The Rose of the World (20 page)

I am seeing the future
, he thought dully.
A terrible, terrible future
. He felt no emotional attachment to the burning people in the ball of fire, although no one should die so horribly under the eyes of a monster. But to see Saro so treated, and by his own brother, was more than he could bear. Of all those left living in the world, he counted only Saro as a friend. The intensity of his outrage took him greatly by surprise. He felt it as a physical presence in his chest and in his head: a swelling of heat hard against bone and muscle.

A mad thought came to him. He would save Saro! He would journey to Jetra and find him, release him from his vile bondage, spirit him away to safer regions.

But even as the thought came to him, despair overwhelmed it. How could he, Virelai, failed apprentice mage, enigma and trickster, achieve such a grand aim? He was lost in a desert, brought back from the dead: an unnatural thing in an inimical place. He had no power, no plan, no map of the future.

But perhaps the crystal knew better. He laid hands on the stone again and brought the image of Saro clearly to mind, concentrating every scrap of willpower he could muster.

Unhelpfully, however, instead of Jetran vistas the crystal now offered him desert light and billowing ash-clouds. A blurred view of towering rock. Streams of fiery red snaking out of fissures, coursing between boulders, cooling into steaming ribbons and heaps.

What place is this?
thought Virelai fearfully. As if in answer, the crystal drew back its focus so that he now saw the scene from afar: a sharp red peak gouting black smoke and yellow fumes into the sky, a great swathe of boulder-strewn sand stretching below it. Two tiny, separate, silhouetted figures could be discerned to east and west in the far distance, making their way – not towards the viewer, but crazily, suicidally, towards the ash-spewing mountain. One was some huge creature, for it walked on all fours. The other appeared human, its head encircled by a tawny nimbus of hair; but whether this was its natural hue, or whether it took its colour from the fiery air, it was impossible to tell. The first figure stopped, turned, appeared to sniff the air; and then Virelai saw and knew it.

Bëte. The Beast; as large as life and healed from whatever wounds it had taken in that rout by the river.

He shivered. Something odd and unsettling was afoot here, and he had no understanding of it at all.

Virelai closed his eyes and touched his forehead to the stone in weariness. At once, he jerked back as if burned. With terrible clarity, Alisha Skylark came riding into view upon a black horse. He shrank back, aghast.

He knew that horse. He had seen it lying stone-dead on the same battlefield where he had himself been raised.

A trickle of sweat ran into his eye and he blinked it away desperately, wanting, but not wanting, to see what the crystal now showed him. The view came closer. He saw Alisha’s jutting chin, the rosettes of white sweat which had crusted on her forearms and face, and on the flanks of the black stallion; and he saw its mad eyes, dull as a dead fish’s. The crystal stayed with this view of horse and rider for many minutes, as if unwilling to relinquish contact with its former owner. Virelai saw them crest a dune, saw Alisha shade her eyes then urge the stallion down the other side with barely a pause. They galloped across a dry river bed without bothering to examine it for any sign of water; they passed a great spotted lizard which reared up on the rock on which it sat, spreading the frill around its neck in alarm. Neither horse nor rider appeared to notice the beast. Even with her fingers knotted in the stallion’s mane, Alisha’s right hand was clenched in a fierce fist. Inside that fist, he knew, was the deathstone.

He could bear to watch their inexorable progress no longer. Appalled by Alisha’s lunatic determination, by the continued, unnatural existence of Night’s Harbinger, he pulled his hands away from the stone, tied it into the spill of cloth and retrieved his waterskin.

If anything, the sightings of Bëte and of the nomad woman confirmed his resolve. He could never go south: there lay potential horrors even worse than those he had foreseen in the Eternal City. Dragging the heavy crystal behind him, Virelai started northwards again.

Thirteen

Among the Houris

‘Wha— Get off! Get off me!’

Katla Aransen came awake in a fury, her fists striking out to right and left. One made solid contact with something which gave beneath the blow and a voice cried out sharply in a foreign tongue.

She sat up and stared about her. She was surrounded by what appeared to be a swarm of gigantic butterflies – fluttering figures swathed in coloured robes – all of which now seemed to be keeping a wary distance.

Disorientated and confused, she wondered suddenly if she had ingested something which was making her hallucinate.

