Jackaroo

by Cynthia Voigt

  “How long ago did she die, my Lord,” she asked, without making it much of a question.

  “Last winter. She was supposed to have a baby but she died instead.”

  Gwyn put her spoon into the hot stew, but did not lift it out. “You dream about her.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “When somebody dies, they can’t feel anything, or see, or think. Or anything,” she said.

  “Do you really know that?”

  “How could I really know that?” she demanded. “But I’ve killed chickens. After you chop their heads off it’s just—meat.” She wished immediately that she had not said that. “I mean, everything alive is gone.”

  But he didn’t seem bothered by the comparison. “I never killed anything.”

  “Not even hunting?”

  “I’m not old enough.”

  “How old do you have to be?”

  “Twelve.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Almost eleven.”

  “That’s about Tad’s age, my brother. You’ve seen him. Tad wouldn’t come with us when we burned Granda, he didn’t want to watch.”

  “Has he killed chickens?” The Lordling at last picked up his spoon and took a bite.

  “He’s watched. I guess he thinks people are different.”

  “Don’t you think they are?”

  “Not that way, no. Because animals and people both have blood keeping them alive. Turnips are different, I think, and apples, things like that.” The relief that she hadn’t put terrible ideas into the Lordling’s head lifted Gwyn’s spirits and loosened her tongue. “People are different from chickens in other ways, and cows and horses. But not that way.”

  “I agree,” he decided. “Do you think people are better? Than chickens? Or horses; I know more about horses.”

  “Oh, well then, my Lord,” she answered with a quick tongue, “I’m not often pleased with people.”

  The look he gave her was not a boy’s look. “Nor Lords either?”

  Gwyn felt her face grow hot. That question she did not answer. She bent her face to her bowl and ate. When she dared to look at him again, he was grinning at her.

  “I know nothing of the Lords,” she told him, cross.

  He just grinned away.

  “Nor am I curious to know.”

  “That’s not true,” he crowed. “You’re as curious as can be, that’s why you ask all those questions.”

  “I didn’t ask that many questions,” Gwyn protested, but then she had to admit it. “Not all that many. And why shouldn’t I be curious.”

  He ate on, well pleased with himself.

  “You aren’t dull yourself, are you my Lord,” she finally gave in to him.

  “It’s all right, I won’t tell,” he promised her. “If I did, you know, I’d get in as much trouble as you.”

  “More, I hope.”

  As they ate, with good appetites, Gwyn hoped the Lordling had not noticed that they were more than halfway through the hanging meat; he could not know, she knew, that at the rate they could move through this snow, they would be caught by night long before they could reach the village. And she wondered about the burial of his mother; she wondered why the Lords would put their dead into the earth, like the animals. She thought she knew why he had dreams—she had never seen such a thing, but she could picture it; a Lady—his mother—lying in a hole in the ground; and she could imagine how it would feel to look down as the face was covered with dirt. She could imagine also, she discovered, how it would feel to lie there, still and dead: The dirt would fall soft, at first, soft as rain and as light, and then it would lie heavy, pressing down—Gwyn shuddered. She was no longer hungry.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

  Gwyn tried to smile easily. “My mother tells me I have too much imagination.”

  “I think you’re right, though, about the chickens.”

  This was what boys did. They thought their own thoughts and when you thought they had forgotten something they would surprise you. “What did she look like?”

  “She was beautiful, she was tall and quiet. Her hair was brown, like mine, but darker. It hung down her back like silk. I can’t remember much. It’s been so long since I was in her care.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When boys turn five they go to live with the men, in the men’s quarters. Only girls stay with the women.” He sopped gravy with his bread. “Or sickly boys; if you’re really sick then you go to the women’s quarters, but I never was. But I could see her at dinners, when she was at the high table next to my father, so I know she was beautiful. You should wear your hair long that way. I don’t know why you all want to look ugly.”

