The Soul Thief

by Cecelia Holland

  She said, “He’s an old beggar and a stealer, too. I knew it when I saw him first.” She glanced up at him, her head tipped sideways, a look crooked like her smile. “Thank God you have not tried to come in along with him. You look as if you eat too much.”

  He sat down on his heels next to her. “I can feed myself. I could have fed him last night, if he had come.”

  “Arre will take in anything helpless. She brings in baby birds and nests of orphaned field mice.” She got up; a farm wife in a tattered shawl was poking around in the front row of her pots, and she went to talk to her. Corban sat where he was. He did not want to be alone any more. He picked up one of the pots, smooth and heavy in his hand, wondering if she had made it. Maybe that was what she did with her hands, when she thought nobody was watching. He put the pot down; under the straw mat where she sat was a shard of a broken dish. There was something on the inside of it. He picked it up and turned it over, and there was a tree on it.

  He sat there and stared at it, amazed. The tree was made of a few dark lines across the clay surface, yet all the tree was there, somehow, even what the lines left out. He lifted his gaze toward Benna, who was talking to the woman in the shawl, and put the bit of clay down carefully where he had found it.

  She came back, carrying a bowl full of dry beans, which she stowed in a leather bag. His gaze went to her hands, her thin strong fingers, stained with dark color. He felt suddenly skin to skin with her, as if he had looked into her soul.

  She said, “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing.” He got up suddenly, knowing she wanted him gone. Looking down at her, he said, “May I come back, sometime?”

  She gave a little, startled laugh, blinked, glanced away. “I suppose so. Yes.” Now she looked at him again, straight. “Sometime.”

  “Good,” he said, and went away to find Eelmouth, and join his foraging.

  He did not find the Viking in his first cast around the town, and tired of looking for him. He took his sling and went out the gate and walked north, into the narrowing valley along the river.

  The path followed the western bank of the river, past fields patchy with melting snow and the sodden, crumpled hummocks of dead weeds, rumpled in long lines from the plow. Through the snow and the moldering old growth new grass shot up here and there in startling green lances. The path was busy. For a long while, as he walked, he put his feet down on the prints of others, and he stood aside to let a cart pass, and went around slower people who appeared ahead of him. He saw men hauling wood in out of the trees along the river’s winding course. On the high riverbank across the way a man sat hunched over a pole tilted out over the slow-flowing water. A hunter’s liver-spotted dog came over to Corban and sniffed at him, trailing along with him a while until a shout from behind called it back.

  The sky was blue when he left Jorvik behind but turned steadily grey, although he doubted it would snow before nightfall. He strayed away from the river, following the land steadily higher, and came at last to a broad snowy slope where nothing had run ahead of him but birds. Taking out his sling, and five or six stones he had been collecting, he went out quietly over the snowfield.

  The wind was rising, and he moved until he was walking straight into it. His cheeks stiffened with the cold. The sky was like beaten metal. In his lungs the air was pure and heavy, like cold water. He was very hungry; he felt thinner for it, airy, open to the cold and the pure air and the wind, part of the winter.

  He went on down the long slow bend of the land, seeing deer tracks, very fresh, cutting across his course. A deer was too large to take with a sling but later if he found someone to help him, he could run these deer and get a lot of meat all at once. He cupped one stone in his hand, already loaded, ready for whatever the snowy land gave him. He loved the silence, the cold clear air in his lungs, even the blankness of the snow. It seemed a blessing not to think. The snow-covered grass gave springily under his feet and made no sound.

  Ahead of him a hummock of the grass exploded, and a piece of it bounded away, a blaze of white through the grey air, each long leap an impossible arc over the snow, and he whipped up his arm and the sling spun open, whirled two times and fired. Halfway through one long gliding arc the hare jerked upward, went rolling head over heels through the snow, its head erupting a bloody blossom, a red spray across the snow. Corban ran toward it, caught it still kicking, trying to get its feet under it to run, although the stone had broken its head; one eyeball lay out on the snow, perfectly round. He sank his hands into the hare’s long thick fur, creamy white and yellow, a few longer, pale brown hairs mixed in. The body went limp under his hands.

