Wild Magic (25 page)

Katla laughed. ‘Halli will have to wait till he returns to Rockfall for any handfasting, and that’s only if my father and Jenna agree.’

‘As the captain of the
Snowland Wolf
, which sails Sur’s moon path and on which Halli serves as crew and Jenna travels as my guest, I have the god’s authority to handfast the two of them if they so wish it,’ Tam said mildly.

Katla raised an eyebrow. ‘And what if she doesn’t wish it?’

Tam Fox shrugged. ‘More fool her. I think she will, though. She’s a woman much in need of a man’s regard, and anyone with half an eye can see that your brother loves her well.’

‘Are you such an expert on love?’ Katla chewed a piece of lamb, took another swig from the flask to wash it down with. The meat felt hot and greasy on her tongue: she swallowed the mouthful quickly before she gagged.

‘Some might consider me such.’

‘But you never wed.’

‘In another lifetime, I did.’

Katla was surprised. She looked up from her plate of food to find that the mummer’s eyes had gone distant and unfocused. Something in his face had softened, making him look at once younger and yet older than his years.

‘What happened? Where is she now, your wife?’

Tam Fox shook his head. ‘It’s not a subject for a pleasant evening like this. I’d rather talk about you, Katla Aransen.’

‘Me?’

The mummers’ chief took the platter away from her and set it on the ground. Then he took both her hands in his own. They were very large, his hands, and very warm, with big, square, capable-looking fingers decorated with several intricately worked silver rings. It felt quite comforting to be held so; but if it was so comforting, why was her heart starting to pound?

‘Katla, you’re a very beautiful young woman.’

Katla almost choked on her wine. Beautiful was not a word she would think of applying to herself; nor was it a term anyone else was likely to confer upon her. Possibly Erno had thought her so, but that had all been trickery. The young Istrian – Saro Vingo – had looked at her in such a way and made her feel as if she might be beautiful: but that had been before the burning, before he had come at her through the fire with his sword drawn. She pushed away the haunting memory of the Istrian’s intense, black-eyed gaze. Tam Fox was another matter entirely. She had always known his attraction to her, but had dismissed it as being a part of what she had thought of as his indiscriminate womanising. But having spent a month in his company she had not in all that time seen him with another woman, nor heard others gossip of his affairs, and realised that she might have to reassess her judgement of him. Not that a month was long enough to make such a judgement; but curiously she found she didn’t much care.

‘My advances towards you as we sailed into Halbo were boorish and ill-timed,’ the mummers’ chief went on, his voice barely more than a murmur. ‘But being in close quarters with you on the ship made me rash.’ His hand brushed her cheek and she felt the blood race through her abdomen and chest; felt it travel up her throat and make her face and ears burn. Tam Fox’s face was suddenly very close to hers: she could feel his warm breath on her neck, smell the wine fumes as he spoke, but whatever he was saying now washed over her unnoticed, a jumble of meaningless sound. All she could focus on was his mouth, for the rest of him was a delicious blur: and so she found herself staring at his sharply chiselled top lip, its deep runnel partially masked by the red-gold beard; the long, full lower lip, a pale, dry, fleshy pink. Then, without taking her eyes from that mesmeric mouth, she placed the wine-flask carefully on the sand, cupped his strong jaw in both her hands and kissed it. The mouth was as she had imagined it might be: hot and muscular, tasting of spices and smoke. And then she abandoned herself to Tam’s insistent tongue and roving hands, caught up fistfuls of his wild hair – beads and shells and snakeskins and all – and pressed herself against him till she thought the heat of her body might just burn all their clothes away. It was only a little while later when she felt the onshore breeze brush her skin that she realised he had managed to remove her tunic and leggings without her having had any conscious knowledge of the fact at all.

When she awoke the next morning, it was to the sound of a horde of small trolls painfully excavating the inside of her skull with their vicious little picks and hammers. Each thump made her wince, and that was before she opened her eyes. Sunlight lanced her pupils like hot needles; she shut them again immediately, only to be assailed by a horrible, flaring red that scoriated her eyeballs. Her mouth felt as furry as the thing she was lying on, and she felt an overwhelming need to pee, throw up or merely die.

