Tale of Gwyn (25 page)

The house below was windowless. Its chimney leaned weakly against the wall, as if a strong wind would blow it over. Nothing moved, except for a child playing at the open door. Another child came out to join the first, a girl whose fair braids caught the sunlight and shone gold.

Gwyn rode down the steep hillside, leaning backward while the horse picked its careful way. The two children watched her approach, backing toward the open door as she came close. Gwyn sat the horse with her shoulders squared and reined it to a halt directly in front of them. There were two little boys now, one hiding behind the skirts of his sister. Their round eyes stared up at Gwyn.

“You are the children of Am, the pigman?” Gwyn asked gruffly.

They nodded.

“Where is your father?”

They said nothing, just stared up at her. Gwyn knew that she must frighten them, that the horse frightened them. She ought to dismount, she thought, but she knew that if she did she would have to mount again, and she could not do that as easily as the soldiers did. Even such children might notice her awkwardness and she could not risk that.

“Where is your father?” she repeated sternly.

The girl pointed with her finger off to the north. “Trading a shoat.” Her voice was small with fright.

“When will he return?”

“Suppertime.”

“Are you in charge?”

The girl nodded. Her eyes were fixed to the mask covering Gwyn's face.

Gwyn reached with one hand under her tunic and took out the bag. She leaned down to put the coins into the girl's grubby hand. “Give those to your Da when he returns.”

The girl nodded.

“Do you know who I am?” Gwyn asked her.

The girl nodded, her face solemn.

“Who?” Gwyn asked.

A smile broke over the child's face, like the sun breaking through clouds. “Jackaroo,” she said.

“That's good,” Gwyn told her. “Good-bye. Don't forget.”

“I won't forget,” the girl promised.

Gwyn turned the horse around and rode away, up the stony hillside, at a walk. At the crest, she turned to look back. The three children still stood together in front of the house. Gwyn lifted her hat and waved it in the air. They waved back at her.

Gwyn's heart was light as she kicked the horse into a gentle canter. She could feel her body riding easily, and how strong her legs were to grip the horse's sides. She could see the hills rising and falling before her. The two pieces of gold would solve so many of Am's problems, and that made her glad. She was glad to have been the one to do that deed and especially glad that it was for her that the smile had come to that child's face. It would be, she thought, remembering back to that midwinter day, like the granny's memory of Jackaroo—the child would grow up to be a woman, and she would remember this golden morning as if it were a dream.

Gwyn was, she realized, more at ease when she wandered about the countryside as Jackaroo than at any other time. It was odd that dressed up as Jackaroo she felt much more like herself. Odd, and pleasant. She liked herself. And in the disguise, she was free to do what she really wanted to do, much freer than was Gwyn, the Innkeeper's daughter. She wondered if she would hear, someday, a rumor about Jackaroo and the pigman's child. She thought about how the rumor would exaggerate, misrepresenting what had actually happened, just as the rumor of Jackaroo's presence at the Spring Fair had spread falsehood.

Gwyn had never been so pleased with her life. She guided the horse between the hillsides and savored her pleasure, as a hungry man savors a meal. It might even grow into a story, telling how Jackaroo had brought two gold coins to a widower, to feed his children.

It was clouds of smoke that caught her eye, rising up over the crest of a hill. The smoke billowed upward, thick and round. A fire.

Among these isolated holdings there would be no village bell to ring the alarm. Gwyn turned the horse to climb up the hill, staying in the open so that they could move more quickly.

The smoke rose from trees in a hollow at the base of three hills. Gwyn thought she heard a cry, like a woman screaming, but the sound ceased. She urged the horse downhill, not bothering to keep to the shelter of the few trees, toward the smoke.

A hut burned, and two figures dragged something toward the flames. Gwyn's horse faltered at the sight and sound of flames, hesitated, then dug its four feet into the ground, refusing to go on.

A third figure held ropes around the necks of two goats. The little animals bleated and tried to pull away from the clearing. Smoke billowed up.

