Chains of Gold

by Nancy Springer

  I had not particularly noticed. But then, I had not been out of our small holding to see how things went elsewhere.

  “Lonn has been with us in the best sense,” Arlen said.

  I did not feel so sure. If we had indeed been blessed with abundance, it could have been the logans looking after us, or the goddess, or even sheer blind luck. But it was like Arlen to feel kindly toward Lonn, and a long step from the bitter Arlen of the springtime, so I smiled.

  He was looking around our beloved cottage as if he had a great confession to make. A fire, some stools, a kettle on the hearth. Not much, but it meant a vast amount to us.

  “All that we have we owe to Lonn,” he said.

  I nodded. It was true, if only because he had shown us the gold.

  “He died so that I might live and have you. He saved my life, there at the esker. He has fed us from his underground stores when we would have starved, otherwise. He saved us, somehow, from the spite of the oak elves, and sent the beasts with meat for us. He gave us the treasure which has bought us all we hold—and, the goddess willing, it will buy us what we need all our lives.”

  Had it, indeed, been Lonn who had done all these things? Some of them, perhaps. The cutworms, even, since they work underground. But the oak elves, the wolves, seemed hardly in his province.

  “If he had not been with us to start with,” I said dryly, “it would not have been necessary for him to feed us.”

  “But feed us he did. And if he had not been with us, so that we hid ourselves from folk, perhaps your father would have had us after all. Captured us within the month, even.” Arl leaned forward earnestly. “Rae, I am ashamed of myself, that I have felt harshly toward him sometimes.”

  “I have felt harshly toward him myself,” I said.

  “I suppose.” He hesitated. “It must be very lonesome for you, up here by yourself always.”

  I shrugged. I had always been much by myself, and one grows accustomed to the conditions of one’s life, whatever they may be. “You could not send him away if you tried,” I said.

  “I know.” He paused, sheepish. “I wish there were some way we could have his blessing and aid and not his taint, that is all. But one cannot have everything. Rae …?”

  “What?”

  “Have you considered how we are to manage, when your time comes? No midwife will come near you.”

  I crossed my hands atop my massive swelling of belly and wrinkled my nose at him. It was true that I was afraid—how could I help but be afraid? Women died in childbirth sometimes, and it was a horrible way to be taken. But fear was of no use. And I knew Arlen’s gentle ways with the mares, the cows, the ewes in lambing, and I knew his stock of herbs, and I felt sure I would be as well off with him as with any midwife.

  “We will manage well enough,” I told him.

  “May the Great Mother bless us with an easy birthing,” he said. “Rae?”

  “What?” I asked again, with all the patience I could muster. He was very much like a child sometimes.

  “When the baby comes, if it is a boy—let us name it after Lonn.”

  I gave him one quick, curious glance, trying to fathom his reasoning. Was this his way of propitiating the goddess, through Lonn, for continued good fortune and an easy birthing? Or did he really believe that Lonn could give us these things by himself? Or was it his hope, perhaps, that Lonn would be so pleased that he would consent to leave us? In the next instant I was ashamed of those thoughts. All I saw in Arl was love of his lost friend, to whom we owed so much. In truth, the name of our firstborn was a small enough remembrance to give to him. I had sometimes thought myself of giving the name of Lonn to the babe.

  “It would be fitting to do so,” I said. And in the same moment I hoped that the babe would be a girl, and wondered why I felt dismayed.

  TWELVE

  It was a boy. And the goddess was gracious to us and gave me an easy birthing. One day in early autumn as I pulled the ripe gourds in the garden my waters broke, spilling on the warm earth, and by the next day, after a night of lamplight and panting, I had my babe. Arlen drew him from me, gentle, breathless until the infant breathed—and the baby did not cry, but merely breathed and smiled. It was the sweetest of smiles. I was as wet with sweat as he was with birthing when Arlen handed him to me, and I put him at once to my breast, where he suckled. The goddess was good to me still, for within two days my milk came in, so the babe had nourishment in plenty, and I did not fall ill with the birthing fever, but healed cleanly and was strong within the week. We were indeed blessed, Arlen and I and the little one.

