In days to follow we learned not to scorn the squirrels’ hoards. When my signal unseen or voice unheard led me to one the next day, we took nuts and cracked them to have with our apples.
Those were not easy days; it would be untrue to say they were. We did not trouble the outlanders any more with the onus of our presence, but waited until they were abed and then took shelter in a shed or barn or byre, stealing a bit of hay for Bucca, or corn. For some reason, although we did not hesitate to take what the horse needed, we would not steal for ourselves. Perhaps we felt somehow to blame, while Bucca was blameless. Therefore we survived on gleanings, we both grew thin and haggard. And I had never known the world was so large, so awesome, or the hours of darkness were so long, away from lamplight and friendly hearth. Until we were settled in our rude bedding with our blanket over us and our bodies nestled together, the nights seemed full of dread mystery, as menacing to us as we seemed to others.
Perhaps because we needed it the more, the presence that traveled with us had grown stronger. Whatever food lay beneath the ground it would show to me without fail, even if it were only a single turnip or a few acorns—always to me, never to Arlen. But Arlen was beginning to sense the being of the thing too. At times one could almost see it; there was a sort of thickness in the air a few feet to the left of us. If we were separated, it went with me. On one occasion when it had led me off to some distance in search of carrots, I turned to see Arlen watching with a peculiar expression on his face. Then he came slowly up to us. I say “us” because there verily was an other there.
“I wonder what it is,” he murmured, gazing off to my left a little.
I must have been feeling particularly hungry that day, and bitter. “You could leave,” I told him, as if he were stupid not to have thought of it himself. “Go off by yourself and join some lord’s retinue, live like a proper person instead of a beast. They would accept you, for this thing would cleave to me; I feel sure of it. Go ahead.”
If he had hesitated so much as to draw an extra breath—but he only smiled and took my hand. “Rae,” he chided, “you are talking nonsense.” And that was the end of it.
Hard days, but good. Arlen had never known women except for the Gwyneda, who were scarcely women at all in any natural sense. It was most sternly forbidden that there should be any contact of a fleshly sort between the young men of the Sacred Isle and the Gwyneda, even though some of the white-robes were as young as the sacred kings. The penalty for such passion was a most unpleasant death. So Arlen had known no lovers but me, and while he knew he loved me he hardly knew how to treat me, not in any usual way. More and more he came to regard me as a comrade, a fellow, and he confided in me much as he would have confided in—well, in Lonn. I did not entirely like this; I would have liked to have been wooed, courted, I who had prayed for a sweetheart. Still, I was a wife, and once a women wed, she stood at the mercy of her husband’s fist; in this regard I was fortunate. Arlen had no notion of manly protection or a woman’s place, but his equable love for me constrained him to keep from quarreling with me and I was glad of it, for he was mettlesome. I was grateful that the hot flash of his eyes fell on folk other than myself.
Being a comrade, I decided, had felt strange to start with, but better and better as time went on. Comradeship assorted well with freedom—another joy that had once felt strange.
Neither of us had a plan. “Where are we going?” I asked once, over his shoulder as we rode.
“I don’t know.” He laughed and nudged Bucca into a springing trot. “Folk think we are fleeing, but they are wrong,” he said. “We are two seekers questing together. We are looking.”
“Seeing the size of the world,” I murmured. The vast world.
I was coming to know Arlen better—a bittersweet reckoning, for one who had dreamed of heroes. There was little of the hero about Arlen, but much to love: the moods that crossed his face, his warm way with animals, his occasional mischief, his mouth that stammered slightly when he was heart-touched or distressed—there were a thousand expressions about his mouth. And for all our happiness and Arlen’s confidence I began to feel that he hid some deep hurt; something was bleeding within him, a wound that had not yet started to heal.
“What is wrong?” I whispered to him, late at night, just before sleeping beneath frosty stars.
“Nothing.”
“I have sensed in you—not sadness, exactly.…”
“It is nothing, Rae.”
“Lonn?” I asked softly, and I felt Arl shake his head, his hair brushing against my cheek.
“I have wept for Lonn. Leave it, Rae.”
It was true, we spoke of Lonn often. I asked again, from time to time, but Arlen did not tell me what ailed him, and I decided he could not, that he did not yet know the name of it himself.
