Tale of Elske

by Jan Vermeer

  For Bob Fraser, in fond memory, and for his beloved wife, Penny—two halves of one

  Chapter 1

  THE VOLKKING STRUGGLED, BUT HIS sickness attacked him both day and night, a war band giving the enemy no respite of sleep. From the longest day until harvesttime, the Volkking sickened, and as it was with the King, so was it with his land. Crops grew unnourished, unrained on, sickly. Streams sank back into their stony beds and fish died in the shallow water. Game was scarce and scrawny, the pelts thin. The people of the Volkaric, too, across that wasting summer, fell into a sickness of lethargy.

  The days grew shorter, and still at each sunrise the Volkking came out to sit on his carved wooden throne. Each morning the wounds of the night’s battle were visible on his whited face, and in his shaking hands—but still the Volkking kept his treasure under his eye. He counted the chests his warriors had filled for him with coins, golden jewelry, silver plates and goblets pillaged from the rich southern lands; he measured the piles of furs his hunters had gathered, wolf, bear and beaver, ermine; he counted his women and his sons. The Volkking kept his treasure close. His people he also kept close, as if he believed that all standing together might withstand Death’s attack, or at least conceal their King from Death’s cold eye.

  The people of the Volkaric did not question him.

  All the long days of his slow dying, the Volkking sat enthroned, and his eye measured his treasure and measured his people, and then he turned his face to the western distances, waiting to glimpse Death’s approach.

  His captains, too, awaited Death and the Strydd that came after. That captain who rose victor from the Strydd—dead comrades at his feet, vanquished comrades on their knees—became Volkking.

  His women, too, awaited Death. They would then wash the Volkking’s body one last time, dress him in the richest of his woven robes, and cover his face with pale, fine hair cut from their own heads. They knew that after the death feast and the death fire and the Strydd, some among them would be taken to give sons to the new Volkking.

  The Death Maiden, chosen for her honey skin and dark grey eyes, picked out by the Volkking himself from among the girlchildren, when his previous choice started her moonly bleeding—the Death Maiden, too, awaited her day.

  Elske was the chosen Death Maiden.

  Even the ironhearted women of the Volkaric, who bore their children soundlessly and lost their men without an eyeblink for grief, would have wished some other girlchild for Death Maiden, even if this did make a good vengeance on Mirkele, that man-snarer, that schemer. Mirkele had never had a captive’s proper shame, not when she was a plump young woman proud of her dark hair and dark eyes, and not now either. She had grown old and thin as a wolf in winter, but still proud, now of this granddaughter. The women would have hated Elske if they could, but not being able to do that, they hated Mirkele the more.

  The vengeance on grey-haired Mirkele was good, better even than when the last of her sons was slain in far-off battle. But an unaccustomed lightness would be taken from the Volkaric when Elske entered into the Death House so that she might follow the Volkking into Death’s great halls and serve him there until the sun burned out. For Elske had been fed of the honey which Mirkele received from the Volkking whenever a boychild was born, and the sweetness of honey cake was on Elske’s breath and her skin was the color of pale new honey, and her greeting glance sweetened the day around her as honey sweetens water. Elske was different from the Volkaric, as small and dark and different as her grandmother, but no schemer, no deceiver, and even the jealous women named neither of them coward. Elske was like the flowers that suddenly swept across the meadows in the spring, appearing without warning, gone almost before they could be seen, delicious in color and scent, a brief gladness. But unlike the flowers, smoke-eyed, bright-hearted Elske had lingered among the Volkaric season after season, until now, when Death would lead her away from them all and the women would have their revenge.

  At last, with the harvest sun high in the sky over him, the Volkking rose up before his throne, and would not move or speak or hear, all the long afternoon. The Volkking stood stiff before his throne, a dead man, yet living, and his silent people watched. Seated on the hard ground around him, as numerous as the grasses in the lands he ruled over, they waited with the Volkking until—long into the star-pricked night—Death felled him.

