The Tale of Oriel

by Cynthia Voigt

  Lord Haldern privately admitted, “I never could like Yaegar. He’s too lazy to keep his word, and he’s a bully when he can be,” Lord Haldern said. In the morning he would seek Oriel out, to say, “I speak out of turn, in the company, in the drink.”

  Oriel kept his own counsel. It seemed to him that Haldern would not speak falsely, drunk or sober, just as it seemed to him that Tintage—who made lighthearted any room he entered, any occasion he took part in—would never speak entirely true, sober or drunk. That is, unless the truth served his own purpose.

  Only Tintage spoke of Lady Merlis by name, and then only to mock her tallness, or her prides, or her attempts to act Lady Earl. Lilos would turn pink-cheeked to say, “How should a woman be more, when her grandmother had the raising of her, and her grandmother—well, everyone knows what was said of that lady. I am sure the Earl’s daughter is as good as she is pure.”

  Tintage would wink at the others, who joined in his mockery of Lilos’s chivalry, and Lilos’s pink cheeks.

  Verilan would ask, “Do you impugn the lady’s honor?”

  “Do you hear him?” Tintage would say, dancing away from danger. “Impugn,” he repeated, echoing the dignity of Verilan’s voice. “Impugn. Impugn.” Each repetition of the word he accompanied by a different noble pose, and a different noble face, until even Verilan joined in the laughter.

  “I keep you safe from pomposity,” Tintage told them. “For which reason, I am the most important person here. I keep us from killing one another. For that’s what we all were willing to do, isn’t it? And still would, if we must.”

  Tintage’s nonsense had enough of truth in it to scrape the skin of every man’s conscience, and reduce all to uneasy silence.

  Oriel spoke out, with a smile to add to his boldness—bold as a smiling sun, he thought to himself—“Not I, I have no wish to kill anyone. Not even you, Tintage. I desire only to beat the hearts out of every one of you, and leave you licking at the dust, and after that to collect taxes from those of you who pay your taxes to the house of the Earl Sutherland. But as to killing—Who then would I drink with? who fight with? Don’t sulk, Tintage,” Oriel said, paying special attention to the mole-eyed young man. “I think they are laughing at me, not you. I don’t know a one of us who would dare to laugh at you.” Tintage flushed with pleasure. “You’re too sharp for the rest of us.”

  “Not for you,” Tintage answered, with a little mocking bow.

  “That’s what Griff and I hope,” Oriel said. “Isn’t it, Griff?”

  ORIEL INTENDED TO MAKE HIS farewells to Beryl before Lord Haldern, with a few of the contenders and a troop of soldiers, rode into the south to gather taxes. Oriel wanted to tell her that he must be away but that Griff remained in the King’s city, if she needed a friend. Now that he remembered Beryl, he remembered he hadn’t seen her since that first day before the King. He only guessed that Griff knew where she was, however, since when he was with Griff it was either with a group of people and the subject of Beryl didn’t arise, or they were alone and the subject didn’t arise because they were discussing points of law, or plans for how to repair damage the Lady Earl’s long regency had done in the Earldom.

  Oriel intended to seek Beryl out. He told himself that if she had needed anything from him, any help, or desired his company, she would have known where to find him. Since she hadn’t, he assumed she had chosen not to. But he didn’t like to leave on such a long journey without telling her that he was going, and doing her the courtesy of bidding her farewell. He knew how much in Beryl’s debt he was.

  Oriel intended, but day followed busy day and somehow, as he drifted into sleep, he hadn’t remembered to ask Griff where she was lodging. He had forgotten, and he reminded himself to remember, and in the morning he forgot again. So that when Beryl was brought by a servant into the room where he sat alone, breaking the night’s fast with a meal of bread, cheese, beer, and new onions, he rose to his feet at the unexpected pleasure. A full summer morning’s light poured into the room and bathed her in its glow. She was dressed plainly, as a woman of the people, but her dark blue eyes were eager to see him, and her hands—as she accepted his offer of a seat, and food, and drink—moved in the familiar gestures, taking a knife to cut a mouthful of cheese, tearing off bites of bread, holding a goblet. It was good to see her face.

