by Fisher, Jude
The nomad woman had been quite lively by comparison. First there had been a great deal of wailing and weeping about the death of some child; and when Garmo had told her he’d give her something to really complain about and Sammo and Heni had stripped her and held her down while he forced himself on her, she’d howled and shrieked and rained imprecations and blows upon him throughout the whole encounter, which really hadn’t taken more than a minute, for all Garmo’s drunken boasts about his sexual prowess. The funny thing was, though, that his prick had swolled up and then gone black and painful the next day; so while she was quite attractive in an outlandish way, with her light, curled hair, her veilless face and pale, brazen eyes, not to mention those lush tits, no one else had much fancied trying their luck with her.
Garmo would probably have to spend his entire share of the reward they’d receive for turning in these prisoners to Lord Tycho Issian on a chirurgeon if he wanted to save his cock from falling off, and serve him right. Gesto had better ideas as to what to do with his money. A side of beef and a flagon of beer at the Bullock’s Head, followed by a good Istrian whore – no, two, he amended quickly – at Jetra’s famed House of Silk. Then go see how much it would cost him to bribe his own way up to sergeant. It’d be worth it just to see the look on Tilo’s face when he turned up wearing a red braid on his arm, too. Self-satisfied bastard, he thought, just as the arrow took him in the neck.
The stench below decks was becoming unbearable. Fat Breta had thrown up again, so weakly that she had been unable to clear the skirts of her dress. Her retching punctuated her weeping: it was a miserable sound. Between the tears and the vomit, at this rate she’d be a shadow of her former self by the time they landed at an Istrian port, if they ever made it that far, thought Katla.
As if echoing her fear, the ship listed deeply to the right, wallowed and then lurched hard to the left, throwing them all sideways, so that Fat Breta’s wailings were drowned under the cries of the other prisoners. Soon even that noise was subsumed by the creaks of the ship’s timbers under the strain of the sea and an incompetent steersman. Surely the poorly crafted planking which was all that held them up above hundreds of feet of Northern Ocean would burst and the vessel spring a leak at any moment. It was not a comforting thought. As the ship hit another trough and rolled like a dying pig, Katla felt the bile rise in her throat and swallowed it down again. To be sick was unthinkable: she was Katla Aransen, daughter of a line of Eyran rovers, born to a life on the ocean wave. She had the sea in her blood! She had first set foot on a longship at the age of three and a half and been sailing all her life, and never once had she thrown up in the seventeen years that followed, storm or calm: it was a matter of pride.
Not that there was much pride left to any of them, save old Hesta Rolfsen. It was hard to think about her grandmother, that tough old matriarch, and her terrible, heroic death. For all her sharp tongue, beady eyes and bawdy humour, Katla was more like the old beldame than she would have cared to admit. On their first night aboard this foreign tub, Katla’s mother, Bera Rolfsen, had told them all of the matriarch’s resolute ending in an attempt to put some backbone into those who wailed and prayed for death themselves:
‘“Here I sit and here I will stay. Rockfall is my home: I am too old to leave it,” those were her words.’ Bera’s face had been as stern as carved wood as she had looked from one to another amid this telling – from Katla’s shocked face, white in the darkness of the hold except for the black bruise on her chin which had ended her fight with the raiders, to Kitten Soronsen’s tear-reddened eyes and Magla Felinsen’s hunched figure; from Forna Stensen, her straw-yellow hair a wild tangle, to Thin Hildi, staring down at her mismatched stockings all torn to bits. Kit Farsen had made a small sound like an injured rabbit, then mastered herself as Bera’s gaze fell upon her. ‘She took her place in my husband’s great dragon-chair. I tried to cajole her, but she would have none of it, and when I tried to take her from there by force she gripped so fast to the chair’s carved arms that I could not move her. I pleaded with her to come with me, but she said she was too old to see any more of this world of Elda but that much experience still lay before the rest of us, and that if no one survived her, who then would be left to avenge her death?’
