Tale of Elske

by Jan Vermeer

  Thorold asked then, “What do they want, these Wolfers? Why do they deal so cruelly with our people, who are not soldiers and must, I think, surrender as soon as they see the Wolfers come?”

  Elske did not know how to explain the people of the Volkaric to the people of this rich and pleasant land. “They want victory in the fight, to prove their courage. They want to take treasure, to please their appetites for food and drink, to rape women. They are as much children as men. They are as much animals as thieves, and murderers. They are like wolves, except for the treasure they seek, coins and jewels, swords and knives, cloths, dark-haired girls.”

  “If it is treasure they want, why don’t they attack the cities where they’d find booty in abundance? These holdings are poor and the cities, especially the castles of the Lords, have greater wealth, so why don’t they go after those places?”

  “They will,” Elske promised.

  This caused another chilled quiet, until Lord Hildebrand asked the question of the meeting, again. “Can you tell us how to stop them, Elske?”

  Beriel had sent her here, to protect this countryside. Elske had few sword skills, and she was no Queen to hearten men for their own deaths. She could fight beside the soldiers, and that would be her choice, but more help than that she could not give them. The rest they must find for themselves.

  “You know where they had gathered together before they left the Kingdom?” she asked the young Lord.

  “As I said.” His finger pointed again to the map. “It seemed the Wolfers had rested there several days.”

  “Then that is where they will enter the Kingdom,” Elske told the men. “That is where you will find them massed like an army.”

  “And there we can use our own army on them,” a captain said, his voice glad. “If not when they enter, then when they leave the Kingdom. Just let them be gathered together, and we’ll be on them like wolves on sheep.”

  The hall was suddenly lit with hope. The men pointed out routes, arguing, and made requests of Hildebrand for supply wagons, and Lord Dugald promised that the treasury of Earl Northgate would stand open for this cause. “That’s the way, then,” they said to one another, and “My men are ready to move out,” and “All haste, my Lord,” they said. Until Hildebrand raised his doubting eyes to Elske and asked, “So, we must trust you to betray your own people?”

  “Not her people,” Dugald’s captains said, but Hildebrand insisted, “How do we know that? She has a plausible face, granted, but do we thus put all our lives in her hands?”

  Again, Elske needed to explain what they could not understand. “I cannot betray the Wolfers. I can only betray the Volkking. The warriors are only his arms and fingers and hands, each man belonging only to the Volkking, and ruled by him. He is the spider in the web; if you take off a strand of the web, the spider only spins another. The web traps moths for the spider to eat, not for itself. I cannot be a traitor to these people and I have already betrayed the Volkking. You have no need to doubt me.”

  But they wanted to know just how she had betrayed this Volkking, so she explained about the role of the Death Maiden, and her grandmother’s revenge on the people of the Volkaric. And from that, with the days of the journey into the hills to polish and improve it, came Lord Dugald’s plan of battle.

  Chapter 19

  IN A SILVERY DAWN, MIST floated on the glassy surface of the lake and rose up into brightening air. All around, forests darkened the sides of the encircling hills. In the far meadow, the night’s campfires were black circles and the sleeping Wolfers short, black lines.

  Soldiers of the Kingdom slipped among the trees, invisible, horseless, wordless. Silently, they circled around the lake, approaching the meadow from both sides.

  Across the black and bottomless water, a small boat moved. Elske sat in the bow. Dugald—with his back to her—rowed. He had wrapped the oars in cloth, to muffle their sound. He himself and Elske, too, were wrapped around with long cloaks.

  The air was damp, chill. Those birds that woke before the sun sang their brief songs, their voices cutting sharp as knife blades through the still air.

  Elske’s boat glided with only the tiniest ripples of sound, through the still water.

  The sun rose up into the sky behind the eastern hills and the lake’s surface turned pale gold, and the mists rose up gold and white.

