A Journey of the Heart

by Catherine M. Wilson

  Maara beckoned to me. Cautiously I approached her.

  "Look," she said, gesturing at a deep fissure in the trunk of the oak tree.

  I was beginning to recover from my fright, but I didn't understand what she was showing me. Then she stepped into the fissure and was gone. By now it was so dark that I thought she might be lost in shadow. I took a step closer.

  "Come on," she said.

  Her voice echoed in the air around me like the voice of a disembodied spirit. I had heard tales of portals that opened into another world. Perhaps this fissure in the tree was such a portal. I closed my eyes and stepped into it.

  I found myself in deep darkness. After a few moments, I began to see a little. Dim light filtered down from above me, revealing the shape of someone kneeling at my feet. It was Maara. If I had taken another step, I would have fallen over her. She struck a spark that caught tinder and blew it into a tiny flame. Then I saw where we were.

  "We're inside the tree," I said.

  Maara looked up at me. "Of course. Where did you think we were?"

  Although I felt a little foolish, at the same time I felt delight at being in the heart of this ancient oak. It was almost as good as being in another world.

  Maara piled up some of the litter that lay on the ground and set it alight.

  "Bring some firewood," she said.

  When I had a good pile of deadfall stacked outside, I brought an armload in to her. She was mixing batter for oat cakes.

  "You knew about this tree," I said.

  Maara nodded. "This was my hiding place."

  We were sitting side by side, leaning against the smooth, warm wood, our bellies full of the best meal we had enjoyed since we left home. Along with venison, roasted on the coals, we'd had fresh oat cakes with bits of dried fruit in them. Now we were sharing a pot of fragrant tea.

  My hunger satisfied, my body warmed, my heart at ease with Maara beside me, I was only half awake, so comfortable that I nearly missed the meaning of what she told me.

  "Your hiding place?"

  Maara sighed. "We don't have to talk about this now."

  "Is it a sad story?"

  "Not anymore," she said.

  "Then tell me."

  "I was an outlaw. I told you that."

  I took her hand and waited for her to go on.

  "It was just after harvest time. The weather was warm and fine. I felt safe in the forest, but every day I moved my camp, in case I was still pursued. After several months went by, I grew careless. By then winter had come, and I had made a shelter. One day when I returned home, I found my shelter torn to pieces, my food stores gone. The furs from animals I'd trapped, that clothed me and kept me warm at night, they were gone too. I had lost everything that made life possible. I was left with only what I had on me, my clothing, my bow and a few arrows, a rabbit I had snared that morning. They weren't satisfied with destroying the things I needed to live. They came after me. I had no time to hunt, no time to sleep. My pursuers hunted as the wolf hunts. They kept me moving."

  "As the wolf hunts?"

  "When wolves hunt an animal too large or too dangerous to bring down, like an elk or a boar, two or three of them together run ahead of the pack and give chase. When they tire, they fall back, and others replace them. Turn by turn, they press their quarry, until it can run no farther."

  "Is that how the northerners caught Breda?"

  Maara glanced at me, surprised. "Yes, I believe so. What made you think of it?"

  "You said something at the time. You said they ran after him until they ran him down."

  "Hunters learn from other hunters," she said. "I once heard that it was the wolf who taught humankind to hunt."

  I remembered my fearful dreams of Breda running from his pursuers, and I saw in my mind's eye an image of those who had pursued Maara. In my mind they had the golden eyes, the lolling tongues of wolves.

  "It was long past the time I wanted to give up," said Maara, "but my body refused to yield. I would stop to rest, intending to stay where I was until they caught me. As soon as I heard them coming, my body insisted on running away.

  "When I came to the stream to drink, a bird began to sing. A songbird in the forest in winter is a rare thing. I felt it sang for me. I followed it for quite a distance, until it perched in the branches of this tree. I didn't see the fissure in the trunk at first. As I stood listening to the bird, a shaft of sunlight fell across it."

  "The bird led you here?"

