“Look how bloody she is,” the pregnant woman said. “She must be dead.”
She had made it apparent that she would not touch the woman sprawled in the ditch. Sighing, the driver gave her the lantern, and knelt in the mud. Seeing no buttons, he tore open the front of the border woman’s blood-soaked tunic. He spread the edges of the wound in her breast, and said sharply, “Don’t look if you’re squeamish. But hold the lantern steady. No, she’s not hurt to death that I can see. Just fainted, probably.”
The pregnant woman said, exasperated, “We’ll have to take her to the next farmhouse. And she’s all mud! She’ll wreck the silk!”
They got her into the wagon, wrapped in a blanket to prevent her from staining anything. The horses smelled blood and tried to hurry away, but the smell followed them. The driver peered anxiously into shadows. The passenger kept a sharp eye out for the lights of a farmstead, but perhaps the winter shutters were already closed everywhere, for the darkness was unrelieved even by stars. She finally said in frustration, “We’ll take her to Watfield, then. My wife will know what to do with her.” Then she sat glumly tapping her foot, wishing she had not noticed that hand reaching toward her out of the darkness. Or that she had looked away.
Chapter 18
The note, written in Shaftalese, remained obscure even after Gilly read it out loud to Clement: “Please visit as quickly as you can. You will not regret it.” The note was signed, not by Alrin, but by Marga.
“You look flabbergasted,” Gilly said, clearly enjoying the sight.
“Come to Alrin’s house with me,” said Clement.
“What for? It’s raining!”
“It’s dinnertime, isn’t it? Or teatime?” Clement raised her eyebrows at him.
“Of course I’ll go with you,” he said hastily.
She sent an aide to put together an escort, and sent another with an explanatory message to Cadmar. That day they had gotten more bad news about a nasty attack on tax-collecting soldiers in the east—some ten from the same garrison, all hunted down and slaughtered, one by one. Now Cadmar was working off a bad temper in the training ring, which was fortunate, for, given his foul mood, he almost certainly would forbid both of them to go anywhere.
But the people of Watfield had finally gotten distracted from their pot-banging by the urgency of autumn work, and Clement’s instincts told her it was reasonably safe for her to go out on the streets. “You just want me along to keep you out of that woman’s bed,” grumbled Gilly.
“I do feel like I’d do almost anything for clean sheets,” Clement replied.
Getting Gilly onto his horse was a painful process, but he looked around himself with lively curiosity as, surrounded by soldiers, they rode out the gate and into the city. “What are all these people doing in town? It’s pouring rain!”
Even as he spoke, the sky opened up with a deluge, and so did hundreds of umbrellas: strange, heavy contraptions of wooden spines and waxed leather that spooked the horses. The farmers that crammed the main road were so intent on business that they hardly looked twice at the company of soldiers pushing through the crowd. Parcel-laden adolescents followed their elders dutifully in and out of shops, and frequently paused to look around for familiar faces and to loudly greet the friends they were able to spot on the far end of the street, or even across the square.
Gilly pulled the hood of his oilskin cape over his head, muttering, “An umbrella would be a fine thing.”
“Your horse would have a fit,” said Clement.
“Not this horse.”
The short journey was lengthened by the crowds, and Clement’s trousers were soaked through by the time they reached the quiet side street, and the respectable townhouse where summer flowers still bravely bloomed at either side of the front steps. The curtains all were drawn, but Clement saw light glimmer in the parlor window, and it was only a moment’s wait for Marga to open the door. She looked beyond Gilly and Clement at the soldiers and horses standing miserably in the road. “You can bring them into the kitchen to dry out and have a bit of cake,” she said.
Clement called an order to the sergeant, who did not conceal his pleasure. She said to Marga as she and Gilly stepped in the door, “This is Gilly, the general’s secretary. Why have you asked me here?”
“I’d like you to meet my brother,” Marga said. “He’s in the parlor. I’ll leave you alone, if you don’t mind helping yourself to tea.” Her words were polite enough, but her tone suggested she had no intention of going anywhere near the parlor no matter what Clement said.
