A Sterkarm Kiss

by Susan Price

  Patterson, so affable and jolly, was still standing behind her, laughing and saying, “You ain’t seen nothing yet! Nowt!”

  Turning to him, tears in her eyes, Andrea snapped, “It’ll be people next, not sheep! Children!”

  He stared at her, still smiling, but raising his brows in surprise.

  “How can you bear to do what you’re doing?” Andrea said.

  There were a few sniggers from the other 21st men—possibly nervous sniggers, possibly not. Then Windsor said, “Oh, never mind our Andrea. She’s a vegetarian.”

  That made the 21st siders laugh outright. Andrea turned away, furious.

  The show was over and everyone, Elves and Sterkarms together, wandered back toward the tower. Andrea didn’t follow but stood looking toward the moorland hills. Sweet Milk was still talking to the men butchering the sheep. She’d walk back with Sweet Milk, she thought. He was a big, calm man. There was nothing, he made you feel, that he couldn’t cope with. And no one would dare to lightly accuse him of vegetarianism.

  Per wanted to run, jump walls, punch things. He had been fearful that he couldn’t fill his father’s place, fearful that he would not prove to be quick enough, cunning enough, bold enough, to take revenge from the Grannams for his father’s murder. But with these Elf-Weapons! His success was certain. The Grannams would go in fear of him. They would hang their heads and humbly apologize for his father’s death—and they would mean it, because the revenge it had brought on them would be so terrible.

  He thought of the Elf-May and looked around for her. He no longer felt the sick pang of guilt stirred by the thought that he’d been with her when his father had been killed. The certainty and totality of his revenge made him full of energy, almost gleeful. Seeing Andrea still standing near the sheepfold, he turned and ran back toward her. As he came nearer, he saw that she seemed miserable and might even be crying. Running up to her, he hugged her boisterously, almost knocking her over, pressing her head into his shoulder and rubbing her back. “Ah, be no feared, wee fowl! Grannams shall no hurt thee—they’ll no come nigh thee! I shall fetch thee ten Grannam heads of thine own!”

  He was dismayed when she started to cry in earnest, pushing him away, spluttering, screwing up her face. “Killed!” was the only word he could understand.

  “Tha shalt no be killed! My word on it!”

  “Not me! Not me! People will be killed! Lots of people! Children!”

  Sweet Milk had come over to them, and Per looked at him to see if he could make sense of it, but Sweet Milk only shrugged. “Daftie!” Per said to Andrea. “Tha canst no fight a battle without killing folk.”

  Andrea looked up at him. “Why fight? Why kill anyone?”

  He frowned. “They killed my daddy.” He admired her pretty face: the big, clear gray eyes; the brown hair stuck to her tears. “Come on now.” Offering her his hand, he led her over the rough meadow toward the tower on its hill. She went with him, and after a few paces, he let go of her hand and put his arm around her shoulders. She didn’t pull away. She was too busy talking.

  “Killing will gan on and on,” she said. “It will solve nothing. It never ends. There be no point to it!”

  “Dost say so?” Per said. His tone made Sweet Milk, who was walking beside them, glance sideways at him. The expression on Per’s face as he looked down at the Elf-May made Sweet Milk smile, and then lengthen his stride so that he outpaced them and left them behind. He felt something of a pang as he realized that the Elf-May was not going to be his, but unless he was prepared to fall out with his foster son and adopted family, there was nothing to be done about that.

  “Revenge has never worked—” Andrea was saying as Per saw that Sweet Milk had put a good distance between them and him and wasn’t looking back. The rest of the party was far ahead, climbing the path to the tower—and if there were shepherds and herd girls about, he didn’t care about them.

  “They kill one of thine, and thou kills one of theirs, and it just goes on and—”

  Per pulled her backward, jerking her to a halt, and kissed her.

  She pushed him away, though she couldn’t get out of his hold, and their mouths parted with some difficulty. “What be this?”

  He made no answer but kissed her again. Why talk? She hadn’t made any fuss about meeting him when he’d come straight from his wife’s bed.

