by Jude Fisher
Inside this packet was a tangle of dark stems and a pile of purple flowerheads. Saro picked one up and sniffed it. ‘I know this one!’ he said suddenly. ‘It grows on the hills near Altea.’
‘It’ll grow in most hilly pastures so long as there’s chalk underneath,’ she told him.‘I got this in Faurea before—’ She stopped.
Saro dropped his eyes.
This, she boiled up and strained, boiled and strained it again until it made a thick liquid of an indeterminate colour he would not have expected at all from the hue of the flowers. It smelled horrible. She gave the resulting decoction over to him. ‘You’ll have to sacrifice a waterskin to this,’ she said. ‘She’ll need a good measure of it three times a day for several days if it’s to make a difference. And that’s your job,’ she added tartly.
Saro watched her as she packed her things away again. ‘You don’t want to touch her, do you?’ he accused.
All she gave him in reply to this was a hooded look.
Whatever Alisha Skylark had administered to Katla seemed to take effect a day later as they cleared the last dunes of the great desert and emerged into the wilderness of stone and scrub which bordered it. The patient was sleeping without taking the noisy, shallow breaths they had been accustomed to hear rasping through the night, and her temperature was lower. Mam, who had dressed a hundred battlefield wounds in her time, took to changing the dressings on Katla’s, and proclaimed that the lividity was paling and the swelling was down. ‘She might yet live,’ she told Saro with her characteristic unsettling grin.
The nomad woman regarded the Eyran girl with her head on one side and a small smile. She had been riding up and looking at her thus as much as seven or eight times a day, Saro noticed, and the smile seemed a sign of her professional pride in the results of her dosings. Working as a healer again seemed to have healed some hidden part of herself: she did not mention Falo again, though sometimes her eyes went cloudy and she allowed the stallion to fall back behind the others, lost in contemplation.
At night, the stars shone so brightly it was hard to look at them. Falla’s Eye beamed down: a beacon for their journey. They had been lucky with the conditions in the desert; but life had taught Saro too many hard lessons for him to trust that all would be well.
Forty-three
The Call
Amid the atrocity of war, as many of Cera’s inhabitants as could fled from the city, terrified for their lives, with no idea of where to go. Some wandered pathetically around the hinterland, sleeping in barns and outbuildings; some marched with hatred in their hearts and revenge fuelling their steps until they fell in with others of like mind, intent on a battle to drive the enemy from their shores for good and all.
But others heeded another call, a silent call which seemed to be borne on the air or in the stones of the ground; and these folk would stop in the middle of whatever they were doing and find that their thoughts turned to that strange ashy wasteland which lay to the north and west of Cera as the crow flies, which they could not. Nothing tangible could be offered at the end of such a journey, for nothing lived there, nor was it habitable: yet those who opened their hearts were filled with certainty that hope awaited them in that place where their nobles and merchants met each year to trade and to gossip, to arrange marriages and settle lawsuits. The common ground: the Moonfell Plain.
Where, as one heresy had it, the goddess Falla and her cat would sit upon her rock and sing to the Moon, whence the rock had fallen, to fetch them back; or, as another of the heresies told, where Falla and her husband–brother Sirio had come together in a mystical union with the great cat – Man, Woman and Beast: the Three as one – to defeat Death himself and bring magic into the world. So many folk had burned for speaking of that old tale that few now recalled it. Sirio had long ago been written out of the old legends of the south, transformed from seed-giver to warrior to minor deity and at last to oblivion; as Falla had in the north, each culture embracing one aspect and one alone.
To reach their destination these travellers were forced to head first south and then cut back sharply west and north around the deep incut where the Northern Ocean penetrated the Istrian mainland, for the Eyrans held the coastal sea, which offered the easiest route.
There they met other travellers, fleeing from Sestria and Ixta, from Hedera and Forent. Ahead of them lay the Skarn Mountains, at this season wild with blizzard and treacherous with avalanche. Yet none turned back.