Gwyn never knew how she knew so immediately what she was seeing. But she knew surely that the three men had attacked the house. Her mind raced as fast as her heart while she sat for seconds that ran slow as hours, trying to think of what to do. She was alone and did not know how to use the only weapon she had to hand. She was a girl and there were three of them, three men.

They had not seen her yet. Gwyn unsheathed the sword and opened her mouth to cry: “Stop.” But the sound that came out of her mouth was a wild cry, bearing no resemblance to any word.

Three faces turned to her, hairy and amazed.

Gwyn dug her heels into the horse's side and urged the animal toward the clearing. She held her sword high against them.

The two men dropped their burden at the door of the flaming hut. They ran. One of them moved with a queer dragging gait. The man holding the goats had disappeared into the trees without waiting. The other two disappeared after him, as fast as they could. Gwyn chased them to the edge of the clearing and then jumped down. She could hear them crashing through the trees. They wouldn't return, she thought, looping the reins around a branch. She hurried back to the burning house. She knew she had seen those faces, and that crippled gait too.

The heat of the fire burned out at her. She dropped the clumsy sword. Just beyond the door she stopped, feeling as if the skin of her hands was being singed. Heat pushed against the mask covering her face.

What they had been dragging was the body of a woman, whose skirt lay over the lintel, her feet—in felt shoes with big holes in the soles—lay out from the fire, pointing in opposite directions. Her hair had already caught fire. Flames danced around her face and crawled along the floor to her bloodstained chest. Inside, the body of a man burned, as black as a log. One of the walls crashed in, obliterating the man.

Gwyn stepped backward. There was a pain like a knife in her belly.

The fire roared in front of her.

Gwyn gulped for air, as if it were drink, but her lungs heaved it out before she could swallow it, and her shoulders were rising and falling. She needed to throw up.

She turned to the trees and bent down, heaving until her stomach was empty. But her chest still heaved and the hand that held up the long mask was wet—with her own tears, because her face was as wet as if she had been standing in a thunderstorm. When she straightened up her legs shook.

She wanted to ride away and never to have seen what she had seen.

She wanted to ride those men down and put her sword through them. Or tie ropes around their necks and drag them to Hildebrand for hanging. Or burning, over a slow fire that gave little smoke so that it should be flames licking up over their legs that would kill them slowly, while they screamed.

Bad enough that the Lords should treat the people as they did, but that the people should so—slaughter one another was—horrible. As if hunger and poverty were not enough as enemies, so the people turned upon one another.

And here she had been, riding along as if it were a game or play, dispensing a gold coin here and there, careless as a Lord.

Gwyn watched the fire, diminishing now. There was little to fuel it. It was like a funeral pyre, and she the only mourner. That was how it would be too, she knew. No one would know what had happened here today, not until the Bailiff came out for the fall taxes. He would be irritated at the loss of coins, no more. He would see charred ruins and be cross at having come so far for nothing. He would make a note that the holding could be sold now.

At last, Gwyn bent to pick up her sword, replacing it in its sheath. There was an anger burning along her bones, licking now like the little flames from the ruined hut. It was anger at herself for being blind to so much: She knew as well as anyone that until the crops came in and the berries ripened on bushes and trees, hunger would rule. The air might be soft and gentle, but that was only spring, which dressed itself out in its pretties but brought nothing that people might eat. She was angry at the world in which such cruel death could come for a man and his wife. She was angry at the outlaws—

But she knew them now, she had recognized them. They were the three men from her winter journey, whom the Lord had sent to sleep with their goats.

She would have those men. Somehow. She knew that limping gait, and she had seen the scarred face among the three that fled from Jackaroo riding down on them. They would pay. Somehow.

Gwyn approached the horse, which waited uneasily, tied so close to the trees that it could barely move its head. “Osh aye, I'm sorry,” she spoke quietly to it. Her voice sounded thick to her ears, thick with tears and anger. She loosened the reins.

Within the trees, she heard a wailing cry. A child, it sounded like a child, a child too young to speak any words.

