Dapple: A Hwarhath Historical Romance

by Eleanor Arnason

  So, after several warnings and a final mistake, Ahl received her beating. By this time she was fourteen or fifteen, with a coat of fur made thick by cold weather. The fur protected her, though not entirely; and later, when she remembered the experience, it seemed that shame was the worst part: to stand naked on the ship’s deck, trying to remain impassive, while Ki used the rope she had failed to tie across her back.

  Around her, the other sailors did their work. They didn’t watch directly, of course, but there were sideways glances, some embarrassed and others approving. Overhead the sky was cloudless. The ship moved smoothly through a bright blue ocean.

  The next day she felt every bruise. Ki gave her another unpleasant cleaning job. All day she scraped, keeping her lips pressed together. In the evening she went on deck, less stiff than she’d been earlier, but tired and still sore. Ahl leaned on the rail and looked out at the ocean. In the distance, rays of sunlight slanted between grey clouds. Life was not entirely easy, she thought.

  After a while, Ki’s lover Hasu Ahl came next to her. Ahl had been named after the woman, for reasons that don’t come into this story, and they were alike in several ways, being both tall and thin, with small breasts and large strong, capable hands. The main difference between them was their fur. Hasu Ahl’s was dark grey, like the clouds which filled the sky, and her coloring was solid. Our Ahl was pale as fog. In addition, she had kept her baby spots. Dim and blurry, they dotted her shoulders and upper arms. Because of these, her childhood name had been Dapple.

  Hasu Ahl asked how she felt.

  “I’ve been better.”

  They became silent, both leaning on the rail. Finally Hasu Ahl said, “There’s a story about your childhood that no one has told you. When you were a baby, a witch predicted that you would be important when you grew up. She didn’t know in what way. I know this story, as do your mother and Ki and a few other people. But we didn’t want your entire family peering at you and wondering, and we didn’t want you to become vain or worried; so we kept quiet.

  “It’s possible that Ki’s anger is due in part to this. She looks at you and thinks, ‘Where is the gift that was promised us?’ All we can see —aside from intelligence, which you obviously have — is carelessness and lack of attention.”

  What could she say? She was inattentive because her mind was full of stories, though the character who’d been like Ki had vanished. Now there was an orphan girl with no close relatives, ignored by everyone, except her three companions: the hero, the tli, and the stone. They cared for her in their different ways: the hero with nobility, the tli with jokes, and the stone with solid friendliness. But she’d never told anyone about her ideas. “I’m not yet fifteen,” Ahl said.

  “There’s time for you to change,” Hasu Ahl admitted. “But not if you keep doing things that endanger the ship and yourself. Ki has promised that if you’re careless again, she’ll beat you a second time, and the beating will be worse.”

  After that, Hasu Ahl left. Well, thought our heroine, this was certainly a confusing conversation. Ki’s lover had threatened her with something like fame and with another beating. Adults were beyond comprehension.

  Her concentration improved, and she became an adequate sailor, though Ki said she would never be a captain. “Or a second-in-command, like your namesake, my Ahl. Whatever your gift may be, it isn’t sailing.”

  Her time on board was mostly happy. She made friends with the younger members of the crew, and she learned to love the ocean as a sailor does, knowing how dangerous it can be. The coast of the Great Southern Continent was dotted with harbor towns. Ahl visited many of these, exploring the steep narrow streets and multi-leveled marketplaces. One night at a festival, she made love for the first time. Her lover was a girl with black fur and pale yellow eyes. In the torchlight, the girl’s pupils expanded, till they lay across her irises like bars of iron or narrow windows that opened into a starless night.

  What a fine image! But what could Ahl do with it?

  Later, in that same port, she came to an unwalled tavern. Vines grew over the roof. Underneath were benches. Perig sat on one, a cup in his hand. She shouted his name. He glanced up and smiled, then his gaze slid away. Was she that old? Had she become a woman? Maybe, she thought, remembering the black-furred girl.

  Where was Cholkwa? In the south, Perig said.

  Because the place was unwalled and public, she was able to sit down. The hostess brought halin. She tasted it, savoring the sharp bitterness. It was the taste of adulthood.

  “Watch out,” said Perig. “That stuff can make you sick.” Was his company here? Were they acting? Ahl asked. Yes. The next night, in the town square. “I’ll come,” said Ahl with decision. Perig glanced at her, obviously pleased.

  The play was about a hero, of course: a man who suspected that the senior women in his family, his mother and her sisters, had committed a crime. If his suspicion was true, their behavior threatened the family’s survival. But no man can treat any woman with violence, and no man should turn against his mother. And what if he were wrong? Maybe they were innocent. Taking one look at the women, Ahl knew they were villains. But the hero didn’t have her sharpness of vision. So he blundered through the play, trying to discover the truth. Men died, mostly at his hands, and most of them his kin. Finally he was hacked down, while the women looked on. A messenger arrived, denouncing them. Their family was declared untouchable. No one would deal with them in the future. Unable to interbreed, the family would vanish. The monstrous women listened like blocks of stone. Nothing could affect their stubborn arrogance.

