Bloodflower

by Bloodflower (The Returning) (retail) (epub)

  ‘Smiling?’ said Cam.

  ‘Aye, they’ve a chair and all.’

  So the rest climbed up to see a train of women in white, their walking stirring up the dust enough to hide their feet, so that they looked as if they glided, with a big man ahorse to the fore of them, and four more men, bigger yet, carrying the chair among them. The chair was white, like the women’s dresses.

  ‘Let’s go to Castle Cross.’

  They jumped from the wall and were off across the paths the earthwalls made, zigzagging towards the crossroads. Cam was last, partly because he was youngest, partly because of Geyard. He hesitated before leaping from the wall, for the ground was really quite far down, and jumping so often became falling, and horses could hurt themselves with a jump like that.

  ‘Leave that old stick,’ said Roan. ‘Or do I take it home for firewood?’

  So Cam jumped, and it was none so bad. Then he ran, clicking his tongue to make galloping sounds, the stick that was Geyard joggling between his legs and tripping him.

  ‘Not a stick,’ he said, panting. ‘A horse.’

  Castle Cross was where the East Road laid itself east–west over the Highway – the castle road that went north to Dorn-Lannet and south . . . well, who knew where it went south. Cam did not.

  The Lady came, the women. Their white dresses shone lights under the sun, all stitched with little spits and chips of crystal. Even their sandals glinted. As they walked they sang, and as they sang they smiled. The Lady held the curtains of the chair aside and looked out, gold at her throat and thick on her wrists, and it was gold that glittered on her dress.

  ‘Look . . .’ Gillert stuck his elbow into Cam’s side. A handful of girls, stripped down to their shifts, walked in the midst of the women, singing, their faces all with the same blind, dazed expression.

  Raene Gost came up at a run. ‘I heard them . . .’

  Something in how she looked at the Smiling Women lifted the skin on Cam’s back, and he shivered. Raene took off her pinny and all the boys tittered. When she took off her dress they goggled and laughed behind their hands. But she didn’t seem to hear them, standing there at the roadside in her white shift. At first she had her arms folded over her chest, but suddenly she lifted them – white from elbow to shoulder, forearms brown – lifted them high and with them her voice, and stepped onto the road, walked beside them, the women smiling, and they took her hand and sang.

  The Lady leaned from the chair, held out a white hand, fingers gold-banded, and threw a shower of sparks. The others were down in the dust on the roadside, scrapping for the coins, but Cam just wanted to look at the Smiling Women, and he did, running after them, eyes full of their light.

  Then Mam rushed up and bent and grabbed him, held him and Geyard all tangled up in her arms, and shooed the others off. ‘You do leave that money. Leave it and get back home. Go on, get!’ She was angry, she was crying. So was Cam. He remembered kicking and screaming – ‘I want to go, I do want to’ – all the way back home, struggling to see them, but distance had taken them away and all that was left was a white shimmer in his mind.

  Da met them halfway down the hill from the cot, puffing. ‘You did get him, then.’

  ‘Raene Gost’s been taken.’

  ‘Just the one?’ said Da.

  ‘Just the one, thanks be to all the great gods.’

  ‘The Gosts will not be thanking them right now.’

  ‘No,’ said Mam.

  ‘She was always a strange, lonesome sort of maid.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Hey, hey my lovely.’ Da heaved Cam into one arm so that he could put the other about Mam. ‘It’s all this talk of war coming down from the Uplands. Brings them all out, looking for answers. Oof, my soldier, you do get too big for lugging about.’ He put Cam down.

  ‘I want to go,’ said Cam.

  Mam put her apron to her mouth.

  ‘Did you forget something.’ Da took Cam by both arms and swung him high in the air. ‘Your pee-pee. Ha, ha, ha!’ He set Cam down. ‘They’re women, women only. You have an old fella, you can’t be one of them.’ He stopped walking to laugh.

  Cam clutched Geyard in both hands, clutched the shimmering in his mind. The wanting nagged at him, all day.

  Mam knew. Come bedtime, she took him on her lap, big as he was. ‘Why do you so want to go with them?’

  ‘They go, go, and I want that.’

  ‘But go where?’

  He did not know.

  The next day, Cam was not allowed from the yard. He rode Geyard round and round it until he was dizzy.

