The Rope Dancer

by Roberta Gellis

  By the time Telor woke, they had a mess the consistency and appearance of mud in the pan. Deri tied back the edges of the tent cloths, helped the minstrel sit leaning against the tree, and presented him with a horn spoon and a wooden bowl full of the “stew.” Telor had taken the bowl eagerly, for the aroma, strongly redolent of onions and garlic, was most appetizing. His expression of consternation when he looked at the contents of his spoon was comical.

  “You cannot sew, and I see you cannot cook either,” Telor said to Carys, half annoyed and half amused.

  “I can,” Carys protested. “I just never had meat to mix in the pot before.” And then, seeing the sparkle of laughter in Telor’s eyes, she realized that she might have fallen into a trap and added, “It is not my favorite task. I only do it so I will not starve. If we travel all day and I am expected to cook, I will have no time to practice my craft.”

  Telor started to laugh, clutched at his sore chest, and shook his head instead. “And sewing takes up even more time,” he remarked.

  “No, truly,” Carys cried, “I never learned to sew. I did not lie to you.”

  Deri grinned. “Carys never lies, but sometimes she does forget to mention something. Go on, Telor, eat. It is not so bad—a little sticky going down, but if you do not look at the stuff, the taste is passable. I cannot say I would prefer it for a steady diet, though. Should we try to get to Marston tomorrow?”

  “No, not to Marston. I told you I did not want Eurion—or for that matter, Sir Richard—to hear of this. Eurion would be worried and Sir Richard will want to send out men to clean out the outlaws. You know this is no time to be marching men-at-arms around.”

  “Hmmm…” Deri nodded agreement. “That was a large band of outlaws. It might mean that men have been driven from their homes in these parts. We rode through a village about a mile back, but not a soul showed a face when we came galloping up the road. I took that for a sign that the people might be in league with the outlaws, but for all I could see the place might have been empty. I do not remember even seeing chickens. Carys, did you notice—”

  “I did not even see the village,” Carys admitted. “I was so frightened, I was blind, deaf, and dumb.”

  Deri looked at her, remembering simultaneously the deadly knives and how dazed she had seemed, unable to obey the simplest order. She was, he thought, not lying about being frightened, but she had fought like one possessed. There must be a gentle soul under the hardness life had taught her.

  Unaware of Carys’s condition during their escape, Telor felt an odd mixture of eagerness and disappointment. He raised his brows and remarked dryly, “At least you waited until we had won free of the fight before your afflictions overtook you.”

  “Should I have let those men drag me off the horse?” Carys retorted angrily. “Or break your arm? Or stab you?”

  Common sense was all on Carys’s side. Telor knew his sisters would have done just what Carys had sneered at, and he would be dead and they, very likely, worse off. Nonetheless, that flash of light he had glimpsed entering a man’s eye gave him chills. Despite his gratitude to her for saving them both, the way Carys fought grated against what he believed was true womanliness.

  “I said there was no debt between us. You saved my life,” Telor admitted uncomfortably.

  “We all did what we had to do,” Deri said hastily. “Let us decide what to do next. You do not want to go to Marston, and I agree because I think you should not ride until that cut heals. It is not deep, but it is long. Do you think it safe to stay here?”

  “I think so,” Telor said, “but I have no idea how far we rode after we broke free of the attack. It seemed several thousand leagues to me, but that does not seem likely.”

  “Perhaps a mile or a little more past the village,” Deri replied. “It seemed a few thousand leagues to me too. I expected every moment to hear a loud thump when you fell off Teithiwr. How Carys held you at that speed I will never know. But I was worried about the villagers sending the outlaws after us. I wanted them to think we had fled all the way to…to wherever is past here.”

  “Creklade,” Telor said. “There may be another small village on a side lane going north—I do not remember the name—but Creklade is more than a league closer than Marston and it is a town—”

  “Thank God for that,” Deri exclaimed. “They must have cookshops. We eat food again.”