“Elderberries,” he murmured once.
“What?” We were riding, and he spoke away from me, so I had not heard.
“Elderberries.” He stopped the horse and pointed.
Bushes clustered thickly beside us, and the black berries hung in bunches from every bough. Arlen reached over and plucked himself a fistful, and my skin prickled in protest.
“Those are forbidden food!” I cried. The elder was the tree of doom and immortality, of death and the goddess; it kept its fruit throughout the winter. An infant laid in a cradle of elderwood would pine and die. The goddess only knew what would happen to a person who ate of the fruit of that tree. But before I could scream or stop him, Arlen put some in his mouth. There was a reckless look about those greenish eyes of his, almost fury.
“I am not going to starve.…” Though in fact he was courting death. He swallowed, seeming pleased. “Rae, they are good,” he said offering some to me.
They were, very good, filling and sweet. I ate them because he had. I wanted to share his fate, whatever it was to be, and some of that angry recklessness was in me also; what new punishment could be in store for us? We would defy it. We ate our fill—and no ill came of it. Even looking back, I can discern none. After that we ate of the elderberries whenever we found them, and they sustained us better than any other food we could find. But we had placed ourselves far from other folk with that act, and we knew it and avoided them when we could, as they avoided us.
We traveled in this way for more than a month, heading mostly toward the north and east, away from the Naga and the seven holds of Rahv. There were two snowstorms; they covered our traces for a while and then caused us to leave more. The land grew more rolling between eskers, and more wooded, and even more sparsely settled. Nothing else changed.
So the greater was our surprise when, rounding the curve of a hill one noonday, we found dug into the side of it a house of earth, a soddy, not a stone cottage or a walled garth but simply a soddy set beneath the copse, and out of it came a man in dark clothing. And when he saw us—we were already quite close, having come on him from around the side of the hill because of its forested top—he walked toward us instead of away from us, and he greeted us.
“Arlen, is it not?” he said. “And Lady Cerilla?”
Arlen jerked Bucca to a halt, and we sat stock-still in astonishment. He looked up at us with bright black eyes. He was a small brown man, gnarled, as if he might be very strong for his size, and, oddly, he stood on brown feet quite bare in the snow. I could not think that I had ever seen him before.
“I have heard many rumors,” he said, “of runaways from the Sacred Isle.”
We had not thought that folk this far away could have heard any such thing, and we glanced at each other in consternation. The man saw the look and laughed softly.
“No fear,” he said. “I am no spy. I only wanted to tell you. Look behind you.”
“Thank you.” Arlen cleared his throat, finding his voice hoarse with a stranger after all these weeks. “Could you spare us some bread?”
“Look behind you, I say.” The small man turned away from us and went back inside his earthen home. Arlen and I glanced at each other, un
certain whether the bread was forthcoming, for the fellow’s manner had been neither friendly nor hostile. We waited a moment, and then Arlen shrugged and sent Bucca trotting onward.
Before we had gone far we came to a windswept esker. The sand and rock of those mounds did not make good footing for a horse, and any other time Arlen would have skirted it. But this time he sent Bucca struggling up the slope, and when we topped the esker ridge we stopped and turned and looked back the way we had come.
No more than a mile distant a band of horsemen was approaching, more than a dozen in number, armed horsemen; I could see the glint of their helms. And they were coming on at the gallop.
SIX
There was no question of our outrunning them. Bucca was worn down from poor feeding and much work; he had become slow and sadly docile. We had to stand and fight. And I knew Arl was not yet so starved as to be docile.
He swung a leg over Bucca’s neck and slid to the ground. Then he boosted me into the saddle and handed me the reins.
“Flee,” he said. “Go, find safety.”
“Nonsense!” I flared at him, and he must have known my refusal was final, for he smiled a little, grimly.
“Well then, go and see if you can find me a weapon.” He started stacking some of the larger rocks together, making a sort of breastwork for himself.
