The Bloodstained God (Book 2) (15 page)

She looked and saw that it was Gorondo, one of the men who had worked for her father in his boat. He was older and wore a scar on the left side of his head that split his hair and broke the line of his chin; a great scar indeed. She flew into his arms, the one piece of her past that had endured.

Gorondo told her the story of the raid. Her father was dead, her mother was dead, her sister taken. Most of the houses had burned and the village had been rebuilt by others, keen to fish the wealth of the reefs that ringed the island. Only a handful of villagers had survived and remained to help rebuild.

Narala could have stayed. She had a boat, she had gold, and she was young and pretty. She would have done well in the new village, but she could not bear to be there. Everything she knew had been ripped apart and buried in the thin, sandy soil of the island. There was only one thing that remained: her sister. She decided that she would find her sister.

She stayed no more than a day, one night in Gorondo’s house with his wife and son, and she could not be away quickly enough in the morning. She had nothing to pack, no ties, and so she walked down to her boat in dawn’s light and raised the small sail and headed north again.

Illusions no longer troubled her. She knew that she could not find Passala on her own. She had only a small piece of gold, a boat, a knife. She sailed north because of what Narak had said to her. She had seen the way that men looked at Narak, how they stepped out of his way, strived to please him. She would serve Narak, and as a servant she would have more power than she could ever have on her own. She would squeeze the men of Telas until they bled the knowledge that she desired. She would find the slavers. She would find Passala.

She landed, sold the boat, and made her way north. Sometimes men challenged her, wanted to steal her freedom, but mostly the ring was enough to put them off. Mostly.

She came to the town of Hegral Cross. It was a small town on a crossroads with a dilapidated tavern, a temple and a few dozen houses. She bought a room and a meal in the tavern, dispelled their prejudice with a show of the ring. It was a poor meal, and a cold room, but she did not mind. A lot of things had ceased to matter since her family had been taken from her. She was learning the ways of Telas, dressed after their fashion now, spoke the language that she had learned as a slave, but she could not change her skin.

In the morning she walked out of the village on the king’s road leading north. Narak and Wolfguard were in the north, she had been told. She walked at a steady pace, leaving behind tilled fields and passing into a thin forest of winter stripped trees, and there she passed by three men. They were felling trees close to the road and two wagons stood by them, stacked with thin tree trunks, the sort they used for building in these parts.

When they saw her, the three moved to block her passage; standing in the road so that she would have to step off it to pass them. She stopped before them and showed the ring.

“I serve Wolf Narak,” she said. In the past it had been enough, but this time it was not. There was one older man and two younger, and while the old man stepped aside the youths did not.

“Anyone can say that,” one of them said. “And anyone can have a wolf ring made.”

“Leave her alone,” the old man said.

“Are you afraid of a ring, old man?” the youth said. “We can have some fun with this one. She is an Isler, and not a proper woman.”

“I do not fear the ring, boy. I fear what stands behind it.” The old man had moved between her and the young men, as though to defend her. One of them seized his arm, pulled him to one side and pushed him so that he fell at the side of the road.

“You sit there old man, or we’ll beat you too.”

The one who had done all the talking reached out and grabbed her arm, but she slapped his hand away and drew the blade she carried. It was a knife, but long enough to kill a man. Her fear was that she did not know how to use it. The youth reached for her again and easily avoided her point when she stabbed at his arm. He laughed.

The other one moved up to one side. He was bigger than the talkative one, looked slow witted but very strong.

“You invite disaster on us all,” the old man cried from the roadside, but he did not rise, and the younger men ignored him.

The big one reached for her, and this time her knife scored flesh, and she saw blood, but it was as though he barely noticed the wound. One hand grabbed her upper arm and the other struck her in the face. She lost the knife. The talkative youth laughed again.

“Hold her there, Telo,” he said, and he reached for her. She twisted away, almost broke the big one’s grip, but he was too strong, and wrestled her back to face his companion. She tried to kick him, but he was too quick.

Something snarled behind them; the sort of noise that made your hair stand on end.

The hands released her. The talkative bastard leaped away. It was a wolf, a huge grey wolf that stood in the road where a few moments ago there had been nothing. It stood there for a moment, staring at the two young men, lips curled back over bright white teeth. They ran, both of them, clattering into the under story of shrubs and bushes in the forest, fear giving them an impressive turn of speed, and then they were gone, just a few distant sounds. Now there was just the old man, sitting on his backside on the side of the road frozen like a statue with his eyes on the wolf, and the wolf, of course. She felt the prickle of fear as much as the old man. It was a powerful beast, large and in its prime. But the wolf walked to her side and licked at her hand. It looked up at her as if to say… but she had no idea what it meant to say; something friendly perhaps, something comforting.

“Thank you,” she said. For certain the wolf didn’t behave like a wolf. It looked at the old man, blinked, licked its chops and sat down beside her like a tame dog.

“Truly you walk with the wolf,” the old man said.

Narala was amazed. There was clearly more to the wolf ring that she had guessed. Somehow Narak had been watching her, or had set a wolf to do so, and the wolf had seen her peril and intervened.

