A Knot in the Grain

by Robin McKinley

  He turned the horse’s head back toward the barn, and as they began the downhill slope, Bel’s nose dropped to its usual place, as if he were wearing a collar and pulling a plough. Before they reached the bottom, Pos dismounted and picked one of Bel’s feet up. In the moonlight it was difficult to say for sure, for his shoes looked as silvery as the landscape; but under Pos’s fingers they tingled, and Pos was sure he saw what he hoped to see. He fumbled for the blacksmith’s bar and pincers he had brought with him.

  Bel, more bemused than ever, stepped very carefully down the familiar path to the barn, anxious about his naked feet. Pos slung the heavy satchel of horseshoes down in a corner by the door, and gave Bel a quiet half-portion of grain, to make up for the interruption of his sleep—and Moly a handful of that, since she was awake and lively, putting her nose over her door and trying to seize Pos’s sleeve with her lips. She ate the grain happily enough, but she still looked after Pos as if she believed she had been left out of an adventure. The other horses stirred in their drowse, thinking they heard the sound of grain being chewed, but believing they dreamed, for they knew the schedule just as Bel did.

  Pos crept back to his sleeping wife, trying to feel pleased with himself and failing; even the moonlight on his beautiful crops did not cheer him, nor the cool rich earth smell in his nostrils. When he eased himself slowly back into bed, Coral turned toward him and murmured, “You’re cold. Where have you been?”

  “There was a noise in the stock barn,” he said, after a moment.

  “Moly having adventures in her sleep,” said Coral; “you needn’t worry, you know, Moly would kick up such a row trying to get any thieves to take notice of her that they’d have little chance to do any mischief. Besides stealing her, I suppose,” she added.

  “It might have been a bear,” said Pos.

  “Mmm,” said Coral, asleep again.

  Pos overslept the next morning, something that had never happened before. It was Coral’s cry of shock and terror that awoke him. She was out of bed, standing by the window, and as he sat up, and then stumbled to his feet to go to her, he saw her raise her hands from the windowsill as if she would ward something off, and back away. “The gods have cursed us!” she cried. “What have we done? What have we done? Oh, why did I marry you if it was only to bring you ruin?”

  He knew, then, and half expected what he would see when he looked out of the window.

  The house and barns stood in a sea of buttercups. Gone were the fields of wheat standing ready for harvest; gone were the neat paths, the fences around the pastures, the smaller tidy blocks of the vegetable garden. He saw a cow blundering unhappily through a tangle of buttercups where the thatching straw had once grown; automatically he recognized her, Flora, always the first one through the gate into fresh pasture, or the first one to find a weak place in the fencing and break through. Behind her at some little distance were Tansy and Nup; the three of them always grazed together, Tansy and Nup following where Flora led. The soft brown and cream of the cows’ hair looked dim and weak against the blaze of yellow, as if the cows themselves would be overcome by buttercups, and crumble to pale ash. Pos saw nothing else moving.

  Ruined, he thought. More years than are left in my life to regain what I’ve lost for us both. And he knew that the horseshoes beside the barn door were iron again.

  “My darling,” said Coral, weeping, “my love, I will go away, back up to the Hills; it is I who caused this. There is a bane on my family, laid on my father’s father. He thought to escape it by leaving the mountains, and I thought to escape it by marrying you; almost I did not believe in it, a fey thing, a tale for children, for I was the eldest, and it had not fallen to me, or to Moira after me, but then Del, as he grew up—no, no, I saw it immediately, when he was just a baby—Moira and I, we both knew, as Rack does, but I would not believe, I would make it not so, not for me, it was only a tale, an excuse for recklessness and waste, I believed loving you was enough, that the bane would not follow after a choice honestly made.…”

  He barely heard her at first, for all he cared about was her distress. He would have to tell her in a moment, tell her that it was he that had ruined them, he and his greed, his dishonest greed, but for the moment he wanted her in his arms, to feel for the last time that his arms were of some use to her, some comfort.

