The Shamer's Signet

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Somehow, I don’t think Mama was thinking only of puppies when she said that.

  We have only one horse, our black gelding Falk that Maudi Kensie gave to us when we lost Blaze in Dunark last year. Mama asked Debbi Herbs if we could borrow her small, rough-coated gray pony, and Debbi said we could. But that was not the end of the difficulties. Mama hardly ever went anywhere without Callan to guard her, and he was nowhere to be found. “Out hunting.” That was all his old gran knew of his whereabouts. “I shall protect Medama,” said the Laclan man. “I’ll gladly accompany Medama and her daughter on the return journey as well.”

  Mama hesitated for a moment. Then she nodded.

  “Rose, tell Maudi that we have gone with Ivain Laclan to Hebrach’s Mill. We should be back again before nightfall.”

  And after that, we were finally able to ride off in the direction of Hebrach’s Mill, to see a man who might have stolen three sheep from his neighbor.

  It had rained in the night, but now the sun had come out, and the day was warm and mild. When we reached the stand of birches at the foot of Ram Hill, Ivain courteously held back the wet branches so that Mama and I could pass without having our cloaks spattered. He really was very polite, with manners much more polished than most people I knew. Callan, for instance, would assume that we were perfectly capable of ducking a wet branch. He would have been waiting for us at the top of the hill instead, having scouted ahead to make sure no enemies were lurking behind the rise.

  “He seems very… you know… courtly or something,” I whispered to my mother. I had never before met a Highlander who shaved off most of his beard and left only one neat little triangle, almost as if he had wiped his chin with a coal-blackened finger. “The way he talks, too.”

  Mama smiled. “Oh, come on. You know by now that there are plenty of Highlanders who do not dress in hides and speak in monosyllabic grunts.”

  “Callan does—just about,” I mumbled.

  “He does not!” she said, but she couldn’t help smiling, for Callan could be very much the Highlander when the mood took him.

  “Medamina,” called Ivain, by now nearly ten lengths ahead of us, “is the pony capable of a slightly speedier gait? I did promise to have the ladies home by nightfall.”

  “Oh, he’s capable, all right,” I called back. “Willing, now that’s another matter.” Debbi’s gray would keep going all day at his own pace without balking, but if you tried to hurry him he sometimes got stubborn. Still, I tightened my legs around him, and although he flicked his ears and swished his tail in annoyance, he agreed to a lumbering canter until we had caught up to Ivain and his big bay stallion.

  We went more or less due east, as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. For once, a day without rain, fog, or lashing winds, I thought, and began to forget about Davin and my earlier bad mood. Debbi’s gray might be no fairy-tale palfrey, but it was pleasant to be out riding on a beautiful spring morning, especially knowing that it would have been laundry day at home.

  I had never been to Hebrach’s Mill, but it seemed my mother had, for when Ivain wanted to pass to the east of a rocky ridge, she reined in Falk and brought him to a halt.

  “Shouldn’t we be on the west side of Kemmer’s Ridge?” she asked.

  “The Kemmer ford is almost impassable at the moment, due to the rain and the last of the melt water,” said Ivain. “I will not risk the ladies to it. This way is longer, but the crossing is much safer.”

  Here he goes again, I thought, with his talk of “ladies.” Men could drown too, couldn’t they? But Mama merely nodded and let him have his way.

  It was a beautiful place. The trail followed the bank of the Kemmermere, a narrow, mirror-smooth lake. On both sides of it, steep slopes rose, covered with silver birches. The water was so still that gray rock, pale green leaves, and black-and-white birches were all mirrored to perfection on the dark surface. A moorhen sailed by, leaving a wake that caused the reflection to wobble and break, but it soon steadied again, so sharp and precise that it was hard to tell the difference between landscape and waterscape. As I looked at the image in the water, I suddenly caught a glimpse of something—a large animal, or perhaps a man? I looked up, scanning the slope above us. I couldn’t see anything now, but there had been something, I was sure of it. I reined in the gray pony.

  “There’s something up there,” I said, pointing. “On the slope.”

  “Yes, I saw it,” said Ivain. “It was just a pheasant.”

