The Tale of Oriel

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Why did your uncle go away south?” Oriel asked. “Has the danger passed? Is the Lady Earl dead?”

  “She died, but—” Beryl continued the tale. “After her two older sons died, she was regent under the law until the baby grew to a boy of twelve, the year he would be named Earl Sutherland, and then—as she and her priests changed the law, and none dared deny her—until the boy was eighteen summers, and wedded. But the young Earl died soon after his only child was born, and she a daughter, Merlis. With the young Earl dead, his mother again ruled, all through her old age. Thus there is no Earl Sutherland, and has not been for many years. Any man who hopes for the title and lands courts the lady Merlis, in whose inheritance they lie. And she, for the last four of her twenty years, has lived at the King’s court, while priests and stewards rule her lands. While her people learn to fear and hate the priests and stewards, and the lords, too, mistrust them. While the priests and stewards, I think, learn to desire the land for themselves. But now the King has declared a tourney, for all the men who would try for the Earldom. They will fight for the title, and the man who is champion will be Earl.”

  “Then why,” Oriel insisted, “did your uncle go away into the south? Leaving you here alone.”

  “To find out his brothers and sisters. The Falcon’s Wing and its village lie far from Lord Yaegar’s walled city, which is the southernmost city of the land, so they might be safe. My uncle wondered how they fared in the dangers.”

  “Why,” Oriel asked her again, not many days later, “did he leave you behind alone?”

  “Because he knew I would be safe, here in this holding. He knew I could keep the farm and flocks, and if I wanted to, take the puppets to the fair. Because,” she looked Oriel right in the eye, “he had started to look at me as a man does at a woman, and so he had to leave, because my uncle is a good man. Because,” Beryl said, and her dark blue eyes were steady, “when a man and a woman share a home, when they are together from one day to the next, day after day, desires grow between them.”

  Oriel thought of Tamara, and understood. A father must be careful who he takes into his home as apprentice, he thought. “When we were at Se—” he started to say, but Beryl raised her hand as if to ward off a blow, and said, “No. Don’t tell me anything.”

  This was not the first time she had silenced them. Griff said that he trusted Beryl to have good reason not to want to know, but Oriel wondered. This day he asked her, “Why do you not let me speak, and tell you my history, and Griff’s?”

  “Where is Griff?” Beryl asked, standing up quickly, putting on her cloak. “He may need help finding eggs, and I need eggs to feed us,” she said, her back to Oriel as she hurried out the door. Oriel stayed by the fire, with only the puppets for company, and wondered what was in Beryl’s mind.

  He found it out, as he thought, that night. Griff had gone to his bed and Oriel rose to follow. Beryl, still seated at the warm fireside, looked up into his face. Her eyes were as dark as a morning sea, and she asked him into her bed.

  “Do you know what you offer?” he wondered, and Beryl laughed, although her face had more of anxious hope than laughter in it.

  “I’ve lived among farm animals, all my life,” she told him, “so there is little I don’t know.” Oriel had suspected that she had given him her heart and he was certain of it, after the night. But she said nothing of that to him. He could share her life, he thought, and he knew it would be a gladness to be Beryl’s husband; he wondered what Griff would say to that possibility.

  In the morning, however, after they had greeted Griff and sat down together, pink-cheeked and contented under his gaze, and after they had all broken fast with bread and cheese, Beryl asked if she might see the green stone again. Oriel gave it to her. She wrapped her fingers around it, as if trying to squeeze it into another shape, and when that failed she opened her hand and set the stone down at the center of the table.

  “The falcon,” Beryl said, “is the sign of the Earls Sutherland.” She looked at Oriel, long and deeply, as she had often looked at him in the night, in the light of the candle that burned by her pillow. “I have wondered how this falconstone came into your hands.”

  “It belongs to him,” Griff said in a quiet voice.

  “I don’t doubt it,” she answered. “But I have wondered, you see—Griff? Do you know what I’m thinking?” Griff nodded. She went on. “I’ve wondered what it signifies that you bring the falconstone into the Kingdom with you. At this very time.”

  Oriel saw it all, at once.

  As soon as he had seen it, it seemed to him that this destiny had always been waiting here for him. He needed only to go boldly forward. He needed only to try his chance.

  If he might be Earl Sutherland—

  There was no further thought of husbandry in his head. If he was to be Earl, and win the hand of the lady Merlis, then he could not have a wife. This they all three knew, and didn’t speak of, although Oriel and Beryl lived together in her house as a man and his wife would live, sharing chores and bed pleasures, sharing also the forming of the plan that would bring Oriel before the King.

  So that Oriel might try his chance to become Earl Sutherland.

  They must rehearse until each of the three players knew his parts and the others’ parts also, so well that all three played together flawlessly, whatever random line or event the particular occasion might add. Then they must costume Oriel so that he would look a showman, who might be also a lord in secret disguise. He could wear the showman’s cape that Beryl’s grandfather had worn, and he wore it easily; but beneath the cape, what shirt and what trousers, and how high his boots, were matters of great importance. All must be suggested, but nothing claimed. “It is well you go clean shaven,” Beryl said. “It’s lords who always have gone clean shaven, as it is lords who know how to read,” she said.

