Tale of Elske (7 page)

“Yes,” Elske agreed.

“Why would you do such a thing?”

Elske found herself talking to the bearlike man even though he was not one of her questioners. “That one was the captain, and the others only followed him. They hoped to ruin Idelle,” she said. Then, seeing by their faces that she had not answered them, she explained, “If a wolf pack is after you and you can chase off the leader, the others will not stay to fight.”

She thought it was the tall man's judgement that would rule the others.

“They meant rape,” Var Kenric said. “I don't understand why you are here, Vars, and under the darkness of night as if in secrecy,” he said, although Elske guessed he well knew. Idelle's father was trying to help her, she could see. And thus she saw that she needed help.

The big man answered Var Kenric. “They say they were only teasing, only flirting, they had drunk too much and were stupid with ale. They say, these guests of Trastad, these Adels who have come here for the Courting Winter which puts them under the Council's protection, they say that the attack was unprovoked.”

“But that is not so,” Elske said.

“We wonder, how you could know they intended harm to your mistress, when they speak Souther,” he answered, and watched her face carefully.

“Ask the two servants,” Elske suggested.

“The servants have been sent out of the city, and so cannot be questioned. The young men deny everything. They demand that we punish you.” He kept his eyes on her face.

Her death, then. Elske didn't know what else there was for her to say, so she said nothing. These men had come to take her to her death and only waited for the tall man to speak the order. She would give Idelle her wolfskin boots, for the young woman had admired them.

“Are you not afraid?” the tall man asked her.

Elske shook her head.

“And were you not afraid when there were seven of these Adeliers ready to attack and rape you both?” he asked.

She corrected his mistake. “There were only three, for two held the two servants back, and two more were soft-legged with drink, not dangerous. There was only the one who was truly a danger to Idelle.”

“No reason for fear, then,” he said, with what might have been a smile. “And if the princeling dies?”

“Why should he die?” Elske asked. “I gave him a scarring blow, not a killing.”

“But how could you be so certain they planned ill?” one of the others asked. “I want to be merciful, but I don't see how you could be so certain they planned ill.”

Elske tried to explain. “When men take too much mead, and they are together, and each wants the others to know his manhood—such men are as dangerous as a pack of wolves at the hungry end of winter. They smelled dangerous, and they said Idelle was a precious virgin of Trastad, and they asked one another, ‘Who's to stop us?' ”

“But how do we know—?” one of the shorter ones started to ask, before another cried him down, demanding, “Do you care more for the profits of these Courting Winters than for the safety of our women?” but “Will you have it known abroad that such an attack went unpunished?” the first countered.

The tall man gave his orders. “Speak no more of it. Let the servants carry tales, as they will, being servants, and all the Adeliers will hear soon enough from their own servants, and from Prince Garolo's face when he reappears in their midst. The story will be told, and it will grow, and if we neither punish nor praise this girl—if we say nothing, as I advise—then the story will act as a deterrent for years to come. It will be known that the Adeliers may not with impunity act like beasts in Trastad,” he concluded, with another small smile that was not a smile.

“But I think the girl had better come with me. I am in need of a nursemaid for my three daughters. I would like my daughters,” he said, unsmiling now, “to be in the care of someone who can defend them.”

“What will your wife say, Var Jerrol, to such a choice?”

“My wife will say what I say,” the man answered. “Come now, what is your name?”

“Elske,” she told him as Var Kenric called across the room, “Daughter? Make your farewells to Elske.”

“But who will be my servant?” Idelle asked. “Elske was to stay with me until I marry.”

“You'll be safer apart, now,” Var Kenric told his daughter. “I'm sorry you leave us, Elske, but this is the better way. When my daughter has no maidservant, then she could not have been the Trastader maiden who was attacked in the street. When you have been hidden away in Var Jerrol's house, nursemaid to his daughters, you could not have been that half-wild servant from off island, for if you were, who could trust you with his own helpless children?”

Elske knew Var Kenric meant to remind her of how great her strangeness was, how perilous her position in Trastad, as a warning not to protest. She needed neither reminder nor warning. And she would move warily in her new position, for this big Trastader was as dangerous as any man of the Volkaric. She bade farewell to Taddus, and to Var Kenric and Ula, and sorrowfully to Idelle, whom she wished joy on her wedding day. Then she followed the four men back out into a night filled with dark falling snow.

T
HE PARTY MOVED SILENT AS
a Volkaric war band through the night. Snow muffled the sounds of their footsteps and the only light came from the lanterns carried by the servants.

Elske moved in their midst like some captive of great worth being taken to the Volkking.

After they had crossed the snow-covered bridge to the old city of Trastad, the party divided. Elske was to go on with the tall man, Var Jerrol, and his two servants. Parting, Var Jerrol said to his companions, “One of you will take the notice down from the door of the Council Hall,” and “We'll see to that,” they promised him. “Good sleep, Var,” they bid farewell to one another, adding that this was a good night's work. “These foreign Adels need to be ridden with a short rein,” they said. “Good sleep, Var.”

The icy air was thick with falling snow. The four made their way, turning now left, now right, past ship chandleries and livery stables, warehouses and taverns. Then they were walking between the flat faces of tall houses, their ground-floor windows shuttered but the upper ones showing cracks of light that lit the snow as it fell.

At one of these tall houses the party halted. The door opened as if they had been watched for, and they entered into a small room. The tall Var told Elske, “The wolf cloak must be burned,” taking it from her. And those were all the words he spoke.

