Tale of Birle

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Some gennlemun.”

  The voices were moving away. Birle’s shoulders sagged with relief. She tried to catch the Lord’s eye, to nod at him so that he too should know all was well, but he stared into the fog over her shoulder.

  “Just row. It’s what you’re good for,” the gentleman’s voice said.

  “I been rowing for two hours, I’ll wager. And with the current running against me. And you too dainty to take a turn at the oars.”

  “It won’t be so hard returning downstream. You can cheer yourself up with that thought.” The voice was mocking now.

  “Could be, I’ll tell him you was drunk, anyway.”

  “He wouldn’t believe you.”

  “Oh aye?”

  “You have the mind and manners of a brute, and I can give him the word of a gentleman.”

  “Hoo,” the second voice crowed, drifting away in the fog. “Hoo, hoo.”

  As the immediate danger faded, Birle remembered the stories she’d heard, the voices rising up through the floors from the public room, creeping out through the crack of a closed door. The Lord signaled her to lean toward him. She could barely find the will to obey him. They were both on their knees in the little boat; they brought their faces so close that they could speak almost without sound.

  “We must go back,” Birle said. “To the Kingdom.”

  He shook his head, the deep blue eyes staring at her, as if he would see inside of her head, to see everything that was there. What should he fear in her? Birle knew what it was she feared. Fear made her bold. “My Lord, we’re near the port. What they do to the prisoners they take—aye, the women especially, but men, men too—I heard a man say that the cries from the cells—it’s those cries that make the skies weep. I heard—”

  He put his hand over her mouth. “Birle. Hush. Hush now. I’ll keep you safe,” he promised her.

  She shook her head. He could not promise her that, if there were many to attack them. She had seen goats upon a nanny in her season.

  “Birle,” the Lord said, “I could kill you, if it were your wish, if death seemed the better fortune. But I don’t understand—I thought that the people took their pleasure as it came to them.”

  “Why should you think that?” she asked him. “We are not animals.”

  “I know. I know,” he said, sounding tired. “My grandfather told me that as well. It would be easier to be a Lord if the people were sheep.”

  The wistful quality of his smile quelled her anger as effectively as a bucket of water on a fire. Aye, and he couldn’t protect her, she knew that. But his promise to do so was genuinely given. How could he know, gently raised and living so easily, how cruel men could be? It was fine in him to make the promise, and to mean it.

  He had never seen goats going after a nanny in her season, or dogs when a bitch was in heat.

  “Can we not turn back?” Her low voice had ragged edges of fear.

  “I cannot, Innkeeper’s Daughter.”

  “Or, let me take us to the opposite bank. To wait. Let the merchants return from the fairs, and whatever thieves they meet on their way, and then—then the way around the port would be safer.”

  “I don’t know. If we make any sound—sounds carry, even the sound of muffled oars. . . . I don’t know how broad the river is, if— Do they guard the port? Have the merchants said?”

  “I don’t know. We can’t see. What time is it, think you?”

  “I don’t know. If we can stay hidden until dark . . . How far is it from the port to the sea?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked at him, his face close to hers, waiting for him to decide what they should do.

  “What have we gotten ourselves into, Birle?” He spoke as if it were a joke.

  It was no joke. Birle would have liked to tell him that. But his smile, and his bellflower eyes close, his face so close to hers that his breath brushed her ears. The confusion of her feelings overwhelmed her. Fear and contentment, and the danger they were moving toward, and she didn’t even know how close it lay, she couldn’t even see where it might come from in the fog— “Please?” she said, her voice like a cry.

  He clapped a hand across her mouth again, and this time held it there. She tried to push it away but he dug his fingers into her cheeks. “Hush. Listen. Hear it? There’s something—get down, pull your cloak over you, stay down out of sight in the boat. In the fog—our only chance is not to be noticed, seen or heard. Hear it?”

