by Andre Norton
Noriel poured water into a huge ceramic pot that stood in the hearth, added some dried cracked grains, and motioned Huana over to stir it. Oseberg handed the plates to Leatrice, then sat down, waiting to be served. Noriel took two long steps to his side and motioned Up! She handed him a knife and some tree fruits and made peeling motions. Huana opened her mouth in outrage, then remembered she was a beggar, living on charity, moaned, and hung her head.
Noriel's heart filled with pity for these strangers, alone and far from their home. To distract them and to open communications, she pointed to herself. “Noriel,” she said. She pointed to Huana.
Leatrice said, “Mother.”
“Mother,” Noriel called. Huana looked up and stared, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.
“Huana,” Leatrice corrected. She pointed to herself. “Leatrice.” And to her brother. “Oseberg.”
“Leatrice. Leatrice Huanasdaughter, Oseberg Huanasdaughter,” Noriel said, pleased.
Huana gaped and stood up straight, confronting this huge, foul-mouthed forgewife. “He is not Oseberg Huanas-whatever-you-said!” she exploded. “I'm a respectable widow, I'll have you know, and these are the true children of their father in honest marriage. How dare you! Beggars or no beggars… .”
Noriel looked at Leatrice, who pointed to herself and said “Leatrice Morgathschild.” She tried to pronounce it as Noriel had, then pointed to her brother and said “Oseberg Morgathson” in her own language. By way of further explanation, she held her hand up high beside her and pointed to the imaginary person she measured. “Morgath. My father,” she explained. She drew an imaginary knife across her throat, hung her head limply, looked up with her eyes full of sudden tears. “Morgath,” she said, and snuffled.
Noriel took the girl in her arms. Ah! Their birthmother was dead, murdered by Falconers or something like, it seemed, and Huana their co-mother wanted it made clear that her sisterfriend was to be remembered. More charitably, she wrapped an arm around Huana, too, and said, “I'm sorry.” She wished she had three arms, one more for Oseberg, or that the child would come over for comfort instead of standing with its back to everybody, shoulders hunched over as if refusing comfort. Oh, well, they were among strangers themselves.
“Oseberg Morgathsdaughter,” she said, and beckoned him over. The boy obeyed, his face streaked with tears too. Huana said sharply, “Big boys don't cry, Oseberg, and you have to be the man of the family now.”
“Oh, mother, leave him alone,” Leatrice protested.
Noriel, understanding none of this, sighed. Wet hen, she dubbed Huana. Oseberg was just a child. Leatrice seemed to have some sense. She dished out four bowls of porridge and gestured to the nearest of her guests to pass them around. Oseberg took the first one to reach him, dug in, and started eating; sharply Noriel said, “Oseberg Morgathsdaughter! Show some manners!” Startled, the child looked up. Pampered, Noriel decided, showing him by gestures to pass things around.
Somehow or other, the morning meal was served and eaten. But when they rose from the table and Oseberg headed out the door without a word, Noriel cornered him. Indicating the bowl, she gestured Up! Up! Reluctantly he cleared his place; Leatrice and Huana did the same, and Huana set about washing the dishes, ordering Leatrice most sharply to help her. Oseberg followed Noriel to the forge.
Huana sighed. She and her daughter were drudges in this forgewife's house. The only one who spoke a human tongue besides the old crones was that insolent whore with red hair, Arona, and even her son must play the servant. These would be hard times indeed.
Down by the mill, the irresistible force had met the immovable object. “Well-spoken!” Lennis snorted, hands on hips. “I don't care if this Egil Lishasdaughter is the Bard Ofelis herself. It's still a Jommy, and I'd sooner have a rattlesnake in the house than a Jommy. Do you hear me?”
Asta Lennisdaughter's lip quivered, something she'd had much practice at. “Mother,” she said reproachfully. “Just look at these poor little children and their hard-working mother. See how cute little Soren is? We'd have a baby in the house again,” she coaxed, “without all the mess and bother of getting one yourself.” The girl held up the golden-haired refugee infant and cooed at it.