Gwyn left the reins and followed the sound to where a bundle of clothes lay hidden under a bush. The cloths moved.

It was a baby, too young even to crawl. When she had uncovered it, its arms waved in the air and its voice wailed. Thin silky hair bushed out over its head, and its eyes were closed with its crying. There were no teeth in its gums. The cloths around it were wet.

Gwyn changed the baby into dry cloths. It was a boy child. His mother must have run to hide him here, to save him. She must have been mad with fear not to know that this would only save him for a slower death. It was such a slim chance that Gwyn had been riding by, and had frightened off the men, and had heard the baby's cries. It was no chance, and the woman must have known that. But she would have clutched at that slender golden thread of false hope.

Gwyn knew what she would do. She wrapped the boy around with his knitted blanket and held him against her chest. He turned his face to her tunic, as if he would suckle, got one of the silver buckles into his eager mouth, then spat it out, crying furiously.

Gwyn mounted even more clumsily than before, with one arm holding the baby. She rode the horse away from the clearing and back up the hillside she had descended. This much she could do, and she would do. For that poor woman, dead now. For this child, and whatever his hard life would bring to him. For the world, that it should not be entirely cruel.

She took him to Guy's holding, riding hard across the hills, not bothering to conceal herself. When she thought back to that ride, Gwyn could only count her luck that nobody had seen her, because she took no trouble to be secretive. When she dismounted before the door to the house, she was not Gwyn, the Innkeeper's daughter. She was Jackaroo, riding the land.

Blithe sat hunched on a stool beside the fire. If there was anybody else in the room, Gwyn did not see them.

Blithe turned to see who had thrown the door open. Gwyn strode to the table and lay the baby down upon it. Her voice still thick with anger and weeping, she spoke to her sister. “Woman, you will raise this child.”

Blithe stood up to back away. She shook her head. She put her hands behind her back in refusal.

“No,” Blithe said stubbornly. “I will have none but my own son.”

“You will take this child and he will be your son.”

Blithe shook her head.

“He has need of you, woman,” Gwyn said. She moved away from the table. The baby opened his mouth to wail, now a weak and helpless sound. Before she could help herself, Blithe had moved to touch him and then pick him up.

Gywn left the room as abruptly as she had entered it. There would be no question now. Blithe's stubbornness would see to that. She put a foot into the stirrup and hauled herself back on the horse.

The horse's head hung with fatigue by the time she got back to Old Megg's, and Gwyn herself felt exhausted. But she changed back into her skirt and shirt and felt shoes, then walked the three horses back to the Inn yard. The sun hung low in the sky as she stabled the animals, and Burl looked questioningly at her, but she did not care to make any excuses.

Da required an answer, however, so she told him that one animal had gotten away and she had spent the afternoon chasing it. He knew what would happen if they lost an animal in their care, so he didn't scold her. “Your mother wanted your help,” he said.

Gwyn shrugged. There was nothing she could do about that now. There was nothing she cared to do about it either. Let her mother have her bad temper. They had lived so long with good luck at the Inn that they had grown soft. They had forgotten how hard the world really was, just as the Lords had forgotten.

A terrible thought came to her as she stood nodding her head at her father: She had forgotten to remove the saddle. She left her father and rushed into the yard.

Burl was walking the horse, whose head hung low and tired. “It ran away,” Gwyn repeated her lie.

“There's a saddle needs cleaning,” Burl answered. She knew then that he didn't believe her, but she didn't care about that either.

The memory of that burned hut and those two burned bodies rose before her eyes, and she thought she would weep again, and she thought the smell of it was in her clothing.

“Gwyn?” Burl asked her, quietly.

She answered him, letting anger speak, not sorrow. “There is no reason for good luck or ill luck. There is no deserving.”

“No,” he agreed.

“But people—they act so—as if—”

“Aye,” he said, letting the horse stand while he spoke with her. “When my parents had the fever, and my brother and sisters, nobody would come to our house. Not even to bring us water and leave it outside. They thought it might be the plague. I would have liked a bucket of water left at the door.”