by Ila Mercer
Yaron’s shoulders lost their rigidity and a look of uncertainty flashed across his features. ‘I’ve ordered the troubadours to leave.’
‘Why?’ his uncle asked.
‘It seems we have caused offence,’ the troubadour leader said.
‘Why, what’s happened?’
‘They pretended this man was a Beast, and charged the folk a viewing fee,’ Yaron said, not quite meeting his uncle’s eye.
Yaron’s uncle gazed at him for several long moments – but Lita could not tell what the exchange might mean and then his uncle said, ‘But that is the role of the troubadours, Yaron. Pretence and parody. I’m sure no harm was meant. They are merely entertainers.’
‘That’s right,’ the troubadour leader piped up. ‘It’s only a bit of fun.’ He turned to the crowd, grinning at them, seeking their approval.
Lita felt those around her loosen as the tension passed. A couple of them even chuckled in response.
For a moment Yaron looked as though he might say something more, but then his eyes scanned the crowd.
Around her the folk had started to chatter amongst themselves. Some had even drifted off, sensing that the drama was over, to seek the next delight offered by the troubadours.
Yaron shook his head and clamped his jaw shut. Whatever he might have said was going to remain locked behind those lips and Lita wondered what it might have been.
She wandered back to the Keep shortly after this, but on finding Madea in a foul mood, decided she would seek out Sal.
Sal as usual was hard at work, making a woollen cloak for one of the stable boys. Lita settled on a seat near the fire and took up a needle and thread and pulled out a stocking for mending. Often, they worked with stretches of long silence, which Lita didn’t mind. It allowed her thoughts to wander and she found it quite peaceful being with someone so undemanding, but it seemed this day, at least, Sal was in the mood for talking.
‘So,’ she said, clicking her needles together. ‘Did you go back for a peep?’
Lita said nothing, but Sal nodded with a knowing look. ‘Waste of your coin, weren’t it,’ she said, with a smug look on her face.
‘It wasn’t a Beast,’ Lita said.
‘Well I could of told you that,’ Sal said, clucking her tongue. ‘Still I suppose you had to find out for yourself, didn’t you?’
‘Have you ever seen a Beast?’ Lita asked.
Sal’s knitting needles stopped clicking and she rested them on her lap. ‘A long time ago. Before I ever come to the Keep.’
Lita leaned in eagerly. ‘And?’
‘When I was younger, I lived in a Keep near mines worked by Beasts - but I never saw one in daylight because they were kept in the pits.’
‘Were they ever allowed out?’
‘No. Folk said they drew power from light. Of course, there was all sorts of blither-blather about the Beasts: how they hungered for young flesh, lusted after our women folk, escaped at night to eat live chickens and howl at the moon. The usual stuff that comes from making up what you don’t know, and I used to believe it too, until I met one.’ Sal paused in her tale, took up her knitting again and wound more wool around the shaft of her needle.
‘What was it like?’
‘Tsk, tsk. I’ll get to that,’ Sal said. ‘Anyway, folk was always telling us to stay away from them old shafts, on account of them being so dangerous. But we thought we knew better. Besides, old shafts were the perfect places for finding stuff like miner’s kettles, broken pick heads, pieces of ore – which we swapped for sweets with travelling tinkers. That’s how come I know about tinkers. But I never come by any MaKiki.’
‘She wasn’t always a tinker.’
‘Anyway,’ Sal said, shrugging her shoulders in dismissal of Lita’s remark, ‘one day me and a friend went deep into the old part of the mine, thinking we’d come across treasures that others had been too lily-livered to find. At first, the shaft seemed like any other, but then it forked. We took the passage to the left but soon enough we came across another fork, and then another, and another, until we forgot which way we’d come. When we turned to go back, we got lost, going deeper and deeper into the mountain.
