Tale of Gwyn (24 page)

“Aye, I have,” she answered him.

“And have you heard the rumors?” He stood beside her and they both watched the dancers. He was a widower, she knew, with three young children in his house.

“I hear nothing but rumors,” she answered cautiously.

He continued as if she hadn't spoken. “There's not one of Earl Sutherland's sons left alive. Of all the six, not one. These are dangerous times.”

Gwyn nodded.

“The King has taken an army into the south. Will the trouble spread north, think you?”

“I hope not,” Gwyn said.

“But it could,” he told her. “Even if we don't have the battles, we'll have the soldiers, and the thieves. I have a good number of pigs, even after the winter.”

“Do you?”

“Aye, and I'll be taking my meat to the south to sell, if not this year the next. With the extra gold I'll increase my herd.”

The sky above Earl Northgate's City flamed red as the sun sank. The walls were outlined in red; they stood like black mountains. The figure of the hanged man was not visible from the field where they danced.

Am repeated, “Dangerous times. A woman needs a man's protection.”

Gwyn did not respond.

Am's round cheeks were pink and a little sweat beaded his round forehead. “As I hear, there will be no journeying after all, for the highwayman. Because the King cannot spare the soldiers. It would be better if they journeyed him—it's fear of hanging keeps the people honest.”

“Think you?” Gwyn wondered.

“Aye, and in such times as these. I heard a rumor I was glad to hear.” His plump hands clutched one another. “They say you're not to wed.”

“Some rumors carry truth,” Gwyn said. She wished she could leave the conversation, but that would insult Am. She was afraid of what he wanted to say to her.

“I have three children.”

“You are fortunate.”

“Osh aye, I am—they're good children and two healthy. It's much for a man to do his own work and a woman's too. The pigs, and the taxes and the meals. They want a woman's hand.”

Gwyn couldn't think of anything to say.

“With the levies so high this year.”

Gwyn nodded, although what the taxes had to do with a woman's hand for children, she did not know. She felt sorry for him.

“We've not much, but nobody's gone hungry at my holding.”

“That's good luck.”

“So—if you'd think to come to us—to me—”

“But I cannot leave the Inn.” Gwyn made herself look at his face as the quick excuse tumbled out of her mouth. “Not in times like these.”

“Aye—no—I thought not,” he mumbled.

She saw then that his trousers were frayed and his shirt worn thin. He had come to her in need. It would give him no cheer to know that she pitied him.

“Not such as I,” he said, moving backward. “But I just wanted to ask. To tell you. That if you ever—” He stumbled away from her.

Gwyn rubbed her hands over her face, her fingers working at her eyes, because she could have wept for him. He had tried so hard to be dignified, so that he would not seem to be begging. He had bragged falsely of his means, but she could not blame him. She watched three children come to crowd around him and pull down on his round arms: The oldest was a girl, her yellow hair in clumsy braids and her skirt out at the hem. Two ragged little boys hung onto his legs, one thin and weak. Without looking back, the family left the field. They would have a long walk home, longest for the man who moved with bent shoulders, as if his burdens were too heavy for him to carry.

Gwyn moved to the safety of her family, overhearing snips of conversation as she moved among the watchers. She had left her shoes behind, standing side by side in the grass like a girl and her bridegroom.

“—even here then? It would be dangerous to him here,” a voice whispered near her. She could not tell if it was a man or a woman, the voice was so low.

“Aye, as I hear, and left a gold coin with a poor singer. They never saw him.”

“He's not seen unless he wants to be,” the first voice answered.

Mother would not speak with Gwyn, for anger. The anger would burn itself out, Gwyn thought, and she was feeling too strangely glad and bitter mixed together to try to jolly her mother. She picked out Rose among the dancers, moving lightly, her hair washed with the red of the setting sun, flowing like a branch of flowers, with a bright ribbon tied into it.

“I would see you among the dancers, Innkeeper's daughter.” Burl spoke beside her.

His face was in shadows, so Gwyn didn't know if he was asking her to dance with him.