  That’s when I knew that things were really wrong. Whatever it had been up there, it certainly was not a pheasant. And suddenly it felt very dangerous to be riding here without Callan, along a different road than usual, and with only a stranger to guide and guard us.

  “Come along now, ladies,” called Ivain encouragingly. “The sun is speeding, and the sheep rustler awaits us!”

  But I did not prod the pony onward, and Mama and Falk could not easily get by me on the narrow trail.

  “Come on, Dina. Ride.”

  “Let’s go back,” I said to my mother in a low voice. “That was no pheasant.”

  A year ago she would probably just have said “Nonsense!” and ridden on. Not anymore. Now we had learned to be careful. Without saying a word, Mama turned Falk around and set off at a gallop, back the way we had come. The pony did not need much encouragement to follow—he knew very well which way was home.

  I looked over my shoulder just as Ivain was discovering that he no longer had two obedient “ladies” on his tail. He did not call “Stop!” or “Wait!” or anything else you might expect. For a brief moment he simply looked furious. Then he put two fingers to his mouth and gave a piercing whistle.

  The shrubbery on the slope came alive with movement and noises, and with shouts that definitely did not come from any kind of pheasant.

  “Ride!” yelled my mother. “As fast as you can!”

  Falk sprang forward with a great deal of will and speed, and the gray pony followed as best he could, but his sturdy legs were much shorter than those of Ivain’s bay stallion. I heard hoofbeats behind me, much too close, and suddenly the stallion was beside us, shoving against Debbi’s gray so that he stumbled and I nearly came off. Ivain seized my reins and forced both horses around with their noses up against the slope and their rumps uncomfortably close to the lake bank.

  “Hold it, Shamer!” he shouted at Mama. “We have your daughter!”

  Mama jerked back on the reins so abruptly that Falk half-reared on his haunches. She turned in the saddle to look straight at Ivain, and her eyes were dark with fury.

  “What kind of a man are you—” she began in that voice, the Shamer’s voice, which cuts right to the soul.

  “Shoot, damn it!” yelled someone from the shrubbery, and suddenly something long and dark was in the air, and there was a whirring sound and then a sickening thud. Mama collapsed across Falk’s neck, and the long dark thing was stuck in her shoulder.

  They had shot my mother.

  They had shot my mother.

  At first, that was all I could think of. Falk took a few uncertain steps forward, then came to a halt again. One of the ambushers emerged from the shrubbery and was sliding the last few yards down to the path. He started walking toward our black gelding.

  I turned to Ivain. Mama’s eyes had struck home, and he was looking somewhat dazed. It was up to me to finish it.

  “What kind of man are you to hurt an unarmed woman and her child?” I hissed, and although I was both furious and half out of my mind with fear, I got the voice right, and I clawed at him with my eyes, so that he shrank back and shielded his face as if I were spitting acid. I drew my meat knife from my belt and sliced through the reins of the bay with two quick cuts, just below the bit. Then I hit the horse across the muzzle as hard as I could. Startled, it tried to back up, put one hoof over the edge and had to scramble to stay on the path. Ivain caught at his reins, but that did no good, of course. Just as the bay was regaining its footing, I pricked its quarters with my knif
e, and the stallion decided that enough was enough. It leaped forward and disappeared down the trail at a panicked gallop, and there was nothing Ivain could do to stop it. Quickly, I turned Debbi’s gray and rode him straight at the man approaching my mother. He spun around. His mouth became a dark O of astonishment, and then the gray pony’s shoulder struck him and knocked him off the path. For a moment, he seemed to hang in the air, his arms windmilling in a desperate effort to regain his balance. I did not see him fall—I just heard the splash.

  “Mama… Mama, are you—can you—”

  Somehow, she was still in the saddle.

  “Ride!” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Falk will follow.”

  I edged Debbi’s gray past our black gelding. The path was much too narrow for us to ride side by side, so I had to trust that Falk would follow his instincts and his herdmate. The last two ambushers had reached the path now, but they had no horses and even my gray pony would be able to outrun them. I rode. And Falk followed.

