Tale of Elske (10 page)

“You think this is the black powder,” Elske decided.

He wore the mourning band for his wife across his chest, but now he smiled at Elske. “Perhaps I should marry you. Other men have clever wives to work beside them.”

“Why should everyone suddenly think of marrying me?” Elske demanded, and he smiled more broadly but did not tell her, so she could only laugh. Then he dismissed her, to return to the little girls. “And why
should
I marry again?” he asked as she turned to leave him.

“You wish for a son,” Elske told him.

“Go now,” Var Jerrol ordered, “before I change my mind.”

VAR JERROL SENT A PARTY
into the south, men willing to risk the hazards of winter travel for the sums Var Jerrol offered. When the survivors of the party returned, marked by blackened, frostbitten toes, fingers and ears, they brought with them a captive, a nervous, quick-eyed man, who asked question after question. Elske translated between the man and Var Jerrol. “What is he going to do with me? Why was I taken?” the man asked. “I'm not a wealthy man. How can they hope for ransom from a simple apothecary? Have you no pity for me? Can you not pity my wife, who must wonder what has befallen me? I'll reward you, I promise, Elske, whatever you ask. A rich husband? If you'd just tell me what he wants. Jewels? In my own city, I have the ear of the Count. The Count will give you whatever I tell him, if you help me get away.”

The apothecary grew bolder with food and drink and warmth and rest. Var Jerrol shared meals with his captive, but kept Elske always in the room, to translate. As the man looked around him more, he no longer asked Elske to help him escape. At last, one day, he inquired of Var Jerrol directly, “What do you desire of me?”

Var Jerrol, who like all of the merchants spoke some Souther, answered this question himself. “The formula for black powder.”

The apothecary laughed, then. “I thought it was something like that. Well, it's simple enough—for a man who knows its secret.” He watched Elske, as she translated. “But I need some incentive to persuade my secret from me. For I'll have broken faith with the Count, and his writ will be out on my life.”

“I could make you glad to tell me anything I asked of you,” Var Jerrol said, but the man only laughed again, and suggested, “You prefer to have me tell you willingly, and truthfully.”

Var Jerrol didn't argue.

“If I'm to lose everything, I'd be a fool to ask nothing in return. I'd need a new home, and large wealth,” the apothecary said. Var Jerrol nodded, eyelids lowered; he accepted the bargain. “I might want a new wife. Young, and unknown to any man, to get my sons upon. I might want Elske,” the apothecary said.

“Elske doesn't wish to marry you,” Var Jerrol said.

“What do her wishes matter?”

“In Trastad, no woman weds against her will,” Var Jerrol said. “Not even a servant. Besides, she is Wolfer bred and raised. And who would take such a woman into his bed, where he must sometimes lie helpless in sleep, when he has taken her against her will? You're safer with the wife I find for you,” Var Jerrol said. “Now, tell me what you know.”

The apothecary sighed, and then announced cheerfully, “I know everything.” As he spoke, Elske repeated the information to Var Jerrol.

Mixed in proper proportions, the ingredients for black powder responded to flame by bursting apart. Like a pig's bladder, when children fill it with air and then knot its neck; if the children drop it into a fire, it blows itself apart. Black powder explodes, the captive said.

The evil smell that accompanied the explosion was burned sulfur, familiar to those who lived near where iron and copper were extracted from their ores. It was charcoal, ground fine, that gave the powder its black color. Charcoal was in short supply in the south, where the forests had been cleared to farmlands to feed the growing citizenry, and there was little wood to burn down to charcoal. Thus, unless the apothecary was mistaken, Trastad would find more and more ships come into its harbor, to be filled with lumber, for use by the southern manufacturies of black powder.

Yes, a city could easily be taken with the black powder, its walls breached by the explosion. There was even talk that some of the Emperor's armies had long tubes, out of the ends of which the black powder propelled sharp pellets, to kill a man before he could come close to you with his drawn sword. This was killing your enemy as soon as you could see him, and he could have no protection against you. But the apothecary doubted these stories, for why didn't the long stick blow up in a man's hands when the fire flashed through the black powder?

Oh, yes, there was a third ingredient, to be ground in with the others, and the joke was it could be found in any cellar, on the wet walls, and it could be found growing atop any manure heap of every farm. This third ingredient was the pale saltpeter that, added in proper proportion—things must always be in the right proportions or the powder wouldn't work, it was knowledge of proportion that made the apothecary's information so valuable—made the black powder. Now, if the distinguished gentleman would give his word to the bargain—?

Var Jerrol would, and offered his hand to seal it.

Then the apothecary could easily write the formula down, if Elske would bring him paper and pen.

She set them down before him, and watched as he wrote, and saw how simple it was.

At this point, Var Jerrol sent Elske from the room, and she never saw the apothecary again. She never asked about him, either, for she had seen Var Jerrol's eyes.

WINTER'S END FINALLY CAME NEAR,
the ice melting out into the sea, first, and then separating into chunks on the rivers. When the grass grew green and the apple trees threw lacy shawls of blossoms over their shoulders, Var Jerrol began talking to Elske about the proper education of his daughters, that they might attract husbands worthy of their father's position. He wished them to learn not only letters and numbers, but also how to mount and ride a horse, and even sword skills, that they might defend themselves, and even to have some knowledge of trade, and banking.

