“Rain at harvest time now,” said a quiet voice behind him.
He looked around and saw his mother’s head and shoulders, her small, strong hands holding the top rung of the ladder. He lowered his eyes. He didn’t know if she believed in the old wives’ tale that killing a sting-bug would bring autumn rains to rot the grain in the field, but he knew that his mother hated to kill any living thing. Her husband often railed against this weakness: “What, woman? Do you think the chickens and sheep will cut off their own heads just to suit your tender heart?” And if he was feeling particularly cruel after killing one of the old hens he would seize her long-fingered hands in his gnarled, bloody ones and lecture her about the duties of a farmer’s wife. She never talked back—he could be fast and cruel with those bloody hands—but only lowered her eyes and nodded silently. Garet’s heart would burn for his mother’s shame, and at night, in his narrow bed, he would call on the spirits of the great Northern heroes in the ballads. He would beg for the strength to change his life, to help his mother, and if his mood was black, he would ask for his father’s death.
Garet met her eyes and defended his actions. “Allia was reaching for it. I didn’t have any choice!”
His mother nodded. She knew that, like herself, Garet had no real cruelty in him, and that for both of them, choices were rare.
“It can’t be helped then. Come down to breakfast.”
Garet untied Allia’s cord from the bedpost and wrapped the end around his wrist just in time as his sister flew at the ladder, missed as usual, and was only saved by a quick tug on her leash.
“Garet! Let go!” Allia fell to the loft floor and tried to wriggle out of the loop tied around her waist.
“Come on, little dragon.” Garet picked her up and Allia immediately stopped squirming and clamped two pudgy arms around his neck.
“Let’s go eat,” he said, smiling at her fierce little face. “People?” Allia’s startling blue eyes fixed on his.
He smiled. “No, you’re still too small a dragon for human meat. It’s porridge until you get your full growth.” It was an old game they played, but one that pleased them both.
Allia allowed herself to be carried down the ladder into the single room of the log farmhouse. The front half was all brightness and morning noise. The table never seemed big enough for his father and hulking brothers, now tearing at the bread on its clay platter. The back of the cabin was windowless and dark. It contained their parent’s large, lumpy bed, his mother’s spinning wheel, and a trapdoor to the root cellar. Garet’s older brothers hinted at a chest of copper coins buried under the potatoes and onions, but they didn’t dare the threat of their father’s fists to try and find it. Garet often thought wistfully of that treasure. What could I do, if I had enough money to escape from this farm, he wondered. Buy passage on a coastal trading ship and go north like his oldest brother, Axil, to fight the dragons? Go west to the demon cities of the coast and find work? Someday, he promised himself, he would leave this place but, as always, the thought of leaving his mother, whom he loved, and his sister, who loved him, made him turn away from such thoughts, and he climbed down towards the heat and light of the small, busy house.
The low sun of morning streamed in through the open door. It shone on the copper pots on their hooks, the painted clay jugs and plates, and on his mother’s worn, white apron. The breakfast had been laid out on the sturdy trestle table. Bowls of porridge, topped with green onions and a few dried flakes of salt fish—for his Northerner parents would not live without some fish, even in this land-bound house—a loaf of dark bread now torn into chunks waiting to receive butter, and mugs of milk, were all laid on the scarred planks. His mother moved silently among the three men already savagely devouring their shares. She would eat later when the house was quiet.
“Get to table and eat,” roared Garet’s father as the boy settled Allia in her seat and tied the cord around the chair’s back. “You’re to help your brothers gather wood for charcoal.”
