Bristling Wood (6 page)

“You’ll forgive me for imposing on you,” Maddyn said. “I haven’t been well, and I need a bit of a rest.”

“Any friend of Nevyn’s is always welcome here,” she said. “Sit down, and I’ll get you some ale.”

Maddyn took off his cloak, then sat down on the hearthstone as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his shirt. Announcing that he had to get back to the cows, Bannyc strolled back outside. The woman handed Maddyn a tankard of dark ale, then sat down near him and picked up her mending again.

“My thanks.” Maddyn saluted her with the ale. “My name’s Maddyn of . . . uh, well, just Maddyn will do.”

“Mine’s Belyan. Have you known Nevyn long?”

“Oh, not truly.”

Belyan gave him an oddly awestruck smile and began sewing Maddyn sipped his ale and watched her slender fingers work deftly on the rough wool of a pair of brigga, Bannyc’s, by the large size of them. He was surprised at how good it felt to be sitting warm, and alive in the presence of a pretty woman. Every now and then, Belyan hesitantly looked his way, as if she were trying to think of something to say.

“Well, my lord,” she said at last. “Will you, be staying long with our Nevyn?’

“I don’t truly know, but here, what makes you, call me lord? I’m as common-born as you are.”

“Well—but a friend of Nevyn’s.”

At that Maddyn realized that she knew perfectly well that the old man was dweomer.

“Now here, what do you think I am?” Maddyn had the uneasy feeling that it was very dangerous to pretend to dweomer you didn’t have, “I’m only a rider without a warband. Nevyn was good enough to save my life when he found me wounded, that’s all. But here, don’t tell anyone about me, will you? I’m an outlawed man.”

“I’ll forget your name the minute you ride on.”

‘My humble thanks, and my apologies. I don’t even deserve to be drinking your ale.”

“Oh, hold, your tongue! What do I care about these rotten wars?”

When, he looked at her, he found her angry, her mouth set hard in a bitter twist.

“I don’t care the fart of a two-copper piglet,” she went on. “All it’s ever brought to me and mine is trouble. They take our horses and raise our taxes and ride through our grain, and all in the name of glory and the one true king, or so they call him, when everyone with wits in his head knows there’s two kings now, and why should I care, truly, as long as they don’t both come here a-bothering us. If you’re one man who won’t die in this war, then, I say good for you.”

“Ye gods. Well, truly, I never thought of it that way before.”

“No doubt, since you were a rider once.”

“Here, I’m not exactly a deserter or suchlike.”

She merely shrugged and went back to her sewing. Maddyn wondered why a woman her age, twenty-two or so, was living in her father’s house. Had she lost a betrothed in the wars? The question was answered for him in a moment when two small lads, about six and four, came running into the room and calling her Mam. They were fighting over a copper they’d found in the road and come to her to settle it. Belyan gave them each a kiss and told hem they’d have to give the copper to their gran, then sent them back outside.

“So you’re married, are you?” Maddyn said.

“I was once. Their father drowned in the river two winters ago. He was setting a fish trap, but the ice turned out to be too thin.”

“That aches my heart, truly. So you came back to your father?”

“I did. Da needed a woman around the house, and he’s good to my lads. That’s what matters to me.”

“Then it gladdens my heart to hear that you’re happy.”

“Happy?” She thought for a moment. “Oh, I don’t think much of things like happiness, just as long as the lads are well.”

Maddyn could feel her loneliness, lying just under her faint, mocking smile. His body began to wonder about her, a flicker of sexual warmth, another sign that life was coming back to him. She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes patient, self-contained, almost unreadable.

“And what will you do now?” she said. “Ride on before the snows come?”

“Nevyn doesn’t think I’ll be fit by then, but sooner or later I have to go. It’ll mean my life if I stay. They hang outlawed men.”

“So they do.”

Belyan considered him for a moment more, then got up briskly, as if she’d come to some decision, and strode out of the room through a blanket-hung door in one of the wickerwork walls. He was just finishing his tankard when she returned, carrying a shirt, which she tossed into his lap when she sat back down.

“That was my husband’s,” she said. “It’s too small for Da, and it’ll rot before the lads grow to fit it Take it. You need a shirt that doesn’t have foxes embroidered all over it.”

“Ye gods! I forgot about that. No wonder you thought I was a deserter, then. Well, my humble thanks.”