  "The forest led me here. The bird was its messenger."

  "There are tales like that."

  "Are there? Will you tell them?"

  "Of course."

  I leaned my head against her shoulder, thinking pleasant thoughts of all the evenings we would spend together here. We would have time for talking, for storytelling, for lovemaking. I was perfectly content.

  I don't remember Maara putting me to bed. I didn't wake until late the next morning. Oat cakes lay warming in the ashes of the fire, and tendrils of steam from a pot of tea coiled into the air. I was finishing the last oat cake when Maara returned.

  "I hope you already had your breakfast," I said, "because I've just eaten everything in sight."

  She laughed. "It's a good thing I found this," she said, and held up the body of a hare.

  While Maara dressed the hare, I examined our new home. The hollow part of the tree trunk extended several feet above our heads. A dozen people might fit comfortably inside it. Cracks above us let daylight in and let the smoke of our fire out. Except for the place that Maara had cleared for our bed, the floor was covered with litter. I went outside and gathered several armloads of bracken. Some I bound together to make a broom to sweep the litter out. I tied the rest in bunches and hung it up to dry, intending to use it to make us a soft bed.

  In a crevice I found a clump of feathers, tied together with a leather thong. I held it out for Maara to see.

  "An offering," she said. "From the forest people."

  I hardly knew which question to ask her first, so I asked them all at once.

  "Who are the forest people? Is this a sacred tree? Will they be angry?"

  "I doubt we'll ever see them," said Maara. "When I was here before, I knew they were close by, but they never showed themselves. Sometimes I left food for them, if I had anything to spare."

  I put the feather offering back in the crevice where I found it. "If this is a sacred tree, won't they object to our living here?"

  She shrugged. "I hope not."

  "How long did you live here before?"

  "Not long," she said. "My pursuers never found my hiding place, but they never stopped looking for me. I couldn't stay in the tree all the time. I had to find food. I had to make a fire. Eventually they would have found me. I had to move on."

  "Where did you go?"

  "I went to Merin's house."

  62. The Past

  All morning we spent on housekeeping. Maara made a meat safe out of hazel wands and set it in the branches of the tree. The air was cold enough to keep the meat for another week or two. What we couldn't eat in that time, we hung up to smoke.

  It was a pleasant day, windless and a little warmer than the day before. After a dark morning, the sun came out to cast bright patterns on the forest floor. Maara made a fire out in the open, close by the brook, and we cooked and ate the hare for lunch. Then she brought both our packs outside and undid them, spreading our belongings on the ground. I watched with curiosity as she picked out a change of clothing for each of us. She had me do up our packs and put them away, while she made our clean clothes into a bundle.

  "Let's go," she said, and got to her feet.

  "Where are we going?"

  She smiled. "You'll see."

  For the best part of an hour we followed the brook upstream. The ground rose steadily until the gentle walk uphill became almost a climb. At last we reached a large rock that emerged from the ground beside the brook. It would be a lovely place in summer. The surface of the rock was
flat, worn smooth by flowing water, perfect for sunbathing, and beside it a fall of water had hollowed out a swimming hole. This time of year it made me shiver just to think about it.

  Maara stood on the rock, examining the ground beside it until she spotted something half-concealed under a pile of leaves. It was a wide plank, rough-hewn, made by human hands. I thought at first it must once have served as a bridge, although the brook was hardly wide enough to need one. Maara set one end of the plank on the rock's edge and slid the other under the waterfall, diverting the water so that it ran across the rock and began to fill a hollow where once the fall of water had scoured it. The hollow proved deeper than it looked, a dozen inches at the deepest part.

  I thought I understood what Maara intended, but I was puzzled.

  "Why did we have to come so far to do our laundry?" I asked her.

  "We're not going to wash our clothes," she said. "We're going to wash ourselves."

  I knelt and dipped my hand into the water, then quickly drew it back. "It's freezing."

  Maara smiled. "Gather some firewood. Bring some stones. Like this."

