The Tale of Oriel

by Cynthia Voigt

  Those things known, Oriel thought he might lie back down, to sleep again, but he had no will for sleep. He looked about him. The room had rough wooden walls, and shuttered windows. Griff slept on his back, his chest rising and falling, and he had been shaved, the scar on his cheek a white crescent. Oriel’s hand went to his own face and he, too, had been shaved. Oriel thought to wake Griff, and then thought to let him sleep on, and then his belly thought of food. He got off the bed and went on bare silent feet to the window. When he opened it, he saw only fields of white, and tall firs covered with white, and falling snow that filled the air with a windless silence. The cold air bit at his chest. A door, when he cracked it open, revealed a large room, where a table and stools were set out in front of a broad stone fireplace, and another table rested against the opposite wall and a girl sat there. She turned the heavy pages of a book. Beside her, a cupboard went from floor to ceiling. Its doors were open to show rows of dolls. A pot hung over the fire, and there was a food smell in the air.

  She turned around. Her eyes were as darkly blue as the sea under a clear summer morning, her hair wild curls. “It’s you,” Oriel said. “You gave me drink. How long have I slept?”

  “Just the afternoon and night and into the morning,” she told him. “I’ll show you the privy, then you’ll want to eat. Aye, and drink, too, I’d guess.”

  “Yes, please, thank you,” Oriel said. The top of her head came about to the level of his eyes, and she wore a red shirt and blue skirt, with heavy black stockings on her feet. She led him through a storeroom behind the fireplace and opened a door to show him a farmyard, and the privy across it. When Oriel returned to the light and warmth, the girl looked up, red-cheeked, from the soup pot. “You’ve no shirt nor boots, not even stockings. I should have—”

  “No matter, lady. No harm, as you see. I’m accustomed.”

  “I’m not a lady,” she laughed. Oriel would have made some response but by then the bowl had been set before him, and a spoon put into his hand, and he was spooning thick meaty soup into his mouth, and he could not think to do anything but eat. Griff entered the room, barely awake, and the girl gave him stockings and a shirt, then showed him the privy, and served his bowl. She cut chunks of bread from a long loaf and dipped mugs of water from a bucket. She brought a green shirt for Oriel, and thick knitted stockings.

  Oriel pulled the shirt on over his head. “It’s been a year, nearly, since last we wore shirts,” he said, moving his shoulders under the cloth to become accustomed to the feeling.

  “Do you feel as if you want to vomit?” she asked. “Eat slowly,” she advised Griff—who halted his spoon halfway up to his mouth, and looked dazed as he stared up into her face. “How long has it been that you’ve gone without?” Griff returned to his food, and it was Oriel who told her that it was perhaps two or three days since they’d last eaten, or not much longer.

  “You’ll find plenty to eat here,” she promised.

  “But you know nothing of—” Oriel said. “But we—”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to tell our tales,” she said, and smiled at them. “Or did you not see the snow falling? So eat now—although, be careful not to overfill yourselves, or you will be ill. I promise you.”

  “Do many starving folk wander here from the mountains that you know this so surely?” Oriel asked.

  “You’re the first,” she said.

  Two candles burned on her table, and two more on the shelf above the fireplace. Their light, and the light from the fire, moved all over the room, revealing shelves filled with bowls and mugs, cheeses and bread. The dolls in the cupboard were brightly clothed people of all ages and conditions. Griff wore a blue shirt. The rafters overhead were brown wood, with dark shadows behind them. The firestones were grey, with black stains on them. The wood floor was scrubbed to a pale sandy color. Until he saw all the colors, Oriel didn’t realize how he had become accustomed to a colorless world, a white world. And cold, where this room was warm, welcoming. He would have thought they were long-awaited visitors by the welcome the room gave them.

  He rose to see what book she read. The page had drawings of plants, with the words beside the drawings. He read slowly, for some of the letters were strangely formed. Peppermint, to soothe the belly, and chamomile to give ease in sleep.

  “That’s what it was,” he said.

  She looked up at him. But why should she decide now to fear him? “What do you mean?” She closed the book.

  “It was chamomile, in the drink you gave me, when you woke me. I remember. I recognized the aroma, that’s all.”

  “You read letters?”

  “Aye, as you must also.”

  “Are you a lord?” she asked, wary.

  “Lady, I don’t know what I am.”

