Chapter 7
Elket looked back doubtfully at the line of footprints they had left behind on the forest road. Although the snow was thin, not even half-covering the ground, she thought the trail might be too conspicuous.
“Don’t worry,” said Yaret, seeing her look. “It’ll snow again before the day’s end and hide all our footsteps. Meanwhile we’d better get a move on if we want to be back before dark.”
Elket tried to nudge the horse into a faster walk. It complied for a few yards before slowing down so that she had to nudge it again. It didn’t recognise her authority; maybe because she didn’t recognise it herself.
This was her second trip to the weaver’s farm, although the fourth for the horse and Yaret. Charo had accompanied Yaret on one visit and Dil and Shuli on a third, when they had come back with a whole sackful of cobnuts from the trees behind the farm. But this time it was Yaret and Elket on their own. It would be the last trip before winterfest – possibly the last for a few weeks, said Yaret, if the snow set in as it usually did; so they would be wise to stock up well.
“We need a cart,” she said to Yaret now, as the horse slowed again.
“Perhaps. I don’t know how to make a cart. I expect Shuli could tell me. In fact, she’d probably show me where to find a set of wheels. But I suspect Poda has never pulled a cart in her life and might not be inclined to learn. What we really need is another horse, one that’s used to haulage. A cow would be nice too.” Yaret gazed out thoughtfully at the snowy landscape. “Two or three cows. The stonemen can’t have taken them all. Once the days start to lengthen again, after winterfest, I might go out and look.”
“Do you want another turn on Poda now?” Elket was aware that Yaret was limping. The stiffness in her step was hardly obvious at most times, but by the end of the day she became more halting. Now that Elket knew what had happened to her foot (and that part of Yaret’s story, a few nights ago, really had shocked even Shuli) she was more concerned about it than she had been before. She felt almost protective of the weaver even though it was Yaret who had now become their adviser and protector.
“No, I’m fine. We’re nearly there now.” The weavers’ farm came into sight, its blackened walls blurred and softened by the snow. Yaret walked into the yard past the – no, Elket could not think of them as Guardians. They were bodies. Bodies everywhere.
At least there were only the two here. But as she glanced down at them, Elket gasped.
“Stop!”
Yaret stopped at once. “What is it?” she said quietly.
“Someone’s been here. On horseback.” Elket hardly dared to speak in case she was overheard. She pointed to the double line of hoofprints in the snow.
Yaret looked down; and up again, her mouth open. Elket had never seen her look so at a loss before. Fear thudded in her chest.
But after those few seconds’ hesitation Yaret strode swiftly forward into the yard. She gave a long, rising whistle – and round the corner trotted a donkey, head nodding, long ears flecked with snow.
“Nuolo! Oh, Nuolo!” And then Yaret was down on her knees and hugging the donkey as if she never wanted to let go. A second, slightly bigger and darker donkey followed the first, purposefully nosing at her back. Yaret raised her head.
“Dolm,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. “Dolm. Oh, you wonderful, wonderful donkeys.”
Elket realised that the hoofprints were smaller than the horse’s. Her fear had been so immediate that it had stopped her noticing. She needed to stop worrying about everything, she knew: but what else was there to do but worry?
She got down from Poda and gave the donkeys a tentative pat. Their hair was rough and matted and their legs muddy but they seemed healthy enough. Yaret ran her hand up and down their legs and along their bodies, before looking up with a smile.
“We could try and build a donkey cart some time,” she said.
Elket smiled back, because she could see how pleased Yaret was; and the others would be glad about the donkeys too, especially Dil. But she was anxious. The horse already ate a significant amount of the oats in the cellar; they put it out to graze in the outlying meadows but that didn’t always seem to be enough. It wouldn’t even eat the red roots. How much extra fodder would these donkeys need?
As if guessing her concern, Yaret said, “They’ve survived well in the wild, from the look of it, so they should be happy in the fields around Obandiro. I like to give Poda a little extra food because we work her hard. But if you’re worried about it, we’ll start to dig up some of the beets in that field south of town. We should do that anyway before the ground freezes.”
That made Elket feel a little better – for a moment. But as soon as she descended the ladder into the weavers’ cellar and perceived how fast the stocks of food down there had shrunk, she felt worse again.
“There’s enough to get us through the winter,” Yaret said, although Elket did not see how she could know until winter was over.