“It isn't seemly,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

He didn't have to agree with her, Gwyn thought crossly. The music made her feet want to move. She felt the grass under her feet. “Besides, I don't have any shoes on. Can you imagine what my mother would say.”

He chuckled. “Aye, I can imagine. No, it would be most unseemly. Even so—”

“I wondered if they might be here, the Lord and his son,” Gwyn asked.

“So did I. But if the rumors are correct, every armed man has gone to the south. Even a mapmaker might be needed.”

“Rumors are never correct. You know that as well as I do, Burl.”

He neither agreed nor disagreed, and in the failing light she could not read his face.

“You'd have made a good husband to Rose,” she said to him, giving him her sympathy.

“Aye, I think so.” He looked toward the dancers. “But I wonder if Rose would have made a good wife to me. Think you?”

“I never thought of that.” Odd, she thought, too, that she didn't feel sorry for Burl and never had. He was a proud man, in his way. Aye, and he'd a right to be, she thought.

Gwyn left the fair when her family did. The dancers would start home later, when stars had filled the sky.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE FAIR, AS
the trees were coming into full leaf, soldiers came to the Inn, where they were quartered. The soldiers and their captain, a tall man with deep creases on his face, all wore the emblem of the bear, Earl Northgate's sign. Their duty was to ride guard along the King's Way between the Inn and Earl Northgate's City. They were also to keep the district peaceful, because their presence would discourage thieves and other outlaws from preying on the people. They would eventually accompany the highwayman on the last part of his journey, which had even now begun in the south. All along the King's Ways, in the north and the south, such troops of soldiers had been sent by the King's orders. Every Inn, in the cities and the country, had such troops quartered upon it, as did many of the villages scattered across the countryside.

There was nothing Da could do about it. The Captain was given room in the barn, and the cows put to pasture in the lower field. The soldiers set up tents under the trees near the King's Way. Some of their horses were stabled at the Inn, some kept near to the camp. Those goats that had been living in the barn were given into the care of the farmer on one of Da's holdings.

The Inn was kept busy from early morning to late at night. The soldiers and their Captain must be fed, their horses cared for. In the evenings, the barroom filled early, as men—hopeful for the summer's crops and the herds' numbers; not mindful of high taxes in the fall—found the pennies for ale. In the evenings the barroom and courtyard were busy. Messengers came frequently and left rumors behind, rumors that spread like water into every corner of the Inn. There were battles in the south and the King's forces were winning and the King's forces were losing. One of Earl Sutherland's sons had been sent out of the Kingdom in disgrace, years ago; he would return to claim the title. There was only a baby left out of the entire family and he hidden away somewhere, and nobody knew where; the King was seeking him, to give him the title. Only a daughter was left, and she of marriageable age; one of the southern Lords had taken her, had locked her away in a tower until she would marry his son. The armies stole from the people of the south, trampled the fields and vineyards, slaughtered the herds. The Ways across the southern Kingdom were so perilous that there had been no Spring Fair. More soldiers were needed. The flames of war were moving northward.

At the end of the day, the Innkeeper's family sat around the table and talked over the rumors. Da argued that they must be exaggerated. “The journeying is still going on. If the King didn't hold rule in the south, the journeying would not go on.”

“They say it won't be long until the highwayman comes by here,” Tad said.

“They say the man walks slowly,” Mother said, “as if he carried a great burden. I wonder what he did.”

“He was a highwayman,” Tad told her. “I want to see him, when he comes here. I've never seen a highwayman.”

“You'll go to the village,” Mother said. “You'll stay with Rose.”

“Da?” Tad asked. “Do I have to?”

Da studied his hands. “The boy will stay with us and see this man, wife.”

“But, husband—”

“And the hanging?” Tad pressed his advantage.

“Not the hanging,” Mother declared. “You'll stay home on that day. I've never seen a hanging and neither will you, as long as I live. I've no desire to watch a man die, as if it were a play upon a stage.”

“But I can see him journey,” Tad said.

“Your father has said so,” Mother answered bitterly.