  “I could not believe that I was evil, only by having been born into the family that I was; I refused to believe in bad blood, in that kind of wickedness. I believed that you can make what you will of your life; oh, no, I did not really believe that, I did think I was doomed as my family was doomed; till I met you, and fell in love with you, that first day, I think, when I looked up from the well and you were there in that old shabby wagon with your beautiful glossy horse, you were like that yourself, old shabby clothes, but such a good face, and I knew from the way you held the reins that I trusted you—that the horse trusted you—and it was only later that I realized that I loved you. I could not believe my luck when you asked me to marry you; I’m only a girl, and knew nothing of farming, knew nothing of anything except feeding seven people on two potatoes, and horses, I knew horses, I knew that Moly was worth saving when her mother died, although the owner couldn’t be bothered.

  “Oh, my love,” she said, almost incoherent with weeping, “I hate to leave you, but it must have been me; whatever lives in Buttercup Hill recognized me; perhaps if I leave, they will give you your farm back.…” She was clinging to him as she never had clung, like ivy on an oak; he had been proud of her independence, that independence choosing to be his companion, to work in his fields with him so that they became their fields; and yet this had been part of what made him uneasy—part of what made him willing to listen to Med. He damned himself now, now that it was too late, for foolishness. He deserved to lose her. But she would not go thinking it was her fault.

  “Hush,” he said. “It is not your fault. It is not. It is mine. No”—as she began again to speak—“you do not know. I will tell you.” But he did not speak at once, and cradled her head against his shoulder in his old knotted hand, and he did not realize that he himself was weeping till he saw the tears fall upon her hair.

  “It is I,” he said at last, his voice deep with misery, “ah! I hate to tell you. It is true, you must go away, but not to save me, to save yourself.” He thought, I can give her a proper dowry if I sell Dor and Thunder; I can get along with Bel and Ark only, for I will have to let Med and Thwan go, of course. With her beauty she will be able to find another husband; and with some money she will be able to find one who will respect her.…

  “Tell me,” she said, and drew her head away, and looked up at him. “Tell me,” she said, passionately.

  “I cannot, if you look at me like that,” he said, closing his eyes, and now he felt the hot tears on his cheeks. He felt her move, and her hands on his face, and her lips against his chin. “I love you,” she said. “I am glad”—she said fiercely—“if this is not my fault, for then I need not leave you after all.”

  That gave him the strength to tell her, and as he had told her nothing before, he told her all now, for he could not decide what to tell and what to hold back. So he began with Med, and of how Med’s words had made him look at what he had turned away from before, that he was an old man, too old for her, and dull, a farmer, with little enough to offer her, except that her own family—here, finally, he stumbled over his words—had so much less. And he thought that perhaps if he had money enough to buy her things—the sorts of things beautiful women should have—perhaps that would be enough, that she would find it enough reason to stay with him.… He stopped himself just before he told her he could not bear to lose her, because he was going to send her away, for he had nothing at all to offer her now.

  She was silent for a time after he had spoken, but she did not draw away as he expected. Her hands had gone around his neck while he spoke, and her head was again in the curve between his collarbone and jaw. At last she sighed and stepped back, and he dropped
his hands instantly, but she just as quickly took them in her own, and looked into his face with her clear eyes and smiled. “It is very bad,” she said, “but not so bad as I expected—feared. For I do not have to leave you after all. I wish—I wish we had talked of this six months ago, for you are an escape for me, and I have never not known this, nor ignored that you are my father’s age. But I was too afraid to tell you everything about me—and you have known that I did not tell you everything, and that is how this began.

  “No,” she said, as he would have spoken. “No. I will not listen, for I know now what you would say, and I will not have it. We are both at fault, and we will work together to mend that fault; and after this we will tell each other—not everything, for who can tell everything even if they wished? Who can tell everything, even to oneself? Not I. But I have known there were important things I was not telling you, and we will make a vow, now, to tell each other everything we know to be important. And”—she laughed, a little, a poor sound compared with her usual laughter, but a laugh nonetheless—“and we will trust our own judgment about importance, for we have had a very hard lesson.”

