Consorts of Heaven (2 page)

What -
who
- had he found?

By the time Kerin was close enough to make out her son’s features, Damaru had returned his attention to the body, which was, Kerin now saw, lying on its front, its head turned away. It appeared to be naked, and covered in mud. ‘Damaru, are you all right?’ she asked again as she came up to him. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No.’ He sounded perplexed that she thought he might be.

‘What do you have there with you, Damaru?’

Damaru turned his head towards her and she saw his eyes glitter in the moonlight. ‘Not part of the pattern,’ he said, his voice a mixture of confusion and wonder: this was outside his experience.

It was outside Kerin’s too. ‘Let me see, please.’ She crouched beside her son. The body was male, not someone from Dangwern, obviously, and if anyone had been missing from Carregogh or Penfrid she should have heard about it - unless, with the drove leaving soon, no one could be spared to carry the news. Yet he did not look like anyone she had ever seen: he was tall, and slightly built, and beneath the dirt his hair was fair and his skin pale and unblemished.

She looked at her son, who was still staring down at the body. ‘Damaru? Did you find him here? This man, he was here, and you found him, is that right?’

‘Aye.’

She did not bother to ask him when: Damaru’s idea of time rarely matched anyone else’s. Instead, she squelched around the body to get a look at the dead man’s face. He had only a few days’ growth of beard, and his short hair was neatly cut. She could see no sign of how he died . . . assuming he
was
dead. Maybe she should actually check.

She reached out to touch his cheek. It was warm.

She moved her hand to his neck, where she felt his pulse, beating faint and fast as a bird’s. He might not be dead now, but if he stayed out here much longer he soon would be.

She looked at Damaru, then beyond him to the shining cloth. ‘Damaru, I need you to help me,’ she said firmly.

 

Yes! Alive!

 

Kerin had hoped, given it was the middle of the night and she lived on the very edge of the village, that they might return unseen, but the Mothers saw fit to choose another path for her.

It was the cloth that gave them away. She had retrieved it from the thorns at the cost of scratched hands, ripped clothes and soaking boots so she could use it as a sling. They rolled the unconscious man onto it, but when they tried to lift him, the sheer, soft fabric ran through their fingers. In the end they wrapped him up in it like a swaddled child and half-dragged, half-carried him back to the village. Both she and Damaru tripped several times on the treacherous slope, and each time they dropped their burden Kerin shuddered, afraid that her carelessness would end up killing the man whose life she was trying so hard to save.

But it was not to be so, thank the Mother of Mercy: when they got him into the hut and onto her bed, he actually appeared closer to consciousness: he moaned and twitched, and his eyes moved behind their closed lids. She piled the covers over him, then lit a rush and put it in the lamp over the bed. The two pieces of fabulous cloth she stuffed into an empty pot; when folded, the material was surprisingly compact. A quick examination of her patient showed the beginnings of a fever, thanks no doubt to his exposure to the elements. She must treat that.

First she and Damaru needed to eat after their exertions; she doled out the somewhat congealed stew and awakened Damaru, who had fallen asleep on top of his bedcovers. It wasn’t the most appetising meal, but it was hot and filling. She finished hers quickly and cleaned the pot so she could put water on to boil.

She was sorting through her herbs when a boy’s voice called from outside: ‘Mistress Kerin?’

She pulled open the door to find Shim, Arthen’s young bonds-man. Behind him, the sky was pale grey; it was nearly dawn. She smiled and bade him good morning.

Shim peered wide-eyed into the hut and said, ‘The chieftain says you are to come to the moot-hall.’

Kerin sighed. She was exhausted, and she did not want to leave the stranger untended - but Arthen demanded obedience, not reasons for disobeying him. Still, she would make him wait a little. ‘Kindly tell him I will be there as soon as I have changed out of my wet clothes.’

Shim’s expression said he had expected something like that. He turned and left.