  Andrea grappled with him again, pulling her head back, though he still held her. She twisted her head, trying to see if the men were still by the sheepfold. “I was talking.”

  “There be gey better things than talking.”

  “But thy father—the wake—”

  “Oh, Entraya—let’s frig.” He could remember his father’s face all too clearly, peering through its shroud, shrunken and yellowish, as if carved from old tallow. The staring coins on his eyes, and the flies landing on his lips. One day he, too, would be like that—but perhaps there would be no one to wake him, and his body would lie on a hillside, torn by crows and foxes. “Let’s frig while we be living.”

  Looking into his face, she remembered Toorkild, and the smell in the room where the body lay. “In thy bower, then.”

  Per’s bower was in the upper, wooden story of one of the tower’s outbuildings. He had pulled the ladder up after them, locked the door, and closed the shutters.

  In the middle of the planking floor was a trapdoor giving access to the store below; above were low beams—low enough to crack your head painfully if you were used to the height of 21st rooms—and a thick heather thatch.

  There was almost no furniture. A wooden bed, with a thick straw mattress and a feather-filled quilt. A couple of wooden storage chests, and some wooden pegs on the wall, and that was all. Per’s longbow and fishing rod lay in one corner. From the pegs hung his quiver, filled with arrows and some snares. His clothes were on the floor.

  The quilt was on the floor now, too, flung off because they were too hot. They had slapped and scratched each other, laughed, pounded, and almost shaken the joints of the old bed apart. They lay quiet, Per on top of Andrea, his head resting on her shoulder. She thought he was sleeping. Though unable to move for his weight, she was happy to lie there, listening to the stealthy movement of some small creature—a bird or a mouse—in the thatch above, and breathing in the strong, sharp smell of his sweat and the summery, musty smell of old hay from the mattress beneath them. She was, for the moment, content. This was what she’d come back to the 16th for.

  With a groan Per raised himself and cast himself down beside her. She raised herself on her elbow and looked him over admiringly, from his suntanned neck and brown, muscled arms, down from his wide shoulders to his white, flat belly. His dark cock and balls nestled among wiry brown hair at the intersection of his long legs. He punched the bed, and it creaked, and a great gust of hay scent rose around them. Andrea pushed her hand through his hair and kissed him. He grimaced, his fists clenched, and he drew a long, hissing breath. “Dead and gone!” he said.

  Andrea hugged him tightly, with arms and legs. “I be sad for it, sad for it.” She held him while he cried, sobbed, groaned, punched the bed and the headboard.

  “Gone—and they killed him! Murdered him! And they are nothing—nothing!”

  After a long time he was quieter. She leaned from the bed and dragged the quilt from the floor to cover them. “Per, sweetheart—when tha kills a Grannam, they feel as thou feels now.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her, frowning.

  “I ken tha no wants to hear that,” she said. “But it be true. They hate Sterkarms, because Sterkarms have hurt them. The Sterkarms hate Grannams because Grannams have hurt them. That be all that ‘taking revenge’ does. It makes grief, and hatred, and anger. You kill them, they kill you. Everybody suffers, everybody loses—even bairns not born yet. Tha canst see that, no?”

  He turned on his back and looked up at her—at her lovely, full
face and clear gray eyes, at the brown hair falling over her plump, sleek shoulders, at the white and pink curves of her full, hanging breasts. “Aye,” he said. Did she think he was a fool?

  “Nobody can ever win a feud.”

  “Kill them all, tha canst.”

  “But—even if that were a good thing—tha canst no kill ’em all, ever.”

  “With Elf-Weapons tha canst.”

  “Per, harken to me.” Andrea leaned over him, her warm breasts on his chest, her hair falling over him. “Be so kind, be so good, harken to me. I can no bear it—all killing, all grief—thy mammy and all women who’ll mourn like her. All sons like thee. All bairns left helpless with nobody to care for ’em—poor lonely bairns like Sweet Milk was.” He was startled that she knew so much about Sweet Milk. “I ken,” she said. “I be an Elf. Be so kind, Per—stop it. Stop it here and now. Be man more braw than all rest—be man braw enough to say, ‘I’ll no take revenge. I’ll make peace.’”

