“I can tell you what you want to know,” he said. “But first I want my Davi back.”
He sat silent while Clement got Gilly settled in a comfortable chair. It had been a long time, Clement judged, since Gilly had even been able to sit in comfort—somehow, she must get him an upholstered chair. She brought him a steaming cup of tea and a great slice of the splendid cake that had been sitting untouched on the side table. “What are you trying to do to me?” Gilly moaned.
“Eat slowly,” Clement said. “Or I’ll make you eat another piece. We’ve got to stay here long enough for all those soldiers in the kitchen to get their bit of cake.”
She turned to the miserable man by the fire and asked if she could serve him some tea. He looked startled, and then disgusted. Nearly five months had passed since Clement took his daughter from his arms, but the sight of the tough old woman at the garrison gates with the child’s name wrapped around her chest had reminded Clement of that family nearly every day. She particularly remembered the way this man had tried to soothe his screaming daughter’s terror.
She said, “You want your girl back before you’ll talk to me? What exactly have you got that makes you think you can make such a bargain?”
The man turned to face her then. He had looked terribly ill five months ago; now he looked half dead. “One of my husbands was in the garrison that night it was burned down,” he said. “And then he ran with those people for a few months. All over the land he went, having what he said were adventures. Then he was hurt and they brought him home to recover, but he died. I can’t do farmwork any more, so I took care of him. He told me some things—he wouldn’t have, but he wasn’t in his right mind towards the end. When I’ve got Davi back, I’ll tell you what he told me—all of it.”
“I’m not setting out to fetch your girl until I know what it is you know,” said Clement impatiently.
He said, “Kill me if you want. I’m dying anyway. When I told my family they couldn’t stop me from coming to you, they abandoned the farm. They figured you’d come after them, I guess, to try to force me to talk. Now there’s nothing you can do to me, nothing you can kill that isn’t dead already. Do what you want.” His tone was flat, bitter, and utterly without hope. He sagged wearily in his chair.
“Friend,” said Gilly, with his mouth full of cake, “I suggest you give the lieutenant-general a little more than that. She’s got to commit a whole company of soldiers to a foul-weather journey, and she’s too good a commander to do that for nothing but a vague hope. Give her an idea of what you know, anyway. You can do that, can’t you?”
The farmer, apparently roused out of his lethargy by the sight of Gilly’s remarkable ugliness, gave him a frankly puzzled look. He wanted to ask Gilly something. It would have been a rude question, something like what are you,prompted as much by how Gilly spoke as it was by how he looked. But the farmer apparently could not bring himself to be so rude.
Clement sat down, and crossed her legs, and endeavored to look as if she really didn’t care about the outcome of this conversation. She sipped her tea.
Eventually, the farmer turned to her. “This group that calls itself Death-and-Life, they want to do something that will rouse all of Shaftal to join them. Then they figure they can exterminate all of you by spring. I know what that thing is that they’re going to do. I know when, and I know where.”
Clement set down her teacup. “It’s almost winter already.”
“It is,” the farmer said indifferently. “Maybe you’d better stop wasting your time.”
She looked at Gilly. He was rapidly, regretfully, eating the remainder of his cake. “How will I recognize Davi?” Clement asked the farmer. “And how do I contact you when I have her? Through Marga?”
As they discussed the details, Clement cut another slice, wrapped it in her handkerchief—the first clean one she’d had in almost half a year—and put the cake carefully in her pocket to give Gilly later. “It will be some time before you hear from me,” she told the farmer. “Fifteen, twenty days.” Because she was unhappy to know that an entire farmstead had emptied itself for fear of her, she wanted to add coldly that theirs had been an absurd overreaction. But even now she was reconsidering her decision to let the farmer go unmolested, wondering if after all it might be better to hand him over to the torturers. Perhaps, she thought, his family had been wise after all.
She lay a coin on the side table for Marga to find, and left the parlor with Gilly sighing sadly at her elbow.
In the kitchen, the dozen soldiers stood or squatted around the hearth, with pieces of cake in their hands, not eating, not bickering with each other, but listening raptly to a woman who sat on a stool at the table, with a bowl of beans at her elbow. She was telling them a story, in Sainnese.