‘Me.’ Katla’s voice was low. ‘I will avenge her. And not just my brave grandmother, either. I will take vengeance for every one of those who died: Hesta Rolfsen, Marin Edelsen, Tian Jensen, Otter Garsen, Signy and Sigrid Leesen, Finna Jonsen, Audny Filsen and all. Even little Fili Kolson and his old dog, Breda: I will kill the men who did this: I swear it on my grandmother’s bones.’
That had stopped Kitten’s tears. ‘And how will you do that?’ she jeered.‘With no weapon and your hands shackled? Will you strangle them between your thighs – or screw them to death when they test you for their brothels?’
‘Kitten!’ Bera’s voice was sharp as chipped flint.
Katla gave Kitten Soronsen such a look that she quelled. One day there would be a score to be settled. ‘Do not ask me how; just accept that I will.’
And she had meant it.
Now, quite suddenly, three days after making that vow, she was crying for the first time since they had been captured. She had come aboard the vessel unconscious from the man they called Baranguet’s well-placed fist; and when she had come to, hurting and furious, she had been charged with adrenalin and resolve. Slow-burning anger had carried her through the next two days, coupled with utter disbelief. At any moment she expected to awake and find herself chilly from sleeping too long in the wind on top of the Hound’s Tooth. But the discomfort of being chained up in this stinking hold was clearly no dream; and the reality of her grandmother’s stiff-backed demise pressed in on her with ever greater impact. Tears fell, searing and unstoppable. They burned down her cheeks, off her chin and dripped onto her leather tunic. Then her nose began to run. Sur’s nuts! There was nothing she could do about it but sniff furiously: like the others her hands were chained to great rusted links stapled into the tarred timbers of the hold’s floor.
Being taken captive had been vile enough: the manhandling humiliating, the knowledge of defeat and loss of control shattering. But tears would help no one; besides, she would not let any of the others see her cry. And so she closed off that part of herself and concentrated on being alive and relatively unscathed, even if confined to this filthy, stinking space, trussed up like a chicken in the belly of a bodge-built Istrian bucket, and heading for a less than pleasant fate.
Katla was, for the most part, a girl who lived in the moment. She rarely looked back; generally considered the future with anticipation, or with frustration that she had not yet reached it. The physical world and her relationship with it was everything; and so she was dealing with some of the more abstract aspects of her situation rather better than her companions. Even as Thin Hildi wept and Kitten Soronsen wailed and Magla Felinsen droned on about the way Istrian women were kept as slaves, Katla kept her horrors confined to her current circumstances.
She had never travelled in the hold of a ship before and she did not like it. She was used to being up in the elements, watching the surf skim off the waves and the clouds scud across the sky, the sunlight spangling the water and the sail bellying out like washing on a line. She was used to standing lightly on the bucking timbers of an Eyran ship built out of the knowledge and love of generations of sea-goers and shipmakers, allowing her body to find its own centre, to move with the rhythm of the ocean, feeling the healthy tensions of wood and iron and water and, somewhere far below, the resonances of the rock of Elda, the veins of crystal and ores which spoke into her blood and bones. It was a mystical connection which gave her a deep faith of rightness in the world
Down here, with her wrists chafed by iron which had bitten into the skins of generations of slaves, amid the stench and the noise, it seemed she had lost the trick of it.
So, unable to do anything else, she gave her thoughts to the infinite number of ways in which she might kill a man
; both quickly and slowly.
Baranguet, she thought murderously, I will start with Baranguet . . .
Two
The Wasteland
In this arctic region day differed little from night. The sun, when it heaved itself over the horizon, offered only a kind of milky twilight for a few brief hours before sliding leadenly back into darkness. Above this short-lived band of light, the sky shaded first to cobalt, then to violet and indigo, before becoming as black as a raven’s wing, and in that blackness – at least to Aran Aranson’s weary, snowblind eyes – the stars were simply too luminous to gaze upon for any length of time.
