Rose of the World (FOOLS GOLD)

by Fisher, Jude

  At last it said quite clearly into his mind: I have licked her wound closed for now but you must take her to the Rosa Eldi if she is to be fully healed.

  Saro gazed down at Katla Aransen. Through the hole in her tunic, the edges of her wound had begun to knit, a translucent skin forming over the ropes of gut and he felt a sudden dart of hope spear his heart.

  It will not last, the cat warned. My skill is with creatures, not humans: you do not have our resilience. It cocked its head. Yes, yes, we will go now: do not fret. I know you hunger for her: I miss her, too.

  ‘Can’t you take us with you?’ Saro pleaded.

  Bëte regarded him with her amber eyes. Where we are going, you cannot follow. Be careful with her, and bring the eldistan.

  Forty

  The War of the Rose

  All along the Istrian coast the Eyran fleet harried and pillaged. They fired the town of Hedera for the eighth time in its long history and stole away treasures and women. Others sailed south and stormed Ixta, and the population fled inland, leaving their city unguarded, the gates wide open to the enemy. Merchants’ warehouses along the quays were stuffed with booty – the lords of Ixta and Cera craved only the best and had sown a taste for luxury and competition in the region. What the Eyrans could fit into their ships without sinking them, they stole: the rest they burned. Convinced that they had done the job bidden of them by their king, and satisfied with their spoils, some captains gave the order to turn back, their ships packed to the gunwales with stuffed antelopes and gilded pots, with the skins of spotted cats and jars of Jetran wine; but more ships arrived out of the mists of the Northern Ocean every day. These freebooters stormed the coastal towns and settlements, releasing hundreds of slaves and sending them into the hinterland with weapons and promises of reward for havoc wreaked: farmers, fieldworkers, even livestock were savaged and slain, the slaves’ fury was so great for the years of cruelty and disdain they had endured; buildings were destroyed, barns torn down, crops trampled and burned.

  Sestria initially put up more of a fight; but by dawn of the third morning the militia had lost heart and fled, leaving the townspeople to the mercy of the barbarian horde. Little mercy was shown. When the seneschal and his officers tried to make an official surrender, they were cut down where they stood and their heads stuck on pikes at the city’s gates. Women were raped; children slaughtered. Bloodlust drove the northern host.

  By the time the eastern fleet reached Forent, terror had spread far and wide. Families packed up what little they could travel with and headed south for the safer inland towns. On their way they met Istrian soldiers coming north: but even that did not deter them from their flight.

  With an eye to the main chance, the leaders of the Istrian militia had perceived that with the flower of their nobility decimated, either in the assault on the Eyran capital, or in rather more mysterious circumstances leading up to the war, the way was open for men of courage and foresight to make their mark. The Empire had not had an emperor for many an age: now it largely lacked an aristocracy. There were riches and castles for the taking, once the foreign invaders were repelled.

  The men who answered the muster harboured ambitions of their own: they, too, knew an opportunity when it presented itself. And the sight of the refugees, rather than transfixing them with fear, merely spurred them on: clearly so many had abandoned their homes that there were sure to be fine pickings for the sharp-eyed and light-fingered. More and more men gathered to the standard raised by the new generals and came north to see off the old enemy.

  And so the tide of battle turned at Forent as the Istrian militia captured escaping slaves and pressed them into service, sending them out ahead of the troops to a certain death at the end of an Eyran blade. And while the northerners dealt with this rabble, Istrians rowed out into the harbour and fired the Eyran ships, then rounded on their enemy from behind. Drunk on their spoils and disdainful of the resistance they had so far encountered, the Earl of Blackwater and his men were entirely taken by surprise by this manoeuvre. They fought ferociously; but they were outnumbered: something else they had not expected. Two thousand Eyrans lost their lives in the battle for Forent, as well as an unknowable number of slaves: the sea ran red for miles around with the blood they sluiced out of the streets.

  The army at Forent, thinking their job done, took occupation of the fine castle, made free with what pleasures they could come by in Rui Finco’s city and drank his cellars dry.

