She Is Here, page 9
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When the question struck her, Anya was back on the main path. How had Dagda known her name?
Ahead, a pinpoint of light grew to orange red and lit the underside of the trees. Poachers. Anya watched from the shadows for a while, then stepped into the light, holding up her weaponless hands, making sure her harp was visible.
The younger of the two men at the fire took up his bow, which was still strung. The older stood and motioned her to the fire. “The night will be cold, soon enough. Join us. There’s food if you need it.”
“I have a little to share,” she said, and sat inside the ring of warmth. Outside the circle a twig broke. “Tell your friend to come back to the fire.”
“Cait! It’s a bard. Come eat your supper.” He turned back to Anya. “She broke that twig on purpose. You’d not have heard her if that’s how she’d wanted it.” He sat down and reached for the hare roasting over the flames. “I’m Owen. This is my sister-son John.”
A woman, younger than Owen, though not as young as John, stepped from the trees, sheathing her knife. Owen nodded in her direction. “Cait, my sister.”
“But not John’s mother,” Cait said. “Is that miserable hare cooked yet?”
They ate the hare with some parsnips John pulled from the fire; they were charred outside, raw inside. Anya felt Cait watching her while she ate. Afterwards, they shared Anya’s cheese and a bottle of water.
Owen apologized for the size of the hare and the parsnips. “Things haven’t been growing right hereabouts for a year or two.”
Cait looked at her appraisingly. “You’re used to better, I’m sure.”
“This is enough, and welcome.”
Shadow on Cait’s face shifted as she raised her eyebrows. “It’ll not be often you drink plain water, or share such a poor meal with the likes of us.”
“I’ve eaten better today than I did yesterday. And there have been days when I would have been grateful for a crust.” She wondered why Cait was so prickly.
“Doesn’t Macalla feed his bards anymore?”
“I’m no bard of Macalla’s.”
Owen and John stirred uncomfortably; Cait spat at the fire. The spittle hissed on hot stone. “No one who still has a harp and calls themself bard stays alive, unless they are Macalla’s.”
“I am no bard of Macalla’s,” Anya repeated.
Cait reached for the harp case, slowly, and unfastened the ties. Gold gleamed in the firelight. “This says you’re Macalla’s.”
“It was given to me today by a man who lives not far from here.”
“No one lives within a day’s walk of here,” Owen said.
Anya looked at him. “There’s a track, no more than two thousand paces from this clearing. And a house. He has a daughter, Brigid.”
John frowned at that but said nothing.
“Show us,” Cait said.
“I’m not sure I could find it again. It’s dark.” And she was tired.
“If there’s a trail there, I’ll find it. Dark or not.” She stood up and unsheathed her knife. “Take me there.”
Anya doubted they could hurt her before she could escape into the trees, but that would mean leaving the harp, and her drum case. Cait made her walk first, following behind her so quietly that Anya turned more than once to check she was there.
The moonlight hardly penetrated the forest. It was cold. Anya stumbled several times in the dark; she wondered how either of them would manage to spot even a plainly marked trail.
“It’s around here, somewhere.”
“Keep moving.”
She did, as fast as she dared, to stay warm. After a while Cait stopped. “Here,” the poacher said softly, “I’ve found it.” She pointed. “It’s very faint. Hasn’t been used much in a long, long time, though someone’s been along it recently. See where the grass is bent?”
“I walked this way.”
Cait ignored her. “We’ll follow it.”
Again, Anya led. The trail was more overgrown than she remembered.
In the clearing, the moonlight was strong. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The dwelling in the centre of the clearing was a ruin. It had been a ruin for a long time. An oak, old and strong, grew up through the roof. Anya rubbed absently at the scratches on her forearms and wondered if she was dreaming.
Cait prowled the edges of the clearing. “There’s nothing here,” she said. “There’s been nothing here since before the old king’s grandfather was a boy. Longer.”
