Tale of Birle

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Do you ever think, Birle, that the truth of stories is deeper than the truth of the world? Because—a man can be put to sleep by a woman’s beauty, and never ask to awaken.”

  She had never thought of that, Birle thought, sleepy with hunger in the warm sun. “Not actually asleep,” she said, to be sure she understood.

  “No, but truly asleep.”

  She wondered if some Lady had cast her spell of beauty over Orien.

  “Maybe, then, I’ll watch for Jackaroo over the water,” he said, but he was teasing. “Do you know the tale of Jackaroo and the prince?”

  “No.”

  He told it to her, of the prince kept in a high stone tower by his jealous stepmother, so that her own son might become king even though he was not the eldest born. The prince was a child when he was stolen away, by guards who did not dare to slay him. The king’s grief killed him, leaving the stepmother as queen regent. The prince grew to young manhood in the tower. Jackaroo came, and climbed up the tower wall, a wall steeper and more impassable than the cliffs behind them. He carried a rope, down which the prince climbed, but the rope broke, stranding Jackaroo above. The prince rode away, and it was the stepmother who ended her days in that same tower, where only the bodies of the guards were to be seen when the prince returned with his soldiers, to set Jackaroo free.

  “The story makes you smile,” Orien said.

  Birle hadn’t known there was a smile on her face. “I’m thinking how differently Jackaroo serves the people,” she said. “Do you know the tale of Jackaroo and the robbers?”

  He didn’t, so she told it: Jackaroo had met a woman, struggling through the snow with her babe in her arms. Robbers had set upon their holding, slaughtered her husband and sons, and set the house to flames. She had escaped into the woods while the robbers were busy at their work. Jackaroo took her and the child to a safe house, then rode up into the mountains, into the robbers’ stronghold, and captured all three of them. He brought them before the Steward, on a day when people had gathered before the city walls and the Lords had gathered atop the city walls, to watch the hanging of a highwayman. Jackaroo claimed the law to protect the people as well as the Lords. The Steward dared not oppose him, nor could he lay his hands on Jackaroo, who stepped into the crowd and disappeared among the people, who would not move to let him be seen, and taken. “Sometimes the Steward could see the long feather on his hat, moving ever away, like a man walking through a field tall with wheat. But the people kept Jackaroo safe,” she said.

  All the long hours they traded stories and songs. Not trying to hide her harsh voice, Birle sang him the song about the gay maiden who spurned the lad who loved her true, and when he died of a broken heart fell down dead herself at his burning pyre. Orien told her the story of Jackaroo and the bride, whom he rescued from the wedding her father forced her to and left in the bed of her true love, where once the night was spent her father would not have her back. He sang her the song of the true knight, who laid down his life for his king against traitors, even though the king had ignored his warnings and only with the knight’s death knew the truth of him. She sang him the lament of the girl betrayed, whose blossoming belly made her shame known. When dusk fell, their voices faded off into sleep.

  Birle awoke to thirst, and moonlight. The cool light fell on Orien, asleep, as if he were a statue carved out of the stone he slept on. She watched his sleep, until clouds covered the moon and she fell asleep herself.

  She awoke again, to a heavy gray morning. When the rain, at last, fell over them, they sat under it with open mouths. She licked water from her hands and wrists. She spread her cloak out on the rock, so that after the rain had stopped she might suck moisture from the cloth. That day they spoke little, and moved not at all. After it had fallen upon them, the rain blew across the sky and on over the sea, and away.

  Chapter 9

  HOW MANY DAYS AND NIGHTS went by, Birle did not know. They might have been many, they might have been few. It made no matter to her if it was day or night. There was a time when it rained, water falling into her mouth, and all over her, soaking into her skin as if her skin itself had tiny mouths to drink in water. Long after the rain had ended, she could suck moisture from her cloak.

