Tale of Birle Read online

  He turned, looked back to smile for her, and was gone.

  Chapter 18

  BIRLE SLEPT DEEP AND DREAMLESS; she awoke just as the last darkness was leaving the sky. The stars were fading away, the air hovered: It was the silvery time of day.

  Quietly, quickly, she dressed, in her plainest skirt and top. She went out to the laboratory, to find ointments; garlic to draw the boils, chamomile for healing. Yul wakened at her first step into the room. “It’s early hours. Go back to sleep,” she reassured him.

  He put his head back down on the straw and closed his eyes, but then she decided to tell him. “Yul? Do you remember Orien?”

  He shook his head.

  “When we were all on the sailing ship?”

  He remembered nothing, his face said.

  “With the two—when you rowed, on the sea.”

  The memory frightened him.

  “There was a man with me, do you remember? He rowed too.”

  “Yes. A man. Not the bad men.”

  “That’s right, not a bad man. That was Orien.”

  “Or-ien.”

  “He needs medicine, and food; I’m going to take them to him, in the city. That’s where I’ll be. Will you tell the master where I’ve gone?”

  “Yes. Yul will tell the master.” Yul sat up in the straw. “Birle will—come back?”

  “Yes, I will, of course I will.” But he wasn’t listening, he was wrapping his fingers tightly around a fold of her skirt. Birle bent over to gently loosen them. “I wouldn’t go away and leave you behind, Yul.”

  He shook his head. “If Birle dies. Gran died, and didn’t come back.”

  “Aye,” Birle said, “if I die, I can’t come back, can I? If I live, I promise you, I will come back. I think today I will live,” she said.

  “Yes.” Yul lay back down, rearranging the straw under him to make it more comfortable, and closed his eyes.

  From the food stores in the house, Birle added bread and cheese to the medicines in the basket, then a jug of wine. She unlocked the door and stepped out, pulling it closed behind her.

  It was not until she arrived at the guarded gateway into the city that she remembered the soldiers. It was not until the two guards ranged themselves before her that she remembered she needed some reason to be going into the city at this hour, long before the morning bells had rung. She had no tale ready to tell them.

  One of them was older, with gray in his beard and eyebrows, the other young. Both had their hands ready at the hilts of their swords and both yawned, sleepy after a night’s watch, but both red shirts were as clean and unwrinkled as if they had just been put on. The older one stood in her way. “And where do you think you’re going, girl?”

  Birle tried to think of an answer, but her mind was sluggish. She could think only of Orien. She made her face a mask of fearlessness as she sought for the reason that would satisfy the soldiers.

  “Well?” the younger asked, more suspicious the longer she took to answer.

  “I must go into the city,” she said.

  “We will know your errand,” the older said.

  “Aye, but—” Birle couldn’t find any ideas in her head. If she had to turn back now—she couldn’t bear to turn back, and wait for the bells to ring. “I must,” she repeated.

  The young soldier looked at her, and laughed. “Some man, I’ll wager. She’s from the castle, slipping out to meet some man, and if Corbel knew that one of his slaves—”

  “That’s not true,” Birle said. She wasn’t slave to Corbel.

  “Or she’s been sent out to find him another maid from the city. I told you, didn’t I? When battle draws nigh, Corbel’s appetites increase—and so do mine, but I can’t feed them as richly as the captain. So I wager we’ll pass this little missy through more than one time. The city is full of maids who’d be happy to lie in Corbel’s bed—he’ll not thank us for hindering her.”

  “Let it be on your head, then,” the younger soldier said. “Because if she’s a spy—”

  “If she’s a spy, then it never hurts to have done the enemy a good turn, should fortune’s tides turn against Corbel. You have your way, girl, you can pass. If it’s a lover you go to meet, treat him well, in memory of two poor soldiers with no girl to come to their beds. And maybe, by summer, we’ll not need beds, for being tucked up forever in the earth. If it’s a girl for Corbel you fetch, we can all hope she’ll give him good sport. And if it’s the enemy you serve, remember how we two let you pass, with no word spoken.”

