Wolfskin

by W. R. Gingell

  The kitchen was bare but for the plain bread and cheese I’d noticed earlier, deflating my hopes of a hearty dinner, and when Akiva began to cut the bread, I watched with glittering eyes. I was too tired and hungry to voice my bitter disappointment, and food was food, after all; but Mother’s rich meat stews were a very present, mouth-watering memory. I ate without complaint, feeling self-righteous, because even if I was a hoyden, at least Mother had made sure I was a polite one. Besides, I didn’t put it past Akiva to tell me shortly that if I didn’t like it I could go to bed without any dinner, and to box my ears for good measure.

  Akiva was as taciturn during dinner as she had been the rest of the day, but I didn’t notice so much because I was dozing over my bread and cheese. I fell asleep after my third slice, and the last thing I remember is the creak and pop of Akiva’s bones as she settled down in her battered old armchair.

  When I woke it was dark and my neck was stiff. Akiva had left me where I was and there was a flat, sore patch on my forehead etched with the grain of the table. I found that I was too sleepy to feel as outraged as I would have liked to feel so I merely wiped away the damp patch by the side of my mouth and blearily headed for my bedroom door, feeling my way along the walls. In the darkness Akiva’s cottage was unfamiliar, the door handles at a confusingly different height than I was used to, but I made it to the safety of my room with no worse injury than another scraped shin.

  As I slid between the cold sheets of a likewise unfamiliar bed, it seemed that I could still feel the grainy wood handle of the trowel in my hand and smell the rich, hearty scent of fresh turned earth.

  I woke earlier than usual the next morning in a hum of excitement. The first in the triad had slipped over the horizon and was only just beginning to light my whitewashed room from grey to white, but I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes as quickly as I could, lacing my boots with the mischievous idea that I might even be up before Akiva. However, when I tumbled out into the main room, messily plaiting my hair as I went, she was already bending by the fireplace, a kettle over the low burning coals.

  She gave me a swift, critical look, and said without preamble: “Shoes off, girl.”

  I gave her a suspicious look to make sure she wasn’t joking, then hastily tugged them off when her one sardonically raised eyebrow informed me that she wasn’t, hopping on each foot successively to do so. I banished the satisfied grin that wanted to spread across my face and straightened again. I was subjected to another stare, this time longer.

  “You’re a bit on the skinny side,” she opined. Her eyes pinioned my toes, which had been wriggling with delight at being free, and I hastily scrunched them tight against the floorboards to keep them still.

  “Yes,” I agreed, inspecting my own familiar, wiry arms and briefly indicating my entire lack of hips. “I haven’t got the voluptuous bits yet.”

  Akiva gave a crack of laughter. “If you’re anything like your mother, you won’t get that until you’re well past your sixteenth birthday.”

  “Good,” I said, in some satisfaction. “Gwen’s got hers and she can’t step outside the door without three or four boys following her.”

  “Neither could your mother,” retorted Akiva. “And that when she was skinny as a broom handle. But she always acted like a lady.”

  I thought about this, unashamed. “She washed her face every night, too, I s’pose.”

  “She did,” Akiva said dryly, and I could have sworn her sharp eyes saw the ring of dirt that lay beneath my collar. While delighting to swim like a fish in any passing stream, I was a past master in the art of avoiding baths. My wash last evening hadn’t been thorough, and I cheerfully suspected that most of the dirt had lodged itself just out of sight behind my ears. They were certainly itching, but that could have been the effect Akiva’s prolonged, sarcastic gaze.

  I was relieved when her attention went back to her kettle, and blew out my cheeks in silent respect. Even Mother didn’t have a look like that. It was a scorcher.

  “Collect the eggs and feed the chickens, there’s a good child,” she said, without looking up. “The henhouse is in the clearing outside the back garden gate. You may have breakfast when you finish.”

  I uttered the requisite ‘Yes’um’ and turned to go, but Akiva’s bony old fingers grasped me by the wrist, surprisingly strong.

  “Stay on the path,” she said.

