The Mill

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “Has he ever made you pregnant?” she asked Doria.

  “Three times,” Doria said. “First time I jumped down them shitting stairs and it came out all bloody. Was a rotten job to clean it up.”

  “And the other two?”

  “I had ‘em,” she sighed. “Local woman took ‘em. Funny little things, they was. Right ugly. Don’t know where they went but my Pa fixed it. Maybe died.”

  “If that happens to you again,” Freya said, attempting patience, “I can recommend herbs. I can tell you how to miscarry, safely and easily too, if it’s early on. You’ll feel sick, and probably be sick, but it wouldn’t be so bad. I know about these things. I’m an apothecary.”

  “Local witch woman gave me stuff the last time,” nodded Doria. “Didn’t work.”

  “What I’d give you, would work,” Freya insisted, not mentioning that sometimes nothing did. “The trouble is, I believe I’m pregnant now. Carrying either your father’s or Thribb’s child. I have to get rid of it. Either come with me into the woods while I look for the herbs I need, or go for me. I’ll explain exactly what you have to pick.”

  Doria shook her head at once. “No, why should I care?” she said. “Had to put up with it meself. Now you can. Hope you gets as sick as a buggered mongrel and sicker’n me.”

  “Then tell your foul pig of a father,” she sighed. “He won’t want the aggravation. Perhaps he’ll let me go and make myself medicine.”

  Freya told Rudd herself. He grunted like the pig she called him. “No medicines. I’ll not risk you brewing some evil concoction,” he said, glaring. “You’ll do yourself in or some such. Sir Kallivan’d be proper angry if you weren’t here no longer when he comes back with his list o’questions. No doubt his lordship’ll do you in himself when he wants. Not afore.”

  “Where is he then?” Freya demanded. It was difficult to demand anything with the man’s fist in her face, but she glared back and persisted. “He said he’d be back in a few days and that was about two months ago.”

  For the very first time, she heard Rudd laugh. “Come back this morning, he did. Just right for a cheery visit. Reckon he’ll be in to see you later.”

  It was snowing again, balls of crystal white like disappearing dreams. The threat of pregnancy had brought back her determination, but it did not seem to bring results. Freya felt punched by disappointment and doubled over, hunched on one of the wooden crates. “You can’t want me to have your child.”

  “Couldn’t care, not one shit,” he said sweetly. “Maybe give you a good kick in the belly. That’ll get rid of it.”

  Kallivan came to the mill, but only briefly. It was a meeting Freya remembered clearly afterwards, for there was something strange about him which she had not seen in his face before. It was the blank white stare of distress. She had not thought him capable of such feeling and said so. When he suddenly opened the door and stood there in the whine and twist of the winter wind, she gazed up at him and murmured, “Have you’ve seen ghosts, or demons perhaps? I’d hoped you were a ghost yourself by now, since you’ve been away so long.”

  He neither slapped nor insulted her. Ghosts indeed. His hat in one hand, he pushed his fingers through his soft wheaten hair, dun feathers over the small flat ears and pinched face. His eyes were empty ice. “The delays I have been subjected to,” he said, almost as if it might be an apology, “have been a serious – inconvenience.” The man stood quite silent for several heartbeats. He looked at her, but Freya was sure he didn’t see her. He saw something else which Freya could not. Finally he turned on his heel and left, looking back briefly over his shoulder. He spoke very softly. “I have no further need of you. Your stories are lies. There is no profit in questioning you. Therefore I intend ordering your death. Either my father or Rudd will finish your life. I leave the manner of it to them, but I doubt it will be quick. You should prepare yourself and say your prayers.”

  She managed to keep her voice steady. “My only prayers are for your own slow death, and that of your father and henchman.”

  Sir Kallivan didn’t answer and locked the door behind him.

  Yet after that declaration, the next few days were peaceful, and she was spared the old man’s attacks. Doria brought her opium and bread each morning as usual. Back as her father’s only bedtime entertainment, she hated Freya more and often kicked her in the stomach. One way, both thought, to get rid of the thing growing inside. But it didn’t happen. Freya was sure now, quite sure, that she carried Rudd or Thribb’s whelp. It made her feel deformed.