  “How is it with you, Beryl?” It was good to speak her name. Those nights were done, but he remembered her hair unbound, and the gladness of her naked soft flesh. “You’ll like the yellower cheese, I think. It’s sharper.”

  Her mouth answered his smile but her eyes didn’t. Obedient to his wish, she tried some of the yellow cheese, and Oriel asked, “Are you well? Have you been keeping well? How came you to arrive this morning, at the very time when I’ve been thinking of you?”

  She looked him full in the eyes, but didn’t speak.

  “We’re riding into the south, to collect the taxes due to Sutherland, and I wished to take my leave of you. And to ask if there is any message you would like delivered to your uncle, if I can find him. And to ask,” Oriel now realized, “where I might find him, if there were any message you wanted to send.”

  “No message,” Beryl said, and slid more cheese from the knife into her mouth.

  “I wish you could see me now,” Oriel told her. “I’m almost indistinguishable from a lord.”

  “I know,” she said. “I often hear about you.”

  “From Griff?”

  “Him. And others, too, the people of the city. Do you want to know what they’re saying about you?”

  “No.” Oriel shook his head. Then he admitted, smiling, “Yes, I do. Since I know you’ll report truly.”

  “At first, they doubted you. They thought you had some hold over the King, to be marked by so many favors.” She gestured with the knife to silence his protests, cut off a chunk of bread, and went on. “Then, they liked to hear of how you learned to fight so well, with swords, and to ride. For you weren’t born a lord, so what you can learn any man might hope for. That’s what they now think.”

  “And you, what do you think?”

  “You already know. But if you would hear it again,” Beryl said, her eyes like seawater dancing under a bright sun, “I think that everyone who looks on you sees a man who will make a true Earl. More and more, the people of the city say the same. They give you honors you haven’t even tried for. Many ladies’ hearts they give you, and victory in argument with the wisest of the priests, and an eye to see when ministers waste the King’s wealth in their own rivalries. Not to mention your great prowess at the hunt.”

  “There is no great prowess,” Oriel protested.

  She emptied her glass and said, “But I do believe the story they tell of a man who stood unmounted to fight off a boar, when another had fallen from his horse into the boar’s path. A man who beat the beast senseless and then slit its throat, and then gave the prize to the fallen man, who is his rival for a great prize.”

  “That was Tintage,” Oriel said. “He’d flushed the boar, and then had the bad luck to be knocked off his mount. It was his kill, by rights.”

  Beryl grinned at him, then made her face solemn, then grinned again. “It was his kill, by rights,” she mimicked him in his own voice. Oriel heard how happy and careless that voice was. “Aye, Oriel, you have so much awaiting you, as you deserve, that you can give honors away like baubles. Aye, and it is good to be in your company again, Oriel,” Beryl said. Then she rose from her seat and folded her hands in front of her, and said, “I must be going now. But I came to say to you, I am with child.”

  “You don’t look it,” Oriel said. He rose also, wondering if this was good news for her, or bad.

  “Not yet,” she said. Beryl seemed to be just herself, her ordinary self. She seemed content.

  “What will you do?” he asked her.

  “Do?” and she looked at him again. They stood face to face now. “I’ll leave the city, perhaps before I start to show, but I thought—there shoul
d be someone else who knows about the child.”

  She didn’t need to remind Oriel that her mother had died giving birth. He felt a sense of his own strength when he made her the promise: “Yes, I will see to the child, should there be need.”

  Then Beryl was gone and a servant had come to take away the plates and it was time to strap on his sword and join Haldern. There was no time to ask Beryl the questions he only thought of after she had left him: When will it be born? Can a woman keep a farm while she has an infant child? Have you need of coins? It is my child you are carrying, isn’t it?

  When he saw Griff that evening, he planned to ask those things of Griff, but there was time only to say, “Did you know Beryl is with child?” before Griff had to rush away. By the time they met again, a couple of nights later, Oriel had other news on his mind. “We ride out the next day but one to go into the south.”

