Tale of Birle

by Cynthia Voigt

  This was a sad song—the knight slain, the lady dying that same day, and her babe within her. Even the downs and derry downs, which could have been so cheerful, became sorrowful.

  “I could never earn my keep as a minstrel,” he said, after a few minutes. “My grandfather keeps a minstrel.”

  Birle sat up. “You have music then, whenever you wish?”

  “Unless the man can’t be found.”

  “Can he come and go as he pleases?” Birle asked. At each question Orien answered, she asked more. He had two personal servants, to keep his clothes and answer his needs. Food was brought to him before he arose from his bed in the morning; the tailor came to his chamber to measure him for clothing, when he needed clothing made, as did the cobbler for boots. He was schooled in swordplay, and in dance. The priests had taught him from books. Birle learned who sat down at the tables in the Earl’s feasting hall, and who had seats at the high table.

  She learned that from boyhood Orien had been taught to read the words and figures in the Stewards’ long books, so that he might understand and safeguard the wealth of the house. He preferred books of stories, like Gran’s, but ability with the figures of the long books was valued more.

  Orien, she learned, stood behind the Earl on Hearing Days, and sometimes spoke advice into his grandfather’s ear. He might go weeks without an exchange of words with his father. On high feast days, he ate with a spoon shaped out of silver. At the King’s table, he told her, even the plates were silver.

  When Birle’s head was so crammed with information that she could take no more in, she fell silent.

  He, too, fell silent, as if he had run out of words. The sun was well up in the sky. The water had been soundlessly creeping up over the rocks, and he climbed back onto the rock, to sit beside her.

  “I see no hope of food,” Orien said then. “Tell me about your home.”

  “The Inn is just beyond the village, by the river. Aye,” she said, just realizing it, “it’s your village.” Then she realized something else. “And it was your boat, too. You are no thief.”

  “Aye,” he mimicked her. “As I told you.”

  “Isn’t the village written down in the Steward’s long book? Or do you mistrust your Steward?”

  “No, I don’t. Although neither do I entirely trust him. He’s a man like any other, with his own purposes to serve. I know how many families live in the village, I know what kind of living they earn from land and river. But there is so much untold by the long books. Are the hardships manageable? How do you build your houses? I know of the Inn, which was built before my grandfather’s time, but how are the village houses made?”

  “They build the houses of wood. A woodman will come, to cut the logs to planks. Out of these they make walls and roof. The house my granda built was made of stone, like the Inn, and there was a journeying slater who made the roof for that. The Earl paid the cost of it, Granda said. Isn’t that holding in the long book? Who will have it now?”

  “There’s nobody who wants it, as solitary as it is.”

  “They are fools, then,” Birle said. “There’s meadow, apple trees, and a spring. The forest for hunting, the river close enough to fish, a house.”

  “It made little for taxes. I don’t know why the Earl gave the holding, except I do—because he could find no reason to say no. He was never satisfied to say no without a reason. But Birle, what about things like stools, or latches for the doors—without a blacksmith, how do you have hinges?”

  Orien wondered about the growing of the grapes and the making of the wines; he asked how a smokehouse was built and how many baskets of parsnips a household would need in its cellars, for a winter. He asked her if she knew why it was that wine made men drunk but water did not; he knew no more of that than she did. He seemed disappointed that she had been kept to the kitchen, and so did not know much of the Inn’s custom except that it sometimes grew loud. Neither could she tell him how much of a burden the taxes were. Her father always put aside coins for the Earl, keeping them safe in a locked box. Other men were not so careful, and grumbled when the Steward had come, but somehow they found the necessary coins and then forgot about it until weeks before the next fair, when the Steward came again. He asked about the number and manner of rooms in the Inn, and how the wine casks were built. He asked about obtaining the fishing spears, and how to keep flour free of weevils. He asked question after question, until at last he fell silent. Birle was glad to rest.

