Tale of Elske (17 page)

Beriel voiced their opinion. “It's not enough, it's not—”

Elske agreed. “If we were to mix it with some wine?”

“Or snow, we can get snow by the window, and melt—?” Beriel suggested.

In the end they did both. Elske sent to the kitchen for a second goblet of wine, and Beriel set her first goblet on the stove to melt the snow she'd filled it with. Also, Beriel cut across the tips of Elske's fingers, and they gained more blood that way, and shared the same pain, and took the same comfort from thrusting their fingertips into the snow. And in the end the results were satisfactory. Melted snow thinned out the liquorish smell of the wine and blood brightened the color of the stain.

“Now we have a few more weeks,” Beriel announced, satisfied.

“And there will be blood in plenty at the birth,” Elske promised. But that did not cheer her mistress.

“It has been too long,” Beriel spoke in a low voice, “since I knew how things are for my land. I remember this from the last Courting Winter, how I am imprisoned in ignorance. Northgate gives generously from the storerooms when his people need, and Arborford, too, cares for his, but there are royal lands that can be gripped hard by winter, and my father is too sick and greedy to remember how the people starve, and die of cold on their holdings.”

“These Trastaders know how to prepare against winter's siege,” Elske observed, but Beriel was lost in her own thoughts and memories: “The people of the Kingdom fear the royal house, and fear not our strengths but our weaknesses. But they do not fear me. They long to have me for their Queen,” Beriel said, proud and sure. “If I claim my rightful place.”

“And your brother?”

“Guerric is like my father, greedy, and his appetites will not learn patience. His advisors use him for their own gains—”

“These are they who raped you?”

“No, those were—”

Beriel ceased speaking, studied her hands where they were clasped together now to halt their bleeding. “I will not think of that,” Beriel said. “When the time comes for my revenges, then I will think of those cousins. And that brother. Leave me now,” she ordered.

Elske withdrew to the antechamber. There, she added the bloodied cloths to the accumulated shifts and nightdresses left for washing, and considered her own plans.

At the next Assembly, Elske left the hall while the Adeliers, the overseeing Vars, and all the servants watched the antics of little dolls on strings, who moved and spoke like people, quarreling, fighting, playing tricks upon one another, and stealing one another's prizes and women. She took her cloak and slipped out into the marketplace, where snowflakes floated down through the windless air.

She hurried down towards the docks and Var Kenric's storehouse, where she hoped to find Taddus, or at least leave word that she had need to meet with him. As it happened, Taddus was there that afternoon, walking about the shadowy warehouse with a long book in his hands as he counted up stacked bolts of cloth and recorded their number. He was surprised to see her. “Alone?” he asked, welcoming, but she answered him without pleasantries. “Is Idelle with child?” She could spare no time for niceties.

“No,” Taddus said. “I've a barren wife. Barren, and grief-filled. If I'd known—”

Elske interrupted him. “If I were to bring you a babe?”

“Who has done this to you?” Taddus asked, and Elske shook her head, impatient.

“If I were to bring a babe, a newborn, would Idelle take it? Would you accept such a child, if I could give you my word that the blood in its veins was as good as yours?”

Now Taddus hesitated. This Elske gave time, however little time she had to spare here. Behind her, in the shop-front, people moved about and sometimes spoke, buying and selling.

“Yes,” Taddus decided.

“Idelle will need to prepare for a babe, as if she approached its birthing,” Elske told him. “It must seem to be your own child you raise. You will want a cow, for milk, or a goat.”

“Not a wet nurse?”

“The fewer who suspect, the safer is your secret. If I can, I will bring the babe to you before the end of winter. I have heard,” Elske told him now, “how a barren woman's womb may open up with the joy of a child to raise, not her own but as good as her own. I have seen her womb now welcoming to the man's seed where before it was stony ground.”

That hope eased the last of Taddus's doubts. “My house will be ready,” he told Elske. He asked, “And when—?”

“I can't be certain,” she said. “I think between the next full moon and the moon after. I must return now, before I'm missed.”

“Alone?” he asked again.

“I am safe, alone. For the brief distance, safe enough.”

Elske had already decided to go out in man's clothing, when she went out alone, if she went out alone again, even in daylight. She would make herself a set of trousers, and that would be all the disguise she would need under her winter cloak, a shirt and trousers. She could tie back her hair, as many men did. Nobody would notice a solitary cloaked boy on the winter streets. But what if the child were wailing at the time?

How could she keep the child from wailing, when she carried it out of the villa on Logisle and across the bridge to Var Kenric's house on Harboring?

If it were night, Elske thought, there would be none to hear a wailing child, muffled as the cries would be beneath her cloak, against her breast. These winter days were mostly night, and that was in her favor. But if there were danger of discovery, then she must strangle or smother it. Lest Beriel be betrayed.

All of this went through her mind in a flash as brief as sunlight on water, as she wished Taddus farewell and he thanked her, and she returned to the Council Hall and the assembled Adeliers, and to her mistress's service.

DAY FOLLOWED DAY, EACH DAY
growing longer in such small steps that it was impossible to be sure that there was any difference between them. Like them, Beriel's belly grew imperceptibly.

Beriel was impatient for the birth to be completed. Once the child was gone, done with, and the afterbirth burned away in the stove, “then I can think of my return,” she said. “If I live.” Anger burned in Beriel more brightly, and shone out of her eyes, too, the closer the babe came to its birth. The Adels stood back from her anger, asking her, “Why so imperious, Lady?” And their menservants sought out Elske to ask, “Little lovely, can't you sweeten your mistress's disposition?”

