Both Black Leg and I felt something for each other, but at that point we weren’t sure about it. He was younger than I was by some two years. He was not yet a man. Kyra fixed an old shirt of Maeniel’s for him, taking it in in places so he could wear it.
There is a lot to a funeral. First, we must each bathe. Since it was almost winter, we put up the bathhouse. It’s a sort of shed where you build a fire and heat rocks. People bathe two different ways. One is to throw water on the heated rocks and sit in the steam, the other is to put the hot rocks into a basin full of water to heat the water, and scrub yourself with nettle soap. I like to just sit in the steam, but Kyra made me bathe with water. Then she turned me around and washed my back.
“He loves you,” she said. “You don’t know it and I’m not sure he does either.”
“He’s my brother,” I said.
“No, he’s not,” she answered. “He is the son of a wolf and a half human.”
“I could do worse,” I said. “Since we met Maeniel, we have never gone hungry.”
“Yes, we are as prosperous as many who live on fine, strong farms,” she agreed. “That fool Dugald keeps talking about you as royalty and says you are destined for a king.”
“I have heard of kings,” I told her. “I have read of kings, but I have never seen one, and I have begun to think Dugald is touched in the head. Why would a king marry me? The merchant’s son aboard the boat seemed to believe I should consider myself lucky to be offered a nice present for lying with him.”
Kyra slapped my shoulder a little harder than she had to—just to get my attention. “I’m finished here,” she said, then handed me the bucket and dipper. “Rinse yourself off. What do you know of men lying with women?”
I shrugged, rinsed, and began to towel myself dry. “Last summer Black Leg and I invented a fine game. You know how couples sneak away to be by themselves in the rocks, the woods, or even the hayricks? Well, we would creep up on them and yell.”
“Merciful God,” Kyra said. “It’s a miracle you weren’t killed. Some of those men—”
“The women weren’t sweet about it, either,” I said. “Once or twice they got me with a rock. Remember when I told you I fell?”
“Heavens,” Kyra said.
I shrugged. “I’m nearly as fast as Black Leg. She was just lucky.”
“Lucky? A finger-long cut over your ear,” Kyra snapped. “I thought you were lying at the time. You are nearly as quick and well balanced as the wolves and you never fall. Nice to know I was right.”
I shrugged again. I was settling my loincloth and reaching for my strophium to bind up my breasts. “At any rate, I know what the procedure is. Both Black Leg and I know how to do it. Do I have to wear this?”
“Yes-s-s-s.” It was a hiss. “Absolutely. Now—and never go out without it again. You and that hellion brother of yours are much closer to being grown than I thought.”
Kyra went out and brought back a beautiful white blouse and another new pair of deerskin britches. I put on the garnet-and-amber necklace and combed out my hair. Kyra pushed me back to arm’s length and looked at me. Her one eye was sad and her expression somber.
“You are very lovely now and soon you will be beautiful. And not in an ordinary way. Youth is always beautiful, but you are like some creatures of fairy born to bring ill to mortals. Only trouble can follow such gifts.”
I laughed. “I am a dowerless girl. Dugald says I bear a great name, but who marries a name? Kyra, don’t be foolish.”
Then I kissed her, and we went to do our sad duty. We had built the pyre of cedar, ash, and oak. Since she had been more than wolf, we resolved to send Mother’s soul into the wind at twilight. We waited until the sun was on the western horizon.
Maeniel covered Mother’s head, and I kissed her between the ears on the top of her head, the way I always did. Black Leg, in buckskins, kissed her the same way. We must have been a strange sight on the lonely headland. The sea below crashed and thundered as the tide began to go out. The wind was a high, shrill keening, and we stood together, the four of us, after I placed Mother’s mortal shell on the pyre. We held hands and said good-bye.
