness, wrapped in thought.
Saro watched her go, his eyes full of misery. The hillman patted him on the arm. ‘She is proud and her people have been harshly treated by the South. They cradle their vengeance, the Eyrans, with as much care as they would cradle an infant. Give her time, my friend: she will come round.’
But of that, Saro was not so sure.
The farther south they rode, the drier and hotter the land became. Rocky streambeds were exposed for the first time in centuries, and the reeds and bulrushes which normally lined their lush banks were sere and brown. No birds sang. The only life they saw were lizards skittering from under the horses’ hooves into the lee of boulders, a striped sidewinder which weaved swiftly away into the roots of a dead tree, and occasionally the shadow of a vulture fell over them as its owner circled overhead on a fruitless search for carrion.
This, Saro could see with his own eyes, for the hillman had prevailed on Mam to let him ride the mule, rather than be slung across it, and Katla, rolling her eyes, had not demurred.
‘Don’t even think about trying to escape,’ the mercenary leader leered. ‘You won’t get far: that beast can hardly be bothered to walk, let alone gallop, and if I have to break a sweat retrieving you, I can promise you’ll regret it.’ And she flashed her sharpened teeth at him just enough to underscore the threat.
There was, Saro thought gloomily, nowhere to run to, even if he had a decent mount: all that could be seen for miles around was scrubland and thorns and a pitiless blue sky.
Two days later they crossed a ridge and came down into the plains which had once provided the grain which fed all of Istria. No more: land that had once been sown with wheat and corn offered ranks of lifeless stubble, between which the topsoil had become so light and desiccated that it had blown elsewhere, leaving a skim of sand over bedrock. They passed parched irrigation ditches and empty ponds, orchards of orange and pomegranate trees now reduced to leafless twigs herded together by drystone walls.
Even with all the men called to war and no one left to tend the crops, the change seemed drastic to Saro, whose homeland this was. There had been dry years before, years when they dug deep wells and passed leather buckets from hand to hand to keep their fruit trees alive; years when scouring winds blew great channels between the crops and no rain fell between Fifthmoon and Harvest Moon, but he had never seen anything like this.
If the plains of Istria were reduced to desert, how much worse would it be farther south, near his home in Altea? Panic gripped his heart. With his uncle dead, his father with the army and no sons to care for her, how would his mother fare? The mercenaries might receive precious little for the return of the heir to the Altean estates; precious little, or nothing at all . . .
In the hills north of Pex, they stopped for the night and Mam sent Persoa and Doc down into the town for news and whatever provisions they could find. Their food was all but gone; and even their water supply, despite the supernatural divining powers of the eldianna, was running low. Their stomachs rumbled and complained, though they would not die just yet. But the horses were rib-thin and exhausted.
Mam poked desultorily at the stew she and Joz had made of what little was left in their stores – a piece of dried mutton, so scrawny and tough that Katla suggested they would be better off adding one of her boots instead, two withered onions, a handful of meal, one of oats, some dried apricots and a twist of thyme. It made for thin pickings. Eventually, Dogo went hunting around for anything else he could find and came back with an empty meal-sack. This he upended over the bubbling pot, then stared in curiously at what had fallen out.
‘Serves you right, you little buggers!’ he grinned.
Katla peered over his shoulder and made a face.
Mam, deadpan, kept stirring.
‘Just a bit more meat,’ she said, feeling the prisoner’s eyes on her.
But when the poor gruel was ladled out, two fat white maggots floated on the surface of Saro’s portion. He looked at them lying there, feeling his guts lurching. At least they weren’t moving. Or were they?
He put the bowl aside.
This seemed to give Katla Aransen yet another cause to despise him, for she picked up the spurned bowl and, maintaining eye contact all the while, drained off the lot without hesitation.
The moon was up before Persoa and Doc returned. Their grave faces and empty hands told more of a story than any words.
Doc peered into the cookpot and helped himself to a portion of the lees and the hillman followed suit. Mam watched with narrow eyes and made no attempt to coax anything out of them until they’d finished eating.
At last, the big man said, ‘War’s started, then.’
Mam raised an eyebrow.
‘Big fleet of Eyran-designed ships left Forent Harbour just before full moon—’
Katla Aransen swore vilely and stabbed the little knife she had been cleaning into the ground repeatedly. ‘Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard.’ Had Morten Danson been lying there, he would now be punctured many times over, his lifeblood leaking away into the hardpan.
‘After that the information gets a bit shaky,’ Doc admitted. ‘Some say they never made it, others that there was some big battle at Halbo; and one old trailman I spoke to said he’d heard something about a monster rising up out of the waters and swamping the fleet.’
At this point, Katla stopped stabbing her dagger into the dirt and glanced up. ‘What sort of monster?’
Doc shrugged. ‘Who knows? Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?’
The Eyran girl looked away from him, then buried the knife in the ground so viciously that it snapped off at the hilt.
‘Break a blade, fate is made,’ intoned Joz Bearhand softly.
Katla stared at the shards, eyes glittering. She blinked rapidly, then cast the useless hilt away into the bushes.