  Then the captains dug out the shallow lake for his Death House, and covered its dirt floor with straw, and wove together dried reeds for its walls, and made its low roof out of straw and branches. That done, they carried the Volkking within, and set the torch into its stand by his head, that he might have a light beside his eyes. All around his bed they spread full half of his treasure. At last they came out again, to drink the King’s mead and eat the festal meat.

  Then the women sent for the Death Maiden. Small in the silver wolf cloak, she walked through the moving shadows of the fires, her bright face hidden in the darkness of her hair. She turned neither to right nor to left as her bare feet took her up to the doorway of the Death House.

  The people of the Volkaric watched, silent, as she approached her fate. At the low entrance, she halted—her back to her watchers—and dropped the cloak around her feet, for the Death Maiden must enter to the Volkking clothed only in her nakedness. The people saw a glimpse of white skin, and the tumbling fall of long dark hair, and she was gone.

  Now the greatest among the Volkking’s captains emptied their drinking horns, set aside their robes and weapons and followed the Death Maiden, themselves naked. The people of the Volkaric, listening, heard what they could not see. They heard the Maiden’s cries as the Volkking’s captains held her down and raped her—as cruelly as they could, in a fury of grief and mead. Listening, the Volkaric beat on their thighs with their hands, to carry her shrieks of fear and pain into the Halls of Death to honor the Volkking. The Volkaric drank deep of the honey mead, beat their thighs, listened to the terror from within and sometimes themselves howled like wolves, the war cry of the Volkaric. When the captains were done, they would leave Maiden and Volkking together, and the last captain would turn at the doorway to lay the torch on the straw floor. Then the Death House and all within it would burn to dust.

  But on this night, for this Volkking’s death, when the Death Maiden no longer cried out, and the beating hands had tired, and throats were too raw to howl again, and silence flowed like night out of the low doorway of the Death House, flames erupted—

  The captains had not emerged.

  Great flames roared forth, driving the people of the Volkaric back with their heat. The flames seized the Death House in their red-fingered grasp and tossed it up into the empty sky as King and Maiden and treasure, and captains, too, in a burial fit for the greatest of Volkkings, all were at once devoured.

  Chapter 2

  ELSKE WAS AWAY TO THE east when the sky behind her began to glow on the horizon, as if a small sun—perhaps a child sun taking his first clumsy, confused steps—had lost his way and was trying to rise in the west, at night. Elske had often looked behind her, anxious to see that light. Only then could she know that Mirkele had finished the death meant for Elske. When Elske at last saw the western sky stained with fire, she turned back onto her own way with a lighter step.

  There was no path, but Mirkele had instructed Elske carefully: Go to the east, up into the hills. Elske moved quickly over the rough land. Having seen the fire behind her, she had no further need to look back. The wolf cloak she wore was too warm for the mild night, and the sack she carried on her back was heavy with baked wheat breads and smoked meat strips, and her winter boots, too; so Elske was bathed in a cool, cleansing sweat. Her grandmother said she must travel to the east and the north, away from the gentle southern lands where the Volkaric war bands
marauded. If the men of the Volkaric ever found Elske—

  Mirkele had told her: She must go to the eastern hills and not stop to rest until she was the night and a day distant from the Volkking’s stronghold.

  Darkness wrapped itself around Elske like friendly arms, concealing her soft footsteps in its own noises. Elske slid through the night like a boat through water.

  She had never seen a boat, of course. But her grandmother—

  Elske could feel the emptiness beside her, where Mirkele had once stood. All the twelve winters of her life had been lived in Mirkele’s company, in the Birth House where the Volkking had placed the little, dark southern captive. In the Birth House, Mirkele lived apart from the others, whose houses crowded together against the King’s walls. Mirkele was midwife, and she also kept those unwanted female children who survived their births, until the spring when she must take those unnecessary babes out into the northern wildness, and leave them there to feed the wolves. That had become Mirkele’s work, after she had been captured and set aside for the Volkking, that he might admire her dark southern beauty and be the first to rape her.