  She clasped their hands together tightly and said, “Promise. Promise me now, as I promise you, to tell you—tell you as much of everything as I can, and I will look into all the shadows that I can for things that need to be told, and perhaps I will even learn to ask you to help me to look for shadows. And there will be no shame between us about this, about what is important, about what shadows we fear—about those very things we most fear to tell each other. Promise.” And she shook their clasped hands.

  “Coral—”

  “Promise.”

  And so he promised.

  And then they went downstairs together, and ate a hasty breakfast, and went out to see what could be done, and to decide where to start.

  Med went willingly. Pos, looking into his eyes before Med dropped his, saw something there that made him—for all the disaster around him—glad for the excuse to let him go, never having had any notion before this that such an excuse was wanted.

  But Thwan would not leave. “I’ve known about Buttercup Hill,” he said, easily giving it the friendly name Coral had used in better times. “My father’s father told stories of it too, Pos. It’s a danger we live by, like a river that may flood. I can afford to work for no wages for a little while. I don’t want much but work to do.” He paused, but Pos was thinking of likening Buttercup Hill to a river. Rivers did not only destroy, when they ran beyond their banks. Thwan went on, slowly: “Good work to do. And I’m too old to be finding another master. Even if one would have me, I’m used to doing things … the way of this farm.” He paused again. “I don’t think what lives in Buttercup Hill means you to starve, and starving is the only thing that frightens me.”

  Pos looked at his old friend half in dismay and half in delight. He had not told him why the buttercups had flooded the farm; only Coral need know that. He would find something for Thwan to do at the other end of the farm while he hammered Bel’s shoes back on; Thwan would not ask for an explanation, but Pos would know he was not offering one. That easily he accepted Thwan’s refusal. He had not, then, the strength to argue, there was too much else his strength was needed for more; but while he did not know it, losing that first argument with Coral had turned him to a new shape. The littleness of the change was such that it would be a long time before he knew of it. But what it meant, now, was that he could let his wife and his farmhand overrule his decision and he lose no face or authority and gain no shame from it. He did not think of this at all. He thought of starving, and of the buttercups where the vegetable garden had been; of whether cows could give milk when their only forage was buttercups. And so Thwan stayed.

  And they did not starve, the three of them, because for the first deadly hard weeks Coral went out in the mornings with panniers behind Moly’s saddle into the wild land beyond the farm, and gathered berries and other fruit, and dug roots and cut succulent young leaves, and brought them home, for she had had long years of feeding a larger family on almost nothing. She refused to accept any praise for this; it was harvest time in the wild too, and there was plenty to eat, and no cleverness necessary in the gathering of it. She taught Pos, who had never known, and Thwan, who had forgotten, how to set snares; and they ate rabbit and hare and ootag. Sometimes Thwan ate with them in the evenings, which he had not done before; it seemed easier, that way, to share equally, when there was only just enough. The noon meal was as it had always been, something on the back of the stove, set there to cook when Pos, and later Pos and Coral, came outdoors in the morning; except on the hottest days, when it was bread and cheese. But previously the noon meal had been eaten out of doors, under a tree, on the porch, in a corner of a field; and all three of them noticed that Thwan was now the only one who seemed still to prefer this. Both Pos and Coral spoke to him about it, but he only smiled, and they saw in the smile that he did not stay away from the house from shyness.

  But for worry, they were all as healthy and strong as they had ever been.

  Strength they needed, and stamina. The first thing they did was look out the fencing for the animals, and it was not as bad as they had expected, for the fencing was still there, under the wild weave of buttercups. It was only that—mysteriously—all the gates had been opened on the night that Pos had pulled Bel’s shoes off after walking on Buttercup Hill.

