A Princess of the Chameln

by Cherry Wilder

  “Have you been collecting herbs and simples, Master Kerrick?” she asked.

  The pouch slung over his shoulder was full. He smiled vaguely and sat beside her on the bench.

  “How does the Carach this morning?” he asked. “Has no one come to ask its blessing for Erran Eve, our day of dancing?”

  “It is early still,” she said.

  “May I see your book?” he asked.

  She handed it to him, and he leafed through the tales and songs and riddles that she knew pretty well by heart.

  “It is a magnificent book,” he said. “Was it a gift?”

  He shut it now and ran a finger over the silver swan on the cover.

  “A royal gift . . .” he added.

  “That is a badge of Lien, where the book was made,” she said innocently.

  “Do you know that some magicians can tell the origin of any object that comes into their hands?” he asked again.

  Niall was teasing, as he often did, and she smiled, unruffled.

  “Can you do that, Master Kerrick?”

  He shook his head. She took the book back, locked it and slipped it into its cloth covering.

  “The festivals divide our year,” he said, “and help to stave off boredom a little. Erran Eve and Midsummer and Carach Troth and the Lamp Lighting and the Holynights and who knows what other days in between. Athron is prosperous and full of magic. My father is to blame for that . . . he brought back the Carach twenty-five years ago. It was his destiny, some would say. Kedran Venn . . . do you know what the driving force is in this land of ours?”

  “I have some thoughts about it,” she said, “but I would like you to tell me.”

  “It is the fact that Athron was once very poor. The memory of that dreadful time is fixed into the minds of the old and passed on to the young, who can’t believe it, having known only prosperity and magic and hope. There are farmers, the parents of your fellow kedran, who hoard food, skimp and scrape in their households, eat meat once a week and kill their aged horses for glue and tallow rather than set them out to pasture. The towns are full of misers, muttering spells to increase their gold.”

  “Well I have seen another side of Athron life,” she said, “and I would say the driving force is indeed your golden prosperity, but that it leads to recklessness, setting all at hazard. This is the place for games, risks, fortune telling and taking not much heed for the morrow because each day, each month, each year is as secure as the one before.”

  They looked at each other and laughed aloud. Presently she rose up from the bench and went off to pay her respects to the Carach tree. She slipped under the white railing and knelt on the short, soft grass. Above her she felt the leaves stirring like silver hands raised in blessing.

  “Oak maiden—”

  The voice was rough and smooth at once, rather like the purring of a huge cat. It made her shudder, not unpleasantly.

  “Oak maiden,” murmured the Carach tree, “are you still here?”

  “You see me, Carach. Will you give me another blessing?”

  “Take it then, Aidris Am Firn.”

  “Carach, when will I see my native land again?”

  There was no answer; a wind shook all the leaves and then was gone. Aidris drew back from the tree and said formally, “I bid you farewell, Carach.”

  She turned to find Niall leaning upon the railing.

  “What speech is that?” he asked.

  “Why, it is the Old Speech,” said Aidris.

  “I have never heard it spoken,” he said. “Who else knows it?”

  “The Carach tree.” She smiled.

  “Ah, so the Carach speaks to you . . .”

  There was a sound of singing; three young women were ascending the hill and a young page with a lute strumming rather listlessly as he climbed after them. The waiting women wore kirtles in the style of Athron, more simply cut and shorter than the trailing and floating garments of Lien.

  “Do not weep, O dearest Mother,

  Soon an end to all my pain,

  Do not blame my faithless lover,

  Sang the Fair Maid of Stayn.”

  The dark-haired Genufa and blonde Amèdine were no more than foils to the loveliness of Sabeth. In a year she had grown in beauty, if only because she no longer took so much heed of it. Her modesty and gentleness were as much a part of her as her singing voice, her gift for fine needlework. She raised a hand and waved to Aidris.

  “Our swan maiden,” said Niall softly, “flown to the warmth of Athron.”

  “Hush!” said Aidris. “I would hear the song.”

  “O do you mourn for lord or leman,

  For kedran bold in battle slain?

  Nay, ’tis for one who died of waiting,

  Called the Fair Maid of Stayn.”