But even if he could not look upon it, he knew, as if there was a lodestone in his skull, that the Navigator’s Star hung directly overhead, and by its position he knew that they were as far north as it was possible to go – and yet it seemed as though the world of ice went on forever. Perhaps, Aran mused as he plodded grimly along the narrow isthmus that had opened out before them, they were already dead and this place was a world-between-worlds reserved for those men of ill-luck with whom the god did not wish to share his table. For there could be no doubt that he was an exceedingly luckless man. Even before he had embarked on this doomed expedition he had lost a son and a wife, and estranged his daughter; and now he was master of nothing. Since Bera had announced their marriage dissolved, Rockfall would return to her family, as was the Eyran way: he had no home. His beautiful ship, the Long Serpent, lay crushed by the merciless ice of the Northern Ocean. The best part of his crew he had lost to storm and sea, to murder and mutiny; and then to the teeth and claws of a snowbear. Some men had preferred to take their chances with the elements rather than accompany him on what they saw as a fool’s errand, and so he had left them behind with precious few supplies and little chance of survival. To his knowledge, the man who accompanied him, and the burden he carried, was all that was left of his glorious expedition.
He turned. The giant, Urse, with his ruined face and single ear, who had once been lieutenant to the lord of the mummers, marched stolidly behind him, his huge feet planted in his leader’s wake, head down, shoulders bowed under the weight of the third survivor of the expedition. Fent Aranson was wrapped in every item of clothing they could spare, yet still his skin was the delicate blue of a robin’s egg and the blood had long since stopped seeping from his severed hand, as if his heart had already given up the ghost.
Aran Aranson set his face into the wind once more and squinted against the glare. To his snow-hazed eyes it seemed there were spirits all around them in this eerie, silent place: wisps of spindrift twisting off the tops of the dunes and banks piled on either side of their passage, curling into the air like a host of lost souls. If anything, the lack of lamentation and wailing added to the impression he had of being in a transitionary zone. Maybe, he thought, as his feet continued their exhausted trudge, they were fated to wander this terrible, freezing nothingness for all time, never gaining on their goal, nor leaving the tempestuous world of men any further behind them.
Urse One-Ear placed his feet in the churned-up ruts made by Aran Aranson and wondered for the thousandth time whether he would ever place them on soft green grass, pebble beach or forest floor again.
As a child, growing up in the treeless wastes of Norheim – all bare rock and low scrub, grey horizons and sea-thrashed shores – he had possessed a powerful curiosity to see more of the world, believing that his homeland must surely be the most godforsaken place in all of Elda. He had seen some startling sights in his life, but these soulless tracts were the grimmest by far. Even in the semi-darkness, the gleam of the never-ending snow hurt his eyes, and the intense cold made his teeth and scars ache and brought vividly to mind memories he had rather leave buried. Many had asked him about the cause of the loss of his ear and about the furrows which ravaged that face, almost closing his left eye and lifting one corner of his mouth to expose a snaggle of teeth, so that he had come to resemble a farm cat kicked in the head by a bad-tempered horse; but Urse had never cared to volunteer the information. Over the years, these fearsome markings had caused no little speculation. Some surmised that he had been in one axe-fight too many, or had come to grief in some tragic nautical accident. The truth was worse, and still gave him nightmares.
