by Alys Clare
Running – trying to run – had screwed tight the pain in his foot until it was all but intolerable, making him weak and faint. Leaning heavily on his gleeve, he forced his legs to move. One step. Two steps. Three. Four.
They came at him out of the impenetrable darkness of the shadows beneath the walls, and he had no warning of their presence. One of them took his gleeve out of his hand, and without its support he fell heavily, into the arms of the other one. He tried to wriggle free, tried to leap away, but his foot would not let him – and, anyway, they were too strong. One went on holding him and the other backed off. But only for an instant; then something hit Morcar with the force of a charging bull and suddenly he was in the air, flying in a smooth arc out over the bank. Then he fell into the filthy ditch and foul, black water closed over his head.
TWO
W
hen I started work this morning, I had not the tiniest inkling that today was going to be the start of something so extraordinary. So much for the skill at reading the future on which I pride myself. I can do piddling little things like saying when it’s going to rain (easy when someone’s taught you how), when a ewe is going to deliver her lambs (again, relatively easy, and pretty much a matter of observation and experience) and reading the sex of an unborn baby (quite tricky, that one, but then I don’t always get it right). But if something really big is looming, I’m as blissfully oblivious as everyone else.
I live with my aunt Edild, who is a herbalist and a healer. I’ve been living with her since my sixteenth birthday back in the summer, mainly because I’m now officially her assistant and there’s so much work to do that it would waste time having to go home to my parents’ house late at night and then return early in the morning. Living with Edild means I get a little extra time in my bed in the morning, and that’s reason enough for me. In fact I love sharing the house with her, anyway, and it’s certainly not because I was unhappy under my parents’ roof. Far from it; I love my family dearly and, once my elder sister Goda had married and left home three years ago, I have nothing but happy memories of life with my clever and efficient mother Essa, my dreamy, precious father Wymond, my stammering brother Haward, my mischievous younger brother Squeak, my baby brother Leir and my Granny Cordeilla, who is a bard and the most wonderful story teller. I love my sister Elfritha, too, although like Goda and me she no longer lives at home. Ever since she was a small child she has wanted to be a nun and last year she got her wish. Now she’s a novice with the Benedictine nuns at Chatteris and, as far as any of us can tell from the few short visits any of us have made, she’s as blissfully happy as if she were already in heaven. The last time I saw her was just after I’d moved in permanently with Edild and we shared a big, silent and slightly self-congratulatory hug because both of us were living the life we wanted.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a nun. It is a hard road, I know. I have looked into my sister’s face, pale, thin and tense inside the unfamiliar white wimple that covers her throat and her bright hair, framing her forehead, temples and chin. I have seen the haunted look in her wide eyes and taken in the dark grey circles around them. I have seen her bite her lip and mutter as she strives to commit to memory the words of new and unfamiliar prayers. I am in no doubt that learning to be a nun is not easy. I had expected all that, and when first I saw my sister in her new life I tried not to let it dismay me. What I had not expected was the laughter. Despite the rigours of the life, despite the huge challenge of living up to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and of spending all your waking hours either praying or working as hard as the lowliest slave, Chatteris rang with laughter. Whatever else they may be, I have had to accept that, in the main, nuns have a light-heartedness and an endearing jollity that make them laugh like children.
I don’t think anyone at home misses me. If they do, I’m only a short walk away. I go back to see them all at least once every week but already they seem to have expanded to fill up the space I left. It makes me sad if I think about it so I try not to.
Life with Edild is hard work but I enjoy it very much. Well, most of the time I do, although it’s only fair to say that there are moments of extreme discomfort. The worst thing is when I have to perform intimate examinations; when, in order to determine what’s wrong with a patient, I have to inspect bits of the human body – male as well as female – that decent folk normally keep well hidden. Edild is relentless, however, and deaf to my protests.
‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in a human body,’ she tells me sternly, ‘and you will never be a healer until you can control yourself sufficiently to look without embarrassment or false modesty at the most secret and private of its parts.’