He smoothed it out, studying with admiration the sleeves, stiff finely embroidered interlace and spirals, and at the yokes, bands. It had probably been her husband’s wedding shirt, because it was unlikely that her man had owned two pieces of fancy clothing, but still, it was a good bit safer for him to wear than one with his dead lord’s blazon. He took off his old shirt and gave it to her.

“Do you want this for the cloth? You can mend the lads’ tunics out of it.”

“So I can. My thanks.”

She was looking at the scar along his side, a thick clot of tissue in his armpit, a thinner gash along his ribs, Hurriedly he pulled the new shirt over his head and smoothed it down.

“It fits well enough. You’re generous to a dishonored man.”

“Better than letting it rot. I put a lot of fancy work into that.”

“Do you miss your man still?”

“At times.” She paused, considering for a few moments. “I do, at that. He was a good man. He didn’t beat me, and we always had enough to eat. When he had the leisure, he’d whittle little horses and wagons for the lads, and he made sure I had a new dress every spring.”

It came to that for her, he realized, not the glories of love and the tempests of passion that the bard songs celebrated for noble audiences, He’d met plenty of women like Belyan, farm women, all of them, whose real life ran apart from their men in a self-contained earthiness of their work and their children. Since their work counted as much as their men’s toward feeding and sheltering themselves and their kin, it gave them a secure place of their own, unlike the wives of the noble lords, who existed at their husbands’ whims. Yet Belyan was lonely; at times she missed her man. Maddyn was aware of his body, and the wondering was growing stronger. When she smiled at him, he smiled in return.

The door banged open, and, shouting and laughing, the two lads ushered in Nevyn. Although he joked easily with the boys, the old man turned grim when he reached Maddyn.

“You were right to stay out here, lad. I like that new shirt you’re wearing,”

Belyan automatically began rolling the old one up, hiding the fox-blazoned yokes inside the roll.

“Tieryn Devyr is up at Brynoic’s dun,” Nevyn went on. “He’s going to assign the lands to his son, Romyl, and give the lad part of his warband to hold them. That means men who know you will be riding the roads around here. I think we’ll just go home the back way.”

For several days after, Maddyn debated the risk of riding on his own, then finally went down to see Belyan by a roundabout way. When he led the horse into the farmstead, it seemed deserted. The wooden wagon was gone, and not even a dog ran out to bark at him. As he stood there, puzzling, Belyan came walking out of the barn with a wooden bucket in one hand. Maddyn liked her firm but supple stride.

“Da’s taken the lads down to market,” she said. “We had extra cheeses to sell.”

“Will they be gone long?”

“Till sunset, most like. I was hoping you’d ride our way today.”

Maddyn took his horse to the barn and tied him up in a stall next to one of the cows, where he’d be out of the wind and, more importantly, out of sight of the road. When he went into the house, he found Belyan putting more wood in the hearth. She wiped her hands on her skirts, then glanced at him with a small, secretive smile.

“It’s cold in my bedchamber, Maddo. Come sit down by the fire.”

They sat down together in the soft clean straw by the hearth. When he touched her hair with a shy stroke, she laid impatient hands on his shoulders. When he kissed her, she slipped her hands behind his neck and pulled him down to her as smoothly as if she were gathering in a sheaf of wheat.

The winter was slow in coming that year. There was one flurry of snow, then only the cold under a clear sky, day after day of aching frost and wind. Although the pale sun managed to melt the first snowfall, rime lay cold and glittering on the brown fields and in the ditches along the roads. Maddyn spent the days out of sight in Brin Toraedic, because Lord Romyl’s men were often out prowling the roads, riding back and forth to the village to exercise their horses and to get themselves out of the dun. Maddyn would sleep late, then practice his harp by the hour with the Wildfolk for an audience. Sometimes Nevyn would sit and listen, or even make a judicious comment about his singing or the song itself, but the old man spent much of his day deep within the broken hill. Maddyn never got up the nerve to ask him what he did there.

One afternoon when Nevyn was gone, Maddyn remembered a song about Dilly Blind, the trickiest Wildfolk of them all. Since it was a children’s song, he hadn’t heard it in years, but he ran through it several times and made up fresh verses when he couldn’t remember the old. The Wildfolk clustered close and listened enraptured. When he finally finished with it, for the briefest of moments he thought he saw or perhaps did indeed see them, little faces, little eyes, peering up at him. Then, suddenly, they were gone. When Nevyn returned later, Maddyn mentioned his vision—if such it was—to the old man, who looked honestly startled.

