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The waves took him. Dashed him towards the rocks. Oh gods and mercy and fuck. I should have been stabbed. I should have died by the knife. A soldier’s death. A warm death. A death where someone might feel some pride that you’re dead. Instead I’ll be torn up on a rock by the sea and no one will ever know and by gods it will hurt and be cold and lonely and cruel.
The waves took him. Dashed him towards the rocks. Hands, lifting him. The water broke in a great jet of spume. A hollow beating like the sound of his heart. He spun around trembling, his ears roared with water. The rocks tore gashes in his legs. Long slippery tendrils of green stuff that whipped his face; he tried to cling on to it but it slid through his fingers feeling vile as raw meat. And then suddenly his face clear of the water, the rock pulling back under him, he clawed and pulled, dragged himself and he was out of the water on a little ledge of rock tilting away from the sea. Water slapped over it when the waves broke, but he rolled and crawled and the water seemed to be receding and he scrambled up rock rough with encrusted shells and collapsed gasping and panting to look back and see ships sailing fast out of the bay away to the south, some maimed and limping, some smouldering still on fire, others making their way fast back into the harbour of Morr Town similarly smashed and broken, others still sinking and dying in the water before him, spreading slicks of planks and oars and dead men.
The battle was over. Marith had lost. Knew him, still, felt the draw of him, a tiny figure on one of the last ships fleeing the harbour, the rage and shame in him radiating out like the beams of the sun, the way you could see light on far hills in the dusk.
Failed! Ha!
You’re fucking delirious, Tobias thought to himself, and collapsed on the rocks of the headland soaking wet and wounded and still just sort of alive.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_22c346b2-5cf8-5ed3-a05c-9c752b682f1b)
The ships pulled back raggedly, like crows flying up from a field when the farmer comes out with a sling and a pouch of stones. Moving fast, with a wind driving them. Sixty had departed from Malth Calien. Perhaps thirty remained. They straggled down along the coast, hugging tight to the line of the cliffs. Looked smaller, weaker, the planks of their sides crushed in like the flanks of a broken-down old horse.
The king’s ship was the last, as was fitting. It sailed blindly, the king looking back staring blindly, the dead thing that was a portent of nothing flopping from the mast with the crows and gulls fighting over its unborn eyes and the blue tongue lolling in its unborn mouth.
There is no plan to get out. There never was. You didn’t really think this bit through, did you?
Luminous creatures rose from the deep of the water, called up by the setting sun. The surface of the sea shimmered, solid as metal to a man’s fooled gaze. Usually they only came in deep water: Marith had only seen them this close to the land a handful of times, and seldom this bright. They’d gone out in a little boat once, him and Carin, paid a fisherman to take them. Sat floating on the water pulling up pure colour hand over hand over hand. It ran through the fingers like milk curds. Smelled sweet as rotten fruit. Eltheia’s tears, the shore people called them. The tears she wept for joy and for sorrow, that her husband was dead.
There is no plan to get out. There never was. Not for any of us.
But he hadn’t thought he could fail. Everything had been so easy. The black ships dancing, the wind strong in their gleaming sails, coming in all together with the men’s armour flashing in the light. The dead foal had seemed such an omen. He had seen them staring, calling it for luck, awed whispered voices as they pointed. Eagles. Horses. The old, old things of the White Isles, even before his ancestors came. Sacred things that knelt at the king’s feet. The men in their coloured armour like a flock of birds on the decks of the ships, his men who would fight for him forever, onwards and onwards forever to be king. They would die for him. They would kill for him. Bright they raised up their voices and shouted the paean, drew their swords to take the enemy, certain in their faith in him. Two battles he had fought for his crown. Two battles he had won. All the men of his father’s army had turned in their allegiance to come to him. They loved him. They knew him. Saw what he was. Ti’s men should have loved him. Known him. Thrown down their swords to bring him joyously to harbour, cheering his name. Bid him welcome to his hall in clouds of dried flowers to place his crown on his head.
