by Jan Vermeer
Elske considered what secrets she had known, and kept, and which she had spoken of, before she said, “I believe that there are some secrets dangerous to their possessors, should they be known.” She was thinking of the secret of the black powder, which she held unbeknownst to any other, not even Var Jerrol, who had assumed she could not comprehend what she had heard; for otherwise—this she knew—he would have had her killed. “And surely those who do not know secrets can live most easily, in this world. For the day, at least.”
“For the day,” he echoed, doubtfully.
“It is not a simple question,” she told him.
“You’ve heard of the black powder,” he told her.
Elske didn’t wonder how he knew that of her. She just answered him truthfully. “Yes.”
“A deeply kept secret, and no man knows where it comes from so that he may get it for his own use, even against Wolfers,” Lord Dugald said.
Elske corrected him. “Men know where it comes from, and where to buy it, and even how to make it. I learned how to make it,” she told him, trusting him, “from a man who revealed the ingredients and their proportions before he died. He gave up his secret so that he would live, but he died because he no longer possessed it. This was among the merchants of Trastad.”
Lord Dugald looked into her face again. “Is this a secret that should be kept?”
“I think, no,” she answered.
“But the people,” he said, and waved his hand in the direction of the door through which the host and his wife had withdrawn. “If the people are so afraid of Wolfers—who are only men after all—how much will they be crazed by fear of the black powder, which is a hundred times more heartless than any Wolfer, and is moreover magic?”
“It is not magic,” Elske told him. “Any man might make it.”
“Can we? Have we the time?” Lord Dugald asked, and when she shook her head he smiled ruefully. “Well, it’s too dangerous a weapon to take lightly up, as if it were no more than a pretty dagger. And the Wolfers do not stand as still as city walls, so it could not serve against them. Yet I would like to be so strongly weaponed.”
“Beriel also wishes to have it,” Elske said. “Ask of me what help you need, for the Wolfers must not come killing here. In Beriel’s Kingdom. In Northgate’s lands.”
“Can they be stopped?” he asked. He answered his own question, “How can I know unless I make the attempt? Are you willing to die in this cause, Elske?”
“Yes.”
“Because it is Beriel’s cause,” he said. “Well, so am I, although I cannot be so willing for you to die. On some Wolfer blade or at the end of a traitor’s rope, we may all die in Beriel’s cause.”
Elske had never seen a man hanged, but she saw in her mind Dugald so dangling, dead, and her heart twisted in her chest.
“Elske?” he asked, watching her face. “What is it? Did you not know the dangers you faced?”
“I knew my danger,” she said, “but—”
“As Beriel knows hers, I promise you. It is in Beriel’s cause, and that is a good one,” he reassured her. “Few understand this of her, but I have known her from a child and seen how she masks her true heart. I know that if one of her people bleeds, Beriel bleeds. If fire scorches the land, Beriel has the scar. Can you ride through the night, Elske?”
“Yes,” she said, and he was not surprised at her answer.
Chapter 18
THE LORDS AND THEIR CAPTAINS gathered together in Hildebrand’s great hall, where the long table had a map unrolled onto it. The Lords were seated in high-backed chairs, and their captains stood behind them. Lord Dugald had Elske seated beside him.
A fire burned in the great fireplace, taking the chill off the air, and the stone walls of the hall were hung with woven carpets. Through the unshuttered windows a mild blue sky shone over the low roofs of Hildebrand’s city. The army waited beyond the city walls for the decisions being debated now, in this hall, and Elske would have felt more at ease among the soldiers.
Lord Hildebrand was an aging man, his thin hair silvery, his cheeks sunken; he coughed, and drank wine to soothe his throat, and kept his eye on Dugald, to learn the younger man’s thoughts. Hildebrand’s heir, a square-jawed man of middle years, sat the length of the table from his father, and kept his eyes on the map as if only his vigilance kept it flat on the table. One of Dugald’s brothers, Thorold, had been sent by the Earl, and with him came four other Lords, all younger sons, all bringing troops in response to Northgate’s appeal.
