“There are no vitals hurt in him,” he said. “Flesh wounds all, painful, and he has lost a quantity of blood, and the loss weakens him. And there is always the risk of contagion. But he is young and strong, and he loves you with a love that would send him leaping through fire. I see no reason why he should not soon be well. The old sow will have to stray in the storm tonight.”
I glanced up at him in shock muted by weariness. “How did you know?”
“I know nothing. It is only a manner of speaking.”
“But you put the lamp out, you knew I was wandering—”
“Anyone would get lost in a night like this. And it is no great trouble to say the appropriate spell.” He shrugged and got up to settle himself on the hearth by Arlen’s side. “Cerilla, you are spent, and I have had nothing to occupy me for some days now. Sleep well. I will watch Arlen this night.”
I laid out the saddle pad for myself and covered myself with our well-used blankets, but I could not go to sleep at once, not without Arlen by my side. My body ached, every fiber of me, with a grief and a dread I could not reason away. I trusted Briony to look after Arl by then, I wanted to go to sleep, I knew I needed sleep, but something within me lay crying, and as exhaustion took me I knew what it was: the child who had cried when my mother had been put into the ground. Mind tried to calm me, but heart knew: Arlen was in deadly danger.
I slept raggedly and awoke in the morning not much the better for it. At once I knew that Arlen was worse. His face was flushed, clammy and feverish to the touch, and all his wounds were swollen and sore and oozing through their bandages. Briony was sitting by his side with a wooden bucket of cold water and a square of cotton cloth.
“Is he in pain?” I asked, going over.
“He does not seem to be. I would take more comfort if he were; it would show that he was fighting the shadows. He has been shaking with chills half the night, though his face is hot. And he does not seem to dream or struggle. Here.” He handed me the wet cloth and took up the bolt to tear more bandaging.
“Folk come here for charms from time to time,” he added, though I had not asked him why he tore up good cloth for Arlen, “and they pay me in whatever they have to offer. I have no need of this cotton right now.” He took the old bandage from Arlen’s thigh and threw it into the fire. The wound looked and smelled worse than I had expected, and I gagged.
“Contagion,” Briony muttered. The word sent a shudder through me.
The next few days passed in a haze of misery. I sat by Arlen’s side for the most part, talking to him from time to time, pleading with him or exhorting him or sometimes even scolding him; none of it had any effect that I could see. Laving his hot forehead, putting peat on the fire, guarding him from chills, helping Briony change the bandages. Briony cooked, mixed potions; I am sure he tried every remedy he knew of. He made spicy, aromatic plasters, which he placed on the wounds to draw off the heat, and he burned incense to purify the room. He brewed possets and ground yael horn to put in the wine for strength, but within days Arlen had slipped away to the point where he would take neither broth nor possets nor wine.
“Let me sit with him tonight,” I said to Briony one evening by lamplight. I felt sure he was tired, for all his day had been spent in nothing but nursing Arlen, and that to no avail. I noticed a crease between his bright black eyes.
“Perhaps some better thought will come to me,” he admitted, “if I refresh myself. Call me if you start nodding.” And he went off into the shadows at the back of the soddy, where the earth formed such odd hillocks and piles, where the roots reached down from the copse above, forming an entanglement. I soon lost sight of him back there, and I did not know what he was doing. Nor did I care to know. I chose to assume that he lay down and slept. Sometime during the night he came out again, and I went to my bed and dozed for a while. But no new thought had come to him, and Arlen was no better with the next day’s dawn.
I took the burden of nursing on myself, insofar as I could, once I had learned the ways of the house, the wheres of water and wine and pans and the like. Busying myself with such things helped me contain my distress somewhat. Briony mixed more poultices, and then out of a chest he brought forth books, a weighty herbal and a smaller book with a black cover, a spell book. Most of the day and into lamplight again he searched through them, and evidently he found nothing of use, for he put them down at last with a sigh.