  Always, Orien was in her sight—except on those rare occasions when one or the other disappeared behind a boulder for privacy. Birle knew that he was growing weaker, as she was, but he would still climb down from the rock to stand at the base of the enclosing cliffs, looking upward. He scratched with his dagger on the stone that was home to them. “Do you think to eat stone, Orien?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. When he showed her his work, she saw that he had scratched their two names into the rock—Orien, Beryl—first his, then hers beneath it, “To mark our presence,” he said. The sun had colored his face and hands brown. “That’s not how my name is written,” she said, but wouldn’t let him cross it out, to scratch her own name beneath.

  Orien kept watch over the empty sea, but Birle did not. He remarked on this, his voice raspy. “You seem at ease, Innkeeper’s Daughter. Is it that the people are more skilled at understanding necessity?”

  Birle’s lips were too dry and painful to make any answer. But she was content; he was correct in that. The sea might blow up white spumes as it raced under a wind, or it might lie smooth; it might rise and fall in its restless tides; the sea might never be still, but she was quiet.

  “It’s hard not to be able to do anything,” Orien said. That was his only complaint. He bore thirst and the weakness of hunger without a word.

  “Aye, but when all my days there’s been someone at my back—goading—to do nothing is not a bad fortune,” Birle answered.

  Words came slowly. She felt as if she had to walk a long distance into her head to find her thought, and carry out the words for it with great effort. If it had not been Orien who asked, she could not have spoken.

  Sometimes, when Birle woke it was night. The stars shone out in their numbers, and seemed to make patterns before her eyes. The moon floated across the sky, with a face that was all sorrow, all the sorrow known to the world. At such waking times, Birle would remember: She began at the first moment, at her first glimpse of the moving shadow, and recalled all that she could from memory. With such a short time left to keep her memories, she counted them carefully. Sometimes, as she lay awake in the night, his voice would ask, “Are you awake, Birle?”

  “Yes, I’m awake.” Neither spoke any more than that.

  When rain quenched their thirst, they spoke with more strength. “I have no wife,” Orien said to her, without warning. Birle sat sucking on a corner of her damp cloak. The taste of wool was not nourishing, nor was it good; but it had flavor and in that it was like food. “I have neither son nor daughter. I’ve left no one in danger behind me.”

  “You didn’t wish a wife?”

  “I didn’t wish the wives they offered, and they didn’t quite dare try to force me to it.” The memory made him smile. “Once, I wished it.” The smile faded.

  Birle didn’t dare to ask the question.

  “But my father married her himself. He said her lands would come to me in the end, so I had no complaint to make. By her marriage into the Earl’s house, the girl’s father secured his son’s lands, so he had no complaint to make. My grandfather was off with the King at that time, and when he returned it was all done—they were wed and bedded. What’s that there? Birle? Is that something—?” He pointed across the water.

  Birle looked, and saw nothing. She didn’t tell him that, but continued looking, as if waiting to see. She wished Orien could learn not to hope for rescue, but he wasn’t the kind of man for hopelessness.

  “What of the girl?” she asked. “Did she have a complaint, marrying the father when she thought to wed the son?”

  Orien shrugged his shoulders, and she saw how thin his neck had become. “I have no way of knowing what the girl thought. The women stay in their own quarters most of the time. They come out to sit a
mong us in their beauty. To make us hunger. The girl carried three children, but none were born living. Neither did she live, after the last. She’s buried beside my mother, and my father’s second wife, and now my father lies in the earth beside all three. I think I would rather be burned, as the people are, Birle, than buried in the earth, as the Lords are.”

  Birle didn’t think he had hope of either, but she didn’t say that. “What did your grandfather do when he found out?” It was like a story to her, some fabulous tale. She couldn’t imagine Da acting so, or—if he did—that either of her brothers would permit it.

