Sorcery Rising (17 page)

‘Grandfather!’

‘Guaya, my dear.’ The old man’s black eyes were small and round, as shiny as a robin’s. He cocked his head to look at her, then cocked it the other way to regard Saro, as quick and intelligent as a little bird.

‘This is my friend—?’

‘Saro,’ Saro supplied quickly.

‘My friend Saro wants something for his lady mother.’

Saro smiled at the old man. She – Guaya – had called him ‘friend’, and though she was a little foreign girl of hardly more than twelve or thirteen, it made his heart feel large and warm in his chest.

‘Guaya—’ he stumbled over the pronunciation: in the nomad tongue it seemed to have too many syllables to it ‘—Guaya said your stones can change colour to match a person’s emotions . . .’

Without a word, the old man picked out a pendant, a long, pear-shaped stone suspended via a simple setting from a fine silver chain. It was elegant and understated, and when he touched it, the stone took on the cloudy blues like those on his own hand. He held it out to Saro, and at once the colours swirled and changed to ochre and mustard yellow.

‘You are happy at the moment, though your happiness underlies a deeper emotion: of anger, maybe or even fear.’

Saro stared at him.

Guaya leaned forward and took the necklace from him, and the ochres gave way almost immediately to a translucent gold. The old man laughed. ‘She is a simple child, my Guaya; and very serene.’

‘It’s a lovely thing,’ Saro said softly. He scanned the display, but the old man had been unerring in his choice. ‘How much would you like for it?’

He was about to open his money-pouch and tip out the contents, when there was a louder cry from the adjacent stall, followed by a great crash and a lot of shouting.

‘Something going on over there, Doc.’

‘Looks like a spot of trouble, Joz.’

‘Shall we wade in, Knobber?’

‘Aye, may as well: always enjoy a bit of a ruck at an Allfair.’

‘Never know who you might thump!’

‘Coming, Mam?’

‘Don’t be stupid: we don’t get paid for this sort of thing.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘I fancy hammering one of them Istrian louts right in the chuds, I do.’

‘Best be careful, Dogo: they’re a fair bit bigger than you.’

‘Here we go down the slippery slope, slippery slope, slippery slope . . .’

Lord Tycho Issian was passing through the fair, having finally found temporary relief at the hands of a dusky woman with shells threaded through her hair (though all the time she worked upon him all he could think of were a pair of pale hands and sea-green eyes), when he noticed a commotion at one of the liquor stalls. A pair of young men were at each other’s throats; but luckily neither of them appeared to be armed. The tall fair one drew his fist back and got the Istrian youth a hard blow just under the ribs. When the Istrian boy – dressed in a strangely familiar bright pink garb – doubled up, the Eyran brought his knee up sharply and his opponent crumpled to the ground, clutching his crotch and whimpering. There was a moment of quiet, when it looked as if the incident might just blow over; as if someone might make a timely joke and everyone would return to their drinking, but into this unnatural calm the blond lad shouted, ‘Take that for your bitch-goddess, you scum! Falla would spread her legs before Sur and bless him for the opportunity!’

Tycho stopped still. The blood rushed to his face, then drained again, leaving his usually walnut features as pale as a northman’s.

At the stall, all hell broke loose. Drinking partners and companions in horseplay they might have been but a moment before; but now they were Istrians and Eyrans to a man: goddess-worshippers and followers of Sur: history and religion separate them more surely than language, culture and learning: enemies for more than a hundred generations, through the rise and fall of dynasties, the destruction of cities, the desecration of shrines, they now recalled with hot passion the side to which they rightfully belonged, and laid about them with swift and stunning violence. Grudges harboured for two hundred years boiled swiftly to the surface: slights recalled from family tellings round the fire; lost grandfathers and wounded parents; fortunes sunk in war and debts owed for ever.

The stall went over with a great crash, the little nomad who owned it running like a cornered mouse this way and that, desperately trying to avoid the raining blows. Then, with a bellow, four men in weathered armour leapt into the fray and began throwing punches in a haphazard fashion, not seeming to care whether their targets were Eyran or Istrian. For a while, it seemed as though their uninvited intrusion might defuse the situation; but then a wild-haired youth had his belt-knife out and there was suddenly blood on the silver blade. An Istrian youth in an absurd silver and orange costume fell to the ground with his hands clasped to his abdomen. Sestran’s younger son, Tycho realised with a start.

