Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Someone bound her legs together just below the knees. Tightly—she almost fell from the bite of the cord—but, thank God! they had bound them together. Then they took her wrists and corded each one separately, pulling the loops tight into flesh still aching from the metal gauntlets. She groaned, but the priests and priestesses did not stop chanting.

  They crossed her arms over her stomach and tied the cords in back, pulling them until her wrists were pressed, fingers up, at her sides. Then they lifted her and laid her on the altar face down. The stone was cold, hard. The sun was not yet high enough to shine into the grove, and the winds chilled her, striking her wet hair and her skin where it was still damp. She turned her head to rest her right cheek against the marble, and smelled incense again.

  Opening her eyes, she saw that they were censing the altar, or perhaps herself, with an incense-burner on a swinging, clicking silver chain. And still their chant went on…after the silence of the underground chamber, this must be a full ceremonial, a farmers’ ritual in all its trappings, and she less a withholder of information than a sacrificial victim on their altar. Again they had made her a participant in their superstitious rites. At least the incense was not so stifling here in the open air. She closed her eyes and tried once more to hear the free chattering of the birds, the humming of the insects.

  She felt the slippers drawn off her feet. For a moment the chorus paused while Maldron’s deep voice chanted a few words in the priests’ secret language. Then Maldron fell silent, the chorus rose again, and a lash struck sharp against the soles of her bare feet.

  She guessed it was Maldron himself who swung the lash…again…and again. Soon she no longer cared. The leather that struck her feet was a disembodied force, and she was conscious of little, between the blows and her screams, except the constant chanting.

  After the lash, he began to use some kind of rod or thin club. She was aware of only one clear thought: that if he broke her feet he could no longer make her walk. But he did not break them.

  The blows stopped. She lay panting, absorbing the pains that still echoed through her body, feeling her own arm bones pressing into her stomach, and smelling incense and perspiration. Then a sharp blade began an incision in the small of her back.

  I will tell them! I will tell them all! All—but what? He would kill Starwind! Or he would not believe it—he would think it another lie. It would do no good. God! It would do no good.

  She could no longer hear the birds. She tried to concentrate on the pain instead—old Moonscar had told her there was a way, somewhere, of using pain as a ladder to climb above pain. It was a very dark way…she could tell only that the blade seemed to be cutting an angle. Then her skin seemed pulled up and something burning struck the raw wound. She did not comprehend until the next incision started, seemingly very close to the first, that only a tiny corner of her skin had been cut away and the place rubbed with vinegar or salt or wine.

  Perhaps three such incisions…perhaps many. Perhaps she was nearing detachment. She could hardly remember the shape of her own body, and whenever she opened her eyes she saw only meaningless forms and colors. Then another hand grasped hers and pain came into her thumb between nail and flesh.

  If I told him—if I named anyone—who would not love such an infant?—Who can I name? Names? My mother’s old friend…has no wife!—The weavers—who are they, where are they? Farmers’ folk… Thorn—

  Twice during the time he stabbed her fingers she fainted. Once she awakened with the smell of vinegar in her nostrils and wet cloths patting her face. A tube was put into her mouth and she sucked up wine, unthinkingly as a child. Her mind came back sufficiently to understand Maldron had tortured all the fingers on her left hand and one or two on her right. “His mother was a warrior who did not want him,” she said. “No one knows his father.”

  The priest took another finger. Soon she fainted again.

  * * * *

  She awakened the second time of herself. She lay on her side between smooth sheets. They were pleasant, although they did not ease the pain. Her fingers were burning and stiff. The soles of her feet throbbed. She had dreamed someone was doing embroidery in her skin, across her back; and a belt of pain lay there beneath a bandage just tight enough to feel when she breathed in. Still, it was good to lie quietly, being given no new hurts, with a pillow beneath her ear and the warmth of a light blanket surrounding her.

  She opened her eyes. Red sunlight was slanting through a lattice and falling on a woman with coppery hair and a white garment. The room was the same one where Frostflower had first been imprisoned, and the woman was Inmara. Inmara sat sewing pale green cloth. The air smelled strongly of incense and faintly of cooking meat…farmers’ hall were not so large, after all, if the smells of their kitchens penetrated even here.