  Until the day a bird arrived, bearing news of the siege of Cera.

  Leaving a garrison of trusted men under Bandino’s command to keep Forent in some order, Manso Aglio, onetime captain of Jetra’s militia and guard of the Miseria, ordered the rest of his force west. It would take some days to reach Cera, even at a forced march; but perhaps that was for the best. Let the raiders have their way with Cera’s pathetic excuse for a militia; let them string up the unpleasant Lord of Cantara, whom he would happily see swing on the arm of a gibbet with the rooks pecking out his eyes; then they would make a heroic appearance to save the day. By which time the Eyrans would be soused with wine and sex, too stuporous to put up much resistance. He’d always fancied being master of Cera’s fine castle. Nice parklands it had, he remembered from the days when he had been stationed there.

  From an Eyran perspective, the siege of Cera had not been progressing well, for the castle had been built in ancient times when men knew the trick of raising massive walls which would withstand even the most savage assault, and although the stonework bore witness to the accuracy of the ballistas the northern army had constructed, they had not yet managed to breach its defences in any significant way.

  King Ravn Asharson sat now in the red light of yet another chilly dawn, and scowled at the grim prospect before him. The previous day the Eyrans had made their first attempt to scale the walls using a pair of siege towers. Every tree within a mile’s radius, the rigging of five of his ships, the flayed hides of a large herd of cattle and a fortnight’s trial and error had gone into the making of the towers, of which one now lay in ruins at the base of the walls like so much firewood, still smoking faintly from the boiling oil and burning pitch the defenders had loosed upon them. Worse, beside the burned and splintered remnants lay the corpses of a dozen of his men, also burned and splintered from the pitch and a long fall; neither of which had managed to kill them swiftly. The archers had done their best to speed the fallen men’s demise, but the screams of the dying men haunted him still, and he knew that few of his comrades had enjoyed much sleep that night.

  The second tower they had hauled out of range, but they would need a dozen or more to make an effective attack, and given the paucity of useful materials left to them, that would require the best part of his fleet. Personally, he had few qualms about such a sacrifice, but the earls were being difficult, and there were mutterings among the men, all of whom had expected to see a short, sharp action, swift victory and a pile of Istrian silver to carry home. If they did not achieve a result soon, he knew there would be desertions, and no amount of threat or censure would turn that tide.

  He ground his teeth in frustration. Some new stratagem was called for. Only sorcery was likely to break these walls; but the damned sorcerer had vanished, and none knew his whereabouts.

  He sighed heavily. It was hard to believe that beyond this cheerless vista lay the most captivatingly beautiful woman in Elda; or that she should have been seen at the castle window helping the Lord of Cantara to safety from the branches of the vast ash tree which had sprung up so bizarrely. This latter detail had been supplied by Stormway: Ravn found he had no memory of the event at all. It was as if he had gone out to fight in his sleep and woken suddenly to find himself in another world entirely, one in which magic held sway. He still did not know whether he believed Bran’s odd account, suspecting the old man of tampering with the facts to persuade him to leave the Rosa Eldi to the mercy of the Istrians; but the existence of the tree was undeniable.

  He stared at it now, hatin
g its knotted bark, its massive trunk and twisted limbs. They’d thought about hacking it down to provide the timber they needed for the siege towers; but as Egg had pointed out, it was so huge it would take a hundred of them to cut through it, and as soon as it had fallen they’d be exposed to the Istrian bowmen from the castle walls.

  ‘It is a mighty tree, is it not, my lord?’

  He turned suddenly, and there was the mage.

  ‘Where have you been? We could have used your efforts yesterday; but now a company of my best men lie dead—’

  The Master waved a hand to cut off this tirade. ‘I have been inside the citadel,’ he said softly.

  ‘Inside?’ Ravn stared at him. ‘How?’

  ‘Ask not how, my lord: ask instead what I have discovered.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Two birds on a single branch.’

