Deep Water

by Pamela Freeman

  “True,” Gris said. “We have stolen. We have enslaved. We have killed. That is true. Have you never raided, Hawk?”

  The man looked aside, and then brushed the question away. His hand movements were odd: larger than Bramble was used to, and with the second finger touching the thumb. They were sitting by a proper hearth, not a fire pit, in a house which only seemed small because she had become accustomed to the large halls of Acton’s home. The walls of the house were wattle and daub, but the chimney was made of flat field stones, intricately pieced together without mortar.

  “We have had no time for raiding for some years. We must defend ourselves instead,” the man — she must not think of him as a Traveler — said.

  “But what if that were to change?” Asa leaned forward to speak persuasively. “What if your people were returned to you? If you no longer had to worry about raids? If you had strong friends at your back?”

  Hawk ignored her as though she were not there.

  “We could make you strong,” she said, trying again. She exchanged a puzzled glance with Acton and gave a little shrug.

  Acton raised his eyebrows and repeated, “We could make you strong.”

  “At what cost?” he countered immediately. In the pause that followed, he turned to Asa as though seeing her for the first time.

  “The women are in the scullery,” he said, and pointed to an open door on the far side of the fireplace.

  For a moment, the three other men froze. Swef bit his lip. Asa’s face went blank but Bramble could almost hear the thoughts racing through her mind: her dignity was not important enough to risk this negotiation.

  “My mother is a wise counselor,” Acton began, but she hushed him.

  “I will speak to the women,” she said. She rose and went in stately silence to the door. The dark-haired man smiled thinly in triumph.

  Bramble was shocked. She had always assumed that women were less esteemed than men in the Domains because of the invasion, because Acton’s people were flawed. She had never wondered how they had been treated in the old days.

  “How strong can men be who take counsel from women?” Hawk asked scornfully.

  Gris smiled. “Easy enough to control weak women, cowed from birth. It takes a real man to control a woman who knows her own mind.”

  “And you do?”

  “My wife has a sharp mind and a sharp tongue, but she follows my lead.”

  “As you would have me do. You wish me to follow your instructions like a woman.”

  Bramble lost interest in the maneuvering for position and dominance, in the promises of alliance and mutual support. What was the point of listening, she thought, when they didn’t keep any of those promises? When they slaughtered everyone instead? She wondered what Asa was doing and saying in the kitchen. Probably promising the women that their stolen children, siblings and husbands would be returned to them. Bramble suspected that even in this culture, men listened to their women behind closed doors. Unlike the sleeping halls of Acton’s people, there were lots of closed doors in houses like these.

  Her attention was reclaimed when Swef sat up straight and said, “So it is agreed?”

  The man put up a delaying hand. “It is agreed that I will discuss it with my advisers, and ask their counsel. If they agree, we may try next summer — a small settlement, to the north where the forest ends. If that is successful, more may be possible.” He spoke as though he were a chief and they were slaves, but Gris nodded in thanks.

  Acton looked impatient, and annoyed by the man’s pretensions. “Hawk, who will decide if it is successful?” he asked.

  Well done, lad, Bramble thought. That’s the real question. Who’s got the power?

  “I will,” Hawk said, standing and looking down his nose at the three of them, even though he was shorter than they were. Swef let out a breath that was almost a snort. Gris simply nodded.

  A girl came from the scullery with a platter of cheese and bread and apricots and put it down on a small stool next to Acton. She was pretty: black-haired and dark-eyed, honey skin and red lips, slim and very slight compared to the blond girls over the mountains. He smiled at her, that sideways smile that all the old stories mentioned, and she blushed and smiled back. Bramble could see why. That smile was attractive, the invitation to shared mischief, if you didn’t know that this man would soon butcher all your relatives — perhaps even the girl herself.

  This is dispiriting, Bramble thought, and if the water which came up then had been real she would not have had the energy to save herself.

