“She, my Aine, is sleeping now. She was in much pain last night. I beg you, let her be for now.”
“Certainly,” I said very softly. “And I am no guest but have the honor of being your servant, for the present.”
“A well bred girl,” he whispered to my lady.
“Indeed,” she answered. “I was not mistaken in her.”
The second son—he could have been no more than ten—was sleeping in the enclosure next to his parents. He had a terrible bruise on his forehead and one cheek. He was weeping.
“My brother,” he said. “We slept together. I woke and reached for the spot where he lay. But he is gone.”
I eased out of the portion of the house where they slept and returned to the hearth. Strange to say, I was familiar with the equipment. A quern, trivets, a stone for kneading, and a bronze pot. One difference. Kyra and I baked our bread on a hot rock. They used a clay bowl with a design in the bottom.
A clay jar with a cover held the mixture of wheat and barley. Water from the spring passed the house in the form of a brook. I found a milk jug and a crock of butter in the water, left there to keep cool.
I ground the grain, no little chore that, but the quern was a good one and the work went quickly.
I made a porridge with milk and butter as I do at home, the only difference being there was more wheat in the mixture here, this being good farmland, not like the cold, foggy, rainy climate of the highlands. I put the porridge on the coals to cook and then assayed bread making.
A pair of very small, warm, soft arms wound themselves around my neck. The little arms didn’t startle or frighten me. I remembered “the lady” said there was another child. The little girl smelled like warm bread and sleep.
“Did my aunt send for you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose she did in a way.” Then I plopped the bread down on the kneading stone, dusted the flour off my hands, turned, and embraced her.
She was a bit clingy. They get like that when frightened.
I put her in my lap and finished kneading the breakfast bread. Then I oiled the inside of a marble bowl I found near the fire, patted out a round of bread, and set it in the bowl, then placed it on the fire.
“That was careless of you,” my lady said. I found she had been watching me the whole time. “You should have heated the bowl first.”
“I know,” I said. “The bread may stick. Kyra wouldn’t have let me get away with it. But—” I hesitated for a second, then flipped the bread with my fingertips, a more difficult trick than it sounds like.
“It didn’t stick,” I said.
The little one was still in my lap as I sat cross legged by the hearth.
“Hmm,” my lady said. “Pert or not, I can see you are a well brought up girl.”
“I hope so,” I answered. “Kyra, Mother, and Dugald certainly did their best. But that’s not the point, is it?” I said as I pulled the bread out of the bowl and tossed another piece of dough in.
“No,” she answered, spooning some of the porridge I had made into a bowl. “I’m afraid you will need more than good manners and an industrious nature to handle this situation.”
I flipped over the baking bread, fine, golden brown on one side. When it was done on the other, I added it to the first on the plate.
She had been crouching beside me. She rose to her feet. “I will serve the family—see if I can get them to eat a bit.”
“I’m hungry, too,” the child on my lap stated quietly.
“We know, dear,” I said.
My lady handed me a small stoneware bowl decorated with white slip and the design of a fish on the bottom in black.
“That’s mine!” the child said.
“Yes, we know that, too,” I answered.
“Daddy says I have to eat down till I see the fish,” she told me. “So don’t put so much in that I can’t get down that far.” This was rather imperious.
“I won’t,” I promised, and ladled some porridge into the bowl and cooled it with a bit of milk. Then I patted out a smaller bread than the others and tossed it on to bake.
My lady returned. “The chief is recovering nicely. But his wife is feverish and the boy turned his face to the wall when I came in and refused food entirely. But I’m going to bring them some anyway.”
“What is her name?” I asked, indicating the child.
The little girl fixed me with a look of deep disapproval. “I know my name, and I can tell it to you myself if you care to ask.”
My lady laughed.
“I apologize,” I said. “What is your name?”
“Treise,” she answered.
“It suits you,” I told her. “ ‘Treise’ means strength.”
“I know,” she answered. “That’s why Father gave it to me. He said I was sure about things at an early age.”
I kissed her on the top of her head and seated her beside me. Then I gave her the porridge and pulled the cooked bread from the bowl. I blew on it to cool it.