  Yet Kallivan returned. I it was a ten-day later. His horse’s hooves left marks in the snow like round puddles, and when the man dismounted, his boots stamped slush. It was dusk, and the frost was collecting under the cottage’s thatch. Although it was late afternoon, Freya was sitting on the doorstep draining pulses. She didn’t get up but moved aside for Kallivan to enter the cottage. Having assumed he had come to kill her, she looked up for a heartbeat and saw that the man, in spite of his damasks and velvet, seemed hunched over, and limped tremulously on one leg.

  She returned to the lentils. The crows were squabbling in the high trees, a dozen of them flying up like great blown leaves and whirling black against the colourless sky.

  There were three voices, all muffled, but although the door was closed, Freya could hear something of their conversation. Rudd’s voice was the easiest to hear being deep and gruff, but all he said was “Yes, my lord. As you say, my lord.”

  Thribb’s voice was distorted at all times and this time she heard only when he shouted. “Son of a whore, you deserve to be flayed. Did you lie down for the whelp to cut you?” There was a crash as of someone falling backwards, but Freya could not tell who.

  Doria was standing by the well, watching. “They quarrels all the time, being family,” she said. “But I doesn’t quarrel with me dad, wouldn’t be right fer me. Since he’s a lord, maybe tis alright. T’will be Master Thribb as does you in, I reckon. Maybe this evening. He’ll feel better then.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Well – you didn’t want the babe in your belly, and now you won’t have the little bugger. You’ll be dead meat in the river by tomorrow.”

  “The river’s frozen solid. And why is Sir Kallivan limping?”

  Doria shrugged. “Dunno. Reckon he fights a lot. Lords do, don’t they?”

  “Perhaps this one does, since he must be hated.” Freya was intrigued, however. First the man wore the face of a ghost-seer, and then, soon afterwards, the recent injury of a well-designed attack.

  He left after supper, presumably for some local inn, where he’d be more comfortable, for he returned early the next morning. It had snowed again in the night and they woke to the frost riming the cobbles and the bars of the window. It snowed again. There was a huge white sky when the white man came riding back the next morning, cantering into the mill’s long shadows like the spectre Freya thought him. As he dismounted, beneath his satin ribband britches, his thin calves revealed scars across to the ankle both back and front like cochineal dyed stripes on a slashed sleeve.

  Expecting death, she had her courage back. She glared, “You look like a popinjay.”

  He took her wrist and dragged her into the small front room of the cottage. This was Rudd’s parlour and usually forbidden to Freya, except for sweeping. It was drab and bare but Thribb already sat on the hard settle, legs outstretched, head back against the wall, mouth open and dribbling as he snored loudly. Kallivan pushed Freya forward and his father woke with a start. She stumbled and fell to her knees at Thribb’s feet and he woke believing she had come to plead in supplication.

  He said, “What the devil?”

  Staying crouched down meant she was less likely to be flung further. Sir Kallivan regarded her with venom. “You have one small chance of prolonging your life,” he said. “You will answer one question, but you will answer in detail and without prevarication.”

  “I already told you months ago that I’d answer que
stions,” she insisted. “But you stopped asking and you stopped coming. Then you said you didn’t want to ask anything anymore. You keep changing your mind. And I already told you I wasn’t scared of dying.”

  “Then be afraid of the manner of your dying, rather than the fact,” said Kallivan. “With Rudd, it is how he executes that can be intimidating, believe me. But I am not interested in discussing your future, or lack of it.”

  “You like to exaggerate Rudd’s ingenuity. You just want to frighten me but it’s all empty threats. Rudd’s too foolish to have any imagination at all.”

  Kallivan’s glare was more terrifying than Rudd’s belt. “If you are uncooperative or insolent, I shall call Rudd to persuade you,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth. “And no doubt my father will enjoy watching. Now! My question is simple.” The words then surprised her far more than she had believed possible. “What do you know of Jak Lydiard, now the lord in the north?” he demanded. “And what does he know of my life? When did you last speak with this man and exactly what did you tell him regarding me? Have you spoken with him concerning the death of his father?”

