Keeper of the Dream

by Penelope Williamson

  It matters for naught, she told herself. Aye, it matters not at all. I will show him that I care as little for him as he cares for me, and it will be true, for I care for him not in the least.

  Her fingers trembled as she picked up the pen, but she pretended not to notice. She saw that the quill’s end had split and she searched through the clutter on the table for the penknife. She slit through a piece of the horny stem, fashioning a new point.

  “My lady …”

  The knife jerked, slicing through the pad of her thumb. She watched, mesmerized, as bright red blood welled from the cut and dripped onto the ledger, and it was odd, for she didn’t feel a thing. She looked up into the beautiful face of her husband’s squire. “God’s death, Taliesin, you fool, look what you’ve done.”

  “Milady, ’Tis you who have done it. One who is as clumsy as yourself ought not to be allowed around knives.”

  “Shut your insolent mouth, boy, and fetch me water and a cloth.” She wasn’t clumsy. She’d never been clumsy in her life until she’d been forced to marry that cursed Norman. If the man wasn’t upsetting her inner humors, his wretched squire was popping up out of nowhere and scaring the sin right out of her.

  Her thumb began to throb now with pain. Suddenly a white film formed before her eyes and her whole body trembled. Surely she wasn’t going to faint over a little cut. She gripped the table with her good hand and looked up to see Taliesin walking toward her. He carried the golden mazer in his hands.

  Oh, please, no … she said, except the words had not come out her mouth. And Taliesin was holding out the mazer, only it wasn’t Taliesin, it was an old man, withered and with yellow skin and sunken eyes, but the eyes … the eyes belonged to Taliesin, jet black and shimmering. Why are you doing this to me? she cried without sound. I don’t want to see any more.

  But the mazer was in her hands and it was pulsing and hot, and she was looking down into a golden mist that swirled and eddied, enveloping her mind. The mist cleared, became the yellow glare of a morning sun, but the air was cool, the crisp air of autumn. She heard the squeal of a stuck pig and smelled blood, and she laughed

  13

  He laughed as the pigsticker thrust a knife into the hog’s neck. The animal thrashed and squealed and blood spurted into the air. It splattered in the dirt and on his bare feet and legs, and then his mother shoved a steaming kettle of boiled oats beneath the hog’s neck, to catch the blood.

  His mouth watered. There would be blood pudding for supper this afternoon and maybe, if there was enough left over, there would be some for him.

  “Raine!”

  At the sound of his name, he looked up. His brother, Hugh, rode across the bailey on a pony. A magnificent white pony with a long blond mane and tail The pony was too big for Hugh; his legs could barely grip its fat back. But I am taller than Hugh, he thought. And he wanted that pony. He could taste the wanting of it even more than he could taste the blood pudding.

  Hugh laughed. “See what my father the earl has given me for my birthday!”

  The earl is my father, too, he wanted to shout, but he didn’t dare. Because he was a bastard, a whore’s son. He knew what the words meant, exactly what they meant. But he still could not understand why his father didn’t like him, was always so angry with him. Why his father should give Hugh a pony and nothing to him.

  Hugh shouted and pointed toward the great hall. A knight came down the steps, a man in sparkling silvered mail with hair the color of the ravens that scavenged in the midden, a man so tall and broad he blocked the pale autumn sun. Someday I will be that big, he thought, as big as my father, a knight like my father, and his guts twisted with the bewildered mixture of fear and longing he always felt when he saw the tall, hard-faced man. But then the knight strode toward him and he was smiling, and suddenly he was sure the smile was for him.

  “Father!” he cried and he ran, and he wrapped his arms around the man’s steel-armored legs. “When is my birthday? Can I have a pony too?”

  He didn’t see the fist until it was too late. It snatched him by the scruff of his tunic and hauled him high into the air until he looked into a pair of pale-gray eyes.

  “You are never to call me that again. I am ‘my lord earl’ to you, you whore’s whelp, and you are never to forget it.”

  “But will you give me a pony too? When it’s my birthday?”

