Out of the Dawn Light

TWO

The autumn went on and the days got steadily colder and shorter. We all worked hard, none more so than my poor father. The demands of our ruthless Norman overlord were diluted down through several tiers before they reached our lowly level, and indeed our local master, Lord Gilbert de Caudebec, was not too hard on us, being a chubby, indolent man who relied heavily on his reeve — who was chilly, self-contained but basically fair — and tended to leave us alone. Nevertheless we were left in no doubt as to what our fate would be if the rigid rules were not obeyed. The few elders who could remember what life had been like before the Conquest spoke wistfully (and very quietly) of the good old days. Most of us had known nothing but the Norman rule and could only take their word for it.

My parents, however, succeeded in shutting out the cruel world every evening when my father closed and fastened the door. The seven of us (eight if you counted the baby) settled down to life without Goda as contentedly and as cheerfully as we had anticipated and, in due course, I forgot Granny’s awful warning about my handsome man.

I did not, however, forget about him.

He had come to Goda and Cerdic’s wedding, I reasoned, and so surely he must be acquainted with one or other family. He didn’t know us, so therefore his attendance must have been on Cerdic’s behalf. There was little point in asking around in the village to see if anyone knew more about him than I did, although this didn’t stop me. The only person who even appeared to know who I was talking about was the old man who had shared Sibert’s straw bale — he’s my mother’s friend Ella’s father-in-law’s brother — who muttered something to the effect that the ‘shiny well-dressed little cockerel’ had talked with him and Sibert for some time.

I found his attitude disrespectful so I went off in a huff and didn’t ask him any more.

I saw little of Sibert. For some reason he seemed to be keeping himself to himself and when we did happen to meet, he did his best to pretend I wasn’t there. Well, I don’t care, I wanted to shout into his frowning face with its preoccupied expression, these days it’s a better man than you that I see when I close my eyes at night!

In any case, life was becoming too full and too exciting for me to spare either man all that many moments. I was newly apprenticed to my fascinating aunt Edild, and Edild is a herbalist and a healer.

She lives in a little house on the fringes of Aelf Fen, by herself apart from a cat, some hens and a nanny goat and quite content with life. Her living space is even smaller than ours but, despite the lack of space, I really love it because Edild has a talent for making a place seem welcoming, homely and secure. Her low door opens into a little room whose beaten-earth floor is always immaculately swept, and the central hearth in its ring of evenly sized stones either contains a fire, burning merrily, or else is laid with logs and kindling and all ready to be lit. Edild sets bunches of herbs to smoulder in among the firewood and I would know her little house blindfold for its sweet scent; in addition to the burning bunches of herbs, the shelves in her house are laden with her remedies and she stores the ingredients in sacks kept in a special wooden box. She has fashioned a narrow platform to the rear of her house and up there, reached by a little ladder, she sleeps in a nest of regularly washed linen and soft woollen covers.

Her garden was always tidily kept and even now, as October gave way to November, you just knew there were bulbs and seeds safely tucked up beneath the smooth brown soil just waiting for spring to bring them back to life. Her reputation had spread beyond the settlement and not many days passed without someone tapping on her door to ask advice, on anything from piles to the suspicion that a neighbour was doing some ill-wishing. Strictly speaking, I was not meant to be privy to Edild’s consultations with her visitors but the cottage was small and sometimes I just couldn’t help overhearing.

It was Granny who had suggested my apprenticeship with my aunt. Granny, as well as knowing all about the ancestors, is very knowledgeable about the living, in particular her three sons (Ordic and Alwyn, fishermen and fowlers, and my father, whose name is Wymond and who is an eel catcher) and her two daughters Alvela (the one who’s the widow of nice Matthew and mother to my taciturn cousin Morcar) and Edild. She knows their strengths and their weaknesses; she also has an uncanny way of appreciating who is likely to get on with whom. She knows, for example, that my uncle Ordic puts a deep, dark fear into my brother Haward so that his stutter gags him to silence when Ordic is about.

