Plain Kate

TEN THE PUNT, THE POOL, AND THE EMPTY ROAD

She rocked like a cradle. There was achuck, chuck like a dove or waves on a dock. Plain Kate woke.

She was dry. She was lying on something soft. She was wrapped in quilts. There was a star of light drifting above her, and a smell like an herb garden. Taggle was a long warmth stretched at one side, his chin in her hand, his tail curled over her neck. She thought they might be in heaven.

Taggle farted.

Plain Kate coughed and sneezed. And then she was really awake.

She was not in heaven, but in a little bunk on a boat. The painted ceiling was close above her. The slap of water thudded through the wall at her ear. Taggle’s tail flip-flipped over her face. She smelled his scorched fur. He squirmed around and soon his face appeared from under the blanket. “Taggle,” she whispered. Her voice was rough with smoke.

He made a little meow. There weren’t any words.

The golden light stirred. A rush lamp of pierced tin swung over her like the night sky. A pale face floated above it.“Fair maid of the wood,” said a familiar voice. “Are you awake?”

“You,” Taggle spat. Because it was Linay.

He barked with surprise and laughter.“This was your wish? A talking cat!”

Taggle’s ears went back. “We don’t like you.”

Linay grinned.“Well, now, I don’t blame you, catkins. But I can heal you, like me or not.” He hung the lantern. “Can you sit, little one?” Plain Kate struggled to sit and he put his arms around her shoulders. He had a little jar in one hand; it smelled of herbs and thunder. Taggle sniffed once, squinted in disgust, and started backing up.

“What—?” Kate tried to say, and coughed. Her throat felt like it had been filed down with a rasp.

“Shhhhh,” he said. “It’s only salve.”

“What do you want?” she whispered.

The salve felt cool as seaweed on her burns. Linay was humming. He put the salve on her forehead and cheekbones. The humming faded into song:

Lenore my sister: she had power

She could bring the bud to flower

Seal the wound or soothe the fever

And so she spent her life

In their fevered year they found her

Drove her mad with whips and fire

Drove her to the freezing river

And there they thought she died

But her wronged soul turned into water

Rusalka, lost ghost of the river

Vampire, siren, doomed to wander

and never find her rest

Lenore, my sister—I would save her

I would pull her up the river

Do to that town what they did to her

and so remake her life

The song was important. Kate tried to hear it and keep it, but she could not. She felt as if she might break into the air as salt breaks into water.“Drink,” Linay said. There was a cup at her lips. The drink was both cool and warm.

She slept.

Kate woke again, and again the boat was rocking. She felt as if she had been asleep for days and days and days, sunk halfway in long bad dreams. The current spoke in the wood by her ear, and she could feel the surge of the boat against it and hear the plosh and clock of a pole. They were moving.

They. Linay.

She sat up. How long had she been asleep? There was dry sourness in her mouth, and the dream stretched out so long behind her.“Taggle,” she whispered, and it came out croaky.

The cat was curled up in a nook by her feet, between a little cauldron and a lumpy bag: three round heaps. She didn’t spot him till he lifted his head and cracked an eye open. “Oh.” He yawned. “Hello.”

“How long—” She rubbed at her eyes and her fingers found patches of numbed slickness on her face. “How long—where are we?”

“A boat,” he said, getting up and leaning into a long stretch. His fur was scorched off on one side, but the bare patches were with new fuzz. “I do not care for it: There’s water. But also, fish, which is nice for me.” He sidled over and rubbed the corner of his mouth on her hand, markingher with his scent.

“How long—I don’t remember anything. How long have I been asleep?”

Taggle shrugged with his whiskers.“It is not a matter for cats,how long.” He tilted his chin up and looked at her—he seemed almost concerned. “I have eaten many times,” he offered. “Many fish, many mice, three muskrats, two rabbits, and a small bird that was sleeping. You have had broth.”

She tried to remember broth, but couldn’t. There was only the long dream about burning and drowning and a woman made of fog, hungry and terribly sad. Stivo crumpling to the ground at a single touch. Daj turning away. Drina bleeding. Behjet throwing the lamp. She shook herself.Broth. It would have been hot. But she felt cold: In her sleep, Linay had fed her, had dressed her—her skin shuddered and her hair prickled. She got up.

The ceiling was low and hung thick with trinkets and bundles of herbs. They tangled and bumped in her hair. She stooped and inched away from the bunk and into the dim and tiny space.

