by D. K. Fields
‘Maybe Sot’s idle,’ Rit said as they walked. ‘She doesn’t farm herself, and she doesn’t help farm your land.’
‘My aunt is not idle!’ Ghen snapped. He felt Melle slip her hand into his.
‘Idleness doesn’t make you rich, Rit,’ she said.
Rit snorted. ‘If she is rich. How can you be sure that’s true, Ghen, when you haven’t seen her for years? She could be letting a field lie fallow and your parents know nothing about it.’
Melle squeezed his hand.
‘My mother says your figs have blight, Rit,’ she said. ‘Whose idleness let that come?’
*
The next day, coming in from an early walk round the fields, Ghen’s father held a sinta. He had found it beneath a tree, the first to fall, which meant that it was time to harvest the crop.
‘First I’ll thank the Neighbour for his generosity, then I’ll send for Sot,’ his mother said, smiling like she’d never smiled before when speaking of her sister. ‘Tomorrow. She can decide then.’
At these words Ghen’s father went straight out to the fields again. Before joining him, Ghen cleaned the sand off his trapped mostins, ready to take to the Wayward woman by the bridge. Sinta harvesting would mean he wouldn’t be able to go to the river for a little while, even if Aunt Sot did come to help. Perhaps his mother wanted Sot to watch Elin and the baby Lyra, who were still too young to work. He still didn’t believe Sot would actually come but part of him hoped she would. Then he could find out what she really did, and then he could tell Rit and Melle. Especially Rit.
When his work in the fields had finished for the day, he packed his jars of mostins into his bag. As he left the house he saw his father walking the sinta field again. He’d walked it every spare moment he had since Ghen’s mother had written the first note to Sot – far more than he usually did. Was he worried about blight but didn’t want to worry the family in turn? Perhaps the blight from Rit’s fields had spread. Maybe Sot was some kind of blight healer and that was why she was coming to his parents’ fields. That would be a job that paid well, Ghen thought, for blight meant a field had to lie idle for two seasons to ensure the disease had gone, and no Lowlander would want that.
He realised his father was looking at him. Ghen turned so his father could see the bag on his back and know where he was going, why he couldn’t stop. He waved. After a moment his father raised his hand to him, then leant against a sinta tree. He must be so tired, Ghen thought, working so hard, doing so well with the land. And yet Hend’s high rents left the family only able to lease rather than own. Rit had once said that a man or woman without their own land couldn’t call themselves a Lowlander; Rit had heard this from his father, and the words made Ghen burn with shame. Now, he turned away and headed for the bridge and his poultice pay, leaving his father to the care of the trees.
*
The Wayward woman was in her tent, as she usually was at that time of day. Though she was still young her eyes were weak, so when she travelled the valley she made sure she returned to her tent by the bridge before the light began to fade. Not much of a Wayward then, Melle said. But many were glad the woman stayed in the valley; she was the closest thing to a stitcher in those parts, and she charged far less.
As he neared the tent she called out to him, as she did when she heard the glass jars clinking in his bag.
‘How many jars today, Ghen?’
‘Nine,’ he called back.
He stopped by the tent’s flap – the nearest thing to a door, he supposed. He never went in until she invited him. She liked to get the coins ready first and, as the tent smelled so strange, he didn’t like to be inside any longer than could be helped. He had nothing against the Wayward, as some did in the valley. It was the creatures she kept in there, dead and drying, and the ointment bottles of fint scraped from the mostins. Fint might help Elin’s cough but it made his eyes burn.
‘Come in where I can see you, Ghen,’ she called.
The tent was full of light; lamps hung from each corner, from the middle of the ceiling and were set round the floor. He blinked furiously, knowing that would help his eyes grow used to the brightness. When he could see again he sat on the upturned crate near the Wayward woman, trying not to look at the gresta birds hanging near his face. Their puckered skin showed in red lumpy patches between the remaining feathers.