Lennis pounced and in one swift motion, stripped away little Soren's blanket. “Another Jommy,” she pronounced, and turned on her youngest viciously. “What's wrong with you, you wretched girl?” she demanded in a fury. “Do you have a perverse taste for the very beasts that killed your grandmother and violently attacked your mother?”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at her daughter. It came to her, not for the first time, that too many things came out as Asta wanted, even when Lennis started by firmly opposing whatever it was Asta was after. “And none of your tricks, young woman,” she growled.
“Mother!” A loud outraged scream from the other room distracted the miller, who promptly abandoned Asta to see what ailed Roldeen. Bursting into the kitchen, the harassed miller gasped in outrage at the sight of the soft-spoken Egil with its filthy madman's hands on the arms of her eldest! In the corner, the Jommy called Egil, sounding thoroughly annoyed, was spouting off in its outlandish gabble at Roldeen.
Quickly, before it could progress from bad words to worse actions, Lennis clouted it along the ear and raised her hand again threateningly.
Instead of retreating as the original Jommy Einas he-daughter always had, or having weeping hysterics as the Jommy had always done in childhood—the little baby—this one stood tall and stared her in the eye. Without first being spoken to—the rudeness of it!—it began babbling at her. Then, seeing she did not understand, it pointed to its sister. Then it pointed to Roldeen and made pinching motions, hard and vicious, over its own arm. It had been about to pinch Roldeen!
“Out!” Lennis shouted, her opened hand sweeping a huge arc that encompassed Egil and the crying child in the corner. Lisha and her remaining children poured into the room.
Lennis pointed to Egil, then to the door. “Get that thing out of here,” she said darkly. Then, with greater generosity, “to little Hanna, “you can stay.”
Egil turned to his mother. They talked back and forth in their unknown tongue, the weeping girl Hanna adding her bit. Egil put one arm around his mother and spoke tersely. The sense was clear to all: “We're leaving.”
“Leave, you ungrateful wretch,” Lennis called after them. “After I was kind enough to take you in and give you a place and feed you, and this is how you repay me?”
Egil turned and spoke briefly. Lennis caught Lisha's eye in outrage. “You just stand there,” she howled, “and let that thing speak for you as if you were witless? Let me tell you, I'd put my daughters in their place instantly if they ever tried to speak for me, their mother.” Her eyes narrowed again and a triumphant smile spread over her face. “Witless. Of course! Well, if you'd sooner starve than live on my kindness, of course, you're all free to go.” She turned back to Asta. “As for you, young woman… .”
Arona spent all day in the records room hunched over the scrolls, getting every detail of the hectic late-night invasion right. She had to guess at the spelling of the strangers’ names, and put them in phonetically. Who had come and when, and who they went with. As her penpoint dulled, she cut it fresh with her tiny penknife; as it wore down, she went to the goose pen to find another quill. Her ink block was growing sticky and her shoulders hurt.
As she finished the first list, she stood up and squinted into the golden western sunlight of midafternoon. And the chores undone! With a sigh, she went to the woodpile and fetched in enough to keep the fireplace going. She went to the well and hauled water enough for Maris to cook their meal and herself to refill their basins and pitchers. The cow would need to be milked later on, but somebody had fed the geese and collected the eggs. The garden could stand weeding, but that could wait until tomorrow. However, she would have to water it.
She drew bucket after bucket of water from the well and sprinkled the plants thoroughly with her hands before laying
down water along the roots. She swept the floor of the house and picked several ears of ripe sweetgrains and her choice of vegetables, placing them on the kitchen table for Maris. Then she set off for the village to see what was happening.
Walking down the familiar path between Records House and her mother's carpenter shop, she ignored vague cramps in her lower abdomen. Bethiah Anghardsdaughter, her mother, was sitting on the front porch chatting with her longtime crony, Noriel the Blacksmith. Arona smiled to see the blacksmith and called out “Hello, Aunt Noriel.” She had been fond of the smith since her fifth year.
For when Arona had just begun to use a precious metal needle instead of a baby's bone needle to mend her clothes, she had to her great shame lost it. Little Arona searched for the needle in all the ways taught her, but before admitting the accident to anyone, had tried one last thing. She had seen how certain things, rubbed against a cat's fur, called hairs and threads to them. Racing into the kitchen, she took one of her mother's precious glass drinking glasses and rubbed it against the fur of Smokey Patchesdaughter, the most docile of the cats. Then she took the glass into the front room to see if it would pick up the needle.
