Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Take the grub,” said Thorn. “I’ll keep him still.”

  Yarn put down her lamp and held out her arms. Thorn let the baby half-roll into them. It was painful to lower her own arms again. She squatted and put one hand around Dowl’s jaws, rubbing his dirty hair with the other. The dog quieted down.

  “We got Golt yesterday,” said Yarn, “to account for any strange noises.”

  “What happened here?”

  “Maldron’s warriors came, about midday. They were searching all the houses. We put Frostflower in Small Spider’s bed with her face to the wall, and told them our daughter had taken very ill. They poked beneath the bed and in the close-room, but did not look at her face.

  “What about Small Spider?”

  “She hid in the cellar while they searched the first two floors. When they went to the loft-room, she slipped up and hid beneath Frostflower’s bed, where they had already prodded. The gods have been kind to us.” Yarn carried the grub to the table and started unwrapping him.

  “Good.” Thorn could have given them the praise they deserved if she herself was less tired, her leg less burned, and Yarn not taking the whole thing so damn…phlegmatically. Smart of them to get that other dog, though. Its bark sounded pretty much like Dowl’s. “How did you know I was going to bring back this bloody mutt?”

  Yarn smiled. “A dog new to a house can be used to explain many noises besides barking.”

  Chumming with sorceri was making sneaks out of them all. “Now the only thing we’ve got to do is keep them from barking at the same time.”

  “My husband will have muzzled Golt by now.”

  The weaver started bringing things down: table scraps for Dowl, kettles of steaming water. Thorn washed herself and buttered her leg while Yarn washed the baby and Brightweave poked its dirty blankets down the close-stool. That was a waste, but they could hardly risk keeping the farmers’ baby blankets around. They had better get rid of Thorn’s purple-and-red clothes, too. Another waste.

  Yarn lent her a night-dress. Except for the makeshift skirt she had wrapped around her trousers a few nights ago, Thorn had never worn a skirted robe. It felt strange—luxurious but dangerous—like wine rubbed on her skin to slow her muscles from the outside rather than the inside. Well, if Maldron’s warriors had already searched the place this afternoon, she ought to be safe here for a while.

  Yarn spooned goatmilk into the baby and the weaver washed the dog in the water Thorn had used, while the swordswoman ate ravenously: warmed-over stew, bread, cheese, raspberries, cool charcoal-filtered water. All this was delay, but there would have been less joy in waking Frost to see them when they were smelly, blood-stained, and hungry.

  There was something else, too. All Thorn’s weariness had dissolved in tension. She had brought back the baby and the dog; but it had not been a clean rescue. She had battered a priestess and left a fellow warrior bleeding and maybe dead. The gods seemed to have been on her side tonight, but they might have been handing her chances to make Hellbog even nastier for herself. For two nights and two days she had been working toward the moment when she could put the grub back into Frostflower’s arms, and now she was half afraid the moment would not repay her.

  She could let the weaver-woman give it to Frostflower instead, but then she would miss…what?

  She wiped her mouth and tried walking up the stairs in her night-dress. How the Hell did people get around in skirts? “You’d better take him up the damn steps,” she told Yarn. “But I’m taking him in to her.”

  Brightweave stayed in the kitchen, holding his own whining mutt. Dowl sniffed at the other dog for a moment, but soon he was bumping around the women’s legs again.

  Small Spider met them at her bedroom doorway. “You’re safe!” she whispered. “You did it! Oh, swordswoman, praise the gods, you’re all safe!”

  Thorn grinned. This was what had been missing. Finally, after all the damn efficiency and self-restraint, someone was showing a little honest enthusiasm.

  “Is she awake yet?” whispered Yarn.

  “No, but—”

  “Go wake her up,” said Thorn.

  The older woman shook her head. “It may not be wise. Sometimes her sleep is like a trance.”

  “Damn it, go wake her up!” Thorn snapped. Small Spider’s reception had made her feel for almost the first time that she had done something worth swaggering about, and she wanted to go in and see Frostflower before the weaver-woman’s everlasting prudence weighed her down again. “She’s been resting for two bloody days—she needs some excitement.”

