Authors: Jude Fisher
If anything, this possibility seemed even more frightening than the prospect of the southern raiders, who were at least warm flesh and blood, men with understandable natures and appetites. The Rockfall women – raised on the glorious, overblown superstitions of the Northern Isles in which the unquiet dead who refused to lie peacefully where they had fallen or been buried rose up blackened with rot and fury, swelled to twice their normal size and wrought havoc on the farms, livestock and folk of their home region, all began to shriek and run away from the apparition.
‘No!’ cried the voice again. ‘Come back and help me put out the fire. Save yourselves!’
But Fat Breta, Thin Hildi, Kit Farsen and Forna Stensen were already sprinting across the home field; and the old women from Seal Rock, surprisingly spry for their age, were not far behind them. But Otter Garsen stood rooted to the spot, despite the fiery turf raining down around her, staring fixedly upwards. The figure on the roof did not look much like her daughter; for all that an afterwalker could change their shape and manner of speech beyond recognition, she was suddenly sure it was not Magla.
‘Otter!’ shouted the thing on the roof. ‘Where’s my mother?’
It was Katla Aransen. Otter’s mouth dropped open. She turned and dashed back into the hall. ‘Bera, Bera!’
The smoke was thick and roiling. Some of it churned upwards to escape through the holes Katla Aransen had made in the roof, but the rest hung dense and choking: she could not see the Mistress of Rockfall anywhere. The building seemed deserted. On she went, her good hand pressed to her face. The hall’s central pillar was now ablaze from top to root and lines of greedy flame had begun to run along the rafters, illuminating the damaged loft-room and the roof beyond. When she turned around, her route back to the door had gone, veiled by new billows of smoke. Her task suddenly seemed foolhardy and pointless: surely no one could be alive in here? She must have been transfixed by the sight of Katla on the roof and missed Bera Rolfsen as she left the building with the others. She turned, and stumbled over the body of the dead raider, went down with a crash and put out her arms to brace herself. Agony as hot as any flame shot up her arm as the ground impacted with her ruined hand. The pain seemed to clear her head. The smoke was less dense at this level: she peered through it and thought she saw two pairs of feet not far away. Gritting her teeth, she crawled towards them.
One pair of feet indeed belonged to the Mistress of Rockfall. Bera Rolfsen stood coughing and wheezing in front of her aged mother. They appeared to be engaged in a fierce debate but from down below, Otter could not hear what was being said. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet.
‘Mother, I cannot leave you!’
Hesta Rolfsen had seated herself in Aran Aranson’s great carved chair, her hands gripping the dragonheads at the ends of the armrests as if she feared her daughter would try to drag her from it. She was too short for it: her feet swung freely like a child’s; like a child her face wore an expression of absolute obstinacy.
‘Here I sit and here I will stay. Rockfall is my home: I am too old to leave it.’
‘Who says you will have to leave? The raiders will not bother to take you and the old folk.’
‘Why should I wish to live when my home is burned down and my daughter is taken from me, while I remain a broken, helpless old woman, of no worth even on a southern slave block?’
Bera Rolfsen made a sound of utter, futile frustration. ‘Then you will die here in the fire.’
In response, the old woman merely folded her arms and stared at a point a few inches from Bera’s head, which is how she came to spy the blurry outline of Otter Garsen. A toothless grin stretched itself across her face. ‘Otter, Otter my dear. Have you come back to die with me?’
‘No!’ Otter coughed, ‘I have come to take you out of here to join your kin. Katla Aransen is on the roof, trying singlehandedly to save the place from burning to the ground!’
‘I fear she is too late and too little to do that,’ Hesta said sorrowfully. She reached out and took her daughter’s hand, patted it softly. ‘You save yourself as best you can, my darling girl, and Katla too. Even if it means going with the raiders, at least save your lives. I am too old to see any more of this world; but much still lies before the pair of you, and if you do not survive, then who will be left to avenge my death?’
This last was ungainsayable.
Bera fell to her knees to embrace her mother one last time, then she rose and, taking Otter’s arm, made her way blindly through the burning hall.
But their way to the door was blocked: some of the roof timbers had charred through at their centres and fallen down across the room. Smoking wreckage lay in their path, through which great gouts of flame burst up sporadically, and there seemed no way through. When they looked up, they could see stars through the holes in the roof.