Feeling something hard pressing uncomfortably into her naked buttock, she shifted her weight and reached down. Her fingers closed over a number of small, unidentifiable objects. Very slowly, she opened her eyes again, shielding herself from the worst of the light with her other hand, and held her discoveries aloft. In her grasp were a pair of pale pink cowrie shells, and a twist of silver wire with several long red hairs still attached to it. More shells were scattered across the blanket; the shrivelled husk of a snakeskin lay beside her on the pillow. Mystified, she looked around. It took a while to register her surroundings or, indeed, her companion. Inside a makeshift tent of sailcloth and lashed-together oars, the chief of the mummers’ troupe lay propped on one elbow, regarding her with a hugely satisfied smile. Some of his braids had come undone and his hair was in disarray.

Events from the previous night started to come back to her in hallucinatory little flashes, and suddenly she became aware that the only item of clothing she was still wearing appeared to consist of a single felt sock, and that was half off her left foot.

Katla groaned. Now death definitely seemed the most welcome option.

‘Well, that’s a most charming greeting, Katla Aransen. Good morning to you, too. And so far I’ve found it to be a very beautiful morning: the sun is shining, the wind is true and there appears to be a naked girl in my bed. Not a bad way to start the day.’

‘Did we—?’

It was a pointless question. The bearskin beneath her hip was still slick and damp. Katla was no virgin: she knew what that must mean. This time her groan was louder.

‘By Sur, I must have been drunk.’

Tam Fox regarded her curiously. ‘You could not imagine engaging with me unless you were rats’-arsed?’

It was a quaint term used predominantly by Fair Islanders. Inconsequentially, amidst all the other confusions, Katla wondered whether that was where he had originated. Her short, bitter laugh was her only reply: his question had surely been hypothetical. When Tam leaned closer and put a hand out to her face she jerked away like a skittish mare.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. Even so, perhaps I will ask your father again for the right to wed you, when we return.’

‘Again?’

Tam nodded.

Katla was aghast. ‘Why, what did he say the first time?’

The mummer tapped the side of his nose. ‘That’s my secret.’

‘I will never wed,’ she said vehemently.

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

Tam raised his eyebrows. ‘If that is your choice, then so be it. ’Twould be a terrible waste, though, if such a lovely body were not to grace a good man’s bed on a regular basis, most preferably mine . . .’

Then he pushed back the covers and ducked out of the tent to stand stark naked in the sun. The light fell on his long, lean muscles, his narrow waist and neat buttocks. He was a well-made man, that much was undeniable, but what really caught her eye was the mass of scar tissue across his back and shoulders.

She called his name to catch his attention, meaning to ask him what had caused such despoliation to his flesh, but when he turned to face her full on, the question went right out of her head, and when he smiled and came back into the tent she made only the most cursory protest when he slid under the furs beside her once more and started to run his big hands gently down her flanks.

Later, it was her turn to prop herself up on an elbow and survey his drowsy face. ‘Do not get the idea that this means more than it does. I still will not wed you, or any man.’

‘It means enough; and enough, as my mother always said, is as much as a feast.’ He smiled like the cheesemaker’s cat. ‘Besides, I only said that perhaps I would ask your father. I may have changed my mind now that I have sampled the goods.’

Katla thumped him furiously and got dressed in such haste that it was only when she stomped off across the beach with the mummer’s laughter ringing in her ears that she realised she had put her leggings on back to front and that the rip in them must have revealed to anyone she passed (and there were quite a few, most of whom seemed to be well aware, from the knowing smiles they conferred upon her, where and how she had spent the night) a very considerable expanse of her bare arse.

They cast off from Kjaley around noon and sailed west-southwest until the sun began its slow dip towards the horizon. They had made good time: a strong wind filled the sail all the way so that they sped along at such a clip Katla could have sworn the prow of the
Snowland Wolf
barely skimmed the surface of the sea. This time tomorrow they would be home. She could feel the draw of the islands in her bones, like an aroma scented on the air, acknowledged but not yet identified.

Halli must have had the same thought; though prompted more by his understanding of dead reckoning and navigation than by some uncanny intuition. She watched him take Tam Fox aside, watched the two of them in deep conversation; saw Tam take a handful of Halli’s hair in his fist and shear it off with his belt-knife. Katla frowned, remembering a similar occurrence of her own. A little while later, Tam crossed the ship and took a bundle of old, faded twine from the bottom of the costumes chest and passed it to Urse, who made his way steadily up the length of the
Snowland Wolf
, tied one end of the twine carefully to the sternpost and then let the other down over the stern to trail in their wake. Then nobody did anything for the best part of an hour; except Jenna, who had donned her best blue dress again and was now fussing with her hair.