The map showed the whole Kingdom, and the men discussed how they might defend it. Troops were kept in plenty to guard the cities, but there was no protection for the villages, nor for the isolated holdings, all easy prey. The map showed these habitations and villages, as well as the cities. Northgate’s demesne spread between the river to the east and the foothills to the west; mountains bordered the northern parts and thick forests guarded the south. Lakes were plentiful among the wooded foothills. The map did not mark the cities of the south, Celindon and Selby, nor the northern city of Trastad. Pericol was only a phrase: HOUSES HERE. It was as if in all the world, there was only this Kingdom.
White pebbles marked the places where the Wolfers had struck at the end of the last summer, and these were all gathered in the southern and western parts of Northgate’s lands. For each homestead or village looted, burned, destroyed, there was a white pebble on the map. There was no marking for the lives lost. The men studied the map to see where a fortress might be built, to be garrisoned to patrol and guard the western and southern borders; or wouldn’t a line of walled castles make a stronger defense?
Looking at the map, Elske could guess that the Wolfers had entered the Kingdom from the south, although she didn’t know how they had found their way to its borders, whether they had been led by some trader who hoped by the favor to gain his life, or if some Wolfer bands, lost and wandering homewards, had stumbled into this unknown land. She guessed that there had been at least three Wolfer bands entering together and then, when they saw what lay before them, separating, each to pursue its own chances. They would have joined up again where they had parted, to return together to the Volkking.
None of the men asked her thoughts.
In any case, her thoughts were more with Beriel than here in this hall. Messengers from the east had told of two great armies moving towards one another, and war declared between the King’s army and the Queen’s. They said a battle was only a few days off. Dugald had told Elske how armies fight: The troops formed into lines, to dash against one another until one or the other mass of men yielded. Elske had thought of the seawalls of Trastad, and the waves rolling up against the great cut stones, and breaking themselves upon the walls; except that there was no victory or retreat between the seawalls and the waves, and in battle men die. In battle, Dugald had told her, the air rang loud, as the soldiers cried out to one another to ask or promise aid, to warn, to threaten, to curse their enemies, to curse their luck. The air rang thick with the sounds of fighting, steel clanging against steel, the pounding hooves of the war horses, the men’s shrieks of fury and fear and pain.
“Have you been in battle?” she had asked him.
“No,” he said. “No, I have not. But I have asked those who have, or their fathers; we have few battles in the Kingdom, although there have been occasional rebellions. I asked because I like to know what might lie ahead to unman me at the very time when I most need my courage. Knowledge blunts the blade of fear,” he said.
“Yes,” Elske had agreed.
“Although there are those who would prefer to run blind into danger. But you are not one of those, are you, Elske?” he had asked, as if his mouth could taste honey in her name, and Elske had felt confused, as if she had stepped from darkness into blinding day. It took a little time for her to ask him, “How are men persuaded to enter such battles?”
Dugald shrugged his shoulders. “They fight to defend their homes or keep their vows, to gain revenge. Men will fight f
or profit, too, and also to stand for a Queen whose throne has been usurped. Do not your Wolfers go into battle? And are they not men?”
“Wolfers swoop in, seize, kill, then return into their hiding places,” she had answered him. “They fight no battles. They are war bands, raiders—not armies.”
“They are cowards, who attack only the weak.”
“Not cowards,” Elske had told him.
Now, seated in this long hall while the men debated how to do battle against Wolfers, Elske could only wish that Beriel was facing a Wolfer war band, and not the army of trained soldiers led by her brother who hated her. The Wolfers would know Beriel’s quality, at one glance, and their choice would be quick—either to take her back to the Volkking, or to cut her throat across. They might not know the word but they would respond to Beriel as to a Queen.
But this brother did not have a Wolfer nature. He feared Beriel, that she was the Queen; and what he might do, in his fear—
Elske felt her heart race at the unfinished thought.
