Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (18 page)

“But to what end?”  The sheriff sat once more behind his
desk. The knight shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  “They would not speak to
me of it, not to tell me her words.”  He rubbed his eyes anxiously.  “My lord,
it’s my own sense of it, no more.  I know only that the farmers began staying
away from their fields soon after they began gathering at her door.  Of course,
without proof...”

“I see.”  Daerwin sat back in his chair and tapped the ends
of his fingers together.  “I see.”

*          *          *

The young woman moved easily in the ebb and flow of the
roadway, meandering aimlessly and yet making her way forward through the
milling farmers and merchants, hoping to catch a stray bit of conversation here
or an exclamation there, anything that might be of use.  But the crowd seemed
to drift and eddy from stall to stall in a thick silence.  But no, they were not
silent at all.  They spoke in an almost constant babble, yet oddly enough, none
of it touched on Chatka.

The streets still glowed with the copper of the
mid-Gathering sunset, and those who had come tonight would take advantage of
this Marketday atmosphere to bargain and barter until the last possible moment,
trading livestock, fruits and vegetables, tools, even sweets and brews they’d
brought from home.  Soon, right before the sun disappeared, they would close
their stalls and follow the rest to the witch’s door.

The village of Belen was no more than a tiny central
marketplace, one of several throughout Brannagh lands that had grown up along
the lords’ property boundaries.  Belen boasted a tanner’s shop and a forge
round the year and market stalls, usually empty, for traveling merchants and
for the farmers come Marketday.  Farms and houses clustered here and there
nearby and moved outward from the village along the roads toward the knights’
manors and castles.  Belen also had a few small shrines and humble sanctuaries,
the largest two belonging to Didian and B’radik, and both were curiously dark
and empty to her eye.

Yet tonight the little road was alive with farmers and their
kin.  From their numbers alone she was sure they came, not only from the
nearest farms of Sir Waydon’s lands but a few from the neighboring knights’
lands as well, some score of families.  All gathered here, just as the sheriff
had told her they would, all to hear the Verdura’s word, though sure he did not
expect so many.  The woman touched the edge of her thick hood with an unusually
long nail and quickened her pace.

Somewhere near, a dark-skinned boy wearing threadbare
breeches and a woolen cloak drawn up about his face likewise moved through the
crowds, not with the usual grace and speed of his kind but with the bobbling,
noisy step of the other farm boys his age.  He stopped occasionally at the
stands along the way to sample their wares and nodded amiably to any who hailed
him as he passed.  Like the woman, he moved relentlessly along the roadway,
sometimes staying just ahead of her, sometimes dropping behind, sometimes at
her very elbow, just as she had taught him.

She gestured “warning” to him and saw his slight nod.

No word of Chatka, nor the least trickle of what she might
speak tonight.  Not from a single soul.  Frustrated, the young woman sidled in
beside some old farmwives who were picking over the apples from a nearby
orchard, hoping to engage them in conversation.  “Early for apples,” she
offered, taking up the accents she heard around her.  “I’d not have thought
they were ready yet.”  She picked up one of the reddest of the apples and bit
into it.

“Aye,” spoke the man at the stall, who had just put a few
apples in another woman’s basket.  He looked the young woman over cautiously
before he accepted her coin.  “Bit to the tart but fine for pies and breads.” 
He saw her bite to the core and was suddenly very concerned, much more
concerned than he should have been.  “Mind you save the seeds, now.”

“Aye,” breathed one of the old women beside her.  “Or if you
like, you can give them to me.  I’ve never enough, it seems.”

Save the seeds?  Why would an orchardman be telling her to
save seeds, save to give them back to him?  But he did not seem interested in
them for himself, she saw, and she was even more puzzled.  She drew breath to
ask, but something in his expression told her that she would do better to keep
her silence.

Having finished her apple and given the whole core to the
grateful old woman, peculiarly enough the very one whose own basket was full of
apples, she continued along her way toward Chatka’s door.

The crowd clotted around an old, ill-kept shack of a house
with a sunken mossy roof and naught but mud-daubed rubble walls to hold it up. 
Behind this small house lay a few acres of unplanted land given over to tall
weeds and mildewed grasses, wet and paddied for rice but with no food grains
growing at all.  The house looked abandoned, though it could not be so.  No
light came from within, no fires, no candles.  With the sun dropping even now
below the rise of hills to the west, soon the house would disappear into the
darkness completely.