She extended a hand to me. “I can do that,” she said. “I won’t eat it while it’s too hot.”
“Very well,” I said. But I held it for a few moments because I didn’t quite trust her.
But I was wrong. She made sure it was cool before she began to scoop the porridge out of her bowl with it.
The lady filled more bowls with the porridge and took more bread. She served the rest of the family.
When she returned, she took her own breakfast with me. We cleaned the pot I’d cooked the porridge in with bread and butter.
“There should be more people here. Servants, fosterlings, oath men. This is a noble house,” I complained. “I can’t do all the work here myself.”
“What? Harassed already?” she said sarcastically. “Besides, that’s not your job. I told you what you have to do. You are not really supposed to be their servant but their savior.”
Then she rose and, taking the dishes we’d used, took them to the stream to scour them.
Their savior, I thought, and rolled my eyes. Oh fine. I didn’t have the first idea what to do. My mind circled, thinking. Maeniel, Black Leg, Mother, and I had hunted large game. Horse! Yes, the Romans rode them, but often as not we ate the ponies gone wild in waste places. There were large cats, not common any longer but found here and there, that sometimes had to be killed. Lions of a sort, bear, and boar.
Only last year we had to hunt down a bear. The beast was crippled, one forepaw ruined by another hunter. It had been reduced to sheep killing but was still a formidable adversary.
These were not safe, simple, aristocratic hunts where one spent a fine day in the field, then came home to a good supper and a warm bed, but strenuous expeditions, out into the wilderness of the highlands.
Once Black Leg and I tracked a wounded deer for two days because Maeniel, our supreme hunter, drummed it into our heads that we must finish what we start and never leave a wounded animal to perish on its own.
My mind ran to traps, pits, and snares. We had taken a second bear in a pit. His taste had not run to sheep but shepherds. This seemed the best possible solution to me. A pit filled with sharpened stakes.
But that presupposed that I would be able to shadow the creature and learn something of its habits.
Maeniel had done that in the case of the killer bear. But I can’t turn wolf, and while I can move almost as silently as he can, if this creature detected me, I would become its next meal. The risk was too great that I wouldn’t last long enough to spring the trap.
Bad. I shook my head. Very bad.
“You are worrying,” Treise said.
“How do you know?” I asked the child.
“I can see it in your face,” she replied. “My father says worrying does no good at all. You should stop.”
My lady was still at the stream fussing with the breakfast dishes.
“May I go outside and play?” Treise asked.
“No,” I said too quickly, then realized I might alarm the child. I was frightened, but it wouldn’t do to communicate my fear to Treise, at least not all of it. She should be warned to be cautious but not so frightened as to be immobilized by terror.
I had once seen a three cornered argument between Kyra, Maeniel, and Dugald about that. “There is risk in life and she must learn to deal rationally with the fact,” Maeniel had said.
Dugald was for terrifying me about certain things. Maeniel had felt there was no virtue in this approach. I’m not sure what Kyra had thought, except that she said, “A fool’s paradise is still paradise. I would never have known joy had I been warned how it must end.” Then she wept and we gave over arguing and tried to comfort her.
Well, there were risks enough here. But overall, I liked Maeniel’s attitude the best. While I live, I will live. In the meantime, there was work to be done.
The hearth must be swept, the cooking utensils put up. She brought back the clean dishes, and they must be placed safely away in a storage niche near the fire. They were bestowed near the big tree that occupied the central space near the hearth.
I must make an offering beside the trunk—oil, bread, and wine. Sweep the wooden floor, feed the stock, air out the bedding, wash any dirty clothes. Then there was the matter of a light meal at dusk and a more heavy one later in the evening. And in addition, no small matter, figure out how to kill that damned thing.
“What will we do?” I asked her.
“I will see to the stock,” she said. “And help wash the clothes. There will be milk. Can you churn and make curds?”
“Yes. Thanks to Kyra, I can do all womanly things.”
“Good. You sweep the floor and water the garden.” She pointed out the door to the south. A large kitchen garden sweltered in the morning sun. A few of the plants were already wilting.
