Folding her arms in the front of her one good tunic, she turned to face the ranked rows of clay animals. To think that the original of one of you pottery putties is touring the fair right now in a thief's swag-bag! What an incredible deed that was: to steal the precious statuette of the sacred cat from the very lap of Lady Alimar Lords'-Friend! That thief must have been mad, desperate, or so pitifully eager for a place in men's memory that he would settle for ill fame as his monument.
Reaching out a browned but still sensitive hand, Roswitha stroked the stone-cool body of the nearest cat. The image, a stoneware object as large as her two fists together, was shaped and painted to resemble one of the exotic cats of the south so beloved of the Lady (although that goddess smiled upon all the furred kind): those with the colors of her harvest feast-days—white grain ears, rich loam, and an impossibly blue scrying-bowl of sky with no stain of cloud breath. True, the statue that the girl held, with its garish glaze and glass-pebble eyes, had more of the mudpie than the festival cake about it, but Roswitha supposed that any object that increased devotion to the powers of light was of worth, especially in these days with the worship of Thotharn growing ever more widespread and bold-faced. A thought occurred to her: was the thief of the sacred cat a devotee of that dark cult or the servant of such a person? Well, she would probably never find out, any more than she would claim the thousand coppers that the fair-wards had cried from the neighboring street to be the reward offered for the statue's return to the guardians of the temple. With a rueful shake of her head, the little clerk replaced the clay image on the shelf and pushed behind the worn tapestry dividing the private area of Shallocq's stall from the public, to examine the small piece of parchment that was all she might ever hope to own of that shrine of seekers and scholars.
For Roswitha was a scholar, and the child and namesake of scholars. Her calling (in every sense of the term) came from the legend of a holy woman who had written books and presented them to a great lord, who was so impressed by her work that he granted her his patronage. "If you are as diligent in your labors as that first Roswitha/' the girl's mother had often assured her, "such a boon may well be yours." But in the three years that had passed since Roswitha had completed her studies, no minor landholder, much less lord, had sought her skills. Only shire-reeves and chapmen who wanted someone with sufficient grammarye (strange how that word meant both writing and witchery) had done so, to have her prepare husbandry tables and "balance" accounts to lessen the palm crossing levied by the priests! And this year at Ithkar Fair there had been even fewer of such commissions—so few, in fact, that Roswitha had been forced to take temporary service as a stall tender with Merchant Shallocq.
For this state of affairs the girl privately blamed the leaders of the Re-Epiphany—or, as the less reverent termed it, the "Three-Epiphany"—movement at the temple, who favored and fostered only scholarly efforts inspired by the hagiography of the Three Lordly Ones. Roswitha and her family, while they had always granted respect to those legendary leaders, had deemed them interlopers, maugre star birthing, and had given their devotion only to those deities sprung from the sky, soil, and stream of KTthholme-World. Such a one was Lady Alimar, for although she had dwelt during their planetfall with the alien trinity, she had been a true daughter of men. But oh, her tales had been star born! Reading them, the little clerk could well believe the apocryphal anecdote that the Three, having completed the Lady's initiation into the mysteries of word smithing, had touched her lips with a coal from the Undying Fire, stolen from the heart of a sun, which gave life and light to their skyfaring ship. And now her image sat in eternal conclave with the images of the Three and their other friends in the high hall ecks, or niches, in the apse of the temple, her scroll and stylus in her hands, and on her lap, in the classic pose of feline vigilance, the S'a-Muse cat, symbol of mystic wisdom and human/nonhuman fellowship. Until this morning. Again, why, how, who?
In the semigloom of the stall's back section, Roswitha fumbled with the rawhide thong that formed the latch of her broadside boards. She knew she must return, and quickly, to the selling area, for Merchant Shallocq would return at any moment, and if he found his wares unwatched, he might express his displeasure with a leathern tongue. But those "S'a-Musings" on Lady Alimar had aroused in her a sudden and powerful desire to examine the copy of the hymn to the goddess she had acquired from the temple scribe the previous evening. Strange, the clerk thought as the stubborn strands parted at last, and the parchment sheet slid, with a leaf-fall rustle, into her waiting hands. I have never felt such a need to do anything in my life; this smacks of those Messages-of-Mind the wise-women whisper of. And to think that Brother Greggorie gave it to me! Could I be being somehow—led? Lifting the parchment square to the narrow shaft of light that struck through an ill-patched place in the curtain, Roswitha joyed anew as the beam woke fire from the gold-leafed squares framing the fat uncials of the capital letters and jewel glow from the colored script of the text.