Beside her, quietly, Dugald asked, “What troubles you, my Lady?”
“I think of Beriel,” she told him. If Beriel lived, Elske would serve her, but if Beriel were dead . . . Elske would not abandon Beriel’s Kingdom to this false King. She thought, imagination as swift as a falcon falling onto its prey, that she would become Jackaroo, riding to free the land of its King, or perhaps she would find her own army. There was this younger brother, Aidenil, and he could be placed on the throne. Her own future decided should Beriel not survive her war, Elske could attend to Hildebrand’s son, asking, “Who is this girl, Lord Dugald? Why does she sit with us?”
“To give us counsel.”
Hildebrand shifted in his chair, and let out his breath in a pfftt sound. “Women at a council of war?” he asked. “Go call your mother, my boy, and you might ask your wife, too,” he laughed.
Hildebrand’s son had already started to rise and obey when his father laughed, at which he sat down, red-faced. Hildebrand coughed, and when he could speak again turned back to Dugald. “My Lord, you are too young to remember—but your father, the Earl, he could tell you. This is one of those ideas out of the south, a Sutherlandish notion. In my father’s time, there was a woman who advised the Earl Sutherland in his council; and they said she had an equal voice. I suppose it might have been possible in those earlier days, when there were no real dangers to face. But if my mother had had a voice, during the droughty years of my childhood when there was such unrest among the people, and armed robbers in the forests and hills—if there had been a woman on my father’s council, I don’t like to think what evil might have happened. It was hard enough times as it was, without a woman’s voice to make quarrels. So, despite your bright eyes, my dear, and the pleasure a pretty girl always gives me, I must ask you to leave us.”
Dugald put a hand on Elske’s arm to hold her beside him.
“Lord Dugald,” Hildebrand protested. “What does she know of war?”
“Nothing,” Dugald answered. Then, with a glance at Elske, he explained to the gathered Lords, “But she is Wolfer born and Wolfer raised.”
“A Wolfer? The enemy—” “Wolfer? A spy—” “Witch—”
The words were whispered around the room, and answered by the name “Elskeling,” spoken reassuringly by Dugald’s captains, that she should not be afraid. But Elske was not afraid of what might happen in this room.
“I give my word for her,” Dugald said, in warning and promise.
Lord Hildebrand spoke to Elske, then. “Would you betray your own people?”
“They are no longer my people,” Elske told him.
He made the pfftt sound again and asked her, “Who are your people?”
“I have a Queen. Beriel,” she answered.
“If she lives,” one of the young Lords muttered.
Dugald reminded them, “We have our own dire necessity. We have a Kingdom to preserve, if we can.”
Elske could speak to that. “They will go no farther than this,” she said, and traced the two rivers that divided Earl Northgate’s lands from the King’s holdings, and Sutherland’s. “It is only this countryside the Wolfers will attack.”
“How can you know this so surely?” a doubting Lord demanded.
“Wolfers fear deep water, and never cross it nor go out upon it,” Elske said.
“This is true?” Dugald asked her, although he already believed her.
“True,” she promised, promising every man there.
“So King Guerric need never have fled into the east,” someone said, and “He could not have known,” another answered.
Lord Hildebrand announced his plan. “We have the numbers to overwhelm them. They are only bands of wild men, and we have trained soldiers. I say, Lord Dugald leads the army into the west to engage these Wolfers in battle.”
“I say, we make a line of our soldiers, along this border,” Thorold suggested. “So many soldiers will make a wall of men to keep the Wolfers out.”
“I say, we divide our troops, and let them roam as Wolfers, to fight and destroy the enemy wherever he might be found,” said another.
“Elske?” Dugald asked her.
She shook her head, and tried to explain. “The war bands are as hard to track as a pack of wolves. They move separately, each going its own way under its own captain, except when they first enter a land, and make the camp at which they will gather again, to leave the land together. You might stand in a castle with your soldiers at the ready all summer long and never see a single Wolfer. Yet if you stretch your soldiers into a thin line, each of your men will be weak and alone—and those the Wolfers will attack.”
