Tale of Elske

by Jan Vermeer

  The fourth morning’s air hung quiet and moist over steep hills. There were pine trees here and their fallen needles made a soft carpet under Elske’s feet. Instead of growing warmer as the day wore on, the air grew cooler. It was the afternoon of this day’s travel when Elske came at last to the merchant’s path of which her grandmother had spoken.

  The path was broad enough for two men to walk abreast; it was worn down to dirt and scarred with the tracks of boots and what Elske guessed might be hooves. Tamara had told her about horses, four-legged and tireless, large enough to carry a grown man on their backs, strong enough to bear a barrowload of goods. Under Elske’s eager questioning, as they sat alone with the babies in the Birth House, Tamara told her about the sea and the boats that rode on it, and about cities, cones of salt, beds that were feather mattresses set on boxes to raise them above the floor, pearls, like river-polished pebbles but white, and round, hung in strings around a woman’s bare neck, and dolls, miniature lifeless people for little girls to play with. The more Tamara told, the more Elske asked, until Tamara’s tales made that other world so real Elske could recognize the tracks the round hooves of horses made in the dirt path. Elske placed her feet carefully on the dirt and turned to the north, as Tamara had instructed.

  That night Elske built a fire and sat by its warmth, chewing on bread and dried meat strips, feeling how the empty spaces around her guarded her solitude. She slept deep and awoke at first light.

  The merchant’s path made easy walking. Elske moved on into winter and the north, through air the sun could not warm. She walked, and listened, and when she heard thudding sounds behind her, she knew she was being overtaken.

  But no human foot stepped so.

  Then, straining to hear, she heard voices, so it was human; and more than one.

  They were men’s deep voices, and one lighter that might be a boy’s or a woman’s, and although many of the particular words were strange to Elske, it was the familiar language of the Volkaric they spoke. The voices drove away the forest silence as they argued about the speed of their travel and the sharpness of their hungers. The thudding steps accompanied the voices and Elske hoped that she might soon see a horse, and touch its long velvety nose with her own hand. She was listening so hard behind her that she stumbled.

  Stumbling upright, she heard the voices see her.

  First, the footsteps ceased, human and animal, then “Hunh?” she heard, and “Father?” and “Look!” “Who’s—”

  A conversation was held in lowered voices.

  Elske did not turn around; she started walking again.

  “Hoy!” a man’s voice called. “Hoy, you! Stranger!”

  Elske stopped. The forest kept close around her, trees hovering nearby.

  “Friend?” the voice asked. “Or foe?”

  Elske waited four heartbeats before she turned to begin what would be next in her life.

  “It’s a girl,” the lighter voice said. “What’s she doing alone? What’s she wearing?”

  There were three of them, one a boy, and behind the three, two beasts which she guessed to be horses. The horses’ gentle-eyed heads were level with the men’s broad, bearded faces.

  The men of the Volkaric had their women pluck out the hairs on their cheeks, to leave long, thin beards growing from their chins, but these men had such thick beards that only their mouths showed, as if they went bearded for warmth, as an animal wears its fur. All three wore short cloaks over trousers stained with travel. The two younger had yellow hair but the older had hair the color of dried grass, and grey streaked both his head and beard. Two sons with their father, Elske guessed. Merchants, from the packs on their own and their horses’ backs.

  “Friend or foe?” the father asked again.

  How could Elske know? She only knew the word foe.

  “Maybe she doesn’t speak Norther,” the older son suggested.

  “She’s small and dark-haired, so she could be from the south,” the younger agreed.

  Elske guessed now at the meaning of the father’s question but before she could speak her answer, he asked, with his finger pointing at her, “You good me?” in Souther so awkward that it took Elske a moment to understand that this was the same question.

  Before she could answer him, he stepped closer. Behind him, the horses stamped. He pointed to his own chest with a finger. “Tavyan,” he said. He pointed at the young man. “Taddus,” he said, and then named the boy, “Nido.”

