Ashhere clutched for the amulet that wasn’t there. The cat twitched its tail and stared at him with unblinking contempt. Ashhere glared back. The cat won.
When he looked up, the cat had gone. He clenched his hands until they stopped trembling, then reached out and touched Eadwine’s face, very gently. It was still too hot, but the fever was not as high and his colour looked a little – a very little – healthier. Eadwine stirred at the touch and his eyes opened drowsily.
“Ash –?”
Ashhere could have wept for joy, and promptly forgave the witch everything and more. She could have turned him into a toad then and there and he would still have been grateful.
“You’re alive, you’re alive –!” And then, anticipating Eadwine’s next question. “We’re all safe, we’re all here, you’re not to worry about anything!”
Eadwine smiled, rather vaguely, as if he was not fully awake. “Frija promised me,” he murmured dreamily, already beginning to slide back into sleep, “Frija promised –”
His voice drifted away. Ashhere had no idea what he was talking about, but that was not an unheard-of occurrence, and it was about time Eadwine’s dreams were visited by something pleasant for a change.
Ashhere jumped as a shadow cut off the light and Severa came briskly in through the open doorway. He looked for any sign of a cat’s tail under her swirling skirts, but was disappointed. Or possibly relieved.
She handed him a large bowl of porridge – did they live on nothing else? – and a jug of milk, and stooped briefly over Eadwine. Drust and Lilla had woken at her entrance and now sat up, blinking owlishly. She included them all in a disapproving look and said something in a sharp tone that Ashhere did not understand, until she made a face and held her nose. He exchanged a sheepish glance with Lilla. She had a point there. The atmosphere in the hut was distinctly pungent, and it had nothing to do with the onions.
Severa thrust a bowl of soft soap into Lilla’s hand, and pointed out of the door and down the slope. “River,” she said curtly. “You wash.” She pointed to a bucket in the corner of the hut, then to Eadwine’s slumbering form. “You bring water. You wash him. Understand?”
Without waiting for an answer, she swept out again as briskly as she had come. Ashhere had another furtive look for a tail.
“Are you out of your mind?” Blodwen scolded, scouring a cauldron in the dairy. “Four bandits –”
“One’s half-dead,” Severa said pacifically, “so he doesn’t count. Anyway, they seem terrified of me. I’d be flattered except they seem equally terrified of the cat. Not like that, Luned, you really should have got the hang of skimming cream by now –”
“– tramps and thieves and I don’t know what –” Blodwen continued.
Severa ignored her. “Gwen, pack the butter in firmly if it’s to keep all winter.”
“– you’ll have them stealing the chickens from under our noses –”
“Oh, Luned, give it here. I can skim the cream and manage the cheese. You help Gwen with the butter. Never mind, lass, the cows are going dry and you’re good with the pigs. It’s about time you started taking them into the forest for the nuts – ”
“– and burning the place down, I shouldn’t wonder –”
“Gwen, not too much salt, we can’t afford it –”
“– we’ll all be raped in our beds!”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Gwen muttered, loud enough to be heard. Luned tried to stifle a giggle and failed. Blodwen turned scarlet.
“Slut!”
Gwen gave her a sweet smile. “Ooo-ooh, listen to the pot calling the kettle black. Who was sneaking about trying to get a peep this morning?”
“I was not!”
“Yes you were, Blodwen,” Severa said placidly. “I saw you. Your tongue was hanging out. The big one’s quite something, isn’t he? He’s called Drust, by the way. Gwen, where do you think you’re going?”
“To do the laundry. Being as it’s stopped raining, you see.”
“Nothing to do with the fact that I sent the tramps to bathe, of course. That hut stinks like a lord’s hall the day after a feast.”
Blodwen abandoned the half-scrubbed cauldron and made a grab for the laundry basket. “It’s my turn!”
Gwen refused to relinquish it. “’Tisn’t!”
“’Tis!”
They tugged the laundry basket back and forth between them.
“None of us is going anywhere near the river this morning,” Severa said firmly. “Leave the poor men alone! Or at least wait until they’re in a fit state to appreciate your attention. They look nearly dead on their feet.”
“I was only trying to help,” Gwen protested, the picture of injured innocence.
“Yes, and I’m the Empress of Rome. Back to work, both of you!”
Her patient’s fever continued to abate, he appeared to be sleeping peacefully whenever she went to check on him and his wound showed no signs of festering again, so Severa left him alone and left his friends to look after him. She was pleased to have been proved right, and reckoned that now she should employ the doctor’s most valuable skill, that of knowing when not to interfere while nature cured the disease. It was towards sunset on the next day when she took them their evening porridge and found that her patient was fully awake at last.
His gaze fastened on her as she approached, and she noticed he had remarkable blue-grey eyes, sharp and piercing. Her grandfather had always insisted that the best steel had a blue tint to it. His features were sharp-cut too, and not just because he was worn from illness. A young hawk, she thought, irrelevantly. With a broken wing.
“How do you feel?”
His mouth quirked slightly, as if he was trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the question.
