The Rose of the World Read Free Page B

they saw as a fool’s errand, and so he had left them behind with precious few supplies and little chance of survival. To his knowledge, the man who accompanied him, and the burden he carried, was all that was left of his glorious expedition.
    He turned. The giant, Urse, with his ruined face and single ear, who had once been lieutenant to the lord of the mummers, marched stolidly behind him, his huge feet planted in his leader’s wake, head down, shoulders bowed under the weight of the third survivor of the expedition. Fent Aranson was wrapped in every item of clothing they could spare, yet still his skin was the delicate blue of a robin’s egg and the blood had long since stopped seeping from his severed hand, as if his heart had already given up the ghost.
    Aran Aranson set his face into the wind once more and squinted against the glare. To his snow-hazed eyes it seemed there were spirits all around them in this eerie, silent place: wisps of spindrift twisting off the tops of the dunes and banks piled on either side of their passage, curling into the air like a host of lost souls. If anything, the lack of lamentation and wailing added to the impression he had of being in a transitionary zone. Maybe, he thought, as his feet continued their exhausted trudge, they were fated to wander this terrible, freezing nothingness for all time, never gaining on their goal, nor leaving the tempestuous world of men any further behind them.
    Urse One-Ear placed his feet in the churned-up ruts made by Aran Aranson and wondered for the thousandth time whether he would ever place them on soft green grass, pebble beach or forest floor again.
    As a child, growing up in the treeless wastes of Norheim – all bare rock and low scrub, grey horizons and sea-thrashed shores – he had possessed a powerful curiosity to see more of the world, believing that his homeland must surely be the most godforsaken place in all of Elda. He had seen some startling sights in his life, but these soulless tracts were the grimmest by far. Even in the semi-darkness, the gleam of the never-ending snow hurt his eyes, and the intense cold made his teeth and scars ache and brought vividly to mind memories he had rather leave buried. Many had asked him about the cause of the loss of his ear and about the furrows which ravaged that face, almost closing his left eye and lifting one corner of his mouth to expose a snaggle of teeth, so that he had come to resemble a farm cat kicked in the head by a bad-tempered horse; but Urse had never cared to volunteer the information. Over the years, these fearsome markings had caused no little speculation. Some surmised that he had been in one axe-fight too many, or had come to grief in some tragic nautical accident. The truth was worse, and still gave him nightmares.
    He had joined Tam Fox’s mummers’ troupe nearly twenty years ago when he was barely more than a lad. At that time, the troupe had owned a bear – a great black shambling fellow from the forests of central Istria – which Tam Fox had rescued from hawkers on the docks of Halbo who were using it to generate themselves a nice little income by soliciting bets on how many dogs could take it down. To cover their risk, they would privately goad the beast for an hour before the bout, taunting it with meat, beating it off with sticks and cudgels until it was murderous. As a result, it had carried more scars than Urse did now – obvious ones, around the paws and muzzle – but more, far more, invisible to the eye. They were much of a size, Urse and the bear; and in one of the old languages their names corresponded, so he had come to feel a common bond with the poor creature and had taken over its care for the mummers’ troupe. Then, one day, he had moved awkwardly, or his shadow had fallen across it in some way which recalled to it a past torment, and it had turned upon him with such terrifying ferocity that he knew his life was over. It had his head engulfed in its noisome,