  Birle just nodded her head. She cared no more than they did what was false and what true in their words, just so they let her pass. She didn’t mind if it was Corbel’s chain at her throat or the soldiers’ whim that gave her passage. She didn’t care if it was she who had made things turn out as she wished them to, or if it lay in somebody else’s power to do that, so long as they did turn out as she wished. When the soldiers parted to let her pass, she went through without any thanks or farewells.

  Birle knew where to look for the tortoise fountain—in the poorest part of the city. No one was yet about on the streets. It was as if the whole city slept, full-bellied for once. Those who slept out on the dirt streets or in doorways had carried within them their burden of food and drink as far as they could, then collapsed under it.

  By the time she came to the tortoise fountain, some few women had come to stand yawning in doorways, and children’s voices could be heard. Birle didn’t remember if she had been on the street that wound away from the headless tortoise before. Wooden huts, carelessly built, most leaning against one another for support, the doorways sometimes pieces of rough-fitted wood and sometimes only cloth hanging over the opening—this looked like any of the city streets. She studied the dwellings on her left, walking away from the fountain. He had said she would know it.

  She did know it. As soon as she saw the shed, she knew this must be the place. Even on those streets it looked mean, uninhabitable. A thick chain hung from a ring on the doorpost. Without asking anyone, she knew it, and knew who had slept at night, thus chained, at his master’s door, and knew also that the hut was empty.

  Orien might have spared her this, she thought, and then she knew why he hadn’t. Aye, if she had known he would be gone before the morning, she’d have insisted that he act, make some attempt at escape, she would have . . . It didn’t matter whether cowardice or concern for her safety had led him to deceive her, since the end result was that he had already been taken to the mines. Taken to his death.

  She had thought that it would be easier if he were dead, and she were to know it—but it was not. Aye and he was no coward, to bid her farewell in that fashion.

  Birle stood staring, the basket heavy on her arm. He had told her clearly enough, but not in words—in the fact of his absence he made sure she must know. He thought to spare her, but he didn’t know her heart. He measured her heart by his own.

  How long she stood there, Birle didn’t know. How long she stood, helpless in her understanding, she neither knew nor cared. The piece of cloth hung for doorway across the street was pulled aside and a woman demanded, “What are you after?”

  She was not an old woman, although her eyes looked old and tired. Her clothing was ragged and bright, like finery someone else had worn the goodness out of before giving it away. Birle tried to swallow down the lump in her throat, so that she could force words out.

  There was something in Birle’s face that made the woman willing to speak. “You needn’t bother asking for the tailor. He’s gone to Corbel’s armies. Well, he won’t last long there—he’ll make no more of a soldier than he did a tailor. I wouldn’t waste my tears over him.”

  “And his slave?” Birle could hardly put words to the question.

  “Well, he was the bonnier of the two, I won’t say you nay.” The woman had a ragged smile, like a rose as its last petals fall. “But you’d best forget him. They took him off to the mines at sunset yesterday. Him and others. Corbel decreed that they might g
o with their bellies full, in honor of the feast. If I’d had the four kiddles, I’d have bought the lad for myself—he was biddable, and he told tales well, and for his eyes. Tears for that one wouldn’t come amiss. Well, and the truth is I shed a few myself when I heard he must be sold.”

  Birle had no tears. She had not thought there could be a grief too deep for tears, but now she knew it. She nodded her thanks to the woman and turned to make her way back to the Philosopher’s house.

  It was midday when she opened the door into Joaquim’s kitchen, the basket still on her arm. She didn’t remember finding her way back through the streets, or passing through the gates. She didn’t remember seeing or hearing anything. She didn’t remember how long she had been gone, or why. She replaced the food she had taken. Yul was digging in the garden and didn’t notice her, but she couldn’t make herself go to greet him. She went into the laboratory to put the medicines back on their shelves.

