Sorcery Rising (46 page)

‘You’ve just rowed past the town.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But we need food, and water, and rest—’

‘You may take some rest, and welcome,’ he replied shortly.

She turned back to watch the town dwindle behind them. ‘I don’t understand. Why aren’t you putting in there? Do you have any idea where it is?’

‘In the end it is an Istrian sea port, and here am I, an Eyran sailor, alone at sea with a stolen Istrian noblewoman wearing nothing more than another’s dress; a woman, moreover, who has blood on her face, and bruises on her arms.’

Selen’s hands flew to her face. ‘Blood?’ Tanto’s or her own? The thought of the Vingo boy’s blood on her face was too horrible to contemplate. Convulsively, she leaned over the side of the faering and stared into the opaque green waves, but the chop of the water was too strong to give back a smooth reflection. Instead, she scooped a handful of it up and washed her skin vigorously, gasping at the chill, then mopped it dry with a corner of the red robe.

‘Gone?’ she asked at last, presenting her face to Erno as imperiously as a spoiled child might to its mother. Her skin, refreshed by the cold saltwater, glowed with vitality and her eyes were as dark and liquid as a seal’s. For just a moment he glimpsed the beautiful and untroubled girl she must have been only a day ago; then, almost as if she drew back into herself under his scrutiny, the tense wariness had returned, and so had the dark shadows that lay in crescents beneath her eyes, and the lines that drew down the corners of her mouth.

It was as if he had been allowed to see too much. Suddenly he felt uncomfortable in her presence. ‘Gone,’ he affirmed quietly, and applied himself to his oars. He could feel her watching his face as he rowed and sensed the way she turned his words over in her mind, but for a long time she said nothing and he almost forgot she was there as he lost himself in the movement of the waves and the oars, the oars and the waves.

At last the open coastline gave way to more broken terrain: little firths and coves where the trees came right down to the water. Reefs broke the surface to the entrance of the first two bays they passed; but the third offered what appeared to be a clear passage to shore. Skewing the boat around with a single oar, Erno made for the land. He rowed in to what gradually revealed itself as a wide shingle beach fringed with birchwoods. The hull grated on the pebbles and Erno leapt over the side. He dragged the boat clear of the waves, lifted the Istrian woman out, and then hauled the faering up onto dry land.

Selen stumbled away from him up the beach, her legs feeling weak and cramped. Swaying slightly where she stood, with the shingle pressing painfully into the soles of her feet, she stared around at these unfamiliar new surroundings. Behind her, she could dimly hear the rise and fall of the Eyran’s voice; but already her demons were calling her, and so she pushed his voice away with them and applied her attention to careful scrutiny of the shoreline. Birch trees; ferns; brambles.
(Tanto’s hands, his mouth
. . .
)
Rocky outcrops through the leaves; dark shadows beyond.
(The blood . . .)
To either side of her pale shingle stretched to cliffs at one end of the beach, and beyond a low headland at the other.
(Knife blade grating against gristle and bone . . .)
Amongst the tidewrack, driftwood; swathes of hard black seaweed; a dead fish, buzzing flies. Her heart sank. There was no shelter here, no sign of habitation at all, and the sun had begun its slow fall into the west. What was the northman thinking of? She turned back, only to find him gone. She spun around, feeling the panic in her rising again, but there was no sign of him – not on the beach, nor in the sea, nor, as far as she could tell, amongst the trees. The faering lay where he had pulled it up, canted onto its side, the bilgewater glistening away into the shingle. His pack had gone from beneath the thwart. She opened her mouth to call out for him, and then realised she had not even asked his name.

She ventured a little distance beyond the edge of the woods in search of him; but she had never been anywhere beyond a tended garden in her life, and then always in the company of the family slaves. Here, there were bramble-thorns that snagged greedily at the voluminous red dress, and loops of ivy to catch an unwary foot, and everywhere a silence that made the skin crawl along her shoulders and spine. A little further onward the silence was broken by the rustling of some creature in the undergrowth, which proved entirely too much for her unsteady nerves, and so she had made her way with haste back to the beach, wrapped herself into the woollen cloak and waited for him to return.
And if he doesn’t, I shall no doubt starve or freeze to death
, she thought grimly,
and then he will have to bear the unwished-for burden of me no longer
.