  It was midafternoon before he spoke again. The sea was sliding down the side of the rocks, pulling back from the stony shore. The sun hung over their shoulders. Unlike the sun and the sea, hunger did not draw back. Birle lay on her stomach at the edge of the flat rock, looking into the water. No fish moved among the stones.

  “Birle?” Orien asked. “How long do you think it will be before we are rescued?”

  Chapter 8

  AS THE AFTERNOON DREW ON, the long, cool shadows of the high cliffs chilled them, while the sky was still filled with light. The water reflected the changing colors of the sky as the sun set behind the cliffs. Then dusk swept like a wind over them, trailing darkness behind. Birle watched the sky.

  The first stars came out, hesitant, shy. They were joined by more, and more, until the whole star-filled sky hung over her. Hunger burned in her belly, crowding it just as the stars crowded the sky.

  “I am sorry, Birle,” Orien said, breaking his long silence.

  She didn’t answer. All she could think of was that she could think of him, now, with his name.

  “We can’t get food here, or water. We can’t build any shelter,” he went on. “I didn’t want to be who I had to be—which, without my sack and the proof of the ring hidden there, I’m not. But this needn’t have been your fortune.”

  Birle’s head was light with hunger, and it was difficult to attend to what he said. “There’s a story—do you know it?—about the man who had his wishes granted.” Orien didn’t know the tale, so she told it to him, how the woodchopper captured one of the little men and claimed from the graybeard the three wishes that were his prize. The woodchopper told his wife the good news that evening, so joyful that he wished the turnip stew she gave him were a string of sausages. She in her anger at his stupidity wished the sausage onto the end of his nose, where it hung until the third wish was spent to remove it. They shared the sausages for their meal.

  Orien then told her of an ancient king who asked that everything he touched might turn to gold. The wish was granted him. So that when his beloved daughter ran to embrace him, she became a golden statue.

  That story, and the rising of the moon before her, reminded Birle of the book she had never read in her grandparents’ house. She asked Orien if he knew the story of the moon and the handsome shepherd. He did, and told the tale. She sang him the song of the old woman and the billy goat in the garden. Perhaps Orien was too hungry for laughter, but she heard the smile in his voice when he asked her, “What would you be doing now, Birle, if you were at the Inn?”

  “Aye, we’d all be in our beds asleep.”

  “How could you be asleep, with the night just begun?”

  “When the day’s work begins in the dark of morning a man sleeps early, and easily.”

  “But do you rise so early?”

  “There’s work to do. Fires do not light themselves, a loaf of bread doesn’t knead itself and run into the oven. Fields and animals must be kept.”

  “I thought your father was Innkeeper.”

  “Aye, and for that reason the work of spring is heaviest. Because the Inn’s stores must be enough to feed the guests. In spring, the ground has to be turned over and the seeds sown. Spring is the season when goats and pigs have their young. Fish for the table—cheeses from the rich milk—and the bedclothes to launder, because in spring the custom at the Inn is busy, with the Steward and his men, there for the taxes, and the caravans traveling to the fairs. Life isn’t meant to be easy.” This was what Da and Nan, and her brothers too, had s
aid to her, over and over.

  “I am not wakened until the fire has warmed my chamber,” he said. “Then the curtains are drawn back from my bed, and I am given bread warm from the oven, and wine in a goblet. At this evening hour,” he went on, his smooth-flowing words making pictures in her mind, “there will be two fires in the hall, and candles on the walls and tables, for light. The Ladies would have withdrawn to their own rooms. I would be perhaps talking, perhaps having a game of chess with my grandfather or a quarrel with my brother. There might be songs from the minstrel, or—since it’s the season—entertainers who, summoned from the fairs, come to the castle in the evenings and the Ladies stay to see them. Then we see a play, or puppets, or there is a man who swallows fire. I wished to be a fire-eater when I was a boy, to be able to do so wonderful a thing and to travel with the entertainers. I know better now, but—he took flame into his mouth, Birle, as if—and it may be—he were not ordinary flesh and blood. I tried it with a candle but the candle kept going out as soon as I closed my lips around it. Once I asked the fire-eater to tell me his secret, and offered him gold for it. But he wouldn’t. He said I had no need of such tricks and he had need to keep them to himself, not give them away to every child who asked. I tried to get Grandfather to make him tell me—the Earl has the power—the Earl could put such a man into the dungeon until he told, or offer him so much gold he’d never need to seek his living again. But my grandfather refused me. He said the fire-eater spoke true, and he wouldn’t take away from a man that which he needed to earn his bread. I would probably say the same now,” Orien said.

