by S. A. Swann
***
Lilly turned around, and when she saw Uldolf, her eyes widened.
“Ulfie!” she cried.
For a few moments, Uldolf was too stunned to react.
She started running toward him, waving her arm as if she was trying to get his attention. “Ulfie! Ulfie! Ulfie!”
Oh, no ...
Uldolf vaulted over the wall because what was about to happen was painfully obvious. “Lilly, no! Don't run.”
But his warning was too late. She only ran a few steps before her foot bogged down in the soft ground and she tumbled, face first, into a pile of newly turned earth. She pushed herself up on her hands and knees, sputtering, coated with dirt from her brow down.
She started sobbing.
Uldolf reached her and bent down to extend his arm to help her up. Instead of grabbing his arm, she threw her arms around him in a hug that knocked him enough off-balance that he almost went facedown in the dirt on top of her.
“Ulfie.” She sobbed into his shoulder.
Uldolf felt his face redden. He wrapped his arm around her and helped Lilly to her feet. She was shaking so hard that he could hear her teeth chatter.
“She's terrified,” he whispered.
His parents had walked into the field after him, using the gate.
Burthe stepped in front of him with a little “harrumph” that made Uldolf s face burn a little hotter. “Let me see her head.”
Uldolf nodded and tried to turn Lilly toward his mother. Lilly wouldn't cooperate, refusing to let go of him. Burthe watched him struggle for a few futile moments, then sighed, walked over behind Uldolf, and lifted Lilly's chin off of Uldolf s shoulder so she could look into her face.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Filthy.”
“Her head, she was bleeding ...”
Burthe tsked a few times and moved Lilly's hair around. Lilly winced, yanking away and burying her face in Uldolf's neck.
“I guess she likes you,” Burthe said finally.
Uldolf patted the back of Lilly's head. “But is she all right?”
“She's fine. Some stitches opened up and bled a little, but the scar's holding together. I don't think I'll need to put new ones in.” Burthe walked around in front of Uldolf, watching Gedim as he examined the elk. “She is certainly touched by the gods if the animal that killed that beast didn't turn its attention to her.”
“You think it was here when she came outside?”
“Look at her, Uldolf. You said yourself, she's terrified. Besides, no predator would abandon a fresh kill unless it was scared off.” Burthe's voice lowered. “Take her inside. Whatever killed it may still be out here somewhere.”
Uldolf remembered the words of the knight from yesterday. Has your farm been troubled lately ...by strange beasts? Men or animals killed or injured?
Could this have something to do with Lilly?
Uldolf let the nonsensical thought go. “Come on, Lilly. We'll get you cleaned up.”
As he led her back to the cottage, he tried to cheer her up. “So Hilde taught you my name, huh? Did she tell you that I find that nickname really irritating?”
“Ulfie,” she whispered.
“No, I guess she didn't.”
She grabbed his arm and hugged it, stopping him. He looked down at her. She squeezed her eyes shut, and nearly shook with the effort of speaking. “I ...I...”
After seeing her mute for so long, he was amazed that she was speaking, but he was also scared at the effort he saw in her face. It was almost as if trying to speak was painful for her. “It's all right, Lilly. Don't force it.”
She shook her head violently. “I ... I ... I never h-h-hurt Ulfie.”
“What?”
“I will never hurt you, Ulfie.”
Uldolf thought of how panicked he must have looked, running outside. “You just scared me, running off like that.”
She buried her head in his shoulder and whispered, “Ulfie.”
“Just don't do it again.”
She didn't say anything more as he walked her back to the cottage. Apparently, the one sentence had taken a lot out of her.
***
“What killed it?” Burthe asked.
Gedim looked up from the carcass and shook his head. “I don't really know. The tracks here look like a wolf, but they're too big, and there aren't enough of them. You'd need a whole pack to take on a bull this size—but a pack would pick on an animal that's already sick or injured, or a calf.”
“A mountain cat?”
“Maybe.” Gedim stood up and looked around. “You think it's still here?”
“No,” Gedim said. “I think we would have heard it, whatever it was. I'm surprised we didn't hear it make the kill in the first place.”
“I'm not, the way you snore.” Burthe turned to look at Uldolf leading the girl back to the cottage. “And it appears that Lilly heard it.”
“Urn.”
“Well,” Burthe went on, “this should certainly stock the larder for a while. It seems that the gods have favored more than our guest, this time.”
“Uh-huh.” Gedim stared off toward the woods.
“What is the matter, husband?”
Gedim shook his head. “Nothing. It's obvious what happened. Some animal attacked this elk off in the woods somewhere, and this bull was strong enough to stumble out here, and our guest managed to scare the animal off...”
“It seems her name's Lilly.”
Gedim looked at her a moment. “Oh, yes. Lilly scared the animal off.”
“Are you sure nothing's wrong?”
Gedim shook his head. “Yes. And you're right. This is a stroke of luck—as long as we butcher it before some Germans walk by and decide we're poaching. This meat needs to be dressed and stored today. Have Uldolf bring the wheelbarrow and some knives out here.”
