Chains of Gold (15 page)

“But we cannot run forever,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

“The way is narrow, where we came up,” he said. “I could perhaps block it with stones …”

“It is spring. We could plant a garden.”

“Well,” he said offhandedly, as if it were but an idle thought, “I might as well leave these things with you, then.” And he removed the saddlebags full of treasure from Bucca's back, gave them to me, and took instead a single gold chain, one of the smaller ones, and pried it apart into links. Each link was as good as a gold coin, and he might yet have to pound some of them into halves or quarters. He put several links in his pocket and gave the rest of the chain back to me. He kissed me. Then he rode away down the gentler slopes of the northern mountainside.

I spent the day drinking at the spring and eating what I could find and sleeping beside our gold.

When Arlen came back at sunset he brought freshly baked bread. I could smell it as he came up the mountainside. He carried a spade across the saddle in front of him, and in his left arm he cradled a lamb, a fleecy white lamb, quite young. He rode up to me and handed the spade down to me and himself got down without letting go of the lamb, holding it tenderly.

“Are we to eat that?” I asked, staring in a predatory way. I must have been parlous hungry. Arlen glanced at me in mild shock and amusement, then put the lamb down on the grass; it lay flat and still, as if it had forgotten the use of its legs. His hands freed, he began to draw viands out of the pockets of his tunic and out of the slack above his belt. There were rounds of bread and hunks of cheese and, so help me, meat pies still warm from the oven. I grabbed one greedily.

“Those are what took me so long,” he explained. “You eat. They have been feeding me all day.”

“They were willing enough to take you in? No taint?”

“No taint. They seemed somewhat in awe of me, though. They could not believe I had come over the mountain.” He shrugged, looking bemused. “I was hard put to make them accept payment for their hospitality. They are friendly folk.”

He was bent over the lamb, handling it gently.

“This little one is sickly. And I think, from my memory of Briony's herbs, I might know the one that could help it. If I can find it hereabouts.…”

He wandered off, searching in the fading light, and I ate my fill, and there was more left for the morrow.

Arlen healed the lamb. I have never fully understood his craft or his gift, only that it takes time and thought and much caring. But within a few days, when we were in need of food again, it was gamboling about on its long woolly legs in the manner of lambs that are well, and when he rode down to the village again he took it with him to return to its owner. When he came back, he bore not only food but seeds for the garden plot we were digging, and a chicken and a clutch of eggs.

“Is the chicken ailing?” I asked.

“No, the chicken is well.” He smiled, looking faintly shamed, as if he had somehow been bested. “It is for us to keep, and if the eggs hatch there will be more. The man set high value on that lamb.”

I will not tell you the whole story of that spring and summer, for it would be only a tale of the ordinary things, hard work in sunlight and good food afterward and days passing one after the other as we made our house. We built it out of stones gathered from the mountain slopes, near the spring and flush against the rock of the northernmost peak for the less labor and for protection against the winter storms. It was only a cottage of a single small room, with a dressed stone for a hearth and a roof of slate, but to us it was home, our first true home, no prison but a haven such as Stanehold and Sacred Isle had never been. Under a sort of half cave or overhang we built a shelter for Bucca, faithful Bucca, who was learning to draw a plow. The chickens flocked everywhere; daily I hunted the eggs. And as the summer drew on there was a heifer. Someday there would be milk for us and for the babe and milk to spare, to set out for the logans. For the time, I left them bread and sometimes an egg, and the gifts were always gone in the morning.

Arlen had given some gold for the heifer, but mostly it was a gift of gratitude from a man whose cart ox he had healed. His fame as a healer of animals was spreading. Every time he went to the village for supplies there was word of another homesteader with need of him, and he would travel to see what he could do. He even went as far as the castle to tend to the lord's lame charger—the lord, he told me, was fierce, but folks in these parts knew nothing of either Rahv or the Sacred Isle, and we were glad of it.

