Chains of Gold (7 page)

For the time, though, we were very much at power's mercy. We knew that Rahv would be in search of us, or the Gwyneda, or both, and we kept on the move across the countryside, not knowing where we were going. This far north we traveled mostly moorland and peat bog and scrubby woodlot, land good for grazing and the hunt but not as fertile as the tilled lands farther south, and therefore sparsely settled. The few villages were clustered within the tower baileys. We could hope for aid only from outlanders, sturdy folk who fended for themselves and picked up the stones for their cottage walls from the eskers and moors. We would come upon their small holdings as we skirted the lands of the petty lords.

We thought we rode alone, but a presence traveled with us.

We did not sense it at first, but others did. The first freezing night after we had left the cenotaph, we gratefully stopped at a small stone cottage, and the folk greeted us with broad smiles—they seldom had visitors, they welcomed us, and of course they could see that we were young fools in love, runaways, and all their sympathies were with us. My white robe was so dirtied and bedraggled by then that no one was likely to think of the Gwyneda, looking at it. The goodwife, a round ruddy woman, merely clucked over it for a moment and bustled off to find a brown linsey frock she thought might fit me. They fed us a warm supper and spoke of giving us provisions in the morning and plotted where they might put our bed. But after we had sat by their fire for a while, their smiles faded.

“What is it?” I asked after some time had gone by and they had grown more and more silent and I thought I saw them drawing back from me. “If we have offended in some way—”

“Missy, ye'd better be off, ye and yer lad.” It was the goodman speaking, his tone a mixture of belligerence and shame. “Ye'll bring ill luck upon us. Ye smell of death.”

Arlen looked up blankly, thinking of our night in the cenotaph, I am sure, though there had been no stench there. “Why, let us wash, then,” he said.

“'Tis not that.” The man rose to his feet, looking ill at ease but determined. “There is death walking with ye; there will come pestilence upon us or some grievous ill fortune if it touches us. Out, now.”

“But wait a moment!” Arlen stood up, incredulous. “You cannot turn us out into this cold night. We will be dead ourselves before morning!”

“Let us stay in the barn, then,” I put in, seeing the dark cast of the man's face.

“And let the cattle sicken and die? I tell ye, go.” The goodman reached for the poker.

“Our perishing will be on your account,” declared Arlen hotly. “And if you think there is death here now—that is nonsense, but I tell you this: if I die this night my vengeful spirit will return to you and never leave you. I vow it.” There was a reckless, burning look in his eyes.

“Husband!” It was his goodwife, frightened.

He was thinking. “Well,” he said grudgingly, “I suppose there be's the shed. Naught in it but tools. I'll take them out.”

“We'll need bedding,” said Arlen, “if we are not to freeze.”

“I'll put in some straw. For ye and the horse. I'll have the horse out of the barn—”

“There's no taint on the horse!” Arlen shouted. “Go smell him for yourself!”

In the end Bucca stayed in the barn, but we went out in the dark and slept in straw in a drafty shed and were glad of it. A small gift of food awaited us at our door in the morning, like a propitiation, but no one came near us. We ate and left feeling saddened and puzzled.

“Are all seculars like that?” Arlen wanted to know.

I had to laugh. “You have nearly as much experience of them as I! How should I know, who have spent my life locked in Stanehold?”

“Have you learned nothing useful at all?” he teased me.

“To be sure! I know several ways to embroider a napkin.”

But it was beautiful, the snow on the moors, and neither of us had ever seen such a thing before, the long windswept slopes of land and the eskers snaking across them, and after a while the pale winter sun came out and touched everything with aureate light. Arlen, who had never been atop a hill in his life, kept shaking his head and exclaiming at every vista, and we could not be very sad, either of us, not with the horse surging under us and the heady feeling of freedom. We tried to keep to the hillsides blown clear and brown, but we could never hide our traces for long, not in the snow, and before the day was old we gave it up and struck out recklessly across the billowing wealds at speed. We laughed as we rode, and we forgot to look back over our shoulders as we topped each rise.

Came afternoon and nothing to eat, our good spirits abated.