Perhaps
, Bera thought,
this will be the last thing I see: the Navigator’s Star which is no doubt at this same moment lighting my husband’s journey into the icefields of the North
.
It might have been a comforting thought in other circumstances. In her current situation, the sight merely made her angry: angry that she should be forced to experience this unpleasant fate; angry that Aran had left her and taken all the men with him, rendering Rockfall defenceless.
‘Damn you, Aran Aranson!’ she yelled into the night. ‘Damn you and your expedition!’
A head appeared. It was a charred head, all black and filthy, with wild hair and bright eyes. It looked like a sprite. It was Katla.
‘Mother, Otter – here!’ A coil of sealskin rope fell down through the hole towards the two women. Loops had been knotted all the way up its length at three-foot intervals.
Bera laughed. ‘Up you go, Otter!’
With only one good hand, it was hard for Otter Garsen to make the climb up the rope-ladder, but she had no wish to die in the smoking ruins of Rockfall’s hall. Up she went in an ungainly fashion, grabbing for each hold with a fervour born of panic, hanging on with the elbow of her right arm while her left searched for purchase. She disappeared through the hole in the roof and a moment later the sealskin rope came looping down again.
It was a glorious winter’s day. The sun shone like scattered gold upon the sea, there was a chill in the air and a stiff breeze filled the sail and drove them at a good clip toward the straits and the Long Man. As they passed beneath the shadow of the great stack, Erno Hamson gazed up at where its sheer pink-white crown glowed in the sun, sending a haze of sparkles of light shimmering off the crystal veins amidst the granite and remembered how it had always been Katla Aransen’s avowed intent to climb to the top of that looming three hundred foot tower.
‘But once you got up there, how on Elda would you get down?’ he had enquired in horror. He had never had a head for heights, had no wish whatsoever to be led to the top of some terrible, exposed lump of rock in the middle of the sea, no matter how much he loved her.
Katla had just thrown her head back and laughed. ‘I’ll think of something!’ she had declared cheerfully. It was her attitude to everything.
He could imagine her now, sitting astride that narrow summit, one leg dangling down the east face, the other down the seaward side, watching the gulls slide past with her eyes half shut in purest delight, like a cat replete with thieved delicacies snoozing off its illicit feast in the sun.
He could not wait to see her.
They sailed into Rockfall harbour in the hour before noon, having made slightly less good time than Mam had expected due to a capricious wind which had seemed to change its direction every time they reset the sail. The harbour was empty. Aran Aranson’s longship, the
Fulmar’s Gift
, was not at anchor; nor were any of the myriad little boats usually moored there. Erno supposed they might be out at sea, gathering in whatever fish there were for the taking in the mildness of the season. He scanned the landscape that came into focus as they rounded the first harbour. An ominous coil of dark smoke spiralled up into the air over the steading and was carried away over the hillside beyond. He narrowed his eyes. Something was wrong with this scene. They kept the fires burning in the hall most of the time, for cooking as well as for warmth, but the dense blackness of the smoke struck a wrong chord. A chill ran through his heart.
They sailed into the inner harbour. No one came out to greet them, and Erno felt the muscles of his chest constrict.
‘This is not right,’ he confided to Joz Bearhand. ‘The Rockfallers are always hospitable.’
‘Perhaps they are being wary,’ said Mam, strapping on her swordbelt.
A grinding noise on the steerboard side of the bow made them all jump. Persoa ran lightly up onto the gunwale and looked over the side. ‘It’s a big piece of wood,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite see what it’s from.’
Dogo fetched the gaff and he and Joz caught the object and brought it to the surface for closer inspection. It was the remains of a small craft, deliberately holed below the waterline. They looked at one another. The further they penetrated the inner harbour, the more wrecked vessels they encountered – a skiff, keel-up, its strakes ruined; a faering foundering in the mud, a fishing boat, its hull all smashed.
Erno’s face was white. ‘Enemies have been here,’ he said fearfully.
‘Perhaps the Rockfallers did this themselves to prevent others using them,’ Mam said softly, though it did not look as if even she believed her own words.