“When I was here today, this was whole.” Anya did not understand. This was the right clearing. “I sat right here and played my lute. A girl called Brigid came out and told me her father would like me to play for him. I went inside. I played. The man asked me to play his harp, this harp. I did. He gave it to me, told me . . . some things.”
“And I suppose his name was Dagda.”
Anya looked at her a long time. “How did you know that?”
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By the fire, Owen stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Dagda, son of Dana, goddess of the People, the Tuatha De Danaan. He is Ruad Ro-fhessa, lord of perfect knowledge. God made flesh, wandering the world to hear the music mortals made.”
For the first time, John spoke. “He was here when the very first bards took up their harps. Some say he taught them. I always wanted to be a bard.” He looked at Anya, then across at her harp. “He’s the father of music and magic in Dumnet. Brigid is his daughter, Dana come again, the goddess with a harp of golden strings which she uses to call down the fires of destruction and purification.” He looked at her again. “Yet you say her hands were crippled, and Dagda gave the harp to you.”
Anya looked at the case on which her hand rested. “The harp is real.” And Dagda? The fire shifted and creaked. John added another branch. Anya watched the flames leap, remembering Dagda naming her Bard; she remembered her own fear of him, momentary though it had been; she remembered his crippled hands, and Brigid’s, and that he had asked something of her. Macalla.
“Where’s Macalla now?”
“Macalla? In Buiscolloc, where else?” Cait said. “Buzzing round Airget, waiting for Rufus to fall from the tree.”
“The king is sick?”
Owen shook his head. “No, but Dumnet is. Rufus, they say, will make the Great Marriage.”
The blood music from her dream sang through her head. She frowned. “Great Marriage?”
“When the king offers his blood to the earth,” John said. “To Dana-the-mother, who is always thirsty.”
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She left Owen, John, and Cait the next morning. It was not safe to travel with poachers; Macalla guarded the game in this forest jealously.
When it began to rain, she left the path and crouched under a tree. Another five days walk would see her in Buiscolloc. The king and his court were there, and Macalla.
Rain shook and pattered on the leaves over her head. The moss between her feet smelled cold and wet. Avoid Macalla until you’re ready: Dagda’s warning had been clear. But ready for what? She touched the tip of one finger to a droplet resting on the surface of the moss, enjoyed the way it gave against her skin. Then she flicked it into oblivion. In the winter court of Dumnet, she would have as much resistance to Macalla as a raindrop.
But Buiscolloc was where she had to go. She had come to Dumnet to find something. Peace, she had thought. Instead, she had found the beginnings of who she could be. The fleck of wodeglass embedded in her leg had awakened a part of her that might have slept until the day she died. Though she had rejected the stone, and its warped power, that place inside was forever awake, and hungry for . . . something. She had groped her way to part of the answer, but there was more. And she would have to find it for herself. Ude could have helped her, perhaps. But Ude was an ocean away.
The only way to learn more was to trust her heart. And that meant going to Buiscolloc. Perhaps she would be ready when she got there, perhaps not, but she would go.
When she lifted the harp onto her shoulder, she noticed something nestling in the depression it had made in the grass. She picked it up: a grey flint as long as her middle finger. An arrowhead. She could see the marks where its maker had shaped the stone; there was a spiral notched on one side, like the one inlaid on her harp. It rested comfortably in her palm. She hefted it, then slipped it into her belt pouch.
It looked like the rain was set in for the day. Nothing unusual at this time of year. Autumn was on its way. That thought brought a sense of urgency she did not understand. She set off briskly.
#
Early on the morning of her fourth day since finding the arrowhead, she heard the mewling of an animal. She unsheathed her knife—bandits had used such traps, before now—and stepped under the trees.
A fox was lying on its side at the base of a rowan tree whose leaves were turning the colour of old blood. Next to the fox, half hidden in a drift of leaves, lay the remains of a vole. Anya put her knife away. The fox watched her approach, then laid its head down. It was too near death to be frightened. She knelt next to it. Its left hind foot was swollen and infected; vole bite. Using a stick, she poked the vole free of its leaf barrow. Breath hissed between her teeth.