  “You read also,” he protested. “I learned letters at—”

  “We need to play the soldier’s tale again,” she said. “Come on, both of you. Sluggards,” she called them. “Babblebrains. To the field, soldiers!” Her voice rang like a horn. Oriel and Griff obeyed her, laughing.

  Rehearsed and ready, they set off for Hildebrand’s city, to join in with the fairing throngs, and crowds of entertainers, and also to practice the playing out of their parts before a city crowd. Beryl knew the ways and chose their routes. She skirted the villages that lay between her valley and the city, and when Oriel asked her why, she said that the spaewife could never be sure of her reception in any place where people lived and talked together. So they slept out under the open sky, or under the protection of trees, and one day’s journey outside the city Beryl sat by the fire, putting tallow into her autumn-colored hair until it straightened and lay flat. She braided it then, into two long braids, which she coiled around her ears. With her hair so mastered, she herself seemed tamed.

  The next morning, Oriel saw for the first time the people of the Kingdom, traveling towards Hildebrand’s city for the spring fair. The men were bearded, the women wore their hair coiled around their ears, men and women and children all wore brown homespun. When they were among the crowds, Beryl let Oriel speak, to ask for food or drink at the Inn, or to offer assistance to a fellow traveler. If she needed to say anything, she spoke hesitantly. She explained it: It was dangerous to seem too much the stranger, among strangers. As spaewife she was already feared. As puppeteer, because she was an entertainer, she could live by rules that ordinary folk envied and avoided, but didn’t fear, as long as she seemed not much different from everyone else. “If my tongue is as bound as my hair, it behooves you to study for the meaning of my words,” she warned them. When she moved among the people, she must seem one of them, lest they notice her and become frightened by her solitariness, and strangeness. Her grandfather had advised her in this.

  “Why did he leave his home?” Oriel asked, thinking of how he and Griff had made their way to this place.

  Beryl didn’t know.

  “I think you don’t kn
ow much about the man,” Oriel observed.

  “I know what he wanted me to know,” she snapped at him. They were naked under the bedclothes in the privacy of their room at the Inn where they would stay, for the fair days. Oriel gathered her to him then, his lively bedwife, who might greet him with a kiss or a challenge, and he couldn’t be sure which.

  THE FAIR FIELD, FOR THE three days of the fair, was transformed by booths and tents, and the crowds of people, into a small city all of its own. A busy market for livestock was held at the same time, in a fenced ring behind the tents of the merchants and entertainers. Merchants sold wool and skins and blades and paper, woven cloth and leather boots. The smells of food filled the air, breads and sweets and roasts and ales. Voices argued, quarreled, sang, begged, haggled; animals brayed and barked. What struck Oriel, looking about him, wandering about, even more than the sameness of the people’s appearance and the contrasting colorful elegance of the lords and ladies when they appeared, was that there were no walls around Hildebrand’s city. There was no guarded entry into the city, no way of assuring the inhabitants their nightlong safety.

  Beryl told him that the border cities, where strangers might approach the Kingdom in number, did have high stone walls, Northgate’s to the west, and Yaegar’s in the south, and Arborford, up against the forest in the east.

  Did Beryl think of herself as a southerner, Griff asked.

  “Nay,” Beryl said at last, “when you are the puppeteer, you belong nowhere.”

  “Nowhere and everywhere,” Griff said.

  Beryl smiled at him, across the firelight, from within Oriel’s arm.

  THERE WERE FOUR PUPPET PLAYS to give, one after the other, and then a short rest before beginning the round again. On the first day, before the first play, just before Oriel would emerge from behind the puppet stage, he pulled his showman’s cloak close around him, and doubted himself. Beryl and Griff had no time for him, being busy with the puppets as they settled themselves into place over the small stage. Oriel was alone with his own unsureness.

  But why should he doubt himself, he wondered, who had been always a man to be reckoned with, even when he had been a boy. That thought gave wings to his spirits. Bold as sunlight, he had promised himself, and so he would be—and he turned his face to the sky and loosened his fingers from the cloak’s edge. For if he did not dare to be showman, how could he dare to try for Earl?

  He stepped out. The small audience barely noticed him, so intent were they on the lowered curtain. He stood, and waited, watching the figures and faces. He recognized, as they gradually turned their faces to him, the wondering, hopeful eyes—which was what he had been accustomed to see, all of his life, except for those rare occasions when, like Nikol, the eyes had held a dangerous stillness. Even Rulgh had looked wonderingly at him.

  Oriel opened his cloak out, like the wings of a falcon, and smiled, and bowed his head to his audience, and greeted them. “We have a tale to tell,” he said. His voice, his gestures, his face, something about him gathered the crowd together, and gathered in also those who had thought to walk by without stopping to see the puppets. Oriel sat down on the edge of the cart, with the stage at his left shoulder. “Once there lived a woodcutter,” he said.

