The Rose of the World (77 page)

‘Why in the name of all that is holy would they be trekking an army through the Skarn Mountains?’ Ravn Asharson rubbed a hand across wine-bleared eyes and stared at the man who had brought this news.

The Earl of Stormway shook his head. ‘I have no idea. But that is not all.’

And then he told the King of Eyra how scouts had reported other movements, and not just troops either.

‘The Moonfell Plain, Ravn: they’re all heading for the Moonfell Plain.’

The King frowned. It was where it had all begun, where he had first laid eyes on the woman whose loss haunted him by day and night; where the war over her had truly started. So the Lord of Cantara thought to make the final battle a symbolic gesture, did he? He shoved himself to his feet, stood there swaying unsteadily, and the flask from which he had been swigging fell and spilled its contents. Blood-dark, the wine pooled out across the flagstones, a great liquid shadow to the man standing over it.

‘Have the fleet made ready, Bran. We sail for the Moonfell Plain on the next tide!’

Stormway left the chamber with the sigh of a man saddled with a logistical nightmare.

Later that morning they overtook the first caravan of travellers – a rag-tag collection of folk: some nomads, some Istrian peasants, women without veils, men in homespun or rich robes, all weaponless.

The people they passed could not drag their eyes away from the woman who rode with this great army. They gazed in wonder at her, their expressions rapt. She, in turn, smiled upon them.

In contrast, Tycho Issian stared at them in disgust: the dregs of the earth, they were, the scum which had escaped his fires. Had he not been in such a hurry he would have had them all scoured from the face of Elda. ‘Out of the way!’ he yelled intemperately and lashed about him with his whip.

One thong caught a woman across her exposed face, as he had thought it might, cutting a deep scarlet line from cheek to jaw, and the creature fell to her knees with a shriek.

‘Had you dressed with the modesty that befits a woman of my land, that would not have happened. Take it as a lesson!’ he hissed, wiping clean the whip on his horse’s mane.

But the Rose of the World slipped from her mount and crossed to the woman’s side. ‘Take heart,’ she said softly, and cupped the welling cheek in the palm of her long hand. When she removed it, there was blood on her fingers, but none on the woman; even the line of the cut was fading. The Rosa Eldi laid her hand upon the white silk of her robe. Then she turned to Tycho Issian, her eyelids flat with loathing. Upon her belly the perfect imprint of a bloody hand was clearly marked for all to see.

‘Harm my people, and you harm me,’ she told him with cold fury. She walked to her mount. The horse – a pied beast of blotched black and white, with an unruly eye and vile yellow teeth – whickered gently and nosed at her, unsettled by the sudden smell of gore. Then it sank down onto its hocks so that she might take her place in the saddle with grace and ease.

All around, the travellers murmured in awe; behind them, the soldiers craned their necks for a view of the pale woman: she was a rare one – you could hardly blame the Lord of Cantara for his interest.

Tycho Issian looked aside. He had seen the hatred in her eyes. A tiny spark of survival instinct suddenly nagged at him to abandon his course, to let her go where and with whom she would, while he was able, before it was too late, but his grand obsession stifled its cry at birth. On they rode, north, to the doom of the world.

Across the wide mouth where the Golden River gave itself up to the mercies of the Northern Ocean, the shapes of many ships were silhouetted against the skyline. Katla Aransen struggled weakly up onto an elbow and stared at one in particular, taking in its brutish prow-head, with its gaping mouth and serrated teeth, and the powerful lines of its hull.

‘That’s the
Troll of Narth
,’ she whispered. ‘I’d recognise it anywhere.’

The merchant and his wife were hiding in the brig. The sight of an Eyran longship – no matter how legendary – did not fill
them
with delight. For his part, Saro Vingo gazed about in amazement. Elsewhere, all manner of other craft were converging upon the sea lanes heading west.

Mam, at the wheel, narrowed her eyes. ‘Something very strange is going on,’ she opined with less than remarkable insight.

‘Strange indeed,’ said Katla, lying down again, every movement an effort, ‘for the
Troll
to have survived an ocean crossing: they must be desperate for ships in Eyra if they’re reduced to using the oldest vessel in the Isles.’

Alisha smiled. ‘Moonfell,’ she said softly. ‘They are all heading for the Moonfell Plain.’