  Freya stared, even more genuinely confused. Over his shoulder she saw it was snowing heavily and once again the whole world was turning white. Now the white man was mumbling at her. Outside the snow gathered; inside she stared into eyes white as frost. Kallivan gritted his teeth, loathing, but holding his patience, needing an answer. But having no idea why, thinking only that something important must have happened, she hesitated, trying to guess. She heard the harsh repeated cawing of the crows outside, Thribb’s sharp intake of breath, and the arrival of Rudd slamming the door behind him.

  “I knew Jak – Lord Lydiard when I was a girl. Very young. I’ve never seen him since. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know where he is and I know nothing about him except that you and his step-mother killed his father. You bought the poison and she put it in his drink. But I never told him that. I couldn’t because I haven’t seen him for years. And,” she said with a bleak fading voice, “that’s the truth.”

  Rudd’s hands were strong, sinews knotted and fingers like old coppiced oak. He wrenched her upright by her tunic, the other hand in her armpit, and slung her hard back against the wall where he held her, a fist now hard to her middle, pressing into her stomach so that she couldn’t slip down again. “Warn her,” said Sir Kallivan simply.

  Rudd put his hands around Freya’s throat. His thumbs jabbed just below the line of her jaw, squeezing tighter and then tighter. First she wheezed, choking and coughing, but as his grip clamped further, she could make no sound at all. Her own hands had been scrabbling at his, trying to wrench his fingers apart and release herself, but then her hands dropped limp at her sides. Unable to think or breathe, within little more than two heartbeats, she felt faint. The dizziness obscured even the pain.

  “Tell his lordship the fuckin’ truth,” Rudd growled, releasing her at the point of losing consciousness, then grasping once more. Her eyes saw her killer through the madder haze of her own blood, seeing only Rudd’s face, so calm, so expressionless, his eyes studying her, deep brown, soft cow’s eyes, eyes that should have been kind. But his watchfulness was merely calculation. How hard to press and where, judging his prisoner’s reaction, once again as if she were some crawling thing he wished to squash very slowly. Not killing. Just warning. But very, very close to death.

  “Enough,” said Kallivan. Rudd dropped her abruptly. She heard Kallivan’s voice fading into some long-lost unimportance as he murmured, “No doubt she’s telling the truth. There’s no urgency now. Keep the hussy for scrubbing and fucking. Kill her if you wish. I won’t be back until spring.” Now she was fainting, and no one could keep her from it. The world spun, noises roared, visions swam like white gulls.

  She woke in a pool of blood, lying not on her bed but on the ground beside it, curled in a new pain she had not felt before. Not the screaming agony of beatings, not the sore humiliation of rape, and not the endless hunger, aching fear, or relentless pounding of the opium headache each morning. This was a new dragging grind in her belly, and the blood had already soaked her rough tunic. Her thoughts turned and tumbled in blinding circles of confusion, but finally she was fully conscious and knew the truth. The pain was difficult to ignore but the truth was an even stronger flood of relief. Doubled, hands around her stomach, she bent, climbed onto her knees, and crawled into her bed, threw off the tunic into the water bucket, and lay naked beneath the blankets, rocking backwards and forwards as she miscarried the infant she had loathed.

  So it was over and she recovered. A ten-day later when Freya once more heard the gurgle of the stream pushing past the blocks of ice, and breaking up the white freeze, she knew she had been imprisoned for months, and now, seeping in so slowly, it was the beginning of spring. Tiny blue zandias budded along the riverbanks and fish flapped again in the flowing water. Little golden fluff-bundles wandered from the hen house and down to the river’s edge and with a creak and a flap, the mill wheel began to turn.

  The miscarriage, although longed for, had left Freya even weaker and sometimes she did not feel able to drag herself over the courtyard to the cottage, and stayed throughout the morning in her bed, even after drinking her poppy juice. She wanted a stronger dose. She didn’t receive it.

