The water was clear, but a little silt had settled and coated the bottom of the bowl. He drank deep. The water was clean and sweet, but his fingers stirred the silt and he saw the symbols worked in gold at its center.
He reached in and tried to explore it with his fingers. A second later, he stood in the presence of Merlin and Igrane. They were standing together in her apartments beside the pool where he had bathed the night before.
Igrane looked at him and screamed. Merlin’s eyes widened in shock and, surprisingly to Arthur, terror.
Arthur jerked his hand out of the water and fell back on the ground next to the basin and the rocks, his vision of the pair gone. But he scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could into the forest.
After about a hundred yards, he was forced to slow down by his own weakness and a painful stitch in his side. He dropped to a walk. After a time, he began to wonder if he had only imagined what he saw.
The woods around him were silent except for the normal sounds of wind, birdsong, and insects. Nothing pursued him. As before, the sense of peace he had found in his dream returned, filling him the way water does an empty cup.
The woodland was open pines, some of them giants, mixed with hardwoods—oak, ash, maple—and in the low places, poplar and willow. He kept to the trees because the clearings were thick with wildflowers— white and red daisies, blue ironweed, and goldenrod were rampant among blackberry vines covered with white flowers and thorns. Here and there crab apple, wild plum, medlar, and gooseberry formed almost impenetrable thickets.
A
rich place, this,
he thought. Then he came to an ancient linden. It had definitely been coppiced.
Someone
lives around hereabouts,
he thought. And sure enough, a few yards farther on, he came to a winding road.
It was little but a wagon trace, two nits in the grass. He followed it to the edge of the forest. He smelled Woodsmoke before he saw the house.
He paused at the last tree to take in his surroundings. He liked what he saw. The house stood on a small knoll in the center of the clearing. It wasn’t round, as his people’s were, but crescent shaped. The building surrounded a courtyard that was open on one side. The shed, with a milk cow chewing her cud, was on one side of the house. Near the forest, a barn stood in the shadow of the trees.
A fenced garden a dozen yards beyond the house was on high ground overlooking the river and a water meadow where two draft horses grazed. Beyond the house was a field, thick with the mixture of wheat, barley, and oats his people commonly grew. It was hard to tell what cereal predominated here, but on casual inspection, it appeared to be wheat. That meant cool nights, warm to hot days, and probably, from the look of the burgeoning root crops in the kitchen garden—they were ready for harvest— rather mild winters.
If the winter included long stretches of freezing cold and a lot of snow, the abundance of the kitchen garden wouldn’t have been possible this early in the year. The wheat crop in the field was still very green and as yet no higher than his calves.
Chickens pecked in the courtyard. Beyond the water meadow, he saw plenty of ducks and geese feeding along the edge of the river.
Guinea hens near the back door of the house set up a prodigious cackling as he stepped out of the woods and began to walk toward the house.
She greeted him at the back door with a pike in her hand and no friendliness in her eyes. The pike looked home forged, a savage, hooked blade sharpened on both sides, the metal dark with age and pitted with rust. But the edges had recently seen the attentions of a file, and they were bright and razor sharp.
But he was more disturbed by the mastiff she held back with the other hand. A big jawed, heavy shouldered fighter of a dog that snarled and strained against her grip, trying to get to him.
“Go!” she spat. “Get off our land or I’ll set the dog on you.”
Arthur backed up. Then went to one knee. “Mistress,” he said. “Please. I’m starving.”
“No!” She was clearly very frightened and unsteady. She backed up, pulling dog and pike with her, and kicked the door shut.
He rose to his feet and staggered away. When he and Cai hunted, they often stopped with the people who lived on the land. They were always hospitable.
But then he considered that he must look like hell, like a brigand in fact. His clothing had suffered from his time in the forest, and the climb down the cliff left him battered, covered with bruises, scrapes, and cuts. His fingers were raw, nails worn to the quick. His face was covered with what must now be over a week’s growth of beard. And he had not lied. He was quite literally starving.