Her mother scolded her then for playing when she should be sewing. Her explanation made no sense to any of the adults, and she was scolded again for playing when her needle was missing. They called in the blacksmith, who had metal magic, to find it.
To Arona's delight, the blacksmith's ritual for finding needles was as unusual as the glass-and-fur one she herself had invented. She took from her apron pocket a tiny metal horseshoe, stroked it with a bar of metal kept wrapped up in her apron pocket, and ran it over the wooden floor. Noriel's little horseshoe found the needle in a crack in the floor.
When Aunt Natha and Mother were in the kitchen fixing cider and cookies for the blacksmith as courtesy required, Arona crept up to the formidable woman and told her about the cat's fur. The blacksmith not only had heard her out, but seemed impressed.
“She's very B-R-I-G-H-T,” the woman spelled out to Arona's elders, “I'd certainly like her as my apprentice, if she had the strength for it.” Then, sadly, “but it's too much to ask of any woman, to give up having children for The Art.”
“Why must your apprentice give up having children?” Arona asked, patting Noriel's hand in sympathy.
Noriel touched her finger to her eye as an unexpected tear formed. “I am very strong, and Falconers do not like that. They kill very strong women,” she said frankly. “So I must stay away from them. But only they can give us daughters. The village asked me to do this anyway, and since I love metal, I did. But it is hard.”
Arona hugged the woman then. “I'll be your daughter as well as Mother's and Aunt Natha's if they'll let me,” she promised. And so it had been through the years.
But today, Noriel looked like a woman who'd had a hard two days, and Aunt Natha was nowhere to be seen. The stranger woman Yelen was sitting by Arona's mother and seemed to hang upon her every word. How she could do that without a common language, Arona didn't know.
“How are your strangers, Aunt Noriel?” Arona called out, joining them on the porch like an adult.
Noriel chuckled. “That Huana! As fussy as a wet hen, always flying up into the treetops over something. She hovers over Leatrice like a broody hen and orders her around like a busybody.”
“And your new apprentice?” Arona was suddenly very curious about the strange children of the strangers, for one day she would have to understand them in full. “How glad I am that you've found one! Do you think it will work out?”
Noriel shook her scarf-tied head and laughed. “Oseberg's a good worker in the forge,” she said, “but an incredible know-it-all. You can't tell that girl anything that her old mistress Morgath didn't do better. In some cases, it's even true, but getting Oseberg to listen to anybody else is like getting the attention of a mule. Sometimes I think she has been pampered like a princess,” she went on. “Her mother takes advantage of her strength, though, quite as much as she takes advantage of Leatrice's willingness to help. But—Arona! Even when they knew you were bookish and going to be a priestess or a recorder or something like that, did your family set you apart? Let you get out of your chores? As if what you were doing was so much more important that you shouldn't have to be asked to do them?”
Arona whistled. “That spoiled?”
“That spoiled,” Noriel said. “Though a good worker, still and all.” Then her huge shoulders shook with laughter. “Oh, well, I'm teaching her manners. We may even make a fair cook and housekeeper out of her, though I despair of her ever learning to sew decently. So did her mother! For Huana threw another of her fits when she saw me trying to teach the child. How dare I try where her own mother has failed?” She threw back her head and roared.
Arona started to chuckle, then giggles poured out of her as she remembered her encounter with Egil. Natha Lorinsdaughter walked up the dooryard path, her nose looking thoroughly out of joint. “That Lennis!” she exploded.
“What's she done now?” Arona's mother asked without real concern.
“Driven her stranger-guests out into the night with a wild tale of them bullying her daughters,” Natha said sourly. “The stranger's oldest daughter tells another tale, of Roldeen pinching her sister and Lennis beating them both. I must say, of the two, I tend to believe the outsiders.” Having delivered this shocking statement, she hung up her shawls. “I promised to ask about finding them another place before my mother and the other elders got dragged into it. What's for supper?”