  ‘Noon meal,’ called Mam. Cam leaned Geyard against the wall.

  ‘What did you do to yourself?’ said Mam. ‘You do look as if you’ve spent the morning rolling in the yard, not playing! Do you go and wash it off or you’ll be staining my tablecloth.’

  Cam went to the scullery and scooped a dipper of water. He heard Da come in, clumping his boots off on the stoop. Cam washed his hands in the dipper, dabble-swipe one way, swipe-dabble the other, which was clean enough, then drank what was left in the dipper.

  ‘They took Grett Hornsloe, too.’

  ‘They did what?’ said Mam.

  ‘Aye. I heard in the village.’

  Cam stood where he was, water drip-dripping from the dipper onto the floor. Grett Hornsloe with her snap-twig bones and skin all loose and veiny. Dancing? Grett Hornsloe dancing, who was older than Mam, older than Grandmam. He saw her bending and bowing, thin feet lifting the dust in feathery spumes. Spin and jump, and going. Gone.

  Sometimes he still thought of them, shedding their white light about, and their bright voices, and gold flying from every lady’s white hands. Is that it? he thought. Is it?

  The spring he turned twelve, all of them were down in the terraces at the planting, Mam and Da and Cam, even the twins, who were little, the same age he had been when the Smiling Women had come. Cam remembered stopping work, tools falling from his hands. There was a throbbing in the air, he could feel . . . ‘Mam?’ he said. ‘Mam, do you hear . . .?’

  Mam cocked her head but didn’t halt her steady, even digging.

  Da did, leaned on his shovel. ‘Why, what is that then?’

  ‘I’m off to the village to see.’ Cam was already running, in case Mam thought she might tell him no. He belted straight up to the Ridge Road that ran high and mighty along the spine of the hill, and through the village.

  A boy with a pipe walked slowly past. A man followed beating a drum. And more men, some of them boys and no older than Cam. They toted mattocks or pitchforks or spears over their shoulders, some wearing leather jerkins, one with a bow and a bracer on his left arm. Their feet beat the ground, one and two and three and four, in time with the drum, and the pipe went over the top of it, thin and light and tinny.

  Dum da dum da, sang Cam in his head. He ran and jumped and walked backwards-looking, alongside them to the square. People were standing at their gates, walking up from their holdings, craning their necks to see what it was that was coming.

  ‘What is it?’ Roan pushed up to stand beside Cam.

  Cam shifted to make room for him. ‘Don’t know.’

  Gillert Smithson came up, black smudges on his face from the smithy. ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Roan.

  ‘The war,’ said someone. ‘The Uplanders’ war. They do march south, towards Dorn-Lannet. The war is coming.’

  The war.

  It did not stop, the drumming and the pipe’s shrilling, the drum beating time with the beat of Cam’s blood and the sounds the boy stirred from the pipe waking the hunger.

  Cam turned to Gillert, and though he had said nothing, Gillert backed a step, eyes going all wide. ‘My da would have my hide!’

  Cam heard himself say, ‘I’m not telling mine, until I am gone.’

  Roan hit Cam in the chest. ‘You would not. Not to war.’

  Cam squeezed dust between his toes. Come, it implored, the hunger, the pull. Come.r />
  Corban Farmer’s sons, both of them, full-grown, stepped up, pitchforks on their shoulders. Then Bailey Nelsan, Layne Gorlance. Up stepped Callen Mansto, his little motherless son, Acton, tugging his arm and wailing. Cam thought of Mam catching him, her arms like steel bands about him, and running him away from the Smiling Women, crying with fright. She does have the twins and little Pin, now, he thought. And she has Da. He stepped up, hands weapon-empty, and that was it, six of them. Only six but a tenth of the village men.

  Roan’s mam grabbed at him. ‘You’re just a boy. Your mam, da – oh! This gods-cursed war.’

  War. The hungering in him burst into excitement and a kind of fear. This is it, he thought. He wondered if he would see Smiling Women, in the north. Da dum da dum. This is it.

  It was like his memories had two distinct parts. Before the war was all light and gold-glamoured, like the Smiling Women in their passing. The war was dark and walled about, and the sword spitting blood and shards of light, and the horrified face behind it.

  He remembered lying in the surgeon’s tent, among the Uplander wounded. He could not have moved or opened his eyes, but he heard them.

