Sorcery Rising (45 page)

Seventeen

North and South

T
he little boat rocked disconsolately on the dark sea. It was perhaps three hundred lengths out from the shore and far to the east of the fairground, sheltering in the lee of one of the barbaric northern ships with a prow carved into the shape of a bear’s head roaring soundlessly into the night. Selen, shivering in the bow of the faering, stared up at it fearfully. In the course of a few short hours, she had come so far from the life she had known that she hardly knew who she was any more. She had killed a man and lost her future, and now here she was, dressed in nothing more than a rich robe made for an Eyran woman which left her face and the top of her breast exposed, alone in the world except for another man whose name she did not know, a man who did not speak her language and had uttered not a word since they had left the shore. He sat opposite her in the small boat, as great and as still as a rock, the moonlight shining in the whites of his eyes as he stared past her shoulder, scanning the silent stretch of water between them and the Moonfell Plain. He had shipped the oars and sat motionless like this for well over an hour now – as unblinking as a hawk watching for prey – but nothing had disturbed the oily blackness of the sea, neither seabird, seal nor the cropped red head of the barbarian woman who had left them on the strand.

Selen shivered. With shaking hands she wrapped the hem of the dress closer around her feet but the fabric had never been designed to keep out chill midnight airs on the sea. She had been shivering thus ever since they had left the Fair, when she had been warm from running across the dunes, away from any pursuit, so she knew it was not just the cold that was causing the great, seismic shudders to run through her body. For his part, the northerner kept staring past her into the night and if he remarked her discomfort he made no acknowledgment of it at all. The moon emerged from behind a cloud. When its light fell full upon his face and made a silver waterfall of his hair and beard, a silver mask of his face, she thought she had never seen a man in such despair. A few moments later darkness returned, and as it did so Selen heard him groan as if in pain.

Then: ‘She’s not coming,’ he said.

He stated it with such flatness that she knew it was not merely his unfamiliarity with the Old Tongue that took the meaning from his voice; his tone was the sound of the loss of all hope. She opened her mouth to deny it, but the cold gripped her and wracked her body so powerfully that it was like a second invasion. The shivering went on and on. ‘Oh,’ she gasped at last, ‘so cold . . .’

‘By Sur – I had not thought!’ The boat rocked violently as Erno came out of his seat and suddenly she was assailed by the smell of him, sharp and salty, terrifyingly male, and his arms were around her, and he was rubbing vigorously up and down her back. A moment later his hands came off her abruptly. ‘My lady, I’m sorry—’ he stammered and stopped, appalled. She had gone as rigid as a tree at his touch; he could even hear her jaw grind its protest.

In the midst of her fugue she was vaguely aware that he had pulled away from her, that the smell and the heat of him had receded, and that the boat was lurching again. But even while she was out here on the sea, with a chill in her bones and her feet bloody and bare in the bilges of an Eyran faering, somewhere in her mind she was back in the warmth of her pavilion, trapped beneath the oppressive weight of the man who was attacking her, her mind a shrieking storm of panic. In one world, Tanto was smothering her cries of outrage with his hand and reciting, shockingly and incongruously, Kalento’s
Lay of Alesto
, punctuated by obscene movements in a region she could not even bear to contemplate; while in another someone was pressing a fold of soft fabric into her stiff fingers and talking to her in the sort of gentling voice you might use to calm a nervous horse. She blinked, brought back to herself of a sudden by the physical touch of the material on her skin, and looked down. In her lap there lay a cloak of felted wool. It had been crudely woven and even in the pale light it looked stained, but the fabric was as soft as the finest and priciest pashkin. Glancing up, she found the northerner was gazing at her, the moonlight delineating the angles of his face. His expression of concern was abundantly clear, but his eyes were too penetrating for comfort. She clutched at the cloak gratefully and, relieved to have the distraction of something practical to do, drew it tightly around her shoulders and tucked her hands under her armpits. For several minutes she sat like this until the shivering had subsided enough for her to speak.

‘You’re right,’ she said suddenly, grasping at the tendril of conversation they had begun. ‘She’s not coming.’

