Sorcery Rising (49 page)

Through it all, Tanto sweated and groaned. His eyelids fluttered, so that Favio Vingo’s heart fluttered with them, but then rolled up to reveal only the pained white corneas beneath. In the third week after the chirurgeon had cut away what was left of Tanto’s manhood, his hair began to fall out as his father combed it; and then the hair from his chest and legs, his armpits and groin followed suit, leaving him at last as pale and smooth as a girl, except where the wound he had taken from the dagger, and then from the surgeon’s knife, was swollen and inflamed. Foul-smelling pus and other noxious fluids leaked incessantly into bandages that had to be changed three times a day. The cost of fresh linen and medicines was becoming astronomical. As the barge forged its way slowly down the Golden River, Favio Vingo sold his best cloak, his jewellery, and two of his stud-horses to finance Tanto’s treatments. By the time they had passed beneath the city of Talsea, its great stone buildings rising on their ancient ochre columns into the mercilessly blue sky, and into the trading-post of Pex, he found that not only had he little left to trade, but also that he had lost all faith in traditional medicine. At Pex, then, the nondescript riverside town in which it was common to break one’s journey on the Allfair run between the Moonfell Plain and the southern provinces, Favio ordered the barge be moored downstream of the five-arched bridge and jumped ship.

An hour before sunset, when Fabel Vingo and the crew were beginning to get restive, he returned, dragging behind him a screeching woman with feathers in her hair, three or four long braids of shells clattering down her back and a huge black bag bumping against her thigh.

‘What in Falla’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Fabel demanded, staring past his brother’s shoulder at the bizarre nomad woman. ‘You can’t bring her aboard.’

It was one thing to wonder at the Footloose from afar: to marvel at the yeka caravans wending their odd and colourful way to the Allfair, to buy trinkets and gifts for the womenfolk from them; even, in direst need, to worship the Goddess with one of their dexterous whores – so long as it was done only during the two-week bustle of the Fair; but to allow any woman to set foot on a ship was well known to bring bad luck, and to bring a nomad woman and her heathen magic on board was madness. Especially given the penalties against magic-peddlers and those who frequented them that had been announced by the Council following the events that brought this latest Allfair to a close.

‘She can save him: I know it!’

Favio bundled the woman up onto the gangplank and pushed her along in front of him, while she whistled and shrieked her protest. At the end of the plank she stopped dead and stared at Fabel, who stood blocking her way. Then, with a single, long-nailed finger she reached out and touched him on the forehead, and gabbled something high-pitched and unintelligible at him.

Fabel stood his ground, glaring at her. ‘Are you mad? She’s a Wanderer, Favio; a witch.’

‘So let her use her magic on Tanto.’

‘It’s heresy, brother!’

Favio thrust his jaw out. ‘I don’t care.’ He pushed the nomad woman in the back until she had nowhere to go but to cannon into Fabel, who stepped backwards quickly, making the superstitious sign of Falla’s fire to ward off her touch.

‘Would you damn his soul as well as your own, man?’

‘He’s not going to die. I won’t let him die.’

Stepping past the nomad woman, who was staring around the barge in bewilderment, Fabel put a restraining hand on his brother’s arm. ‘Favio, hear me: in the condition he’s in, it might be a blessing—’

Favio’s face blackened with fury. ‘He’s not one of your precious horses, to have his throat cut when he’s past performing.’ He shot Fabel a venomous look. ‘If it were Saro lying there, you’d not say such a thing.’

It was the nearest either of them had come to acknowledging the truth of Saro’s parentage. Fabel paled. Then, without another word, he pushed past the nomad healer and headed off down the barge, his back hard and straight, his legs carrying him across the deck in angry strides towards the pens where the horses were tethered. He was halfway there before realising that the subject of this last part of their conversation was standing quietly at the stockade, watching him with hollow eyes.

It was too late to turn back, Fabel thought, and now Favio would think he had deliberately set this course, as if aligning himself with the son he had sired. Well, there was nothing for it. He quickened his pace, feeling his brother’s eyes drilling into his back like awls.

‘The horses are quiet, lad,’ he said with forced cheerfulness.

