The Earth Goddess

by Richard Herley

  But Bocher had yet to answer the question.

  Tagart looked up and for the briefest and most extraordinary moment sensed Bocher’s dilemma, glimpsed somehow the inmost workings of his soul. Bocher had recognized the source of his own hostility. His eyes were drawn to Paoul’s. The room might have been empty of everyone else. The child was looking at him calmly, with complete confidence in the fairness of the outcome. He had said nothing, not a word, since the start of the meeting, but it now seemed as if he were not only a party to the negotiations, but benignly overseeing them. He was content to put his trust in Bocher. He had placed Bocher entirely at liberty: he was free to choose as his conscience and judgement directed best.

  “Well?” said the elder.

  “Let them stay.”

  “And the payment?”

  “It is little enough. Give them what they ask.”

  * * *

  The dawn of their last full day in Sturt brought cold air from the north, and suddenly it seemed that winter was very near. The previous night the sky above the village had been threaded with the thin calls of migrating redwings. Tagart had lain listening to them for hour after hour, kept awake by the pain in his legs and lower back, while all round him, in the straw, the other members of the group had slept.

  He had heard the furtive movements of Munt and the girl Tanda; he had heard Fodich talking in his sleep; he had heard one man and then another getting up, at long intervals, to urinate. He had heard Paoul close by: the steady tenor of his breathing, the occasional rustle when he shifted or turned. And slowly, like the growing chill in his joints, Tagart had watched the grey morning light pushing back the darkness to reveal the interior of the ruined barn which was serving the group as a dormitory.

  There would be one more night here. Tomorrow they would have to leave, to continue their wanderings. At this season work became hard to find. Most of the farmers themselves would be hungry by the spring: the harvest taxes saw to that.

  By midwinter, when the snows came, Tagart and the others would again be fending for themselves in the woods. Last year they had built a makeshift camp and subsisted on the few beasts the able-bodied men had managed to kill. The weather then had been kind, but the preceding year two of their number, an old woman and a child, had succumbed to the cold. Perhaps this winter it would be Tagart’s turn. Or perhaps the camp would be attacked by wolves again, as it had been two years ago, when three people had been lost.

  The group was getting smaller and weaker. Sometimes, when the sun shone and food was plentiful, it was almost like a real tribe, or a large family, but more often there were arguments, bitterness, endless jealousies and complaints. Munt, Einthe, and his woman Igmiss had once been slaves. Except for Paoul, all the others were of pure nomad stock. That was one source of friction; and then Tanda, free of the restrictions of tribal law, had made trouble between Munt and Worley which had lasted until Worley’s death.

  At the beginning, when Altheme had been alive, Tagart had hoped to find further remnants of the nomad tribes, but it had never happened. The survivors of the siege, of the fighting at Valdoe, had scattered in all directions. Most had gone north, back to the forest. His own group had spent three years there, searching, visiting all the old camps and hunting grounds. They had found nothing but desolation, the results of clearance and the Gehans’ campaign of extermination. By now, after seven years, there could be little hope. Tagart’s party, as far as he knew, was the only one left.

  Once it had numbered nineteen. Now it was reduced to eleven. Two of the slaves had managed to join villages, and a third had been recaptured and presumably taken to Valdoe. Soon there would be too few people left to support him and Tagart knew the group would break up. At that time his life would end. Fodich would want to stay, and Maert, Fodich’s woman, but he would be too much of a burden and eventually they would have no choice but to leave him. No village would take him in. Alone and crippled, he might last about a week.

  He did not care. He cared only about what would happen to Paoul.

  Without thinking he reached for the pouch he wore on a cord round his neck, and as he clasped it saw Altheme, dying under the oaks, tormented by insects, disfigured by exhaustion and pain. Her features were blurred now. He had never so much as thought of her in that way, but her face and the faces of his women, the two women he had loved in the old time, had become interchangeable and confused. The second woman had proved false; the first had not, and she had borne him a son. They were dead too.