‘Only nine jars today,’ she said.
He could see the pennies glinting in her hands, ready if he chose to take them, rather than have the poultice. Her hands were stained with brown marks. He wondered if they ran over her wrists and up her arms, which were hidden by the sleeves of her shirt: made of a green material that made him think of the river in winter.
‘I had to turn the medlars,’ he said, ‘and the sinta barrels needed cleaning out.’
‘You work hard, Ghen. Do you like it, being in the fields?’
Her question stunned him. He was a Lowlander, no matter what Rit said about his family. Lowlanders farmed. There was no ‘like’ about it, it was life. Unless you were Aunt Sot. The Wayward was waiting for him to answer, her round, unlined face tilted towards him.
‘Yes,’ he said, not knowing what else to say. How to explain that the fields and their crops were in his thoughts from the moment he woke to the moment he fell asleep? That in his dreams he tied back sinta branches, turned medlars, cleared the holen beds of weeds. That even now, as he sat in her tent and felt the prickling behind his eyes that the fint brought, his fingers itched to dig deep into the ground, to cup the living things growing there and to make them turn a profit. But the Wayward wouldn’t understand. She dealt in death. She’d kill the mostins once she’d scraped the fint from their wings. What she did with the bodies afterwards, he didn’t want to know.
‘Would you like to do something else, away from the fields?’ she said.
He pulled the bag onto his knees and began to lift the jars out, gently, trying to keep the mostins’ wings from banging the glass.
‘You clean them so well, losing the sand but not the fint,’ she said. ‘You take great care, unlike so many Lowlanders I have seen at work.’
Ghen didn’t know why she was speaking to him about such things. Usually he got out the jars, she inspected the mostins and then she paid him. Nothing more was said, or needed to be. He’d already been inside too long on this visit. The fint was making his eyes stream. The dead grestas seemed to have shifted closer to his face.
‘I’m sorry there’s not more,’ he said.
‘And there will be fewer from now on.’ She held up one of the jars and the mostin inside it suddenly woke and banged against the glass. It left such thick smears of fint that it almost disappeared behind them.
‘Why? Are the mostins dying?’ As he said the words Ghen’s stomach dropped, thinking of the poultice for Elin’s cough.
The Wayward woman shook her head. ‘How shall we do this – pennies or the poultice?’
Each time he came she gave him this choice, but he had only ever chosen the poultice. It was on the tip of his tongue to say he’d take that, but he found himself thinking of his exhausted father resting against the sinta tree, of his mother asking Aunt Sot to help with the harvest. Of Hend. A week without the poultice wouldn’t make too much difference to Elin, would it?
‘The pennies,’ he said to the Wayward.
She didn’t seem surprised by this, only looked at him for a long time, so long that Ghen wondered if the coins had ever really been a choice; that there was only one answer to her question. But then she pressed the coins into his hands.
‘Goodbye, Ghen,’ she said, which was also different to their usual, wordless parting.
‘I’ll be back after the harvest,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said, but she said it quietly, and he didn’t think she was saying it to him.
She stayed by the tent flap as he walked away. When he came to the bend in the lane he looked back and she was still there, outlined in clear, bright light, as if the sun were risi
ng behind her.
*
His parents were on the porch when he drew near the house. They were sitting without any lamps and, after the brightness of the Wayward’s tent, the darkness was a relief.
‘There must be another way,’ his father said, but his voice was strange. It was wavering, catching on something – tears. His father was close to tears, and that stopped Ghen in his stride. He’d never heard his father cry before, and he certainly didn’t want to see it.
‘We’ll take a fourth field from Hend,’ his father said. ‘Red holen prices are going up. We can plant more.’
‘Another field will only give us more rent to pay, and more labour needed to pay it,’ his mother said. Her voice was her voice, no change.
