Firethorn Page 4

  A cock belonging to the old alewife, Anile, was always the first to crow in the village, long before dawn. I rose at his summons to grind barley, oats, and rye for bread and porridge. Wheat went for taxes, so we never had the fine, leavened bread of the manor. The brothers complained until I learned to grind fine enough. We hid the mortar and pestle in a hole in the wall, because Sire Pava enforced his monopoly on milling. We’d take the miller a scant measure to make him think it was all we had, and he’d be sure to cheat us in turn.

  Sometimes in the dark I heard the rhythmic scraping sound of other women grinding, and I wondered if in time I’d be worn smooth enough to fit in, smooth as an old mortar. A mudwoman’s toil never ends and never lasts: clean clothes are dirtied, meals are swallowed, and there are always new weeds in the garden. I remembered the Kingswood, how I’d risen when I pleased—forgetting how restless my sleep had been, and how I’d longed for even the humblest porridge. The tedious chores wore away at me, but I was glad to spare Az the worst of them. She was not as frail as she looked, but there was so much that needed doing. She said we pulled well in the same yoke, and whatever had she done before I came?

  I learned to tell her sons apart. The youngest was called Fleetfoot because he won all the village races. He was still a smooth-cheeked boy, with a deep chest and lean flanks like a gazehound. The second youngest was Ot; he was proud of his new blond beard, roaming out of the house at night to show it to the village girls. I started calling him Wheatbeard and the name was apt, so he kept it. Maken was the eldest still at home and in no hurry to be wed, for girls and widows (and wives, Halm said) were fond of his merry hazel eyes and his wide shoulders, and many had found him a sweet nut come cracking time. I found him unsettling, myself, and it made me shy of him.

  On Peacedays, the one idle day in every tennight, I’d watch the green youth of the village go courting, with their banter and raillery, forthright stares and sly glances. No one looked my way. I’d been fair enough before the Kingswood, I suppose, fair enough for Sire Pava. Now my ribs showed plain as those on a stray dog; my hips had hollows instead of dimpled flesh. When I looked at my face in a basin of water, my cheekbones and chin were too sharp, my eyes too deep and too dark.

  I found I couldn’t sleep under a roof and within walls, next to Az and her boys when they unrolled the pallets at night. I slept under the rowan tree, and even there I rested uneasy. Carnal’s female avatar, that fat voluptuary Desire, sent me dreams, and with them her itch and tickle. Better if she’d come when Sire Pava wanted me; now she was too late. I ate as much as I could, but Az’s sons were hungry, and I never had my fill.

  I saw old friends from the manor on market days and on Peacedays, before the village shrine. Cook was shocked that I was so gaunt, and brought me savories from the manor table. She said Dame Lyra could curdle milk with a look since her miscarriage, and no wonder: Sire Pava had brought his mudwoman right into the manor, and she’d started another bastard with a daughter just off the tit. I dreaded seeing Sire Pava about the village, but he heeded me no more than the dirt he trod underfoot. I didn’t want his notice, but it angered me to know I didn’t trouble his mind in the least, while he troubled mine.

  When I lived in the manor, I thought the villagers dull witted, with their lazy way of talking. They lopped off the end of every word, as if they couldn’t be bothered to pronounce it plainly, and yet they used so many: they dawdled all around a tale when a straight path would have been quicker. But when Az and I would go visiting, words went galloping past and I’d stumble after.

  They said they were living like toads under a harrow since Sire Pava had claimed an extra day of labor every tennight, leaving them only five for their own fields. They said Steward was always watching, prying. Nothing was beneath his notice; he’d skin a flea for its hide and tallow.

  And some went on to say that although the old Dame had been too meddlesome by far with her herbs and potions—being something of a canny-woman, after all—and too strict to wink at even a little hole in a grain sack, she’d never stolen the food from between their teeth. It rankled me, this backward praise. I thought of how the Dame and I had gone into their crofts, bringing remedies for their ills, how she’d tended women and children with her own hands, how they’d blinked and looked away in the darkness of those stinking huts, shuttering the whites of their eyes. I’d supposed them shy, perhaps bewildered by her kindness, surely grateful. Now I heard their ingratitude and distrust. But I said nothing.