  The night before, as they stood in the short reeds, the coracle at their feet, Elske and Dugald had looked across the black surface of the lake to the many, many campfires—almost a reflection in yellow of the many, many white stars scattered across the black skies above—and they had spoken in whispers to one another, “At halfway, do you think?” It was at that point, they’d agreed, that Elske should stand up in the bow of the boat, and make herself visible.

  Dugald, her ferryman, would be hidden behind her.

  Their hope was to distract the Wolfers. They hoped that the sight of Elske—some of the men might think they recognized her—gliding towards their camp across the surface of the water, would seize their attention so that the Wolfers would not discover the approaching army until it was too late to do anything more than stand, and fight. They hoped that by the end of morning the soldiers would have driven the Wolfers out of the Kingdom. Elske—and Lord Dugald, too, who would let no other man take his part—would alarm and attract the Wolfers by gliding right up into their midst.

  When the time was right, Elske would give the signal for the attack. Until they heard that signal, the soldiers were under the strictest orders of silence. It was Dugald who would tell her when the time was right, another part he would let no other man take.

  “The Queen put her into my care,” he said, over and over. “Elske is mine to guard.”

  Neither he nor Elske spoke aloud what they both knew, and all the others also understood: The two in the little boat would be alone in the midst of the enemy when battle was engaged. Elske was the staked goat, to draw the enemy out, and Lord Dugald perforce staked with her.

  The boat drew the sun’s gold after it across the wide lake, as a Lady would the train of her fine gown. The boat moved forward through the fading mist, so that it would seem—when Elske stood—that she floated upon mist, not water.

  Halfway across, at a whisper from Dugald, she stood up. The round-bottomed coracle rocked under her bare feet and she heard Dugald’s intaken breaths, his unspoken fear, before the boat rocked itself into safe balance again.

  Balanced, Elske dropped her cloak. This was what she had told no one. As naked as the Death Maiden entering to the Volkking, Elske stood in the bow of the boat. Her dark hair flowed down over her back.

  Dugald rowed steadily, quietly. His back was turned to her, so he could not see Elske, nor the beginnings of movement among the men on the shore. The men stirred. Their voices sounded, clear across the water, groaning, laughing, quarreling.

  Elske stood motionless and the boat glided under her feet.

  A few of the Wolfers rose. She was not close enough to see their faces and know if she knew them. They rubbed at their arms and looked about them. One man pointed, at her, and his neighbor responded by turning around to look. A muffled wave of voices rolled towards her, almost a greeting. Slowly, the Wolfers drew together in their numbers. Slowly, gathering, their eyes all fixed on her, they approached the water’s edge.

  They could not believe their eyes.

  They were there in their hundreds, twenty and more of the raiding parties, come to scour this fat land clean of its goodnesses. In their hundreds they drew towards the edge of the lake, as if towards the Volkking’s carved throne on the day he distributed the year’s takings. But on this day, they faced not the man on the throne but a naked girl, her arms at her side, being carried magically towards them on water.

  And on this morning, they drew their long knives out of the scabbards. Their long beards hung down narrow from their chins and their wolf eyes were wild.

  The boat glided forward, towards them, towards their center, and the bolde
st of them stepped out into the water.

  Elske stood with her dark hair loose over her shoulders.

  There was a time of absolute silence. Silence hung over the scene like a knife. And then the sun broke free of the hills, to rise up into the sky as if it were a ball of flames, ignited, lighting everything.

  “Now,” Dugald said quietly, and Elske opened her throat.

  The Wolfer war cry rose up out of her chest, out of her mouth and into the air where it twisted, and clawed its way up. Her cry howled out over the water and into the trees.

  Before that sound had left the sky, an answering, echoing cry from the throats of hundreds of unseen soldiers rolled like a fog out of the trees.

  On the shore, the Wolfers looked to one another, unable to know, undecided and leaderless. The motionless Death Maiden approached them, coming ever closer.

  Their eyes were on Elske, wild with confusion and doubt; then their faces turned from her to the trees, out of which soldiers emerged, howling endlessly as they marched into battle, attacking in orderly lines.

