Sorcery Rising (15 page)

He pushed his way towards the wagon into which she had disappeared, only to be met by a man of middle years, who stepped out in front of him, making the odd little nomad bow.

‘
Rajeesh
. Can I help you, my lord?’

He spoke with little intonation: certainly not an Eyran accent, that; nor Istrian either. He was too fair-skinned to be a desertman, despite his mannerisms; too wan and light-eyed to have come out of the mountains. His hair and brows and lashes were so pale as to be colourless. He looked like a plant kept too long out of sunlight, that has grown etiolated and weedy in some cold, dark place. Tycho regarded him curiously.

‘Out of my way, fellow,’ he said, his voice suddenly thick with desperation.

The man smiled. It was a slow smile, and not entirely pleasant.

‘Ah,’ he said, and winked.

Tycho bridled, insulted by the man’s knowing look, his confiding tone.

‘There was a woman—’

The man inclined. ‘Yes, my lord?’

‘The woman. In your wagon . . . I want her.’ The words were out before he could stop them. A terrible cold wave of dread flooded over him. Something wrong here, something terribly wrong.

The albino cocked his head. ‘All men seek a fountain in which to quench their thirst. And the Rosa Eldi is the very ocean. Every man seeks the Rose of Elda,’ he said cryptically. ‘Who would not?’

Tycho stared at him. ‘What are you talking about? All I want is a woman: the woman in your wagon. Is she yours? Will you sell her to me?’ He started to open the leather pouch at his belt, but the man put up his hand.

‘My business is maps and charts,’ he said softly. ‘Those I sell. The Rose of Elda cannot be bought.’

‘If she is a woman, then she can be bought. Surely all things have a price?’ Tycho was horrified to find himself wheedling, plaintive.

The map-seller laid a hand on the Istrian lord’s arm. Even through the linen of his shift, Tycho could feel the man’s fingers were cold and clammy, like a sea-creature, a jellyfish; some thing not fully alive. He felt himself quail away from the touch. ‘If I cannot buy her,’ he said, more forcibly, ‘maybe we can come to some agreement whereby I can borrow her for an hour or so?’

‘Borrow, my lord? What is borrowed and then lost can never be returned.’

Tycho frowned. ‘Don’t play games with me, map-seller. Why would I lose her? I’ll give you two hundred cantari for an hour of her time.’ Two hundred cantari: it was a small fortune: what was he saying? He must be addled. But the pale man made no reaction.

‘Regretfully, lord, I cannot trade her: her fate lies elsewhere.’

The image of a white face and huge green eyes swam up suddenly in Tycho Issian’s mind. His heart began to hammer alarmingly; he could feel the beat of his blood down every inch of his arms and legs. It prickled his back, pulsed through his skull, as if he were in the grip of a fever.

‘Marriage, then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’ll take her to wife.’

What was he saying? This surely was madness: a possession of the spirit.

This offer, at least, had sparked a reaction. A strange, quizzical light had appeared in the map-seller’s eye. ‘Marriage, you say, sir?’

Tycho took a deep breath, meaning to take back the foolish words. But instead: ‘Yes: I’ll wed her. Give her to me now and I’ll wed her directly, as soon as the proprieties can be met and the rituals performed. By Falla, I swear it.’

The man shook his head slowly. ‘Ah, I knew she was precious, sir: but maybe I have underestimated her true worth. Indeed, sir, I do not think I shall part with her thus. I bid you good day, my lord.’ And with that, he brought the wooden blinds clattering down over the stall and retreated into the wagon.

Tycho Issian hammered on the door for ten minutes or more, but no one answered.

‘Katla, Katla!’ It was Jenna, and she had clearly been running. Her ample bosom heaved and heaved. It had made her cheeks rosy as apples. Her eyes sparkled.

‘What is it, Jenna?’ Katla laid down another of the chased daggers and stood back to admire her handiwork. They made a pleasing array, fanned out as they were against the rich red cloth, their steely edges glinting in the sunlight. Already she had sold two: to a rich Eyran farmer from the mainland, and another to a quietly-spoken Istrian with short silver hair and a patrician manner. She’d charged him extra: it looked as if he could afford it.

‘Father will present me to the King: he will put me forward as a possible bridal partner!’

Katla’s head came up with a start. ‘What?’

‘He has agreed, at last! King Ravn will see me tomorrow night, and he will choose me for his bride.’ Her face was rapt, her eyes made sly and unfocused by the power of her dream; she looked like a farmcat slipping sated from the dairy. She leaned across the stall, clutched at Katla’s arm. ‘So you must come with me now, at once, to the nomad quarter. I must get charms and potions and ribbons and – oh, Katla!’