“Meet her brother?” said Gilly doubtfully, in Shaftalese.
“Cake,” said Clement, handing over her wet cape for Marga to hang up in the hall.
“Oh, cake,” said Gilly sarcastically as he followed her toward the parlor. “Well, if he’s waiting in there to shoot you, at least you’ll shield me from injury. And maybe I’ll have time while he’s reloading to shout that I’m a helpless cripple. And maybe he’ll slice me a piece of cake.”
Clement stepped through the door with her hand on her saber. The emaciated man who huddled miserably by the fire looked up at her entry, but certainly seemed unlikely to attack her.
“I can tell you what you want to know,” he said. “But first I want my Davi back.”
He sat silent while Clement got Gilly settled in a comfortable chair. It had been a long time, Clement judged, since Gilly had even been able to sit in comfort—somehow, she must get him an upholstered chair. She brought him a steaming cup of tea and a great slice of the splendid cake that had been sitting untouched on the side table. “What are you trying to do to me?” Gilly moaned.
“Eat slowly,” Clement said. “Or I’ll make you eat another piece. We’ve got to stay here long enough for all those soldiers in the kitchen to get their bit of cake.”
She turned to the miserable man by the fire and asked if she could serve him some tea. He looked startled, and then disgusted. Nearly five months had passed since Clement took his daughter from his arms, but the sight of the tough old woman at the garrison gates with the child’s name wrapped around her chest had reminded Clement of that family nearly every day. She particularly remembered the way this man had tried to soothe his screaming daughter’s terror.
She said, “You want your girl back before you’ll talk to me? What exactly have you got that makes you think you can make such a bargain?”
The man turned to face her, then. He had looked terribly ill five months ago; now he looked half dead. “One of my husbands was in the garrison that night it was burned down,” he said. “And then he ran with those people for a few months. All over the land he went, having what he said were adventures. Then he was hurt, and they brought him home to recover, but he died. I can’t do farmwork any more, so I took care of him. He told me some things—he wouldn’t have, but he wasn’t in his right mind towards the end. When I’ve got Davi back, I’ll tell you what he told me—all of it.”
“I’m not setting out to fetch your girl until I know what it is you know,” said Clement impatiently.
He said, “Kill me if you want. I’m dying anyway. When I told my family they couldn’t stop me from coming to you, they abandoned the farm. They figured you’d come after them, I guess, to try to force me to talk. Now there’s nothing you can do to me, nothing you can kill that isn’t dead already. Do what you want.” His tone was flat, bitter, and utterly without hope. He sagged wearily in his chair.
“Friend,” said Gilly, with his mouth full of cake, “I suggest you give the lieutenant-general a little more than that. She’s got to commit a whole company of soldiers to a foul-weather journey, and she’s too good a commander to do that for nothing but a vague hope. Give her an idea of what you know, anyway. You can do that, can’t you?”
The farmer, apparently roused out of his lethargy by the sight of Gilly’s remarkable ugliness, gave him a frankly puzzled look. He wanted to ask Gilly something. It would have been a rude question, something like what are you, prompted as
much by how Gilly spoke as it was by how he looked. But the farmer apparently could not bring himself to be so rude.
Clement sat down, and crossed her legs, and endeavored to look like she really didn’t care about the outcome of this conversation. She sipped her tea.
Eventually, the farmer turned to her. “This group that calls itself Death-and-Life, they want to do something that will rouse all of Shaftal to join them. Then, they figure they can exterminate all of you by spring. I know what that thing is that they’re going to do. I know when, and I know where.”
Clement set down her tea cup. “It’s almost winter already.”
“It is,” the farmer said indifferently. “Maybe you’d better stop wasting your time.”
She looked at Gilly. He was rapidly, regretfully, eating the remainder of his cake. “How will I recognize Davi?” Clement asked the farmer. “And how do I contact you when I have her? Through Marga?”
