“Yes,” I said, “I suppose she did in a way.” Then I plopped the bread down on the kneading stone, dusted the flour off my hands, turned, and embraced her.
She was a bit clingy. They get like that when frightened.
I put her in my lap and finished kneading the breakfast bread. Then I oiled the inside of a marble bowl I found near the fire, patted out a round of bread, and set it in the bowl, then placed it on the fire.
“That was careless of you,” my lady said. I found she had been watching me the whole time. “You should have heated the bowl first.”
“I know,” I said. “The bread may stick. Kyra wouldn’t have let me get away with it. But—” I hesitated for a second, then flipped the bread with my fingertips, a more difficult trick than it sounds like.
“It didn’t stick,” I said.
The little one was still in my lap as I sat cross-legged by the hearth.
“Hmm,” my lady said. “Pert or not, I can see you are a well-brought-up girl.”
“I hope so,” I answered. “Kyra, Mother, and Dugald certainly did their best. But that’s not the point, is it?” I said as I pulled the bread out of the bowl and tossed another piece of dough in.
“No,” she answered, spooning some of the porridge I had made into a bowl. “I’m afraid you will need more than good manners and an industrious nature to handle this situation.”
I flipped over the baking bread, fine, golden brown on one side. When it was done on the other, I added it to the first on the plate.
She had been crouching beside me. She rose to her feet. “I will serve the family—see if I can get them to eat a bit.”
“I’m hungry, too,” the child on my lap stated quietly.
“We know, dear,” I said.
My lady handed me a small stoneware bowl decorated with white slip and the design of a fish on the bottom in black.
“That’s mine!” the child said.
“Yes, we know that, too,” I answered.
“Daddy says I have to eat down till I see the fish,” she told me. “So don’t put so much in that I can’t get down that far.” This was rather imperious.
“I won’t,” I promised, and ladled some porridge into the bowl and cooled it with a bit of milk. Then I patted out a smaller bread than the others and tossed it on to bake.
My lady returned. “The chief is recovering nicely. But his wife is feverish and the boy turned his face to the wall when I came in and refused food entirely. But I’m going to bring them some anyway.”
“What is her name?” I asked, indicating the child.
The little girl fixed me with a look of deep disapproval. “I know my name, and I can tell it to you myself if you care to ask.”
My lady laughed.
“I apologize,” I said. “What is your name?”
“Treise,” she answered.
“It suits you,” I told her. “ ‘Treise’ means strength.”
“I know,” she answered. “That’s why Father gave it to me. He said I was sure about things at an early age.”
I kissed her on the top of her head and seated her beside me. Then I gave her the porridge and pulled the cooked bread from the bowl. I blew on it to cool it.
She extended a hand to me. “I can do that,” she said. “I won’t eat it while it’s too hot.”
“Very well,” I said. But I held it for a few moments because I didn’t quite trust her.
But I was wrong. She made sure it was cool before she began to scoop the porridge out of her bowl with it.
The lady filled more bowls with the porridge and took more bread. She served the rest of the family.
When she returned, she took her own breakfast with me. We cleaned the pot I’d cooked the porridge in with bread and butter.
“There should be more people here. Servants, fosterlings, oath men. This is a noble house,” I complained. “I can’t do all the work here myself.”
“What? Harassed already?” she said sarcastically. “Besides, that’s not your job. I told you what you have to do. You are not really supposed to be their servant but their savior.”
Then she rose and, taking the dishes we’d used, took them to the stream to scour them.
Their savior, I thought, and rolled my eyes. Oh fine. I didn’t have the first idea what to do. My mind circled, thinking. Maeniel, Black Leg, Mother, and I had hunted large game. Horse! Yes, the Romans rode them, but often as not we ate the ponies gone wild in waste places. There were large cats, not common any longer but found here and there, that sometimes had to be killed. Lions of a sort, bear, and boar.
Only last year we had to hunt down a bear. The beast was crippled, one forepaw ruined by another hunter. It had been reduced to sheep killing but was still a formidable adversary.
These were not safe, simple, aristocratic hunts where one spent a fine day in the field, then came home to a good supper and a warm bed, but strenuous expeditions, out into the wilderness of the highlands.
Once Black Leg and I tracked a wounded deer for two days because Maeniel, our supreme hunter, drummed it into our heads that we must finish what we start and never leave a wounded animal to perish on its own.
My mind ran to traps, pits, and snares. We had taken a second bear in a pit. His taste had not run to sheep but shepherds. This seemed the best possible solution to me. A pit filled with sharpened stakes.
But that presupposed that I would be able to shadow the creature and learn something of its habits.
Maeniel had done that in the case of the killer bear. But I can’t turn wolf, and while I can move almost as silently as he can, if this creature detected me, I would become its next meal. The risk was too great that I wouldn’t last long enough to spring the trap.
Bad. I shook my head. Very bad.
“You are worrying,” Treise said.
“How do you know?” I asked the child.
“I can see it in your face,” she replied. “My father says worrying does no good at all. You should stop.”
My lady was still at the stream fussing with the breakfast dishes.
