by Robert Earl
As the two men listened, the music changed. At first, it had been a lullaby, sweet enough for the sourest ear.
Now, it speeded up, building into a wild, beating rhythm that set their blood racing and their tired feet itching to move.
“Shall we?” Mihai asked turning to his friend with a mock bow.
Dannie looked at him uncomprehendingly. Mihai held out his arm, and Dannie grinned, only half embarrassed. He had got used to Mihai’s sudden, wild enthusiasms.
“Come on,” Mihai said, “with music like that it would be rude not to dance.”
Dannie grinned, and, dropping his tools, began to dance. He linked arms with Mihai, and the two spun each other around in a high-kicking jig.
They were clumsy, tired by the day’s labours, and heavy-footed with boots clogged with mud, but they danced with a will. A gaggle of children, who had been following them with the unthinking instinct of born pickpockets, started laughing. Then somebody started to clap a beat to accompany their stumbling performance, and soon others joined in.
By the time Chera realised that she had an audience, the two men were dancing in a ring of clapping Strigany. For a moment, she played on, her fingers flitting over the chords with a will of their own. Then she stopped, and the music came to an awkward halt.
Dannie and Mihai gave a final pirouette, and, to the cheers of their audience, bowed. When they turned to Chera, it was to find her blushing bright red.
She looks as delicate as the first blush of colour on a new rose, thought Dannie.
Mihai wondered how it would be to be held by her as she was holding the harp.
“Good afternoon, domnuezuella,” both men said in perfect harmony.
“Good afternoon,” Chera said, and put a hand over her mouth. These two were both so handsome, she thought, and so different. The one with the strange white hair bore himself with such dignity, and with a certain sadness, too. His friend, on the other hand, was red-haired and blue-eyed, and wore the brightest smile she had ever seen.
She glanced from Dannie to Mihai, and then back again, and all of a sudden she felt something apart from her usual shyness at strangers.
“The way that you played that music,” Dannie said, “was masterful.”
“We thank you for it, domnuezuella,” Mihai added. “I’ve never heard better.”
“It was wonderful,” Dannie added, not to be outdone. “I’ve never heard that tune before, either.”
Mihai looked at him.
“I’ve been trying to interest my friend in this beautiful art for a long time,” he told Chera. “I’m glad he recognises how brilliant your recital was.”
Dannie barely paused before replying.
“Even a deaf man would have recognised your playing for the art that it was, domnuezuella,” he said.
“I made it up just now,” Chera said, surprising herself at her bravery in talking to these men. Work, or even combat was one thing, but romance…
She felt her cheeks burning, and raised her hands to cover her face.
“Really?” Dannie asked. “You created such beauty out of thin air?”
“It was wonderful,” Mihai added.
There was a moment of silence as the three of them tried to think of something else to say. Chera, remembering the magic that Maria had worked upon her, lowered her hands.
Mihai tried not to stare at her. Dannie sighed, and sought inspiration in the clouds. The small crowd that been clapping their performance a moment ago, looked on with fresh amusement.
“I would like to give you a gift,” Mihai said, at last thinking of something to say. “So that maybe you will play for us again.”
“What a good idea,” said Dannie.
Chera shook her head.
“I don’t mind playing for you again,” she said. “Strig-any are all one family. You don’t have to give me anything.”
“We must give you something in return,” Dannie said solemnly. “It is our way. Anyway, there must be something that you miss in this place.”
Chera looked past the wagons, and out into the drab heath beyond. The shadows of the clouds rolled across it, as black as night, but even where the sun shone there was no colour for it to catch amongst the mud and gorse, and withered grasses.
“I miss flowers,” she said.
“Then flowers,” Mihai said with a bow, “it shall be.”
Chera wriggled with embarrassment, clasping her harp. The two men watched the way that the curves beneath her shift moved, and the way that the pinkness of her flesh showed beneath the stretched white cloth. Both realised that they’d do anything but kill to be the first to return with their tribute.
Maybe they’d even do that.
“Might we ask your name, domnuezuella, so that we know for which beauty we are seeking the blooms?” Mihai asked.
“Her name,” said a voice from behind him, “is Chera, and my name is Malfi, Domnu Malfi. I am her father.”
Dannie and Mihai turned to find Malfi standing behind them. They saw the scowl on his face, the strength of his arms, and the cleaver that he wore at his belt. It was not a romantic sight.
“Good afternoon, domnu,” Mihai said.
“We wanted to see if you needed a hand with your section of the barricade,” Dannie added.
“How neighbourly. In fact, it does seem that our barricades aren’t yet strong enough to keep out the undesirables.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Mihai said, pretending not to understand.
“Yes, you are still here, aren’t you?” Malfi said. He glared at the younger man, who shifted uncomfortably.
“We were just going,” Dannie told him, “unless you have anything that needs to be done?”
Malfi said nothing. Instead, he let his hand fall to the handle of his cleaver.
“Right, we’ll be off then,” said Dannie.
Mihai followed him to the edge of the encampment. Then he turned and smiled at Chera. She smiled back, before he turned back away, and, beneath her father’s glare, hurried off.
“Oh Father!” she said, stamping one foot down upon the running board of her wagon.