  Still in Gris’s body — she was coming to recognize his scent, if not his mind — she surfaced to find him in a cave with Hawk and Acton and a woman. Bramble wondered where Swef was, whether this was another visit altogether. Jumping about in time was wearying. She longed for it to be over.

  The woman was old, the oldest person Bramble had seen so far on this journey, and she wore animal skins roughly stitched together. Her white hair was felted together like a mess of snakes and her skin was dirty. She sat on a bear skin in front of a small fire, toying with a set of stones. The air should have been smokier here than it was.

  Acton seemed to share the thought, because he looked up to the shadows above, and Gris followed his glance. The smoke wound its way out of a vent at the top of the cave. The woman caught Acton looking and gave a toothless grin.

  “Clever one, aren’t you?” she asked, casting stones casually across the skin. Without looking at them, she gathered them in.

  “I don’t understand you,” Acton said slowly, still finding his way in a foreign tongue. “What do you want?”

  “Sit down,” the woman said, but it wasn’t a reply. She was looking at Gris hard and leaned forward, as he sat on the other side of the bear skin, peering into his eyes. Her breath was rank, like dog breath.

  “And you, kinslayer, you’ve got a passenger. Hello, girl.”

  If she’d been in her body, Bramble would have jumped at the words. The woman was clearly looking straight at her, seeing her in Gris’s eyes. Gris had tensed at her words, but more at the word “kinslayer” than the greeting.

  “Dotta!” Hawk reproved her. “This is important.”

  “You think this is not?” Dotta replied, but she leaned back and spat into her left hand. Hawk copied her and they clasped, palm to palm. Hawk prepared himself, as though he had thought the question out carefully.

  “What will be the results of allowing the strangers to settle in our territory?”

  Dotta drew out the five stones — so little of this ritual has changed, Bramble thought, I wonder why? The stones were mountain stones, gray and black and silverfish. They fell face up.

  “Death. Betrayal. Chaos. Ruin. Destiny.” Dotta poked at each stone in turn like a baker testing if dough has risen enough, then gathered them in. She didn’t look at the men.

  “Hah!” Hawk broke his hand free and glared at Gris. “So.”

  “Wait!” Acton said. “I have a question.”

  Dotta didn’t speak; she simply spat in her hand again and held it out to Acton. Reluctantly, he spat in his own palm and clasped hers. They don’t have stonecasting, Bramble realized. I never thought before, but no one consulted the casters about the Ice King. The stonecasting is part of the Domains, not the Ice King’s land… she wasn’t sure what that meant, but it seemed important, somehow.

  Acton’s gold hair shone in the firelight. He bowed his head for a moment as though praying, then asked carefully, in a halting accent, “What will be the results of not allowing us to settle in your territory?”

  Dotta laughed and cast the stones.

  “Death. Betrayal. Chaos. Ruin. Destiny,” she chanted as they fell. They stared at her in astonishment, but she was right. The same stones, in the same order. Dotta hawked and spat in the fire and laughed at their expressions. “Did you think the Destiny stone meant nothing?”

  “If we don’t let them come . . .”

  “They will come anyway,” she said. “If not t
hese men, then others. I have advice for you, Hawk, which you will not take. Run! Take your women and your children and your animals and your chattels and run a long, long way from here. The world is wide, but the Ice King’s country is small and getting smaller. Run, little one! Or you will not see two more summers.”

  Hawk sat very still. “Is that prophecy?”

  “It’s common sense, which is worth more!” she retorted, reminding Bramble of Martine in Oakmere.

  He relaxed a little. “Then there is still room to prevent the worst.” He turned to Gris. “If we let your people in, you can support us against the others. The stones say Death and Ruin, but not whose death. Let us make it the deaths of others!”

  Dotta made a disgusted noise and rose with audibly creaking bones.

  “You,” she said to Gris. “Come.”

  She picked up a piece of bone with a plug on one end. It hung by a cord from her fingers. With the hem of her skirt guarding her other hand, she plucked an ember from the fire and dropped it in the bone, and put in tinder which she had had lying ready. Then she took a step back and began to swing the bone around and around her head, like a slingshot. Gris, Acton and Hawk scrambled up and out of the way. Dotta chuckled.

