Tale of Gwyn (20 page)

Da shook his head. Gwyn held her tongue—there were twenty silver coins in a gold one. It was not much the man asked.

“If not the holding, then—I could write a dance for Rose's wedding. I could do that, and it would be a song people would remember. It would be a fine gift for a man to give his daughter, on her wedding.”

“What man would pay coins for a song,” Da said.

“As I've heard, the Lords do.” The Fiddler spoke in a low voice.

“I'm not a Lord, man.” Da's voice carried through the room. The few men still drinking there looked up at him then quickly down, as if they did not wish their thoughts to be seen.

“Then I'll have to pledge you my fiddle. It's all I have.”

“How would you keep yourself without your fiddle?” Gwyn asked him.

“I can't keep myself with it, now can I, Innkeeper's daughter?” he asked her, his voice cracking with the shame.

Da didn't need to say anything. The Fiddler knew his request had been denied. But he stood helplessly there, his hands opening and closing. Gwyn felt sick at heart.

“Your brother wouldn't have denied me. Win wouldn't have said me no,” the Fiddler muttered.

Da's anger flowed out of him, like fire leaping up. “Win would have long ago been begging himself, Fiddler. As you well know. And I've kept the Inn and made it prosper, while he would have wasted it. As you well know.”

The white, lined face collapsed. “Aye, aye, I know it. All the same,” and he smiled as if his eyes were looking at something nobody else could see, “he was a grand fighter. A grand lad.”

“A grand fighter,” Da agreed.

Gwyn left the Inn the next morning early. Her mother's voice followed her out the door. “What's got into you? Where are you going? Answer me, miss—or are you too proud now to speak to your own mother? And I want to know who's going to—” But Gwyn never heard what chore would fall onto somebody else's shoulders. Let Rose come down from sewing on her pretties for a time. Let Tad try his hand at it, whatever it was. And why didn't Mother do it herself? But she did not answer and she did not turn back.

She skirted the village, leaving it behind her. She went on to the vineyard, where the stumpy vines still waited in their winter death. She crossed the vineyard and slid down the muddy hillside to Old Megg's house. She did not go in immediately, but lingered outside, looking around her at the empty goat pens and the empty hillsides and the distant line of silent mountains. When she had looked her fill, she entered the house.

She kept her cloak on against the chill, but she opened the shuttered window and left the door open behind her, for light and fresh air. Although it was not in her plan, she took a piece of charred wood from the fire and wrote her name down on the tabletop, where she and Gaderian had worked so many evenings ago. She wrote her name first; and then she wrote all the letters of the alphabet in a line.

That satisfied her, and she rubbed them all out, leaving a smear of charcoal on the wood. Then she went to the cupboard.

It was all there, just as she had guessed. She spread the clothing out on Old Megg's bed. The sheathed sword she put on the table. She touched everything with curious fingers. The wide brim of the hat was wrinkled from being jammed into a corner, and its white plume hung down dejectedly. The white shirt was softer than any shirt Gwyn had ever touched, with a silk ribbon to tie it at the neck and buttons at the ends of the full sleeves. The scarlet cape had been folded so carefully it wasn't wrinkled at all and lay bright as blood on the blankets.

There were trousers, too, and a braided silk belt to hold them up. The tunic was blue, as the stories told, but they did not tell the way silver threads had been woven into the fabric, making it glimmer in the light. The clasps, six of them, going down the front of the armless tunic, were of heavy silver, plainly wrought. The boots reached up over Gwyn's hips when she stood them beside her, but the tops were made to fall over in a cuff. The mask Jackaroo wore was red silk, not black, with tiny stitches to hold the hem around the eyeholes. Gwyn tied it around her head. It covered her hair like a cap and hung down almost to her collarbone. She could see out of it easily.