Ghen’s father sniffed in the darkness.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ his mother said. ‘We don’t even know that Sot will take—’
Elin’s cough sounded and his mother was opening the door, a soft light giving her back her features. Before she could go inside, his father spoke again.
‘It’s not too late. Surely we can wait, talk to Hend.’
Elin’s cough grew louder, and Lyra’s cry joined it, bringing his father to his feet as well. He put his hand on Ghen’s mother’s shoulder and tried to turn her to him, saying her name softly.
‘Let’s see what Sot offers,’ his mother said.
And they were gone into the house.
Ghen came to the porch. The cane chair was still warm. He worried to hear his parents worry. He took out the coins the Wayward had given him. Every penny in the jar under the floorboard got them closer to buying the land from Hend, his father said. In the morning Ghen would give the coins to his parents. He counted the coins out, enjoying the weight of them, but there were too many.
She had paid him for twelve jars instead of nine.
*
When his mother pushed open the door to his room the next morning, she was surprised to find him already washed and dressed, sitting on the edge of his bed.
‘It’s early yet,’ she said. Steam curled from the cup she carried, sent the tea’s sweetness round the small, bare room. ‘Your father’s not long awake.’
He held out the pennies. She put the cup down on the little bench where he kept his few things: a slingshot he used against the birds that beaked for seeds in the soil; his pruning gloves; a spiralled shell that Melle had given him. She said it came all the way from Bordair.
‘Money from the Wayward,’ Ghen said, as his mother took the coins. ‘I chose the money this week. For the jar to buy the fields.’
His mother sat down on the bed beside him.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured. She said nothing more, but she didn’t get up to leave, not even when the sound of Elin’s cough drifted into the room. His mother simply stared at the coins now in her hands.
‘It’s right that I work the land, isn’t it?’ he said.
She looked up quickly. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘The Wayward said something. I didn’t understand. It doesn’t matter.’
His mother put the coins in her pocket and stood.
‘It’s just that, they have the sight,’ he said, ‘don’t they?’
‘Who?’
‘The Wayward.’
‘They say some do.’ His mother handed him the tea. ‘But the one by the bridge, she can’t see much at all, can she? Don’t let your tea go cold now.’
*
Ghen was so distracted by the Wayward’s words that it was only when a cloud of dust appeared at the bottom of the lane that he remembered about Sot coming. He peered through the branches of the sinta he was stripping of fruit, watching the dust cloud get closer. His father was working in the tree next to him. He, too, stopped at the sight of the cart, his hand stilling on an unpicked sinta.
Ghen’s mother went to open the gate, calling to his father to watch the girls on their blanket at the edge of the trees. He and Ghen climbed down their ladders but his father didn’t watch the girls; instead he watched, as Ghen did, the cart driving through the gateway. The cart had an awning. Their cart had long ago lost its well-patched top; they went to market with the rain dripping square on their heads. The horse now being pulled to a halt by the house was a fine animal with high withers and a high-stepping gait. Such horses were bred for their looks, not for pulling any kind of weight, and their good looks were costly. As costly as taking Greynal baths, Ghen guessed.
Sot climbed down from the cart and tied the horse to the porch rail. She opened her arms to embrace Ghen’s mother, but his mother stepped neatly away. They stood feet apart as they spoke, his mother avoiding Sot’s eye.
Ghen saw he’d been right remembering that Sot had dark hair. She wore trousers of thick, blue twill and a cream shirt with sleeves that stopped below the elbow: not quite farming clothes, but not dress ones either. Perhaps she really had come to help with the harvest.
His mother and Sot both turned and looked at him, their conversation at an end.
‘Back to it then,’ his father said, suddenly stirring himself and moving quickly. ‘Up the ladder, lad. Off you go now.’
But before Ghen could do as he was told, Sot was walking towards them.
‘How long has it been, Eam?’ she said to his father.
‘Good of you to come,’ he said, although the way he spoke made the visit sound anything but good.
Sot smiled and touched his shoulder. His father started backwards.