“Terrible,” he answered weakly. “I understand I have you to thank.”
“For feeling terrible?”
“For being alive to complain about it.” He paused, as if recovering his breath or gathering his strength. “Drust says you are a goddess. Ashhere says you are a witch.”
So that explained the gratifying deference, and their terror of the cat.
“You speak their language, don’t you? Will you do me a favour? Explain to your friends that the cat is just a cat? She catches mice and steals the cream when she thinks I’m not looking. She’s not me in shape-changed form, she’s not a familiar, she’s not a demon or a spirit. She’s just a cat, all right?”
What a relief it was not to have to try to communicate in single words and sign language!
“I don’t pretend to have any idea what that was all about,” he said, after translating, “but I’ve told them. They don’t believe you, by the way. And I must say they have a point. How did you cure me of a ripped gut, if not by magic? Such wounds are always fatal.”
“I didn’t cure you of a ripped gut.”
“Well, I don’t seem to be dead.” A flicker of laughter crossed his expressive face. “Unless every priest of every god I’ve ever heard of was spectacularly wrong, anyway.”
“You didn’t have a ripped gut.”
“No? It had all the signs.”
“Your feet were covered in fresh blisters from a long walk. You couldn’t have walked that far with a hole in the gut, you’d have been dead within the first day or two.”
He considered this thoughtfully. “Mmm. I remember thinking it was taking an inconveniently long and painful time to die. But surely you couldn’t be certain just from that?”
“Ah, what made me certain is that I like garlic.”
A narrow line of concentration appeared between his brows. “Forgive me for being stupid,” he said at length, “but I don’t see –”
Severa laughed. “Forgive me for being cryptic. It is a bad habit of mine. Garlic pottage, remember? I knew you must have eaten some because I could smell it on your breath. But there was no smell of garlic from the wound. So no hole in the gut.”
“Clever.”
“Common sense.”
/> “Maybe, but a rare skill to find on a remote country farm! How is that?”
“It was my grandfather’s craft. He taught me. Keep a wound clean and that is half the battle. Some useful advice for the amateur who bandaged you up with scraps of metal and cloth still in the wound! No wonder it was festering. If I may –?”
At his nod, she turned the blanket back, a minimal amount to avoid embarrassing him, and examined the gash.
“It does well,” she said, satisfied. “Which I have to say is more than I expected. What happened to you?”
He hesitated. “We were on the wrong end of a fight,” he said, at last.
“I didn’t think you fell out of a tree,” she said dryly. “Who are you and where are you from and what are you doing here? It is a strange thing to see a Brittone travelling with Saxons.”
“I am fortunate in my friends,” was the guarded answer. “And in any case, Drust is a Pict, not a Saxon.”
She was not to be diverted. “Whatever,” she said impatiently. “Are you going to answer my question? What were you doing on the moors? Looking for sheep to steal?”
He was indignant. “Certainly not!”
“Then what?”
“Passing through.”
“Over the moors? There’s nothing on the other side except forest to the end of the world. Nothing comes from that direction except thieves.”
“How many times do I have to say it? We are not thieves.”
“Then what?”
“Travellers.”
“Oh, yes, and I’m the Empress of Rome!”
“With a name like Severa you very well could be, or at least named for an Emperor. It is a Latin name, is it not?”
“I can’t help my name,” she said sullenly. “And stop trying to change the subject! If you claim you aren’t thieves, what are you?”
Eadwine groaned to himself. He did not feel up to being interrogated, but he could hardly tell her to mind her own business. She was their hostess, she had saved his life, and until he was fit to travel they were dependent on her goodwill – unless he was prepared to turn the bandit she obviously thought him. He scrambled to think of an innocent explanation for the presence of four strangers. There weren’t many. Most people never went more than a few miles from their homes in a lifetime.
“We are poor country men,” he said, hoping that might elicit some sympathy. “Driven from our home, looking for new land to settle. We were attacked on the road, took refuge in the forest, and lost our way.”
She did not look convinced, but shrugged and did not press the point. “Have you a name? Your friends told me theirs, but did not seem to understand when I asked yours.”
Now he had to think again. This was becoming hard work. His real name was out of the question. Even a rumour of his presence would provoke Aethelferth to send a warband, and the consequences were likely to be as severe for the farm as for himself. No warband would willingly miss an opportunity to make a little profit when outside home territory. He had found that out as a green youth in his first season, when he had pursued raiders back over the border into Bernicia and the warband had cheerfully run amok. It had taken the execution of one of his own men to impose his authority, and he had fully expected to be lynched for it. The memory still made him shudder. But the incident had given him a name, and it could probably be translated –
“Steeleye,” he said.
Severa arched one well-marked black eyebrow expressively. “If you say so.”
“Am I allowed to ask you a question, Mistress?”
She laughed. “Fair exchange, I suppose.”
“What place is this?”
