C. J. Cherryh - Fortress 05 (4 page)

“No!” a feminine squeal came from the guards’ room, and several men laughed. “The scriptures is against immodesty,” the girl said,

“an’ ye keep your nasty hands t’ yourself.”

There were remarks below hearing, and then the girl began citing scripture: “Cursed is the flesh and the desires of it, cursed is the lustful man and the issue of his…”

Aewyn surged up to his feet, outraged. “Hush, now, hush,” his guards were saying, wishing to keep the peace in the hall, but the undercook’s daughter was a righteous girl: so she said at every chance. Madelys was her name, she had probably come up looking for used dishes, and she was too holy for a nunnery, was what everyone said—which was why Cook thought she was proper enough to be waiting on a young lord in his own premises— and spying, meanwhile, on his household.

It was a very furious and upset Madelys, as Aewyn faced the hall— Madelys with her serving tray and used dishes snatched under her arm and a fury on her thin face. She scarcely bobbed a curtsy as she stood there confronting him and glaring at his bodyguards.

“Out!” Aewyn said.

“It ain’t me!” Madelys said, with not a
Your Highness
nor any other grace. “It ain’t me at any fault. They was pullin’ my skirt!”

“No one ha’ touched the lass, Your Highness.” This from his oldest guard, Selmyn, and if he had any discernment in him, or cared at the moment, this was the source of truth, far more than this surly girl.

“Out,” Aewyn said the second time, and not loudly at all. If he were his father, Cook’s daughter would already have been running; but he was not, and she stood there glaring at him like a badger in its den. He said, more harshly: “Get out!”

She hunched her tray closer, turned, and stalked out the door, which one of his guards opened for her, without a second curtsy or a mollifying word.

He was truly not supposed to swear. His father and his mother would hear about it if he did, though not, perhaps, from these men.

He turned a carefully serene face toward them, then walked with a certain embarrassed dignity back to the fireside, where Otter stood utterly dismayed.

“Madelys,” Aewyn said, his face burning, “is the only maid Mother will let come through my doors, and she has to come because the menservants aren’t to touch the dishes.”

“Do you have to mind what she says?” Otter asked him. “Are we in trouble?”

“No.” He plumped down whence he had risen, signaling Otter to do the same. “Oh, I could be rid of her like that if I took my nurse back. I know Nurse would send her away. But I’m too old for Nurse telling me what to eat and when to eat and always scolding me about my clothes.” He missed Nurse. Sometimes he missed her keenly. But when she visited, as she did, she always hugged him like a baby, straightened his hair, and more particularly, would never let him sit on the floor with his half brother. The notion of pretending they were in Gran’s little house in Amefel just would never occur to Nurse, who had one notion of the way things should be and never left it. “Madelys is just a fool, is all. She really does want to be a nun, but you have to have a dowry for that, and being undercook’s third daughter, she has two sisters to marry first.” He gave a laugh. “If she doesn’t mend her ways, I’ll save up my market pennies for a year and give her one.”

Otter didn’t seem to understand. He shot a troubled look toward the short hallway and the door.

“It’s a joke, goose.”

Otter showed a shy smile, then. His country brother was sometimes slow to laugh at angry people, although he had a very quick wit in private. Aewyn fell onto his belly and shut the little book, which was done up in goatskin with a painted picture of the lodge in a little medallion. “It’s a silly little book. It was a present, really. Brother Siene used to be a copyist in the monastery—he was Bryalt—and he could read, besides. He made it for my father to give to my mother on her birthday: he can’t give her the lodge, which he would like to have done, because she’s Elwynim and he can’t give away Guelen land, but he could give it to me. He says he will, when I’m nineteen. And my mother gave me the book because I was always borrowing it.”

“Will you live there when you can?”

“As often as I can. I’ll put fish in the brook. I’m tired of waiting to see one.”