  “Long hair would get in the way. It would fall into the stew. It would be in a terrible mess every night and I’d have to spend hours combing it out when I only wanted to go to sleep. Look at your hair now from not being cared for—it’s like a bird’s nest. Hair like that would be nothing but trouble to me.”

  “The servants take care of it.”

  “I have no servants.”

  “What about Burl?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How is it different?”

  She tried to tell him about Burl, whose parents had died of sickness in Hildebrand’s City, when he was a boy, how the priest had brought him to one of the fairs and Da had bought him, to train him. The Lordling pelted her with questions about that, asking what would have happened if the Innkeeper hadn’t wanted him, where else he might have gone, asking what would have happened if Burl had been a girl, asking why the priests hadn’t brought him to the Lords to be a servant, asking if he would serve Tad when Tad inherited. His spirits certainly seemed eased, Gwyn observed to herself, patiently answering his questions.

  They talked through the afternoon, sometimes with the Lordling answering Gwyn’s questions about life in his grandfather’s house, sometimes with Gwyn answering his about how Da’s holdings increased. They went outside, where he insisted that she let him hide and then come to find him. She had no trouble seeing where he was, until he demanded how she knew, and she showed him the way his tracks through the snow gave him away.

  Inside again, he helped her shake out the bedclothes to freshen them and they turned his mattress over. They ate cheese and bread, drank melted snow, built up the fire. He took out the long book again, and the bits of charcoal, and continued talking as she sat at the table with him.

  “When do you think we’ll be able to leave here?” he asked her. He had taken one of the last pages for his own and was making marks on it. She watched him, envying the work of his fingers. She wished her hands had some work, even knitting, to occupy them.

  “Maybe soon. Not tomorrow yet.”

  “We’ve started the last of the cheeses. Should we eat less?”

  “Not yet, my Lord,” she decided.

  “It would be all right. I expect I can stand to be hungry.” She thought that was true, and she thought he wouldn’t complain about it either.

  “I know that, my Lord.” Firelight gave his face warmer colors, but even so, she thought, he looked less pale than before. His voice, too, when he spoke, seemed livelier.

  “What about you?” His eyes caught hers.

  “Me?”

  “Will you marry?”

  “Me?”

  “You’re almost too old, aren’t you? What happens if you don’t marry by the time, what will you do? Do you want to?”

  Such questions he had no right to ask. “I don’t know, my Lord.”

  “But you must have thought about it, Gwyn.”

  “Aye, I have. But my thoughts are my own business.”

  She should not speak that way to a Lord, however young, and she knew it.

  He did not seem to notice her stiffness. “What if you don’t, what if there’s nobody you want to, you could come be my servant. I’d like that. I would, wouldn’t you? We’d have to cut off your hair and pretend you were a man, or a boy becaus
e you wouldn’t need to shave a beard, but what if we did? If we did, when I marry then you could serve my wife.” He watched her face eagerly. Gwyn didn’t know whether to laugh at his tumble of ideas or pity the loneliness that made him dream up such things. “I mean it, Gwyn. We could do that. Would you like it?”

  She hesitated.

  “No, you wouldn’t. Neither would I, if I were you,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind if we didn’t go back for a long time. Would you?”

  “No, my Lord, I wouldn’t,” Gwyn told him honestly. She liked this boy, this Lordling. “Except that I have so little to do,” she admitted. “I’m used to having my days busy.”

  “We could carve wooden swords and I could show you how.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea. “And we can continue breaking a path,” Gwyn said. It was only the evening that stretched so long and empty. “I would make a terrible servant.” She laughed. “I have a temper and a sharp tongue and I don’t like being lazy.”

  “I know,” he answered, not looking at her, watching his own hands where they moved on the paper. “I know you’d hate it. You’d get all sour, like green apples.”

  “And everybody knows how bad green apples are for you.” She was enjoying his idea of her.

  He laughed with her and closed the book. With the charcoal, he made marks on the wood of the table. Gwyn watched him. He was making letters, four of them, but not in a cross the way the maps made them. He wrote them in a straight line. Two she recognized.