Saro managed a wan smile. He’d had little sleep on this voyage, and the past few weeks had been amongst the worst of his life. He had tended his brother night and day as well as he was able, gritting his teeth against the agony and the seething hatred he could feel bubbling away like magma beneath the surface of Tanto’s consciousness every time he had to touch him – to turn him over to stave off bedsores, to change his foul bandages, to feed him; to clear his waste away. For some perverse reason, Favio had deemed it ‘good’ for Saro to undertake these tasks.
After all
, he had said, regarding with flinty eyes the lad whom he presented to the world as his second son,
you owe it to your brother, for if it hadn’t been for your overweening pride and selfishness none of this would have happened
.

Saro had never succeeded in drawing a fuller explanation from his father as to his guilt in Tanto receiving a knife-wound and the time when it might have been possible to discuss it in a civilised fashion had been and gone in the single look that had passed between him and Favio as they stood over Tanto’s sickbed that first night, before Favio, with a disgusted sigh, had broken the contact and left the room with his head in his hands. It was the clearest indication he could ever have had that his father wished it were Saro lying there instead of Tanto, the Vingo family’s pride and joy; Saro, who failed at everything his older brother excelled in; Saro who had the look of a young Fabel about him, who reminded him at every turn of his wife’s unfaithfulness, and of his own weakness in not revealing the adultery. And so he had endured the dual hurts of his father’s resentment and the horrible empathy that linked him more closely than they had ever been linked before with his dying brother, and every day felt less like living himself. And the dreams . . . He forced his mind away from that worst hurt of all.

‘Good day, Uncle Fabel,’ he said now. ‘They’re happy that the barge has stopped moving; but Night’s Harbinger is off his feed.’

Fabel looked alarmed. They’d been forced to leave the Moonfell Plain before he could conclude the deal he’d been negotiating for the sale of the stallion. It had been a good deal, too, and luckily with a horse-breeder less than a day’s ride away from Altea town, so he was still hoping to close the bargain when he returned. After their disastrous Fair, it was the only bright prospect on the horizon.

He climbed laboriously over the stockade and made his way to the separate pen where the stallion was tethered. The horse rolled a weary eye at him, threw his head up and backed away.

‘Ho there, lad—’ Fabel reached out and touched the stallion’s arched neck. It felt warm and hard beneath his hand, but not unusually so. He made a face. The boy had an over-active imagination: the horse seemed fine. ‘Well, likely he’ll eat when he’s hungry,’ he called back over his shoulder.

Saro shrugged. ‘I don’t think he’s well,’ he persisted. ‘And one of the mares is wheezing, too.’

He pointed out a handsome chestnut to his uncle.

‘She’s drinking a lot of water.’

Fabel shook his head. ‘The horses get nervous on the barge, you know that, Saro.’

‘I saw Father bring the nomad healer aboard,’ Saro started tentatively. He had gone from animal to animal that day, touching them as he groomed them and listening to their silent thoughts, even though it distressed him to do so. They were hot and listless, which might just have been due to the change of climate as they moved further into the south of Istria; but he also picked up on a certain level of anxiety from the horses, separately and as a group, that spoke of sickness and fear, even though few obvious symptoms had yet expressed themselves. What concerned him most was that it might be the sickness that had swept through the livestock a couple of years past, immediately following an Allfair. It had seemed a mystery, a plague from the Goddess at the time he had thought, smelling the awful stench of burning horseflesh when their neighbour Fero Lasgo had been forced to slaughter all his livestock and incinerate them on towering great pyres whose greasy black smoke had drifted low across the fields on a stifling, windless day. As he recalled, that sickness had started as innocuously as what he intuited here today. Nomads were known for their clever ways with animals, and if it could be detected early, and treated . . .

‘I thought, perhaps, when she’s tended to my brother, she might take a look at—’

Fabel shook his head impatiently. ‘Your brother’s life is in Falla’s hands now, and it won’t do to anger her with heathen magic. If the Lady thinks we have no faith in her, she’ll take Tanto to her for sure, but your father won’t see reason. We must stop him, lad, but he won’t listen to me. You might try, though.’ He looked at Saro hopefully.

But Saro shook his head. ‘He won’t listen to me, either. But even so, I must speak to her.’ Superstition or no, he couldn’t see the horses sicken and die if such could be prevented.

Fabel looked dubious. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, lad: all she seems to be able to do is shriek and whistle. I doubt she understands a word of Istrian. But you might be able to remove her bodily from the chamber before she has a chance to do her mischief on him—’

But Saro was gone.