  “Path, huh!” I said loudly. The back garden gate hadn’t wanted to open any more than the front gate had, and I’d stubbed my toes kicking it open. In my opinion, Akiva cared a great deal too much about her grass. The chookhouse was outside the main garden, a little ways into the shady forest, and I had been looking forward to exploring a little before I fed the chooks. I looked sourly down the dirt path and said another hearty ‘Huh!’ to relieve my feelings, then glumly set out down the path.

  The chooks mobbed me at the wire gate, and I hopped on one foot, shooing them with the other to prevent their escape until I could scatter the seed far enough to distract them away from beckoning freedom. As they scrambled for the grain on spindly legs I regarded them with a certain amount of fellow feeling, and gave them a half-measure more of the mix to make up for another day of imprisonment. That done, it was only a matter of displacing a few broody chickens in order to collect the eggs. I peeked behind the chickenfeed bin and a few of the nesting boxes in a hopeful sort of a way, supposing that Akiva must keep her arcane supplies somewhere, after all. The house had been disappointingly normal. Herbs were all very well, but there should be at least a dragon about the place.

  I dangled my basket disconsolately on the way back, counting on my fingers. Common-or-garden herbs, no dragon, no exotic supplies, tending garden beds– apprenticeship was beginning to look more and more like work, and less and less like adventure.

  On the other hand, the savoury smell presently emanating from the kitchen window promised bacon and eggs for breakfast, and anyone who fed me bacon for breakfast couldn’t be all bad. I thought, graciously, that it might be possible to give Akiva another chance.

  “Wipe your feet,” said Akiva shortly, as I presented the eggs. I skipped a few steps backwards, did a little more than my usual shuffle on the mat to help good impressions along, and danced forward again.

  “The garden gate needs greasing,” I announced in a spirit of helpfulness, eyeing the bacon that Akiva was deftly snatching out of the frying pan.

  “The goose-grease is in the cupboard.”

  I scowled. “What, me?”

  “After breakfast. Next time you’ll remember not to mention a problem if you aren’t prepared to fix it.”

  I certainly would! I thought indignantly. Mistress Pennypurse said I was too pert by half, but she couldn’t do anything about it: it was quite another thing to have Akiva think so and be perfectly capable of administering lessons.

  The bacon softened my mood somewhat, but when Akiva set me to weeding an overgrown corner of the garden while she donned her hooded cloak with every appearance to suggest that she was going out, I let myself fall into simmer of sulky grievance that was not helped by knowing she was well within her rights to do so.

  I was almost too preoccupied in my sense of injury and the fact that none of the weeds would come out to notice that there was something not quite right about that hood, but the idea planted itself in my mind to be explored as soon as Akiva was gone. It certainly looked like a proper hood: there was nothing unusual there. The oddity, I thought carefully, pursuing the thought as I tugged heartily and entirely ineffectually at any convenient weed; was in the pattern of green summer leaves. Pattern wasn’t the right word, though. It didn’t look so much like a pattern as it did leaves sewn together, right down to the rustling late summer leaves make against each other as they prepare to brown for the autumn. I looked speculatively at the trees surrounding the cottage: and sure enough, but for a few evergreens, most of the foliage had gone dark, dark green with spots of brown and gold, promising an early autumn.

 
; I smiled a benign smile around the garden at large. Magic at last! Not even Gwendolen could sew leaves together to make a cloak! I made a note to watch and see if the leaves in the cloak changed with the seasons, and wondered speculatively just what function a magical hood served. Invisibility, most likely. I was considering this interesting possibility when another gaze around the garden brought me to realise that I was no longer alone. There was a young man propped up against the fence, watching me with interest, his arms folded casually on one of the lower boughs of a patchy weeping willow. I returned his look with one of my own, because I hadn’t seen him arrive, and I should have.

  “You have to sing,” he said. He was a nice looking boy with tawny-brown eyes under a shaggy mop of golden hair, and a smile that reminded me of Father, so I was polite.

  “Pardon?”

