by M. R. Carey
Haijon clapped me on the shoulder. “Thanks, Koli,” he said. “I’m glad I asked you. I’m glad someone other than me knows it. It was bouncing around inside my head until I thought I would go crazy from it. But now there’s two of us knows, it’s a lot easier.”
He left me the jug, and the secret of his heart’s choosing, and walked on back to the gate.
I drained the jug dry before I got up.
12
Then Molo Tanhide, that was Spinner’s father, took sick. His lungs had always been bad, on account of the chemicals he mixed up in his vats. He was a dyer as well as a tanner, and both jobs involved strong brews and sour, steaming air. Now Molo couldn’t hardly catch a breath at all, and it was a painful thing to see him try. He kept his mouth wide open while his throat worked and his hands twitched and shaked. And yet his chest barely moved, this while. There was not much air going in there, for all the effort he put into it.
The hope was that Molo would last until the end of the Summer. There was a wandering doctor that come to Mythen Rood in Falling Time. Her name was Ursala-from-Elsewhere, and she brung strong medicines. But Falling Time was a long way off and Molo’s sickness growed on him fast and hard. In the meanwhile, Shirew Makewell done what she could. So did Rampart Fire, declaring the tannery a share-work so Spinner could tend to her father while others done what was needful at the vats.
I went there every day to drop off food for her and sometimes to help her mix the dyes or soak the hides, although I was not let off from my duties elsewhere and could sometimes only stay for a little while.
Haijon had more time to spare, since Ramparts did not have to heed the call to share-work. His sole, single duty was learning the cutter, and even that he could only do when Mardew let him borrow it. So a lot of times when I come to the tannery I found him already there.
It should of been like old times, when the three of us was shut up in the Waiting House together, but it never was. There was too much between us now, though it did not ever get said out loud. He loved Spinner and I loved her too. I’ve taxed my thoughts with wondering whether either of them knowed how I felt, but I can’t answer that. Seeing how hard it was for me to speak for my own self, I won’t presume to speak for anyone else. Anyway, I found Haijon’s always being there a burden, and I don’t doubt he thought the same thing every time I come along. For each of us would rather of been with Spinner alone.
Alone is the wrong word though, with Molo in the next room dying slowly. His breathing, like the sounds of a man put to torture, was the background to all we said and done. Sometimes I sit and talked with him while Spinner worked, though not as often as I should of done. I was fifteen years old, I thought myself in love and in all respects I was as shallow as a puddle.
Summer ended, which we always greeted with relief. The forest was less likely to move now, meaning that hunters could go more freely and fresh meat become a possible thing again even for them as kept no ducks or chickens.
One morning in October, the bell on the gather-ground rung when we Woodsmiths was at breakfast. It rung in the two-then-one peal that meant a death, not the wild jangle that meant a danger. My mother set down the apple she was eating and was out of the door without looking back. We all followed right behind her, Mull stopping only a moment to take the porridge pot off the fire. It sounds cold, but it was one of my mother’s sayings that them as waste good food is cursed to starve. It was something my sister done without even thinking of it, nor it didn’t mean no disrespect for the dead, whosoever it was.
On the gather-ground, Catrin was standing on one side of Spinner, and Haijon on the other. The other Ramparts was all there too, which was unusual. Spinner’s eyes was all red from crying, so I knowed right away before a word was said.
“Molo Tanhide died in the night,” Catrin told us. “Spinner found him this morning, not moving. She fetched Shirew Makewell and Shirew called him dead. His goods is passed to Spinner since she was his onliest kin. Anyone that wants to speak against that should speak it now.”
Nobody said a word.
“Good then,” Catrin said. “The laying out of the body and the cleaning of Molo’s room is share-works. I want three souls for each. Tonight we’ll drink and sing his good passage, and tomorrow, assuming there’s clouds in the sky, we’ll have the burial.”
We all waited to be dismissed.
