Chains of Gold (20 page)

“We—could have another,” he suggested, very softly, very diffidently. “Perhaps it might be a girl.…”

“And if it were not?” I snapped, as if the whole horror were somehow his fault. “What must I do with another boy? Drown it in the cistern?” So he got up and left me alone, as being alone was what I seemingly wanted.

What a quaint pattern life makes. When Lonn had been too much with us we had struggled, stolen moments to make love at times and in places safe from the spying of his angry eyes. And now that he was gone, now that we had all the world and time to spare, we scarcely looked at each other. We had not kissed since that last night beside Ophid's fire. Nor did I see how we ever could again.

“It will get better,” Arlen said to me one evening during my long silence, helplessly. “Things will get better as time goes on. You must believe that, Rae.”

I did not believe it, not in any measurable way. But time did go on. Signs of early spring appeared, the purple buds swelling, the tree frogs creaking in the night. Some sort of stirring took place in me also, within my numb endurance, and I began to think again. The small added pain of thinking did not matter to me any more. Snow melted, and something hard and frozen began to melt in me and pool, though I could not yet weep.

“I have been blaming you,” I said quietly to Arlen one evening, in the midst of the silence, as he would sometimes speak to me. “And I have been blaming Ophid, and the goddess, and the world, and the Naga for being the way they are, anything to blame away my pain.”

He looked at me with a sunrise of hope in his face, though he tried hard to suppress it, and he set down the pegs he was carving and came over to me.

“But now I see it is no use blaming anyone but myself,” I told him. “What I did was wrong, deathly wrong, and all sense should have told me that.”

Sunrise faded. “We had no choice, Rae,” he said softly.

“I am not speaking of you. I am the mother, and I speak of me. I held a baby in my arms, and I cast it away. I was frightened, worn down by fear, but now I have suffered too much to be any longer afraid and I see that I was wrong. No mother can give up her child in such a way and be blameless. All nature is against it.”

“Rae, give it over, let it go, turn away! Have you not grieved enough?” He had grasped me by the arms in his fervor, nearly shaking me, but I sat impassively in his hands. “Do not blame yourself,” he begged. “It is just—something that happened. We have the authority of the oracle—”

“And I believed the oracle. And I still cannot think badly of Ophid; nor can I think badly, any longer, of you. But I have seen things in a new way, and I know now that what I did was wrong.” I stood up, and he stood beside me, and suddenly he was angry at me.

“Very well,” he flared. “You are a heartless, wicked woman. What are you going to do about it?” For he thought there was nothing to be done.

And I surprised him by smiling at him. I think it was an unnerving smile. “But I have not said that I was wicked,” I told him softly. “Only that what I did was wrong.” And I went to bed and lay in the dark, half triumphant, for I had a plan. I had not, indeed, given up my child. And as for what had gone wrong, I hoped somehow to set it right.

I grew more cheerful over the next several days, and talked readily with Arlen about commonplace things, and he noticed it. This was all part of my plan, to comfort and reassure him. What I had not expected was that I felt my love for him again blooming in my heart. I would have to leave soon, or I would not be able to bear it.

For leave I must, to find the babe. And, as I felt certain that Arlen would not knowingly let me go, I would have to slip away in secret. In some other plight, perhaps, with nothing wrong between us, he might have let me go off on my own—but I felt sure he would hold desperately to me now, for he would be too afraid of losing me forever, too afraid that I would not come back. He would try to keep me by him, or, failing that, he would come with me. And I felt beyond all reason that this was a journey I had to make on my own. Only, how to leave him hopeful, comforted …?

“Look, Arlen,” I cried rather crazily one day, “the swallows.”

The birds were coming back to their nests in the rocks. Back from the far reaches, as they did every spring.

“The swallows,” I told him earnestly, “they are like us, Arlen, their fidelity. They return. They always return.”

He peered at me strangely and merely nodded. Perhaps he thought I spoke of our returning to our home from the Naga. But I knew my eyes were wide, my color high, and I hoped he would remember afterward, and understand.