Saro sighed. He had travelled this same route the previous year to his first Allfair. It felt an age ago: and he was far from the innocent, hopeful boy he had been then.

‘I can feel it,’ Katla said suddenly. She closed her eyes. Sweat had beaded on her forehead. Her cheeks were sallow.

Saro experienced yet another stab of concern. ‘Your wound? It’s hurting you?’ He touched her shoulder, wishing for the first time that Guaya had not taken back her gift: he suspected Katla Aransen of dangerous stoicism where her injuries were concerned, for she rarely complained.

Katla’s eyes snapped open. ‘The Rock, you idiot: I can feel the Rock.’

And Saro was cast back to that first morning at the Fair, when he had stumbled out amongst the booths while the rest of his family were still snoring off the araque binge of the night before and been gifted with a vision: a girl whose skin shone gold in the sunlight, whose red hair made a nimbus around her head; a girl wearing, in Istrian terms, hardly anything at all, in that most sacred and forbidden of places: on top of Falla’s Rock. He smiled at her now, not even minding that she had called him idiot. ‘I remember the Rock,’ he said quietly.

When she smiled back at him he felt engulfed by flame, just as he had been that first time. ‘I shall climb it again,’ she declared; and abruptly his heart fell into a cold chasm, for he knew that her smile had been for the memory of the climb, and not for him at all. Knew, too, with a terrible leaden certainty, that she would never climb anything again. She was dying, though the fact of it went unsaid. He withdrew his hand.

‘If you do, you’ll die.’

Katla made a face. He was right, she knew: she could feel the twist and pull of the wound, the wrongness of it. Once, when Mam’s attention had been diverted by the overhead flight of geese heading north, she had steeled herself to look at the wound and had pulled the bandages away. That night, when the rest were asleep, she had wept until dawn.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Not like this.’ And she turned her head away from him, her features pinched shut with misery.

‘God’s prick, this armour chafes!’

‘They don’t cater for dwarves in the Istrian militia.’

‘Who are you calling dwarf, you overgrown bull’s pizzle?’

Words could rarely make Joz Bearhand rise to the bait. He grinned. ‘It was your idea to join up with this lot,’ he reminded.

‘Fat lot we’ve got to show for it.’ This last speaker was a tall, gaunt man with a skullcap and a lantern jaw.‘We missed out at Forent, never got near Cera, and there’s bloody scant pickings here.’ He cast his eyes mournfully over the landscape, kicked up a cloud of dust. ‘Unless you can find me a merchant with dung for brains and a fetish for ash.’

‘I thought there’d be whores.’

‘Dogo, you’re an idiot. There’s only whores here during the Allfair.’

‘How long do we have to wait for that, then?’

Doc rolled his eyes. ‘Somehow I don’t think there’s going to be one here this year.’

‘Why are we here, anyhow?’

Joz shrugged. ‘To fight? It’s generally what we do.’

Dogo stared around. ‘Who shall we start with, then? That bunch of matrons over there?’ He indicated a gaggle of women trying to drag their wagon out of the way before the track ran into a deep defile. Its back axle was broken, the wheels splayed apart. The column passed, stepping around it, no one stopping to help. ‘Or them?’ A crowd of old men, some nomads and children, yeka, horses, dogs, and what looked a pair of wolves.
Surely not?
He shook his head and turned back. ‘Now this lot look more promising.’

Doc shaded his eyes. ‘Isn’t that—?’

Joz Bearhand swore horribly.‘It’s that bastard Tycho Issian,’ he pronounced.

‘What, the one who’s been burning Footloose the length and breadth of Istria?’

‘The very same.’

‘Waste of good women.’

‘Women, men, children, Wandering Folk, herb wives, hillmen, healers, heretics – anyone whose face didn’t fit. An affront to human life, that one.’ Doc spat in the dust at his feet.

‘Waste of good spit, that. My throat’s so dry I’d roast a nomad myself if it’d earn me a decent ale – ow!’

Dogo’s chinstrap broke under the impact of Joz’s hand and the helmet went rolling off down the mountainside. The little man stepped to the edge of the trail to watch it bounce several times and come to a halt in the scrub grass at the bottom.

‘Ah well, it’s no great loss. Rubbish, these Istrian helmets are.’

He turned back to his companions, just in time to see the arrow lodge in Doc’s eye.