  But her grandmother—

  Elske now told herself the story she had often been told, but told it silently, her voice kept inside of her head, as she traveled east. Her grandmother had been no maiden. Mirkele had deceived the Volkaric war party with her slight girl’s body, and her silence. Mirkele was clever, and she had kept silent until she could understand the language of her captors, and learn what they had planned for her. She kept silent, and never said that she had been a wife and borne children, until she spoke it into the Volkking’s ear.

  The Volkking’s wrath at learning this had fallen not on Mirkele, who deserved it, but on his own men, whom he shamed with beating, and shamed by keeping their sons for his own, and shamed by mocking their ignorance of women. Mirkele he set apart, to midwife the women of the Volkaric and to bear whatever children were got upon her; for the Volkking wished her to live and not—as the women hoped—die.

  The streams Elske splashed through now were cold on her bare feet and ankles, and that refreshed her, helping her along her way, just as the sharp stones and bristling undergrowth pricked, to speed her on. All of that night’s journey Elske remembered her grandmother, filling the empty place beside her with memories.

  She remembered Mirkele when her grandmother’s hair was dark and her voice sweet as she sang the babes to sleep; she remembered how Mirkele would look up from where a root stew bubbled, or glance over at Elske as she showed the steps of a dance; and she remembered Mirkele’s gladness, as if her life among the Volkaric were no more trouble than a moth, fluttering at her face. But when the Volkking chose Elske Death Maiden, something changed in Mirkele, as if this last was the smithy’s anvil blow that hardened her to steel; and Mirkele’s hair began to turn grey.

  Elske remembered Mirkele in their own language, the language of the southern cities. This was one of their secrets, that Elske could speak Souther. Another was that Mirkele had taught Elske to read letters, and to scratch words into the dirt, as she herself had been taught, when she was a girl, in her father’s many-roomed house. In their secret language, Elske gave her grandmother her true name, Tamara, and she called the Volkaric as Tamara had, Wolfers.

  “Wolfers know only fear and greed,” Tamara said. “They cannot taste the sweetness of honey.”

  Tamara had instructed Elske: She must travel to the east until she came to a path made by merchants carrying goods northwards from the wealthy cities of the south. Years ago, Tamara had been seized from her home and husband, and then falsely bartered for gold by the Wolfer captain to merchants who spoke of that path, leading eventually to a great city in the north. The foolish merchants were stripped of life and goods by that same captain before the day’s end, and Tamara was taken to her life among the Volkaric. “Well,” Tamara always ended the story, “and so I have you, my Elskeling.”

  Two times earlier in her life, Tamara had escaped the Wolfers, but not the third. She instructed Elske: “Travel northwards. Listen to me, and haven’t you always had goodness happen for you? Maybe you will reach some place to winter over, but if winter does come down before you reach safety, that will be a gentle death.”

  Elske knew that Tamara’s end in the Death House had not been gentle. She also knew, however, that in her death Tamara had taken revenge on those who had seized her from husband and children, from her birthright, too, and she had taken revenge for the two young men who once gave their lives for hers, in the first Wolfer raid she survived. So Tamara had a good death.

  Night’s darkness cloaked Elske, covering her as the winter snows cover mountains, from peak to foot. Elske moved with the weight of darkness on her shoulders, on her head; and she tasted it in her mouth like the flavorless rills that ran so fast in spring melts. Now there were trees around her, tall, thick, dark shapes, rooted, and the spaces between them—into which she moved—blocked sight with their dense blackness. She heard the rustling of leaves at her feet, and a sighing wind, and occasionally the owl’s questioning cry. It was the harvest season. Wolves would not yet be on the hunt and bears would be fatted for winter, slow and sleepy. The darkness smelled empty, clean, safe. Elske felt herself part of the darkness, moving steadily through it, as invisible as the night air.

  Because she could not tire, Elske did not tire. It would be a day, or maybe two, before any of the women went out to Mirkele’s hut, so much did the Volkaric fear her. The women would draw close to the hut, and hear nothing. They would enter to find—if animals hadn’t carried them all away—the bodies of the babes in Mirkele’s care. “I am caring for them,” Tamara always said before she and Elske snapped the necks of those girl babies, giving the wolves bodies as flesh to be eaten, not living babes as prey. In this, too, Tamara defied the Volkking; had it been known that the babes had been killed before being fed to the wolves, it would have meant Tamara’s death, and Elske’s, too. But she always said, “I set these children free from life before they know any greater harm than hunger.” On that final night she sent Elske away before the slaughter. “You go off now, Elskeling, Elskele. I do not fear my death when it makes your life.” And Elske obeyed.