  If he had been home, he would have given the skin to Mav. If he had a home. His mind teetered on the edge of some other, larger thought he had no strength to consider.

  He gutted the hare, and pulled out its heart and liver and ate them, toothsome even raw, still hot on his tongue. In spite of the winter there were little yellow bits of fat under the hare’s skin and he ate them too. He cast the rest of the innards into the snow. He linked the two long hindlegs together, one foot through the other ankle, and went off across the moor again.

  As he went he watched for signs of ducks and geese, he noticed the paths of the deer, and studied the curious tracks of birds different from the ones in Ireland. The cold bit his toes and fingertips but he felt better, even though he was still very hungry. Out here everything came down to a track in the snow, the feel of the wind, and his skill with the sling, and all those things he understood. The world shrank down to the cold and the snow and himself, walking through it, moment by moment. He ambled slowly down toward a river in the distance, and on a slope spooked a second hare, this one brown and white, a darting fleck in front of him, which took two stones to kill. In the cold his hands moved like lumps and he had to force himself calm enough to fire the second stone, but he brought the hare down at last, and gutted it and ate of it and bound its hindlegs together, and took it back with the first.

  By sundown he had worked his way back across the valley and down, on the other side of the river from Jorvik. He knew that the potter woman and her sisters lived on this bank, opposite the city, and he could see some little huts crowding there above the water. He went through a shabby little wood eaten down to nubs and dead leaves, a great bramble between him and the riverbank, a snarl of branches. It seemed like a midden, and now he saw the trickle of smoke coming up from it, and out from the edge of it came the girl Arre.

  He stopped, his jaw dropping. This was their house, then, this wretched hovel, which his father would not have kept cows in. He stood rooted down, unwilling to go closer, and then Arre saw him.

  She waved, with a flash of her smile; he had to go on forward, he had to meet her. He held up the hares to her, glad of something innocent to say.

  “I brought you something—for Grod.”

  “Meat,” she said, her eyes widening, and gave him the full blessing of an admiring look. “You are God-sent—we had nothing today but some nuts—come in, please.” She swept out her hand, beckoning him on as if to a king’s hall.

  He stooped down to get in through the door. Ahead of him, Arre straightened up in a half-darkness, holding the hares up, and crying, “Look! We have food—God be thanked—and Grod’s friend here—what is your name?”

  “Corban,” he said, blinking, half-blinded in the gloom, and smiling stupidly at people he could not see. The ripe stink of goat reached his nose, and smoke, and many people in a small space.

  “Corban!” Grod cried, and came up out of the settling hazy gloom around him, reaching out to grip his hand. “You did come. I knew you would.”

  Corban looked around, his eyes more used now to the dim light. The hovel was a round dome, high enough in the middle, where he was standing, that he did not have to stoop his head. The underside of the dome was of laced willow branches, fuzzy with cobwebs. He was standing almost in the fire circle; Arre had taken the hares around to the other side of it, where a wide
flat stone lay, and she knelt down and laid the hares on the stone and began to cut them up.

  Off to his right, against the wall, was a pen of withies, stuffed with goats. An old man sat between them and the fire, a blanket draped around him. In the back of the room, quiet, her hands covering something in her lap, was Benna.

  She was watching him; when he saw her, their eyes met, and they both looked quickly away. He lowered his gaze, his cheeks hot.

  “You killed these?” Another girl, with wild wooly hair as pale as sunlight, had come up by his elbow. “How did you do that?”

  “With his sling, Gifu,” Grod said, strutting, his hands on his hips. “I told you he is a mighty hunter.”

  Corban grunted. “Yes, a great murderer of squirrels and hares.” But the wild-haired girl gave him a long look.

  “You must be good.”

  He said, “The one thing I am good at.” He could not meet her eyes; he watched Arre neatly dividing up the hares.

