Chains of Gold (10 page)

High, keening note in the storm's clamor—

I stopped where I stood, my heart pounding and sweat streaming down between my breasts even in the freezing cold, and in that instant I learned the feeling of unearthly fear. It was a spectral light, corpse white, and the spector was the sow, the hideous old sow who eats her own farrow, the young she has just given life. I saw the small leg of one hanging out of her mouth, the blood of it running down her jaw. She was as red as of clay or the reddish moon, and I saw her great dugs hanging down by the dozen, and the farrow squealing about her feet, and the black moon-marks on her hams, and her white ears. Then she turned on me the glare of her eye, a small, bloody, baleful eye, and I turned and ran. The night was full of the sounds of death to me then, the blackness of night the color of death, all of earth a great tomb of death and snow its shroud.

Sheer weariness slowed me to a walk soon, but I had lost my way, and if indeed I had ever known where I was going I no longer did. I stopped and stilled my weeping, hearkening and trying to think.

Then a light blazed out in the darkness, far brighter than the other and from a different place, too bright to be a lamp—and even if it were a lamp it could not be from the soddy, I felt sure, not off in such an unlikely direction. No matter. I trudged toward it, the wind to my back now, a great ragged moth drawn to the flame, blankets trailing like brown frayed wings. It seemed quite distant for such a bright light, and when I drew closer to it at last I could not believe the blaze of it, like no other flame I had ever seen, unwavering—

It was a lamp in the window of the soddy.

A magical lamp. Briony had placed it there to guide me, and as soon as I opened the door and he saw me he got up and snuffed it out; the ordinary flame of the oil lamp seemed dim as midnight by comparison. He went back to his place by Arlen's side, and I stood just within the doorway, panting.

“Death is out in the night,” I said. “I have seen her.”

“I know,” he said. He held a bowl of broth and was trying to feed it to Arlen. I put down the borrowed bedding and took off my wet mantle and went to help him, but Arlen's head seemed lifeless in my arms, heavy, his face hot and fevered, his pulse a fluttering thing, a dying lacewing. No, not dying—my mind denied it. But he seemed very far from us, and he was not taking the broth for all of Briony's urging.

“Arl!” I begged him.

The sound of my voice moved him somewhat, for he stirred slightly and took a spoonful.

“Keep talking to him,” Briony said.

I coaxed and pleaded and called to him, and we got some of the nourishment down him at last. I laid down the soft pallet for him, the pillow for his head, and we moved him onto them as gently as we could, but we need not have been fearful of hurting him; he was far away again and did not so much as moan. I took away our old dirty blankets and covered him with the cleaner ones from the homestead, and then I sat looking at him, wishing there were something more I could do.

“Eat,” said Briony, offering me a bowl of broth and a hunk of bread. But I shook my head. “Eat,” he repeated. The tone of his voice did not change, but he put the things into my hands. “It is no use you should starve yourself, Cerilla.”

It was true. I would be of no use to Arlen if I sickened. I nibbled at the bread, took tiny sips of the broth. The food went down slowly, for fear clenched my stomach against it. Briony must have seen my fear, or perhaps he felt fear himself, for he sat beside me and talked to me about Arlen.

“There are no vitals hurt in him,” he said. “Flesh wounds all, painful, and he has lost a quantity of blood, and the loss weakens him. And there is always the risk of contagion. But he is young and strong, and he loves you with a love that would send him leaping through fire. I see no reason why he should not soon be well. The old sow will have to stray in the storm tonight.”

I glanced up at him in shock muted by weariness. “How did you know?”

“I know nothing. It is only a manner of speaking.”

“But you put the lamp out, you knew I was wandering—”

“Anyone would get lost in a night like this. And it is no great trouble to say the appropriate spell.” He shrugged and got up to settle himself on the hearth by Arlen's side. “Cerilla, you are spent, and I have had nothing to occupy me for some days now. Sleep well. I will watch Arlen this night.”