“My stomach is pinching me,” I complained. And a day before I had been grateful merely to be alive and at liberty.

“So is mine,” said Arlen wryly. “They used to feed us well, back on the Sacred Isle—us boys, I mean. Scant fare for the white-robes, but anything we fancied for us lads, except love.… Bodies beautiful for the goddess. Meat being fattened for the slaughter.” A note of longing had crept into his voice in spite of his bitterness—he was thinking, perhaps of dinners past. I paid no attention, for something inexplicable was happening within my senses and my comprehension.

“Wait,” I said to Arlen. “Stop the horse a moment.”

Bucca was glad enough to stop, and I slid down. We were at a level hilltop with a copse of tangled trees and something rumpled under the snow. Not knowing what it was, but following the guidance of a force I did not understand, I walked for some small distance, then stopped and scrabbled with my feet. The earth was peaty, friable even though frozen. I kicked at it and uncovered something that shone whitely—a turnip. I found a flat piece of rock and dug harder, with it and with my hands. There were withered stalks to be seen beneath the snow, now that I knew what to look for, and they guided me to more turnips and other things, I think they were parsnips, and orange roots such as I had seen in cattle mangers the night before—I did not care. If cattle could eat such things, so could I. On the instant I bit into one and decided it was tolerably good.

Arlen had long since tethered Bucca and come to help me. He was finding roots as well, but he took his first handfuls to the horse before returning to eat himself. I had sat down on a stone and was eating heartily. He stared at me in wonder.

“That is someone's foundation you are sitting on, I think,” he said. “This was their garden; see the furrows? The house was destroyed by fire or war, I suppose, and they were killed or perhaps they went away. But the root crops survived. Cerilla, you say you know nothing, but you saw this place when I would have ridden past.”

“I saw nothing,” I said.

“Then how did you know food was here?”

“It wasn't me.”

“Oh? Who then?” He smiled, thinking I was teasing him again, but I did not answer. I shied from saying what was true: that I had been told about this place, voicelessly, by something not myself.

Arlen gave up on getting any sense out of me, his gaze wandering. “Wait,” he exclaimed. “Are those apples on yonder trees?”

They were, withered but still red and edible. We gathered as many as my mantle pockets would hold and we gave Bucca some. I am sure Arlen saw those apples on his own, without any strange prompting. But I had not so seen the fruits that lay beneath the soil.

We ate more roots and held some in our hands and took to horse again. Before we had gone far, the peculiar summons sounded through me once more. “Wait,” I murmured to Arlen, “there it is again,” and I slid to the ground and walked. When I felt compelled to stop, I searched beneath the snow and found a flat rock. Arlen had come up behind me expectantly. I turned the rock up—a squirrel's hoard of seeds and acorns lay beneath. We both broke into laughter. “No, thank you,” we declared in unison, and we went on our random way. I felt the odd presence no more that day.

“Shall we try again?” Arlen asked as evening drew on, meaning that we should again ask hospitality of an outlander. I acceded. It seemed to me that the problem of the previous evening might have been their oddity, those folks, not ours. So when we saw a prosperous-looking holding in the fold of a hill we rode toward it, found the gate in the stone wall, and entered the yard. A woman met us with a smile. But even as we dismounted the smile faded and she backed away from us.

“Go on, go on your way. Please. It's early yet.” she begged. And as we stared at her she ran inside and swung shut the heavy wooden door. We could hear her barring it and calling to her children to stay away from the windows, for the dead were riding by.

So ride we did. “The dead don't hunger,” Arlen grumbled. “We should have asked for food.”

There was another, poorer holding farther up the valley; we could see it in the distance, and we reached it in the dusk. A man with a lantern was coming in from his work in the byre. He brought the light close enough to look at us, then shouted and lifted his stick. Arlen turned Bucca and sent him out of the yard at the gallop. We both fell silent, feeling like lepers.

