by Andre Norton
The constant bump and sway of the wagon kept one alert, mainly to the task of holding to one’s seat. Askla, succumbing to the herb sedative, collapsed against Leela and the fishergirl pulled her slighter companion half across her knees steadying her with one muscle thick arm.
But Twilla’s thoughts ranged well beyond the wagon and her companions in travel misery. What she had learned from Leela about the trials ahead was disheartening. Unless she could bring her talent for healing to the attention of someone in authority she perhaps had little chance to escape the lottery.
And the thought of that tensed her body, brought a bitter taste into her mouth. A healer was never wed, except by her full choice, and then to one who was compatible to her trade, for one did not stifle arts once learned and one was under the yoke of sworn duty to exercise that learning wherever it was needed.
She was no house and field servant to labor for the advancement of a land breaker and she had a very shrewd idea that that was the probable fate of all of them. As her body swung sharply to the lurch of the wagon she closed her eyes and reviewed all Hulde had ever said concerning her own trade.
Hulde was a healer, a well known one. But Twilla knew that the Wisewoman was more, though her fellow townsmen and women might not have known that. There was much knowledge to be gained from the crumbling pages of Hulde’s old books. Knowledge which Twilla had shared, if only in a very small part.
She was certain that Hulde had powers which extended far beyond the concocting of brews and the making of salves. She could light a candle with a pointing of her finger, and she had some foreseeing—though that was erratic. But she was no dabbler in gaining power for power’s sake.
Twilla marshalled memories and reviewed them with strict attention. She longed for freedom to do some experimenting, but in the present circumstances that was dangerous. She had not forgotten the fact of that looming threat, which had pulled her herself away from the Wisewoman—or had it been only a rumor mouthed by Harhodge in warning?
Once more in a sharp mind-picture Hulde was before her, holding her hand. It was as if Hulde, in spite of herself, had, through her own talents, been given some order—
Twilla shook her head—guesses were not facts. But the main fact was that the weight of the mirror was still against her. Again she was tempted to draw that forth and look at it but prudence cautioned against such action.
The caravan came to a stop well before nightfall. They were within the first foothills of the mountains, but even here the scars of man’s plundering were wounds across the land. However, they were glad to be out of their racking prison, sitting about one of the fires as two of the caravan men under Tathan’s loud-voiced orders lifted out the benches to which they had clung during the day and brought out long sacks, lumpy with straw, tossing them in the wagons to serve for beds.
There was little talk among the travelers of Twilla’s wagon, though the men about their tasks made clamor enough. They were too worn by the ride to do more than huddle down and watch with near vacant eyes the installing of a pot on the fire and the brisk labors of Tathan and another of the warriorwomen in feeding into it first water brought in buckets from a stream not too far away and then slabs of rock-hard meat and blocks of pressed vegetables.
“You—” Tathan had been standing, fists on hips, watching her companion throw this provider into the pot, now she crooked a finger and beckoned directly to Twilla, “stir this, girl. You’ve had enough training in such from that upnosed mistress of yours.”
Twilla obediently pushed her cloak back on her shoulders and took up the long-handled spoon Tathan had indicated, setting to work keeping the now bubbling contents of the pot in motion. The smell was not the same as came from Hulde’s nourishing stews and soups. But with Tathan watching, she did not wish to add anything to make the mess more palatable.
In the end they were each given a bowl of greasy, watery stuff, a hunk of journey bread to be softened in it, and a leather bottle of small ale passed along. Twilla noted that only Jass and Leela took more than a sip from that. And she refused her share entirely, content with a cup of water from the cask which had been hung on the side of the wagon.
Overhead the sky was darkening. The mountains looked like crouched things from the fringes of a nightmare. Overhead the stars were beginning to wink into frost points of light. The moon was full and when it arose as they still huddled about the fire, it gave a measure of light, though there were a string of oil lanterns about to ward off the night.
“In with you—” Tathan bore down upon them as they sat near-bemused by fatigue and a kind of hopelessness, which Twilla felt rising like the waves of the sea about them. The warwoman gestured to the wagons, and they got their aching bodies in and onto the scant comfort of those straw-filled pads.
Askla sniffed and then gave a soft, choked sound. Twilla reached out through the dimness and put her hand on the smaller girl’s shoulder where she curled on the bed.
“Think on what is good,” she repeated awkwardly old, old words which had been said to her in the Kinderhost long ago. “Remember those you love and who love you—”
Askla’s body shook under her touch. “I will never see mother again—” her grief-hoarse voice was a rasping whisper.
“Perhaps not so. Lay still—” Twilla hunched up on her own bed place and leaned across to the other. Her hand went from shoulder now to the girl’s head, pushing back the folds of her hood, touching her forehead just above and between her eyes. “It is well—” Her words became a croon, so soft that she thought none else would hear. One of Hulde’s remedies was the use of will alone. She tried to project into the other a feeling of peace, realizing that this was far different from watching beside the bed of one ailing, but she had very little peace in her own mind to draw upon. However, she sensed that the girl was ceasing to tremble so and in a few moments felt and heard the even breath of sleep.