  She heard it, a creaking of wood like trees pulled by the wind, and a clanking of metal like a workhorse turning the plow on its chain. Too frightened to protest, or to think, Birle obeyed. She slid backward, to lie curled up on the floorboards. She pulled her cloak up over her until she lay in darkness, alone.

  She heard the faint rustle that she thought was the Lord, arranging himself under his own cloak, and then—for minutes, or maybe an hour—she heard nothing but faraway sounds. She didn’t know what those sounds were, or if it was distance, or fog, or the enveloping cloak that made them sound so far away. Her heart beat so loud in her ears she was sure it must be heard, like a drumbeat. She couldn’t catch her breath and her whole body seemed to be quivering as she strained to hear.

  A shriek filled the air, like lightning. Another came after it and then there was silence. The shriek echoed in her head. Who would shriek so, and what must be happening? It was as thin as a child’s voice in terror. Birle strained her ears, and could hear nothing.

  Something thumped against the side of the boat, rolling her sideways. She wanted to throw off the cloak and jump up, knife in hand, to face whatever danger awaited. She wanted to scream out aloud. She clamped her teeth shut. It could be another boat their boat had run into and at any moment they would be plucked up and out, like eggs taken out from under a hen.

  But the boat seemed still to be moving. A log, then? Or a branch, torn from its trunk by the wind. Pilings, that held up a dock?

  Fear pressed down heavy on her, her shoulders and legs, on her bent neck. In the blackness under the cloak fear was blind, a blind, groping thing struggling to get out, like a kitten taken to be drowned in a sack. Birle had never known how much fear she could feel, and she did not think she could endure it. She stared into the blackness, her hands clenched under her cheek. Fear lay down on top of her like a black cloud, trying to get into her mouth through her clenched teeth. There was nothing she could do but wait, and hope that the danger—a danger she couldn’t even lift her head to meet—might not notice the little boat, drifting helpless through the fog. Birle shut her eyes, to shut out the imagined dangers. Without thought, or choice, she was asleep.

  SHE WOKE TO THE SOUND of her name, spoken over her head. The darkness as her eyes opened puzzled her, and the stale air, and the way the boat was rocking. Lifting her head, remembering, throwing off the cloak to sit up, Birle saw that the Lord was sitting in the rowing seat with the oars in his hands and that the fog had closed in around them. The little visible world had grown even smaller. She held on to the side of the boat with a hand, against the rough rocking. Water sprayed into her face, and she welcomed its sharp coldness. The water tasted of salt.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Did you faint? I thought only Ladies were given to fainting.” There was no fear, no caution, in his voice.

  “I was asleep. How long has it been? Are we safe?”

  “Safe?” He raised his eyebrows. “We passed the port—we must have—some time back. I think now we are on the sea. If my belly is to be believed, it’s late into the day. Tell me, Innkeeper’s Daughter, do you prefer the known danger or the unknown?” He gave her no chance to answer the question. “Are you sorry now?”

  That question he did give her time to consider. Birle could wish herself at the Inn, in familiar surrounding, with the smell of a stew in the kitchen and the sounds of custom in the public room, and Nan bursting in to scold. But that life seemed no more than a dream remembered. She was about to answer him, no, not sorry; but he answered
himself.

  “I am. I am sorry. I should have overpowered you that first morning, it would have been easy—or left you behind while you slept at night. I haven’t served you well.”

  The kindness of his thought touched her even while the bitterness of his voice made her want to remind him that his way would be easy, now that the port lay behind him.

  “Should we not be making toward the shore?” she asked him.

  “Which way would that be?”

  The fog drifted close, in sheets like rain, in long groping white fingers. Beyond the close, drifting fog a settled whiteness filled all the air.

  “When the fog lifts we’ll know which way to go,” Birle said.

  “The sea, as I’ve heard, is endless and empty. You should be sorry.”

  “Aye, maybe I should. And maybe I would be, if it would make any difference.” Although that last she would not promise, watching his mouth’s corners turn up in a reluctant smile. “When the fog lifts, when we can see the sun, then we can know. The land lies to the east of the sea.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s on the map,” Birle reminded him. “If we go away from the setting sun, or toward the rising sun, we must come to land, sooner or later.”