  Birle tried to imagine days where there was not always some voice telling you to hurry at your task, so the next could be started. She tried to imagine an evening of entertainment—but the nearest she could come was her grandparents’ house. “My granda played music on a pipe.”

  “So it isn’t all labor,” he said.

  “But it is.” The work of keeping your belly filled, from one day to the next, from one season to the next—but he couldn’t understand it, she thought. She was herself having just a taste of a laborless life, through the chance of having found Orien in the dark, and the mischance of being marooned.

  “Last night the whole world was a storm,” Orien said then. “What do you think happened to it? Do you think a storm travels across the sea until it falls off the edge of the world?”

  Birle had never thought about that.

  “Or does it blow itself out, like a log in the fire that burns itself out, using itself up and destroying itself even while it rages?”

  “I don’t know,” Birle said. “I never wondered about a storm except when it was upon me.”

  “I think I will practice that wisdom,” Orien said, “and sleep.”

  Birle lay upon her back, her cloak around her like rolled bedclothes. The moonlight washed over her face as the waves washed up against the rocks, until she too slept.

  She awoke to his voice, and sun falling over her from a midmorning sky. Clouds moved across the sky, slow and stately, like a procession of Lords and Ladies. “Hungry,” Orien said. “I’m so hungry . . . and thirsty.”

  Birle had never before slept through the dawn. This, she thought, is what it would be like to lie abed, like a Lady.

  “My mouth is so dry, my lips are dry, and my hands—Birle, look, is my hand trembling?”

  She couldn’t make out his hand in the brightness of the sun. Her mind wouldn’t clear itself, to undertake the day.

  “I’ve been a fool, Birle. I shouldn’t have let yesterday go by. We’ll only get weaker. There must be something to eat, somewhere in this place. I’ve been thinking, and if I’ve the strength I should try to climb the cliff. Before I get any weaker. We can’t just sit here telling stories until we starve. Birle? Get up.”

  Birle stood. Her legs were unsteady under her, her boots heavy.

  “You have your knife? You can watch for fish,” Orien told her. “Fish live in water, and there’s certainly enough of that. Unless fish, like men, can’t swallow seawater. Are you awake? And stay out of the sun if you can. The sun dries you up. Birle?”

  Unable to think, unable to awake, she obeyed. She stood in water so cold it penetrated the leather of her boots to numb her feet and calves. She watched through it, for any movement. She saw nothing. And why, with the whole deep sea to swim in, any fish should come to this rocky, shallow water, she didn’t know. Every now and then she turned around to see Orien, splayed out against the face of the cliff. His progress was slow. Then it halted. Then he was moving spiderlike back down the cliff.

  She too gave up her useless pursuit. Climbing back up onto the rock, she tried to think of how to comfort him. “The pain of hunger passes,” she said.

  His smile came slower now, and not so bright, but it was still a smile that glowed in his eyes. “I’ll welcome that,” he said. “But do you know this from experience? Have you been this hungry before?”

  Birle shook her head. She’d never gone a day without food before. Or without drink, she thought. At that thought, thirst troubled her again. Her mouth felt pinched and wrinkled, like the flesh of salted fish.

  “You look like an old madwoman from the forest,” Orien said. “Or one of those who live out under the open sky.”

  Birle put her hand to her long braids. Her hair hung unraveled. Her hair hung tangled down over her back. She almost laughed aloud at the joke of it, with her child’s dreams of the wedding day when she might wear her hair at last unbound. Orien looked—Lordly still, even with a rough beard growing on his face, and his hair matted. The blue of his eyes was the only true color in the world.

