The Tale of Oriel (27 page)

It wasn't long at all before a Wolfer called up, and waved. Oriel and Griff, with Jorg between them, took a slanted easy path down the hill to the garden. The woman was on her knees, weeping, with two little children hiding in her skirts. Her belly was swollen out with a third child. Her hair, and that of the two children, was black as a moonless night, softly black like night clouds. The woman's hair, neither bound nor combed, flowed over her bent shoulders like a nighttime river.

Rulgh reached down to lift a lock of her hair from her shoulder, and to rub it gently in his fingers, as if it were a cloth of wonderful weaving.

The woman looked up at Oriel, and at Griff. Her mouth was slack with fear and trickled blood. “Help us,” she asked. “Help me. These children, my children—”

Oriel had seen too many women, heard too many women's cries, to feel anything. Still, a sickness gripped his belly.

Watching his face, the woman ceased her weeping. “How can I save their lives?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“There is no way,” Oriel answered her. “Nor your own,” he said, although she hadn't asked that.

She nodded, and rose up, gathering her children under her arms. “Then tell me this: How can I ask him to kill us quickly, and at once?”

Oriel had thought he was beyond where pain could touch him. “There is no way,” he said again, and in anger. He turned to Rulgh, speaking in the simple language they had developed between the two of them.
“Fruhckman,
to kill children.
Fruhckman,
a woman—aye, and so great with child—”

Rulgh's face grew red. “Not so. Is not so.”

Oriel looked into his captor's eyes briefly, then turned his head to spit onto the ground. Rulgh would know his meaning. Oriel hoped only that, in the slaughter that would follow, he would be the first on Rulgh's sword.

“Aye,” Griff's ragged voice came from Oriel's shoulder. Griff hadn't spoken in days. “Is so,” he said now.

Rulgh raised his sword over his head and howled, like a wolf. At the sound, the children whimpered into their mother's skirt, and one of the Wolfers moved to pull a child loose, but Griff let Jorg fall to the ground so that he could stand between the man and his prey.

“Not so. Rulgh not so, not
fruhckman
,” Rulgh cried aloud, telling the news to the empty sky. “Feed us,” he said to the woman.

She was afraid again. She looked to Oriel. “Tell him, can you tell him? The armies have destroyed the good of this farm.”

“Are you alone?” Oriel asked her.

“My husband went to battle—for the silver piece they give to every man who joins an army.”

“Which army?”

She shook her head. It made no difference to her, which banner he fought under. “He gave me the coin, but I buried it. Should—?”

Oriel shook his head quickly. “Don't—”

She understood him without explanation. “My man will be dead by now, I think. And I will be glad to join him. But for the children, here, I'd—”

“Can you feed us?”

“Poorly.”

“Do so. Can you wash this man's wound?”

She shrugged. “Why should I?”

“For your children's lives, as may be,” Oriel said.

“You said there was no way.”

Oriel shrugged, and wondered at her stubbornness to have no hope. “Perhaps even among the Wolfers there is.”

Rulgh had hovered impatiently over the talk. “What?” he demanded now. “What?”

“Woman will feed you,” Oriel answered him.

Rulgh glared at him but did not ask why it took so many words to say so little.

The Wolfers gave Jorg the straw mattress and then dropped to the floor. Even the Wolfers were tired out. They talked among themselves in low voices.

The farmwife made a pot of watery turnip and parsnip soup, and brought out half a round of bread. Oriel kept close, should she need an extra hand as she served the Wolfers. Griff stayed outside with the children, who seemed to recognize him as one who would not push them away.

From what Oriel could understand, there were two things bothering the Wolfers. First, their dead. He couldn't tell if it was the loss of the men or if it was that they had been abandoned at the site of the battle. Then, second, something about gold troubled them.
Malke,
that was a word they kept using next to the word for gold. It was Malke that really worried them.

The next day found the Wolfers rested and ready to go on. Jorg, however, couldn't leave his bed. The farmwife fed him water from the stream, and cooled his face with damp cloths. They would stay, Rulgh said, until they knew Jorg's fate. Meanwhile, their eyes often went to the wife, and Rulgh's hands often went to her mass of black hair, but he forbade any man to take her for his desire.

On the second day, while Jorg sweated and mumbled on the bed, Rulgh sent his two men off to the west, to search for game or food, and himself took Oriel into the hills east of the farmstead. They soon found, and ran down, a goat that had either been turned loose to wander in the woods, or had escaped into the woods. But the point of the hunt was for Rulgh to take Oriel's opinion of how the Wolfers might get the gold they had failed to win in battle.

Oriel tried to explain to Rulgh how he might have fought the battle at the mines. Rulgh asked Oriel what the chances of a second attack might be and wasn't angered when Oriel said it would undoubtedly fail. “Go like a thief,” Oriel advised again.

Rulgh was reluctant. Wolfers were bold. Wolfers weren't like foxes, to steal in and steal out in the secret parts of night. Wolfers were warriors.

Oriel shrugged, and turned away from his captor.

Rulgh asked if one of his Wolfers, or he himself, could disguise himself as a slave, and betray the mines from within.

Oriel asked if the man was ready to be branded with fire, and—should the plan fail—live out his life as a slave in the mines.

Rulgh shook his head. He would not use a Wolfer so.

Oriel shrugged, and turned away.

Rulgh said, they would take Oriel, sell him to the soldiers, let him then betray from within.