When she carried on walking on the king’s road the wolf came with her, no longer concealed, but walking at her side, an unquestionable sign of Narak’s favour. Narala could not help herself. She started talking to it. She had been alone for weeks; first sailing south to her home, then north again, and lately walking north along quiet roads, shunned by the pale skinned people of Telas. Now that she had a travelling companion, though it was a wolf, she talked to it like a friend.

The wolf, of course, did not reply, but more than one she caught it looking up at her as she spoke, trotting slowly along in its tireless way. At night it would vanish, slinking into the woods of fields, coming back to her side hours later. She guessed it went to hunt.

For two days they went on like that. She talked and the wolf listened. A lot of the time she talked nonsense, just to hear her own voice. Sometime she confided her desire for revenge, sometimes she talked of her home in the Green Isles, and sometimes she just talked- the weather, the trees, the road – anything was meat enough.

They came to a crossroads.  People had told her about it. North led to the great forest, and that way lay the road to Wolfguard. To the east there was the Green Road, and beyond that the kingdom of Berash. West was Telas Alt, the capital.

By now the roads were busy. The thin traffic of the south had swollen as she moved north. Carters dominated the roads, moving in long, slow, dusty trains that moved only a fraction faster than she walked. It took each of them an age to pass her if they travelled the same way, and all the time she tasted the road, blinked to keep the fine dust from her eyes. The wolf attracted a lot of attention, but nobody troubled her. Indeed, nobody approached her at all.

She took the road north, but had only taken a few paces when she felt its absence. The wolf was no longer beside her. She stopped and looked back. It stood at the crossroads, looking at her. It was three paces down the road to Telas Alt, on the road to the west.

“Do I leave you here?” she called to it.

The wolf took a few more steps to the west and stopped again, looked back.

“I need to go north,” she said. “To Wolfguard.” But the wolf stood and stared until she became certain that it wished her to go west, to the capital. She was uneasy about that. Country towns she could cope with, and villages were quickly passed and forgotten, but Telas Alt was a city. Those few people who had spoken to her on the road had described it as the city of cities, a place where raw humanity gathered in thousands and tens of thousands, so many houses clustered together that it took hours to walk through it all.

She did not want to go there. There were no cities in the Isles, and she did not want to feel that much hostility battering at her from every side. The one certain thing that she had learned was that Telans did not welcome people of her skin colour among them. They tolerated her because of the wolf.

Despite her misgivings she gave in, walked back and headed west with the wolf once more at her side. She trusted the wolf.

Telas Alt, of course, was quite a way down the road, and they walked for three days along an increasingly busy highway until she caught her first sight of the city. They were still miles distant, but she could smell something unmistakably unnatural in the air, an olfactory miasma that could only be the city. In the distance she could see that the sky was dirty. She had never seen anything like it. It both horrified and fascinated her. So many people lived here that they changed the world around them.

From this distance she could see nothing of the town, but the great fortress that was the manifestation of the king’s power stood above it all like a dead tree stump on a desolate plain. It took all her courage to walk towards it, joining the thickening flow of carts, riders and those others on foot as they all pushed towards Telas Alt. There was some unspoken rule, it seemed, because the carts stayed on the right side of the road so that there was room for the equal numbers moving away from the city. Riders did the same, and everyone on foot just had to take their chances in the traffic.

The houses started before the city. Farms seemed smaller, their buildings closer to the road. It already felt like a town before they came to the gate, and the wall. The wall shocked her. She had never seen a city before, never mind a city wall. She found its huge, heavy presence menacing, but no more so than the guards on the gate. There were four of them, uniformed, armoured and armed. Something else – she had never seen soldiers before. Most people passed through the gate unmolested, but two of the men moved to block her path. In the crowd they did not see the wolf that walked at her side.

“You’re a long way from home,” one of them said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Yes? Is that all? What’s your business here?”

She showed him the ring, pointed to the wolf. “You will have to ask him,” she said. “He brought me here.”

The guard stepped back one pace. The wolf looked at him.

“The Wolf, eh? Well, I’d best let you be about it then,” he said.

“Thank you.”

She walked past them into the city. She was aware that the man who had questioned her was talking to his comrades, but she was too distracted to pay them any heed. The city swallowed her whole.

As soon as she stepped beyond the gates all trace of the natural world was swept away. The smells, the sights, the noises were all man made. Here and there she saw a green flash of moss, a tuft of grass in a dirty gutter, a sparrow peering down from a slate roof, but they were overwhelmed invaders in this artificial world. She walked slowly beside the wolf, and it led her down cobbled streets, along paved roads, through dim alleys, and everywhere the endless variety of the artifice astonished her. In her home everyone had made their houses the same way, the boats looked the same beneath the paint, pots, pans, knives and fishhooks were all broadly similar, comfortingly familiar. Here it was as though men had strived everywhere to build to a different line, to try a new shape of window, a new kind of door. The people themselves were a blaze of colour, a catalogue of different styles. In five minutes she had seen more shapes of hat than she had ever guessed could exist.