Tale of Elske

by Jan Vermeer

  The Longest Night drew closer and still Elske had been offered no place. Var Kenric’s house was hung with greens, to celebrate the season and the marriage. The bed linens were hemmed and folded up into the chest at the foot of Idelle’s bed, ready for the wedding night. Snow piled high in the courtyard behind the house, where evergreens showed black against the whiteness of the snow. It was full winter, almost the Longest Night. “A place will be found for you, Elske,” Idelle assured her, uneasily. “Somewhere. Soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

  They were returning through the empty streets of Old Trastad from the bakeshop where Idelle’s marriage cake would be made. There would be bad fortune on the marriage if the guests were offered no marriage cake of dense, heavy sweetness, rich in honey and nuts and ale-soaked raisins, so they had stayed on, discussing ingredients with the baker. They walked back in the long darkness that devoured winter’s brief day. At one corner they almost ran into a group of young men, Adeliers accompanied by two servants. The Princes held their heavy cloaks close around them, and were wrapped also in the perfume of ale. They leaned into one another, joking and cursing in Souther. The servants followed behind, carrying jugs of drink.

  Elske knew, immediately and without question, that Idelle was in danger. She smelled danger as strongly as might one of the wolves whose skins made the cloak she wore.

  The darkening air was thick around them. The snow-covered street was empty of people, the shop-fronts shuttered at day’s end. Sounds were muffled, in these twisting streets.

  The young men stumbled by, laughing. Then Elske heard them halt, turn, and come to walk only a few paces behind Idelle, boasting to one another about their knowledge of women, speaking about Idelle in her heavy woollen cloak, “one of these precious virgins of Trastad. Plump as a honey cake, isn’t she? Would she be sweet in the taking?” they asked, and answered themselves, “Who’s to stop us finding out?”

  Although she didn’t know Souther, Idelle seemed to understand her danger. She began to walk more quickly, concentrating on the snowy ground ahead of her feet.

  “And a maidservant, too. Two’s double one, and always will be,” one voice said and another answered, “She’s a child, too young to be worth the trouble,” but he was hooted down. “Where are your eyes, fool?”

  Elske pretended to trip in her haste to get away, and she fell forward. She used her hands to break her fall, and heard laughter from the young men behind. The snow stung her skin as she reached beneath it; and when she scrambled back to her feet, she held one fist-sized rock in each hand.

  Now the Adeliers made their move, and rushed ahead to face the two women. Idelle started to cry out, a thin wailing cry, pleading for kindness.

  Elske kept her hands under her cloak. She considered the seven laughing young men.

  Two were so ale-sodden that they were obviously no danger. One, with full lips and a jewel in his ear, she counted their captain. All had eyes bright with eager cruelty, like a war band going together into battle. Two of the Adels held back the menservants, who now called out warnings in Norther. “Run, Varele. They’ll ruin—”

  Elske stepped between Idelle and the young captain. “Quietly now,” she advised her trembling mistress. “Your fear will make them the more cruel.”

  Idelle raised her hands to her face, and whimpered into her fingers.

  Two young men grabbed her from behind, and she screamed out.

  Elske screamed, too. But when Elske screamed, it was the war cry of the Volkaric that came out of her mouth, a howling like the voice of a wolf. The cry wound around the narrow streets as if they were in the wild and merciless northlands. She howled again and the Adels loosened their hold on Idelle. They turned to their captain.

  This young man paused where he stood, his jewel glinting in the lantern light. Elske saw in his eyes a tingle of fear and his own pleasure at the fear. Quick, she swung her fist at him, and hit him on the side of the head.

  He fell sideways onto his knees in the snow.

  The other Adeliers stood wordless. And watched. Idelle, too, had fallen silent.

  Elske howled once more as she bent over the young man and lifted his head by the thick, dark hair. She smiled down at this drunken Adel Prince with the rich jewel in his ear, knowing what revenge she would take on him.