Some of the soldiers glanced at Clement pleadingly, asking her not to interrupt, so Clement let Gilly in and closed the door behind them. Marga silently offered Gilly her stool, but he gestured that he could continue to lean on his cane. The storyteller, without pausing or seeming to notice the new arrivals, continued to weave her tale, which had to do with an arrogant man, a magical forest, and a vicious wild pig. Having arrived as the tale was finished, Clement could not follow its import, but the storyteller was an extraordinary sight. Though she was dressed in a plain servant’s outfit, and covered to the knee with a stained apron, her dark, angular face could not be disguised as ordinary. She had black hair, black eyes, skin of such deep brown it would disappear into shadows, a face that was all hollows and jutting angles. She had seen some action recently, for that face was marred with fading bruises.
Her tale was finished. The soldiers uttered sighs like children when the show is over, and only then remembered their uneaten cakes. The storyteller, though, seemed to be waiting for something. Some of the soldiers gave another one a nudge, and he cleared his throat and told a soldier’s tale that Clement had heard many times before, usually told better. When he was finished, though, the storyteller gave a bow, as though to thank him, and her hands, which had been gesturing to illustrate her tale, returned to the drudge’s work of shelling beans.
The soldiers stuffed their cake in their mouths and reached for the rain capes that were drying on hooks by the fire. But they paused and glanced at each other hopefully when Gilly grated in his unlovely voice, “I’ve never heard that tale before. Might I trouble you to tell another?”
The woman said, “I am a gatherer of stories, and I will trade with anyone, story for story.”
Gilly seemed nonplused, but one of the soldiers said, “Iness will make the trade for you, sir. Iness knows lots of tales.”
“Well,” said Gilly, “Perhaps I will accept that stool after all.” He perched on Marga’s stool with his hands resting on his cane. Clement, standing beside him, leaned down so he could explain himself. He whispered, “Winter entertainment.”
Then the kitchen door opened and Alrin, dressed in gorgeous silk, bustled in. She stopped short in surprise at the crowd. The storyteller leaned towards Gilly, as though to directly address him. “I will tell you a tale of a people who live on the sea, whose harbor is called Dreadful because so many boats have been wrecked going in and out of its narrow entrance. Within the harbor, though, the water is still as glass, and the boats must be rowed because no breath of wind ever stirs there. The people walk from boat to boat to go visiting and never set foot on land at all, except to fill their water barrels. A woman of these people was so ugly that no one could bear to look at her, and she lived by herself without even dog or cat for company. No one would fish with her, either. So no one could explain how she came home, day after day, with her hold full of newly caught fish.”
Clement had heard Alrin take in her breath, and looked at her in time to see her glance with horror at Gilly, and then open her mouth as though to stop the story. But Gilly’s ugly face was decorated with a delighted smile. Clement whispered to Alrin, “Leave it be.”
The storyteller’s tale slowly, quietly, became hilarious. She
told of the various, increasingly absurd ways that the fisherwoman’s kinfolk, jealous of the ugly woman’s wealth and success, tried to trick her into revealing her fishing secret. Then, they began to offer bribes, and finally offered her the one thing she did not have, and could not get for herself: a loving husband. But first she demanded that her potential husband prove his love (here the tale became as salacious as any soldier might wish) and, to his surprise, the potential husband managed to do this. And so, in the end, it was revealed that the ugly woman was sticking her face into the water, and the fish, fleeing the sight, were swimming directly into her nets.
The kitchen had echoed with laughter, and even Alrin wiped her eyes and exclaimed, “Well! Who would have thought!”
Iness, the soldier, told his own tale, but with a certain self-deprecating air, for he was a mere amateur and Alrin’s servant clearly was a master.
In the crush of the hallway, as the soldiers wrapped themselves in capes and pressed out the narrow door, Gilly, Alrin, and Clement were trapped together into a corner. Alrin said rather anxiously, “I had no idea she spoke Sainnese. Or that she was a storyteller. She’s just a tribal woman who’d been set upon … I found her by the roadside.”