“Don’t take that tone with me,” Malfi retorted. “I won’t have vagabonds wandering around our camp. And why don’t you go and put some more clothes on? You’ll catch a cold.”
With that, he turned, and stomped off to make sure that their barricade was completed by nightfall.
Chera watched him go, and, still scowling, put her harp away. It would have been nice to have been brought some flowers. It would have been nice to have seen those men again, but, now that her father had frightened them away, she knew that she’d never see either of them again. The next morning dawned cold and grey, the chill a promise of the winter that was on its way. A sleeting drizzle angled in from the east, and the mud into which Flintmar was sinking had already become ankle deep.
Mihai had risen with the dawn, and boiled a pot of water in the brass stove of his wagon. Boris and Bran woke up as the smell of burning charcoal and tea filled the wagon in which all three slept.
“So what are we doing today?” Bran asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. Mihai had opened the wagon’s rear door to let out the smoke and the steam. Boris took one look at the weather outside before making a suggestion.
“I say we make some crossbow bolts, or maybe,” he said, yawning and stretching comfortably within the cosy confines of the wagon, “we should just decide what we’ll say at council tonight. I hear the domnu will be elected as Kazarkhan. The one-eyed old tyrant will make a good one too, I reckon. Remember-”
“The bastards that tried to rob us after we left Lerenstein?” Bran finished for him, and grinned wickedly. “It was almost as if the domnu knew they were there. I bet they hadn’t taken such a beating as we gave them in their whole miserable lives.”
“The domnu used to be a mercenary didn’t he, Mihai?” Boris asked “Mihai?”
“What was that?” Mihai asked. He had been lost in his plans, as h
e had gazed into the rain, but now he poured the tea and passed the wooden bowls to his friends.
“Your father,” Bran told him, “he used to be a mercenary, didn’t he?”
Mihai grunted, and winced at the scalding heat of the tea. He was drinking it quickly, eager to be about his business.
“Yes, he was. That’s how he lost his eye.”
“So,” Bran began.
“Think he’ll be elected Kazarkhan?” Boris finished.
“If they’ve got any sense,” Mihai said. He nodded, and slurped down the rest of his tea. “After all, it isn’t a personality contest, so the miserable old devil stands a good chance. Right, I’m off. See you tonight.”
“Off?” asked Bran, who had been blowing on his tea.
“Off where?” Boris asked.
Mihai couldn’t help it. He looked shifty. The twins were suddenly alert.
“You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” Bran said.
“Because we’ll find out anyway,” Boris explained.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just going back to that forest we passed on the way here. I want to find some wood for making crossbow bolts with.”
“Plenty of seasoned wood here,” said Boris, reasonably.
“The best sort of ash, too,” his brother nodded.
“Yes, well you can work on that, and I’ll restock our supplies.” Mihai smiled at his own invention. “Can’t be running out of seasoned wood, even for crossbow bolts, and I saw a good few stands of ash in that forest.”
“Looked more like oak to me,” Boris said, frowning.
“Like you’d know oak from ash,” Bran said, rolling his eyes.
“You’ll know oak from ash from my fist if you don’t shut up,” Boris told him, conversationally.
“Going to use it to wipe your eyes with?” Bran asked from within the safety of his blankets.
“Idiot,” Boris said, affectionately.
“Fool,” Bran muttered, and drank his tea. “Hey, where’s Mihai gone?”
“Must have grown tired of your arguing,” Boris said, and dragged a sackcloth bundle down from its wicker shelf. He unrolled it to reveal a bundle of thick wooden shafts. Bran found the box of goose feathers, and started splitting them into fletch for the arrows Boris had started shaping with his knife.
“How much do you want to bet he’s gone to collect ash from the forest?” he asked after a while.
Boris sniggered.
“Girl, you reckon?”
“No doubt about it. Not that I blame him. There’s a whole caravan of seamstresses, apparently. Grigor was telling me. Imagine it, every single one of ’em for sale. Fat ones, skinny ones, old ones, young ones: you just go in and take your pick. If you’ve got the coin, of course.”
Both men paused in their task, and looked wistfully out into the sodden settlement beyond.
“Let’s get about making some coin, then,” Bran said and, thus inspired, the twins got stuck into their morning’s work. Mihai was glad that he’d been able to slip away. For a moment, he’d considered going on foot, so that he would be able to slip around the pickets that blocked the road out of Flintmar. He’d dismissed the idea almost as soon as it had occurred, though. If his excuse was good enough for the twins, it would be good enough for the men on the barricade, and anyway, it was too far to walk.
He would need time to look around if he was going to find a nice enough bloom in this season.
It would have been nice to have brought the twins to help him, but he hadn’t even considered that for a moment. There was no way, absolutely no way, that he was going to tell them that he was going to all this trouble to pick some flowers.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered to himself, as his horse trudged unhappily into the sheeting rain. Mihai’s waxed cloak was already dripping, and it flapped up in the sudden gusts, so that his breeches were soon wet too.
Even as he said the words, he knew that they weren’t true. Not going to fetch Chera her flowers, now that would have been ridiculous. She was, Mihai had decided, the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen, and he had seen a few. It was just that, somehow, the tavern girls and seamstresses that he had so cheerfully bedded, had never had anything like this effect on him.