  “You have to sing to the garden to get the weeds out.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “The garden likes it. It won’t let go of the weeds if you don’t sing.”

  “That’s blackmail!” I said, impressed.

  The boy grinned. “I broke two shovels on my patch before I learned the right songs. Can you sing?”

  I shrugged. I certainly used to sing at home, but since my idea of singing was to bellow sea-shanties at the top of my lungs, Mother usually thrust me out of the house as soon as I began.

  Momentarily suspicious, I narrowed my eyes and regarded the tawny-haired boy.

  “Akiva didn’t tell me that.”

  “She didn’t tell me, either,” he said sympathetically. “Akiva never tells you anything if she thinks you can learn it for yourself. She didn’t have a teacher, so she had to learn everything by herself. Now I’ve got my own wardship I thought I’d come to see her next victim.”

  “What do you mean, wardship?”

  This time it was his turn to gaze at me thoughtfully. “I don’t think I should tell you if Akiva hasn’t.”

  I stuck my chin out mulishly. “But you said–”

  “I know, but this is different. Look, what’s your name?”

  “Rose.”

  “I’m Gwydion. I was Akiva’s last apprentice.”

  I looked him up and down. “Well, you survived.”

  He grinned again. “You sound just like her,” he said, and straightened. I opened my mouth to reply indignantly, but he turned away with a wink, and disappeared.

  I was inclined to scowl after him, but it occurred to me that Akiva’s old apprentice was using something very like magic, and the thought cheered me up. I plumped myself down on the dew-damp grass, resting my forearms on my crossed legs, and frowningly considered the garden. I couldn’t recall that I knew any gardening songs at all. I knew that there were many, because Aunt Myra also sang to her garden; though when Father was alive he had said that this was more because of the quality of the liquid that Aunt Myra drank from strange-smelling jugs in her garden shed than because she fancied it did the garden any good.

  But as I sat there considering the garden, the thread of a song seemed to trail through my head, a half remembered catch of tune.

  Soil is rich, roots run deep . . .

  Now where had I heard that before? And what were the last two lines?

  I hummed the tune beneath my breath, singing the first two lines over and over to myself until the last two lines followed naturally.

  Soil is rich,

  Roots run deep;

  Weeds loosen,

  Moisture seep.

  I sat up straight in exultation. That was it! I wriggled my backside to settle myself more comfortably in the turf and sang the song through twice.

  I wasn’t sure if the song did magic or if the woods and soil were magic and simply liked being sung to, but the weeds came out more easily after that. In fact, they came out rather more easily even than ordinary weeds did.

  Gradually the earth grew damp and rich under my fingers and the pile of weeds beside me rose to mammoth proportions. Eyeing the huge pile askance, it occurred to me to wonder again just how long it had been since Akiva had weeded this particular garden patch. When I had asked her yesterday evening, she had only given one of her rather rude cracks of laughter and said: “Yesterday.”

  I had wondered if she was having a private joke at me, but it seemed to me that I could remember her weeding the garden beds in this section as I sweated away at digging the new garden bed yesterday. I wondered if singing to the garden would have made my job easier then, too. I had an idea that it might have. I was in half a mind to ask Akiva if it was so: and if it was, why she hadn’t told me, but I had a feeling that it would just be another of those things that she expected me to work out for myself. I saw her briefly in my mind’s eye, looking at me indifferently and demanding to know why I should have it easier than she had.

  Chapter Two

  The weeks passed quickly with Akiva. Not all of my time passed in the garden: some days Akiva would don her leafy hood and I would know that we were going in search of particular herbs and plants that didn’t grow in her garden. Bad weather didn’t keep us indoors, much to my gleeful approval; we sallied forth into garden or woods whatever the weather.

  Akiva, crabby old crone that she was, mustn’t have got over my tearing up the forest with my trunk, because whenever she allowed me to come with her into the forest I was always ordered to stay on the path. The command made my eyes snap and my chin stick out mulishly, but I had learned by now that it was only a shade more useless to argue with Akiva than it was to try and pump her for information. When I complained once too often about having to stay on the path after being sharply told off for attempting to lean out and pluck a blackberry that was two feet from the path, and sulkily asked her why I was forever to remain on the path, Akiva only said brusquely: “Because it’s safe. Do as you’re told.”

