Rose of the World (FOOLS GOLD)

by Fisher, Jude

  She was a pretty thing, Ravn thought assessingly, with her black hair and doe eyes and that soft and rounded body. In an earlier life he would surely have bedded her by now and discovered for himself all the fragrant, secret curves he suspected lay beneath the demure robe she wore; though in the presence of his wife – so lithe and svelte, so long-limbed and graceful – she seemed just a little coarse and graceless. Not that that would ever have put him off in those lusty days of yore. When you inhabit an island kingdom possessed of limited bloodstocks, it is necessary to lower your standards from time to time. Besides, he had often found it invigorating to punctuate rich fare with plain. This foreign girl intrigued him more than he would have cared to admit. Perhaps it was her genuine care for their baby which stirred him so. He watched her now as she took the child from his cot and encircled him in her arms, then with a practised hand slipped one of her lush breasts – its areola so dark against her olive skin that in the half-light it looked almost black – from beneath the folds of her shift and presented it to the child’s howling mouth. At once, two things happened: the baby’s wail dissipated to a loud sucking noise; and Ravn experienced a pleasant flutter of sensation in his lower abdomen. A moment later, his cock was as stiff as a stick.

  Embarrassed, the King of the Northern Isles clutched the bedlinen close to suppress the offending item, but if his wife noticed his discomfiture, she made no sign of it. Regretfully, he drew his eyes away from the sight of the southern girl nursing his heir and concentrated his gaze on the long, elegant curve of the Rosa Eldi’s back and the sheaf of silver-gold hair cascading down to the faint rise in the ermine-trimmed robe which denoted her slim buttocks, and was surprised to discern in himself a faint disappointment, an infinitesimal lessening of his desire for his wife.

  Ravn was not a man made for fidelity. He had never been faithful to one woman for so long. Indeed, he thought, turning this thought over slowly in his head, he had never before been faithful to any woman. A sudden flare of resentment billowed up inside him. He was the King, for Sur’s sake, and known affectionately by many of his subjects as the Stallion of the North: why should he not continue to have his choice of bedmates, wife or no wife? If he wanted to tup the nursemaid, why should he not do so, now that he had done his duty and sired an heir? His forebears had certainly taken their pleasures where they pleased; why, it was even rumoured that Erol Bardson was somewhat closer to him in relationship than mere cousin . . . His grandfather had strewn bastards all over the Northern Isles, and he had been hailed for his remarkable potency rather than lambasted for a fickle nature. He was about to open his mouth to speak some of what was on his mind when the Rose of the World turned to face him.

  Her eyes – as green as malachite and fringed with lashes of lustrous black, a wonder in themselves, considering the silvery gold of the hair on her head, and entire lack elsewhere – were lambent in her perfect face. Her gaze was so piercing that it was as if she could shine those bright orbits into the depths of his skull and illuminate every dark crevice therein. He felt distinctly uncomfortable; then hot with shame. Then the heat intensified. All at once the unworthy thoughts fled away from him – moths annihilated in the flame of his wife’s regard – and his erection surged out from under him. He watched her mesmeric gaze drop and her lips curve into the most beatific smile.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, and her voice was as low and reassuring as the tide lapping at a gentle shore, ‘I see I have a wife’s duty to attend to.’

  She took three steps towards the bed, reached out and cupped the King’s balls with one smooth, cool hand. Ravn’s cock – as if suddenly touched by lightning – leapt and bobbed at her touch. Then she looked back over her shoulder to where Leta Gullwing, oblivious to the sexual theatre taking place only steps away from her, gave suck to the child. ‘Take the boy away,’ the Rosa Eldi said softly.

  ‘I will take your son into my room, madam,’ Leta said quietly.

  Then she opened the door to the adjoining chamber and slipped through it into the candlelit darkness beyond.

  Only the most subtle of observers might have noticed the very slight emphasis she had placed on two of those words.

  Your son, she thought bitterly, closing the door behind her softly. Your son, indeed.

  She turned to regard the baby lying swaddled in his sheepskin wrap upon his cot and Wulf gazed back at her soundlessly out of the soft white cloud of wool, a tiny dribble of milk bubbling from the side of his mouth.