“If the enemy will not engage us in our numbers, how do we fight him?”
“If you know where they gathered together last fall, before leaving the Kingdom—do you know where that is?” she asked.
“Isn’t it too late?”
“Have you had word of attacks?” Dugald asked Hildebrand, who shook his head; there had been no word. “How early in spring do they leave their own lands, Elske?” he asked.
“The land of the Volkaric lies northwards from the Kingdom, and they will leave in early spring, but not so soon as to be caught by a late winter storm. Then they must travel into the south, to find again their way into the Kingdom, through the forest, as I guess.”
In her mind, she could see the long-bearded Wolfers, knives at their sides, racing up through the thick forest into this newfound land. She could see their speed and eagerness, how they hungered for the slaughter and the stealing. How each captain hoped to carry back to the Volkking the richest treasures, and give to him the greatest honor, and gain from that an eminence over all the other Volkaric warriors. Elske never doubted the boldness of the Wolfers, and their willingness to die in the chance of standing proud before the Volkking. She didn’t think these bushy-bearded soldiers of the Kingdom had that same wild courage.
These people of the Kingdom did not know the enemy they faced. Elske drew her attention back to the questions Hildebrand’s son asked. “Lady,” he began again, “these Wolfers—” He looked about him, as if hoping some other man would ask it. But no other man offered. “Their cry freezes the heart, and— What can we tell our soldiers? To keep them from cowardice, which will not only defeat but also shame them. Do you know the cry?”
Elske did.
“Do you know how we might guard ourselves against its power?”
“What can be so fearful in a sound that comes from men’s throats,” Elske asked, “any more than a dog’s bark? But you might ask your soldiers to answer in kind. The Wolfers give themselves courage, following their own voices into battle. If your soldiers have the same voices, why should they not find the same courage?”
“Can you teach us?” one of the captains asked, and “Yes,” Elske agreed.
One of the young Lords had been studying the map. “They gathered here,” he said, now. “In my father’s lands, beside this lake. Lady, following the
ir spoor we found campfires—” There was something in his eyes that sorrowed Elske, as if he had seen that which would never leave off troubling him, every day of his life, and every night. “Lady,” he asked again, “these men had taken— We found a creature, like a doll, at one of the holdings, only . . . It had been made out of the family, the limbs of children, the woman’s body. Lady, these were goatherders. Not soldiers. Not armed.” He had placed his memory out on the table before all of them. They wished to look away from it, but knew they had to stay and face what he had seen. They were angry at him, displeased. The silence in the long room grew heavy, the air cool despite the warming fire.
A captain asked, “What kind of men are they?”
“Not men at all,” another captain answered. “They are animals.”
“Lady?” they asked her, as much fearful as furious.
Elske shook her head. She could not answer, did not know.
The young Lord insisted. “As if death were a game.”
So Elske answered him. “When men have drunk too much honey mead together, as the Wolfers love to do, or wine, or ale, and more so if they have passed some danger together, then they will do such things as they would otherwise not think of. Even Wolfers, accustomed as they are to battle and blood, can be made more wild by blood and drink and the fear with which their victims look at them.” She looked around at the smooth-shaven Lords in their blue shirts, the bearded captains wearing metal breastplates.
They did not wish to meet her glance, and their faces were wiped clear of any expression. So she knew they had seen men behave so, and had perhaps themselves done that of which they would not willingly speak.
She turned to Dugald, to his rock-grey eyes. “Yes,” he said. “They do. We do.”
Around the two of them, the other men breathed out, and each might have been thinking to himself that whatever he might have done in the past, which he would never tell, he would not act so again in future. Dugald, by his words that did not deny, freed them, as from the spell of their own actions. As if their own actions were the enchantress and it must take Dugald to break her spell.