‘Fate? I care nothing for fate. I don’t believe in gods or goddesses or magic or curses or prophecy or deathstones or any of that nonsense – whatever any of you say,’ she said grimly, glaring around at all of them, as if daring anyone to contradict her. ‘I believe that if we act, we make things happen; and if we don’t act, things happen to us. I’m fed up with having things happen to me. I’ll make my own fate. I’ll make my own decisions and my own mistakes, and if I bring down ruin on my own head, well at least it’ll be my own fault. I won’t boast that I’ve made the best decisions in my time, or that I haven’t hurt others when making them, but I’ll stand my ground and take the consequences, come what may. I’ll eat dirt if I have to.’
‘Aye to that,’ Mam averred heartily, breaking the awkward silence that fell. ‘But I fear we’ll all be eating dirt if we hang around here any longer.’ She stood up and wiped her hands on her tunic in a businesslike fashion. ‘Let’s get going,’ she said. ‘Altea’s what – two, three days south?’
Saro nodded.
‘Let’s hope your ma’s got some provisions laid in, then, eh?’
There were no workers in the orchards around Altea and the trees appeared withered and fruitless. As they rounded a bend at the top of a steep hill they came upon the stinking carcasses of two white oxen lying by the
side of the road, their stomachs flyblown below starved and ribby flanks. On the lee of the hill the cart the beasts had been drawing lay abandoned on its side. A pathetic tumble of possessions spilled out of it into the dust of the road – some Jetran pottery, broken by the fall, bundles of fabric, parts of a loom, an old wicker chair, its pretty fretwork polished and gleaming from the rub of years.
Saro wailed and jumped down off the mule. He knelt amidst all this sorry jetsam and pulled the chair free of the tangle, then leant his head on it and sobbed.
Joz dismounted and came to stand beside him.
‘What is it, lad?’
Saro turned a miserable face to the big man. ‘These are my mother’s things. This is the chair she nursed us on, me and my brother; this is the chair she sat in, day and night, by the side of Tanto’s bed when he was ill and looked as if he would die. And then in the end I killed him after all . . . Oh, Mother, how can you ever forgive me, if you are even still alive?’
His voice trailed off to a whisper. Joz, ever a man of great heart, laid a hand on the lad’s shoulder, but this just served to make Saro sob louder. The rest of the group watched this outpouring of grief uncomfortably, all except for Persoa, who slipped silently from his horse, crossed quickly to the wreckage, and gently drew the young Istrian to his feet.
‘Your brother was an evil man,’ he said. ‘And he was responsible in part for what has happened here.’
Saro looked at him through red eyes, mystified.
‘Many forces have acted upon this region,’ the hillman said, ‘that it should be leached so dry. The climate has been changing ever since the Goddess came back to the world: for wherever she is, there is beneficence, and she is a long way from here. Water is her element, and I can feel it running, drawn to her as a lodestone is drawn to the north. And I suspect that the deathstone, too, has taken its toll. But those we spoke to in the town of Pex had other things to say about the starvation the folk of the south have endured these past months.
‘During his time in Jetra your brother held sway, and he was a tyrant in many ways beyond the most obvious. Not only did he make a name for himself for the torture and burning of thousands of innocents; he also demanded that every town render up to him vast amounts of food and wine. Those who did not at once comply with his orders found themselves accused of sorcery and burnt with the nomads that were rounded up.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I was amazed that the soldiery of the Eternal City should be complicit in such ill-doing, but when I questioned further I was told that every scurvy villain prepared to take Jetra’s coin signed up to do Tanto Vingo’s bidding while the rest went off to war, and were paid most handsomely for it . . . and not only in cantari.
‘He has bled the country dry, even as far as his own estates. I think you have done the people of Elda a very great service in removing such a wicked soul.’
Saro hung his head, taking all this in. When he lifted it again, his eyes were clearer, though still troubled. ‘And what of my mother?’
Persoa looked over Saro’s shoulder to Mam. Their eyes locked for a moment, then the mercenary leader said with forced cheer, ‘She probably gave these things away, lad. To someone worse off than herself.’
Saro shook his head. ‘No. She would never had given her chair away, not to anyone.’
‘Looters?’ Dogo suggested gleefully.
Saro fixed him with a hard stare.‘If there have been looters at work, then things are dire indeed.’
No one else had anything to say. Saro got back on the mule with a pale, strained face and they rode the track to the Vingo estate in silence.
The villa was deserted. Expecting the worst, with lurid images of death and decay imprinted in his mind, Saro breathed a sigh of, if not relief, then something close to it. Even so, to see the place he had been raised in abandoned and bereft of life was a desolate experience. Out in the courtyard, his mother’s flowerbeds, over which she had lavished such care even in the hottest season, were crusted with cracked soil and withered plants. The well was dry and even its leather bucket was gone, leaving just a frayed tangle of bleached rope swinging in the breeze. The storehouse had been ransacked and empty flour sacks and cheese moulds lay strewn across the floor.