  The back of a hand smashed into his mouth and he hit the ground with a smack that drove the air from his chest. He skidded along the hard-packed dirt and into the butchered hog, knocking over the kettle. Blood-soaked oats slopped over him and his mother screamed at him and Hugh laughed. But it was his father’s voice, harsh with anger, that squeezed his chest with pain.

  “Shut your mouth, boy, or I’ll have the flesh flogged from your bones. Aye, I’ll have you flogged anyway. Impudent whelp …”

  His chest heaved as he fought for breath and tears burned his eyes, but he didn’t cry because knights never cried.

  His mother bent over him. Her hair fell across her face and into her mouth that was red and open with laughter. She cackled and prodded him with her toe. “ ‘When is me birthday?’ he asks. Well, it’s been an’ gone and we all forgot it. Tried to forget it, mayhap, ’cause we never wanted ye born in the first place. Paid me an old witch thrupence to purge ye. Puked and bled me guts out for three days, I did. Near killed me, it did. But ye hung on, ye stubborn, tough lil’ bastid. ‘When’s me birthday?’ he asks. Well, we forgot it, we did.”

  But he didn’t care about his birthday anymore, because he had seen the marshal coming with his knotted rope, and he turned and pressed his face against the ground that was wet and sticky with the hog’s blood and the spilled mush.

  The rope slashed across his back, but he didn’t cry because knights never cried….

  “I won’t cry,” Arianna said.

  “Well, I should hope not, my lady. It’s only a little cut, after all.”

  Arianna blinked against the haze of a bloody sun that dimmed and became the green-spangled walls of her chamber. For a moment she felt a burning pain across her back and she was confused, for Taliesin was pressing a cloth against her thumb. She had opened her mouth to tell him it wasn’t her thumb that hurt, when nausea suddenly cramped her stomach and the painted walls tilted and blurred. She clenched her jaws, squeezing her eyes shut. She thought she smelled boiled oats and hog’s blood, but that couldn’t be, for it was late July, not slaughtering time, and she had ordered no pigs butchered this morning. And then no sooner did she think that then she remembered.

  The old bard had put the golden mazer in her hands—no, Taliesin had startled her and she had cut her thumb with the penknife, and that fool boy brought over the mazer and she had made the mistake of looking into it and she’d had a vision. That was all, simply a vision. She had watched a hog being butchered in a strange bailey that must have been Chester, for the old earl was there; she had recognized him, for he looked so much the way his son did now. And Hugh was there, he had been given a pony for his birthday and when she saw it she wanted one too….

  No, Raine had wanted the pony. He had been the one in the bailey and she had just seen that brief moment out of his past. Except that she had done more than see it, she had been him, been Raine as a small boy and everyone had forgotten her birthday—no, his birthday. It had been Raine’s birthday that was forgotten. There had always been a fuss made over her on her birthdays.

  Arianna clenched her teeth against a shudder that racked her body. These visions were becoming too real. To be in someone else’s mind and heart like that, it was too frightening to contemplate, for what if she lost herself and never came back?

  “You’re not going to faint over a little bit of blood, are you, my lady?”

  She opened her eyes. Taliesin had ripped off a piece of the cloth and was tying it around her thumb. A curtain of flame-colored hair obscured his face. “Why are you doing these things to me?” she demanded. She still felt queasy inside, all hollow and sa
d.

  His head came up, and he brushed the hair back with a pale, thin hand. His eyes glimmered at her, like a cat’s eyes at night. “Because the cut must be cleaned,” he said. “Else it will putrefy and your arm will rot off.”

  He had hold of her hand still, and it trembled in his. “Don’t play the fool with me, boy. Why are you making me see these things … feel them …?”

  “What things? If you mean startling you so that you cut your thumb, you must acquit me, my lady, for I knocked ere I entered. I feared something was amiss, for my lord had come thundering into the hall, all wild-eyed like a charger with a burr beneath its saddle, nearly knocking me down, and bellowing at me for being in his way. I pray you haven’t bungled things again, my lady.” He heaved a long-suffering sigh. “For, the goddess be my witness, I am being worn to the bone trying to keep the peace between you.”