Gitel and Galit looked knowingly at each other. Garet winced. His brothers, using pinches and slaps as measures of persuasion, would make him do all the gathering of wind-fallen wood. And if his father complained at the end of the day that there was not enough, they would innocently blame it on his laziness and swear that what had been collected was due to their labours alone. Such lies often meant another slap for Garet, this time from his father. When the twins did allow Garet to stop working, they would force him to wrestle or box, practicing for their chief amusement of fighting with other farm lads. No drinking party at the trading post or rare social gathering in those lonely foothills was complete without a brawl. Garet never hit back, because experience had taught him that too much resistance meant a real beating. Instead, he kept his wits about him and twisted and dodged as best he could. His brothers thought this was great fun and bet each other as to who would catch him first. If Garet was lucky, they were too tired by the time they did catch him to do much damage. Garet might be thin, but he had wiry muscles from doing his own and his brothers’ work; he also had black and blue patches from their sport with him.
The torments had gotten worse since Axil left for the north. Before his eldest brother fled the same mixture of brutality and boredom that choked Garet, the twins were afraid to harm him, openly at least. Axil, unable to protect his mother or himself from his father’s anger, had done what he could to keep Garet safe. Bruised and disheartened, he left one night, a year ago, with only the clothes on his back and a bundle of food that his mother claimed he had stolen, so as to deflect her husband’s rage. Before he went, he told Garet, “Get out! Get out as soon as you’re old enough to earn your way. There’s no life for you here!”
Garet had been only fifteen then. Now, at sixteen, he was old enough to follow his advice, if he dared. With Axil gone, the twins had welcomed their new freedom. They eyed him now, grinning.
Before he could think of an excuse for his father’s deaf ears, his mother spoke softly, “I think Garet had better take the sheep to the hill pasture to fatten them up.” Her voice was quiet and toneless.
Garet held his breath. His mother rarely contradicted his father. Hilly glared at her, but she stood deferentially, head bent down and slumping her shoulders as she usually did around her husband.
“The good summer grass is about gone,” she said, not quite looking at the glowering figure seated at the head of the table. “We’d best graze off the rest of it, before autumn.”
Faced with an undeniable truth, her husband chose, as he always did, to meet it with scorn and anger.
“What difference is it?” Hilly finally growled. “He’s no use working at the hard jobs anyway. Geyahh! You’re treating him like he was Southern dandy, or a girl!”
In his father’s view, Garet was small, timid, and skittish. Hilly’s attempts to “train-up the boy” had, in his own definite opinion, come to nothing.
Garet blushed hotly while Allia swelled up for a tantrum on behalf of her beloved brother, playmate, and protector, but was distracted when Gitel dug an elbow into Galit’s side, provoking a spew of porridge back into his bowl. Allia switched her glare to the twins.
“If he were a girl,” Gitel said, “we could marry him off, see, and maybe make some money on the deal.”
His father roared with laughter but Gitel’s own guffaws were cut short by a wooden spoon slapped down on the back of his knuckles.
“You little nit!” Gitel raised the wounded hand while Allia waved her weapon, looking for another opportunity to strike.
Hilly laughed even louder, if possible, and grabbed the twins, one choking and the other cursing, by their fist-lumped ears. He pulled them outside, dragging them in the direction of the tool shed. His mother closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, pushing at it as if she would keep those loud, cruel men, her own husband and sons, from returning. Then she turned and, after giving Garet a soft pat on the head, and kissing the triumphantly crowing Allia, started clearing the dishes. B
reakfast once again survived; it was time to get on with the day’s work.
And so it was that Garet was with the eighteen sheep the family owned, watching them graze on the hillside the day that his life changed. The pastures above the farm ran steeply to the crests of the surrounding hills. A smart shepherd sat above the sheep on one of the innumerable boulders these hills spawned, so that any chasing would be downhill and not up.
Below his perch, the farm lay scattered like bits of wood left over from a creek’s spring flood. There was not much to look at. Beyond the cabin with its swayback roof, a sheep corral, a few sheds, and a cow barn were placed with a fine lack of care. Wooden fences ran haphazardly, jumping and diving over the uneven terrain. The numerous holes in these barriers were patched with old tree stumps or woven plugs of brambles. The whole farm wore its neglect and indifference like an old, shabby coat, and surrounding it for as far as he could see were only trees and stony hills. Garet knew his father liked this isolation, and, although his wife might have craved other farmwives to talk to, it mattered nothing to Hilly that the nearest company was three hours walk away, at Three Roads tavern.
