by Alys Clare
I did screw up my courage and ask where Hrype was, to which a terse ‘No idea’ was the reply.
Oh, dear ...
I was out searching for dew-fresh blackberry leaves – they stop wounds bleeding and are also useful to lessen diarrhoea – early the next morning, when it happened again.
Someone jumped me.
I could not believe it.
At first I was just so angry that it drove out fear. Whoever held me was yet another huge man, and when I beat my fists against his broad, bare arms, it felt like striking hard old oak.
He carried me away from the track into a small stand of hazel trees, my face thrust into his chest so that my cries were muffled and I could barely see. Just as on the previous occasion, he – they – had chosen the spot well: there was nobody around.
The man carrying me dumped me on the ground. I stumbled and fell, then leapt to my feet, spinning round to stare in panic at the circle of hairy, heavily armed giants surrounding me.
One of them had long, flowing hair and a thick, abundant beard. Both hair and beard were light, coppery red.
His blue eyes were on me and they burned as if he had a fever. Even in that very first moment, my healer’s instinct told me there was something deeply amiss with him. Not thinking what I was doing – I was far too terrified to think at all – I sent out a feeler towards him, and in return got such a jolt of wrongness that it made me stagger backwards away from him.
He was like a flying arrow, directed with furious purpose in one direction. His fanaticism bordered on madness, and I was at his mercy.
A sob rose in my throat, and I only just managed to suppress it.
‘You know who I am,’ he said, his voice a low, guttural growl. I nodded. ‘They have told you, my kinsmen, what I search for and why I want it.’ Again, I nodded. He knew I knew, it seemed, so there was no point in denying it. The last thing I wanted to do was antagonize him.
‘I must get to Miklagard, you see.’ Now he sounded reasonable, as if he was stating something that everyone ought to understand. ‘The Great City,’ he added, ‘which you may know as Constantinople.’
I barely knew it as anything. It was a word on Gurdyman’s map. ‘Yes,’ I whispered. It sounded more like a whimper.
‘I cannot make the journey without the stone,’ he went on, pacing to and fro before me as if he could not contain the destructive energy coursing through him. ‘My grandfather tried, you know, and he failed. He is no more now than a name on the stone that marks the death place of so many brave men. I will not be one of them!’ he shouted, his voice rising alarmingly. ‘I will not,’ he added, softly now. ‘But I need the shining stone. It is mine – it should have been passed down to my grandfather and my father, and, had events turned out as they should, it would now be in my hands.’ He raised those great hands, turning them this way and that, then clasping them close together as if they held a round object. It did not take much imagination to know what that object was.
His eyes were on me again, burning into me. ‘You know where it is,’ he said, and the sudden chill in his voice made me shiver. ‘You will take me to it.’
‘I can’t!’ I cried. ‘I don’t know where it is – truly, I don’t!’
Slowly he shook his head. ‘I do not believe you. My kinsmen did not go to all that trouble with you merely to have you tell them I don’t know where it is.’ His parody of my high-pitched voice, shaking with fear, was cruelly accurate.
‘But I—’
He cut off my protest. ‘I do not know where Einar took you, but it is not important. You have revealed to them everything you know, no doubt convincing them that the precious object is perfectly safe wherever it is that it lies. Now you will tell me, and then we will go to where my stone is hidden and I will take possession of it.’
‘I don’t know anything!’ I squeaked. ‘I can’t find the stone for you because I have no idea where it is.’
If I’d believed repetition would work, I was wrong. Skuli drew a long knife from his belt and slid his finger along its brilliant edge. A thin scarlet line appeared in the fleshy pad of his fingertip. I felt sick.
‘I could cut you,’ he mused, ‘or I could cut that pretty little brother of yours – Leir, I believe, is his name. Or, tenderer flesh still, your baby nephew, the child that your brother and his dark-haired wife dote on.’
He knew all about us! Well, I thought, my mind racing, of course he did. He had broken into all our homes. Searched the graveyard where he thought my Granny Cordeilla lay interred. Killed my sister’s mother-in-law and my aunt.
‘I cannot tell you what I do not know.’ My mouth had gone so dry that I could hardly get the words out.
He moved as fast as a snake. His arm was round my chest, the knife tip pushing into my face just under my left eye. I froze.
‘Thorfinn was treated by a young woman who lived here-abouts,’ he hissed right in my ear. ‘She was a kinsman of yours. He left my stone in her care.’
And Skuli had burst into the places where my family lived, searching for what he believed was his, not caring what he broke, whom he hurt or killed, in the process.
The sharp little point was a constant pressure against my skin, not exactly hurting but, as it were, just about to. Quick as a flash, he moved it to my right eye, then back to the left. Into my mind flew the dreadful image of what it could do to me if he pushed a little harder.
‘I don’t know who she was,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve been trying to work it out,’ I added in panic as I felt the muscles tense in the arm that was holding the knife.
‘Try harder,’ he commanded.
‘I believe the healer might well have been an aunt of my mother’s,’ I said, the words tumbling out of me. I thought I was about to wet myself. ‘But I don’t know who she is or where she lives!’