Erno bowed his head, a gesture of defeat and resignation. ‘I know,’ he said at last. ‘I know.’

She watched him retrieve the oars with a grimace. He slotted them into the rowlocks with exaggerated care as if eking out every possible last second; then with a last miserable look back towards the shores of the Moonfell Plain he began to row purposefully out from behind the moored ships into the ocean. For a long time there was nothing to hear but the slap of water against the sides of the little faering and the splash the blades made as they dipped and rose, and Erno’s breath soughing rhythmically into the night air. Selen closed her eyes.
Sleep
, she thought.
Yes, sleep would be good
. . . She let the small noises of their passage wash over her and began to drift away from herself, out into the night.

Perhaps it was the sound of the man’s laboured breathing, perhaps the salt smell of the ocean, or the rocking of the boat that tricked her, but what seemed only moments after she had slipped into a doze, panic rose in her like nausea. Images of her attacker assailed her again and again. She opened her eyes wide and stared out at the sea, but his lust-swollen face reasserted itself over the black waves, and the pattern of moonlight on the crests reconfigured into the splash of blood flowering on Belina’s white shift . . . The horrible invasion enacted itself again and again, each time with the addition of a new and vivid detail; the grasping of his hands, the bulge of his eyes, the feel of the shaft of the knife in her palm; how she had curled her fingers around it and improved her grip as reflexively as she might have picked up a hairbrush or a spoon; the way his body had stiffened and his mouth gone slack as the knife went into him the first time; the gush of his blood on her hands . . . The shock of the hot liquid on her skin, the easy parting of his flesh, had terrified her so much that her mind had fled away, leaving her in the grip of a revulsion so powerful that all she could do was to withdraw the blade and strike at him over and again until he, too, fell away.

No
, she thought fiercely.
I will not think this. If I let myself dwell on this, I will go mad
. She willed her mind to blankness and stared determinedly past Erno’s shoulder, out to sea. All she could see beyond the northerner was a featureless stretch of dark water, merging at some imperceptible point with the featureless dark sky.
My future
, she thought with sudden fear:
my future, as empty and mysterious as the night
.

As they rounded the first headland to the east of the Plain, Selen turned in the little wooden seat and watched until the lights of the torches and glowing fires of the Allfair faded to no more than pinpricks and were then eclipsed by tall cliffs stacked with silent seabirds, their ledges gleaming white in the light of the moon.

Erno rowed through all the hours of darkness. At some point Selen fell into an exhausted sleep that was blessedly unvisited by dreams. She awoke to the feeling of warmth upon her face, and when she opened her eyes, it was to see the red rim of the sun creeping above the horizon. It was the banners of light streaming out across the sea that had touched the skin of her cheeks and forehead and brought her to consciousness. Right in front of her, too close for comfort, was a figure in the stern of the boat, its outline limned with the weird dawn light, its face no more than a shadow to her against the fiery glow of its hair. Startled, she fell backwards off her thwart. ‘Karon!’ she cried out, and shielded her face with her hands. In her terror she did not know what to do, where to go. Wildly she looked around. There was nowhere to go. It was Karon, come to fetch her, for she was dying; or dead, and now the Goddess would take her heart and weigh it against a spent coal . . .

The figure leaned forward into the light and was transformed to the big northman who had rescued her on the Moonfell Strand. It was the first time she had seen him by daylight, and she couldn’t help but stare. He was striking, she thought with a shock, in a bizarre sort of way; his hair and beard as blond as silver, and braided up in that barbaric fashion the northerners had, with bits of bone and shell, faded rags of cloth; the planes of his face as hard and chiselled as carved oak; and his eyes—

‘Your pardon, my lady?’

Selen came back to herself with a gasp. In the shock of seeing the face of her rescuer she had forgotten the lack of the customary veil between the two of them. Flustered, she dropped her eyes from his intent gaze, focusing instead on the strange and intricate knotwork in his beard. ‘I woke from a dream,’ she lied, for she could not imagine having to explain her error to a foreign man. ‘I did not know where I was.’