***
As the day progressed, the dressing and disposition of the carcass took all of Gedim's attention, so much so that he completely forgot the unease he had felt earlier. As he had said, it was obvious what had happened. The elk had stumbled into their field and collapsed from its wounds.
Despite the marks he saw, leading back into the woods ...
The elk was nearly sixteen hundred pounds. There wasn't any predator Gedim knew of that could have dragged it here.
Chapter 12
By midafternoon the next day, despite Uldolf s best efforts, about half the tree was still there. Gedim had done his best to work around the obstruction, but it was now at the point where the fallen tree was holding up the plowing. So now, with the sun halfway down in the sky, both Gedim and Uldolf were working to clear it.
They worked in silence, removing the last few branches from the tree's crown. After nearly an hour Gedim said to his son, “You've been awfully quiet lately.”
Uldolf looked up from the limb he was chopping. He shrugged and looked back down at his work. When it appeared that Uldolf had nothing to say, Gedim went back to the limb he was working on.
He was finding it both frustrating and a source of pride that his one-armed son was disassembling the tree almost twice as fast as Gedim himself was. Almost to the point that it might actually go faster if Gedim wasn't in the way.
They worked in silence for a few more minutes before Uldolf asked him, “That elk. That was a good stroke of luck, wasn't it?”
“The best we've had in quite a while.”
Uldolf nodded, chopping harder. He was shirtless, and his upper body was coated with sweat. “If it hadn't...”
Gedim lowered his axe. “Son, 'might haves' are pointless.”
Uldolf kept at the limb. It was nearly twice as thick as his thigh, and Uldolf was halfway through it. Each blow of the blade threw up splinters and wood chips. They adhered to Uldolf s sweaty arm, making it look as if he had sprouted a thick coat of blond fur below the elbow.
“What would we have done with her?” Uldolf asked, breathing the words between blows of the axe. “We were nearly out of fo
od.”
“Not 'nearly.'“
Uldolf shook his head and stopped chopping. After a moment, he asked, “Did you ever talk about giving me up?”
“Don't be ridiculous.”
“Am I?” Uldolf shrugged his right shoulder. Only a slight hollow marked where an arm had been. “A crippled child? That had to be a huge burden.”
Gedim sighed. “You've been our son since we took you in.”
Uldolf started attacking the branch again.
“Now, hold on.” Gedim walked up so only the trunk of the tree was between them. “Stop!”
The axe stopped moving, but Uldolf didn't look up.
“I should toss you out of the house just for talking such nonsense.” Gedim folded his arms. “If you so much as hint to my wife that she doesn't love you as much as the woman who bore you, I will personally beat you within a hair's breadth of living.”
Uldolf nodded.
“We took you in because we loved your first family, and we loved you— Look at me, you self-pitying brat.” Uldolf raised his head, and Gedim could see tears. The sight filled him with anger, frustration, and an aching sadness. “Damn it, son, are you going to doubt me now?”
“No, Father.”
Gedim stood there while Uldolf resumed chopping the branch. He was dumbfounded about what to do next. He thought those wounds were long healed. He had long ago dropped the “adopted” when he thought of Uldolf. Uldolf was as much his son as if he'd been born of his own flesh.
Uldolf had certainly come into their house with the requisite blood and tears. The memory was seared in Gedim's brain; he could still taste the smoke, smell the blood.
He could still see his uncle's chambers as he had found them. He remembered stepping over the eviscerated corpse of his five-year-old niece Jawgede, Uldolf s little sister. He remembered the blood streaking the walls, the tapestries hanging in rags. He remembered the small tearing sounds as the soles of his boots adhered to the blood on the floor.
He remembered a woman's hand, bejeweled and manicured, discarded in a soldier's empty helmet; a boot holding a leg from the knee down, somehow standing by itself; the head belonging to the chieftain of Mejdân, Radwen Seigson, staring at him from beneath half a table.
And he remembered finding his ten-year-old nephew, Radwen's son Uldolf, bleeding to death from his shoulder.
Gedim didn't remember exactly how he had gotten the boy out of that hell, but he remembered the boy's delirious pleas. The same two words, over and over again.
“P-please, stop.”
Uldolf never described what had happened in that room, and Gedim had never asked. Uldolf had said more than once that the fever from the wound had stolen much of his memory. Though sometimes Gedim heard his son cry out in his sleep, and wondered if Uldolf simply didn't want to remember.
***
Uldolf felt something snap under his axe, and he took a jump backward as the weight of the limb tore it free of the small amount of wood holding it upright. It fell next to him with a satisfying crunch.
He stared at it for a few moments, trying to think of something to say that wouldn't anger his father more than he'd been angered already. His father's words still stung him, but probably not quite as much as Uldolf s words had stung his father. He couldn't question the faithfulness of his parents, and certainly couldn't compare them to his first mother and father.
Both of them had proved themselves beyond any accident of birth. They had chosen him, crippled, half dead, and fevered ...
“Father,” Uldolf said finally.
“What?” Gedim looked up from gathering stray branches from under the fallen tree.
“You're right, I am a self-pitying brat. I'm sorry.”
“Forget it, son.”
No, Uldolf thought, I shouldn't. How many parents out there would just give up on half a child, even one that was their own flesh and blood?