  Carys made a face at Deri and laughed, but then she shook her head. “Perhaps you know better than I,” she said, “but I do not think it would be wise for Deri to pay with money not earned in the town, at least, not more than once.”

  Both men looked at her in surprise and then at each other with concern. A dwarf could not be overlooked, and would be known for a stranger and likely for a player. A player with money was immediately regarded as a suspicious person. If he were simply passing through, no more than doubting or ugly glances might be cast at him; if, however, he was seen more than once, making it clear he was staying in or near the town, he would almost certainly be arrested while the citizens were asked whether they had been robbed or defrauded. Even if none took advantage of the opportunity to accuse him, just for the amusement of seeing him whipped or put in the stocks, he would be ordered to leave the town and not return on pain of punishment.

  “But if I danced and Deri beat the drum for me,” Carys continued before either of them could speak, “no one would think anything of that. I think I could earn enough for food. Of course, if I had a rope I could make much more.”

  “No,” Telor said, and simultaneously Deri exclaimed, “That’s the answer!”

  Carys looked from one to the other. “Does Creklade forbid players?” she asked.

  “No,” Telor replied, “but you cannot dance in those clothes, and you have nothing else. Besides, so close to Marston Deri will be recognized, and—”

  “I think you did get hit in the head,” Deri interrupted. “I have been in Marston twice in my life and never in Creklade. Why should anyone know me there? And even if a groom from Marston should be in the town,” he added with a touch of bitterness, “I doubt he would look hard enough at a fool in motley to recognize his face.”

  “And I still have my dancing dress,” Carys said. “It is not very fine, but—”

  “It is fine for our purpose,” Deri remarked. “A dwarf and a dancing girl would be expected to be poor.”

  “It is not decent!” Telor exclaimed with such force that he hurt himself and put a hand to his ribs.

  Carys first looked astonished; then her face cleared. “You mean because the dress is so torn. I have made the tears all smooth so they look like slashes done apurpose, and the front of the gown is sound. The cuts will ravel after a time, but for now the dress will serve very well.”

  “Serve very well to expose you for every man of the town to gape at,” Telor snarled. “I forbid it!”

  As the words came out, color rushed into Telor’s face. He realized that his opposition to Carys’s dancing had little to do with a fear of damage to his reputation and that he had betrayed his true feelings to her and to Deri. Plainly and simply, he was jealous; he did not want other men to possess, even only with their eyes and lewd thoughts, what he wanted for himself. And yet he was just as bad as any of those men, for was it not only lust he felt? He tore his eyes from Carys’s stunned face and closed them, fighting tears of embarrassment and weakness.

  His process of thought and reaction were too quick, and he missed the change in Carys’s expression from angry shock to a kind of marveling adoration. To Morgan and Ulric she had always been an item of trade. Her ropedancing was the main moneymaker, but both would also have sold her body every night had they been able to cow her into agreeing. And Telor wished to forbid her exposure to no more than lustful looks.

  She knew it was because he wanted her himself…but that was so different too. Morgan and Ulric had also wanted her—but they had always been willing to sell her for whoring first and use her later themselves. Only Telor thought h
er worth enough to keep her all to himself. A shiver of delight went through her, and she reached out and gently touched the hand nearest her, which had balled into a fist.

  “I think I could pass as a merchant’s servant,” she said, smiling at Telor’s averted face. “So if you would add the cost of a rope to that of the clothes, I could buy one. I would wear my fine clothes and the hood to hide my hair when I buy the rope, and change my face—I can do that. Then I could meet Deri, change my clothes to the old braies and the plain shirt, and we could come into the town together. No one would recognize me, and I could rope dance dressed as a boy. It is the skill and seeming danger that counts on a rope. No one cares whether the dancer be man or woman.”

  Telor opened his eyes cautiously and glanced at Carys sidelong. He had found it hard to believe the practical words and the joyous tone of her voice were real. But her expression confirmed that she was delighted with his rude objection—her eyes a glinting gold in the dappled light under the tree and her mouth curved into a smile that had no tinge of either amusement or mockery. There was an immediate pleasure in knowing that Carys was glad to escape dancing and what it implied, and an instant filling and warmth in his loins despite the pain and weakness of his racked body because he could not believe Carys had not recognized his jealousy.