  Holding the second stone like a fist, Elske raised her arm and smashed it into his lip and nose. Then she let his head fall back.

  Now it was the captain who whimpered, and his hands covered his face, and he curled up on the ground. “Help me!” he cried.

  The snow beside his hidden face stained out a bright red.

  The servants, now free, called to Idelle and Elske. “Run! Run! We have no weapons! We can’t help you! Run!”

  Idelle sobbed, asking Elske, “What have you done? What have you done?” But Elske turned to the Adeliers, three now lifting their fallen captain, and spoke to them in Souther. “If you had succeeded, you would all have been dead men.”

  They stared at her.

  “Fruhckmen,” she named them, the Volkaric word. They didn’t know the language but they understood her meaning.

  Now Idelle was running awkwardly home, her feet tripping on her own cloak in her haste and fear, but Elske knew they had no more to fear from these Adeliers, these cowards. And their captain would be marked for life for what he was. She’d seen his bloody teeth in the snow. She’d split his lip like a nutshell.

  WHEN IDELLE TOLD HER STORY to Ula, and then again to her father after he had returned in the evening, there was a great commotion. Var Kenric pressed Elske over and over, “And she was never touched? Never harmed?” When Taddus came to call, Var Kenric pulled him aside and spoke to him in a low voice, in the corner of the front room.

  Idelle sat wrapped in a blanket in her chair by the fire, sometimes weeping in remembered fear. They gave her wine to soothe and strengthen her. “If it hadn’t been for Elske,” she kept saying, and Ula stroked her hair and spoke to her as softly as if she were a little child.

  After a time, Var Kenric said quietly, “I thank you, Elske.” He had started to add, in warning, “But you—” when he was interrupted by a pounding on his door.

  He opened it to four men accompanied by servants carrying lanterns. The men stamped their feet in the snow and asked to enter the house.

  “Certainly,” Var Kenric said. “May we be well met, gentlemen.” He offered to take their cloaks and he offered tankards of ale. They shook their heads, declining to give up their cloaks, declining refreshment, and to persuade them he said, “It’s a cold night.”

  “Colder for some than others. You must know, we’ve a gravely wounded princeling on our hands.”

  At that, Var Kenric called for Elske to join them around the table, leaving Ula, Idelle and Taddus near the fire.

  The four visitors were thickset Trastaders and one stood taller than the others, a bearlike man with heavy-lidded eyes and a thin mouth. Elske didn’t know how they would deal with her. Among the Volkaric, reward for courage was given as swiftly as death for cowardice—but she was among Trastaders.

  One of the shorter men spoke. “You have attacked and injured an Adel.”

  “Yes,” Elske agreed.

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  Elske found herself talking to the bearlike man even though he was not one of her questioners. “That one was the captain, and the others only followed him. They hoped to ruin Idelle,” she said. Then, seeing by their faces that she had not answered them, she explained, “If a wolf pack is after you and you can chase off the leader, the others will not stay to fight.”

  She thought it was the tall man’s judgement that would rule the others.

  “They meant rape,” Var Kenric said. “I don’t understand why you are here, Vars, and under the darkness of night as if in secrecy,” he said, although Elske guessed he well knew. Idelle’s father was trying to help her, she could see. And thus she saw that she needed help.

  The big man answered Var Kenric
. “They say they were only teasing, only flirting, they had drunk too much and were stupid with ale. They say, these guests of Trastad, these Adels who have come here for the Courting Winter which puts them under the Council’s protection, they say that the attack was unprovoked.”

  “But that is not so,” Elske said.

  “We wonder, how you could know they intended harm to your mistress, when they speak Souther,” he answered, and watched her face carefully.

  “Ask the two servants,” Elske suggested.

  “The servants have been sent out of the city, and so cannot be questioned. The young men deny everything. They demand that we punish you.” He kept his eyes on her face.

  Her death, then. Elske didn’t know what else there was for her to say, so she said nothing. These men had come to take her to her death and only waited for the tall man to speak the order. She would give Idelle her wolfskin boots, for the young woman had admired them.