Leela shifted on her pad sending the straw crackling under her. She tried to keep her hearty voice to a whisper.
“Good for you, healer. That one will have it hard—perhaps more than the rest of us—unless it be that Hadee with her ugly head and whine of a voice. Best we keep up spirits as we may and make the best of ourselves. No man is going to be pleased with a watering jug or an ugly face, and there is no good coming from making the worst of our lot.”
“Just so, Leela,” Twilla strove to find the proper words for the question which had been forming in her mind. “What if they have among us—for we have not truly seen the others—someone truly ugly? If the man has to take her—what would be her lot?”
The straw crackled as if Leela squirmed again. “One I would not wish for, healer. Be glad you are reasonably fair of face. Me, I’m passable and I have the strength for work. Jass now, she’s small but she’s tough and she comes from farm stock. That Rutha—she’s a different sort but there are men who take pride in having such a wife as other men look after. Hadee—who knows?”
She added nothing to that and Twilla thought that she slept. But Twilla herself fingered the mirror, drawing it out of hiding, a thought so dim she could not truly pin it for examination stirring in her mind. Her fingers, though they wore no polishing pads, moved across the slick surface in the old familiar pattern. At last she tucked it into safe hiding again and settled herself to sleep.
3
THE CARAVAN ROUSED early in the mornings—they were on their way usually by the first showing of sun rim. They had three days of steady climbing, a fairly gentle incline at first and then steeper where the ill-made road narrowed. At times they were ordered from the wagons to tramp along behind, lightening the loads. On the third day it began to rain, not with the fury of a storm but with a continued steady downpour to turn the whole way and those padding along it sodden.
At least these heights had not been scarred by the eternal mines and there was spring green beginning to show, even in dwarfed and ragged patches. The wind-twisted trees of the heights had been hacked away to clear the tra
il and their tangles of branches, too small to feed the fires, left to molder and grow strange-shaped lichens.
Twilla kept an eye on those patches of growth, trying to recognize any of which Hulde had made healing use. The supplies she carried in her shoulder pack were certainly limited and, though she had no time nor the proper facilities to prepare any herb harvest, it would be good to know what might be discovered.
Tathan and her even more unattractive assistant guard-driver were ever busy watchdogs. If they walked to ease the draft animals she herded her charges close together and constantly urged them on. Iyt was her assistant. She, when taking her turn at such shepherding, favored them with a monologue concerning the future.
Her words confirmed what Leela had learned from her kinsman. These would-be brides had little choice ahead, nor had their prospective grooms much more. A man could choose not to take his chances at the lottery—for the girl there was no choice at all.
Oddly enough it was Hadee who challenged that point of view on about the fourth time of the warwoman’s gloating speech.
“If we be not to some man’s choice,” she tugged at her hood trying to keep it from sliding down from her shaven head where only the shadow of down showed the return of hair, “then what?”
Iyt laughed.
“Choice is luck, king’s maid. Your man’s name goes in the pot and someone draws it out. Does he think you a fright—as you are—then he cannot send you back for another drawing. Lord Harmond, he is a fair man—each draw is final—so you both make the most of it. Better,” she raised her heavy voice to include them all in that admonition, “make the best of yourselves and have a sweet tongue at the greeting.”
Twilla considered that carefully. Surely they would have need of a healer. She had listened carefully to every scrap of rumor and gossip she could pick up and had heard no mention of such among the new land farmers. If she could prove herself—but Iyt was continuing:
“There was a gal two convoys back—she had had the plague and was cheek-marked from it—looked like a warty toad or nearabouts. The man as drew her was one of the officers—and—well—that one disappeared. Maybe the green demons got her.” Her tongue swept across her thick lips as if her words were pepper relish on tasteless meat.
“Green demons?” That was Rutha. “More like—”
“Hush yourself, up-nose!” snapped Iyt. “And don’t think that the green demons do not live. You’ll see a plenty of their work overmountain. Get yourself a-near the Wythe Woods and you’ll maybe meet one for yourself.”
“These demons,” Twilla for the first time broke into the conversation. She had had little to say when Tathan or Iyt were about, even to her own companions, feeling from the start of this journey it was better to spend most of her energy in listening rather than in speech.
“These green demons—what harm do they do?”
Iyt raised her hand, fingers curved in a ward sign. “They steal a man’s wits, or his eyes, or him! Let a man who has no woman of his own get close to the Wood and he’s their meat. Even Ylon, Lord Harmond’s own son, he’s been demon maimed—blind as if his two eyes were screwed out of his skull. They took some children also in the first days, and a couple of women—but they were all found wandering, wit struck, afterwards. Some, they got back their wits, only they don’t remember what happened to them. ’Cept the children—those kept running off for awhile tryin’ to get back to the Wood. Had to tie them up, even, until at last the fit wore off them. Yes, a man with a wry-faced female could well toss her to the demons and none would know the better.”
A plague-scarred woman who had won her freedom—or had she simply been put to death by the man she had been forced upon? Twilla wondered. And these tales of green demons—she had read in Hulde’s books of berries which, when eaten by the unwarned, could provide hallucinations and affect the mind. Perhaps this Wood harbored strange growths unknown to those of the coast, unknown even to Hulde’s forerunners.
