Morningstar (7 page)

I learned something that evening: Physical labor can be immensely satisfying to the soul. There was a stack of logs, sawn into rounds of roughly two feet in length. They were of various thicknesses, and the wood was beech, the bark silvery and coarse but the inner bright and the color of fresh cream. The ax was old and heavy, with a curved handle polished by years of use. I placed a log upon a wide slab of wood and slashed at it, missing by several inches. The ax blade thudded into the slab beneath, jarring my arms and shoulders. More carefully I lifted it again, bringing it down into the center of the log, which split pleasingly.

As I have said, I was not a small man, though I had little muscle. I was tall and bony, but my shoulders were naturally broad, my arms long, and my balance good. It was a matter of a few minutes before I was swinging the ax like a veteran woodsman, and my woodpile grew.

I worked for almost an hour in the moonlight, stopping only when my fingers became too sore to hold the handle. There was a deep ache in my lower back, but it was more than matched by the pride I felt in my labor.

For the first time in my life I had labored for my supper, working with my hands, and the flames of tonight’s fire, the warmth I would know, would be the result of my own efforts. I laid the ax against the lean-to and began to stack the chunks I had cut.

Megan walked out into the night and nodded as she saw all that I had done. “Never leave an ax like that,” she said. “The blade will rust.”

“Shall I bring it inside?”

She laughed then. “No, young fool, leave it embedded in a log. It will keep the blade sharp.”

She waited as I stacked the firewood, then bade me follow her to a small hut at the rear of the building. Even with the winter wind blowing, the stench was great as she opened the door. There were some twenty geese, seven turkeys, and more than a dozen hares hanging there. I cast a swift spell, and the aroma of lavender filled my nostrils.

“Have you ever prepared a goose?” she asked.

“For what?” I answered, forcing a smile.

“I thought not. Nobleman, are you? Servants to run your errands, build your fires, heat your bed? Well, you will learn much here, master bard.”

Stepping forward, she lifted a dead goose from a hook and pushed it into my arms. The head and neck flopped down against my right thigh. “First pluck the bird,” she said. “Then I will show you how to prepare it.”

“It is not a skill I wish to learn,” I pointed out.

“It is if you want to eat,” she replied. After working with the ax, I was extremely hungry and did not argue. My hunger, I should point out, did not last long. Plucking the bird was not arduous, but what followed made me wonder if I would ever eat goose again.

She carried the carcass to a long, narrow bench. I followed her and watched as she sliced open the skin of the creature’s neck. Then she cut away the bones and head and pulled clear the crop bag, which she flung to the floor. “Useless,” she said. “Even dogs wouldn’t touch it. Now give me your hand,” she ordered me, and took hold of my wrist. “Insert two fingers here on either side of the neck and rotate them inside the beast.” It was slimy and cold, and I could feel the bird’s tiny tendons and veins being torn as my fingers slid over the brittle bones. She pulled my hand clear, then inserted her own fingers into the hole. “Good,” she muttered, “you have released the lungs, the gizzard, and the heart.”

“I’m so pleased.”

Turning the goose, she took up a small knife and then pushed a finger into its body. Extending the skin, she cut a circular hole at the rear and discarded the sliced flesh. “Push your hand in and pull out the insides,” she ordered me. I swallowed hard and
did as she instructed. My stomach turned as the oily, dark, and bloody mess pulled clear. I stepped back from the table.

“Don’t you vomit in here!” she snapped. Stepping forward, she continued to clean out the goose, removing what appeared to be oceans of fat. “Good tallow,” she said. “Candles, grease for leather, ointment for the rheumatic. Liver, heart, and lung make for good broth. A fine bird.”

I couldn’t speak and turned away to where the hares were hanging head down. Each of them had a small clay pot suspended from its ears. Walking toward one, I glanced into a pot; it was full of blood, but worse than this, there were maggots floating there. I watched another emerge from the hare’s nostril and drop into the congealing blood. Sickened, I leapt back.

“This one’s rotten!” I said.

