Cat in Glass (6 page)

“I’ll be back a week from today,” he said, “to check the reeds again. Perhaps I’ll see you.”

“Perhaps,” said Jacinth, and she waved to him as he started across the field toward Aranho. When he had dwindled to a small, limping figure in the distance, she sat down by the fire and picked up a stick. Staring after him, she stirred the ruddy embers beneath the dye pot into a confusion of hungry flames.

They met many times in the field beside the creek that spring. Joth came more and more often to check the reeds, and Jacinth found reasons, no matter how small, to gather whatever flowers were blooming in the meadow. In the long afternoons, only the birds and the buzzing insects heard the murmur of two human voices in the glens and linden groves. As spring turned into summer, Joth and Jacinth spoke to each other first like gregarious children, then like old friends. By and by, they spoke almost without words.

The first month of summer was nearly through when Jacinth recognized the longing that welled up in them both. They lay beside the creek, propped on their elbows, facing each other. Joth tickled her lips with a long blade of timothy. Then softly, with his fingertips, he stroked her hair and her cheek and the smooth hollow above it, which no one but Jacinth had ever touched before. She closed her eye and felt the large wetness of tears forming there and did not know whether joy brought them, or confusion, or knowledge that the time was not yet right.

Jacinth caught his hand and wove her fingers through his. “Though I wish it were otherwise,” she said, “we must be patient awhile longer.”

A shadow fell across Joth’s face, and his eyes grew dark for a moment. “Have I overstepped myself?” he asked. The question seemed simple, but in the sound of his voice and the way he held his head, Jacinth saw that he had left much unasked. She held his hand tighter.

“No, dear Joth,” she said. “You are like the sun to me. No day seems whole without you anymore. No task seems meaningful. But there is something I must do first.” She gazed at him, thinking of the tapestry, of the lily she had never received, and of the bitterness that lingered in spite of her love for Joth. From a thicket across the stream came the hollow cry of a short-eared owl.

So it came to pass that in the early summer Jacinth prepared to join the lily hunt. She told no one the exact nature of her plan, not even Joth, though she was sometimes certain he
had guessed it. She made herself a pair of stout, coarse trousers and a sturdy jerkin the color of thick forests. The smith of Aranho gazed at her quizzically when she bought a tempered dirk from him; the fletcher frowned at her request for a bow and a quiver of ashwood arrows. But in the end, her gold was as good as anyone else’s, and they accepted her money though she offered no explanations. Last of all, she straightened her back and strode into the shop of Bot the cobbler, as if she were any other customer.

Bot was old, and his hands too gnarled for proper cobbling, so Joth did the fine work while Bot cut leather and cajoled his customers. Jacinth ordered a pair of tall leather boots from him, finished with beeswax to keep out the cold and damp.

“I’ll be walking a long way,” she said as Bot measured her. “Sometimes through deep mud and sometimes over rocks.”

She looked up and saw Joth watching her as he worked at his last, one eyebrow raised. Her heart quickened with fear and excitement at the thought of the task she was about to undertake.

At last the appointed morning arrived. In the chill light of dawn, Jacinth dressed carefully, as she imagined a knight might dress before battle, pale and filled with the need to trust something larger than herself, a set of rules, a ritual made right by centuries of practice. She tugged the new boots over her calves, slipped the dirk through her belt and the quiver over her shoulders. Then she knotted a bag of journey bread at her hip, took up her bow, and started down the road to Aranho, looking neither right nor left.

By the time she reached the village, a crowd of young men had already gathered in the square, all laughter and nerves in the first copper light of the sun. As she approached, a hush fell over them. The muscles of her stomach tightened as she waited to see what would happen.

“What are you doing here, one-eye, dressed up as if you were a man?” asked one of them.

Jacinth fought the old fury and pain as she replied quietly, “I am walking with you to the forest.”

Several of the young men cried out at once. “But you can’t! … But you’re a woman! … You have no right to join in the lily hunt!”

Jacinth laid her hand on her dirk. “I have a right to walk wherever I please, whenever I choose. And if any of you think otherwise, then I invite you to stop me, at the expense of your own blood or mine.”