So I am compelled to take my turn with my aunt when someone comes creeping in, red in the face and trying to pretend they are anywhere but in a healer’s house. In fact it is the shame and the distress of the patient that usually helps me get over my diffidence. This poor soul is in pain, I tell myself, and the nature of the complaint means they probably haven’t had even the small comfort of talking it over with someone else. Then the compassion takes over and I just want to help them feel better.
When I managed to tell Edild this, blushing and stammering as badly as my poor brother Haward, she looked at me coolly and said, ‘You may have the makings of a healer after all, Lassair.’
Edild is not one to overly praise her apprentice.
The other uncomfortable moments are when my aunt takes me down the strange, dark pathways that lead to the mysteries that lie at the heart of our calling. Only a little way down, for I am still fearful and she respects the fact that I’m doing my best. She builds up a good fire in the circle of hearth stones in the middle of her floor, and we sit cross-legged either side of the leaping flames. She mutters her incantations, inviting the guardian spirits to be present, and I listen intently, forming the words in my mind and trying to commit them to memory, for one day when Edild has gone to the ancestors I shall have to do this alone. Then she puts certain herbs on the fire – I’m only beginning to understand why she uses this herb or that for the immediate purpose – and we sit and breathe in the new aromas that twist and spiral up into the air. Sometimes she asks for guidance; when, for example, she is uncertain how best to help a patient. Sometimes she asks for strength, for herself or for me, if we have been drained by a difficult case. Sometimes she just wants to say thank you, for we both know full well that we could not do our work without help.
‘We are but instruments, Lassair,’ she tells me often. ‘The healing gift is bestowed by the spirits and they use us to do their work.’
If I were ever inclined to get swollen-headed because I’m a healer, Edild is very good at knocking me down to size.
The scariest times are when Hrype comes to sit around the fire with us. Hrype is my friend Sibert’s uncle, and he lives with Sibert and Sibert’s mother Froya, who was married to Hrype’s dead brother, Edmer. Sibert is a little older than me, and usually we are good friends. Two years ago I saved his life and he saved mine. It has forged a bond between us. Sometimes we like each other, sometimes not. We are not and, I think, could never be indifferent to each other.
Sibert is a little odd; Hrype is very odd. He has dark blond hair that he wears rather long and his silvery eyes sometimes look as if they’re lit from within. He has high cheekbones and he looks like a king. When the three of us sit around the fire I look from him to Edild and when the light from the flames turns her red-blonde hair to liquid gold, she, too, seems to be alight. I feel very ordinary by comparison. I don’t think even the fiercest firelight could make me glow like that. People say I resemble my aunt. I wish I could believe them.
Hrype is a sorcerer. I realized that some time ago but I only began to understand what it really meant once he started joining Edild and me around the magical fire. He has frightened me several times but, despite the way my heart thumps in terror and the fact that for several nights after he’s done something really spectacular I’m suddenly scared
of the dark, I keep coming back for more. If for nothing else, I can never pass up the opportunity to watch him cast the runes. He keeps them in a small leather pouch that always hangs at his waist. It’s smooth and soft as if it is very old – as indeed it probably is, for Hrype comes from a long line of cunning men. Before he even opens the bag he closes his eyes and descends into a trance. It’s so strange – you can almost see him withdrawing. He goes on sitting there, still as a stone and hardly breathing, but you just know that the essence of him has gone somewhere else. He opens the bag and takes from it a square of linen, its hems neatly sewn. He spreads it on the ground before him, carefully smoothing it out. It is always immaculately clean. Then he picks up the leather bag and holds it in both hands, his long fingers wrapping protectively around it but with a touch so light that it might be full of quail’s eggs. He chants for a very long time and then – and it always makes me jump – suddenly he casts the rune stones on to the cloth.