‘To cut a long story short, our folk gave up on us after seven days, thinking we must have been done dead by then. But tales of us must have reached the Beasts because one of theirs set out to find us, making use of the tunnels between the old and new mines. Why he did it I’ll never know but he found us within a day of beginning his search. My friend had hurt himself and couldn’t walk so the Beast had to carry him out like a baby. I remember the scent of the Beast as I held onto him, old and stale like any unwashed man but his hands were kind and gentle.
‘When we reached the entrance of the cave, it was night. The moon was just a thin little rind in the sky and there was not much light by which to see the Beast. Still, I wanted to get a look at him and said he should come out - that he had his chance to run away from the mines now. But he just squeezed my hand and told me he couldn’t go because the foreman would kill seven for every one what escaped. After that he slipped back into the shadows and I never saw him again.’
Sal’s Beast sounded kind and her earlier defence of them now made sense to Lita.
‘When we told our elders how we’d been rescued,’ Sal continued, ‘it caused the worst bother. From then on, Beasts were shackled in gangs. I suppose they thought if one could find his way through the mines, then others could too. And I felt sorry because I thought we should of been grateful.’ Sal clucked her tongue and shook her head.
‘So, you still don’t know what they look like,’ Lita said.
‘Not really. It was dark in the cave, but he sounded a bit like my papa and at the entrance of the cave I could see his outline, which looked like any man.’
Like any man. Were they really any different? ‘If they look like men, why are they called Beasts?’ Lita asked.
‘Well,’ Sal said, thinking it over, ‘folk say the Beasts can turn into different creatures – so there’s that. But I think there’s another reason. Calling them Beasts is a sly way of saying they’re different, their dangerous, they’re not like us. And pretty soon it changes how everyone thinks of them. Once folk start to think of them as animals, they lose all shame in slaving them. And, as soon as a person’s wealth depends on the Beasts, they’re not gonna let others tell them they’re wrong. In fact, they’ll probably do all they can to prove they’re right.
‘But if they look like men…’
‘Ah, Lita.’ Sal shook her head. ‘They even have a way of explaining that – saying it’s nothing more than the clever mimicry of a man. All I know, Lita, is that Beast who found me deserved better than a life of toil down a dirty hole. Beast, man, whatever he was, means nothing to me. I’ve met beggars with hearts as pure as a mountain stream and Kings whose hearts were more rotten than a barrel of last season’s apples. It’s the little things, day in day out, that tell the world what you really are.’
When the Nightingale Won't Sing
She did not come, and he knew she wouldn’t. All the same, Ari’s heart lurched every time he heard footsteps pass the library door and when the hinges finally creaked opened, he felt a short-lived flutter of hope.
It was Lars. He had not come to the library once, since Katarin took up the role of tutor. In fact, it could be said he avoided the place for he always had an excuse as to why he had not come, though Ari never enquired. During their feculent confinement across the sea, Lars had been ever present, a beacon of decency amongst his fellow Dracodians. And now? It wasn’t that Lars had done anything wrong, but Ari had thought Lars might have tried harder to make some sort of change. After all, he had witnessed the vile conditions under which Ari and his kin suffered first hand, yet it seemed that Lars’s good intentions would wither on the vine.
‘How is it going?’ Lars said, perching his rump on the edge of a chair.
‘Well enough,’ Ari replied, shrugging off his disappointments. ‘I can make some
sense of this thing, at least.’ He held up the Cartal, a red leather book with gold letters on the cover and gilt-edged pages.
Lars smirked. ‘I could never make head nor tail of the thing. It might have been written by monkeys as far as I’m concerned.’
‘It’s certainly hard to follow and some of its logic makes no sense to me.’
‘Best not to say that to a Brother.’
After this they spoke at length about Katarin and her situation now that her father’s ship had gone down. In Dracodian culture, an unmarried noblewoman, Ari learned, always lived under the protectorship of a nobleman’s house, usually her father. In situations where there was no father, the responsibility often fell to a trusted relative or friend of the family. In Katarin’s case, she had no other living relatives, and therefore Senna Jogan had decided that Katarin would remain under his care until her marriage to Senna Worrel.