  “Make peace with Grannams?” Per said, shoving her aside as he sat. “We made peace with Grannams, honey. My daddy be dead because we made peace with Grannams.”

  There was anger in his tone, and Andrea hesitated to say more. She might lose his love, and her influence over him. And she was just a little scared of that anger.

  But—if the killing went ahead, and she hadn’t done all she could to stop it …

  “I understand,” she said on a sigh. “If tha said, ‘No revenge,’ thy mammy would be angry, thy father’s brother would be angry—it be too much to ask. No one could be so brave.”

  Per leaned back on his elbow. “I’d no care for them, if—”

  “If what?”

  “If I thought it was right.”

  “How can it be wrong? If it comes to blood feud, there’ll be more murders, and more and more, and more sorrow, and more and more. It’ll never end.”

  “They killed my daddy.”

  “And how many Grannams have Sterkarms killed? And robbed, and hurt?”

  His face was set, angry. That, she knew he was thinking, was different. The Sterkarms were in the right. The Grannams were in the wrong. The Grannams, of course, thought the opposite.

  “Per,” she said, and put her arms around him and kissed him. “If tha stopped feud, I’d think thee so braw, so braw a man.”

  Angry, he moved away from her, to sit on the bed’s edge. “Whisht now. I mun go and watch by my daddy.” He rose from the bed and gathered his clothes. She lay in the bed and watched him dress, watched him unlock the door and lift the ladder, ready to drop it down into the alley.

  “Per.” He turned to look at her. “So braw a man,” she said. “So braw a man.” And after he’d left, she curled herself up, hugged her pillow, and glowed with the sense of her own power.

  15

  16th Side: The Funeral

  Toorkild’s bier was carried on the shoulders of men chosen for the honor. Per was at the front, with Sweet Milk beside him. Behind the bier came a piper and a fiddler, playing the slowest, saddest tunes they knew; and behind them a long, straggling procession of people, Isobel at their head. Close beside her walked Joan, keeping her hands clasped before her and her eyes cast down. It was the safest place to be because, although Isobel didn’t like her, she hadn’t, yet, offered to do her any harm. To raise her eyes, to look in any direction, to look at anyone else, was to know how much the Sterkarms hated her.

  The Elves, as honored guests, were close behind Isobel—­Andrea, in her clothes borrowed from the Sterkarms, and Windsor in his smart suit; and then his bodyguard in their fatigues. After them the more important of the visiting Sterkarms, and then the long tail of farmers, shepherds, and servants. Only a few remained at the tower, to watch the surrounding countryside and sound an alarm if necessary.

  The funeral procession followed a path that wound from the tower out onto the moors. Above them was a wide blue sky; around them miles of heather and bracken and scrub, over which blew a thin, cool, damp wind. The space hushed the fiddle music, and through it sounded the call of the peewit. Behind it was a great silence.

  A low stone wall surrounded the graveyard. Outside the boundary was the wild moor; within was a grassy lawn, close mown by the sheep that jumped the wall. The ground was rucked, mounded over new graves and sunken over old ones, but there were no headstones. The Sterkarms remembered where their dead lay, without stones to mark the place.

  “They have a nice day for it, anyway,” Windsor said to Andrea, and smiled when she frowned.

  A roofless, half-ruined building at the graveyard’s center had once been a chapel, but no one among the Sterkarms could remember when it had last been used.

  In front of the ruin waited the open grave. Joan remembered her father saying, “There be always room in Sterkarm graveyards. Why? Because only women and children be buried there!” Why was that? He’d laughed. “Because men are all buried in Carloel city, where they’re hanged as thieves!”

  Here’s one who won’t be buried in Carloel, she thought. She kept her face lowered and expressionless while the thought cackled in her mind. She’d felt much safer in the topmost room of the tower, with the Elf-May for company, than out here, surrounded by Sterkarms. Her fervent wish was to get back to the tower room as soon as possible. Better still, to get away from here altogether and back to her own country.

