Surely this was the heart of the universe, the place of perfect centeredness. As I drew close to it I felt myself on the verge of a breakthrough into unimaginable abundance. At this point, the Three Lordly Ones had achieved immortality by becoming gods to us. And wherever they had gone, in their infinite and godlike wisdom they must be aware of me. Would surely reach out and gather me in, now that I was here. Would lift me up—
“Stop that, you beggar, what are you doing here?!” Harsh hands grabbed me, pinioning my arms behind my back. Angry faces surrounded me. Eyes were flashing, mouths were stretched wide with yelling, but I hardly heard. Kept concentrating on the Three, calling desperately to them to come back to me, feeling almost confident, almost safe, for the first time in my life. Had got so far against such odds, I.
Then someone hit me a mighty blow on the side of the head and I tumbled off the world.
When I woke up, I was lying in a stone cell bedded with filthy straw and slimy refuse. No head ever hurt worse than mine. The room was dark and stinking, worse than any mountain hut. Shut my eyes tight and willed myself to be somewhere in the silvery vault of the sky with my true people. When I opened my eyes again, however, I saw only a scruffy rodent no more than a handspan from my face, watching me with dispassionate assessment.
Sat up abruptly and the creature scurried back, but not very far. A quick inventory of myself showed they had taken my purse, my bow, and my quiver—but somehow overlooked that last arrow, the one I had thrust through my belt. My ragged tunic must have concealed it.
If I possessed magic, this was the time to prove it—and legally, too, for was this not self-protection? Flung my arrow straight at the rat, like a killing-dart. Saw it hit the mangy hide and bounce off harmlessly, falling into the straw.
Where was the magic?
On hands and knees I crept forward and reclaimed my only weapon, while the animal watched me. In dark corners, his littermates chittered and rustled the straw.
Footsteps on stone in the corridor, and the heavy door grated open. Someone thrust a lamp into my cell and an old woman hurried forward to bend over me. The door was shut behind. Even in the dim light I recognized her as one of the twins, the salt peddlers from the fair.
“You’re accused of invading the shrine, Weenarin,” she said in her cracked voice. “It’s a serious charge, the priests want you executed. Is there anyone you can send for who will pay for your freedom?”
Pay for my freedom. The mountain folk? No, I had no resources with fat bribes in their pockets. I had nothing at all. It seemed even the Three Lordly Ones were not interested in me. That had been a childish fantasy, I saw now; this prison cell and the hungry rats were the reality.
She saw my shoulders slump. “I thought not, lad. You must do for yourself, as we all do. You are alone among strangers.” An odd look flitted among the wrinkles of her folded face, and she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Alone as the Three Lordly Ones were when they arrived here, no doubt, and had to depend upon their wits and skills to survive.”
My face must have mirrored surprise, for she cackled a laugh. “Did you think they just sank to earth and were immediately hailed as gods? How little you know of life, Weenarin! Don’t you suppose it more likely they met a hostile reception at first? Judge by your own experiences. They were strangers and very different from the natives; they were probably attacked and captured, imprisoned maybe, and had to disguise themselves very cleverly in order to escape. And then the authorities, to cover their embarrassment at being outwitted, may have surrounded the advent of the Three with all sorts of supernatural tales, which became myth and miracle in time. ...” She clamped her jaws on her words like a trap snapping shut. Instinctively, I understood the danger there must be in telling tales so at variance with the dogma of the priesthood.
The old crone leaned closer to me, thrusting her face into mine until I shrank back, which made her laugh again. “You think I am ugly, Weenarin? This wrinkled old visage displeases you?”
Kindness curved my tongue. “Your face is the map of your years,” I told her. “The landscape of a life is an honor to its wearer.”
She straightened up. “Come,” she said briskly. “It is time to leave this place.”
“But how? I am imprisoned for a crime—will they just let me walk out of here?”
“Of course not, no one ever
lets
anyone do anything. Just bring that arrow and follow me.”
Set in the door of my cell was a narrow window, high up, just large enough for the face of a guard to peer through. The old salt peddler went to this door and knocked, and when the guard looked in she told him, “I’m through now, let me out.”