‘And what did she say to that?’ Ari asked, with a sinking feeling.
‘She agreed that she would stay under my father’s protectorship but made it quite clear she no longer wanted to marry Worrel.’
Ari felt his hopes rise again, though he knew it was foolish.
‘My father told her she would have to marry me if she refused my brother.’
‘Oh,’ Ari said, he was at a loss for words. Anything he might say would come out false. It was a better match for Katarin, he had to admit but he could not bare the thought of her marrying anyone.
‘I can’t see it happening. She will get over her quarrel with Worrel, I’m sure.’
‘She didn’t say what the quarrel was about?’
‘No. She excused herself after that and hasn’t left her rooms all morning. I think the shock of…you know…’ Lars trailed off and he shifted in his seat. After several moments of contemplation, he said, ‘Have you had a chance to fix Yaron’s nightingale?’
Ari shook his head. ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do to fix it. I have put it together at least a dozen times. And nothing works.’
Lars nodded, his brow creased with frown lines. ‘I wish I knew a way to get through to him. Nothing I say seems to reach him. He likes you though.’ He glanced up, meeting Ari’s eyes. ‘That game you were playing last night? What was it?’
For a moment Ari was puzzled by the question, until he remembered that he and Yaron had been making signs for each other during dinner. ‘I’ve been teaching Yaron some messages my people leave for each other in the forest. He’s a fast learner. Already knows more than a hundred signs.’
‘Really?’
Ari nodded.
‘His mama was good with him that way too,’ Lars said. ‘She and Yaron had their own funny ways.’ He laughed, and his eyes glazed over as he stared at the far wall. ‘When she tucked him in at bedtime, they had this ritual. She had to say good night to all of his toys, and if she ever got the order wrong, he would make her start all over again. At the time I thought she was indulging him too much – I said she should let the nursemaid tuck him in. But she didn’t see it the same way. She said it helped him to settle, and I must admit, he never had a problem with night terrors.’
As Ari listened, he realised it was the first time Lars had ever spoken about his dead wife in a personal way. ‘She sounds like a good mother,’ Ari said.
‘She was,’ Lars agreed, and then his face crumpled. ‘I miss her so much sometimes.’ His voice was thick with emotion, but he took a deep breath and pasted a tired smile on his lips.
‘You honour her when you remember,’ Ari said.
‘But it’s like swallowing stones,’ Lars replied.
‘I know.’
They sat in silence for a while. Ari thought back to the time when his twin brother had died. He decided to share the memory with Lars, and though he did it because he thought it might help Lars, he did it too for the way it revived his memory of the people, the scents, the images of home, making his heart swell with love and sadness.
On the day of his brother’s death, it had been hot, and the sea was still. Ari and Demi were swimming past the reef, much further than they were allowed to go. Ari had dared his brother Demi to dive to the sea floor and bring back an empty kurri shell. It was something Ari had done a dozen times that afternoon, but Demi was not a strong swimmer, and when he dived to the bottom of the sea, he never came back.
In the weeks that followed his brother’s death, Ari hardly ate or moved. He recalled the terrible ache that lived inside his chest and whenever his father came into the hut, he would avoid looking at Ari as though Ari’s life was an outrage in the face of Demi’s death.
It was Ari’s granddam who made the terrible ache easier to bear. In the quiet of the afternoon, when long fingers of light lanced through the slats of the hut, and the didi flies droned in slow circles above their heads, Ari’s granddam would take up her weaving. Ari was fascinated by the process and often prepared the flax by stripping it into smaller segments. After a while, she would start her stories – one sliding seamlessly into the next – until, like the flax that she wove, every memory strand seemed inevitable in the rich and varied chronicle of their village life. She told tales of long, long ago, as though they happened only yesterday and recalled recent incidents as though they were as vital as the tribal legends. She recalled the time Ari’s father had eaten too many ripe stritta fruit from the bobo tree in their courtyard and then sat groaning with his backside over a pot for a whole day. The image had brought tears of laughter to Ari’s eyes. And then she recalled that it was the very same bobo tree from which Ari toppled when he tried to rescue Demi from the skinny branches. Oh, he had been stiff and bruised for a week after that. And then she unfurled the tale of their delivery: Ari so eager and squawling, while Demi was so reluctant for birth that he curled up and stayed another long day. By and by he relived every memory with his brother, and it felt as though Demi was still a part of their lives. The terrible ache did not completely vanish, but it became easier for Ari to bear.