Dugald didn’t make his usual weak remarks about heathens. We soaked some hanks of wool in oil and wine, pushed them among the logs, then we kindled a small fire and tried to light the pyre. She made a small bundle on top of the big pile of wood where we had curled her nose to tail as she usually slept. But try as we might, we couldn’t get the wood to burn. The sun slipped below the horizon, its glow kicking long legs out over the water. With the approaching darkness, the wind picked up and began to flail us with spray from the surf.
And then I understood.
I’m not sure how I understand these things. Dugald has all sorts of explanations, but they raise more questions than they answer for me. I simply knew. I walked out on the headland and put my hand on Mother’s body, a cold lump under the linen.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll call if I need you. Go! Find your peace.”
The fire leaped from my hand to the wood, as it had the day on the beach when the cold almost killed Gray Watcher and me. The fire burned far more brightly and fiercely than the amount of oil and wine we had included among the wood could explain. White hot, the flames roared through the logs until the heat drove us back far from the headland. The flames consumed the she-wolf and blazed with fierce intensity as the roaring, exploding sheets of fire took my mother’s soul to the stars.
FIVE
HERE IS MAGIC. THE FEW THINGS I HAD learned were really only tricks. I found out when I encountered the real thing. We questioned Cymry again at the turning of the year. As always, I asked if we would face raids that year. He said yes, but then would say no more. Kyra, as usual, tormented and threatened him. He wept and begged for more wine, oil, and meat. So I gave it to him, but either he didn’t know or wouldn’t tell us anything more. My own feeling was that he didn’t know. The world is a complex place, and any other world would be, also.
Winter was upon us, and it would be a hard one. The rain and cold in the late summer had killed the wheat crop and a lot of the barley. Rye and oats were all that was left. I went out with the other women to collect acorns and hazelnuts, and we got quite a few baskets of those. The meal would be ground and added to flour for bread.
I was working with the other women when the Gray Watcher came to call me. We had spread the hazelnuts and acorns out on the threshing floor. We were drying them. Put them away wet and they become moldy. The old people, the first people, lived on them. One way to make sure you had plenty of food was to allow both oak and hazel trees to become widespread, so they broadcast the seed in any area where it looked as though it would grow well. We had no problem in collecting a lot of both. Storage and processing were the difficulty.
This was the reason the chief was important. That’s a leap. Maeniel called it a route to power. He served the community by maintaining an area of dry storage under his house and by defending a large amount of common land where stock could be grazed by each family. He saw to the forest also, where our pigs foraged. They got most of the available hazelnuts and acorns on level ground. So I and the rest of the women had been climbing around the rocks for several weeks, collecting the surplus. It reposed in big baskets on the threshing floor. They had to be turned every day to ensure they were dry before they were placed in the basement of the chief’s house.
One thing knocks against another, like a wave brought into being by an offshore storm that ends by crashing into a beach a dozen miles away in the sunshine. If the wheat and barley crops both failed, we would not have enough food to overwinter the stock, the sheep and cattle that provided both milk and meat for the summer. Yes, we could collect acorns and hazelnuts as we had, but if we took too many of them from the forest, then the pigs would not do well, and they are a staple in winter. But we women could collect acorns and nuts from the rocks where the pigs can’t forage, and the men could fish and bring in cod from the deep, c
old water off the coast.
Neither task is easy. Both are arduous and can be very dangerous. Issa was in bed with a badly twisted ankle. All the more dangerous because she was due to deliver her second child in a few weeks. The rest of us were weary from toiling over the water-soaked nuts. The ones collected from the rocks were apt to be more tainted by damp than the ones in the forest.
The men who must fish had to take out the old pirate boat, since it was the only one we owned that could be trusted in deep water. It took ten men to row it—at least ten men—and they would be hard put to control her. Maeniel was among the crew. The chief wouldn’t risk more than twelve men on her, because we all knew that, should she go down in a storm, the icy water would claim her crew in a few minutes. Only a little over a hundred people lived in our hamlet. Twelve men would be a disastrous loss, and twelve young men at that. The grieving would never be done. The loss of so many sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers might destroy us. The women might leave, never to return.