  Paoul was his only son now. The boy believed him to be his father. Five years ago, on that long and terrible summer evening, Tagart had been charged with bringing him up in ignorance of the truth, in ignorance even of his mother’s true name. Altheme had exacted this promise and in secret had given Tagart her pouch. It contained what was left of her valuables, the bits and pieces of jewellery she had snatched up before leaving the Trundle. They were for Paoul, she had said, whenever he should need them. Their worth, Tagart believed, was trifling; but, despite all the privation he and the others had endured, despite the almost continuous temptation to exchange mere trinkets for food and shelter, he had been unable to bring himself to sell the least part of Paoul’s inheritance.

  The time was drawing near when Tagart would have to do it. He did not know how. He knew only that the boy was too young, too defenceless, to be left to the mercy of circumstance. Alone, or with only Fodich to guard him, he would end in slavery or suffer some even more appalling fate. For months, years, Tagart had been worrying and wondering what to do.

  In vain he had examined each village with an eye to leaving Paoul as an adopted son of one of the kindlier families. Certainly there would be no trouble in finding him such a home; there had even been an unprompted offer, earlier this year. Refusing it had made Tagart realize much about himself. The family had been unsuitable, but his refusal had been immediate and instinctive, and he had seen for the first time how much he dreaded giving Paoul up. Since then he had tried to be unselfish, to look without bias at prospective homes, to be less critical and suspicious.

  Even here, in Sturt, he had made himself overcome a feeling of unease which formerly might have impelled him to take Paoul and leave. The head man, Bocher, seemed to be watching the boy. His own son and Paoul had become firm friends. Everywhere he went Paoul made friends with all the village children and left a deep impression on their parents, but something about Bocher’s interest had struck Tagart as undesirable. Perhaps not suspicious or threatening, but unwelcome just the same. Paoul’s friendship with his son was unfortunate. Because of it Bocher and his wife had been able, at leisure, to evaluate the most obvious of Paoul’s gifts, none of which he was old enough to know how to conceal.

  Everyone in the group loved him, but only Tagart, who had spent so much time in his company, had glimpsed the full extent of his qualities. It had always been accepted that Paoul was intelligent, but recently, in the past few months, Tagart had begun to realize that he was much more than that.

  He feared for him. Paoul made friends too easily. Tonight, as usually happened at the end of a stay like this, Tagart was due to go to the head man’s house to collect the group’s wages and, as proof of the council’s satisfaction, a clay tablet impressed with the village seal.

  Because of Paoul’s effect on the head man and his family, the occasion had been turned into a sort of farewell meal to which Paoul had also been invited. This had happened before, at one or two other villages. Tagart did not like eating with these people. He much preferred it when they treated him with incivility. It was safer to keep a distance. So far he had not found the heart to teach this to Paoul, but he would soon, gently, have to tell him that not everyone could be trusted.

  As the daylight grew Tagart heard waking sounds and voices from the village compound. Presently, after a breakfast of oatmeal and milk, the others would leave him behind for the day. They would go out to the fields and by their labour provide his food and shelter while he, to make himself feel useful,
would sit outside the barn and repair such broken weapons and implements as the villagers cared to bring. It was then that he chafed most harshly against his fate and wished that Brennis Gehan’s spear had done its work properly and left him dead on Valdoe Hill instead of half alive. That he had been crippled was bad enough, but then to be given Paoul like this – to be unable to protect him – was unbearable. Like Paoul’s father, the man who had wielded the spear, the irony of this circumstance was too cruel and complicated for Tagart to understand.

  He watched Paoul sleeping for a moment longer. Fodich awoke with a yawn. Einthe sat up and stretched. Then there arrived, at the barn door, the two village girls with the pails containing breakfast, and everyone else began to stir.

  3

  At bedtime – especially when the evenings grew dark and the table lamps lit either side of the bed – Hothen’s second self emerged. Gone were the tantrums of the day; forgotten were his cruel words and threats, his transparent, ugly little deceits. In the unsteady lamplight he looked almost like a normal child of his age, but more helpless, and sad, and Rian felt she might one day even bring herself to pity him.