The vole was grossly misshapen. Physically warped in a way she knew immediately. This was the work of wode.
She sat back on her haunches for a moment and thought. The muzzle of the fox was caked with dried vomit. There was none of this wode-spoiled creature’s flesh inside the fox, then. The only source of taint was the bite.
She lifted her finger in front of the fox’s snout to let it sniff, then touched the matted pelt of its left leg, high up. The muscle was tight and hot, but that would heal if she could cut away the poison gathering around the bite below its dew claw. It whined as she stood up.
It took her a while to find the white flowers of wild garlic and dig up two bulbs. Then she cut several strips of moss with her knife. She had no means of knowing when the vole had bitten the fox but the influence of wodeglass was fast; she would have to do what she could now, with no time even for fire.
Using two stones, she crushed half the garlic to a paste and rubbed the rest over her knife blade. Then, from her pouch, she withdrew a bundle of yellow silk tied with a blue ribbon. She unwound it. In the centre nestled a tiny stone vial the size of her fingernail. Tincture of alemb. Rare even in Araby where it was prepared from the spines of a desert plant, it had cost her two gold crowns in Altberg. A year ago, Ude had been there to do the cutting, to hold her muscles still and soothe away the pain with theurgy. She herself was no witch, but she was a healer. No Empire physician would do what she was about to, but she had been a healer long before she got the Altberg seal to prove it. What did it matter that the creature suffering before her was only a fox? She remembered her own suffering clearly.
Using her knife, she cut away the lead seal but did not yet unstopper the bottle. She laid her free hand over the muzzle of the fox until it struggled for breath then, careful to turn away her own head, she flicked out the stopper and held the vial under its nose. It sucked in air bitter with alemb and went limp.
Cutting away rotting flesh was not new for her. She ignored the smell as best she could and concentrated on pulling back the skin to expose the flesh beneath. The tendons did not seem to be infected. The poisoned muscle was reddish grey and spongy; it did not bleed under her blade. She cut until she reached healthy tissue.
She smeared the wound with a handful of garlic, packing the paste in as tightly as she could, then wrapped it with the moss. The strip of blue cloth that held her hair back secured the moss to the fox’s leg. She checked her handiwork. It would take the fox a day or so to gnaw through the cloth. The wound should stay covered long enough for the garlic to do its work. She listened to its regular breathing. It would stay limp for a while yet.
Even after all the rains of the past weeks, there were brittle twigs and dead fern to be found under the trees. She made a fire, and as the vole and dead flesh burned she tied back her hair with twine from her pack, then held her knife in the flames until the blade turned black. She stabbed it clean in the turf, then heated it again.
When she turned back to check on the fox, it was gone.
#
The vole and the fox were only the first of the plants and animals she found changed by wodebreath. As she drew near Buiscolloc, the taint grew stronger. The trees thinned; when she ate stew in the house of some poor man, she lifted a carrot on her spoon to find it twisted in strange shapes; the children she passed on the path that had widened to a cart track looked sickly, with pale skins and odd eyes; babies did not thrive and cows were slow to give milk.
Buiscolloc stood high on a plain and alongside the slow, wide curve of a river that ran south to the sea, a day’s ride away. Somewhere to the west, on the downs road that a more trusting traveller would have taken from Guerent, lay the plain of towers, huge standing stones rumoured to have been laid in a circle by the gods themselves before time began.
The cart track broadened to a road, and the road became paved on either side; the pavements became thronged. A cold wind pushed along the streets close to the ground. On the outskirts, the people Anya passed looked like farmers going about their secondary profession, trade, leading ox wagons, or herding goats, but always in towards the city loaded with produce, and out of the city purses heavy with coin. As she followed the road, it narrowed again; yards to the left and right were full of livestock and farmers bargaining over sacks of grain. Further in, she saw a tavern, The Wyvern, then another and another. And houses. At first these buildings were low, pleasant looking structures, then they grew crowded, and started to shoulder above each other crooking this way and that in an effort to see the light. The result was dark and twisted rows separated by narrow muddy streets reeking of filth. A pig ran from a side alley. She saw a cutpurse slit open the money pouch of a farmer leaning against the lintel of a tavern, and longed for the forest.