His own hand went to the dagger at his belt, but even as his fingers brushed the pommel, the fighting had surged back and engulfed another stall. Two northern youths stumbled backwards, pursued by four or five of the southerners. One of the Eyrans was the tall red-haired lad who had wounded the Sestran boy. He raised his knife hand – a threat, it seemed – but two of the southerners fell upon him and wrenched it away. A tall Istrian with short dark hair and a thick nose yelled in triumph and went for the Eyran with his own blade. The northerner tried for frantic evasion, but in doing so, backed into the jewellery seller’s stall, which had partly been sheltering him.

‘Saro!’

Guaya clutched his arm in terror, for suddenly there were brawling men everywhere. There was a high, thin wail of despair, and Saro whirled around just in time to see the old man disappear from sight as his stall overturned in a great flurry of boards and fabrics. Moodstones flew all around, and where they touched human skin flared to deepest crimson and wild purple, before falling, pale and cloudy once more to the ground.

A pair of combatants came crashing towards them, their faces contorted with hatred, their fists swinging wildly. Saro grabbed Guaya and thrust her behind him. He could feel how she trembled in his grasp, and then someone caught him a savage blow on the temple and he was down on the ground, with the black dust of the plain in his mouth and eyes, and feet all around him, on top of him, kicking and stamping. Where he had been struck, it felt as though his skull had swelled to twice its normal size, and each beat of his blood there felt like a tide. He tried to raise his head and felt an appalling wave of nausea sweep through him. Someone kicked him hard in the guts and he doubled up reflexively, retching and heaving. With a tremendous effort, he managed to roll under the remains of the moodstone-seller’s stall, only to find himself face to face with the old man, whose blood ran freely down his face from a rough gash on his forehead. The moodstone there shone clear and limpid, a blue so pale as to be almost white in the midst of so much crimson.

‘Grandfather!’

Suddenly, Guaya was on the ground beside him, with blood in her hair and her tunic half-ripped from her. Tears poured down her nut-brown cheeks. She cradled the old man’s head on her lap. ‘He’s badly hurt: we must get him away from here.’

Saro nodded dumbly: it was about as much as he could manage. He closed his eyes and swallowed down the bile that rose in his throat. Then he hauled himself upright, using one of the stall’s struts for support. The sight that met his eyes was astonishing. It looked like a battleground: two men lay writhing on the ground – one was Diaz Sestran, he realised with a chill of recognition; but the other was a young Eyran with light-brown hair and a braided beard. Blood spurted from a deep wound in his thigh. All around the two wounded men, a dozen or so youths were fighting in earnest – knives out, or with sticks in their hands – impromptu clubs taken from the broken stalls – and the air was heavy with bellows of rage and blood-lust.

He reached down and hauled the nomad to his feet. The old man felt as insubstantial as a bird: all skin and clusters of thin bones that felt as though they might snap like twigs under his hand. Guaya ran around the other side of her grandfather, wedging her shoulder under his armpit, and together they began to drag him away.

They would have succeeded, had a small man in boiled leather armour not cannoned into them as he tried to flee a tall young Istrian in a bright pink tunic, who was coming after him with his silver knife outstretched. The small man caught Saro by the arm, swinging him round, so that the moodstone-seller was wrenched from his grip and flung forward. There was the sodden, crunching sound of an impact, followed by a terrible wheezing cry, and by the time Saro had recovered himself, he found Guaya, her face distorted by grief and loathing, laying about his brother, Tanto, with her fists, and the old man lying on the ground with the silver knife buried to the hilt in his chest. Tanto was holding the child away from him, his fingers splayed wide across her forehead, a look of pure disgust on his face; then he pushed her savagely, turned, placed his foot on the old man’s chest, retrieved his knife, and walked away. Saro, rooted to the spot, stared after him in disbelief.

The small man Tanto had been chasing vanished into the crowd.