  Small Spider glanced at her mother eagerly. “I will wake her,” said Yarn, handing the grub back to Thorn.

  When Yarn had gone into the bedroom, Small Spider brushed the baby’s cheeks with her finger. “Oh, isn’t he darling! How did you ever do it, Thorn? Isn’t it wonderful?” Without the girl’s praise to help her through the wait, Thorn would have gone in herself to hurry things up.

  At last Yarn returned. “You can go in now, warrior.” She held back the curtain with one arm and folded the other around her daughter’s shoulder. “We will be here.”

  Thorn entered the room. It was lighted by a candle in the god’s niche above the bed. Frostflower lay propped up on several pillows. She was looking toward the door, and she seemed to have some expression in her face…not hope, not fear, not eagerness…curiosity, maybe, but not as if anything concerned her personally. More as if she was watching a newly-hatched chick and wondering if its down would dry out brown or yellow. Thorn wished she knew what the weaver-woman had told her.

  “Who is it?” said Frostflower. The warrior realized her hair was still dyed and she might look as strange as she felt in a faded night-dress. How much did the sorceress understand of what had been going on around her? Did she even know Thorn had been gone for two days?

  As Thorn hesitated, the dog pushed past her and ran toward the bed, barking and wagging its whole back end loose.

  “Dowl!” The sorceress tried to raise herself a little higher on the pillows. She winced, but smiled immediately afterwards and held out her arms. “Hush, Dowl, hush.” The dog stopped barking and began trying to scramble up onto the bed, while Frostflower patted him with her bandaged hands. She was not laughing, not exclaiming as Thorn had seen her do before when she played with the mutt; but at least there was a hint of pleasure in her face.

  By the gods, soon there was going to be more! If the damn dog could do that much…

  Frostflower looked up again. “Thorn? How… What…?”

  The swordswoman walked quickly across the room. Halfway to the bed she gave the grub a surreptitious poke with one finger. For once, she wanted him to yowl. He obliged.

  Frostflower stopped petting Dowl. The dog licked her arm and then sat with his front paws on the bed, watching the women and thumping his tail. Thorn knelt and held the baby so the sorceress could get a good look at its yelling face.

  The sorceress held out her arms, not practically, as Yarn had done, but reverently. Thorn put the baby into them, keeping her own arms beneath it until it was safely lowered to Frostflower’s lap. Almost at once it stopped crying, blew a spit bubble, and went back to sleep.

  Using one of her good fingers, Frostflower wiped the drool from the corner of its mouth. “How large he’s grown,” she said softly.

  Thorn was glad she had brought him in herself. The weaver-woman would not have known how to enjoy this moment.

  CHAPTER 9

  The sorceress had lain too long in deep slumber; she did not know how long. From time to time she had wakened, and one of her friends had put food and wine into her mouth and attended to her needs before she began again on some technique of the mind…never of the body, her body was too weak and full of hurts…and achieved a dreamless rest that would have honed her power in the old days, but that now she valued only for the forgetfulness it brought. Once, attempting the technique with which she might have been able to enter free travel, she had dreamed she felt her body divi
de in two…she had seemed to be in the upper shadows looking down on herself and on the bed looking up at herself at the same time, and she had wondered if it would have been like that…when she woke, whoever gave her food had been weeping. That was the only time she had dreamed, before Thorn brought Starwind back to her.

  That night, after Thorn brought him back, Frostflower’s blood coursed too quickly for her to use a technique. She no longer wanted to forget, but to be healed. In the old days, she could have gone into a healing trance, speeding her body’s time; now, she could only wait for her body to mend in its normal time. By breathing slowly, she would manage to drift into a natural sleep; she would dream; she would wake, turn her head, see the infant sleeping in the weavers’ old cradle, Small Spider dozing or Yarn watching beside both cradle and bed, and Dowl sleeping curled on the floor, or else standing, his head on a level with hers, watching her. Then she would sleep and dream again.

