Tale of Birle Page 2

  Thinking that, she slipped into sleep.

  SHE OPENED HER EYES TO darkness. Was it moments or hours she’d slept? Overhead, the river of night was crowded with stars.

  No man had mapped the sky, although some few had mapped the land. Birle had seen these maps, from her grandparents’ cupboard. It was safe to think of them, although not to put those thoughts into words. Some things were never to be spoken of.

  Maybe the Lords had maps of the sky, she thought. She might ask this runaway servant that, before she sent him on his way. She had no idea where his way would lead him, except south. To hear the merchants talk, and the tales of the entertainers, the lands to the south were more strange than people of the Kingdom could imagine. Such tales were quickly cut off, because the people of the Inn and of the village were frightened by strangeness. Just as they feared the night, Birle thought. Birle had been taught that fear, and believed it, when she was a child. But now—

  Sometimes, on a winter morning, when she opened the kitchen door to go out and draw water, the stars hung so close outside the door that she thought she would be able to step out among them, and she felt her blood racing at the possibility. What was known, and safe, seemed then to her like a cell in one of the Lords’ dungeons. All the fear she lived among seemed then like a yoke across her shoulders, a heavy burden that kept her from moving swiftly, freely. Aye, men carried fears like great stones strapped on their backs, she thought. Why else had Da and Nan protested so when she said yes to Muir?

  Birle shifted against the boat-ribs behind her, to find more comfort. Whatever others might say, she had nothing to fear from the night. People just felt safe with known things, things fixed and regular as the sun’s passage across the sky. Night too had its one light, the moon; but the moon didn’t move in the sun’s orderly pattern. The moon even changed its shape, growing and shrinking—sickle to circle to sickle, to darkness. Darkness, Birle thought, looking up through dark air to the tiny lights of the stars, needed no map, because men avoided darkness. The work of darkness differed from the work of day. People slept away the dark, the long nights of winter, the short nights of summer. She wished she could sleep this night away, she thought, her eyelids closing down heavily.

  WHEN SHE AWOKE AGAIN AND raised her head from her chest, Birle’s neck was painfully stiff. Opening her eyes, she wondered if the sun had set forever, yesterevening, and would never rise again. Still, the stars shone white in a black sky. Birle pulled herself up to sit straight against the bow. She gathered her cloak around her. It was as if the sun and the moon had been blown out, like candles, but by what giant’s breath? Granda had asked her once, “There might be people living up there, in the stars, think you?”

  Granda had a way of saying and doing odd things, so Birle wasn’t surprised at the question. “Aye, no,” she promised him. “The stars are only lights in the sky. A man can’t live in a light, any more than in a candle.” They had gone outside into the cold, to bring in wood for the fire. Three winters ago that had been, Birle calculated. A fall baby, Birle was then in her eleventh winter. Granda was an old man standing beside her, his breath floating white in the air before him, watching the moon sail among the stars.

  “Aye, and you’re probably right, although I like to think it,” he had answered, his voice as warm as summer. He had still been strong enough, that winter, to go out with her to fetch wood from the pile he built up in summer and fall. He had still been alive. “Although,” his voice went on as he piled logs into her arms, “when I saw your mother, with her hair like starlight netted, I sometimes wondered.”

  It was that same night that they had told her about the treasure.

  Sitting on the warm hearthstone, the door bolted fast against the night and the little high windows shuttered safe, Birle had looked up to where her grandparents sat at the table, both of their faces turned to her. “What treasure?” she had asked. “The Inn doesn’t have any treasure. I never heard about any treasure.”

  “The secret held safest is the one no one even thinks to wonder of,” Gran said.

  “Where is it? What is it? Did you bring it with you when you left the Inn?”

  “Aye, we did,” Gran answered, looking over to Granda, who said at the same time, “We left it with your father, for it is the Inn’s treasure.” Then Gran smiled—a girl’s smile on her old-woman’s face, the smile of a girl in springtime, a girl in springtime dancing at the fair. Gran’s smile never grew old. Birle didn’t know what to make of what they were saying, but that didn’t trouble her. She sat contented, her back toasted by the fire, growing sleepy, and glad to be away from the unending labor of the Inn.

  “It isn’t any treasure you’d guess,” Gran said, rising from the stool she sat on to go to the cupboard under the bed. Bending down, she lifted out bedclothes, and then a long sheet of paper, which she carried over to the table as carefully as she would a baby.

  Birle didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what paper was, or what it was used for. But it was the Lords who owned and used it. The Steward kept his records, not in his head, as Da did, but in long books, a stack of paper sewn together and then placed between thin pieces of wood. The Lords wrote proclamations on paper, then rolled them up and tied them with strips of cloth, and the Lord who was riding as messenger would unroll the paper and read off what it was the Lords wanted their people to know. Birle couldn’t think what her grandparents were doing with this sheet of paper, how they had come to possess it. But it wasn’t anything to call a treasure, she thought, getting up to look closely at it; only the Lords would have a use or value for it, and she wouldn’t dare to offer it to a Lord. He might ask where she had gotten it.