Kerin sat on the low bench beside the hearth to remove her mud-spattered breeches. Instead of changing back into her everyday skirt she got down the embroidered one she had made for capel-best the autumn before Neithion died. It had become a keepsake: a reminder of her life with him; she remembered how this section had been woven while she listened to him pound herbs in the pestle, or how that piece of embroidery had been inspired by a tune he had been playing. Though she had held onto it for as long as she could, this year it would go with the drove, along with her second-best skirt and the new one she had yet to finish. She had nothing else left to trade.

Damaru, sitting on his bed and toying with the last of the stew, watched her as she put her sodden boots by the fire to dry. ‘Will you watch over him?’ she asked, pointing to the stranger in her bed. Damaru looked at the stranger, at her, then back at the stranger. She took that as assent.

She strapped on her clogs and clumped up the hill to the moot-hall.

The chieftain sat in his high-backed chair in front of the hearth. He was wrapped in his fur cloak. From the noises coming from the curtained alcoves around the edge of the hall she knew his household was already awake. As usual, Gwellys would eavesdrop on her son’s business, and whatever was said here would be round the village by noon.

As she moved to stand in front of him Arthen said, ‘Arlin’s youngest has the flux again. She told my mother that she saw you and Damaru carrying something into your hut when they were coming back from the earth-closets. Did she see true?’

Kerin was exhausted, and now she was irritated. She decided to keep the existence of the rich cloth to herself. ‘She did. We found a man at the mere. He is sick.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I do not know. He is sick, as I said, and if I do not tend him, he may not live long enough to awaken and tell us his tale.’

‘Sick, or injured?’

Kerin looked around at the sound of the voice to see Fychan, Arthen’s younger son, lift the curtain and walk across the hall. This was all she needed. Arthen frowned at the intrusion, but Fychan appeared not to notice. He continued, ‘Father, if he is injured, it could have been reivers, back this way. Or maybe this sais
is
a reiver.’

Kerin looked back at Arthen and said firmly, ‘He has no injury. He is sick.’ She could not resist adding, ‘You are welcome to come and see for yourself.’

Fychan scowled, the expression pulling at his scar. Kerin suspected he would sooner put out his other eye than cross her threshold.

‘No,’ said Arthen, as much to curb his son, Kerin suspected, as in reply to her. ‘Go. Tend your patient. Tell us what he has to say for himself when he wakes.’

Kerin nodded to Arthen and left the moot-hall.

Patterns of melody catch and beguile, and the web of sound won’t let go. It is something other than pain, something worth reaching for—

 

As she headed home across the square, Kerin heard the sound of a harp drifting up the slope. Skyfools had a natural affinity with music; Damaru had picked out a tune on his father’s harp before he could walk and had often retreated into music when things confused or frustrated him. But since Neithion’s death he had rarely played; when he did, it was usually slow, melancholy airs. This was different: wild music, conjuring music, cascades of notes chasing each other through the pre-dawn light. It was music fit to wake the dead.

She ran back down to the hut.

Inside, the single rush-light illuminated Damaru as he sat at the foot of her bed, his harp between his legs, his face twisted into an ecstasy of concentration. He continued to play as she stepped over his outstretched legs and bent to examine her patient.

The man’s breath came hard and fast, like the panting of a dog, and his skin was burning hot. Kerin returned to the herbs she’d left strewn over the table, searching for a combination to bring down the fever and drive off the chill inside.

When the music slowed, Kerin looked up from her pestle. Damaru’s expression had become pained, and he was biting his lip. She went over and knelt beside him. Damaru’s lack of interest in music since his father’s death had left his hands soft, and now blood was welling from the edges of his nails and smearing the harp strings.

Kerin felt tears spring to her eyes: her crazy, unearthly son, with no regard for himself. Whatever happened with this stranger would not change the fact that the drove would be leaving soon, and Damaru was now of age, and he would be leaving with it. She had begged Arthen to let her go too, just to have those last few weeks with her boy, but he had refused her.