  Since she enforced the command with a none-too-gentle box on the ears, I had felt aggrieved for the rest of the walk.

  A month after I arrived at Akiva’s cottage, I was allowed to go home for a half-day. I’d been lethargic for some days, at first unaware and then unwilling to admit that I was feeling homesick, and I hadn’t expected Akiva to notice. If she did notice, though, Akiva didn’t comment upon it. She merely remarked after breakfast that it was about time I made myself up some pinafores.

  “Off to town with you. Tell Mina Pennypurse there needs to be enough material for two pinafores,” she said. “And tell her to put it on my account. You may spend the afternoon with your mother and sister so long as you’re back before nightfall.”

  I said, very primly: “Thank you, Akiva,” but I could feel the heat of excitement causing my eyes to sparkle, and Akiva looked at me with a dry amusement in her old eyes that suggested she knew perfectly well what my emotions were.

  “Get along with you, child. Stay on the path, and be back before nightfall.”

  It wasn’t until I was some way into the village that I became aware of the stares. A flutter of curtain or a pair of eyes peeking over the shutters was quite normal if the fair was passing through, but I wasn’t prepared for the same level of scrutiny to be directed at me. I scowled at a mother who gave her big-eyed child a none-too-gentle tug to hurry him out of my way, and she scurried away with a frightened look that puzzled me as much as it amused me. What had struck the village? Fortunately I wasn’t one to blush, and I strode up the main street with a fierce smile that made matters worse, much to my satisfaction.

  The general store was crowded when I got there, filled with the same stares and quickly averted gazes as the street had been. I bared my teeth at them all in another fierce smile; and then, feeling better, spent some time looking over the bolts of cotton with mingled disinterest and foreboding. The choice of dress stuffs wasn’t to me the excitement that it was to Gwendolen.

  I was turning over a bolt of sensible brown cotton that would give me as little trouble as possible to sew, when Mina Pennypurse herself rapped me across the knuckles and told me sharply not to touch.

 
“I need new pinafores!” I said indignantly, scowling up at her gold spectacles. They were mirror-like and hid her eyes, but her sharp nose quivered as if she had smelled something nasty. “I’m a customer the same as everyone else, so there!”

  “The likes of you can wait outside!” she retorted, and gave me a clip across the ears for good measure.

  I wasn’t expecting it, since Miss Pennypurse (although muttering at my general and particular evils) had never raised a hand to me before; and I was too surprised to duck. I retreated in bad order, clutching my ear, and sat down on the front porch to dangle my bare feet with a feeling of injury. At least when Akiva clouted me it was for a reason. I felt gloomily that I had lost this particular round.

  “They don’t like you not wearing shoes,” said a voice to my left. I looked around enquiringly, and found myself looking into the blue-eyed gaze of a girl I knew vaguely as Elizabeth Gantry, the sister of one of Gwendolen’s bosom friends.

  “And you came in right when they were talking about Akiva,” she added, licking a finger that was coated with sprinkles. She had a small paper bag of the brightly coloured candies that she was dipping her forefinger into at a steady, thoughtful rate. Now she offered it to me, and I helped myself. “Miss Pinchface thought you heard her. She thinks you’ll carry tales back to Akiva.”

  “So I will,” I said vengefully, scowling over my shoulder at the shop window. I wouldn’t, of course: there’s nothing worse than a tell-tale. I would just have to be injured but honourable. I sat straighter in the self-righteous knowledge, and drummed my bare heels against the porch.

  “What are you in for?”

  “New dress,” said Elizabeth laconically. “My custard exploded. Burned little holes in the bodice and stained the skirt.”

  “My custard did, too,” I told her. “Gwendolen’s didn’t. It went beautifully.”

  “Hers would,” said Elizabeth. “Anyway, it was getting too short.”