It was not difficult for me to make my way to one of our scattered hoards and take some gold for myself without being seen. Provision was more troublesome. I could not prepare anything of a quantity to see me through the wilderness without Arlen's noting it and wanting to know why. Nor, for that matter, could I prepare much for Arlen, either, to sustain him for a few days while I was gone. In the end I made a meat pie for each of us and put them aside, and that was all. And I kissed Arlen that evening before we went to sleep, and my heart ached for him, because I knew what happiness that made him hope for, and in the morning when he awoke I would be gone.

I waited until he was well asleep, and then I slipped out of our bed and took just a spare blanket and a few viands and a change of clothing, that was all, in haste, and I went to saddle Bucca. There was no question of my not taking Bucca, for unless I did so Arlen would himself ride and overtake me. On Bucca I could leave him well behind before morning. Arlen would have to borrow a horse to do the spring plowing.… When Bucca was standing at the ready, I went softly back inside the cottage for a moment and took a charred stick and drew the outline of a swallow on the flat, dressed stone of the hearth. I made it distinct, dark enough so that I could see it in the moonlight from the window. I wanted to kiss Arlen again, but I was afraid that I would wake him. I put his dinner on the table, and so I left him and rode toward the south and west, over the lip of the mountain.

We had found a way to ride down the terraces by then, a hard way but not impossible, and Bucca knew it as well as I did. Still, I must have been desperate or crazy to try that trail by moonlight, and half a dozen times I believe we nearly broke our necks, Bucca and I. And he wanted so badly to go back to his warm stall—I had to force him onward, kicking him and lashing him with a stick, weeping all the while because I longed for home as fervidly as he did.

When light of dawn began to show, I found the going easier, and by the time Arlen might have been stirring in our bed, I was well down past where we had found our hoard of treasure. For what treasure was worth.

I rode hard all day, and I rode late, and I ate little. No one pursued me or disturbed me, for no one lived in these parts except logans and the beasts of the wilderness. And the next day and the days that followed I rode early and late and as swiftly as I was able. My food was soon gone, and it was mushrooms and wild asparagus again to eat. I did not care, for I was not very hungry, as I had not been for months. I wanted only to get through the Forever Forest to the wild moorlands where the eskers were, and to a certain esker, and a soddy. I was on my way to see Briony. Mandrake that he was, speaker with spirits, he might be able to tell me a way to find my baby.

SIXTEEN

The trees were fully in leaf when I reached the familiar soddy and stopped Bucca outside the door. I dismounted, but before I could knock, Briony opened it and came out to me.

“Rae,” he said in a low voice, staring. “But—you are thin, your face is drawn down by sorrow. What has happened?”

His eyes were still as black as beads of onyx, his face expressionless. I found his blankness oddly comforting. We went in and sat facing each other, and I told him everything, told him things I would not have been able to tell anyone who would have cried out in shock or wept in pity. He had lit the lamp before I was done, and when I was finished he wordlessly prepared us some supper while I tended to Bucca. There was no question but that I would spend the night under his roof, nor did I think amiss of so doing.

We ate supper and cleaned away the leavings in a silence that troubled neither of us. After we were done, Briony spoke to my plaint as if I had only just voiced it.

“Wrong it may have been, as you feel it was wrong,” he said. “But if wrong it was, then Ophid has erred gravely, and that would be unlike him, for he is a highly competent oracle.”

“I was much impressed by Ophid,” I said. “I do not think badly of him in any way. Nevertheless, and against all reason, I feel that I was terribly wrong to cast away the babe.”

“And you wish to right the wrong.”

“It is not just that.” I swallowed. “I—I want my baby back.”

He must have heard the pang in my voice, but his face did not change. “Yes,” he murmured. “Of course.”

“So will you tell me, Briony, where I might find him?”

“It seems reasonable to suppose,” he said, “that the little one is in the realm of the dead.”

He said that as another person might have said. “He is in Stanehold” or “She has gone to the marketplace”; he spoke as of a place he was familiar with. I sat up eagerly.