Chicken, in honor of their stranger-guests, fixed in a strange style. Yelen smiled very smugly as they ate their fill. She was indeed an excellent cook, Arona thought as she took second helpings, then thirds. The parts had been dipped in a heavy batter and cooked in hot grease like frybread. It was served with whipped tubers with a chicken-flavored sauce. That was a new idea, and very, very good.
Her cramps slowly started coming back. Arona, who was fourteen years old, had a suspicion what they were. So that dreadful day and night at the trailhead had borne no fruit? Not that she wanted a baby now anyway. She was only the Recorder's apprentice, not the Recorder. Her mother and aunt and cousins and sisters always had room for one more, but it wasn't the same as having her own household.
She had nobody to share a baby with. That was the problem. In a village where all the girls had their best friends from childhood—and changed often, but still had best friends—she was too bright, too intense, too quick with her tongue, too interested in things they were not. There were several girls she liked, who liked her, but they were never very close.
Egil was bright, and interested in the same things she was. Egil was strangely-behaved, though, and that worried her. But maybe she and Egil would end up as sisterfriends one day. That would be nice.
She had left the records unfinished! Excusing herself from the table, she said, “Thank you, Mama, all, but I did leave something undone at Records House. We still have a little light left. Will you excuse me?”
“Certainly, dear,” Bethiah said placidly. Yelen murmured agreement.
Arona raced down the path back to Records House and all but ran into Egil. He caught her by the arm. “Where are you going in such a hurry?” he asked.
“Records House, and if I'm in a hurry, you should know better than to grab me,” she snapped, annoyed. He looked as if he were starting to argue; she grabbed his fingers. “Don't tease, Egil! The light's almost gone, and I have my work to do.” He made no move to let her go. “Oh, Egil, Aunt Natha's even now looking into finding your family a new home,” she remembered to tell him, then wondered if she would need to pry his hands off her. To her relief, he removed them himself and bowed, saying, “Thank you,” then dashed off.
She went to the familiar records room and lit a candle to enter one last line.
“Ay-gill Lishasdaughter accused Roldeen Lennisdaughter of violence against her sisters. She made this accusation to Natha Lorinsdaughter, who said Lisha and Len
nis quarreled over this and Lisha left Lennis's house with all her children. They want a new home. Natha Lorinsdaughter is asking about this. Ay-gill wants to go to school.” Arona sat and thought about the next item and decided, reluctantly, it must be recorded in case matters between the strangers and the village ever came to judgment.
“Ay-gill also kissed this recorder Arona Bethiahsdaughter for no reason and apologized later but gave no reason for the kiss, except that she wants to be friends. She also laid hands on me even though I was in a hurry and serious, which was rude. Their manners are different. Nobody knows how different.”
She blotted the ink and weighed down the scroll's corners to let it dry overnight, then made ready for bed. Her supposition was correct: there would be no child. There would be other years, other Falconer visits. Maybe if she wanted a child, Egil would do this for her. That would be a lot better than another Falconer visit. Egil would make a marvelous best friend once she learned manners. It would be nice to have a friend she could talk to. Maybe. One day.
Egil Bakerson stared after Arona thoughtfully. No, not at all in the common style. Even that young lout Oseberg Smithson couldn't keep his eyes off her. Or his hands, from what Egil had heard. Pity he hadn't thought of it before trying that kiss! Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Oseberg had been sure, with so many girls in the village and so few boys, they'd both have all the girls they wanted. Oseberg hadn't stopped to think that these girls were used to grown men, not boys, and Falconers at that. It would take a most uncommon boy to compete with Falconers. Of course, it might be to their advantage that the Falconers were seldom around and the boys were. On the other hand, that might just make the boys seem commonplace compared to the girls’ remote, glamorous Falconer lovers.
Arona wasn't giving Egil a second glance. That wasn't surprising. A homeless, landless, penniless nobody and stranger to the village, he'd have to be somebody first. Luckily, their interests coincided. He liked what little taste he'd had of reading, writing, and keeping records, and she obviously took the recorder's office seriously, almost too seriously. Arona would consider the village recorder to be somebody. If he were the villager recorder, she'd have to consider him.