Firethorn

by Sarah Micklem

  Yet he was jealous. I smiled and put my palm flat on his chest, resting my fingertip in the notch of bone at the base of his throat. “You don’t care?”

  “Not a whit.” He gritted his words between his teeth, and when he kissed me, he bit. I bit him back. He gathered me up and turned me under him. He hooked his arm under the crook of my knee, and I raised my hips to take him in.

  But he tarried to look me in the eye. “I feared I’d lost you. I looked everywhere, and you’d vanished.”

  “I found my way back.”

  “I thought Hazard Chance had taken you as quickly as she gave you.”

  “It was Ardor who brought us together, not Hazard,” I said.

  “No,” he said, taking a fistful of my hair, “you are Chance’s blessing on me, to preserve me through dangers and bring me fortune in war. You are my luck.”

  It was true, then. I’d been taken for a warrior’s Chance-given trinket. I’d been wrong to flatter myself that he wanted something more of me than an amulet to hang about his neck. The tenderness I thought I’d seen, the care he’d taken to seek me when I was lost—it was his own skin of which he was fond, not mine. I said, “So you can die in your bed?”

  Sire Galan never answered. He buried himself in me, and the sound he made seemed wrenched from him, pulled up by the very root. I lay under him as still and silent and cold as he’d lain not long before. But the more I retreated, the more he pursued. He wouldn’t leave me be until I’d turned on him as fiercely as he came after me.

  Before he spent himself, he sighed talisman into my ear. Then he drifted away into sleep and left me far behind.

  When the Sun rose and Sire Galan saw the bruise blooming on my cheek that he’d planted with his blow the night before, he fed me a few honeyed words and promised me a gift. He got sour answers from me. I was in no mood for his charm or his presents. I draped the end of my headcloth to cover the bruise as well as I could.

  Sire Galan sent Spiller to look for the pots I’d left on the cliff and took me to the market. Sire Alcoba came with him; he had a purseful of coins that he tossed in the air, saying he’d buy either a blade or a sheath, depending on what caught his fancy first. They were followed by their armigers, Sire Rodela and Sire Buey, and behind them the bagboys, Noggin and Fetcher. Noggin took my arm, for Sire Galan had told him to look after me. I soon learned to keep my distance from Sire Rodela, who nudged me into a puddle at every chance. I walked behind Sire Buey instead. He was a stolid fellow, quite unlike his master, and marched in a straight line regardless of the footing.

  The market ran along both sides of the south road, under arcades built of poles roofed with waxed linen, reed mats, or leather. The morning mist turned to a fine rain, and we crowded close under the awnings.

  As far as I could tell, everything was for sale in this market except the wind. They even sold water. Half the horizon brimmed with water, yet none in sight was drinkable, so water was hauled in barrels on oxcarts from the wide river a morning’s ride to the south, upstream of the delta marshes that soaked alternately in freshwater and salt; drudges lined up with pots and casks and buckets and skins to carry it away. Across the road from the water sellers were the sellers of wood; next to them were drudges sitting on the ground with a few eggs or a brace of pigeons or a heap of turnips and onions on a cloth in front of them. Farmers and goodwives, free to do as they pleased now that the harvest was in, came to sell when they heard that a colewort in the Marchfield fetched as much as a goose would at home—and stayed, turning their hands to laundering or their backs to carrying, only to find their money went faster than it came, no matter how tight they drew their purse strings.

  The merchants of luxuries arrived daily from Ramus or from places much more foreign, to judge by their strange faces, with skin very fair or very dark, and their stranger garb. They brought pickled quail eggs, wine from the skirts of the Crags, canopied beds and carpets, a thousand things, just so a cataphract might fancy he ate and drank and slept at home. The Blood spent freely, thinking they would soon be rich with plunder, or else past need of riches.

  We stopped at a clothier’s stall, one of the best, which had a red canopy over three tables piled with fine-worked cloth. Sire Galan bought me a scarf green as new willow leaves, fringed with gold thread. He wanted me to put it on there and then, and pulled off my old headcloth. I pushed his hands away and quickly tied the new one myself, so it covered the bruise and wrapped around my neck. Now I was marked with his colors. The blue of my dress looked gray against the willow green.