  “That’s your name,” he told her. She stood behind him to look at the letters. GWYN. She studied them in silence, while he wrote something else underneath. Just as she opened her mouth to see if he would name the two letters she didn’t know and wondered if she dared ask him to give her a piece of charcoal to copy the shapes herself—if she would be going too far to ask that—he pointed to the long line of letters underneath her name.

  “That’s my name,” he told her.

  Gwyn could think of nothing to say. She did not look at the Lordling. Her eyes were caught like a hooked fish on the long line of letters. The first and last were the same as in her name, she noticed.

  “My name’s Gaderian,” he said. He turned his face to look into her eyes.

  Gwyn didn’t know what she should say. She didn’t know if she ought to say anything, or if this was something she ought to begin forgetting right away.

  Oddly enough, it was the Lordling who reassured her. “You won’t tell.”

  Gwyn shook her head. No, she never would. “Hello, Gaderian,” she said.

  That struck him funny. “Hello, Gwyn.” He giggled.

  Then she dared to ask him the name of the first letter, the round one with the tail. Then, when he answered that, the name of the middle one, the one that looked like a forked twig. He answered both questions, so she knew the names of all the letters in her name. She asked him about the letters in his own name, the tall mountain peak letter first, then the big-bellied one.

  “You’d better learn the alphabet,” he told her. “Sit down here,” he told her. She pulled her stool over beside him. He put a piece of charcoal into her hand.

  “But you have to promise, on your honor—” he said.

  “On my honor,” Gwyn promised.

  “And I give you my word too, on my honor,” Gaderian said to her.

  They got to work.

  Chapter 12

  THE NEXT THREE DAYS PASSED quickly, with too much to do in them. Gwyn and Gaderian broke more of a path each morning. The weather held clear and cold. Under each day’s sunlight, the snow sank, until it was no higher than Gwyn’s knees. It was heavier to push through then, but even so they could make better progress. Often Gaderian could move right along the surface, because his weight was not enough to break through the thickened snow. Then he would suddenly fall through at a soft spot and emerge with his head and cloak coated. Usually he worked patiently behind Gwyn, trampling down the path she had broken. Sometimes, she would hear his voice and turn to find herself alone: When he hid like that she would track backward until she could see where he had gone off the rough path, then her eye would search out the marks on the snow’s surface until she saw a mound suspiciously higher than the rest. Sometimes, if she had not marked carefully the direction of his voice, she could not find him. He was getting better at concealing his tracks. In the mornings, they trekked across Da’s vineyard and down that hillside to the dell, where the snow was piled up deep and heavy, and up the next rise. On the third morning, Gwyn heard the distant song of a bird from among the trees ahead. They were just past halfway to the village and she told Gaderian, “I think tomorrow we can go home.”

  “It’s not my home.”

  They stood side by side, with the sun high overhead. She could see distant lines of smoke rising up into the clear sky. She put her arm around his shoulder for a minute and told him, “I too will be sorry to come to the end of these days.”

  “Anyway we’re running out of food,” he consoled them both.

  During the afternoons they had mock battles with the staffs and with rough wooden swords they had made out of thin slats of wood. Gaderian tried to explain to Gwyn that it was entirely different with steel at the end of your arm. The wood, he said, was too light to really give you the feel of it; steel could bend and spring, slice and jab. But Gwyn could learn to keep her free hand behind her, and how to move with the parry-thrust of the one-handed weapon. When they fought, with staff or sword, they took care not to strike one another around the face or head, but went freely for other parts of the body. Most often, they both picked up a few bruises. As they played out their matches, Gwyn learned some of Gaderian’s quickness of foot, as if it were a dance, not a match. He, in turn, became more aggressive, bearing down upon her steadily when he had an advantage, as if it were a march, not a match.