  The King regarded him suspiciously. ‘Do not speak to me in riddles, old man, or I will have your head.’

  Rahe smiled, an expression which did not reach his pale and rheumy eyes. ‘Not here, my lord: the very air has ears.’

  Being sequestered for the best part of a month in Cera’s castle with screaming women and children, no fresh food and all the wells full of mud and worse from the flood had been a far from pleasant experience for Tycho Issian. It was an experience he might have dealt with in better temper had the woman in the next chamber not locked and barricaded her door against him.

  And to make matters worse, she had the sorcerer, Virelai, in there with her.

  Day and night the Lord of Cantara had raged against her, but all he received by way of response was a taunting silence. He had sent guards to break down the door; but all they had succeeded in was splintering its veneer, beneath which gleamed an iron interior he could have sworn had never been there before. He ordered that no sustenance be delivered to the room and waited for her pleas; but none came. Then, driven to wild and jealous distraction, he had climbed into the garret above the tower room and bored a hole in the ceiling, tormented by visions in which the pale man straddled the pale woman and rode her relentlessly, or she sat astride his lap and held his head between her white breasts. He had bored one hole after another before she became aware of him and he was able to look down on her, seated in apparent chastity on the bed beside the sorcerer, his hands in hers, her lips moving in such quiet speech he could not hear what she said.

  The last hole he had made was right above her: plaster trickled down from it like snow.

  She had looked up then, and her green gazed pierced him.

  ‘Go away,’ she had said with perfect clarity, and he had felt the words like icicles in his heart.

  And curiously, he had done just as she requested. And he hadn’t been back. He still wasn’t sure why.

  Since then he had sat and seethed. He had watched his archers try and fail to make their mark on the Eyrans. He had watched them send flight after flight of arrows out over the great tree, and he had watched most of them strike uselessly into the waterlogged ground fifty yards from the enemy lines, the sole casualty being one foolish Eyran, jeering at their efforts, who had strayed too far forward and been shot through the throat. This had raised a thin cheer from the soldiers on the battlements, but until the northerners had brought the siege towers within range every other arrow had been wasted. Military training had never been of high priority in this rich and complacent city.

  And still there had been no sign of reinforcements, despite all the useless birds he had sent. A week ago he had sent out two boys by dead of night to carry word to Forent: less than an hour after they had been thrust outside, screams had been heard in the hills beyond the town.

  When the northerners had started to construct their engines of war, he had known himself doomed. Bringing down one of the towers had been a triumph, but he knew in his heart it would be a shortlived triumph: the Eyrans had all the time in the world, and access to every barn, every herd, every well in the environs of the city. It was a rich agricultural area: they could sit outside his walls for a year or more and experience no greater hardship than a slightly longer walk for provisions as the days spun by. In truth, they did not even need the siege engines: all they had to do was to sit outside his gates for another month, playing their barbarian games with sheeps’ knuckles, braiding their hair, sharpening their swords, and the city and its starving populace would be theirs. And all for what? The sake of a strange and beautiful woman who filled men’s minds with lust and withheld her bounties from them with a spiteful will. He could hardly think straight any more, the blood beat so hard at his groin.

  It was with dread that the Lord of Cantara rose from his sleepless bed that morning and peered through the window. Outside, dawn tinged the ground-fog a cold and ominous red; but even though the chilly mist coated everything with clammy fingers, no sight could have been more delightful to his eyes.

  The surviving siege tower lay abandoned, its war platform poking through the surf of fog like the wreck of a great ship. He scanned the horizon, but saw no masts. The cook-fires were burned out and blackened, the cauldrons and tripods taken away, the tents dismantled. Even the stockade of cows looted from nearby farms lay unguarded. The cows lowed pitifully to be milked.

  Where were the Eyrans?

  There was not a single sign of them. They had given up: gone, sailed away. There could be no other explanation.