  They talked about me as well when my back was turned. Az was too kind to tell me what they said, but Halm and Betwyx, the wives of Az’s sons, told me how the tittle-tattles clucked that Sire Pava had tried me and found me lacking—though a few said I’d run off to bear his child and bury it. I felt shame that such tales were bandied about. Perhaps they wanted my own account of it, good currency among the other wives, but I wouldn’t oblige.

  I gave the gossips another cud to chew, for I never said where I’d spent the year away. Neither the truth nor a lie would do, and that left only silence. Some took offense, saying I supposed I was too good for them. But all agreed that wherever I’d gone, I’d come back strange.

  Word got about that I was god-bothered and the questions ceased. The Blood who are touched by a god are sent to the temples to serve as Auspices, or, if their wits are too addled, to be tended with care. Among the mudfolk, the god-bothered may become wandering Abstinents, pleasing their god by mortifying their flesh, or revelators who tell fortunes in the marketplace, or servants at a temple, drudging for the priests of the Blood. Most stay in their villages, sometimes shunned, sometimes sought after for their gifts of healing, hexing, or foretelling. Always pitied. It’s said the gods most love those they most afflict. This I doubt.

  As one of the god-bothered, I might have done anything—raved of voices and visions, fallen down in fits or gone naked—and no one would have been amazed, save Az and her sons. But I wished only to be unremarkable. If Ardor spoke to me now, it was no more than any woman might hear when she roused up the fire for the morning porridge: the fire song of Ardor Hearthkeeper.

  A few women came to me for help, and then a few more. One pleaded for a blight to mar the smooth skin of her rival, and I sent her off with my rage at her heels; another asked for a charm to make her next child a boy, and I turned my back on her. But I did my best to soothe those who came to me with pains. I filled Az’s hut with drying herbs, and her kitchen with tinctures and salves, and daily I brought home beneficial plants from hedgerows, fields, orchards, anywhere my duties took me.

  I’d been mistaken to think the Dame was the only healer in the village. Every mudwoman knew simples and the charms that went with them to treat everyday complaints, but there was also a midwife and a woman who could cure a baby’s colic with her spittle. The men had their own healer, of course; a woman could ease a man’s aches, bruises, and fevers with a poultice or tisane, but if she touched his open wound, she’d sour his blood and cause the wound to fester. The men’s carnifex, named Fex for short, came to his calling by way of gelding calves, colts, and hogs; his remedy for everything was leeches and more leeches.

  They called me a greenwoman. I only did as the Dame had taught me, but they trusted me more now that they thought I was touched.

  One morning Az saw three crows land in the yard while she was weeding the kitchen garden. The one on her left flew away over the wall; the middle one preened; the one on her right went into the byre and came out with a beakful of straw. I was next door with Halm and her baby and her daughter Lilt when Az called us to come and look. By the time we came, only one crow remained, strutting in the dust.

  Az was shaken. “I must go to the Kingswood today. Will you come with me?”

  Halm made the sign to turn bad luck away. “Why must you go there? Knock on Mischief’s door, he’s sure to bid you welcome.” Like Na, like most of the village folk, she thought the forest was full of menace, and not just from the kingsmen. Those who thought otherwise were n
ot inclined to speak of it.

  I said I would go, and gladly. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” Az told Halm, and she gave me a basket to carry loaded with barley and a flask of goat’s milk.

  We followed the river toward its source in the mountains. The path climbed gently at first, then steeply, and I matched my pace to Az’s. She panted as she climbed under the hot Sun, so I forbore to ask her questions until we stopped to rest in a field of blooming flax. Swallows darted over the field, the undersides of their wings catching the blue of the flowers.

  “What did you see, Az? What does the omen say?”

  To my surprise, Az began to cry. “The crows told me I’ll have but one son left in my croft by wintertime, for one will fly and one will marry. We’ll be begging the woodward for the king post to raise a new roof soon. Ah—change is hard for an old woman! Even good news comes like a thief.”