He had joined Tam Fox’s mummers’ troupe nearly twenty years ago when he was barely more than a lad. At that time, the troupe had owned a bear – a great black shambling fellow from the forests of central Istria – which Tam Fox had rescued from hawkers on the docks of Halbo who were using it to generate themselves a nice little income by soliciting bets on how many dogs could take it down. To cover their risk, they would privately goad the beast for an hour before the bout, taunting it with meat, beating it off with sticks and cudgels until it was murderous. As a result, it had carried more scars than Urse did now – obvious ones, around the paws and muzzle – but more, far more, invisible to the eye. They were much of a size, Urse and the bear; and in one of the old languages their names corresponded, so he had come to feel a common bond with the poor creature and had taken over its care for the mummers’ troupe. Then, one day, he had moved awkwardly, or his shadow had fallen across it in some way which recalled to it a past torment, and it had turned upon him with such terrifying ferocity that he knew his life was over. It had his head engulfed in its noisome, furnacelike mouth and was bearing its jaws down upon him when Tam Fox had intervened, hurling himself upon the bear and blowing all the time on a high-pitched whistle which Urse could hear only in the vibrations it made in the bones of the creature’s great skull. With a roar, it had spat him out and pulled away, only to be speared by Min Codface and the contortionist, Bella; but not before it had raked the mummers’ leader thoroughly with its wicked claws, and taken Urse’s ear and half his face with it. It was a miracle that he had survived his injuries; a miracle, and Tam Fox’s patience and near-magical skill with herbs and ointments.
He had told Aran Aranson that he wished to join his expedition to the island of gold because experience had taught him he was unlikely to engage the affections of a woman sufficiently for her to agree to be his wife without the lure of a good farm (which he could never afford without a large windfall); but the truth was that when the mummers’ leader was lost with the wreck of the Snowland Wolf, some significant part of Urse One-Ear had gone down to the seabed with him. Tam had seemed almost supernatural in his energies and grace; that a life like his could be snuffed out in such an arbitrary fashion had made him lose faith in his own worth and survivability. It seemed a fitting bargain to offer himself up to the god to do with as he wished by taking a place on this madman’s quest. Through one ordeal after another he had endured; but when they had finally encountered the snow-bear in these nameless realms, he had been ready to surrender his life to it, deeming it a fitting end, since his life was already forfeit to a bear; but by typically random chance it had chosen Pol Garson over him, and then Aran’s son Fent. That it had not taken him was perplexing: like Aran Aranson, he sensed they had crossed over into some mythical place where men paid the dues they had tallied up in life, and had resigned himself to wait for whatever judgement would fall. Now he was not sure whether to feel relief or to brace himself for the next onslaught.
So when the great bird skimmed suddenly above them it seemed like a portent. Yet, in front of him, Aran Aranson continued his oblivious trudge: he had seen nothing.
‘Albatross!’ Urse cried, hollowing his hands around the word. Aran turned like a man in a dream, and Urse repeated the observation, pointing overhead.
He watched the bird circle them and frowned. Something about it seemed unnatural. He could not determine why he thought this, only that its presence made him uneasy. Something, perhaps, about the way it had appeared to hover over them so effortlessly before wheeling away again. What was it about the creatures of this ice-world? The snowbear had seemed too intent upon them for mere hunger, its mean black eyes as flat as a shark’s, dual-natured, as if driven by another’s will.
Many hours later they reached the ice cliff and prepared themselves for another endless white vista; but once they rounded its western shoulder another world lay before them: a landscape composed all of ice: but what remarkable ice it was! Walls and buttresses curved like vast ships rose out of a frozen sea. Great towers swept skyward, aquamarine at their base to ethereal green and translucent pink-white at their mist-wrapped summits. Battlements and terraces ringed these towers around, and into them were carved not only eyelets and arched windows, but fabulous beasts like those in the ancient tapestries of Halbo Castle – winged gryphons and prancing unicorns, grinning trolls and fearsome dragons, gigantic hounds and monstrous eagles; or perhaps their eyes were playing tricks upon them and the whole was no more than some ice-madness, a snow-blindness of the mind; an extravagant fata morgana induced by their avid desire for some mark of man on this endless wasteland.
Indeed, Aran Aranson began to rub his sore eyes with the back of one frozen hand, as if to dash the bizarre vision away; but when he focused them again, it was to see a figure approaching, a figure which did not trudge as they did across the snow, nor churn up the ground as it went, but which seemed to skim the surface of the ice without touching it, and this observation convinced him finally that he had lost his mind.
Three
Stones
In the midst of the mayhem that followed, someone ripped the bag from Saro’s head.