I stayed in our mountaintop haven, my belly swelling with child, and never went down into the village at all. Arlen's new friends knew of me, for he made no secret of it that he had a wife, but I would not go down among them, lest my death dog go with me and frighten them and set them against us. Nor did any of them ever come near me, for the village folk would not come up the mountain. It was a forbidden place, they said, the home of otherfolk and the oracular dead, and they feared to set foot there. I think they whispered among themselves about Arlen, that he was divinely sent to them, a demigod, even. His speech was somewhat different from theirs, he told me, and they seemed awkward with him at times, half in awe. But no one could long be frightened of Arlen, good heart that he was.

In time, as more folk felt need of him more often, he took to going to the village every day in case some messenger awaited him. I would wave him on his way. And through the summer I gathered beans from our garden and made bread from the grain we had bought and gathered blackberries and felt the movement and the growing of the child in my belly.

“Have you noticed,” Arlen said to me slowly one evening near autumn, “how the rats and snakes never take our chicks from us, as they do to others? And the cutworms have not been in our corn? And our spring continues to flow even though the season has been dry?”

I had not particularly noticed. But then, I had not been out of our small holding to see how things went elsewhere.

“Lonn has been with us in the best sense,” Arlen said.

I did not feel so sure. If we had indeed been blessed with abundance, it could have been the logans looking after us, or the goddess, or even sheer blind luck. But it was like Arlen to feel kindly toward Lonn, and a long step from the bitter Arlen of the springtime, so I smiled.

He was looking around our beloved cottage as if he had a great confession to make. A fire, some stools, a kettle on the hearth. Not much, but it meant a vast amount to us.

“All that we have we owe to Lonn,” he said.

I nodded. It was true, if only because he had shown us the gold.

“He died so that I might live and have you. He saved my life, there at the esker. He has fed us from his underground stores when we would have starved, otherwise. He saved us, somehow, from the spite of the oak elves, and sent the beasts with meat for us. He gave us the treasure which has bought us all we hold—and, the goddess willing, it will buy us what we need all our lives.”

Had it, indeed, been Lonn who had done all these things? Some of them, perhaps. The cutworms, even, since they work underground. But the oak elves, the wolves, seemed hardly in his province.

“If he had not been with us to start with,” I said dryly, “it would not have been necessary for him to feed us.”

“But feed us he did. And if he had not been with us, so that we hid ourselves from folk, perhaps your father would have had us after all. Captured us within the month, even.” Arl leaned forward earnestly. “Rae, I am ashamed of myself, that I have felt harshly toward him sometimes.”

“I have felt harshly toward him myself,” I said.

“I suppose.” He hesitated. “It must be very lonesome for you, up here by yourself always.”

I shrugged. I had always been much by myself, and one grows accustomed to the conditions of one's life, whatever they may be. “You could not send him away if you tried,” I said.

“I know.” He paused, sheepish. “I wish there were some way we could have his blessing and aid and not his taint, that is all. But one cannot have everything. Rae …?”

“What?”

“Have you considered how we are to manage, when your time comes? No midwife will come near you.”

I crossed my hands atop my massive swelling of belly and wrinkled my nose at him. It was true that I was afraid—how could I help but be afraid? Women died in childbirth sometimes, and it was a horrible way to be taken. But fear was of no use. And I knew Arlen's gentle ways with the mares, the cows, the ewes in lambing, and I knew his stock of herbs, and I felt sure I would be as well off with him as with any midwife.

“We will manage well enough,” I told him.

“May the Great Mother bless us with an easy birthing,” he said. “Rae?”

“What?” I asked again, with all the patience I could muster. He was very much like a child sometimes.

“When the baby comes, if it is a boy—let us name it after Lonn.”

I gave him one quick, curious glance, trying to fathom his reasoning. Was this his way of propitiating the goddess, through Lonn, for continued good fortune and an easy birthing? Or did he really believe that Lonn could give us these things by himself? Or was it his hope, perhaps, that Lonn would be so pleased that he would consent to leave us? In the next instant I was ashamed of those thoughts. All I saw in Arl was love of his lost friend, to whom we owed so much. In truth, the name of our firstborn was a small enough remembrance to give to him. I had sometimes thought myself of giving the name of Lonn to the babe.