  The boy pointed to the older man’s chest and said, “Father.” Then he bowed at Elske, grinning widely. “May we be well met,” he added in Norther.

  “My name,” Elske said then in the Norther they had first used to her, “is Elske.” She might have added, like the boy, May we be well met, but she didn’t know what this would mean.

  “You speak our language?” Taddus asked, surprised.

  Elske answered him carefully. “There are—different words.” Then she addressed herself to the man, the father. “I can hear you, almost, what you say. Not every word.”

  The path on which they stood threaded through this deep forest like a well-hidden secret, so there were both time and safety for all the questions the men had.

  By careful attention Elske understood that Tavyan, the father, wondered where she was going, and she answered that she was traveling to the north. He asked about her parents and she could say she had none, only a grandmother newly dead.

  Tavyan asked her what country she came from, and that meaning she couldn’t guess. He asked her again, and again she couldn’t answer, until Nido interrupted impatiently to say, “What land, what people?” and Elske could tell the father, “The people of the Volkaric.”

  They looked to one another, wary, and said nothing, all three ranged against Elske.

  “The Volkaric are yellow-haired,” Tavyan said to her, “blue-eyed. Like us.”

  “My grandmother was taken captive from the south. They say, I am like her.”

  “But why have you left your people?” Tavyan asked.

  Elske told him nothing false. “My grandmother sent me away.”

  “Well,” Tavyan said. “Well, then. How far—?”

  “Father.” This time it was Taddus interrupting impatiently and Tavyan gave way, making his decision, asking her, “Shall we four travel on together? We also go to the north.” He explained, “The city, Trastad, is our home.”

  “Trastad.” This could be the northern city Tamara’s merchants had hoped to reach, as if Elske might complete the journey Tamara had begun, as if their lives were still connected. She answered Tavyan with a smile, “Where else should I go, and who else travel with?”

  So they set off, with Elske in the lead. She had answered their questions and any she had for them could wait until they halted at nightfall. Tamara had always told Elske stories, tales of foreign people and their foreign ways, tales of watery oceans stretching out as far as the eye could see, tales of a Kingdom hidden away safe from the rest of the world, where the King looked on his subjects as a gardener looks on the plants whose well-being makes his own. In her stories, Tamara had spoken of men like these three, whose work was carrying goods from one place to another, for buying and selling. Merchants traded goods for gold, as if each merchant were a Volkking, to have his own treasure-house.

  Elske listened carefully to her traveling companions. In their talk, his father and brother scolded Nido for speaking foolishly, and teased him for his laziness, and for wandering off the path. Nido pestered them to tell him how many more days it would be before they were home at last, until they told him sharply not to be so impatient. They talked about men they had done business with in the southern cities, and whether the cloth Taddus had insisted they purchase would please the women of Trastad or if, as Tavyan predicted, it would prove profitless.

  Elske liked the sound of that word, profitless; it was narrow and tidy, like the Birth House in Tamara’s care.

  The men spoke quickly and with much argument, although they often
laughed. Elske wished she could walk backwards, to see their faces. The Volkaric laughed at another’s pain, or shame; their laughter was as sharp as their swords; like swords, laughter was used to wound. The Volkaric argued over things that could be taken, a bowl of stew, a pelt, a woman, and they talked only to give orders. These three used talk differently.

  Nido talked the most. He thought they had been ten days and nights on the path, for he had been counting carefully. He thought the mother would be watching for them over the sea, and asked could he be the one to go up behind her and put his hands over her eyes to surprise her, and her new baby, too. For weren’t babies born in summer?

  Taddus scolded his brother for talking as if they had arrived safely home already, tempting fortune to do ill by them, and said something about Elske that she didn’t understand.

  “She wouldn’t harm us,” Nido argued.

  “Don’t go——ing her,” Taddus warned. “She’s Volkaric.”

  Elske turned the sound into letters in her head, as Tamara had taught her. T-r-u-s-t-ing.