Megan walked over to where the creature was hanging. “Not at all. It is just high. The meat will be soft and full of flavor. Wulf will be coming for it tonight. We’ll prepare that next.”

I could not watch and, without the usual courtesies, ran from the hut.

The sound of Megan’s laughter echoed after me.

It is hard for a young man to discover that he is useless. We have such pride when young. I was a good bard and a fine musician. As a magicker? Well, there might have been twenty or thirty men in the southern kingdom who were better than I, but not more.

Yet here in this village I was little more use than a mewling half-wit. It galled me beyond words. I wanted to leave, to march away to some larger settlement. But the forest was vast, and my knowledge of it scant.

That evening I sat disconsolately before the fire tuning my harp and thinking back to the days of childhood in the south. Jarek awoke sometime before midnight and, without a word to Megan, took up his cloak and walked from the house.

“Where are you from?” I asked the old woman.

“Not from here,” she answered. Her speech was clipped, the pronunciation good. But the voice was disguised, I felt.

“Are you noble-born?” I inquired.

“What would you like me to be?” she responded.

“Whatever you wish to be, madam.”

“Then take me as I am. An old woman in a small village by a lake.”

“Is that all you see when you look in the mirror?”

“I see many things, Owen Odell,” she told me, an edge of sadness in her voice. “I see what is and what was.”

The fire was crackling in the hearth, the smoke spiraling up through the small hole in the high thatched roof, the wind hissing through cracks in the wooden walls.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

She smiled wearily. “You want me to be some mythic queen or ancient sorceress? Do you seek always to make the world fit into a song?”

I shrugged. “The songs are comforting, Megan.”

“You are a good man, Owen, in a world where good men are few. Take my advice and learn to use a blade or a bow.”

“You wish me to become a killer?”

“Better than to be killed.”

“Are you a widow?”

“What is this fascination you have with my life? I grow herbs and prepare meat for the table. I weave cloth and cast an occasional spell. I am not unusual or in any way unique.”

“I do not find you so.”

She stood and stretched her back. “Go to bed, bard. That is the place for dreams.” Wrapping her shawl about her, she walked out into the night.

I don’t know why, but I was convinced she was leaving to meet Jarek Mace. Taking her advice, I stripped off my clothes and stretched out on the bed, pulling the goose-down quilt over my body.

Sleep came swiftly, and I dreamed of a lost swan, circling and calling in the sky above an ice-covered lake. I knew he was searching for something, but I did not know what it was. And then I saw, beneath the ice on the water, a second swan, cold and dead. But the first bird kept calling out as he flew on weary wings.

Calling … calling.

There are, it seems to me, two kinds of pride. One urges a man to disguise his shortcomings for fear of looking foolish. The second spurs him on to eliminate those shortcomings. Happily, I have always been blessed with the latter.

I set to work during the winter months to learn those skills which would make me a valuable asset to my neighbors. Despite my loathing of carcasses and blood, I taught myself to gut, skin, and prepare meat for the table. I learned to tan hides, to make tallow candles, to identify medicinal herbs and prepare infusions and decoctions.

And I labored with ax and saw to supply Megan with firewood aplenty.

The villagers also taught me something valuable: how to live together in harmony, each man and woman a link in a chain, each dependent upon the other for food, clothing, shoes, bows, medicines. There was only one piece of communal property—a large cast-iron oven. It had been bought in Ziraccu and carted into the forest, where it was leased to Garik the baker. The rest of the huts made do with field ovens, bricks of clay erected over tiny trenches. Garik would make bread and cakes for the villagers in return for meats, hides, and home-brewed ale. Megan earned her living by supplying herbs and curing meats. Wulf, the hunchback, brought in venison and boar meat. Each person had developed a skill that enhanced the lives of the other villagers.

Even Owen Odell found his niche. Each week, on the holy day, I played my harp in the village hall, creating new vigorous melodies so that the villagers could dance. I was not popular, you understand, for I was an Angostin among Highlanders, but I was, I believe, respected.