  She held up both hands to show me that she wanted stones the size of a loaf of bread. By the time I had collected half a dozen, she had a fire burning there on the rock beside the hollow. I knew what she was doing. It was a trick I had used to heat water when I didn't have a cooking pot. I would fill a leather bag -- a water skin or even a carrying bag as long as it was watertight -- and drop hot rocks into it. We heated the stones in the fire, then nudged them into the water.

  Maara took a handful of tubers from the pocket of her tunic and shredded them on the surface of the rock.

  "You first," she said.

  I hated the thought of undressing in the cold. I wished I had worn my cloak, so that I could undress under it. As quickly as I could, I hurried out of my clothes and into the water. It was only lukewarm, but the fire helped keep me warm enough.

  Maara wrapped the shredded tubers in a bit of cloth and soaked them, squeezing them until they made a lather. Then she began to scrub me. The tubers worked almost as well as soap. They had a delicate scent, like a meadow of wildflowers.

  "Did you once bathe here?" I asked her.

  "Yes."

  "When you were an outlaw?"

  Her hands paused for the briefest moment.

  "Before that?"

  She nodded.

  At once I understood the implications of what she had told me. "How far is Elen's house from here?"

  "Far enough."

  "How many days?"

  "We came here in summertime," she said.

  "You and Elen?"

  "Elen and her companions."

  When I would have asked her more, she gently pushed me back into the water so that she could wash my hair. While she finger-combed the tangles out, she tried to talk of other things, but I was not so easily distracted.

  "Won't you be in danger here?" I asked her.

  "Not if no one finds us."

  "What if someone does?"

  "I told you," she said. "This forest is a boundary. No one comes here."

  "Elen came here."

  "Only in summer."

  "If someone did come, would they know you?"

  She shrugged. "They forgot about me long ago."

  But the more she tried to reassure me, the more fearful I became.

  "You shouldn't have come back here," I said.

  Maara stopped what she was doing and met my eyes. "Where else should we have gone?"

  "Anywhere else."

  "There was nowhere else."

  I couldn't argue with her. I was on the verge of tears.

  "Hush," she said. "Let's not borrow trouble. I know this place. We can survive the winter here. We might even manage to live well and in some comfort. Should we have begged the mercy of the northern tribes, or challenged the mountains to the east or some other place where I've never been?"

  She was right. Still I couldn't put away my fear, until her lips on mine broke the spiral of my worried thoughts and brought me entirely into the present moment. It was a long kiss. I was sorry when it ended.

  Maara helped me to my feet and dried me with my dirty shirt. While I put my clean clothes on, she undressed and got into the water. Goosebumps appeared along her arms. The water must be cold by now. I resolved that next time she would bathe first.

  While Maara shredded more of the tubers and wrapped them in the cloth, I built up the fire. Then I took the cloth from her and began to scrub her back. The water on her skin deepened its color. Although it was only midafternoon, the light had begun to fade, and Maara's body took on the dark colors of the forest.

  I set the cloth aside and used my hands. Her skin was smooth, slippery with lather. As I ran my hands across her back, I found the scars, not many, invisible to the eye. As often as I'd bathed her, I had never noticed them before. Scars on the back are not a warrior's scars.

  They should have made me angry. Instead they made me cry. Silent tears spilled down my face. I was behind her. She didn't see them. I kissed the nape of her neck and used her hair to wipe my tears away.

  It was cold, now that the sun had gone. The walk home took longer, because of the dark. We had wrapped our wet hair up in our dirty shirts and wore our dirty trousers like shawls around our shoulders. I would have made fun of our outlandish costumes, if I had been lighthearted.

  Safe inside the hollow tree, we dried our hair by the fire. Maara had hung the deerskin across the fissure in the tree trunk to keep out the draft, and the small space inside the tree warmed quickly. Soon we were in our shirtsleeves. We hadn't spoken more than a word or two since our conversation at the bathing rock. Maara seemed lost inside herself, and I couldn't let go of the thought that we had fled a place where there was a price on my head, only to come to a place where there was a price on hers.