  After a moment Inmara looked up and saw that Frostflower had awakened. The priestess rose and laid down her sewing. She lifted a cup from the table; she brought the cup to Frostflower. It ws glazed white pottery, with a bronze lid and a thin silver tube in the lid.

  Vaguely remembering that some while ago she had been given wine through such a tube, the sorceress sucked. The liquid was warm and oily, with a strange, salty taste.…

  Not until she had swallowed several mouthfuls did she realize she was drinking meat-broth.

  She choked, spitting out the tube, coughing and spewing the stuff from her mouth. She tried to sit, fell onto her back—awakened the line of pain—rolled to her other side and lay retching and gasping.

  “Frostflower!” The priestess’ voice was not loud. Mock concern—trick concern. Of all farmers, she had almost been ready to trust Inmara.

  “Frostflower, what is it? What’s wrong?” A hand was pressing on her forehead—a soft, warm hand, dry, uninjured…

  “His mother was a warrior who did not want him—I do not know his father.”

  “You must not repeat that lie. You will not be tortured again.”

  “You…will not force me to…to drink meat?”

  “Nothing. Rest now.” Inmara’s hands were busy wiping, wiping Frostflower’s face, wiping the sheets where the broth had wet them. “I should have known you would not want anything immediately on waking. Later—”

  “You will bring it back?” The sobs shook Frostflower’s body and rekindled her sores, but she could not stop sobbing.

  “You ate so little last night… Will you have a little hot mintwater, then, to soothe your stomach?”

  Was it really possible such a voice cloaked so much malice? “You did not know…you did not know we do not eat butchered animals?”

  “You do not…? Oh, sorceress, I am sorry!”

  They had not known! Last night’s bowl of cooked flesh, today’s warm, greasy broth—she could almost have laughed. Yet they had known how to take her power.

  “Will you eat eggs, then? Milk? Fruit?”

  She needed food. Hunger was a dull awareness rather than a healthy craving, but she knew it was there within her. “A little wine… If I could have a little wine? And…perhaps a few carrots? Or asparagus…lentils…anything but flesh, Lady.”

  “Rest.” Inmara wiped Frostflower’s cheeks and held a cloth to her nose. Then she left the bedside. Her footsteps moved across the tiled floor, her voice called softly. There were murmurings, more footfalls. Frostflower was exhausted and drowsed once more.

  The room was twilight when next she opened her eyes. The faint stench of meat was gone, replaced by a stronger fragrance of mint. She stared at her hand, lying near her face on the pillow. Her fingers were thick and white, as thick and stiff as they had felt. She understood at last that each finger was encased in bandages. She began to thump them unthinkingly on the pillow, playing with them—playing with the pain—as if they were new toys.

  Inmara came, helped her to sit, and propped pillows behind her carefully, so as not to press against the small of her back, where the pain was. She noticed she was wearing another loose garment, this one of smooth, heavy silk. (Silk!
but perhaps they did not know…they had not known of the meat. And, this time, she was too weak for protest, no matter how many silkworms had been murdered.) The priestess gave her a small warm cup and she found she could balance it on her right palm, steadying it with the three fingers left whole and unbandaged, and sipping the warm, mint-flavored water through another thin silver tube.

  The sky was still translucent blue behind the black lattice and vines. Inmara lit three oil lamps to keep the chamber light. Then she came and sat beside the bed, feeding the sorceress boiled carrots, tender young asparagus, fine wheat porridge cooked with raisins and peaches.

  And suddenly Frostflower understood the full bitterness of farmers’ cruelty. If she were imprisoned in a stinking cell underground, lying on bare wet straw, her wounds left to fester, and only moldy bread and stale water set out for her if she could feed herself in the darkness—then she could have looked forward even to scaffolding and hanging as a release. But surrounded with reminders that life could still have comforts, even after rape and torture…

  Yes, they are clever, they are cruel beyond anything we have imagined of them.

  “Lady,” she said, “when am I to be hung?”