Gwyn watched this conversation with interest. With Rose gone, more work had fallen to Tad. Of necessity, Tad had served in the barroom and cared for the animals. He seemed to have taken over the kitchen garden as well, with Mother kept busy at the ovens and at the washing tubs. Tad made mistakes enough, but he was learning. It was that learning that emboldened him to cross Mother's wishes about the highwayman.

Gwyn had little time to herself those days. For a few minutes at the end of each day, alone now in the room she had shared for so many years with Rose, she wrote letters in the book she had bought at the fair. At first she could not remember words. But that soon came back to her as she scratched on paper with a bit of charcoal until her eyes were too tired to focus on the marks she made. She practiced the shapes of the letters, and some words too, just to see how they would look. DA and MOTHER, RAMS HED INN, and TAD. When she figured out how to write Tad's name, she was so pleased she wanted to go into his room and show him, even though she knew she could not. JACKAROO she wrote, liking the look of that better than JACARU or JAKUREW. However tired she was, she always hid the book carefully at the back of her cupboard before going to sleep.

It was many days after the fair before Gwyn got away to do what she had decided at the dancing that she would do. She watched for her chance. That chance came when a Messenger and his two guards arrived unexpectedly. Their horses had been ridden hard, all the way from High City. Gwyn said that she would take the job of walking the horses cool. It was almost midday by the time she led the three horses behind the village and then, climbing onto one and holding the reins of the other two in her hands, took them at a faster pace up to Old Megg's. There, she shut them into the empty goat pen and changed quickly into boots, trousers, tunic, cloak, and mask. She did not want to risk wearing the hat on horseback, but she also dared not risk appearing without it. For the same reason, she belted the sword around her waist.

She found the mare's saddle where they had left it, up in the loft. She tossed it down to the floor. She had decided which horse was the quietest, and when she buckled the girth around its belly, she spoke cheerfully to it, so that it would get used to her voice. The horse seemed docile enough. Gwyn pictured in her memory the way the soldiers mounted, then put one foot into the stirrup and swung the other leg across the horse's back. It was harder than she had thought it would be to mount that way. She turned the horse's head to the east.

Am's holding lay, she knew, over toward Lord Hildebrand's City, little more than an hour's walk beyond Blithe and Guy. The house was, if Blithe spoke truly of it, little better than the pen where his pigs wintered. The holding, Gwyn remembered, lay upon a rocky hillside, up to the north from Blithe's house. She would head for Guy's holding, which she knew well enough. Then she would follow the little trail northward. A number of small holdings dotted those low hills, but she would trust to luck to find the right one.

Riding along, with the horse at a trot and the leather creaking under her, Gwyn grinned to herself. If she couldn't find it then she would stop for directions. It might be that luck would ride with her. If not, as Jackaroo she could ask a question and no one the wiser. But she could not lose too much time, she thought, urging the horse to a faster pace. The horse broke into a canter and for a minute Gwyn stiffened in alarm. But the motion merely rocked her. She thought she could stay on.

The countryside flowed past her at an alarming rate. Spring rains had been gentle and the sunshine generous. Green shoots grew up in neat rows on the plowed fields. Flowering bushes looked like low fountains of color, white, yellow, and many shades of red. Newborn kids suckled at their mothers.

Gwyn had never ridden on a saddle before, nor in trousers, and she found it comfortable, as comfortable and easy as the smooth gait. In a short time, she could look down over Guy's holding, the low stone house where he and Blithe lived with his family, the farmyard and fields where men bent in labor. Gwyn turned the horse northward, following a narrow path toward the mountains, the lower slopes of which showed green.

When there was cover, Gwyn kept within it. When she emerged from sparse trees into open land, where sheep grazed and distant houses nestled in folds of earth, she circled the dwellings closely enough so that she could see if it was squalid enough to match Blithe's description. These dwellings were far from one another, and Gwyn followed the smoke from kitchen fires to find them. At the fourth holding, she reined in her horse and looked down. Sunlight poured over her shoulders, where the red cape hung. Gwyn shifted her seat and put a hand on the hilt, to keep the sword from striking the horse's side.