Within minutes, the cold of the beach-stones began to seep its way up through the fabric.

It was many hours and full dark before the northman returned. Selen heard footsteps crunching on the shingle behind her and scrambled to her feet. ‘Where did you go?’ she cried angrily. ‘You left me without a word. I thought you had gone for good and left me to my fate.’

Erno threw a bundle to the ground, where it landed with a rattle, a clank and thud, as if the cloth that swaddled it hid items made from many different elements. ‘Almost I wish I had!’ His voice was grim, his usual courtesy gone.

Shocked by the vehemence of his tone, Selen waited.

A few moments later he added: ‘Besides, I told you quite clearly that I was going to determine the lie of the land. And I also said that when the water had drained from the faering, you would be best for warmth and comfort to take shelter inside it and wait for me there.’

Now Selen remembered the vague murmur of his words and how she had ignored them, and felt her face flush in the darkness, partly out of an embarrassment that did not come naturally to her; partly in angry reaction. ‘How could you think I could stand to be in that filthy little tub a moment longer!’ she stormed. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I had stayed at the Allfair and trusted my fate to the judgement of civilised folk rather than perish due to the neglect of a barbarian.’

There was a moment of silence in which she could feel his eyes upon her face. Then the northman laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. ‘Civilised folk! If I did not mistake your words when Katla and I came upon you, you feared that your so-called civilised folk would burn you for your crime.’

‘My crime?’ Selen’s voice rose to shrill indignation.

‘You killed a man, or so I believed you to say.’

‘He was a pig, a vile creature. He killed my slave. He . . . he . . . attacked me. I was defending myself.’

‘I choose to believe you,’ Erno said stiffly. ‘Others – more barbaric than I – might not.’ He started to undo the knot in the huge bundle on the ground.

‘How dare you treat me so, as if you do me a favour by taking my word?’ Rage overcame both cold and shock. ‘I am the Lady Selen Issian, only daughter of the Lord of Cantara!’

Erno took a deep breath. Something in him had changed and hardened in the course of the last few hours; something that had made his jaw tight and his temper short. ‘Yesterday, Selen Issian, you may have been the daughter of a noble Istrian house with slaves to bully and money to burn; but today you are outcast and alone in the world, unprotected by the law or by your family. I do not see that there is much between us in that respect, save that at least I own the clothes on my back.’

Her mouth fell open in incredulity. And then she flew at him. Her fists, small and hard with her fury, pummelled at his chest, his arms, his neck. One blow caught him painfully on the underside of the chin, so that his jaw snapped shut, jarring his teeth. He stepped back, appalled at the violence in her, appalled that he was responsible for unleashing it. She came after him, shrieking in the southern tongue, which sounded entirely unmellifluous in these circumstances, but all he caught was the Istrian word
hama
for ‘man’, over and over again. She scratched his neck and bit his arm. She tried to kick him between the legs, but he saw the red robe flap in the moonlight and dodged away. It was as well, he considered, that she had no knife this time. At last he managed to pinion both her wrists in one hand, then with the other he pulled her toward him and held her clasped against his chest so that she could do no further damage. They stayed locked together in this manner for some minutes until he felt the fight go out of her. And still he held her, thinking as he did so that he had never held a woman for so long before, other than his mother as she was dying, and she had been as thin and as fragile as a little bird as she reached the end, quite unlike this dervish of an Istrian woman. And then he thought of Katla, and how he had kissed her outside the Gathering, how her lips had felt beneath his own; how her hands had grasped his shoulders, how she had angled her jaw so that their noses would not clash, and how he had wondered that she knew just what to do to inflame his desire. And then he remembered the smell of the charm as it ignited – the acrid, nostril-scorching stink of the burning hair and suddenly he had to push the Istrian woman away from him. He did so with more force than he had meant, for she fell heavily to the ground, but in his desperation he did not even notice. He ran down the shingle to the edge of the water and there, with his eyes stinging and a white heat in his head, he vomited noisily into the surf again and again and again, retching and heaving until there was nothing left inside him to expel.