  How has it come to this, Leta Gullwing thought, that I have given away my son, the only thing I seem to have in all the world that I could call my own, to be the heir to a strange king in a strange land, claimed by a woman whose expression changes not one whit when she regards him, while every whimper he makes tears my heart; and I cannot even remember how any of this sad tale came to pass?

  She rubbed her hand across her face in a gesture both of exhaustion and resignation. It had happened, and now she was caught inextricably in the web, like a fly whose futile struggle had ended. She could not flee alone, and she could not abandon her son; she had nothing she could trade for passage from this island, and there was nowhere, anyway, she could think to flee to.

  When dark despair swept over her, as it did so often, little Wulf was her only consolation. Leaning over the cot now, she reached a hand out to touch the tiny boy, and quick as a flash he grabbed two of her fingers in a tight grip and carried them to his mouth, where he stuffed them between his bony little gums and sucked on them noisily, fixing her all the while with those disturbing purple eyes as if daring her to withdraw them. Where on Elda have those eyes come from? she wondered, as she always did. They certainly did not come from his mother, for her own eyes were the smooth deep brown of polished wood. But just who the child’s father was remained a mystery to her. She could remember so little of her life before she came to this place, it was almost as if she had had no life. But the baby was very tangible evidence of some other existence, and her own looks and limited understanding of the guttural Eyran tongue clearly indicated she was not from the Northern Isles. Sometimes when she dreamed, she dreamed of a place in which the harsh light gave every shadow a sharply defined edge, where the air was hot and dry, where the buildings were made from a different stone to the uncompromising grey of the granite of these islands; where women floated past like apparitions, draped in diaphanous robes. Sometimes she dreamed of a dark-skinned man with a jutting black beard whose eyes sparked fire at her. Sometimes she dreamed that the thongs of a whip curled around her back, leaving behind painful welts and intense fury and she would wake with her heart hammering and her fists clenched.

  After these dreams, two words would stay with her: two pretty, foreign-sounding words for which she knew no meaning at all. They slipped sideways into her head, sliding back down into her unconscious mind like silver fish in a black sea. The harder she pursued them, the deeper they dived.

  Sudden silence from the cot; then a release of pressure. Wulf had fallen asleep at last. Leta withdrew her wet fingers and wiped them quickly on her shift, where they left little gleaming trails, like a snail’s path. Undressing swiftly, she climbed into her own small bed, pulled the coarse blanket up over her hunched shoulders and tried to ignore the rising sounds of passion from the next room.

  When she felt most alone, as she did now, she liked to imagine herself lying in the arms of a man who would cherish her against all the ills of the world. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could feel the hard muscles of his upper arm bunched beneath the nape of her neck, his warm breath on her cheek, his protective hand splayed across her hip. Between them, their baby slept contentedly, his brow as smooth and untroubled as a sea-washed stone. Nothing can touch you. Nothing can harm you. No one can take your child from you, he would promise, over and over, until she fell asleep.

  Drifting into the doze that presaged slumber, she grasped her pillow tight. ‘Ravn,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Ravn.’

  Seven

  Katla

>   The day before the Rose of Cera made landfall, two of the raiders staggered down into the hold with a barrel of saltwater which they set down with such a thud that a large portion of its contents sloshed over the side, drenching Thin Hildi from top to toe so that she began shrieking hysterically until the third – a man with a bundle of rags under his arm, and whose face seemed set in a permanent sneer – struck her so hard across the face with his free hand that her head snapped back on her neck like a broken daffodil.

  One of the barrel-carriers addressed something to the rags-bearer in the hissing southern tongue, his face screwed up in obvious disapproval. Then he said slowly and with great emphasis in the Old Tongue so that all the women could hear and understand him: ‘Bastido said not to mark the merchandise.’

  ‘This?’ The sneering man grabbed Hildi by the hair and wrenched her face into view.‘Merchandise?’ His face twisted into a mocking grimace. ‘Who in all of Falla’s green and pleasant world would pay for this?’