As they discussed the details, Clement cut another slice, wrapped it in her handkerchief—the first clean one she’d had in almost half a year—and put the cake carefully in her pocket to give Gilly later. “It will be some time before you hear from me,” she told the farmer. “Fifteen, twenty days.” Because she was unhappy to know that an entire farmstead had emptied itself for fear of her, she wanted to add coldly that theirs had been an absurd over-reaction. But even now she was reconsidering her decision to let the farmer go unmolested, wondering if after all it might be better to hand him over to the torturers. Perhaps, she thought, his family had been wise after all.
She lay a coin on the side table for Marga to find, and left the parlor with Gilly sighing sadly at her elbow.
In the kitchen, the dozen soldiers stood or squatted around the hearth, with pieces of cake in their hands, not eating, not bickering with each other, but listening raptly to a woman who sat on a stool at the table, with a bowl of beans at her elbow. She was telling them a story, in Sainnese.
Some of the soldiers glanced at Clement, pleadingly, asking her not to interrupt, so Clement let Gilly in and closed the door behind them. Marga silently offered Gilly her stool, but he gestured that he could continue to lean on his cane. The storyteller, without pausing or seeming to notice the new arrivals, continued to weave her tale, which had to do with an arrogant man, a magical forest, and a vicious wild pig. Having arrived as the tale was finished, Clement could not follow its import, but the storyteller was an extraordinary sight. Though she was dressed in a plain servant’s outfit, and covered to the knee with a stained apron, her dark, angular face could not be disguised as ordinary. She had black hair, black eyes, skin of such deep brown it would disappear into shadows, a face that was all hollows and jutting angles. She had seen some action recently, for that face was marred with fading bruises.
Her tale was finished. The soldiers uttered sighs like children when the show is over, and only then remembered their uneaten cakes. The storyteller, though, seemed to be waiting for something. Some of the soldiers gave another one a nudge, and he cleared his throat and told a soldier’s tale that Clement had heard many times before, usually told better. When he was finished, though, the storyteller gave a bow, as though to thank him, and her hands, which had been gesturing to illustrate her tale, returned to the drudge’s work of shelling beans.
The soldiers stuffed their cake in their mouths and reached for the rain capes that were drying on hooks by the fire. But they paused and glanced at each other hopefully when Gilly grated in his unlovely voice, “I’ve never heard that tale before. Might I trouble you to tell another?”
The woman said, “I am a gatherer of stories, and I will trade with anyone, story for story.”
Gilly seemed nonplused, but one of the soldiers said, “Iness will make the trade for you, sir. Iness knows lots of tales.”
“Well,” said Gilly, “Perhaps I will accept that stool after all.” He perched on Marga’s stool with his hands resting on his cane. Clement, standing beside him, leaned down so he could explain himself. He whispered, “Winter entertainment.”
Then the kitchen door opened, and Alrin, dressed in gorgeous silk, bustled in. She stopped short in surprise at the crowd. The storyteller leaned towards Gilly, as though to directly address him. “I will tell you a tale of a people who live on the sea, whose harbor is called Dreadful because so many boats have been wrecked going in and out of its narrow entrance. Within the harbor, though, the water is still as glass, and the boats must be rowed because no breath of wind ever stirs there. The people walk from boat to boat to go visiting, and never set foot on land at all, except to fill their water barrels. A woman of these people was so ugly that no one could bear to look at her, and she lived by herself without even dog or cat for company. No one would fish with her, either. So no one could explain how she came home, day after day, with her hold full of newly-caught fish.”
Clement had heard Alrin take in her breath, and looked at her in time to see her glance with horror at Gilly, and then open her mouth as though to stop the story. But Gilly’s ugly face was decorated with a delighted smile. Clement whispered to Alrin, “Leave it be.”
The storyteller’s tale slowly, quietly, became hilarious. She told of the various, increasingly absurd ways that the fisherwoman’s kinfolk, jealous of the ugly woman’s wealth and success, tried to trick her into revealing her fishing secret. Then, they began to offer bribes, and finally offered her the one thing she did not have, and could not get for herself: a loving husband. But first she demanded that her potential husband prove his love (here the tale became as salacious as any soldier might wish) and, to his surprise, the potential husband managed to do this. And so, in the end, it was revealed that the ugly woman was sticking her face into the water, and the fish, fleeing the sight, were swimming directly into her nets.