“You say you do charms,” I suggested timidly; it is a bad business to anger a witch, and I had stayed away from talk of magic until then. But I was becoming desperate. “Is there nothing you can say, a spell—?”
“A mandrake can only do so much!” he burst out.
I gaped, and he turned away sharply, having said more than he intended.
“A mandrake?” I exclaimed.
“Yes. A mandrake,” he responded sharply, turning back and striding a step or two toward me, as if I had accused him of something. “Why do you think I live in earth? Most men are not so fond of dirt.” He touched his low ceiling. “But I go back there, amongst the roots whence I came, and burrow in earth to my knees, to my neck, cover myself with it if I can, for it feeds me better than meat. Are you dismayed?”
I shook my head, my mouth still agape. “It is just that—I have never seen a mandrake, and I did not know they became so—alive.”
“I am a rather vital one. Rumor has it I am sprung from a hanged man’s semen that spurted onto the ground. His death seed. I am expert with aphrodisiacs.” He grimaced, mocking himself. “You and Arlen do not need that of me.”
“But, Bri—” I had not called him Bri before, and I stopped, confused.
“What? What is it?”
“I do not care if you eat dirt,” I told him earnestly. “You have been good to us.”
“I have my ethics,” he said stiffly. “No heart, not in any human sense, but I have loyalty, ambition, pride in my craft. And right now I have frustration.”
“So there is nothing more you can do for Arlen.” I said it because it would have hurt him to say it, perhaps as much as it hurt me. I felt the pang like a lance head of despair.
“No.” He got up, swinging his sinewy arms, brown, knotty arms much like the tough roots that hung down not far away. He faced toward them, and away from me, as he spoke. “I am good for all the everyday magics,” he said, sounding dry, toneless. “Charms for colic and clubfoot and pockmarks, spells for crops or childbirth or calving or spitefulness or the return of unrequited love. I am especially competent in regard to love. But the great things—” He gestured, arms lifted. “—death and healing and redemption—they are not for me. The goddess has charge of them.”
EIGHT
Arlen was dying. I did not know how I could bear it, but there was no way to doubt it, no room left for hope. He no longer responded to anything, not even my voice, not even the pain when Briony lanced his wounds as a measure of last resort. He lay as if he were already dead, his face no longer flushed but pallid, his breathing shallow and out of rhythm. Briony and I both sat up with him that night, though we knew we could not help him, though he was not even aware that we were there.
“He should not be taken away for those wounds!” Briony burst out when the hearth fire had burned down to embers, shielding us with shadows so that I could not distinctly see his face. “He should not be dying. The cuts were clean and not very deep. He is young, strong, comely enough for all normal purposes and very much in love with one who is worthy of all love—”
I looked at him, startled by the sudden anger or yearning in his voice, by the way he fell silent abruptly, as if he had said too much. I wondered if Briony had ever known love, he who dealt in spells of love. How or whom does a mandrake love? A flame flared briefly from the embers to show me his face, but as usual, I could not read it.
“One who returns his love,” he went on more collectedly. “He has a life of love ahead of him, everything to live for. I cannot understand why he is failing. He is no coward; he fought armed and m
ounted men for your sake, fought them like a berserker. Why is he not fighting this death that lies on him?”
We sat in silence for a while.
“I have never understood men,” Briony exclaimed into the darkness with a passion I had not expected from him. “If I were he, I would be fending off the serpent with my bare hands and all the strength in my body.”
“Do not rail at him,” I said, though not sharply.
“I am not! There must be a reason, if only I could understand—Cerilla, tell me about him.”
That awoke a vague wonder in me. “You seem already to know all about us,” I said. “Our names, how we fled from the Sacred Isle—”
“I hear the talk of the underworld, that is all. It travels fast, but it is no more than gossip, rumors. Tell me the things you truly know.”
