“The iron mines? He’s a damned child.”
“That’s what the Censor’s clerk said. It wasn’t right for a child to suffer a man’s punishment. He said nobody would miss one boy out of a thousand prisoners. If we taught him right, kept a tight leash on him, he might one day have a place in the Vigil. And no one would hassle a Havenar for the skin he wears or the tongue he speaks.”
Bram nodded. “It’s a relief to hear there’s still some justice in Haukmere.”
“Not much of it,” said Venser. “That clerk went to the mines for him, in the end.”
“Castor Stannon keeps careful count,” said Bram coldly. In the glow of the fire, the boy was marking a stout stave with deep gouges, guiding Aewyn’s hands to where most of the wood would fall away and a little bow suited to her frame would emerge.
“He seems well enough,” said Venser, watching the concern cross Bram’s face.
“No he doesn’t,” Bram whispered. “Look with your sword eyes. Look how he moves.”
Venser squinted, held his breath, moved with him. All he was doing was measuring and notching the wood. But he would not put his back to the door.
“How does he sleep?” asked Bram.
“He wakes in a start, more often than not,” said Venser, “now that you mention it.”
“Do you put him on watch?”
Venser nodded. “He’s got sharp eyes, like Tsúla.”
“Don’t vary the watch,” said Bram. “Same time for him every night. First watch, or last watch, doesn’t matter. But put him to sleep and wake him up at the same time every night.”
“That’ll help?”
“It might.” Bram refilled his stew bowl from the wine jug—it was more wine than stew now—as Venser emptied a little purse onto the table with a clatter.
“What’s this?” asked Bram.
“Payment for the bow,” said Venser, with a jerk of his shaggy head toward the two youngsters.
“Gold,” said Bram, holding a tiny coin to the light. “Gull pennies. Where’d she get all this?”
“Darmod Pick,” said Venser, waiting for the name to set in. Bram swallowed his wine a little too hard, and the big man laughed.
“That old filcher?” Bram asked. “He coughed this up for her? He’s certainly doing well for himself.”
Venser nodded. “They’re all doing well,” he warned. Bram looked at him, then back at the coins, their exquisitely minted surfaces gleaming in the firelight. As of one mind, the two turned their eyes to the boy by the fire, his smile brilliant under Aewyn’s barrage of questions.
“Keeps careful count, does he?” said Bram.
“Not a skatt escapes his notice,” said Venser. “Nor a bucket or two of Haukmere gold, by my reckoning.”
“I’ll talk to Robyn in the morning,” said Bram, and poured himself another drink.
The next three nights were agonizingly slow for Aewyn. With the return of the Havenari, the cottage had been turned into a sort of barracks. Robyn’s men were glad to be back among the women of Widowvale, for a time, but they came and went in a constant procession from the little cottage. Few enough were the moments of peace between their boisterous comings and goings, and fewer still were the moments the girl left them in peace as Fletch set about carving her bow in addition to his usual duties. She was such a constant presence that eventually Robyn handed down her own longbow for Aewyn to try. The pull of Robyn’s bow was so hopelessly stiff that she wondered whether Darmod’s gift was a terrible mistake, nothing more than an idle ornament of unexpected generosity. But when Fletch (at her daily insistence) set aside the time to finish her bow a day early, it was sized and weighted very differently, and she found it a surprising comfort in her hands.
Over those three days, Corran Oltman came regularly with food for the soldiers, and Arran came down from Grimstead every afternoon with a heavy cask of wine for the Havenari. They were among the last of Grim’s own, for the many toasts raised to him had depleted what was left, and the weakness of the season’s grapes was a shame that wore heaviest on Arran. He stayed longer than he should have to enjoy Aewyn’s company, calling her “sister” and chiding her for her long months of absence. He told her how Karis and the others fared—Rinnie, the youngest, had been learning to read on the knee of his uncle the Reeve—and shared his measure of gossip from the town, as it came to him easily in the company of Grim’s wine. He looked more like Grim, except around his lean middle, with each passing day. Corran came and went quickly and silently, sour-faced upon noticing Aewyn’s unflagging interest in the young man tillering her bow.