His brother’s chamber was as stuffy as a bread-oven; which was no wonder, with three people crammed into a room that barely contained the bed that had been set up there. At one end, Favio Vingo peered desperately over the bedstead as the nomad woman laid her hands on his son’s fever-ridden body and slowly shook her head.

‘Bad wound,’ she was saying in heavily accented Istrian. ‘The knife that . . . made this . . . hole . . .
kalom
.’

‘Speak Istrian, woman; or at least the Old Tongue, you illiterate old hag!’ Favio threw his hands up in the air and began pacing the three steps back and forth that the chamber’s dimensions allowed. ‘Can . . . you . . . mend . . . my . . . son’s . . . wound?’ he shouted, emphasising every word as if for the benefit of a deaf child. ‘Can . . . you . . . make . . . him . . . well?’

‘No, no . . .’ The nomad woman shook her head faster, her hands scything the air in her frustration. ‘
Kalom ealadanna
. . . strong magic . . . the oldest.
Ealadanna kalom; rajenna festri
.’

Favio frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

Saro, drawn by an urge he did not fully comprehend, took a step through the doorway. Finding himself inside the room, and at a loss as what to do next, he placed the palms of his hands together and bowed to the healer in the polite nomad way he had learned from Guaya and later observed, but this time without the error he had first committed. ‘
Rajeesh, mina konani
.’

The healer’s eyebrows shot upward like lark’s wings. She smiled delightedly and then rattled out a great stream of nomadic gibberish: ‘
Felira inni strimani eesh-anni, Istrianni mina. Qaash-an firana periani thina; thina brethriani kallanish isti – sar an dolani fer anna festri. Rajenna festri: er isti festriani, ser-thi?
’

Saro waved his arms frantically. ‘No, no,’ he said quickly in the Old Tongue. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying—’

But the old woman was not to be stopped in mid-flow. ‘
Serthi, manniani mina? Brethriani thina ferin festri mivhti, morthri purini, en sianna sar hina festrianna. Rajenna festri en aldri bestin an placanea donani. Konnuthu-thi qestri jashni ferin sarinni?
’

Without thinking, Saro put his hand on the healer’s arm to stop her words and all at once was overwhelmed by her horror at the wound that would not heal, could never heal. For the blade that had made the wound had been forged with the old magic –
ealadanna kalom; rajenna festri
– the earth magic had returned; ill to those who do ill – and the blade knew: his brother had done an evil deed, he had murdered innocence, and so the wound the blade had dealt would fester and boil and never be brought to health until the evil his brother had done was atoned for and forgiveness given by the one who had made the wound.

Konnuthu-thi qestri jashni ferin sarinni?

Did he know the knife that had made the wound?

How could he? But somehow he had his suspicions: the dagger that . . .
she
, the beautiful swordmaker . . . had given him had disappeared on the night of the Gathering, and he had not seen it since. But he remembered the way it had shivered in his hand, the magical sense of it he had imputed to his feelings for its maker, rather than to its true nature. Saro believed in magic now: oh, yes he did: was he not haunted by it day and night?

Wide-eyed, he turned to his father. ‘I think she is saying that my brother’s wound has festered because the knife that made it judged him evil.’ It sounded mad even as he said it, and Favio Vingo looked as if he might explode at the very idea, but still Saro persisted. ‘I believe the blade that made the wound was the one the Eyran girl—’ he could not bring himself to say her name ‘—forged. She made a gift of it to me at her stall when Tanto and I were looking at her weapons, but Tanto must have taken it . . .’ He faltered, for something here was wrong: he had not thought through the implications.

Favio looked triumphant. ‘I knew it! I knew it! She tried to kill him with her witchery, the Eyran whore. She poisoned the blade against him: no wonder my poor boy will not heal!’ Perversely delighted to have a solid reason for Tanto’s persistent fever, he grinned wildly. ‘That little Eyran witch: it was she who did this to my lad; not Selen as she lied. I knew we were right to feed her to the flames. She poisoned him with her foul magic and then tried to poison him further with her words. Damn it, boy—’ he reached over and shook Tanto by the shoulder as if to share this wondrous knowledge with him ‘— she went to the fires, and thank Falla for it! Now all we need is for this Footloose witch to give you a spell that will counter the Eyran’s vile sorcery—’