Tale of Elske (3 page)

So they set off, with Elske in the lead. She had answered their questions and any she had for them could wait until they halted at nightfall. Tamara had always told Elske stories, tales of foreign people and their foreign ways, tales of watery oceans stretching out as far as the eye could see, tales of a Kingdom hidden away safe from the rest of the world, where the King looked on his subjects as a gardener looks on the plants whose well-being makes his own. In her stories, Tamara had spoken of men like these three, whose work was carrying goods from one place to another, for buying and selling. Merchants traded goods for gold, as if each merchant were a Volkking, to have his own treasure-house.

Elske listened carefully to her traveling companions. In their talk, his father and brother scolded Nido for speaking foolishly, and teased him for his laziness, and for wandering off the path. Nido pestered them to tell him how many more days it would be before they were home at last, until they told him sharply not to be so impatient. They talked about men they had done business with in the southern cities, and whether the cloth Taddus had insisted they purchase would please the women of Trastad or if, as Tavyan predicted, it would prove profitless.

Elske liked the sound of that word,
profitless
; it was narrow and tidy, like the Birth House in Tamara's care.

The men spoke quickly and with much argument, although they often laughed. Elske wished she could walk backwards, to see their faces. The Volkaric laughed at another's pain, or shame; their laughter was as sharp as their swords; like swords, laughter was used to wound. The Volkaric argued over things that could be taken, a bowl of stew, a pelt, a woman, and they talked only to give orders. These three used talk differently.

Nido talked the most. He thought they had been ten days and nights on the path, for he had been counting carefully. He thought the mother would be watching for them over the sea, and asked could he be the one to go up behind her and put his hands over her eyes to surprise her, and her new baby, too. For weren't babies born in summer?

Taddus scolded his brother for talking as if they had arrived safely home already, tempting fortune to do ill by them, and said something about Elske that she didn't understand.

“She wouldn't harm us,” Nido argued.

“Don't go——ing her,” Taddus warned. “She's Volkaric.”

Elske turned the sound into letters in her head, as Tamara had taught her. T-r-u-s-t-ing.

“She's trusting us enough to travel with us,” Nido argued. “That's evens up.”

They spoke in Norther, but with a difference. Elske's accustomed language was like the broth made from gnawed bones, but this language of theirs had meat in it, too, and onions, and other unknown foods, even pinches of salt.

“How do we know she's not leading us into an ambush?” Taddus asked his father.

“How does she know we won't rape her or sell her as a slave?” Tavyan answered. “I've decided that she'll travel with us, and that settles that.”

Taddus ignored his father's last words. “You know what they call them, in the south. Wolfers. You know that, and do you know why?”

“She's not like a wolf,” Nido said. “Anybody can see that.”

“Wolves,” Taddus continued, “will smell out a pregnant doe, and they'll trail after her until she gives birth. Then the wolves take the helpless newborn, and the mother too weak to escape. That's what Wolfers are. They know nothing of mercy or law, government or trade.”

Elske said nothing, and asked nothing, not when they spoke of things she knew, not when she wondered at the meaning of their words. She walked and listened.

When they halted at sunset, with four it took almost no time to gather wood and start a fire. Elske had her own loaf and scraps of dried flesh, which she offered around to the others. They turned away from her food. In turn, they offered her a round, speckled-red object. “Apple,” they called it.

Elske took it into her hand. The apple was hard, not as heavy as a rock, palm-sized. A short twig rose out of its top, like the cut cord on a newborn. She looked across the fire to Nido's face, shadowy in the firelight, then to Taddus, and Tavyan.

Tavyan held one of these apples in his own hand and said, “Eat.” He bit into it.

Elske tried to tell them. “My grandmother spoke of apples, and trees with white blossoms in the spring.” Tamara had also told of little cakes, like bread only so light and so sweet with honey and something called raisins that, speaking of them, Tamara smiled to remember what it was to have such a cake in her mouth, and taste it. Elske held out her hand, the apple in her palm. “I never thought I would eat an apple.”

