The Sterkarm Handshake (3 page)

“You can try that.” Bryce let the pause go on awhile. “If we can't keep the Sterkarms quiet, we're going to have Scotland and England on our backs as well.”

“I don't need reminding of that,” Windsor said.

Long before FUP had come along, the Scotland and England of the sixteenth century had been perpetually annoyed by the Sterkarms and the other families of feuding raiders who lived along the border.

The Scottish-English border had never been clearly drawn, and the result had been a long strip of “debatable land” over which neither country could enforce law. The wardens, officers of the English and Scottish crowns, had struggled, with too little money and too few men, to capture raiders, retrieve stolen goods, keep up with constantly changing feuds and alliances, and bring to trial offenders who laughed at them. Being granted the post of warden was a punishment. The best prospect a warden had was to come to terms with the most powerful family in his district, accept their bribes and place himself under their protection. An honest warden died young, of exhaustion or violence.

Both Scotland and England would have been glad to have the borders settled and quiet, but neither could agree on the exact line of the border. Scotland claimed Northumberland and Cumberland as rightfully belonging to the Scottish crown, while England insisted that the border should be set even farther north than it already was. FUP offered a solution.

It had taken a great deal of expensive consultation with experts on sixteenth-century life, language and costume, and the forging, in the twenty-first century, of a great many gold coins that would be acceptable to the English and Scottish courts, 16th side. And then FUP had sent representatives to the two kings, to propose, in Latin, that the governance of the difficult border lands be privatized. Let the Elves take it on, at their own expense. No longer would England or Scotland have to find the money to keep castles garrisoned and in repair, or to compensate citizens deprived of their goods, or to imprison, try and execute captured raiders. The Elves would undertake all that. The Elves also pledged to keep the debatable lands quiet, preventing the former evil predations and disturbances. There would be peace on the borders.

What would the Elves get out of it? Well, if the two great sovereignties would grant them the right to raise taxes, and the right to the produce of the borders … They were also willing to pay tribute to the two crowns and, in token of this, please accept this gold …

It took long and complex negotiations, and payment of a great deal more gold, before the suspicions of Scotland and England were overcome, and the Great Seals of both countries fastened to the contract. But it had been managed.

The Scots and English wardens, relieved of their duties, had departed with a mixture of relief and sorrow that Bryce understood. It's often the hardest, most unforgiving posts that create the greatest commitment in the unfortunates who have to fill them.

“Border men!” said the Scot. “They rob and thieve and murder but have a hundred smiles and a thousand honeyed words to save their necks when caught. Remember that. And never shake hands with a Sterkarm.”

The English warden, who had been owned for almost the whole of his service by the Grannam family, had said, “They're ill to tame, the border men. May Christ preserve your soul! And beware of shaking hands with a Sterkarm.”

But it seemed that all the research, all the planning, all the painstaking negotiation and diplomacy needed to persuade England and Scotland to FUP's way of thinking was as nothing compared to dealing with the Sterkarms.

“Can I leave it to you to arrange our visit 16th side?” Windsor said. “Make it soon. The Sterkarms have got to learn that we Elves control the borders now.”

3

16th Side: At Home with
the Sterkarms

I'm so lucky, Andrea thought.

The hall occupied almost the whole second floor of the tower, and in the early evening, as the night meal ended, it was noisily crowded with men, women and children. Some were still gathered around the two long trestle tables that ran the room's length, standing as they ate. Others, after a day spent out on windy hillsides, were pressing around the fire, bringing bread and beer with them. The sound of laughter and chatter resounded from the plastered stone of the walls.

The light came from a few candles placed on the tables—they smoked and stank of mutton fat as they burned—and from the large fire of peat and dung built in the stone fireplace. The red-and-gold firelight constantly faded and brightened as the flames rose and fell or were swayed by drafts. It seemed to provide as much darkness as illumination. Someone leaning over a table to reach for a piece of bread threw a big, dark shadow over half the room; and darkness jumped and shifted among the rafters. In the farthest corners, and in the doorway leading to the stairs, the darkness was deep.

The peat smoke from the fire smelled of leaves and earth, though with a harsh catch that bit at the lining of the nose and throat. The smoke hung in the air, thick, gray and drifting, often obscuring the rafters and sometimes even the faces of people standing. It reddened eyes and set people coughing, though the Sterkarms were so used to it, they hardly noticed that they coughed.

Andrea could have filled a page with notes about the various whiffs and stinks that drifted about: the fruity tang of beer, a gust of stale old sweat every time someone passed or moved, and someone nearby had very cheesy feet. Other people smelled of sheep and of horses. It wasn't that the Sterkarms themselves were especially dirty—it was early in the autumn, the weather was mild, and many of them still swam in the river every day. But their clothes, being mostly of wool, were difficult to wash without spoiling and harder still to dry, so they tended to stink from weeks of wear.