Erno smiled: another revelation, for it transformed his whole demeanour. Where before, by darkness, he had seemed dour and forbidding, his face set in grim and watchful planes, the smile brought a warm light into his blue eyes and loosened the tense muscles in his jaw.

‘You called me “Karon”,’ he smiled. ‘I have good ears. Is he not the boatman who brings unfaithful souls through the fiery river for Falla to judge and chastise?’

Selen stared at him, dumbfounded.

Erno’s smile widened. ‘We are not all such barbarians in the north, you know. Some of us own parchments. Why, one or two of us can even read. I have made my way through the whole of
The Song of the Flame
, translated into the Old Tongue, and even parts of
Strictures for a Life of Devotion to the One
in the original. I cannot say I understood much of either, but I liked some of the poetry a lot.’ He paused. ‘“
And Karon lifted her body into the black craft, and with the black sail furled as tight as a crow’s wing, he sculled silently into the black smoke that issued forth from the Kingdom of Fire
”. I can’t manage it in your own language, though, I fear: too many strange sounds for a poor Eyran to master.’

‘I thought you northerners scorned such fancies,’ Selen said, taken aback and therefore with a sharper tone than she’d intended.

‘You thought all we do is to sail and fight and rape our captives? Well, I hate to disappoint—’

Selen’s eyes went wide then, much to her horror, filled with tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ Erno said quickly, furious at himself. ‘By Sur’s raven, you are right,’ he added bitterly. ‘All I’m good for is swords and oars; I should leave pretty speeches to others. Lord knows, it’s never done me any good in life.’

The Istrian woman wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, blinking rapidly. ‘Please don’t say another word,’ she said and watched his face fall still and hurt.

Silence hung between them, and into it fell the mournful call of a gull, far away over the land. Selen turned to watch it sweep across a green-edged bay and out across hills that rose and fell in gentle undulations punctuated by crescents of cliffs and wave-washed platforms of rock. When she looked back the way they had come, she could see the serrated tops of the Skarn Mountains, their snowy caps gleaming gold in the rarefied new light.

Three hours after the sun had climbed to its highest point they rounded a headland and found themselves confronted by the distant vista of a harbour in which a myriad of vessels bobbed close to shore and a hundred or more houses climbed the sides of the forested hills. A stone keep with a tall watchtower crowned one of the hills. The little town looked as small and peaceful as an answered prayer. Selen licked bone-dry lips and felt the gnaw of her empty stomach. Curious, that the body should make such simple but urgent demands even in the most dramatic circumstances.

Her companion pulled the oars in, shaded his sun-reddened eyes and gazed at it wordlessly. After a while he dropped his hand. ‘I’m sorry to break our vow of silence,’ he said reluctantly, ‘but do you have any idea where this place might be?’ He frowned against the bright light.

Selen looked at him in disbelief. ‘Why should I know?’ she asked. ‘The Moonfell Plain is the only place I’ve ever travelled to in all my life. I come from Cantara.’

As if that explained everything.

‘I thought you might be familiar with a map of your own country,’ Erno persisted.

‘Geography is not something they teach the women of Istria,’ Selen said tartly. ‘It is not thought to be useful to those of us who never have the freedom to travel any further than between house and garden, or to make the one trip required to sell us to a husband. In such a life, can you imagine the temptations the sight of a map might offer? We might realise the world is a much larger place than we had thought and feel even more confined than we already do; we might be seduced by exotic names and the call of faraway places. We might consider crossing the will of our fathers, who know so much better than we do the best course our lives should run. We might even run away to sea.’

Erno noted the glint in her eye and her acrid tone and was surprised to realise that this quiet, dark, southern woman could remind him of Katla in one of her more contrary moods. He nodded, not knowing quite what to say in response. He himself had seen a dozen maps of Istria, and now he wished he had paid rather more attention to them. Still, he considered, what difference did the name of the town make to them? It was a foreign port, as all ports here were foreign. He dug the oars into the water with even greater alacrity and pulled swiftly past the harbour.

‘What are you doing?’ Selen demanded with alarm.

Erno regarded her solemnly. ‘What does it look like?’