  “Are you not afraid?” the tall man asked her.

  Elske shook her head.

  “And were you not afraid when there were seven of these Adeliers ready to attack and rape you both?” he asked.

  She corrected his mistake. “There were only three, for two held the two servants back, and two more were soft-legged with drink, not dangerous. There was only the one who was truly a danger to Idelle.”

  “No reason for fear, then,” he said, with what might have been a smile. “And if the princeling dies?”

  “Why should he die?” Elske asked. “I gave him a scarring blow, not a killing.”

  “But how could you be so certain they planned ill?” one of the others asked. “I want to be merciful, but I don’t see how you could be so certain they planned ill.”

  Elske tried to explain. “When men take too much mead, and they are together, and each wants the others to know his manhood—such men are as dangerous as a pack of wolves at the hungry end of winter. They smelled dangerous, and they said Idelle was a precious virgin of Trastad, and they asked one another, ‘Who’s to stop us?’ ”

  “But how do we know—?” one of the shorter ones started to ask, before another cried him down, demanding, “Do you care more for the profits of these Courting Winters than for the safety of our women?” but “Will you have it known abroad that such an attack went unpunished?” the first countered.

  The tall man gave his orders. “Speak no more of it. Let the servants carry tales, as they will, being servants, and all the Adeliers will hear soon enough from their own servants, and from Prince Garolo’s face when he reappears in their midst. The story will be told, and it will grow, and if we neither punish nor praise this girl—if we say nothing, as I advise—then the story will act as a deterrent for years to come. It will be known that the Adeliers may not with impunity act like beasts in Trastad,” he concluded, with another small smile that was not a smile.

  “But I think the girl had better come with me. I am in need of a nursemaid for my three daughters. I would like my daughters,” he said, unsmiling now, “to be in the care of someone who can defend them.”

  “What will your wife say, Var Jerrol, to such a choice?”

  “My wife will say what I say,” the man answered. “Come now, what is your name?”

  “Elske,” she told him as Var Kenric called across the room, “Daughter? Make your farewells to Elske.”

  “But who will be my servant?” Idelle asked. “Elske was to stay with me until I marry.”

  “You’ll be safer apart, now,” Var Kenric told his daughter. “I’m sorry you leave us, Elske, but this is the better way. When my daughter has no maidservant, then she could not have been the Trastader maiden who was attacked in the street. When you have been hidden away in Var Jerrol’s house, nursemaid to his daughters, you could not have been that half-wild servant from off island, for if you were, who could trust you with his own helpless children?”

  Elske knew Var Kenric meant to remind her of how great her strangeness was, how perilous her position in Trastad, as a warning not to protest. She needed neither reminder nor warning. And she would move warily in her new position, for this big Trastader was as dangerous as any man of the Volkaric. She bade farewell to Taddus, and to Var Kenric and Ula, and sorrowfully to Idelle, whom she wished joy on her wedding day. Then she followed the four men back out into a night filled with dark falling snow.

  Chapter 6

  THE PARTY MOVED SILENT AS a Volkaric war band through the night. Snow muffled the sounds of their footsteps and the only light came from the lanterns carried by the servants.

  Elske moved in their midst like some captive of great worth being taken to the Volkking.

  After they had crossed the snow-covered bridge to the old city of Trastad, the party divided. Elske was to go on with the tall man, Var Jerrol, and his two servants. Parting, Var Jerrol said to his companions, “One of you will take the notice down from the door of the Council Hall,” and “We’ll see to that,” they promised him. “Good sleep, Var,” they bid farewell to one another, adding that this was a good night’s work. “These foreign Adels need to be ridden with a short rein,” they said. “Good sleep, Var.”

  The icy air was thick with falling snow. The four made their way, turning now left, now right, past ship chandleries and livery stables, warehouses and taverns. Then they were walking between the flat faces of tall houses, their ground-floor windows shuttered but the upper ones showing cracks of light that lit the snow as it fell.

