Reave the Just and Other Tales (31 page)

“In glee and malice, he thrust his visage close to mine. ‘You are a great fool,’ he informed me. His breath stank of garlic and stale wine, rotting teeth and unrestricted appetites— ‘You thought yourself safe, didn’t you?’ he jeered. ‘Hiding in a sanctuary. Sneaking into the skirts of a pretty maid. You thought—’

“His taunts died with him. Beyond him, I saw his companion climb open-breeched onto the table and Irradia. Leaning forward suddenly, I sank my teeth into the flesh of his lower lip.

“My bite drew blood. And blood drew life. Without pause or hesitation, he folded to the stone at my feet as though Heaven itself had stricken him.

“Immediately I received the benefit of his many lusts. His vitality became mine. His strength suffused my limbs. On the instant I ceased to be the weak and starving creature whom the Cardinal’s ruffians had captured. Although I remained bound, I was no longer helpless.

“Shouting wordless threats to distract Irradia’s assailant, I struggled to win free of my ropes.

“Curses answered me, guttural and dismayed. The man rolled from the table to his feet. Clutching at his breeches with one hand, he snatched a dirk from its sheath with the other, then lumbered furiously forward to stab at me before my bonds loosened.

“He succeeded well enough. His dirk he pounded into my shoulder with the force of a blacksmith’s hammer. But it did not suffice. Irradia’s tortures had driven me to madness. And I possessed all his companion’s great strength.

“While his dirk thudded deeply into me, I turned my head enough to nip at his wrist.

“It was a small wound, no more—a drop of blood. I required nothing greater. He toppled, lifeless, onto the corpse of his companion, and I used what he had given me to snap my ropes.

“The dirk I must have plucked out, but I do not recall doing so. I kept it, hardly thinking that it might be of use to me.

“Then I was at Irradia’s side.”

Perhaps it was not weakness which upheld me. Perhaps wrath and sin had struck so deeply into my bones that they became a form of strength.

“I had no garment with which to cover her. But she was clad in blood, and did not need one. Yet for that very reason I dared not touch her, although I burned to lift her into my embrace. I did not wish to slay her.

“Blinded, she could not return my gaze. For a moment, however, she seemed to know me. Her lips shaped my name, and she strove to speak. Lowering my ear to her, I heard a word which may have been, ‘Forgive—’ But I could not ask whom she wished me to forgive—or why. Or how. When she had breathed her prayer, she succumbed to unconsciousness.”

At last the end was near, and I hastened to meet it. I had forgotten my fear. For the moment, at least, the prospect of my death had lost its power to appall me.

“Then there came upon me a time of darkness—a time I have no courage to describe. I might have restored Irradia, as I restored Lord Numis. I might have given her the life which I had torn from the Cardinal’s servants, and raised her whole from her ordeal.

“But what then, my lords? What then? We would be prisoners still—and I would be weak again, as I am now. What hope did we have of flight? In darkness and despair, I saw that we had none. And when we had been secured anew, His Reverence would return her to torment. The screams which had brought me to madness would be no more than a foretaste of those which would surely follow.

“I had learned to love Mother Church, as I loved Irradia. Under her sweet influence, and Father Domsen’s teachings, I had dreamed that I had a soul. But in the High Cardinal’s oubliette I abandoned it.”

That pain—that sin—was mine. Mere revulsion and death could not bereave me of it.

“With a caress of my hand, I took her life, so that His Reverence Beatified would never harm her again. Her small scrap of vitality I added to the strength I had already harvested. Then I made my escape by ascending the walls until I came to the mouth of the oubliette, and so to the open night of the city.

“Sestle I fled as quickly as I could manage.” I had explained enough. My tale required little more of me. “When I learned of my lord Duke’s opposition to the High Cardinal’s doctrine, I made my way to Mullior. After a time, I gained an opportunity to offer him my service.”

It was finished.

“In his service, my lords, I carry out my penance. My sin is plain to me, and I expiate as Straylish Beatified instructed me. I bear Irradia’s pain. I seek to restore life. I resist the righteousness which damns me. And I obey Father Domsen. I take no life which has not already been claimed by God.

“Do with me what you will. I am done. Perhaps it is true that I have no soul. Irradia whom I loved asked me to ‘Forgive,’ and I cannot.”

Bowing my head, I fell silent.

_______

The distress in the hall echoed my own. So much I had gained, if no more. Lords and ladies wrestled with emotions which they must have abhorred. Priests murmured over their beads, telling prayers I did not choose to hear.

The Duke’s heir gripped my arm convulsively. “Fear nothing, Scriven,” he whispered. His voice caught. “Fear—nothing.”

