Chains of Gold (16 page)

“Well,” said Arlen wearily, “little Lonn is duly named.”

“Was he like this all the time?”

“No, only lately, after we had started home. The naming went well enough.”

“And was there a fuss?” We stood on mountain rimrock, looking down at the village.

“Indeed there was, though a friendly sort of fuss. No one knew I had a son, we have kept your condition so secret, and so of course it was a great surprise for them to see me with him, and then every goodwife in the village wanted to know why you had not come down for the naming, and when I told them you were still weak from childbirth they talked of venturing up here to help you with the chores. But nothing came of it, for they are afraid. Perhaps someday—”

I was not listening, but looking at the village, and my eyes widened, and I gasped. “What in the name of the goddess is that?”

A blaze, a fire, in the village square. And as we watched it grew greater, and another sprang up beside it, and on the summits of the foothills and moorlands all around sprang up others, in pairs.

“It must be—we have lost reckoning.…”

It was the day of the quarter year, between winterking and summerking, or rather the eve of that day. And the village folk were preparing to celebrate the festival of the dead.

“We had better get within,” Arlen said uneasily. Spirits were wafting through that dusk, for the portals between the now and the afterlife stand wide open on the eve of that day. Folk took refuge between the fires and made propitiation of burned beans, spirit food. We went inside and stirred up our own hearth fire and sat beside it, and we burned a few beans ourselves. But we found it hard to feel very afraid of the spirits of the dead. We had lived with one of them for so long that we no longer noticed him.

The next day, as I sat and sorted wool in my lap and rocked the cradle with my foot, the baby spoke to me. “Rae,” he said indistinctly. It was a weird, husky voice to come out of that flower-petal mouth, and I was quite startled. I stopped what I was doing and stared. The baby smiled at me, a winsome, toothless gape. The voice had been a fluke, I decided. A meaningless murmur, a burble of the stomach, even. I turned my eyes back to my work—

“'Rilla,” the baby said. “Rae. La-dy Ce-rilla.”

I jumped up and retreated a few steps in shock and horror, the wool tumbling down on our dirt floor, unheeded. “Stop that,” I said sharply, my voice trembling. “Stop it, or I won't feed you!” I am grateful still that Arlen was not there to hear me. Though of course Lonn had chosen to speak when Arlen was not there. And on the instant I felt ashamed. To offer to starve a tiny babe, my own firstborn, whom I dearly loved—

“Go to sleep,” I muttered, caught between guilt and anger. But the baby cried until I took him up and comforted him. When he was sleeping I picked up the wool and put it away; my hands were shaking too badly to work with it any more that day.

It is odd how one can manage to ignore ill chance, even the worst of ill chance, for a few days. Hoping, I suppose, that one might be mistaken, that circumstances might not be as vile as they seem. By the time Arlen came home for his dinner, I had almost convinced myself that nothing had happened or that, if it had, it would pass. He knew I was distraught; he could tell it by my silence and my restlessness, and he asked me what ailed me, but I told him nothing. What was I to tell him? That our Spriggan was possessed? Perhaps it would pass with the passing of the day.

“Lady Cerilla,” the baby said to me the next morning, more plainly; and I ran away so as not to have to face what was happening, ran into the coppice by the house with the tears streaming down my face and stayed there for the better part of an hour, and then I was ashamed of myself again. But when I came in the baby did not speak to me any more that day.

On toward evening I left the little one asleep in his cradle before the fire and went out to help Arlen with the heifer in the byre, and he helped me gather eggs. When we came in together, he turned first to the infant, as he always did. I watched Arlen's face to see the smile in his eyes, but the smile stopped before it had well started—a shocked silence came there instead, and he sharply drew in breath. And when I glanced at the cradle, there, sleeping with the baby, beside him and draped and looping all over him and about him like an oddly patterned blanket—it was a serpent, the most sacred amber-golden serpent with the brown chain markings on its back, a serpent of great size; its head, beside little Lonn's on the pillow, was as big as my hand.

