Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  His hold was loosened—she broke away with a sob. “You are cruel, farmer!”

  His voice grew hard again. “You have not yet felt my cruelty, sorceress.” She heard him return to the door and open it. “But I show you two last kindnesses. I do not ask you to name any who may have helped or befriended you or listened to your sacrilegious teachings—I ask you only to name the child’s parents. And I will send you no food this morning.”

  He left, bolting the door again. Although she could not have looked at another bowl of butchered meat, this promise to send her none seemed the greatest threat he could have offered her—as much as to tell her she must expect great pain this same day, as if he had forbidden her to soil his property with her vomit. Or…perhaps by the afternoon he meant to have her on the scaffold, her stomach empty so that it could be filled with the small, sharpened stones. Perhaps before evening she would be hanging from a gibbet, with insects eating her flesh and the stones working their way into her bowels.…

  She crept back to the bed and covered her face with her hands. Searching for other thoughts than scaffold and gibbet, she remembered she had never entered the trance of cool breathing, which would have restored the time she forfeited from her life when she identified with Burningloaf’s iron nails to rust them. Stripped of her power, she could not now have recovered that time, even if there had been any purpose in seeking it. But to go through the old exercises for a few moments, perhaps to enter something like the trance, might at least help her gain some measure of detachment-in-unity.

  She lay slowly flexing and relaxing her muscles. For a long time this continued to remind her that soon her body would be injured and bleeding, no longer responsive to her control. The dull sense of hunger, too, made her muscles seem already weak and sluggish.

  But at last her mind began to empty of fear. Whatever was to happen eventually, she was slipping for now into the state of timelessness, when the past was one small circle of all events both recent and long ago, the empty future seemed suspended forever, and the present was an all-encompassing blanket floating in nothingness. Gratefully, just before her mind took the branching off into normal sleep, she began to vary the rhythm of her breaths in the pattern that would have carried her, if she still had her power, into the trance…and she entered something much like it, although without its restoring quality; for, as her mind slid the last few rungs into unconsciousness, she felt…or dreamed she felt…a coolness as of soft snow in her lungs.

  Had she entered the trance of cool breathing in earnest, and not as a nostalgic exercise to make her wait more endurable, she would have chosen a time beforehand for her awakening, or set a small loop of the outer senses to act as a warning snare and pull her back to consciousness at any disturbance in her surroundings. But she had neglected both these precautions as being pointless and, indeed, no longer possible for her. She had hardly expected to achieve something so like the real trance. She did not wake until she felt a sharp prodding on her cheek.

  Opening her eyes, she found Maldron’s yellow-haired wife, Enneald, bending above her, prodding her cheek with one long fingernail. “Ah!” said Enneald. “You see, she is alive.”

  Two others were in the room: a yellow-haired girl just emerging from childhood, and a slender dark-haired youth not much older. Both wore farmers’ white. The girl, by her sharp features and light hair, would likely be Enneald’s daughter. The boy did not resemble Maldron, or either of the wives Frostflower had seen. Perhaps he was a nephew, or the visiting son of some other priest.

  “Is she strong enough?” said the boy.

  Enneald pulled Frostflower’s wrist, and the sorceress obediently sat. “I say she is strong enough,” remarked the priestess. “Inmara will have the final judgment.”

  “I never knew they could sleep so soundly. Are you sure she’s power-stripped?” The girl who appeared to be Enneald’s daughter pinched Frostflower on the arm and then pulled back her hand and stood waiting as if to see what would happen.

  “I am quite sure, Kalda. Your father saw to that as soon as he caught her.”

  “We should not be speaking,” said the boy in a voice that must only recently have turned deep.

  Kalda giggled. “Oh, that’s not until we get into the Passage, Daseron!”

  Daseron glanced at her with disgust. “Thank the gods you’re not old enough to come into the Truth Grove.”

  Kalda made a face at him, then pinched Frostflower’s arm again. “Look at her! Oh, look at her, she’s afraid of the Truth Grove! You’re afraid, aren’t you, sorceress?”

