Wild Magic Page 10

  She looked away, discomfited by this bizarre thought, and as she did so her eye was snagged by another fall of blonde hair: truly gold this time, rather than the green of an unripe wheatfield, as it had been the last time Katla had properly seen her friend: for there, seated a few places down from the King, between a scrawny young man in a purple tunic and a greybeard in an overstuffed doublet, was Jenna Finnsen. And next but two from Jenna was the shipmaker, Morten Danson.

  Perfect, thought Katla. Two birds with one shot.

  There came a great burst of raucous applause. Katla turned to see that in the middle of the players’ circle, Sur had just polished off the Dragon of Wen with a great flourish of his oversized sword, and Tam Fox had taken the floor. He clapped his hands and called for quiet.

  ‘And now,’ he declared. ‘It is time for a miracle of mutability, a magical, mirth-making mystery of tantalising trickery, a phenomenal phantasmagoria, a triumph of transformation, a veritable spectacle of shape-shifting!’

  The crowd applauded. They enjoyed the troupe-chief’s wordy introductions. Four of the players carried on a striped tent made of flexible poles and densely woven cloth and set it down behind Tam Fox, shuffling around to situate it exactly where it was required. It stood maybe a head taller than Tam himself, and a tall man’s length in diameter, looking remarkably sturdy for all its lightweight components.

  ‘I need two volunteers,’ Tam Fox proclaimed. ‘A gentleman, and one of the fairer sex. They will enter the magical booth and – well, what they get up to together in there is their own affair of course—’ This encouraged a number of crude comments and whistling. ‘All I can promise is that what you are about to perceive is the rare and ancient art of shape-shifting!

  ‘Any volunteers?’

  Only one person – Silva Lighthand, seated between the shipmaker and the old, fat man next to Jenna Finnsen, and primed to play her part – answered his call.

  Tam Fox smiled. ‘Is there no gentleman brave enough to take my challenge?’

  This was Katla’s cue. With the Serpent’s head jammed hastily down over her face, she came cartwheeling out of the shadows, a lithe figure all in sheeny silver, all the way to the royal bench, where she stopped, panting slightly, before Ravn Asharson and his new wife. There she executed a flamboyant bow, then turned enquiringly to Tam, as she had been told.

  ‘Shall my lord take the challenge?’ Tam Fox cried out.

  The crowd fell hushed and shocked at his effrontery, but almost immediately Katla was on the move again, with a grin and a back-flip which brought her directly in front of Morten Danson. The shipmaker stared at her, aghast, as she leapt up onto the table and took him by the arm. Then, hauling him to his feet, she ignored Silva’s outstretched hand and moved beyond her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Silva hissed; but ‘Shhh,’ Katla replied and reached across for the daughter of the Fairwater clan.

  Jenna opened her mouth to protest; but the Serpent dipped its head and – she was quite sure of this – winked at her out of the eye-slit that had been cut between the salmon-skins. In the moment of hesitation that followed, Katla grabbed her friend and pushed her and the shipmaker out onto the floor.

  ‘Why,’ Tam declared with a slightly bemused frown, ‘it seems the Serpent has found two brave souls to take with him on his journey into the underworld.’

  The crowd cheered wildly.

  It was too late to escape. Morten Danson decided to try to make the best of the situation and began to grin and to wave with his free hand, but the hand that Katla held imprisoned was damp with sweat. He isn’t enjoying this at all, she thought gleefully. And how much less is he going to enjoy what comes next . . .

  Tam Fox gave the pair a loud lecture on their proper behaviour when they were together in the tent (since the presence of the Serpent could lead only to greater temptation). He made to look under Jenna’s skirts to ensure she was wearing stout undergarments, which caused her to slap his hands away and to blush furiously. The crowd cheerfully roared its encouragement to the shipmaker, who looked equally embarrassed by the proceedings. Then Katla led them inside the canvas, gripping their hands with all her might. In the seconds before chaos ensued, she heard the musicians strike up, and the sound of dancing feet encircling the tent; then the floor gave way beneath them and they were falling.