  She stroked the hair from his eyes and arranged his arms on the counterpane. “There,” she said. “Now you’re nice and clean, your mother will come to tell you a story.”

  “You tell me a story,” he said. “Are you a slave, Rian?”

  “Yes. I am a slave.”

  “Can I have some more blackberries tomorrow?”

  Rian stood up without answering: the Lady Ika had appeared at the door. Rian moved back from the bed. “Good evening, my lady.”

  “I came in too late,” Ika said. “Was Hothen asking for anything special?”

  Even his own mother had trouble understanding his stammer. “Just some blackberries, my lady. For tomorrow.”

  “Of course you can have blackberries again, my darling.” Ika felt for the bedpost and guided herself to the seat. “You can have anything you want.”

  As usual, Rian settled herself in the far corner, leaving her mistress to hold Hothen’s hand and to recount in a soothing voice the tales he liked so well.

  Rian did not pick up her sewing; away from the bedside lamps it was too dark. Her corner, like the rest of the room and, it seemed, the rest of the world, had been banished, excluded, shut out from the illuminated scene of mother and child together. Its radiance did not even reach the ceiling; the shapes and identities of nearby furniture receded into the gloom.

  Ika’s face was three-quarters turned away, her thick blonde hair plaited into a mass which caught the light only at its edges. But Hothen, his pillow, and the carved bedhead above him were fully lit. The bedhead was made of blackened oak. On it, within a stylized border of wreathing vines, each scale of the Gehan serpent threw its upward shadow. The original pigments of red and green had mostly flaked away, for the bed was old, a hundred years at least. It had been made for the first Flint Lord and used by his descendants and successors – five in all, the five Brennis Gehans, the last of whom had been Ika’s brother. The bed had been kept in a larger, much grander chamber then, but under its covers Hothen had been conceived.

  Rian looked on bleakly, reminded again of her former mistress. In this bed unhappy Altheme had also slept. Rian had adored her; she still mourned her loss, eight years ago this winter. Where was Lady Brennis now? What had become of her unborn baby, the Flint Lord’s first and rightful child?

  Dead, both were surely dead. After the siege of the Trundle, Altheme had fled into the forest with the savages – the remnants of those who had vainly tried to take the fort. In the following years the last of the savages’ tribes had been systematically destroyed by Torin Hewzane, the new Flint Lord, the man installed by the Home Lord and the mainland Gehans; the man who had betrayed and murdered Altheme’s husband. If she had survived, Lord Torin would have found her. She had not been found. Altheme and her child were surely dead.

  Yes, they were dead. Brennis Gehan Fifth had left only a single monument to himself, perhaps a fitting one – defective, inbred, reared on a diet of lies and intrigue. How much more terrifying would be Hothen’s rages if he knew the extent of his importance abroad, at the citadel? For Rian had heard that he was being kept here as a check on Lord Torin. The Home Lord, as did the whole fort, the whole of Valdoe, knew Hothen’s parentage; if it ever became necessary or expedient, there might yet be a Brennis Gehan Sixth.

  The stories Ika told him often concerned Brennis Gehan First, founder of the Valdoe domain, builder of the Trundle and, after her own father, chief inspiration of her brother’s life. At least, the stories purported to detail the valour of the first Lord Brennis, but in many episodes Rian recognized a subtly fashioned portrait of Hothen’s father, and sometimes, unconsciously, Ika gave her hero her brother’s features, demeanour, and manner of dress – far removed from the ugliness and austerity that were said to have characterized his ancestor. Yet she never spoke of him directly, not to anyone, least of all to Hothen.

  On her brother’s death she and a servant, a certain Rald – who had also shared her bed – tried to escape from the new Lord Brennis. They did not get far. On the orders of the Home Lord, Ika was brought back and given medication for the blinding she had received in the siege. During this treatment it became apparent that she was pregnant. The priests, aware of the rumours that had been current just before the siege, questioned her closely. At first she maintained that Rald was the father. Rald, who had red hair and green eyes, was interrogated and the nature of their relationship was established. The last union that could have given rise to a child had taken place at least two months before the siege.