I am lucky, Andrea thought. Her feet rustled in the thick strewing of straw and herbs that covered the hall's stone flags. Overhead, the whitewash on the beams and planking of the ceiling was almost hidden under layer after layer of soot deposited by the smoke. From the rafters hung many, many rounds of flatbread, all strung on the same length of twine through the hole in the center of each piece. So lucky to have the chance to see this and, yes, even to smell it. So lucky to be able to listen to the stories.

The family table, the only one provided with chairs and stools for the diners, was set across the hall at right angles to the others. Andrea sat there, alone. Her hostess, Isobel, had harried her son and husband off on some errand as soon as they'd swallowed their last mouthful, and then had disappeared herself. Ever since Andrea had brought them the news that “Elf-Windsor” was coming to visit the next day, Isobel had been in a fret.

Sweet Milk had kept Andrea company at first, but then he'd gone away too. At least that had given her a few minutes to write down what he'd told her, in the notebook taken from her pocket. She'd had to hold it awkwardly in one hand while writing with the other, because the boards of the trestle table were too greasy to rest the book on. The Sterkarms used thick squares of stale bread for plates, and the gravy soaked through.

Sweet Milk's story was exactly the sort of firsthand account she needed for the book she planned to write when she went home: an account of the Sterkarms' way of life. Even if she never got it published, it ought to help her get a post in some university's anthropology department.

The chance to live with the Sterkarms had been one she'd just had to grab. The job had seemed fated to be hers. She'd only heard about the job by chance, and then had almost not bothered to apply. But she'd been almost at the end of her studies and beginning to look around for work. She thought her Danish had swung it for her—her mother was Danish, and she could speak a reasonable Danish herself. She never would have been able to pick up the Sterkarms' thick dialect so quickly otherwise.

Of course, she was a dimension removed from her own world, so this wasn't the sixteenth century of her own timeline—if she'd understood the scientific explanations at all correctly. But, she'd been assured, the two dimensions were so close, there was no essential difference. “The dimensions diverge inasmuch as Anne Boleyn wore a red dress to her execution in one, and a pink dress in the other” had been one rather distasteful explanation. The scientists had been more interested in whether oil, gas and gold had exactly the same properties in both dimensions.

But to be
in
the sixteenth century, even if a dimension removed from her own. To be talking with sixteenth-century people, seeing how they lived at first hand, experiencing it herself. She could never think about it for more than a couple of seconds at a time because it made her dizzy. If she ever let herself truly feel how incredible, how miraculous—the technology! The implications!—then she was sure her mind would fly to bits.

She wished she could think as the Sterkarms did: that all she had done was to step over the magical boundary between Elf-Land and Man's-Home. In an odd way they feared the Time Tube as magical and supernatural while, at the same time, regarding it as entirely natural. But then, so much of their world was inexplicable to them. They didn't understand why the sun and moon rose and set or moved across the sky, or what dreams were, or why people fell sick. The arrival of the Elves was just one more inexplicable thing that they had no choice but to accept as true. She made a note.

She read again through the notes she'd just made.

Sweet Milk told me when he was about ten, reivers came and burned down his family's home. He thinks they were Grannams, probably on way home from reiving Sterkarms. They came on SM's little holding and took the chance to reive a few more goats and sheep. Sweet Milk, his mother & siblings ran away, watched riders by light of burning house. Sweet Milk's father stayed behind, very foolish if brave. When family went back next day, father was dead. Sweet Milk says his body torn all to pieces, so many lances had been driven through him. Tears ran down into his beard as he told me this. The Sterkarms aren't at all ashamed to show their feelings.

Andrea's own eyes had filled as she'd listened, and she'd found it hard to swallow, but she was always embarrassed by tears and tried hard not to show them. “No use crying over spilt milk,” her father had always said. Besides, researchers were supposed to keep a distance between themselves and their work. She tried. It wasn't easy.

Sweet Milk said he held one of his small sisters in his arms and watched his mother crouch by his father's body and howl like a dog. His mother, and six children, had been left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what little grain they could rescue from the burning house.

She read it over and over, shaking her head. It seemed extreme to her—the robbery, the burning, the murder, the destitution, all piling one on another—but it helped her understand the world she was in. No one among the Sterkarms thought Sweet Milk's story strange. Such things happened commonly. That was why the towers were built, with their fifteen-foot walls; why the outbuildings had no entrances on the ground floor; why every man went armed and no one ever left the tower alone.

Something banged on the table, surprising her and making her look up. It was Sweet Milk come back, and setting down a fresh jug of beer. He seated himself heavily on a stool and grinned at her through his beard.

He was a big man, probably in his thirties, with long dark hair and a dark beard. His hands were big and thick fingered with scarred knuckles, his face usually grim, and he rarely spoke. He'd made Andrea nervous when she'd first met him. He'd seemed as threatening as any twenty-first-century biker. Then she'd got to know him, through Per, who treated him with familiar, affectionate contempt, and she'd found that Sweet Milk was good-natured, shrewd and funny. She valued his friendship a great deal. It had been Sweet Milk who'd told her about “the Sterkarm handshake,” and he was an influential man at the tower—Toorkild's foreman when farming, and his second in command when fighting. Toorkild thought so highly of him that he'd given him the responsibility and great honor of being Per's foster father. And yet Sweet Milk wasn't a Sterkarm. He was a Beal.