I often wonder if Granny suggested my vocation because she knows about the dowsing. Not that I knew it was called that, not till she spoke of it to me. As far as I was concerned, it was just something I could do, in the way other children could wiggle their ears, raise one eyebrow or turn a line of handsprings. My talent is being able to find things. I knew where my mother’s pewter brooch was when it fell off her tunic into the woodpile. Out in the pasture I found a coin with a woman’s face on it. I know where water is, not that there’s any great skill in that when you live in the Fens, but actually I can find water sources that are hidden deep in the earth. All I have to do is focus my mind, hold out my hands and sort of feel the ground before me. When I approach the object of the search, whether it’s water or a lost object, my palms begin to tingle and after that it’s easy. Granny saw me mucking about with my friends one day and asked me quite sharply what I thought I was doing. When I told her, there was a sudden bright light in her eyes and she gave me a wide smile. Then she grabbed my hand and hurried me away to the hazel grove, where, after a bit of muttering to the tree and some funny movements with her hand, she broke off a little branch, stripped off the twigs and the leaves and then split one end. She pushed the split ends in my hands, turned me round, gave me a shove and said, ‘Now, walk. Tell me if anything happens.’

Excited, strangely fearful, I walked. After a few moments the hazel rod started trembling. Then it bucked and spun in my hands, so violently that I dropped it. I turned to Granny, aghast.

I didn’t know it, but she had made me walk across the line of a stream that runs deep underground beneath the path that leads out of the village.

I hurried to pick up the stick, holding it out to her in the full expectation of a scolding. But instead she came to stand beside me, gave me a hard hug and said, ‘Child, you’re a dowser.’

Even apart from my peculiar skill, Granny knew that Edild and I would get on and we do. We have similar colouring and we look alike — sometimes people take us for mother and daughter — and we laugh at the same things, finding amusement in the incongruous and sometimes, it has to be said, in the vulgar and the frivolous. Not that Edild ever shows this light-hearted, laughing side to those who come seeking her help; it is an indication of how well we understand one another that she has never had occasion to tell me not to appear in the presence of a patient with anything but a serious face and a studious, intent manner.

Since the late summer Edild had been instructing me in an overview of her craft. I have learned about the main healing herbs and how to prepare and use them, the making of amulets and talismans and the composition and reciting of charms. She also explained to me the workings of the human body, male as well as female, which I must admit caused me to blush more than once despite the fact that, like all country children who grow up cheek by jowl with their family’s animals, I first witnessed the mystery of procreation when I was still learning to walk. Still, animals mating is one thing; people, quite another. Now, as the winter days grew short and the darkness waxed, Edild began teaching me about the stars and their influence on everything — people, animals, plants — that lives under the great bowl of the sky.

‘I have cast your web of destiny, Lassair,’ she said to me one bright morning. ‘We shall use the knowledge that it provides as a basis for our discussion on how the planets guard us, guide us and, indeed, make us what we are.’ I like that about Edild; even when the lesson consisted of her talking and me silently listening, she still calls it a discussion. ‘You are air and fire,’ she went on, ‘and you live in your mind and not your body. You are restless, drawing on a great well of energy, and in time you will perceive and penetrate the web that connects all of life. You will brim over with creativity and new ideas and you will be brave, uncompromising and direct, yet possess the ability to conceal your true self with a plausible false skin.’ Yes, that bit sounded like me; I had always been a good liar. ‘You are essentially a private person, and your friends and your lovers’ — I blushed violently — ‘will sense that they are never truly close to you. You must learn to distinguish between independence, which is admirable, especially in a woman, and its darker face, isolation.’

‘But I’m not isolated!’ I protested. I felt the urgent need to lighten the mood. ‘I live in a tiny cottage with seven other people!’

Edild regarded me, her green eyes solemn. Then, ignoring my foolish comment and my nervous little laugh, she went on, ‘At the time of your birth, the Sun, the Moon and the planets were all in signs of air and fire. You are water-lacking, so that the turmoil of emotions experienced by others will be incomprehensible to you, and you are also earth-lacking, and will thus have little sense of being grounded firmly in the good Earth.’

I was never going to achieve closeness with people, even my lovers. I would never understand emotion, presumably not even my own. Oh, it sounded bitter. My dismay must have shown in my face for Edild reached out and took my hand, squeezing it in her own.