From the Blue Woods they came, on horses, on mules, on yeka and wagons, and on foot. Merchants and factors, peasants and townsfolk, carpenters and fishermen, artisans and slaves, nomads and magic-makers, herb wives and healers. From Pex and Talsea and far Cantara; from Gila and Circesia; from Gibeon and Altea, Galia and the Eternal City of Jetra they came. They traversed the wide open spaces of the southern plains, they crossed deserts and scrublands, rocky hills and rolling fields. None made the journey in dread for their lives, though the hazards were clear and present; some spoke of dreams or omens; others merely smiled to themselves, as if they had received a visitation and their fate was no longer their own.
They all had odd stories to tell: of birds flying north at the wrong time of year, of bears and horses travelling in concert with wolves and hares; of the dead walking; of a golden giant accompanied by a huge cat striding across the horizon.
Farther south, some weary travellers coming north out of the Bone Quarter had the luck to fall into company with a pious merchant and his family who owned a goods barge on the Golden River and were heading with all speed and no cargo for the northern coast. Two of the band were fit enough to lend a hand with the lock system and the steering. Out of sight, the wife made the sign against the evil eye when she saw the nomad woman; but when the healer cured her warts, she was soon all smiles. The fourth member of this group lay like one dead; secretly, the merchant expected to pitch her over the side by Talsea, or Pex at the latest.
The summons – if summons it was – travelled well beyond Istria. Far to the north, on the isles of the kingdom of Eyra, old men laid down the nets they were mending and listened intently, as if there was a voice on the wind, or in the mist roiling in off the sea. Children stopped playing and cupped their ears, or lay on the ground as if in a dream. Women hanging out the washing or breaking down grain with mortar and pestle closed their eyes, brows faintly wrinkled, as if they were concentrating.
A group of women from the villages between Ness and Blackwater put out to sea in the fishing vessels which had been beached while their husbands were at war. ‘We are promised a fair passage,’ Hesta Aralsen answered mysteriously when her cousin Merja queried the wisdom of traversing the Northern Ocean without a navigator or even a man aboard. ‘We will know the way.’
Elderly merchants found themselves dreaming of the old crossing between Halbo and the Moonfell Plain, the pattern of stars clear in their heads, the urge to voyage still with them when they woke. Some acted on this urge; others did not. Families drew lots as to which members would sail and which would stay behind to care for the stock and the farms, the children and the old. An extraordinary flotilla left Eyra’s mainland: grand old trading barges and knarrs; fishing boats with worn, patched sails, ketches and skiffs: no craft seemed too mean or too small to join the call. Even some of the ships that had recently returned from the Southern Empire with their holds stuffed with goods unloaded at the docks, took on provisions and turned south again.
Not everyone made their way to Moonfell buoyed up by anticipation and hope. For as many who heard and heeded the call in both Eyra and Istria, there were those who closed their hearts and clung to long-cherished beliefs and hatreds which made a sure and undeniable framework for the world, beyond which all was chaos and unreason. These girded on their swords, took up spear and shield and mounted horses, or marched or sailed to confront the old enemy.
By the last days of Elda’s winter, almost thirty thousand people were converging on the Moonfell Plain.
Forty-four
Mo
onfell
Virelai gazed at the serried ranks of peaks that stretched away from them, losing clarity in the distance to merge with the sky in a dreamlike haze. He felt much the same way himself, someone with a foot in two worlds, neither of which claimed him fully. He was a man, raised by a mage as a servant; but it also seemed he was a son to gods. What did that make him? He did not know, and found that the concept would not bear long or sane scrutiny.
Ahead, beyond the long column of army which marched in front of them, a distant col announced the start of the steep defile which would lead them down onto the Moonfell Plain.
The last time he had travelled this route across the Skarn Mountains it had been in the joyous company of nomads on their way to the Allfair. With the Rosa Eldi and her cat – two of Elda’s most powerful entities, had he but known it – stashed in the back of his wagon. Much of that leisurely time he had spent with Alisha and known the comfort of human warmth, of skin against skin, and had truly thought himself free of the destiny from which he had escaped. How different were things now.