Outside the cottage, preparations for the Harvest Fair hung in the air like ripe apples waiting to drop. Tents were raised and firewood gathered. Old barrels, bottles, and horseshoes were collected for children’s games. Alec Mercy brought out his flute and his great bannerhorn, a tremendous fifteen-foot sounding horn of shining bellmetal reinforced with steel. He stood the horn on its stand and hoisted the banner of the Protectorate of Haveïl upon its length, since the town had no proper flag of its own. Its long pennant, a single golden oak leaf on a field of forest green, fluttered in the autumn wind as the townsfolk busied themselves. Alec set up his honey-stand on the edge of the green with the help of Bram, who was given a bottle of Alec’s harvest mead for his trouble and had it drunk by nightfall. He seemed sullen and sad, as usual, but worked for Alec with surprising effort and concentration, if not quite finesse.
The preparations for the fair were among the fastest and smoothest in its history, for Poe had come in from the field and was glad to exhaust himself helping any who were brave enough to ask him. He had at last come into his full strength, and he hoisted the massive center cabers of the largest pavilion tents into position as if they were little more than hand tools. Perhaps Aewyn had put him up to it, or perhaps he sensed something of the sacred in their tents and autumn balefire, and felt rather than understood the importance of lending his strength to the celebration. In any case, he came at last among the children and families of Widowvale in the autumn of the Year of Strangers, and was no longer a stranger to them. The women usually raised the tents themselves, as it pleased them to offer the miners a bright spectacle on their return, and when Poe eagerly took on the work of five or six of them, a friendship was cemented that would not be forgotten. None knew, then, that it was to be his first and last festival among them.
It was early on the fourth day of Silmaunt in the Year of Strangers—the year 3413 by Moon-reckoning—that the miners came in from the caves and the camps, weighed down by ore and roughly refined metal, staggering with as much rock in their clothes as on their backs. Unlike the Havenari, whose horns rang in the distant hills as they trumpeted their approach, the miners had no need of horns nor hooves to announce their coming. The thunder of their tools and rock-harvests clattering in wagons, and the roar of their deep voices lifted in song, raised all the clamour they needed:
Ale and cake! Fire on water!
Eat the cake and drink the fire!
Fire for an old man’s daughter,
Ale and cake and fire on water,
Water for your heart’s desire!
Flesh and fowl! Change of fortune!
Home from hills and home to hold!
Hold each man unto his portion,
Flesh and fowl and change of fortune,
Silver Green has greens on gold!
Lay the boards! Set the table!
Light the fires and burn the bones!
Pass the horn if you are able,
Lay the boards and set the table,
Drain it if you drink alone!
Home and hearth! Hive and honey!
Death to rock and life from soil!
Darkness take the days more sunny;
Home and hearth and hive and honey
Free us from the summer’s toil!
There was clamour from the townsfolk, too, as those who had loved ones or relatives (and in many cases, men who were both) among the miners made the
ir way down to the road to see who, indeed, was among the living. The miners who came home to Widowvale were slow and careful in their work: they were free men working for their own purses and not for the hoards of other lords, and they kept each other from the mountain-greed common to many of their profession (which is not so pronounced, in any case, with silver as it is with gold). But rock is sometimes a false friend and a fickle partner, and those who went into the earth, though the miners did not delve deep, did not always return.
The Year of Strangers, as the Chronicles of Widowvale recorded, saw only two losses: Anulf, a quiet man from Adân with few friends, and Owen son of Orin, a small man (like his father) who was nimble in small tunnels and always ready to help a friend. They died together in a collapse some miles south of Minter’s Rock, where the soil was soft above them and it might have gone differently for miners with rock in their blood. But Owen was the son of a groom, and disdained his father’s humble trade for what could be had mining lead and silver for his own purse. He and his father had had a falling out over it, once. Their feud was settled in death.