  The paper was drawn over with dark lines, which divided it into odd-shaped sections, and with irregular markings, which looked like the traces of birds’ feet in mud. The stiff paper was spotted brown, like the backs of her grandparents’ hands. That was the first map Birle had ever seen.

  Her grandparents explained it to her, pointing out the different parts of the Kingdom—the mountain-walled north, where they had been born, and the forest-walled south, where they now lived; the long rivers, which divided the Kingdom between those lands the King held for his own and those he gave over to the use of his two Earls; the places where the cities had been built; the King’s city, the Earls’ cities, and the cities of the great Lords who served the Earls. As she learned how to see the map, Birle looked for her own place on it.

  “The Inn stands here.” Granda put his finger on a bend of the longest river. His finger was swollen at the joints, hooked like a bird’s talons. “And this house lies—about here, think you, lass?”

  “Aye, you know better than I,” Gran answered him. “You could always read a map better than I. When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south,” Gran told Birle.

  “Not empty,” Granda corrected her. “The forest is never empty.”

  Gran was more interested in talking about the map than in quarreling. Her finger followed the river off to the north, to show Birle where the great mountains guarded the Kingdom. “We’ve stood at the feet of the mountains, your Granda and I,” she said. “We lived”—her finger moved—“here.” The finger stopped at a point on the King’s Way midway between two cities.

  “Your mother’s mother also came from those parts,” Granda said.

  “When you journeyed north, to bring back the vines,” Birle told him, to show that she remembered the story. “When Da was only a little boy.”

  “Aye,” Gran said, in her memory-laden voice, “so that when your mother’s mother died of giving birth to Lyss, and my own child died before three days were out . . .”

  “Lyss filled the empty place,” Granda said.

  Until Lyss herself died, Birle thought, wondering if the map was a treasure because it held the key to so many memories, as if the memories themselves were somehow put into the map. Her eyes found a place on the river, above the Inn, where her mother would perh
aps have capsized, on a late-winter morning when the water ran icy cold, and come home to die in fever before a fire that couldn’t warm her. Birle was too young to remember her own mother; she had other people’s memories, but none of her own. The map would be no treasure to her. For mother, Birle had Nan, who came a servant from the hiring fair before Lyss died, and then after his years of grieving were completed, came a woman to her master’s bed, to have all the authority of a wife over the Inn.

  You didn’t need any map to hold the memories, Birle thought. She didn’t know why this memory-map should be a treasure.

  Unless those bird scratchings above the cities and across the forests, along the bending line of river and straighter line of Way, showed secret stores of gold and jewels, buried underground in chests, or hidden deep within caves. Then the map might be a treasure. But that was as unlikely as one of the old stories, where tiny deathless folk lived in trees that knew no season, or animals talked, or Jackaroo rode.

  The old people talked on, their fingers moving over the map. Birle was restless. What was she to do with this treasure? If there were stores of gold marked on it, someone would have gone out to claim them already. A man like Granda, unafraid of travel. The way life would be, then, if he had, for the family that held such riches—but none of the people lived so. Only the Lords lived in that fashion.

  She interrupted her grandparents. “Is this the treasure? Where can I hide it?” They must know there was no place for secrecy at the Inn.

  “You won’t be taking the map with you,” Gran said, sharp and displeased. Her finger came down on the scratchings, one after the other, hopping like a bird over the map. “These are the treasure.”

  Hope rose in Birle’s chest. If she had been right in her thinking, if there was even one treasure to be dug up . . . she smiled in excitement.

  “She’s but a greedy child. She’s young to have the keeping of it,” Gran said.

  “I can keep secrets,” Birle promised. “I’m not too young.”

  “It’s not her youth I’m thinking of, lass,” Granda said, “it’s our age.”

  Birle made herself sit patient, or at least look patient, while Gran argued it out within herself.

  Finally Gran spoke to her. “It’s letters. These are letters.”

  Birle didn’t understand.

  “Words,” Granda said. “These letters”—he pointed to the scratchings Birle had asked about—“name Lord Mallory. To say that this is Lord Mallory’s city.”

  Birle backed away from the table.

  “This line marks the King’s Way, and these letters name it,” Gran said. Her finger followed the Way to where a wide-winged falcon had been drawn. “Sutherland,” Gran said. “Earl Sutherland’s city.”

  “You mean reading.” Birle looked from one old face to the other, hoping they would deny it. She knew now why it had been kept secret. Only the Lords could know how to read.

  “Aye,” Granda said. “And writing.”

  This wasn’t any treasure, Birle thought. This was knowledge, a secret like the old story of the weasel that struck out at the child come to rescue it from the trap. “Never tell me,” she asked them. “I’m too young, Gran’s right.”

  “Gran and I, we have decided,” Granda said. “You are the one of our grandchildren to have the treasure. Aye, then, you must, Birle.”