And then the fighting! His soldiers fierce and confident, Ti’s ships meeting them in flights of arrows, the water lurching, the fire, but still he’d been so certain he would win. Kill them! Kill them all! So wondrous, fighting on the cramped confines of the deck, penned with nowhere to go, slaughtering. Sending a man crashing down into the cold water, bleeding into the water, the hungry sea claiming him, the white fingers taking him, his body too weak to keep himself afloat, the look of panic in his eyes as he bled and drowned. Wondrous. Fighting pure and without thought. Nowhere to go. No one who could come. One false step and the water beckoned. Nothing could be controlled; he could not even order his men. Maelstrom like the water. Death like the breaking waves. So certain he would win.
Thalia had seen him fighting. That would have been a good thing also, that she had been there and seen. Her kiss of welcome as he turned back to her, perfumed with his enemies’ blood, raising her hand with his as they came into harbour, leading her up the roads of the town to his home, the people acclaiming him, her face bright with pride and desire; ‘Be welcome to your home and the home of our children, my beloved,’ he would have said as the doors were thrown open, the men and women and servants kneeling in the blare of silver trumpets, a victory feast and then up to his bedchamber with crimson hangings, the windows open to the sea, her eyes wide.
That was what it should have been. Not this. He could not even bear to look at her.
A splash, the iridescent colours of the water rippling. A body, thrown overboard from the next ship. It sank straight as a stone. Coated and covered in luminous colour. He remembered his own hands, out in the rowing boat, dipped in it, the tiny things sticky and shining, a thin film like dipping his hands in the honey in which his father’s body lay. Carin’s hands covered in it. Carin placing his hands sticky and shining over his heart. The water closed, the ripples stilled. They couldn’t keep the dead on board the ships. Weren’t going to take them with them to wherever they were headed for. A pile of corpses, lined up on the decks. A pile of the dying, needing water and aid. Throw them over into the deep. Forget them. The iridescent colours of the water. The red painted eyes of the ships. Kill them! Kill them all! Dead’s dead.
He’d killed so many, fighting on the ships. Seen one of his brother’s ships holed and sinking, sinking with men jumping screaming from its sides. Oh gods, that had been beautiful and worth seeing! The great crack as the wood shattered where two ships met, the water rushing in hungrily, the enemy’s ship lurching and mawing and breaking, coming apart into pieces, disembowelled. An animal gutted, its life pouring out in thrashing bodies. Life spilling. Men as the entrails of some great blind beast.
Thalia had been in danger, then, Ti’s soldiers coming over the sides with swords while he stared at the dying. He should never have taken her. Left her safe with Matrina to wait on her and teach her good eastern ways, had her brought over in triumph, crowned and robed in gold. But she had insisted. Said she would be safe. And he had so wanted her to see. And the fear in him, when Ti’s men came at her, there were so many between him and her and the thought for one moment that she might die, her beautiful body sliding down into the water, lost to him, and the thought of what he’d do to the world if she died. He’d come running, killing as he came towards her, killing everything, Ti’s men, his men, the things in the air, the things in the shadows calling him as king. All the blood coming down. She had saved herself, blazing up in light, the men falling back from her, falling into the water, screaming down on the planks of the deck with their eyes buried, so that he’d killed them where they lay, Ti’s men and his men, until she was safe, and he knew then that he’d kill everything in the world that ever was and ever would be, apart from her.
Fighting. Killing. Nothing but killing. Perhaps that was when it had started to slip away from him. And his men had been fighting. And he had been fighting. And the ships had crashed and holed each other and fought as living things. And the swords had been bloody. And the water had been bloody. And his men had been fighting. And somehow, somehow the battle had been lost. The ships had turned in panic with Osen cursing him pointing out he’d been wrong, and he hadn’t had a chance to kill anything more. And he’d lost his kingdom and his crown and his father and his mother and his brother, and everything in the world that had ever mattered, apart from her.