That, Otter clearly thought was worth laughing at. Aewyn laughed, himself, and rolled onto his back on the bearskin rug, looking up at the laquear ceiling. The beams were dark polished wood, with boars’ heads set where they met the walls. The center of the squares had sheaves of barley in some, and deer in others, with the crest of Guelessar in the centermost, in gold. He had never really seen these things for what they were, until Otter came: like the book, they were the accounting of the wealth of the kingdom, which was his to enjoy and spread about in charity, dispensing justice and making sure the wealth went where it ought, to men of peace. Otter had grown up otherwise, in a little farmhouse, over in Amefel, with his gran, who was a wisewoman, but a witch, really, as the Quinalt saw it, and who was not really Otter’s own grandmother. Otter had never ridden a horse, only practiced with a wooden sword, with Paisi, who was Gran’s real grandson. Paisi was peasant-born, and in Guelessar, Paisi, being a farmer, would not have known about swords, but he had learned a little. It was all very different where Otter had lived. There had been wars in Amefel. And even the farmers had learned to fight.

The wind blew at the windows and fluttered the fire in the fireplace.

“When the storm blows itself out,” Aewyn said, “we could go riding.” He had a second, glum thought. “If it weren’t holiday coming. If the weather clears by tomorrow, we could do it, but it doesn’t sound like it out there, does it?”

“No.”

A deep sigh. “Besides, it’s a great fuss, getting the horses up from pasture, then only having to send them down again. But we shall go after. There’ll still be snow all about. And by then the merchants will wear down the snow. And then—” He had brought out the book and shown Otter this special prize of his, and now he had a keen notion what would be a great treat. “Then, after Festival, we shall go to the lodge. It’s not that far. The brook may be frozen, but you can see it all the same. We can spend a night or two there.”

“If your father will let us,” Otter said.

“I’ll tell you what’s not in the book,” Aewyn said, rolling back onto his stomach and his elbows, looking straight into Otter’s pale gray eyes. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “The lodge has its own ghost.”

“A haunt?” Otter asked, duly impressed.

“It’s supposed to be a grave from before the lodge was built, and nobody knew it was there, nor ever has found it. But late at night pans fall in the scullery, and footsteps go up and down the stairs.”

Otter’s eyes were wide as could be. “Is it a man or a woman?”

“Her. It’s a lady. Well, a woman. She could be a farmer or a herder. Nobody knows. But cakes go missing out of the kitchen, and everyone says it’s the ghost.”

Now Otter looked doubtful and grinned. “I can think of another way cakes disappear.”

Aewyn laughed, too. “We’ll stay up late and see if cakes disappear,” he said. “We just have to endure Festival to get there.”

“Day after tomorrow,” Otter said.

“Three days earlier than yours, in Amefel, isn’t it? And no dancing.” He understood that Otter was Bryalt, like his mother. “I like your holidays much better. But I daren’t say that, being the Prince. I have to be good. Have you tried your clothes?”

“Clothes?” Otter asked, confused, so he hoped he had not spoiled their father’s surprise.

“Papa sent some. For the whole Festival. Mother said so. I thought they’d have come this morning. They were supposed to.”

“I haven’t seen them.”

“Oh, well, they’ll be there. Probably the servants are brushing them. They had better be there.”

“Where am I supposed to wear them?”

“To services every day.”

Otter wore a look of slight dismay. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said that.

“Papa says you should sit with us in sanctuary,” Aewyn said.

“What does the queen think about that?”

“Mother wants you there, too.”

Otter didn’t say anything to that, only looked unhappy.

“Papa says it will be a good thing if you come. People will know you’re my brother. You’ll be welcome. You will. You’re to walk in with us and sit with us, and the people will see who you are.”

A small silence. “I don’t know why.”

“Because you
are
my brother.”

“I’m not, quite. It’s pretending.”

“It’s not,” Aewyn said fiercely. “You are my brother. You will be, in public, so everyone knows who you are, and that my father and my mother agree. I heard them talking about it, and my mother says it’s a good idea.”

“If His Majesty says so,” Otter said faintly. “I’ve never been to Quinalt services. What am I to do?”

“Oh, all you have to do is sit when we sit and stand when we stand and stay next to me and do just as I do. The choir sings and the Holy Father gives a sermon every day. We listen, and we get up and go home. The first day is Fast Day. That’s the worst. You have to dress in the dark every day. But we go without eating from dawn to dark on Fast Day, and it’s always breakfast before the sun comes up, because we have to be there at sunrise. But it’s just five days.”

It was what his mother used to say to him to cheer him up. “And then the Bryalt holiday starts, midway through. My mother puts up decorations in her chambers when that starts. You could put them up, in yours, well, after Fast Day. You shouldn’t put them in the sitting room, though. We can’t do that.”