  We did not call him Lonn at once. That was not the custom, for children were taken away so frequently, the little visitors, that most often parents waited to see if they planned to stay, not naming them until the moon had come round again, to save themselves from so much hurt. But I think Arlen and I would have been slain with sorrow if this baby had been taken from us, name or no name. Indeed, we gave him a pet name, calling him Spriggan, our little elf. And how well I remember that first evening, when he had been bathed and warmed and dried, and the soft hair floated on his head, red-gold in the firelight, as fine as swansdown. I held him, and Arlen sat on the hearth beside us both, gazing as if awestruck, as if the goddess were there and he would fall down in worship.

  “Touch him,” I offered. “Go on. You delivered him from me; you need not be shy with him.”

  Arl put out a hand toward us, and tiny fingers curled around one of his. “So golden,” he whispered. “No—pink. And soft as a rose petal.”

  “Pink and golden both.” I had my face against the baby’s hair, and I sniffed the top of his head, rubbed my cheek against it. “And—the fragrance, like nothing else in the many kingdoms. Like the most delicate of spices, and—earth.…”

  “Like a baby,” Arlen said.

  “Like all babies, and yet like no other baby either. I think I would know him anywhere just by the sweet fragrance of his head.”

  “Would you, now.” His mood of wonder had changed to one of gentle amusement. “Well, I think I would know him better by this.”

  He touched it softly. Along the baby’s small left shoulder lay a birthmark, a purple stain, as dark as blackberry wine, nearly as dark as elderberries. It was a looping, mottled thing, indistinct, rather like a knotted chain or perhaps the serpentine of the Sacred Catena.

  “It may go away,” I said, though only for the sake of argument, for I did not consider it a blemish but a blessing, the kiss of the goddess.

  “I warrant it’ll stay. Anyway,” Arlen added, “all powers be willing, you’ll never have to go wandering about sniffing him out, like a brachet with a lost pup.”

  Little did we know.

  For a month all went well with us. Autumn deepened. The babe was a babe like any other: our Spriggan, our very special own, to be sure, but much like all babies everywhere. He was troublesome by night and slept away the days in his cradle by the hearth—a cradle made by his father’s own hands, made of birch, the wood of inception and springtime growth. He sucked greedily at my breasts and smiled toothlessly afterward. Dark came earlier each evening, as days shortened toward winter.

  Four weeks to the day after the baby’s birth, as was the custom, Arlen took him down to the shrine of the goddess in the village to be named. I did not go. That was not as was the custom, but it could not be helped; there was a shimmering presence in the air to my left, and I dared not venture where other folk were. I gave Arlen a honey teat made of sweets and cloth to soothe the little one should he become hungry, and I sent father off with child and waved after them and watched them on their way, and I watched for their return through a long afternoon, restless and lonely.

  With the coming of dusk I could hear the baby crying. All the way up the mountainside he was crying in great frantic gasps until he was hoarse with his bawling, and though I tried to shut my ears to it for the sake of whatever lies Arlen had told the villagers, in the end I could not stand it. I bolted out of the house
and ran to meet them, nor could I rest or speak until I had taken the babe from Arlen and put him to my breast. Sucking, he quieted, though from time to time a sob still shuddered through his small body.

  “Well,” said Arlen wearily, “little Lonn is duly named.”

  “Was he like this all the time?”

  “No, only lately, after we had started home. The naming went well enough.”

  “And was there a fuss?” We stood on mountain rimrock, looking down at the village.

  “Indeed there was, though a friendly sort of fuss. No one knew I had a son, we have kept your condition so secret, and so of course it was a great surprise for them to see me with him, and then every goodwife in the village wanted to know why you had not come down for the naming, and when I told them you were still weak from childbirth they talked of venturing up here to help you with the chores. But nothing came of it, for they are afraid. Perhaps someday—”

  I was not listening, but looking at the village, and my eyes widened, and I gasped. “What in the name of the goddess is that?”

  A blaze, a fire, in the village square. And as we watched it grew greater, and another sprang up beside it, and on the summits of the foothills and moorlands all around sprang up others, in pairs.

