Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “I be not far from habitation,” she replied. Then, putting out a knobbly, vein-laced hand, she touched his knee. “Yea, ’tis thee, after all. I thought I heard thy voice at last among the voices of the living. The dark star hast given up its secret at last.”

  For a moment Dammerung was very quiet. They were all very quiet; even the soft chuffing of the horses’ breathing had withdrawn to the outskirts of all sound, leaving their little stretch of road in silence, limned with the thin trickle of the stream. Dammerung’s hand stole forward and touched the old, cold knuckles on his knee. There was a soft spark of light, blue light—if the gloom and the lanternlight had not been so uncanny Margaret could have sworn a blue light echoed in the old woman’s eyes.

  “So,” whispered Dammerung. “It is you. Well, old mother—” humour tinged his voice “—what oracles do you have for me?”

  “Dost not mock me, young man,” the old apple-leaf woman replied, withdrawing her hand from the War-wolf’s touch. “Thou knowest the council of the twelve houses.”

  His countenance softened; his smile ran and hid in the corner of his mouth. “There be but one house-door of heaven at which I would peep in.”

  And she, still more gently, murmured, “’Tis left ajar for thee.”

  Margaret felt Dammerung go very still, still as a stone, the sensation of his presence withdrawn into his smallest inner self. Then, roughly, he put the back of his sleeve across his face as if to scrub something away and said, “Can I prevail upon your hospitality for us? For we are without house-beam and without fire in a foreign land.”

  “With a willing heart at a good hour,” she replied, and turned to slip back into the way to lead them on. Dammerung hastily flung his cloak off his shoulders and, bending down, wrapped it around hers; her smile, seeming oddly far away, shone back at them in the lanternlight the way Margaret’s dreams of the sickle moon would shine. Rubico shuffled after her. Reaching across the distance, Dammerung grasped Mausoleum’s reins and pulled Margaret along after him as they left the stone road and turned in pressed knee to knee down a narrow deer-track in the wood.

  With her free hand Margaret reached round to soothed down the hair that was prickling with electric feeling up the back of her head. It would not be soothed.

  At the end of the track, up a long, winding rise, was a huntsman’s hut set squat into the narrow of the wood like a cornered boar; firelight shone out from its open doorway and a blue smudge of smoke muted the flame and the cobalt of the evening sky overhead.

  There was no shelter for the horses, but as it was such a fine night Dammerung had them slip off their saddles and hitch the animals to the low-stooping branches of the surrounding trees. Margaret, too, heaved the rough travelling saddle from Mausoleum’s back and staggered under its weight after Dammerung to the doorway of the house. He pushed in, foxy bold, and stood just inside, looking round on the old apple-leaf woman’s little domain. Gathering courage, Margaret pressed in after him through the thin screen of faience-beads—they whispered and clinked together behind her—and stepped to his side to look too.

  There was not much to speak of. There was a low central hearth, shaped in a circle and made completely of brick, with a dozen low wicker stools littering the floor around it. The walls were crowded with wooden shelves, each shelf crushing shoulders against the next shelf, and each full to bursting with pottery, oddments for cooking, and the sort of unchancy, ominous stuff Margaret would expect to find in an alchemist’s shop.

  Dammerung slung his saddle down inside the door and reached for Margaret’s to consign it to the same treatment.

  “Would it do any good,” he asked the bent figure by the hearth, “to offer help in making supper?”

  The old eyes looked up at him, an inexplicable look of wonder in them. “Nay, ’tis my place to serve thee. Wouldst not take from me my place?”

  “Of course not. Only—”

  “Thou feelest the oddness of it, and thou laughest in thy heart.”

  The thin, imperious face lengthened with a toothy smile. “Oddities I am no stranger to. Margaret—” He steered her to a stool and pushed her down onto it. He folded up on one beside her, elbows on his knees, and she was vindicated by seeing how close to his ears his knees came, for the stools were fit for children and not much else.

