Spear, page 2
Winter was harsher than the one before, and from the birds and badgers and foxes and stoats she heard rumour of a great new band of bandits. Grim and fierce, said the badger; sharp-eyed and cunning, said the fox. She remembered the ram. She could best them in battle; she could! And she longed to escape the cave and her mother and find adventure. Find her true self.
One morning she woke to find the bright, glittering cold changed to dull grey and the drip, drip of icicles thawing. She knew from the sleeping grumble of a hedgepig turning in her den that it would be a brief thaw, but for now her footsteps might blend into the melt and be hidden. She took up her axe and went looking for battle.
She loped over the hills, then south down the valley, scenting the air, asking the worms deep in the dirt: Where are they? She found nothing until on the eastern slope of the valley, farther south than she had been before, she trod on snow which did not give like snow, and her stride stuttered, and she stumbled. She dug in the snow and found an arm, with black hair curling from beneath its cuff. She dug more and uncovered a man, long dead, much eaten by beasts. She squatted in the snow and laid a hand on the shattered thigh bone of his left leg and caught a small, mournful memory of falling from the saddle; a prayer in some smoky, spiky tongue that almost made sense; and blood pooling on the turf, turf that was brown with the end of summer. She sought for more, but, faint to begin with, the memory blew away in the wind. She brought her attention back to the body before her. Over a glittering shirt—sewn with shiny overlapping metal, like fish scales—he wore a wide leather belt hung crosswise, and from it hung a blade in a scabbard.
She saw that the scabbard could be unhooked, lifted it off, and drew the blade with some difficulty: it was rusted in places, and the tip was missing, but it was a sword, like the swords of the knights who chased the dragons around the bowl. She swang it with one hand, then the other; it was not very big. She resheathed it and laid it to one side. On a smaller belt around his hips was a fine bright purse and a good knife with silver-inlaid hilt. On his left hand, a ring with a reddish stone carved with a strange beast, perhaps a fish, only balanced upright on its tail. She dug further, and found a spear, two spears as she had seen the knights carry tied to the saddle of their horses. But there was no horse and no shield, no pack of food or bedroll or travelling cloak that she could see. She piled her spoils, said a blessing, as she would to a dead hare, then left him exposed so that hungry beasts might find his bones and feed their young.
Just inside the thicket, hidden from the world and also from her mother, she laid out her finds in the weak waterlight of winter. The purse was bright but empty except for a worn silver coin with a Redcrest king’s head—emperor, in the language of the scrolls. The small belt was no better than her own, so she set it aside for use on the coop she meant to build for the ducklings she would catch for her mother when the duck eggs hatched. The fish-scale shirt was made of thin, supple leather, with each scale sewn on with sinew. When she tried it, it was tight at the shoulder, tighter across the chest, and too short for her arms. Did its magic work? It had not saved the man who wore it. Perhaps there was no magic for falling off your own mount and dying alone and unmarked. Perhaps its magic was only against blades. There was a tear in the leather on the right side, repaired and cleverly hidden by the scales. The spears were good straight ash. One thick-shafted, with a broad leaf-shaped blade and two wide flanges beneath that, the other a slimmer shaft topped not with a blade but a long point, as thick as her middle finger with hammer marks plain on the tapering sides, and sharp-tipped, even now. Different heads for different uses, though she did not yet know what. The knife had a good blade but she preferred her own. The baldric was sturdy leather, stiff now from lying in the snow, but sound. And last, the sword. The scabbard was wool-lined wood wrapped in carved leather with a heavy tip of silver. The tip was etched with what might be faint figures, blurred and worn with age, and the leather had once been green, or perhaps blue like that wrapped around the hilt, and wound about with black wire: a strange, rough leather, with stipples. The pommel had once held a stone but now gaped empty. She drew the blade and shook the scabbard to see if the missing blade tip might fall out; none did. The wire-and-leather grip felt good in her hand, sure and light. But she did not swing the sword. She laid it on the fish-scale shirt and studied it carefully. The metal rippled and flowed where it was not rusted. This was a fine thing, wounded but not dead, and if she worked steadily she could bring it back to health by spring.