Near the house, a log lay under a tree and a stump near it was smoothed off to form a rude table. He collapsed on the log to consider what to do now.
He didn’t know he had fainted until he awakened in the grass with her looking down at him. When she saw he was conscious, she backed away very quickly.
“I didn’t know,” she said, “that… things had gone so hard for you. Forgive me. I would never refuse food to a starving man. I thought… I was afraid… I… please eat and go! We have troubles of our own here.”
He saw a cloth covered dish resting on the stump, and next to it, three loaves of the small, flat breads baked on a griddle by country people. When he sat up, she hurried away toward the door. The dog was chained near it, and the pike leaned against the wall beside the door frame. She took both dog and pike into the house with her, and he heard the bar fall inside.
He fell on the food. Until he was half finished, he didn’t realize what he was eating, and then he wasn’t sure. Chicken? Pork? But it didn’t matter; he was ready to eat anything he could get his hands on. He did notice that the stew was mostly vegetables—onions, leeks, cabbage, turnips, carrots— all things that could be collected quickly in her garden. The bread did have butter on it, and he was grateful for that.
He found he had to slow himself down to be sure he didn’t upset his stomach with the unaccustomed bounty of a full meal. When he finished, he leaned back against the log. He dozed for a time, and when he woke he found he felt human again for the first time since the beginning of his ordeal.
He studied the farm. She was alone. He was almost sure of that. And it was possible she was running out of food. Also, the woodpile was almost empty.
He found an ax hanging on the wall of the house next to its file. He sharpened the ax and spent two hours replenishing the wood supply. The chores on such a place as this were no mystery to him. He and Cai had been sternly taught that the open handed generosity of the poor was not to be trifled with. If they could not repay with the game they brought in, they must make some other offering, and most often this involved work of some kind.
Noble or not, at Morgana’s stronghold everyone worked, and he was never spared his share of the chores. Besides, there was in his nature a strong tendency toward the keeping of order. When he saw that something needed to be done, he felt gratified by being able to do it. Sometimes when that was the only reward he got, the satisfaction of a job well done was enough for him.
These chores were lined up before him, beckoning, and he attacked them with a will. After he felt the woodpile was sufficiently full, he went to the stable and cleared the stalls of the two draft horses and dumped the manure in the compost pit near the forest. He filled the stall floors with sweet, clean hay and the mangers with feed.
Not the best,
he thought.
Spelt, but better than ordinary hay or the grass from the water meadow.
He was worried about catching the horses, but they greeted him with cries of joy. It was plain they were used to human tending. When he got them on dry ground, he checked their hooves for damage from having been on the damp ground so long. They were not massive draft horses that he’d sometimes seen shown off by prosperous farmers but simply square, sturdy cobs. Their coats were a mass of tangles, manes and tails snaked and knotted with weeds and burrs.
He spent a rewarding two hours grooming them and trimming hooves. When he came out of the barn, there was another bowl of food and more bread on the stump, this time clearly a chicken stew. Again he ate ravenously.
He went to the house and stood by the wall. It was stone, he noticed with some surprise, worked cobbles held together with mortar. There were few windows, and they were high up, just under the eaves.
“I’m going to the river to bathe,” he said, “and I will return and sleep in the barn. I am feeling better now, and I am very grateful for the food and shelter. But I will leave tomorrow, if you wish.”
There was no reply. The only sound he heard was the brief wailing of a child that stopped abruptly, as though it had been put to the breast.
When he returned, he found some bread and cheese on the stump. He sat and ate it quietly, watching the sunset, the river painted gold in the fading light.
He was a king on exile but still a king. Yet he knew he wouldn’t have minded if he had been born a humble man and had the privilege of settling in a place like this. To know this was his land and sit quietly, as he was now, overlooking the house, fields, and pastures. If they were his own, it would have given him abiding pleasure.
He watched as the light slowly changed from yellow to rose to gold, and at last into purple and blue. The stars flung their pathway across the sky.