“May I go outside and play?” Treise asked.
“No,” I said too quickly, then realized I might alarm the child. I was frightened, but it wouldn’t do to communicate my fear to Treise, at least not all of it. She should be warned to be cautious but not so frightened as to be immobilized by terror.
I had once seen a three-cornered argument between Kyra, Maeniel, and Dugald about that. “There is risk in life and she must learn to deal rationally with the fact,” Maeniel had said.
Dugald was for terrifying me about certain things. Maeniel had felt there was no virtue in this approach. I’m not sure what Kyra had thought, except that she said, “A fool’s paradise is still paradise. I would never have known joy had I been warned how it must end.” Then she wept and we gave over arguing and tried to comfort her.
Well, there were risks enough here. But overall, I liked Maeniel’s attitude the best. While I live, I will live. In the meantime, there was work to be done.
The hearth must be swept, the cooking utensils put up. She brought back the clean dishes, and they must be placed safely away in a storage niche near the fire. They were bestowed near the big tree that occupied the central space near the hearth.
I must make an offering beside the trunk—oil, bread, and wine. Sweep the wooden floor, feed the stock, air out the bedding, wash any dirty clothes. Then there was the matter of a light meal at dusk and a more heavy one later in the evening. And in addition, no small matter, figure out how to kill that damned thing.
“What will we do?” I asked her.
“I will see to the stock,” she said. “And help wash the clothes. There will be milk. Can you churn and make curds?”
“Yes. Thanks to Kyra, I can do all womanly things.”
“Good. You sweep the floor and water the garden.” She pointed out the door to the south. A large kitchen garden sweltered in the morning sun. A few of the plants were already wilting
.
“It was fenced, but what about deer?” I asked. “There is no dog.”
She laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. “There were two dogs a few weeks ago. They both disappeared.”
“Oh!” I answered.
“Later today we have a somewhat more dangerous task. We must collect acorns, a sack full for the pigs. The remaining pigs. I might add, there are only two boars left; the sow and her litter disappeared about the same time the dogs did.”
“Oh,” I repeated, and then was mindful of the child. “Mercy me!”
I felt Treise against my shirt and then she clutched my left hand in a hard grip. My lady thought my subdued expletive very funny and let out a peal of laughter.
I said, “Treise, you stay close to me. I will need your help today. Let’s go out and water the garden.”
Treise let go of my hand but followed me as closely as a shadow.
The garden was on a gentle, well-drained slope near the house. The stream ran past it, moving downhill toward the sea.
This man was a very good farmer. I like gardens, and Kyra and I had built one using terraces near our home on the coast. We grew leeks, onions, turnips, garlic, rosemary, sage, a variety of greens, and carrots. Here, he had a much warmer climate and deeper, richer soil than we had. And he’d done well with it.
The crops were planted in high rows and I saw why when I reached the fence. He had built a small dam that could be lowered into the water to divert the stream into the garden to water his crop when it was hot and a bit dry, as it was now. On the other side of the stream, he had constructed a fish stew, this being an earthen pond for raising table fish.
It was a pretty but rather treacherous place, ringed with cattails, cress, and yellow wild water lilies. A stand of osier willows grew at one end near the forest. It was dark under the trees.
I gave a shiver and set my mind on my task. I dropped the dam and the water began to flow through a trench into the garden.
I began looking for a gate. The fence was a tangle of berry vines covered with thorns and white flowers. I took Treise’s hand and began walking along, looking. I didn’t find one and the path began to press close to the dark forest. So I turned and retraced my steps until we reached the trench. I was thinking that I must judge if the garden got enough water from the outside and find the way in later, when Treise’s hand tugged mine.
“Look, that’s funny. I never saw any like that before,” she said, looking up at me. “What made them?” She pointed to some big three-toed footprints in the mud beside the flowing water.
I’ll give myself this. I can believe that it would have taken anyone a short time to study those tracks and reach the obvious conclusion. And I was still puzzling when I caught the movement from the corner of my eye and I saw the big reptilian head dropping down not at me, at the much more tender morsel at my side—Triese.
My hand tightened on Treise’s and I flung her under the thick, thorny berry canes that twined in the fence.
“Crawl under the thorns!” I screamed.
Then the thing’s teeth closed on my right shoulder and one wiry, clawed hand seized my body at the waist.
Death! I thought. But I’m going to hurt it before I go.
I am not very big. I could see the eye, in the sunlight, nacreous yellow as molten gold, pupil slit like an adder’s. The jaws engulfed my whole shoulder and right breast. I fancied I felt the long, sharp, triangular yellow teeth grate on bone.
They did grate on something, but it was not bone.
I was dead. I knew even if the thing didn’t eat me, damage done by those jaws would kill me.
Hurt it! The command drummed in my brain. Make it pay!
My right arm moved in the creature’s jaws and I felt the thing’s leathery neck. My vision darkened as I threw everything I had into my fire hand.
The world vanished. How does a bolt of lightning feel when it flashes through the clouds into the earth? I know, because that is what I was for a moment, a channel for raw, ravening, blazing power!
Even from whatever hiding place my soul had flown I heard it scream.