Katla marched boldly up to Tam Fox, who was now sitting on the chest, plaiting together a black and yellow braid.

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded, hands on hips.

The mummers’ chief did not even look up from his task. ‘You’ll see.’

‘I’ll see what?’ Katla persisted.

Tam said nothing. His fingers flicked the strands of hair expertly in and out of one another until he reached the end of the braid. There he wound the remaining strands into a complicated knot and finished off the binding neatly. He waved it in front of Katla’s nose, then whisked it out of her reach and stowed it in his belt-pouch.

‘Wait and see.’

And with that, he leapt to his feet and padded his way down to the stern, where he drew the soaking twine aboard, unhooked its dry end from the post and brought it dripping back up to the centre of the ship. There, he squeezed the seawater out of it until there was a small pool at his feet; then he called Jenna and Halli to him. Katla watched curiously as Tam Fox made the pair face one another, then wound the wet twine about their wrists in a complicated series of figure-of-eights so that their palms were inextricably pressed together. Then he crouched, dabbled his fingers in the puddle of brine and anointed each of them on the forehead and tongue.

By now, a group of the mummers had gathered around their captain and the lovers: Katla had to move nimbly to get herself to the fore of the crowd in time to hear Tam Fox intone: ‘This salt you taste is for remembrance, that the Lord Sur has witnessed your promises.’ Then he raised his voice. ‘The Lord of the Waters, Lord of the Storm, Lord of the Isles watches the vows which you, Halli Aranson and you, Jenna Finnsen, make this day in your handfasting. This twine that I have bound about you symbolises the endless circle of life, which is the Lord’s gift. In exchange, I offer this braid as a token of their vow to take one another as man and wife within a year from this day, and to honour Sur’s name with their lives and the lives of the children they will bring into your world.’

He took the braid of black and gold hair from the pouch at his belt and held it aloft so that all might see. Then he cast it over the side. Jenna followed its arc, her upturned face lit golden by the setting sun. The saltwater gleamed on her lips, which were curved into the most blissful smile. Halli’s face was blithe: he looked, Katla thought, like the child he had once been. Apart from the beard, and that big strong jaw . . . The braid lay bobbing on the sparkling waves for a second, then it filled with water and sank slowly from view.

Everyone started to talk at once, congratulating the couple, exclaiming at the tightness of the binding Tam had made, and at the unusual configuration of knots.

‘Look,’ Min Codface was saying, ‘he’s woven in a blessing for five children. Five! Imagine that!’

‘Are you sure it’s not five sheep?’ someone else said. ‘The knots are very similar for “babes” and “ewes” . . .’

They all laughed.

Katla laughed with them, though she was more than a little annoyed that no one had thought to include her in their plans before the fact. She was about to swallow her irritation and offer her own good wishes to her brother and her friend when she felt a vague tremor beneath her feet. The vibration she felt from it travelled through her soles and into the bones of her shins, setting up a faint aching sensation. The ship rocked slightly, then it was gone.

She frowned, shifted her feet. When she looked up, she found that Tam was watching her curiously and she looked away quickly, just in time to catch sight of an oddly forked tail emerging out of the foam of the steerboard wash, and then disappear again.

She ran to the gunwale, looked overboard. Nothing. Nothing except a serried rank of greying waves tinged with the last of the sun’s red light and the bright white of the scudding surf. But the wood under her palms told another story. The planking was filled with weird energy: her hands tingled and buzzed, but not in the familiar way that denoted the approach to land, the passage of the ship over reefs or veins of crystal, lodes of metal; deep-buried ores. The charge was more frenetic, as if it were tangled and knotted, caught in cross-currents; confused, warped, even. So when the surface of the sea began to behave in a strange way – swelling out in slow, broad circles, heaving upward like a welling geyser – she held her breath and waited, beguiled, hypnotised, unable to move. Gradually, the waves swamped away from whatever they had been hiding, to reveal the thing that had been following them, that had brushed the keel of the ship a few moments ago, the thing that owned the forked tail she had glimpsed, and she was barely more than a little surprised.