The Gathering Storm (117 page)

“It’s lost?” The child’s voice quavered as the enormity of the accident struck home. “But we can’t replace an iron blade, Uncle. Can we?”

The man shook his head, unable to speak through his tears. He and the child went to the shore. Neither wore shoes or leggings. They waded through the reed-choked waters, the man pushing the stick along under the surface, the child groping through the vegetation.

“Where did it fall?”

“Ai, God! It happened so fast! What will we do? Ai, God. What will we do when the steward demands recompense?”

He stepped out from the trees.

The dog barked at once and trotted forward to greet him, snuffling into his hands as the man stood and pulled the child against his body, shielding it.

“What is it, Uncle?” cried the child. “Is that a wild beast?”

“It’s a man!”

“That’s not a man. It looks like a goblin!”

“It must be a beggar, child. God enjoin us to give bread to beggars.”

“Even if we’ve none to feed ourselves? What if he’s a thief or a bandit?”

“Hush, now. See how Treu greets him.” The man pushed the child behind him. He stood to his knees in the water, and from the safety of the pond hoisted the dripping brush hook handle so it could be seen he had something to use as a weapon. “Greetings, stranger. You’re welcome to our steading
if you’ve a wish for a hank of bread and a cup of sweetened vinegar.”

“Give me the handle,” he said as he approached. He held out his hand, and the man got the strangest look on his face, puzzled and wary at the same time, but as he waded into the water with Treu wagging his tail happily at his side, the laborer let him take the handle.

“I saw where it fell.” He thrust the handle into a stand of reeds, and after pushing it here and there for a little bit the stub jostled something hard. He reached into water made murky by all the wading. Groping through pond scum, his fingers skimmed over a curved blade.

“Here.”

The laborer wept when he lifted the hook out of the water.

“Bless you, Friend! Bless you! You have saved my family. Come, I pray you. Come with me to my home, and we’ll feed you, for you look sorely in need of feeding.”

“So I am,” he said wonderingly. The water had sluiced a layer of dirt off his fingers and arms, and he could see his nails grown long, packed with dirt under the cuticles where before he had merely seen an encrustation of filth formed in the crude shape of a hand. His bare thighs and chest were equally filthy. A scrap of grimy cloth concealed his hips. Otherwise he was naked.

What was he?

He lifted his head to stare at the man, thinking that the laborer’s gaze might tell him something he needed to know, but the other two had already clambered out onto the shore and the child kept its distance, although the dog seemed eager enough to accept his strokes and patting.

“Come,” said the laborer.

He led the way through feather grass whose golden heads were stippled with black. The ground had a moist, squishy feel under his feet, as if it never entirely dried out, but the dew on the grass had burned off and it was beginning to be hot and humid. They crossed into the woodland and walked on a well-worn path in glorious shade. Here the mark of human hands shaped the land; where larger trees had been chopped down for planks and logs, light speared into open spaces lush with saplings and shrubs. No fallen trees rotted and there weren’t
many branches on the ground either; the villagers had picked the ground clean for firewood. Some pigs rattled away over the ground, squealing.

“Pigs haven’t done well this year,” said the laborer, squinting after them. “Some of the sows went dry and there wasn’t a litter that half didn’t die though we did what we could to save them. It’ll be hard going this winter. Four of the steward’s cattle died over the winter beyond what was picked out for the Novarian slaughter. Two of the steward’s mares lost their foals, too.”

“My mam died just last week,” said the child. “She saw demons and they made her fingers and toes burn until she went crazy. So did the deacon and six other folk in the valley. It was witches what cursed them. They gave me and all the other kids a tummy ache for days, too, those witches. And my fingers got all cold.”

“Hush now, Brat.” He said the word fondly. “I beg pardon, Friend. We don’t mean to burden you with our troubles.”

“Was there a murrain among the cattle?” he asked, because he had a sudden unexpected memory of sheep with weeping hooves and a crying farmer who was set to lose everything, but he couldn’t recall how it had all fallen out.

“God forbid!” The laborer drew the Circle at his chest. “We’ve been spared that curse at least. We’ve had too much rain, and it’s been cold. This sickness that’s haunting the valley, that’s troubled us. But we’re no worse off than many other folks, I’d wager.”