  Inmara tucked the sheets and blanket closer about her arms and waist, smoothed the pillow and cushioned her hands on her lap. “You need not be hung, Frostflower. If you will tell us who are the child’s parents…”

  Here it was, then—the offer of life, the last temptation a sorceron in her place would ever have thought to fear. Inmara offered not only life, but conversion to farmers’ ways, adoption into a farmer’s household.

  “…Maldron is a good husband, Frostflower…gentle, loving. He has given Enneald children, he gave Wilvara children…with the help of the Goddess, he will yet give me a child. You could bear babes of your own…”

  What else could she have hoped, now? And what sorcerer could she have found willing to sacrifice his own power for her? Wonderhope of Mildrock Retreat? Even if she could bear to have any man touch her again in that way…yet she had suffered perhaps even greater pain of the flesh in other parts of her body since…and in order to bear a child…Wonderhope? No, not Wonderhope—not even Wonderhope, especially not Wonderhope. They had decided so early, years ago; they had never regretted… To approach him now, to tempt him, to beg him, and then perhaps not to be able to bear even his touch—that would have been crueler than any priest’s trick.

  “…You have been through pain enough already for a purification,” Inmara went on; and in the lamplight Frostflower saw that the silk garment they had put on her this last time was either white or very pale bluish-gray. “The remaining rites will be mild, only a little sprinkling with water, and putting on the wreath and necklace. You will need to chant in the public ceremonials, of course; but we will not insist you have a statue in your own chamber. You will have your own food. You need never eat flesh…”

  It should have disgusted her. It did not. Had she stolen Starwind as the farmers believed, she knew she would have revealed his parents in that moment—and the knowledge was as bitter as what had been done to her in the Rockroots. She put the heels of her palms to her wet cheeks. “You said you would not torture me again, Lady!”

  Again the priestess arranged Frostflower’s hands in her lap, wiped her face, held a cloth to her nose. “You do not believe that we…enjoy torturing?”

  “You surround it with your ceremonies—as if I were—as if I were a piece of butcher’s meat for your gods, the gods of your mythology!” Ah, God! How could I have thought of joining the farmer-priests in their superstitions?

  Inmara began to massage Frostflower’s forehead. The sorceress might have jerked away from the priestess’ touch, but not without reawakening the wounds in her back.

  “It is because we find the need distasteful,” said Inmara, “that we surround it with solemnity.”

  “Do you always… All your ceremonies are to cover some distasteful need?”

  Inmara’s fingers moved to the back of Frostflower’s neck…gentle, unbandaged fingers rubbing between pillow and skin; and Frostflower must accept kindness as she had accepted pain: helplessly.

  “The ceremony you witnessed at our woodland altar…did that seem ugly to you, Frostflower?”

  “I am permitted to remember it?”

  “To remember it, among ourselves. Not to reveal it to common folk.”

  The pride of the farmer-priests. “Not ugly, but…disproportionate. So much ritual to clothe your simple lovemaking.”

  “It was our prayer, our consecration to Aeronu, the Goddess of Birth. I have never been able to conceive. With the help of Aeronu, Maldron was trying to give me a child at last.”

  Even the thing that had been done to her in the Rockroots—even that had been meant to be good, a compensation in itself for loss, not a bloody sacrifice that must be made for the sake of children. Otherwise, two sorceri who sacrificed their power and yet did not succeed in getting offspring would have been even more pitiable than a sorceron raped. “It was… Lady, it had a kind of beauty.”

  Inmara’s hands moved to Frostflower’s shoulders. The massaging of a priestess was not so different from that of a fellow sorceron.

  “Is it so painful to return the boy to his true parents? Frostflower, you cannot watch him grow. We will send word through all the Tanglelands, to the eastern and western mountains, if need be, until we find them.”

  “You will search for his parents with your messengers…yet it was necessary to torture me?”

  “Oh, gods!” Inmara’s fingers faltered. She regained her self-control and continued massaging for a moment, then rose and removed the small table with its tray of half-empty dishes from the bedside to the door. She did not return to sit beside Frostflower. She went instead to the window and stood gazing out through lattice and vines at the dark. Almost as Frostflower herself had stood last night, a prisoner gazing out.