‘Look,’ she said brightly after a moment. ‘Look at your chart, Lassair.’ She spread out a large square of vellum, beautifully marked with a big circle divided into segments and dotted with intriguing little signs and symbols. ‘This is the moment of your birth, in the early pre-dawn light of the twentieth of June, in the year 1074, and this is where the planets were positioned.’ I followed the long finger with its short, clean nail as she pointed. There were the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, marked on my web of destiny as if for that instant of my birth, their sole purpose had been to make me what I was. It was an awesome thought.

Something struck me; I heard Granny’s voice, speaking of another Lassair. ‘My namesake was a child of the fire and the air,’ I said cautiously. ‘It’s in Granny’s story.’

Edild smiled. ‘I thought you would remember. Yes, Lassair’s web was very similar to yours — she too had Mercury placed in his own house of Gemini, the planet of love in the same air sign and the warrior god in Aries, most warlike sign of all.’

She fell silent, frowning as if in thought. Perhaps she was thinking, as I was, of the mysterious ancestress who had borne my name before me and I knew enough about her to understand that she cannot have had an easy life, to say the least. I hesitated, and then said in a small voice, ‘Will I be a mystery too? Will I disappear into the mist one day and nobody will know what’s happened to me?’

Edild have me a hug. ‘I doubt it,’ she said robustly. ‘You usually chatter so much that we’re left in no doubt whatsoever where you are and what you’re up to. Now, come and look at my model of the planets and I’ll tell you which of them influence which healing herbs and show you how to work out the best time for planting and harvesting.’

Later that day, while Edild was closeted with a young woman suffering from something that necessitated privacy while she removed her undergarments, I crept back to have another look at my fascinating but alarming web of destiny. My head was full of the morning’s lesson and I now knew what some of the symbols meant. There was the Sun, as Edild had said, in the sign of Gemini at the moment of my birth; there was the Moon, in distant, mysterious Aquarius; I had believed Aquarius the Water-Carrier to be a water sign (it seemed logical) until Edild put me right and said he was an air sign. There were Mercury and Venus, both also in Gemini; there were Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, in the fire signs of Aries and Sagittarius. All placed just as Edild had said.

And, apparently, very similar to their positions in the chart of Lassair the Sorceress, whose fate we do not know but who was strongly believed to be half elfish. .

Oh!

I rolled up the chart and retied its ribbon. I did not want to know any more.

The Winter Solstice was upon us and, as my family has always done, we celebrated with a meal eaten as the light faded. As well as my immediate family, my uncle Alwyn, my aunts Edild and Alvela and my cousin Morcar were also there, which meant it was a crush but nobody minded. When we were all seated, my father blew out the lamp and we all sat in the darkness. Out of the silence came Granny’s voice, intoning that tonight was the longest night of the year and that tomorrow the dark began to give way to the light. This was the signal; my father struck a spark with his flint and lit a precious stump of candle, saved for this purpose, and from that one light we each lit little tallow lamps of our own until the flames shone out in a circle that illuminated our faces and showed that all of us were smiling.

It might be midwinter still, with many cold, hard days of frozen ground and driving rain ahead, but now that the Solstice was here, we knew that the year had turned and the Sun was coming back. On that frosty night, with the stars shining brilliantly in the sky, that was something to smile about.

A couple of months after Christmas, Goda sent word. She was pregnant, she was perpetually sick, her entire body had swollen up so that she could barely move and she needed me to go and look after her.

I protested as violently as I could, bringing to bear every argument from the necessity to continue my instruction with Edild to the well-known fact that Goda didn’t like me and it couldn’t possibly be good for a pregnant woman to be in the perpetual company of someone who was so far from being a kindred spirit. Nothing made a jot of difference. Goda had sent for me and I must do as my parents commanded and go to her.

In desperation I turned to Granny. Whatever anyone else said, if Granny decreed I did not have to go — if, for instance, she insisted that it was far more important for me to get on with my studies than to tend my ingrate of a sister — then I would be saved.

But Granny took me aside, put her thin arms round me in a sudden intense hug and said quietly, ‘It’ll be a sore trial and you’ll hate it. But you must go, child.’