  “Is that it?” Gifu asked, pointing at his belt. She was bold as a boy, he saw; she looked nothing like Benna or Arre.

  “Yes,” he said, taking the sling from his belt. “Would you like to try it?”

  The girl’s blue eyes blazed. “Yes. Could I? Yes.”

  “Come outside.”

  He led her out to the evening air, sweeter and freer outside, easier to breathe. He had a few stones left and he slung them one at a time and knocked down branches from the dying trees in the meadow around them. “See that one—the crooked one, there?” He launched a stone that clipped it neatly in half.

  “Let me try.”

  He showed her how to load the stone, how to whirl it, and to snap with her wrist when she loosed it, so that the stone hurtled spinning through the air. The cool clear evening settled over them. Yet he kept looking back to the hut, his eyes turning that way, his mind.

  The girl Gifu fired off several stones, running off into the meadow to scrabble up new ones; she started off shooting wildly, but soon she got the knack of it. Arre came out the door.

  “The meat is cooking.”

  “Wait—” Gifu was fitting another stone to the sling. “Wait—one more—”

  “Bring it in when you’re done,” Corban said, and went back into the reeking warmth of the hut.

  Benna was spitting chunks of hare and laying them across the fire, amd turning them as they cooked. Corban’s belly rumbled. He went to sit by her, and said, “I can help you.”

  “Don’t you think I can do it?” she said. She threaded the spit neatly through the hare’s backstrap.

  He said, “You do it better than I, but still, I want to help you.” He turned the chunks of meat already cooking over the coals. The girl’s long slim fingers, stained and deft, drew his eyes.

  She said, quietly, “Thank you for bringing this.”

  “I owe it to you,” he said. “For Grod.”

  She glanced at him, sideways, with her small crooked smile. Arre came, and Benna gave her some of the cooked meat; Grod was right behind her, his hand out, as always. When they had taken food away Benna said, “Will you not eat some, Corban? You brought us this meat.” Her gaze followed her own hands, neatening up the bloody stone.

  He reached for a bit of the hare. The other people close around them made him edgy; he wanted to talk to her, he wanted to ask her about the drawing of the tree he had found on the pot. She took some of the meat and chopped it and went over to the old man, woke him with a gentle hand on his shoulder, and sat down to feed him. Corban watched her through the corner of his eye. It angered him that they lived so low, these girls; he wondered why nobody in the city came to help them.

  He thought of who would ward them, in the city, up in the King’s Hall, and saw the other side of that, and maybe why she stayed here in this hovel; why she struggled to keep her younger sisters here.

  He ate another piece of the meat. The girl Gifu came in with his sling, downcast.

  “I can’t do this.”

  “You need to do it more, is all,” he said. He shifted, to make room for her. “Eat some of this.” He moved backward a little more, which put him nearly to the rear wall of the hut, and he put his hand down on a broken bit of pottery.

  “Ouch.” He picked up the shard. Benna swung toward him, her eyes wide.

  “No—Don’t look—”

  He lowered his eyes to the piece of clay in his hand and saw that on it she had drawn Arre’s face. He let out a wordless sound, amazed. Benna sprang across the space between them and snatched it from him. She gave it a single quick, angry look, and wheeled, and smashed it down against the rock by the fire.

  “Stop! Why did you do that?” Corban scrambled toward the fire, trying to find the pieces. “It was beautiful.”

  Benna turned away from him. She mumbled something; stoop-shouldered, she went back to her father. Corban found one bit of the clay, and then another, but most was dust. Gifu and Arre were watching him; he lifted his eyes to them, and said, “Why did she do that?”

  Arre shrugged. “She breaks them, almost all.”

  Gifu said, “It doesn’t do any good. We can’t eat them.”

  Benna was leaning on her dozing father. She said roughly, “It’s a sin. I should not. I keep trying not to do it, but I do it anyway.” To his amazement he saw she was crying. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  He said, “It was beautiful.”