Chapter Ten (#ulink_73a9c09b-4687-5228-8988-b1aa714c1627)
‘Do you need anything else doing in the village, Ru?’ the woman Lan asked. ‘While I’m down that way?’
Ru thought. ‘Not the village. But you could check on the goats. Saves doing it later.’
‘I will, then.’ Lan adjusted her headscarf and went out. Took a deep breath of air after the smoky tallow damp of the house, that was one more thing she could not get used to. Physical weariness. Hunger. Her skin itching, her hair itching, her clothes itching. She had a grim and certain horror that she had become infested with lice.
‘If the young one’s a bother, slap him on the nose and tell him “no”,’ Ru called after her. Lan called back yes. Her hands were rough and callused, broken nails, red scabbed raw knuckles. Slap him on the nose. She walked quickly down the track leading to the village, that ran out over the cliffs over Telorna Head.
A bed by the hearth and three meals a day and a clean dress. What Ru gave her, in exchange for work. She checked on the goats, did her errands in the village, went back to Ru by the fire to cook them an evening meal. Thought about walking on to Morr Town. Never did.
On the first day Lan had walked on shaking legs up the beach over the moorland of Seneth, following smoke from a village where she thought she might get directions to Morr Town. And the villagers had been kind enough, given her directions, if not to Morr Town then to a town called Ath west along the coast from where the road ran off towards Morr Town and the seat of the king. She knew the name, she thought. And that had been good and easy, along a well-made road banked with beech trees fiery with dried leaves, beech mast crunching pleasantly under her feet. On the second day her body shook and her mind screamed and she could not walk for seeing fires burning, and she had stumbled down the road off into the wilds, and there she had found a rundown house, and an old sickly woman, who was called Ru.
‘Did the young one bother you?’ Ru asked.
‘Yes. But I hit it on the nose as you suggested.’
‘He’s the next to be slaughtered. When needs be. Difficult, that one.’
Lan served the food. They sat quietly to eat.
Ru said when they had finished eating, ‘I’ll teach you to spin, if you want. If you’re staying here.’
‘I can’t stay,’ Lan said.
‘My husband died,’ Ru said. Lan looked up at her, confused. ‘A long time ago. Years. Years and years. Still young, he was. I was young. He died in a brawl in a tavern, the innkeep said he was attacked by thugs, but … He died and I stayed here, learnt all the things I needed to learn, did what needed doing, worked hard. It’s not much of a life. But he had locked my skin away somewhere, you see, and I never found it. So I have to stay. I’ll teach you to spin and cook and work if you want. If you’re staying.’
This thin tired old woman bent double from her work. A selkie. A sea maiden. A god thing. She swam in the sea as a seal, shed her sealskin and danced on the shore as a woman, until a man came and stole away her skin. And while the man had her skin she must stay with him. Marry him.
Ru said, ‘Always, for someone, the world is being broken, Lan, girl. I’m not so resigned to it. Still long to go back to the sea. Dream it. But it was a long time ago. So many years.’
They stared down at their empty plates. Lan said, ‘My brother was murdered and I couldn’t bear the grief of it. So I went far away to try to forget. And while I was far away I walked out of a shop doorway and saw my brother’s murderer’s face. And I dragged my brother’s murderer all the way back here with me to punish him. And everyone I ever cared for died as a result. If I hadn’t walked out of the doorway. If I hadn’t seen his face.’
‘If,’ said Ru. ‘If.’
‘I could search the house for you. For your skin.’
‘I’ve searched. You think I haven’t? It’s not here. Wherever he put it, it’s hidden somewhere fast. Under a stone on the shore. Buried in a box in the cold earth.’
‘Let me search. Please.’
Ru said, ‘And what would I do, if you found it? Go back to the sea?’
This thin tired old woman bent double from her work, her hands gnarled and shaking, her eyes half blind. Seals swimming, lithe and glossy and beautiful, twisting and diving in the water, wild and nameless and free.
Ru said, ‘Don’t search for it.’