  Joaquim was stripping dried leaves from a bunch of comfrey. For an infusion, Birle thought. She had no desire to help him. A beaker bubbled over a low flame at the far end of the table—the liquid in it was golden, and a handful of pebbles rumbled in the liquid. She would have gone back into the house, but her master called her name.

  “What is this story Yul told me? Who is this man, Orien?”

  Birle didn’t care that he was displeased. “It doesn’t matter.”

  He looked up at her. “What has happened?”

  Birle shook her head. Nothing had happened.

  Now his voice was gentle. “Is there some harm my knowledge can mend?”

  “There’s nothing to be done,” she told him. She didn’t want to talk. She was having difficulty enough forcing breath down into her chest.

  “There are some,” Joaquim told her, “who say that the Lady Fortune has a wheel, and all men are fixed upon it. The wheel turns, and the men rise, or fall, with the turning of the wheel.”

  Birle nodded her head. She would agree with those who thought so. She would agree that she was bound to such a wheel, and—being fixed upon it—must follow its turnings. She felt as if the wheel’s weight were on her back, as if at the same time she must ride it, she must also bear it. She would agree that it was thus for her—but what of Orien? She could not accept that Orien must be fixed to such a wheel.

  “Who is this man?” Joaquim asked again.

  “He’s been sold to the mines,” she said. Joaquim’s face told her what she already knew. But having spoken so much, she said more. “In the Kingdom, he would have been the Earl Sutherland. There are two Earls, who serve under the King and rule over the Lords and people. Orien was heir to the Earl Sutherland; he was the eldest son.”

  “What happened?”

  “He left it all behind him.”

  “And you came with him.”

  That was near enough to be the truth.

  “And you were both, somehow, captured, and sold into slavery.”

  She nodded.

  “But now he’s been taken to the mines. And now the best you can hope for him is that he will die quickly.”

  Birle gave no voice to her anger—how could he say it so? Even if it was true, to say it so, as if it were no more than any of the other ideas he uttered so easily.

  “I thought last night—you smile so seldom, but last night there was springtime in your smile. Maybe they are right, Birle, and we are bound to the wheel until death frees us.”

  As if she had hoped that her master would be able to do what she knew could not be done, Birle’s heart flickered like a candle, and went out.

  “I must,” she said, “prepare the meal. I must. There’s work must be done.” How she could bear the weight of the hours, she didn’t know. But if there were no toil she must think of Orien—a tiny figure bound like all the others to a wheel of iron, and his eyes the blue of bellflowers.

  Those days Birle labored long, late and early. She didn’t know how many days there were, she only knew that there was no easing to the grief. All she could do was bear it, through the long days. Yul worried for her; she saw his worry without being able to ease it.

  Joaquim too worried, but not over Birle. Her master was often out of the house, but doing what she didn’t know and he didn’t say. When he was at home he didn’t work in the laboratory but wandered restlessly about whatever room he was in. Birle thought Joaquim was afraid, but that didn’t trouble her. Neither was she troubled at the changes in the marketplace, where fewer customers—and none of them the wealthy of the city—paid more than goods were worth, and paid the sums without question or complaint. Fewer red shirts patrolled the streets of the city, watched over the marketplace, guarded the gates. Birle had no thought or care for any of this. It was the most she could do to thank Yul when he brought her in a handful of flowers grown wild in the grass of the yard. She sat up by candlelight, copying pages into Joaquim’s book, until her head fell forward onto the table and she could sleep.

  Beyond the open door to the yard, a heavy black sky hung like a curtain, pricked with stars. The wavering light of the candle flowed like water over the sheet of paper, and the pen scratched steadily, as letters and words—carefully shaped—came from its sharpened tip. Sleep would find her there, and carry her off before she had time to notice its presence. Sometimes when she slept she dreamed, and sometimes when she dreamed she saw Orien, and once he was laughing. When she awoke from that dream her face was wet with tears.