Two dead in a year was, for the miners, an average loss; yet their deaths were lamented in the usual fashion and with no less sorrow. Orin the Groom mourned his son the longest, for he had not made amends, and he did not dance or make merry at the festival that year. Owen the Tall, a fellow hiller who had come up from Rahasta three years before, mourned his namesake a long time at the moot-hall. Aside from the tradition of mourning one’s namesake, and aside from the older Owen’s reputation as a kind and good man in spite of his strife with his father, Owen the Tall was not so particularly tall, and only held the name by way of being taller than Owen Orinsson. In the years to come, to his disappointment, he was known simply as Owen.
But this is not his story, nor the story of any man named Owen.
The Harvest Fair was not the only time the miners returned to Widowvale, but it was the only time of year they all returned on the same day. Some in the distant south and west had been away for months, and some who mined at Minter’s Rock for only a few days, but always they were received as if they had come from far off and their journey home was long and arduous. That their work was dangerous, and that Owen and Anulf did not return, added solemnity to the young rituals of the village, and the joy of seeing the others returning to their families (those that had families, at least) seemed all the brighter for that peril. Every man who made it back alive was celebrated, and none with greater joy than Aeric the Miller, who returned to his wife and daughters with heavy bags of silver, and threw them into the grass to greet his lame, scampering dog with both hands.
Having crept away from the village green to take his rest in the woods, Poe caught Aewyn’s unmistakable scent, mingled with that of human girls freshly blooded, and followed her up the hill. Hearing low, hushed voices, he crept as quietly as his big frame allowed. When he ran into Aewyn, bounding back down the hill, the two startled each other into a sudden gasp of mingled surprise.
“Poe,” she said to him, out of breath.
“I wondered,” he said in awkward Tradespeak, which he had been speaking all day, “what place you had got to.”
“I went to Maiden’s Watch with the girls,” she said. “Ali invited me. She said it was time I went.”
Poe nodded. “You are a woman now, in my years and even in theirs—though you do not feel like them, somehow. What happens now that you are a woman?”
Aewyn shrugged. “I cannot say,” she replied. “All I saw were a lot of naked men and giggling girls.”
“It is some kind of ceremony, I think,” Poe said. “A very strange one, when the males display their love-parts and the females answer with laughter. Among my kin, that would not be the start of a happy union.”
“It did seem strange,” Aewyn admitted. “Some didn’t laugh. They looked frightened. Ali laughed the hardest, but then, she has five brothers. There was little mystery for her—nor, I suppose, for me.”
“Are you to choose a man from among them?” asked Poe. “Is this naked-watching the beginning of a courtship?”
“I don’t think so,” said Aewyn. “So few of the girls marry the miners, in the end.”
“I hope you get a strong one,” said Poe. “A man of renown among his kin.”
“I don’t know what I would do with one,” said Aewyn.
“Mate and make children, if you can,” said Poe flatly. “I am not convinced you have enough Iun in your blood to breed with them. You look the same, but your smell is…only you. I have no word for it. You are like no man or woman.”
“Grim always said that fairies can’t have children of their own,” said Aewyn, somewhat sadly. “He said that’s why they steal children in the night. That’s why they stole me from my real parents, he said.”
“Your mother, Aelis…” Poe trailed off; the name was too hard for him. “You are the true daughter to your mother.”
“I feel it,” said Aewyn. “But I don’t even know what that means.”
They had begun the short walk back to town by now. Poe stopped for a moment, looked off into the heart of the deep wood.
“You should see her again,” he said thoughtfully. “If you are a woman of your mother’s kin, she can tell you what that means. She can teach you the woman-stories, and show you how it is done.”
Aewyn walked on sadly. “She is ever harder to find,” she said. “The longer I live in Widowvale, the farther she goes into the woods—away from the village, away from my mind. I fear I have offended her, becoming so civilized. Or perhaps I have just become too ordinary. Long have I lived in the house of Grim—just an ordinary child of an ordinary man.”
Poe shook his head. “Grim was an ordinary man, it may be. But by his craft he learned to feed his tribe and make them happy. Rare is the tongue that laughs in Widowvale without his magic upon it. And he had many children, and passed to them his ways. I was not at his side when they planted his body like a seed, far from the sky—but I know none of the Iun, not even Darmod, would have dared call him ordinary.”