  “The old ways still work,” she said. The tinder burst into flame like a torch. “My sisters are dead,” she added, “but I still keep the flame. My sister’s daughters have taken it now, far away, where it will be safe. For a time, a long time.”

  The men were silent.

  “Come,” she said again to Gris, swinging the bone lightly from side to side, so that the tinder burnt just enough to give off light.

  He followed her deeper into the cave, to a passageway. She turned and put her hand on his sleeve, looking into his eyes intently. Her smell was overwhelming, so close.

  “Girl,” she said. “Remember this. You will have need of it later.”

  Bramble shivered and wondered if it were her own body or Gris’s that trembled. There was no doubt that Dotta was seeing her, talking to her as though Gris weren’t there.

  She led him through a labyrinth of passageways, telling Bramble each turning. “Three down and then left. Two down and right. Four down, past this outcrop and sharp right. Down on your knees, now, for a while . . .”

  The path went on for some time, Bramble trying frantically to memorize all the turnings and twistings. At last they came to a larger space and Dotta stopped. She whirled the bone on its cord in a wide circle above her head, illuminating the walls and ceiling of a large cave. There, floating on the walls above them, vivid with ochre — red and brown and charcoal black — were paintings. Animals. Aurochs, the wild cows that still could be found in these mountains, even in Bramble’s day. Hares, their long ears absurdly pricked. Elk raising noble antlers to the sky. Deer running and leaping in a herd. Running from a pack of men with spears. Tiny black figures, but unmistakable. Other figures, too, smaller, rounder, darker altogether. Bramble had no idea what they were.

  “Why have you brought me here?” Gris asked with a croaking voice. He cleared his throat. “What do you want?”

  Dotta moved closer to Gris and looked into his eyes. “You’ll need this place, girl, when you make your search. This is a place where calling is done. When you need the earth spirits, come here and call them.”

  “What are you talking about, woman?” Gris said, his mind feeling deeply unsettled. But Bramble was tense with frustration. How? She wanted to shout.

  Dotta smiled, the toothless mouth gleaming wet in the flickering light. “How?” she echoed. “The way the hunters drew the prey to them. How else?”

  She touched the wall lightly where the dark, rounded shapes were. Shadows flowed across them as the bone swung back and forward, making them seem to move, seem to writhe and deform. “The prey must be called with love, though, or it does not come. Remember that.”

  Bramble stared at the drawings, trying to remember the sequence of passages and turns that had brought them here.

  “You can go now,” Dotta said casually, and as if at her command the waters rose and carried Bramble away.

  Dotta’s Story

  MY AUNTY LIG was one of three sisters, as her mother had been, and her mother before her. She was the middle child. Brond was the eldest and Gledda the youngest, and they lived together. The way I was told it, Brond was Mim’s mother, both of them black-haired charmers, and she was carrying a second girl. Gledda was sure that the father was the traveling skald who’d been around the season before.

  “Well, we’ll never know,” Lig said philosophically, “for sure as ash follows flame, Brond’ll never tell us, and there’ll be no telling from looking at the baby.”

  She knew the new baby would have red hair, like Lig. And the third girl, which was me, whom Brond would bear in a couple more years, would be chestnut-haired, like Gledda, flame there, but buried deep. It was always so in our family: three girls, the first black-haired, like charcoal, the second with hair as red as flame, the third with hair like banked embers. But only one of them would bear children, and then there would be three daughters, and three daughters only.

  Our lives had been so for as long as memory, since the first Mim had made her bargain with the Fire God and brought down a piece of the fire mountain to warm the hearth of her people. The Byman girls, our family were called, which means burning, and alone of all the women of our people, we didn’t attend the ritual at Spring Equinox, because the wildfire was with us all year round.