  At one of these tall houses the party halted. The door opened as if they had been watched for, and they entered into a small room. The tall Var told Elske, “The wolf cloak must be burned,” taking it from her. And those were all the words he spoke.

  A maidservant gave Elske a candle, and led her up three flights of stairs. She opened a door into a dark, cold chamber that contained a bed, a chest and a short-legged box made out of flat tiles. As Elske watched, the servant struck a tinderbox to light a fire in the box, blew on it until the flames burned eagerly, then took three pieces of wood from a basket and fed them to the fire. She half-closed a metal door at the front of the box. “Once your room warms, you should close and latch the door of the stove,” she told Elske, and left the room.

  Stove, Elske thought; and she thought she understood; she had already learned latch. It was wonderful, Elske thought, to keep fire tamed in a box that took its smoke away with pipes and chimneys. Winter in the one-roomed houses of the Volkaric was a choking season, unless you opened the shutters and let clean icy air blow through.

  Elske looked about her to see what the candlelight revealed. The bed had fat covers lying on it, and pillows, too. Two small windows were tucked under the low ceiling, and they showed a black curtain of night, with little white flakes blowing up against the outside of the glass. She set the candleholder down on the wooden chest, hung her dress on a peg beside the door and latched the door of the stove, closing in its fire. Then she climbed up on the bed. She slipped down under the coverlet, as if all her life she had been used to such a bed. But she did not sleep. She remembered.

  She remembered the orderly quiet of Var Kenric’s house, and the days as Idelle’s maidservant, days as like one another as one onion to the next; and she remembered the young men’s threats, in the lonely street. She remembered the strength of her arm against their captain; remembering, she noticed what she had not seen at the time, which was how easily cowed they all were—Idelle, the Adels, the servants.

  What she would be now, Elske did not know. Nursemaid, if she could believe Var Jerrol, and she had no reason to disbelieve him. Had he not taken her under his protection? But Elske knew enough about Trastaders to know he would have his own uses for her, for his own profit.

  Remembering, Elske noticed again Var Jerrol’s eyes, how they had measured her, and then she noticed how he had—having taken her measure—given orders to arrange the outcome to his will. Among the Trastaders she had met, only Var Jerrol might be dangerous, Elske thought.

  And then she
noticed that she had taken her own measure of him.

  Her legs and shoulders were already sleeping, but a newly born person behind her eyes struggled to stay awake, just a little longer, to ask if Elske had also noticed this: that she could change things. For had she not changed everything?

  Almost, she reminded herself, changed everything to her death. And now Elske noticed that while, like any Volkaric man or woman, she did not fear death, she would, like any Trastader, prefer to live. Her further safety was up to her, Elske thought, as sleep finally overmastered her.

  WAKENED BY THE DOOR—OPENING—and somebody entering the room, Elske sat up in a room filled with sunlight. She had slept well into the morning.

  A red-faced Trastader girl, wearing an apron over her dark dress and a white kerchief around her hair, stood at the foot of the bed, her arms full of cloth. Elske waited for her to speak. The girl stared.

  This went on until Elske moved to get out of bed, setting her feet on the floor.

  “Odile says you’re to dress and come down. Into the cook room.” Her message delivered, the girl left the room.

  Elske bent down to see out the windows.

  Black bare-armed trees grew up out of the snow, and grey stones made a low wall at the end, and beyond that stretched a river so shoreless it had to be the sea, Tamara’s sea.

  “Oh,” Elske said, aloud alone, and “Oh,” again.

  That morning the sky shone so clear and so blue that the sea sparkled deep and bright, blue as the tiny bellflowers that appeared in the brief Volkaric spring, and bluer. Blue as only itself, the sea shone back at the shining sky, outside her window.

  Elske laughed out loud. But she could not linger. She dressed and followed the stairways down to the entrance hall and then followed her nose.