  She lifted her head and saw that her tears had blotted the page, so that it would have to be redone. She went outside. Once again it was the silvery time of day, but this morning a fine rain filled the air and brushed against her face. On her way to the privy, she saw that Yul had put a bundle of clothing out, up against the wall of the laboratory. She would launder that day, then, and never mind if it was not fair. She would heat the water to scalding over the fire, so that when she put her hands into it there would be a pain she could put a name to. It was not until she was coming out of the privy that Birle thought to wonder why Yul, who had never before bundled his dirty clothing in that manner, should do so, or to remember—with a suddenness that squeezed the breath out of her chest—that there had been something like a stick across the top of the bundle, as if to hold it in place in a wind, or like an arm.

  Until she had pulled the arm away, and turned the listless head to face the rain, she didn’t dare to know it was Orien.

  There was no time for gladness. When she turned his face, the one eye that could open opened, and didn’t see her. His tongue flicked between his caked lips, to taste the rain. The right side of his face was an open sore, red and festering so that the eye—caked with pus and dirt—couldn’t open. He was burning up with heat, with fever. The sore that was his face smelled like rotting meat.

  Birle crouched on the ground beside him, just for a minute or two, until the joy that made her hands tremble and the fear that made her heart beat painfully fast had both receded. Then she decided what to do.

  She went into the laboratory and roused Yul. “Help me,” she asked. Yul carried Orien back down the grassy yard and laid him on the ground under a cluster of bushes, grown so tall that their branches formed low rooms. Birle sent Yul to bring blankets, and a bucket of clean water, and cloths.

  She washed Orien’s face and neck. He turned and complained under her hands, but he didn’t know who hurt him so. He spoke no words, and if he had she would not have heard them. They had branded him, the wound had infected—as if half his face had been held in the fire. She didn’t think of that. She thought only of cleaning his poor face, gently, gently, bathing it in cool water and dripping water from her hands into his mouth when it turned, like a sucking babe, toward the coolness of water.

  His wrists were chained together with iron loops two fingers thick. She didn’t think of that. The little rain pattered down.

  Leaving Yul with Orien, she went into the laboratory for medicines. Garlic ointment—it would pain him but it would clean the wound—barley water .
. . she didn’t know what she might use, she thought, but then she realized that she did. The pages she had copied were copied into her memory. Thinking quickly, she took down the vial of dwale. A drop or two, in the barley water, would give him sleep. Too much—and her hand shook—would kill him; but dwale in small measure—she watched one drop, then two, fall into the vial of water—would ease him, and let him sleep.

  While he slept, she would cut away the hair from his face, then she could apply ointment with less pain to him. She didn’t know if Yul’s strength would be any use against the chains on Orien’s wrists.

  She could only hope that her master would be too distracted by whatever was worrying him to notice that something was going on. She must put a meal on the table, but it wasn’t time yet. If Orien was sleeping a drugged sleep, she could leave him safely hidden there, for the time it took to feed her master.

  If Birle had been less distracted by her own misery of the preceding days, she would not have been so surprised at her master’s announcement as he sat down for his morning bread and wine.

  “Today I leave,” Joaquim said. “I leave the house, the city, this warbegone countryside—and the false alchemy too—and I leave my brother’s rule. You’ve no reason to look dismayed, Birle. I warned you.”

  “I had forgotten.” They would have the house to themselves, then. That suited her needs. “What should I pack for your journey?” Orien could have Joaquim’s comfortable bed. There was medicine and food to hand.

  “You’ll pack nothing. And you’ll say nothing either, not to anyone. Corbel won’t know until nightfall that I’ve gone, he mustn’t know. When the soldier brings a cart to the door, you and Yul must put the sacks into it—as we did last year. Where is Yul? Have you woken him? I’ll put my Herbal in one of the sacks, that’s all I need to take with me.”

  “Will the soldier let you leave the city?”

  “He won’t know until I don’t return. I wouldn’t think of giving the order. Only Corbel has the power to exact obedience. I’m like your lost Earl—I have no desire for power. It’s my brother who desires that. He counts the cost well spent that gets him what he desires.”