  “You think Maken will marry? Who will he marry?” It was a question I pondered often at the time.

  Az shrugged her humped shoulders. “The crow flew right over the village with the straw, and there’s no telling where he came down. Plenty of women in his path. I worry more for Fleetfoot. I fear he might not live to grow a beard.” She rubbed tears from her face with both hands. “Come, we have a ways to go.”

  There is a path the fallow deer use when they come down from the woods to nibble on the heavy heads of ripening grain. We followed it through the wall of brambles, out of the Sun and into the shadows under the trees, and then Az left the path and led me deep into the forest to the great oak, Heart of the Wood.

  I knew where she was leading me, of course; every step was familiar. Yet I wondered at how I could have forgotten—or put out of my mind—the sense of presence that fills the Kingswood. I had been a creature of the wood, one among many, so enfolded in that vast life that I’d lost myself there for a time; now I was touched by awe and dread, like any trespasser who strays too far within those precincts.

  Az did not seem afraid. She had me put the basket with the barley and goat’s milk in a crotch of the great oak high above her head. Then she began a low chant, standing between two roots as thick as a man’s thigh, rocking back and forth. I sat on the ground nearby, and after a while I fell into a shadow dream with my eyes wide open. Before me a green veil stirred in the wind, woven in a shifting pattern of leaf and branch, light and shadows. I looked at it sideways and caught a glimpse of a black horse galloping, its rider cloaked in a green flame. But soon I became aware of other shadows crowding close, at the edge of vision. I felt we had a multitude around us, and it raised the hair on my nape.

  Az was still murmuring, rocking. She wept again.

  Late in the afternoon she came out of her trance. She cut a green branch with a fine spray of leaves from Heart of the Wood, giving thanks as she did so, and led me away, sure of her steps even without a path. We climbed a steep slope and then descended into a ravine between two long ridges, where one of the streams that feed our river had cut deep into the rock. The shale walls of the gorge were covered with ferns, sprigs of twinflower, and brilliant green mosses lush from seeping waters. The stream was shallow, swift, and cold. We scrambled on slippery rocks and clung to roots and saplings. Az’s breathing was harsh and her limbs trembled. I begged her to stop and take some food, for I’d gathered mushrooms and starchroot and berries on the way. She shook her head and we went on, unspeaking.

  Darkness comes early deep in the mountains. By the time we reached our destination, the bright blue ribbon of sky overhead had turned cobalt. Az had led me to the headwater of the stream. Where the two long ridges joined, the waters of a spring tumbled out of a fissure in the cliff face into a pool littered with great boulders. One side of the ravine was a wall of pure gray clay. It had been mined over the years, and the diggers had left a wide shelf of clay next to the pool. We piled up leaves in a hollow, and Az and I curled up to sleep.

  I spoke in a dream, and woke myself, though both word and dream escaped me. I saw three lights moving near us and shook Az in a panic. “No fear,” Az said. “They’re here to keep us from harm,” and she went back to sleep.

  In the morning she was more forthcoming. “Our dead are all through these woods,” she told me. “We buried them here to keep them close, so they’d look after us, each one under a sapling according to their nature. Many of these trees are our people. Then the Blood came along and made us burn the dead. We’ve lost six generations since they came from Oversea, six generations wandering who knows where. But those who are left here still come at need, if they are not forgotten. I think soon they may be forgotten.”

  She pointed at the ridges. “In the beginning our people were fashioned from this clay, right here between the Thighs. You’ll not come into your strength till you know what clay made you. This isn’t your place.”

  Tears started to my eyes as if she’d struck me.

  She leaned over and took my hand. “Don’t take it hard. I’m only saying I don’t need an omen bird to tell me you’ll fly away again.”

  I went to find food while Az worked all morning, digging and shaping clay. By the time I came back, she’d made a clay woman about knee high, forming it around the oak branch so that a topknot of leaves sprouted from the head. She smoothed the clay until it was like skin, and incised spirals over the round breasts and belly. Last of all she scratched eyes in the featureless oval of the face. I was amazed and afraid to see how the clay woman looked back at us from her new eyes, and I wondered if Eorõe Artifex had been surprised, when she shaped our forebears, the first people, to feel the clay come to life in her hands.