  Sometimes she dreamed of sliding rocks, of golden beetles with crimson marks like writing on their backs, of icy water trickling over her feet, of a dark cave which was either a loose memory or an old dream she had first dreamed in early childhood, of Windslope Retreat and the various cottages in which she had lived…but in the dreams they were mixed together—stone walls and wooden at once—and different, sometimes small and dungeonlike, sometimes as luxurious as the dwelling of the farmer-priest. Once she and a companion had to carry a pail of unbaked bread over a wide field of gray grass that turned into mud beneath their feet; they were carrying the bread to Thorn, who was sleeping in the grain cellar so that the infant would not wake her if it cried—so much remembrance of reality carried over into Frostflower’s dream—and the companion was either Thorn herself, or Small Spider, or Wonderhope, or a stranger. Most of these dreams should have disturbed her, but vaguely comforted her instead.

  At other times she dreamed of what she tried to forget or feared to imagine while awake—she was walking through an unknown place when she came to a body dressed in red, twitching on a gibbet, and, going forward to speed its time and hasten its death, she saw her own face beneath the red hood; or she was Thorn carrying Starwind through endless Truth Groves, with priests now closing in from one side, now from another, now firing the trees with their torches, and the demons of farmers’ superstition pouring water on the ground to turn it into a Hellbog; or she was on the scaffold again, almost as it had really been, the sword smoking in the brazier while she waited spreadeagled…but this time, instead of being tied to the egg-shaped frame, her knees and upper arms were glued with a paste that was causing her flesh to melt into the wood, and the crowd was filled with sorceri, more and more of her own people each time she looked—until at last an old sorceron stood before her on the scaffold, said “I am God,” and thrust a testing finger up her…

  That was the worst dream; and it came, she thought, more than once. Yet from even this dream she woke strangely calmed, feeling something almost akin to power in the rapid throbbing of her blood through her body. Her loss could never be regained; but she had the child back, and she allowed him to fill all the places where once her own ambitions had been.

  So frail a creature on whom to base her entire will to live…she recognized the danger—a chill, an accident, any of countless childhood dangers could take him, even were there not ten days’ journey between the weavers’ home and the safety of Windslope. But he was no more fragile than the entrance to her own body had proven; and, having died over and over in the hands of the priests, she had used up her capacity for despair.

  Toward morning, the child woke and began to cry. Yarn changed his breechcloth and helped Frostflower put him first to one breast and then the other before feeding him from a spoon. Poor Starwind! Already seven—no, eight days old (how long had Frostflower lain in the weavers’ house?) and he had never yet successfully drunk from a breast…unless the farmer’s old wetnurse suckled him.

  When Starwind slept again, Frostflower decided to practice a trance technique. The night’s dreams had helped her adjust to the idea of living again, but now she judged herself in need of another period of deep, uninterrupted sleep. Starwind’s mouth on her nipples being her most vivid recent sensation, she thought of how she might once have speeded time for her breasts, and found herself wondering, in the unclear thought that preceded sleep or trance, whether, now her body had felt man, she could hasten the coming of her milk…half-forgetful that the same penetration which was meant to engender new life replaced for all time the power to manipulate time.… Passing through the half-dream, she scarcely knew whether she took the branch that led to natural sleep or the one that would have led to trance.

  When she woke, her eyelids orange with the full daylight against them, she was surprised at the decrease of pain in her body. She should not have been; she soon realized that her body had been healing itself for however long she had been here, while her mind, having lost almost all sense of the passage of time, still kept the memory of pain fresh. Now that Thorn had brought Starwind to detach her concentration from herself, the memory was no longer juxtaposed upon the actuality.

  She opened her eyes and saw Thorn sitting beside her. The swordswoman’s hair was indeed brown. It had not been a trick of the shadows last night.

  “Your sleep was comfortable?” said Frostflower.

  “Too damn comfortable. I slept the morning away like a blasted turtle.”

  Frostflower smiled “Or like a sick woman?”