It has happened.
They look around at houses, fields, woodlands, and shore and say, “We are accursed. Let us go. Women are always in demand. I will not want to look on sea or shore that has taken my life, my love.”
We have, you know, four fairs. The women offer themselves to the king or queen as the case may be. The king makes a loud noise among the people and says, “We have women here for the taking; who needs a wife? Hire them for a year. See if you suit. Yes, some have children at their skirts. All the better. You will know they can breed well. Come and look, tender your offer to me. I will hold the cash till we see if both of you will make it permanent or not.”
I had a mind to do this myself when I became a woman. That way you get a good look at him and can name your own price. Dugald, Maeniel, Kyra, and I had a terrible blowup about it. They wanted to marry me off, as propertied women are by their king. I was against this, royal or not. I had no wish to be bestowed in a place not of my choosing, with a man who possibly only wanted me because his kin told him it would be to his advantage to be with me.
Then Dugald flew into a rage, a terrible rage. He broke all the cooking pots without even touching them, stirred the fire to such a roar that it nearly consumed the roof, and even awakened Cymry from his tranced place among the dead. He began to scream. Kyra, Maeniel, and Black Leg ran. He told Maeniel—before he ran—that this is what came of teaching a woman to be independent and know her own mind. That she would set her face against both wisdom and the wise, and that the auguries had foretold that I would wed a king.
I stomped my foot and said, “Fine! Who can escape her fate? But if I am to wed this king, then where is he? If I am to take him to my heart late in life, then I am not minded to wait so long, but will have others before him.”
“No,” Dugald screeched. The fire began charring the roof beams. It blazed so high, fanned by his magic wrath. “No,” he repeated. I would have none before this king, and for Black Leg to get that look out of his eye. Or he would use his powers to drive him away so that he must go run with his brothers who led lowland packs. Then I stormed out weeping, following the rest.
But both Maeniel and Kyra made me promise to humor Dugald for at least another two years. A few days after that, when I and the other women had begun gathering the hazelnuts and acorns, Magetsky, the raven, returned. She lived with us off and on when she hadn’t taken up with a mate. Maeniel said she was the only bird he knew that was a tramp. Love ‘em and leave ‘em.
I had no idea what he meant, but let me tell you, Magetsky didn’t improve Dugald’s temper one bit. She’d picked up a few new tricks. Her old ones were bad enough: squirting shit on your clothes when you were bathing or pinching the tender area between forefinger and thumb if you didn’t let her share your dinner. But now she had learned to make a sound like a cow fart, and she liked to perch in the rafters while we were eating and do this. And while flying, she had perfected her ability to aim her ordure—that is the polite word—at anyone walking below.
One evening at dusk, she nailed Dugald. Splat! Right on the top of his head. Kyra and I laughed until we were sore. But Dugald called up a really bad curse, placed it on an arrow, and sent it winging after her. We didn’t see her for a few days, and Dugald walked around with a satisfied smirk on his face. But then she returned, looking bedraggled. She said it had taken her a day and a night to outfly the curse, then a storm had blown her to Ireland. The weather was deteriorating, and she had the very devil of a time getting back. She complained of Dugald to Maeniel, but he told her she deserved what she got and to think twice about using Dugald for target practice anymore.
None of us gave it a second thought. I because I was a child and children think they know everything. Maeniel didn’t because, though he is magic, he doesn’t understand much about it. Kyra did worry, but she was working hard with the other women and didn’t confide her fears to me. But some sentinel saw the effects of Dugald’s magic and passed the word to others, who had been waiting for a long time.
The dead ride hard.
Maeniel and Black Leg came by. Maeniel handed me my bow.
“Hunt,” he said. “We will be gone a few days. You, Black Leg, drive the deer toward her.”
“I thought you were both going,” I said.
“No,” he told me. “The chief won’t risk more than one man from any family. What would Dugald and you do were you left alone? I know you believe you’re grown, but I worry about you nonetheless.”