The fluttering things were closing in again. ‘Go away!’ she shouted, and winced as her loud voice echoed off the stone.

The creatures gathered in a knot.

Katla felt as though she had stepped into a dream. Someone else’s dream, and not a pleasant one, at that. She decided to search for an immediate escape. Looking around, she found she was in a large, tall-ceilinged stone room, an unusual thing in itself for a girl raised in a turf-roofed steading. On the opposite side of the chamber a fire crackled in a soot-stained hearth. To her right ran a long wall with a huge iron-bound wooden door set into the middle of it. A pair of narrow arched windows gave a distant view of cloud and pale grey sky. In the centre of the chamber a large metal container belched clouds of aromatic steam into the air.

None of it made sense. Where was she, and how had she got here?

She recalled climbing the shale cliff, Kitten Soronsen’s treachery, watching her mother fall prisoner to the raiders. She remembered feeling very, very ill and worrying how Hildi, Breta and Magla could possibly fend for themselves if she slept. Beyond that, she could remember nothing at all.

She looked down. Her situation got worse. Her clothes – rags, really – were tumbled in a heap beside the couch on which she sat.

All of them.

She could not remember the last time she had been naked in anyone else’s view. Then she could. Keel Island. Tam Fox.
But even then
, she thought, pushing the pain of that rich and sensual memory away,
I still had a sock left to me
. . .

Grabbing her clothes to her, she leapt to her feet and made for the door.

‘And where do you think you are going?’

A familiar voice. Katla came to an abrupt halt as one of the voluminously robed figures moved between her and the door. Whoever it was, they knew the Eyran tongue, though no Eyran woman worth her salt would ever be found wearing a bizarre draping of turquoise silk which left only the lips and the hands visible. The lips were painted, too: a bright and sparkling damson-red. They looked like – well, the effect was oddly obscene. Even so, Katla found herself staring at that mouth as though it might hold the key to the whole conundrum. Its chiselled lines, the swell of the lower lip; the way it curved into a contemptuous smile. Though men might admire such a mouth, it seemed to Katla cruelly set, and she knew it only too well . . .

Suddenly it felt as if her entire ribcage was filling up with bile.

‘Kitten Soronsen!’ she snarled. ‘I might have known you’d survive. And looking just like an Istrian whore!’

‘I hardly think you’re in a position to claim the moral high ground, standing there all naked and filthy, a woman who opened her legs to a
mummer
!’ Kitten sneered.

Katla’s hands became hard claws. She flew at the other girl with loathing, ripping and rending the flimsy silk as if she wished it was Kitten’s own flesh. Soon the turquoise robe was no more than a ruined mess tangling around Kitten’s feet. Tripping in its silken folds, Kitten went down, shrieking with rage and Katla fell upon her, consumed by thoughts of how glorious it would be to bury her fingers in flesh, in hair, in eye—

At this, the robed women intervened, pulling Katla away and clucking fiercely in their unintelligible southern language. No butterflies, these. Even in the depths of her bloodlust, Katla was surprised that these seemingly fragile creatures should be possessed of such a powerful grip. But Gramma Rolfsen had always warned her never to judge a horse by its colour, a man by his hair or a woman by the cut of her dress, and Katla learned yet again how appearances could deceive. She struggled hard, but the fever was still in her and before long her arms and legs felt like lengths of wet rope: against the determination of the Istrian women she could do nothing at all.

A taller figure, all in black, came forward. ‘Cover yourself!’ she barked at Kitten Soronsen, throwing a dark robe at her. ‘Your body is gift of Goddess, not to parade wantonly in such manner!’

The blonde girl bowed meekly. There was something very wrong about this; something wrong, too, about Kitten Soronsen’s palely naked body. Katla could not think what it was, but it niggled at her. She craned her neck for a better view, but then the harridan strode forward to interpose herself between the two of them. Taller and wider than Katla, she seemed almost to block out the light. She inclined her head and regarded her captive minutely. Katla could feel the weight of the woman’s gaze upon her even through the veil she wore, raking up and down, taking in every detail, every bruise, every flaw. It was an unpleasant experience: she felt like one of her father’s prize mares being sized up at Sundey Market.
Any minute now
, she thought,
the creature will start feeling up my legs and commenting on the shape of my fetlocks
. . .