“I've written down all tha told me,” she said, “so I can remember it all.” She held the notebook up for him to see, and he peered at it. To him it must seem nothing but wriggling lines and scribble. He couldn't read or write even his own name.

“Elf-Work,” he said, grinning. He had big, square teeth. When Andrea had first come among the Sterkarms, she'd expected to find a lot of stunted, puny creatures with rotten teeth, and had been surprised, even faintly disappointed, to find how wrong she was. The grit that got into the bread from the grindstones did wear down their back teeth, but since none of them had ever tasted sugar, and they drank a great deal of milk, the rest of their teeth were good and strong. Some even whitened them by chewing on hazel twigs.

“Canst spell me with that?” He nodded at the writing.

“No. And I would not spell thee, Sweet Milk, even if I could.”

“Ah, tha needs no Elf-Work to spell me, Honey.”

Andrea looked down at her notebook, pretending that she hadn't heard and hoping that, in the red light, the flush on her cheeks wouldn't be seen. She couldn't get used to being admired and complimented. Back in the 21st she was “Big Fat Andy,” and had learned to expect that men would look straight past her. But what the 21st called “big and fat,” the Sterkarms called “bonny.” Tall as she was, full fleshed, broad beamed, bosomy, thunder thighed—the eyes of the Sterkarm men lit up. They noticed her all the time, and it was disconcerting. Would a looker like Per have given her even one glance if he'd been born and raised in the 21st?

“Wouldst tell me what happened after thy father was killed?”

He seemed disappointed that she wasn't going to flirt, but took up his story again. His family being Beals, in a part of the country where Beals were few, there had been no one who would, or could, give them aid. Sweet Milk and the other children had helped his mother build another house—like the one burned down, it had been nothing but a flimsy shelter made of branches and mud and thatched with heather. The widow had labored on, trying to make a living with nothing, from nothing. Her younger children had sickened and died, and after a couple of years, Sweet Milk had wandered away, to try and find some less hungry life for himself.

Had Sweet Milk been a Sterkarm, his life would have been easier. Sterkarms were as thick as grass in that country, and also as thick as thieves. A Sterkarm widow and her children would have been helped by someone, and the dead man would have been avenged. But the Sterkarms felt no obligation to help a Beal.

“So I was a loose man in moss,” Sweet Milk said—that was, a man without family to help or protect him, living rough in the hills, marshes and moors. This wild, sodden, mountainous country made such a life hard, and if you killed game or sheep, or even gathered berries, on land claimed by the Sterkarms, you were likely to end up hanged—or, if there was no handy tree, held down in a stream and drowned. Sweet Milk had thought about going to some other part of the country, but where would have been the gain? The Beals weren't a strong family anywhere. Walking would bring him into Grannam country, or Allyot country, where he would be no better off.

In the end he'd walked up to a Sterkarm tower and asked for work, shelter and food. “If they'd killed me, I should have been out of rain.”

If they'd ever caught him butchering their sheep—and he could admit now that he had done that—the Sterkarms would certainly have killed him, but it was all but impossible for them to kill someone who asked for their hospitality. If even a Grannam, one of their worst enemies, had come to their gates asking for food and shelter, he would have been given it and treated with courtesy. Whether, having left their gates again, a Grannam would have got very far on his road was another matter.

Sweet Milk, once through the Sterkarm gates, had set about making himself indispensable, setting out to win praise for every task he was given, looking for jobs and doing them before he was asked, determined to become so valued a servant that he would never again be loose in the moss.

“Tha've done very well,” Andrea said, her head leaning on her hand. She'd been listening, fascinated, trying hard to remember every word, since she didn't want to distract him by writing while he talked. “Sweet Milk—why art called ‘Sweet Milk'?” It was typical that as almost the only man at the tower who wasn't named Sterkarm, and so didn't need a nickname, he was always, but always, known by the most baffling she'd heard yet.

“Dost not know?” He grinned.

She shook her head. Most nicknames were obvious: “Nebless” or “Noseless” meant a man whose nose had been cut off, or who had a big nose; “Half-lugs” was someone who was deaf, or who'd had one ear cut off, and “Gob” or “Gobby” meant “mouthy” or “big mouth.” But “Sweet Milk”? It meant “fresh milk,” as “sweet water” meant fresh, drinkable water, and it was true that the Sterkarms drank a lot of milk, in all its forms, and valued fresh, whole milk highly, but Andrea still couldn't quite see the connection. You'd be looking at Sweet Milk a long time before he reminded you of anything either sweet or milky.

“I'll no tell thee, then,” he said.

He wanted her to wheedle it out of him, and she would have done, except that Isobel came bustling up and set her hands on the table. Sweet Milk sat back and fell silent. Every man in the tower was afraid of Isobel.

Leaning across the table, Isobel held Andrea's attention with her amazing eyes, which were huge, round, so pale a blue they were almost silver, and just like Per's. “Entraya! Have you any wee white pills?”