The Rose of the World Read Free Page A

great rusted links stapled into the tarred timbers of the hold’s floor.
    Being taken captive had been vile enough: the manhandling humiliating, the knowledge of defeat and loss of control shattering. But tears would help no one; besides, she would not let any of the others see her cry. And so she closed off that part of herself and concentrated on being alive and relatively unscathed, even if confined to this filthy, stinking space, trussed up like a chicken in the belly of a bodge-built Istrian bucket, and heading for a less than pleasant fate.
    Katla was, for the most part, a girl who lived in the moment. She rarely looked back; generally considered the future with anticipation, or with frustration that she had not yet reached it. The physical world and her relationship with it was everything; and so she was dealing with some of the more abstract aspects of her situation rather better than her companions. Even as Thin Hildi wept and Kitten Soronsen wailed and Magla Felinsen droned on about the way Istrian women were kept as slaves, Katla kept her horrors confined to her current circumstances.
    She had never travelled in the hold of a ship before and she did not like it. She was used to being up in the elements, watching the surf skim off the waves and the clouds scud across the sky, the sunlight spangling the water and the sail bellying out like washing on a line. She was used to standing lightly on the bucking timbers of an Eyran ship built out of the knowledge and love of generations of sea-goers and shipmakers, allowing her body to find its own centre, to move with the rhythm of the ocean, feeling the healthy tensions of wood and iron and water and, somewhere far below, the resonances of the rock of Elda, the veins of crystal and ores which spoke into her blood and bones. It was a mystical connection which gave her a deep faith of rightness in the world
    Down here, with her wrists chafed by iron which had bitten into the skins of generations of slaves, amid the stench and the noise, it seemed she had lost the trick of it.
    So, unable to do anything else, she gave her thoughts to the infinite number of ways in which she might kill a man; both quickly and slowly.
    Baranguet, she thought murderously, I will start with Baranguet . . .

Two
    The Wasteland
    In this arctic region day differed little from night. The sun, when it heaved itself over the horizon, offered only a kind of milky twilight for a few brief hours before sliding leadenly back into darkness. Above this short-lived band of light, the sky shaded first to cobalt, then to violet and indigo, before becoming as black as a raven’s wing, and in that blackness – at least to Aran Aranson’s weary, snowblind eyes – the stars were simply too luminous to gaze upon for any length of time.
    But even if he could not look upon it, he knew, as if there was a lodestone in his skull, that the Navigator’s Star hung directly overhead, and by its position he knew that they were as far north as it was possible to go – and yet it seemed as though the world of ice went on forever. Perhaps, Aran mused as he plodded grimly along the narrow isthmus that had opened out before them, they were already dead and this place was a world-between-worlds reserved for those men of ill-luck with whom the god did not wish to share his table. For there could be no doubt that he was an exceedingly luckless man. Even before he had embarked on this doomed expedition he had lost a son and a wife, and estranged his daughter; and now he was master of nothing. Since Bera had announced their marriage dissolved, Rockfall would return to her family, as was the Eyran way: he had no home. His beautiful ship, the
Long Serpent,
lay crushed by the merciless ice of the Northern Ocean. The best part of his crew he had lost to storm and sea, to murder and mutiny; and then to the teeth and claws of a snowbear. Some men had preferred to take their chances with the elements rather than accompany him on what