  So the women, when they dared to approach the Birth House, would find the babes dead, the larder empty and the fire cold. They would think they saw Mirkele’s revenge for the loss of her granddaughter.

  In part, they would have seen truly. Tamara’s hope, and Elske’s, too, was that they would not see completely. Tamara’s hope, and Elske’s, too, was that the women of the Volkaric would think that such a girl as Elske would go gladly into the Death House. So foolish and fearless a girl would want no more for herself than to satisfy those around her. Tamara’s hope, and Elske’s, too, was that the two sharpened knives the old woman had strapped to her own feet, invisible in the night, would lie undisturbed in the ashes of the Death House, as unrecognizable as the grey hair Tamara had stained dark with the blood of the slain babes.

  As to the captains, their hope lay in the nature of drunken men—drunk on their desires for the Kingship to come, drunk on the heavy mead and the pride of their importance to the King, drunk with rape. Even if they are warriors tried and trained, drunken men cannot defend themselves against a sharp knife, and well-honed hatred.

  Tamara’s and Elske’s best hope was that the Wolfers would believe that these captains had chosen to follow the Volkking into deathlong service. “After that,” Tamara said, “the new Volkking will be busy enough, finding some harvest in his fields, sending out swift raiding parties to fill his storerooms and build his treasure troves, filling women’s bellies with his sons. Why would he chase down an old woman, crazed with age and grief? With his people to keep under his hand and winter to survive.” And so they hoped Elske would be spared her life.

  Day came greyling first, and then golden shafts of light greeted Elske from among trees, and she walked towards them. She stumbled, with the weight of sack and memories, and with th
e uneven ground underfoot where undergrowth tangled around her legs. But the warmth of sunlight tasted sweet on her tongue, and brought her fresh sweat.

  Deep in forest now, she let the eastern hills pull her to them. She could see but a little distance ahead, into thickly grown trunks and fading leaves on low branches. She could hear birds, and a chuckling of water.

  Elske followed that watery sound to a brook that tumbled across her way. Without dropping the sack, she knelt to drink. She had carried in her hand the small loaf that would make her day’s dinner, and when her thirst was refreshed with icy water, she walked on—pulling off little bites of tough, nutty, dry bread, chewing them slowly. With food, more of her strength returned.

  The sun moved across its arched sky path, as slowly as Elske moved up steep hillsides. When at last the sun lowered at her back, Elske halted at a stream. She dropped the sack from her back and put her face into the water. She finished her small loaf and took out a piece of meat to chew.

  There need be no fire that night. The air was warm enough and she could do without the light. When darkness closed around her, she wrapped herself in the wolf cloak, even knowing that this sleep made the last ending of Tamara. For Elske, now, everything must be unknown and companionless.

  Chapter 3

  WAKING, ELSKE SATISFIED HER THIRST and set off into the rising light. Damp air rode a lively breeze and she lifted her face to it, in welcome. All across the grey morning, Elske kept her own silence in order to hear the day’s voices, the whispering wind, the hum of insects and, starting at midday, rain thrumming through the trees with a noise like the beating of tiny drums. No sunset troubled the end of the watery day. No stars troubled the sky as Elske lay down to sleep in the company of trees and stones, inhaling the dark, rich smell of wet earth.

  During the night the sky emptied itself of rain and the sun rose up into a blue field across which clouds ran like wolves, hunting, or like a herd of deer, fleeing the wolf pack. By full sunlight, the earth and stones were warm against the soles of Elske’s feet. This untraveled wildness was crowded with undergrowth and thick with trunks of trees, a place where boulders hunched up out of the ground. After that day’s rough travel, Elske lay down under her cloak and her tiredness opened its arms in welcome as if sleep was a lost child come safely home at last.