The long, honey-colored summer days flowed over Trastad. Piet of the brown hair asked for Elske's hand in marriage and she declined him. Var Jerrol warned her that when he himself wed—for he had chosen his new wife—Elske must leave his house if she would not take Brown Piet. He warned her that she was approaching her fifteenth winter, entering her marrying years, so she should look about her for a man who pleased her most. He would give her a dowry, Var Jerrol said. But Elske had no desire to marry.

She had chosen her future, he said. The city would give her as maidservant to an Adelinne, to serve the young woman during the Courting Winter, to companion her to the Assemblies and other entertainments and probably, since most of the Adeliers spoke that language, speak her familiar Souther. Elske would be sent to Var Vladislav, High Councillor of Trastad, the wealthiest of its citizens, master of many vessels and a large banking house, possessor of vast forest estates on the mainland, and farms and copper mines as well. She would be just one among many maidservants in his great villa on Logisle. This must be her future if she would not marry, Var Jerrol told her and waited again for her answer.

Risking his displeasure—for she found herself unwilling to bend to his will—Elske again declined to take a husband. She had no desire for any man to husband her, she said, and while there would be an emptiness in her heart where the little girls had lived, still, her choice was to be sent away from them.

“Do you think to overmaster me so easily?” he asked, and she laughed, partly for the pleasure of seizing her will from him.

“I don't think to overmaster you at all,” she said. “I'm not such a fool.”

She accepted the purse of coins he gave her, and wished him well with his new wife, wished the daughters well with their new mother, and when the cool, brief days of autumn spilled over the three islands, Elske said her farewells to Var Jerrol's household, made her curtsey to the new Varinne—as round and rosy as the first had been slim and pale—and followed Red Piet for the last time through the stony streets of Trastad. They walked past docks and warehouses busy at the concluding days of the trading season, and over the bridge to Harboring where—as she knew—Idelle awaited Taddus's return with the sorrow of an empty cradle, and then across another bridge to Logisle. There, the stone villa of High Councillor Vladislav opened its heavy doors to Red Piet's pounding.

The manservant told Elske she must go around the side of the palace, as he called it, and reminded Red Piet, before he closed the door upon them, that he should know better than to come pounding at the front door of the High Councillor's palace.

“You could marry me and come back to Var Jerrol's,” Red Piet said to Elske, then.

“Why does everyone wish to wed me?” Elske asked him and he told her, “To keep you safe among us, and have you in my bed. But you won't marry me?”

“I'm to serve the Adelinne.”

“And after that?” he asked her.

“How can we know what comes after?” she asked him, bidding him farewell.

Alone now, she followed the sandy path around the villa, passing tall empty windows, passing through gardens where the last of the summer roses faded on their thorny branches, passing into the kitchen gardens—herbs, and the tall stalks of onions trampled down onto the dirt, the green fronds of carrots, waiting in the earth and apple trees behind all—passing on to a plain wooden doorway. The villa was like a bird, with its two wings spread out. The central section rose up four stories, its windows growing smaller with each ascent; it needed four great chimneys. Elske faced one of the wings, only two stories. She could look into the windows and see dried herbs hanging in bunches down from the rafters.

Then the door opened to her knock, and the same stern manservant urged her inside. “You've come from Var Jerrol. You're to be maidservant to our Adelinne. You're called Elske,” he told her. “I am steward to the house of Var Vladislav, who is the High Councillor of Trastad.” As he named his master, and gave him his title, the steward became even stiffer than before, and more dignified.

Elske said nothing, and this pleased him.

He led her down a narrow dark hallway, past a large cook room—where three open fires burned, and several young women were at work at a table, and cauldrons steamed on the great hob—into a moist, windowless washroom. There two vats of water boiled over open fires, and two women stirred them with thick poles while a third watched them at their work. The third woman introduced herself.

“I'm housekeeper to the High Councillor. Var Jerrol has sent you to us, and Var Vladislav takes his spy's word for you, so who am I to question? We are to have the Fiendly Princess for our Adelinne. For they've sent her back, to angle again for a husband, and you are to be her maidservant. Carry on here, girls,” she said, and “Yes, Missus,” they answered her.

They were stirring around among white cloths, sweat running down their red faces and chests heaving with the effort. The housekeeper took Elske by the arm and led her out of the washroom, then down a long hallway, lit by dim daylight.

There was first a room where servants dined but Elske would not, and then storerooms holding food and linens, pots, brooms, stacks of wood for the stoves, as well as eight large copper tubs for bathing. At the end, a door opened onto the entrance hall of the villa. There, the housekeeper allowed Elske to look into the two reception rooms, one for the Varinne when she had callers, the other for the Var to conduct his business. She pointed out the room in which the Var and his family dined, and the large dining room where the Var entertained. There was also a ballroom, the walls hung with beryl glass, which in daylight made it as bright as outdoors. At the foot of the broad staircase that rose up from the back of the great hall, the housekeeper told Elske, “Under no circumstances will you ever go up into the family's private apartments.”