  Thin Hildi had never been what one might call a pretty girl, that much was true: she had earned her nickname easily enough at home in Rockfall even before being subjected to the privations of this voyage; but now, Katla thought, her shackled hands bunching into powerless fists, Hildi’s skinniness was pronounced – her face as peaky and gaunt as an old spinster’s, her shoulder blades, jerking wretchedly with her racking sobs, like plucked chicken-wings. It was indeed hard to see how she would command any price on a slave block. Fury swept through Katla yet again at the indignity of their situation.

  ‘Leave her alone, you bastard!’ she shouted in Eyran, dragging uselessly at her chains. The words were blasting through the close air of the hold before there was any chance for her to consider the wisdom of this outburst, but that was Katla through and through. A few seconds later, and after brief consideration, she reiterated – this time in the carefully enunciated common language: ‘Take your hands off her, you son of a whore!’

  The sneering man pushed Thin Hildi away from him with the utmost contempt and stared at the filthy little creature who had had the temerity to insult him – him, Gasto Costan, free man of Forent Town, upholder of Falla’s justice, envy of his neighbours for his fine villa (or rather, his brother’s fine villa until, well he didn’t like to recall the unpleasant circumstances of his good fortune . . .). No one insulted Gasto Costan and lived to tell the tale.

  The man who had hit Thin Hildi had a slight cast to one eye, Katla noted, which in addition to his generally unprepossessing appearance made him look both shifty and lecherous. Even his fellows seemed to regard him with distaste. She watched one of them shoot the sneering man an unfriendly glance before turning on his heel and heading back up the steps to cleaner air above decks. The other, a gigantic man with a flattened nose which bespoke too many bare-knuckle fights, looked on uncomprehending. But Katla had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.

  The sneer turned into an unpleasant grin. Then the man called Gasto Costan started to pick his away amongst the dumbstruck women towards her.

  ‘Give me the key, Agen,’ he called back to the big man. ‘I have plans for this one.’

  Reaching Katla, he squatted and looked her up and down with his head on one side, like a vulture deciding which morsel of living flesh to prise out of its prey first. Katla glared at him with a pugnacious look in her eye, a look which promised violence and murder if only her wrists were unchained; a look which turned to outrage as he shot out a hand to fumble at her tunic. He managed to get one of her small breasts in a painful grasp, then she battered at his hands with the shackles, her whole body galvanised by repulsion. But all he did was laugh loudly, and shout back to the other raider, ‘Hurry up with that key, idiot!’

  The giant obviously held a lesser rank to the sneering man, for after hesitating, he did as he was told and began to shamble across the hold, past the sprawling form of Thin Hildi, stepping awkwardly over shackled legs and piles of filth. There was a pair of rusty iron keys at his belt on a simple split-loop, but it seemed to take him forever to extract them from this contraption and give them into the impatient hands of his superior. The first was no fit; but the second released Katla’s shackles into the staple of iron embedded in the deck. Gasto Costan hauled her upright and held her at arm’s length.

  ‘With a bit of a wash, she’ll be halfway decent,’ he declared, leering at Katla’s bruised and grubby form. He asked, almost confidingly, ‘How would you like to worship the Goddess with me, little firehead? With hair that colour I bet you’ll make a fine initiate into Falla’s mysteries.’

  Katla frowned. She had no exact understanding of his words; but she could have a pretty good guess at the context. With supreme effort she gathered what tiny amount of saliva she could summon from her dry throat and when he leaned in as if to kiss her, spat it with horrible accuracy right into the middle of his sneer. It was hard not to feel true satisfaction at his horror-struck reaction, even though she knew she had hardly improved her chances to avoid whatever vile fate he had in mind for her.

  ‘Get away from my daughter, you pig!’

  Bera Rolfsen strained at her shackles so that the chains came taut and bit into what little flesh remained on her limbs.

  Now all the women joined in, yelling in their native tongue so that the hold was stuffed with a raucous hubbub. All except for Kitten Soronsen, who sat with her hands and feet pressed neatly together, watching silently as Katla Aransen got what she had long deserved.