A maidservant gave Elske a candle, and led her up three flights of stairs. She opened a door into a dark, cold chamber that contained a bed, a chest and a short-legged box made out of flat tiles. As Elske watched, the servant struck a tinderbox to light a fire in the box, blew on it until the flames burned eagerly, then took three pieces of wood from a basket and fed them to the fire. She half-closed a metal door at the front of the box. “Once your room warms, you should close and latch the door of the stove,” she told Elske, and left the room.

Stove
, Elske thought; and she thought she understood; she had already learned
latch
. It was wonderful, Elske thought, to keep fire tamed in a box that took its smoke away with pipes and chimneys. Winter in the one-roomed houses of the Volkaric was a choking season, unless you opened the shutters and let clean icy air blow through.

Elske looked about her to see what the candlelight revealed. The bed had fat covers lying on it, and pillows, too. Two small windows were tucked under the low ceiling, and they showed a black curtain of night, with little white flakes blowing up against the outside of the glass. She set the candleholder down on the wooden chest, hung her dress on a peg beside the door and latched the door of the stove, closing in its fire. Then she climbed up on the bed. She slipped down under the coverlet, as if all her life she had been used to such a bed. But she did not sleep. She remembered.

She remembered the orderly quiet of Var Kenric's house, and the days as Idelle's maidservant, days as like one another as one onion to the next; and she remembered the young men's threats, in the lonely street. She remembered the strength of her arm against their captain; remembering, she noticed what she had not seen at the time, which was how easily cowed they all were—Idelle, the Adels, the servants.

What she would be now, Elske did not know. Nursemaid, if she could believe Var Jerrol, and she had no reason to disbelieve him. Had he not taken her under his protection? But Elske knew enough about Trastaders to know he would have his own uses for her, for his own profit.

Remembering, Elske noticed again Var Jerrol's eyes, how they had measured her, and then she noticed how he had—having taken her measure—given orders to arrange the outcome to his will. Among the Trastaders she had met, only Var Jerrol might be dangerous, Elske thought.

And then she noticed that she had taken her own measure of him.

Her legs and shoulders were already sleeping, but a newly born person behind her eyes struggled to stay awake, just a little longer, to ask if Elske had also noticed this: that she could change things. For had she not changed everything?

Almost, she reminded herself, changed everything to her death. And now Elske noticed that while, like any Volkaric man or woman, she did not fear death, she would, like any Trastader, prefer to live. Her further safety was up to her, Elske thought, as sleep finally overmastered her.

WAKENED BY THE DOOR—OPENING—
and somebody entering the room, Elske sat up in a room filled with sunlight. She had slept well into the morning.

A red-faced Trastader girl, wearing an apron over her dark dress and a white kerchief around her hair, stood at the foot of the bed, her arms full of cloth. Elske waited for her to speak. The girl stared.

This went on until Elske moved to get out of bed, setting her feet on the floor.

“Odile says you're to dress and come down. Into the cook room.” Her message delivered, the girl left the room.

Elske bent down to see out the windows.

Black bare-armed trees grew up out of the snow, and grey stones made a low wall at the end, and beyond that stretched a river so shoreless it had to be the sea, Tamara's sea.

“Oh,” Elske said, aloud alone, and “Oh,” again.

That morning the sky shone so clear and so blue that the sea sparkled deep and bright, blue as the tiny bellflowers that appeared in the brief Volkaric spring, and bluer. Blue as only itself, the sea shone back at the shining sky, outside her window.

Elske laughed out loud. But she could not linger. She dressed and followed the stairways down to the entrance hall and then followed her nose.

The large cook room was filled with the odor of bread and porridge. A thin woman stood at the long wooden table, her knife raised. The carcass of a rabbit lay before her, skinned, its guts removed, the head and paws chopped off. The woman had blood on her hands.

“You'll be the girl,” she greeted Elske. She didn't wait for any response. “I'm to feed you and then take you to the master. That's Var Jerrol, in case nobody told you, and I'm Odile, housekeeper for the Var. His wife is so worn out by childbirth that she is dying of the coughing sickness, so there are the little girls to look after. Do you know anything of children?”

Elske said, “I only know about babies.”

“What, how to get one?” Odile laughed, loud and short, like a dog's bark, and drove her knife into the shoulder of the rabbit. “How old are you? Are you bleeding yet?”

“This is my thirteenth winter and no, I am not.”

“It'll be any day, from the look of you, and what's your name? Sit, I've porridge.”

Elske sat on the bench and the woman dipped a bowl into a cauldron set on the hob, then set it steaming down on the table. Elske took the spoon the woman gave her, and ate.

After a bite, “Good,” she said, and it was. Porridge was food to fill a belly, and keep it full. “Elske,” she said, between mouthfuls. “That's my name.”

Odile cut the rabbit into pieces which she dropped into a second, smaller cauldron, then swung it on a metal hook back over the open fire. “That's done,” she said. “And you're fed. Now you go to Var Jerrol. I'll warn you, you'd better tell him whatever's true. He'll find you out easy as breathing if you lie to him, and that'll be the end of you.”

So openness would be her safety, here in Var Jerrol's house, as much as it had been what kept her safe among the Volkaric. Elske followed Odile to a chamber off of the entrance hall. When she entered that room, she saw the Var sitting straight-backed in a chair, and he was busy with the many papers opened out in front of him. Shelves on the wall held leather boxes, and squares were on the walls, most colored, one blank. The man was writing.

Elske went up to one of the colored squares, to look at it more closely. This was not cloth, although when she touched it, it was as smooth as her skirt. This square showed a man's head, smaller than a real man's head. Although it was as flat as glass, it didn't look flat. The man stared off, as if he saw something over Elske's shoulder. But when she turned there was nothing to be seen.