Plenilune (30 page)

“How are things in Hol?” Rupert began politely.

“I saw the slaughtering beginning as we came out and I will go back, finding it done, and all things prepared for winter.”

“By then, too,” added Rupert, “there will be more things done with than the harvest.”

“That, too, is in my mind.”

Margaret watched Bloodburn’s hands interlock themselves: long, old, vein-raised hands that were mottled by the sun, hands that were silver with scars and still strong. She shivered and wished she did not have to sit next to him, nor with her back to the open wood.

Rupert went on. “I am told by my folk that it will be a mild winter, and so an early spring, and I think that bodes well for us.”

Bloodburn looked sidelong from under his grizzled brows. “Malbrey was telling me about the star you saw. And sure that we are friends, but I do not put much stock in stars.”

“Do you think I quell at a mere blink of light?”

“No…But then, is it not a mere blink of light? Yet Malbrey was insistent upon your trepidation.”

Rupert’s face was sharp and scornful, upreared, the lips pulled off the teeth in an unconscious snarl. “Trust me, or trust nothing, to know what I am about. When the time comes, can I so count on you?”

Bloodburn turned his head away and there was in his voice a careful gentleness which belied a sullenness beneath. “The Overlord knows that he can count on me.”

“Yes,” Rupert said more kindly after a moment. “The Overlord knows.”

When the meat was finally cooked they ate, much more relaxed with warm food before them, under a clear faience-blue noon sky with the wind in the tops of the pine-trees and the sound of water falling somewhere far off, echoing in the quiet. To Margaret it was a strange, shining experience, at once awful and enjoyable, for the cold sharpened her senses and the quick, flashing wit of her companions, like kingfishers, darted by her and seemed to weave the circle of their hunting party with brilliance. At times she hated, keenly, why she was there—and the boar-meat, cooked fresh and unsalted, was gamey to her taste—but beneath the prickling hatred she knew, very clearly, that she would have given anything,
anything
—even the familiarity of her own home in Aylesward—to be sitting among these people on this snowy November day. Whatever else came, she knew she would remember the hunting party for the rest of her life.

But Plenilune was not done surprising her. As with Songmartin’s suddenness, flashing out of nowhere and startling her with a quick scene of beauty and truth and goodness, as with the shepherd’s panpipe playing in the windy clearness of the fells, Plenilune flung round silver balls of shocking splendour at her again. The little party was getting up to go—someone was packing up what was left of the boar-meat and someone else was kicking snow over the fire—when they realized that Twiti the lymer had gone missing.

“So like him to go wandering,” said Skander. “He got all the wanderlust of the litter.
Shee hee!
here, boy!”

They broke up, leaving some to close up the camp while others moved through the wood, calling for the errant dog. Having nothing better to do, Margaret flung the heavy length of her skirts over one arm and waded through the snow and bracken with them, Latimer tagging along behind her. She felt oddly responsible for the dog, a strange kinship for the moment when it had tried to save her life from the boar.

He cannot have gone far
, she reasoned as she slid ungracefully over a log and dropped into a deep, ugly, messy depression in the earth. Latimer fell in after her.
And we are not so far from home that he can be in danger. But what a naughty dog! that he does not come when we are all calling for him.

“Margaret!” Rupert’s voice carried faintly through the woods. Stopping a moment, she frowned, elected against going back, and pushed on, as much now to get away for a few minutes as to find the lymer.

A bit of cloud had scuttled away from the low winter sun when she came stumblingly through a low hawthorn thicket, pushing aside branches and stepping on twigs as she went. Latimer whined softly. Margaret had a brief, confused sense of coming out into a small clearing before the world became a riot of gold and jewel-black and an upward rush of white and surf-sound. Goldfinches burst upward from the uncut turf in a whirling cloud, circling and chittering, filling the air with a thin, fine filigree of splendour. They finally settled in the trees just as Margaret was getting her breath back, and she got a clear view of the white thing that had lain in their midst.

