Modern Classics of Fantasy, page 85
I said the first thing that came into my head. “Greetings to you, stranger, and God’s blessing on you.”
She made a sound that might have been laughter or a sob. But she said clearly enough, “Greetings and blessing, in God’s name.” She had a lady’s voice, and a lady’s accent, too, with a lilt in it that made me think of birds.
“Where are you from? Do you carry the sickness?”
The lady did not move at all. I was the one who started and spun about.
Mère Adele was noble born herself, though she never made much of it; she was as outspoken to the lord bishop as she was to any of us. She stood behind me now, hands on her ample hips, and fixed the stranger with a hard eye. “Well? Are you dumb, then?”
“Not mute,” the lady said in her soft voice, “nor enemy either. I have no sickness in me.”
“And how may we be sure of that?”
I sucked in a breath.
The lady spoke before I could, as sweetly as ever, and patient, with Francha’s head buried in the hollow of her shoulder. I had been thinking that she might be a nun fled from her convent. If she was, I thought I knew why. No bride of the lord Christ would carry a man’s child in her belly, swelling it under the coarse brown robe.
“You can never be certain,” she said to Mère Adele, “not of a stranger; not in these times. I will take no more from you than a loaf, of your charity, and your blessing if you will give it.”
“The loaf you may have,” said Mère Adele. “The blessing I’ll have to think on. If you fancy a bed for the night, there’s straw in plenty to make one, and a reaper’s dinner if you see fit to earn it.”
“Even,” the lady asked, “unblessed?”
Mère Adele was enjoying herself: I could see the glint in her eye. “Earn your dinner,” she said, “and you’ll get your blessing with it.”
The lady bent her head, as gracious as a queen in a story. She murmured in Francha’s ear. Francha’s grip loosened on her neck. She set the child down in front of me—Francha all eyes and wordless reluctance—and followed Mère Adele through the field. None of the children went after her, even Perrin. They were meeker than I had ever seen them, and quieter; though they came to themselves soon enough, once I had them back under the May tree.
* * * *
Her name, she said, was Lys. She offered no more than that, that night, sitting by the fire in the mown field, eating bread and cheese and drinking the ale that was all we had. In the day’s heat she had taken off her hood and her outer robe and worked as the rest did, in a shift of fine linen that was almost new. She was bearing for a fact, two seasons gone, I judged, and looking the bigger for that she was so thin. She had bones like a bird’s, and skin so white one could see the tracks of veins beneath, and hair as black as her skin was white, hacked off as short as a nun’s.
She was not that, she said. Swore to it and signed herself, lowering the lids over the great grey eyes. Have I said that she was beautiful? Oh, she was, like a white lily, with her sweet low voice and her long fair hands. Francha held her lap against all comers, but Perrin was bewitched, and Celine, and the rest of the children whose mothers had not herded them home.
“No nun,” she said, “and a great sinner, who does penance for her sins in this long wandering.”
We nodded round the fire. Pilgrimages we understood; and pilgrims, even noble ones, alone and afoot and tonsured, treading out the leagues of their salvation. Guillemette, who was pretty and very silly, sighed and clasped her hands to her breast. “How sad,” she said, “and how brave, to leave your lord and your castle—for castle you had, surely, you are much too beautiful to be a plain man’s wife—and go out on the long road.”
“My lord is dead,” the lady said.
Guillemette blinked. Her eyes were full of easy tears. “Oh, how terrible! Was it the war?”
“It was the plague,” said Lys. “And that was six months ago now, by his daughter in my belly, and you may weep as you choose, but I have no tears left.”
She sounded it: dry and quiet. No anger in her, but no softness either. In the silence she stood up. “If there is a bed for me, I will take it. In the morning I will go.”
“Where?” That was Mère Adele, abrupt as always, and cutting to the heart of things.
Lys stood still. She was tall; taller in the firelight. “My vow takes me west,” she said.
“But there is nothing in the west,” said Mère Adele.
“But,” said Lys, “there is a whole kingdom, leagues of it, from these marches to the sea.”
“Ah,” said Mère Adele, sharp and short. “That’s not west, that’s Armorica. West is nothing that a human creature should meddle with. If it’s Armorica that you’re aiming for, you’d best go south first, and then west, on the king’s road.”
“We have another name for that kingdom,” said Lys, “where I was born.” She shook herself; she sighed. “In the morning I will go.”
* * * *
She slept in the house I had come to when I married Claudel, in my bed next to me with the children in a warm nest, Celine and Perrin and Francha, and the cats wherever they found room. That was Francha’s doing, holding to her like grim death when she would have made her bed in the nun’s barn, until my tongue spoke for me and offered her what I had.
I did not sleep overmuch. Nor, I thought, did she. She was still all the night long, coiled on her side with Francha in the hollow of her. The children made their night noises, the cats purred, Mamère Mondine snored in her bed by the fire. I listened to them, and to the lady’s silence. Claudel’s absence was an ache still. It was worse tonight, with this stranger in his place. My hand kept trying to creep toward the warmth and the sound of her breathing, as if a touch could change her, make her the one I wanted there. In the end I made a fist of it and pinned it under my head, and squeezed my eyes shut, and willed the dawn to come.