They had stopped for no more than a few hours since they had set out on this journey. He ached from head to foot; but even his mount did not seem to wish for rest. Ears pricked, head constantly fighting his hand on the reins, it seemed eager for their destination. Or perhaps, Virelai considered, the horse felt the draw of the Rose of the World as did the men who rode beside him, their eyes fixed to the length of that slim back and the way her slight haunches sat the sturdy pony which bore her.
Every so often she would turn in the saddle and survey them and the army which straggled behind them with an unfathomable expression which lay, to Virelai’s mind, somewhere closer to satisfaction than to any other emotion he could name. Her green eyes, so startling in that pale oval, would skim over them and she would smile minutely before turning her face to the northern horizon once more, her silver-gold hair rippling like a waterfall down her back. And when Virelai glanced sideways he would find Manso Aglio’s ugly visage stretched in the most gormless grin; and Tycho Issian’s straining with impatience.
But there a came a time when she turned to them and her eyes shone with an excitement which seemed to crackle off her frame.
‘He is coming!’ she breathed. And she threw her head back and laughed, a sound which rang off the rocky peaks like an echoed shout of triumph.
Manso Aglio turned to the Lord of Cantara. ‘Who does she mean?’ he whispered, not knowing why he lowered his voice so.
Tycho gritted his teeth. ‘Who do you think, you fool? Ravn Asharson, of course. The bloody Stallion of the North.’
‘Why in the name of all that is holy would they be trekking an army through the Skarn Mountains?’ Ravn Asharson rubbed a hand across wine-bleared eyes and stared at the man who had brought this news.
The Earl of Stormway shook his head. ‘I have no idea. But that is not all.’
And then he told the King of Eyra how scouts had reported other movements, and not just troops either.
‘The Moonfell Plain, Ravn: they’re all heading for the Moonfell Plain.’
The King frowned. It was where it had all begun, where he had first laid eyes on the woman whose loss haunted him by day and night; where the war over her had truly started. So the Lord of Cantara thought to make the final battle a symbolic gesture, did he? He shoved himself to his feet, stood there swaying unsteadily, and the flask from which he had been swigging fell and spilled its contents. Blood-dark, the wine pooled out across the flagstones, a great liquid shadow to the man standing over it.
‘Have the fleet made ready, Bran. We sail for the Moonfell Plain on the next tide!’
Stormway left the chamber with the sigh of a man saddled with a logistical nightmare.
Later that morning they overtook the first caravan of travellers – a rag-tag collection of folk: some nomads, some Istrian peasants, women without veils, men in homespun or rich robes, all weaponless.
The people they passed could not drag their eyes away from the woman who rode with this great army. They gazed in wonder at her, their expressions rapt. She, in turn, smiled upon them.
In contrast, Tycho Issian stared at them in disgust: the dregs of the earth, they were, the scum which had escaped his fires. Had he not been in such a hurry he would have had them all scoured from the face of Elda. ‘Out of the way!’ he yelled intemperately and lashed about him with his whip.
One thong caught a woman across her exposed face, as he had thought it might, cutting a deep scarlet line from cheek to jaw, and the creature fell to her knees with a shriek.
‘Had you dressed with the modesty that befits a woman of my land, that would not have happened. Take it as a lesson!’ he hissed, wiping clean the whip on his horse’s mane.
But the Rose of the World slipped from her mount and crossed to the woman’s side. ‘Take heart,’ she said softly, and cupped the welling cheek in the palm of her long hand. When she removed it, there was blood on her fingers, but none on the woman; even the line of the cut was fading. The Rosa Eldi laid her hand upon the white silk of her robe. Then she turned to Tycho Issian, her eyelids flat with loathing. Upon her belly the perfect imprint of a bloody hand was clearly marked for all to see.
‘Harm my people, and you harm me,’ she told him with cold fury. She walked to her mount. The horse – a pied beast of blotched black and white, with an unruly eye and vile yellow teeth – whickered gently and nosed at her, unsettled by the sudden smell of gore. Then it sank down onto its hocks so that she might take her place in the saddle with grace and ease.