But no neighbours meant no help either. It seemed a wonder to the boy sitting on the boulder, arms wrapped around his knees, that they grew enough to keep them alive through each winter, though it was often a near thing. A late spring might see his mother taking him far up the wooded slopes to pick wood sorrel. If they were lucky, they would run across rabbit tracks. Then his mother would put aside her reluctance to take a life and show him how to track the small animal to its rough tunnel and pull it out with a noose of flexible spruce roots. Those rabbits and his father’s luck with a bow had often meant the difference between mere hunger and slaughtering their sheep to survive. If the sheep ever were lost, his father would have to go back north and admit defeat or maybe even move west, to the river cities to work for a rich man, two things his father would rather die than do.
Garet stirred on his perch. The thought of the wider world thrilled him, perhaps because he knew so little about it.
He did know that it was a world of two great threats. In the North, a place of deep, narrow valleys, where cold rivers tumbled to an even colder sea, dragons harried the fishing boats and fired the ripe grain in the field. In the South, a land of fertile soil and broad rivers, demons hunted people through their strong-walled cities. No, it was not a safe world out there, but those people, even though harried by one or the other of these terrors, still managed to live their lives. And at least they had lives.
Although he had never been farther than Three Roads, he had also heard enough to know the general geography of the Midlands. The Ar, the same river that fed the fertility of the South, split into North and South branches, collecting the waters of these foothills and the farther mountains. This twinned river enfolded a wide plain of gentle climate and rich soils. For a hundred years, people had left their hazardous lives, mostly from the cities of the South but also from the North and the rest of the known lands, and plowed and built until farms dotted the wide prairie. No dragon flew past the endless forests that separated their bleak mountain nests from the Midlands to burn the rich grain fields. No demon clawed at a house door closer than the fortress of Old Torrick, where the two rivers met and gave themselves, through a roaring waterfall, back to the Ar. Generations of men and women had lived peacefully and profitably here. Demons and dragons had become the tales of a winter’s evening, bringing wide eyes and a child’s playful shrieks, but no real fear.
Garet slid off the boulder and rebuilt his small pile of stones. Whenever a ewe strayed too far, he threw a stone over its head to strike the ground beyond. The animal, as stupid as Gitel and Galit put together, would run from the noise and crowd back into the small flock. There, attracted by the sweet grass of late summer, the sheep would munch contentedly until some new whim sent one of them wandering. Garet sighed. His mother had sent him up to the field early, with a packet of bread and a jug of water. The message was clear: stay up there all day, out of your father’s way.
With the sheep temporarily content to feed in a group, he leaned back against the boulder and drifted into a pleasant daydream. It was a familiar one about stealing his father’s coins and buying a horse from a Midland farmer to ride, oh to ride all the way along the North Ar to Old Torrick. From there, to gallop past the tumbling waters of the Falls to the first big city of the Southerners, Shirath, the “City on the Two Banks.” He had heard tales of that city from plainsmen come trading two years ago at the Three Roads tavern for hill country wool. They spoke of Shirath’s beauty, of her lively markets, and of the three great, arched bridges that spanned the Ar to make it one city instead of two. With no experience of the wide world, Garet could not even guess if the merchants’ houses, as the traders claimed, were covered with gold and staffed by bejewelled servants, or if the number of storytellers in the market was always greater than the number of listeners. In his fantasy, Garet stood in the middle of three such storytellers, all vying for his attention with tales of heroes, dragons, and demons.
A distant sheep ‘bahhed’ and Garet came back to his unheroic reality and the pile of stones. It took three well-placed missiles to guide the latest woolly adventurer back to the flock. With the truant returned, Garet settled down again to his dream of wealthy cities—until the next ewe strayed and ‘bahhed’ him back to his life. The rest of the long day teetered between daydream and dull reality.