  He dropped her hand to snatch up a basin of pink-colored water and Arianna started, for it was the bronze basin from the laver that he held, not the golden mazer. “What did you do with it?” she cried.

  “My lady?” He jerked so violently that water slopped into the rushes, but he stared back at her with blank, wide-open eyes, like a puppy caught with a half-eaten shoe between its paws.

  “Myrddin’s magic bowl—what have you done with it?”

  “I know naught of a magic bowl.”

  “You lie. You stole it from me that day Rhuddlan fell and then put it here in this very chamber to bedevil me on my wedding day. A moment ago you handed it to me and now it has gone missing again and you …” Her voice trailed off. He would admit to nothing. It mattered for naught anyway, for the bowl would turn up again, and she didn’t want any more of its cursed visions anyway.

  The squire had returned the basin to the laver and was edging toward the door. “Taliesin,” she commanded, and he froze, then turned, and his face pleated into a comical expression of reluctance.

  “My lady, I swear to you I know naught of magic bowls, and I have important matters to attend to. Aye, my lord’s armor needs polishing and though that brother of yours is grooming my lord’s destrier, I fear the wretch is hopelessly incompetent and I shall be the one to suffer my lord’s ire if the task is not done properly. I shall be hung up by my thumbs—”

  Arianna’s laughter cut through the boy’s tirade. “Quit flapping your tongue ere it falls out your mouth from overuse and tell me—do you know the date of Lord Raine’s birth?”

  He blinked, then a smile flashed across his face. “Strange that you should wonder, for it came to my mind only an hour ago that my lord was born under the influence of Mars, which explains why he is oft so irascible and foul-tempered.” He heaved a put-upon sigh. “The blessed event took place twenty-six years ago tomorrow, and thus was I doomed to this miserable fate.”

  Arianna failed to see what the one thing had to do with other. “Fool boy, you were not even a lustful urge between your father’s legs at the time of my lord husband’s birth. But you say that his birthday falls on the morrow?”

  “Aye. And pity it’s a fast day, for he is not overly fond of fish, is my lord. But doubtless the cook will conjure up a frumenty for the feast to tempt his appetite.”

  “We are having a feast?”

  “Why, I think that a splendid idea, my lady!” the boy exclaimed, clapping his hands. “Would that I had thought of it. Though you should have told me sooner, for I shall want to compose an ode in honor of the occasion.”

  She scowled at him, for she suspected that a feast was precisely what he had been after all along. Perhaps he wanted a reason to perform on his harp. She wondered again if the music she had heard last night had been made by him, not by a dream. But, no, even with an extraordinary talent the boy was too young to be so skilled. And yet … yet, suppose he were llyfrawr, a wizard. It was said that wizards could fashion music out of the very air, they could assume any shape and travel through the circle of time, they could make themselves invisible or be in two places at once, so perhaps they could even conjure visions and bend the unsuspecting to their will.

  God’s death, Arianna, you witless nit! Who ever heard of a wizard wandering about in these modern times? And certainly no self-respecting wizard would take on the shape of that irritating squire.

  Besides, what did it matter from whence the vision came? It had all happened to Raine, the boy, just as she had seen and felt it, and she knew with a certainty she could not explain that it had never been forgotten by the man. She ached for the man, even more than she ached for the boy. No wonder he had grown up so hard, so unfeeling.

  His birthday was tomorrow and this once, she vowed, it would not be forgotten. There was scarce time left to arrange for a proper banquet, but it could be done if she put the whole castle to work. She would give him a gift too. Aye, a gift would be nice….

  She wished she could give him a pony. But she was twenty years too late.

  “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen …”

  Arianna folded her arms across her chest and frowned at the stacks of trestle tables lined along one wall of the great hall. With only twenty tables and all of Rhuddlan at the feast, people would be pressed in rows one upon the other like piglets suckling at a sow’s tits. But twenty would have to be enough, she supposed. There certainly wasn’t time before the morrow for the carpenter to make any more.