  The hooting of the pipes and thumping of the drums camouflaged most effectively Morten Danson’s shriek of outrage and the grating of the trapdoor, before Urse had the shipmaker secured under his massive arm and gagged with impressive speed and dexterity.

  Katla extricated herself from the hay-bales that had been placed there to break their fall and hauled Jenna out of the way so that the two mummers who were taking the place of the shipmaker and what should have been Silva Lighthand could climb back up through the hole. The replacement for Danson was a little, wiry, bald man called Lem, who wore nothing but a pair of oversized boots and a breechclout into which had been inserted a vast sausage.

  ‘Ready, my fine pike?’

  Min Codface, dressed in a flimsy, low-cut shift and a ludicrous wig, hefted Lem through the hole, then levered herself up with athletic ease. As she exited the trapdoor, Katla could see that she had tied strips of linen around her calves and thighs to accommodate an armoury of throwing knives. Just in case of trouble.

  ‘By Feya’s tits, Katla, what are you playing at?’ Jenna was red in the face. It looked as though she might at any moment burst into tears.

  ‘Right,’ said Katla grimly, removing the Serpent head with a flourish. ‘Is it the skinny runt or the fat old goat they’ve got you down to marry?’

  Jenna blinked. ‘I knew it,’ she said at last. ‘I knew it when you winked at me, though it seemed such a mad notion that you should be travelling with a troupe of mummers.’ She thought about this. ‘Or maybe not, actually.’

  ‘So? Which one?’

  ‘The goat,’ Jenna said humourlessly.

  ‘And do you want to take him?’

  ‘I have no choice. They tell me there’s no money coming in and he’s a rich man.’

  ‘Halli still loves you.’

  Jenna stared at her. Then she started to cry. ‘Oh, Katla, I’ve been so unhappy . . .’

  Above them, the music stopped. Then there was a scuffling sound as the tent was removed, and after a moment’s stunned silence the crowd started to shout with laughter and clap enthusiastically.

  Katla grabbed her friend. ‘No time to talk. Are you coming with us or staying to marry the goat?’

  For a moment the blonde girl hesitated. Then she nodded vigorously. ‘Coming with you.’

  There was a commotion behind them as Morten Danson was stuffed into a roll of theatrical backcloths and thrown into a covered wagon. Jenna looked alarmed. ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Bit of a jape,’ Katla grinned. ‘He’ll be fine.’ If just a little incandescent with rage, she thought cheerfully, when he finds out where he’s going. And why.

  Six

  Exiles

  Erno Hamson sat quietly in the corner of the inn and listened. He had been there, listening, for close on two hours now. It was a great deal warmer and more comfortable inside the Leopard and Lady (known by the sailors and dock-workers of Hedera Port rather more colloquially as the Cat and Quim) than it was outside, especially in the rather basic shelter he had managed to rig up from the overturned faering in which he and the woman had made their escape from the Moonfell Plain, branches and driftwood and a large sheet of sailcloth he’d managed to steal from a shipyard as darkness fell the previous day. They had been travelling for several weeks now, drifting from place to place, living off the land and the sea, without any sort of plan. The woman complained about this a lot; but Erno did not care. Since Katla Aransen had died his world felt cold and empty: so wandering and living rough was the same to him as living in a palace.

  But being in the Cat and Quim was certainly preferable to being down on the small shingle beach. It meant, apart from anything els
e, that he did not have to listen to the woman’s soft, sibilant southern voice as she sang those peculiar little nonsense rhymes she was so fond of. To begin with, he’d thought it was his poor ear for Istrian that was at fault, as he caught a word and a phrase in strange conjunction – something about a frog and a spoon; or a cat in a well, a spider and some curds and whey – then he’d realised she was crooning nursery songs to herself, songs which had their equivalent in the Northern Isles of his own homeland. For a time, that had made him sad for her, displaced as she was from her own people; but lately he had begun to find it irritating, as if it was her way of shielding herself from him and their situation. By now, after three moon-cycles and more in Selen Issian’s company, he could converse well enough in the southern language, though when he ventured into public places like Hedera Port, he’d had to claim his ancestry and bizarre accent hailed from the mountains in the far south in order not to draw unwelcome attention.