There was a moment of utter stillness. I closed my eyes, committing to memory what might be my last sight of the world. Then, as if my own terror had somehow made him do what I so desperately wanted, the knife point was lowered. He removed his arm from my throat and shoved me away from him, so hard that I fell flat on my face.
I lay panting, trying to work out which part of me hurt the most and if any bones were broken.
Then he spoke. ‘Find out where this woman is,’ he ordered. ‘Then go and fetch my stone.’
I tried to get up on to my hands and knees, but the pain stopped me.
I felt a foot in the small of my back. ‘I will be watching you,’ he said, the cold words like a judgement. ‘If you fail or if you try to deceive me, I will cut off your baby nephew’s face before his parents, bring your little brother’s eyes to you, and then I will kill you.’
The vomit rose in a hot surge, up my throat and into my mouth, and I retched into the grass. When it was over, I raised my head and wiped the tears away.
They had gone. I was all alone in the hazel grove, and I wanted to die.
It was a long time before I dared go home. I’ve seen the effects of shock in others, and I knew very well what I must look like. I made myself collect more blackberry leaves, the familiar, routine task helping to calm me, but still I did not dare risk my aunt’s piercing glance. Like the coward I was, I waited till she was busy with a patient and left the basket of leaves by the door, calling out that I was off home now, to see my mother, and would return later.
It would be light for some time yet, and most of the villagers were still out working, up in the fields on the higher, dry ground or down by the water. Fortunately for me, in my family’s house everyone was absent except for my mother. She sat by the door in the sunshine, spinning wool and watching her sleeping grandson.
I went to sit on the ground beside her, leaning back against the sun-warmed wall of the house and closing my eyes. I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was. I could easily have fallen asleep, but I must not even think about it. I had a task to carry out; one which I dared not fail. I glanced over at the sweet little face of my brother’s baby son, and had to fight down a
nother bout of nausea as Skuli’s words tried to force themselves into my mind. Ruthlessly I shut them out, and a spasm of pain shot through my head.
‘You all right, Lassair?’ my mother asked.
I opened my eyes. She was looking down at me, an expression of concern on her face. If I’d thought that she was a safer option than my keen-sighted, professional-healer aunt, I had underestimated her. Or maybe it was just that I looked even worse than I thought I did.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘A bit tired. It’s warm today, and I must have walked for miles.’
‘Yes, you were out a long time.’ There was a pause. ‘Want some nice, cold water?’
It was a long time since my constantly busy mother had offered to get up and fetch me a drink. On the few occasions in the course of a day that she actually manages to sit down, she tends to stay there. I smiled. ‘You’re occupied with your wool,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘I’ll do it.’
I sat sipping at the water, working out how to ask her what I had to know without raising her suspicions. I must not let out even the smallest hint of what this was really about, for my mother would tell my father, he’d get a band of kinsmen and neighbours together, and the next thing we knew, there would be a battle between my family and Skuli’s band of well-armed giants, and you didn’t need rune stones to work out how that would end.
After a while, I knew what to do.
I said, putting concern into my voice, ‘Mother, we’ve had all these awful attacks and assaults on us and on Father’s poor sister Alvela. But I’ve been thinking – do you know if any of your side of the family have also had their homes searched? After all, it’s—’
My mother’s scornful snort interrupted me. ‘Do you think we didn’t think of that?’ she asked shortly. ‘We’ve not been idle while you’ve been tucked up safe and sound in Cambridge with your wizard!’ The irony of that, when you considered what had really been happening to me, struck me quite forcibly. I suppressed a wry smile. ‘We all realized that my kin would likely be also at risk too,’ my mother went on, ‘but there’s not many of them left now and nobody living that close.’
Yes. I brought to mind our family history. My mother had not originally been a local woman. Her family were all shepherds, living inland from the wet fenlands, on the firmer, dryer ground where the right sort of grazing is found. Her parents were long dead.
‘I’ve only the one brother,’ she mused, ‘and he and his family live over to the east, out beyond Thetford. My aunt Ama, too – that’s my mother’s sister – moved right way, to Fulbeach.’ She glanced at me. ‘You won’t have heard of it – it’s a tiny place, by all accounts, down south of Cambridge.’
I was tingling with excitement. My aunt Ama. Yes, Ama, that was her name; the name I didn’t think I remembered. Well, I had remembered it. She must be the little healer – Thorfinn’s saviour, the woman who brought him back when he was about to lose himself.
It must be her. Surely it was ...
Feigning nonchalance, I said casually, ‘I’m not sure I can picture her. Have we ever met?’
‘No,’ my mother replied. She gave a short laugh. ‘And if you met her in the road, you’d never know she and I were close kin, it’s that different we look.’
Yes! Inside my head, I gave a cheer.
Silence fell between us. I could just make out the soft, rhythmic sound of my mother’s spindle as it spun this way and that through the still air, twisting the raw strands of wool into yarn. Presently, she started to hum.