  Had her expression shown fear, then? Frostflower was surprised. The calm of her sleep had not yet worn off, and she felt not so much frightened as bemused by the girl’s prattle. “Take your enjoyment teasing me now,” she said, looking steadily at Kalda. “It seems you must remain curious about this Grove, while I am to know its truth.”

  “Now see what you’ve done?” said Daseron. “Aunt Enneald, if you don’t keep her quiet—”

  “Hush, all of you!” Enneald seemed to relish the chance to claim authority. “Sorceress, you will not speak except to tell us from whom you stole the child. Daseron, think of your own tongue before you scold your cousin.” And to Kalda the sorceress heard Enneald say softly, “Prove to them how nearly grown you are, dear.”

  So had Silverflake and old Moonscar used to admonish Frostflower and Puffball when they were children. So, perhaps, might Frostflower herself someday have admonished Starwind. Silverflake at her sharpest-tongued had not been as unpleasant as Enneald; nor, Frostflower hoped, had she and her sib been so dislikable as Kalda…yet it was strange to see farmers behaving among themselves so nearly like sorceri, so nearly like those few common folk whose family life sorceri could sometimes witness. Perhaps, to one another, Enneald, Kalda, and Daseron seemed as affectionate in their bickering as Silverflake, Moonscar, and Puffball had been at Windslope; or Brightweave, Yarn, and Small Spider in their home at Frog-in-the-Millstone. No doubt it was to keep Frostflower from seeing this that silence had been enjoined on them.

  Daseron bound a leather cord around her wrists, pulling it until it pressed down on the bones and caused a tingling to spread towards her fingers. She wondered if he were inexperienced and clumsy, or if her torture had already been begun.

  Looping another cord between her bound wrists, he led her out through the passageway and into the long, echoing hall. Enneald walked ahead of them, Kalda behind, and two warriors who had been waiting in the passage walked one at each side of her. Had they expected a power-stripped and unfed sorceress to overcome Enneald and Daseron?

  Behind the dais at the end of the long hall, they came to a curtained doorway, carved with gilded symbols from the farmers’ mythology. At either side of the door stood an oil lamp on a stand. Kalda stepped forward, silent now, but not quite able to repress a smile of anticipation. Taking one of the lamps, she pulled the curtain aside until the rest of the procession should pass through. Enneald took the other lamp and led the way into a narrow, tiled passage.

  Frostflower kept her gaze straight ahead and tried to let no muscle of her face move as she passed close to Kalda, but out of the corner of her eye she saw the child grin. Both warriors followed immediately behind the sorceress. The passage grew dusky as the young farmer-priestess let the curtain swing down.

  Ten paces from the doorway, they began to descend a long flight of stairs. So at last they were taking her into their dungeons. The remnants of Frostflower’s sleep-calm were long dispelled. Now and again she shivered and could hardly stop; and she guessed that her pale skin must be even more pale. She was glad of the semidarkness, glad that not one of her escorters could see her face and that only the swordswoman directly behind her might notice the quivering of her shoulders. Soon she would lose even that degree of solitude.

  Yet the descent was not unlovely. The wall mosaics continued the entire way, clean and glistening, with numerous metallic tiles which glanced in the lamplight. The steps, which Frostflower t
hought to be granite, were worn but easy to descend: dry, shallow, and broad. The air, though close, was fragrant, the incense growing stronger as they went deeper.

  Sorceri who had actually seen farmers’ dungeons rarely survived. Frostflower and her people had never guessed, speculating in Windslope Retreat, that farmers might design their underground places for their own delectation rather than for the discomfort and disgust of their prisoners. At first the unexpected beauty was vaguely reassuring; but soon Frostflower understood from it how much beneath consideration the farmers held her people. Far from being the focal point against which all their torments of mind as well as body must be aimed, she seemed a passing intruder in their home, worth little special effort to break her will.

  The stairs widened into a circular chamber, perhaps twelve paces across. Inmara waited near the center of this room, arranging cloths and brushes on two marble tables. Beyond her was a second arched doorway. Many large hanging lamps illumined the tiled walls and floor, while the air was heavy with incense smoke that curled from braziers and moved only slightly with the slow draft between the doorways. Steam rose from basins around the walls. The ceiling was crossed with thick, gilded beams, and appeared to rise in a high dome above them.