The mercenary troop fanned out to quarter the area more effectively, searching for any signs of life or food, leaving Saro to wander the villa on his own – but whether this was a gesture made out of compassion or awkwardness, he did not know. He went from room to room, feeling like a ghost haunting its lost home. Everywhere there was broken furniture, shards of crockery, empty bottles. Drapes, clothes and linen lay trampled on the floor, dirtied by many feet. It looked nothing like home any more.
Someone had lit a fire in the chamber he had shared with his brother when they were children. The remains of one of their beds, smashed into firewood, lay in the ashes, along with a scatter of charred bones which looked to have belonged to a small animal of some sort.
He pushed at them with his boot, and the pile collapsed with a sigh, black dust billowing out into the room. Something skittered out from under the second bed and ran frantically across the room, mewling.
It was a kitten.
Saro stared at it, amazed. Brindled and big-eyed, it ran into a corner and stared back, terrified but defiant.
Picking up a bed sheet, Saro approached carefully. All the lank fur on the kitten’s neck stood on end and it hissed and spat at him, and then when he engulfed it in the linen, sank its claws and teeth through the fabric into his hand, but Saro held on grimly as the tiny creature’s terror and fury flowed through him. Then, for the first time since old Hiron Sea-Haar had gifted him with this unwanted empathy, and with no conscious thought for what he was doing, he turned the tide of the sensations which buffeted at him and allowed a wave of calm and gentleness to flow back in the opposite direction, and after a while the kitten stopped biting and lay compliant in his hands.
It was maybe two hours later when Dogo and Joz Bearhand returned to the villa with a bagful of scavengings and found him dozing on the front steps in the last of the day’s sunlight with the creature curled up asleep in his arms.
‘Aha!’ said the little man, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I see you’ve found us some supper!’
Saro’s eyes snapped open. The kitten, its nap disturbed, burrowed its head further into the crook of his elbow. ‘It’s not for eating,’ he said fiercely.
‘Not for eating?’ Dogo looked amazed. ‘All things are for eating. I’ve had many a tasty cat stew in my time. Boil it up with a bit of rosemary, the meat comes right off the bone lovely. Tastes just like chicken.’
Saro got to his feet, tucking the little beast so firmly under his arm that it meeped anxiously. ‘No one’s stewing this kitten,’ he declared. ‘You’ll have to kill me to take it.’
Joz grinned. ‘No worries, laddie.’ He held out the bag. ‘We’ve enough here to keep us going for a couple of days. No one’s going to eat your cat.’
Dogo leered evilly. ‘Not till the third day, anyway.’
They had found a root cellar in one of the outbuildings in which a fallen roof had defeated the looters. After much back-breaking excavation, it had rendered up a number of rather desiccated vegetables, a sack of rice which the mice hadn’t got at, and some mouldy cheeses, which looked a good deal more palatable once the rind was removed. Doc had found some nettles and burdock growing around what was left of the lake, and some bales of dry hay in one of the barns, so at least the horses could be fed. But it was Mam and Katla who had made the best find. As the sun dipped below the jagged horizon of the mountains, they led a skinny, stumbling cow into the courtyard and proceeded to butcher it on the spot.
‘It was on its last legs. I doubt it would have lived another day,’ Mam said matter-of-factly as she cleaned off her dagger.
In the end, they threw everything they could fit into the old iron cauldron from the kitchens and cooked it all up together, while Joz hung strips of meat over the fire to smoke. While Mam
and Dogo cooked, Katla crouched beside Saro and examined the kitten curiously. She put a finger out and the kitten sniffed it, then began to lick it vigorously, wrapping its tiny paws around her hand and digging its claws in for purchase. Without a word, Katla pulled back her hand, got up and walked away.
Saro watched her go, feeling unaccountably sad.
‘It’s a gift from the Goddess,’ Persoa said softly from behind him. ‘The little cat. It’s her gift to you.’
‘Perhaps I’m her gift to it,’ Saro replied.
The hillman smiled. ‘If such a tiny creature can survive amid such desolation, then so shall we all.’
Saro raised an eyebrow. ‘Not much hope for the poor cow.’ He remembered what Alisha Skylark had said of the nomad way of life, about sharing the world with its creatures rather than eating them, and felt ashamed at the way his stomach rumbled at the gorgeous aromas emanating from the cauldron.
The hillman laughed. ‘No, that is true. But tomorrow it would have been dead and only the crows and the vultures would have benefited. Besides, it seems it is not only we humans who will eat well tonight.’
Saro looked up and found Katla Aransen standing over him. In her hands she held a gleaming hunk of raw meat, and a sharp knife.
‘Something for your kitten,’ she said shortly, and squatting down, she began to cut off tiny pieces for the little beast, which sat bolt upright on Saro’s lap, its gold eyes gleaming with firelight, not knowing whether to purr or growl or snatch at the food.
In the end it did all three at once.
Thirty-two
An unexpected encounter
The next day, as they crested a high ridge, Joz pointed out a plume of dust in the valley below them. ‘Soldiers on the march?’ Mam asked, squinting. Her eyesight was not as sharp as it had once been, not that she was going to admit it to anyone.
Joz shook his head. ‘Wrong direction,’ he said tersely. ‘Whoever they are, they’re heading south and west.’