  Sire Alcoba leaned on a table, watching us. “I’ve never seen hair that color,” he said to Sire Galan. “Even her eyebrows and lashes are red as fox fur. You should bid her pluck her brows, keep it hid.” He raised his own eyebrows as I flushed. “Where do you suppose they breed her kind?”

  Sire Galan turned to me. “Do your parents have the same coloring?”

  He’d never questioned me about my family before. I was pained that he asked now, so idly, to please a friend; and it was an old wound he struck upon, because there was no answer to give him. “I can’t tell,” I said, “for I remember neither father nor mother.” I’d dreamed of my father in the Kingswood, and his hair was reddish brown—but I didn’t see fit to mention it.

  “That boy, your cousin, is flax haired. But what of your brothers and sisters, or your other cousins?” This question was not so idle. Sire Galan chased after some scent.

  “No one else in the village has red hair, and let that be an end to it!” I said.

  “You see?” said Sire Galan, as if I had driven home some point. “Wherever Chance sows lucky ones, there they spring up. They are Hazard’s breed, and father and mother have less to do with it than you might think.”

  Hazard again, and now Hazard’s breed. Let him think so. I should be glad he believed I was made of some finer mud than other drudges. But I wasn’t glad; I was galled.

  The clothier hovered nearby, watching us. His hands alighted first on one stack of cloth, then another. When we’d entered the stall, he had begged pardon of the cataphracts for having nothing fit for them; his cloth was ill made; he knew they were used to better. Merchants always bargain this way with the Blood, claiming their goods are too poor while asking prices too rich. Sire Galan did not seem to notice, as I did, how the merchant grew by degrees less obsequious; he offered us a piece of wool pulled from the bottom of a pile—would do excellent well for a dress, he said. It was dyed a vivid green, much too yellow.

  Sire Galan might have bought it, but I shook my head and said, “See how this was woven by a slattern! It’s loose everywhere except where it’s too tight. And I know this dye. It will fade in the wash like a painted face. It is a bawd’s gaud and I will not wear it.”

  Sire Alcoba said to Sire Galan, “Whether your sheath is Hazard’s breed or not, it’s clear she was born a vixen. I believe you’re outfoxed. You gentled her only last night, and now she bites again.”

  Sire Galan took my arm. “She’s my own sweet vixen,” he said.

  Sire Alcoba laughed and called him besotted, and Sire Galan smiled back. But when we left the shelter of the shop he dropped my arm and walked ahead again.

  To be in such a crowd, and all strangers, was strange to me. We could not help but rub elbows and tread on toes. Low made way for high, low waited upon high, low stood patiently in the mizzling rain while high stood under the awnings. As for Sire Galan and Sire Alcoba, they might have been strolling down any market lane in Ramus. They met friends and stood in the road talking, never mindful that others had to step around us. They met acquaintances, and bowed and doffed their caps; they met enemies too, I suppose, for they doffed their caps with one hand while keeping the other on their swords—very politely. In the Marchfield the clans kept the peace or suffered the king’s displeasure, and even a young hotspur took care not to give offense by staring too hard at another man, or walking between two friends on the street, or forgetting to offer a greeting or ask a by-your-leav
e upon parting, or committing any of a thousand small discourtesies that might provoke an edged answer.

  Amidst all these men were many women, more than I expected to see in an army camp. Most would have looked at home around the village well, or scraping pots in the Dame’s kitchen: a goodwife selling a few leeks, a worn-out drudge with a bundle of laundry bigger than she was and two children clutching her skirts.

  Then there were the whores, enough of them to fill a town of women. Some trawled the crowd, flashing their lures: striped skirts, crude as sacking or sumptuously fine, and all covering much the same wares, no doubt. More harlots could be found down at the end of the market road, across from the armorers and too close to the stink of the tanners. The better quality of courtesans had their own pavilions, set back from the road and well guarded.