All around, the travellers murmured in awe; behind them, the soldiers craned their necks for a view of the pale woman: she was a rare one – you could hardly blame the Lord of Cantara for his interest.
Tycho Issian looked aside. He had seen the hatred in her eyes. A tiny spark of survival instinct suddenly nagged at him to abandon his course, to let her go where and with whom she would, while he was able, before it was too late, but his grand obsession stifled its cry at birth. On they rode, north, to the doom of the world.
Across the wide mouth where the Golden River gave itself up to the mercies of the Northern Ocean, the shapes of many ships were silhouetted against the skyline. Katla Aransen struggled weakly up onto an elbow and stared at one in particular, taking in its brutish prow-head, with its gaping mouth and serrated teeth, and the powerful lines of its hull.
‘That’s the Troll of Narth,’ she whispered. ‘I’d recognise it anywhere.’
The merchant and his wife were hiding in the brig. The sight of an Eyran longship – no matter how legendary – did not fill them with delight. For his part, Saro Vingo gazed about in amazement. Elsewhere, all manner of other craft were converging upon the sea lanes heading west.
Mam, at the wheel, narrowed her eyes. ‘Something very strange is going on,’ she opined with less than remarkable insight.
‘Strange indeed,’ said Katla, lying down again, every movement an effort, ‘for the Troll to have survived an ocean crossing: they must be desperate for ships in Eyra if they’re reduced to using the oldest vessel in the Isles.’
Alisha smiled. ‘Moonfell,’ she said softly. ‘They are all heading for the Moonfell Plain.’
Saro sighed. He had travelled this same route the previous year to his first Allfair. It felt an age ago: and he was far from the innocent, hopeful boy he had been then.
‘I can feel it,’ Katla said suddenly. She closed her eyes. Sweat had beaded on her forehead. Her cheeks were sallow.
Saro experienced yet another stab of concern. ‘Your wound? It’s hurting you?’ He touched her shoulder, wishing for the first time that Guaya had not taken back her gift: he suspected Katla Aransen of dangerous stoicism where her injuries were concerned, for she rarely complained.
Katla’s eyes snapped open. ‘The Rock, you idiot: I can feel the Rock.’
And Saro was cast back to that first morning at the Fair, when he had stumbled out amongst the booths while the rest of his family we
re still snoring off the araque binge of the night before and been gifted with a vision: a girl whose skin shone gold in the sunlight, whose red hair made a nimbus around her head; a girl wearing, in Istrian terms, hardly anything at all, in that most sacred and forbidden of places: on top of Falla’s Rock. He smiled at her now, not even minding that she had called him idiot. ‘I remember the Rock,’ he said quietly.
When she smiled back at him he felt engulfed by flame, just as he had been that first time. ‘I shall climb it again,’ she declared; and abruptly his heart fell into a cold chasm, for he knew that her smile had been for the memory of the climb, and not for him at all. Knew, too, with a terrible leaden certainty, that she would never climb anything again. She was dying, though the fact of it went unsaid. He withdrew his hand.
‘If you do, you’ll die.’
Katla made a face. He was right, she knew: she could feel the twist and pull of the wound, the wrongness of it. Once, when Mam’s attention had been diverted by the overhead flight of geese heading north, she had steeled herself to look at the wound and had pulled the bandages away. That night, when the rest were asleep, she had wept until dawn.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Not like this.’ And she turned her head away from him, her features pinched shut with misery.
‘God’s prick, this armour chafes!’
‘They don’t cater for dwarves in the Istrian militia.’
‘Who are you calling dwarf, you overgrown bull’s pizzle?’
Words could rarely make Joz Bearhand rise to the bait. He grinned. ‘It was your idea to join up with this lot,’ he reminded.
‘Fat lot we’ve got to show for it.’ This last speaker was a tall, gaunt man with a skullcap and a lantern jaw.‘We missed out at Forent, never got near Cera, and there’s bloody scant pickings here.’ He cast his eyes mournfully over the landscape, kicked up a cloud of dust. ‘Unless you can find me a merchant with dung for brains and a fetish for ash.’