  Hothen was born two hundred and eighty-four days after the start of the siege. He was fully formed; he had been carried for the full term. His hair, like his father’s and mother’s, was blond. His eyes were blue, and that was how they remained. There could be no doubt. Hothen was the son of Brennis Gehan Fifth.

  To everyone but Ika, it was obvious from the start that the child was not normal. He was slow in learning to suck; in the cradle he lay inert, taking no interest in dangled toys or his nurse’s fingers. He did not recognize his mother, and was nearly three before he uttered her name.

  About that time the convulsions began. Mercifully they had now abated, but in their place had come fits of frightening and inexplicable rage. These always followed the same course. Some incident, at the meal table, for example, would be enough to spark one off. Hothen’s eating habits were disgusting. Rian might reach out to wipe his chin, to offer the mildest possible word of correction; and it would start.

  First, with miraculous fluency, his stammer forgotten, he would say the worst and most hateful things he knew. Rian was dung, vomit, spittle. Somewhere – no doubt from the soldiers in the enclosure below his window – he had learned a variety of profanities, each of which he knew how to use to telling effect. Rian tried not to listen, but often his words struck deep and she was hurt that such things could be said at all. He seemed to have a cruelty far beyond his years. And then, without warning, in the middle of a stream of vituperation, he would slur his speech, shouting and struggling uncontrollably, upsetting dishes and bowls and platters, become incoherent, demented, and, just as suddenly, quiet. He would drool, pull faces, perhaps begin to laugh. His head would twist to one side and then the other. His eyes, which always seemed slightly filmed, would become yet more opaque, unfathomable, and withdrawn. Very often he would bring up whatever he had eaten.

  Afterwards, much subdued, he would allow himself to be cleaned and carried to his bed: these rages always left him much exhausted. Even in his sleep he made Rian more work, for he was still not properly trained. Sometimes she had to change his bedding twice or more in one night.

  Looking after him, and she had always been his nurse, was gruelling work for a woman of her age. By rights she should have had assistance, for she was also Ika’s body-slave, and by rights Hothen should have had his own body-slave as well as a nurse. But Rian h
ad to do it all. In just the same way were the quarters for Ika and Hothen dingy and cold. Their food was inferior, and their clothing had to last. They were Gehans, members of the Home Lord’s clan, but the other slaves and servants, the workmen and soldiers, treated them with ill-concealed contempt. Their movements were closely regulated. Ika – because, they said, of her blindness – was not allowed to leave the Trundle on her own. Accompanied, she could go as far as the settlement fields, but no farther, and the road to Apuldram, where the ships docked, was strictly out of bounds. Ika and her son were prisoners, and that made Rian doubly a slave.

  Perhaps she was lucky to have a position of any kind. At least it was keeping her alive. She might easily have followed all those whom Lord Torin had suspected of loyalty to Brennis Fifth. In the weeks after he had taken power, many, many people had been put to death – not only here at Valdoe and in the outer forts, but in the villages also. And though Rian knew she was too old and unimportant ever to be considered dangerous, still she was guarded in what she said. She did not care so much about herself, but her own three children – who had long since grown up – were all in service here.

  She leaned back, glad of this chance to rest before her duties of the evening. Tonight there was to be a banquet, and Ika had to go. Each autumn a commission was sent from the homelands to inspect the domain: it had arrived this afternoon. The custom was for a welcoming feast attended by everyone of rank. Lord Torin and his lady would of course be there, as would his two generals and their ladies, the commanders of the outer forts, and the most important priests and Trundlemen. There would be other freemen too, those who were rich and who benefited from Valdoe and the Home Lord, and everyone else whom the commission expected to see. They would be expecting Ika. Tomorrow they would probably come to check on Hothen.