Surely Lord Harmond needed a competent healer with all this threatening his hard-held domain. But how could she reach him? She had seen the commander of the caravan only at a distance. He kept himself and his men well away from the wagons in which the women traveled. Their guards were all warwomen and she had, she believed, a very thin chance of gaining any attention—save perhaps a kind she did not want—from Tathan and Iyt.
On the fourth night they camped in a narrow meadow high in the mountains. Meeting there a second party from the plains beyond bringing fresh beasts for riding and haulage. The rain let up enough so that they saw a sullen red streak across the sky and Twilla thought that they would have a fair day tomorrow when they would make the last ascent and crossing through the pass.
As usual they were herded to their pallets in the wagons after they had eaten. Askla said little, she was like some small animal who obediently followed her trainer’s orders. It seemed to Twilla that the real girl had retreated so far within some hiding place that what remained was close to a shell. Leela had trod upon a rough rock when they had been herded up to a spring to drink and wash, and Twilla had bandaged the broken skin and set an herb padding over it. Tathan had come upon them when she was so busied and had watched.
“Healer, eh? Well, you might as well forget such thing over mountain, Kindergal. Lord Harmond, he don’t take to Wisewomen. If you have any sense you’ll toss that there bag of yours in the bushes tomorrow and act like you are—bride bait and nothin’ else.”
“But,” Twilla was so surprised that she sat back on her heels staring up at the woman, “healers are welcome—they are needed!”
“Lord Harmond he wants no women shifting their-selves from place to place, disturbing the peace. There ain’t enough females to go around—and he ain’t gonna have someone grab one as is gadding about when she should be with her lawful husband. You get right out of your head, Kindergal, that you is going to set up like a Wisewoman and be free and easy—because it won’t happen.” She showed yellowed teeth in a wide smile. “Your Wisewoman weren’t no big thing, were she? Let them take you—didn’t see her do anything to stop us—did you? Git right out of that head of yours that you are any different from the rest of these here gals.”
She laughed and tramped off. Twilla tightened that last loop of the bandage on Leela’s foot. She kept her eyes strictly on what she was doing but her thoughts were busy, though she felt as if they had been badly shaken up.
“Could be, she’s right,” Leela said in a low voice. “I’ve been thinkin’ that’s what you had in mind—git told off as a healer. Most o’ ’em never marry do they? Well, what this Lord Harmond wants is wives—”
Twilla had been weighing Tathan’s contemptuous warning. Yes, it could be true. She knew herself that Hulde’s talents had sometimes been resented, feared even. That was why the Wisewoman had gone to the Kinderhost for an apprentice. Most fathers would not give a daughter to be trained at a craft which might raise her above him in the general order of things. And one of the court nobles might be even more prejudiced—they were used to trading their daughters off in various alliances to bring themselves place and power.
So her hope of being able to make her own way over mountain seemed in dire danger. There was—she fastened on a thread of thought—she would have to consider it carefully.
Now that they were back in the wagon supposedly to sleep she was still weighing one peril against another. Not that she was even sure she might be able to do what she was thinking about now.
An ugly wife might find herself a dead one. On the other hand she knew several tricks by which she might defend herself once the lottery was past. The supplies in her shoulder pack were not the most potent she had about her—there were two tiny packets wrapped into the folds of her girdle which were to be counted on. Witless and blind—green demons—also a knowing person might act both of those for temporary safety. But the main thing—
Her pallet was at the far end of the wagon. The waning moon was a thinning slice in the sky. The wane—yes ce
rtainly this required the wane and not the gathering of that potent light. She had never tried what she wished to do, was not even sure she had the power. But now it was her last chance.
Hunched up, so that she could see the moon through an open flap of the canvas over her head, Twilla brought out the mirror and set it firmly on her knees, gripping between them that cord threaded through the hoop at its back.
“Up and down, out and in,
Sunward, and windershins.
Give now the look to seen
By all save the eye serene.”
She kept her whisper to the merest thread of sound. Her fingers slid back and across the surface of the mirror in patterns they had never followed before—not when she had been at the binding.
And her mind fastened feverishly upon a picture, held it steady, refining it as well as she could. Until looking into the mirror, she indeed saw the reflection she sought. Scanty eyebrows above eyes which looked weak and red-rimmed. A nose so swollen that it near resembled a snout, but the sharpest were those pits in roughened skin of cheek and chin. She had seen enough sufferers of the pocking fever in her time with Hulde to be able to reproduce such an appearance.
Holding the mirror so close that her nose nearly touched the surface, she surveyed her reflection. So far she had succeeded. But it remained—had the reflection worked its spell directly on her? She ran her fingers over her chin—the chin felt smooth to the touch—but then it would—for it was sight alone which must be confused by the change.
And how could that be tested? Wait—pock scars—no, suppose she showed now only the vicious rash of the disease? That might be better accepted. She could induce a measure of fever—they—they might even jettison her here fearing contagion! She looked intently into the mirror again and made the change from pock marks to the reddened lumps that would form such—keeping the largely swollen nose.