  Enneald went to Inmara and spoke softly with her for a few moments, nodding back towards the sorceress. Inmara approached, took Frostflower’s leash from the youth Daseron, and untied her bonds, feeling her wrists carefully. Then with the soft pads of her fingertips she touched the prisoner’s cheek. It was not so objectionable, somehow, to let this woman see her fear, and Frostflower lifted her gaze to Inmara’s large gray eyes.

  “We are to cleanse you thoroughly here,” murmured the priestess. “It is no more than what all of us undergo every season and before our greatest ceremonials, except that we are not lifted from the floor.”

  She led Frostflower to the middle of the room and lifted away the single cloaklike garment which had been her only covering since the old nurse put it on her last night. Here the floor sloped gently downwards on all sides to a copper grating. Inmara stationed her almost upon this drain and fitted silver (or silver-coated) gauntlets about her wrists, tightening each bracelet in turn with an attached screw.

  The warriors came forward and hooked chains into the hinges at the back of each gauntlet. They drew the ends of the chains up over metal grooves embedded in the beam above, and continued to pull, jerking a little, until Frostflower’s toes no longer brushed against the floor.

  “Except that we are not lifted… Except…” Ah, Lady, you have never been hung by your wrists!

  The warriors secured the chains on the other side of the beam, and the priestesses began to scrub her with cloths and brushes. They worked thoroughly and methodically, beginning with her arms and elbows, moving downwards to her scalp, hair, face and ears, throat, shoulders…and so on, little by little. She was dimly aware, from the few directions muttered by Enneald, that Kalda must be handing the women their various brushes, hard- or soft-bristled, thin or large and flat, as needed; and from time to time Daseron or one of the warriors dashed a basin of cold or steaming water over her. Soap stung her eyes and her reopened prick-wounds; and even the less tender areas of her skin burned with the pressure of the bristles. If farmers themselves indeed underwent this harsh cleansing several times yearly, she might almost have pitied them. Her feet remained so near the floor that only through an effort of her overstrained will could she keep herself, once satisfied it was impossible, from straining further to reach a footing and take a little of the pressure from her upper body. The bracelets that had seemed merely snug when Inmara first adjusted them, were unbearably tight now. Her arms and shoulders, her very ribs and breasts, ached tensely in their dislocation. Her hands felt at once numb and about to burst. Her fingertips were nearly on a level with the bottom of the ceiling beam—when she pressed them against the wood, it sent a sharp pricking through her hands; but she continued to press upwards, seeking some forgetfulness of her other pains by inflicting on herself what new pangs she could.

  The rasping of hard bristles over the soles of her lifted feet, which would otherwise have been a torment in its own right, was welcome as a sign that the cleansing was almost done and she might hope soon to be let down.

  They combed and braided her hair and bound it up on top of her head. They tied some kind of soft cloth slippers upon her feet, and then at last the warriors unfastened the chains from the beam and lowered her again to the floor. The cloth slippers soaked up water that had not yet drained through the copper grating; and, as her arms were let down, nausea filled her stomach and a sharp throbbing her head. The smell of incense had become close and stifling, the steam wetly smothering. When Enneald unhooded the chains from the gauntlets, Frostflower swayed and would have fallen, but Daseron caught her. One of the priestesses threw another garment over her, soft and thick and dun-colored instead of brown.

  Handling her through the cloth, the warriors took her to the wall and sat her on a bench. Another table stood near, with its basins and brushes. Inmara came, drew Frostflower’s arms through the sleeve-slits in the garment, and unscrewed the bracelets. The sorceress glanced at her own whitened wrists between swollen, discolored hands and arms, and looked away again. Touching the skin gently, Inmara eased left hand and wrist into a basin of warm water. The sorceress winced as a brush struck her palm.

  “Tell us now,” murmured Inmara. “Who are his parents?”

  “I have told you.”