“The Quinalt doesn’t allow it?”

“No.” Aewyn lowered his voice, and confessed: “I like my mother’s holiday ever so much better, with the evergreen and candles.

Especially the cakes. Do they make the sweet cakes in Amefel, the brown ones with the nuts?”

“Oh, nut cakes, yes. And braided bread with apples in it.” Otter’s eyes brightened. “Do you have that for holiday?”

“Well,” Aewyn admitted, “no one downstairs knows how. But Mother’s maid knows how to bake the cakes herself, and she goes down to the kitchen, and tosses Cook out, and we have them for days.” He saw how Otter’s eyes brightened at that news. “They pass the cakes out among all my mother’s staff, all through the Bryalt holiday, and she puts the evergreen up and lights bayberry candles in her private chambers at night, and they go to the Bryalt shrine on the last night, or at least Mother does, and her maids. My father can’t, and I can’t, not even when I was a babe in arms.” That was always a sore spot with him and with his mother. “She misses the dances. But they sing songs in her rooms. What else do they do in Amefel?”

“They give out the little cakes, free, in the shrine, except if you have coin in your purse you have to make an offering to keep all your other coins lucky. And there’s a penny baked into some of the cakes. The aetheling—the duke—throws pennies all up and down the street when he rides to.the front gate to open it for the year.

I’ve picked up three, all told. They’re supposed to be lucky.” He pulled out the plain braided cord he wore about his neck, and showed three dull brown pennies, pierced through. Aewyn had seen it before, and wondered then if it was a charm.

“Is it magical?” he asked warily.

“Oh, it’s Gran’s; it could be. She made it for me, from the lucky pennies. Holiday pennies. It’s bad luck to spend them.”

“The Quinalt takes the money we give,” Aewyn said. “It doesn’t give it out. Everybody has to give something, The priests do give out food to the poor on the last day and set up long tables in the square. First day is the day I hate.”

“Fast Day?”

“That’s the hardest. Fasting daylight to dark. And praying at sunrise in the Quinaltine. We have to go there while it’s still dark, it’s always cold, because the sanctuary hasn’t heated up yet, and it’s long, long praying. You get tired, you mustn’t fidget, and you can’t eat or drink anything, not even water, on the day, from the first the sun rises. Even the horses and the cattle can’t eat or drink until the sun goes down.”

“But they don’t know what day it is!”

“Oh, truth is, they’ll feed themselves off browse. That’s why we put most of the horses we can down in pasture.”

“But it’s thick snow down there now. Will they put out hay?”

“They’re not supposed to, really. If the wind’s blowing, you’ll hear the cattle bawling clear up on the hill. Lamenting the sins of the world, the fathers say. And the horses that have to stay in stable, the courier horses and such, they’re pent in, and there’s no hay.”

Otter had been on his belly, leaning on his elbows before the fire.

Now he had sat up. “That’s outright cruel, not to feed them.”

“Well”—Aewyn looked to see where his guards were, and lowered his voice—“the fact is, the grooms up on the hill always spill a lot of grain in empty stalls before the day, and leave buckets full of water, then let the horses across to the empty stalls where the grain is, that afternoon, for all the horses that have to be up on the hill. It is sort of a sin, if the priests had to rule on it, but nobody mentions it happens, so nobody ever complains. And I don’t know for sure, but I’d wager with all this snow that the stable-boys leave a gate open so the livestock down in pasture can get into a section where there’s a haystack. The priests say one thing, but the grooms always get around it because nobody wants the horses tearing up the fences.”

“That’s lying, isn’t it?”

Aewyn gave a second look toward the guards’ hallway. And back.

“It’s not really lying. It’s just pretending. Pretending isn’t a sin.”

“It’s still lying. And starving the horses is a sin.”

“Well, you can’t say that to the priests. Nor even where the guards can hear you.”

“I can say it to you, though. Don’t
you
think it’s wrong?”

Sometimes Otter’s questions were worrisome. “I don’t know I ever thought about it. We’re not supposed to lie. Or be cruel. But my father says sometimes people have to, anyway, for good reasons. The horses not knocking the boards down would be a good, practical reason for sneaking the grain in, wouldn’t it? And we’re lying so we don’t have to be cruel. So I suppose that one cancels the other.”