"You have a wonderful gift," the scholar had told the monk, whom everyone jestingly called "the Short-Hand" by reason of his rounded and closely written style. Brother Greggorie had glanced up from the page whose illumination he was completing upon hearing Roswitha's words, and the polite reply he had had upon his lips had frozen, to be replaced by a look as of one confronting a fetch. Mechanically he had set his sigil to the sheet and thrust it across the trestle that served him as a workbench at the astonished girl.
"You likewise, lady-loved," he had replied in a low but carrying voice; and before Roswitha could ask a question or offer a payment, the temple scribe had turned his attention— deliberately—to another patron. The clerk had been left with mouth open and hands full of a copy of the anonymous hymn lyric "Hail to Thee, Bright Star" rendered with such craft and cost as to make it worthy of the richest merchant's book of hours.
Recalling this odd transaction as she perused her treasure once more, Roswitha considered the monk's cryptic pronouncement and was puzzled all over again. She had thought "You likewise" meant "I will give you a wonderful gift," and "lady-loved" indicated "one endowed with close female friends," but now—questions and questions! Where were the answers?
Questions were forgotten as Roswitha was drawn into the hymn itself. Gently but irresistibly its words insinuated themselves into her mind and its rhythm into her heart, so that by the time she had reached the chorus of the third and final stanza, she was chanting softly and swaying from side to side. Chant and sway? No—she should sing and dance! The girl had risen to her feet and begun to hum, thanking the Mother as she did that the sun was rising so swiftly today, permitting her to see the poem in the back-stall murk (for surely it was the light and not the letters that shone so brightly?)—
—when a shadow fell across the curtain, and not Shallocq's, either.
Moved still by that eerie compulsion from beyond herself, the clerk, with a speed and stealth she would not have believed possible, slid the parchment between its board covers, cinched the cord, and thrust the whole into the inner pocket of the alchemist's dross-colored robe, which she wore for travel and which she now pulled on. Stepping to the moth-eaten drape, she applied an eye to the sunbeam hole and saw a thin, shifty-eyed man of middle age swathed in the black mantle of a Niobean friar, one of that elusive and sinister brotherhood whose devotion to the Three Lordly Ones consisted of a perpetual funeral service. Silent and lithe as a slimpsel, he flowed toward the low shelf from which the clerk had removed her solitary customer's cat statuette, in the same motion drawing from beneath his voluminous robes a twin to that piece. Twin? Only as a peasant maid's wheat wreath twisted with ux-vine and Lady's tears for the Feast of Firstfruits was the double of the precious Wreath of Offering lying on the high altar of the Comforter's Shrine— it was the temple cat!
As Roswitha stared in dumb amazement, the thief placed the true statue on the shelf in the spot made vacant by the purchase of the terra-cotta piece. When he bent, a fold in his robe opened and a dead-black mask-s
haped pendant on a skein of what looked like human hair was revealed. An instant later, the ornament was hidden once more as the man straightened, but not before the clerk had recognized the face of the mask, with its aristocratic features set in a poisonously beautiful smile, as that of the demon Thotharn. The watching girl bit back a gasp. So—not only was Shallocq involved with those who stole material goods from the temple, but also with those who would take from the gods the greatest and most unmaterial "good": worship. In the wake of shock came rage: how dared they so insult the Lady, she who had with her tales strewn the dreary path of life on KTthholme-World with the stuff of stars? Gods damn them to the hell of an existence without dreams!
As though he had divined Roswitha's thoughts, the renegade monk abruptly turned toward the curtain that concealed the girl and with a muttered exclamation grasped the fabric and tore it open.