He remembered walking into the barn but never remembered crawling into the hay. He was so weary that he slept this night without dreams, in absolute peace. Or at least in a peace as absolute as he had ever known.
He woke before first light. When he and Cai spent time with people on the land, most families were up and stirring at their chores before the sun crossed the horizon.
He dropped down easily from the loft. The horses were restless in their open stalls, tethered to the walls by ropes. He saw they had finished the hay he had put in their mangers yesterday. He checked their hooves and saw they were dry. So he released them and turned them out into the water meadow to graze.
He followed them more slowly. As he did, he passed the smokehouse.
He paused. Yes, there was a wisp coming from the chimney. But there was no firewood stacked beside it. He comprehended that she must have used what was there when the wood box at the house was empty.
He shrugged. Such an expedient was a desperate one for a farm wife. The fire in the smokehouse must be maintained to cure the ham and sausage necessary to overwinter the family. But then he remembered she’d looked none too steady on her legs when she’d hurried back into the house.
If there was a child… she might have borne it after her husband left and had no means of going for help.
Bad,
he thought.
Very bad.
He opened the smokehouse door. It was almost empty. Damn! What kind of man was her husband to leave his wife without food or fuel? And pregnant in the bargain.
It was none of his business, and he had problems of his own. But another possibility occurred to him. Perhaps the man was in the house, lying ill or injured.
He told himself sternly that it was none of his business… but… well, he could kill a pig. A spear was leaning against the wall just outside the smokehouse.
He closed the smokehouse door and hefted it. It had a brutal, wide, razor sharp blade, and a crosspiece just below the blade. Its maker had equipped it with a stout handle that could be used to hold the pig back in case the spear missed a vital organ and the animal lived for some while until it bled to death. Pigs were most dangerous then. When suffering mortal wounds, they turned on their attackers.
He left the spear where it was and walked up to the house. As before, he spoke to the wall. “My lady, I cannot know what your trouble is. But if food would be a help to you, before I go I can kill a pig and you can fill your smokehouse.”
This time he got a reply. It took so long that he was about to turn and walk away when she spoke.
“Yes… I would like that. I need food… meat… badly. The garden helps now, but…”
“Say no more,” he said. “I understand.” He didn’t, but he said he did, afraid she might shame herself by breaking down. “I will return with the pig.”
He relieved himself in the shadows by the compost pit, then washed in the river. He stood on the bank holding the spear and considered.
Beyond the water meadow, the forest stretched down to the river. The sun was up and the morning chill was beginning to depart, but mist still drifted in the shallows on both banks. He rolled up both sleeves of his heavy linen shirt and dusted his hands in the fine, dry dirt above the water. Along the river’s edge ran a trail, a very faint track, and he suspected it led to pig wallows near the water.
The first was empty. But he saw traces, troubled reeds and cattails where the pigs had been feeding. The second held a sow and a half dozen piglets. He had no desire to tackle her. Suckling pig was a delicacy among his people, but he had no mind to sacrifice a productive sow—correction, the farmer’s productive sow—for a brief feast, however juicy.
The third held another sow, no piglets. She lay in the wallow, blowing bubbles contentedly.
He slowed his pace. Yes, he thought.
They will be somewhere close by
.
He heard the crashing in the bushes before he saw it coming. Then a second later, it came, moving right toward him, charging him, head down, tusks bared, foam at the open jaws. At the last instant, he sidestepped and drove the spear into the left flank, just behind the left foreleg.
The hit was perfect. The boar spear entered the animal’s body without scraping anything as it would have if it struck a rib.
The boar crashed into the ground and slid for a few feet, dragging him along with it, already dead almost before its legs folded. He pulled the spear out and allowed the boar to bleed for a time, while he slit the throat, using the spear. Then he lifted the hindquarters to drain the body of blood.
He hated that. Wasting the blood. It made wonderful sausage. But no help for it. In the normal course of events, he and his men would have caught it in a net, stunned the animal with a wooden hammer, then strung it up and slit the throat. But here he was alone and must do the best he could.