“It was fenced, but what about deer?” I asked. “There is no dog.”
She laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. “There were two dogs a few weeks ago. They both disappeared.”
“Oh!” I answered.
“Later today we have a somewhat more dangerous task. We must collect acorns, a sack full for the pigs. The remaining pigs. I might add, there are only two boars left; the sow and her litter disappeared about the same time the dogs did.”
“Oh,” I repeated, and then was mindful of the child. “Mercy me!”
I felt Treise against my shirt and then she clutched my left hand in a hard grip. My lady thought my subdued expletive very funny and let out a peal of laughter.
I said, “Treise, you stay close to me. I will need your help today. Let’s go out and water the garden.”
Treise let go of my hand but followed me as closely as a shadow.
The garden was on a gentle, well drained slope near the house. The stream ran past it, moving downhill toward the sea.
This man was a very good farmer. I like gardens, and Kyra and I had built one using terraces near our home on the coast. We grew leeks, onions, turnips, garlic, rosemary, sage, a variety of greens, and carrots. Here, he had a much warmer climate and deeper, richer soil than we had. And he’d done well with it.
The crops were planted in high rows and I saw why when I reached the fence. He had built a small dam that could be lowered into the water to divert the stream into the garden to water his crop when it was hot and a bit dry, as it was now. On the other side of the stream, he had constructed a fish stew, this being an earthen pond for raising table fish.
It was a pretty but rather treacherous place, ringed with cattails, cress, and yellow wild water lilies. A stand of osier willows grew at one end near the forest. It was dark under the trees.
I gave a shiver and set my mind on my task. I dropped the dam and the water began to flow through a trench into the garden.
I began looking for a gate. The fence was a tangle of berry vines covered with thorns and white flowers. I took Treise’s hand and began walking along, looking. I didn’t find one and the path began to press close to the dark forest. So I turned and retraced my steps until we reached the trench. I was thinking that I must judge if the garden got enough water from the outside and find the way in later, when Treise’s hand tugged mine.
“Look, that’s funny. I never saw any like that before,” she said, looking up at me. “What made them?” She pointed to some big three toed footprints in the mud beside the flowing water.
I’ll give myself this. I can believe that it would have taken anyone a short time to study those tracks and reach the obvious conclusion. And I was still puzzling when I caught the movement from the corner of my eye and I saw the big reptilian head dropping down not at me, at the much more tender morsel at my side—Triese.
My hand tightened on Treise’s and I flung her under the thick, thorny berry canes that twined in the fence.
“Crawl under the thorns!” I screamed.
Then the thing’s teeth closed on my right shoulder and one wiry, clawed hand seized my body at the waist.
Death! I thought. But I’m going to hurt it before I go.
I am not very big. I could see the eye, in the sunlight, nacreous yellow as molten gold, pupil slit like an adder’s. The jaws engulfed my whole shoulder and right breast. I fancied I felt the long, sharp, triangular yellow teeth grate on bone.
They did grate on something, but it was not bone.
I was dead. I knew even if the thing didn’t eat me, damage done by those jaws would kill me.
Hurt it! The command drummed in my brain. Make it pay!
My right arm moved in the creature’s jaws and I felt the thing’s leathery neck. My vision darkened as I threw everything I had into my fire hand.
The world vanished. How does a bolt of lightning feel when it flashes through the clouds into the earth? I know, because that is what I was for a moment, a channel for raw, ravening, blazing power!
Even from whatever hiding place my soul had flown I heard it scream.
I hit the ground hard, realizing that, like a predator that takes a noxious insect into its mouth and realizes too late that it isn’t edible, it had spat me out and fled, crashing through the fish pond into the forest.
I sat up. I wanted to be sure I still could. Then I saw that the green armor that protected my right hand from the thorns now extended over my whole body. A princely patrimony. If my father left me nothing else, this would suffice as a mark of his acknowledgment.
I was almost afraid to look at my right shoulder and hand. They were not unmarked. My shoulder and breast were deeply bruised, the red already turning an angry purple.