  Thorn grinned back and started to put a flask with a copper drinking-tube to the sorceress’ lips. Frostflower shook her head and tried to sit. Suddenly drinking-tubes were repellent to her—she would drink from a cup.

  The warrior helped her into a sitting position, gave her cool cherry juice, and lifted a pot to a cooking-brazier. Then she returned to sit beside the bed. “Look, Frost,” she began, but paused and took one of the sorceress’ hands before going on. “I wish you’d try to get a little solid meat into you.… All right, don’t worry, it’s only porridge cooking. But—damn it, if we had a tree’s age I wouldn’t even suggest it, but if we’re going to get you back to your retreat before the bloody farmers decide to search the town again, we’ve got to get your strength up.”

  Even from this friend who had risked everything for her and the child, it was hard to take the bare suggestion of meat. “I will be strong enough very soon. I could almost have sat up by myself.” Frostflower pressed her fingers tightly around Thorn’s. “You see? There is almost no pain in them. I will hold the bowl and spoon and feed myself.”

  Thorn shrugged. “I’m slipping out of here tonight to go find that damn merchant and his bloody wagon. I’m taking Small Spider and the dog with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Safer. Probably not by much, but still a little safer. You’re supposed to be Small Spider. If Maldron’s bitches come again before I haul Spendwell back here, the weaver or his wife puts Starwind in with you and you huddle up with him under the blankets and keep him quiet.”

  Frostflower nodded. She had been only dimly aware of the first search, but she understood that Small Spider must have experienced great danger hiding from the warriors. “And the cradle?”

  “They’re going to bring up a box for him instead, make him a bed out of sick-room rags. Clean, of course.”

  “Bring the merchant quickly, Thorn. I will be strong enough.” Strong enough, perhaps, even to look at him and thank him.

  As Thorn stirred the porridge, Frostflower began to pick the bandages from her fingers. Her nails were still tender; but after she had dabbed some dry blood away with saliva and the cleaner strips of bandaging, they looked very well healed. She was proud of the way she handled her bowl and spoon.

  Thorn watched her musingly. “You’re really sure you’ve lost your powers?”

  “Don’t hurt me, Thorn.”

  The warrior tugged at a piece of cloth covering the garnet in the pommel of her dagger. “Look, Frost, your God seems like a pretty good sort. Why would he tak
e away your powers when the damn thing wasn’t your fault?”

  It was painful to talk of her loss, even to think of it; but Thorn seemed ready to listen and perhaps be convinced. As long as Thorn clings to her superstitious belief in the farmers’ gods, thought the sorceress, she will think herself damned to everlasting torture. I can do so little to thank her; if I can persuade her of the truth, free her of that ugly fear…but how to begin? “God did not take away my powers. It was Maldron who took them, using…that unfortunate young man.”

  Thorn grunted. “I see why your God doesn’t punish that motherpricking farmer—it’d be a couple hundred gods or so to one. But why take it out on you?”

  How could she explain without making the Infinite seem cruel? “It is not cruelty, Thorn. It is the order of creation.… God is female and male in the same being, and all things are the offspring of the divine union. Either we can imitate God in the union that creates offspring, or we can imitate to a very small degree God’s control over creation; but we cannot do both.”

  “Frostflower, as far as I can see, your God’s been working pretty damn well with some of mine to get us through. Most likely yours even did the convincing—I don’t know why my gods would have wanted to help me out for my own sake. That doesn’t seem as if he’s—she’s?—angry with you, does it?”

  Frostflower sighed and put the half-empty bowl down carefully in her lap. Her fingernails were beginning to ache, and her throat muscles to swell. “It is not anger. The order of creation is for the good of all. If we could imitate the powers of both creation and control, we would grow proud.”

  “You haven’t imitated the powers of creation. It only happened once, and it didn’t take any bloody effect.”

  The sorceress blinked, trying to hold a tear in her eye so that Thorn would not see it. “To imitate control, a person must act alone, individually, as she or he was born. When the individuality is once broken, it can never afterwards be restored.”

  “That’s not much control your God has over creation, if he can’t bend one of his own rules sometimes.”