  Birle shook her head, but even then she knew that if she must, she would have to. People had no more choice than animals about what burdens they carried. That night, however, she refused to go back to the table. She sat—sullen and afraid—before the fire. That first night they spoke no more of it. Gran put the map away, Granda took out his pipe, and the song he played moved around the little room, like sunlight left behind when summer was chased away by the cold seasons.

  Over that long winter, and the next two, Birle had learned to read and to write. She started out unwilling, but helpless; then when she first wrote down the letters to make her own name, she wanted to hurry and know all there was to know. In the same cupboard as the maps, there were two long books kept by Stewards of older times, records of supplies and expenses, plantings and harvestings, taxes paid in coins, in goods, in labor. There were also two books, bound not in wood but leather, which told stories. Gran read those stories aloud to them. By the end of the third winter, Birle could take her turn reading the evening story. She was not as fast and clear as Gran, but her tongue stumbled over words less than Granda’s. In these stories, animals talked and thought as people did, trying to deceive and make profit from one another. The second book they had not gotten to, although Gran told her that in it there was a story of a woman magicked into a spider, because she was so proud of her weaving, and a young herdsman deep in unwaking sleep because the moon fell in love with his beauty. Birle was looking forward to reading those strange tales.

  But in the spring, Granda died, as gently as he’d lived. Gran walked the long way to bring them the news, but would not come back to live there. One summer noon Da found her lying beside the stream, her hand trailing in it as if she had been reaching for the watercress that choked the water. Da reported the empty holding to the Earl through a huntsman. By the time he could send Reid and Birle to empty the supplies from the little stone house, the fall fair had come and gone, and the first frosts were on the ground. When Birle looked for the maps and books, she saw nothing there but bedclothes. Gran might have buried them, a thief might have taken them, or perhaps Da had them now. Birle didn’t know. She had never dared to tell Da that she, too, held the Inn’s treasure. She watched him, but he never gave away the secret. She too kept it locked inside her head, and would have forgotten it if she could.

  But she couldn’t. Even now, the only human creature awake in the night, she saw letters shaped by the stars—an L, an E, a W, and even an A right above her eyes. I’s, T’s, they were common. It was the bellied letters that were hard to find, like C and O. She might, she thought, making it into a game, make her own name, spell it out up among the stars, if she could find a B and an R. She stared into the sky, searching out letters, so that she might not think of the sorrow of those two deaths. As she had stood at the second burning, with the ripe summer sun setting into thickly leaved trees, she had felt alone with a sharpness she had never known before.

  And that, she thought, uncomfortable in the little boat, with the runaway sleeping sound at the far end of it, with the waves gentle in a dying wind, that was why she had welcomed Muir. Muir danced with her, and said she was the prettiest little thing to be seen at the fair, and asked her if she would be his wife, with an expression in his eyes that made her feel a power she hadn’t known she had, and she had said yes to him. Da tried to talk her out of the wedding, saying she was too young, saying Muir was too old. Birle stood silent. Nan said that she was old enough, but not in the ways that made a man glad of his wife. “She thinks life in a city house will be easy,” Nan said. “Aye, and what holding would you have for a son, or dowry for a daughter?” As much as you, Birle thought, but did not speak the words. Her mother had not been much older when she wed, she thought, and did not speak those words either. She had only to stand firm and they would have to give way to her.

  So they had, in the end, and without any joy. Birle had felt no joy either, at the victory, just relief that the quarrel was ended and she could come closer to a house in Sutherland’s city, and the solitary life of a wife whose husband kept the distant forests for the Earl. Her life at the Inn did not suit her. She wore it like somebody else’s cast-off boots, which pinched and chafed.

  In a few days, little more than a fortnight, it would be the spring fair, and Muir would await her there, to wed. Alone in the night, under the eyes of the stars, Birle felt for the first time as frightened as Nan said all sensible girls should feel before they wed. Well, she could ask him to wash as regularly as she did, and she could teach him gentler manners. Besides, he would be away—as huntsman guarding the forest, then as captain over a troop of soldiers, who must live with his
men in the soldiers’ barracks. As for children, she need not concern herself much with that. It was the men who slept at night in their own beds, their wives at their sides, whose wives had children. If Muir did not like his intended bride to be out in the forest, with a runaway servant, for the length of a night—if he did not know how much it mattered to save a man’s livelihood—well, then, he was free to not like it. He could come to the marriage place and say her nay when the priest came to them, and tell why. A man could do that, under the law.

  Birle imagined that scene. She saw the faces of those who heard him. She saw her own shoulders held stiff and proud, as Muir spoke falsely of her. The imagining warmed her heart; she thought that, among the listeners, there must be many who admired this girl.

  But, she thought, laying her head back down along her arm, Muir wouldn’t speak those imagined words. She had imagined it as her brothers would have spoken it. Muir spoke more simply. The pictures started at the beginning again, like turning back to the first words of a story. The girl, with her hair long and loose, in her finest skirt and shirt—all unknowing of what lay before her—walked with her family to the wedding place under the walls of the city. There, her cruel bridegroom waited.

  Birle slept again.