  More mysteriously, the beasts all ate buttercups with apparent relish. (Even Turney, who did not know that his three human beings were careful to leave something on their plates for the dog’s bowl when they would have liked to eat the last scrap themselves, was seen gravely nipping the heads off buttercups, and swallowing them enthusiastically.) The cows’ milk had never been so thick and rich and abundant as in the first buttercup weeks, for all that their calves were half grown and they should be beginning to dry up toward winter. Even the sheep’s udders swelled, though this was at first unnoticed since unexpected, invisible under their thick curling fleeces (thicker than usual, thought Pos; must be coming up a bad winter). The horses seemed tireless, however many times they went up and down the fields pulling Pos’s heaviest blade, for the buttercup roots went deep (a rare crop of poppies we’ll have next year, thought Pos).

  “In case you’d like to know,” said Coral, “this proves that they aren’t buttercups. Real buttercups are poisonous.” (Slow-acting, thought Pos. Cumulative. The stock will all die suddenly, any time now.)

  Pos taught Coral to make cheese, and after they’d had a few weeks to ripen, risked taking a few cheeses they hoped were surplus to market day in town; and these fetched prices better than their previous cheeses ever had, after Coral brought enough over from their lunch the first time to offer small sample tastes (wasteful, thought Pos). And then the three cows that had been barren in the spring dropped unsuspected calves at the very end of summer, and the calves were bigger and stronger than any Pos had seen in all his years of farming, although the mothers had found the births easy. These calves grew so quickly that Coral said to Pos that she felt that if she ever had time to stand still for a quarter hour and watch, she would see them expand. “We could ask Thwan to eat his lunch next to the cow pasture,” she suggested with a grin, “and ask if he sees anything.”

  Pos shook his head. “Something not right about them,” he said. “Something grows too quickly in the beginning, gets spindly before the end, doesn’t grow together right.”

  When Pos took all the calves to the big harvest fair in late autumn, the youngest ones were almost as well-grown as the oldest. It was one of the youngest that fetched the best price of all, and the farmer who bought her exclaimed over the heavy straight bones and clean lines of her, how square and sturdy she was built.

  Several people remarked on the slight golden cast of the coats and hoofs and eyes of those last three calves, just as other people remarked that they could pick out one of Buttercup Farm’s new cheeses because it glowed as it lay among other, more ordinary fare, jus
t as their sheep’s wool, which had only looked like any wool on the sheep’s backs, proved to have a faint golden tint when it was washed and spun.

  Winter was a lean time nonetheless, for they had had little harvest. The wheat and straw crops were ruined, though there were vegetables left under the buttercup vines as there had been fence posts and rails under them, and so they did not starve; but they had none left over to sell, and before spring they began to wish they had sold fewer cheeses, though they had spent every penny they earned on stores for the winter, for the beasts as well as themselves, and for seed for the spring. There was nothing over even to mend the old wagon, which was at its creakiest and most fragile in cold weather.

  It was a hard winter (though not as hard as Pos predicted). Snow fell, and no one had any good winter crops, and what little grew was tough and dry and frostbitten. But when the spring came and the horses drew the plough through the fresh-cut furrows one last time before setting seed, the plough seemed to fly through the earth, although its blade glinted gold rather than silver, and Bel’s and Ark’s flaxen manes were almost yellow. And the buttercups still twined over all the fencing, even the stair rails up to the porch around the house, and showed flowers early, as soon as the snow melted, before most other leaves were even thinking about putting in an appearance. (Pos said that the buttercups hid mending that needed to be done, and that Flora would be finding the weak places for them.)

  The cows all delivered their calves safely, and none was barren, and the sheep delivered their lambs, which were mostly twins, but the grass rose up thickly enough to support any amount of milk for any number of babies, and cheese-making besides. The cheeses this year were as yellow as they had been the autumn before, and the new babies again touched with gold; and then bright chestnut Moly threw a foal, though she had not been bred that they knew, and the farm horses were all mares and geldings. The foal was as golden as a new penny, and as fleet as a bird, with legs even longer than its dam’s as it grew up, and they called it Feyling, and when it was four years old, Coral rode it at the harvest fair races, and it won the gold cup.