  “He could do nothing. He was angry at my father—because he had given his word as Earl for the marriage—but he could do nothing to change what had taken place. I think also that he felt sorry for my father. You have to remember, Birle, that if you are the eldest, you are the son who will be Earl. My father had to see first his youth and then his manhood spent in waiting. He was afraid the treasure would never come into his hand. So he granted himself whatever other desires he had. He wished the girl for himself. She had the beauty of a butterfly, delicate, dainty. Fragile. And she had two prosperous villages for dowry, with all the lands attached. I didn’t blame him.”

  “You should blame him.”

  “Maybe. But I couldn’t, once I got over my own anger. I can’t.”

  But his heart must have been broken, because he never had married, Birle thought. Maybe Orien was right, maybe he was not the man to be Earl. Not because his father could overpower his desires, but because he had a heart that could be broken. Because he couldn’t keep anger at his father, but must understand him.

  “It was my father hated the sight of me, not I the sight of him, as he would have hated anyone who was the heir and might live to be Earl.”

  Orien might easily have been a different kind of man, living as he had, Birle thought. This was another wonder in him. Lords or people, she thought there could be no other man like Orien. How could she not be content, Birle thought, to spend whatever days remained to her with this man?

  HOW MANY DAYS LAY BEHIND them, Birle could not remember; how many might be left she couldn’t guess. She lay on her stomach on their flat rock while Orien picked his slow, careful way along the water’s edge. The light in the sky was changing, but whether with morning or afternoon Birle couldn’t be sure. It had been a long time since any rain had fallen on them, once again a long time. She no longer felt hunger at all, but thirst left her mind dizzy, as weak as her legs.

  As she watched, the little figure of Orien began to wave its arms in the air. She saw him as if he were some insect moving around a candle. It was a curious series of movements, first the arms waving in the air, then the cloak being held up and shaken. It was like the dance of a creature that was not human, with no reason you could think of for its gestures. Birds sometimes flew at one another in the air like that, squawking, circling, then following one another in dips and swoops—Birle never knew why they did that, or what they meant by it. Orien waved his cloak up and down, over his head in just such strange dancing motions.

  Something black moved in the corner of her eye. Slowly, she turned her head to catch it; her skin scraped across the stone.

  It was a boat she saw, huge, its enormous sail filled with wind. Her head snapped up, and her legs and arms coiled up under her. A rush of energy gave her back the strength she’d lost.

  She slid down the rock’s side. She stumbled, running across the shore to Orien. He was jumping and waving his cloak. “It’s a boat,” she said.

  “Wave your arms!” he cried.

  She was already waving her arms. The wind blew into her face and made Orien’s cloak snap.

  “They’ve got to see us,” Orien said.

  The boat’s sail was broad, and square, a heavy red sail. Its mast ran up through the center of the sail. It was bigger than any boat she’d ever seen, at least four times as big as any of the fishing boats. Like the fishing boats, it had oars fitted through holes in its side.

  “There’s a little boat, behind it, like a dog following,” Birle said.

  “Keep waving!”

  She hadn’t stopped. Her arms flapped over her head, like his cloak. Her own cloak lay on the rock, useless.

  “They see us,” Orien said.

  Birle couldn’t be sure. The boat didn’t hesitate on its way.

  While they stood waving, and watching, with their voices blown back into their faces as they called out across the waves, the distant boat passed out of sight around the corner made by the long arm of cliff. They called after it, and waved, even when they could no longer see it.

  Weakness overcame Birle. She sank down onto the shore. Her feet were in the water and she couldn’t feel them. Orien didn’t sit, but he sagged. His cloak dragged in the waves. She couldn’t think of anything to say, to comfort him. When he raised his head at last, and turned to look at her, she could not see his thoughts in his bellflower eyes.

  There was no use in speech. He reached out a hand to pull her to her feet. She trailed behind him, back from the water. There, they stood side by side, looking at the empty sea.

  After a long time he said, “I know they saw us.”

  After a long time she asked him, “Do you think they’ll send help?”

  “I’m not thinking anything, Birle.”

  “Aye,” she said.

