Chance (15 page)

“Full oft you have with Wirral lain!” called another.

“And you and Wirral have been one!”

“And one you twain shall remain!”

“And now by Chance he's slain!”

The voices shrilled dark and gleeful.

Slowly Chance turned and looked at his daughter. Xanthea, his firstborn child, and the only one who remained to him. He turned with a sure sense of doom, for it was for this, he knew, that the Denizens had sent the oak limb down on Wirral. To spare him for this. His own daughter.

There beneath the oak she stood, Xanthea, yet not the Xanthea he remembered. Her body, so tall, tall with pride and a vibrant energy. Her face—for the first time Chance saw truly her startling, great-eyed face, its uncanny beauty. Grotesque beauty, quite unlike her mother's smooth-faced loveliness. Xanthea's was a mad, verdant, shadowed beauty, as wild as the Wirral. Xanthea's ways, he deemed, as dark as midnight in Wirral. Xanthea, in Wirral conceived, of Wirral magic conceived and born, by Wirral bred—one with Wirral, as the Denizens had said. Xanthea was Wirral.

With a strange, slow, hating smile she regarded him. Then, like a doomster, she lifted steady hands and put on her mask. Her golden mask. In it, she seemed to loom, tall, tree-tall, still and fearsome.

Halimeda came and stood by her husband's side, slipped her hand into his.

“Wirral will take back its own.” Standing like the goddess of the forest, Xanthea decreed it.

Chance found his voice. “It is the Denizens who have done this to you,” he protested. “They have made you their tool. And you have let them.”

Vehemently Xanthea told him, “Lay the blame to your own account. None of this could have happened had you loved me.” Her glance through her golden mask raked them both, her mother and father standing before her. “Had you loved me at all, it would have held me, I could never have left the fortress walls. For all I have ever wanted is love.”

Her weird lover had given her love enough to make her anew, give her selfhood she had never known. Now he lay, bone of deer and outlaw's skull, fur of fox and oak limbs.

“But failing that,” Xanthea said, “I shall have vengeance.”

And though he yet held the knife in his hand, Chance could not move as she walked up to him, tall, taller than he, and took it away.

Then she turned to the forest that waited, listening, all around. And she spread wide her long, strong arms and cried out a summons.

“My cousins!” she called, and they came to do her bidding.

Lord Robley, the smiling neighbor with the lovely wife, had not failed to make note of the strange goings-on at Wirralmark Manor by means of his spies. And no sooner had Chance gone away into the wilderness of Wirral than Lord Robley arrived at the head of several troops of men to take fortress and lands for himself. He met little resistance, even from the chamberlain and the household guards, for Lord Chauncey's followers were disheartened. There had been too many horrors of late, the finding of bodies in a certain bedroom being only the most recent.

Within a few days of his coming, Lord Robley had settled himself in power, sent for his wife and retinue, given commands. And the folk of Wirralmark accepted his commands almost gratefully. He was a hard lord, Robley, but they were accustomed to harshness in a lord. It was eerieness that unsettled them. The shadow of Wirral. And they hoped Lord Chauncey was dead and would not come back to make trouble for them all.

Even in their wildest whisperings, even in the ghastliest of the tales told in low voices before a dying fire in deep of winter, they had never foreseen how long the shadow of Wirral would grow.

Nor was it Lord Chauncey who came back to haunt them. It was his daughter. Chance's daughter.

On a moon-gray horse Xanthea came, the morning of Robley's fourth day in power, boldly and openly, riding aside with her oak-green gown flowing down around her feet. From her saddle hung a mask of gold, with the peacock feathers trailing down, and close beside it the carved wolf-mask. On her body Xanthea wore a girdle of emeralds and gold, a torsade of gold; no armor, no weapon of any kind. But at her back rose the dust of a great army.

A peasant boy first saw and brought the news to the fortress, running without ceremony in to Lord Robley's presence, gasping so that he could scarcely speak, his face so mottled and twisted that at first those who saw him thought he had gone mad. When Lord Robley heard his words, he felt sure of it. But then the watchman on the platform shouted down the same report, in a voice hoarse with fear.