The stones are beautiful. I have no jewels, nor am I ever likely to have any, but even if someone offered me any I would prefer to have rune stones like Hrype’s. They are pale, translucent green, and he tells me they are made of jade, brought to this land from far, far away by one of his ancestors who voyaged east to find the rising sun. Into each stone had been carved a strange shape whose lines glitter like gold, and Hrype reads their mystic messages as easily as a scholar reads words from a parchment.
Once, unable to help myself, I stretched out a finger to touch the nearest stone. Quick as a snake Hrype’s hand was wrapped round my wrist, holding me in a grip that hurt. I gave a little bleat of pain and he eased the pressure. Then, staring deep into my eyes so that I felt quite unable to look away, he said softly, ‘They are not for you, Lassair. Their power would unmake you.’
Despite my fear of Hrype and having to deal with embarrassing ailments, I am happy. I want to be like my aunt, for as well as being fascinated by her craft I love her independence. She is the only grown woman I know who lives on her own – well, apart from me and I don’t really count – and I envy her that so much. Most of my contemporaries are already settling for this boy or that and quite a few are married with babies. They often look at me pityingly, believing that my thin, boyish body is unattractive beside their curves and that no man would ever want me to warm his bed and bear his children. I don’t want their pity, even when it is kindly meant and not prompted by spite. Any fool of a woman can conceive a child – even I could, for although I am still flat-chested and my hips are as slender as Sibert’s, my courses started some time ago and I know that I am fully mature – but not many are called to be a healer. No; I want to stay here with my aunt until she has taught me all the things I want so much to know.
This morning Edild and I were working on a basket of comfrey root that we had harvested the previous day. Comfrey is such a generous plant; in spring and summer we use its fresh green leaves for healing wounds and knitting broken bones, and mixed in wine it makes a remedy for an abnormal blood flow in women. Today we made sure to set aside some of the root we had collected for drying, so that we would have supplies through the winter, but the majority we intended to use straight away. Like almost all preparations, the potency is greatest with fresh ingredients. Edild was making a decoction. She had boiled pieces of comfrey root in fresh water and now was carefully placing the vessel at the edge of the fire so that it would simmer steadily until reduced by a third. She planned to take some to an elderly man in the village who was suffering from burning in his stomach; Edild had diagnosed ulcers. The remainder of her brew would be made into a syrup and set aside for the first of the winter’s crop of coughs. We could be sure that, living as we did so close to the Fens and their perpetual damp air, almost everyone in Aelf Fen would succumb to the phlegm sooner or later.
I was busy with Edild’s mortar and pestle, crushing the comfrey root and steadily adding little dribbles of water to make a paste. This paste is good for slow-bleeding wounds that are reluctant to heal and I planned to use some in the afternoon on my mother’s cousin’s haemorrhoids.
Edild and I were so absorbed in our tasks that neither of us heard our visitor till she rapped on the door. Edild shot a significant glance at me – as the apprentice, one of my jobs is to answer the door – and, trying not to let my reluctance show, I laid down the pestle, wiped my hands on my apron and, making sure my hair was neat under its white cap, went to see who had come calling.
I opened the door to my aunt Alvela, youngest sister in the brood that includes my father and my aunt Edild. She is actually Edild’s twin, and I suppose they are quite alike to look at even though they are very different in temperament. Edild is level and cool; Alvela tends to lose her head and fall nose-first into panic at the least provocation.
She was in a real state this morning. Before I had got further than, ‘Good morning, Alvela, what can we—?’ she had elbowed me out of the way and, eyes frantically searching, cried, ‘Where’s Edild? I need her! Oh, don’t say she’s not here, she must be here, she must!’
‘I am,’ said Edild coolly, rising gracefully to her feet from her crouching pose beside the hearth. ‘What’s the matter, Alvela?’
Alvela’s face crumpled and tears overflowed from her red-rimmed eyes. It was obviously not the first time she had succumbed to weeping this morning. She threw herself into Edild’s arms and said, ‘It’s Morcar, it’s my boy, my precious boy!’ Morcar was in his mid twenties and therefore hardly a boy, I thought, to anyone but his mother. ‘Oh, Edild, what am I to do?’ she wailed. ‘What is to become of me?’