I laid out the saddle pad for myself and covered myself with our well-used blankets, but I could not go to sleep at once, not without Arlen by my side. My body ached, every fiber of me, with a grief and a dread I could not reason away. I trusted Briony to look after Arl by then, I wanted to go to sleep, I knew I needed sleep, but something within me lay crying, and as exhaustion took me I knew what it was: the child who had cried when my mother had been put into the ground. Mind tried to calm me, but heart knew: Arlen was in deadly danger.

I slept raggedly and awoke in the morning not much the better for it. At once I knew that Arlen was worse. His face was flushed, clammy and feverish to the touch, and all his wounds were swollen and sore and oozing through their bandages. Briony was sitting by his side with a wooden bucket of cold water and a square of cotton cloth.

“Is he in pain?” I asked, going over.

“He does not seem to be. I would take more comfort if he were; it would show that he was fighting the shadows. He has been shaking with chills half the night, though his face is hot. And he does not seem to dream or struggle. Here.” He handed me the wet cloth and took up the bolt to tear more bandaging.

“Folk come here for charms from time to time,” he added, though I had not asked him why he tore up good cloth for Arlen, “and they pay me in whatever they have to offer. I have no need of this cotton right now.” He took the old bandage from Arlen's thigh and threw it into the fire. The wound looked and smelled worse than I had expected, and I gagged.

“Contagion,” Briony muttered. The word sent a shudder through me.

The next few days passed in a haze of misery. I sat by Arlen's side for the most part, talking to him from time to time, pleading with him or exhorting him or sometimes even scolding him; none of it had any effect that I could see. Laving his hot forehead, putting peat on the fire, guarding him from chills, helping Briony change the bandages. Briony cooked, mixed potions; I am sure he tried every remedy he knew of. He made spicy, aromatic plasters, which he placed on the wounds to draw off the heat, and he burned incense to purify the room. He brewed possets and ground yael horn to put in the wine for strength, but within days Arlen had slipped away to the point where he would take neither broth nor possets nor wine.

“Let me sit with him tonight,” I said to Briony one evening by lamplight. I felt sure he was tired, for all his day had been spent in nothing but nursing Arlen, and that to no avail. I noticed a crease between his bright black eyes.

“Perhaps some better thought will come to me,” he admitted, “if I refresh myself. Call me if you start nodding.” And he went off into the shadows at the back of the soddy, where the earth formed such odd hillocks and piles, where the roots reached down from the copse above, forming an entanglement. I soon lost sight of him back there, and I did not know what he was doing. Nor did I care to know. I chose to assume that he lay down and slept. Sometime during the night he came out again, and I went to my bed and dozed for a while. But no new thought had come to him, and Arlen was no better with the next day's dawn.

I took the burden of nursing on myself, insofar as I could, once I had learned the ways of the house, the wheres of water and wine and pans and the like. Busying myself with such things helped me contain my distress somewhat. Briony mixed more poultices, and then out of a chest he brought forth books, a weighty herbal and a smaller book with a black cover, a spell book. Most of the day and into lamplight again he searched through them, and evidently he found nothing of use, for he put them down at last with a sigh.

“You say you do charms,” I suggested timidly; it is a bad business to anger a witch, and I had stayed away from talk of magic until then. But I was becoming desperate. “Is there nothing you can say, a spell—?”

“A mandrake can only do so much!” he burst out.

I gaped, and he turned away sharply, having said more than he intended.

“A
mandrake?
” I exclaimed.

“Yes. A mandrake,” he responded sharply, turning back and striding a step or two toward me, as if I had accused him of something. “Why do you think I live in earth? Most men are not so fond of dirt.” He touched his low ceiling. “But I go back there, amongst the roots whence I came, and burrow in earth to my knees, to my neck, cover myself with it if I can, for it feeds me better than meat. Are you dismayed?”

I shook my head, my mouth still agape. “It is just that—I have never seen a mandrake, and I did not know they became so—alive.”

“I am a rather vital one. Rumor has it I am sprung from a hanged man's semen that spurted onto the ground. His death seed. I am expert with aphrodisiacs.” He grimaced, mocking himself. “You and Arlen do not need that of me.”

“But, Bri—” I had not called him Bri before, and I stopped, confused.

“What? What is it?”

“I do not care if you
eat
dirt,” I told him earnestly. “You have been good to us.”