There was a homestead beyond the esker, half hidden by a fringe of larch. I rode Bucca down there—I had never ridden by myself before, and I grabbed his mane for balance as we skittered down the rocky slope. but as soon as we reached the meadowland I kicked Bucca fiercely for speed, and he was a good horse; he did not fight me for mastery, but galloped me into the garth. Folk fled before us, and I did not waste time asking for succor, but looked about me. There were a pitchfork and a spade standing against the wall. Without getting down I was able to seize them, hanging onto the horse’s neck, and after I had struggled upright again we were off. I stopped Bucca at the bottom of the esker and tied him by the reins to a thorn bush. Then I hurried up the slope afoot, using the handle of the spade as a staff to aid me, and was relieved to find Arlen where I had left him.
“They’re just behind the copse, yonder,” he said in a low voice.
“Have they seen you yet?”
“I think not, or they would have been here before now.”
He was hunting about as he spoke, looking for sizable stones. A few large boulders jutted from the top of the esker, looking like fangs, and he had built a hasty wall around them. I put down the pitchfork and spade and started filling my skirt with egg-sized stones to throw. Then the horsemen trotted out from behind the copse and spied us, gave a shout. Arlen picked up the pitchfork as they charged toward us.
“If you have any sense at all,” he told me, “you’ll flee.”
I glared at him.
“Rae—” It was a different tone, an endearment and a plea. I touched his hand, but I did not reply; how could I leave him to face sixteen armed men alone? We stood side by side, at the ready.
But at the base of the esker their charge faltered to a halt. It was bad footing for horses, I knew, but they turned aside before they touched it. What had stopped them? Horses milled about as the men sat them uncertainly, and one hulking man, he who must have been the leader, shouted furiously at the others to continue.
“It’s that confounded aura of yours giving them pause!” Arlen exclaimed. “By my body, Rae, perhaps you had better stay with me after all.”
I was not listening. I only stared at the captain, the big brute. “It’s Eachan,” I breathed.
“What?”
“My father’s toady. That swine. The one who killed my sister.” A taut, burning feeling filled my chest.
He had struck her down with his own ugly fists; only for that she had shown him some spirit, he had bruised and battered her and knocked her head against a stone pillar until she was dead. Then he had buried her with no more ceremony or sorrow than he would have shown for a middling-fine hunting dog. Now Father had sent him for me, it seemed.
“Here they come,” said Arlen.
Eachan had bullied them into ascending the slope at last, but they came halfheartedly, the horses soon slowing to a walk. Eachan himself stayed below, lolling on his steed and watching—
The taut feeling in my chest tore open, and rage burst out. I flung a stone with a force that brought forth a yell of pain from somewhere in the ranks.
“Eachan!” I screamed, a witch’s shrill. “Ea-chan! Coward! Coward! Murderer! Woman-killer—how many men does it take to help you kill women?” I hurled stones furiously, knowing that none of them could reach him, venting my rage on the men within range. Arlen was throwing stones also; one man had fallen from his horse, stunned, and others were cowering under our pelting. I was not satisfied; I wanted to hurt Eachan.
“Do you not care to murder women yourself these days? Must you have hirelings do it for you?”
His face had gone dark with wrath—and shame, I hoped. But there was no shame in his voice, only the hard edge of malice. “My orders are to take you alive, missy,” he boomed. “The Gwyneda want you for killing. Forward!” he roared at his men.
They heard the threat in his voice and kicked their mounts into a plunging canter, the steeds slipping on the pebbly terrain. Swords drawn and shields at the ready, they made for us. Arlen leveled his pitchfork to hold them off, and I swung the spade at them, screeching, slashing with the edge of it and hitting at their legs and the shoulders of the horses; I had not known such ferocity was in me. As for Arlen, his eyes burned with such reckless despair—or desperation—that I would have been afraid of him had I not known that something of the same sort was in me as well; he lunged fiercely, spearing his enemies with his awkward weapon. Some already bore wounds, and they fell back for fear of him.
“Surround them!” Eachan bellowed.
There was, indeed, no reason why they should not take us on all sides and not in the front merely, where our breastwork was. Some of them went around to come at us from behind, and I put my back to Arlen’s back, defending him as best I could, swinging my spade as high as my arms would take it. But from time to time one of our enemies would reach over me to prick him in the shoulder. Never badly; each such attack gave me a surge of new force that sent them swiftly into retreat. But Arlen must have known I was tiring. He maneuvered us so that we each had some breastwork to one side, wheeling us around a quarter turn—and then I could see Eachan still down below, watching. The sight enraged me.