“One more thing,” Catrin said. “Glad tidings on the back of sad ones. My son, Haijon, and Spinner Tanhide are pair-pledged and mean to be wed. I hope you’ll give them your good wishes.”
Cheers went up on all sides. I think it was only me that stayed silent. My mother studied my face a while, then put her arm across my shoulders and give me a squeeze.
“There’s other hens in the yard, Koli,” she murmured.
My heart was freighted too heavy to answer.
13
I will pass over the wake, if you don’t mind. Wakes has always struck me strange, and this one was stranger than any I ever went to. I was grieving a double grief, and one of them (the selfish and stupid one) I could not speak.
Everyone else was in a more mixed-up place than that, being sad for Molo and happy for his daughter being taken into the Ramparts. Nothing could go ill for her now. She was gathered up, and safe, at the very moment when she might otherwise of been most sadly lost and alone. It was a good end, like the last words of a story. And so they lived after, long and happy, until they died.
How could I not want that for her? How could I put my own self and the things I dreamed of before Spinner’s coming down, light and easy, in a bed all of softest duck-feathers?
I could not rejoice, and I will not disguise it. I thought of things that had passed between us and my heart said no. This thing could not be. It could not be her bedtime-story happiness, because she was meant to be happy with me and she must know that. What she had with Haijon was different and less.
I was not so lost to sense that I thought like this all the time. Only I could not put it wholly out of my mind, nor bring myself to be joyful over something that seemed like a bad mistake, a thing gone where it wasn’t meant to go.
We buried Molo in the little plot in the half-outside where all our dead was laid. Catrin said some words over him, and Spinner done likewise. They was Dandrake words, which come as a surprise to me. I never knowed until then that Molo believed in Dandrake. I knowed Spinner didn’t, and thought that must of been on account of how she was raised.
But it struck me strange for another reason too. Molo was ever a kind-hearted man, and Dandrake’s teachings don’t incline much in that direction. They come down to us from around about the time when the old world fell to pieces, and they have got that flavour running all through them. Most especially in the seven hard lessons, which Catrin spoke at Molo’s burying.
“The first lesson is that god isn’t looking at us no more.
“The second, that he won’t look again until all men and women live by the right.
“The third, that them as won’t live by the right themselves got to be made to do it by pain and preaching, and by the marks of godhead made in their mortal flesh.”
And so on. It only gets worse from there, so I stopped listening.
Dandrake lived by his own rules, if the stories are true. He roused up his followers to a holy war, and marched them south to London. They was going to whelm the city, kill the king along with all his Count and Seal, and build the holy kingdom of Shrewshalem right here in Ingland. They didn’t get there though. They had got to cross the Fathom and the Curtain first, and that was no easy thing. The king’s men met them there and sowed the land with their blood, in the place that’s now called Skullfield, and that was how they knowed they wasn’t yet righteous enough to get the job done. As for Dandrake, they never found his body, so either he was took up to Heaven to be with the dead god and the ever-living, or else he found some other way out of that situation. Such as, it might be, running away.
It’s hard to say, now, how much of
this happened and how much was made up later, by them as took Dandrake’s words and kept them. I know this much though: anyone who talks about the right way to live, as if there was only just the one, is blind in one eye or maybe both and is not worth listening to.
I seen Spinner a few times after Molo died. I was one of the three that volunteered to clean and tidy at the tannery, so I was oftentimes in her company. She said she was glad I was there, for she could cry around me without feeling foolish and smile without feeling heartless and unnatural.
“You ain’t nothing of that kind,” I says. “You got every good thing in your heart, Spinner, and nothing else.”
“Nobody’s altogether good, Koli,” she told me. But she hugged me, and I hugged her back, and I think she took some comfort from me. Selfish though I was, I was glad to give it.
Spinner give me something in return too. Right after we spread the room with rue and rosemary for the soul-send prayer (another Dandrake ritual that I did not have no patience for), she opened up a cupboard and handed me a pair of boots that was inside.
