The Emerald Circus

by Jane Yolen

  Elaine stared out across the gray waters as the ferret-faced woman rowed them to the isle. Her father sat unmoving next to her in the prow of the little boat, his hands clasped together, his jaw tight. His only admonition so far had been, “Be strong. The daughter of a vavasour does not cry.”

  She had not cried, though surely life among the magic women on Ynis Evelonia would be far different from life in the drafty but familiar castle at Escalot. At home women were cosseted but no one feared them as they feared the Daughters of Eve, unless one had a sharp tongue like the ostler’s wife or Nanny Bess.

  Elaine bent over the rim of the hide boat and tried to see her reflection in the water, the fair skin and the black hair plaited with such loving care by Nanny Bess that morning. But all she could make out was a shadow boat skimming across the waves. She popped one of her braids into her mouth, remembering Nanny’s repeated warning that someday the braid would grow there: “And what knight would wed a girl with hair agrowin’ in ’er mouth, I asks ye?” Elaine could hear Nanny’s voice, now sharp as a blade, now quiet as a lullaby, whispering in her ear. She sighed.

  At the sound her father looked over at her. His eyes, the faded blue of a late autumn sky, were pained and lines like runes ran across his brow.

  Elaine let the braid drop from her mouth and smiled tentatively; she could not bear to disappoint him. At her small attempt at a smile he smiled back and patted her knee.

  The wind spit river water into her face, as salty as tears, and Elaine hurriedly wiped her cheeks with the hem of her cape. By the time the boat rocked against the shore her face was dry.

  The ferret-faced woman leaped over the side of the coracle and pulled it farther onto the sand so that Elaine and her father could debark without wading in the muddy tide. When they looked up, two women in gray robes had appeared to greet them.

  “I am Mother Lisanor,” said the tallest one to the vavasour. “You must be Bernard of Escalot.”

  He bowed his head, quickly removing his hat.

  “And this,” said the second woman, taking Elaine by the hand, “must be the fair Elaine. Come, child. You shall eat with me and share my bed this night. A warm body shall keep away any bad dreams.”

  “Madam—” the vavasour began.

  “Mother Sonda,” the woman interrupted him.

  “Mother Sonda, may my daughter and I have a moment to say goodbye? She has never been away from home before.” There was the slightest suggestion of a break in his voice.

  “We have found, Sir Bernard, that it is best to part quickly. I had suggested in my letter to you that you leave Elaine on the Shapwick shore. This is an island of women. Men come here for commerce sake alone. Ynis Evelonia is Elaine’s home now. But fear you not. We shall train her well.” She gave a small tug on Elaine’s hand and started up the hill, and Elaine, all unprotesting, went with her.

  Only once, at the top of the small rise, did Elaine turn back. Her father was still standing by the coracle, hat in hand, the sun setting behind him. He was haloed against the darkening sky. Elaine made a small noise, almost a whimper. Then she popped the braid in her mouth. Like a cork in a bottle, it stoppered the sound. Without a word more, she followed Mother Sonda toward the great stone house that nestled down in the valley in the very center of the isle.

  The room in the smithy was lit only by the flickering of the fire as Mother Hesta pumped the bellows with her foot. A big woman, whose right arm was more muscular than her left, Hesta seemed comfortable with tools rather than with words. The air from the bellows blew up a sudden large flame that had a bright blue heart.

  “See, there. There. When the flames be as long as an arrow and the heart of the arrowhead be blue, thrust the blade in,” she said, speaking to the new apprentice.

  Elaine shifted from one foot to another, rubbing the upper part of her right arm where the brand of Eve still itched. Then she twisted one of her braids up and into her mouth, sucking on the end while she watched, but saying nothing.

  “You’ll see me do this again and again, girl,” the forge mistress said. “But it be a year afore I let you try it on your own. For now, you must watch and listen and learn. Fire and water and air make Evian steel, fire and water and air. They be three of the four majorities. And one last thing—though I’ll not tell you that yet, for that be our dearest secret. But harken: what be made by the Daughters of Eve strikes true. All men know this and that be why they come here, crost the waters, for our blades. They come, hating it that they must, but knowing only at our forge on this holy isle can they buy this steel. It be the steel that cuts through evil, that strikes the heart of what it seeks.”