I did not heed him. Drained of fear and strength and supplication, I regarded only Duke Obal. Above his jaw’s grim thrust, a gleam of moisture or regret pierced his gaze. His expression I was unable to read. But I would not have been surprised to hear him say that I had shown myself no fit ally of Mullior—that my sin and my nature justified the High Cardinal’s enmity—that a man who had slain his only friend, his only love, could not claim clemency here.

Doubtless His Reverence the Bishop would assert as much, when he recovered his wits.

Slowly Duke Obal turned away. His features were hidden from me as he addressed the hall. In a voice husky with fervor, he announced, “There is one aspect of Scriven’s tale which he did not mention—because he does not know it. He has already been given a sign of Heaven’s acceptance.

“Before your eyes,” he told the gathering, “he has been tested by holy water. Pure water blessed and sanctified by my confessor was mingled with Scriven’s wine. You have seen that he drank of it—twice—and took no hurt.

“It is not baptism,” he acknowledged. “But it will suffice for me.”

Abruptly he raised his fists, and his voice lifted to a shout like the cry of an eagle. “Who speaks against him now?” he called fiercely. “Who
dares
?”

Bishop Heraldic cleared his throat. Shamefaced, he mumbled, “Not I, my lord.”

Around him, lords and ladies added, “Not I.” Merchants and guards, officials and priests, did the same, swelling a chorus of assent. Lord Numis might have protested, but two of the Bishop’s confessors stilled him.

Lowering his arms, Duke Obal returned to me. With a few strides, he crossed the rugs between us until he stood near enough to place his hands like an embrace upon my shoulders.

“Then, Scriven,” he proclaimed so that none would mistake him, “I say to you before all these witnesses that you are my trusted friend, and I am honored by your service. Be welcome in Mullior. Be at home. As you keep your vows, so will I keep mine. The House of Obal stands by you. While I live, you are safe among us.”

In the grip of his strong hands, I straightened my back and met his gaze as best I could.

“Thank you, my lord. I will keep my vows.”

He deserved better gratitude, but I had come to the end of what I could do. I had begun to weep, and had no heart to stanch it.

He was more than a good son of Mother Church. He was a man of faith.

Together the Duke’s Commander and the Master of Mullior’s Purse offered me escort in their lord’s name, showing openly that they, too, honored me. With their support, I left the hall and the palace, and made my way accepted into the night.

F
ern loved pigs, but in all the village of Sarendel-on-Gentle she may have been the only woman who did not own one.

The Gentle’s Rift down which the river ran was at once fertile and isolated. The wains of the merchanters came through in season, trading salt by the pound and fabric by the bolt for wheat and barley by the ton; there were no other visitors. And the good people along the river wanted none—especially after they had listened to the merchanters’ tales of the larger world, tales of wars and warlocks, princes and intrigues. Their lives in the Rift were like the Gentle itself, steady and untroubled. Whether poor or comfortable, solitary or gregarious, the villages and hamlets had only four essential activities—their children, their farms, their animals, and their ale. Pleasure produced their children, work in the fields and with the animals produced their food, and ale was their reward.

Among the fields and meadows, cows were precious for their milk, as well as for their strength at the plow. And pigs made better meat. For that reason, sows and porkers were common.

It may have been because they were raised for meat—because they were such solid creatures, and so doomed—that Fern loved them, although they were not hers.

In Sarendel she knew them all by their size and coloring, their personalities and parentage. Recognizing her love, they came to her whenever they could. And she adored their coming to her, as though she were a great lady visited by royalty.

Yet she took nothing which was not granted to her, and so she returned them. Before she returned them, however, she pampered them as best she could in the brief time her honesty allowed her, tending their small sores and abrasions, offering them the comfits and comforts she was occasionally able to scavenge for them, scratching their ears when she had no treats to offer. She wept for the porkers and flattered the sows. Since she had no language of her own, their throaty voices were articulate enough for her; she knew how to warm her heart with their snorts and grunts of affection.

When they strayed among the hills, she could divine where they were, and so she was able to recover them. When they misplaced their piglets, she found the young and brought them home—her ear for the thin squeals of the lost was unerring. When the sows suffered farrowing, she came to them from wherever her scavenging took her, bringing poultices and caresses which eased the piglets out.

The good people of Sarendel could not comprehend the sounds which came from her mouth, but they understood the importance of gratitude and kindliness in a small village. When Fern had performed her small services for the creatures she loved, the farmwives and alemaids to whom they belonged thanked her with gifts of food, which did more to keep breath in her body than the sustenance she scavenged.