But when the thief s eyes adjusted to the dimness of the storage space, he saw only a lumpy pallet, a stack of crates, and two barrels of refuse over which was thrown a beggarly cloak of anonymous hue. Seizing a prybar from atop the cases, he belabored the mattress a few vicious blows, then flipped it quickly over. With a grunt of exasperation, he turned his attention to the barrels; and what would have become of the hapless scholar stretched over them, none but Lady Alimar might have said, had not that one—or Ones greater—sent the fair-wards down the street at that moment, their weighted staves striking the cobbles of potters' slip like the machinery of the law. Spewing a curse so dreadful that it made Roswitha's short-cropped hair stand on end even beneath her hood, the bogus brother slid from the storeroom in a running crouch and poured himself into the alley behind the shop like a bucket of night soil.
Roswitha lost no time. Leaping from her improvised perch and hurrying to the shelf, she took up the precious figurine and returned with it to the back room. There— possessed once more, it seemed, by the strange compulsion— she swaddled it in rags, thrust it into the bottom of her vending basket, and arranged several imitation statues on top. Then, stripping off her cape, she laid it over the basket and, pulling the tapestry to, returned to her accustomed place behind the counter.
And here was Shallocq, sudden as a summoned friend.
"How goes business?" asked the merchant. He spoke with forced heartiness and grinned like such a lackwit that Roswitha was hard put to keep her own expression safely stupid, but the girl noticed that his plump, beringed hands kept clasping and unclasping and his broad brow beneath its gem-tasseled turban was twice filleted with natural diamonds of sweat.
"Poorly, alack," sighed the clerk, offering her employer the cashbox whose chains made more noise than its contents. "But one sale this whole morning—"
"To whom?" interrupted Shallocq, too eagerly. As Roswitha looked blank, he stammered, "I mean, to—to what manner o' man? Observations are vital—help you know your market—"
Black market, you mean, thought the scholar contemptuously. Aloud she said, carefully casual, "Why, to a young farmsteader who wants to 'mure it in the wall of the barn he's building as a vermin bane. I told him that a mouser was good, but a muser was better, and that if he wanted the thing to bless as well as curse, he should take it to the temple for a benison. Which reminds me"—here the girl paused to swing aside the curtain and draw forth the cloak-draped figurine basket, thankful for even so brief a chance to stem the tide of her false-sounding chatter and wipe her own sweating brow—"at the orraree this nooning the mystery play of Lady Alimar is to be given. Likely the country folk will gather there—in fact, our sole customer said he was bound to the place—so I thought it would be profitable to 'take the goods to the goodmen.' With your leave, Merchant Shallocq?" Roswitha finished by batting her eyes and smiling brightly, presenting the very picture of guileless youthful enthusiasm for a new enterprise. Inwardly she was quaking.
The chapman swiped distractedly at his bead-dewed face and shook his head. "No, girl, keep close for now. I—I might have an important customer, who knows"—giggle— "and I'd need you to tend the yokels. Put by your basket."
"But I must go!" blurted Roswitha, and then could scarcely keep from clapping a horrified hand over her mouth.
"Go?" The merchant was suddenly alert. "Go where?"
"To the—" Desperation and no holy compulsion supplied the answer. "To the drop seat!" And abandoning all pretense at propriety, Roswitha freed a hand from her burden and clutched her crotch.
Shallocq still looked suspicious, but after a moment he gave a mutter of exasperation and waved the girl off. Scarcely daring to believe her success, the little clerk swung out of the stall and was off down the cobbled and increasingly crowded street before the merchant could realize she was still carrying the basket.
Roswitha fought the impulse to look behind her until she reached the Webster's stall at the head of the lane. There, ducking behind a rack of tabards, she peered through the neckhole of an outspread sample in the direction of the potter's stand.
Shallocq stood staring at the vacant spot left by the double "adoption." As the girl watched, a second figure joined him at his curious vigil—a small, limber man swaddled in a black monk's robe. The two conferred hastily, and then, with terrible inevitability, two heads came up, two arms flung out, and two mouths tore open in a single cry: "Thief! Thief! Wardens, ho!"