  Other whores sat on blankets beside the road. When a man came along, they’d close a little curtain hanging from the awning to screen them from passersby—if they bothered with the curtain. One such blanket bawd crossed glances with me as she drew the curtain behind a new customer, who was already fumbling at his laces. I looked down quickly. When I looked up next, the curtain was closed. All the shame was on my part—in her look there’d been nothing but weary indifference. Her pander was there, slouching against a post; he had four or five other women as well, sitting in a row along behind him, wearing his blue and black stripes. He saw me looking and tipped his coxcomb cap, kissing the air at me. I spat on the ground and turned my back.

  Such a crop of flesh, such a harvest of shame: I couldn’t avert my eyes for long. While Sire Galan saw to the mending of a gauntlet at an armorer’s stand, I stared at the whores.

  I’d seen a whore only once before. She was a peddler’s woman, come to our village on the mountain road. She’d whitened her face with a little starchroot and reddened her lips, but still she was as ordinary as a turnip, neither homely nor beautiful, like half the wives in the village. The peddler carried a big sack of goods for the women, and she had her little one, you might say, for the men. His sack was full of shells such as you could pick up for free along the seashore; in the mountains they are prized for making beads and amulets. Her sack was empty—but which do you suppose fetched the highest prices? The women threw stones at her until she fled. The peddler shrugged his shoulders and hawked a few more trinkets, knowing full well, I imagine, that his doxy would do a fine business in the fields, out of sight of the wives. She left a gift behind too: the canker, which visited many a marriage bed and is stubborn to cure.

  I despised whores; but I feared them more, as I feared the bad luck that put them in a striped skirt.

  I was surprised to see these women, the drudges and the drabs, but more amazed still to see women of the Blood, arm in arm with a cataphract or an armiger, come promenading down the market road. They couldn’t walk unless they had an arm to lean on, because the high wooden pattens they wore strapped to their slippers to keep them out of the muck also made them teeter and mince along.

  Sire Pava’s wife had not been such a work of artifice. She’d never seen Ramus, and had only hearsay to go on when she stitched her clothes or covered her hair. These dames were from the very wellspring of fashion. Their faces were pale with powder, colorless except for their eyes and the clan marks tattooed on their cheeks; they plucked their eyebrows and hair so that their foreheads should be smooth and white as new-laid eggs, and pinned thin veils to their headcloths to allow a glimpse of this smoothness, this whiteness. Dresses of velvet lined with rabbit fur or of brocade heavy with gold thread hugged their breasts and gathered about their hips to show the curve of their bellies. They held up their skirts in front and trailed them behind in the mud. After my years in the Dame’s workshop, I could not help but tot up the hours of spinning, weaving, dying, and stitching in their garments, the labor wrought into every muddy fold.

  This, then, was beauty, not some milk-fat cow girl with her cheeks reddened from the Sun like the queen of the village fair. Beauty might flick a glance over me, and find me beneath notice; beauty eyed Sire Galan and found him pleasing.

  And beauty was also for sale in this market, it seemed. We met a man of the clan Ardor with his daughter on his arm; she was slim as a reed, but her dress made much of what little figure she had. Her hair fell to her thighs, twisted in a net dotted with pearls. She kept her eyes downcast as her father spoke of her. “She’s the last of seven daughters,” he said. “Was there ever a man so unfortunate, to sire such an ugly child and have no dowry left to make her face seem sweeter?”

  Sire Alcoba said the maiden’s skin was as luminous as the pearls in her hair, and Sire Galan said her behavior was perfect in modesty and several other things that I could see were all too true.

  Her father said, “To be sure, her skin is fine and her virtue unsullied, and yet I could wish she were not so very plain and so very thin. A man would have to overlook her face and figure. Still, she’ll make a fine mate; she will bear.”

  “It is not her face but her dowry that is plain,” Sire Alcoba said gallantly.