* * *
THAT LAST MONTH of winter, as she laboured over the sword and its scabbard, her mother would cajole her, beg her Dawnged to stop, and when the girl did not, Elen became silent, her eyes dark at the centre, dark as ink dropped in blue dye, and ringed with charcoal. Elen grew frantic as the girl worked; she wept and muttered, and cried out in her sleep for Tâl, but the girl kept working, scouring off the rust, honing the blade, greasing the metal with the last of their duck fat, relining the scabbard with sheepskin stolen from a farm, replacing the little leather ties and their broken enamelled cairns at the ends with copper blobs she learnt to melt in her homemade crucible. She knew her mother scryed and wove spells when she left with her spears and learnt how to hurl them, but she did not care. She threw and threw until both spears always struck their target; she learnt that the broad-headed one would not fall out of a running deer but would drag it to a halt, and the other one could punch through metal—had punched through the arm of the fish-scale shirt. A hunting spear, and a spear for hunting men, armed men: a battle spear. She did not know how to mend the fish scale, which she had split, so she cut the leather shirt down the back to make it wider, to fit, took out the broken scales, and sewed in their place, and down the new leather in the back, small oblongs of wood wrapped in boiled leather and dyed dark with oak gall. The leather baldric she soaked in fat rendered from a wild pig, and soaked again, until it was as supple as a length of cloth.
One afternoon when winter was done and the world had begun its turn towards the light, with green shoots thrusting through the dark earth, the girl roamed the high fell in the steeper, northern part of the valley. And even here men were coming again with their sheep; she found droppings and followed them—followed the complaint from an old wether with worn teeth that this time perhaps the woman who herded them would leave them their wool until it was warmer. She was smiling to herself about the foolish old sheep, and sending it news of where it might find tender grass suitable for its mouth, when she heard a savage snarl, and ran. She leapt a tangle of gorse, and found a stray ewe with one lamb at her tail backing away from a wild dog that looked to be half wolf, standing over one already-dead lamb, hackles raised, and thinking, Kill them all, kill kill kill. She threw her hunting spear and took the dog through the side of its chest, tearing its heart. “Hush,” she told the ewe and her living lamb, promised she would use the dead lamb with all reverence, and showed them the way back to the flock.
When they were upwind, she gralloched the lamb, drained it, and buried the guts so as not to draw more predators to the sheep. She slung the carcass on her shoulder—it was a good one, fat with new grass, and would feed her and her mother for a week; the shepherd could spare one lamb, for she could have lost two—and turned for home. But as she reached the lower trackway, she heard something new: jingling. Jingling and hooves. She stilled, unmoving as a stump, and blended into the mix of evergreen, bare twig, and white-blossomed hawthorn that ran alongside the track. A company of men, a score or more, cantered by. They wore mail shirts—some ringed, some sewn plates, some fish scale—and helmets, and swords, and shields with painted devices, and their mounts glittered with gold at tailpiece, headpiece, and saddle. Two carried spears like standards, with little bannerlets fluttering from the top. One, his helm tucked under his arm against the blue-and-brown leather of his tunic, had gleaming dark skin, almost as dark as the bowl, with the hair on his head springy and tight-curled as a sheep’s and none on his chin; another was milk-pale and speckled as a thrush’s breast; a third, lean and lithe in plain black, above which his face and neck showed the rich brown of walnut; and another had sloping shoulders and a belly rounded as a duck egg—and his skin eggshell smooth. All different yet somehow alike—not family but easy with one another, and loud, laughing and singing, bright and clean. The same bright, the same clean she remembered from the scent of the promised lake. The girl’s heart soared: a story come alive from legend, knights hunting dragons!