“Is this a relative of yours after all?” the guard asked. “Will you pay for his release?”
She snorted. “Of course not, he’s a mere nobody from the mountains. I was mistaken.”
The bolt was drawn and the door swung open just enough to let an old woman walk out; a tall, gaunt woman wrapped in a voluminous cloak. She did not wait for me or offer any suggestions.
A slender fellow, crouched down, could almost hide himself in her shadow. Made my decision and scurried after her, squeezing through the doorway with her body between me and the guard, shielding me. The corridor was almost as dark as the cell had been, and we had left the lamp behind on the straw. The guard did not realize what had happened until we were several paces beyond him. But then he let out a yell that would bring skeletons out of their graves.
The old crone darted forward, carrying me in her wake like a whirlwind. There were men rushing after us, but she dodged this way and that, down twisting passages and through narrow openings that I never noticed but that the old woman found unerringly. Like rats in their warrens, she seemed perfectly familiar with the dank stone fortress where I had been imprisoned. She knew it better than any of our pursuers, in fact, for when we at last emerged from some abandoned storeroom into a courtyard overgrown with brambles, there was no one behind us. Far off, I could hear the ringing of alarm bells, but we were free.
Wanted to express my gratitude to the old woman, but she shrugged it off. “The oppressed learn many skills,” she said. “And sometimes we are able to use those skills to help a fellow creature. It is nothing, only common decency.”
Common decency. Never before had I heard that phrase, and it pierced me like an arrow.
In the clear light of day I could see that she was very pale and her breathing was labored, and I felt guilty for having put an old body to such strain. But she refused to rest. She set off in a westerly direction without looking back, and I trotted like a dog at her heels because I had nowhere else to go.
“How will you care for yourself now?” she asked after a while. “Your goods were confiscated.”
“In my bedroll—which was poor and shabby and not worth taking, I hope—I still have a supply of the gray feathers I used to fletch arrows,” I told her. “If I can get them, surely I can find wood for shafts. My bronze arrowheads are gone, but there is flint in the hills and I know how to chip it into arrowheads if necessary.”
She turned and looked at me, and her eyes twinkled in their network of wrinkles. “You have a fallback position, I see. I like that, it speaks well for your thought processes. There is a deserted farmstead not too far from here where you may hide, if you like, while I return to the fair. Salt must be sold, business must be done—you understand. My sister and I can send you a little food later, and we will get the mercer to see if he can find your bedroll and feathers. If you are fortunate, no one has bothered with them.”
“Never been fortunate, I”, was my reply. A miner’s son, no sky-born princeling ... but then I thought of the gray feathers and the singing arrows and bit my lip. Thought of the old woman and her brave kindness and regretted my words.
That night I lay shivering in a half-collapsed cow byre, hidden from the nearest road by a stand of woods but close enough that I could hear the clatter of hooves and the frightening sounds of what might have been a search party looking for an escaped prisoner. Sometime before dawn I finally fell into a troubled sleep, and when I awoke the wall-eyed mercer was standing over me, with my bedroll tucked under one arm and a pail of broth in his hand.
He watched in amusement as I gulped down the soup. “I’ve forgotten what an appetite a growing lad has,” he remarked. “It’s been so long. ...”
When my belly was tight and round as his, I put down the empty pail and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. He had squares of fine linen for mouth-wiping, but he did not offer me one. “Now that you’re fed and have your belongings, such as they are, I must leave you,” he told me. “I must be getting back to the fair.”
Back to the fair. Rested now, and a little less afraid, I, too, yearned to go back to the fair! To stand for just one moment more at the sacred shrine and feel the sweet glory roiling through me; to believe myself to be part of something splendid instead of a mere troll from the mountains, outlawed now and futureless as well. But I said nothing of this. Pride was strong in me and would not ask for pity.
Perhaps that is why he hesitated before leaving me there. If I had asked for help, would he have abandoned me? Will never know, but sometimes I wonder.