“— it,” Nido urged. “There's nothing to be afraid of.”

T-r-y. Elske put the new word away in her head and promised him, “I'm not afraid.” She opened her mouth and bit into the apple. Her teeth cut through its tight skin and she heard a sound—like frosty grasses underfoot just before the snows begin—as her teeth closed around the flesh and a bite fell off it, into her mouth. She chewed it. The taste was like—clear as water, and sweet, like Tamara's winter medicine of water with three drops of honey stirred into it. But this apple was dense as a turnip, this apple was food. Elske opened her eyes to smile. Two of the watching faces smiled back at her, but Taddus asked his father, “Do they know the value of the skins they wear? Do you think she knows how much her cloak is worth?”

“You don't think to take it from her, do you?” His father laughed.

Then Taddus, too, smiled at Elske. “We won't harm you.”

“Why should you harm me?” Elske asked, and took another bite of the apple. When these Trastaders smiled, their teeth gleamed white, especially when the smiling man was bearded; these Trastaders smiled freely.

“And you won't harm us,” Nido announced.

“Why should I harm you?” she asked, her smile broadening.

Nido added, “You couldn't, anyway, you're only a girl,” at which both Taddus and Tavyan laughed, and warned Nido that he was too young to understand what harm girls could do to a man. Then Nido became angry, and asked why, if Taddus felt that way, he was in such a hurry to get home and get married?

Like Nido, when Elske finished the apple she tossed the core into the fire, where it sizzled and steamed and sweetened the rising smoke. A white crescent of new moon hung in a black, star-speckled sky above them, the fire had burned down to bright warm coals, and they were all tired; so they lay down and slept.

In the morning Tavyan showed Elske what their journey would be. “The mountains lie between us and Trastad,” he said. “We are heading for the pass,” he said, and took a stick to draw in the dirt. Elske crouched beside him. “This line is our path, running north.” Then he drew uneven lines, approaching the path and forcing it to turn west, “Mountains,” showing how the path turned back towards the north and east, between the jagged lines. After the mountains, the path he drew became a river, he said, as he ended it with the letter T.

“Trastad?” Elske guessed, and he said, “Beyond Trastad is only the open sea. At this time of year, most of our merchants return to Trastad by sea.”

Elske was studying the lines in the dirt.

“You can drown in the sea,” Nido told her, but she couldn't understand what was so important in that. “Men do, sailors, all the time.”

“That's nothing to do with us,” Taddus pointed out to his brother, and Tavyan, too, ignored his younger son, saying to Elske, “It's only a roughly drawn map.”

“Map,” Elske said, shaping the word in her mind. Now that she had seen a map, she could travel on her own—if she wished—to Trastad. Now that she had seen a map, she couldn't lose her way. Without thinking, she wrote the word with her finger in the dirt. Then she stood, and picked up her sack.

The others were staring at her. At last, “You know letters,” Nido said.

Elske sensed some danger. “My grandmother taught me.”

“Do all the Volkaric know letters?” Taddus asked.

To think of that made Elske laugh, and when she laughed the danger was gone. “The Volkaric didn't care to know, and what need did they have? They had no parchment, or”—she remembered the odd little word, a Souther word—“ink.”

“Father,” Taddus said again, reminding them that the morning was going rapidly by.

“My brother's bride awaits him,” Nido explained to Elske.

“And we all have winter moving towards us,” Taddus said.

“Two good reasons for haste,” Tavyan said, and they set off.

For that day and the next the path took them west, until on the third morning they came to a broad, shallow stream, its stones gleaming in the water. This stream led them back to the north and east. Then, every day the mountains came closer, taking up more of the sky with their white peaks, and the stream the travelers climbed beside ran away behind them, down rocky hillsides. Rain fell, so cold that Elske wore her wolfskin boots, which kept her legs and feet as warm as summer.

Taddus wished he could have such boots. “Not for myself, for Idelle. My wife, as she soon will be, when we return. At the Longest Night, Idelle and I will become a husband and his wife,” Taddus told Elske, proud to say it, and eager.