She stripped off her own clothes and put on the shirt, tucking it into the trousers, which she hoisted up high then allowed to fall over the belt when she had tied that tightly around her waist. The tunic was long, reaching halfway down her thighs, and for all its richness the fabric was light to carry. She slung the cloak over her shoulders then pulled on the long boots. Everything was large, made for a man, but as she looked down at herself she saw that she looked like a man. Her breasts and the curve of her hips were all concealed under the straight tunic. Her hair was covered by the mask. She put the hat on, but it caught on the coils over her ears and wobbled. Impatiently, she removed it and untied the mask, then pulled the bone pins out of her braids. She piled them on top of her head, and pinned them in place. She tied the mask on again and replaced the hat. Now it felt right.

Gwyn laughed at herself, and she was afraid. She didn't want to think what she was dreaming of, and she did not know how to stop herself from imagining. At last, she picked up the sword in its scabbard. She buckled the broad belt across her hips.

Alone in the small room, she strode back and forth, getting used to the feel of boots on her skirtless legs. She was swaggering, she thought, laughing aloud now. It would never do to swagger so. She tried to remember how the Lord had walked long across the garden and she stepped out boldly in imitation of his memory.

Twelve paces across the room, turn, twelve paces back. The boots were too big for her feet, and her ankles wobbled in them, but you could stuff them with straw to make them fit. The sword hung heavy at her side, clumsy. She put her hand on the hilt as she had seen the soldiers do, and it rode easily then.

Gwyn strode out the door, out and away from the house. Her whole chest felt as if it were quivering—with excitement, with joy, with fear. The empty hills around her could not see, could not speak. She was safe, safe enough. She pulled the sword from the scabbard and held it out in front of her. It was heavier than the wooden swords she and Gaderian had matched with, but it had a balance that made it easy at the end of her arm. Her hand fitted well within the metal cuff of the hilt.

Her feet planted wide apart, she raised the sword to the sky. “Jackaroo,” she said, her voice a whisper. The name reverberated inside her head, as if it were the note of a single horn singing across the hills, calling up to the mountains—Jackaroo.

S
PRING SPREAD ITS BROAD CLOAK
over the countryside. The first little green buds appeared on the trees as the sap rose up into their branches. Patches of moss and ferns appeared in the woods, and a few fragile flowers came up, yellow crocuses, blue periwinkles. The wombs of the goats swelled out with young and the kitchen garden lay brown and empty, its seeds growing secretly underground. Farmers planted their fields with turnips, potatoes, oats, onions. There was fish to be bought at the market.

Gwyn welcomed the first sudden days of spring, when every morning carried an armful of surprises—the surprising brightness of sunlight or gentleness of spring rain; the surprising softness of air all around and ground underfoot; the surprise of birdsong. It was on one such morning that Da surprised her when he found her alone in the barroom. Gwyn had sent Tad out to look for weeds in the garden and break up the ground after a rain. Burl was cleaning the barn stalls. Mother and Rose were upstairs, making preparations.

“This wedding,” Da said, standing at the doorway to the guest rooms, which he was getting ready against the Bailiff's stay, “it's only a fortnight away. You'd think a demon drove your mother.”

Gwyn swept warm water over the boards, sweeping out the dirt of the last evening's business. “Mother wants to do Rose proud.”

“Aye and she will that. Your mother's a fine, proud woman.”

Gwyn didn't say anything. She wondered if Da was going to ask her about marriage. Mother had been after her, and Rose too, in a gentler way. She hoped Da wouldn't say anything. It was not that she wanted to change her mind. Far from it, although she understood her own reasons for that no better than she understood the reasons for the many other changes she felt taking place within herself. A few years earlier, when her body had so suddenly changed, she had felt awkward and uneasy, unsure; she recognized that same feeling now, but it was not her body that caused it, it was her self. Everybody seemed a stranger to her now, even the Innkeeper's daughter, Gwyn, herself. She swept the wet floor and waited to hear what Da would speak of.

“I saw you, daughter, when the Fiddler came to ask—”

Gwyn grunted, to show she had heard and understood.

“I want you to know—because I know how rumors are, and how little truth there is in them, and I wouldn't have you think ill of me. The rumors exaggerate.”

“Exaggerate what, Da?” Gwyn asked. She leaned on the broom. “Exaggerate the troubles in the south? Exaggerate the hunger here? The dangers on the roads?”

“That too, but I'm speaking of myself. They exaggerate my position.”