‘To me, to me!’ The Lord of Cantara’s voice shrieked over the whistle of arrow-flight, over the screams of injured horses and the cries of dying men falling around him. ‘Protect the lady!’

The Rosa Eldi stared around, eyes wide in bewilderment and horror. The ambush had been so swift— Her horse skittered suddenly as the man next to her howled in agony and fell sideways, half in and half out of his saddle.

‘Virelai!’ she cried.

But Virelai was gone, his mount taking flight in its terror, its rider flopping this way and that like a straw doll tossed into rapids. The Rose of the World kicked her own horse and the black and white lifted its head and took off after the bay.

When Tycho looked back, she was gone, already fifty yards away, the piebald horse a moving patch of light and shadow amidst the welter of bodies. Panic seized him. He drew his sword and flourished it wildly.‘To me!’ he cried again.‘Follow her!’

Direct progress was difficult: everywhere before them was chaos, as travellers and wagons, horses and dogs, wolves and goats and cats impeded both the Eyran attackers and the Istrian pursuers. Noncombatants scattered in all directions, screaming. Tycho hacked at them mercilessly.‘Get out of the way!’ His sword made brief, brutal contact and an arm flew overhead, spraying him with gore. The man to whom it had once belonged – an elderly nomad, separated from his small troop – watched it in puzzlement, then crumpled to the ground.

Blood was in the air, in the ground: you could smell it, the iron-sweet tang of it. The lady was close, but there was a heaving melee all around her. Beyond, he could see the southern lord battling his way towards her like a man possessed, with half the Istrian army at his heels. Aran Aranson assessed the situation swiftly. It had started as a reconnaissance mission, an advance scouting party sent on to see what they could see, return silently and report back; but when they had got to the top of the ridge they had been amazed to find the enemy almost upon them. An ambush had seemed too good a chance to miss, the defile a perfect situation for a surprise attack. All they had to do was to create sufficient confusion, separate the Rose from the Istrians and carry her off back to Ravn and make sail back to Eyra. Audacious and opportunistic, it might have made him the hero of the hour; but the situation was becoming more foolhardy by the second.

‘Back, back to the plain!’

Aran gave the signal to disengage and those Eyrans within earshot or sightline took to their heels, dodging and weaving between the knots of travelling folk, the rocks and the enemy. They were agile, sinewy men, born to rugged country and harsh conditions, and now they were running for their lives. Desperation lent fuel to their muscles. Unencumbered by armour or horses, they slipped back through the narrow defile whence they had sprung and hurled themselves down the mountainside, surfing the screes, zigzagging between boulders, at a speed no Istrian could match. Even as targets for the archers they proved too fleet and unpredictable, bobbing and jagging like hares; in moments they were gone.

Istrian militiamen poured through the gap after them, frustrated and furious to see them escape, oblivious to the shouted commands for order from behind them. Down the treacherous trackway they plunged, their horses sliding, loose rock skittering beneath their hooves. One lost its footing and ploughed into two in front, which in turn slid sideways and tumbled, smashing unstoppably into a cadre of troops and spilling their shrieking riders down three hundred feet of broken ground.

Of the chaos ahead Tycho Issian was unaware: all he knew was that the Rose was within sight and apparently unharmed, just passing through the defile on her runaway horse. Spurring on his mount, he trampled a dying soldier underfoot and raced after her. The piebald was a wily beast. It sensed clear air on the other side of the gap, a chance to escape the mayhem on this side. Head down, oblivious to the pursuit and knowing only that its rider was anguished, it wove between knots of fighting men, terrified travellers and loose animals straight for the gap.

Tycho swore foully. She was getting away. ‘Stop her!’ he yelled, but no one heard him. He ploughed through the middle of a wagon train, scattering children and dogs, rammed through a contingent of his own soldiery and rode on, screaming imprecations.

An unhorsed Istrian tried to stop the piebald and was spun aside for his pains. Emerging through the gap in the defile, the Rosa Eldi’s mount slid to a halt. The path below was jammed with fighting men and dying horses; but when it turned to seek another way, the Lord of Cantara was upon it with a triumphant shout. He grabbed at its reins, drew it alongside with such force he cut the piebald’s mouth so that blood jetted from it, covering its rider’s skirts. But the Rosa Eldi did not seem to be aware of anything: she had her hands clamped to her head and was screaming, an ululating wail of terror and despair.