‘And this must be Ghen,’ she said, not noticing Ghen’s father recoiling. Or not minding.
She was younger than his mother. He realised he hadn’t known until that moment which of the two was the elder. But now it was clear. Sot’s skin was smooth, her dark hair unmarked by grey. She stood straight when his mother’s shoulders curled from years of weeding.
Sot held out her hand. It took him a moment to realise he was supposed to shake it. Her palms and fingertips were rough and coarse like his own: working hands. She kept hold of his hand, turned it over and looked at his palm, straightened each of his fingers in turn. He didn’t know what to do. His father had turned away and was shaking a barrel half full of sintas to knock out the dead space. The fruit rattled loudly against the staves.
*
When the sintas had all been thrown down into the soft landing of the nets, the tree branches bare, his mother and father began to toss the fruit into the barrels. Ghen had expected that Sot would sit with the girls on the blanket, but his mother had taken them inside once Sot had arrived, and Sot stayed in the field. Ghen was still up the ladder and had lost sight of her on the ground below. She must be helping his parents collect the fruit, he thought. How long until her back began to ache and she went inside to rest? Not more than two barrels, surely. Though her hands were working hands.
He felt a tremor go through the ladder and looked down. Sot was there, one foot on the bottom rung.
‘You don’t need to steady it,’ he called. ‘The feet are in special holes.’
But she wasn’t listening. She was climbing up.
The ladder shook with their shared weight and Ghen gripped a thick sinta branch.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted down.
If she could hear she ignored him for she kept on climbing. There was no sign of his parents on the ground below. Was his aunt some kind of simpleton? Was that why she never came to visit, and why they never visited her?
Her dark hair came level with his shoulders and then there was her face, smiling up at him, a little red and sweaty in the heat.
He stared at her in astonishment.
‘It’s a wonderful view up here,’ she said.
He swallowed and said, ‘This is really only a one-person job.’
‘It’s been a long time since I cut back and tied off any sintas,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to show me how it’s done.’
He waited a moment, testing whether she was serious, but she made no move to go back down the ladder, and he couldn’t very well get down
himself until she did.
He firmed his grip on his blades and told Sot, ‘You have to scrape the old wood back. If you try to cut it out then you might cut the new wood beneath. It takes a little while but it’s much better for the tree.’
She nodded, and the eagerness of her expression encouraged him to continue.
‘Like this.’ He laid one of his blades gently on the branch nearest him and then pulled it towards him. A sliver of wood, thinner than a gresta feather, lifted from the branch and floated to the ground below. ‘Keep your wrist light so you don’t go too deep. When you’ve got the hang of it you can use both hands.’
‘Show me.’
He did as she asked and the old wood flew from the tree. In a matter of moments he had one branch completely cut back and satisfaction flared in him. He couldn’t tell if his aunt was impressed. She seemed to be in a hurry.
‘And tying off?’ she said.
‘But I haven’t finished this tree’s cutting back yet. You have to cut back before you tie off, otherwise you might not get all the old wood. You might seal it in and then the next crop of sintas will be poor.’
She waved away his concern and the ladder lurched. ‘Yes, yes, I see, but just show me how it’s done. You can undo it afterwards, can’t you? I just need to see how you do it.’
Ghen gave a short sigh. Why had his mother written to his aunt to come when she didn’t respect the right way of doing things? No wonder she didn’t farm herself. He did as she asked though, only to stop her from making the ladder lurch anymore.
‘You need some of this tongut – Mama has it. She measures out the lengths. Pull it taut like this,’ at which he pulled the gnarly string between his hands, ‘and wrap it round the branch, starting close to the trunk. Tuck the little branches in so they get tied off too. That way the fruit grows closer and has a sweeter flavour. Our sintas are well known for that in the valley.’
He waited for her to say yes, so she’d heard. But she was staring at his hands, unused tongut still wound round his fingers.
