Authors: Jude Fisher
‘Come on, Ferra, let’s get you somewhere safe,’ she said, gripping the girl by the arm.
But whilst Ferra’s body might be standing there on the path to Seal Point, her mind was somewhere else entirely. She stood like an afterwalker with the dying sun reflecting in one unblinking pupil and made no move to save herself at all. Katla rolled her eyes. ‘By the lord,’ she grumbled, getting a shoulder under Ferra’s left armpit, ‘you deserve to die, so you do.’
A vast amount of sweaty effort got Ferra Bransen to the relative safety of the fish-drying sheds. Katla stashed her inside with a sigh of relief, bolted the door to stop her from stumbling out, wailing like a gast, and then made for the steading.
Captain Galo Bastido drew his men to a halt at the wall surrounding the steading’s home meadow.
‘Remember,’ he warned them, ‘our priority here is to capture the man called Morten Danson and take him back to Lord Rui Finco alive and unharmed so that he may fashion ships for the Istrian war effort. After we have him safe and secure then, and only then, may you have your way with the women.’
He watched the Forin brothers, Milo and Nuno, exchange an amused glance, as if nothing their leader could say was going to stop them having their fun, saw how Pisto Dal stroked his scarred cheek thoughtfully, and how the two swordsmen stood back as if waiting for others to do the dirty work for them. It might well be dirty work, too, he thought, assessing the view in front of them. The steading’s main hall was a long, low structure built sturdily from timber, stone and turf. It was designed to withstand high winds and lashing rains, debilitating frosts and freezes. The main door was closed tight and no doubt bolted and barricaded from behind. There were three women up on the roof with weapons in their hands, looking defiant. There was, however, not a single man in sight which was a curiosity in itself, and though he could glimpse a crowd of faces at each of the small, hide-shrouded windows, he could have sworn not a one of them wore a beard. But whether the hall was occupied by men or by women, it made no odds to the Bastard. He had been in similar situations before and he knew how such a building might be taken. And it was not without considerable loss of life.
He climbed the wall and stood carefully out of arrowshot. ‘Greetings to you people of Rockfall!’ he shouted in the Old Tongue and waited for a response.
None came. The women on the roof stood there, nocking arrows to the strings of their bows as nonchalantly as if they were about to shoot chickens for fun, as he and his brother had as children on their grandfather’s farm. One of them looked old enough to be his grandmother.
He drew a deep breath and went on: ‘My name is Galo Bastido and I am the captain of this force. Istria has declared war on your islands and we have come from the Empire city of Forent on behalf of its lord to bring back the shipmaker, Morten Danson. Send him out to us and we will sail away and leave you in peace. If you do not, we shall take him by force and many of you will die unnecessarily!’
Behind him, he heard Baranguet crack his knuckles and make a bawdy comment to his neighbour.
A slightly built woman – one of the three standing on the roof – who wore her hair in two long, deep red braids, took it upon herself to speak for the people of the island. ‘Be off with you!’ she shouted in the Old Tongue, her Eyran accent rendering the words harsh and guttural. ‘We have no intention of opening our doors to you or allowing anyone to be taken onto your vessel without a fight.’
Bastido laughed. ‘I can assure you, madam, that you do not wish to pick a fight with us! I have here thirty trained warriors, all raring for a scrap!’
‘And I have fifty!’ Bera lied.
‘Fifty defenceless women, more like!’ Baranguet called out. ‘And each of them ripe for the picking if you are anything to go by!’
His captain rounded on him furiously, though he kept his voice low. ‘It would be far better to take the shipmaker without a battle, Master Whip; wounded women fetch a poor price on a slave block . . .’
Up on the roof, Otter Garsen took the Mistress of Rockfall by the arm. ‘Bera,’ she urged in a low whisper, designed for no one else, including the Seal Rock women behind them, to hear, ‘perhaps we should let the shipmaker go to them. What good is he to us, except to send the lot of us to Feya’s weaving room for all eternity?’
‘No,’ Bera returned fiercely. ‘Morten Danson has already undergone the indignity of being abducted by my family, and I have lost one of my sons into the bargain. He may not be a man much to my taste, but I will not hand him over to a rabble of Empire mercenaries like this. The Rockfall clan has some pride left.’