  The others crowded in around them, fetching a stool out of corner there, budging up shoulder to shoulder with the next man. Margaret found the sharp scent of spice lingering in her nose and turned to find her next elbow neighbour was Aikin Ironside, folded much like she was—with elbows misplaced and knees where his chin should be—on a stool, his eyes like a cat’s eyes reflecting the light of the fire. Huw Daggerman sat next to Dammerung on his other side and quietly began pulling knives off his person, laying them on the edge of the hearth. When they were all assembled and stools had all been found for them, there was hardly any room for the apple-leaf woman at the fire.

  “’Tis not such fare as my lords are accustomed, but—you see—I have put forward my best.”

  Dammerung leaned forward, pulling in the scent of fresh barley cake and a gardener’s stew. “Ah! But we have food which ye know not of…The mortal flesh, which the Greeks declaim but gives forth a mighty argument for importance when the stomach goes empty, is passing happy with this, old mother. You have outdone yourself on our account.”

  The old woman cracked open a clove of garlic and began patiently to shave it into the iron pot hung over the flame. Sparling pulled a hawking glove out of his coat and, donning it, swung the pot on its hook until the flames were licking evenly round its full-moon curves.

  A warm sense of camaraderie enveloped Margaret. Dammerung had leaned back against the nearest shelf and flung his arm round her shoulders in a rough possessive gesture; the men were chatting sleepily together over their bowls of stew; Huw Daggerman was edging his way into their life, testing the waters as he went: she saw him make a pass at Aikaterine and be rebuffed deftly and finally, and it made her smile.

  As the talk grew louder and more comfortable and the perry cider which the old apple-leaf woman gave them to drink soothed their aching limbs, Dammerung turned and whispered into Margaret’s ear,

  “What do you think of our worthy host?”

  Margaret’s eye jumped beyond the ring of rough, tousled heads to the red shadows on the outskirts where the old woman dutifully worked making a powdered concoction of dried herbs. The figure, so innocuous, so small and shrunken as if she had slipped into a crack in the world and it would take only a breath of mortality to blow her clear through, made the hairs simmer on the back of Margaret’s neck. Nothing the old woman had done for her had ever made her feel comfortable or safe. She remembered the defiance in Skander’s hall, the reckless laughter she had thrown in Rupert’s face, the slyness of Periot’s stolen book, the riddle...

  ...the riddle...

  “I have seen her a few times before.” The words came surging out of her mouth as if she were sleepy, as if she were talking at random about the deepest things in her heart, and yet the world was clear-cut to her, very small and sharp as if she were holding it in her hand. “Yet I have that uncanny feeling that I have known her before. You know, that feeling you get when you know you have never met a soul before in your life, and yet that sense of having touched them before comes to you, inexplicably, powerfully. That is how I feel.”

  “I know the feeling,” he murmured.

  “And...and...I would trust her into a hellmouth,” she tore her gaze from the old woman and looked at Dammerung’s safe, familiar face, “but I would never want to be left alone with her.”

  Dammerung’s lips were smiling mockingly, but there was a cool, patient understanding in his eye. “Wouldn’t you? I think you would do passably...”

  “What does she mean?” Margaret demanded in a suppressed, hard whisper. She bent her head; her hair, sliding down over her ear, hid her face from all in the room except Dammerung.

  “How do you mean ‘what does
she mean’?”

  “She is like the fairy godmother in the stories, that is always popping up at the most inconvenient times to save the day.”

  His nostrils flared with laughter. “What, you think she is a fairy godmother? Shall I tell her that?” He stirred as if to rise.

  “Of course you shan’t!” With a little flutter of panic she put her elbow on his knee. “She has never once said who she is or where she comes from, and she seems the sort of person who will tell you or not tell you as she pleases. I wouldn’t press her, not for the world. I would trust her to be good, but I would not trust her to not be terrible.”

  “A little old woman who blows about like the wind and barely weighs much more than a feather?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, and even as the words were swelling with formation on her tongue she thought very clearly, There. You have cornered me into what you wanted me to think. Good job. “Aren’t so all who are born of the Spirit?”