Brought back to herself by the fall, Selen lay there listening to the awful sounds the Eyran made and experienced a moment of genuine terror. Had he eaten something poisonous during his hours away from her? What if he died? She would be left here alone, without provisions or shelter, and with no one in the world to turn to for help . . . Could she row the wooden boat on her own, to some little coastal town where they had not heard of the Lord of Cantara and his missing daughter? It seemed unlikely.

The retching noises had turned to something else, she realised, while she had been thinking these selfish thoughts. She frowned. Was the northerner dying? He seemed to have gone very quiet, except for a series of soft gasps that might just have been the lapping of the sea. She held her breath and listened more carefully. He was sobbing.

She had never heard a man weep before and it made her even more afraid. She sat up, the shingle rolling and crunching beneath her, and the Eyran fell abruptly silent. Staring into the gloom, she saw a dark shape silhouette itself against the shining sea. Then the shape came upright and started to move up the beach away from her. She heard rather than saw the moment when the northerner left the beach, heard the sound of pebbles give way to sand beneath his boots, and then to the rustle of vegetation. For several minutes she stayed as still as stone, her arms clasped around her knees, listening to the small sounds he made in the woods, fearing to move again as if, hearing her, he might feel prompted to abandon her forever.
And who could blame him if he did?
she thought, suddenly ashamed of her outburst.

Then his footsteps sounded on the shingle again. There followed little noises she could not interpret, and then colour bloomed in the night and suddenly she was able to see the Eyran bending over a small cone of sticks sunk into a circle of stones, blowing until the small flame took hold of the kindling and burst into life.

‘Here,’ he said shortly, and cast something at her feet.

Whatever it was fell with a soft noise in the pebbles. Puzzled, she leaned forward, reached out and then drew back her hand with a sharp exclamation.

‘A dead animal!’ she cried in horror. ‘Why have you brought me a dead thing?’

‘You should eat.’

She stared down at the dark shape on the ground. It was small and furred. She prodded it gingerly with her foot and it fell sideways, the firelight revealing a white scut and long ears. A coney, its belly all bloody where the guts had been removed.

‘How can I eat this?’ she asked in disgust.

‘Skin it and spit it over the fire,’ Erno replied grimly. He turned away.

‘I don’t know how!’

‘Then eat it raw and furry for all I care.’

Her brow furrowed in dismay. For a moment she thought she would weep again; then she grabbed the creature up and took it into the light. ‘Give me a knife,’ she said angrily.

Erno regarded her warily, then tossed her his belt-knife. ‘Slip the blade between the fur and the meat,’ he said, more kindly. ‘Then pull the coat away. It’s not difficult.’ He watched for a moment while she wrestled awkwardly with the small corpse, then moved off into the shadows.

Tears of self-pity pricked Selen’s eyes and she blinked them away furiously.
Damn him to the Goddess’s fiery hell
, she thought: she would cook and eat the whole thing if he did not return, fur and all.

Some time later, she had managed to wrench most of the skin off the beast, though the touch of its slick, cool flesh made the bile rise in her throat, and cook it sufficiently to revive her appetite. When the northman did not return from wherever it was he had disappeared to, she gave in to her hunger and devoured as much as she could of the small thing, remembering only at the last that it was only propriety that she should save some part of the creature for him.

She sat and waited with the cooling remnant in her hands, waited until the fire burned low and the moon rose to its zenith. At last he returned and without a word sat down opposite her and gazed into the dying flames. He remained like this, inturned and uncommunicative, for several minutes until at last he foraged in his bag and took out a piece of coloured twine. This, he began to tie into intricate knots, chanting over them in the guttural Eyran language as he did so. He tied into one knot a feather, glossy and black; into another a shell with a hole in it. Finally, he reached inside his tunic and withdrew a small leather pouch. From it he took a length of gleaming red hair, charred at one end, and wove this into the last knot of all. He started a new chant for this most complex of knots, but after a little while his voice cracked and he stopped. Light from the embers gleamed in his downcast eyes as he turned the strange artefact over and over in his hands. She ached to ask him what it was and why he had made it, but she could not find the words. Erno, however, felt her eyes upon him.