So I turned our nuts into the rest of the baskets, and Black Leg and I set out to hunt.
“So why can’t you stay home and marry me?” he asked once we were out of earshot of the other women.
“You are my brother,” I said.
“No, we are not blood relatives,” he said. “Maeniel and I have fostered you, but we are not kin.” This was true.
“The church frowns on it,” I said.
“And since when have you ever given a damn for those mad monks living on the islands off the coast? If we followed their teaching, we would have died out years ago. Or, I should have said, you would have died out years ago. I am but a humble wolf. But you humans are a plague upon the earth.”
I began laughing.
He pushed me, and it only made me laugh the more. “I don’t know if I want to lie down under any man and wiggle and moan the way those silly girls do.”
“Well, you won’t have to,” he said, “because I don’t want to lie on top of any knobby-boned woman and make her wiggle and moan. Not any woman, least of all you. I’d rather go into the forest and throw myself atop a deadfall tree. I don’t know why they want to do it anyway, and, besides, you have more sharp edges than a sack of firewood.”
I picked up a stone, threw it at him, and raised a knot on his ribs. Then ran. I said I could outrun even the wind. He chased me to the top of the hill and down the other side into the valley. He was stubborn about it, though. He wouldn’t turn wolf. If he had, he might have caught me, but he remained human, and so by the time he ran me down, though I was breathing hard, he was completely winded.
It was late afternoon by then, and we were near a lake where the deer came down to drink at dusk. We sat down on a rock to talk and wait for evening. He was still on the same subject.
“No, really, why can’t I marry you?”
“You’re younger.”
“Only by two years. It won’t be long before that won’t matter. I love you,” he said seriously. “I don’t want you to go marry some old king.”
“I’m not marrying any king. Dugald is stuffed with foolishness. Losing his place at the queen’s court turned his brain.”
“How many kings do you see hereabouts? Fool! The closest thing to it here is a chief, and he’s ancient. Oh yes, forty is to thirteen. And all he has is that prissy Issa, who is married to Bain, and he beats her. He took a swing at her when she caught him with the serving girl the last time she was pregnant,” Black Leg said. “I wouldn’t try to beat you if you married me.”
>
I was sitting cross-legged on a sun-warmed boulder. “That’s because you’re too tired when you finally catch up to me,” I said.
“No.” His face grew serious. “I love you. I don’t want things to change. No, I wouldn’t harm you if I weren’t tired. We, the gray people like Maeniel and I, aren’t dangerous in love. We could keep you fed even if all the wheat, oats, and barley died of the cold. I could kill every day and not just when the chief wants to make feast in the hall. He kept us fed when we didn’t think about men and women at all. When we lived in the mountains alone with the pack.”
He leaned against the boulder and looked up at me, and I saw he was serious. Then I became serious, too.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t want to sell myself to some man either, but I don’t know if I have a choice.”
“You do have a choice—me.” He stretched out his hand toward me, and I took it. “See how easy it is to make the pledge?” he said.
I pulled my hand away and looked out toward a standing stone that overlooked the sea. They called it the Beltane Stone. It is the festival of desire—on the first of May, when summer is established and men go to the assemblies to present themselves to the king, and the girls without land or other property hire themselves out looking for a permanent arrangement.
As I said, women were always in demand. There were never enough of us to go around. A strong, skilled, handsome woman could do well for herself, especially if it was her first outing and she was fair. No powerful man would want me as a first wife, but I might become a third or fourth wife of a strong lord or the successful leader of a war band. Such always wanted more women. There is no great wealth without many women. A man needs women to till his fields, spin, weave, gather wool, and tend to his dairying, not to mention to care for the children he has fostered on them. He gives the women the means to wealth—land, sheep, cattle; she spins and weaves the wool, churns the butter, makes cheese, and grinds the grain for porridge. She may claim her share for the work she contributes and her skills.
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