“I know.” Gwyn resumed her work, the brown water flowing before her.

“Do you?”

“Da, of course. Your holdings are the vineyard and two small farms to the west of the village, and both of the farms are kept by the men you bought them from. I know it's not the wealth of a Lord that you have.”

He smiled at her, then. “I have also given dowries to two daughters in as many years.”

“While keeping the holdings for the Inn's welfare,” Gwyn agreed.

“It's not that I didn't want to help the man, daughter. It's that I cannot. If I were to help one, then all would come to stand in line before me, their hands out. I'd run out of coins soon enough. And where would we be then, come the Autumn Fair and the Bailiff's next visit, were summer to scorch the crops, or the war in the south spread north and—”

“They'd resent it more, anyway,” Gwyn told him. “It would be like the Doling Rooms.”

Da sighed and agreed. “I just wanted you to know, daughter.”

“I know,” Gwyn answered, her arms busy.

“Do you know also what it is you have chosen? What it will mean to you?”

Gwyn stopped work again. She looked at her father. He was, she reminded herself, concerned for her well-being. That was what prompted his question. “No,” she said. “How can I know that? How can anyone know that?”

He let the questions go. “We'll have Messengers and soldiers soon, and the Bailiff.”

“We'll be ready.” The Bailiff collected the taxes before the fair, probably because any man with money near his hand on the day of the fair would spend or gamble it away. The Lords made sure they got their taxes before the merchants and mountebanks put hands into peoples' pockets.

“I would like to help the Fiddler,” Da said. “If I had only myself to think of, I'd have given him the coin.”

“Aye, I know,” Gwyn reassured her father. She thought, perhaps he would have. But the fact was that he had not.

She swept the shallow tide of water out onto the stones of the Innyard. Burl was crossing it with two buckets of water in his hands. His foot had healed and he walked without any trace of a limp. He greeted her without stopping. Gwyn stood with the mild sun on her face and the sweet air at her nose. “It's a nice day, isn't it,” she said.

Burl set his buckets down then. “Aye,” he said. “It happens every year. Every year I begin to think that there is nothing worth hope in this world, and then every year spring comes—like music.”

Before she could answer him, he had picked up the buckets and moved on. Gwyn stared after him. His shoulders, under the rough shirt, were broad and strong. He worked with steady energy, without complaint. He spoke seldom, and then always in the same tone. But he played his pipe and she wondered whether Burl too wore a mask. He moved into the dark barns and she went back to the house. Everybody else did, so why not Burl as well?

No reason, Gwyn thought later, striding through the woods. How could she know the reasons for anything when she didn't even understand the reasons for which she was where she was, dressed as she was, and for what purpose. The high boots shielded her legs from snapping branches, the mask hung close over her face and the short red cape swung with her shoulders. Her heart sang.

She carried the hat in one hand and held the sword steady with the other. The gold coin she had put into a cloth bag, tied at her waist. Her legs felt long without skirts to wrap them around, and her stride was free.

The Fiddler's hut had been built beside a little stream, to the west of the Inn. In summer, the water was choked by watercress, but in early spring it chuckled freely along southward, to join the river. Gwyn stood among the willows crowding close to the stream's edge and studied the tiny house across the way.

A thin trickle of smoke rose from the chimney leaning against one end. The door was opened and so were the shutters of the window. Except for a breeze that rippled the surface of the water, nothing moved in the quiet glade. Watery spring sunlight poured down over the scene.

The house sat at the edge of a narrow clearing, with the trees and undergrowth of the woods close up behind it. Now that she was there and dressed and ready to act, Gwyn realized that she did not know how to do what she wanted to do. She leaned against the trunk of a willow, hidden by its flowing branches where yellowy-green leaves sprouted, and considered the situation.

It was easier if you were on horseback. If you were on horseback, you could announce your arrival with a thundering of hooves. That would get people out and waiting. No explanations would be necessary. But Gwyn was not on horseback.

She looked at the hut and its placement. She took the piece of gold out of the little purse and wrapped it around with her fingers. Then she placed the hat on her head, took a breath, and stepped into the shallow stream.