“Here, Koli,” she said. “I want you to have these. My da was working on them right up to when he died, and I finished them last night. I can’t think of nobody I’d sooner give them to.”
The boots was lovely things, made of tawny leather that was soft but strong, and finished with stitches so fine you almost couldn’t see them. The laces was leather too, and topped with weighted rings of white iron.
“I can’t take these, Spinner,” I said.
She kissed me on the cheek. “Yeah, you can,” she said. “You got to, for they’re a remembrance of my da, and I know you would want to honour him.”
Which I did, but I knowed even then that I wouldn’t never think of Molo when I put them boots on, but of Spinner’s hand sewing the last stitches.
We walked out of the tannery side by side, and she shut the gate behind us. “It’s so strange,” she said, “to think I’ll only come back here to work from now on, and not to live. It’s like there’s two of me, and one of them is dead.”
I knowed that feeling well enough. I felt the same way after Jud got took away, and it lasted a long time. But life is a lot stronger in us than we think, and always pulls us back even when our hearts is pulling the other way. I told Spinner that, and she said she believed it.
We said goodbye at the door of Rampart Hold, and I watched her go inside.
“Thank you for the boots,” I called, but I said it as the door closed and she didn’t hear me.
And now I think the time is come for me to talk about Ursala.
14
Ursala come to Mythen Rood in Spring and again in Falling Time. In Falling Time, she always come between the yellowing of the leaves and the first snow. That was a wide window, but then she walked a wide range – all across the valley and the hills around it, to Tabor in the east and Burnt Lea in the far west. She even went as far as Half-Ax, back when that road was still open. Nobody ever wandered so far or seen so much – or so I thought then. Every year we thought she might not come back, having met something on the road that was too much for her, but every year she turned up the same as always. “She never yet promised Catrin a time,” my mother said. “She never promises anything. But if you made a wager on her you wouldn’t lose by it.”
I remember what it felt like, as a child, to see her walking up the straight street to the gather-ground. To see them, I should say, for Ursala-from-Elsewhere didn’t come alone. She come with her striding friend, the drudge, which was a piece of tech the like it’s not easy to describe.
The drudge was like a horse, if a horse was made all of metal and didn’t have no head. Four limbs it had, and a wide, rounded body with signs all on it from the before-times. And over that, a great number of bags and harnesses that Ursala had set upon it, some big and some small, that it bore in patience. It did all things in patience, following where its mistress led at the same steady pace and never once faltering.
Also it had a gun, set in its back, that turned and quartered all the time and looked in every direction. That gun, and the drudge’s perfect aim with it, was the reason why Ursala could walk the roads alone and not get killed or et. I don’t know that anyone ever seen it fire, but then I never seen any woman or man offer slight to Ursala, or gainsay her. You would have to be a reckless wight indeed to do such. She weared a bracelet on her wrist that was the same grey as the cutter blade, and like the cutter blade it was said to turn silver when Ursala bared it and looked at it a certain way. It was tech, and it was called the mote controller. It made the drudge mind her and obey her.
Ursala was from elsewhere, and she looked it. She was tall and thin as a willow stick, her face all sharp and the bones of her body plain to see in the strange, tight weeds she wore. Her eyes was green, with darker green painted over the lids of them, as shiny as oil on water. Her skin was a darker shade than anyone’s, even mine and Athen’s. Her long, black hair was wore in a kind of braid down her back, with beads wove into it. She had a way of holding herself, flicking her cloak to make it hang the better and looking at you straight all the while, like as if to say “I’m a queen, where I come from. What are you, now I’m standing here?”
She was different when she was doctoring, and different again when she was drinking, but no matter what she done there was not much that was warm in her and not much that was bending. In her doctor work, she was patient and steady and used her voice to calm you, but I never seen her touch anyone outside of what was needed to find a hurt or tend to it, and even then she done it with a set face and a frowning look.