  I hoped she was right about no one coming here. The signs of our presence were everywhere. We had washed the remains of our fire from the surface of the bathing rock, but it had left its mark. The places where we gathered wood, where Maara had dug the tubers, where we knelt beside the brook to fill our water skins, all remembered us. Maara had taught me to read the signs left by others. I was not blind to the signs we left.

  Something else disturbed me. It felt almost like desire, though it was prompted, not by love, but by a hunger I had never felt before. I thought about her body, its shapes and textures, the way her wet skin had shone like bronze in the firelight. Her body kept her secrets, but my hands had searched them out. In her body was the memory of things her mind had long forgotten. Her body expected pain and was surprised by pleasure. Her body defended her, even against love.

  "You might as well ask me now," she said.

  I stared at her. I didn't understand.

  "I was an outlaw. Haven't you ever wondered why?"

  I had, of course, but one doesn't ask such a question lightly. I knew the danger of speculation, of thinking things that might not be true, yet the thought could make them seem so, and I had tried not to wonder.

  "If you had asked," she said, "I would have told you."

  "I knew you'd tell me when you were ready."

  "Are you ready to hear it?"

  "Whatever you did, it makes no difference to me," I said.

  "I killed someone."

  "So did I."

  "No," she said. "I killed a man in his bed. I killed him while he slept."

  "Why?"

  "He was Elen's husband."

  "What did he do?"

  She didn't understand my question.

  "Did he hurt someone? You? Or Elen?"

  Maara's eyes glittered in the firelight. "Don't think so well of me. I killed him out of jealousy, I think."

  Maara sighed and gazed into the fire. "She married him for the sake of an alliance. She still took me into her bed when he was away, and when he was at home, sometimes she came to mine. Even after she began to love him, she still came to me."

  "How do
you know she loved him?"

  "She told me so."

  How cruel, I thought, but I kept my opinion to myself.

  "When I used to sleep among the other companions," she said, "I heard them whispering their secrets to one another. They talked of who had caught their eye, of who had offered them a flower or danced for them at the bonfire. Elen began to do the same with me. She would tell me things he said and did and ask me what I thought they meant. I knew what she wanted to hear. She wanted to believe he loved her. I told her that anyone would love her when they knew her, but of course I was speaking for myself."

  Maara fell silent. I watched her eyes grow fierce as she remembered a time that had caused her so much pain. My heart ached for her.

  "Time went by," she said, "and Elen didn't come to my bed anymore. At first she made excuses, although she owed me no explanation, but after a while it was as if there had never been any intimacy between us. She treated me as she treated the others, and that hurt most of all. More than the loss of her body, I grieved the loss of her friendship."

  Now my heart began to ache for myself, and jealousy left its sour taste in my mouth.

  "I did the unthinkable," said Maara. "I complained to her. I begged her to spare some time for me. I accused her of throwing me away." Maara glared at me, as she must have glared at Elen. "Worst of all, I spoke before others. I didn't care about the consequences. I spoke my heart. I had no right to speak to her like that. She was a married woman, and I was just a slave. She should have had me punished for it, but she treated me with kindness. She took me aside and told me she was sorry she hadn't spoken to me before. Her husband was jealous, she said, and she intended to keep herself for him, because she loved him. She was kind, but she made it clear to me that I had lost her."

  There was so much pain in Maara's eyes that I wanted her to stop. As if she had heard my thoughts, she said, "I'll never speak of this again. Hear it now, or not at all."

  "Go on," I said.

  "Elen put me to bed that night and lay down beside me, although she wouldn't let me touch her. I kept my tears inside, but she knew they were there. She tried to comfort me, and while she was beside me, I was comforted a little. At last she fell asleep. I watched her until the lamp went out. The next thing I knew someone was shaking me awake. It was Elen, telling me I had to leave the house. Then I saw the blood. We were both covered with it, and the knife was still in my hand."