  The Byman girls didn’t have much need for men, except to get their daughters. We did for ourselves, as crafters of one kind or another, but mostly potters. Over the generations our old stone house had filled with the results of our work and it was like walking into a treasure chamber, with old wall-hangings and shining platters on the wall, with glazeware in every color gleaming: pale green and midnight blue, and the special deep red glaze that people from as far away as Turvite came to buy. That red glaze made looking into a bowl like looking into the depths of the earth, and there were some who said that the recipe for it had been given to the first Mim, from the Fire God himself. But when I asked one of my aunts, all she would do was smile and say, “I learned it from my mother, and where she learned it, only she knows.” Which was no help at all because their mother and their aunts were dead, since the winter after young Mim was born.

  That was the way it always happened, too.

  Lig told me she had always hoped that she would be the one to have the children. When she was little, she planned what she would call them. Bryne, perhaps, or Ban, for the bone the first Mim had carried down the mountainside, full of fire. Or even, daring thought, Rosa, the name of her friend from the village. She played with dolls, while Brond and Gledda were only interested in messing around with clay. Even her mother thought she would be the one to carry on the line.

  “Look at her,” she would say to her sisters, watching Lig croon a dolly to sleep, “she’s made for it.”

  “Well, I hope so,” the girls’ Aunt Bryne had answered once, thinking Lig couldn’t hear, “for she’s not half the potter the others are.”

  Lig knew it was true. Brond and Gledda were potters born, crafting reasonable bowls before they could sew. So as she grew up she took on most of the cooking and the cleaning, and left them free to perfect their craft, sure that she would have the most important role of all, to mother the next batch of daughters.

  But by the time she was old enough to dance the Springtree and run off to the woods afterward with a sweet young man, Brond was already pregnant with Mim. That first Springtree morning had put a sharp taste in her mouth, the taste of uselessness. For if Brond was bearing, then she and Gledda were barren. That was the way of it. Poor Ham the farrier hadn’t known what to do when she’d rolled away from him, after, and cried into the new grass. She’d tried to reassure him, but to the day of her death when he looked at her a cloud went over his face, as it will over the face of a man who remembers failure. He married Rosa and had six children w
ho followed him around like puppies. Lig had always known he’d make a good father. She didn’t go to their house much, though, and her old friendship with Rosa withered away.

  Brond had been glad enough to let her look after Mim, especially during the bad time, when they were dealing with the shock of their mother’s death, and then their aunts’. Even though they knew it was coming, it was still a shock. No one had told them what to expect until after Mim was born.

  “You mustn’t tell her or the other girls, when they come,” Aunt Bryne had said sternly, coughing her life away with fever. “For then they’d never try for a child until you were all dead, and it might be too late. Just let them choose their own time, and be thankful.”

  “Aye,” their mam said. “We’ve made a good bargain with the Fire God. He gives us health and prosperity, he protects us from ill, and he gives us a quick death when the time comes. But he likes his servants to be young, and vigorous, like him. Small blame to him.”

  “Our line will never die,” Aunt Aesca breathed. “Remember that. Never so long as the fire burns.”

  That was small comfort to Lig or to the others, as they watched the three of them, their three beloveds, waste away and die. Afterward, though, they clung to it as a solace. At least there was a reason for the deaths. Most people, Brond pointed out, die for no reason at all. Surely that would be harder to cope with.

  Lig wondered.

  Watching Brond feed Mim had been like a pain, like an ache in her own breast, but it was bound up with the general pain of grief and misery they all lived in at the time. Since then she had grown to love Mim as her own.

  But she didn’t think she could bear to see Brond have another daughter, and this one a girl with flame hair, like hers.

  “She should be mine,” Lig muttered to her pillow. “We should have one each. That would be fair.”

  As Brond rounded out and slowed down, sitting more by the fire in the kitchen than by the potter’s wheel in the workshop, Lig found it hard to be in the same room with her. She spent more time in the garden. She raised most of their food anyway: vegetables and herbs, fruits, chickens and ducks and eggs. There were two gardens: a walled garden next to the kitchen, and an orchard which ran from the other side of the house down to the river.