With a terrible wail, Guaya fell, sobbing, across her grandfather’s prone body. The old man moved a hand slowly to her face and cupped her cheek. His eyes were dull. Saro knelt beside them, shocked into uselessness. Where Tanto had withdrawn the dagger, bright-red blood pumped inexorably out of the wet hole, staining the nomad’s white robe. Saro watched it with something approaching fascination, then slowly, instinctively, he pushed his hand against the gaping wound, trying to stem the flow. It pushed up between his fingers, fountains of it, thick and unstoppable. So much blood. He could not imagine any body held so much blood, let alone the body of such a frail, elderly man. He could feel the quick, thin pulse of the heart beneath the heel of his hand, fluttering away like a tiny bird in a cage. He pressed down again, harder. As he did so, the old man turned his head. His dark eyes bored into Saro’s and the nausea rose in him again; different this time, more like dizziness or vertigo, and then the nomad placed his hand over the one Saro held upon his chest and whispered something in a language Saro could not understand, a language punctuated with little pressures of air that in a stronger man might have come out as whistling sounds: and then he died. Saro could tell the exact moment the nomad’s spirit passed from him; not just by the way his eyes went unfocused and his mouth fell open, as if in some expression of regret; but when the moodstone on his forehead gave up all its colour, falling away through the sheerest of pastel shades to an eventual bleak and unmarked grey.

Saro felt his mind become a cool, clear pool of calm: a glacier lake; a mountain tarn, untroubled by the movements of men, its surface unbroken by the slightest ripple. All around, there was a moment of the utmost quietude; and then came a hubbub of sound. Out of the distant crowd rose the high-pitched wail of a grieving woman; the shouts of men, angry or horrified; the weeping of a child.

Saro lifted his head. Tanto was standing some distance away, his eyes blank and unresponsive. Beside him was Lord Tycho Issian, his hand on Tanto’s shoulder: an approving hand, it seemed to Saro then, in that moment of clarity, rather than a restraining one. An old woman came running towards him, arms outstretched, tears streaking the paint on her face. She fell on her knees beside the dead man and began to cover his face with kisses. Suddenly embarrassed to be witness to such pain and intimacy, Saro stood up, and the blood ran off him in streams. His hands dripped with it.

He turned and started to walk away: away from the scene of death, away from his brother and the curious onlookers; but suddenly there was a hand upon his arm. As it gripped him, he was engulfed by a hot wash of sorrow; sorrow, and despair: someone had killed her grandfather, needlessly, wantonly, and then had walked away; he had died in front of her, all the light going out of his eyes. Fear, such fear: for now Grandmother would break her heart, and who would look after them both now, now that Grandfather was gone, dead and gone?

He blinked, shook his head. The hand fell away, and with it went the chaos of emotion, leaving him feeling like a fish cast up on a stormtide, weak and struggling for air in an unfamiliar element. He looked down. Guaya, the child, stood there before him, her eyes huge and brimming. She held her hand out. In it sat the moodstone pendant that Saro had chosen for his mother. In the child’s palm the stone had taken on the blue of a winter sky, streaked with pale strands of purple, like the premonition of a sunset, and he knew at once that it marked both her grief and her fear; knew not from the stone, but from something inside himself, something new and unasked for; something that had entered him like an uninvited visitor.

‘He said he wanted to give you a gift,’ she said quietly. ‘I think he meant this.’

Saro shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not the necklace, that wasn’t what he meant.’ He smiled, and felt the tears come.

The child stared at him uncomprehending, then pushed the pendant into his hand nevertheless, and ran away.

Seven

Rose of the World

F
rom the safety of his caravan in the nomad quarter, Virelai watched the fracas with interest and not a little fear. He saw the moodstone stall go over with a crash, and the old man disappear from view beneath a trample of angry feet. He saw how a small, fat mercenary – trying to escape the fury of a young Istrian almost twice his height, dressed in a vile pink tunic that had no doubt afforded the mercenary ample ammunition for the insult that had engaged the southerner’s ire – had cannoned into old Hiron, spinning him around to meet the thrust of his pursuer’s knife. All this had been extraordinary enough to someone raised in the swaddling confines of Sanctuary, where his entire experience of violence had been restricted to an occasional cuff around the ear. But witnessing the casual brutality with which the Istrian had then retrieved his dirtied weapon – setting his foot on the dead man’s chest for leverage – he had felt both deeply agitated and yet at the same time perversely excited. The action had spoken of something deeper and darker than mere ferocity. It was at once fascinating and repellent. It spoke of insouciance at the value of a life; a fixation with self to the exclusion of all else; a rampant, intemperate egotism. Virelai had not believed men capable of such aberrant behaviour; he found himself unable to take his eyes off the man.