In my spare moments, which were few, I sat and watched the village life, observing my neighbors, learning about them, their fears and their hopes. Highlanders are a disparate people, a mixture of races, and the ancestry of many could be seen in their faces and builds. Garik the baker was a short, powerfully built man with flat features, a jutting brow, and a wide gash of a mouth. It took no great imagination to see him dressed in skins, his cheeks painted blue in the spiral patterns of his Pictish ancestors. There were several like Garik, whose bloodlines ran from the earliest human settlers; they were dour men, hard and tough, men to match the mountains. Others, like Orlaith the cattle herder, were taller, their hair tinged with the red of the Belgae, their eyes dark, their souls fiery and passionate. A few showed Angostin lines—long noses and strong chins—but they admitted to no Angostin heritage. This was hardly surprising,
since the Angostins were the most recent invaders, a mere few hundred years before. And Highland memories are long indeed.

My reputation among them was raised several notches when I used a search spell to locate a missing child. She was Wulf’s youngest and had wandered off into the forest during a cold afternoon. Wulf and a dozen of his fellows set off to look for her, but the temperature was dropping fast, and most of the men knew the child could not survive for long.

A search spell is not difficult to cast when one lives in a forest and people are few, though only the very best magickers could cast a successful search spell within a city. This one was slightly more difficult for me because I blended the spell with one of warming. Even so, an apprentice could have cast it.

Essentially one pictures the object of the search and creates a glowing sphere of white light. The image of the object—in this case a yellow-haired child—is set at the center of the light sphere. Then the light is sent out into the woods, seeking to match the image at its heart to an outside source. It is not an unusually complex spell, and if by chance there were several yellow-haired children in the forest, it would probably alight on the wrong one. But on this day there was only one lost little girl, and the sphere found her wandering beside a frozen stream, her fingers and lips blue with cold.

It touched her, and the second spell became active, covering her with a warm, invisible blanket while the search sphere rose up above the trees, blazing with light and drawing the rescuers to the toddler.

The child was unharmed, and such was Wulf’s delight that he made me a present of an ornate dagger with a leaf-shaped blade and a ruby encased in gold at the hilt. He also grabbed my shoulders, dragged me down, and kissed me on both cheeks, an altogether unpleasant experience.

But in the days that followed, when I was out among the villagers, I would be greeted with smiles and people would inquire politely after my health.

It was two months before news of the war filtered through to the village. A travelling tinker, well known to Wulf and therefore allowed to pass through, came to us one bright cold morning. He told of the fall of Ziraccu, the slaughter of its inhabitants. Count Leopold had been found hiding in the granary; his eyes were put out, and he was placed in a cage and hanged from the
ruined walls. Then the army had moved on to the north. Thankfully, they had avoided this part of the forest.

During the evenings I would sit with Megan, listening to tales of the Highlands. They were fine, companionable times. Jarek Mace was often absent, traveling to other settlements yet always returning with news, or coin, or venison.

“What were you like when younger?” I asked Megan one evening when Jarek was abroad on one of his journeys.

“I was like this,” she answered. Golden light bathed her from head to toe, and her short-cropped iron-gray hair was replaced by golden curls hanging free to milk-white shoulders. Her face was beautiful beyond description, her eyes blue as the summer sky, her lips full. Her figure was slim, but the breasts were large in comparison; her neck was long and sleek, the skin smooth as porcelain.

I was lost for words—but not at her beauty. This was one of the seven great spells, and only masters of the craft could weave one so casually.

“Where did you learn such a piece?” I asked.

The beautiful woman shrugged and smiled. “Long ago, from a man named Cataplas.”

“He was my teacher,” I told her.

“I know.”

“But I had not the skill to learn the seven.”

“There is yet time,” she said, letting fall the spell.

“You are noble-born,” I pointed out. “The gown you conjured was purest satin, and there were pearls at the neck and cuff.”

“You think I would create sacking to wear?” she countered.

“Why must you be so mysterious, lady?”

“Why must
you
be so inquisitive?”

“The first words you spoke to me were, ‘Do you not bow in the presence of a lady?’ Not a woman—a lady. That intrigued me at the time; it still does. You were not born in the village.”