  A terrible story, but also beautiful. Perig was the hero and shone like a diamond. The three men playing the women were grimly convincing. Ahl felt as if a sword had gone through her chest. Her stories were nothing next to this.

  Afterward, Ahl found Perig in the open tavern. Torches flared in a cool ocean wind, and his fur—touched with white over the shoulders — moved a little, ruffled. Ahl tried to explain how lovely and painful the play had been.

  He listened, giving her an occasional quick glance. “This is the way it’s supposed to be,” he said finally. “Like a blade going to a vital spot.”

  “Is it impossible to have a happy ending?” she asked, after she finished praising. “In this kind of play, yes.”

  “I liked the hero so much. There should have been another solution.” “Well,” said Perig. “He could have killed his mother and aunts, then killed himself. It would have saved his family, but he wasn’t sure they were criminals.”

  “Of course they were!”

  “You were in the audience,” said Perig. “Where I was standing, in the middle of the situation, the truth was less evident; and no man should find it easy to kill his mother.”

  “I was right, years ago,” Ahl said suddenly. “This is what I want to do. Act in plays.”

  Perig looked unhappy.

  She told him about her attempts to weave and be a sailor, then about the plays she had acted in the hayloft and the stories in her mind. For the first time, she realized that the stories had scenes. She knew how the hero moved, like Perig acting a hero. The tli had Cholkwa’s brisk step and mocking voice. The stone was a stone. Only the girl was blurry. She didn’t tell Perig about the scenes. Embarrassing to admit that this quiet aging man lived in her mind, along with his lover and a stone. But she did tell him that she told stories.

  He listened, then said, “If you were a boy, I’d go to your family and ask for you as an apprentice — if not this year, then next year. But I can’t, Ahl. They’d refuse me and be so angry I might lose their friendship.”

  “What am I to do?” asked Ahl.

  “That’s a question I can’t answer,” said Perig.

  A day later, her ship left the harbor. On the long trip home, Ahl considered her future. She’d seen other companies of actors. Perig and Cholkwa were clearly the best, but neither one of them would be willing to train her. Nor would any company that knew she was female. But most women in th
is part of the world were broad and full-breasted, and she was an entirely different type. People before, strangers, had mistaken her for a boy. Think of all the years she had acted in her loft, striding like Perig or mimicking Cholkwa’s gait. Surely she had learned something!

  She was seventeen and good at nothing. In spite of the witch’s prediction, it wasn’t likely she’d ever be important. It seemed to her now that nothing had ever interested her except the making of stories — not the linked verse epics that people recited on winter evenings, nor the tales that women told to children, but proper stories, like the ones that Perig and Cholkwa acted.

  Before they reached Helwar, Ahl had decided to disguise herself as a boy and run away.

  First, of course, she had to spend the winter at home. Much of her time was taken by her family. When she could, she watched her uncles and male cousins. How did they stand and move? What were their gestures? How did they speak?

  The family warehouse was only half-full, she discovered. This became her theater, lit by high windows or (sometimes) by a lamp. She’d bought a square metal mirror in the south. Ahl leaned it against a wall. If she stood at a distance, she could see herself, dressed in a tunic stolen from a cousin and embroidered in the male style. Whenever possible, she practiced being a man, striding across the wood floor, turning and gesturing, speaking lines she remembered out of plays. Behind her were stacks of new-cut lumber. The fresh, sweet aroma of sawdust filled the air. In later life, she said this was the smell of need and possibility.

  In spring, her ship went south again. Her bag, carefully packed, held boy’s clothing, a knife and all her money.

  In a town in the far south, she found an acting company, doing one of Perig’s plays in ragged costumes. It was one she’d seen. They’d cut out parts.

  So, thought Ahl. That evening, she took her bag and crept off the ship. The night was foggy, and the damp air smelled of unfamiliar vegetation. In an alley, she changed clothing, binding her four breasts flat with strips of cloth. She already knew where the actors were staying: a run-down inn by the harbor, not the kind of place that decent female sailors would visit. Walking through the dark streets, bag over her shoulder, she was excited and afraid.

  Here, in this town, she was at the southern edge of civilization. Who could tell what the inland folk were like? Though she had never heard of any lineage that harmed women. If things got dangerous, she could pull off her tunic, revealing her real self.

  On the other hand, there might be monsters; and they did harm women. Pulling off her tunic would do no good if something with fangs and scales came out of the forest. At most, the thing might thank her for removing the wrapping on its dinner.

  If she wanted to turn back, now was the time. She could be a less-than-good sailor. She could go home and look for another trade. There were plenty in Helwar, and women could do most of them. She hadn’t really wanted to fish in the ocean, not after she killed the fish in the basin. As for the other male activities, let them have fighting and hunting dangerous animals! Let them log and handle heavy timbers! Why should women risk their lives?