  THE HORSEMEN RODE OUT OF the city and followed the King’s Way east until they reached a ford; there they crossed the river and headed south. Lord Haldern led them. In his troop were twenty picked soldiers and six of the young men who would contend for the title of Earl Sutherland. Oriel was one of the six.

  He alone wore neither hat nor helmet. He alone lacked stitching or sign, in gold or silver, to name the house he belonged to, or the lord he served, or to identify him as a King’s man. His shirt and cloak were the green Beryl had recommended to him for his chance before the King. He had not thought by his simpler dress to single himself out, but he was not displeased to have done so.

  Near the King’s city, the land prospered. The fields bloomed with crops and the orchards with leaves and budded fruit. Fish leaped up in river and pond. Oriel saw between the rows of leafy onions how rich and black the soil was. In the green stems of rye and millet and in the honey-colored heads of wheat, he saw how the soil fed everything that grew on it. This was a prosperous land.

  As the troop moved farther from the King’s city, however, things changed. The people welcomed the soldiers but all bewailed that the protection was only temporary. For a farmer didn’t know when he planted his crops if they would be left to grow, and young men refused to work, without the promise of a harvest. Why should we labor to dig into the ground what will only be burned away when it breaks through the soil? they asked. Better to take the pleasures we can find now, while we live.

  So each village and every lord welcomed Haldern’s riders, and looked with hope at those who were contenders for the Earldom and the hand of Merlis. All pitied Merlis, who must keep within her castle for her own safety, and was thus unable to help her lands and her people.

  Haldern’s riders passed this castle at a distance. Oriel saw its tall towers rising up into the rainy sky, and he wondered if the lady stood at one of the windows, looking across to the troop of soldiers and suitors as they crossed her land, to collect her taxes.

  One evening, after they had been many days on the roads, they came into a village by the river’s side, one of the villages in the Earl’s granting. There, several people had collected around a man who stood with his fist raised over a woman who knelt on hands and knees in the dirt before him.

  Oriel recognized the event. Without thought of asking permission or advice from Haldern, he leaped off his horse and shoved through the crowd to grab the man’s arm from behind.

  The man was tall and thickly muscled, but surprise gave Oriel temporary advantage. Memory of the whipping box burned in him. The man would have had to have been even more tall and even more heavily muscled than he was to shake off Oriel.

  “What—?” the man grunted. “Who—?” Oriel pulled down sharply on his arm.

  “She’s a woman,” Oriel said. “Why should you—?” The man turned, to shove him.

  Then the man pulled himself free of Oriel’s grip, and stepped back, on braced legs. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Oriel. By what right—?”

  But the man had undergone a complete change of expression and attitude. He dropped to one knee and took Oriel’s right hand into his. He bent his head over the hand, before he rose to stand before Oriel. “I’m Major of this village, my lord,” he said.

  Oriel wondered why the man’s spirit should so suddenly shrink at the sight of a shaved face, and high boots. Unless it was the sight of the sword that conquered him.

  “The woman is a widow,” the Major said. “By custom, she must give back the cottage and boat that were her husband’s holding.”

  “By custom?” Oriel asked. It seemed an odd custom that would require a widow to give up her livelihood.

  “By custom and by law. If he has a brother—”

  Oriel interrupted, speaking loudly. He had watched men lie before. “Not by law, I think.” If the man deduced that Oriel had read the law, so much the better.

  “I spoke hastily,” the man admitted. “Custom is as much as law, for us, my lord. By custom alone, then, the man’s brother is given the holding.”

  Quick to sense her advantage, the woman knelt in the dirt again, at Oriel’s feet. “Help me, my lord,” she said. “And my children. Help us, we implore you.”

  Oriel didn’t pity her, and he wished she wouldn’t kneel so at his feet, with a hand on his boot as if she were a dog. “Why were you about to strike her?” he asked the man.

  “According to the custom, she must relinquish the holding, as the village asks her. She has been told she must leave the cottage, and she disobeys. So we have told her she must leave the village. But she won’t go. There must be punishment, or who would obey my word? I don’t misuse her. She doesn’t bend barebacked, my lord, and I have neither stick nor thong.”