Indeed, the dark-robed woman started to bark out commands to the other women, commands which set them scurrying here and there about the chamber, gathering items, preparing for a task. Katla did not like to think what that task might be. Now the woman leaned in closer. Her lips, revealed through the unflattering slit in the veil, were pale, unpainted, shapeless and ugly. Two thick black hairs sprouted from a mole beside her mouth.

‘You northern women like demons,’ this creature spat, her words heavily accented. ‘You have no manners, no restraint. You should be ashamed. How your men can love you, when you so rough and nasty?’

Katla laughed. ‘And how much do you think your men love you when they wrap you up in these awful robes and shut you away like prisoners?’

The black-robed woman pursed her lips. ‘We choose to wear Goddess’s robes: it a matter of respect.’ She gestured to two of the other women and together they advanced upon Katla.

Katla put up her fists. Tremors of fever ran through her so that she shivered where she stood. ‘Come any closer, and you’ll learn the meaning of “rough and nasty”,’ she promised.

‘Do not be afraid of her,’ Kitten Soronsen called out.‘She’s too ill to do you harm: see how she trembles and shakes.’

As if cheered by this the women advanced again. With deceptive speed, the black-robed woman dodged Katla’s flying fists, ducked beneath her elbow and caught one of her arms painfully behind her back.

Katla yelped.
I must be getting slow
, she thought miserably, as her arm was forced yet higher.
But damn me, I don’t feel well.

Even as she thought this, her knees buckled, though with the tall woman holding her up, she could not fall. The others came now, sensing her weakness, caught her feet, lifted her off the ground. The next thing she knew, there was an immense splash and she was engulfed.

Not again
, she thought. Lashing out desperately, Katla erupted from the perfumed bath with liquid gushing from her hair, her ears, her mouth. The women stepped back, alarmed, but Kitten stepped forward, clutching a wicked-looking long-handled brush.

‘Hold her down and I’ll do the honours,’ she announced, and a cruel smile curved those chiselled lips.

Katla stopped thrashing, she was so appalled. ‘When exactly was it that you turned traitor, Kitten Soronsen? When the Istrians caught you, or when you slipped from your mother’s womb?’

Kitten shrugged. ‘I decided to make the best of a bad situation.’ She winked at Katla. ‘I think I might quite like it here. But I can’t imagine you will.’

Katla glared at her. ‘And what about the others?’

‘They’re downstairs with the lesser houris, being scrubbed down and prepared for the slave-blocks,’ Kitten said coolly.

The blood rose in Katla’s head till all she could hear was a buzzing in her ears like a hive full of bees. She wanted to leap from the bath, stark naked, and stop Kitten Soronsen’s cruel little mouth; she wanted to pummel her to pleading submission; she wanted—

But the women’s grip tightened as though the intent that trembled through Katla’s muscles spoke directly to them, and she could do nothing at all.

Kitten laughed and the candlelight played off her sparkling lips. Inconsequentially, Katla marvelled that a captive northern woman like any of the rest of them should have had such luxuries as paints and perfumes lavished upon her. Just what
had
Kitten Soronsen said or done to have won such favourable treatment? It was very disturbing. In her befuddled state she couldn’t see the logic in any of it at all. And why were they treating her to a bath, too? A swift dunking along with the rest of her compatriots would surely suffice for a trip to the slave-blocks . . .

Then Kitten set about Katla so ferociously with the bristle brush and lye that Katla had no further opportunity for logical thought, and for a long time in that room there were no further words of Eyran uttered which did not consist entirely of profanity and threat.

Katla had never been so clean in her life. It was not a natural state of affairs and she did not like it at all. Life on Rockfall – or at least a life spent running, climbing, riding, fishing, gathering ragworm and bilberries and generally grubbing around – did not much feature scented baths and the liberal use of wash-cloths. Skin which had never been fully exposed to the air since Katla had learned to crawl fast enough to escape the attentions of her mother and grandmother now glowed uneasily in the candlelight. She had never felt more naked in her life. It was as if all her protective camouflage had been stripped away; no prize mare now, she felt like a sheared sheep staked out for the wolves.