  The girl nodded and her attention blew upon the small fire of words.

  “It matters not, child, that we make a short single edge, or what the old Romies called a glagy-us. It matters not we make a long blade or a double edge. If it be Evian steel, it strikes true.” She brought the side of her hand down in a swift movement which made the girl blink twice, but otherwise she did not move, the braid still in her mouth.

  Mother Hesta turned her back on the child and returned to work, the longest lecture done. Her muscles under the short-sleeved tunic bunched and flattened. Sweat ran over her arms like an exotic chain of water beads as she hammered steadily on the sword, flattening, shaping, beating out the swellings and bulges that only her eye could see, only her fingers could find. The right arm beat, the left arm, with its fine traceries of scars, held.

  After a while, the girl’s eyes began to blink with weariness and with the constant probings of the irritating smoke. She dropped the braid and it lay against her linen shirt limply, leaving a slight wet stain. She rubbed both eyes with her hands but she was careful not to complain.

  Mother Hesta did not seem to notice, but she let the fire die down a bit and laid the partially finished sword on the stone firewall. Wiping her grimed hands on her leather apron, she turned to the girl.

  “I’m fair famished, I am. Let’s go out to garden where Mother Sonda’s set us a meal.”

  She did not put her hand out to the girl as she was, herself, uncomfortable with such open displays. It was a timeworn joke on Evelonia that Hesta put all her love into pounding at the forge. But she was pleased when the girl trotted by her side without any noticeable hesitation or delay. A slow apprentice is no apprentice, Mother Hesta often remarked.

  When they stepped out of the shed, the day burst upon them with noisy celebration. Hesta, who spent almost the entire day every day in her dark forge, was always pleased for a few moments of birds and the colorful assault of the green landscape drifting off into the marshy river beyond. But she was always just as happy to go back into the dark fireroom where the tools slipped comfortably to hand and she could control the whoosh-whoosh sigh of the bellows and the loud clangorous song of metal on metal.

  A plain cloth was spread upon the grass and a variety of plates covered with napkins awaited them. A jug of watered wine—Hesta hated the feeling heavy wines made in her head when she was working over the hot fire—and two stoneware goblets completed the picture.

  “Come,” Mother Hesta said.

  The word seemed to release the child and she skipped over to the cloth and squatted down, but she touched nothing on the plate until Hesta had lowered herself to the ground and picked up the first napkin. Then the girl took up a slice of apple and jammed it into her mouth.

  Only then did Hesta remember that it was mid-afternoon and the child, who had arrived late the evening before and slept comforted in Mother Sonda’s bed, had not eaten since rising. Still, it would not do to apologize. That would make discipline harder. This particular girl, she knew, was the daughter of a vavasour, a man of some means in Escalot. She was not used to serving but to being served, so she must not be coddled now. Hesta was gentle in her chiding, but firm.

  “The food’ll not disappear, child,” she said. “Slow and steady in these things. A buyer for the steel comes to the guesthouse table and he be judging us and we he by what
goes on there. A greedy man be a man who’ll pay twice what a blade be worth. Discipline, discipline in all things.”

  The girl, trying to eat more slowly, began to choke.

  Hesta poured the goblets halfway full and solemnly handed one to her. The child sipped down her wine and the choking fit ended suddenly. Hesta made no reference to the incident.

  “When you be done, collect these plates and cups and take them to yon water house. Mother Argente will meet you there and read you the first chapter of the Book of Brightness. Listen well. The ears be daughters of the memory.”

  “I can read, Mother Hesta,” the girl said in a quiet little voice. It was not a boast but information.

  “Can you? Then on the morrow you can read to me from the chapter on fire.” She did not mention that she, herself a daughter of a landless vassal, had never learned to read. However one came to the Book —by eye or ear—did not matter a whit. Some were readers and some were read-tos; each valued in the Goddess’s sight, as Argente had promised her many years ago when they had been girls. So she comforted herself still.

  “Yes, Mother,” the girl said. Her voice, though quiet, was unusually low and throaty for one her age. It was a voice that would wear well in the forge room. The last novice had had a whiny voice; she had not remained on the isle for long. But this girl, big eyed, deep voiced, with a face the shape of a heart under a waterfall of dark hair, was such a lovely little thing, she would probably be taken by the mothers of the guesthouse, Sonda, Lisanor, and Katwyn, no matter how fair her forging. Sometimes, Hesta thought, the Goddess be hard.