  She was not plain at all. She peeped at Sire Galan from under her lowered lids, a look both shy and a little sly. I was not the only one to find that no other man in the crowd overshadowed him. His shoulders were wide, his hips were narrow, and his green kidskin surcoat fit well enough to prove it. He wore white linen around his brown throat, and long boots over his long legs. I stood behind him, and couldn’t see his face, but I knew what I would see: a smile, not too broad, nor strained, nor insincere—a bit knowing, perhaps, but never enough to be offensive—made by a fine pair of lips, the upper more curved, the bottom more full; a look that alighted, considered, but couldn’t be said to linger too long for courtesy or good sense—and burned just the same, igniting a blush on those white cheeks. He knew his sway—had reason to know it well, I could see—but didn’t seem to trouble himself to use it. It was no small part of his charm that he bore it so lightly.

  His beauty was a blade and we would be parted by it. If he were unsightly, I would not have to see these glances from under lowered lids, or the bold stares, of two or three dames we’d met on the way, that dared him to make a cuckold of the man on their arm; or, worst of all, those looks that spoke too clearly of remembered intimacy. But if he were unsightly, he might wear longer but not so well.

  I stared down at my bare feet in the cold mud, wondering: Why, then, had he exerted himself for me? Come back, when we were on the road, to cajole me out of a sullen humor? Barbered Sire Rodela for me? Ridden to find me when I was lost? If I was not mistaken in him, let him turn now and give me a look, a speaking look, for all to see.

  Let him give me even a glance.

  Sire Alcoba clapped the father on the shoulder and walked him away, with a nod to Sire Galan, saying, “Perhaps you know my wife’s cousin? She married Sire Gambade dam Caracoler by Sagitta of Ardor some five years past …”

  As she was led away, the daughter turned her head, not enough for another peep, but enough to show her profile: a delicate gem.

  Then Sire Galan turned and looked at me, still wearing his smile.

  “Let’s to the cobbler,” he said to me. “Winter is setting in and you must be shod.”

  He would do the same for his horse.

  That evening I washed out my old headcloth in a bucket of costly water. The shoemaker had made me wipe my feet before he would take my measure, and offered me nothing to clean them with, not so much as a cup of water to rinse them, so my old linen had to do. The more mud I’d wiped off, the dirtier I’d felt. I hadn’t thought to be ashamed of my feet before. My last pair of shoes wore to pieces in the Kingswood, well into winter. I had endured the cold and the chilblains until, slowly, I’d cobbled myself a new pair of feet with soles of horn and toes tough as roots, numb to cold and impervious to stony ground. Now I saw how my feet were splayed, knobbed, cracked, roughened, how dirt had gone under the skin, out of reach of a rag and spit. Unfit for shoes. A drudge’s hooves.

  N
evertheless, I had two pair of shoes now. The tough brogans would be ready in a few days. The other pair, slippers of red and black leather stitched in a diamond pattern, had caught Sire Galan’s eye; he paid an astounding price without so much as dickering. I wore them inside the tent while I hung up my old headcloth to dry. How they pinched! The leather would stretch or my feet would be crushed—there could be no other accommodation between the shoes and me.

  I was by myself for a few moments in the tent. I could go nowhere without an escort; even to visit the cesspit I had to take Spiller and Noggin with me, to guard each end of one of the great planks that straddled the trench. There were gangs of boys who would tip the plank as you squatted upon it and drop you into the dung.

  This pinched too. And I was not the only one who felt squeezed too tight. When we got back from market, Sire Galan had told Spiller, “If she’s not with me, you’d best stick to her like a burr. If she’s lost again, I’ll take it out of your hide with something worse than a flogging.”

  I heard Spiller mutter that he had no quarrel with me, but he’d not be saddled by a mare.

  “And you’re an ill-fitting old boot,” I told him. But in truth I had no wish to venture past the clan’s tents on my own, being quite convinced it was not safe.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Wager

  ’d wanted to see more of the world; here it was, the whole world, so it seemed to me. And what a brave glittering sight, what a hubbub and clamor—what a stink! Even the wind from the sea could not sweep the stench away.

  The clans had come to these barren hills and planted a forest of tents leafed with gaudy canvas and leather and blooming with banners. The men were pent up so close in this false forest that they crawled upon each other like wasps. Pent up and idle, idle and restless, they waited for the king to let loose the swarm. In this wood there were but two kinds of game: men and women. Men were hunted on the tourney field. Women were hunted everywhere.