‘They look like fearsome men,’ Otter continued. ‘What chance do we stand against them?’
‘That we shall soon discover.’
‘Can you not at least lie and say Morten Danson is not here?’
Bera snorted. ‘We Rockfallers do not lie. It is a matter of honour.’
‘Honour will see us all die.’
‘If we do, it will be with honour, nevertheless.’
‘Then it shall be with many of our enemies lying dead at our feet,’ Otter declared grimly.
Bera Rolfsen said nothing more. Instead, she waved her sword at the Istrians. ‘Women we may be: defenceless we are not. If you imagine we represent an easy harvest, you and your men may try your luck, Captain Galo Bastido; but you will find no easy pickings here, and the only crop you will reap shall be one of spears and arrows!’
Bastido shrugged. ‘Ah well, madam,’ he called back, ‘have it your own way. You cannot say we did not give you a fair chance!’ He turned to his men. ‘Try not to hurt them too much,’ he said loudly, ‘at least not visibly. Remember each of them alive and hale will fetch over three hundred cantari in Gibeon’s market!’
Just as the Istrains began to move forward, one of their number cried out suddenly and fell down. It was one of the north coast men, a wiry, dark-skinned man known as ‘the Gutter’, who’d worked the fishing fleet off Cera for over twenty years and had a way with a gutting spike. Fittingly, an arrow jutted out of his abdomen. He writhed about like a thrashing snake, clutching the shaft with gore-slimed hands and making the most horrible noises, until Baranguet cut his head off and quieted him. ‘Belly wound,’ he said matter-of-factly to Bastido, who looked faintly appalled. ‘They rarely survive a belly wound, and he was making a terrible racket.’
Pisto Dal laughed. ‘I never liked him much anyway.’
It was left to Clermano, the most seasoned of them all, to wonder whence the stray shaft had come. It had taken the Gutter, who had been standing towards the back of the group, in the left side; and it seemed too long a shot to have come from the hall.
Clermano was not the only one wondering this. Otter turned to the Seal Rock woman; but her arrow was still nocked; and Bera had not yet opened her quiver. She called down into the hall below, ‘Did one of you do that? Speak now!’
It was left to Kitten Soronsen to reply. ‘No one here has loosed an arrow: how that came about is as much a mystery to us as it is to you.’
Oblivious to the snagging thorns, Katla Aransen climbed swiftly down from her stance on top of the hawthorn arch and sped silently west, in the lee of a drystone wall, her bow bumping against her spine. Where the wall turned at a right angle to meet the home field, she stopped and peered over. She was now directly behind the raiders, some of whom were engaged in slinging the headless body of their recently dead companion into a ditch, whilst the rest were opening quivers and nocking their ornate, southern-style bows.
Not much range on those
, Katla noted.
They’ll have to get in close to the steading to be effective
. She saw how her mother and the women on the roof of the hall had their arrows trained on the visitors and nodded in appreciation. She had never seen her mother in such a light before. Her chest swelled with unexpected pride.
The raiders fired off a few testing bolts, which flew straight and true, but fell well short of their intended targets. Their leader said something to his men in the hissing Empire speech, and they began to advance.
Go on
, thought Katla,
just another few yards
. . .
Another few yards and Otter Garsen made good on her promise, taking one of the raiders right through the throat with a quarrel fletched with black-tipped goose feathers.
One of mine
, Katla thought cheerfully, beginning to enjoy the situation. She extracted a similar arrow and fitted it to the hunting bow. Then she sighted it on a big man wearing his black hair in a tail and his right ear ringed with silver. With a whisper, the shaft whipped through the air between them and took the southerner between the shoulderblades. No question as to where that shot had come from: like a hare she scurried the length of the wall, keeping well down all the way. At the corner, she bobbed up. Three shafts looped over her head. She felt the breeze from them skim her hair. Two of the raiders detached themselves from the group and came after her.
‘Nuts!’ swore Katla, and ran away down the hill towards the copse, whooping with laughter. Once in the stand of oaks there, she shinned up one of the rough-barked monsters and pressed herself along a branch. It was awkward drawing the bow in such a position, but she and Halli had mock-hunted one another since the age of four, and she always won. The first man came crashing into the wood like a boar on heat. She shot him in the chest. The second man arrived a few seconds later. There was no way she could sight another arrow on him in time. Slipping her arm through the bow to stop it falling, she took her thigh-knife out of its sheath and waited for an opportune moment. This man was more wary than the first. He did not see his fallen companion until he had trodden on his outflung arm; but instead of bending to examine the body, he leapt away backwards and Katla’s knife embedded itself in the moss where he had been standing.