Oriel knew who he would betray.

Rulgh watched his face and said, No, they would take Griff, sell Griff.

Oriel hid his feelings.

Rulgh watched Oriel's face and said that Oriel would stay with the woman and Jorg and children. When Rulgh returned with the gold, then they would deliver the year's booty to Malke.

“Malke?” Oriel asked.

“King,” Rulgh answered. He waved his hand in the direction of the white-clouded horizon. “Days away. In city, Malke waits. Wolfers give King,” Rulgh held up his two hands, then gathered the fingers of one hand into the opposite hand, “from two, one hand.”

Oriel understood now. “Take me to the mines. Not Griff.”

“No.” Rulgh turned away.

“I am stronger.”

Rulgh turned back. “Yes, stronger. Strong to keep here, or Griff—” He made a chopping motion with his hand.

Anger burned at Oriel's belly. “If you harm Griff—if anything—I will have revenge,” he told Rulgh.

Rulgh didn't know the word. “Revenge?”

“Aye, revenge.” Oriel raised his bound hands to his own throat and drew them across, like a blade. “I am dangerous,” he said, and made the sign.

Rulgh laughed out loud.

THE THREE WOLFERS, AND GRIFF,
left the next morning. After that, Oriel awaited their return day after empty day. He worked the garden and snared rabbits when they had picked clean the goat carcass. Rulgh had untied his hands, knowing that as long as there was a question of Griff's safety Oriel would do Rulgh's will.

When Jorg died, Oriel and the woman carried him to the hillside, and buried him. They left Jorg his clothing, and his boots, too, lest Rulgh should accuse them of robbing the dead Wolfer. The woman thought Oriel should at least trade his trousers for Jorg's heavier pair, but Oriel—mindful of the beryl he wore hidden at his back—refused. Day followed long day, and still the Wolfers, with Griff, did not return.

The woman knew better than to try to escape, or send her children away; for Oriel must stop her. But he promised her, “If they return and all is well, if you can stay behind when we go north, then take your silver coin and go south. Go to Selby, on the coast,” he told her. “Find the Saltweller. Ask for help from his daughter, Tamara. Tell Tamara, it is Oriel who sends you, and Griff.”

“Griff with his sad eyes,” the woman said. “You, Oriel, who seem kind but you are cruel. Which of you was this girl's sweetheart?”

Oriel had no time for such questions. “Can you find your way to the sea?” he asked the woman.

“I can try. For the children.” She turned away, to return to the garden, where the weeds grew abundantly. Her great belly went before her like a sail filled with wind.

“He has spared you,” Oriel reminded her.

“I understand,” she said, her back to him. “I would be a fool not to be grateful. Or to you, also.”

“It would be dangerous to be grateful to me,” Oriel said. He looked away to the south, where long days ago the Wolfers, and Griff, had disappeared into the trees. He looked away to the north, where those clouds lay—as always—along the horizon. “Those clouds, do they never move closer? Do they never bring rain?”

“Those are the mountains, not clouds. Farther away than even the Wolfers' realm, they say, and impassable. The mountains are covered in snow all the year round, so high are they, if you can believe the stories. If you can believe the stories, a man who crosses the mountains, and lives, will find himself in a land where the soil is rich and the law is strong, under one King, and the people prosper, for they work year after year in peace.”

“I've heard of a Kingdom,” Oriel said.

“Aye, there are always tales,” she said.

THE THICK LONG ARMS OF
the onions waved in their rows in the garden before the Wolfers, and Griff, returned. Four had gone and four returned, one bent over with the weight of the sack he carried on his back, and the other three walking upright.

Rulgh made his proud greeting to Oriel. “We are stealers, and have gold. We have no men dead. Malke not complain of Rulgh, not with much gold. Now we eat.”

Griff twisted his shoulder to let the heavy bag roll off, and Oriel turned him around. Griff's back was crisscrossed with scars. The crescent on his cheek Oriel had been ready for, but these puckered lines—as if he had been whipped until the skin began to peel away from the meat beneath. “What is this, Griff?” he asked.

Griff shook his head.

“No, tell me,” Oriel said.

Griff wouldn't speak.

“If slave,” Rulgh explained, still smiling. “A slave is whipped.”

“The soldiers whipped you? Why?” Oriel asked.

“It doesn't matter,” Griff said. Griff moved now like a man who knows his own strength and knows his own strength is enough. His eyes, as the woman said, were sad, a dark sad brown.

“Not soldiers. Wolfers. I,” Rulgh said. His eyes were bright with his own cleverness. “To make soldiers
tewkemans.
To believe Griff slave. Slave run away from master.”

Oriel was a man of ice, burning cold. “I warned you,” he said.

Rulgh ignored him. Rulgh didn't even dismiss Oriel, he just ignored him. It was all Oriel could do to keep his heart and eyes icy cold because he couldn't even make good his own word.

Rulgh had taken from Oriel even the power to keep his own word. He had whipped Griff hard enough to leave ruts in Griff's back, and counted himself clever to do that. There was another reason why Rulgh had whipped Griff; he wanted Oriel to know that Oriel was powerless.

But Oriel would never accept that knowledge. It was false, and Rulgh was false, and Rulgh would come to understand that.

“It's done now,” Griff said. “Finished.”

“We eat,” Rulgh said, and clapped Oriel on the shoulder in celebration of his victories. “We rest, one day, two, and then go home. Jorg?” Rulgh asked.