Wild Magic by Jude Fisher Page A

the outskirts of the city, they had witnessed a veritable cavalcade trotting smartly towards them: mounted men in fine cloaks and shining helms, their long hair braided and their beards knotted with brightly coloured fabric, pennants fluttering from spears that gleamed as if they had never been put to any other use; women peering out of covered wagons pulled by the sturdy ponies of the Northern Isles whose manes and plaited tails had been all threaded through with ribbons. One of the wagons, bearing a group of giggling girls combing out each other’s long hair, passed so close to Katla and Halli that they were forced to leap out of the way; but when Katla leapt back, shouting furiously and waving her fists, Halli grabbed her by the arm.
    ‘Don’t!’
    She stared at him incredulously. ‘They could have killed us—’ She stopped. Halli’s face was pale and strained, his eyes dark with some unreadable emotion. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
    But he just shook his head and started walking again, head down, wrapped in grim thought and Tam’s fine cloak, and said not a word more all the way to the shipyard.
    Morten Danson’s yard lay encircled by the arms of a wide lagoon, beyond which the hills of the firth rose into the wide blue sky. Once, this vista must have been one of the most beautiful in the Northern Isles, for the land would have been forested as far as the eye could see with native oak, ash and pine, and the waters of the firth would have mirrored in its clear surface a dozen shades of green, the dark, serrated mountain peaks, the high white clouds scudding across bright northern skies. Now not even tree-stumps were visible in this place, for the forests had been replaced in the shorn uplands by a dense tangle of bracken and bramble and bilberry or by blackened mats of burned roots, producing a forlorn-looking landscape that was of little use to man or beast. Down on the river plain, ramshackle buildings had colonised the open areas – sheds of weathered planking with rusting tin roofs, structures of stone and turf, log cabins and warehouses, temporary shelters made from hide and poles – a miserable-looking shanty town. The hulls of a hundred vessels in various stages of completion lay amid all this chaos, their staves and stems poking up into the air like the skeletons of butchered whales. It looked, Katla thought, as if a great sea battle had been fought here millennia since and the waters had retreated, leaving in their wake the carcasses of the slain as a warning to others.
    In the lagoon a great litter of vessels lay scattered, most of them stationary, some slowly weaving a line in and out of the dozens of moored pontoons, barges and rafts of timber. Clearly the local area had been stripped of every suitable tree for miles around, and demand for new ships ensured that Morten Danson had to source his materials from rather further away. The largest of the logs must surely have come from the sacred Barrow Plantation, since the trees which had been cut and stripped of their branches to provide this timber must once have towered to over a hundred foot in height, ancient giants now laid low.
    A tributary stream of the river that flowed into the southern end of the lagoon had been diverted from its original course, which now lay abandoned, marked only by a line of darker grasses and a bed of dry pebbles through which tall weeds protruded, so that it now ran between culverts of stone right into the heart of the yard. Men ran from the stream to the steaming sheds with great leather buckets brimming with this diverted water, and so much vapour billowed up from these sheds into the air of the valley that from a distance it seemed that the manufacture that went on in this valley was not that of ships but of clouds: a weather-factory such as only Sur himself could possibly command.
    Katla and Halli made their way down the road leading into this well of industry and stared in amazement. Even Halli, who had