“If you do start seeing them, lad, for the sake of every god, don’t go telling people about it. You’ll be mocked within a bare thread of your life.”

“Oh, I know that, sure enough. I’m just puzzled. I never had so much as a touch of the second sight before.”

‘Truly? That’s odd, because bards so often do have the sight. But anyway, lad, you’re doubtless picking it up just from being here with us. Suppose you laid your sword down close to the fire in the hearth. In time, the blade would grow hot, even though it wasn’t in the fire itself. Being in a center of dweomer power can do that to a man with a sensitive mind.”

With a little shudder Maddyn looked around the towering stone chamber. A center of power? he thought; truly, you can feel it sometimes.

“Well,” Maddyn said at last. “It was a strange chance that brought me here.”

“Perhaps. But naught happens to a dweomerman by chance, especially not in these cursed and troubled times.”

“I take it the wars ache your heart.”

“Of course they do, dolt! If you had any sense, they’d ache yours.”

“Well, good sir, I’ve never known anything but war. Sometimes I wonder if the days of the old kingdom are like the tales in some of my songs—splendid to hear, but never true.”

“Oh, they were real enough. There was a time when a man could ride the roads in peace, and the farmers gather in their crops in safety, and a man have a son and feel sure that he’d live to see the lad live to be grown and married. Good days, they were, and I pray constantly that they’ll come again.”

Maddyn felt a sudden longing to know that kind of life. Before, he’d wanted battle glory and honor, taken it for granted that there would always be wars to provide them, but all at once he wondered if glory were the great prize he’d always believed it to be. Later, when he went out to walk on the top of the hill, he found that the snow had been falling all morning. For miles around, the world was soft and white under a pearly gray sky, the trees etched against the horizon, the distant village snug under a breath of smoke from its chimneys. He’d seen views like it a hundred times and thought nothing of them, but now it was beautiful, so beautiful that he wondered if he’d ever really looked at anything before he’d ridden up to the gates of the Otherlands.

At night, whenever the weather allowed, Maddyn rode down to see Belyan. At first he was afraid that Bannyc would resent this outlaw who’d ridden in and taken his daughter, but the old man regarded him with a certain pleasant indifference. Her sons were a different matter. The younger found him a nuisance, and the elder frankly hated him. Maddyn took to arriving late at the farm, when he could be sure they were asleep, because Belyan made it clear that the lads came first in her heart—fair enough, he thought, since they both knew he’d be riding on in the spring. Yet whenever he held her in his arms, the spring seemed very far away.

Once the snows came in force, it was hard to ride down to her bed as often as Maddyn wanted. One night, after a frustrating week of being snowbound in the hill, he left early and pushed his horse hard through the heavy drifts. He stabled his horse, then climbed in through Belyan’s chamber window, pushing the oiled hides aside and cursing while she laughed at him. Although she had a freestanding clay stove in the chamber, it was still bitter cold. He threw off his cloak, pulled off his boots, then got into bed before undressing the rest of the way.

“Your chamber’s as cold as the blasted roads!”

“Then come over to my side of the bed. It’s nice and warm.”

When he took her in his arms, she turned to him greedily with a simple, direct passion that still took him by surprise. She didn’t know how to be coy and flirtatious like the other women he’d had. When would she have had the time to learn, he supposed, and it didn’t bother him one whit. Later, as he lay drowsing between sleep and waking, he found himself considering staying in the spring. Bannyc would be glad to have an extra man to help work the farm; Bell would be glad to have him in her bed every night; the lads could gradually be won over. While Maddyn didn’t love her, he liked her, and it would do well enough all round. Yet he didn’t dare stay. For the first time, he saw clearly that he was indeed running for his life. Any lord in Cantrae who recognized him would turn him over to Devyr for hanging. He was going to have to ride west, ride fast and far enough to find a lord who’d never heard of him or Lord Brynoic and one who was desperate enough for men to take him on with no questions asked. Most likely, he’d end up riding for one of the enemy sides in the long wars, a Cerrmor ally or an Eldidd lord. He kissed Belyan awake and made love to her again, simply to drown his thoughts of the future ahead of him.