Even as she stared at it, her hand clenched white about Latimer’s collar, and it stared back at her, she could not quite believe her eyes. It was a unicorn, full grown but only the size of a colt, with grey on its muzzle and ears and knees. It did not look much like the horses she was used to: it seemed to have wandered out of an old orient, far off in time. Its eyes were larger and longer than most equines Margaret had seen, its ears longer too, and it wore Pharaoh’s beard on its chin with such a supercilious nature that she could feel herself suddenly blushing with fear.

For a long breathless moment she and the beautiful, weird thing watched each other unblinkingly—she realized that it had enormously long, black lashes—while the goldfinches flickered by overhead. Neither of them seemed to know what to do. Margaret was not sure if she could leave quietly and respectfully, or if she did not dare move; she could see the unicorn was trying to decide if she was a threat or an annoyance. It swivelled its ears and turned its head—the light sang sharply on its horn-point—and then, suddenly, with a sighing heave of its flanks, it turned away, disinterested, high-stepping through the sodden grass with the late dew gleaming on its hide. Its soft, grey-plumed tail was the last thing she saw, glinting among the black pines, swallowed up by trees and undergrowth and the sharp pale winter sunlight.

The goldfinches swept up in a gold cloud and flew away south.

When the silence descended again—thick, smothering silence—Margaret put out her hand against the nearest tree-trunk to support herself for a moment. Then, “Come along, Latimer,” she said, and turned back the way she had come.

They had found Twiti, who had wandered off with another dog, by the time she returned. No one save Rupert seemed to have noticed that Margaret had wandered off too—Skander glanced her way once from scolding Twiti, but she could not read his expression. Latimer broke away from her and ran to join his fellow lymer, and Rupert, disengaging himself from Malbrey’s company, came to fetch her. With a swift upward rush of panic she schooled her face, inexplicably afraid that he would see in her eyes the thing she had seen, and that seemed to her, though she could not explain it, a breach of faith with something greater and more solemn and more brittle than herself.

“So. You have not run off, then,” said Rupert quietly.

She said with tired mockery, for it had been a long day, “To whom should I go? Winter woods are unforgiving companions.”

“Has the snow got into your boots?”

“No.”

It was only after noon by two hours and already the light was looking westerly, the sun swinging in a low arc on the fell horizon, striking on the southern crown of Seescarfell and breaking up on the lower wooded slopes that touched Marenové’s back door. Waiting as Rupert brought up her horse, Margaret felt that they stood on the threshold of winter, that autumn was a mere blink of fire-colour behind them; and squinting up the long level afternoon rays, she felt the winter would be long, long and empty with Rupert for company, and something in her middle wrenched with strong self-pity.

They were a rambling party on the homeward journey. No one kept to single file and everyone talked as much as he liked, though quietly, pleasantly. Riding along behind Rupert, the wood flooded with tarnished gold light, Margaret watched the strong, ephemeral images of her companions—Woodbird in a silvery, feathery splendour; Aikin Ironside with a rich, reddish aurora about him—and after the self-pity, as she always felt after self-pity, she knew again that she was glad she had come. The afternoon light held back the bleak prospect of the lonely winter in Marenové for a while longer and she held the pine-wood close, the company closer, knowing all the while that they looked at her askance as one might look at a hangman’s noose. But she knew that if she thought too hard about the closed and closeted winter she would despair. She could not think of that.

A jewel-blink caught her eye. Skander’s roan sidled close, his hand flicked out, eyes soft alight, and he saluted her privately, admiringly; and suddenly she smiled, sharply, so keenly that it hurt.

Sleepily, gladly spent by the day’s exertions, with the rich, clean splendour of the golden light running in their veins, they wound back up above Ryland and passed through the curtain walls into Lookinglass. Margaret was sore and cold and glad to be helped down, even by Rupert, and to wade through the milling pack of warm hound-bodies. She flung the reins of her mare over its head and passed them off on a stable-boy.

“Well, vixen?” asked Rupert. “Did you, after all, enjoy yourself? You did very well.”

She rubbed her chilled arms. “At times. I am not yet used to Plenilune. It is very alien and—dangerous. I do not know that I
enjoy
anything. I am always on my toes.”