“My dad died,” said the Brat kindly. “But that were two winters ago, when we hadn’t enough grain or stores to last all winter and the new lord didn’t bring more, not like the old one always done. So all our troubles didn’t just start this year!”

“That’s right,” agreed the laborer. “They started when the rightful heir was dispossessed by that greedy Lord Geoffrey, for he wanted the county to go to his infant daughter instead of the lord’s true son. That was when all our troubles started. Every one of them.”

Maybe the root shrugged up out of the ground and wrapped its tendrils around his foot and tripped him. Maybe his scattered thoughts skipped, jostled by these words, so that he stopped paying attention to the uneven trail.

He stumbled and went down hard on his knees, bruising his knees, his hands, and an elbow.

The child cried out. Treu barked, then came to lick him, and while he lay there half stunned and aching, he heard the laborer speak softly to the child.

“I’ve never seen Treu take to a man like that. Never.”

“And him such a wild beast!” whispered the child agreeably. “He stinks!”

“Hush, Brat.”

They did not want to touch him or get close enough for him to touch them. With a grunt, he sat back on his haunches, then rose, shaking himself as a dog shakes off water. He was indeed so filthy that dust and matter spattered onto the ground around him as water droplets might spray. They stepped away, and the laborer gestured awkwardly toward the trail and kept walking. It wasn’t difficult to keep up with them looking back every five steps, although he hurt all over. The fall had jarred him badly and his head throbbed; each step jarred more pain loose until he thought he was going to go blind.

The hamlet appeared where woodland ended in open ground striped with fields of rye and a trio of soggy gardens ringed by high fences to keep out deer, goats, and rabbits. Farther down, at the valley bottom, trees grew thickly along a small river’s winding banks. Three more dogs came running out to greet them; tails wagging and ears high, they swarmed around him and he patted them all.

“Where is this?” he asked, staring over the straggle of buildings.

“Shaden is what we call it. Just my father and his brother and sister and two cousins came out here thirty year back when they were young, with the permission of the count, and cut back the forest and tilled the high ground. I heard tell from the deacon, before the sickness took her, that the count—him who died just a few year back—had a new plow so strong it could cut through that good earth down at the bottom of the valley, but we’ve never heard tell of such since he died, God rest him. It’s said he meant to share out plows among the countryfolk, but the new lord hasn’t done so. That land would make good tillage. We had such a hard rain these past two year that the best soil got washed down to the river, and we
got black rot in the rye stores, and it come up in the grain again this year.”

“It’s my job to pick it out,” said the Brat cheerfully, “but I don’t get it all.”

The hamlet boasted five houses and one common stable in addition to six lean-tos, a chicken coop, and a broken-down corral missing half its fence, with the inside grown to weeds.

Every soul in the village turned out to see the marvel: a visitor. Even the old one—the Brat’s grandmother—got up from the bench on which she sat in the sun and hobbled over to examine him with the expression of a woman who has seen too much not to be skeptical of a gold coin pressed into her hand.

“This beggar did me a good turn,” said the laborer, “and I’ve promised him a bit of bread and something to drink in recompense.”

He went over to the corral and sat on a listing log. He was so weary. A passel of tiny children stood at a safe distance and stared at him, with an older girl keeping watch to make sure they didn’t venture—too close. The dogs scratched at the dirt before settling down at his feet. The adults seemed to be conferring among themselves, out of earshot, but the Brat lugged over a big ceramic pot sealed with a lid and a wide basket tipped over her head like a hat. She settled down on the ground near him and gestured to the other girl.

“Won’t you come sit by me, Lindy?” She smirked when Lindy shook her head and took a step back.

After setting the basket down beside her, she took the wooden lid off the pot to reveal grain. “It’s not gone down to the miller yet, but that’s a two-day walk,” she said as she ran her hands through the grain. “Uncle goes tomorrow.” She began to pick through the grain, tossing black kernels onto the ground. The dogs snuffled at them but did not eat. “Whew! This is a bad one!”

“Here,” he said, “let me.” He slid off the log before she could say more than a startled protest, and the watching children shrieked and scuttled backward, but the Brat only scooted away, not running, as he crouched beside the wide-mouthed pot. The top layer of grain was indeed contaminated by monstrous black kernels grown to twice the size of the
regular kernels. He sifted them through his hands into the basket, but the farther down he got, the cleaner the grain became until there wasn’t a trace of black rot.

