Not many miles along, where low woods of maple and sumac gave way to plowed fields, I met a party of men coming toward me. There were four of them, walking two by two, three dressed much as I was, in light woolen the color of sheep and one in a linen apron much stained. This one also led an ox and cart. The two in front stopped as they saw us: muddy horse and muddy man, and they gaped like baby birds. Their next reactions were very different, for the peasant on the left pointed, hopped, and ran at me, shouting, “That’s my horse! It’s mine! Mine!” while the other—the fellow in the apron—cursed, threw aside what looked like a saw, and turned his back on the whole scene.
“I don’t doubt this one’s your horse,” I answered the farmer, and instinct prompted me to speak the broad Zaquash idiom of the territories. “I found it in a sinkhole.”
“’Deed! Indeed! In a hole he was, and neither man’s brain nor ox shoulders could get him out.” The owner spoke better Velonyian than I had expected. He took the mud-slick rope from my hand, and so it was he who was dragged at a good foot’s pace along the road. I liked the change.
“I got him out,” I said, and then realized it sounded like boasting. The peasant and both his retainers stared at me, fish-blank. The aproned fellow spat in my direction.
“Don’t min’ him. He thought he was going to get to take Rufon out piece by piece and keep the pieces. He’s butcherman.” This peasant spoke the heavy Zaquash I had expected. Probably he was the owner’s hired man.
“How’d you get him, then?” asked the farmer. “We couldn’t pull him nor pry him.”
“I used a class two lever, with the cart as fulcrum and myself as weight.” When none of the four congratulated me or even nodded comprehension, I began to add, “A class two lever is one where—”
The farmer cut me off. “He must a worked his way mostly out by himself,” he said, and as far as their party was concerned, that finished the matter. I stood in the road and allowed the horse to drag them on, for truth to tell, I was slightly miffed. After a minute the hired man ran back, puffing, to inform me that his master didn’t really think I had been trying to steal the horse and that I was invited to dinner.
To have it granted that I was not trying to steal was not as satisfactory as being thanked for returning a valuable animal otherwise doomed to rendering, but it occurred to me that there probably would be things to eat on the farmer’s table that I would not find by the side of the road. I had had nothing but my own cooking or Powl’s (horrific thought) for three years.
The walk to the farmstead was one long argument between Farmer Grofe and the butcher over the latter’s disappointed hopes. He felt that since he had closed his shop for a half day for this effort, he should receive recompense in the shape of a sheep or goat at least. After all, he remarked, the doctor doesn’t give back his fee when the patient dies, so the butcher ought not to be penalized when the victim does not die. Grofe was no sophist. He told the butcher that it was the luck of the draw, and if he found any of his livestock, large or small, hanging in the village shop the butcher himself would join it.
The two attendants rolled their eyes at this, indicating that Farmer Grofe’s threats were rare and to be taken at face value. Next, the butcher suggested that I be held for the cost of a new cart, since my trick with the class two lever (he remembered that part) probably had broken at least an axle. No one replied to this, but I began to wonder if my being invited to dinner was entirely a friendly gesture.
It was a very uncomfortable journey, and an uncomfortable meal afterward. I had been away from groups of men a long time.
There were marrows in butter, and there was Mistress Grofe: a thin woman much smaller than her husband and seemingly angry. She did not inquire about the conditions of my visit, and that seemed to me odd, but neither did she fear to take the butcher’s part in the argument. I felt she believed the man’s goodwill to be of more future benefit to her than the services of one chunky plowhorse.
There was fresh mutton passed about the table, and that liberally, for it was the beginning of slaughter season, but the dishes that caught my eye and set me drooling were the great tureen of bright soup, with red beets and white parsnips floating amid a speckle of green herbs, and the poppy-seed pastry, glazed in syrup. The smells of the table were overpowering to one who had been so long on plain stuffs, but overpowering in a different manner were the odors of the diners: Grofe, his wife, two sons, one daughter, the man I’d met earlier, and one maid-o’-work. Three years of militant washing, in the company of Powl only, had made me more delicate-stomached than a deacon. The warm smells of the food mixed with the still warmer smells of sweat stink and well-aged sweaty wool, and that kitchen smelled worse to me than the fresh guts of a rabbit.
Adding to this the natural shyness of a man who never knew, when he opened his mouth, which language or mixture of languages would be coming out, and the Grofes had a very quiet dinner guest who breathed through his mouth. Perhaps they thought I had a cold. They did not ask me anything of who I was. It was obvious to look at me that I was a nobody.
The Grofe farmstead had much heavy woodwork in the dining room, and a clock that announced the hour by the antics of a wooden man who left his cottage on the wall and hit a tiny triangle with a mallet as many times as the hour allowed. The ringing was not made by the triangle, of course, but the effect was still amusing, at least for the first few hours. The furniture was black with beeswax and the cushions plump and the room very tidy. Mistress Grofe sat at her end of the table and glared her anger at all of us.