By the full moon they had entered a high valley, its narrow meadows and steep hillsides dusted with frosts. There another stream tumbled down into the valley bottom and this new stream followed the valley to the east, curling and coiling between mountain steeps.

These mountains were so high that the travelers fell asleep before they could see the moon risen into the night sky, and awoke after she had once again slipped behind the mountains. They were accustomed to traveling together, now, and Elske knew much that she had not known before. She knew that a wife was the woman a man of Trastad had chosen to be his lifelong companion, promising never to move another woman into his house; marrying his wife, a man became a husband. She knew that Nido had three sisters waiting at home, two of them older than he but the last younger, and his mother expected another child, which Nido eagerly hoped would be a boy. The reason for this was the Trastader customs of inheritance, and Elske needed many questions to understand these. By Trastader custom, when he married, Taddus would live with his wife's family, where he would become the inheritor of her father's wealth, all other children of the father having died. But Tavyan, too, must have an heir, which Nido would be, as a son. But if the expected baby was a boy, then there would be another heir for Tavyan's property, to feed the family and give dowries to the daughters. So Nido would be able to apprentice himself to a ship's carpenter, which was his desire. And if the boy did not live? But Nido would be already apprenticed, contracts signed, fees paid; so then one of his sisters' husbands must inherit the business. It was all arranged by law. “Law?” Elske asked.

Elske learned that Tavyan was bringing back from the south not only rich fabrics and colorful threads to stitch them, but also two barrels of a drink called wine, for which the richest merchants of Trastad would pay many coins. “Wine is cheap in the south, where grapes are plentiful,” Tavyan explained to Elske, “but comes very dear in Trastad.” The horses also carried many cones of the finest salt. Because this would be a Courting Winter, Tavyan told Elske, there would be much call for salt.

Elske asked what a Courting Winter was. They told her that every second year great and rich families from many distant lands sent their sons and daughters to Trastad, where they were welcomed, for a price, into the best houses of the city. These Adeliers, as the foreigners were called, were offered various entertainments, dances, feasts and Assemblies, during the course of which many of the sons chose wives, many of the daughters husbands. Whatever the Adeliers made of the opportunities Trastad offered, Tavyan said, the Trastaders made profits.

Before they left the shelter of the high valley, snow had caught them twice. Then the stream they followed led them out of the mountains and through steep hills, growing deeper, its banks becoming steeper as other streams ran down from the north and west to join it. By the time the land became rolling hills, their stream had become a river, and they were drawing close to Trastad. “How will you live,” the three asked her now, “in Trastad, in the winter?” Elske had no answer; how could she know how to get food and shelter in Trastad? “We'll help you,” they promised her. “Don't worry.”

Elske had never thought to worry.

The river looped through gentle country, close to the city; here the land was cleared and farmed. On the last night they slept in the stable yards of an inn. Just as Tamara had told, the inn bustled with activity of hosts and guests and animals; it offered foods richer than Elske had even imagined, and rooms with beds. But Tavyan preferred to dine on bread and onions, and to sleep the four together, close to their horses and goods, discouraging thieves.

When they asked her what the Volkaric did with someone who stole, Elske couldn't make them understand that only the Volkking owned treasure, so that a man could steal only from the Volkking, which was treason. For treason, a man's feet were cut off and they drove him away, crawling, to feed the wolves. “I never saw this, but my grandmother remembered,” Elske told them. “We had no thieves,” she told them, and she thought that the Trastaders must honor this in the Volkaric.

But “Brutish,” Tavyan said and “Cruel,” Nido said, shaking their heads. Taddus said nothing, but only because they were so close to Trastad that he could think only of his Idelle.

They met no other travelers. “At this time of year, merchants choose to travel by sea,” Tavyan told Elske. “So would we have, except there was a storm from the northeast and I have no wish to die by drowning. We found horses to carry our goods, and set off, leaving the sea captains in the port awaiting fair weather. Also, one of us was impatient to be home.”