  “Truly it is a foolish old song,” said Niall of Kerrick. “Would any die of waiting, Kedran Venn?”

  “Nay, you mistake the theme, Master Kerrick,” she said. “The Fair Maid, surely, died of love.”

  She ran down the hill and met the women. Genufa and Amèdine greeted her, all smiles, and Sabeth gave her a quick embrace.

  “We will ride to the dancing floor,” she said. “Will your company ride escort?”

  “Why, Aidris Venn,” said Amèdine, “Have you been taking instruction from yonder scholar?”

  On the hilltop Niall Kerrick bowed to them, hitched the strap of his herb satchel and strode off into the trees.

  “Ladies,” whined Moss, the page, “are you going to the Carach? I want my breakfast . . .”

  He played a chord all out of tune and fumbled with the pegs of his instrument. The three girls jollied him along, and Aidris ran back down the hill to the barracks.

  She came into the muster hall in time and took her place for first breakfast. She sat beside Ortwen Cash, the big country girl who rode with her in Grey Company. There were fifteen kedran, three companies, in this early muster, and ten men-at-arms.

  “Where you been?” wheezed Ortwen softly.

  “Up the hill.”

  “Who you see there?”

  She reeled off the names, and Ortwen frowned, crumbling bread.

  “Always ballocking around with the house folk. Han’t you been taught your place yet?”

  “You’ll protect me, sweetheart,” said Aidris, digging her in the ribs.

  Ortwen went off into a guffaw of laughter, checked when Lawlor, their sergeant, raised her head. Ortwen had protected Aidris more than once during the past year. She had been bullied, set upon, accused of giving herself airs. She defended herself, but refused to fight in the “single combats,” anything from finger-wrestling to staff play, that were popular in quarters. She knew enough of kedran ways not to pimp to an officer. She lost her temper only once when a burr was set under Telavel’s saddle and left a sore. She flew at the arch bully, a hard-muscled girl from the west coast called Hanni, and fought so recklessly that the pair of them were hauled bleeding out of the stableyard, to the sick bay first and then the coop.

  Aidris was ashamed to have fought in this childish way, even for Telavel’s sore place. Any way she looked at it, behind bars for instance, with a loose tooth and swelling eye, it was a tactical error. She was the shortest and lightest of all the kedran. She was also Aidris Am Firn, and she had not endured attack and pursuit to break her arm or her head in the stableyard at Kerrick Hall. Ortwen made her give it out that she would not fight or take part in “single combat” because of a vow made to her family. It was a notion the kedran understood; they were full of promises, vows, magical compacts.

  Towards the end of breakfast, as was usual on a feast day, Megan Brock, the captain, came in attended by her two lieutenants, to give the order of the escort. She was a tall, grizzled woman of fifty with a long, livid scar on her left cheek. Aidris remembered the first time she stood in the stableyard, unsaddling Telavel.

  A man-at-arms had shouted out some jeering words on the order of “What d’ye call that . . . a pony or a wee grey dog?�
� A voice, resonant as brass, rang through the yard.

  “What’s with you all, bloody clodhoppers? Have you never seen a Chameln grey?”

  Then the captain had looked Aidris herself up and down. Her blue eyes were bright and cold. They pierced every disguise, they saw into the lazy good-for-nothing soul of every kern and kedran on the Goddess’s good earth. Aidris felt that she was known at once.

  “Venn? Kedran Venn?”

  “I have called myself kedran on the way into Athron,” said Aidris, “but I have done no more than a few months training.”

  “Weapons?”

  “The bow. A little sword play.”

  “Drill?”

  “Mounted drill. A little.”

  “What news of my old comrade Jana Am Wetzerik?”

  “She is the general now.”

  “Where did you do this bit of training, Venn?”

  “With the palace guard . . .”

  It was a slip. Megan Brock did not ask, “Which palace?”

  “Let me guess.” She smiled. “The palace of the Firn.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  She felt the captain’s eye upon her ever afterwards. When drill and dressage and the management of her gear became difficult, she heard the brazen shout of “Venn!” in her dreams. She was accused of being a favorite, one of Brock’s pet lambs. For more than half a year she felt driven, put upon, singled out unpleasantly.