After dinner, at Grofe’s request, I scratched out a picture of the affair I had created to liberate the horse from the sink-hole; it was done on the back of a bill of sale for wheat in the shock, I recall. Grofe was literate, at least to the point of signing his name. He seemed to understand the principles of my deed (I have learned since that most farmers far surpass me in that sort of cleverness), and I found myself miming how I had jumped up and down on the butt end of the sapling, and how the beast had looked being hauled up by the neck, almost like Zhurrie the Goblin of North Dormitory, Sordaling School. I was terribly bucked up to find I could make these people accept me, even if only to laugh at me, and that I slid into their accent and idiom as cleanly as Powl might have wished.
I said that Grofe and his wife had a daughter. Her name was Jannie and she was sixteen years old. She had covered the walls with samplers of trees, flowers, houses, alphabets, all sorts of usual things, and now she took up a position at the right of the fireplace, engaged on an embroidery of adult scope. It made her squint a little and couldn’t have been pleasant work, but perhaps she needed the excuse of work to remain in the parlor with a male guest.
When the hired man returned from his evening call at the barn to say the old horse had made light work of his oats and looked ready for five more years, Grofe broke out a bottle of very potent cider and poured for me the very first glass. Jannie glanced up, hidden from all eyes but mine by the frame other needlework, and when she met my glance she was not squinting at all.
Most sixteen-year-old girls are pretty, and I can remember nothing more about her than that she was at least as good as the average, that she was slight as her mother, and that she had brown hair in ringlets.
Already I was less bothered by the nearness of humanity and by its odors. The cider, atop the mass of lamb, soup, marrows, and pastry, made me very warm, and the company’s laughter had softened my mood further. Without becoming talkative, I had come to be at ease and to wonder at this strange unity that was a family household.
To most men I suppose there is nothing to wonder at:
People live in households, in family. But I had lived first in some sort of castle, then in a school, and lastly in an observatory, and to me this was exotic. Attractive. The red cushions, the little wooden man, the beeswax shining by firelight. Even with Mother glaring in the corner.
Until that glance, without squinting, that no one in the room could see except myself.
The air was sweet and my privacy sweeter. If Master Grofe and his men had seen the look his daughter had granted me, and had they further known the effect it had had on me, body and mind, I was firmly convinced they all would have risen up and slain me.
The troop on horseback that descended on the Grofes’ came along the road a quarter mile from my bed under a walnut tree, so I became aware of them only as a shudder in the earth and a dream of the chestnut horse’s ineluctably muddy progress. I was awake but unprepared when I heard Jannie’s scream, and then I was running for the roadway. I am no great runner, because of the length of my legs, but I can go on, barefoot or no, and barefoot was how I chased the six men who rode from Grofe’s farmstead, I reached the road before they did and hid beside a hedge, knowing a horse’s night vision exceeded even mine.
I had no thought that the Grofes had taken it into their heads on impulse to flee their homes in the middle of the night. I doubted very much that they owned as many as six riding horses: luxuries on a farm. These riders had to be those notorious things, Zaquash avengers: ill-content young trouble makers who strike at the well-to-do landowner of Velonyan blood. I remembered Master Grofe’s lack of accent, and his unusual education, and it became obvious to me. Also obvious, by the lumpy appearance of one man in the middle of the riot, they had raided Jannie Grofe herself. As I became aware of the position of that rider, I sprang across the road, close enough to startle the horses. The men were wearing bag masks, the trademark of the Zaquash avenger. The man holding the girl, however, rode not the Zaquash flat pad, but the old Velonyan saddle, cross-pommeled and long in the stirrup. The horse was tall and the road high-crowned, so the only part of the fellow I could reach was his straight knee, which I hit with the heel of my hand as heavily as I could. I thought to make him drop the reins so I could take control of the horse. Howling, he dropped the girl instead. As I was standing below, I caught Jannie, threw her over my right shoulder, and ran.
Four of them followed us, thrashing over high crop and stubble fields, and though the riders could not see us, the horses could, and they knew what they were chasing. As once before in my life, I made for the line of darkness that was trees.
Jannie was shouting for me to put her down. I don’t know if she even knew who had her, though later she said she had known, but I had not the time to follow her dictate, even if her legs had not been tied together.
Very soon I could see the animal’s noses out of the comer of my eye, growing larger and closer, and I gave up this rabbit game. I threw Jannie sideways as far as I could and bounced out of the path of the leadmost horse.
It was startled, and it plunged forward. As the near front hoof circled up in the canter, I caught it and helped it further up and out. The horse fell away from me, and I nearly took the force of its rear legs’ convulsive kicks as it toppled into the next two beasts behind it. I did nothing more heroic after that; I hefted Jannie Grofe in my arms and pounded on.
We made the wood line and the creek it concealed, where horses could not follow. We were very quiet, and I untied her with my hands and teeth. After a while we heard the raiders give up, cursing, and depart the way they’d come.
Jannie took a large splinter out of my instep, where I had trodden a branch end-on. She was very collected. More than averagely pretty, for a sixteen-year-old. We walked the fields home cautiously, hand in hand, and in my young pride I refrained from limping.