“Ordinary or not,” said Aewyn, “I miss him.”
“Then whatever it means to you, that you may become a great legend…in your bones, he has become that already.”
They came the long way down the easy slope of the hill in relative silence, before Aewyn stopped on the edge of the green. Poe knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“What does it mean,” she asked, “being a karach who is… male?” Her eyes darted with innocent curiosity over his long body.
“Nothing, now,” he said, his voice low. “Male, female. Without each other, those words are hollow as two empty pots. What did the females know about teaching me what is male? There are no males left of my kind. And now there are no females, either. So it matters not, man, woman. Only karach.”
“That can’t be true,” offered Aewyn. “Alec Mercy has told me of karach mercenaries in Travalaith, scores of them. Come, we can ask him.”
“I would not go into the Iron City for any purpose under sky,” said Poe, “not if all my fur were on fire and the Black Wall a great roaring river. There is foul magic there, and even fouler people. If my people are lost there, they are sure to remain lost.”
“There is sorrow in you,” said Aewyn, her hand reaching high on his shoulder.
“It is not sorrow I have, I think.” said Poe. “Only the empty wait for death. My life, like all our lives, is a short time. But when my body is tired and the mǎnuk come to take my spirit away into dreams, then I do not pass into the legend of my children, as your Grim did. On that day, my tribe, too, all our time in the world and the last of our stories, it is only a dream lost without a dreamer.”
“That sounds like sorrow to me, my friend,” said Aewyn, clutching herself gently and close against the karach’s chest.
“Perhaps it is,” he said. “I do not know the word so well.”
Sorrow was a word nearly unknown that day on the village green of Widowvale. As the
gathering swelled, the merchant wagons began to appear, trundling roughly over the grass trail winding up from the Iron Road. They carried all manner of goods from the mundane to the marvelous—huge barrels of salt from the Pale Sea, just in time for pickling and butchering, and bolts of fine-threaded silk from the farms of Selik. Spices they brought from the east and south, strange herbs and flowers in mysterious phials of weird blown glass.
In its first days as little more than a loose trading post of wood huts, the outpost once called Silver had been nigh impossible to find. Even the Havenari admitted it was hard to find still—yet by some miracle of commerce, on the day the miners came in from the camps, their wagons weighed down with lead and their sacks with freshly smelted silver, a string of lost travelers bearing reasonably priced goods from distant lands would somehow stumble upon the hidden vale.
“We are not so hidden as I feared,” said Marin the Reeve each year, as sure as the tides.
“Nor so hidden as I would like,” said Alec Mercy each year in response.
At this festival in particular, even Karis came down from Grimstead, lured out of the house by her children, and she walked among the townsfolk for the first time in a year. No word was spoken to her of her dead husband, so fragile she seemed, until Bram, having heard at last the news that Grim was gone, wailed in mourning and offered extreme condolences to the widow, which she suffered with dignity and only a few tears of her own.
“You would think him Grim’s true wife, the way he carries on,” observed Marin over the stem of his pipe.
“It is not the man he mourns,” said Alec. “But I’ve tasted the wines of Grim’s final year. I feel like weeping myself.”
But Alec did not weep, for Robyn had come at last to the Harvest Fair as she promised, and sprang now across the field as though her soul as well has her body had at last left its plate mail behind it. She wore only her dress of green linen, and her archery brace; when the time came, she would shoot in the dress, then dance in the brace—and outshine the men of the village at both—while the old true-widow Oltman and her sons shook the first rusty songs from pipe, drum, and psaltery with more spirit than skill. Aewyn wove a crown of bright blue knightsage and autumn grass for Ali, and beneath it the girl’s golden hair shone with the last radiance of summer, to the admiration of many just coming into manhood. The younger boys and girls had learned that Poe would suffer them to climb him like a grassy brown hillock, and played on his naked back beneath the broad white oak.
The Season of the Plough Page 12