There were so many things, the seemingly inconsequential things that had made him not a winterking but Arlen to me, Arlen my beloved and sometimes my vexation. The way his ears itched so that he drove me to distraction with noises and scratching, and the way he always had to hug something to go to sleep. The way he swaggered when he was tired. Things even less definable: the glance over his shoulder when we were riding, hands twirling locks of Bucca’s mane—if there was an essence about Arlen, how was I to tell it to Briony?
“Cerilla,” he urged.
“Animals,” I said, for want of anything better to say. “He adores animals. Whenever he sees an animal, even a coney or a squirrel, he looks at it, he points it out to me. Kine, swine, he sees them all with such excitement.… Well, I suppose there could not have been too many animals on the Sacred Isle, and he looks at other things too, the countryside, and exclaims; sometimes he is like a delighted child. But animals—he wants to touch them, to be with them. When we are in a barn, he goes from stall to stall, even if it is only cattle or donkeys there, chirruping and giving water and washing sore eyes. When we are with the sheep in the field, he plucks the parasites off them.”
“Why animals?” said Briony softly.
I shrugged. “Why not? From what I have heard, the beasts are far kinder than most folk on the Sacred Isle.”
I felt him looking at me, so I went on.
“They did terrible things to the boys sometimes, to toughen them. They give them whips and set them against each other, or all against one, which was even worse, though Arlen said—Lonn would never strike at him, not even if it meant punishment, but Arlen struck at Lonn once because he was made to, and then he wept and could not sleep afterward, though Lonn forgave him.”
“Lonn?”
“His friend—” I swallowed. “Who died in his stead.”
“Arlen has been favored with such a friend? Few of us ever find a true friend or a true love. Arlen has both! And yet his has been a terrible life.” Briony sounded dazed.
“Yes.” I plunged on. “Twice a year, in preparation for the ceremonials of sacred kingship, they would have the boys over the age of ten taste of a mock death to harden them against the real death to come. They would hang each one by a noose around the neck, hang them until they swooned and then take them down, and when they revived they were mocked if they had struggled, and sometimes a puny one was not taken down, so they never really knew, beforehand—” I stopped, feeling sick. “I can speak no more of this.”
“Nor do I care to hear much more.” Briony got up and gave fuel to the fire. “Yet, if I only knew.…”
“Knew what?”
“Knew Arlen, truly knew what it was like to be Arlen.” He sat down beside me again. “If I could somehow enter into his heart and mind, to understand him, I wonder if I could not somehow help him.… Cerilla, you should have taken him to a better witch. I have been envying him.” The admission came out harshly.
“Great Mother of us all, why?” I was astonished.
“He has—everything, youth, his freedom, your love.… But he has paid.” Briony got up abruptly. “I believe I had better go think.”
“Bri—”
He would not look at me, but he listened.
“I do not understand him either. He has never told me, but—I have sensed a despair, a dark wound, a bleeding—within.…”
Briony went back into his earthworks to be by himself.
I sat with Arlen, quite alone. He did not move or moan; he required nothing of me. From time to time, feeling helpless, I would speak to him, whisper his name, but he did not respond to me, did not even stir. I decided I need no longer forbear from hurting him, and I got down on the pallet with him, took his head and upper body into my arms, rocked him, held him against my breasts. I could hear him breathe, shallow, gasping breaths, but he hung as limp as a lifeless doll in my arms, and anguish set me to weeping. I held him and wept until dawn, and with the dawn he was no better. Dim silver-gold light showed me his face pale and still, and though I yet felt a pulse in him there was no touch of color to his skin; he might as well have been a corpse. Something in my mind crackled angrily, and I called on the dead.
“Lonn!”
I whispered it at first, then spoke up more urgently. He had helped us once, maybe more than once. Perhaps he would help us again.
“Lonn!”
A thickening came into the air of the soddy, and a heaviness. That familiar presence. I knew it, I should have known it before. He had been with us since the cenotaph. He had never truly left us until Briony had sent him away.