When they were safely past she draped her lamb over a boundary stone, wrote with a piece of chalk on the side of the stone Mine, touch not! in the language of books, and again in the straight scratch-marks of the language of Eiru, and ran after the knights.
They were moving fast on tall horses; she did not have them in sight when they found their quarry. Or, rather, when their quarry found them: not dragons but bandits. They were ambushed by well-organised fighters—there were more bandits than knights, many more, and more vicious. There was no glorious charge as in the stories, only men running under horses’ bellies and slashing them open, rusty knives sneaking into gaps in armour, the shock of bright banners falling, and then the knights—strong and fresh and well fed—tightening their reins and drawing their swords. And it seemed to the girl as she ran towards them with the speed of a loping wolf that if their horses had not responded so fast many more knights would have fallen in that first rush—and more even than that, for now the girl was among them, unseen, saving many with a quick, hidden thrust from a hedge, a fast slash from behind a tree, and a lithe dance alongside a riderless horse—who understood her gestured request and sheltered her from sight—to hamstring a bandit looming over a dazed, bare-headed knight. The knight—the milk-faced one, in brave green-and-yellow leathers—had lost his helm and taken a blow from a stave alongside his temple. She saved him, unseen—though perhaps he did see her, for his eyes widened before she whirled away. But she had seen the weight of the blow he took; he might survive but likely would not remember.
Then the knights settled into their grim killing, for once over their shock they were skilled and fast, and the girl watched the flickering sword work of the man in black leather who stayed on his horse, the brave charge of the one in blue-and-brown leathers—though in a helmet now—who cast a spear then leapt from his horse and fought back-to-back with another with a lush, curling beard until no bandits were left. And after, when they were gathering themselves up and collecting their riderless horses—which the girl had persuaded to stand quietly outside the fighting until called for—she scooped up a fallen leather cap with cheek flaps, for she had seen what could happen to a bare head.
She watched them get their breath, strip the bandits—one exclaimed at a shield he found—bind their own wounds, bind their horses’ wounds, and take stock before riding slowly back down the valley, two bodies slung over horses’ backs, and many men walking to save their own wounded mounts. She shadowed them as they walked—the man in black limped, though she could tell it was an old limp, and familiar, as much a part of him as breathing—ghosting along, listening, drawing even closer when they stopped at dusk and built a fire, dulling their night sight.
They spoke more like her mother than the folk of the fell, though the limping man in black spoke with a rise and fall that spoke to her of mountains in another land, and the lush-bearded man with an accent scented with sun-warmed fruit and wine. The dazed man in green and yellow seemed high in their company but allowed himself to be told what to do, which was to sit down and keep still, because he had staggered when he dismounted, and staggered again when he tried to fill a pot with water. His ears must have been ringing, or perhaps he was angry, because he shouted rather than spoke.
His beardless friend in brown-and-blue leathers looked up from the shield he was examining and said, “Oh, just admit it, Cei. Your horse threw you; he likes you as little as you like him.”
She listened to the horses, found Cei’s bay gelding: it was true, there was no love between the two; Cei was … afraid of his horse? No, not afraid, exactly. The bay showed her the way he sat: tight, hunched, fretful of falling and being humiliated.
Cei said, “I was pushed. By some beardless stripling who then for some unaccountable reason used a boar spear like an axe—a boar spear! He swung at me with such force that when he missed he took off the leg of one of his fellow peasants. Which poured blood like a river and ruined my tunic.”
The man in black looked up. “A stripling you say? Took off a man’s leg with a boar spear?”
“Fearsome,” said the one in brown and blue.
Cei plucked at his red-stained tunic and frowned. “Just big and stupid. My head hurts. Is there wine, Lance?”
Lance, the man in black, shook his head and gestured at the man in brown and blue. “Bedwyr drank it all.”
Bedwyr, who had opened his mouth to deny it, saw Lance’s slight head shake, and lifted the shield instead. “Perhaps it was your fearsome peasant who took Talorcan.” He traced something on the shield, and sighed.