I was thinking hard. My mother was wrong about Fulbeach’s obscurity: I had heard of it. It was half a day’s walk from Cambridge, south-east of the town, and its inhabitants frequently brought their wool into Cambridge, both to the town’s own market and to be shipped away from the quays. It was probably a day’s walk from Aelf Fen, yet my mother spoke as if the distance was an insurmountable barrier. It was the way of it, I reflected, when people lived each and every day in the same small place. In their minds, they created tall, insurmountable walls around them that became as forbidding as the real thing.
My mother had started talking again, remarking on how long it was since she’d seen her brother, and wasn’t it strange, how you all got so busy within your own lives that you just didn’t seem to find the time for the things you’d like to do, but I was barely listening.
I was thinking about my mother’s aunt Ama, the healer.
Given the unthinkable alternative, it looked as if I would have to go and find her.
I set out very early the next morning, on the pretext of more plant gathering. I had surreptitiously packed up some food and a flask of water, for I knew I would be gone all day. It would take some explaining, but I’d worry about that when I returned.
If I returned. An image of Skuli and his knife floated before my vision, and I tried to banish it. If he was having me watched – I was quite sure he was – then surely he would realize I was doing my best and let me get on with it? That would be the logical reaction. The trouble was, I was not at all sure Skuli was the least bit logical.
As I trudged along, keeping up a good pace, I thought about what I would do when I got to Fulbeach and located my mother’s aunt Ama. How would I persuade her to give up the treasure that a long-ago patient had left in her care? Dear Lord, would she remember that she even had it, let alone where she might have hidden it? I turned the questions this way and that, exploring possibilities. Could I get her out of her house on some pretext and search it? Could I pretend an interest in magical stones, and persuade her that I was just itching to have a look at the one I’d been told she possessed? Could I just tell her the truth?
I stopped before midday to eat. I was ravenous, having used up most of my energy in walking so hard. Then I got up and went on. I had reached the conclusion that I would just have to appeal to Ama’s healer’s instincts to save lives, and convince her that members of my family – hers too, since they were her niece’s kin – would suffer terribly and die if she did not help me.
With that feeble plan the best I could do, in the middle of the afternoon I walked into her village.
‘I’m looking for Ama. Ama the healer?’ I asked, over and over again.
I should have asked my mother more questions before I set out on my quest. I would have saved myself a long walk.
My mother’s aunt Ama wasn’t a healer at all. Like the rest of my mother’s family, she was a shepherd. Friendly people trying to be helpful pointed out her tiny house – on the edge of the village – and I saw the fields where her small flock had grazed; even, hanging on a nail in a tumbledown lean-to, the heavy shears she’d used to remove their thick fleeces. The shears were rusty now; the little house empty.
My mother’s aunt was dead. If she’d even known anything about a sick Norseman and a magic stone – which I now very much doubted – then she’d taken her secrets to the grave.
The best I could do was stand in the village’s burial ground and grind my teeth. Somewhere under my feet, her bones were rotting back into the earth.
Which was absolutely no good whatsoever to my family and me.
FOURTEEN
‘The thing to do,’ Giuliana Guiscard said firmly to her son, ‘is for you and Roger to have a private little chat.’
Rollo absorbed the shock of her announcement without moving a muscle, and he was pretty sure he had given no hint of his surprise. While it was true that such a meeting was the best thing he could have hoped for, he had thought it so far beyond what he might realistically expect that he’d dismissed it.
He met his mother’s dark eyes. ‘This private little chat could be arranged?’
She waved a long-nailed hand. ‘Of course. I wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise.’
Intrigued now, he said, ‘How well do you know the Great Count?’
She smiled. ‘Bosso was very fond of your father.’ Her casual use of Count Roger’s nickname underlined her intimacy with him. ‘Well, what else would you expect of cousins?’
> Rollo smiled to himself. Cousins was stretching it, since his father and Roger were really no more than distant relations who happened to share a family name. In any case, there was no rule that said cousins had to like each other. The two men had apparently been close, however, and Count Roger was renowned for being loyal to those within his private circle. It looked as if this meeting might actually take place ...
‘What’s he like, now he’s lord of all Sicily?’ Rollo asked.
Giuliana turned to look at him, her expression intent. ‘He is as you recall. He’s still handsome, tall and elegant. He has much charm, and is courteous and cheerful with all men. He is also very clever and extremely sharp-witted.’ She paused. Then, staring straight into Rollo’s eyes, said quietly, ‘Never try to deceive him, for the repercussions would be unthinkable. His own son Jordan once tried to rebel against him, and Roger had all the leaders of the revolt blinded. He pardoned Jordan only at the very last moment, to remind him to have more respect for authority.’
Rollo nodded. The story was well known. The last-minute reprieve had been predictable – although possibly not by Jordan himself – for the Count’s love for his eldest son was legendary. Jordan was cast in the Count’s precise mould, as fierce and brave a fighter as his father, and would, but for his illegitimacy, have been his natural successor. The younger man had died of fever the previous September, and it was said that Roger had at first been inconsolable. ‘Is the Count beginning to overcome his grief?’ Rollo asked.
Giuliana shrugged. ‘I expect so. He has a country to rule. Besides, his new little wife has already achieved the miracle and borne him a healthy boy child, and there will no doubt be more to come.’