  With a worming movement he pushed her elbow off his knee and put up his bare feet on the warm bricks of the hearth, spreading and closing his toes so that the firelight shone through and was cut off by turns. “I always thought souls were a bit heavier than feathers,” he mused. “Especially when they begin to wake. Oh, speaking of waking—” he put down his feet again. “Are you done there? We are starting out at the crack of dawn—”

  “No preamble? Plunging me back into life on the march wholesale?” Her limbs felt hopelessly tired already anticipating the cold early morning.

  “—and you need a decent night of sleep, which you have not had for the past two nights.”

  “I slept decently the night before last. I think. I remember dreaming...” Was it a dream of someone on the edge of reality, on the edge of her dreams throwing back the curtain to show her reality, someone looking in on her from some other world? Had that been only a dream, or had that really happened? She could not remember, and Dammerung was suddenly busy spreading the word to sleep around the fire and giving the old apple-leaf woman a series of sound compliments that would have made a girl blush.

  They bedded down on the floor, rolled up in their blankets with saddle-pads for pillows, some men shoulder to shoulder and others stretched out like chessmen packed in their case, head to foot, head to foot. The room darkened as the fire went down, sullen red, casting up a volcanic glow on the ceiling. Margaret lay in a corner, Dammerung’s feet stretched by her cheek, his pack, which formed the barrier between his sleeping place and hers, digging peculiarly sharply into her bent knees. With the soft swelling of even breathing filling the place, the night-noises of insects and a badger murmuring on the other side of the wall, she turned over like a dog on her belly, cradled her head in her arms, and plunged without a backward glance into a deep and much-needed sleep.

  26 | Gemeren

  Glad as she had been to put the ship behind her and stagger on dry land again, after the first two days of straight rain riding across the hilly south country of Orzelon-gang, always damp, always stiff, always smelling of horse, Margaret pointed out as amiably as she could that passage on shipboard was faster and, even if the water was all around, it was considerably dryer.

  “One of the many mocking paradoxes man has contrived to thread into his world,” remarked Dammerung from beneath the dripping crest of his hood. “Give yourself until evening,” he added, “and we will be in Hannibal—where we will, by God’s grace, light such a candle as shall dry our shifts a bit.”

  By midafternoon, to Margaret’s relief, the rain slacked off, and by the time they threaded their way between a post rider and a merchant’s train in the mucky churning bottom of a ford and were clipping, sodden and hungry, up the stone road into the wide swell of Tarnjewel dale, the high winds were shredding the clouds in banners of white glory and the sun was splintering across the western sky. Dammerung’s cloak was beaded with gold raindrops; throwing back her hood, shaking her hair loose into the wind, Margaret felt her dampened spirits unfurl and dry into cheerful equanimity. In two conjoining fields and across a wood-enclosed brook she saw signs of recent warfare—fire-scars, an enormous, freshly-turned mound of earth, shreds of stained clothing—but the slant of the evening summer light and the fresh rain cast a brilliance of slumber over the farmlands so that, were it not for the clink of Widowmaker and the way it would fling off a shard of light every time Rubico rebounded from his trot, Margaret could almost believe the world was at peace.

  “I cannot help feeling,” said Margaret as Hannibal came in sight, “that it would be less pretty in less flattering lighting.”

  “Why do you think I kept only a lamp in the cellar?” Dammerung asked without skipping a beat.

  She recalled something evasive about being afraid of the dark, but that moment, rushing back on her with no tinges of humour to soften it, was too deep and secret to mention between them in the presence of other people. She managed a half-hearted laugh and said vaguely, “If you are fishing for compliments, I may just bite.”

  He looked pleasantly surprised. “Why, because I deserve it, or because you are so kind?”

  “Let us say both: it casts us in the best lighting too.”

  They took the eastern bridge of the old shallow cirque with the sun in their faces and the wind singing a coming-home song in their ears; riding under the ancient earthworks of the town, the sharp scents of spices and the evening’s hundreds of suppers cooking over the evening’s hundreds of fires swelled to meet them and brought the warm sweet water to Margaret’s mouth.

  Dammerung twisted in the saddle. “Aikin, I was—where are you? Oh. Aikin, I was going to drop in on your honourable High Sheriff to get the local news. You know these folk. Would you care to join us?”