“I have my ethics,” he said stiffly. “No heart, not in any human sense, but I have loyalty, ambition, pride in my craft. And right now I have frustration.”

“So there is nothing more you can do for Arlen.” I said it because it would have hurt him to say it, perhaps as much as it hurt me. I felt the pang like a lance head of despair.

“No.” He got up, swinging his sinewy arms, brown, knotty arms much like the tough roots that hung down not far away. He faced toward them, and away from me, as he spoke. “I am good for all the everyday magics,” he said, sounding dry, toneless. “Charms for colic and clubfoot and pockmarks, spells for crops or childbirth or calving or spitefulness or the return of unrequited love. I am especially competent in regard to love. But the great things—” He gestured, arms lifted. “—death and healing and redemption—they are not for me. The goddess has charge of them.”

EIGHT

Arlen was dying. I did not know how I could bear it, but there was no way to doubt it, no room left for hope. He no longer responded to anything, not even my voice, not even the pain when Briony lanced his wounds as a measure of last resort. He lay as if he were already dead, his face no longer flushed but pallid, his breathing shallow and out of rhythm. Briony and I both sat up with him that night, though we knew we could not help him, though he was not even aware that we were there.

“He should not be taken away for those wounds!” Briony burst out when the hearth fire had burned down to embers, shielding us with shadows so that I could not distinctly see his face. “He should not be dying. The cuts were clean and not very deep. He is young, strong, comely enough for all normal purposes and very much in love with one who is worthy of all love—”

I looked at him, startled by the sudden anger or yearning in his voice, by the way he fell silent abruptly, as if he had said too much. I wondered if Briony had ever known love, he who dealt in spells of love. How or whom does a mandrake love? A flame flared briefly from the embers to show me his face, but as usual, I could not read it.

“One who returns his love,” he went on more collectedly. “He has a life of love ahead of him, everything to live for. I cannot understand why he is failing. He is no coward; he fought armed and mounted men for your sake, fought them like a berserker. Why is he not fighting this death that lies on him?”

We sat in silence for a while.

“I have never understood men,” Briony exclaimed into the darkness with a passion I had not expected from him. “If I were he, I would be fending off the serpent with my bare hands and all the strength in my body.”

“Do not rail at him,” I said, though not sharply.

“I am not! There must be a reason, if only I could understand—Cerilla, tell me about him.”

That awoke a vague wonder in me. “You seem already to know all about us,” I said. “Our names, how we fled from the Sacred Isle—”

“I hear the talk of the underworld, that is all. It travels fast, but it is no more than gossip, rumors. Tell me the things you truly know.”

There were so many things, the seemingly inconsequential things that had made him not a winterking but Arlen to me, Arlen my beloved and sometimes my vexation. The way his ears itched so that he drove me to distraction with noises and scratching, and the way he always had to hug something to go to sleep. The way he swaggered when he was tired. Things even less definable: the glance over his shoulder when we were riding, hands twirling locks of Bucca's mane—if there was an essence about Arlen, how was I to tell it to Briony?

“Cerilla,” he urged.

“Animals,” I said, for want of anything better to say. “He adores animals. Whenever he sees an animal, even a coney or a squirrel, he looks at it, he points it out to me. Kine, swine, he sees them all with such excitement.… Well, I suppose there could not have been too many animals on the Sacred Isle, and he looks at other things too, the countryside, and exclaims; sometimes he is like a delighted child. But animals—he wants to touch them, to be with them. When we are in a barn, he goes from stall to stall, even if it is only cattle or donkeys there, chirruping and giving water and washing sore eyes. When we are with the sheep in the field, he plucks the parasites off them.”

“Why animals?” said Briony softly.

I shrugged. “Why not? From what I have heard, the beasts are far kinder than most folk on the Sacred Isle.”

I felt him looking at me, so I went on.

“They did terrible things to the boys sometimes, to toughen them. They give them whips and set them against each other, or all against one, which was even worse, though Arlen said—Lonn would never strike at him, not even if it meant punishment, but Arlen struck at Lonn once because he was made to, and then he wept and could not sleep afterward, though Lonn forgave him.”