“It would be fitting to do so,” I said. And in the same moment I hoped that the babe would be a girl, and wondered why I felt dismayed.

TWELVE

It was a boy. And the goddess was gracious to us and gave me an easy birthing. One day in early autumn as I pulled the ripe gourds in the garden my waters broke, spilling on the warm earth, and by the next day, after a night of lamplight and panting, I had my babe. Arlen drew him from me, gentle, breathless until the infant breathed—and the baby did not cry, but merely breathed and smiled. It was the sweetest of smiles. I was as wet with sweat as he was with birthing when Arlen handed him to me, and I put him at once to my breast, where he suckled. The goddess was good to me still, for within two days my milk came in, so the babe had nourishment in plenty, and I did not fall ill with the birthing fever, but healed cleanly and was strong within the week. We were indeed blessed, Arlen and I and the little one.

We did not call him Lonn at once. That was not the custom, for children were taken away so frequently, the little visitors, that most often parents waited to see if they planned to stay, not naming them until the moon had come round again, to save themselves from so much hurt. But I think Arlen and I would have been slain with sorrow if this baby had been taken from us, name or no name. Indeed, we gave him a pet name, calling him Spriggan, our little elf. And how well I remember that first evening, when he had been bathed and warmed and dried, and the soft hair floated on his head, red-gold in the firelight, as fine as swansdown. I held him, and Arlen sat on the hearth beside us both, gazing as if awestruck, as if the goddess were there and he would fall down in worship.

“Touch him,” I offered. “Go on. You delivered him from me; you need not be shy with him.”

Arl put out a hand toward us, and tiny fingers curled around one of his. “So golden,” he whispered. “No—pink. And soft as a rose petal.”

“Pink and golden both.” I had my face against the baby's hair, and I sniffed the top of his head, rubbed my cheek against it. “And—the fragrance, like nothing else in the many kingdoms. Like the most delicate of spices, and—earth.…”

“Like a baby,” Arlen said.

“Like all babies, and yet like no other baby either. I think I would know him anywhere just by the sweet fragrance of his head.”

“Would you, now.” His mood of wonder had changed to one of gentle amusement. “Well, I think I would know him better by this.”

He touched it softly. Along the baby's small left shoulder lay a birthmark, a purple stain, as dark as blackberry wine, nearly as dark as elderberries. It was a looping, mottled thing, indistinct, rather like a knotted chain or perhaps the serpentine of the Sacred Catena.

“It may go away,” I said, though only for the sake of argument, for I did not consider it a blemish but a blessing, the kiss of the goddess.

“I warrant it'll stay. Anyway,” Arlen added, “all powers be willing, you'll never have to go wandering about sniffing him out, like a brachet with a lost pup.”

Little did we know.

For a month all went well with us. Autumn deepened. The babe was a babe like any other: our Spriggan, our very special own, to be sure, but much like all babies everywhere. He was troublesome by night and slept away the days in his cradle by the hearth—a cradle made by his father's own hands, made of birch, the wood of inception and springtime growth. He sucked greedily at my breasts and smiled toothlessly afterward. Dark came earlier each evening, as days shortened toward winter.

Four weeks to the day after the baby's birth, as was the custom, Arlen took him down to the shrine of the goddess in the village to be named. I did not go. That was
not
as was the custom, but it could not be helped; there was a shimmering presence in the air to my left, and I dared not venture where other folk were. I gave Arlen a honey teat made of sweets and cloth to soothe the little one should he become hungry, and I sent father off with child and waved after them and watched them on their way, and I watched for their return through a long afternoon, restless and lonely.

With the coming of dusk I could hear the baby crying. All the way up the mountainside he was crying in great frantic gasps until he was hoarse with his bawling, and though I tried to shut my ears to it for the sake of whatever lies Arlen had told the villagers, in the end I could not stand it. I bolted out of the house and ran to meet them, nor could I rest or speak until I had taken the babe from Arlen and put him to my breast. Sucking, he quieted, though from time to time a sob still shuddered through his small body.