Dawn came and went, and another dawn, and Lys stayed. The sky that had been so clear was turning grey. We needed every hand we had, to get in the crops before the rain came. Even mine—Mère Adele scowled at me as I took my place, but I stared her down. Lys took the row beside me. No one said anything. We were all silent, that day and the next, racing the rain.
The last of the barley went in the barn as the first drops fell. We stood out in it, too tired and too shocked by the stopping of a race we had run for so long, to do more than stare. Then someone grinned. Then some one else. Then the whole lot of us. We had done it, we, the women and the children and the men too old or weak to fight. We had brought in the harvest in Sency-la-Forêt.
That night we had a feast. Mère Adele’s cook slaughtered an ox, and the rest of us brought what we had or could gather. There was meat for everyone, and a cake with honey in it, and apples from the orchards, and even a little wine. We sat in the nuns’ refectory and listened to the rain on the roof, and ate till we were sated. Lame Bertrand had his pipe and Raymonde her drum, and Guillemette had a voice like a linnet. Some of the younger ones got up to dance. I saw how Pierre Allard was looking at Guillemette, and he just old enough to tend his own sheep: too young and small as he had been in the spring for the Comte’s men to take, but grown tall in the summer, and casting eyes at our pretty idiot as if he were a proper man.
I drank maybe more of the wine than was good for me. I danced, and people cheered: I had a neat foot even then, and Pierre Allard was light enough, and quick enough, to keep up with me.
It should have been Claudel dancing there. No great beauty, my Claudel, and not much taller than I, but he could dance like a leaf in the Wood; and sing, too, and laugh with me when I spun dizzy and breathless out of the dance. There was no one there to catch me and carry me away to a bed under the sky, or more likely on a night like this, in the barn among the cows, away from children and questions and eyes that pried.
I left soon after that, while the dancing was still in full whirl. The rain was steady, and not too cold. I was wet through soon enough, but it felt more pleasant than not. My feet knew the way in the black dark, along the path that followed the priory’s wall, down to the river and then up again to a shadow in shadow and a scent of the midden that was mine and no one else’s. There was light through a chink in the door: firelight, banked but not yet covered. Mamère Mondine nodded in front of it. She was blind and nearly deaf, but she smiled when I kissed her forehead. “Jeannette,” she said. “Pretty Jeannette.” And patted my hand that rested on her shoulder, and went back to her dreaming.
The children were abed, asleep. There was no larger figure with them. Francha’s eyes gleamed at me in the light from the lamp. They were swollen and red; her cheeks were tracked with tears.
I started to speak. To say that Lys was coming, that she would be here soon, that she was still in the priory. But I could not find it in me to say it. She had eaten with us. She had been there when the children went out in a crowd, protesting loudly. When the dancing began, I had not seen her. I had thought, if I thought at all, that she had come here before me.
In the dark and the rain, a stranger could only too easily go astray. It was not far to the priory, a mile, maybe, but that was a good count of steps, and more than enough to be lost in.
What made me think of the Wood, I never knew. Her words to Mère Adele. My first sight of her on the Wood’s edge. The simple strangeness of her, as I sat on the bed and tried to comfort Francha, and saw in the dimness the memory of her face. We had stories, we in Sency, of what lived in the Wood. Animals both familiar and strange, and shadows cast by no living thing, and paths that wound deep and deep, and yet ended where they began; and far within, behind a wall of mists and fear, a kingdom ruled by a deathless king.
I shook myself hard. What was it to mc that a wayward stranger had come, brought in our harvest, and gone away again? To Francha it was too much, and that I would not forgive. Whatever in the world had made our poor mute child fall so perfectly in love with the lady, it had done Francha no good, and likely much harm. She would not let me touch her now, scrambled to the far corner of the bed when I lay down and tried to draw her in, and huddled there for all that I dared do without waking the others. In the end I gave it up and closed my eyes. I was on the bed’s edge. Francha was pressed against the wall. She would have to climb over me to escape.
One moment, it seemed, I was fretting over Francha. The next, the red cock was crowing, and I was staggering up, stumbling to the morning’s duties. There was no sign of Lys. She had had no more than the clothes on her back; those were gone. She might never have been there at all.
I unlidded the fire and poked it up, and fed it carefully. I filled the pot and hung it over the flames. I milked the cow, I found two eggs in the nest that the black hen had thought so well hidden. I fed the pigs and scratched the old sow’s back and promised her a day in the wood, if I could persuade Bertrand to take her out with his own herd. I fed Mamère Mondine her bowl of porridge with a little honey dripped in it, and a little more for each of the children. Perrin and Celine gobbled theirs and wanted more. Francha would not eat. When I tried to feed her as I had when I first took her in, she slapped the spoon out of my hand. The other children were delighted. So were the cats, who set to at once, licking porridge from the wall and the table and the floor.