  “Yes, it was necessary. As it will be necessary to hang you.”

  Perhaps I could name the weavers of Frog-in-the-Millstone? They would accept Starwind—Yarn and Brightweave would pretend to be his mother and father, if warned—but how to warn them? How tell them to claim Starwind, so that confusion and surprise will not betray them? And even if it were possible to warn them, there would be neighbors to testify that Yarn had not been pregnant, had not grieved for a stolen infant.

  “When?”

  “Soon. Perhaps tomorrow.”

  If they had hung her at once, immediately after the Rockroots, before she had learned that great bodily pain and some measure of comfort were still possible afterward…“And when you do not find his parents in all the Tanglelands?”

  “If that were possible… I would raise him as my own.”

  He would not grow up learning of the One God, or knowing the joys of sorcery and study—he would learn farmers’ superstitions and how to wield them…but he would have comfort in the farmers’ halls, and, with such a mother as Inmara, perhaps even a measure of his own kindness. Perhaps he would follow the example of Maldron’s nameless ancestor and drain more of the marshlands, perhaps even find the mud-clotted body of his mother.

  “Let me live until you have searched all the Tanglelands. Someone may try to claim him who has no right.”

  “I will speak of it to Maldron. But I do not think… Frostflower, you must tell us quickly!”

  So there was nothing more to hope except that her scaffolding would be disembowelment, for the quickest death. Her face was wet and sticky again, tears beginning to drop from jaw to throat, nose filling. She wished Inmara would return with a kerchief, but the priestess was blowing her own nose. God of power! Thorn had not wept even when convinced she must end in the farmers’ Hellbog forever. “Lady…will you…will you bring him to me one more time? Let me hold him one last time?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Again tonight Maldron had wept before falling asleep in Inmara’s arms. Despite his tears, despite the pity he allowed only Inmara to see, she kn
ew he would have forbidden her to take the infant one last time to the sorceress. No one else, however—not even Enneald or Varin, and surely none of the servants—could question the elder wife, who held highest authority in Maldron’s absence. When he rolled from her in his sleep, she rose softly and took the child from his cradle.

  From the old cradle that had been made six generations ago and held most of the family’s sons and a few of the daughters since Terndasen’s time. If the gods permitted her to keep this child, she would name him Terndasen, after that ancestor of her husband.… It had been a mistake to give the babe this cradle, and a place in her own room. She would have all the more pain restoring him to his right parents. The nurse should have kept him during their wait.

  The child began to cry on being lifted. If Maldron heard or woke, he would think Inmara had left her chamber to walk with the infant and still him. Soon the babe quieted, gurgling drowsily in her arms. Raes and Aeronu had meant her for a mother—why had they kept her womb closed so long? She was in her thirty-fifth year—had Aeronu meant this child for her adoption?

  There was no guard at Frostflower’s door this night. The sorceress was too weak, too injured. Would she even be able to walk up the scaffold steps tomorrow? Setting the babe safely to one side, Inmara lifted the bolt and opened the door.

  The sorceress made no sound. Perhaps she was in such another trancelike state as Enneald, Kalda, and Daseron had spoken of finding her in when they came to bring her to the cleansing. Without putting down the baby again, Inmara groped for a candle, held it to the tiny blue constant-wick that burned in Jehandru’s niche before the statue.

  The priestess stood for a few moments, holding the candle and looking down, wondering if the sorceress had died. These atheists from the mountains and edges of the Tanglelands had strange, evil arts; perhaps, even power-stripped, they retained an ability to suicide without weapons. Aye, and would that have been so evil a deed, for a woman in Frostflower’s place? Ointments and bandages could ease only partially the inflamed knife slits in back and fingers or the bruises on feet and wrists. Nothing—except, perhaps, sleep—could ease the thought of scaffold and gibbet. Had Frostflower’s skin seemed so extremely white that first evening, when she was led into the hall? Had her long hair looked so very fine and black, framing her thin, triangular face?