A low muttering rippled through the crowd, and Jacinth tightened her grip on the dirk.

At that moment, a clear voice cut across the morning air, as sharp as the cry of a meadowlark. There stood the high elder of Aranho, a man who was old long before Jacinth or the lily hunters had been born. He rested withered hands on thin hips and said, “Who among you ever offered her a lily?”

Silence fell on the crowd once more as men looked away across the fields or watched their own feet shuffling uneasily in the dust. No one answered.

“Then none of you has the right to stop her,” he said, standing squarely, like a battle-scarred hound who is well
aware of his own strength. After a moment, he squinted at Jacinth and smiled through his wrinkles. She nodded her thanks.

Without another word, the young men made way for her, and she took her place among them. She stood as straight and tall as she could, resisting the urge to paw the ground like a nervous horse as she waited for the procession to begin. Neither did she turn her head, searching for particular faces in the growing crowd of spectators, as some did. Her cheeks burned, for she knew how she must stand out among the sturdy hunters. She imagined the citizens of Aranho whispering about her, snickering behind their hands, as they had done so many times before.

Though it seemed to her that hours passed, the sun was still low in the sky when the march began at last. They headed east, toward the sea and the deep forests.

As they approached the last stone cottage before the village gates, she heard someone call her name. From the grassy verge beside the road, her sister Wynna waved, children clinging to her skirts as Jacinth had clung to her own mother’s skirts long years before. Beside her stood Joth, looking tall and strong in spite of the crutches tucked under his arms. Jacinth slowed her vigorous pace and blinked, for in all the years she had known him, Joth had never gone to watch a lily hunt begin.

“Good luck!” called Wynna.

Jacinth raised her hand to return Wynna’s greeting, but her gaze never left Joth’s face. He was smiling, and the smile illuminated him as if the day’s soft yellow sun had
risen from the horizon of his own heart. Its light crept into every corner of her, no matter how deep the shadows, and courage came with it.

“I’ll be back soon,” she cried. “I promise you!”

Then the tide of marching hunters swept her up, and the journey began in earnest.

They followed the road toward the east, traveling across grassy plains that ran unbroken for miles and miles. For two nights, Jacinth camped alone, ahead of the others. They would have nothing to do with her once the high elder had been safely left in the distance. On the first day’s march, some of them made a game of throwing pebbles at her so that she was forced to choose between endless small bruises and solitude. In her pride and pain, she took advantage of the fine boots Joth had made for her and strode ahead smiling grimly while the strong young men of Aranho trudged along on tired and blistered feet. A bitter satisfaction filled her, for she had been forced to accept solitude many times over in her life. It was nothing new to her. No matter, she thought, as she lay beside her small fire. She tried to dream only of Joth and the lilies, but the night songs of toads and owls pounded down on her like cold, lonely rain, and she cried in her sleep, her fingers clenched white around the handle of her dirk. For it did matter. It mattered as much as it always had.

Jacinth knew nothing specific about where the lilies might be found. She suspected that some of the other hunters had received instructions from those who had gone
before. But even if that was true, none of them would have shared such manly secrets with a woman—particularly one so proud and hideous. She knew only that lilies favored damp, shady places, loamy ground near bogs or the margins of deep forest ponds. She knew also that the forests lay in the low hills that separated the meadowlands from the eastern sea. When the hunters began their march from Aranho, the wooded coastal hills lay far off in the blue distance. But every day they grew closer, until on the third morning the faint smells of leaf mold and pitch and the vast, wet sea awakened Jacinth from her troubled sleep.

She sat up at once, sniffing the air. The sun had just risen. Birds twittered sleepily, and somewhere in the shadowy grass a cricket still chirped. She looked into the windless sky, and eagerness surged through her as she realized that before this day was over she might well be holding a lily in her own hands. She scrambled into her boots, picked up her weapons, and started down the road.