When he finished his story, Lars’s head was in his hands. ‘You think I should share my memories of Morial?’
‘His mother?’ Ari asked, seeking confirmation.
Lars nodded.
‘As a start, I think you could tell Yaron what you told me before,’ Ari said. ‘He needs to hear about his mother.’
‘I don’t know if I can.’ Lars said. ‘What if I choke up?’
‘Then he will see that his father is sad. Is that so bad?’
Lars shook his head. ‘I guess not but what should I say?’
‘Start with a happy time and go from there.’
*
Later, in the gloom of his cell, Ari pulled the nightingale apart, yet again. He would not admit defeat. Once more, he examined every part, to see if he could figure out what was missing. He was so engrossed, that he did not hear Katarin until she was standing at his cell gate.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Where did you come from?’ Ari said in surprise, almost dropping the cloth that held the nightingale’s parts.
She unlocked the gate and slipped into his cell. Her hands fluttered briefly to her waist and then she pulled her cloak in tight to her body. She sat on the end of the bed and glanced around the room. Ari thought she appeared nervous. They made small talk for a while because Katarin was keen to hear how Ari had applied himself to his studies that day. But when he broached the subject of her audience with Jogan, she suddenly became quite agitated.
‘I have no intention of marrying Worrel and Lars is not much better,’ she said vehemently. She explained that after their flight through the forest the previous evening, she had remained awake most of the night, thinking about her future. And, she had realised what sort of life was being carved out for her. ‘Take me with you,’ she said, reaching out for his hand.
Ari felt a spike of shock.
‘When you return to your home, I want to come too.’ She held his gaze.
Ari found he was at a loss for words and his hear
t hammered in his chest.
‘You think it’s a terrible idea.’
‘No,’ Ari said, his voice a little shaky. ‘I’m shocked. You would leave your home and follow me to a land filled with people you have never met?’
‘What does it matter when I don’t have a home anymore? And besides I know you.’ She said the last timidly, which was unusual for Katarin as she was always so forthright.
‘What does Mika say?’ He knew that Mika would have to object.
A flush of colour stole into her cheeks and she turned her head slightly. ‘I haven’t told her.’
‘Worrel will never allow it.’
‘He can’t stop me if he doesn’t know.’
Ari thought about his home, about the play of light across the sea, of the cool green river where they collected tikka weed. An image of his granddam came to mind, her silver hair framing wise old eyes. She would not be able to wait his return forever.
But then he remembered the hold of the ship. The stench of illness as it drew each of them closer to death. He thought of the kin he had never met, toiling away in Dracodia’s filthy mines and he knew he could not leave. He could not abandon the hope that he might yet make a difference.
‘I’m sorry Katarin,’ he said, grasping her hands. ‘But I made my promise to the Order. And if there is any honour in Dracodia, I hope to win my freedom as well as that of my kin.’
She ripped her hands from his. ‘You’re a fool if you think they will honour any of their promises. They don’t care whether you’re smart or as dumb as a mule. They’ll use you up just the same. You should run while you still have the chance. I don’t understand why you haven’t. I can’t believe it’s your word that holds you here.’ There was a fierce brittleness to her features, as though her anger might shatter any moment and send forth a torrent of tears. She picked up her skirts and vaulted from the bed, swinging through the gate, leaving it wide open in her rush up the stairs.
‘Katarin?’ Ari called, though not so loud that it would draw the attention of the guards.
But she did not turn as she disappeared up the spiral stairs.