He did not expect to be given a precise answer, for a country woman would only know her own village and its immediate neighbours, but he was hoping for something that would give him a clue to their location. Unfortunately, the river was called the Derwent, which was not much help as half the rivers in Britannia seemed to bear that name. There was even one in Deira. The half-dozen villages strung along the river and its tributaries were all subject to a lord who lived with his warband in a stone fort on one of the tributaries. Everyone called it simply ‘the fort’, but Severa said hesitantly that her grandfather had told her it used to be called Navio. This was not much help either, as Eadwine had never heard the name. He tried another tack.
“Who is king here?”
This was even less fruitful. The only king she knew by name was Arthur, who was thought of as a great and good king of somewhere far away and long ago. No doubt the great man – now more than seventy years dead – would have been highly gratified at this proof of his everlasting fame, but it was not of much practical use.
“Never mind,” Eadwine said, when it was clear that her world extended no further than about a day’s walk in any direction. “How long may we stay here, Mistress?”
“Until Samhain Eve.”
He was puzzled to be given a fixed date and a little disappointed that it was so soon. He had lost track of time but it probably was not much more than a month away.
“I thank you, Mistress,” he said politely. “I am sure I will be fit to travel by then.”
She clicked her tongue impatiently. “What do you take me for? I wouldn’t throw out a dog if it was still sick. I meant you can stay here until we leave.”
This was really confusing. “Leave here? You don’t live on this farm?”
“This isn’t a farm, it’s a hafod. A summer farm, yes? Cows in the meadow, pigs in the woods, sheep on the moors. Our village is Derwent Bridge, half a day’s walk down the river. Most people stay there and work the fields and harvest the crops. A few of us drive most of the village’s animals up here at Beltane and tend them all summer, making cheese and butter until the cows go dry and then fattening the pigs in the woods when the nuts start to fall. Then at Samhain we drive them back to the village for the winter. Until Samhain you may consider yourselves our guests here, provided you behave yourselves. But my authority only extends to the hafod. After we return you must either leave or ask the village headman, my husband’s brother, for permission to stay longer.”
“I understand. I am deeply grateful to you. We all are. May we earn our keep? I am afraid four strangers will be a great burden to you.”
She cast a disapproving glance at the spear propped against the wall, and at the swords that Lilla, Drust and Ashhere were all wearing.
“What do fighters know about farming? Like as not you’ll do one job and make two. All I ask of you and your friends is that you keep out of the way, don’t eat too much, and don’t steal anything.”
These instructions were not too difficult to follow. In any case, they were all exhausted and glad of the opportunity to sleep as much as possible, although they made sure someone was always on watch. Gradually, their bruises mended and their strength came creeping back. They cleaned and sharpened their weapons. Eadwine begged needles and thread from Severa and they sacrificed the remains of his cloak to repair the rest of their ragged clothes. Ashhere chipped a billet of oak out of the firewood supply and laboriously whittled it into the shape of a hammer. It made him feel better, although the cat seemed unimpressed. Soon Eadwine was able to stagger out of the hut to sit on the bench by the door, where he could watch the hafod at work. Transhumance was not widely practised in Deira, so a summer farm was a new concept, and indeed any kind of farm was a new world to him. Farming was a constant feature in the background of his life, in the sense that one passed fields of crops or herds of cows, but he had never observed one in detail before.
The routine seemed fairly simple, and Severa would usually answer questions when she brought them food, although she seemed startled and sometimes exasperated by his ignorance. All the animals were corralled in the walled yard during the night. Each morning, the cows were milked and then turned out into the meadow, two of the women drove the pigs into the woods, and the sheepdog took the sheep up onto the moors, with the half-witted shepherd tagging along behind. The other two women, i
nvariably Severa and one other, stayed on the hafod washing, carding and spinning wool – the sheep had been sheared earlier in the summer, and there was a whole shed stuffed full of raw fleeces – processing astonishing quantities of milk into butter and cheese, and working on a variety of other tasks such as collecting honey, brewing mead, doing laundry, digging the vegetable patch, mending and cooking. The main meal was eaten around sunset, when the animals and their herders had all returned, and was a simple – not to say monotonous – diet of rye or barley porridge flavoured with onions, garlic or other vegetables, milk, butter, soft cheese, a little honey and a few eggs. Sometimes the herders would bring back nuts, berries or mushrooms gathered from the moors or the woods. Meat, Severa informed him, only appeared if one of the chickens got sick. The people tending the animals took bread and hard cheese with them, since they would be out all day. For those who stayed on the farm there was more porridge, if anything. Bread required grinding grain, which was toilsome and wasteful, and so was made in batches every few days and kept strictly for the herders. They did not brew beer, since no grain was grown on the hafod and it was quite enough trouble to bring enough up in the spring to keep them in pottage for the summer, and although they brewed mead it was stored away and not drunk. The only drink was water from the stream, which fortunately was clear, bright and refreshing. The stream was the abode of a water-goddess, who kept watch over the hafod and guarded it from harm, and under no circumstances was she to be angered by throwing any dirt or rubbish into the water. Laundry, bathing and anything else that needed a large quantity of water was done by the river.
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