  And the amount she ate! It was hardly credible that one so small could eat so much without doubling in size. It was becoming a trial travelling with her: when he was lucky enough to come by more bread than they could eat in a day and stockpiled it for later, he would wake the next morning to find it gone, along with all the dried fish and the round of cheese he’d been saving for harder times. Given the desperate nature of her situation – as a fugitive from the vaunted ‘justice’ of Istria for killing the man who had attacked her at the Allfair – he felt duty-bound to stick with her, even though it was because of her that they had consigned his beloved Katla to the fires. There were days when he could hardly bear to look at the Istrian woman: and this was one of them, which was why he was here now, with his hood up, and his eyes cast down, sipping from the flagon of weak beer he’d been nursing for the past hour. He’d spent his last coin on his first flagon, which had gone down rather too quickly for prudence or savouring, but when he’d left the inn to visit the outhouse at the back he’d found a single cantari trodden into the mud there – dropped by some customer too sozzled to mind his coin-purse, he’d bet – and that had bought him this current flagon and would either buy another two; or some food, if sense prevailed. Either way, he reckoned, Sur must be smiling on him.

  The Leopard and Lady was the first Istrian tavern he’d been able to pluck up the courage to go into; but it was the similarities between the inns back home and those in the Southern Empire that were most striking to him, even so. It was cramped and dark and smoky, you had to shout your order over the noise, and the beer was weak and cost more than it should. Despite the great differences between the cultures of the two countries, inns were still, it seemed, places where men came to get away from women, from the dullness of their work and the responsibilities of their home lives. They came to drink; they came to be in the comfortable company of other men; and they came to talk. It was amazing what you could hear in a place like this if you sat quietly enough that no one paid you any mind. So far he had discovered many small and interesting facts.

  He had learned that one Pico Lansing was offering special rates at the brothel he ran – the Maiden’s Arms, down at the end of the docks – where you could now get two girls for ten cantari, and probably eight if you bargained hard enough, since business was so poor as a result of the greatly increased workload at the local metalworks; he had learned that the tall fellow with the shining bald head and hooked nose standing morosely at the bar over a tall glass of rose araque, that vile, smoky-flavoured spirit the Istrians favoured so highly, was having a hard time having his parents’ house repaired up on Sestria Hill, since it seemed impossible to lay hands on a carpenter at the moment for love or money, even with the rain pouring through and ruining furnishings that his wife had had her eye on these last seven years; and that the price of tin and brass had unaccountably gone sky-high, while silver values had fallen, the money market was so glutted with coin. He learned that a band of Footloose travellers had passed through the environs of the port town the previous week and been chased off the land on which they had traditionally camped these past twenty years and more, and that in their wake the wife of the merchant Paulo Foring had prematurely given birth to a monster – a child with a huge head and wings instead of arms, that had torn her apart as it breached, and that she would probably not survive. Much muttering followed this pronouncement, and others had their own stories to contribute: how a pregnant brood-mare had produced a pair of full-grown lions and then expired, since they had eaten her from within; how a fish had been pulled up in the nets last week that had tiny fingers on its fins and toes on its tail – it was hanging on a post down at Calabria Dock if anyone wanted to go and see it; how a girl from a good family – the Layons, from that estate in the valley – had escaped the Sisters of Fire, where her father had sent her in punishment for refusing to marry the man he had chosen for her, and had fled to the nomads, pleading with them to take her in; but they in their turn had stoned her away, but only after she had been raped by a dozen of their number, and now lay close to death. She could not, it was whispered, even pray to the Goddess for forgiveness, since the evil men had taken her tongue as well as her chastity. Many around the inn had made the fire-sign at this terrible news. The Footloose should be burned once and for all, one man had cried and others had nodded in agreement. Magic was wicked and dangerous: all the years of potions that had little effect and charms that never worked, were surely to lull folk into a false sense of their own safety, while the nomads gathered their strength and prepared to take the Empire apart in vengeance and spite.