She turned, having seen through the corner of her eye a man
dressed to all outward appearances like one of the farmers except that the
hooded cloak he wore up about his face, though he’d taken pains to scuff it up
along the roadside, was of a finer cloth than any these women could hope to
weave.  So he’d decided to come after all, even after the sheriff dressed him
down.  She’d thought he might.  The young woman’s mouth curved into a grin, and
she worked her way toward him.

“Peace,” spoke the woman as he backed away from her
approach.  “You know this voice, Waydon.”

At once, the disguised knight’s expression relaxed.  “Gikka,
praise to B’radik.  I’d not dared to hope he would...”

“Save your noise,” she hissed, looking about at the crowd. 
They were well away from people now, and in the din of the place, they would
not be overheard.  Even so, she would not have the crowd know she was there,
especially not for his mindless gabbling.  She saw a quick flash of steel on
the edge of her vision that disappeared immediately; Chul had moved himself
nearer, and the flash of his hunting knife in the torchlight was his signal
that he was watching her back.  Satisfied, she turned her attention back to the
knight.  “Chatka?” she prompted quietly.

“Aye,” he breathed, nodding toward the hovel.  “That’s the
house they gave her as payment for her visions.  Methinks they’d give her their
very lands, an they could.”  He huffed.  “Then she could tell them pretty
stories from dusk until dawn.  There, the sun has just gone below.  She should
emerge presently.”

Gikka glanced back toward the dark doorway.  “Have you
watched afore now?”

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, still watching the
doorway and the crowd gathered there.  “Not this close; only from my own
doorstep.  Afraid they might know me.”

“But not tonight.”

He tugged self-consciously at his hood.  “Nay, not tonight,
not with so many others to draw their attention.”

A moment later, the wooden door to the tumble-down house
shuddered once, then again, and finally fell back into the darkness, and all
those gathered fell to silence.  They watched the blank doorway, each anxious
to be the first to catch sight of her tonight, each wanting to be the one to
raise a cheer.  Another moment passed.  Then another.

Gikka looked at Chul and tapped her nail once against her
hip.

The boy’s head jerked up in puzzlement.  Caution, again, but
this time...  He turned his head back to watch the door and looked over the
heads of the crowd.

No one moved, no one sneezed or coughed or laughed
nervously.  The crowd was drawn taut, a single animal being, malleable to the
Verdura’s touch and barely restrained.  And she had yet to present herself. 
Once she emerged, assuming she could wield it, the crowd would be a formidable
weapon in her hands against any outsiders.

A moment later, the witch woman shuffled from her doorway
carrying a few empty baskets which she dropped one after another across her
doorstep, a humble entrance for one so eagerly anticipated.  While she had yet
to look at the farmers directly, she seemed pleased by the size of the crowd
gathered there.  Gikka guessed the woman’s age to be somewhere about one
hundred twenty, not so very old by Bremondine reckoning, just past middle
years, yet the woman had gone to great pains to make herself appear quite
ancient.  Her thick hair was drawn back smooth against her head and pinned into
a tight blue-black bun, and the lines of her face appeared an almost moldy
webwork against her deep olive skin.  Yet her eyes held something very wild and
predatory.  Something very Verdura, to Gikka’s eye.

The farmers had seemed ready to cheer Chatka, but when she
finally appeared, oddly enough, they had not.  Instead they greeted her with
taut, reverent silence, a silence more dramatic because under it, the crowd
fairly burned with its own tension.

“Bread,” cried Chatka almost painfully.

A score of hands went up, one from each family of farmers,
and each bore a small loaf of bread, no larger than the scraps of dough Greta
threw to the dogs at Brannagh.  One by one they dropped these little loaves
into the basket and returned to their places.  Yet their tension, completely
unrelieved by this activity, had grown much stronger, and each jostled and
pressed and tried to keep his own loaf of bread in sight, as if it were a
favorite nephew at First Rites.