Ru said, ‘There are a thousand cruelties in the world, Lan. Cruel dead things. Monsters. Chance. Tidy the plates away. Then I’ll teach you to spin.’
The woman Lan nodded, took the plates away to the slops bucket and the bowl of water for washing she had been heating on the fire. Hot water, lye soap that made her hands dry and sore. The soap was a new thing, like the bread, got from the village where she had taken the wool Ru spun. Great massed coils of it, fine for weaving, thick for knitting blankets and mittens and caps for the winter cold. Ru had spun it and saved it, unable now to reach the village on the other side of Pelen Brook to trade. So some tiny good comes from my ruin, Lan thought. Someone’s world kept alive. The cottage was filthy where Ru could not see the dirt. The goats were wild with uncombed coats where Ru could no longer walk to them. If I leave she will die, Lan thought.
They sat in the half-dark by the fire, and Ru taught her to spin.
‘I will show you a special thing,’ Ru said a few days later when Lan had returned from milking the goats. She went to a cupboard at the back of the house by her bed, brought out a bundle wrapped in leather. Unfolded it carefully and there on the leather was a piece of yellow cloth. Fragile as cobwebs, with a sheen like a child’s hair. Ru held it up. It shone and glowed and blazed. Not just lit from the sun but lit from itself. Like mage glass. Like magic fires. Like laughing eyes.
‘Oh!’ Lan cried. One beautiful thing. Such a beautiful thing. ‘Is it … Is it magic?’ Mage cloth, worked from dreams. A princess shining in the light of her own gown. Eltheia herself must have worn such things.
‘Smell it,’ said Ru.
Lan bent towards it, carefully, fearful she might damage it by breathing, so delicate it seemed. It should smell of spices and honey and the petals of new flowers. It should smell, she thought with a pang of rage, like Thalia’s hair. She breathed in the scent of leather, the worn skin smell of Ru’s hands. And under it … Salt. Seaweed. Fish. She looked up, shocked.
‘Sea silk,’ said Ru. ‘The threads of tiny sea creatures. In the sunlight it glows. If left in the sun it will glow at night. Touch it.’ Soft as thistle down. So soft Lan could barely feel it. Glowing. But the smell of the sea. A dress for a mer princess, perhaps, a selkie to dance on the sands in the moon. No human woman would wear it, smelling like that.
‘Is it yours?’ Lan asked. She imagined Ru as a young beautiful sea maid, silvery haired and slender ankled. This the last precious fragment of her gown.
‘I wove it,’ said Ru. ‘I gathered the silk. Wove it with my own hands.’
‘But I’ve never heard of such a thing.’ There would be a way to take the stink out, and all the lords and kings and queens of Irlast would want such a fabric. Eltheia and Amrath, shining like the sun. Landra Relast should have had wardrobes full of it.
‘I made it,’ Ru said again. ‘The most beautiful fabric in the world. No one else knows how to make it. It took me forty years to make.’ Held it to the sun again and again it glowed. ‘If you stay, I can teach you.’
An image for a moment, the two of them, the sea witch and the burned woman, bent at their work, weaving dreams and light into cloth that would never be enough to use and that smelled of salt and sea and fish so that no one would wear it even if they ever made enough to wear. Bolts of shimmering, stinking gold falling through their hands. All the lords of Irlast could not conceive of such a treasure.
‘I can’t stay,’ Lan said. Still mesmerized by the silk, but the silk made her think of other things. Silk gowns, gold bracelets, the glitter of drinking cups in her father’s hall.
‘No.’ Ru wrapped up the leather again, placed the bundle back in the cupboard by her bed. I have just told her she will die this winter, Lan thought. Without me here she will die. ‘I didn’t think you would. You want to go. You want and you don’t want. But you will.’
‘I could stay here the winter. Find someone to take care of you. I could look for your skin.’
‘I don’t want my skin, Lan, girl. Not now. If you found my skin I’d ask you to burn it, and then I’d die. But you wouldn’t burn it and you won’t find it. And I won’t die.’
