The Rose of the World (2 page)

As fate would surely decree, Aran Aranson’s voyage is disastrous: struck by storm, by ill omen and mutiny Aran, his murderous younger son Fent and the last remaining member of the crew, Urse One-Ear, will find themselves adrift in the weird and hostile landscape of an island which may be the famed isle of Sanctuary, somewhere between the world of men and the world of legend . . .

Prologue

Where am I?

Who am I?

Neither question gave up a simple answer, though the ‘where’ might be easier to determine than the ‘who’. Stars wheeled overhead in a clear night sky. Out of all that silver-speckled blackness the constellation known as Sirio’s Ship, with its three aligned stars forming a single straight mast, leapt immediately to the eye. Orienting himself by this, he saw where the Fulmar flew ahead, north toward the Navigator’s Star, the brightest light in the sky. Turning, he located the Stallion and the Twins, showing between high silhouetted peaks, and to the west of them the complicated patterns of the Weaving Woman and the Archer. A sliver of new moon lay between the paws of the Great Cat; soon it would drop and the stars would turn and dawn would reveal the particularities of his location.

He already had a suspicion of where he found himself. He had navigated too many ocean crossings, studied the heavens for too many years ever to be completely lost in this world of Elda.

And thus he knew himself to be somewhere in the depths of the southern continent. Even if the unusual configuration of the stars had not offered that evidence, there were other signifiers available. Volcanic sand crunched beneath his bare feet. The air was dry and smelled of sulphur. It whispered against his skin, soft as a woman’s caress. Frowning, he dropped a hand. Why was he naked? Naked and in an Istrian desert, somewhere below tall volcanic mountains?

He searched his memory, which yielded tiny, precious details.

Dread and fear; fury and hopelessness. Freezing salt water which burned the throat and nose, and a terrible crushing, a searing pain in the chest, which spread through his entire body like wildfire through sere grass. From nowhere, or from everywhere, came a voice which rumbled through all that choking darkness, reverberating through the bones of his chest and skull so that it was almost as if the voice were his own, an internal command made massively manifest. Then, a sensation of great velocity, a roaring, tumbling, rushing through different elements – water, earth, air – or maybe it was himself flowing, merging with his surroundings in some bizarre metaphysical union.

The gap between ‘then’ and ‘now’ remained impossible to bridge. He felt hollowed out, scoured like a pot ready to be refilled. Bewildered and a little afraid, he shook his head, and the beads and bones woven into the long braids of his hair chinked lightly against the bare skin of his shoulders.

Then, putting the Navigator’s Star behind him, he began to walk towards his destiny.

One

Captives

‘Do you believe in magic, Tilo?’

‘Sergeant to you.’

‘Do you believe in magic,
Sergeant
?’ This last was uttered with sarcastic emphasis: he and Tilo Gaston had grown up in the same rat-run of Forent’s alleys, behind the shipyards where the whores and the destitute lived and where the air owned a permanent miasma of urine, salt and tar; but even though they’d signed up for the militia on the same day the dark man had managed to bag himself a rank Gesto could only dream of. He found it hard to believe merit had had anything to do with it.

Tilo Gaston ran a hand through his hair and stared at the figure in front of him, swaying awkwardly to the rhythm of the packhorse he was tied onto. They had placed a bag over the pale man’s head because Isto had insisted that a sorcerer could sear you dead from the inside out with his gaze; but Isto had never been the brightest coin in the bunch. There had been little resistance from the lanky albino creature, who seemed more like a dying eel than a magicker: clammy and languid, he had said not a word since his capture, let alone tried to lay on them curses or enchantments. The other one, though, the lad – he was a different matter. Eyes like a man three times his age: a man who had seen far too much. You could believe a fair bit about a boy like that. But magic?

He shrugged. ‘Lot of strange things in the world. I’ve seen flowers bloom in the Bone Quarter and chickens with two heads. I’ve seen fish fall out of a clear sky and a stone bleed. I’ve stood on ground that shook beneath my feet and heard voices where there could be none. Unnatural phenomena: that’s what they are.’

Gesto tried to look interested and failed. He hated it when Tilo played the sage: it was just another way of reminding his old friend of the gap that had opened up between them. You wouldn’t think that bearing a rank would make such a difference, but somehow it did: you got the pay, the choice of billet and the best women too. But why it encouraged Tilo to think it endowed you with a more valid experience of the world, he had no idea. He wished he had never bothered to ask his question.

If Tilo was aware of his comrade’s irritation, he gave no sign of it. Unfazed, he continued, ‘I’ve seen travelling players disappear in a cloud of green smoke, only to pop up right behind you out of nowhere; and I once saw a Footloose woman produce a whole swathe of silk flags from out of her cunny; but that’s illusion, that is: tricks and mirrors. But whatever it was you saw the boy do with that necklace thing the captain’s got wrapped so careful in his saddlebag, I can’t believe it was magic. Some sort of new weapon, I’d guess; or maybe just a shiny gewgaw that gave Toro’s horse a fright so it tossed him off and broke his silly neck.’

Gesto bristled. Besides himself, three men in the troop – seasoned soldiers too brutalised to have any imagination left to them – had sworn they had seen the boy blast Toro off his horse; and he had been right there when it happened! He might have been in pain from where that damned big cat had raked his leg, but there had been nothing wrong with his eyes, for Falla’s sake! And he had seen the body. There hadn’t been a mark on it, the only sign of Toro’s precipitous demise being an expression of astonishment and upturned, shocked, white eyes.

‘Well, I saw what I saw,’ he declared mulishly, and let his horse drop back in order to end the conversation.

His leg throbbed dully in the heat of the day, and his throat was parched. They had been riding steadily since dawn and it was now past lunch time, but the captain showed no sign of stopping. Sand swirled up around them and got into the most unbelievable nooks and crannies. Trust the Goddess, he thought, in a moment of sheer heresy, to design a man to have so many awkward places in which sand could embed itself and irritate you so. To take his mind off these discomforts, he turned to survey the rest of the troop and saw where the boy rode in the company of Isto and Semanto halfway back down the line. Like the pale man, the boy’s head was also swathed, his hands bound to the cantle in front of him. He sat his piebald pony with a complete indifference to its uncoordinated gait, so that he was thrown around each time the pony lurched. Shoulders slumped, feet limp; every line of his body carried the same message: that he did not care whether he lived or died.

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.