Once the last loaf of bread was dropped into the basket and
the last farmer had retaken his place, the old woman lifted the basket over her
head and plucked one piece of bread from it.  The air was charged with their
breathlessness, waiting for her to set the basket down once more, that they
might see whose loaf she had taken.  A single low cheer rose from somewhere in
the midst of the crowd where the lucky farmer’s fellows congratulated him, and
the tension dissipated.  Tradition blessed him tonight.

Chatka raised the bread over her head and cracked the little
loaf open.  Then she brought it down and stared into it.

“What is she doing,” whispered Sir Waydon.

“Gathering the tenday’s bread, I’d say.”  Gikka nodded with
a wry grin toward the basket.  “You don’t suppose she’d be giving all that
bread back, now, do you?”  She looked up to see him staring at her.  “Course
she’ll be giving them a show for it, telling them some obvious nothing as she
gets from ‘reading the grains,’ but her gain is the bread.”  She shook her head
with a sneer.  “Bloody amateur.”

“Hear me,” Chatka intoned, and her voice trembled
dramatically.  Entranced, the farmers who had begun to murmur between
themselves while she read the grains, fell silent.  “I see again the same, that
vision which, as I have foreseen, has brought so many of you to my door.”

“Bloody charlatan,” muttered Gikka.  “‘As I have foreseen,’
by Limigar...”

“I see fields unreaped, unthreshed and dusted with an early
frost.  Your own fields.  Yet a great threshing comes to all of Syon, and when
it comes, the grain that does not shun the chaff shall be lost itself.”

Gikka’s eyes narrowed.  So she’d “predicted” the plague,
aye, but any mother’s son knew by now that the priests’ disease had spread, and
would spread, far and wide over Syon an the priests did not learn to cure it
ere they died.  But to turn the hale against them as had it, to call them
unclean and unworthy chaff, this was none to the good.

“Open gates stand locked, and the Dragon turns his eye away,
for the scythe touches not his blood.  Thus you stand against your fear whilst
he hears only the murmur of unhallowed lips.”

Gikka’s brow rose in surprise.

“Touch not his feast, touch not his sin.  In time, those who
stand steadfast and pious shall be rewarded.  When you wake from your prayers,
your sacrifice will open winter’s secret stores to you, and none to pay the
Dragon.”

Sacrifice.  The rotting grains afield or some other to come
later?  She thought of Pegrine and frowned, repeating the message to herself
that she might convey it to the sheriff intact.  So Chatka was speaking openly
against Damerien then, and telling the farmers to abandon their fields. 
“There’s your proof,” she muttered to Waydon.  “Now it’s but to see the cause,
an she lets slip with it.”

“Seeds!” Chatka cried suddenly, and once again twenty hands
rose, each clutching seeds, and once again they filled one of her baskets. 
From where Gikka and Waydon stood, they could not see if all the seeds were
from apples or not; surely she had not called just for apple seeds, and if such
was her demand, why?  Now the woman poured them in a thick, dramatic black cascade
like curdled blood flowing over the step, and then she stood back.

Sir Waydon gasped.  “Oh, no.”

Gikka looked up at the knight sharply.  “How now, Waydon?”
she whispered.

He licked his lips and drew her aside, out of earshot of the
farmers who stood nearby.  “When I spoke with the farmers two days ago, I asked
them how they hoped to survive the winter without the harvest.”

“Aye,” said Gikka, narrowing her eyes.

Sir Waydon frowned.  “Of answer, the farmers said only this,
but to a man: ‘The gods will provide.’  Now, having heard her words, I begin to
understand.  Not all the gods,” he said a bit too loudly.  “Didian.”

“Keep a low tone,” she warned, looking back to see that none
of the farmers had looked up.  “Sure it’s not Didian; he takes his part at the
Gathering.”  She nodded toward Chatka.  “Winter belongs to Bilkar, and He’d not
feed wastrels...”  Not Bilkar the Furred whose own monks may only call upon him
once and pay for it with their lives.

Waydon did not hear her.  “Didian, Kanet perhaps, as well.” 
Sir Waydon shook his head.  “‘Winter’s secret stores.’”  He turned to watch the
farmers in amazement.  “Perhaps they hear in her words that Didian will grant
them a second warm season in winter.  ‘And none to pay the Dragon.’”  He looked
up again at Chatka.  “But only if they stand steadfast.”