“But now that there are three more of us–”
“We’ll have to be careful, it’s true, but think of all that we’ve discovered in the houses just on the Cross-street and the Market-street.”
“But the Market-street cellars had all fallen in.” The houses had been floored with wood, unlike the buildings on the Cross-street, and any cellars were full of a jumble of burnt beams and broken planks.
“It’s true the things in there are harder to retrieve, but it’s still worth trying. There was that pea-flour and old clothing only yesterday, and there’ll be plenty more waiting to be found. Ondro has been very useful in helping dig the cellars out.”
Ondro was the shepherd whom Yaret had met near his lonely hut, which he had refused to leave until he brought the two girls to the Dondel Bridge. It was true that he had been useful; for although he looked thin and wiry he seemed to be remarkably strong, and would dig all day without complaining. Indeed, he hardly said a word at all, even at council, but just gazed around with a slightly vacant face. Yaret had said that he wasn’t really vacant, but was not used to expressing his thoughts to other people. Elket wasn’t convinced that there were many thoughts in there to be expressed. Certainly nothing like the busy complexity of her own.
Stop thinking and start doing. That had been one of her father’s complaints to her. At least Ondro said nothing like that. By the stars, I wish you’d been a boy. Though Dil had never seemed to content him either. Lazy little lump. Get off your backside. And Dil would get a wallop. Sometimes she would deliberately aggravate her father so that the wallops landed on her instead. Their mother had been too tired and sad to interfere.
It had been a shock to find her father gone. She hadn’t exactly hated him, but she had wished so fiercely and helplessly that he was different that it was alarming to know he had been turned into a pile of ash. She knew it wasn’t her fault. His death was nothing to do with her longing for him to be changed. She hadn’t wished him dead. But she felt he blamed her for what had happened, because blaming her was what he did. He was definitely not a Guardian.
While she packed roots into a sack from the diminishing pile in the cellar she wondered if Lo and Renna’s father had been like that as well. Although Lo hadn’t said anything about him, she felt it might explain Renna’s continuing silence. Nearly two weeks and Renna still hadn’t spoken. Both girls – women really – were thin, thinner than Ondro, lighter and frailer than Elket, with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks. They were from a neighbouring farm and Lo, the elder by two years, was nineteen but looked much older. Worn-out. Yaret said quietly to her that the farm had obviously not prospered.
It was Ondro who had explained how, soon after the coming of the darkburns, he’d found the two girls cowering in their burnt-out shed. He was hunting for lost sheep at the time, and had led them back to his shepherd’s hut. He seemed to regard them as oversized lambs.
When Yaret had met him on her expedition to Byant he’d thought it wiser not to mention the concealed girls: but two days later, when he saw the returning stonemen in the distance, he decided that he had to get them out. He was just in time. From their hiding place behind a hedge he watched the stonemen ride up to his hut, kick down his door and set fire to the interior. No darkburns required.
So then he’d brought the two girls to Obandiro. Ondro didn’t seem to mind his change of circumstance. He just accepted it and got on with whatever needed doing, although he made it clear that he would still be going back at intervals to check his sheep.
The girls were different. They slept, and lay around, and did almost nothing. It made Elket angry. Their laziness added fuel to the smoulder of resentment that lay deep inside her. She knew the resentment was there and didn’t see why she shouldn’t let it stay. It was a change from worrying, and felt more powerful. She had enough to be angry about, after all. Why not start with the girls?
When she carried the sack full of roots up to the horse, she found Yaret bundling matted lumps of speckled wool into a saddle-bag.
“Raw wool,” she explained, “from the bottom of the washing-tub. I doubt if my grandparents even knew it was there.” Elket nodded. Any extra bedding would be welcome.
They had split into two cellars now that there were eight of them. It wasn’t an even split: Shuli and the new girls shared the cellar they’d cleared two doors down, while Ondro and the others remained underneath the inn. Elket didn’t mind Ondro. He was old, about forty maybe, but she’d rather share with him than with the idle girls.
Yaret went back down the ladder and came up with the remains of the dried fruit and a sack of oats – the last sackful, although there were still some left back home.