He looked over his shoulder at her from where he saw to the loosening of his horse’s bridle. “You and I. We need not speak of it now, but I am very proud of you for the thing you did.”

“You ought not to be,” she replied tersely. “I did not do it for
you
.”

The dogs began barking happily as they were led off to their kennels round the back of the stables. Blue-bottle Glass, rid of his mount and clipped with a lead, was prancing and kicking across the yard as if he had not just been taken out on a boar-hunt: his piercing squeal rang down through the terraces. She heard Skander calling out, “Take care, Periot! I’ll see you on the morrow. Give my best to Ely!”

“Thank you, sir, I will—God keep you!”

“And you, sir!”

Their voices faded off into the thin winter twilight, drowned in the bustle and murmur and animal noises of the dispersing party. Feeling detached, Margaret turned from Rupert to watch the distant figure of the shepherd stalking down the damp stone stairs to the foot of the kitchen garden where he would rejoin the walking path and descend to his own village. He was a sturdy, friendly image, and Margaret liked him with an empty, desperate liking that felt like the hatred of despair. She said, without looking round,

“Would it be futile to ask you if I might go to church tomorrow too?”

She heard the chink as Rupert, having cinched the straps, let the stirrup fall to its length.

“It would.”

She turned to him then, eyes reddened from the cold and stinging so that she had to squint them, and all she could see was his lean, handsome, hawkish face looking past her shoulder with a cold stare at the back of the receding shepherd. The look in his own narrow eyes was angry and hungry.

“You are spiteful.”

He switched his gaze quickly to her. “Maybe—but are you not, also? But I am a disciple of verities, and I will not submit you to the womanish tradition of their assemblies and their council of lies. They wallow in their lies—returning every seven days to the same falsehoods, washing themselves in the same filth of their minds, and all the while believing they are coming clean. It is unmanly. It is despicable. Cast it from your mind at once.”

“And if I will not?” she challenged in a small, hard voice. Like adamant, the pounding blows of his words only drove her into a smaller, harder, more brightly-furious lump, and she dared defy him for one moment, for Skander’s sake and for Periot’s, and for Ely Jacland’s, and for one small shard of a child’s prayer that she had clung to in her most tormented moments.

He said finally, “You will submit and be obedient—for your own good. Furthermore, I will have you be a good example to the other women. I won’t have you acting like those Thrasymene wenches who are lordless and think they can carry themselves about like men.”

“Would you have me be like Kinloss, then?”

They stepped aside, his hand under her elbow, as the stableboys took away their horses. Turning together, they walked side by side into the bare garden and began mounting the hard-cut, narrow steps. “Kinloss,” Rupert mused regretfully. They came above the level of the curtain wall and the late sun struck them in the back, making a dark-copper glory of his hair which the high, cold wind took and blew wildly about on its ends. “Bloodburn has a heart of steel and is passing loyal, but he is a domestic brute, that I will not deny.”

Margaret had put up her hand to shove her loose hair from her face and had opened her mouth to thrust back with, “And you are not?” when she shut it again, realizing that she was inviting trouble. But Rupert had heard her abbreviated intake of breath and had paused, foot lifted to the next step, to look quizzically at her, and he had seen it in her face. His eyes dropped to her lip—the stinging was gone, but she could still feel the little break in it—and he almost lifted his hand, a spasm of regret pulling at the corner of his own mouth…but there were people in the yard and they were in the open, and his hand dropped at his side again.

“We will go home tomorrow. Malbrey is coming with us to stay a few days, and anyway, three days with family is always enough and more than enough.”

He must know that she wanted dearly to stay longer with Skander Rime, and he must know that she loathed the thought of going back to Marenové in the company of Malbrey of Talus Perey. Would that he fell in a river and drowned! But she said nothing, and they went up together toward the porch and the promise of warmth within the house.

But on the top step Rupert suddenly stopped and swung round, as if stung. Margaret, too, hesitated and looked back. For a moment there was nothing unusual about the late afternoon bustle of the yard and garden, but then, on the fringes of it all, not far from where Periot had disappeared down the path, she saw the withered figure of the old woman who had interrupted their dinner last night.