I hit the ground hard, realizing that, like a predator that takes a noxious insect into its mouth and realizes too late that it isn’t edible, it had spat me out and fled, crashing through the fish pond into the forest.
I sat up. I wanted to be sure I still could. Then I saw that the green armor that protected my right hand from the thorns now extended over my whole body. A princely patrimony. If my father left me nothing else, this would suffice as a mark of his acknowledgment.
I was almost afraid to look at my right shoulder and hand. They were not unmarked. My shoulder and breast were deeply bruised, the red already turning an angry purple.
As I watched, the green vines faded from my skin and it returned to its natural, rather pale color.
When I looked up, she was standing there holding Treise and gazing at me in some astonishment.
“In all the years I have tracked that beast and tried to destroy it, I have never seen a champion do it so much damage.”
“It is alive and thus can be killed,” I said. “And I think I can find a way to do that. But I will need your help.”
She helped me to my feet, and I walked to the house. When I entered the door, Treise cried out and held her arms toward me.
I took her and kissed her.
“Make the sacrifices,” my lady told me.
“Come, Treise,” I said to the child. “We must give thanks.” I carried her to the tree that rose just beyond the hearth.
An ancient oak, its roots clutched the ground like claws or thick, knotted fingers. At the center of the house, it enjoyed a space of its own, paved hearth cobbles that looked as if they had been collected from the beach. Above the roots the gigantic trunk rose, as wide at the center as a tall man’s body from head to foot. Between two of the roots, the cobbles formed an offering basin.
The lady brought honey, oil, and mead.
I knelt and seated Treise on one of the roots. I raised my arms in the position of invocation. My body was still shaking. The dress she had given me was torn away at the right shoulder and terrible bruises covered my right shoulder and breast. The teeth of the beast hadn’t penetrated, but they had scratched the skin in a number of places and blood ran down from my shoulder and breast and trickled over my stomach and groin. In places it dripped on the stones.
“I live,” I said, “and for that I am thankful.”
Outside the wind sobbed in the trees, and it was as if I were being answered.
“Now, I must kill it,” I continued, “but I will not call down your blessings on death. Yet you know as well as I that it is sometimes necessary.”
Then I made the offering of mead, honey, and oil at the roots. They are a token, no more than a token, of what we owe, to what the tree represents.
Treise was quiet. She sat still, looking at me with wide, dark eyes.
When I was finished, I picked her up, rose, and faced the woman.
She nodded her approval. As a virgin child I belonged to her, and, in a way, she to me.
“Is there a workshop?” I asked.
“Certainly,” she answered. “Every farm has one. But, remember, you have not much time.”
“How so?” I asked. “And how much?”
“How so?” she mused. “Have you ever seen a sapling bent to make a snare?”
“Yes,” I answered, much mystified.
“Well, that’s something like what I did to the world in order to bring you here. Although the forces involved are much greater, they strain against my grip. Sooner or later they will pull free and, like the bent sapling, spring back and carry you home. How long—a few days at most.”
“Then we must hurry,” I said. “Where is the workshop?”
Treise led me to it.
There must be such a place on all farms. Tools must be repaired, harnesses mended, soap made, osiers dried and cut to useful lengths, logs formed into timber and beams,
wood cured for fence posts, hides tanned, nets woven, and fishhooks hammered out—the million and one tasks that arise on a working farm.
The king was a neat man. His tools hung over one bench clean and shining, each one in its place. Along another wall were piled things left over from the butchering and brush cutting that routinely goes on every day on a farm—wood, hides, horns, sinew, bones, jars of rendered fat; odds and ends of wood too good to burn, too small to be made into furniture.
This was just what I wanted.
I described to her the thing I wanted to make.
“Never,” she answered, “have I seen such a weapon.”
“I think there may be none in the world yet. Or if there are, only a few and very far away.”
She nodded. “That’s why I sent for you. I needed fresh ideas.”
We got to work.
There was a lathe. I began to make the first and most important part from an ash butt I found with the other scrap. She began shaping the sinew and horn. Treise sat on the floor and made mud bread.
The ash was hard wood and like stone. I kept having to sharpen the bronze knife. But at length, I got it into the shape I wanted.
She had managed the sinew and horn. I hunched down next to Treise and stacked the parts laid out on the floor, trying to remember exactly how Maeniel put them together.
“I need glue,” I said. “Now I need glue.”
“How is glue made?” Treise asked.
“From the horns, hides, and hooves of animals,” I answered. “Especially the hooves.”
Risderd had quite a large pile of them.
“We will need a pot,” I said.
The lady looked at me in exasperation. I was grimy and perspiring. So was she.
“Now glue,” she said.
“It’s the only way I know how to make it.”
“Then glue it is,” she answered. “But come. We must tend the family.”
Risderd was up walking around. When she saw him near the fire, she repaired my dress and hair.
“I came to find you, Eline,” he said to her. “My wife is very bad and she has a high fever.”
We both went to her sleeping platform immediately. She was tossing and turning, the bandages on her arm and side loose and bloody.
The Dragon Queen Page 26