Neither Beriel nor Elske cared to answer such questions.

The questions Elske did answer were those Beriel asked. “How do I know when birth has begun?” and Elske explained about the waters, breaking and flowing. “And that is all? Why do women moan so about it?” Beriel asked, and Elske spoke of the slowly closing gap from one cramping pain to the next, through much of which a woman might continue at her daily life—until the end, when a woman could think only of pain, and the desire to push the child out into the world. “How do you know these things?” Beriel demanded.

“My grandmother—the women came to her for their births. Our house was the Birth House.”

“Was your grandmother, like you, not so strengthless as she looked?”

“Do I look strengthless?” Elske asked.

“You look of such cheerful heart, people think you guileless, which they take for weak. You smile as if this was a world without cruelty, hunger, injustice, ill luck, a world with neither fear nor shame. You smile like someone who is not life's prisoner.”

“When I can so easily die, how can I be thought a prisoner?”

“As the world sees things,” Beriel began, and then stopped.

They had lingered at table after their meal. Beriel had eaten little and drunk two goblets of red wine. Outside, a thick snow fell steadily. There would be no Assembly that day.

“As the world sees things,” Beriel began again, and again didn't finish her sentence. She rose from the table and walked over to the door, opened it and for a long time stood with her back to Elske, looking out into the falling snow.

Elske sat still. She waited to hear her mistress speak the thought that had moved her to open the door.

When Beriel at last turned around, her blue eyes shone as if there were not a gathering darkness outside, and a confining snow. “It's starting. I think it is— Now it's gone again, but—You said, the pains would come wide apart at first, and these—but I am not at peace,” Beriel said. “The King my father is an old man, ill, and if he should die while I'm sent away here into the exile of courtship—”

Beriel fell silent again. Elske could not know if it was a birth pain that silenced her, or her own thoughts.

“A dead woman is no danger to a living King,” Beriel said. “I must be careful to live.”

Elske gathered their plates onto the serving tray.

They returned to the bedchamber, but Beriel still did not sit. She paced slowly from door to window, and back again, and back again, as steady as the sea against its shores.

“The Wolfer women make no sound?” she asked once.

Elske nodded. If the labor had begun, then she needed to prepare for many hours of sleeplessness. The first child might curl up smallest against his mother, but he was also the most reluctant to leave her. The first labor was the hardest, longest; but not necessarily the most dangerous. Unless, of course, the baby lay wrong in its mother, lay feet down and head up, for example, or crossways; those births were the most difficult. Whether first or not, such births were often the last.

“This Guerric, this brother, is only a year younger than I am. A year and a little less, my mother having been in a great hurry to produce a son. And heir, as if she did not wish me to inherit the throne. They make no sound at all?”

“Mewlings, sometimes, like a kitten,” Elske said. “Later, all panted—” She tried to remember everything, and was about to mention groanings when Beriel announced, “What any other woman can do, that can I do. And man, too—but that's not the question here, is it?”

“No, my Lady,” Elske smiled. Then she thought to tell Beriel, “Among the Volkaric, to become King one must win the throne away from all others, in battle, after the Volkking dies—”

“And the Death Maiden with him.”

“Yes, then. For the Strydd, the captains strip naked, except for their swords.”

“Naked?”

“Clothed in their strength and courage, why should they need more?”

“The captains fight until one has conquered all the rest?”

“Yes. Then all serve the new Volkking, and all belongs to him.”

Beriel paced, and every now and then stopped to lean against something, concentrating on her labor.

“They do then make some small sounds?” she asked.

“My Lady, if you will be soundless that will keep you safest. And the babe will—”

“I've told you, I will know nothing of this babe.”

“Yes, my Lady,” Elske said. She explained to Beriel, “I can tell them you are ill, but to keep you safe we must give no suspicion of what illness it is that keeps you in your chamber.”

Beriel agreed without argument. She paced, and said, “In a battle for the crown, I would stand the victor. Against my brother. Guerric plies his sword as if he were a strengthless girl, with a girl's cowardly heart. He keeps his horse to a trot, lest he fall off. He loves sweet cakes better than his land. He isn't fit to be King, and yet he is the King's preferred heir.”

“A man who brings others to rape his sister, that man isn't fit to be King,” Elske said. “Even were he a brave and strong swordsman, he would not be fit.”

“Neither, I think, is that man fit who drags a girl child behind him into death,” Beriel remarked.

“It is the way of the Volkaric that the Volkking take a maiden to serve him in his death, and offer him her body for his comfort in Death's halls. Is it the way in your Kingdom that a Prince should lack heart in fighting? And seek to shame his blood sister?”

There was no answer. Beriel waited out a pain, then said, “I have another brother, and sisters, and they are not poisoned as Guerric is, with envy and fear of me. I have a good brother, Aidenil.” Beriel smiled, thinking of this brother. “My sisters, too, are gentle and obedient. Only in Guerric does ambition rage.”

“And in you, also, my Lady.”

“Do you say I'm no better than he?” Beriel demanded, displeased.

Elske said, “I say nothing of better.”

“And why should I not be Queen? And is not revenge the action of a Queen?”

“Whatever you do will be the action of a Queen,” Elske said, and Beriel subsided. Later, in the deep night, as the pains came more swiftly, “My mother, who should have saved me, has always betrayed me,” Beriel said. She still refused to sit, or to lie on her bed. Elske knew that soon it would be good for her mistress to take off her gown, and good for Elske to take the white linens from off the bed—lest either be soiled in a manner that could not be explained away. Elske had already called for a bowl of water, as if for washing, and set it on the stove to heat. She had called also for a jug of wine.