This time, since I had called him, I could almost see him. Wavering, insubstantial, not truly connected with the earthen floor or anything around him, but still—I thought I could make out a human figure, the shadow of a face. He stood there, or shimmered there, unmoving.
“Lonn,” I appealed, “you had power, you could have been a great wizard. Help him! You have saved him from death before. Save him yet this once more.”
Nothing happened except that Briony came out of the back of the soddy, looking earthy and weary.
“So,” he remarked, “he loved you too.”
I could not comprehend at the time, thinking it was Arlen whom Lonn loved. “Lonn,” I pleaded, “speak to him, send him back to me.”
I could not clearly recognize the shadowdrift of a face or see the look on it. But it seemed to me that Lonn, or whatever answered to the name of Lonn, stiffened and moved back a trifle, as if discomfited.
“He is incorporeal,” Briony said to me. “He cannot speak. Moreover, it is of no use to call on the dead to heal the living.” He came over and sat by me to take the sting from his words. “Everything about the dead calls us to death.”
“Then you mean—” I whispered, aghast at what I had done.
“No, no, it is of no great harm, having him here.” Briony hastened to reassure me. “He has been with you for weeks, so one more visit is of small moment. It is only—Lonn is dead, so how is he to comprehend that you wish Arlen to live? That Arlen should live?”
We sat numbly; we sat and Lonn waved in air, as the morning light grew stronger, aureate, showing us Arlen’s fair young face so still, so shining pale. Gold and russet lights touched his hair. With an odd clarity I noticed the curve of his eyelashes, shining the color of bronze, of orichalc, very fine over his lidded eyes. How lovely he was, almost as if the winterking glory were on him again.
“Do the dead love death,” I asked Briony wistfully, “as the living love life?”
He stirred to answer, but then he sat up arrow straight and stared at me. And then he leaped up with a shout and darted across the room, brushing aside Lonn’s presence with the haste of his passing, making for the worktable where he kept his herbs and powders and the stone slabs and tools for mixing them.
“Cerilla, you have given me the answer!” he shouted, frantically concocting. “Love, life—they were never allowed to love it, these sacred kings, don’t you see? Half hanged, mocked if they struggled—” He reached up to snap off one from a bundle of dried roots. “And love spells I can do. But what is life?” He turned on me suddenly, his black eyes glinting. “What a
re the things that make life? Cerilla, quickly!”
“Why, everything,” I faltered. “The animals. The horse.…” Moving with sudden unreasoning sureness, I went and found a horsehair on the saddle pad I had been using for a pallet, a long gray hair from Bucca’s mane. “Here,” I said, handing it to Briony.
“And one of yours.” He took it from my head with an odd tenderness in the twist of his deft brown hand. “All right. What else?”
“The world.…”
“A pinch of earth from outside. And a blade of grass, and a twig or a leaf if you can find them. Make haste.”
I ran to fetch the things. I had not been outdoors in so long, I was dazed to find the snow was melting.
“That will have to do for now,” Briony said when I brought him what he needed. “I could do better with a little more time, but we will put the rest in words. Now, the wine—”
I brought him the elderberry wine, poured half a tumbler full. Briony added his potion.
“And we are going to get this down him if it kills him,” he said grimly.
We nearly did kill him in stark fact, administering that draught. He choked on it in his stupor, and Briony had to beat him to make him breathe again. Then he swallowed, and groaned—and then I breathed; I had been holding my breath and pleading with the goddess. Then he swallowed the rest of it, slowly.
“Sunshine,” Briony was saying, “and the way it dapples through leaves, and there will be the first buds of leaves in a month or so. Trees. Oak, ash, willow; the whitethorn will flower in May. Birds. The robin and the little crowned wren. Swans on the Naga, are there not? Soon the swallows will return and nest. Horses, are they not beautiful? So curving their necks. And the broad sweep of the moors, so much sky, and sunrise and sunset—have you ever seen the heather in bloom, Arlen? Have you?”
Arlen stirred and muttered as if in pain or protest.
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