Indeed, in gratitude one of her fellow villagers would almost certainly have given her a pig, had she been capable of raising it. Alas, that steady nurturance would have been beyond her. In a village where poverty was common but active want was rare, Fern was destitute. If Yoel the aleman had not allowed her a disused storeshed to serve as her hovel, she would have had no place to live. If the farmwives had not given her scraps of weaving and discarded dresses, she would have had no clothes. If Sarendel-on-Gentle had not granted her the freedom of its refuse, she would have lacked food more often than she had it. Her parents had been poor—her father a farm laborer, her mother a scrubwoman—able to feed and clothe and shelter her, but little more; and they were long dead. From dawn to dusk she was friendless as only those to whom words meant nothing could be, comforted only by the affection of the sows and porkers.

If she owned a pig—so the village believed—she would have fed it before she fed herself; and so she would have died.

Even with only herself to keep alive, no one would have been surprised to find her dead one morning among the fields or beside the river. Her life was a small thing, even by the ordinary standards of Sarendel-on-Gentle. The village in turn was a small thing along the verdant Rift. And the Gentle’s Rift itself was a small thing within the wide world of Andovale, where princes and warlocks had their glory.

No one took note—or had cause to take note—when Fern of Sarendel-on-Gentle was adopted by a pig.

He was not a handsome pig, or a large one. Indeed, she saw as soon as she looked at him that he was dying of hunger. His brindled skin showed splotches of disease, as well as of scruffy parentage. Stains and gashes marked his grizzled snout. One eye appeared to be nearly blind; the other was flawed by a strange sliver of argent like a silver cut. In the early dew of dawn, he shouldered his way into her hovel as though he had traveled all night for many nights to reach her, lay himself down at her feet, rolled his miscolored eyes at her weakly, and began at once to sleep like the dead.

Fern had only seen that sleep once before—a sleep without the twitches and snuffles, the unconscious rootings of a pig’s dreams. She had no measure of time, and so she did not know when it was, but on some prior occasion she had found a lost sow far from the village. The sow had broken her leg crossing a streambed. The disturbance of the rocks and mud showed that she had struggled for hours, perhaps for days; then she had lost heart. She was asleep when Fern found her, and Fern could not rouse her; she slept until she died.

Fern understood instantly that the pig now asleep at her feet was like that sow—brokenhearted and near to dying.

As she looked at him, however, an image formed in her mind. It was unfamiliar because she was a creature of instinct and did not think in images.

Rueweed.

Rueweed and pigsbane.

Also carrots.

Rueweed was poison to both pigs and cattle, as everyone knew. And pigsbane was presumed to be poison, for the simple reason that pigs refused to eat it—and pigs were known to be clever in such matters. Nevertheless Fern did not hesitate. The images which had come into her head were like the voiceless promptings that told her when one of the pigs of the village was in need of her. She did not question them any more than she questioned why this pig had come to her—or where he had come from.

She had seen Meglan, one of the farmwives, working in her carrot patch yesterday. Perhaps there would be carrots in Meglan’s refuse-tip today. And Fern knew where to find rueweed and pigsbane.

Hurrying because a pig had come to her for his life, she clutched the scraps which served as her cloak around her and ran from her hovel.

Along the one street which passed over the hills and became Sarendel-on-Gentle’s link to the other villages of the Rift, past both alehouses, into a little lane which separated thatch-roofed shacks from more prosperous homes of timber and dressed stone, she made her way in a scurry of haste. An observer who did not know her would have thought she looked furtive. However, the villagers were accustomed to her crouching gait and her habitual way of keeping to the walls and hedges as if she feared to be accosted by someone who might expect her to speak, and so she passed as unremarked as a wraith among the dwellings to Meglan’s home on the outskirts of the village.

Apparently unaware of Meglan spading her vegetables outside the house, Fern went directly to the refuse-tip beyond the fence and began rooting in her human fashion among the farmwife’s compost.

Meglan paused to watch. She was a kindly woman, and Fern’s haste suggested extreme hunger. When she saw how Fern pounced on the remaining peels and tassels of yesterday’s stew, the farmwife unthinkingly pulled up a fresh handful of carrots, strode to the fence, and offered the carrots over the rails to Fern.

Too urgent to be gracious, Fern snatched the carrots, snuffled a piggy thanks, and scuttled away toward the hills as fast as her scrawny, unfed limbs could carry her.

Pigsbane. Rueweed. Meglan’s generosity had already fallen into Fern’s vague past, in one sense vividly remembered, in another quite forgotten. In her present haste she could not have formed any conception of how she had come by so much largesse as a handful of fresh carrots. Her head held nothing except rueweed and pigsbane and the need for speed.

It did not occur to her to fret over the fact that centuries of habitation had cleared all such plants away around the village for at least a mile in any direction. She did not fret over facts. They simply existed, unalterable. Yet she was afraid, and her fear pushed her faster than her strength could properly carry her. A pig had come to her, heartbroken and dying. She did not understand time, but she understood that when the pig’s broken heart became cold death it would be a fact, as unalterable as the location of pigsbane and rueweed on the distant hillsides. Therefore she was afraid, and so she ran and stumbled and fell and ran again faster than she could endure.