‘I’ll stay a few weeks more. Get you supplies in. Make things easier for you. Find someone to help you, maybe.’
‘I managed before you came without that. Daresay I can manage again. Though it’s kind of you to think of it.’ Ru’s rheumy eyes flickered. ‘Don’t go looking for revenge, Lan.’
‘Revenge?’
‘The sea and the sky have blood in them. A great wrong was done to you. But don’t go looking for revenge.’
Why not? Lan thought, and Ru looked at her hearing it in her face.
Ru picked up her spinning. ‘Come and sit and we’ll try the thick thread for knitting again.’
But what else have I got left, Lan thought, except revenge? That’s why I left the rest of them to die, isn’t it? So I could avenge them? She said in a rush, like water pouring out, ‘I watched my sister dying. I watched my mother dying. I ran down into the dark and hid. Ran away. Left them dying. To be revenged.’ In her mind the crash of breaking stonework, the roar of fire rushing in waves, the screams. More than men screaming. Claws in the sky. When she thought of it now she saw bloody eyes.
‘I brought him back here for vengeance,’ Lan said. ‘That’s why I brought him back here. To be revenged. To destroy him. And that’s why all this came about. Because I brought him back.’
All this, because Lady Landra couldn’t live knowing he was living. All this, because Lady Landra was filled with the need for revenge.
Silence.
Ru said, ‘You hold it gentle, with a loose wrist. See? Careful. Get the softness in the thread as you turn it. Good soft cloth. A bone spindle’s best. Gives the luck. Strong and supple as young limbs, we want it. Strong and supple and soft. Horse bone’s best of all, of course, if you can get it. That’s it, hold it loose, see? You feel the difference now?’
The spindle turned. A small worm of greyish thread. The woman Lan nodded.
‘Hel, for warmth and comfort. Benth, that is safety from disease. Anneth, to ward off the lice. Say them as you spin. Hel. Benth. Anneth. Hel. Beneth. Anneth. Warm the cloth. Soft the cloth. Warm the wearer. Soft the cloth.’
Keeping someone warm and keeping them comfortable. Keeping them safe and free from lice. Worse things in the world, surely? And more useful than most things.
‘Hel. Benth. Anneth. Hel. Benth. Anneth. A cloak to shelter in the winter. A blanket on a cold night. A bed to sleep and bear children. A winding sheet for an old man’s corpse. Hel. Benth. Anneth. Hel. Benth. Anneth.’
Lady Landra had stepped out of a shop doorway in Sorlost and seen Marith’s dead face walking past her. Not been able to look away. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she’d screamed at him. He’d looked back at her and said, ‘You’re the ones who’ll die.’
If she’d stepped out of the doorway a moment earlier. A moment later. Dismissed her glimpse of his face as an illusion. Looked the other way from him.
Left him alone.
Marith has to die, she thought.
Lan said, ‘I have to leave, Ru.’
‘So you said. Stay a few weeks to get some supplies in for me.’ Ru broke off the spinning, set down the thread. ‘Someone from the village to help me would be a kindness. To look after the goats, tend the field by Pelen Brook. But don’t look for my skin.’ Ru took up the spindle again. ‘And don’t go looking for revenge.’
So it was settled. A farmer in the village had a daughter who would go to Ru, live at the house, do the work, take the place as hers with Ru living there to spin wool and sleep in the corner where Lan had slept.
Ru gave Lan the stinking yellow gold cloth. ‘There’s no purpose to it,’ she said to Lan. ‘I can’t go down to the shore now, even, to gather more of the threads.’
‘You could teach Kova, when she comes.’
‘I could.’
I did all I could do, thought Lan. Kova will work the farmstead better than I ever could. Manage the goats better, cook better food. Kova will maybe find a man to marry, has a man in the village already maybe, they’ll have children and Ru will look after them like a grandmother. They’ll bury her nicely on the seashore when she dies.