  Turning to face the soldiers on their left and turning to face the soldiers on their right, turning to face Elske, turning back to see soldiers, the Wolfers turned their backs to the lake, the Death Maiden, and the army. They fled.

  They ran in packs across the meadow grass, faster than the more heavily armored soldiers could go. They crossed the meadow and melted into the trees, as fleet as wolves.

  The soldiers hesitated, unprepared for this response. Elske raised her cry again and—trained to this—they answered her, louder and more clear here in the open air. Then their captains ordered them after the enemy in his flight. Giving the Wolfer cry, the captains led their men in the pursuit.

  Then it was that the coracle scraped its bottom on the sandy lake bottom.

  Elske lost her balance, and stumbled forward. Clutching at the rounded side of the little boat, she tumbled sideways and the boat rocked.

  Dugald leapt out of the boat, then, and in the same motion turned, drawing his sword to fight—as he expected—to his death. But he could see no enemy to engage. He could see only his own soldiers, some alert and watching on the meadow, some racing into the distant woods, and then he saw Elske crouched naked in the bow of the boat.

  “What—?” he asked her, as he covered her with his own cloak. “Where—?”

  Elske climbed onto her knees, and then—the cloak wrapped around her—out of the boat and into the shallow water.

  “Elske! What has happened?” he demanded. The water rose almost to the top of his leather boots, and he clambered quickly onto dry land. There, he reached out a hand to her, if she might need it.

  Shivering from excitement, her teeth chattering with victory and with fear dispelled, as if she stood barefooted in a snowstorm before the lighted doorway of her grandmother’s little house, Elske felt laughter rise up in her. “I said, they are children. I said, I think—” She shivered violently.

  “Bring drink for the Lady,” Dugald called to a group of watching soldiers.

  She was given a leather flask filled with a liquid that burned down into her stomach, and warmed her. She drank it eagerly, and coughed, and laughed out loud.

  “As if I led troops of dead men against them,” she told Dugald. He understood her immediately, and looked off towards the trees into which the Wolfers had fled.

  “What shall we do, Lord Dugald?” a captain asked and Dugald gave the order, “Pursue, and do not take prisoners. Let me march with you, to see how the battle goes.”

  “There is no battle, my Lord,” the captain pointed out.

  ALL THE MORNING, ELSKE WAITED alone beside the quiet lake, while those soldiers left on guard there rested on the ground behind her, joking and jovial now. She could hear complaints that they had missed their chance to prove their courage and skill, matched by rough reminders that they had also missed their chance at death and wounding. “To be prepared for bloodshed, and know you have the courage for it, but not to be put in the way of it—now there’s a soldier’s dream,” more than one said. “This is our Elskeling’s way of war,” they said and called out, “Lady, I’ll be your soldier on any cause.”

  “The battle won and not a man lost,” they rejoiced.

  It was midday before Dugald returned to break her solitude. He’d left a troop of his own soldiers following the Wolfer trail as the war band dashed headlong, stopping neither for drink nor food, back into the south, fleeing the Kingdom. “They’re not likely to come back against us,” he decided. “We can sleep easy upon the question of Wolfers.”

  “Unless they have changed their natures, I think we can,” Elske agreed.

  “And you did not guess what they would think?”

  “How could I guess more than that seeing me they might be stunned with surprise, and therefore taken at a disadvantage? You know that was my thought. How could I guess that they would run from me?”

  “I think it was the armies in the forest they ran from.”

  “Thinking they were armies of dead men, and deathless.”

  “Did you know that you would be naked?” he asked her then.

  “I knew I must be. As the Death Maiden is, when she enters to the Volkking.” She also knew he would have forbidden it and so she had kept silent. Just as she had known his fear of drowning when he insisted on being her boatman, and kept silent. Now she waited for his sentence on her.

  “You did not tell me that you would be naked.”

  “You would have stopped me, I think,” she said.