  If anything, the noise served to ignite Gasto Costan’s anger further. Grabbing Katla with greater strength than she would have ascribed to such a puny-looking man, he thrust her hard at the other raider. Katla lurched forward, then lost her balance to the chains that still held her feet in place, and fell face forward against the giant, her shackled hands pinned against his massive chest. There, she found herself half-smothered in his sweaty embrace and for a few crucial seconds could not breathe, all her senses engulfed by his rank stench. A moment later her feet came free from the shackles and she was tucked unceremoniously under the giant’s arm and heading at some speed through the hold.

  ‘Dunk her in there!’ the sneering man ordered, and the next minute, the world turned upside down. Plunged headfirst into the barrel, Katla opened her mouth wide to roar her protest, and found herself inhaling water which burned her eyes and throat and forced itself down her gullet. When she came back upright, hauled out by Casto Agen with her wrist-chains clanking, all she could do was cough and choke and retch for a very long time. Then, her feet once more safely on the deck, Katla shook herself like a dog, covering everyone in a five-yard radius in a sheen of freezing liquid.

  Gasto Costan ran his hand disgustedly down his wet tunic, took out his knife and advanced upon Katla with a gleam in his eyes.

  ‘You mustn’t damage the merchandise!’Bera cried in panic. It was all she could think of.

  ‘I have no intention of carving up the little trollop,’ Gasto sneered. ‘I am merely going to clean her up and then consecrate her.’ With a flick of his knife he made to cut away Katla’s tunic; but at the best of times it was a sturdy thing, albeit of stained and battered leather: now, soaked with sea water, it was as tough as old boots and no pathetic little Istrian-made knife was going to make much impression on it. Frustrated by these attempts, he tried to haul the jerkin off her; but when he grabbed the hem and started to hoist it up past her waist all he got for his pains was the vicious jab of a knee in a foolishly unprotected area.

  ‘Little bitch! Hold her fast!’ he shrieked at Agen, and slowly the giant lumbered forward. Katla took one look at the size of the man, reckoned her chances of taking him down at around nil, and transferred her attentions to Gasto Costan. With a speed he could never have foreseen, she leapt at him, her arms going up then down as fast as a striking snake; a moment later she was behind him, and he was between her and the giant with a set of chains locked tight across his throat and his little knife now transferred to one of his attacker’s fists. From behin
d his left ear, Katla’s grin shone out, all white and ferocious amid streaked skin and dark, shiny-wet hair. She looked like a water sprite – not one of the kind ones who would sometimes take pity on a drowning man and carry him gently to shore, but one of those which dragged a swimmer down into the murky depths, tangled his feet among the weeds of the seabed and mercilessly ate him alive till he stopped struggling.

  ‘You,’ she said to the giant in the Old Tongue, looking him in the eye so as to impress her will upon him. It gave her a crick in the neck. ‘Give the keys to that woman there.’ She nodded towards her mother.

  She had to repeat this request three times, as well as jabbing the little knife hard into her captive’s neck – enough to draw a very pleasing runnel of blood and a terrified yelp – before Casto Agen sufficiently grasped what he was supposed to do. The bunch of keys were back hanging from the other man’s belt; the giant had to go down on his knee to extract them from the hook there. After a lot of undignified fiddling he stood up, looking somewhat at a loss, while Gasto Costan hissed curses at him in their nasty southern language. Then off he went across the hold to Katla’s mother, like a half-trained and rather slow-witted dog.

  A moment later, there came a thunder of feet and a barrage of shouting, and several raiders came pelting down into the hold. Casto Agen stopped a foot away from Bera Rolfsen with his hand extended, palm out, in the act of handing her the keys, as if someone had just turned him to stone. Then he turned slowly to survey the newcomers.

  Baranguet was in the lead of the group. He had his favourite whip in one hand and a long curved sword in the other. He did not look as if he would be much concerned at the possibility of damaging the merchandise, but behind him came a short, wide man – Galo Bastido, also at full tilt. It took a moment for Baranguet’s eyes to become accustomed to the dingy light; then he came to a sudden halt and gazed into the obscurity of the hold at the women, who instead of appearing beaten and listless now seemed to be alert and engaged by something he could not quite fathom. Having no chance to check his pace, Bastido cannoned into the back of his deputy.