When she was drinking, she was wont to talk to herself inside her tent, like she was keeping up two sides of an argument. She liked wine a whole lot, and drunk it whenever it was put in front of her, but it didn’t seem to make her happy. And if it fretted her to be with people when she was sober, she just plain couldn’t bear them when she was in her cups.
It was no secret that Catrin Vennastin misliked Ursala, very strong. Nobody knowed why exactly, but it almost seemed to me like there didn’t need to be a reason. They was just opposites, not in anything they said and done but in who and what they was. Catrin was strong and fixed. Ursala was strong and wandering. I don’t know how to say it better than that.
And anyway, long and short of it, it didn’t matter. Ursala was needed, lots of ways. Mostly she was needed to doctor. Shirew Makewell did well enough for the hurts of the everyday. She could bind or burn a wound, dig out a choker seed, set a limb, put a poultice on a scald. But Ursala could see the places inside you that was hurting, and she could go inside you to make them right again. She done this with a machine that was inside the drudge, that she called a dagnostic.
I’ll tell you a story to show how that worked. When Athen was eight she had terrible pains in her stomach, bad enough to make her scream if you even touched her there. She had had the pains before, and they had gone away in their own course. This time, they didn’t go away but got worse, and Athen sickened. She was burning up from the inside, though our mother sponged her with cold water every few minutes. Her breath come less and less until you couldn’t hardly see her chest move. Jemiu thought she would die. She didn’t say it, but I seen in her face that she thought it. No tears, just the hard set of facing into a grief that hasn’t quite come yet.
But Ursala turned up at the village gate when Athen was in the third day of this. Jemiu begged her to come straight to see her, which she did. Normally the first thing Ursala did when she was inside the gates was to sit and have parley with Dam Catrin, telling her how things stood in the other villages and in the valley as a whole. This time, when she heard how it was with Athen, she left the Ramparts waiting and come straightway to our house. She brung the drudge too. It smashed the lintel of the door in coming inside. A crowd come along behind it, there being many in the village who wanted to see this, but Jemiu turned them away at the door and bid them keep respect.
Ursala led the drudge to Athen’s bed and ther
e she put her hands on the drudge’s flank and opened it up like as it was a cupboard. The sight made Mull and me gape our mouths open, for inside the drudge there was nothing but lots and lots of tech, with shining wires that trailed out of it and lights that was shining and moving. This was the dagnostic, which I hadn’t ever seen before that time. Ursala touched some of the wires to Mull and they seemed to go into her. Jemiu went pale and her hands was shaking, but not a word come out of her.
Ursala tugged her sleeve up then, and I seen the mote controller on her wrist. It was glowing silver, like I had heard tell it did, but also there was signs and symbols of the old times running all over it like ants, almost too quick to see.
“This is septicaemia,” Ursala said. “Her appendix has burst, and the poison is spreading infection through her body cavity. The only option is to clean it out, but at this stage I can’t make any promises. I’ll do my best to save her. And your best is to leave me to do it.”
It sounds cruel, writ down like that, but Ursala didn’t say it cruel. She said it in the way Molo Tanhide skinned that needle when it was wrapped around his daughter’s hand: like she knowed how much it hurt but she wasn’t going to dance around it or shy away from it because that would only make the damage that much more.
She was in Athen’s room for some while, a lot more than a glass’s turning, but somehow when she was in there the time didn’t seem to pass. When she come out again, to us it was like we was all of us still in the same moment somehow. Ursala had blood on her, a lot of it, and so did the side of the drudge that was now closed shut again. Jemiu looked at her, pleading, but couldn’t bring herself to ask. So I said it instead. “Is she alive?”
Ursala nodded, and my mother let out the sob that had been inside her all this time. “She is,” Ursala said, “and I have good hope she’ll stay that way. Put this tincture under her tongue tonight and again tomorrow. Then when she wakes, boil some tea from willow bark and let her drink it, hot or cold as she prefers. That will ease the pain.”