  His confusion didn’t concern her. “Reading is dangerous knowledge, for those who are neither lords nor priests.”

  He’d forgotten danger, in this house. But then it must be dangerous knowledge also for her; and for him to have of her, and for her to have of him, that, too. They would have to trust one another, then. The thought, he noted, didn’t alarm him.

  “I thank you for the warning. As for all else you’ve given us, without our asking. Oriel, that’s my name,” he introduced himself, “and he’s Griff. We’ve come from over the mountains,” he told her.

  She didn’t doubt him. “It was a long journey, by your beards. And not an easy one, by the marks on your backs. And the crescent on his cheek,” she said. “Griff.”

  Griff lifted his head and smiled at her. “Not an easy way at all. Best forgotten, now that we’ve arrived safely,” Griff said.

  So Griff also felt welcomed in this room.

  “Won our way, too,” Oriel reminded Griff. “Griff also reads,” he told the girl, “and we know numbers, but we’ve been in danger before—all of our lives, haven’t we, Griff? When you think of it.” Oriel’s spirits were rising within him, like a bird moving into flight. “Where are we, lady? And what are these dolls? And what is your name? Are we in the Kingdom?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Where else should you arrive, when you cross the mountains?”

  “The world is so large,” Oriel explained, laughing, “that I might be anywhere at all, lady, once I cross the mountains.”

  She rose from her stool and brushed her hands down over her apron with dignity. Her cheeks were still pink. “I ask you, don’t call me lady, for I’m none. What you call dolls are puppets, most of which my grandfather made. Have you never seen puppets?”

  They hadn’t. Now it was her turn to laugh at ignorance, but she kept it to a mischievous smile. “My grandfather came from the lands south of the Kingdom, and he brought the puppets with him. Here, Oriel, sit with Griff and I’ll—It’s better to show than to explain. Besides, the snow has us trapped, or, it has you trapped—Do you wish to travel on, have you some destination?”

  She brought out a three-paneled screen, with a window cut into the central panel. Over this window, a curtain fell. Then she fetched two of the dolls from the cupboard, and Oriel saw that strings tied to the dolls led up to wooden crosspieces. She disappeared behind the screen and he heard only clatterings.

  She had shaved them, and bathed them, too, he thought. She had fed and clothed them. Why should she do such a thing? Was the Kingdom a place where strangers had no power to harm you, and thus were never to be feared? Where life’s necessities were present in such abundance that nobody begrudged giving them to another?

  Could there be such a place? Oriel doubted that, although he had no doubt that this was such a place. He would have turned to Griff with the questions, except that the curtain rose up, pulled back by some invisible hand, and he saw the dolls, standing upright, now, in front of a painted city—and the dolls spoke.

  The dolls not only spoke, they also moved. Each moved in his own way, and each spoke in his own voice. They were a countryman—plain and simple, in dress and words—and a city man—who spoke and dressed with more fan
cy touches. Each thought the other a fool. Each thought he was getting the better of the other. They met and quarreled and parted, and the curtain was lowered again.

  The girl came out from behind the screen, holding one of the dolls suspended by its crossed wooden pieces in front of her, and by movements of her hand she made the doll precede her. It was the countryman. He went up to Griff’s stockinged feet and placed a hand on Griff’s leg, as if to attract his attention. Griff reached down to shake the hand, as if the puppet were a living man.

  “That’s what puppets are, that’s what they do,” the girl said. She could have no doubt that she had surprised them. “And I am the puppeteer’s granddaughter, and the puppeteer’s niece, and I’m the puppeteer, too.” She curtsied mockingly. Oriel stood and reached out a hand to lift her up, as he bowed to her mockingly. Griff took the crossed wooden pieces and tried to make the countryman walk, as she had, but he failed.

  “There are puppets for all stations of men and women, even the highest born. My grandfather made most of them, my uncle made others, and I have built one, but not well. There is a book, with the words for the puppets.” She stopped briefly, then hurried on. “I am clever with my voice,” she announced.

  “Aye, you are,” Oriel agreed.

  Her blue eyes watched his face.

  “My name is Beryl,” she said then.

  Again, Oriel laughed aloud, just for the joy of it. If this wasn’t the house of his good fortune, then fortune was a cheat. Again she turned away from his laughter, but this time he thought he understood her feeling, although he didn’t understand her reason. “No, lady, why do you turn away?” His hands at his back, his fingers worked at the waist of his trousers.