  The procession turned in at the gate in the graveyard wall, the slow music still playing, and walked between the grassy mounds toward the open grave. Andrea saw, with a shock, that beside the loose earth dug from the grave was a neat pile of old bones and skulls. The small graveyard was full, and every digging of a new grave meant disturbing others—but the old bones were simply left there, beside the new grave, for everyone to see. Interesting, she thought: the contrast between 16th and 21st attitudes to death. Then she reminded herself that she was attending the funeral of a man who had been her friend, even if in another dimension. Was the Toorkild in that other dimension experiencing a sudden shiver as, in this one, his body was set down beside his grave?

  Sweet Milk and the other men waited, looking to Per, who stared around at the sky and the moor. This, Per thought, was the last of his father. Once the bundled body was lowered into the hole and the earth thrown in, there was no pretending or hoping. He shook himself slightly. What hope had there ever been, since his father’s brains had spilled into his hand? Get the job done. Gritting his teeth, he stooped and uncoiled one of the linen bands looped under the corpse. The other men immediately took up the other bands, and between them they lifted the body up and, stepping awkwardly, carefully about the edge of the grave, brought it over the hole. Hand over hand, the muscles of their arms working, they lowered it in.

  More and more people were coming up and gathering around. One fiddler still played. The tune was frail in the wind and hard to pick out, but each note was sharp and sad. Those who had walked at the back of the procession were now coming up and, unable to find a place in the graveyard, climbed on the wall. A gang of boys herded three sheep out through the gate.

  Under his breath, Windsor said, “I would have thought they could afford a coffin.”

  Andrea ignored him. Coffins weren’t the custom here, 16th side, but she wouldn’t waste an explanation on him. His bodyguard were all taking off their caps and respectfully lowering their heads.

  The corpse was in its grave and the fiddler stopped playing—but a lapwing squealed, and a sheep baaed. Andrea had to sniff and wipe her eyes. Many of the Sterkarms were weeping openly, the men as well as the women.

  Per jumped down into the grave, at his father’s feet. Reaching up, he took from his mother’s hands a round loaf of bread and placed it at the corpse’s side. Isobel was already reaching down, to hand him a leather bottle. Andrea saw the tears shining on Per’s face as he looked up. She wished that she could stand beside him and offer some comfort, but with both his mother and wife b
eside him at the graveside, it was a little awkward.

  Isobel leaned over the grave again, bringing something from beneath her cloak and passing it down to Per, who took it from her and, bending, placed it on the corpse’s chest. It was a sheathed sword. Then Per held up his hands to Sweet Milk, who hoisted him out of the grave.

  Isobel stooped, took up a handful of loose earth, and scattered it over the bundled corpse of her husband. The soil rattled as it fell on the shroud. “To earth tha’ve come,” she said, and choked. “Fare well, Toorkild.”

  Fare well, Andrea thought, as fresh tears rose to her eyes and throat. That meant not simply “good-bye” but “go well” or “travel safely.” Toorkild had a long, lonely journey ahead of him, and they had provided bread and drink to help him on his way, and a sword to defend himself. I must, she thought, at some time get them to tell me exactly what they do believe about the afterlife.

  Per stooped and took up earth. He held his hand above the grave and was about to scatter the earth when a cry went up from outside the graveyard. “Sterkarm! Sterkarm!”

  The men about the grave jerked to attention and reached for their weapons. Everyone looked around, eyes and mouths open. The people on the wall turned, and waved and jumped down. A new cry went up. “Little Toorkild! Wat!” People were leaving the graveyard.

  Per, his heart thumping, shoved his way through to the graveyard wall, Sweet Milk close behind him. Andrea, leaving Windsor at the graveside, struggled after Per, to be near him. She managed to push her way between two men and get next to the lichen-grown stones of the wall but could still see very little, as there were so many people running excitedly up and down on the path that led to the graveyard. But she could hear the plodding of a pony’s hooves on the turf and she saw, between the dodging of the people, a pony—no, two ponies—being led toward the graveyard gate.

  The ponies entered the graveyard, and everyone turned and surged toward them. Andrea had to struggle again, to push through the people. She heard Sweet Milk bellow for quiet. Good old Sweet Milk! He’d sort things out.