  “You have named a warrior who could not have been pregnant long enough to have borne him. Frostflower…we have only prepared you, here, for a Ritual of Truth.”

  The others—Eneald, the youth, Kalda with her grin, the two warriors—were putting away the rest of the cleansing implements. They did not seem to be listening. Perhaps Inmara had been instructed to press the weary question again…or perhaps she sincerely pitied the sorceress.

  “Lady,” Frostflower murmured, “have you never thought that a sorceron who can turn a young person old might also…might also grow a newborn thing quickly into a youth?”

  Inmara’s brush faltered. “What do you mean?”

  Almost the sorceress had betrayed Starwind to those who might abhor a child grown by time manipulation in the mother’s womb. “If…if I were to tell you, Lady, that Dowl…my companion dog…five days ago was a newborn pup?” It was not true—Dowl had lived five years, growing in his own time; but, as Frostflower had chosen her words, it was not a lie, either; and it might show her how farmers would accept the truth of Starwind’s birth.

  Inmara put down her brush and massaged Frostflower’s fingers in the warm water. “We do not question you about Dowl, Frostflower. Nor will I speak of what you have told me. If…if Maldron knew the dog to be sorcer-grown, he would decide it must be killed.”

  Thank God I did not barter Starwind’s life to escape a few moments of pain! Thank the priestess for warning me!

  Inmara finished washing her hands and wrists, looped a braided cloth cord loosely about them, and helped her to her feet. They have not been clever, thought the sorceress; they have left me already too weak to endure much more.

  She did not notice the order of the procession as they led her out. She did not at first realize they were ascending the second stairway, not the one down which they had come. Vaguely she remembered that Kalda was to be left behind and that a while ago she would have been glad the mocking girl should witness no more; but now she did not turn to see how far Kalda might follow.

  At the top of the passageway, fresh air cleared her head a little, and she looked around. They had emerged in a garden. The flowers were not oppressively fragrant, as the incense had been; the splashing of a fountain might have been pleasant if it had not reminded her of basins of water dashing over her. She glimpsed gray, enclosing walls far the right and left, and blue sky above. This was hardly the dark torture chamber of her own people’s imaginings; yet its menace was all the keener, as if she alone were forbidden to
enjoy such beauty while in the very midst of it.

  A small grove of fruit trees waited…she could no longer judge how many paces distant, but the trees looked small enough to hold in her hand. She heard a faint chanting, a farmers’ chanting, and realized it came from the grove. She shivered and tried to concentrate instead on the birds’ calls. The birds—robins and thrushes, swallows and wrens—they might look on, but they could not understand, could not care, perhaps did not realize how some human creatures were hurting another. If they noticed, they must think it some silly human game. The birds, the insects, the small animals that must be hiding even in a farmer’s private garden—all these would continue their own lives unconcerned with what happened to her or with what the farmer-priest who claimed to own their land did on it today.

  As she walked, her feet unsteady in the wet slippers and parts of her body still damp beneath the cloth, a wasp lighted on her garment and crawled unconcernedly toward her arm. She watched it until one of the warriors noticed it and lifted a hand. “Don’t kill it,” said Frostflower.

  “You’re not to talk, sorceress.” But the warrior only brushed the insect away. Go, small creature, thought Frostflower, gazing after it until her eyes lost their focus. The small creatures were all she had left to help her achieve some kind of detachment-in-unity.

  The procession reached the grove of fruit trees, Inmara supporting rather than leading the sorceress.

  Maldron waited in the grove, standing at a black marble altar; and eight or nine young people, all in farmers’ white, stood behind it, chanting. The priestesses and Daseron joined them, and that made…why should Frostflower count them? She had not realized he had so many children…or nieces and nephews…or wives and sisters and younger brothers.…

  He came around the altar. He alone seemed not to be chanting. Looking down at her, he unbound her hands (will they never have done tying me and untying me as if they feared I could spread my arms and fly from them?) and lifted off her garment. She began to shudder and could not stop, dared not glance up again, dared not glance at any part of his body beneath his long white tunic. She closed her eyes.