I could not help it; I had been through too much. My nerve broke and I began to scream. Arlen grabbed me and put a hand over my mouth to hush my noise; I did not struggle against him, but I kept screaming, the sound muffled by his fingers. The baby stirred sleepily, and the serpent raised its great head and regarded all of us with eyes as green as emeralds. Lidless, expressionless eyes—remorseless, I thought. There was wisdom in serpents, but no mercy. Whatever they did, their reasons were their own. Still, it did not hurt us, any of us, but merely flowed over the edge of the cradle and out before the baby was fully awake. And then with great dignity, with its head raised regally, it rippled its way to the door and out into the dusk.

I kept screaming. I have never been so out of control, before or since, and Arlen could not comfort me, though he attempted to soothe me in every way he could think of, holding me in his arms, rubbing my back and shoulders, talking to me, trying to make sense out of me—nothing helped.

“Lonn!” I kept shrieking, “Lonn!”

And he kept saying, “But he is all right! Look at him!” meaning that the baby had not been harmed.

But I was screaming because Lonn was there, Lonn whom the goddess had gifted with the gift of serpent power, and I did not want him in my cradle; I wanted my own sweet Spriggan back again.

Finally in simple exhaustion I stopped screaming, but I could not eat or sleep, and Arlen was worried about me. He did not leave me alone the next day. But as nothing more happened, I became calm and ate some supper toward nightfall, and on the following morning he went off to the village to tend to an ailing milk cow.

As soon as he was well gone the baby looked at me. “Lady,” he said in his deep man's voice, and I jumped up from where I sat with a cry.

“What do you want of me?” I shouted, and at the same time I covered my ears with my hands because I did not want to hear. But I heard well enough.

“You,” Lonn said.

I snatched up an earthenware bowl, meaning to fling it at him, but how could I hurt a baby, my baby? I flung it against the wall instead, where it broke. The look on my face must have been fearsome.

“I found you food,” he reminded me. Speaking seemed difficult for him, but easier than it had been two days before. “When you were hungry. And—gold.”

It was true, all too true. Curse the gold, I thought vehemently, but I did not say it. I did not know what to say.

“I—love—you.”

I had never wanted love less, not of the perverse sort he was offering me. Man's voice, dead man's voice out of the body of a baby—it sickened me. In the name of all that was sacred, how was I to tell Arlen? I could not tell him. Perhaps I was somehow mistaken, or perhaps I was insane, raving. If I were not already, certainly I soon would be.

“Lady Cerilla—”

“Be silent,” I told Lonn savagely. The baby started to wail with fright or hunger, and after some hesitation I put it to my breast. It was the baby, I told myself, the sweet baby, not Lonn. Those tiny hands feeling at my breast were the hands of an innocent—or were they? Lonn had spoken from the infant's mouth. How much of this small body I held was itself, and how much was Lonn?

Arlen returned in the early afternoon while the baby was sleeping, and I passed him in the doorway.

“Stay here, tend the little one,” I ordered. “I am going down to the village.”

“What?” He was utterly taken aback, as was to be expected, for I had never gone down to the village, and we had always said I never could; I would turn the folk against us with the taint of death that followed me. But now I strode off amidst Arlen's startled pleas for an explanation, and I would offer him none, and I would not think clearly even within myself just what it was that I expected to find.

It seemed odd, very odd, to approach the village and step within it after having regarded it all those months from my far vantage. I felt as if I were stepping into a tapestry. Perhaps it was only because nothing seemed real, those terrible days. Woodenly I walked between the houses, wondering at them, that they seemed so upright, so solid. I came to the square, where the women stood and chatted around the well. As I approached they turned and looked at me, the stranger, and I stopped, waiting for them to grimace, to shout in shock and terror, to run. Hoping they would.

They did not. They came up to me, curious, trying not to seem too curious.

My tongue would scarcely move. I had to moisten my lips before I could speak. “I am Rae,” I whispered to them. “Arlen's wife.…”

On the instant there was a spate of happy talk, deferential, even. Was I, indeed, and had I come down at last, and was I well; they were happy to see me. And would I come and have some soup and a scone. So good to know me at last after all this time, and they gave me their names, Treva and Nissa and Peg, and they valued my husband and all he did, such a generous heart he had, and he was so good with the animals, and never sharp in his dealings, not at all. And they hoped we had enough and to spare, and that the season had favored us with good crops. And my little one, the baby, was all well with him?

