The Rose of the World by Jude Fisher Page A

power or weight; but big men never expected a girl of Katla’s size to put them down. She watched the raiders’ chief’s face twist into a grimace of frustration when he found he could not move his arms; then she grabbed the little knife she had taken from the sneering man and plunged it to the hilt into his eye.
    ‘That’s for Gramma Rolfsen!’
    Bull-like, Galo Bastido began to roar. He writhed in agony. Appalled that he had not simply and quietly died, Katla leapt backwards off him as if scalded. Slowly, deliberately, the captain levered himself to his feet, the hilt of the knife protruding obscenely. He fixed Katla with his one good eye blinking desperately and staggered two paces towards her, hands reaching like those of a sleepwalker. Katla took two steps back, hit a crossbeam and stumbled. A blast of pain shot through up her leg. ‘Sur’s bollocks!’
    Twisted ankle. Very painful, but not fatal as long as she didn’t let it slow her down, for Galo Bastido was still advancing, lurching with all the horrible obstinacy of an afterwalker. Gritting her teeth against the agony, Katla pushed herself upright and skittered sideways.
    A moment later, having come round in a panicky semicircle, there was nowhere left to run. The back of Katla’s head made audible contact with one of the starboard ribs, and when she reached back with a questing hand, all she found was splintering wood sticky with caulking-tar. She faced the raiders’ leader, her eye-teeth showing in a feral grin. She was quick, she was tough and she was very angry, she reminded herself. ‘Come on then, you bastard,’ she taunted him, putting up her hard little fists. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got left.’
    Galo Bastido snarled. He made a vile gurgling noise that might have been a curse, a threat or a last breath. Then he took a huge, staggering step towards her, pitched forward like a hewn tree and fell face down between her spread feet. The hilt of the little knife hit the deck first with the unforgettable sound of metal forcibly striking bone and gristle. Katla grimaced. The raiders’ captain lay still; but Katla had already seen a man who should have been well dead return to life. She waited another few seconds, and when he was still unmoving, booted him hard in the head with her good foot. He didn’t stir at all.
    ‘Got you.’
    A shocked silence floated out across the hold as if everyone was holding their breath; then Fat Breta started to scream and scream. Curses, shouts, howls of pain and fury rent the air. Women shrieked and men bellowed. Katla grabbed up the fallen cutlass from behind the still corpse of Galo Bastido and stared wildly about, trying to decide on her next course of action. She scanned the hold and its mass of bodies for sight of her mother, but in the midst of all the chaos it was hard to make out one filthy, half-starved Eyran woman from another.
    There came a sharp crack, then a shout, followed by another and another. Little by little the noise and movement seemed to subside, all except the incongruous keening noise of a trapped seagull, or a tortured cat. One moment, all was chaos; the next a space was clearing in the middle of the hold and people were breaking off whatever they had been doing to watch something.
    Baranguet had Simi Fallsen by the hair and his pet whip – now disentangled from the sword Katla had stolen from the giant – in his hand. Three women lay in front of him, red welts on their bare arms. Of these, in the gloom, Katla could recognise only Kit Farsen, whose face was turned up pleadingly, tears washing cleaner tracks down her grime-engrained cheeks. The keening sound went on and on, then stopped abruptly as the whipman wrapped his fist one more turn around Simi’s lank brown locks and yanked hard. Simi was a big woman – taller than the whipman by several inches, and even wider across hip and shoulder – but his hard muscles showed in corded swells down both arms as he bore her down until her