  “Did you never wonder, Birle, why it is that the people must work and the Lords live at ease?”

  “Aye,” she said, and was surprised when he laughed, and then surprised that he laughed, for his mouth must be as dry as hers.

  “A man’s bones would ache at the end of every day, and he would know the next no different.”

  “Aye.”

  “It is a beast’s life, Birle.”

  She would not have him think her an animal, whatever else he might think of her, not such a beast. “What I used to do was shirk. If Nan wanted the garden worked, or the bedclothes washed, she would tell me to do it. I wouldn’t say no to her but—just because you say you’ll do something doesn’t mean—saying is different from doing. It wasn’t I who wished the linen laundered, it wasn’t my linen, I have no linen. If the task wasn’t started in time, then the work couldn’t be done that day. If a stew burned for lack of stirring, we could still eat what hadn’t burned. If weeds grow larger they are easier to pull out. Nan would get into a fine anger, all of them would. And much of the time, they’d find it simpler to do the job themselves than to make me do it. So my own life was in that way made easier.”

  “Weren’t you ashamed?”

  “Why should I be? If I spent the morning scrubbing the floor of the barroom, by night it would be filthy again. What’s the good of work like that? If Nan cared to have her floor shining with cleanliness, let her wash it. If they called me lazy, that’s only a word and didn’t hurt me. I did enough.” The old anger was there in her voice, she could hear it. It was weak with thirst and hunger, but it was present.

  She thought she knew what he must now think, and wanted him to know better of her. “When I cared for my grandparents, it wasn’t—I wasn’t—it was easy to say yes to my grandparents, to do the task. They didn’t wish me to be servant to their wishes.”

  “Nan—she wanted you for a servant?”

  “It felt so.”

  “What about the others, your father and brothers?”

  “They said Nan had the right of it. When the Inn prospered we all prospered. The work had to be done and done right.”

  Orien took a while to think about that. “I begin to understand why you were eager to wed your huntsman.”

  “I was a fool,” Birle told him.

  “Maybe. But how could you know. It would be hard if so
meone else owned all your days, and all your work.”

  He understood, he did understand. The Lords need never concern themselves about the people, much less understand, but Orien did. If such a man were Earl . . . but Orien said such a man would be dangerous to the house, and it must be that he understood that too. For which reason, he had left everything behind him, all that was his by right of his high birth. That was much, a third of the Kingdom. She thought Orien must be made of different material from any other man or woman she had known. Even, she thought, her grandparents. Such a man ought to live at his ease, she thought, and his people labor to keep him.

  “I’m tired,” Orien said. “Hunger leaves me tired. Thirst too, and I am thirsty. I am not well-schooled for this fortune.”

  “Hunger fades, after its time,” Birle told him. “Even if you don’t feed it, hunger fades.”

  “I get impatient, waiting for what will happen next,” he said.

  What would happen next Birle didn’t want to discuss with him. The sun hung high in the sky and there was no shade for them to move to. She didn’t know if Orien understood their peril, but if he didn’t she wouldn’t be the one to tell it to him. Telling would make no difference.

  “If we were in one of the old stories,” she said, trying to speak lightly, “what would happen next is that Jackaroo would come riding across the water, to carry us to safety.”

  “How could a horse cross the sea without sinking into it?”

  “In a story,” she reminded him. You could grow accustomed to almost anything, she thought, surprised. She had grown so accustomed to speaking with Orien that she spoke without thought, and he a Lord. She had grown accustomed to this stony world; her body didn’t protest rock for ground and floor, stool and bed. She had learned how to watch the endless sea, with its rising and falling water, she knew what she might expect the sea to do. The music of waves against rocks was as familiar to her now as her Granda’s pipe, playing. “It is no more amazing,” she said, full of the strangeness of the actual even more than the strangeness of the fabled, “than a boy sleeping forever, forever young.”