I should have it carved on the back of the arm I still have: “Be grateful for what the gods have given you.”
“Ulfie!”
Uldolf looked up from his wood-chip-covered arm to see his mother with her arm around the shoulders of a briefly unfamiliar woman. The new person had long midnight-black hair that glistened in the fading afternoon light.
Then Uldolf saw the vivid green eyes, the cock of her head, and the smile. The confusion must have been visible on his face because she repeated, slower, “Ulfie?”
Uldolf looked at his mother. “What did you do?”
“I took some oak gall and prepared a dye. It seemed that blaze of red hair would attract attention.”
Lilly held up a full bucket of water toward Uldolf.
“And she's gotten to the point where she's well enough to get into trouble if we don't give her something to do. You men looked thirsty.”
Gedim came around the tree, shaking his head. “Thank you, my lady.” He gave Lilly a small bow before pulling the ladle out of the bucket.
Uldolf frowned. “Her shoulder. Should she be carrying that?”
“Don't worry,” Burthe said. “She's stronger than she looks. And I took out the last stitches this morning.”
When Gedim was done, Lilly walked over to Uldolf, still holding out the bucket. “You can put that down if you want,” Uldolf told her.
“I'm going to leave her to watch over you two.” Burthe turned to go.
Uldolf took a step toward his mother, but he walked into a bucket that swung into his path at chest level. Water splashed his chest and ran down his arm.
His father laughed. “I do believe you should take a drink from the young woman.”
Lilly nodded at him. “Ulfie,” she said.
Uldolf sighed, grabbed the ladle, and took a drink.
***
Lilly stayed, watching them for the rest of the afternoon. She sat on the wall about three yards from where the trunk had crashed through. Every time Uldolf glanced in her direction, she would smile at him. Uldolf would respond by turning away and chopping harder.
It didn't keep him from imagining her sitting there, rocking her legs back and forth.
He would have imagined that dyeing her hair such a dark color would have made her less attractive. However, all the black hair did was make Uldolf realize how much her original fiery mane had distracted from the rest of her features. Even with the angry red gash above her right eye, her face was something that men more talented than he wrote lyric poems about.
And he shouldn't be thinking that way about her. The more she recovered, the more he saw that there had to be a family somewhere, agonized about losing her. Such a beauty would almost certainly be betrothed to someone, if not married already. As delicate and unmarked as her skin was, Uldolf strongly doubted that that family, or her absent husband, worked the land like him.
Yesterday, after she had blurted out a complete sentence, he had tried to ask her about her family, but she had only responded by shaking her head and saying, “No,” or “Ulfie.” When he had asked her where she lived, she had said, “Here,” and smiled at him.
Uldolf still didn't know if she didn't understand his questions, couldn't yet form an answer, or was having fun at his expense.
Still, she was starting to speak again. And eventually they'd be able to have her tell them where her people were. Then I'll take her home, Uldolf told himself.
And if she was of noble birth, it was near certain that there would be a reward for the man who brought her safely home. That might give his family the resources to make it through another winter. He hoped that would make taking her home easier.
Besides, betrothed or not, a woman with such a generous, happy spirit deserved more than half a man.
***
By the time the sun reached the tops of the trees on the western edge of the field, the fallen oak was finally so much cordwood. Lilly surprised him, again, by announcing, “I help!”
She joined him and his father as they moved the segmented logs off of the field. At first she would lift one and Uldolf woul
d take it from her, but then she'd just smile and grab another, larger log. He worried about her shoulder; he could vividly remember her right hand shaking as she fastened his cloak around herself.
However, from all appearances, the wound no longer bothered her. And, whatever her family history might have been, she showed no aversion to working.
Once they had removed all the branches from the main trunk, they chopped the trunk itself into four segments. When Gedim came back with the horse and a harness, they had to push the large sections so the horse could drag them out of the divots the tree had dug in the soft earth.
Uldolf and Lilly rocked the sections as his father drove the horse forward. Lilly had placed herself shoulder to shoulder with Uldolf so that her arm touched his side. As the sweaty skin of her forearm slid against him, he could feel her muscles flex and tense.
Like his mother had said, she was stronger than she looked.
And not just physically, Uldolf thought.
The tree was gone before the sun.
Chapter 13
Now that she was well, Lilly's words “I help” became a familiar phrase around the household. Initially, because of her communication difficulties, and her apparent lack of any practical knowledge of how to do anything, Uldolf s parents met that phrase with some trepidation. But like her strength, she had reserves of intelligence that simply weren't apparent on the surface. Just by watching Burthe prepare one meal, she was able to cook a passable stew on her own. And after a few minutes with Gedim, she was able to hitch up the plow as if she had been working the farm all her life.
It made Uldolf feel better about bringing her into the house. The more tasks she did, the more she made up for the extra food she ate. It was something that Lilly seemed to understand, and Uldolf suspected that it drove her statements of “I help.”
In a strange way, he was proud of her. Not just the intelligence and the strength, both of which he suspected she was born to and was just reclaiming as she healed. What most gratified him was her selflessness, her desire to help everyone.