  We left the woman behind rubble in a dry niche in the rock. Az said Maken would come to fetch her when he was ready to build his house, and hide her in the wall to bring blessings.

  Az was in good spirits on the way home, for she’d heard under the great oak that Fleetfoot would not be dying just yet. She knew he’d be leaving, but not where he’d go or whether he would return. She’d made him a clay man the size of two fingers, with an acorn for a heart. She wanted him to keep a bit of the earth he came from, to keep Mischief from crossing his path. But some fates are beyond our power to avert; the more Az fussed over Fleet-foot, knowing she’d lose him, the more surely she sent him away.

  When harvest came we reaped daylong in the fields and went to sleep with straw in our hair and grit under our lids. The work hardened me, until I could keep up with the fastest reapers. Everything smelled dusty. The stone granary within the manor walls filled up while Steward and the priest, Divine Narigon, stood at the door making the tallies, watching each other like two cats.

  I pinched my arms and legs to feel the fat under the skin. Az made me a new dress from cloth Na had left her, dyed a dark blue with woad. My tongue got quicker, and keener too. Laughter came hard to me, but Fleetfoot liked to tease me and make me smile. Life with the Dame was like a tapestry locked in a chest; I stopped taking it out to look at the colors. Nor did I think of my year in the Kingswood, though sometimes I dreamed of it.

  All this talk of war: rumors flew like chaff above the threshing floor, and it was hard to find a grain of truth in all the dust. King Thyrse had campaigned nearly every summer of his reign, and he’d reigned since before I was born. People said he loved war nearly as well as hunting, and better than women (for he hadn’t found the time between campaigns to take another wife after his first died barren). His battles meant no more to me than a rumormonger’s songs, so long as he kept war from our gates and took it to others.

  The Dame had filled her levy with horses instead of men: she had an old battle-scarred stallion that bred true, and a fine horsemaster to train his get. A good warhorse was worth five times his weight in foot soldiers. And if, every year, a few younger sons among the mudfolk were hungry and restless enough to run off to war, well then—it made for peace in the village with the mischiefmakers gone.

  This year was different. The king had summoned the troops to meet after the fall harvest, which meant a winte
r campaign. Nobody knew why but everybody made surmises. And it was true: Sire Pava was going to war. He’d called for four drudges from the village to serve as foot soldiers. Perhaps he wouldn’t come home. Well rid if he didn’t.

  Messengers had gone back and forth between the master and his father, and Sire Pava had gone to Ramus to be fitted for his armor—and very fine it was: a helmet topped with a crest of gilt steel feathers and armor covered in silvery scales like a fish. They said his horse’s barding alone cost enough to feed us all for a year. He was spending money in the village too, buying leather fittings, cloth coarse and fine, hams and preserved ducks, cheeses, dried fruit, grain, a thousand things. But what he paid the armorers he took from us, in new taxes and fines for every small offense. It made for quarrels, as some drudges had coins for the first time and others said the granaries would be empty by midwinter, and famine would come calling. But the boys liked to sneak off and watch Sire Pava train for war, his new armor flashing in the Sun.

  Fleetfoot and I went to see him too, climbing a tree that overlooked the outer court. He’d cut down the manor’s guardian tree. Until I saw it with my own eyes, I had not believed it. That tree had been beloved, fed yearly with libations of ale and pruned into a perfect dome. As a child I used to hide in its branches and eat plums and cast the pits at Na when she came looking for me. Its leaves were dark, but when the Sun came through, they’d shone red as wine. Now there was nothing left of it but a bare trunk and two limbs to make a quintain for jousting, standing in a muddy field where once there’d been a garden, with paved paths and lavender and roses and benches of turf.

  It had rained after tennights of cloudless skies, and turned chilly. Sire Pava and Divine Narigon chased each other on foot, whacking away with wooden swords weighted with lead. They slid in the mud, grunting and cursing. I turned my head and spat on the ground, but I could tell Fleetfoot was taken with the sight.