The cutpurse slipped the stolen money into his jerkin and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. Anya made sure she was not looking, but realised he was staring at her nonetheless. Staring at her harp.
She gave no sign that she had noticed his interest but walked quickly. The next tavern was far enough along the road to be out of sight of the cutpurse. She laid the harp against a wall and covered it with her cloak, then waited for someone to come out. It was a man who looked young enough for this to have been his first drink.
He tried to step around her with a mumbled beg-pardon but she laid a hand on his arm, forcing him to look up.
“Is there a temple of Rhea hereabouts?” The Empire goddess of healing had servants everywhere.
He sniffed and wiped at his nose with his sleeve. The sleeve was already wet, either from his nose or from dragging it through ale slops. “East, there’s one east of here somewhere.” He coughed and shivered.
“Perhaps you would like to show me the way there, and have one of the sisters look to your health.”
He laughed. It was a mean, worldly laugh at odds with his face. “They’ll be hard pressed to see to their own health when Rufus is dead and gone.”
He would have pushed past her but she moved out of his way too fast.
The temple of Rhea was smaller than she had expected. Nor did it have the usual walls and front courtyard. It was a building faced with stone and roofed with clay tiles, which made it different from its wood and thatch neighbours, but it was poor-looking when compared to the large and graceful temples of Herstal and Altberg.
The entrance was a low passageway of curving brick. The far end was barred and attended by a young cleric with her hood pulled up against the cold. She would not let Anya in.
“We’re in retreat.”
“I have to see your Mother.”
“She isn’t seeing anyone. We’re in retreat.”
“I must see her.”
The cleric was becoming impatient. “I’m sorry your visit to Buiscolloc has started with disappointment but if it’s a room you need, then find an inn. We are in retreat.”
“I understand that you might have reason to be wary of outsiders, but I’m not Dumnetian.” She thought of the paper in her pouch that she had carried for many months. “I’m a physician from Herstal.”
The cleric raised her eyebrows politely.
Anya put down her harp and opened her belt pouch. “Do you read?”
“I do,” the cleric said stiffly.
“Here.” She held out the scroll stamped with the blue seal of the Herstal Guild of Physicians.
The cleric pulled it through the bars and untied the silk cord. She mouthed the words as she read. She looked up at Anya, then back at the scroll.
“I need to see your Mother,” Anya said again.
“Wait here.” Her feet crunched on the gravel path. A fountain pattered somewhere in the distance.
The cleric came back without the scroll but with a large iron key. She opened the gate. Anya followed her along the paths where a few roses still bloomed and wind blew fountain spray in her face. The shutters on the infirmary windows were open; it looked empty. In all the temples of Rhea she had ever been, the infirmaries had always been overflowing.
Bild, the Mother of Rhea’s temple in Buiscolloc, was a big-boned woman with a pox-scarred face and coppery brown hair tucked behind her ears. Her grey robe was belted efficiently around the waist. “I don’t have much time for conversation. Say what you have to say.”
Anya put her harp down and considered. “I need your help.”
“What makes you believe I’ll give it?”
“I’m a healer, you’re a healer. Unless I miss my guess, you too come from the Empire.” Bild nodded. “I have been entrusted with a . . . task, of which I will only say this: the one who entrusted me with this task does not love Macalla, nor does he believe in the necessity of Rufus’s death.”
“You mean the murder of King Rufus, in what these barbarians call a religious ceremony.” Bild glared at Anya’s harp. “When Rufus is dead, Macalla and his thugs, his so-called bards who denounce all gods but Dana-the-mother, will rule in all but name in this place, and then what will happen to the temples of Rhea, and Mereut, and Tyr?”