I sighed and retrieved the spoon. Francha’s face was locked shut. There would be no reasoning with her today, or, I suspected, for days hereafter. Inside myself I cursed this woman who had come, enchanted a poor broken child, and gone away without a word. And if Francha sickened over it, if she pined and died—as she well could, as she almost had before I took her—
I dipped the porridge back into the pot. I wiped the children’s faces and Francha’s hands. I did what needed doing. And all the while my anger grew.
The rain had gone away with the night. The last of the clouds blew away eastward, and the sun came up, warming the wet earth, raising pillars and curtains of mist. The threshers would be at it soon, as should I.
But I stood in my kitchen garden and looked over the hedge, and saw the wall of grey and green that was the Wood. One of the cats wound about my ankles. I gathered her up. She purred. “I know where the lady went,” I said. “She went west. She said she would. God protect her; nothing else will, where she was going.”
The cat’s purring stopped. She raked my hand with her claws and struggled free; hissed at me; and darted away round the midden.
I sucked my smarting hand. Celine ran out of the house, shrilling in the tone I was doing my best to slap out of her: “Francha’s crying again, mama! Francha won’t stop crying!”
What I was thinking of was quite mad. I should go inside, of course I should, and do what I could to comfort Francha, and gather the children together, and go to the threshing.
I knelt in the dirt between the poles of beans, and took Celine by the shoulders. She stopped her shrieking to stare at me. “Are you a big girl?” I asked her.
She drew herself up. “I’m grown up,” she said. “You know that, mama.”
“Can you look after Francha, then? And Perrin? And take them both to Mère Adele?”
She frowned. “Won’t you come, too?”
Too clever by half, was my Celine. “I have to do something else,” I said. “Can you do it, Celine? And tell Mère Adele that I’ll be back as soon as I can?”
Celine thought about it. I held my breath. Finally she nodded. “I’ll take Perrin and Francha to Mère Adele. And tell her you’ll come back. Then can I go play with Jeannot?”
“No,” I said. Then: “Yes. Play with Jeannot. Stay with him till I come back. Can you do that?”
She looked at me in perfect disgust. “Of course I can do that. I’m grown up.”
I bit my lips to keep from laughing. I kissed her once on each cheek for each of the others, and once on the forehead for herself. “Go on,” I said. “Be quick.”
She went. I stood up. In a little while I heard them go, Perrin declaring loudly that he was going to eat honeycakes with Mère Adele. I went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with bread and cheese and apples, and put the knife in, too, wrapped close in the cloth, and tied it all in my kerchief. Mamère Mondine was asleep. She would be well enough till evening. If I was out longer, then Mère Adele would know to send someone. I kissed her and laid my cheek for a moment against her dry old one. She sighed but did not wake. I drew myself up and went back through the kitchen garden.
Our house is one of the last in the village. The garden wall is part of Messire Arnaud’s palisade, though we train beans up over it, and I have a grapevine that almost prospers. Claudel had cut a door in it, which could have got us in trouble if Messire Arnaud had lived to find out about it; but milord was dead and his heirs far away, and our little postern was hidden well in vines within and brambles without.
I escaped with a scratch or six, but with most of my dignity intact. It was the last of the wine in me, I was sure, and anger for Francha’s sake, and maybe a little honest worry, too. Lys had been a guest in my house. If any harm came to her, the guilt would fall on me.
And I had not gone outside the palisade, except to the fields, since Claudel went away. I wanted the sun on my face, no children tugging at my skirts, the memory of death far away. I was afraid of what I went to, of course I was; the Wood was a horror from my earliest memory. But it was hard to be properly terrified, walking the path under the first outriders of the trees, where the sun slanted down in long sheets, and the wind murmured in the leaves, and the birds sang sweet and unafraid. The path was thick with mould under my feet. The air was scented with green things, richer from the rain, with the deep earthy promise of mushrooms. I found a whole small field of them, and gathered as many as my apron would carry, but moving quickly through them and not lingering after.
By then Sency was well behind me and the trees were closing in. The path wound through them, neither broader nor narrower than before. I began to wonder if I should have gone to fetch the Allards’ dog. I had company, it was true: the striped cat had followed me. She was more comfort than I might have expected.
The two of us went on. The scent of mushrooms was all around me like a charm to keep the devils out. I laughed at that. The sound fell soft amid the trees. Beeches turning gold with autumn. Oaks going bronze. Ash with its feathery leaves, thorn huddling in thickets. The birds were singing still, but the quiet was vast beneath.
The cat walked ahead of me now, tail up and elegantly curved. One would think that she had come this way before.
I had, longer ago than I liked to think. I had walked as I walked now, but without the warding of mushrooms, crossing myself, it seemed, at every turn of the path. I had taken that last, suddenly steep slope, and rounded the thicket—hedge, it might have been—of thorn, and come to the sunlit space. It had dazzled me then as it dazzled me now, so much light after the green gloom. I blinked to clear my eyes.
The chapel was as it had been when last I came to it. The two walls that stood; the one that was half fallen. The remnant of a porch, the arch of a gate, with the carving on it still, much blurred with age and weather. The upper arm of the cross had broken. The Lady who sat beneath it had lost her upraised hand, but the Child slept as ever in her lap, and her smile, even so worn, was sweet.