She blinked to clear her eyes and murmured Damaru’s name, repeating it over and over to get his attention. Finally he focused on her, though he kept playing. ‘Damaru, stop now,’ she said, but he ignored her.

When she tried again, he muttered, ‘I want to keep him here.’

Kerin said gently, ‘Damaru, I am making medicine to keep him here.’

Damaru shook his head, though he looked uncertain and the music faltered for a moment. Then he said, ‘You only heal his body. His mind is broken too.’

Kerin was not sure what Damaru meant, so she said, ‘Damaru, a mind can only grow well in a healthy body.’ That had been one of Neithion’s sayings - he had said it a lot when Damaru was younger, and he did everything he could to ensure his only surviving child’s bodily health, hoping that one day his mind would develop as it should. That was back when they had believed him merely simple, not touched by the sky.

Hearing his father’s words repeated must have got through to him, for Damaru stopped playing. Kerin lifted the harp from his lap and went back to the table as Damaru closed his eyes and rested his head against the end of the bed.

She selected herbs for fevers and chills, and counted out five of the precious berries her husband had bought on his final drove. His best friend, Huw, had passed them on to her, telling her the trader had charged a high price for them, for, he had claimed, they would cure anything from toothache to the falling fire. Huw’s tone implied he thought Neithion had been duped, but with Neithion’s death still a raw wound, Kerin had snapped at him for this harsh judgment. She had regretted her temper at once - Huw was a good man, one of the few who had never criticised Neithion for marrying her . . .

She had not used the berries till now. No one in the village had deserved this last precious gift from her dead husband. When she crushed them they smelled sweet, more like food than medicine. While the mixture steeped, she took the remaining warm water and cleaned the man’s head and chest. His skin felt sticky, even after she had got the mud off. It reminded her of Damaru after he had got at the honey-pot and smeared himself with the stuff when he was just a little lad.

She put the stranger’s age at around the same as hers, perhaps a little younger. He had a handsome face, though there was an indefinable otherness about him. As she had thought, his skin was unmarked by scars or rashes, and when she examined his hands she saw no calluses, and the nails were clean and even. Where had this man come from, to have the skin of a child and the hands of an invalid?

She wondered if he too were sky-touched, and from a richer village, where he was honoured and given the best of everything. No, he was surely too old to be a skyfool: he would have gone to the Beloved by now. So maybe he was a noble from the lowlands. Neithion had told her how men down there had other men to tend their animals, grow their food, even to build their homes and bargain for their luxuries.

She found herself wanting to stroke the milky-white skin and soak up its fire. Seeing this exotic stranger in her bed was awakening feelings she had long suppressed - feelings she must continue to suppress . . . She turned away and went back to the table to fetch her bowl.

When she returned, she piled blankets under his head, then dipped a clean linen square into the bowl and wrung out the cloth over his lips. The liquid dribbled down his face and onto the bedclothes. She tried again, and this time his lips parted and he swallowed a little. She repeated the exercise until the bowl was empty.

Kerin knew she was nowhere near as good as Neithion had been; she feared the stranger’s illness would be beyond her meagre skill. Neithion had been so talented a healer that people had come from other villages to seek his help. He had trained her in the healing arts to indulge her, not because he had ever expected she would need to take on his role.

She returned the bowl to the table, then bent to shake her son awake. He blinked up at her. She held his hands up so he could see them. ‘Your fingers are cut, Damaru. I am going to clean and bind them. It will sting a little.’

He nodded dumbly, still half-asleep, and bore her ministrations quietly. After she had finished she helped him to his bed.

She would have liked to sleep herself, but she needed to watch over her patient. She had not been able to do anything to save Neithion - she had not even been with him when he died. She composed a prayer to the Mother of Mercy, the first true prayer she had spoken for some days other than those small mutterings offered during the rituals of daily life. If the Skymothers willed it, and if it was in her power to do so, she would save this stranger.