Resisting the urge to hurl herself down the street in a blind panic, Roswitha cut through the crowd before the Webster's stand, pausing long enough to gawk convincingly— she hoped—back in the direction of the potter's stall with the rest of the fairgoers, then swung with only businesslike briskness into a side lane. North—she must proceed north, she knew, to reach the temple—and she was acquainted with all the public passages; but this tentways maze was known to few save merchants and less legal lighteners of purse. Bewildered, the girl had paused at a crosspath to consider her course when a gentle warmth began to radiate from the pocket in which she had placed the broadside case. Astounded but strangely unafraid, the scholar, following a hunch, turned to the right. Immediately the sensation ceased as though doused. A turn to the left, however, rekindled the viewless flame. Left it was, then. I certainly got a bargain yestereven with this gift, she thought almost cheerfully, moving as quickly as she dared. Learning and leading in one package! As though there were a difference . . .
Roswitha might have revolved this matter clear to the temple, had not yet another turn—and a guided one, at that—brought her to the mouth of a throughway and nearly into the arms of a squadron of fair-wards charging past. Dodging behind a knot of wrathgrape drinkers accepting tipples from a steinbeckoner, the girl hastened down the street. Above her heart, which was drumming beat to retreat, her head was chilly calm. Had she been meant to give herself over to the fair-wards—was that the meaning of her near collision? After all, what defense could Shallocq and sidekick bring to bear if questioned under truth spell? Roswitha had almost persuaded herself to turn back when a burst of cold welled from her breast "plate," so forceful it made her cry out and set hand to her bosom. Scrubbing a sleeve across her tearing eyes, she stumbled on. She had heard of the hounds of Thotharn, which harried men to Heldelving; but where would the cat of Lady Alimar chivy a woman? To the stars?
At the head of an alley, the beleaguered scholar ducked beneath a ward rope, fashioned of a length of hawser painted blue. In a dark alley of her own mind, a warning tocsin rang—disturbing such a barrier, magically charged as it was, was to summon not the fair-wards but the wizards, for the ropes guarded only sacred precincts—but so powerful this time was the compulsion that, literally, burned in her breast that the girl took little heed.
Arriving at the end of the way, she found it partially blocked by a great wagon-mounted tent bepainted with holy pictures even gaudier than those in Shallocq's stall, and she realized that she had come by a back lane into the orraree, and that before her stood the shake-scene stage of the mystery troupe.
The huge cart faced the circular court side on, its heavy plank panel dropped an
d propped slantwise to form a ramp for the ascent or descent of the players, its multilayered tent panels folded open to the backdrops that depicted Lady Alimar and the Three Lordly Ones.
With surprise and delight, Roswitha recognized the coach stage as the one that had come every year during her childhood to the village where her family lived and whose performances, crude and melodramatic as they were, had been the inspiration for the scholar's lifelong study of Lady lore. How she had thrilled to watch the enactment of the sacred stories, and what a dream beyond dream it had been to actually perform with them one season when the troupe-mistress's daughter had taken ill, playing the part of the country maid to whom the star-singer had told her tales! The little clerk longed to mount the ladder leading to the end of the wagon facing her, which served as the company's tiring room, and wish them well, but, hearing the hubbub of the thief takers approaching the orraree, she knew that she dared not take the time and turned regretfully away.
She had been about to mingle with the crowd already well come to the place of star-prayer when the whip-crack smack of a hand connecting with a cheek sounded from the coach, followed by a spate of furious words in the strident voice of a woman: Dame Alyson. Curious, Roswitha paused. The troupemistress seldom played the termagant in life, no matter what her role on stage—what was amiss?
"Phaw, Coll, to smell you a body'd know what you did with your share o' the take, if they hadn't eyes to see! Drunk as a maggot in a rum cake, you are, and it's curtain up at the nooning bell! Who's to do the priest, then, with your wife in childbed and your brother lame from that ox kick? Belike not even the Dark One'd have you in your condition, but he can try for all I care! Get out—wow!"
With these words the door in the end of the show wagon was flung open, and a disheveled young man in peasant dress was ejected forcibly therefrom. He landed in a pile of fodder laid for the wagon beasts and promptly either fainted or fell asleep. Dame Alyson, appearing at the door, glared down at her inebriated son-in-law; then, looking up, she shook a hammy fist at the sky. "Faith," she muttered, "it's small wonder the Lady is figured as a cat—she bares her claws today, and no mistake!"
Norton, Andre - Anthology Page 23