  Telor tried to shut off his desire by comparing Carys to his sisters again but this time she came out ahead. She was unlike them in ways other than sticking knives in men’s eyes. Where they would pout and sniffle for hours over any affront, even an imagined one, and seize on any sign of weakness in father, brothers, or husbands to use for their own purposes, Carys…At that point Telor checked his thoughts, knowing that these were almost more dangerous than his desire. He told himself firmly that the reason Carys was pleasant and reasonable was that he was offering her what she wanted, not because her nature was sweeter than that of other women.

  “So do you agree to that, at least?” Deri was asking in an irritated voice, unaware that Telor had been lost in his own thoughts. “And if you do not, would it be safe to hunt hereabout, or are we to starve?”

  “Let him be,” Carys said softly. “We are fools to talk about such matters now. We must make do with what we have tonight. Tomorrow I hope we will all be better able to decide what is best to do.”

  They did not come near starving in making do. Telor had hard cheese in his saddlebags, and Carys found more edible bulbs and thin, young wild onions, which they ate with chunks of stale bread. For her, it was a better meal than many in the past, and she sat contentedly afterward, wrapped in Deri’s cloak because her blanket was under Telor, watching the brightening twinkle of the fireflies in the open area near the stream as the dusk deepened. She hummed happily, an old folk tune, “Summer Is a’Comin In.” Both men watched her in silence, but she was unaware, absorbed in her own thoughts. Soon Deri rose and helped Telor to lie down. Then he checked the animals and walked off toward the road, murmuring that he would sit there awhile to make sure no threat to them was moving along it.

  “You sound happy,” Telor said softly to Carys after Deri was gone.

  “I am happy,” Carys replied, turning her head toward him.

  Telor could just make out her smile. “You are not afraid to be abroad in the dark?

  “It is not new to me. Why should I be afraid?”

  “What of the spirits that are said to wander in the night?” Telor asked.

  A soft chuckle. “In all my years of wandering, no spirit has ever threatened me. Oh, I have heard the tales Morgan whispered fearfully to a farmer with an outlying cot or in a small village—but that was always in the winter when we wished to lie warmer and feared a cold welcome. Such tales found us a shelter quickly enough, whether through pity or through the desire to use us as a horrible example. Yes, more than one priest and bailiff seized on Morgan’s fancies and approved and upheld him. But do you not think, Telor, that even if the priest believed, the bailiff might have felt the tale would keep his people at home at night and prevent mischief that might otherwise happen?”

  “The priest might have thought more like the bailiff than you would suspect,” Telor said, laughing. “But there are many who do believe in spirits—I am not sure that I deny them altogether—but I too have been abroad enough at night to know they do not throng the roads the way my sisters and mother in Bristol fear.”

  Carys chuckled again. “That is no fault of theirs, I dare say. I suppose, living always in so large a town as Bristol, they are kept close and safe and can have no proof against tales like those which sprang from Morgan’s mind and spread. I should think it is too late to teach them different, and God save them from ever needing to learn.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Carys drew her eyes from the now brilliant sparks of the fireflies and looked at Telor, but she could not see at all into the shadow made by the tent cloths. Then Telor said, “The road is hard. I suppose you also long for a safe nest.”

  “Oh, no.” Once more Carys uttered a soft, contented chuckle. “I would never wish to leave the road.”

  Telor felt an odd surge of excitement, not sexual this time, although that urge lay under everything else, like a sweet, heavy drug that had not yet completely overcome him, but he said nothing.

  “It is too late for me also,” Carys went on slowly, more as if she were explaining to herself than to him. “Perhaps if I knew no better, I would have been content, but now I would choke shut up behind walls. And I could not bear to know myself trapped utterly and forever under some man’s will. For me, although I have never taken that path, there is always an escape. I need not endure a hated master. I could go to another troupe.”