  “She’s trusting us enough to travel with us,” Nido argued. “That’s evens up.”

  They spoke in Norther, but with a difference. Elske’s accustomed language was like the broth made from gnawed bones, but this language of theirs had meat in it, too, and onions, and other unknown foods, even pinches of salt.

  “How do we know she’s not leading us into an ambush?” Taddus asked his father.

  “How does she know we won’t rape her or sell her as a slave?” Tavyan answered. “I’ve decided that she’ll travel with us, and that settles that.”

  Taddus ignored his father’s last words. “You know what they call them, in the south. Wolfers. You know that, and do you know why?”

  “She’s not like a wolf,” Nido said. “Anybody can see that.”

  “Wolves,” Taddus continued, “will smell out a pregnant doe, and they’ll trail after her until she gives birth. Then the wolves take the helpless newborn, and the mother too weak to escape. That’s what Wolfers are. They know nothing of mercy or law, government or trade.”

  Elske said nothing, and asked nothing, not when they spoke of things she knew, not when she wondered at the meaning of their words. She walked and listened.

  When they halted at sunset, with four it took almost no time to gather wood and start a fire. Elske had her own loaf and scraps of dried flesh, which she offered around to the others. They turned away from her food. In turn, they offered her a round, speckled-red object. “Apple,” they called it.

  Elske took it into her hand. The apple was hard, not as heavy as a rock, palm-sized. A short twig rose out of its top, like the cut cord on a newborn. She looked across the fire to Nido’s face, shadowy in the firelight, then to Taddus, and Tavyan.

  Tavyan held one of these apples in his own hand and said, “Eat.” He bit into it.

  Elske tried to tell them. “My grandmother spoke of apples, and trees with white blossoms in the spring.” Tamara had also told of little cakes, like bread only so light and so sweet with honey and something called raisins that, speaking of them, Tamara smiled to remember what it was to have such a cake in her mouth, and taste it. Elske held out her hand, the apple in her palm. “I never thought I would eat an apple.”

  “— it,” Nido urged. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  T-r-y. Elske put the new word away in her head and promised him, “I’m not afraid.” She opened her mouth and bit into the apple. Her teeth cut through its tight skin and she heard a sound—like frosty grasses underfoot just before the snows begin—as her teeth closed around the flesh and a bite fell off it, into her mouth. She chewed it. The taste was like—clear as water, and sweet, like Tamara’s winter medicine of water with three drops of honey stirred into it. But this apple was dense as a turnip, this apple was food. Elske opened her eyes to smile. Two of the watching faces smiled back at her, but Taddus asked his father, “Do they know the value of the skins they wear? Do you think she knows how much her cloak is worth?”

  “You don’t think to take it from her, do you?” His father laughed.

  Then Taddus, too, smiled at Elske. “We won’t harm you.”

  “Why should you harm me?” Elske asked, and took another bite of the apple. When these Trastaders smiled, their teeth gleamed white, especially when the smiling man was bearded; these Trastaders smiled freely.

  “And you won’t harm us,” Nido announced.

  “Why should I harm you?” she asked, her smile broadening.

  Nido added, “You couldn’t, anyway, you’re only a girl,” at which both Taddus and Tavyan laughed, and warned Nido that he was too young to understand what harm girls could do to a man. Then Nido became angry, and asked why, if Taddus felt that way, he was in such a hurry to get home and get married?

  Like Nido, when Elske finished the apple she tossed the core into the fire, where it sizzled and steamed and sweetened the rising smoke. A white crescent of new moon hung in a black, star-speckled sky above them, the fire had burned down to bright warm coals, and they were all tired; so they lay down and slept.

  In the morning Tavyan showed Elske what their journey would be. “The mountains lie between us and Trastad,” he said. “We are heading for the pass,” he said, and took a stick to draw in the dirt. Elske crouched beside him. “This line is our path, running north.” Then he drew uneven lines, approaching the path and forcing it to turn west, “Mountains,” showing how the path turned back towards the north and east, between the jagged lines. After the mountains, the path he drew became a river, he said, as he ended it with the letter T.