  ‘This is him. The right arm – I aimed for his neck, My Lord Father, and then saw his eyes, so . . . now . . . now he does not look so like to Gyodan.’

  ‘So.’

  When he was well enough to do it Cam asked the surgeon, in his halting Uplander, ‘Who came and stood by my bed?’

  ‘Lord Ryuu and his son.’

  All that long winter while Cam ghosted about the keep, healing, neither prisoner nor freeman, yet somehow a little of both, they never spoke to him, the Uplander Lord and his son. All the while, the pain in his stump was a gnawing thing that kept the other gnawing quiet.

  ‘Why me?’ he asked the surgeon.

  The surgeon spread one hand, Uplander-style. I do not know.

  ‘Why me?’ he asked the girls who sat on his lap at the public house.

  ‘Why not,’ they’d say, and they’d take him out the back.

  Why me? he asked himself, looking down from the wall onto the wide sward where he had fought, now green and growing with the bodies of Kayforliers, Isycherns, Dunne-men lying under it.

  He came back from the war, and it was the returning that would lay to rest the beast that ate him from the inside, he was sure of it. For a time it did, too. The quiet, the peace, the routine.

  ‘This is it,’ he said to Da. Da only nodded.

  But later, months later, Cam said to Ban, ‘It does flatten everything, the routine, the quiet. Always the same, do you feel it?’

  ‘If it was so good,’ said Ban, ‘why’d you come home?’

  Cam laughed, to hide the hurt that Ban’s words put in him.

  He remembered the Smiling Women. The war had broken their fine houses and, loosed from the spell, the women had scattered, back to their homes. Raene Gost had come home, all bleached and hollow-faced and somehow not right in her mind any more, for all she could talk about was the One, the Goddess and Mother. I am another Raene, he thought. But my One is the war and that quick moment when he cut off my arm.

  Mam was one wall, and Da another, with his love that would not let Cam be anything but a burden to him. Even Pin, who was like a new day, a fresh start, so bright and eager and unhurt, seemed to bind him somehow. And Ban? Cam touched the thought carefully, shied away. Ban was a closed door now

  ‘Shut in.’ Cam had tried to explain it to Mam. At first it was like this.’ He spread his hand against the wall of the cot. ‘Home. But now I’m shut in and I cannot stand it. I just have to push them all away.’

  Mam had looked like to weep.

  He found going to the inn kept the walls from closing on him. Until this evening.

  ‘That all you good for now, is it?’ Da had shouted ‘Drinking and fighting and women’s work?’

  All the family looking on, looking at him.

  ‘What do you know about it, Old Man? What do you know!’

  ‘Urrrr.’ Da had shuffled his feet and poked his eyes at the roof ‘Arr.’

  ‘DON’T!’ yelled Cam, ‘TIP-DAMN-TOE! AROUND! ME!’

  ‘You’re not the son I remember, not since you ran off to that war.’

  Cam had hurled Geyard’s bridle at the wall. ‘Cripple! Drunk! Dishonest! You make it clear what you think of me. My own da and you trust me with nothing. I don’t wonder Fenister pulled out of the betrothal, if he took your lead. If not for you, I’d be wed by now, and settled and making a home for my wife and myself. Getting respect, instead of it always being taken from me.’

  He saw Pin sliding sideways along the bench, grabbing hold of Mam’s kirtle.

  ‘For shame!’ Mam had a voice on her. It rode over his and Da’s together. ‘And the little one terrified.’

  ‘Inn does not help it,’ said Da.

  ‘What does?’ Cam walked over to the tack and picked it up.

  ‘By the great gods you are a thorny one.’

  Cam gathered the tack up, folding it against his leg. ‘What is there for me here? Nothing but doors closing in my face.’

  Mam and Da had brought him up true, and here he was now, creeping away like a thief. Not to the inn, no. Saddling the grey horse that Da always said was too fine a beast to put to the plough, and leaving.

  From yard to road, and road to Castle Cross. The grey was beautiful. Big and ghost-coloured and silken-stepping. He didn’t have a name, the Lord’s son had said in his message, when he had given him to Cam. It was gone with his first owner.

  ‘What do you call him?’ Da had asked.

  ‘I don’t. He doesn’t have a name.’