Home… That was what the dingy cellar underneath the inn felt like now, as much home as Elket’s drab old house had been. Since the baby, her mother seemed to have been hardly there in spirit. She was somewhere else, somewhere the sick baby was. Elket thought the baby would have died soon anyway and that would have broken her mother’s heart. So. It was to have been called Jeret but they never called it that; it was just a gasping shivering little animal with blue lips and no strength in its hands. Poor thing. She allowed herself to think that now. Poor little thing. Poor Jeret.
She found the tears pricking at her eyes again and turned to the donkeys to disguise it, breathing in their warm wet-grass-and-muck smell. She wasn’t even crying for the baby, poor little Jeret though he was, but for her family, given no chance to be different, no chance for anything to change although her father would never have changed anyway. So stop crying. No point. It was time to go.
On the long walk home Elket led the laden horse and Yaret led Nuolo by an improvised woollen halter. Nuolo could easily have broken it but she didn’t try, and Dolm followed her doggedly. Every time Elket turned round to look, Yaret was smiling. The donkeys would be the obvious choice for Best Thing at evening council.
But she was soon surprised by something better than the donkeys. As they came out of the woods above Obandiro the thin snow along the ground was shaded blue by the fading light. The whole landscape was a wondrous wash of patterned indigos and twilight blues and slatey greys that blurred into the distance until they met the darkening sky. A single streak of pale, cool gold lay on the horizon in defiance of the dusk.
She stopped and looked. Poor baby Jeret and her angry father fell away, lost in the blue waves of the fields and trees, their skeletal starkness transformed by snow. This was winter.
My heart feels hot and heavy, Elket thought, but this is beautiful. So cold and beautiful. I shall have to tell… who do I tell?
They were all gone, all her friends, all her aunts and nan and neighbours, all the people that she might have told. They were not Guardians. Just bodies. Just dead.
Beside her Yaret was gazing out as well, with one hand on Nuolo’s back.
“It’s hard to realise,” she said, and stopped.
“I don’t find it hard,” said Elket. She knew her voice was thin and bitter.
Yaret took a deep breath and began again.
“I have sometimes found myself thinking,” she said, “that anger is like a darkburn blazing in the heart. We want it to run out and leap on other people and burn them as well. In that way one person’s anger could set a whole town burning. It is a destructive thing. We all have good reason to be angry now. But if you keep your anger nurtured, and feed its fire in your heart, it can never be safe there, it will burn through. It will escape and damage others somehow.”
“So what do you do with it?” muttered Elket.
“I think… if you can’t quench it, you have to make of it a furnace where something can be forged. A sword, a spade, a ploughshare; something useful. What I mean is, anger has enormous force. So you have to use that energy in the most productive way you can. Whether that is digging or building or hunting or making war or making something else. But you have to shape it and not let it shape you.”
Elket thought about this as she gazed down at the sweeping wonder of the landscape.
“My father was always angry,” she said. “Usually. Nothing was ever right for him. Everything was my fault.”
“To say that was unfair of him,” said Yaret quietly, “would be to state the obvious. Do you know why he was that way?”
“What do you mean?”
“What was his own father like?”
“I don’t know. I never met him. If you mean that maybe Da was hit and shoved around and sworn at and had things thrown at him as a child and that’s why he did the same to us, I don’t see that it follows. It just makes it worse, because he knew what it was like.”
“But people get trapped in ways of thinking,” Yaret said.
“Then they should climb out of the trap.”
“If they can see how to. Was he the same with Dil?”
“Not as bad. But Dil was a boy. There were three other boys but they were all born early and they all died. There might actually have been more than three… I don’t know. They didn’t tell me.”
“Your parents bore a lot of grief,” said Yaret.
“I suppose.”
“You were the eldest?”
“Yes.”
“Were you his?”
This shocked Elket so much that she did not answer. She took a step back and stared at Yaret, who merely shrugged.
“Maybe I am becoming trapped in my own way of thinking,” she said, “because I have my own small darkburn here to deal with,” and she tapped her chest. “But if you weren’t his child it might explain some of his behaviour.”
“I… Whether I was his or not, he was still my father,” Elket burst out. “He took me on. He was supposed to look after me. That was his job.”
“He knows that. The dead stand in the shadows of the room and bow their heads, for on the shining walls are written all their errors and omissions.”
Elket felt a shiver run up her spine. “That’s Ulthared, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Poor old dead.”
“Yes. They are brought to know what they have done. We all are.”