Then Lord Robley himself looked, and then with small thought for anyone else he mounted the first horse he could come to, sent it out the postern gate and galloped away, though he was no coward. And all his troops who could manage it did likewise. For approaching they had seen warriors a hundred feet tall, wooden warriors with leafy helms. Trees.

Striding along on great, trampling roots they came, oak and ash and beech and elm, and their passing made a sound like stormwind in the branches of Wirral and left the land fallow. And few were those who would stand before them, for even the least of them, linden and rowan and cherry, a mere thirty feet tall, even these were more than a match for any man. They could be hewed, but they did not bleed. Some few brave tenants took axes and stood at the edges of their fields, attempting to turn the trees aside. Within a few moments they had been trodden into the ground, part of the earth they had tilled, and in years to come oak and ash, linden and cherry would grow out of their bones.

Wirral had reached out to take back its own.

Folk, even the soldiers of the fortress, screamed and ran before that army. It leveled cottages as it came. A trampling of roots, the thwacking of a few swinging limbs, and that which had taken men many years to build lay in splinters, ready to rot back into loam.

Xanthea rode her moon-gray horse through gates swinging open and unattended, into an emptied fortress. Trees followed her. Not trees, truly, but truly Wirral, spirit of Wirral. These were Denizens, generations of the Wirralfolk, the elders who had gone before. Voiceless though they had become in form of trees, their great rage had moved them to follow Xanthea's call. Xanthea dismounted, and took the masks in her hands, and her horse turned to a squirrel, scurried to the top of an oak. Some of the trees began to tear down the stones of the fortress walls, prying them apart with a grip fit, like the grip of roots, to crack boulders, then hurling them away as children hurl pebbles.

“Leave the keep a moment longer,” Xanthea told them.

She walked through the empty, echoing passages, and the stench of corpses from her former chamber did not trouble her. She climbed the stone stairs to the roof and watched the trees. All around the keep they swarmed, for miles all around, trampling away everything that bore the smell of man, just as they had trampled Chance and his lady into Wirral loam, the day before. And though they seemed as many as the midges that swarmed over the fen where the corpse-white monster nodded, Wirral had scarcely thinned by dint of this slight stretching. Some few saplings would gain more light, was all. Wirral stood as it ever had, thick and verdant and perilous.

“Yours the final victory, Wirral,” Xanthea whispered.

I will never take another lover. I will never have any lover but this.

She went down, and stood aside, and the trees tore the keep to bits, and Xanthea laid her masks on the pile of rubble that was left.

At last, satisfied, the trees ceased their tramplings. More slowly circling, they sought new places for themselves, then stood still. They put their roots into the cleansed ground. The day faded into a golden-glowing dusk, and for miles around there was no sound but the clear call of a bird. Xanthea ventured, and wherever she wandered she found nothing of human making to disturb her eye. Nothing but Wirral. This portion grew thin, it was true. But the revels would go on. Before many years had passed, it would grow thick as grass. It would be well and whole again.

“Wirral, my love,” she spoke aloud, “I will wait.”

When full dark came, and in it the full moon, Xanthea strode away from the ruined fortress, back toward the place where she had left fur of fox and outlaw's skull, bones of deer and withered leaves and the soul of a wandering wolf.

Somewhere close at hand, though she saw no one, she heard the twittering chuckle of a Denizen.

“For Wirral is soft and Wirral is stark,

A blossom blue and an outlaw's bone,

The tooth of the wolf and the song of the lark,

And Wirral will take back its own!” it sang.

“Wirral will take back its own.”

THE WOLF GIRL SPEAKS

When the men came

My pack mates ran

All but my mother

At the mouth of the den

Trembling—shot down.

The men reached in—

I cringed with the others

My brothers and sisters

Their puppy fur pressed

To my furless skin—

The men clubbed them dead

And pulled me outside

Though I bit and clawed

To the horrible harsh daylight

And tried to make me stand

On my long hind legs

I had not yet learned to weep

So I bared my teeth instead

And damn them they smiled.