‘I cannot come now,’ Katla said carefully, thinking that Finn Larson must have lost his mind. Been nagged into insanity, most likely. And so much for poor Halli, after the family had encouraged him so. The venality of the shipmaker and the inconstancy of his daughter infuriated her, sharpened her tone. ‘This is my living, selling this lot – I can’t just go traipsing off round the Fair at your whim!’

‘Don’t fret, Katla.’

She turned around to find her father standing there, his eyes filled with the same dreamy rapture as Jenna Finnsen’s. In his right hand he clutched a roll of old parchment.

‘Go have fun with your friend – it is your first Fair, after all.’

‘But, Da: my stall. I need every bit of the money I can make from it if I’m to recoup my expenses and have any left to myself—’

Aran waved her objections away as if they were midges. ‘There’ll be no problem with money: not now, nor ever.’ He reached into his pouch, withdrew the lump of gold.

Katla’s eyes went round.

Jenna Finnsen gasped. ‘Oh, it’s gold! How beautiful it is. Gold—’

‘Where did you come by it, Da?’ Katla asked, suddenly suspicious. There was something not right here, though she could not finger it; as if the world had bent slightly out of true.

Aran smiled and tucked the ingot carefully into the pouch once more. He patted it. ‘Ah, now that would require the telling of a long, strange story. Run along, Katla: I will mind your stall myself. I know the price your wares can fetch, don’t worry about that. And—’ he pressed a coin into her hand ‘— have some fun.’

‘But, Da: what about the sardonyx?’

‘Halli’s manning the stand. It was time he took some responsibility on his shoulders. He’s a man grown, and will soon be making his own way.’ He smiled at Jenna, who blushed and looked away.

Katla’s sense of unease only deepened further as they forayed into the nomad quarter. Jenna babbled on and on like a river in spate – about dresses with embroidered facings, the latest Galian braid, slippers with a heart-shaped heel. The words washed over Katla, whose mind shied away from her ridiculous prattlings like a frog trying not to drown in the backwash. It was hard to know how best to serve your friend in such circumstances: to tell the truth – that King Ravn was surely here to make a strategic match, which meant lands and power; money and influence; and though Finn Larson might be Eyra’s finest shipbuilder, he was hardly a noble; nor was his daughter such a beauty to sway a man’s judgement beyond the rational – would just bring Jenna grief, and anger at the speaker: as Katla’s grandmother always said: ‘the bearer of bad tidings always bears the brunt’. So instead, she nodded and smiled and pointed out to Jenna as they passed the stalls on which lay pretty gewgaws: ivory buttons carved into snowdeer and ermine and strange, long-necked animals like malshaped cows; ribbons with a many-coloured sheen; pieces of lace so fine they looked like cobwebs. But Jenna knew what she was after, and these fineries, though they distracted her for a while, were not her goal.

‘The charm-seller,’ she said after they had wandered for the best part of an hour. ‘Over there!’

She pointed to a coloured wagon above which a banner had been raised with a name spelled out awkwardly in the Old Tongue. Katla narrowed her eyes and scrutinised the banner for some moments. Her letter-reading was neither quick nor accurate: it had required too much sitting still as a child to learn it properly, and Katla had always been a fidget, always had other plans in mind than sitting quietly at Bera’s knee, while the boys ran around in the yard, yelling their heads off.

‘Fezack Starsinger?’ Katla said at last. ‘What sort of a name is that?’ She scoffed. ‘If you believe that to be a true name you are more simple-minded than I took you for.’

Jenna tossed her head so that the sun gilded it with every shade of gold. It seemed possible, Katla thought with surprise, that the urine might have done its work after all.

‘The Footloose choose their own names: it’s a mark of their freedom. Don’t you know anything? Marin told me about Fezack Starsinger. She’s a proper magic-maker, Marin said: sold her a potion to make her breasts grow, and already they are each a finger’s width greater than they were yesterday.’

‘When they are a hand’s width greater, let me know and I’ll send Tor to check them out.’

Jenna giggled. ‘Now he’s a proper man,’ she said. ‘Hate to think where his hands have been.’ She glanced slyly at her friend. ‘Though perhaps you know more about that than you’re saying.’

‘I do not! He’s an oaf.’ Katla shuddered.