  DINA

  The Willow Place

  Away! That was my only thought at first. Far away, and quickly. But I soon realized that my mother would not be able to travel very far. If we simply followed the path until her strength failed, they would catch us anyway. We had a lead, but they probably had horses waiting somewhere, and once they got themselves mounted, they would be hot on our trail. We had to find somewhere to hide, and preferably a place that would provide some shelter against the chill and dampness of the night. If only this had happened at Birches, or at least a little closer to Baur Kensie where I was beginning to know my way around. I had no idea where to go. And horses are hard to hide. They are too big, and it is difficult to get them to be still. Perhaps it would be better to find one place for them and another for Mama and me? But the thought of parting company with them was frightening. If I lost them, I’d never be able to get Mama home.

  A small creek crossed the path and tumbled on down toward the lake. Instead of crossing it, I persuaded the gray to wade along it, upstream. The bottom was rocky and difficult, but this was the sort of thing the gray pony was good at: he was no racer, but he knew how to watch his footing.

  “Mama?”

  “Hush,” she whispered. “Just ride.” She had tucked her right hand into her belt and was clutching Falk’s mane with her left, so as not to fall. The arrow was sticking out from her right shoulder like a quill on a porcupine.

  “Shouldn’t we… draw the arrow?” I said it hesitantly, knowing that “we” meant me, and I was not at all sure I had the courage or the strength.

  She shook her head faintly.

  “No. It’ll bleed too much. Later.”

  We splashed onward up the creek. The banks had become steeper and taller, and branches curved and tangled overhead so that it was like walking through a tunnel. And then there was suddenly no way forward. A fallen tree blocked the creek, and although a person could climb under it—at least a person who did not have a yard-long arrow sticking out of her—there was absolutely no way we would be able to get the horses past it.

  I stared at the fallen birch tree and felt the tears burning hotly on my cheeks, from fear and utter despair. We were trapped. There was no way up the banks, they were much too steep. There was no way forward. And if we went back, we would be heading straight for Ivain and his men.

  “Haul it,” said Mama. “Haul it out of the way.”

  Haul it? There was no way I’d be able to move an entire birch tree. And then I saw what she meant. Debbi’s gray was not, after all, chiefly a riding horse. He was a tough little worker who had hauled plenty of timber in his day. And fortunately Callan’s lessons on how to survive in the Highlands had not been totally wasted on me. “Rope, blade, and tinderbox,” he would preach. “Never set out without rope, blade, and tinderbox.”

  I slid off the pony’s back, got out my coil of rope, and got a loop of it around one end of the tree. The other end I attached to the saddle. But what was the command the Highlanders used for this?

  “Halla-halla,” Mama whispered. I nodded, and swallowed. Would Debbi’s pony obey someone who had never done this before?

  “Halla-halla-halla,” I said loudly and firmly, and followed it up by clicking my tongue a couple of times just to be on the safe side. And Debbi’s gray may have looked like a rather plain and rough-coated little gelding, but in reality he was a treasure, a rare treasure on four legs. He set his hooves firmly in the bottom of the creek and hauled with every ounce. And slowly, slowly and draggingly, with a lot of snapping and cracking and clattering, one end of the tree came free of the bank, and the trunk settled lengthways in the creek instead of crosswise.

  “Good boy. Good boy,” I said, and patted the rough gray neck. “And halt!” And my gray pony halted and stood there, calm and solid, not knowing that he had just saved our lives.

  I carefully led Falk past the tree and commanded him to halt also. And then I got a great idea. I looped the rope around the saddle horn once more and got Debbi’s gray to haul the tree back to its crosswise position. It felt wonderful. It felt like closing a door behind us. If they guessed that we had ridden up the creek, if they got as far as the tree… then they would think they had been mistaken. And even if they were clever enough to guess what had really happened, they might not be able to do anything about it, because I very much doubted that any of them would be riding a tough little Highland workhorse who thought nothing of hauling timber from sunup to sundown.

  “Good idea,” said Mama in the hoarse, weak whisper that seemed to be all the voice she had left now. I could see we were running out of time. I had to find some kind of hiding place soon, some place where I could get her off the horse and get her to lie down. I coiled the rope again and got back on the gray, and we rode on, farther up the creek, slowly, so that Mama would be able to hold on just a little longer.