I learned more of human nature that early morning, which is to say, I became more confused. The victor’s welcome I received from the Grofe household (and that in truth I had expected to receive) was cut through by a strain of its own opposite. The old wife who embraced her lost daughter cuffed her also, without explanation and at regular intervals. She demanded of me what my whole role in the damned business was, as though both Jannie and I hadn’t related it in detail already, and turned her back to rail at Grofe once more before I could reply.
Grofe himself was less accusatory and less distraught, but again and again he made me repeat that I had not known the raiders, their horses, their words, the place from which they had come, or the place to which they vanished. More than once he asked me about a small box, not much larger than a loaf of bread, I had not noticed such a thing, but he didn’t want to hear that.
Their disbelief was understandable, for the story told by Jannie was one of great drama, with massive struggle against armed men and the tossing of a horse and rider over my shoulder. I tried to reduce the narrative to human proportions, but the hired man, whose name I now remember to be Quaven, stared and glared at me in the light of the single lamp, with black shadows of the black chair backs climbing up and down the walls. Mistress Grofe had woken first at the sound of the approaching horses, but (she repeated more than once) had not been able to rouse her old man. One raider had broken the front window, crawled in through the mess of slats and panes, and had drawn the bolt for the rest of them, and by the time the elder son had reached the bottom of the stairs, they were standing in possession with torches, swords, and a primed harquebus pointed right up the stairway.
They grabbed the boy and began ransacking the house for valuables, and when that proved time-consuming, dragged the girl from her bedchamber instead and offered to trade her person for the proceeds of the early barley crop. It was not “all your gold” or “your silverware and jewelry.” I inquired after this, since it seemed to speak close knowledge of the farmstead or at least of the area. Grofe repeated that it had been the proceeds of the early barley crop they demanded, and that is what he gave them, in a box not much larger than a loaf of bread.
And still they took her, tying her hand and foot, and they rode off with Jannie, the harquebus, the box, and all.
Grofe sat at the black table, with one hand clutching at the hair of his forehead and the other making angry flat thumps against the wood. With every thump the smell of beeswax rose and mingled with the smell of the smoky lamp.
“We can go after them, Daddy,” said the younger boy, a child of perhaps thirteen who was already taller than I. Grofe looked up absently and continued to thump.
“Do you have horses?” I had to ask. “I mean, not like the chestnut, but road horses.” If they had horses, they should already be on the road and riding, instead of damaging the woodwork and burning oil.
“A few saddle mounts,” answered Grofe, shooting me one of his untrusting glances. “Not fast, but good for a long way. But it wouldn’t do to go haring off, not knowing after who or where.”
I remembered the sound of their retreating hooves. “They went north, on the plain road, with one horse lame and a man with a broken leg.”
“So you say.” Quaven did not bother to conceal his suspicions of me.
“The road is dry already,” answered Grofe. “They’d make sure of that before riding out on us.”
“Not so dry as that, only two days after a rain. There’s a heavy night dew this season; I have cause to know that.”
They all stared at me, even Jannie.
“I can track for you,” I told him, all the while knowing Powl would call this a mistake.
Quaven had fetched me my boots, for I didn’t want to do any more treading on my bare, wounded foot, and the rest of my gear was spilled out on the kitchen table as security (I suppose) for my good behavior. I could not ride and track, so I had to trot before them, while Grofe, Quaven, and the elder boy used my white, moonlit head as a beacon.
The farmer had
heard my name as Zural, which would be at least a good Zaquash sort of name, and I let him call me this. Now, finally, he asked me what I did for myself and I told him I was an optician. He let that be, though I imagine he thought it to be some minor territorial religious sect.
The place where the riders had left the road after me was unmistakable, as was the place where they had scrambled back on. One horse stepped unevenly, while another, with larger feet, wandered from one side of the road to the other, seeming to be imperfectly controlled.
A few miles on, they turned right into the forest, on a path that was between a cow trail and a wagon road.
“Commerey,” stated Grofe.
The tracks in this damp wood were unmistakable, and with my attention relaxed, my mind became aware of how weary I was, having walked all the previous day, then sprinted, then run with a heavy weight. A soft, heavy weight, very pretty, and of a certain shape. Only sixteen.
My foot slipped in the muck, and in the sudden awakening I remembered who was behind me and that they did not trust me.
The land opened again, and ahead was heard a wailing and a weeping that announced itself to be no trivial matter. “Commerey,” said Grofe again. He quickened his horse and trotted by me, followed by the others. When I caught up with them they were on the large porch of a house built to their own plan, and another man was hammering his fist on the wall
harder than Grofe had pounded the table, while a woman more generously built than Mistress Grofe hung over the rail, weeping. Small children hung upon her or huddled on the steps.
Grofe was striding back and forth, adding his anger to theirs.
“You’s avengers got their boy. Killed him as he stood,” said Quaven to me. This insistent, deliberate connection of myself with the thieves and murderers, added to my tiredness and my sore foot, caused me a moment of blind anger, and I had to catch myself with my hand already launched. All I could do was make myself miss his face entirely, so only the wind made him blink, and then I held guard for another half second, until I was certain I had myself in rein.
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