  “It must be—we have lost reckoning.…”

  It was the day of the quarter year, between winterking and summerking, or rather the eve of that day. And the village folk were preparing to celebrate the festival of the dead.

  “We had better get within,” Arlen said uneasily. Spirits were wafting through that dusk, for the portals between the now and the afterlife stand wide open on the eve of that day. Folk took refuge between the fires and made propitiation of burned beans, spirit food. We went inside and stirred up our own hearth fire and sat beside it, and we burned a few beans ourselves. But we found it hard to feel very afraid of the spirits of the dead. We had lived with one of them for so long that we no longer noticed him.

  The next day, as I sat and sorted wool in my lap and rocked the cradle with my foot, the baby spoke to me. “Rae,” he said indistinctly. It was a weird, husky voice to come out of that flower-petal mouth, and I was quite startled. I stopped what I was doing and stared. The baby smiled at me, a winsome, toothless gape. The voice had been a fluke, I decided. A meaningless murmur, a burble of the stomach, even. I turned my eyes back to my work—

  “’Rilla,” the baby said. “Rae. La-dy Ce-rilla.”

  I jumped up and retreated a few steps in shock and horror, the wool tumbling down on our dirt floor, unheeded. “Stop that,” I said sharply, my voice trembling. “Stop it, or I won’t feed you!” I am grateful still that Arlen was not there to hear me. Though of course Lonn had chosen to speak when Arlen was not there. And on the instant I felt ashamed. To offer to starve a tiny babe, my own firstborn, whom I dearly loved—

  “Go to sleep,” I muttered, caught between guilt and anger. But the baby cried until I took him up and comforted him. When he was sleeping I picked up the wool and put it away; my hands were shaking too badly to work with it any more that day.

  It is odd how one can manage to ignore ill chance, even the worst of ill chance, for a few days. Hoping, I suppose, that one might be mistaken, that circumstances might not be as vile as they seem. By the time Arlen came home for his dinner, I had almost convinced myself that nothing had happened or that, if it had, it would pass. He knew I was distraught; he could tell it by my silence and my restlessness, and he asked me what ailed me, but I told him nothing. What was I to tell him? That our Spriggan was possessed? Perhaps it would pass with the passing of the day.

  “Lady Cerilla,” the baby said to me the next morning, more plainly; and I ran away so as not to have to face what was happening, ran into the coppice by the house with the tears streaming down my face and stayed there for the better part of an hour, and then I was ashamed of myself again. But when I came in the baby did not speak to me any more that day.

  On toward evening I left the little one asleep in his cradle before the fire and went out to help Arlen with the heifer in the byre, and he helped me gather eggs. When we came in together, he turned first to the infant, as he always did. I watched Arlen’s face to see the smile in his eyes, but the smile stopped before it had well started—a shocked silence came there instead, and he sharply drew in breath. And when I glanced at the cradle, there, sleeping with the baby, beside him and draped and looping all over him and about him like an oddly patterned blanket—it was a serpent, the most sacred amber-golden serpent with the brown chain markings on its back, a serpent of great size; its head, beside little Lonn’s on the pillow, was as big as my hand.

  I could not help it; I had been through too much. My nerve broke and I began to scream. Arlen grabbed me and put a hand over my mouth to hush my noise; I did not struggle against him, but I kept screaming, the sound muffled by his fingers. The baby stirred sleepily, and the serpent raised its great head and regarded all of us with eyes as green as emeralds. Lidless, expressionless eyes—remorseless, I thought. There was wisdom in serpents, but no mercy. Whatever they did, their reasons were their own. Still, it did not hurt us, any of us, but merely flowed over the edge of the cradle and out before the baby was fully awake. And then with great dignity, with its head raised regally, it rippled its way to the door and out into the dusk.

  I kept screaming. I have never been so out of control, before or since, and Arlen could not comfort me, though he attempted to soothe me in every way he could think of, holding me in his arms, rubbing my back and shoulders, talking to me, trying to make sense out of me—nothing helped.

  “Lonn!” I kept shrieking, “Lonn!”