  “Why should you laugh at my name?” she demanded, angry, “when my name is no odder than yours.”

  “I am not laughing at your name. I am not laughing at you. I am laughing at fortune, or luck as I think, for—” Oriel had worked the beryl out of its hiding place and brought his closed hand around. “Look,” he said, and opened his fingers.

  Beryl picked the beryl up in her own fingers. “What is it?”

  “A precious stone, called a beryl. You see? It’s all we have left of what we started out this journey with. So when you tell me your name is Beryl— You seem to me a great good fortune, Beryl.”

  She looked up, pleased, startled. “I would like to be that,” she said, as if he had asked her for a solemn promise and she were giving it. “What do you know of the carving on the back of this?”

  “It’s a bird,” Griff said.

  “It seems a strange thing to do to a precious stone,” Oriel said. “To carve into it.”

  Beryl looked from one of them to the other, and then returned the stone. “It was my grandfather who named me,” she said. “But he died when I was young. He had white hair, I remember, and his fingers were bent—” She made her hands into claws.

  “Are there no men for the house?” Oriel asked.

  “My uncle has gone to the southern Kingdom,” she said.

  “When do you expect him to return?”

  She shrugged, and didn’t answer.

  Oriel tried another approach. “Do you fear us, Beryl?”

  “No,” she said.

  She told them, “You are right to wonder about me. I have lived alone here the year and more since my uncle traveled to the southern Kingdom. And this spring I’ll take the cart to Hildebrand’s city by myself, to the spring fair, to try my fortune as puppeteer, which is not what a woman is supposed to do. Because I think if my uncle didn’t return after the first winter, then he won’t. Whether of his own choice or because he has been cut down, I may never know.”

  “Are you safe here, alone?” Oriel wondered.

  “Aye, safe enough, so far. I am a full two days’ journey from the nearest dwelling. The people—” she stood straighter, her dark blue eyes looking directly into his, “might say they feel unsafe so close to me. Distant as I live, I live too close for some.”

  Oriel was puzzled. She was perhaps sixteen or seventeen summers, and a girl, and of laughing disposition, and willing to care for strangers in need. “Why should anyone fear you?” he asked.

  She stood before him as the Wolfer Captains stood before their King. “They say I am a spaewife,” she said. “Which I am not, not as they mean it, although I know herbs to heal with. But that is only because the Herbal was my reading. And would they have me deny my own knowledge, when my knowledge might heal them? But, you see, I gave advice, when I was asked, most often to girls who wished to wed—and they asked what I saw in the future, and I answered—as I should have known not to. I have no powers. I only thought, when I thought of the girl’s nature and the man’s nature, what would be likely to happen. I only thought, and spoke my thoughts. But it came to pass and so— They call me spaewife, when they are afraid of me. They call me by name when they need my help.”

  She stood before them.

  “So you may wish to leave when the storm lifts, and make your way to a village or to Hildebrand’s city.”

  Oriel looked briefly to Griff, to be certain they were agreed, before he answered. “And why should we, when we have still to learn how to work these puppets, when you have saved our lives? Is it not so, Griff? When this is the best place I have ever come to, in my whole life? The best we have ever known, isn’t that so, Griff?”

  Chapter 21

  THIS GOOD PLACE, WHERE THE girl Beryl lived alone, was a small farm at the far end of a narrow valley. Hills rose around it, like a cupped hand. The house lay close to the river, on rising ground, with its farmyard and outbuildings spread out behind. The house had four rooms—the big room for cooking and eating, with its shelves for cookware and food, with the cupboard where the puppets and a few books were kept; a bedroom off one end for Beryl; a bedroom off the other end for Oriel and Griff, and beyond that a storeroom, which had once been another sleeping room but was now crammed full—with scraps of cloth and wood and string, painted backdrops, with baskets of onions, milled wheat, parsnips, and apples, with dried herbs in clusters hanging from the rafters, with a mattressless bedstead on which lay boxes of clothing whose wearers had died, or gone away.

  Outside, there was a barn, where fowl roosted in straw and goats gathered, where a small horse munched hay in its stall, where the winter feed was stored. In a back corner, draped over with a heavy brown cloth, stood the can. Its long narrow shafts, between which the horse fit, rested on the dirt floor of the barn. Oriel and Griff insisted on seeing the cart, and admired the way it folded down upon itself to make a protected place for puppets and supplies. When the lid of the cart was unfolded upward, it became a puppet stage and the floor of the cart became boards where the puppeteer stood, hidden from the crowd, to work his puppets’ strings.