It wasn’t just that she was lovely, he considered, although she certainly was. Everything about her, from the curve of her hips to the tilt of her nose, was perfect. No, it was much more than that. Maybe it was something to do with the music.
For no good reason, he suddenly remembered the night in Lerenstein when he had sung the charm to quieten the guard dogs of the inn that they’d burgled. Then, the thought was gone, and his attention returned to the way that Chera’s hair had gleamed in its braided tress, and the way that her shift had flushed pink where the thin material had been stretched across her chest.
Mihai was lost deep in a fantasy, in which he was heroically saving her from a band of marauding orcs, when he noticed that another rider was ahead of him on the road out of Flintmar. In the sheeting rain, it was impossible to see who it was, but Mihai spurred his horse on anyway, curiosity getting the better of him. As he drew nearer to the rider, curiosity gave way, first to suspicion, and then to dismay.
The rider wasn’t wearing a hood, and his sodden white hair was recognisable anywhere.
“Dannie,” Mihai said as he drew level with him.
“Oh,” Dannie, who had been hunched against the rain, said, looking as dismayed to see his friend as his friend had been to see him. “Mihai.”
“What are you doing out in this filthy weather?” Mihai asked.
Dannie shrugged and looked away.
“You know that I am apprenticed to the petru,” he said. “I spend my time on all sorts of tasks.”
Mihai nodded sceptically.
“This task wouldn’t be taking you to where those wolf roses were in flower back in those woods, would it?”
Dannie grinned. “My task might take me there, and where are you going in this filthy weather?”
“I thought that it would be a nice day to gather some staves from the forest,” Mihai said, and wiped the sheen of rainwater off his face.
“What a coincidence,” Dannie replied, his tone the driest thing in a hundred miles. “We might as well go together, then.”
Mihai nodded. So, he wouldn’t be the only one to bring Chera flowers. That was all right. He’d just have to make sure that the ones he brought were the best.
The barricade soon loomed up out of the downpour ahead of them, and a pair of miserable pickets strolled forward to wave them down. Although both men were swaddled in cloaks, the rain had made rats’ tails of their beards, and they were shivering.
“Are you the relief?” one of them asked hopefully.
“No,” Dannie said, “I am the apprentice of Petru Engel, from the caravan of Brock. My business is elsewhere.”
“Damn,” the picket said, making no attempt to hide his disappointment, “and who are you?”
“I’m looking after him,” Mihai said.
“You’d better go through, then, but remember that you’ll be outside of Flintmar, so you’ll be outlaws until you return.”
“We’ll keep our wits about us,” Dannie told him, and, with a final, disappointed glance down the road, the two pickets went to untie a section of the barricade so that the two men could pass.
“Right then,” Mihai said when they were out of earshot, “shall we race to that clearing? It can’t be more than a couple of miles away.”
“In this weather? You’re crazy.”
Even so, when Mihai spurred his horse into a gallop, Dannie didn’t hesitate to join him in his mad dash through the sheeting rain. “These aren’t as nice as I remember,” Mihai said as he plucked one of the dog roses from the bush. In the week since he had passed it, the petals had turned brown, as though singed, and, as well as being discoloured, they were also limp and wilted.
“It’s a shame,” Dannie agreed.
Both men had di
smounted to search through the flowering bushes that grew in the clearing. The rain had given way to sunshine. The forest floor was steaming and the wet autumn leaves gleamed as though freshly created. The water and sunlight had come too late to save the flowers, though. Their season had well and truly finished.
“I suppose that we could give her some flowers made out of wire and cloth. Hradic the tailor does that,” Mihai suggested.
“Good idea,” Dannie agreed. “I think that I’ll stay here for a bit though, as it’s stopped raining.”
Mihai nodded.
“You’re right. There are plenty of other places to look. What’s that blue one called that grows in the autumn?”
“Blueskife,” Dannie told him. “It’s good for gout and rheumatism.”
“How romantic,” Mihai said, and Dannie snorted.
“Romantic or not, I don’t know if it grows amongst oaks.”
“Let’s find out,” Mihai said, and so, vaulting back up onto their horses, the two men rode slowly off into the depths of the forest. It was Dannie’s mare who saved them. Although the rainstorm had long since dried up, the wind still blew strong enough to set the forest’s branches crashing and rattling against each other in a constant, deafening rhythm. Although neither the Strigany nor their mounts could hear anything, apart from the steady roar of the wind in the trees, it didn’t stop Dannie’s mare from smelling the danger that lay ahead.
She stopped suddenly, and, when Dannie nudged her with her heels, she stubbornly refused to walk on. Instead, she shifted nervously from side to side, and whinnied a warning.
“What’s up with her?” Mihai asked.
“Something,” Dannie frowned. “Something ahead, something she doesn’t like.”
Both men turned to look along the deer path that they had been following. Apart from the constant flurries of falling brown leaves there was no movement. There was certainly no sign of any danger.
“Whatever it is, we should check it out,” Mihai decided, eyes brightening with the promise of adventure.