Before noon, the road had become a narrow path among tall, leafy trees. Jacinth sat down to rest a moment. She wondered whether to follow the road until it disappeared entirely or strike out on her own. The thought of leaving the traveled way frightened her, for she had never been in a real forest before. Strange, bright flowers pushed up through the carpet of fallen leaves and needles; shining beetles crept over the rocks. She did not know what animals might lurk among the trees.

Suddenly, as if fierce bears and wild pigs had leapt from her mind into the woods, she heard the sharp snap of a dry twig.

She jumped up, drawing her dirk, and found herself staring into the grimy face of a lily hunter. His fair hair stood up in dusty spikes, and the lines of dirt around his mouth flowed into an arrogant grin.

“You slept too late, one-eye,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his belt. “My friends and I will take all the lilies, and well be on our way back to Aranho before you even know where to look. Then maybe you’ll understand your place in the world.”

Jacinth’s heart sank like a rock tossed carelessly into an icy stream. The long winters of lonely weaving washed over her, and she thought of the unfinished tapestry, of returning to Joth empty-handed and broken beyond saving.

The young hunter must have seen the terror in her face, for he leaned back and roared with ugly laughter. “That’s what you get!” he shouted jubilantly. “That’s what you get for trampling the old laws!”

She stared at the dirk in her hands, its cool blade gleaming in the sunlight.
The old laws
! a voice inside her screamed.
The laws that say there is no place for a one-eyed weaver or a cobbler with one leg
! In her fury she grasped the blade and crushed it until she felt the metal bite through her palm. Blood ran in scarlet rivulets down her wrist.

Through a haze of pain and passion, Jacinth watched the young hunter turn and swagger off down the path, his shoulders still jumping with laughter.

“I make my own roads!” she cried. “I make my own roads!”

But if he heard her at all, he gave no sign of it.

She sat down on a flat stone and bound her hand as well as she could with a strip she tore from the hem of her shirt. After a time, the anger and trembling left her. A cold, desperate courage replaced it. Let the menfolk of Aranho seek lilies where they always had! The woods were thick and huge and full of places where no human being had ever walked before. She would find her own lilies, or she would die in the attempt. She stood up, straightened her back, and plunged into the forest.

She followed the contours of the land ever upward, leaving a trail for herself by cutting notches into the tree trunks at regular intervals. The farther she went into the woods, the larger the trees became, and the thicker the undergrowth. Spiral ferns snatched at her arms and legs, and bloated insects stung her face. She tripped over roots and waded through thick, slimy mud. She tried not to notice the eerie cries and thrashings of the unknown creatures around her, tried to ignore the swollen fungi that sprang up in rank profusion on the damp forest floor.

Late in the afternoon, when dusk had already descended around her, she came to a place where the land sloped down in all directions. She stood at the base of an ancient maple tree and turned slowly. She had arrived at the crest of a hill. Yet the trees were so tall and closely spaced that she could see nothing, so she laid down her bow and set about climbing the maple.

Its trunk was almost as big around as her father’s largest millstone, and the branches hung far above her head. But the maple had stood in the forest for many long years, and
its bark was thick and full of ridges. By stretching and straining and planting her supple boots carefully in these small footholds, she gained the lowest branch. Higher and higher she climbed until at last she stood erect in leafy sunlight far above the other trees. She clung to the branches for a moment, giddy with the view that spread below her. As the sun sank lower and the land cooled, a spicy wind flowed out of the forest toward the sea, which lay like a bolt of blue-gray satin on the eastern horizon. The trees marched down to it, thronging over the hills until they reached the broad, white shore.

A valley lay at the southeastern foot of her vantage point. The valley cradled just what Jacinth had hoped to find—a small, glassy lake, fringed on one side by a marsh. Loons flew above it in profusion, making ready for the night. Their laughing cries floated up whenever the wind dropped. Jacinth’s blood sang like the strings of a well-tuned harp. The land, the sea, the wind spoke to her like old friends, and she knew deep within her that if she could reach that lake, she would find the key to a new life for herself and Joth; she would finish the tapestry and pluck it from her loom in jubilation at last. She took one last worried glance at the sinking sun, then scurried down the tree and trotted off through the dusky undergrowth toward the southeast.