‘So would Erno be more to your taste then? All quiet and shy, and no need to brag about what’s in his breeches?’

‘Jenna! Anyway, what would you know about such?’

‘Girls’ talk.’

‘And which girl would know such a thing?’

‘Marin says he’s a fine figure of a man, Erno Hamson. That’s why she’s doing all she can to make herself more attractive to him.’

‘And Erno likes a woman to be hung with cows’ udders, does he?’ Katla said furiously. She thought of her own small breasts, as firm as a boy’s, and hardly any bigger. Not much for a man to get his hands on there. Perhaps she should buy Marin’s potion. She grinned. Perish the thought, and be thankful to be able to run without getting a pair of black eyes.

‘Come on, then. Let’s go see your charm-maker.’

They were just about to knock upon the wagon’s door – a work of art in itself; since it had been painted a rich dark-blue and decorated with a firmament of stars and the moon in all of its phases – when it was flung open and a young man came stumbling out, head turned to bid the charm-maker farewell. ‘Wear it next to your heart,’ the old woman was saying, ‘and her love will keep you warm . . .’

Then he cannoned into Katla, who fell backwards down the steps, landing unceremoniously on the black soil, where she began to laugh uproariously.

It was Erno.

For a second he stared at Jenna, flattened against the side of the wagon, then down at the shorn girl, an expression of the utmost horror on his face. Then he stuffed something rapidly under his shirt.

All at once Katla stopped laughing and regarded him solemnly. There seemed to be something different about him, something striking; even impressive. Framed by the gloriously artificial welkin, all glowing golds and silvers against their dusky background, with the arch of the true heavens rising above him, Erno looked for a moment like Sur rising from the Northern Ocean to survey his newfound realm with wonder.

Then, with an embarrassed bob of his head, he was gone, running like a rabbit between the stalls. Katla watched him till he was out of sight, then shook her head as if disturbed by something and picked herself up off the ground.

Jenna, grasping her money-pouch eagerly, was already halfway into the wagon. Katla ran up the stairs to join her.

The Footloose woman was a sight to behold. It was not that she had not seen a bald woman before, Katla thought, remembering Old Ma Hallasen, whose hair had fallen out, they said, at the news of her husband’s death at the hands of the raiders twelve years ago, and who had since that time gone simple in the head, and now lived in the little bothy down by the stream with no more company than a cat and a goat; it was just that Fezack Starsinger – her single weird decoration of feathers standing proud on the top of her skull – had a head the perfect oval and burnished brown of an acorn.

Jenna was already in full flood, so that the nomad woman started to wave her hands about frantically. She whistled and cawed like a jackdaw, and then, quite clearly, she said: ‘Quiet now, girl. Slowly for Fezack, if you please. Old ears, slow mind,’ and Jenna reiterated her request again, without all the embellishments about King Ravn and her heart, and her father’s promise, and all the crowds of people who would attend the Gathering.

‘Something he will notice me for,’ she finished. ‘Something that will draw his eye away from all others.’

The old woman leaned forward and fingered Jenna’s hair. ‘Such beautiful hair: like spun gold.’

Jenna grimaced. ‘Lots of Eyran women have hair like this,’ she said. ‘It’s not enough to make him notice me. Don’t you have a potion or something?’

Fezack grinned. She had little red gems inset into her teeth which caught the light like tiny fireflies. Then she nodded vigorously. ‘I have what you need. Not cheap, though.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Jenna, recklessly. She poured the contents of her pouch out into her palm. ‘Take what you want.’

The old woman bent her head over Jenna’s outstretched hand and rooted around in it with a clawlike fingernail. At last she fished up two or three small coins and bit each one consideringly. Then she slipped them into a small ceramic pot on the shelf behind her and went off into the back of the wagon.

‘I do hope you know what you’re doing,’ Katla whispered. ‘I’m not sure I’d trust her.’

Jenna’s chin came up obstinately. ‘This is my one chance,’ she said resolutely. ‘I must seize it with both hands.’

Fezack Starsinger came back a moment later with a small glass vial. She pressed this item into Jenna’s hands and, lifting the great golden curtain of her hair, whispered something in her ear so that Katla could not hear what she said. Then she straightened up and opened the door to usher them out. They each bobbed a courteous farewell, and then they were out in the blinding sunshine again, blinking and disorientated by the startling contrast with the dingy, stuffy wagon. The old woman stood on the steps, looking down at them. ‘Not till he sees you,’ she reminded Jenna, wagging her finger sternly. ‘Remember.’