Scarcely an hour had passed when she returned to her hovel, clutching the fruits of her scavenging in the scraps of her clothes. Sweat left streaks in the grime of her cheeks, and her eyes were glazed with exhaustion; she could have collapsed and slept and perhaps died without a moment’s pause. Nevertheless she was still full of fear. And when she looked at the pig sprawled limp and hardly breathing in the dirt of her hovel, new images entered her mind.

She had no fire for heat, no mortar and pestle for grinding; she made do with what she had. First she tore the pigsbane to scraps. Scrubbing one stone over another, she reduced the scraps to flakes and shreds. Then she set them to soak in a bowl of water.

Shaking with tiredness and fear, she broke open the leaves of rueweed and rubbed their pungent odor—the tang of poison—under the pig’s snout.

With a snort and a wince, the pig pulled his head back and blinked open his eyes. One of his eyes was unquestionably blind, but the other flashed its slice of silver at her.

At once, Fern set her bowl of soaking pigsbane in front of him. In relief rather than surprise—how could she be surprised, when all facts were the same to her?—she watched him drink.

When he had emptied the bowl, she gave him the carrots.

That was all she could do. If she had understood time, she would have known that she herself had eaten nothing for at least a day and a half. Her fear and strength were used up. Curling herself against the pig’s back to keep him warm, she sank into sleep.

She did not think of death. Her heart was not broken.

Sleep was a familiar place for her, full of colors which might have been emotions and the affectionate snuffling of sows suckling their young. But after a time the colors and sounds became more images, and these were not familiar.

She saw the silver cut of the pig’s eye rising like a new moon over the night of her mind.

She saw herself. How she knew it was herself was unclear, since her only knowledge of her appearance came from reflections in the moving waters of the Gentle, yet she did know it. And she knew also that it was herself beaten and weary, nearly cold with extinction.

Although the image was of herself, however, it did not disturb her. She gazed at it the same way that she gazed at all the world, as a fact about which there were no questions.

A crimson hue which might have been vexation or despair washed the image away, and another took its place.

In this image, she rose from her hovel and went to the nearest alehouse. There she scratched at the rear door until the aleman opened it. Then she dropped to her knees and made supplicating gestures toward her belly and mouth.

This image did disturb her. It came to her clad in the yellow of lament. She was Fern. She accepted gifts, but she did not ask for anything which was not hers. The image of pleading sent tears across the trails of sweat on her sleeping cheeks.

Nevertheless the thin sliver of argent in her mind and in the pig’s eye bound her to him. He had come to her, adopted her: she was already his. When she awoke, she pulled her scraps of clothing about her and crept weeping along the street to Jessup’s alehouse, where she scratched at the door behind the building until he answered. Filled with yellow and tears, she fell to her knees and begged for food with the only words she knew—the movements of her hands.

From his doorway Jessup peered at her and frowned. He was not known for Meglan’s unthinking generosity. Stern and plain in all his dealings, he had used his father’s alehouse to make himself wealthy—as such things were measured in Sarendel—and he liked his wealth. He made good ale and expected to be paid for it. Farmers and weavers, potters and laborers, men and women who wished to drink their ale today and settle their scores tomorrow were strictly required to take their custom to Yoel’s alehouse, not Jessup’s. In some other village, in some other part of Andovale, Jessup would have closed his door in Fern’s face and thought no more about it.

But here, in Sarendel-on-Gentle, beggary was unknown. Jessup had not learned to refuse an appeal as naked as hers. Fern herself
was
wellknown, however: both her destitution and her honesty were as familiar as the village itself. On this occasion, her plight was as plain as emaciation and grime, tears and rags could make it. And finally, at Jessup’s back door there were no witnesses. No one would see what he did and think that he had become less strict.

With a black scowl, he retreated to his kitchen and brought out a jug of broth, a slab of bread, and an earthen flask of ale, which he thrust into Fern’s unsteady hands.

Snuffling grief instead of thanks, she returned to her hovel.

She did not want to eat the bread or drink the broth and ale. She felt that a violation had taken place. She had been hurt in some way for which she had no words and no understanding. She took nothing which was not granted to her. But as soon as she reentered her dwelling the brindled pig fixed his eyes upon her. He could scarcely lift his head; he clearly had no strength to stand. His exhaustion was as profound as hers, and as fatal. The danger that he would starve had been only briefly postponed. And the scabs and splotches which marked his hide were plain signs of illness rather than injury. Yet he fixed his eyes upon her—the one blind, the other flawed with silver—and she found that she could not refuse to eat. Did she not love pigs? And had he not come to her in his last need?