  There were differences between herself and the other kedran that she could not hide and had never thought about. She was put in with ensigns, the cadet-officers, for “benchwork,” because she could read, write and cypher. She was put on the lists for scribe duty with the two overworked scribe sergeants when it transpired that she could write straight-letter. She managed to hide the fact that she knew runes. She learned quickly not to answer more than once or twice when Megan Brock held a class on soldiering, on warriors of old time.

  The kedran of Kerrick Hall were mostly farmers’ daughters working for their dowries; they signed on for a four-year term, then went home. A few stayed for eight or even ten years and became ensigns or sergeants. There were no more than a dozen “true kedran” in ten companies, and they were veterans, mercenaries, from Cayl or Eildon or the Chyrian coast in the west of Mel’Nir. The five companies of men-at-arms were more equally divided: half of them were veterans, half farm boys or the sons of smaller landholders. There was no fighting to be done; this was not Mel’Nir, where turbulent warlords challenged the power of the Great King. It was not even the Chameln lands, where tribal disputes sometimes flared, where brigands lurked in the mountains, and where, of late, the rulers had needed protection.

  The captain read off the escort order; the kedran and men-at-arms sighed a little; Aidris listened to the din of spoons and platters. She was in Athron, in the muster hall, in her company; she was safe, she was invisible. She was lost and far from her native land. So it would go forever: the round of the seasons and their festivals, turning slowly as the earth turned. Erran Eve, with dancing; bonfires at Midsummer; singing for Carachmoon; torchlights at harvest. She would grow grey as Megan Brock here in the service of Lord Huw Kerrick. She would die here, and they might find her sword at the bottom of her clothes press and wonder what talisman she had been hiding.

  “Doan look so glum,” murmured Ortwen. “We’re leading off. You’ll ride with your precious house folk all day long. It’s a soft duty. We’ll eat well and have a chance to tread the dance floor.”

  Riding to the dancing floor, Grey Company,—three dappled, one flea-bitten and one Chameln grey—crossed a wide meadow to the banks of the Flume. At a word from Lady Aumerl, ranks were quickly broken, and the ladies and gentlemen mingled with the kedran. Aidris, at the head of the troop, on lovely Telavel, two to three hands smaller than the other greys, found herself riding between two tall horses. A wind ruffled the grasses of the river meadow, and she was shaken by memory. She looked to her left and saw Lord Huw Kerrick, that still, dark-eyed man who had brought the Carach tree back to Athron.

  “Will you go questing, Kedran Venn?” He smiled. “Your grey steps out so boldly!”

  “Not I, my lord,” she answered. “I am not one to look for adventure!”

  There was a laugh from Lady Aumerl, on her right, riding astride in a high-backed saddle, as was the custom for Athron women. She was full-figured now, but handsome, with dark brows and firm red cheeks. It was not hard to think of these two as young lovers, riding on the many quests they were supposed to have undertaken.

  “I think you hold questing for mere foolishness, Kedran Venn,” she said.

  “Ah, my lady,” said Aidris, “I am not so churlish. I have much reason to be grateful that Sir Gerr went questing into the Chameln lands.”

  “I rode this way on a quest once,” said Lord Huw, “and the one who rode at my side raced off, from about this old alder stump, just ahead, clear to the bridge, yonder.”

  “Race again!” said Lady Aumerl, “but let the kedran take my place. I will set ten florins and a firkin of wine for Grey Company on this sweet Chameln greyhound.”

  “What, against my Fireberry?” cried Lord Huw.

  So the wager was made, because Gerr of Kerrick, riding behind with Sabeth, heard it all and Sergeant Lawlor winked at Aidris. Fireberry, full sister to Firedrake, was fast enough; Telavel was unproven to all but a few. Aidris felt herself more or less in the spirit of the thing; bets were laid, and the sergeant acted as starter.

  Then Aidris whispered to Telavel, feeling a sudden desire to win the race, as Fireberry drew away. The grey set back her dark ears, and they were gone, over the soft, magical turf of Athron. She thought of the silver grass of the plain, endless, and the locks of hair, high on the spirit trees. Then she was at the bridge; she heard a cheer from Grey Company as Fireberry came up behind her.