‘Calm yourself,’ Edild said, somehow managing to give her twin sister a comforting hug and a bracing shake at the same time. ‘Come and sit down –’ she led Alvela to the bench on the far side of the hearth – ‘and Lassair will make you a soothing drink.’ She shot me a glance, nodding towards the pot in which we keep the mildly sedative herbal mix that we prescribe to those whose fears and anxieties threaten to make them ill. I hastened to obey, reaching down a clean mug and checking to see that there was water almost on the boil in the pot suspended over the fire.
‘Now,’ said Edild as Alvela collapsed on to the bench, ‘tell me what has happened.’
Alvela stared at her for a few moments, her mouth working although no words came out. Then she gulped, blew her nose on a soaked piece of cloth, dabbed at her streaming eyes and said, ‘He went to Ely to work on the new cathedral.’ She sobbed again. ‘He’s had an accident, a terrible accident,’ she managed through the tears, ‘and he’s all but drowned!’
‘But not drowned?’ Edild demanded.
Alvela raised her head to stare at her sister. ‘Not quite,’ she acknowledged.
Edild gave her another little shake. ‘Well then!’ she said encouragingly. ‘He’ll probably—’
But Alvela was not ready to be comforted. ‘He’s stabbed through the foot like Our Lord on the cross!’ she cried out, agony in her voice.
What? They’d crucified him? Surely not . . .
Edild, similarly perplexed, glanced at me, her frustration evident in her eyes. ‘Explain,’ she commanded, her arm around her sister’s waist.
The infusion was ready. I blew on it to cool it and handed it to Alvela, who took it with barely a nod and then stared at it as if wondering how it came to be in her hand. ‘It’s very hot so you must sip it,’ I said gently. ‘It’ll do you good, Aunt.’
She gave me a weak smile and did as she was told. She sipped once, twice. Then, haunted eyes back on Edild’s face, she said, ‘He stuck an eel spear in his foot. Then he fell in a ditch. Someone found him – thank God, some monk was hurrying back to the abbey before they locked the gates for the night and heard my poor boy spluttering and gasping.’
‘This monk managed to haul him out of the water?’ Edild asked.
‘Yes, yes, then he went for help and they carried him – Morcar – back to his lodgings on a hurdle.’
‘Then—’ Edild began.
‘Oh, will you s
top interrupting!’ Alvela shouted with sudden, impatient fury. Edild folded her lips on whatever retort she had been about to make. ‘Sorry,’ Alvela muttered. She took a mouthful of her infusion, then another. It seemed to be doing her good. She looked up, first at her sister and then at me, eyes narrowed as if she were assessing our relative strengths. Then she said, ‘A peddler brought word this morning. Morcar lies abed wracked with pain and nearly out of his mind with fever, and if you don’t help him he’ll die.’
THREE
I
think I probably made the herbal infusion too strong, for quite soon Alvela started yawning, and then her body went all sort of floppy, and I had to help Edild get her over to my bed, where we laid her down and covered her with my woollen blanket.
Then Edild shooed me out of the way as she began methodically assembling the potions and medicaments that she required.
‘He’ll need something immediately to bring down the fever,’ she said, reaching for balm mint, cinquefoil, wood sorrel, ‘something to expel the poisons –’ her busy hands found the dandelion, or piss-the-bed as it was known – ‘something to help him sleep –’ dill – ‘and something to clean the wounds in his foot.’ She drew a huge bag of dried lavender from its place on the shelf. ‘Put water on to boil, Lassair,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘and I’ll tell you what you must do.’
I hurried to obey, flying around the small room as my aunt thought up more ingredients that might or might not come in useful and telling me what to do with them. I thought at first that there were so many potions and remedies to prepare that I was going to have to do my full share of the work. She kept saying you and not we, so I amended this and thought instead that I would be doing all the preparation while she went away to think quietly how best to treat her sick nephew.