  Erno listened to these latter rantings with a grimace. He gave little credence to the superstitious nonsense the southerners attached to the nomad folk whom, Sur knew, he had little reason to love, but who had seemed, on the small acquaintance he’d had with them, pleasant, gentle people with no interest in the acquisition of wealth or power: and that was more than he could say for the larger part of Eyrans or Istrians he’d encountered, most of whom devoted their lives to the pursuit of one or the other, and frequently both. The girl had most likely been assaulted by men of her own kind and lost her tongue to prevent her speaking out. Nothing would surprise him: the Istrians behaved strangely around women – setting them up as worshipful beings, then treating them like possessions, using them as lust dictated, as if they were merely chattels without any sentience, let alone a will and a soul of their own. But something about the arrangement must work, for no one protested against it or fled the country: there were, as far as he knew, no southern women in Eyra, where women were known for speaking their minds and having the run of the household.

  From the first two snippets, however, he learned that plans for war with the North were well advanced: if the shipyards and the craftsmen were kept so busy, then the Istrian Council had clearly given orders for the preparations of a fleet. And if that was the case, then if discovered he would be even more unwelcome here than he already felt. His left hand went unconsciously to his hair. He had persuaded the Istrian woman to cut it for him, when it became clear that the southerners rarely wore their hair long, let alone in braids with shells and rags bound into it. Every object carried its own freight of significance. One had been a braid in memory of his mother, dead of a fever, bearing little strips of her clothing and a shell she had given him. One he had made for Katla, which included a small plait of red-gold hair wound around the silver-white of his own in a complex, formal knot, and a pebble she had once taken a liking to, and he had spent hours boring a tiny hole in it with the awl he used for repairing his leather. The silver wire with which he had tied it into the braid had come, unbeknownst to Katla, from her smithy. She used it for laying delicate knotwork patterns into the engraved head of a fine axe or the blade of a dagger, and it was expensive stuff, but at the time he’d tucked it into his money-pouch all those months ago he had not thought she’d miss a finger’s length. And now, of course, she’d have no use for it wherever she was, weaving cloth with Feya in the women’s hall, while Sur feasted in the Great Howe. He’d kept
the braids (they were wrapped in a corner of sailcloth and packed into the storage compartment in the faering: he’d thought it best not to carry them with him on these forays) shaved off his beard with a well-sharpened knife, and kept it shaved every other day which was an almost unbearable nuisance, and dyed his hair black with octopus ink purchased at a small harbour further down the coast; but his light eyes were impossible to disguise, and so he wore the hood.

  He was just about to allow prudence to triumph over pleasure by removing himself from the tavern and buying some food in the market, when he heard the name ‘Vingo’ dropped into a conversation somewhere to his right, and his head shot up like a wolf scenting prey.

  ‘Howled like a dog, he did, and claimed he was blind, that’s what Foro said: but it ’twas the darkness of the room fooled him. There was never a happier man than Favio Vingo then, to have Falla return his son to him.’

  ‘Aye, well maybe she didn’t want to keep the lad for herself. Tales I’ve heard . . .’

  ‘Tanto Vingo? He’s a national treasure, that boy. Came second in the swordplay at the Allfair, you know; and then ran himself onto an Eyran blade trying to save some northern ruffians from stealing his wife—’

  ‘Wife-to-be,’ another corrected. ‘They were not even handfasted by the night of the Gathering. Lord Tycho went off the deal and refused to complete the bargain.’

  ‘I’d heard it was the Vingos pulled back,’ said the first man. ‘He’s a strange one, right enough, is Tycho Issian.’

  ‘He’s a pious man: a most righteous lord, out preaching every day on the iniquities of the Eyran oppression of women. I heard him speak in Forent last week, and he was most convincing. Truly, I felt like taking ship there and then for the Northern Isles and bringing back every woman I could find to do the Goddess’s service—’