Gilly said, “What is her name?”
Alrin hesitated. “I don’t know. She seems a bit addled.”
“Really! But she tells a good tale. Perhaps we might hire her to tell tales in the garrison on these long winter nights.”
Out in the rain again, once Gilly had been hoisted into the saddle and had wrapped himself thoroughly against the wet, he said ironically, “Now what do you suppose got your courtesan so flustered, eh? I’d have thought she’d have nerves steady as my horse’s.”
“Perhaps she feared the servant’s tale had offended you. People are always assuming you to be short-tempered.”
“Like that ugly woman’s fish, they flee my ugly face! Ha!” He chuckled to himself all the way to the garrison.
Chapter Nineteen
It was snowing: a light snow, like powered sugar sifting down from the shimmering dawn sky. It glittered, casting a dazzling haze like dust, or mist. Shivering and sleepy, Garland picked up the milk can that Karis had hauled up the mountain the night before and left out on the porch all night, and felt that its contents were frozen solid. The four ravens muttered restlessly on the protected perches Karis had built for them, then one came flapping out and asked, “Will you feed us?”
“Be patient. I’m baking you some cornbread.”
The raven flew up to the railing. “Here, here, here, here, here!” he called. Black shadows flapped in the shimmering mist of snow, and three more ravens landed on the rail in an icy spray of slush. So many ravens! Garland stepped backwards into Karis, who was just coming out the door with her head buried in an enormous knitted jerkin.
Her tousled, sleep-flushed face emerged. Her eyes, which had been stark, now glittered at him with something resembling humor. “You don’t have to cook breakfast for the birds.”
“But they’re people.”
“Created people? They’re so alike, even I can’t tell them apart.”
“They talk,” Garland said. “So they’re people.”
Karis jammed a cap onto her head, pulled on a sheepskin jerkin, and took some heavy knitted gloves out of the pocket. “Well, you’ll also have ten human people for breakfast. Six of them have been on the road all night, running before the storm. They’re at the foot of the mountain now, with three heavy wagons and a lot of exhausted horses, and a very slippery road ahead of them. Raven, go tell them I am coming to help.”
The raven that had asked about breakfast leapt off the railing into the snow.
“Will you take these three raven-people inside to get dry?” Karis said to Garland. She looked ruefully at the moth holes in her gloves which left large portions of her fingers exposed. “I hope they brought the rest of my clothes.”
As Karis set forth after the bird, into the snow, Garland offered his arm to the nearest sodden raven. “I’ll take you in to sit by the fire.”
The raven stepped from the railing to his forearm, and thanked him politely.
The day after Karis had finished the beds, she had made mortar out of sand and slaked lime, and with scavenged bricks had built into the kitchen chimney the sweetest oven Garland had ever baked a pie in. By the time harnesses could be heard jingling in the yard, two pans of cornbread were cooling for the ravens, and the oven was full again, this time with eight loaves of bread that puffed up in the heat quite satisfactorily. Applesauce bubbled in the pot on the fire, and a pan of pork sausages kept warm on the hearth. Garland heard the front door open, and swung the teakettle over the hot part of the fire. He did not have enough plates or cups to go around, but few travelers show up without their own tableware.
A cold draft washed in, and Garland heard the grunts and curses of weary people moving heavy objects. A slim young man came blundering down the hall to the kitchen doorway, where he paused vaguely, blinking snow from his lashes and polishing his spectacles on the front of his rather dirty shirt. “I’m all snow,” he complained. “There you are,” he added, as he perched his still-dirty spectacles on his nose. “My brother!” He clasped Garland’s hand in his own very cold one. “So happy to meet you!” he said in Sainnese. “I get so lonely for my own language, don’t you? Even though I don’t miss those bloody, boring soldiers the slightest bit.”
Apparently oblivious to Garland’s stunned surprise, he unpeeled from himself several layers of dripping jerkins, still talking.