“Coward!” I shouted at him. “Murdering coward! Are you afraid to face me youself, you who killed my sister?”
He came up the slope like a charging bear. Once you have called a man a coward enough times, it seems, he is no longer afraid. Arlen saw him coming and leaped forward to meet him with a wild shout, spurned his own breastwork with his foot to send it scudding down the esker slope. It took the feet out from under Eachan’s mount, but Eachan leaped clear as the beast came crashing down. He charged afoot, sword raised, and Arlen awaited him between the fanglike rocks. Eachan’s men fell back a few paces, glad enough to leave the field to him for the time—
And Eachan broke Arlen’s pitchfork with one blow of his sword.
I sprang forward, battering the brute with my spade, now blunted; he shrugged off my beating as if he had not felt it. And Arlen stood staunchly between his rocks, not yielding, fighting with nothing more than his bare hands. Eyes ablaze, no hint of fear in his face, trying to wrest the sword from Eachan’s grasp, while I was hurling myself against Eachan from the side, kicking and clawing and tearing at him. We both fought like lunatics, but it was no use. Eachan was like a bull for strength, and he was cruel, teasing us. He gave Arlen a few wounds, cuts, shallow wounds to hurt and bleed, and then he gave him a few deeper, trying to make him cry out. And all the while Arlen withstood him gamely—and I broke my spade on Eachan’s back—and then he ran his sword through Arlen’s thigh, and Arlen went to one knee with the pain, his eyes afire with hatred.
I stood woodenly, beyond screaming or clawing at Eachan and hitting him; I felt as if my heart had been torn out. Then Eachan stabbed Arlen in the shoulder so that he fell back on the ground.
“Belly next,” Eachan said. And then—
And then I took a rock as large as a smith’s anvil, picked it up in both hands, lifted it high, and smashed Eachan’s head with it, lifted it high as I should not have been able to do and smashed it again. He lay on the stones, and I split his head open, and I stood on his body and continued to pound at his head with my monstrous rock until what lay there had turned to something other than Eachan. I ground my heel in what had been his brains. When at last I was tired, I looked up—Arlen! I had forgotten him, and he lay moaning in pain. I went to him quickly and pressed a fold of my skirt against his worst wound, the shoulder wound. Hazily I became aware that Eachan’s men were sitting their horses all around us, and I looked up at them. It did not appear as if they were going to help me, so I dismissed them.
“Go away,” I told them.
They shook their heads. “We are taking you to our lord,” one of them said, meaning Rahv. “There is to be a reward for your capture.”
I chose not to understand. “Go away,” I said again. “I must care for him. Leave us.”
Several of them dismounted and began to approach us from all sides. They moved slowly, cautiously, as if they expected me to be dangerous.
As, indeed, I suppose I was. But I did not feel dangerous just then; I felt exhausted, heartbroken and helpless. They were not going to let me be, they were going to take me away from Arlen, leave him there to die. I could not bear it. All powers that be.… There were no words in me. All was feeling, despair and plea, but the feeling was a prayer.
The rocks of the esker started to stir.
The men froze where they stood, some few feet from me. And well they might. For out of every cranny, out from under the boulders, out from between the rocks that had been our small stronghold, out from under Eachan’s body, burrowing out of the very sand—snakes crawled, snakes, so it seemed, by the hundred. Most were small, but some bulked as long as a man and as thick as my arm, and they were black, shiny bead-black with golden eyes, and yellow like the sand, and brown, all hues of brown, dun, ochre, umber, and some were vipers, I could tell by the squat shape of their heads. I took Arlen’s upper body into my arms with some thought of protecting him, but I was too spent to be very frightened, even though the snakes slithered right past us. They were all darting down the esker slopes, toward my enemies. And that presence was there too, that wavering thickness in the air, I had never seen it so plainly—with them, as if directing them. The men turned pallid, as ashen as corpses, calling back and forth to each other in voices thick with fear, some retreating slowly and some afraid to move.
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