“But where is that, Briony? How do I reach it?”

“How does a serpent seek the underworld?” he questioned in return. I bristled, thinking he was trifling with me.

“Don't riddle me, Bri! I had quite enough of that with Ophid.”

“But I speak of simple fact!” He raised his dark brows slightly. “One enters the Afterworld through the serpent's burrow.”

“
What
serpent?”

“Why, the great serpent, to be sure.”

Memory of an immense head, a forked tongue as long as a sword. “In the esker?” I hazarded.

“Nay, Rae. You'll have to go farther than that.” He was not laughing at me after all. “The greatest of serpents. The Naga.”

“Of course,” I murmured.

“The adder's tongue feels the way.”

It would be far to the north, at the source. “Is it a cave?” I asked. “A passage?”

“Yes. But you know, Rae, there are dangers. You may not be allowed to return, having once gone down there.”

“I will have to risk it,” I said, and my bravado was not all false; I cared for no danger, those days. I had even risked leaving Arlen.

“You will need gold,” said Briony, “for the water crossing.”

“I have gold enough.”

“And do not eat in those nether regions, not so much as a crust of bread, and most especially not elderberries or any other of the foods of the dead.”

The familiar prohibitions. “I will remember,” I said, and I thought the conversation was done. But I was wrong.

“Rae.…”

What could he want of me?

“Has it gone wrong between you and Arlen?”

“I hope not,” I told him. “I hope he will be waiting for me when I return. I hope there will be—love between us.…” My voice faltered as I wondered how, with the curse that seemed to be on us.

“If not,” said Briony softly, “there is love for you here.”

I stared at him, astonished beyond speaking, and he left his at the table to come over and kneel on the dirt floor beside me. His hard brown face looked as blank as ever, except that maybe there was just a suggestion of pleading in it.

“I loved you from the first day I saw you,” he said, “if what a mandrake conceives by way of devotion is to be called love. I am an unhearted thing, quiet; I can make no great show. But I am constant, Rae.”

I found my tongue, and I am ashamed to say that all I had to offer him was annoyance.

“Half my childhood I wanted love,” I exclaimed, “and now I have found all too much of it, it seems! Lonn, and now you—”

“I am sorry,” he said, and he got up hastily. “I did not mean it to be an onus on you. I only told you because I thought, if you should ever want a shelter, a haven—I would ask nothing of you.”

“I don't care,” I shouted at him, because what he was saying frightened me. “I shall love Arlen forever. Even if we never touch each other again.”

“I know that love,” Briony said, his voice bleak, and I looked at him where he stood, then hung my head.

For some time there was silence. Finally he went to the hearth and sat down.

“It is a perplexity,” he said in a dry, dispassionate voice, “how I, a mandrake and a dealer in philters for passion, could have let myself be surprised into such an entanglement.” He spoke almost lightly, and I looked at him in growing amazement and something of compunction.

“You could have given me such a philter at any time while I was here, slipped it into my food or drink.”

“What good would it have done?” He shrugged, waving away my reluctant gratitude. “I could only have inspired in you a passion equal to your love for Arlen, nothing more, for there is no greater devotion. You would have been torn, heart torn, between us.”

He had refused to hurt me. “And you saved Arlen's life,” I said in wonder, “when you could have let him die. You saved him for my sake.”

“Of course.”

“And you bear no grudge against him.”

“Of course not.” He peered at me as if to say, You humans are a skewed and twisted lot. “I like him very much,” he added. “As much as a mandrake can like anyone.”

“Might all men be as honorable as a certain mandrake.” I got up uncertainly, no longer so willing to spend the night beneath his roof. “I should go.”

“Why?” He got up also but did not offer to come near me. “I am, as you say, honorable. You have nothing to fear from me.”

That was true, I felt sure. I could trust him; indeed, I would have trusted him with my very life. I wished I could somehow give him happiness. But I did not love him, could never love one whose eyes did not know how to smile, and I could not feel comfortable in the presence of his pain. Once I left him in the morning, I knew, I would not come near him again.