  As she watched the girl eating, then wiping her mouth on the linen square with an easy familiarity, Hesta remembered how mortifying it had been to have to be taught not to use her sleeve for that duty. Then she smiled because that memory recalled another, that of a large, rawboned, parentless ten-year-old girl she had been, plunging into the cold channel of the Tamor just moments ahead of the baron who had claimed her body as his property. He had had to let her go, exploding powerful curses at her back, for he could not himself swim. He had been certain that she would sink. But her body’s desperate strength and her crazed determination had brought her safely across the brackish tide to the isle where, even in a boat, that powerful baron had not dared go, so fearful was he of the rumors of magic. And the girl, as much water in as without, had been picked up out of the rushes by the late forge mistress and laughingly called Moses after an old tale. And never gone back across the Tamor, not once these forty years.

  In the middle of Hesta’s musing, the girl stood up and began to clear away the dishes to the accompaniment of a trilling song sung by a modest little brown bird whose flute-like tunes came daily in spring from the apple bough. It seemed an omen. Hesta decided she would suggest it to Mother Sonda as the bird name for the vavasour’s child—Thrush.

  There were three other girls in the sleep room when Elaine was left there. Two of the girls were smoothing their beds and one was sitting under a corbeled window, staring out.

  Elaine had the braid in her mouth again. Her wide gray eyes took in everything. Five beds stood in a row along the wall with wooden chests for linen and other possessions at each bed foot. A fine Eastern tapestry hung above the beds, its subject the Daughters of Eve. It depicted about thirty women at work on a large island surrounded by troubled waves. Against the opposite wall were five arched windows that looked out across the now placid Tamor. Beneath the windows stood two high-warp looms with rather primitive weavings begun on each.

  One of the standing girls, a tall, wraithy lass with hair the insubstantial color of mist, noticed that Elaine’s eyes had taken in the looms.

  “We have been learning to weave. It is something that Mother A learned from a traveler in Eastern lands. Not just the simple cloths the peasants make but true tapisseries such as the one over our beds. That was a gift of an admirer, Mother A said.”

  Elaine had met Mother Argente the night before. She was a small white-haired woman with soft, plump cheeks and hands that disguised the steel beneath. Elaine wondered who could admire such a firm soul. That kind of firmness quite frightened her.

  She spun around to set the whole room into a blur of brown wood and blue coverlets and the bright spots of tapestry wool hanging on the wall. She spun until she was dizzy and had to stop or collapse. The braid fell from her mouth and she stood still, hands at her side, silently staring.

  “Do you have a name yet?” the mist-haired girl asked.

  After a moment came the throaty reply. “Elaine.”

  “No, no, your bird name, she means.” The other standing girl, plump and whey-faced, spoke in a twittering voice.

  Mist-hair added, “We all receive bird names, new names, like novices in nunneries, until we decide whether to stay. That’s because the Druids have their trees and tree alphabet for their magic, but we have our little birds who make their living off the trees. That’s what Mother A says. It’s all in the Book. After that, if we stay, we get to have Mother names and live on Holy Isle forever.”

  “Forever,” whispered Elaine. She could not imagine it.

  “Do you want to know our bird names?” asked whey-face.

  Before Elaine could answer, the tall girl said, “I’m Gale—for nightingale—because I sing so well. And this is Marta for house martin because she is our homebody, coming from Shapwick, across the flood. And over there—that. . . ,” she hesitated a moment, as much to draw a breath as to make a point, “that is Veree. That’s because she’s solitary like the vireo, and a rare visitor to our isle. At least she’s rare in her own eyes.” She paused. “We used to have Brambling, but she got sick from the dampness and had to go home or die.”

  “I didn’t like Bram,” Marta said. “She was too common and she whined all the time. Mother Hesta couldn’t bear her, and that’s why she had to leave.”

  “It was her chest and the bloody cough.”

  “It was her whine.”

  “Was not.”

  “Was.”

  “Was not.”

  “Was!”