  “A greyhound?” cried Lord Huw. “That little mare is the wind itself! Is she only a sprinter? How does she go over distances?”

  “The Chameln greys are meant to be stayers,” said Aidris. “They are bred for the plains.”

  They got down and walked their horses to the dance floor as the rest of the party came up. She was hailed as the winner and given ten florins for a race well run; she thought of her birthday. Then with Grey Company, she went to where their horses were tethered and stood watching the dance with Ortwen. Now that the party from Kerrick Hall had arrived, more and more country folk streamed across the bridge over the Flume to stand by the dancing floor.

  It was a maze marked out on the ground with fences of dried grass and fresh wildflowers, knee-high to the dancers. In the center was a high mound of earth covered with white blossom; it put Aidris in mind of a grave. She shuddered when five village men in green, with bells on their ankles, threaded the maze to the sound of tabor and bagpipe, then circled the mound until a pretty girl, decked with red ribbons, rose up from out of the flowers.

  “What villages are those across the river?” she asked Ortwen.

  “Lower down is Greenbank,” said Ortwen, “what used to be Lower Stayn. Stayn is just across the bridge. Right there, looking over the fence . . . that’s the Fair Maid.”

  Aidris laughed aloud. A black and white cow crowned with flowers stared moodily across the river.

  “Now see . . .” said Ortwen. “Here’s another dance for the day.”

  A young man threaded the maze in a white cloak, and when he came to the center, he turned his cloak and showed that it was all streaked with bright red. He lay down upon the mound of flowers; the dancer was Gerr of Kerrick.

  Aidris gave a shocked whisper, “Is he meant to be dead?”

  “Not for long,” said Ortwen cheerfully. “See—the ladies will try to wake him.”

  Three waiting women from the Hall and three village maidens threaded the maze from different directions. They came to the center and bent down in turn to kiss the sleeper.

  “No prizes for guessing his favorite,” said Ortwen. “My troth, what a harvest that sir knight ma
de when he found you and her both in the mountain passes.”

  Sure enough, when Sabeth kissed the sleeping lord of the dance, he woke straightaway. The music of pipe, tabor, dulcimer and flute rang out bravely as they threaded the maze together.

  “That will be a match!” said Ortwen. “Depend upon it.”

  “I hope so,” said Aidris.

  But the ceremony was unsettling. She remembered how the northern tribes forbade the wearing of certain mourning bands, even in play. A pretended death would have shocked them unutterably. And she knew that the risen lord of the dance was a figure from the dark past of the Goddess’s reign, in many ages since the making of the world. The young king or his chosen slave was murdered; blood was spilled indeed, for a sacrifice. In Athron they even played at magic.

  So she came into Lindenmoon—in the Chameln land it was Elmmoon—in her eighteenth year and let the round of the seasons take her. It was as if part of her mind was sleeping, as if one Aidris pined and waited in some secret place while the other went about as a kedran. She found herself asking, as the other kedran did, “What year was that?” When did we ride to Benna with the wheat, to Parnin as the lord’s escort? When did Hanni become ensign? When did poor Bertilde get herself into trouble with Sergeant Sterk and marry out of the troop? When did little Venn come down with measles, cow-pox and mumps, things every Athron child had before its tenth year?

  During the days of the winter feast the barracks were emptied of all but a few kedran veterans. The younger kedran and men-at-arms went to their home towns and villages; the older men were married and did not live in quarters but in cottages on the estate. Lord Huw freely invited those remaining to live in the Hall until after New Year, but the older women went up only for a couple of nights’ feasting, then stayed in the barracks, celebrating in their own way.

  “Go along, lass,” said Sergeant Lawlor to Aidris. “You have a sweet friend up in the house. You doan want to stay here boozing with the old companions.”

  The sergeant was one of the ugliest women she had ever seen, Aidris decided upon first view, with long arms, a thick neck, eyes like black beads set in a face of crumpled brown leather . . . a walking reminder of that piece of homely wisdom that said a kedran was one that none would take to wife. Yet in a year or two or three she found herself astonished when a new recruit whispered, “My Goddess, yon Lawlor’s face would turn the milk sour . . .”