  “Trastad?” Elske guessed, and he said, “Beyond Trastad is only the open sea. At this time of year, most of our merchants return to Trastad by sea.”

  Elske was studying the lines in the dirt.

  “You can drown in the sea,” Nido told her, but she couldn’t understand what was so important in that. “Men do, sailors, all the time.”

  “That’s nothing to do with us,” Taddus pointed out to his brother, and Tavyan, too, ignored his younger son, saying to Elske, “It’s only a roughly drawn map.”

  “Map,” Elske said, shaping the word in her mind. Now that she had seen a map, she could travel on her own—if she wished—to Trastad. Now that she had seen a map, she couldn’t lose her way. Without thinking, she wrote the word with her finger in the dirt. Then she stood, and picked up her sack.

  The others were staring at her. At last, “You know letters,” Nido said.

  Elske sensed some danger. “My grandmother taught me.”

  “Do all the Volkaric know letters?” Taddus asked.

  To think of that made Elske laugh, and when she laughed the danger was gone. “The Volkaric didn’t care to know, and what need did they have? They had no parchment, or”—she remembered the odd little word, a Souther word—“ink.”

  “Father,” Taddus said again, reminding them that the morning was going rapidly by.

  “My brother’s bride awaits him,” Nido explained to Elske.

  “And we all have winter moving towards us,” Taddus said.

  “Two good reasons for haste,” Tavyan said, and they set off.

  For that day and the next the path took them west, until on the third morning they came to a broad, shallow stream, its stones gleaming in the water. This stream led them back to the north and east. Then, every day the mountains came closer, taking up more of the sky with their white peaks, and the stream the travelers climbed beside ran away behind them, down rocky hillsides. Rain fell, so cold that Elske wore her wolfskin boots, which kept her legs and feet as warm as summer.

  Taddus wished he could have such boots. “Not for myself, for Idelle. My wife, as she soon will be, when we return. At the Longest Night, Idelle and I will become a husband and his wife,” Taddus told Elske, proud to say it, and eager.

  By the full moon they had entered a high valley, its narrow meadows and steep hillsides dusted with frosts. There another stream tumbled
down into the valley bottom and this new stream followed the valley to the east, curling and coiling between mountain steeps.

  These mountains were so high that the travelers fell asleep before they could see the moon risen into the night sky, and awoke after she had once again slipped behind the mountains. They were accustomed to traveling together, now, and Elske knew much that she had not known before. She knew that a wife was the woman a man of Trastad had chosen to be his lifelong companion, promising never to move another woman into his house; marrying his wife, a man became a husband. She knew that Nido had three sisters waiting at home, two of them older than he but the last younger, and his mother expected another child, which Nido eagerly hoped would be a boy. The reason for this was the Trastader customs of inheritance, and Elske needed many questions to understand these. By Trastader custom, when he married, Taddus would live with his wife’s family, where he would become the inheritor of her father’s wealth, all other children of the father having died. But Tavyan, too, must have an heir, which Nido would be, as a son. But if the expected baby was a boy, then there would be another heir for Tavyan’s property, to feed the family and give dowries to the daughters. So Nido would be able to apprentice himself to a ship’s carpenter, which was his desire. And if the boy did not live? But Nido would be already apprenticed, contracts signed, fees paid; so then one of his sisters’ husbands must inherit the business. It was all arranged by law. “Law?” Elske asked.

  Elske learned that Tavyan was bringing back from the south not only rich fabrics and colorful threads to stitch them, but also two barrels of a drink called wine, for which the richest merchants of Trastad would pay many coins. “Wine is cheap in the south, where grapes are plentiful,” Tavyan explained to Elske, “but comes very dear in Trastad.” The horses also carried many cones of the finest salt. Because this would be a Courting Winter, Tavyan told Elske, there would be much call for salt.