And gold and silver pieces will blossom over her grave and they’ll all live happy in a marble palace, thought Lan, and the sun will always shine. Kill them all and burn them and spit on the ashes. The world’s a cruel place.
‘Have this too,’ said Ru. She pressed a small bone spindle into Lan’s hands. Lan looked at it. ‘Horse bone,’ said Ru. ‘My husband’s father made it.’ Worn and yellowed. Old.
‘How old are you, Ru?’ Lan asked, while she thought of the tales of the sea folk she’d heard. Deathless. Ageless. Gods. Carin had been fascinated by them, but they’d never much interested her. Peasant people. Sea things. Men things, also. Rape and kidnap and desire. Keeping something you shouldn’t.
Weak things.
‘Old,’ said Ru.
I don’t need to worry she’ll die, thought Lan suddenly then. Fool! She put the yellow cloth and the bone spindle away in her pack beside the willow wand. Hel, for warmth and comfort. Palle, that is smooth sheen of a calm sea.
Kova came next morning, strong and plain with strong green eyes. Seemed kind enough, Lan thought, judging her with a new way of judging that Landra Relast had not known. Her hands were strong, used to work. Her face was meek. She looked a little afraid of Ru. Maybe she knew what Ru was.
‘There’s soap and candles in the cupboard by your bed,’ Lan told Ru. She did not say that she had traded the silver ring she had worn for them. To Kova she said, ‘There’s bread in the pantry, flour and butter in the crocks. I milked the goats this morning. They don’t give much. There’s a nice bank of winter mint on the path down to Pelen Brook, near the big ash tree. Ru likes it in the stew.’ She took Kova out to the vegetable garden behind the house, all bare now apart from black kale ragged like leather. ‘She tries to do more than she should,’ Lan said to Kova. ‘Thinks she’s stronger than she is. Care for her and she’ll be kind.’ Kova looked at her with strong green eyes and strong hands used to work and a meek face. ‘I’ve a sister who’s marrying a fisherman, mistress,’ Kova said.
Some, some in this world must be kind.
So that was that. Lan set off slowly down the path into the village.
There were rumours flying in the village of things happening in the lords’ halls, ships and soldiers summoned to Malth Elelane, mutterings of war. Lan walked with slow steps along the coast road. Walking the road again alone was the worst thing. Without her name and her wealth she was nothing. How strange it was. This was how Marith had been, she thought dully as she walked. Nameless and powerless. She remembered Thalia on the moorland stumbling in the cold, the way Marith’s eyes had been when he looked at her. Little wonder he felt so angry now. But this was also what he had wanted, she thought. To be nothing. To be the thing that was hurt, not the thing that did the hurting. ‘I was happy,’ he’d said. ‘I didn’t ask to come back. To be king.’ Briefly, she thought, briefly he had escaped.
She walked on all day. She tried not to think of Ru in the damp dirty house that was warm. She stopped in the evening in a way house, huddled in the corner furthest from the doorway, frightened someone might come. Cold greasy trimmings of meat, bread, water: she placed some of each carefully before the godstone at the entrance, saw its gratitude in its blank faceless eyeless face. Before she tried to sleep she got out her pack and looked at the things she had. A horse-bone spindle. A scrap of yellow cloth. A broken twig that was bound to her skin. A gold ring stamped with a bird flying, her father’s crest.
‘Eltheia,’ she prayed as she curled up on the stone ledge to sleep, ‘Eltheia, fairest one, keep safe, keep safe.’ She slept with the bone spindle in her hand, dry and smooth and chipped at the edge, old yellow bone riddled with tiny holes where it was chipped, carved from the shoulder bone of an old broken-down farm horse that she heard galloping in her dream. The things that walked the lich roads walked past her, and let her be.
‘I am not going looking for revenge,’ she said aloud when she woke to frost crisp white-silver on the dark ground. ‘I am going to make him nothing. As he wanted to be.’ A bird flew up cawing from the trees behind the way house. ‘Not revenge.’