“I hope it’s not all sorrow and repentance for those…” She gestured at the blue, dead town beneath them.
“Without sorrow there’s no joy,” said Yaret. “Or less intense joy.”
“Is that Ulthared?”
“No. That’s me. There is joy too in the Ulthared but I won’t say it now.”
“Why not?”
“Wrong time.”
Elket sighed. “I still feel angry with him.”
“Then make of it a furnace,” Yaret said, “and think of something useful you can forge.”
Elket kicked at the snow under her feet. “Well. We’d best move on or we’ll be late for council.”
She pulled on Poda’s halter until the horse began to walk. Then she stroked Poda’s strong arched neck in case her feelings had transmitted to the horse, which would not be fair. Poda was a magnificent horse, who made her dream about her owner: Eled, the young stricken Rider who in Yaret’s nightly tale was now lying in a hollow tree in Farwithiel. In last night’s account, the other Riders of the Vonn had just departed and Elket sensed something in Yaret’s telling that was more than plain regret. Maybe she was angry at being left alone to look after Eled, and that was her small darkburn. Elket didn’t know.
At any rate, the whole account of Farwithiel was like stepping inside a marvellous land of Ulthared. Yaret had described the Farwth to an awed silence in the cellar, although Elket had the feeling that she did not say all that she knew. Everyone had listened intently, even the two new girls.
“Those girls,” she said to Yaret now. “Lo and Renna. I know they’ve had a hard time, but it’s more than two weeks now since they got here and they’ve still done nothing.”
They walked on a few more paces before Yaret answered.
“It will take a little longer yet. I think they’ve been starving.”
“We’ve all been hungry.”
“No, we haven’t. Not really. If you were hungry you’d eat the red roots. If you were starving you’d eat grass and leaves and leather, and I think that’s what Lo and Renna have been doing for the last few months.”
“But nobody starves!” cried Elket. “In Obandiro? Starving?”
“They were outside Obandiro and nobody knew. Ondro saw them occasionally, and he says he did worry about them. Half their flock died of bloat and they had to sell the rest. He gave the family a couple of sheep but he had nothing else to give them. He says he told an alderman about them when he was in town for market, a few days before the stonemen came. Nothing was done. Well, there was no time, I suppose.”
“But they hardly eat anything,” protested Elket.
“They eat more than they did at first. I think they were so unused to eating, or their stomachs had shrunk so much that… Anyway,” said Yaret, “they’re eating better now. I just wish we had some better food to give them.”
“Is that what’s happened to all Shuli’s eggs?”
“Yes. It was her own idea.”
Elket felt ashamed. “We could grind up cobnuts,” she suggested after a moment, “with oats or flour, and make them into little cakes.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. It would be a good thing to try.”
They were almost at the town now and Elket could see the ruins of her old house beyond the truncated market-tower. There was an inconspicuous trickle of smoke coming from the fire-place on the Cross-street: they still used the same cooking fire, although now they had cleaned out the inn’s own hearth and had begun to keep a second, smaller fire in there to gather round in the evenings. The fires would be essential once winter hit the town in earnest. One of the cleared cellars had produced two metal buckets, so they set one over the new fire for warm water in the morning. It was a wonderful luxury. They had even washed and dried some clothes.
The cellar was increasingly cold at night – it didn’t help that Yaret insisted on leaving the hatch open by day, so that it wouldn’t get damp. They had to leave it propped slightly open at night, too, for ventilation. For warmth they made do with the hot stones. But the earthen floor was always cold.
Her mother had put a hot brick in her bed, wrapped in a cloth. Her father had thrust a bowl of warm milk at her, scowling.
“Well, get on with it! Drink it down! Some children would be grateful.”
She had not been particularly grateful. Yet they had never starved. She had hardly ever been hungry. Her father had worked hard – as a waller, fencer, builder – and he had always let them know exactly how much hard work the food had cost. But the food had been on the table.
And maybe she hadn’t been Da’s child after all. She knew nothing of the history of her parents’ marriage. Her babyhood had never been discussed. So; maybe.
Oddly enough, it made her feel something almost like sympathy. Lumbered with a touchy stranger who snapped back at him. Sometimes he raised his hand but did not strike.
Now he stood in the shadows with head bowed. Well, he should have done far better. But he could have done far worse.