At least the night was clear; there was starlight to ride by. It was also cold. We took shelter finally in a sheep shed far up a long hillside, at the distance of a meadow from the nearest homestead, and we took pains that the folk should not see us in their sheep cot. It was a little, low stone building with the south side open to the weather, a shelter meant for lambing, perhaps. There was some soiled straw in it, and also there were some sheep. They stank, but we nestled down among them for the sake of the warmth of their wool. And Bucca had only the shelter of a thin whitethorn grove and a blanket on his back.

In days to follow we learned not to scorn the squirrels' hoards. When my signal unseen or voice unheard led me to one the next day, we took nuts and cracked them to have with our apples.

Those were not easy days; it would be untrue to say they were. We did not trouble the outlanders any more with the onus of our presence, but waited until they were abed and then took shelter in a shed or barn or byre, stealing a bit of hay for Bucca, or corn. For some reason, although we did not hesitate to take what the horse needed, we would not steal for ourselves. Perhaps we felt somehow to blame, while Bucca was blameless. Therefore we survived on gleanings, we both grew thin and haggard. And I had never known the world was so large, so awesome, or the hours of darkness were so long, away from lamplight and friendly hearth. Until we were settled in our rude bedding with our blanket over us and our bodies nestled together, the nights seemed full of dread mystery, as menacing to us as we seemed to others.

Perhaps because we needed it the more, the presence that traveled with us had grown stronger. Whatever food lay beneath the ground it would show to me without fail, even if it were only a single turnip or a few acorns—always to me, never to Arlen. But Arlen was beginning to sense the being of the thing too. At times one could almost see it; there was a sort of thickness in the air a few feet to the left of us. If we were separated, it went with me. On one occasion when it had led me off to some distance in search of carrots, I turned to see Arlen watching with a peculiar expression on his face. Then he came slowly up to us. I say “us” because there verily was an other there.

“I wonder what it is,” he murmured, gazing off to my left a little.

I must have been feeling particularly hungry that day, and bitter. “You could leave,” I told him, as if he were stupid not to have thought of it himself. “Go off by yourself and join some lord's retinue, live like a proper person instead of a beast. They would accept you, for this thing would cleave to me; I feel sure of it. Go ahead.”

If he had hesitated so much as to draw an extra breath—but he only smiled and took my hand. “Rae,” he chided, “you are talking nonsense.” And that was the end of it.

Hard days, but good. Arlen had never known women except for the Gwyneda, who were scarcely women at all in any natural sense. It was most sternly forbidden that there should be any contact of a fleshly sort between the young men of the Sacred Isle and the Gwyneda, even though some of the white-robes were as young as the sacred kings. The penalty for such passion was a most unpleasant death. So Arlen had known no lovers but me, and while he knew he loved me he hardly knew how to treat me, not in any usual way. More and more he came to regard me as a comrade, a fellow, and he confided in me much as he would have confided in—well, in Lonn. I did not entirely like this; I would have liked to have been wooed, courted, I who had prayed for a sweetheart. Still, I was a wife, and once a women wed, she stood at the mercy of her husband's fist; in this regard I was fortunate. Arlen had no notion of manly protection or a woman's place, but his equable love for me constrained him to keep from quarreling with me and I was glad of it, for he was mettlesome. I was grateful that the hot flash of his eyes fell on folk other than myself.

Being a comrade, I decided, had felt strange to start with, but better and better as time went on. Comradeship assorted well with freedom—another joy that had once felt strange.

Neither of us had a plan. “Where are we going?” I asked once, over his shoulder as we rode.

“I don't know.” He laughed and nudged Bucca into a springing trot. “Folk think we are fleeing, but they are wrong,” he said. “We are two seekers questing together. We are looking.”

“Seeing the size of the world,” I murmured. The vast world.

I was coming to know Arlen better—a bittersweet reckoning, for one who had dreamed of heroes. There was little of the hero about Arlen, but much to love: the moods that crossed his face, his warm way with animals, his occasional mischief, his mouth that stammered slightly when he was heart-touched or distressed—there were a thousand expressions about his mouth. And for all our happiness and Arlen's confidence I began to feel that he hid some deep hurt; something was bleeding within him, a wound that had not yet started to heal.