  A huge and oppressive weight seemed to lift from his shoulders, to be replaced by swelling pride. Clearly his gamble with the boiling oil – every drop of cooking oil and lamp oil they had in the city used in a single grand gesture of defiance – had paid off and the enemy had lost heart. He laughed, suddenly joyful and filled with hope. He would surely be hailed as a hero for seeing off the barbarian horde.

  This happy thought occupied him thereafter for the rest of the morning: then paranoia descended again. No man would willingly abandon the Rosa Eldi. He had with his own hands killed two guards who had tried to lay hands on her before the siege had begun: he knew her power. And so even as he sent men out to cull the cattle the northerners had left behind and called for a victory feast to be prepared three days hence, he set lookouts on the battlements and kept the soldiers at their positions for three nights to be quite sure that the Eyrans could play no trick upon him and take him by surprise.

  On the fourth night, the city of Cera feasted.

  And it was on the fourth night that Ravn Asharson made his move.

  Festivities were at their height: the oxen had been roasted, every chicken in the city had been chased and cornered and roasted and stuffed with the last of the preserved figs. The men (no women were present: except three slavegirls who had had to be forcibly encased in their discarded sabatkas before being allowed in the presence of the Lord of Cantara) had drunk the cellars dry and now everyone was in fine voice, extolling the Duke of Cera’s bard, who had just performed a fine self-penned ballad entitled ‘The Heroic Stand of a Righteous Man’ to honour Lord Tycho Issian’s victory over the Eyran king. The less drunken amongst the gathering thought they detected some clever double meanings in the lyrics and were guffawing bawdily at the back of the hall, others were reminded of another song with a most similar tune and refrain, and were debating amongst themselves exactly what it was the bard had plagiarised, when the great doors opened and two figures stood framed beneath the ornate marble archway with its exquisite figurings of mosaic tile.

  A hush fell across the hall. Even the most drunken fell silent and gazed in wonder.

  Superficially at least, the two late entrants bore a striking resemblance to one another: both were tall and slim and possessed of an almost luminous whiteness of skin. But where one had its long pale hair caught back in a tail, the other wore hers loose so that it cascaded like a waterfall in sunlight across her shoulders and breast. They looked like figures out of legend, out of a different age of Elda; and with good reason.

  Together, they stepped over the threshold of the hall and walked with stately grace to the tab
le where sat Lord Tycho Issian, his wine cup halfway to his lips, his eyes wide with surprise.

  The Rose of the World came to a halt before the man who had stolen her from the northern king and inclined her head.

  ‘My lord,’ she said in her soft, low voice, a voice which yet penetrated every corner of the room. ‘My son and I would speak with you.’

  Tycho Issian screwed up his eyes in consternation, and in an attempt to focus on the perfect face before him. Damn the wine, and damn the woman for choosing this moment to break her long self-imposed isolation. Usually so abstemious in his drinking habits, he had allowed himself the luxury of celebration this night of all nights: the release of tension and the devotion of two attentive slave boys had assured his inebriation.

  ‘Your what?’

  He had not meant it to come out so belligerently. He watched her eyes fix upon him, glinting, and regretted his haste. Discomfited, he transferred his gaze to the sorcerer, and for the first time saw the likeness. He blinked, looked back at the Rosa Eldi. Truly, now that he saw it, it was uncanny. But the woman before him could be no more than – what? – twenty-three? twenty-four? Her face was unmarked by age; her body unmarked by childbirth. He frowned. It could not be possible.

  A riot of thoughts assailed him, topmost of which was that his daughter – out of jealousy or spite – might have lied when she claimed the Rose of the World to be barren. And if she had, then he would have his own son from her after all. He would take her and—

  ‘You are not listening to me.’

  His head snapped up. The pale woman had said something.

  ‘I regret I did not catch what you said,’ he apologised carefully, each word an effort.

  ‘I said,’ she enunciated again, ‘that your enemy are upon us.’

  There was a moment’s shocked silence throughout the hall; then came a storm of voices.

  Tycho Issian lumbered to his feet, the warmth of the wine draining abruptly away. ‘Here? Now, at this hour?’ he slurred.