  And he kept saying, “But he is all right! Look at him!” meaning that the baby had not been harmed.

  But I was screaming because Lonn was there, Lonn whom the goddess had gifted with the gift of serpent power, and I did not want him in my cradle; I wanted my own sweet Spriggan back again.

  Finally in simple exhaustion I stopped screaming, but I could not eat or sleep, and Arlen was worried about me. He did not leave me alone the next day. But as nothing more happened, I became calm and ate some supper toward nightfall, and on the following morning he went off to the village to tend to an ailing milk cow.

  As soon as he was well gone the baby looked at me. “Lady,” he said in his deep man’s voice, and I jumped up from where I sat with a cry.

  “What do you want of me?” I shouted, and at the same time I covered my ears with my hands because I did not want to hear. But I heard well enough.

  “You,” Lonn said.

  I snatched up an earthenware bowl, meaning to fling it at him, but how could I hurt a baby, my baby? I flung it against the wall instead, where it broke. The look on my face must have been fearsome.

  “I found you food,” he reminded me. Speaking seemed difficult for him, but easier than it had been two days before. “When you were hungry. And—gold.”

  It was true, all too true. Curse the gold, I thought vehemently, but I did not say it. I did not know what to say.

  “I—love—you.”

  I had never wanted love less, not of the perverse sort he was offering me. Man’s voice, dead man’s voice out of the body of a baby—it sickened me. In the name of all that was sacred, how was I to tell Arlen? I could not tell him. Perhaps I was somehow mistaken, or perhaps I was insane, raving. If I were not already, certainly I soon would be.

  “Lady Cerilla—”

  “Be silent,” I told Lonn savagely. The baby started to wail with fright or hunger, and after some hesitation I put it to my breast. It was the baby, I told myself, the sweet baby, not Lonn. Those tiny hands feeling at my breast were the hands of an innocent—or were they? Lonn had spoken from the infant’s mouth. How much of this small body I held was itself, and how much was Lonn?

  Arlen returned in the early afternoon while the baby was sleeping, and I passed him in the doorway.

  “Stay here, tend the little one,” I ordered. “I am going down
to the village.”

  “What?” He was utterly taken aback, as was to be expected, for I had never gone down to the village, and we had always said I never could; I would turn the folk against us with the taint of death that followed me. But now I strode off amidst Arlen’s startled pleas for an explanation, and I would offer him none, and I would not think clearly even within myself just what it was that I expected to find.

  It seemed odd, very odd, to approach the village and step within it after having regarded it all those months from my far vantage. I felt as if I were stepping into a tapestry. Perhaps it was only because nothing seemed real, those terrible days. Woodenly I walked between the houses, wondering at them, that they seemed so upright, so solid. I came to the square, where the women stood and chatted around the well. As I approached they turned and looked at me, the stranger, and I stopped, waiting for them to grimace, to shout in shock and terror, to run. Hoping they would.

  They did not. They came up to me, curious, trying not to seem too curious.

  My tongue would scarcely move. I had to moisten my lips before I could speak. “I am Rae,” I whispered to them. “Arlen’s wife.…”

  On the instant there was a spate of happy talk, deferential, even. Was I, indeed, and had I come down at last, and was I well; they were happy to see me. And would I come and have some soup and a scone. So good to know me at last after all this time, and they gave me their names, Treva and Nissa and Peg, and they valued my husband and all he did, such a generous heart he had, and he was so good with the animals, and never sharp in his dealings, not at all. And they hoped we had enough and to spare, and that the season had favored us with good crops. And my little one, the baby, was all well with him?

  I startled the women by bursting into tears, and they became alarmed.

  Was the baby sick? Surely Arlen could help him. Or was it something dreadful, the smallpox, the plague? No? Was I overwrought? Should they—and here they hesitated—should they come and lend me a hand at the cottage?

  I turned and ran from them, back through the village street and up the steep slope, panting and gulping and grasping at the prickly gorse, never feeling it sting. I dare say they thought I was mad. They stood and put their heads together, not attempting to follow me. I came back to the cottage at last, gasping and blown, and I must have looked wild, for Arlen got up from where he sat at the table and came to me.