  “I think I would have tried to stop you, and you would have persuaded me of the need,” he corrected her. “Elske,” he said and then said her name again, “Elske. I never tire of your surprises. You know that.”

  That, she hadn’t known.

  “I can warm my hands in the grey of your eyes, as in the warmth of wolf fur. I warm my heart at the sound of your name. Elske, if I have my way, I will have you with me every day of my life, as long as I live,” he told her, and added, “Also, in my bed.”

  Elske had not known that, either.

  “Will you have me?” he asked, and before she had time to say yes, he said, “For husband, I mean. Do you want me for your husband?”

  “How could I not want you?” she asked him. “For husband, but—”

  “Why?” he interrupted.

  This she could answer easily. “Because you are true-hearted,” she explained, “and brave. And useful—in many ways—and you desire to be useful to people. Because”—she didn’t know how to say this in the more delicate southern language, in a way that would be decent to him; the feeling being so unfamiliar to her, and confusing to her, and understanding as she now did how rape was not the right word for her feeling—“because I would be in your bed with you, and both naked, even if it is not decent,” she said and then, when he shouted with laughter, she remembered, “because of your laughter.”

  When he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up into his embrace, the soldiers around them looked away, mumbling to one another, shuffling their boots into the dirt, coughing and spitting, before they gave way and stared.

  When Dugald set her apart, it was only to hold out both his hands to her and say, “I offer you my heart, Lady, my hand, my title and my lands. Give me your word that you will take them.”

  “I promise you,” Elske said, almost unable to breathe for gladness, almost as if she were drowning, with his hands held in her own strong grasp.

  Chapter 20

  THE ARMY UNDER LORD DUGALD returned woundless the way they had come. At every village and inn they were greeted by welcoming crowds, for their story preceded them. Elske grew accustomed to hearing her name called out, perhaps by the children near a farmhouse, “Elske, Elskeling!” or by villagers gathered near a well, “Elskeling!” She rode at Dugald’s side, once again dressed as a Lady must and riding sideways. Elske could wave, and smile, and be glad of the victory. She could be glad that through the victory, the shadows of fear had be
en lifted from this land, with its stony fields and the flocks of sheep and goats which grazed on its hills, with its dark-eyed sturdy people, who cheered for the soldiers as they marched past in file, and cheered for their Earl that would be, and called her by name, “Elske!”

  Dugald chose not to disband his army until he knew the outcome of the royal contest, so he sent messengers out ahead, to find what news they could, and received them without delay when they returned, and questioned them closely. For these interviews Elske was with him, although, “Beriel does not concern me as she does you,” he remarked.

  “Beriel is your lawful Queen.”

  “And I will be her loyal vassal,” he said. “But if she dies in battle, she cannot be my Queen and I must be vassal to another, and that with a good heart—if my lands are to prosper. She rules you almost as a sister, bound in blood. Let us hope she will approve our marriage.”

  “How could she not?” Elske asked.

  “Beriel’s is a Queen’s royal will,” Dugald said. “But first, there is the question of the throne to be settled, for if Beriel is slain or taken—”

  All along the King’s Way, messengers met them with news, in Hildebrand’s city, in inn yards and at the ford of the river. The reports of these messengers sometimes echoed and sometimes contradicted one another:

  There was to be joined a great battle, with many soldiers risked on both sides.

  There was to be a duel, because Beriel had challenged Guerric, offering a fight to the death. Her brother would not accept her challenge, claiming she mocked him, being a woman, claiming that a victory in such combat would be shame.

  A later messenger told them the armies had taken up positions on opposite sides of a broad valley, where the sleepy little river meandered lazily through grassy meadows.

  Dugald rode on towards the King’s City, encountering the messengers who rode to tell him that a fierce battle raged, the green grass turned into mud by the booted feet of the soldiery while the little river turned red with men’s blood. They told him, Guerric delayed the start of battle, and delayed again, while Beriel chafed at the postponement of the chance to prove her claims. They told him, Beriel was slain, taken captive, hanged as a traitor without her royal privilege of the ax.