Her scorched smock that had been her father’s, that she had worn for years, was gone. She was wearing a linen dress, white and embroidered in white, a fine thing edged with lace. It was too big for her and the lace trailed on the floor. She hitched it up.

“I did not catch the fish,” Taggle said, continuing his tale of food as he followed her. “I could, of course, but there is the matter of getting wet. He gave them to me. Though I still do not like him.”

Daylight poured down from the hatch and fell in a square on the decking. The rest of the cabin was shadowy clutter. Bags and coils of ropes and strings of dried sausages hung on the wall. There was a smell of wet wood, river rot, human sweat, sausage, spices, and the musty smell of many herbs. Plain Kate looked around for her boots.

She found them slumped in the shadows. She bent to pick them up. Then she stopped. The boots were sitting beside a box, a crooked little chest of splintered planks. The lid, though, was carved and beautiful: a stag leaping.

She knew that stag. The box was made from pieces of her father’s stall.

And there was something wrong about it.

All of Kate’s hair stood up. The box was darker than it should have been. It looked as if it were breathing. “Taggle?” she whispered. “I’m looking for a hatchet.”

“I wouldn’t,” said a lilting voice behind her.

Plain Kate spun around. Linay was leaning at the ladder, white in the stream of sun.

“That box is not a matter for hatchets. As you love your life, leave it alone.” He smiled at her, that slow, slow smile. “Unless, of course, the hatchet is for me.”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s good to see you up. There’s no one about. Come above.”

She hesitated, squinting at his brightness.

“Don’t worry. It’s safe enough while the day lasts.” He slipped up the ladder.

Plain Kate watched him go, and threw a long look at the huddled, splintery box. Then she went to get her boots. Moving them stirred up a smell of scorched leather and smoke that made her for an instant almost sick with fear. She swallowed it and took a steadying breath. Then she pulled on the boots, checked her knife, and followed Linay through the hatch.

The punt Kate remembered from Samilae was tied up in a slow curve of the river, where the current had cut a straighter channel and left a loop of still water, shielded by a sand spit and hung with willows. Plain Kate stood up out of the hatch and breathed deep.

Big willows surrounded the river, and beyond them was a strip of wheat fields. The air smelled like bread. Beside them in the water, a gray heron was standing above its own reflection. She looked at it and it looked at her and they were still for a moment, until the heron lifted heavily on its huge wings, and was gone.

“Oooo,” said Taggle, springing onto the bench at the punt’s blunt end.

“He’s too big for you, catkins,” said Linay. He sat cross-legged on the roof of the cabin. “Could kill a pike, that beauty.”

“Hmmph,” said Taggle, and closed his eyes in the dappling sun.

Plain Kate stood weak-kneed on the tiny deck and had nowhere to look but at the sky, and at Linay. She looked at Linay. He was wrapping strips of white cloth around his hands, tugging them into place with his teeth. The sleeves of his zupan were hanging down his back; his arms were bare, and the bandages went to his elbows. The insides of his forearms were spotted with fresh blood.

Plain Kate knew knives: A man might cut himself there, but only on purpose.

He looked at her watching, and held up a hand as if to show the blood. She turned away.

Her face floated in the dark water. Kate saw herself and closed her eyes, her hands rising up to cover her burnt face. She felt the bubbled scars. She moved her hands away.

The water below was a pool of dark mirror, showing willow and small gusts of sky. And her face.Plain Kate she is, she thought.Plain as a stick. One side of her face was splattered with burn scar, mostly pale and slick, but thickened and bubbled where it was worst, a rectangle from ear to eyebrow. Her hair had been singed off on that side too, and was growing back only in patches, ugly as a chick just getting its feathers in.

“It’s as well,” said Linay gently, behind her. “Everyone will turn away from you. Fewer will see.”

That she had no shadow, he meant. Once she looked past the burns she could see that being shadowless too had marked her: Her nose threw no shadow across her face; her eyes had no weight. She looked half washed away, floating in the water like a drowned ghost. She turned away. Linay was still watching her, intense, as if he were hungry.

He was bloody and wild and pale. Pale…He’d been pale when he took her shadow, but pale and strong. Now he looked gray, weak as she was, and wild in his weakness.

He raised a white eyebrow at her.“If you would wash, do it before darkness.”

She hesitated.

“Go on. It will do you good, if your legs will hold you. I shan’t peek.