The breeze on the hill finally turned, signalling the approach of evening. Garet kept one eye on the cabin, looking for his mother to wave him down for the day. Sitting hunched beside the boulder, he slowly released his dreams and concentrated on reality. As the fantastic images faded, he knew in his heart that he was not destined for an exciting life. He was no hero from his mother’s Northern songs. His hands were callused from wielding a shovel, not a dragon-killing spear. His clothes were hand-me-downs and hung loosely, giving him a scarecrow look. No, he did not seem designed for adventure, and, if he were honest with himself, he would have to say that his life would likely be spent in these lonely hills, farming and working until he died, perhaps of boredom.
Now, as the sun slid past the brow of the hill, turning bright day into sudden twilight, Garet climbed the boulder again to look for his mother or brothers to wave him down for supper. No one appeared and Garet finally decided to get the flock headed downhill before it became too dark to see. The sheep were uncharacteristically nervous as they neared their pen. Every other day they trotted happily into the corral, knowing that Garet would mix their ration of grain with some expensive, tasty salt to keep them healthy. Now they milled and crowded from one side of the enclosure to the other, calling to him in plaintive voices.
Inside the cowshed, their milk cow, Saliat, lowed just as nervously. She pranced and pushed against him so urgently that Garet bent to check her udder, but his mother had already milked her dry. The frightened beast then laid her big, soft head in the crook of his arm and rolled her eyes. “Shhhh, shhhh girl, shhhh,” Garet said to calm her, but she kept butting into him until he had to leave the poor thing uncomforted, still moaning and staring in her stall. A shiver ran up his back as he walked to the cabin; every animal on the farm was at the point of panic. The chickens buzzed like feathered bees from roost to roost in their coop. The two sows and their piglets backed into a corner of the sty and bared their teeth at Garet as he walked by. The dog, a skinny mongrel with only three legs that his father kept, “just for the bark,” whimpered and hid under the steps that led to the farmhouse door.
Garet slipped inside and felt the heat on the left side of his face from a roaring fire in the hearth. His father, who ordinarily wouldn’t waste a twig more than was necessary for cooking or heating, especially on a warm summer night, was just pushing in another log. He levered it with the poker between hearth’s stone teeth and glared at Garet.
“You’re late—as usual. Help your mother.” He poked the log furiously and Garet saw sweat beading
on his forehead and upper lip.
Garet looked to his mother, but she didn’t acknowledge him. She seemed unaware that he had even entered the house. Twisting a washcloth between two white-knuckled fists, she stared out into the twilight beyond the open door.
The dog yelped. Gitel and Galit clattered into the house as if they were being chased by all the people they had ever offended. Galit slammed the door behind him and threw the latch. The cabin fell into shadow; the one small window, covered with a thinly scraped sheep hide, let in barely enough light to show his mother’s twisting, wringing hands. The fire only confused his sight with its dancing patterns of light and shadow. Without a word, his father took down the winter lamp from the mantle and lit it.
Garet was dumbstruck. No one, especially someone as stingy as his father, wasted lamp oil. Every winter they were treated to lectures about how the expensive oil must be traded all the way from the dry lands south of the Midland Plains, its price increasing with each mile travelled. And yet with twilight still brightening the sky, the winter lamp blazed on the mantle! He shivered, despite the heat of the fire. This was so strange; what was happening to them? Only Allia seemed immune to whatever fit had gripped his family and was now jumping under his own skin. Tied to her chair and fixing the door with her usual savage glare, she held a wooden spoon ready in her hand.
His mother finally stirred herself to put the food on the table, and they all sat in silence. The dinner was a fine one, for late summer was a rare time of plenty. It consisted of a stewed hen, who had ceased to lay eggs thus sealing its fate, new potatoes, and greens that his mother grew in the farm’s kitchen garden. But the dinner had no taste for Garet. He could barely force any food past his chattering teeth. The muscles of his shoulder knotted under a nameless dread. His brothers jumped at every clink of a fork against a plate. In desperation, he tried to break the mood by daring to talk directly to his father.
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