  Veree stood and came over to Elaine, who had put the braid back into her mouth during the girls’ argument. “Don’t let their squabblings fright you,” she said gently. “They are chickens scratching over bits of feed. Rumor and gossip excite them.”

  The braid dropped from Elaine’s mouth.

  “You think because you’re castle born that you’re better than we are,” scolded Marta. “But all are the same on this holy isle.”

  Veree smiled. It was not an answer but a confirmation.

  “We will see,” hissed Gale. “There is still the forging.”

  “But she’s good at forging,” Marta murmured.

  Gale pursed her mouth. “We will see.”

  Veree ignored them, putting a hand under Elaine’s chin and lifting her face until they were staring at one another, gray eyes into violet ones. Elaine could not look away.

  “You are quite, quite beautiful,” Veree pronounced at last, “and you take in everything with those big eyes. But like the magpie, you give nothing away. I expect they’ll call you Maggie, but I shall call you Pie.”

  Beyond the fingers of light cast by the hearth fire was a darkness so thick it seemed palpable. On the edges of the darkness, as if it crowded them together, sat the nine Mothers of Ynis Evelonia. In the middle of the half circle, in a chair with a firm back, sat Mother Argente, smiling toward the flames, her fingers busy with needlework. She did not once look down to check the accuracy of her stitches but trusted her fingers to do their work.

  “Young Maggie seems to be settling in quite nicely. No crying at night, no outlandish longings for home, no sighing or sniffles. We needn’t have been so worried.” Her comment did not name any specific worrier, but the mothers who had voiced such fears to her in the privacy of their morning confessionals were chastised all the same.

  Still chafing over the rejection of her suggested name, Hesta sniffed. “She’s too much like Veree—high-s
trung, coddled. And she fair worships the ground Veree treads, which, of course, Veree encourages.”

  “Now, now, Hesta,” Mother Sonda soothed. She made the same sounds to chickens agitated at laying time and buyers in the guesthouse, a response in tone rather than actual argument. It always worked. Hesta smoothed her skirts much like a preening bird and settled down.

  Sonda rose to stack another log onto the embers and to relight a taper on the candlestand. A moth fluttered toward the flame and on reaching it, burst with a sudden bright light. Sonda swept the ashes onto the floor where they disappeared into shadows and rushes. Then, turning, she spoke with a voice as sweetly welcoming as the scent of roses and verbena in the room.

  “Mother A has asked me to read the lesson for this evening.” She stepped to the lectern where the great leather-bound Book of Brightness lay open. Above it, from the sconce on the wall, another, larger taper beamed down to light the page. Sonda ran her finger along the text, careful not to touch either the words or the brightly colored illuminations. Halfway, she stopped, looked up, and judging the stilled expectant audience, glanced down again and began to read.

  The lesson was short: a paragraph and a parable about constancy. The longer reading had been done before the full company of women and girls at dinner. Those who could took turns with the readings. All others listened. Young Maggie, with her low, steady voice and ability to read phrases rather than merely piece together words, would someday make a fine reader. She would probably make a fine mother, too. Time—and trial—would tell. That was the true magic on the isle: time and trial.

  Sonda looked up from the text for a moment. Mother Argente always chose the evening’s lesson. The mealtime reading was done from the Book’s beginning straight through to the end. In that way the entire Book of Brightness was heard at least once a year by everyone on the isle.

  As usual, Sonda was in full agreement with Mother A’s choice of the parable on constancy. In the last few months the small community had been beset by inconstancy, as if there were a curse at work, a worm at the heart inching its way to the surface of the body. Four of the novices had left on one pretext or another, a large number in such a short time. One girl with the bloody flux whose parents had desired that she die at home. One girl beset by such lingering homesickness as to render her unteachable. One girl plainly too stupid to learn at all. And one girl summoned home to be married. Married! Merely a piece in her father’s game, the game of royalty. Sonda had escaped that game on her own by fasting until her desperate father had given her permission to join the Daughters of Eve. But then, he had had seven other daughters to counter with. And if such losses of novices were not enough—girls were always coming and going—two of the fully vowed women had left as well, one to care for her aged and dying parents and take over the reins of landholding until her brothers might return from war. And one, who had been on the isle for twenty years, had run off with a Cornish miller, a widower only recently bereaved; run off to become his fourth wife. Constancy indeed!