When the ship hit the shingle on the gently shelving shore, Erno was the first out into the surf, mindless of the cold water, the state of his carefully chosen clothes, or anything save knowing what it was that had happened here. The mercenaries followed shortly after, though Mam left Persoa in charge on board and made sure the crew were armed and ready for action if it were required of them.
‘Challenge anyone who passes,’ she instructed them. ‘Ask them the name of the swordsmith who works on this island, and if they do not know it’s a woman, or that her name is Katla Aransen, kill them.’
As they ran up the lane from the harbour past the fish sheds, something whimpered and clawed at the silvered wood of the third hut.
‘A dog,’ said Joz dismissively. ‘Just a dog got itself trapped.’
They opened the barred door with some care: even a trapped and weakened dog could give you a nasty bite. Instead, out fell Ferra Bransen in a ragged dress and stained shift. Her face was swollen and she kept babbling at them. There were black bruises on her arms and one of her eyes was crusted with blood. They couldn’t get any sense out of her. Doc wrapped her in his cloak and carried her back down to the harbour to Persoa.
In the undergrowth leading up to the steading they found the battered body of a black-and-white dog, and a little farther on the corpse of his companion, the shepherd, Fili Kolson.
Grimly, they continued on their way. Near the top of the hill they came upon the thorny arch known as Feya’s Cross. A strip of red silk lay forlornly upon the ground, trodden into the path by the passage of many feet. Erno picked it up, frowning. It reminded him of the betrothal dress Katla had worn at the Gathering; but the image which intruded itself upon his mind was of a small dark woman wearing that garment instead, which made him frown harder. He pocketed the piece thoughtfully. A little further on and a horrifying vista presented itself.
At the top of the hill, the home meadow stretched away from them, strewn with discarded weaponry. The Great Hall of Rockfall lay beyond, a smouldering ruin. Charred timbers stuck out of it like the ribs of a dead animal. He gave a loud, hoarse cry.
Crows lifted from the field in a clatter of wings, cawing with displeasure. It did not take much imagination to know the manner of the feast they had disturbed. Bodies lay tumbled here and there: men, in wargear and southern dress; women face down, their skirts bundled above their waists so that their private parts were immodestly exposed to the unwinking eye of the bright noon sun.
Erno Hamson fell to his knees. ‘My god,’ he said, over and over.
Mam marched to the burned hall, her jaw set so hard that the sinews stood out on her neck. Her sword was out, though it did not seem likely there would be any practical use for it other than the digging of graves. Doc and Dogo mooched speculatively around the bodies, removing an item here, an item there. Joz stared about him, his beard jutting fiercely. He sheathed the Dragon of Wen and walked from one corpse to another rearranging the clothing of the women. He did not put anything past Dogo. Each one he turned over was older than he had expected from the mere fact of her rape. It seemed southern raiders cared little for the age and dignity of their victims. It did not surprise him: he had seen sights like this, and worse.
Erno had not. He tailed the older man, grimacing at the revelation of each face and feeling guilty at the relief he felt every time it was not Katla. He recognised Tian Jensen and Otter Garsen and thought a couple of the others might be from the Seal Rock area. There were no young women here.
‘Taken for the slave markets,’ Joz said gruffly as if hearing his thoughts. ‘Taken to be sold to brothels in the southern towns.’
A red wave of fury engulfed Erno. Surely Katla would die rather than allow such a fate to befall her? But even as he thought this, the conviction came to him that even were such to be the case, he had rather a thousand times over see her alive and ill-used, than dead and untouched. He looked up, his eyes blurry with unshed tears, and saw Mam coming back out of the hall, a fine sword in her hand. He recognised the style of that sword: it was unquestionably one of Katla Aransen’s finer pieces of work. His heart lurched sickeningly. ‘What?’ he croaked out. ‘What have you found?’
‘You might ask who,’ Mam said and her face was grim. ‘But I do not know. You must come and undertake the task of naming them.’
It was with heavy steps that Erno Hamson made his way into the hall where he had been fostered since he was a child of eight, the place he had long considered his home. It was a ruin. The roof beams had fallen in and so had the ceiling and much of the turf. Little fires still smouldered where the pieces of turf sustained them. Light drilled down through the curling blue smoke in harsh shafts, illuminating the legs of a dead man, the outstretched hand of a young woman. ‘Oh no,’ he breathed, and now the pent tears spilled.