I had tears in my eyes and angrily I brushed them away. I made it a rule never to let anything Goda did make me cry, or at least not when anyone was watching. ‘Why?’ I wailed. To my shame I sounded like a three-year-old whining against sense and reason for its own way.

Granny had broken away and now she gave me a little shake. She muttered something — it sounded like wait and see, but that did not seem to make any sense — and then she said brusquely, ‘We all have to do things we don’t like and it won’t be for ever.’

Then she turned aside and hurried away.

Even in the extremity of my despair, I did not suggest that Elfritha go in my place. Elfritha is a year and four months older than I am, as I have already said, and she wants to be a nun. She is also gentle, impractical — when she’s in the convent they’ll have to watch her to make sure she doesn’t spill swill buckets and absent-mindedly tear her clothing on brambles like she’s always doing with us because I’m sure people vowed to poverty aren’t allowed to be wasteful — and inclined to daydream. All of which qualities drive Goda to distraction so that she has always been even rougher with poor Elfritha than with me. Besides the fact that nobody in their right mind would ask Elfritha to look after a tetchy and uncomfortable pregnant woman, I love my second-eldest sister far too much to make her suffer as she undoubtedly would in Goda’s household.

Elfritha may be dreamy and unworldly but she is not lacking in intelligence. She must have realized that I was being forced to take on an unpleasant task because she wasn’t suited to it, and just before I left for Icklingham and my new (and I hoped purely temporary) abode, she sought me out and gave me a present.

‘What is it?’ I asked. She had wrapped it in a piece of old linen and bound it with twine so I couldn’t tell, although whatever it was felt soft and squidgy.

She smiled shyly. ‘It’s something to remind you of home and a sister who loves you.’ No possibility that I would have one of those where I was going, I thought. ‘Open it when you get there,’ Elfritha added quickly as I went to pull at the twine. ‘And’ — she leant in very close and spoke right into my ear — ‘thank you.’

I looked at her quickly and I saw that she had tears in her eyes.

Would they miss me? I wondered as I trudged the six miles from Aelf Fen to Icklingham on a sharp, cold morning a week later. My parents would, I supposed, even if only as another pair of hands to get through the extraordinary amount of work there was to do each day. I was sure my brothers and sister would too, since, with Goda gone and no longer a selfish, bossy and malicious presence in our lives, we seemed to appreciate each other all the more. Granny and Edild would miss me, of course.

Anyone else?

I was thinking, naturally, of Sibert. Since the wedding, my memories of and crush on Romain had faded considerably and once again it was Sibert whom I imagined walking, talking and sometimes fighting by my side as I slid into sleep at night. Well, it was understandable, Sibert being on hand, as it were, and Romain long gone. Not that I had in truth seen very much of Sibert during the autumn and winter. Once I had come across him in earnest conversation with Granny, although what they were talking about I never discovered since they clammed up as soon as they saw me and neither would say a word. Once he had fallen into step with me as I returned from checking on the sheep in their outhouse and we exchanged a few rather stiff comments. That was about it but all the same I wished, as I hunched up my pack and tried to blow warmth into my cold hands, that there had been the occasion to say goodbye.

Perhaps he would not even realize that I had gone.

Depressed, I put my head down, struggled against the wind — just to add to my misery, it was blowing hard out of the east, almost exactly the direction in which I was walking — and plodded on. All too soon, the huddle of small cottages, pens and outbuildings that was Icklingham came into sight.

I strode up to Goda’s door — they had made quite sure I knew where to go — knocked and waited. As if she were deliberately making me stand out there in the cold, perhaps to indicate right from the outset just who was in charge around here, it was some moments before she answered. Then I heard her voice, its timbre rasping, its tone discontented and complaining.

‘Don’t loiter out there all day!’ called my sister. ‘I’ve just been sick, I’m shivering and I need a hot drink, oh, and you’d better clear up the mess. I missed the pot.’

My first two orders, before I’d even got through the door. It was without doubt a taste of things to come. With a secret sigh, I went in.