  Winter wrapped the farm and valley up in snow. The three of them were isolated at the back of this valley, at the back of the Kingdom. It seemed as if there were no other living persons in the world, and the world was improved by that.

  It was not very many days before Oriel felt as if he had always lived in this place, with these two, and the snow piled high beyond the door, and the warm hearth within, and the smells of bread and stews, and the chores that needed doing. Beryl showed them how to work the puppets. “The people must never know that the puppeteer is there,” Beryl said. “The coins are paid to the puppets, not the puppeteer.” Oriel’s hands couldn’t learn the knack of the puppets. He couldn’t disguise his voice, either. If he spoke high and soft for a woman, he only sounded like a man making fun of a woman’s higher voice. If he creaked and groaned with age, Griff and Beryl laughed aloud. He could do any man, soldier or King, slave, lover, highwayman, goatherd, traitor, but it was the words he spoke that changed, not his voice. Griff was quick with the puppets and he could speak convincingly in a child’s voice as well as the voice of an old person. But it was Beryl who gave the puppets life. Her hands enabled all of their moving parts to work as if of their own wills. Beryl could sp
eak in anyone’s voice, in everyone’s voice, and in the voices of animals, too, if animals could speak. Once Beryl walked a young man onto her stage. In the way he strode across the stage, in the set of his shoulders and chin, Oriel recognized himself; the puppet stepped without hesitation to the front of the little stage and looked into the room. He picked out Oriel where he sat. “You know me, don’t you?” the puppet asked, as boldly as Oriel himself might have.

  Beryl talked freely but asked no questions of Oriel or Griff; in fact, she would not let them speak of themselves, and whenever they started, she would quickly begin some other tale, of her family, of the Kingdom, of Jackaroo, of the healing powers of herbs, of anything it seemed, just not to know their past.

  Her own past made a long tale. Her grandfather the puppeteer had come to the Falcon’s Wing, the Inn at the southernmost point of the Kingdom, stepping out of the forest on a journey that began nobody knew where, with only an idiot for servant and companion. “Like us,” Oriel said. “You’re the idiot, Griff.”

  Griff pointed out, “I’m the one who can work the puppets. That makes me the puppeteer and you the idiot, Oriel.”

  Beryl’s grandmother lived at the Falcon’s Wing. Beryl’s eyes grew moist as she told this part. The grandmother saw in the first glance that this stranger was the man for her, and her heart never faltered for all of their long lives together. This was the way of the women of her family, Beryl said, to love immediately and always. Beryl was the only child of the couple’s youngest daughter. Her own mother had seen the man she wanted and gone with him unhesitatingly; only to return alone, great with the child she gave birth to before dying. “I had grandfather and uncle for mother and father,” Beryl said. “I didn’t lack anything.”

  “Why did they leave the southern Kingdom?” Griff asked.

  To get away from the Lady Earl’s soldiers, Beryl said. The last Earl but one in the south, Gladaegal, Earl Sutherland, had died too soon, leaving two young sons and a third unborn. His lady was made regent, until the oldest son could be named Earl. Only this lady was cruel, and greedy, and perhaps angry to be left so young without a husband. When her eldest son died of a stomach sickness, tongues wagged. Tongues wagged about how he had come to be so sick, and how long the second boy would live—for it was well known that the lady preferred the infant who was at her breast to the boy who was already training at soldiery. This second son drowned, and tongues wagged. Then stories arose of a lost Earl, the true Earl, who had gone away into the southern cities, beyond the Kingdom, and become a great man there—or died young there, in a duel, over a lady’s honor; the stories were not certain. “You can imagine how hard it was to know the truth,” Beryl said. “You can guess how uneasy people were, under the heavy rule of the lady. My grandfather feared that if the Earl’s Lady knew of him, he would be taken by soldiers. Those whom the soldiers took away were never seen again. So my grandfather, with my grandmother and their two youngest children, my uncle and my mother, came away into the north. My grandmother grew herbs, for eating and healing—she wrote the Herbal, which I read in—and shared her understanding of sickness with any who asked it of her. My grandfather was the puppeteer at the fairs, and although he would never perform in any of the lords’ great houses—although he was asked, and asked again—he earned enough. My life has been an easy one.”