The kitchen had echoed with laughter, and even Alrin wiped her eyes and exclaimed, “Well! Who would have thought!”
Iness, the soldier, told his own tale, but with a certain self-deprecating air, for he was a mere amateur and Alrin’s’ servant clearly was a master.
In the crush of the hallway, as the soldiers wrapped themselves in capes and pressed out the narrow door, Gilly, Alrin, and Clement were trapped together into a corner. Alrin said rather anxiously, “I had no idea she spoke Sainnese. Or that she was a storyteller. She’s just a tribal woman who’d been set upon . . . I found her by the road side.”
Gilly said, “What is her name?”
Alrin hesitated. “I don’t know. She seems a bit addled.”
“Really! But she tells a good tale. Perhaps we might hire her to tell tales in the garrison on these long winter nights.”
Out in the rain again, once Gilly had been hoisted into the saddle and had wrapped himself thoroughly against the wet, he said ironically, “Now what do you suppose got your courtesan so flustered, eh? I’d have thought she’d have nerves steady as my horse’s.”
“Perhaps she feared the servant’s tale had offended you. People are always assuming you to be short-tempered.”
“Like that ugly woman’s fish, they flee my ugly face! Ha!” He chuckled to himself all the way to the garrison.
Chapter 19
It was snowing: a light snow, like powered sugar sifting down from the shimmering dawn sky. It glittered, casting a dazzling haze like dust, or mist. Shivering and sleepy, Garland picked up the milk can that Karis had hauled up the mountain the night before and left out on the porch all night, and felt that its contents were frozen solid. The four ravens muttered restlessly on the protected perches Karis had built for them, then one came flapping out and asked, “Will you feed us?”
“Be patient. I’m baking you some cornbread.”
The raven flew up to the railing. “Here, here, here, here, here!” he called. Black shadows flapped in the shimmering mist of snow, and three more ravens landed on the rail in an icy spray of slush. So many ravens! Garland stepped backwards into Karis, who was just coming out the door with her head buried in an enormous knitted
jerkin.
Her tousled, sleep-flushed face emerged. Her eyes, which had been stark, now glittered at him with something resembling humor. “You don’t have to cook breakfast for the birds.”
“But they’re people.”
“Created people? They’re so alike, even I can’t tell them apart.”
“They talk,” Garland said. “So they’re people.”
Karis jammed a cap onto her head, pulled on a sheepskin jerkin, and took some heavy knitted gloves out of the pocket. “Well, you’ll also have ten human people for breakfast. Six of them have been on the road all night, running before the storm. They’re at the foot of the mountain now, with three heavy wagons and a lot of exhausted horses, and a very slippery road ahead of them. Raven, go tell them I am coming to help.”
The raven that had asked about breakfast leapt off the railing into the snow.
“Will you take these three raven-people inside to get dry?” Karis said to Garland. She looked ruefully at the moth holes in her gloves that left large portions of her fingers exposed. “I hope they brought the rest of my clothes.”
As Karis set forth after the bird, into the snow, Garland offered his arm to the nearest sodden raven. “I’ll take you in to sit by the fire.”
The raven stepped from the railing to his forearm, and thanked him politely.
The day after Karis had finished the beds, she had made mortar out of sand and slaked lime, and with scavenged bricks had built into the kitchen chimney the sweetest oven Garland had ever baked a pie in. By the time harnesses could be heard jingling in the yard, two pans of cornbread were cooling for the ravens, and the oven was full again, this time with eight loaves of bread that puffed up in the heat quite satisfactorily. Applesauce bubbled in the pot on the fire, and a pan of pork sausages kept warm on the hearth. Garland heard the front door open, and swung the teakettle over the hot part of the fire. He did not have enough plates or cups to go around, but few travelers show up without their own tableware.
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