“Weenarin,” he said at the entrance to the byre, with one foot already out into the sunshine, “I’ve been thinking. You have a skill, and—perhaps—some small gift for magic, though I confess I do not know exactly what sort of magic it is or how it should be used. I cannot take you back to the fair with me, for you would be arrested on sight and I as well, for harboring you. But in less than a ten-day the salt peddlers and I will be returning to our own valley, many days distant from here.
“We are not much bothered there by the authorities, the sheriffs and tax assessors and their ilk. It is a pleasant place, but those of us who live there have to work hard to maintain ourselves. You know how to work hard, though, don’t you?”
Nodded. Could not trust myself to speak.
“Very well, then. If you can continue to hide yourself successfully until it is time for us to pack up and leave, you can come with us if you like. We can use a good fletcher. We don’t offer you more than you’re willing to get for yourself, you understand. But the only other option you have is to try to get back to the mountains, and that would be a hard journey for a lad alone, impoverished, and with a price on his head.”
This was not the choice of my dreams, the radiant beings in their silvery palace, holding out a hand to their true son and asking forgiveness for having left him behind. Offering luxury, offering godhood. No. Nothing I had come to the fair expecting had happened as I’d imagined it would. Instead I had been robbed, imprisoned, and brushed with an odd touch of magic over which I had no control, and now I was offered a life of continuing labor among strangers in a strange place.
No sky-born lordling, I—and I sneered at myself for ever thinking otherwise. The mountains that had made my tribe hard and bitter had failed in their duty to toughen me; had left me with a burden of compassion for injured birds and old women. So probably I should not try to return there; was not fit to live among stronger folk.
That is how Weenarin came to be in this caravan heading west, muffled to the eyes in a salt peddler’s cloak, carrying a heavy load of fabric bolts belonging to a potbellied mercer. In my bedroll lie the gray feathers, sleek and shining, and when we reach the distant valley I will make arrows and put them into the service of these people who have befriended me.
Do not know what I can do for them; do not know if the very arrows I make may not someday turn against me, for they have a strange power beyond my understanding. But at least I will be with three friends who are not bitter by nature, though they are as ugly as I am, a scrawny mountain troll. And mayhap I will grow to be content in their company. Though not happy; I do not expect to be happy, since I am not who I dreamed of being.
Born a fletcher, I.
The noise and bustle of Ithkar Fair went unnoticed at the rickety stand where Corielle the jeweler was finishing a bracelet of bronze. She sensed several people approaching, and an acrid, unfamiliar reek met her nose. In the next stall, Daramil the baker muttered, “So the priests of Thotharn have added alchemy to their other wickedness?’’
The voices of the priests of Thotharn came closer; one, hard and jovial, nagging at the edge of familiarity. The priests appeared only as a blur to Corielle, who was nearly blind, but she listened as she checked the bracelet over with practiced fingers. Feeling a slight roughness, she picked up an abrading tool and began to work. The priest of Thotharn spoke, sourly.
“That is what I mean, brothers. The places that could be given to master craftsmen are now cluttered up with the likes of this bedraggled wench, who has somehow managed to lay her hands on some craftsman’s tools—the fair-wards must be as blind as she is to let her get away with it!—and sits aping the motions she must have once seen her master make, in hopes the ignorant will mistake her trash for honest trinkets. Were it our fair”—the voices trailed off as they moved on—“we’d deal with her as with a common beggar. ...”
She heard another voice, soft, answer but could not distinguish the words. If only I had my sight again, she thought uselessly, and touched minds with the scarlet bird on her shoulder. “Go look, Pawky. Bad smell, angry voice. Go see.” The bird flew off, squawking. Then she indulged the luxury of anger.
She had once been a slave. Only now, two years later, could she call it “the fortunes of war.” Her poverty was evident and, in any great marketplace, despised. But her work was good, and slowly the discerning would come to see it, for she had been bred to the trade and knew her worth.
Pawky flew past the priests, and one tried to swat him out of the sky. “That trinket wench’s pet,” the hard voice said impatiently. Through Pawky’s mind Corielle could see an image of herself and her bird, a sorry contrast to a soft, silken lady in a soft, silken room, with a tiny golden bird in a tiny golden cage, cagebirds both. Pawky flew past the man’s face, and then Corielle was sure who he was.