  “Us” meaning...?

  Aikin squeezed out from among the others and shouldered in alongside Dammerung. “Certainly!” He squinted into the blade of sunlight and pointed up the street. “At the other end—of course—and where this road corners with the dyers’ shop—you cannot miss it, it sports always a viciously red bolt of cloth—is a decent sort of way-house if the others care to wait out from underfoot. The evening traffic is thick with everyone coming back in from the fields.”

  “Oh, so?” said Dammerung. “Towns and peoples are not so unlike the whole world over. I will make note of the way-house. Hallo!” he called back over his shoulder. “You’re to go on to the way-house by the dyers’ shop: it sports a red cloth so that the Hebrews will not miss you.”

  “The sheriff’s building is just here,” murmured Aikin, gesturing to a tall wooden building set off the sidewalk.

  They parted; Margaret watched Aikaterine go with obvious misgivings on the maid’s part, though Huw Daggerman, since the evening with the old apple-leaf woman, had been nothing but respectfully courteous. She watched them mingle with the street traffic from where she stood on the sidewalk, then turned to follow Dammerung—only to nearly run into him, for he, too, had stopped, and was laughing silently after Aikaterine’s prim, metal-plated back. He caught Margaret’s eye, shared the humour, and then neatly dodged a mother and child, crossed the sidewalk, and was halfway up the wooden staircase of the High Sheriff’s building in two bounds. Aikin beckoned an “after you;” hauling on her rough aubergine-coloured skirts, running fast to avoid the thick sidewalk traffic, Margaret shimmied up after Dammerung as he reached the top and landed two hard thumps on the worn shell-coloured door.

  There was a pause. Aikin pushed off his hood and ran his fingers through his hair to reawaken its natural liveliness; after another moment, he took the time to scrape his boots off on the edge of the top stair riser.

  “Should we—” began Margaret, peering at the two-story window on a level with them and thinking the place looked like a public building.

  “Hark! the host advances!” Dammerung interrupted: the sound of boots on a wooden floor echoed in the room beyond. The latch rattled and the door swung inward.

  “Better late than never,” said a man’s voice, “but if yo
u expect me to boil a lamb-shank at this time of—oh.” A middle-aged, sandy-haired fellow who could have gone shoulder to shoulder with Skander and have given Capys a run for his money stopped in the middle of his sentence and his doorway and looked, obviously surprised, on the three of them. Only for a moment, then he regathered himself. “That boy is very late.”

  “What, the groceries?” Dammerung chimed. “Quite.”

  The Sheriff’s gaze fixed on Aikin with a light of recognition. “Hallo! Good evening! Never mind the lamb-shank—please, come in.” He stood back, pushing aside a long bench on which, Margaret was sure, many errant bottoms had sat, and motioned them in. “This was unexpected, my Lord Aikin. Word through the grape vine was that you were in Darkling.”

  Aikin slung off his cloak and reached to take Margaret’s. “Not so far as that, good sir. We were but in Hol-land easing the tension on Darkling’s borders. Word came that our father was in some need of assistance here; we saw signs of battle on the way.”

  The Sheriff nodded gravely. “That was a week ago. Rupert de la Mare landed west of us and pushed eastward, very nearly into Tarnjewel, when my Lord Gro returned: he and Capys managed to shove the bulk of de la Mare’s force northwestward, out of our hair.”

  “And your pasturelands,” mused Dammerung. He had strolled to the window and was looking down into the street.

  The Sheriff turned at the sound of his voice. “Forgive me for a man’s shot in the dark. You must be the War-wolf.”

  “Today I must.” The pale blue eyes swung and glinted in the level light. “Tomorrow too, perhaps. Later I will be someone else.”

  The Sheriff’s brow said, “What?” and his eyes cut across to Aikin with a look that said clearly, “Dost deal with a mad man, my lord?”

  But Dammerung pushed off from the window sill and came back into the middle of the room, his head back, his eyes coursing over the Sheriff’s face. “You must forgive me, though I never shoot in the dark. I think you fall on my side of the fence.”