We have saved the child they said

The poor wild thing

A good day's work

We have rescued her they said.

©
1982 Nancy Springer

THE BOY WHO PLAITED MANES

The boy who plaited the manes of horses arrived, fittingly enough, on the day of the Midsummer Hunt: when he was needed worst, though Wald the head groom did not yet know it. The stable seethed in a muted frenzy of work, as it had done since long before dawn, every groom and apprentice vehemently polishing. The lord's behest was that all the horses in his stable should be brushed for two hours every morning to keep the fine shine and bloom on their flanks, and this morning could be no different. Then there was also all the gear to be tended to. Though old Lord Robley of Auberon was a petty manor lord, with only some hundred of horses and less than half the number of grooms to show for a lifetime's striving, his lowly status made him all the more keen to present himself and his retinue grandly before the more powerful lords who would assemble for the Hunt. Himself and his retinue and his lovely young wife.

Therefore it was an eerie thing when the boy walked up the long stable aisle past men possessed with work, men so frantic they did not glance at the stranger, up the aisle brick-paved in chevron style until he came to the stall where the lady's milk-white palfrey stood covered withers to croup with a fitted sheet tied on to keep the beast clean, and the boy swung open the heavy stall door and walked in without fear, as if he belonged there, and went up to the palfrey to plait its mane.

He was an eerie boy, so thin that he seemed deformed, and of an age difficult to guess because of his thinness. He might have been ten, or he might have been seventeen with something wrong about him that made him beardless and narrow-shouldered and thin. His eyes seemed too gathered for a ten-year-old, gray-green and calm yet feral, like woodland. His hair, dark and shaggy, seemed to bulk large above his thin, thin face.

The palfrey's hair was far better cared for than his. Its silky mane, coddled for length, hung down below its curved neck, and its tail was bundled into a wrapping, to be let down at the last moment before the lady rode, when it would trail on the ground and float like a white bridal train. The boy did not yet touch the tail, but his thin fingers flew to work on the palfrey's mane.

Wald the head groom, passing nearly at a run to see to the saddling of the lord's hotblooded hunter, stopped in his tracks and stared. And to be sure it was not that he had never seen plaiting before. He himself had probably braided a thousand horses' manes, and he knew what a time it took to put even a row of small looped braids along a horse's crest, and how hard it was to get them even, and how horsehair seems like a demon with a mind of its own. He frankly gawked, and other grooms stood beside him and did likewise, until more onlookers stood gathered outside the palfrey's stall than could rightly see, and those in the back demanded to know what was happening, and those in the front seemed not to hear them, but stood as if in a trance, watching the boy's thin, swift hands.

For the boy's fingers moved more quickly and deftly than seemed human, than seemed possible, each hand by itself combing and plaiting a long, slender braid in one smooth movement, as if he no more than stroked the braid out of the mane. That itself would have been wonder enough, as when a groom is so apt that he can curry with one hand and follow after with the brush in the other, and have a horse done in half the time. A shining braid forming out of each hand every minute, wonder enough—but that was the least of it. The boy interwove them as he worked, so that they flowed into each other in a network, making of the mane a delicate shawl, a veil, that draped the palfrey's fine neck. The ends of the braids formed a silky hem curving down to a point at the shoulder, and at the point the boy spiraled the remaining mane into an uncanny horsehair flower. And all the time, though it was not tied and was by no means a cold-blooded beast, the palfrey had not moved, standing still as a stone.

Then Wald the head groom felt fear prickling at the back of his astonishment. The boy had carried each plait down to the last three hairs. Yet he had fastened nothing with thread or ribbon, but merely pressed the ends between two fingers, and the braids stayed as he had placed them. Nor did the braids ever seem to fall loose as he was working, or hairs fly out at random, but all lay smooth as white silk, shimmering. The boy, or whatever he was, stood still with his hands at his sides, admiring his work.