  “Aye, and you use your fist well enough to break flesh and bones, and you use shame,” the woman cried. “Save us, great sir!”

  Oriel didn’t know how to proceed. If the people were encouraged to go against customary usage, then the village would be at the mercy of whoever proved strong enough to force his will upon the people. So obedience to custom, especially in parlous times, gave the village the safety of numbers banded together. But the woman had children to care for, and the village should take care of its own in times of need—or what did the village have to offer its people in exchange for obedience?

  This question was more complicated than the whipping box.

  The men on horseback waited quietly for him, to let him play out the scene he had entered. “Who is the brother?” Oriel asked, thinking that the man might be compensated with coin. For he knew how fierce a woman could be, for her children. “Which man stands to lose the use of the holding if the woman keeps the cottage and keeps use of the boat?”

  Faces were amused, and before he turned back to the Major of the village he had guessed why. But he waited until the Major spoke it. “I am that man.”

  Then Oriel let anger flow into his shoulders and his voice and his face. He knew that he seemed now as dangerous as an unsheathed sword and that might cause trouble he wished not to have, but still he judged that fear would serve him best here. “I have no time for this,” he said. “Let the woman be, let her live in the holding and fish with the boat.” The woman clambered to her feet, still pale, but now satisfied.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said, and bowed her head.

  Oriel looked around at the men and women, who had gathered first to see a beating and then whatever fight ensued, if they were lucky enough to have a fight to watch. They were, he saw, glad enough for what they deemed justice. Their glances were on him as he walked back to his horse and remounted. He spoke to the watching eyes. “You need a new Major I think.” He turned his mount away before any answer could be given. Let the village know that it must be ready to protect itself and every person in it.

  An Earl, Oriel thought as he rode behind Haldern out of the village, with the purse of tax money in the soldiers’ care, was an idea as much as a man. The idea of the Earl, the idea of the Earl’s justice, would be enough to govern men’s behavior, most of the time. The certainty of the Earl’s concern an
d action was all that was needed. The Earl didn’t need to be a daily presence to keep order. He needed only to be known to be in his castle, in his power.

  Chapter 25

  THE LANDS OF THE EARLS Sutherland pleased Oriel, more than any other country he had seen. Often, as they rode, he would stop his horse, dismount, and walk, trailing farther and farther behind the others. He did this just for the pleasure of walking the southern lands, the sense that when he put his foot down on the land it became his. He did this under the strong southern sun and the fat plopping southern rains. The others stopped mocking him when they saw that mockery didn’t affect his good humor.

  He taught them to swim, on a dare. The bolder ones—like Wardel—chose to be rowed out onto the river so they might jump into the deep water, learning to float on top of it by necessity. The more cautious ones—like Garder—he led into the water from the shallow banks, giving them time to learn to trust their ability to float. Some he teased and led laughing into the knowledge. Some he challenged and led quarreling. Some he persuaded. Haldern declined, saying he was too old to learn anything new, and Oriel let him be. Lilos said he was too skinny to learn, and too afraid, and would have to put it off until a later, fatter, braver time, and Oriel didn’t argue with the Prince because he thought how tender his pride must be. So the two of them went off one early dawn—the sky as pink as a girl’s mouth—to teach, and to learn, where none but the two might see any panic, humiliation, or failure. Lilos had, as Oriel had foretold, small difficulty learning.

  The horsemen were welcomed into the great houses of lords and fed well, and entertained with music and dance. They were welcomed at towns and entertained with the best foods the Inns could produce. They were welcomed into villages and offered shady shelter, and cool water. But why, Oriel wondered, were the people so quiet and, he thought, anxious. The people and their lords were anxious to please the riders, anxious to welcome them and to wave them on their way, anxious, and wary, too, he thought. Why should these people—with their guarded smiles and low-pitched voices, with their way of listening before they uttered an opinion so that the opinion they uttered never varied from the opinion they heard—be the inhabitants of this prosperous land? The people of this land should be gladsome, openhanded and openhearted, boisterous.