  When the sun slid down the sky, they went inside. They ate as little as possible and added water to the stew to make it a soup, so that it would last longer. It might always snow again. In the evenings, they worked over the letters. Gwyn learned them quickly. Although her hand formed them clumsily on the wooden tabletop, her memory could hold their shapes and their names. She learned how the letters stood together to make words. “What I’ll do with this knowledge, I don’t know,” she often said.

  “The same thing I’ll do with my knowledge of how to use a staff,” he answered her. “I could send you a book, if you’d like that.”

  “And have the Bailiff after me?” she asked, laughing. “No, thank you very much, I’ve no wish to go to prison.”

  “Nobody goes to prison for something like that, Gwyn. You don’t really think they do, do you? Besides, I bet I could do it secretly.”

  “I hope you won’t even try.”

  “Not even maps?”

  “Oh,” and Gwyn hesitated. She never tired of looking at the Lord’s maps, at the design the lines made; she liked understanding the bird’s view of the Kingdom, and where places were in relation to one another.

  “Does your father mean to map the lands beyond the Kingdom?” she asked Gaderian. It seemed to her that his father must be the King’s mapmaker, and that he must be training Gaderian to his art.

  “We may not leave the Kingdom,” Gaderian answered her idle question. By that time, Gwyn knew better than to ask him why. He kept his secrets, and she knew no more about his own home or his proper title than she had known the first time she had heard of him.

  Gwyn had no time to get back to the secret cupboard in those few days. The thought of the clothes hidden there was often in her mind, but she didn’t dare risk looking at them with Gaderian so often at her shoulder. He was both curious and quick-witted, and Gwyn thought that until she was sure she knew exactly what it was she was hiding, she would give him nothing to question.

  She had told him tales of Jackaroo in the same spirit that he had told her stories of knights who fought dragons and rescued princesses from dark towers. “I don’t believe in dragons,” she told him. “Nothin
g made of flesh could have fire inside it to spit out, and they must be flesh or they couldn’t be slain.”

  “This Jackaroo is nothing but a thief, a vagabond,” Gaderian had told her. “No Bailiff would be as stupid as that, you know. If he was that stupid, he couldn’t be a bailiff. The people would always be tricking him, the Lord’s revenues would fall off and he’d get rid of that Bailiff and put in someone who could do the job.”

  “And Ladies would never wander the countryside alone, even asking for someone to save their fathers.”

  “No more than a King long dead would dress up like that and ride around trying to atone for his wicked life.”

  “But they are good stories,” Gwyn said.

  “I like stories,” he agreed.

  “You wouldn’t expect to be sent off to fight a dragon, would you?” Gwyn asked Gaderian.

  “No more than you would sit back and wait for Jackaroo to come rescue you from trouble,” he answered her, laughing.

  Gwyn almost asked him what he would make of the clothing hidden away behind the cupboard. For all that he was so much younger than she was, he had a much broader knowledge of the world. She had already opened her mouth to tell him, and show him, and ask him, when she realized how foolish that would be. Until she knew whose they were and how they had gotten there, she shouldn’t put knowledge of them into the Lord’s hands. Not even into Gaderian’s hands.

  THE LAST DAYS IN OLD Megg’s hut were good days, for all that they ate sparingly and were never far from hunger. Gaderian no longer dreamed and Gwyn had put aside the question of her own future. The last days went slowly and peacefully by them.

  They were both in high spirits as they closed and latched the door behind them. Gwyn carried the Lord’s saddlebag over her shoulder. The long book and pieces of charcoal were safe inside it. They had tidied the house, covered the last log with ashes so that it would burn out safely, and piled fresh-cut wood beside the fireplace, should another have need of it. There was a little meat left and the last part of the cheese. The saddle and bridle were safely hidden in the loft, and Gwyn had folded the blankets from the bed to add to those that filled the secret cupboard, to preserve its secret more safely. They set off together on the white path they had made for themselves, Gaderian chattering about the surprise their arrival would be as they climbed the hillside and crossed the vineyard.