He turned his face up to the oak. A puckered scar ran the length of one cheek, gathering the skin on either side into obscenely pink and shiny folds, which stood out harshly against the walnut brown of the rest and the corner of his mouth was pulled up into a ferocious half-grin which exposed two sharp yellow teeth just like a rat’s. Fascinated by the disgusting irregularity the scar gave to his features, Katla scanned his face, then watched in horror as his black eyes fixed on her amongst the yellow, thinning leaves and the left side of his mouth curved up to match the right.
‘Got you!’ he said in the Old Tongue.
It was the last thing Pisto Dal said. Katla’s second knife, a finely weighted object with a chunk of sardonyx in the hilt and a damascened blade, inserted itself with a gristly thump in the place where his nose would normally be. She watched his eyes roll down to view this new protuberance, then back into his skull. His legs folded under him and he crumpled to his knees, ending his life in the traditional position of the devout Falla worshipper.
‘No,’ Katla said softly, letting herself down out of the oak. ‘Got
you
.’
By the time she had retrieved and cleaned her precious knives and got back to the top of the hill, matters had taken a turn for the worse. The raiders had got in close to the hall, too close now for arrow-shot from the windows. Only two of their number lay dead in the home meadow, though several dozen goose-fletched shafts pincushioned the ground. Several spears lay scattered like sticks. Another two men were limping, and had bloody fabric tied tightly around their legs, at calf and thigh respectively. Some of them had swarmed up the corner of the hall and made it onto the low turf roof. Of Bera and Otter there was no sign. One of the Seal Rock women, however, lay unmoving up there with two thick shafts protruding from her torso. The men on the roof were digging at the turf.
Inside the hall, Bera Rolfsen had something of a mutiny on her hands.
‘Send him out!’ demanded Tian Jensen again. ‘He’s not one of us: we don’t care what happens to him.’
For his part, Morten Danson looked like a man in shock. His face was still and white and his hands were shaking. Even so, ‘Send me out then, Mistress Bera,’ he said. ‘They want me to build ships for them: they cannot afford to kill me.’
‘That we will not,’ Bera returned fiercely. ‘Even if it would save the lives of those few of us here, to allow them to take you will result in many more lives being lost in the long run if you help to build them a fleet of vessels with which to storm Eyran shores.’
The shipmaker hung his head. He did not know what to say. He did not want to be taken captive by these rough foreign men, that was for sure; but neither did he wish to be held responsible for the deaths of these mad Rockfall women. Besides, if the raiders took the hall by force, might he not be killed anyway, by accident?
‘He could build flawed ships for them,’ suggested Forna Stensen guilefully. ‘Then they would sink in the Northern Ocean and take their accursed crews down with them and Sur can build up the walls of his howe with their bones.’
Morten Danson nodded vigorously. ‘I could, I could!’
Bera laughed bitterly. ‘If you think they will leave us be when they have their hands on you, then you are a greater fool than even I took you for, Master Shipwright. Once they have you safely bound, they will come for us: they may well be happy to collect whatever fee this Lord of Forent may pay them for your safe delivery; but these are not men who will be so easily satisfied.’ She turned to the gathered women and addressed the room at large. ‘Take a look at them. These men are a rabble, a mob of hired hands and ne’er-do-wells who would sell their own mothers, grandmothers, aunts and lovers if it would make them a single cantari of profit or gain them a moment’s advantage. You have all heard tales of the Southern Empire and the illicit appetites of their men. They respect women so little that they cover every piece of them except those parts which may accord pleasure. And you saw what they did to poor Magla Felinsen—’ At this, Otter Garsen moaned and knit her hands, but Bera went on mercilessly: ‘And how they dealt with the man who fell with the arrow in his gut. These are not honourable warriors bound by a code of fair behaviour; they will kill for what they want and take whatever is left for profit. Mark what I say and imagine how they are even now calculating our worth on a southern slave block!’