  The waves tumbled onto the shore and splashed against the rocks. Her legs were so weak under her that she sat down heavily, again. Orien sat beside her, his knees drawn up, his head on his knees. His beard was ragged and brown, like weeds growing up already dead.

  She felt sorrow for him, sorrow so deep she almost put out her hand to touch his shoulder, in whatever comfort human touch could bring. They were so lost in disappointment that both were surprised when the voice hailed them. “Hoy!” it called, riding the wind in. “Hoy! The island!”

  Orien was on his feet while Birle was still finding her legs to put them beneath her.

  A man rowed his little boat into the bay. He hesitated there, far out from shore, oars raised. At that distance, he was little more than a shape with a voice. He twisted in his seat in the bobbing boat to stare at them. They stood at the water’s edge, staring back.

  He put the oars into the water again, and rowed closer.

  “Have you your cloak?” Orien asked, his eyes watching the boat’s approach. “Better go get it.”

  She rushed to obey. The oarsman didn’t come straight into shore, but turned the boat around when he was still an arrow’s flight from them. He looked at Orien, and then his eyes found Birle where she bent to pick up her cloak. He watched her all the time she took, picking it up, fastening it at her neck, returning to stand beside Orien. She didn’t like his looking, and she didn’t like his looks—a heavy, whiskery face, with little eyes and a thick mouth.

  “In trouble?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Orien said.

  The man nodded, but made no move. “Need help?”

  “Yes,” Orien said.

  “Food? Water?” the man asked. The questions were stupid, but those eyes were not. “Rescue?” he asked.

  They stood waiting, in their thirst, hunger, and fear. He sat, studying them. Then he put the oars into the water again. Birle wondered if he would leave them, and she didn’t know whether she wished him to. But he nosed the boat in toward shore.

  “That’s my ship, she’s anchored behind the cliff,” he said. “There might be room for two passengers.”

  Birle’s blood rang a warning in her ears. “Orien,” she said, pulling on his arm. “I don’t like this.”

  Orien took her warning seriously, it wasn’t that. It was the helplessness of their position that he argued. “I think we must, Birle.”

  “Course,” the man said, still safely distant, “there’s a price. For the risk—since there’s plenty of dangerous men out and around. There’d have to be a fee. We can’t carry you for nothing. Feed you.” The eyes studied them and he added, “Give
you drink.”

  “We’ve nothing,” Birle answered him, glad to be able to say no.

  “Nothing at all?” He sounded disappointed. “It’s not many days. We’d ask little. It wouldn’t take much to pay your way.”

  “I’ve dagger and sword; she’s a knife,” Orien called. “We have no choice,” he said to Birle.

  The man’s mouth flickered open in a smile. “There’s always something. You just drop them there, at your feet, and step back.”

  They did as they were told.

  He climbed out of the boat and pulled it behind him by a rope. Holding the rope, he studied the knives, carefully. His fingers went over the hilt of Orien’s dagger, and he spat on it, then rubbed it clean with his thumb. “Welcome aboard,” he said then, with a wide gesture of his arm toward the boat, and that smile that made Birle think she’d be safer starving where she was. “Name’s Ker,” he said.

  “Orien,” Birle protested again.

  “You can stay, if you must.” Orien’s cheeks were hollow with hunger and he had little strength for anger. “But I wish you’d come. I don’t know how long it would be before I could come back for you.”

  So she followed him, since he would return for her.

  The man helped them into his boat, and sat them side by side on the stern seat. This boat was heavier than the river coracles. Its sides were double-ribbed, its wood thick-cut. Ker grunted with the work of rowing, but said nothing to them. Her own weakness assailed Birle, until she could do no more than sit upright as the boat pushed its way through the waves, and keep her head from falling forward onto her chest.

  The ship, when they came to it, rode high over her head. Arms reached down to catch her wrists and she was pulled up over its side. She slid down onto the deck, until hands and Orien’s voice urged her to move under shade. When she sat leaning back against wood, out of the harsh sun, Birle opened her eyes.