  The words were not directed at him, but Telor felt a surge of indignation at the idea of a woman choosing whether or not she wished to stay with the man to whom she had been bound. At the same time, crazily, Carys became more desirable, a greater prize. Between the two emotions, he could not decide what to say, and Carys, unaware she had both shocked and excited her companion, went on dreamily.

  “I love the road. I love nights like this, of talk with good companions who know my worth. I love knowing that tomorrow my rope will be raised and folk will look up and gasp and cry out as I dance. I love to know that the coins they throw in admiration of my skill will buy my bread. And then the next day will show me a new place—or an old place, changed enough while we traveled so I could say, ‘Oh, see, there is a new house. The alehouse sign is all done anew.’ Of course, this is a lovely night. When I am soaked through with rain or shivering so hard from cold that I fear I will shatter my bones, then the road is not quite so dear to me.”

  Carys’s voice seemed to become brisker and took on an amused tone on the last few sentences. Telor thought sleepily that he detected a cynical note too, but loss of blood and the weariness that pain brings had made his eyes very heavy. “Well, you need not fear being soaked or frozen anymore,” he mumbled drowsily. “We do not camp out when it rains or in bitter weather.”

  Chapter 11

  Telor did not recognize the significance of what he had said until some time after he woke the next morning. At first he was too absorbed in his own misery, for the cut on his hip was puffed and sore, and every spot that had taken a cudgel blow seemed to have hardened into rock. His muscles grated on each other like millstones when Deri helped him to the stream to empty his bowels and bladder and wash, and it was a good ten minutes after the dwarf had resettled him against the tree that he could think of anything beyond repressing screams. Carys was nowhere to be seen, and Telor remembered Deri had told him she had gone to see what she could glean for breakfast. It was then that he suddenly remembered he had virtually told her he expected her to remain with them.

  The slight shock he felt at the realization passed quickly into a mild sense of foolishness. He had known since the third day at Castle Combe that Deri wanted to keep her and that she did not wish to leave them. Certainly she had expressed no surprise at his statement; he had been half aslee
p, but he would have remembered that. He was pretty sure she had laughed and said something like “I would like that,” which meant she had assumed all along that she would be traveling with them permanently. Then he remembered the rest of the conversation and amended the idea. She would be traveling with them until she decided she wanted a change.

  At that moment Carys, with the front of her shirt bunched up into a bag held by one hand, leapt light-foot from the far bank of the stream to a large stone, thence to another, and so to their side. She did not call out—a long-inbred caution; players preferred not to be noticed except when they were performing—but she was grinning and waving in her free hand several feathery-leaved plants.

  “I have hemlock for you,” she said, falling to her knees beside Telor.

  “I admit I feel terrible,” he answered, raising his brows, “but not bad enough to take poison.”

  “Do not be so silly,” Carys giggled. “I do not want you to drink it. I will grind it and lay the crushed leaves on your wound. They will take the pain away. If there is any extra, I can put some under the bindings over your ribs too. That will help a little, but hemlock is not so good when the skin is not broken. If we had some goose grease…”

  “We can buy that when we buy food,” Deri said over his shoulder as he rummaged in his saddle bags. He found a ragged strip of leather and handed it to Carys. “You can use that for your poultice.”

  He watched as she pulled the leaves from the stems, arranged them along the leather strip, and started to pound them with a smooth stone. The juices were thin and watery, and it was soon clear that they would not stick to either the skin or the leather on their own, so Deri took a cross garter from Telor’s bundle of extra clothes to bind the poultice around Telor’s hips. While Carys applied the wet mass to the wound, he cleaned the bulbs and roots she had dropped out of her shirt. There was so little hemlock, once the leaves were washed, that Carys decided it was not worth Telor’s discomfort to unbind his ribs and rewrap them, so they took out what little was left of the cheese and bread and broke their fast, discussing, as they ate, the projected visit to Creklade.