  Doria spat at her, “You ain’t got no idea how much it costs, does you?”

  “So why does your father spend that much on me?”

  “His lordship said when he brung you. Dope her, he says, and gave coin fer it. Pa’s still got the coin and he won’t stop till tis all gone. But that won’t be long. That coin tis almost run out. “

  “I reckon.”

  With spring came a burst of tiny wriggling tadpoles, baby rats, bees and wasps like orange stars in the blossoming bushes, bats roosting up in the mill’s highest corners, and birds singing and nesting, noisily courting and quietly brooding as they sat to hatch their eggs.

  And something else came on the spring breezes, which did not fit any pattern or expectation. First came the faint echoes of music, and then came the dancing shadow hopping and skipping up the river bank, kicking at the last remaining pebbles of ice, stopping to admire the flowers and the ducklings, and then singing a tune so sadly pretty that Freya ran to her door, and peeped out.

  The sunshine, still tentative, stretched the shadow into one impossible dark stripe, but the ringing of the bells and the gentle melodic voice in minor key was a familiar memory.

  Chapter Eleven

  So far south, no winter weather had the power to dull the skies or turn the hills white with snow. Throughout the year, whatever the season, the days on the Island of Giardon blasted in golden heat, while the nights sank in bitter freeze. It was not cold enough for more frost than a sprinkle; there was never snow and only occasionally a scrape of ice. And whatever the nightly chill brought, was melted immediately on sunup the following morning.

  The Islanders never spoke of seasons. There was a time when the birds roosted, and there was a time when the crocodiles guarded their nests with ferocious devotion, then shepherded the newborn tiddlers to the water where it ran deep. But the weather never changed, and Jak and Symon had forgotten it was winter.

  “How far south, then?” Jak asked.

  The Shammites were cooking, sharing, and gossiping. “In days? In miles? In degrees? In time to sail? And sailing – is it a rowing boat or a floating reed mat? Is it a sailing boat or a steam engine?”

  “Just where the bloody hell are we?” Jak grinned. “I never took much interest in the geography of the islands. But the climate here is as crazed as its people.”

  “Shamm,” said Shozwall, drawing a small circle in the sand, “is here. And over here,” he leaned over Jak’s knee and drew a somewhat larger circle, “is Eden. Now,” dot, dot, dot, “these are the islands between the two, but way down south. Six of them. Giardon isn’t the biggest or the smallest, the furthest south or the furthest north. Just the prettiest and most stupi
dly irritating.”

  “You know all their plans?”

  “More or less. It’s not hard to find them out. A couple of bribes and a couple of threats. And we go to chat with them as if we come from Happua, the next island down. We say so and they just believe us. They may be damned stupid, but they’re nice little fellows at heart. If it wasn’t for that bastard ridiculous myth of their history, we could probably all make friends.”

  Having first nodded, Jak then said, “Not that I remember Shamm as being a friendly country at all times.”

  “The invasion,” grinned Shozwall, “was a bloody long time ago.”

  The story told around the campfires had been Jak’s delight and he was impatient to sail home and follow the trail. Both court, where he had a right to live, and the Island Prison, where he could arrive with papers either forged or genuine, would be likely to discover the man Fraygard, and through him the woman Chia. Without actually meeting the couple he now supposed to be Freya’s parents, he could not be sure of their identity, but already he believed it. Hyr was not a common name. He knew exactly who he was himself, but it had never occurred to him that Freya might have a secret family. Indeed, if this pirate’s story was true, and he had not distorted, exaggerated or completely invented the facts, Jak might discover that the girl he had once loved, and still loved, carried royal blood in her veins. Perhaps. Stories were usually false trails like the myth of the Giardonites and their improbable history.

  But, since he thought of Freya often and especially before falling asleep, this gave him an engrossing motive for thinking about her even more often.

  Symon said quietly, since it was still his own private secret, “I knowed a lass once called Freya. Reckon it coulda bin the same.”

  Looking at him with suspicion, Jak raised one eyebrow. “And you’ve only just thought to tell me this?”