  Her frown deepened as she studied the condition of the great hall. It was clean enough, for she had already seen to that. But the rafters were black as the bottom of a well with soot and the walls sorely needed a fresh coat of whitewash. She thought how much plainer was this hall compared to that of her father’s llys. Except for a few moth-eaten stag heads and rusted weapons hanging on the walls and pillars, there was naught to catch and please the eye. What was particularly needed, she decided, was something bright and colorful in back of the high table. A biblical painting, perhaps, or an array of silken pennons in peacock colors.

  Suddenly she knew just what would be her birthday gift to Raine. She would fashion him an enormous banner to hang in back of his high seat. She would make it of the richest silk, the deep red color of fall apples, and on it she would put his black dragon device. Thus all strangers who came to sup and sleep in their hall would see the banner and mark that it was the Black Dragon who was lord here.

  Filled with excitement over her plans, Arianna set the kitchens into an uproar preparing for the feast. Then she saddled a palfrey to ride into town to purchase the silk she would need from Christina, the draper’s daughter. The day had turned suddenly stormy, and she thought with a sigh that she would probably get wet. Gray clouds had piled up overhead, like mounds of dirty fleece, and the marsh grass rippled in a stiff wind that smelled of rain.

  The toll keeper waved Arianna through the town gate—she didn’t pay, for the toll went directly into her husband’s purse. A pack of dogs chased and nipped at her palfrey’s heels, their yapping competing with the cries of fishermen who trolled the river with their nets. She passed by the open, cavernous doors of the mint, where sparks flashed and the air thrummed with the sound of hammers pounding the dies. They were fashioning new coins with Lord Raine of Rhuddlan’s likeness on the face of them, just like the Roman Caesars of old.

  He had come far, she thought, from the ragged boy who had yearned for a pony and was given a beating instead. As the palfrey picked its way slowly through narrow streets that stank of pigs, she pictured the look of surprise and pleasure on his face when she presented him with the banner on the morrow.

  The draper’s daughter lived in a large, timbered house that fronted the market square and backed up against the quay. The market square wasn’t square at all, but shaped rather like a large, lopsided triangle of packed dirt that turned into a bog in winter. At the pointed end of the triangle squatted the church, with its chunky, square stone bell tower. In the front yard of the church a man sat in the stocks, hunched in misery, with a stinking, rotting mackerel tied under his chin.

  In the middle of the trian
gle stood the large market cross, carved of granite, and beside the cross a well where a group of women had gathered to gossip, water buckets balanced on their heads. Their magpie chatter ceased immediately as soon as they caught sight of Arianna.

  She dismounted before the draper’s house just as the first drops of rain left penny-sized patterns in the dust. Skirting around a braying donkey that had been overladen with sacks of wool, she entered the dark cool interior of the undercroft.

  A servant rushed forward, bowing low. “Milady!”

  “Fetch your mistress, if you please.”

  The servant left and Arianna looked around her. Stacks of bundled fleece tied up with reed cords took up a good part of the floor, along with barrels of papyrus and indigo and sheafs of woad leaves, all used for the dyes. Shelves on the wall were piled with bolts of cloth in rainbow hues.

  A small door opened into another room, from which Arianna could hear the smack and clatter of looms. Another door led out back where bare-legged workers in clogs beat the raw wool in tubs of water and dyers dipped and stirred lengths of cloth in vats with long wooden poles. She stepped into the yard, holding her breath against the stale reek of urine, which was used to set the dyes.

  Thunder rumbled overhead and it began raining harder. She was just about to step back inside when a movement to the left caught her eye. Steps led down the side of the house from the upper story. A man stood on the narrow landing, facing an open doorway. As she watched, he leaned into the shadows as if he were imparting a farewell kiss, and indeed, a woman’s hands went around the man’s neck. Then the man turned and ran lightly down the stairs. He carried a leather bag in one hand, which he thrust through his sword belt, and Arianna thought she heard the jangle of coins.

  At the bottom of the steps the man paused to take a look around him, his eyes narrowed against the pouring rain. Arianna got a glimpse of familiar honey-brown hair and a dashing, flowing moustache.