  “How are you so certain that’s what the map says?”

  Birle had not thought fear would bite him as hard as it had her. “North is marked on the map.” He still stared at her. “That’s what the N means, my Lord, with the arrow beneath it to point north.”

  “I thought you had recognized it.”

  She had fallen into his trap.

  “You know N, that it’s a letter. Do you know other letters?” He sounded curious, not angry. Birle nodded her head. “You’ve seen other maps too, I warrant that.”

  Birle nodded.

  He thought about this. “And words? Can you read?”

  “Aye, my Lord. And write.” Maybe she shouldn’t have added the last, but she was proud to surprise him.

  “Who would have taught you?” he asked. “There’s no danger now in answering my curiosity.”

  That reminded her of her own questions. “What did you do, that you must flee your own lands, your own home, your own family? There’s no danger now in answering my curiosity either.”

  She thought he would laugh aloud, but he didn’t. “What I did was be myself, be the man I am. Let me ask you a question, Birle. How many just Lords can rule before the land goes to ruin?”

  “Why should a Lord not be just?” she asked.

  “Which is the greater good for the people, justice or safety? If the land goes to ruin, then there is no living for the people. They suffer first, and most. So that if a Lord cares feelingly for his people, he is the very one who will put them into danger. One such Lord, in several generations, might do good. But how many such Lords can the people bear?”

  Birle couldn’t have answered that question and he didn’t seem to want her to. He might have plotted, she thought, against a Lord he thought was such a danger. Plotters, even among the Lords, were hard dealt with. If a servant turned his hand against his master the whole house trembled on the act, and what were Lords to Earl and King but servants to master.

  And why, she wondered, were they talking of such things? It was as if both of them wished to be distracted from the troubles they faced and could do nothing about. If they were afloat on the sea, and blind in the fog—they didn’t even know what direction they should turn in. What then did it matter that she knew reading and writing, or that he had been caught out in a plot against his overlord?

  Chapter Seven

  DARKNESS LOWERED ITSELF DOWN UPON them, at the end of that day. Ordinarily, light and color drew up out of the air leaving darkness behind, but that evening the dark came down, flowing down into the fog, like mud into a river. The Lord did not speak.

  How long it was after that that the wind came up, Birle couldn’t tell. The wind blew at the fog, blowing it away. Looking up, she saw the sky stretched huge above her. She hadn’t thought the sky could be so large. Thick clouds moved across it, dark shadows that showed—where they broke—glimpses of the young moon, and her attendant stars. Birle’s spririts lifted. “My Lord, are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  The boat leaped about on the sea waves, like a kid at play.

  “Should I row? Think you?”

  “Do you know which way the land lies?”

  “I thought you might,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” he said. She waited for him to make the choice. When he made none, said nothing, she spoke again, across the darkness.

  “I think the land is over there, where the wind comes from. It feels to me as if that’s where the land is.” If she were rowing, then at least she could warm herself. This wind had an edge to it that cut through her cloak. Waves sprayed up, and into the boat. Aye, he was probably cold, too. “It’ll be hard going against the wind. Let’s each take an oar.”

  “That’s better than sitting and waiting for whatever might come upon us,” he said. “Well, then, Innkeeper’s Daughter, we’ll row. But move very carefully. This boat seems not as safe a place as once it was.”

  Cautiously, the Lord first, they settled themselves on the rowing seat. As they stroked with the oars to bring the boat around into the wind, waves splashed up over the side. The water was ice-cold upon Birle’s fingers. She ignored it, trying to match her strokes to his.

  Rowing was hard work, made harder by the spray of cold seawater over her head and neck and hands. But it did warm her. She hoped it was warming to him, as well. It must have been, because when he spoke his voice was rich with laughter. “We made it safely past your dreaded port. That’s something to be proud of, if the tales you told me are true.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be?”