You could be forgiven for thinking that a woman not quite six months married to the man of her choice, in a decent enough little house and with a baby on the way, might have been happy; ecstatic, even. You don’t know my sister. It was hard to imagine why on earth she’d wanted to marry Cerdic, since now that she was his wife she spent all her time telling him how useless he was and how she’d been far better off at home. I couldn’t see how she reasoned that out. At home she had been made to do at least some of her share of the work (my mother can be a tough woman) and she had shared her cot and her tiny amount of privacy with Elfritha. Cerdic’s house might have consisted of just one small room (I slept in the lean-to with the placid and gentle-mannered family cow, an arrangement I would have chosen even had there been room for me in the house), but he was a skilled carpenter and had made it soundly so that it was wind-proof and, when the fire in the central hearth was well alight, really quite snug. He had built a low cot up against one wall and on it he and Goda had the luxury of two wool blankets, made for them by Cerdic’s mother, as well as a mattress stuffed with new straw. There was even a curtain fixed up to draw across in front of the bed if Goda so wished. Cerdic was not a poor man; a good carpenter always finds work. Like everyone else, he had to spend a part of each week working for the lord but he was eager and had an honest face, two qualities that ensured a regular stream of requests for his services.

Whatever he did, he was never going to be good enough for my sister and, poor man, he must have realized it. I wondered, with pity in my heart, just how soon after the wedding she had revealed her true self; how soon the now even more massive breasts had begun to pale in significance in the face of the bad temper, the selfishness, the foul mouth and the unerring aim with a wooden spoon or, in really bad moments, a clog. When I arrived, I noticed that Cerdic had a bruise on his left temple and I had a pretty good idea how he’d come by it.

When out in my lean-to I had unwrapped Elfritha’s present, I discovered that she’d woven for me a beautifully soft shawl of lamb’s wool, dyed in the lovely, subtle shades of green that she knows are my favourites. I was very glad that I had opened it in private, for Goda would have taken one look and demanded to be given it since, as she so often repeated, she was the pregnant one, she was the one suffering all this discomfort and misery and she was the one who needed spoiling. I vowed to make sure she never found out about my shawl. If this meant I could only snuggle into it in the lean-to, with no one but the friendly cow to appreciate how its colours made my eyes bright, it was a price worth paying.

I studied Goda subtly, trying to work out how far along she was in her pregnancy. When I had asked when the baby was due she was at first vague and then, when I protested that surely she must have some idea, violent. ‘Mind your own business!’ she screamed, only there was another word between own and business, one that I would have been thrashed for using. I could have pointed out that, since I had to look after her during her pregnancy, it was my business, but the bruise on Cerdic’s temple was still in evidence and I kept my mouth shut.

But I reckoned that, armed as I was with Edild’s instruction in the mystery of how women have babies, I could work it out for myself. The vastly swollen breasts and the sickness were, I believed, symptoms of the first three months, but I thought Goda was further along than that. Edild had demonstrated, using little drawings, how the baby in the womb gradually pushes upwards, so that a good midwife could judge from the height of the bulge how many months had passed since conception. I had to help my sister with her weekly wash — she complained, among many other things, that her condition caused her to sweat copiously — and, since she appeared to have left all modesty far behind her, she was in the habit of flinging off her clothes, lying back and ordering me to sponge her all over. Thus I was able not only to look at the big bump of baby but also run my hand over it and I calculated that she could be as much as six months pregnant.

It was now the end of March and she had wed Cerdic in late September. This baby must have been conceived virtually on their wedding night.

If not before.

I did not waste much time on the fact that my sister might have anticipated her wedding vows. If she had, she was far from being the only one. Possibly she had feared a last-minute defection in her husband-to-be, and letting him make love to her — perhaps encouraging him to — had been a way of ensuring he made an honest woman of her. Who knew? Who cared? No — what concerned me was when I might expect to be released from her household. If I was right and she was six months gone, my deliverance could come as early as June or the beginning of July. I could be home — and back at my lessons with Edild — soon after midsummer, with the rest of that bright, happy, outdoor season still ahead.

It was a lovely, heartening thought and it kept me going through the spring and early summer as inevitably, as Goda grew bigger, more cumbersome and more uncomfortable, matters went from bad to worse.