“Look at that!” The Brat had slid closer by degrees and now she peered over his shoulder and whistled with awe. “Nary a bit wasted! That’ll be enough flour to get us through to harvest, after miller and lord take their tithe.”

“Brat!” Uncle called, and she hopped up, poured all the grain back into the pot, covered it, and hoisted it up to haul back to him.

Chickens came over, pecking for the discarded grain, but he shooed them away and swept dirt over the black grains. They looked evil to him, although he wasn’t sure why. He’d seen black rot before, just never so heavy. Indeed, staring through the hazy day toward the fields it seemed to him that the entire field was poisoned by black rot, as thick as flies on honey, and he heaved himself up and walked, weaving because he really was getting light-headed from hunger, out to the fields and down those long strips brushing his hands over the heads of rye. They tickled his skin. Black grains tumbled to the earth like rain.

Harvest tomorrow, or next week—wasn’t that what the girl had said? He couldn’t recall. The dogs followed him patiently down one strip and up the next and after a while he remembered that the villagers had promised to feed him and he wandered back through golden fields unstained by rot into the hamlet. Here he found a wooden platter waiting for him with a cup of sweetened vinegar that made his eyes open wide, a cup of onion soup, and an entire half a loaf of rye bread, very dry so probably some days old, but by soaking it piece by piece in the soup he softened it and gulped it down. It sat like a lead weight in his stomach, the vinegar fizzing and bubbling, the onion burning, and he was suddenly so tired that he had to lie down. He crawled over to the stables where he would feel more comfortable with the animals, but of course what animals the villagers kept were out grazing in the pastures, so he found a filthy pile of straw for his bed and slept.

THE griffins could take the cold, but they didn’t like the elevation, and despite the uncanny number of trees blocking the road and rockfalls whose shatter-trail had to be cleared before the wagons could pass, it was the griffins who slowed them down most.

“It were a warm, wet winter,” said their guide, an old Avarian man called Ucco who had crossed the pass at least fifteen times in the last twenty years, leading merchants out of Westfall and southern Avaria who had slaves, salt, and Ungrian steel to trade in northern Aosta. “That makes the avalanches worse, mind you. If it’s cold, it don’t melt. But it weren’t so bad earlier this year, for I crossed back in Quadrii with a Westfall merchant who’s been trading Ungrian slaves for Aostan spices and cloth. I don’t know where all this rockfall come from, or how these trees come to fall. It weren’t here two month ago.”

“Might there have been storms?” the prince asked. “We got hit by a dozen strong storms out of the south. I lost a dozen men, and saw a village flattened by wind.”

“Nay, not so I recall except that one thunder boomer in Cintre that blew a bit of snow on it off the peaks. But for that, it hasn’t rained much the last two months. See how the streams are low. Look at all that bare rock on the heights. Where’s the snow? That’ll bring drought, mark you. Drought this summer already, and drought this autumn, and worse to come if there’s not snow this winter.”

He was a voluble man accompanied by an exceedingly pretty granddaughter who seemed delighted to flirt with a noble prince who was, once again, without his wife. It was at times like this Sanglant missed Heribert most, but in truth Hathui proved a stronger fence; she had a hard gaze and a way of snorting with laughter that suggested amusement at the foibles of mankind.

“The men have cleared the trees away, my lord prince,” Hathui said now, riding up to him where he waited on the road. She eyed the granddaughter, rolled her eyes, and went
on. “Two were felled by axes. You can see the bite of a blade in their trunks.”

“Bandits?” he asked.

“No bandits up here, my lord,” said the old guide, “unless they’ve come north from Zuola because of hard times there. No man winters up here. That’s a death sentence.”

“The monks winter over at St. Barnaria’s Pass.”

“Well, they ain’t rightly men, are they? Clean-shaven like women—begging your pardon, my lord—and women can take the cold better, that’s for certain.” He patted his granddaughter fondly. She was a sturdily built girl of no more than fifteen or sixteen years with the thick buttocks and legs of a person who hikes and climbs every day. She smiled at Sanglant, displaying remarkably even, white teeth, sign of strong stock. Hathui snorted. He flushed and hastily turned his attention to other things, tilting back his head to survey their route.