“That’s my books they’re swearing at. The damned things are no end of trouble. And of course, they’re going all the way up to the attic.” The young man paused to peer closely at Garland through his smeared lenses. “Thank you for feeding her.”
“Are you Medric?”
“For feeding Zanja,” said the very peculiar young man.
“The one who’s dead?” Garland felt quite bewildered now.
“In the woods, late in the summer. A rabbit stew.”
Garland remembered a silent, remarkable, solitary, well-armed woman who had walked through the pathless woods as though she had been traveling there since the beginning of time. She had not been of Shaftal; she had, it seemed to him, not even been of that world. Wholly preoccupied with some massive mystery, she seemed to scarcely notice Garland. But when, along with the stew, Garland had cooked pan bread for her, with wild herbs in it, she had come out of her preoccupation to say to him, “This is the best meal I ever tasted.”
“It wasn’t just a rabbit stew. There was bread …”
“Well, I don’t know allthe particulars.”
“That was Karis’s wife?”
“Her tormentor,” said Medric. “Her champion. Her poet. Her captive.”
It appeared he could indefinitely continue with this contradictory list, but he was distracted by the arrival of two more people: a gray man, who looked like the breath had been knocked out of him, supported by the most terrifying woman Garland had ever set eyes on.
Medric hurried to grab both the man’s hands in his. “What happened?”
The frightening woman, having settled the gray man on a stool, said, “They dropped a box of books. He tried to catch it, of course.”
“You can’t be killed by the books! After all you’ve done for them!”
The gray man, despite his obvious pain, managed to laugh.
“Maybe we’d better find J’han,” said the woman.
With a worried glance at the baking bread, Garland fled the kitchen in a panic. In the hall, extremely muscular people, Karis among them, were heaving crates towards the stairs. In the back bedroom, Garland found J’han, already awakened by the racket and mostly dressed. “There’s a man in the kitchen who’s having trouble breathing,” Garland said.
“Bring that box, will you?” J’han sprinted down the hall in his stocking feet.
Leeba slept in her little twig bed, with the lizard nearby in his own bed, and t
he rabbit smothered under a blanket, with only a torn, cotton-leaking foot showing. Garland shut the door quietly: the longer Leeba was not underfoot, the better.
“Get out the foxglove—it’s labeled,” said J’han, the moment Garland entered the kitchen. “Emil, lie down on the floor so your heart won’t have to work as hard. Is that water heating on the fire?”
“The pain is passing,” said the gray man.
“Sorrow is killing you,” grumbled J’han. “For that I have no cure.”
Garland said, “J’han, I can’t read.”
The terrifying woman turned her gaze on him. Garland set J’han’s chest of medicines rather hastily on the table, and tried to think of an excuse to run out of the room again. Was the cornbread cool enough to feed to the ravens?
Medric opened the box, and plucked out one of the tin canisters, and showed Garland the handwritten label. “Foxglove,” he read. “Poison. Say, isn’t it time that Leeba learn her letters?” He added to Garland in Sainnese, “Take deep breaths, brother. It will pass.”
The terrifying woman said in a cool voice that slashed Garland’s ears like a razor, “I am Norina Truthken. Who are you?”
Medric clasped Garland’s hand. “The truth,” he prompted him. His hand was still cold from the snow, and soft, a scholar’s hand, but there was a strength in it, too.
“Garland. A Sainnite. A cook.”
The terrifying woman said, “I’ll stay out of your kitchen.”
“What?”
The woman laid a hand on J’han’s shoulder and the healer, shockingly, pressed his cheek against it. And then she went out, and even from the back seemed dangerous. As soon as the door was closed, Garland’s panic fled.
“She has a strong effect on people,” said J’han. “But I guess we’ve all gotten immune to it.”
Medric brought J’han the canister, but J’han waved him away. The gray man raised a face as gaunt and stark as Karis had looked when Garland first met her. But there was a kindness in him, and Garland immediately began to think of what to feed him. Tea, he thought. This man needs tea, and a lot of good, hot bread, perhaps an entire loaf. Then some real food. “Surely that pot’s about to boil,” he said, and opened the tea tin.
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