  Grod said, in the shadows, “What are you all talking about, anyway?”

  Corban cast a look at him over his shoulder. He laid down the two broken bits of the clay. “I think it was beautiful,” he said again, and straightened up. “I’m going. Thank you for cooking my supper for me.”

  Grod leapt up. “No, stay! You can sleep here—why go to the church—”

  “I don’t live here,” Corban said. “You don’t either.” He could not abide the stink, he thought, but did not say that. He could not abide that these three girls should live in such a den. The church was cold but better than this. “Good-bye,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Benna had composed herself; she rose, and went to the door with him. “We must thank you, who brought us the meat.” Her eyes were red. She would not look him in the face. He guessed she knew he could not endure the hut and was ashamed. She followed him outside, where he gathered the cool damp night air into his lungs, sweet and clean. Snowflakes drifted down past him. The dark was a thickening gloom.

  She said, “Do you know how to cross the river?”

  “I will find the way,” he said.

  “There are stepping stones. Let me show you.”

  She walked along side by side with him, down to the riverbank. Neither of them spoke. From the high bank he looked down through the drifting snow and saw the wide flat stones that spanned the river.

  “Why did you break it?” he said, at last.

  “Ah, God,” she said. “Such a poor, pitiful thing—they never come out the way I want them to—” She gave a shaky little laugh. “It’s wicked and vain and I can’t even do it well.” She turned around suddenly, going back. “Thank you, Corban.”

  He watched her walk away, back to the tangled heap of brush that was her home. He watched her until she was gone back inside, out of sight, and turned and went down and crossed the river, and trudged up toward the church to sleep.

  His steps dragged. The city lay cold and empty around him, the houses shuttered up against the dark. In each a dog barked as he passed, heralding him up the hill. The street was slippery with the snow and he shortened his steps. He thought of the church, lonely and cold, and for a moment wished he had stayed behind in the hovel across the river.

  He stopped by the fountain, looking down the street, the dark steeple looming up over him; few but steady, the snowflakes wandered down around him. Grod could crawl in under the hem of the girls’ rags but he would not. Yet he thought he could not endure to sleep in the church any more.

  He remembered what Eelmouth had said, and w
ent on past the church, down the long wide street toward the river, which flanked the hill on which the King’s Hall stood. It shone with torches, up there, and he heard the thrum of voices, and a burst of laughter. It drew him like the warmth of a hearth. He turned up the steep hill, his feet slipping and sliding along the muddy, slushy path. Eelmouth had said he could come in there. There was meat every night, he said. He had praised what Corban did, in the fight in the horseyard. He could make a place there, with Eelmouth’s word for him.

  He went up toward the loud and light-filled house on the hill, and into his mind came the thought that this was what his father had wanted of him, all along; to serve a king.

  He stopped. He was close enough now to see through the open door, the crowd and thrash of many people inside, moving back and forth. The smell of meat reached his nose. He heard a woman give an unfrightened, artful shriek. He knew he would never go in there, to be Eric’s man.

  Behind him on the far riverbank lay another house, where he also could not enter; he was suspended between them, caught in the middle, hanging above an endless nothing, ready to drop. He turned, his feet stumbling on the steep slope, and went on down the hill and back to the cold, empty darkness of the church.

  Benna chewed the meat first for her father, who had no teeth left. He sat nodding his head as if he heard music somewhere. He never asked where the meat came from, and he never thanked her for feeding it to him. While he chewed, she looked for his shoes and socks, which he had taken off, and put them on again. His feet were horny and knobbed and black with dirt, the toenails warped into lumpy little claws. She snugged his socks up over his legs to keep him warm.

  He said, “Tell Gifu to come. I want to see Gifu.”

  He loved Gifu best, who hardly ever even gave him a look.

  Benna sat beside him, waiting with another bite of the meat. She wanted to believe she cared for him from a daughter’s love but she also knew she needed him. She claimed her place in the market in his name and the right to mine clay from the riverbank. Without him they could not go on living even here.