I startled the women by bursting into tears, and they became alarmed.

Was the baby sick? Surely Arlen could help him. Or was it something dreadful, the smallpox, the plague? No? Was I overwrought? Should they—and here they hesitated—should they come and lend me a hand at the cottage?

I turned and ran from them, back through the village street and up the steep slope, panting and gulping and grasping at the prickly gorse, never feeling it sting. I dare say they thought I was mad. They stood and put their heads together, not attempting to follow me. I came back to the cottage at last, gasping and blown, and I must have looked wild, for Arlen got up from where he sat at the table and came to me.

“Lonn,” I said hoarsely, standing just within the door.

“He's all right,” Arlen told me in a tone meant to be soothing.

“No!” I stamped my foot at him. “Lonn is—there!” I pointed at the cradle, trembling, and Arlen stared at me in perplexity.

“Not here!” I waved my left hand about in the air and tried to explain; I was beyond sparing him any longer. “No more presence, Arl. No wavering thing by me, no death dog. The women down below, they greeted me. Lonn is not in air any more. He is there.” And I pointed at the cradle again.

Arlen's face had sobered as he listened to me, beginning to understand, but he did not yet share my panic, my despair. “Perhaps he has merely left us for a while,” he said gently, “as he has done before.”

“No! He is—in the baby.” The words choked me, and I started weeping again. Arlen came and comforted me in his arms, but I could tell he did not yet entirely comprehend or believe me. How could he? I scarcely believed the horror of it myself.

“I—” It was too grotesque, I could not manage it. I turned to Lonn and shouted at him. “Go ahead, tell him! Speak, show him what you have done! So clever—talk, you wretch! You do to me often enough!”

The baby, of course, merely started to cry, and Arlen took a step back from me.

“I am not insane!” I flared at him.

“I have not said so,” he replied levelly, and he picked up the little one and soothed him, since I would not. “The baby talks to you.”

“Yes.”

“What does he say?”

“He calls me by name. He says he—loves me.…”

I faltered. It sounded so harmless, so sweet, even, coming from my lips. Arlen was regarding me in a quiet, watchful way that infuriated me.

“Look! Look at his eyes!” I shouted, pointing a shaking finger again. The baby's eyes had gone from their middling gray color to a deep purple shade I remembered well, dark amethyst, the deepest hue of wood violets. Arlen scarcely glanced at them.

“Babies' eyes change color,” he said. Reasonable, not ungentle, but I wanted something more of him.

“You do not believe me!” I accused him.

“I do not know what to believe. Perhaps only that you need rest.” He sighed. “But yours is the breast that feeds this little one.”

I took the babe and gave the breast, but he could see my revulsion as I did so, and for the rest of that afternoon and all the evening he studied me, studied the babe but mostly studied me, and I could not eat under his gaze, and I slept only from exhaustion. The next morning Arlen gave me a searching glance, kissed me, and strode away to see again to the ailing cow.

As soon as he was well gone, Lonn spoke to me in his dark and husky voice. “You should not have told him, lady,” he said. “It was to be our secret.”

Speech was coming to him more easily now, it seemed. I did not jump up and scream this time, but sat numbly, ignoring him.

“But it does not matter.” A small note of spite slipped into the voice. “He thinks you merely mad. He will leave you, and then I will have you to myself.”

“You think poorly of your friend,” I retorted briefly. Though the very thought of Arlen's leaving me wrenched at my innards.

“I will have you—”

“The friend you died to save.” He did not want to speak of Arlen, I saw. Or of that past time, that sacrifice.

“I want you. I will have you to myself.”

“And what will you do with me,” I asked sourly, “poor little thing, you?”

“I will not always be little. I will grow. My hands will learn to grasp, my body to stand and walk. I have time, all the time in the world and the afterlife; I can wait. I will grow strong in body, as I am already powerful in magic. I will have you in the end. You will be my bride.”