  She stopped outside the inn, almost ready to turn around. Then she remembered Perig in the most recent play she’d seen, at the moment when the play’s balance changed. A kinsman lay dead at his feet. It was no longer possible to go back. He’d stood quietly, then lifted his head, opening his mouth in a great cry that was silent. No one in the audience made a noise. Somehow, through his silence and their silence, Ahl heard the cry.

  She would not give that up. Let men have every other kind of danger. This was something they had to share.

  She went in and found the actors, a shabby group. As she had thought, they were short-handed.

  The senior man was pudgy with a scar on one side of his face. “Have you any experience?” he asked.

  “I’ve practiced on my own,” said Ahl.

  The man tilted his head, considering. “You’re almost certainly a runaway, which is bad enough. Even worse, you’ve decided you can act. If I was only one man short, I’d send you off. But two of my men are gone, and if I don’t find someone, we won’t be able to continue.”

  In this manner, she was hired, though the man had two more questions. “How old are you? I won’t take on a child.”

  “Eighteen,” said Ahl.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes,” she answered with indignation. Though she was lying about almost everything else, eighteen was her age.

  Maybe her tone convinced the man. “Very well,” he said, then asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Dapple,” she said.

  “Of no family?”

  She hesitated.

  The man said, “I’ll stop asking questions.”

  She had timed this well. They left the next morning, through fog and drizzling rain. Her comrades on the ship would think she was sleeping. Instead, she trudged beside the actors’ cart, which was pulled by a pair of tsina. Her tunic, made of thick wool, kept out the rain. A broad straw hat covered her head. Oiled boots protected her feet against mud and pools of water.

  From this point on, the story will call her Dapple. It’s the name she picked for herself and the one by which she was known for the rest of her life. Think of her not as Helwar Ahl, the runaway girl, but Dapple the actor, whose lineage did not especially matter, since actors live on the road, in the uncertain regions that lie between family holdings and the obligations of kinship.

  All day they traveled inland, through steep hills covered with forest. Many of the trees were new to her. Riding in the cart, the pudgy man —his name was Manif—told her about the company. They did mostly comedies, though Manif preferred hero plays. “These people in the south are the rudest collection of louts you can imagine. They like nothing, unless it’s full of erect penises and imitations of intercourse; and men and women watch these things together! Shocking!

  “They even like plays about breeding, though I prefer—of course—to give them decent comedies about men having sex with men or women having sex with women. But if they insist on heterosexuality, well, we have to eat.”

  This sounded bad to Dapple, but she was determined to learn. Maybe there was more to comedy than she had realized.

  They made camp by the side of the road. Manif slept in the cart, along with another actor: a man of twenty-five or so, not bad looking. The rest of them pitched a tent. Dapple got an outside place, better for privacy, but also wetter. The rain kept falling. In the cart, Manif and his companion made noise.

  “Into the halin, I notice,” said one of Dapple’s companions.

  “And one another,” a second man added.

  The third man said, “D’you think he’ll go after Dapple here?”

  It was possible, thought Dapple, that she’d done something stupid. Cholkwa had warned her about the south.

  “He won’t if Dapple finds himself a lover quickly,” said the first man.

  This might have been a joke, rather than an offer. Dapple couldn’t tell. She curled up, her back to the others, hoping that no one would touch her. In time, she went to sleep.

  The next day was clear, though the ground remained wet. They ate breakfast, then struck the tent and continued inland. The change in weather made Dapple more cheerful. Maybe the men would make no advances. If they did, she’d find a way to fend them off. They might be shabby and half as good as Perig and Cholkwa, but they didn’t seem to be monsters or savages; and this wasn’t the far north, where a war had gone on for generations, unraveling everything. People on this continent understood right behavior.

  As she thought this, one of the tsina screamed and reared. An arrow was stuck in its throat.

  “Bandits!” cried Manif and shook the reins, crying, “Go, go,” to the animals.

  But the shot animal stumbled, unable to continue; and the second tsin began to lunge, trying to break free of the harness and its comrade. The actors pulled swords. Dapple dove into the edge-of-forest brush. Behind her was shouting. She scram
bled up a hill, her heart beating like a hammer striking an anvil, though more quickly. Up and up, hoping the bandits would not follow. At last she stopped. Her heart felt as if it might break her chest; her lungs hurt; all her breath was gone. Below her on the road was screaming. Not the tsin any longer, she thought. This sound was men.

  When she was able to breathe, she went on, climbing more slowly now. The screaming stopped. Had the bandits noticed her? Had they counted the company? Four of them had been walking, while Manif and his lover rode. But the lover had been lying in back, under the awning, apparently exhausted by his efforts of the night before. If the bandits had been watching, they might have seen only five people.

  No way to tell. She continued up the hill, finally reaching a limestone bluff. There was a crack. She squeezed her way in, finding a narrow cave. There she stopped a second time, leaning against the wet rock, trying to control her breath. Somehow she’d managed to keep her bag. She dropped it at her feet and pulled her knife.