In the flickering flame light, the girl saw painted on the shield the same strange upright fish beast carved into the ring she had found on the dead man. His device. Talorcan. Even the dead had names. But the man named Talorcan, or who at least had worn Talorcan’s ring, died alone, and died before the bandit band came to the valley. The bandits must have found his horse, or perhaps what the wolves had left of his horse, and the shield still tied behind the saddle.
The men ate, and talked of Talorcan, who had left on a quest nearly a year ago. They addressed many of their remarks to Cei; they were keeping him awake, she thought.
On the other side of the fire, closer to her, the one with the curled beard looked up from cleaning his sword and said, in his sunlit accent, to Bedwyr, “They weren’t all peasants.”
“No?” Bedwyr said. Then to Lance, “Andros thinks we weren’t fighting peasants.”
Lance limped over to join them. “No. Some were fighting men. We have faced them before, I think, and taken their surrender.”
Andros went back to his sword, and Bedwyr said softly to Lance, “Did you see this fearsome stripling among the dead?”
“No,” said Lance just as softly. “And I wonder if he was our helper.”
“Helper?”
Lance nodded. “Did you not feel it?”
“No,” Bedwyr said, but he fingered something that glinted silver, hanging like an amulet around his neck.
“I thought I saw from the corner of my eye something moving, just after you cast your javelin.”
“Something?”
“It moved lithe as a cat.”
“A cat? You dreamed it.”
“Did I dream all the dead? We had help; it was too easy.”
“Easy?” said Bedwyr. “We lost two Companions and three mounts—to what should have been a rabble of bandits. Who knew there could be so many in this forsaken valley?”
To the girl it was clear Lance was thinking much he was not willing to say. In the end he said only, “We would have lost more without our mysterious helper who has melted away like mist.”
“And will you tell that to the king?” Bedwyr dropped his amulet, a cross, beneath his tunic.
Lance rubbed his face and looked at Cei, who was now playing a lethargic game of knucklebones with the egg-shaped man. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll suggest we should not yet reclaim the Valley of the Tywi. The whole thing has the smell of the uncanny.”
Bedwyr touched his chest where the cross hung out of sight. “That’s business for Myrddyn.”
Lance nodded. The girl could tell he did not like this man whose business was the uncanny. “Perhaps I’ll know what to tell Artos king when we get back to Caer Leon.”
Artos, she thought. A king. In Caer Leon. The words rang in her head like a bell, like the scent of the lake, like the bright clean shimmer around the Companions.
She withdrew to the shadows and began the long walk back under a thick twist of stars.
No one had touched her lamb—of course they had not, for they thought it belonged to the fey—so she gathered both spears in one hand and hoisted the lamb’s loose weight back over her shoulder. The shafts of both spears—a boar spear, she thought; a javelin—were sticky with blood. She looked at her big hand, red now. Men’s blood. She had killed a man; more than one man. The world looked no different, but she felt different in it, as though it had tilted on its axis and the line of stars had changed.
* * *
SHE CLEANED HERSELF and her spears before she found her way back to the thicket, and finding her way took more time than it should, almost as though she were a stranger and her mother’s warding geas worked against her. As though she no longer belonged.
As though she could smell the change, her mother would not at first speak to her, and then began to shout wild accusations: Did the girl want them to be found? Did she want her mother’s mind rived from her body and that body used like a rag? Did she want her mother to lose everything, every single thing she had earned? And after her rant she fell into moaning, and then into silence. It would pass, the girl knew. Meanwhile, she ate and slept, hunted and foraged, and her mother just followed the girl with her haunted forget-me-not blue eyes, drew figures in the hearth ash and cast bones, and jumped at strange noises.
After two days of this, the girl sat by her mother, took her mother’s hand, and said, “What is my name?”
Elen’s hand lay limp in the girl’s.
“I need a name.”
But Elen looked at nothing, or something only she could see.