  ‘Hey, Noname,’ Da had said, and that was his name, at least the one everyone used. But to himself, Cam called him Geyard.

  Why me? Cam would ask him, Lord Ryuu’s son. Why? It may be the answer was what he had been seeking.

  And so he left them, the safety, the prison of family and friend and village. Through Castle Cross he rode and on, north and away. And that was it – was everything and more and enough. For now.

  THE SEA

  Da and Cam fought, and it was a thing too big for tears. Pin heard Cam stamp outside, slamming the door against the jamb, and listened to his steps crossing the yard: hard, angry. After a pause the jingle of the harness sounded, and the clop of the grey’s hooves, fading.

  Pin fled up to her room then, crying until she could not breathe and Mam had to put her to bed.

  ‘Hear that singing?’ Mam rocked her. Pin heard Mam’s heartbeat, and the sea-noise her own ears made, blocked as they were by Mam’s breast and Mam’s hand. Not a thing else. The house was quiet.

  ‘That’s the merrows, the water people. Catch one, it’ll give you a wish.’

  Pin sat up. ‘Hughar says there’s no such thing.’

  ‘Ssh.’ Mam soothed her back down. ‘There is so. But if you want to hold one, your wish must come from the heart.’

  ‘If you’re done, it’s cold enough still to want that door closed,’ said Mam the next morning.

  Da sighed and pushed the door shut. He walked to the fireplace and leaned on the mantle, tapping his fingers against the wood. Mam had only to say, ‘Gavrin!’ and he stopped the tapping, sat for a moment at the bench, then was back to the door again, looking outside.

  ‘I did say it and shouldn’t have,’ he said finally.

  ‘Well don’t you.’ Mam went slam, slam with the teacups.

  ‘But he’s not what he was, before he did run off to that rotted war.’

  Mam said not a word now, whanged the breakfast dishes onto the tray.

  ‘Come come—’

  ‘Pah!’ said Mam. ‘Not what he was! The two of you, pah!’

  She shoved the tray clattering across the table and stood glaring at Da, hands on her hips. Da looked away.

  ‘And you, my maid.’ Mam turned her anger on Pin. ‘Have you got the eggs in yet?’

  Da sighed at Pin. ‘Your mam does want us out from underfoot.’ He stood
up, put on coat and scarf and hat. ‘I’ll go chase Cam out of the tavern.’ He held out his hand to Pin. ‘And I’ll walk you as far as the henhouse.’

  Every morning it was her task to collect the eggs, then to let the chickens out to scratch in the orchard. ‘Cam did say he would help me get them ready for market.’

  Da led Pin outside. ‘It looks like you’ll have to do that yourself.’

  Pin put the egg-wrap on the stoop on her way back.

  ‘You did wash those eggs, my maid?’ Mam called from inside, though she could not see Pin.

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘And wrap them?’

  The first market of the year was in two days’ time, and Cam had promised to help her wrap the eggs. Strands of flax had to be knotted into little baskets, each holding five eggs, suspended one beneath the next so that they did not touch, and these packages hung from the eaves for safekeeping until market day. Though she waited about the house until Mam sent her outside to play, Cam did not come.

  Pin stepped off the stoop and headed across the yard to the seedbeds. They each had their own. Edord had sown his early, against Da’s advice, and was watching it as if that would help the seeds sprout.

  ‘That does teach you to listen better to your da.’ Hughar tapped Edord on the rump, trying to topple him.

  When he saw Pin, Hughar left Edord alone and showed her some slugs he had found under a stone. She screamed, screamed louder still when he slipped some down her pinny. Pin ran to Da, who sent her up to Mam. And that’s when Pin discovered that Mam had wrapped the eggs herself, having given up waiting for Cam.

  ‘Carp, carp, carp,’ Mam said later to Pin. ‘I do wish they’d leave each other be.’ Mam was on all fours – all threes actually, because one hand was free to scrub the stoop. Pin crouched so she had one arm free to do nothing. She hated scrubbing. She liked to carry the pallets, or dig or carry seeds for Da, but she hated scrubbing.

  The sun crawled out from behind the clouds, leaving a short skirt of shade about the house. Pin stared at its white circle, then down at the valley, the sun’s shape black now and laid atop everything her eyes looked at.