  The banks of the creek were much lower here, and the water flowed more slowly. A narrow trail wandered along the bank, probably made by passing deer. I urged the gray pony up the bank, got off, and went back to support Mama in the saddle as Falk made the climb. For a while we followed the trail.

  Then I saw the willow.

  It was huge. A green waterfall of leaves. Once it had grown at the top of the bank, but then some storm had half-uprooted it—one could still see the yawning hole where its old roots had been torn from the ground. But the tree had survived and had continued to grow, almost vertically, and had created its own little spur of land down in the bed of the creek.

  I got off and once more commanded Falk and the gray to halt. Carefully, I climbed down the willow’s trunk. It was like passing a curtain made from slim green and yellow leaves. And once past the curtain, there was a small sandy island to stand on, a hidden island completely shielded by the dense foliage. A bower. A tree house. The perfect hideaway.

  “We’ll have to go back to where we can get down into the creek again,” I told Mama. “But it’s worth it—even the horses will fit inside!”

  Mama only nodded, a very faint nod. She was deathly pale now and blue around the lips, like a child who has stayed too long in the water. Blood from the wound had soaked her shirt, but there was less of it than I would have imagined, so Mama had probably been right to leave the arrow where it was. I tried to push my fears for her aside. Once we were down there in the willow place, sheltered and safe, then I would be able to tend to her. Not before.

  It felt frightening and wrong to turn back and ride in the direction of Ivain and his men. Luckily we did not have far to go. I got the horses down the bank once more, and then we rode up the creek again until we reached the willow. I got off—by now my boots were totally soaked—and led the pony through the curtain of leaves. He went calmly and willingly past that obstacle as well. I tied him to a solid branch and returned for Falk. He balked at first, tossing his head in alarm; I could see how his every jittery move hurt my mother, and I felt like screaming at him to behave, but it would have done no good. Only quiet words and sooth
ing touches would persuade him. And finally he came, perhaps because he caught the pony’s scent and knew that his herdmate waited in there behind all that frightening green stuff.

  I helped Mama down off his back and got her to sit on a pile of old willow twigs I had hastily gathered. I would have to get us a drier bed eventually, but there were more urgent things to be done right now. I unhooked my tin cup from my belt and got Mama a drink of water.

  “I have to go back there and wipe our tracks,” I said. “If they find our trail, and the hoof marks suddenly stop right by the willow… well, it won’t be too hard for them to guess the rest.”

  Mama sipped the cool, clear water. “Go,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

  She meant that bit as a joke. But her smile turned into a grimace of pain, and I had to fight back the tears. Again.

  Once I had done what I could to erase our tracks, I gathered some pine boughs to make a sort of bed for us. And then there was no avoiding it anymore. We had to do something about the arrow. It had not gone completely through the shoulder, but I could feel the point like a hard lump beneath the skin, just below her collarbone.

  “What should I do?” I asked. “Should I pull it out?”

  Mama shook her head. “Pulling won’t do it,” she said. “It needs to be pushed. It has to come out here in front. And you’re just not strong enough.”

  “But… we can’t just leave it. You won’t even be able to lie down!”

  “Use your knife. Cut off the shaft.”

  I did what she said. It wasn’t easy. I could see just how badly I hurt her every time I even touched the damned arrow. When I was done, tears were streaming down her face. It was horrible. It’s horrible to see your mother cry like that. And afterward she lay there so pale and quiet, I was afraid she had begun to die.

  Even though it was dangerous I lit a tiny fire—just enough to heat a cup of water. There were enough twigs and dry leaves around. And that was another good thing about our hideout: there was no shortage of willow bark, and willow-bark tea is a good remedy for pain and fever and infection. When she had finished the tea, I helped her to lie down and wrapped her in my cloak as well as her own. She ate a little bread. I ate a bit more, along with some of the cheese we had in our saddlebags. The bread felt lumpy and strange in my mouth, as if eating had suddenly become an alien practice. But I did feel a bit steadier with a meal inside me, despite everything that had happened.