  “I wonder, often, about those wolves and bears you spoke of,” he reminded her. “Which matter not at all, now. There’ll be little danger from wolf or bear here on the sea. And what do you think of it, Innkeeper’s Daughter. Do you think if we knew where our choices would lead us we would still make them as we did?”

  “But we can’t know,” Birle said. She paid little attention to his words. She was busy with her own thoughts. Her own thoughts were uncomfortable companions. The wind, she thought, was rising, steadily rising. It might just seem that way now because they were backing into it, and thus receiving its full force—or so she hoped. But the clouds also seemed to be moving more swiftly across the sky, and to be massing together. Birle turned her head and saw—coming at them across the sky from the direction she hoped was west—an endless darkness, like a wall.

  Did waves wash over the bow more frequently? More strongly? The whole back of her cloak felt wet. She bent herself to the task of rowing, both hands on the oar handle. She couldn’t even see to know if they made any progress. There was no landmark against which to place the boat.

  Aye, and there was no land, here on the sea.

  She was afraid, again afraid. She did not dare to name her fear, for hope that it might prove groundless, for fear that naming it would give it truth. She sat with her back to her fear, as to the wind and waves. Fear blew and sprayed at her back but she dared not turn around to face it. How long they rowed thus she didn’t know.

  When the skies opened and rain poured down upon them, they both stopped rowing, without a word. Against wind-driven waves the oars did no work. Waves crashed into the sides of the boat. The boat bounced and fell. Water poured down over Birle’s head and shoulders and legs. Water splashed over the sides of the little boat. The wind roared like water. “These boats,” Birle called, “are built for quiet waters.”

  “If we don’t bail the water out we’ll sink,” he called back.

  They had nothing but their hands to bail with. Birle bent down and cupped her hands together, to lift water over the side of the boat. The boat rolled and bucked on the black water, under the black sky. The Lord worked beside her.

  The whole world had contracted
to the little boat, and the splashing of water, out of the boat and into it. She was barely aware of the sheets of water pouring down into the boat from the sky. She would have stopped the work of bailing if she could have thought of a reason to do so; although, there was no reason to continue it, none that she could think of.

  When the Lord took hold of her wrist, she thought he must be thinking the same thought. But he pointed toward a patch of whiteness, moving on the water beyond his shoulder. Except that it did not lie quiet, that patch of whiteness was like a patch of snow, hidden deep among the trees from the warmth of spring.

  “What is it?” Birle called. He shook his head; he didn’t know.

  The boat spun around, and crashed down against a wave. Birle’s knee cracked against the oar that swung uselessly up and down. There was a heavier darkness waiting behind the unquiet patch of white. Something was drawing them toward it. A screaming cry was making its way up from Birle’s stomach, fighting its way up to her throat.

  The boat rolled under them. She slid heavily against the Lord, who struggled to keep his seat in the boat. He fell off the seat and onto his knees on the floorboards. Birle slid heavily away from him.

  His hand latched on to her wrist again. “Rocks,” his voice called close into her ear.

  Birle had no time to think. The boat was thrown into the middle of white-crested waves. Her hand grabbed for his wrist as they tumbled into the water. Her shoulder hit something hard, his wrist slipped out from her numb fingers, her head was taken by the waves. She turned over, her head pulled down, down into darkness underwater. Her legs rolled heavy above her. She had no choice but to go where the water took her, turning in the icy water like a leaf in stormy air. She tried to struggle against it, struggle up into the air. Blackness struck her on the back of the head and she tumbled into it, like falling into water.

  WHAT ROUSED HER, BIRLE WAS not sure. It might have been the sun coming up over the distant edge of the moving water. When she opened her eyes, she could see the first early curve of the sun, over the unsteady horizon. It might have been the odd sucking sound below her, or the cry above her, a wailing screech answered by another and another. Birle lifted her head to find the source of the cries, which seemed to be two large soaring birds. Or, it might have been the hardness of the rock on which she was lying facedown, and the soreness of her arms, legs, shoulders, even her head, of her back and belly. She had heard such cries before.