  That was the cue. He heard the curtain draw up behind him. The faces before him moved their attention to the stage. “Who went out early in the morning, to chop the wood he would take to market.” Behind him the puppets clattered, as the woodcutter bade his wife good day, shouldered his axe, and marched off. This was the story of the woodcutter who caught the dragon’s tail, and so won the wishes, which his wife used to get more wealth, until finally she wished herself King. When she became King, she drove her woodcutter husband away, and he went back to the forest, and freed the dragon from where the axe held him pinned. The wife was left in her plain rags before the proud lords and ladies of the court, and in her plain wits, and they drove her out of the palace. She made her miserable way back to the woodcutter’s cottage.

  This point of the story, as the puppet wife returned to the little cottage painted onto a cloth, was where Oriel needed to be more than showman. He turned to the audience. “And how shall the husband greet her?” he asked.

  A man’s voice cried out that her head should be taken off, or maybe she should be driven with sticks far into the forest and left to fend for herself if she could and to die if she couldn’t. Another man’s voice said she should be forgiven, for women couldn’t help their greed. A woman said she should be made to be a servant to the woodcutter and never again a wife. At the harsh judgments, the puppet herself stepped forward to persuade the audience to mercy, and to harangue them for their pitilessness. “I’m only a poor old woman,” she whined. “What would you have of me?”

  Then the woodcutter came home, with his day’s labors on his back, and she set meekly about being his wife again. “And so they lived the rest of their days in harmony,” Oriel ended the tale.

  Afterwards, as the plays went on, the thought flew about in Oriel’s head, like a bird trapped in a barn: The crowd had answered the puppet’s questions, so they would let her have her own life. He could hope now that when they trailed their net in the King’s city, they might snare the King. There was good reason to hope.

  Hope, and the soaring sense of the crowd that wished him well, and opened their purses to him gladly, was not strange to Oriel, or unexpected. But to have his boldest hopes confirmed—he could have leaped up to a mountain’s peak and laughed into the sky with it. For if he could have the chance, he could win the Earldom. He was the man to be the Earl Sutherland.

  At the dance that evening, with the fiddlers and pipers playing music that bubbled like water under his feet, Beryl would not dance with him. He chose, then, girls whose hair fell loose down their backs, going boldly up to such a one with his hand held out, to lead her into the dance. And she would always take his hand, and follow him into the circle of dancers, and follow him with her eyes when the dance was over and he led another partner into another circle of dancers.

  At last Griff stopped him, to take him back to where Beryl stood. Beryl told him that those girls were only wed that morning and unless he wished every bridegroom at the fair to seek his blood, he had better become one of the circle of watchers, aye, and best to stand apart from her. For he should not become known as the Spaewife’s man. Not if he would be Earl. If he would be Earl, Beryl advised him, then as showman he had best be seen to be alone, to stand apart from all other men. “As you do,” Beryl added. “Is it not so, Griff?”

  Griff was there in the shadows with them. “It was always so, lady,” he said. “From the first—”

  “Aye, don’t tell me,” Beryl said, and held up her hand to Oriel as if it was he who had spoken.

  Then, one afternoon, Oriel was challenged. As the puppets bowed behind him, and in front of him the people laughed and clapped their hands together and reached into their purses to drop copper or silver coins into the basket, a man’s voice called out. “You, Showman. Show-peacock.”

  Oriel stepped forward, searching the crowd for the face that voice might speak from. A rough-bearded man stepped to the front of the crowd, with two companions. All had dark hair, and they might have been brothers. “You, Showman. Have you a name?”

  His was the voice of a man eager for the fight. “Aye,” Oriel said, but said no more. If there was to be a fight, it would not be one he asked for; neither would it be one he feared.

  The crowd subsided, whispering, watching.

  “Are you too proud to give it out, this name?”

  “No,” Oriel said. He could have laughed aloud.

  “See him, people,” the man said. “He goes unbearded. Would you wonder what his name is, when he goes unbearded, and colors his shirt, and his boots are up to his knees?”

  The crowd’s curiosity was raised, and Oriel thought he might satisfy it. But he was careful to toss his name out to the crowd like a girl’s laugh, not to give it up to the man like a surrender
ed weapon. “Oriel.” He called it out clearly.

  A ripple went through the crowd, and for the first time Oriel was uneasy. He didn’t understand. But the man did, as his smile showed.

  “Rik’s my name. Although you are too proud to ask for it. Or-i-el,” Rik said, dragging out the letters. “And you came from the south, I’ll wager, that’s what you’ll say, if I ask you.”

  Oriel was opening his mouth to agree, when the murmurs warned him. The language was the one Oriel spoke himself, but Rik’s tone was a Wolfer tone, the way a Wolfer with his blade at a man’s throat spoke, and stood, and smiled.