Plain Kate was working her way toward the pool that was hidden from Linay’s boat by the largest willow. She inched along the bottom of the V made by the steep bank and the willow’s great furrowed trunk, balancing with both hands. The willow’s rough bark made her feel the fragile tightness of the new scars on her hands. Her hands felt as stiff as if gloved.

“I could kill the heron,” said Taggle. “If I wanted. I would lie in wait on one of the willow branches and take him from above.”

“Like a panther,” said Kate, who wasn’t really listening. Her hands. Her hands that held her carving knife. Her skill with that knife was her whole life, the only thing she had left in the world. Her hands felt so strange.

Taggle curled his tail.“Like a panther. Ah. A panther.” He sprang up on a branch and padded along by her ear.

“Taggle,” she began. She wanted to ask him what would happen to her if she couldn’t carve. What would happen—but she could not think of any words. And then she came clear of the willow, and found herself above the edge of a pool set like a jewel into the bank. The willow branched above and green fronds trailed like a curtain, all around.

Taggle stretched himself out on a branch over the pool.“I would wait,” he announced, “like this.”

Plain Kate stood looking down at the green, dappled space. Her skin was sticky and grimed as if she’d been wound up in a spiderweb for months. Her legs trembled with weakness. And her hands felt numb, bigger than they should have, and farther away.

“I will keep watch,” yawned the cat, and closed his eyes.

What will I do? she had wanted to ask him.What will I do if I cannot carve? But it was the wrong question.What will I do without my shadow? What will I do with no family and no people, no place to belong? What will I do with my life in the hands of this dangerous man?“Taggle,” she began.

But the cat was so intently keeping watch that he had fallen asleep. He lay on the branch with his dangling feet dream-twitching. Kate laughed. And laughed. And found she couldn’t stop laughing. It tore at her until she doubled up and her eyes streamed. And still she kept laughing, until she threw up with the horror of it.

The physical shock of the sickness calmed her. She washed. Exhausted, she slept. When she woke it was golden afternoon. Linay’s boat was out of sight behind the big willows, but she could hear the river patting its flat sides. She could go back there.

Or she could leave.

Anyone who saw her would take her for a demon. She could not go among people; they would kill her. She could not live on her own; she would die.

When you are carving a narrow point, like the tail of this fish, her father had said to her, big hands over her little ones, and the carving beneath them,this is a time of danger. The knife may slip. It may follow a grain and spoil the line. There may be a flaw deep in the wood that will snap your work in two. You will want to leave the tail thick and crude; that is safer. A master carver will be brave, and trust the wood. Things will find their shape. Kate, My Star. Lift your knife.

Plain Kate stood up. Between her and the road was a steep slope, almost a bluff, tangled with the bent roots of the willows and clogged with nettles. She tilted her chin up.“Taggle,” she said, “we’re leaving.”

When Kate finally reached the road she was scratched and netttle stung and shaking with exhaustion. It had only been a little climb, but her body was weak. She tried to hear her father’s voice:Be brave. Things will find their shape. Lift your knife.

She turned her back on the way Linay had been going, and followed the road upriver. The road went with the grain of the land, cutting between the river bluffs and the strip of farmland won from the forest: fields of wheat and millet, with the wooded hills beyond. It was a narrow road, quiet. Kate walked and Taggle ambled at her heels.

As she walked, the weather changed. Butter sunshine gave way to a light like watered milk, and then to a thick fog, wet as drizzle. The fog caught and twisted the sound of crows in the wheat, hoarse as a mob of voices.

A little way into the fog they found a tree stump abandoned in the road. It was oak, big as a shed, and still harnessed to a yoke that stood empty. Plain Kate touched one of the hames: ash wood, old but well-made, its inner curve smooth as a lady’s wrist. It was not the sort of thing people in a poor country left to lie in the middle of the road. Plain Kate edged around the stump—and then she saw something that made her stop. In among the biggest roots was a knot of wood, twice as big as her head. It was a burl.

Burls had twisting grains that made them hard to carve, but made them beautiful. Many a carver had made his masterpiece from just such a burl. Kate had dreamed of it—but had never been able to afford the wood. Burl wood was rare and expensive.

Plain Kate looked down at her hands, stiff and patched with scars, white and pink like the belly of an old fish. In an unknown country, with not so much as a kopek in her pocket, there were better things to carry than ten pounds of wood. And there were easier things to carve, when you weren’t sure if your hands would serve you. Indeed, anything she could have chosen would be easier to carve than an oak burl.

But she took it anyway.

Plain Kate walked down the road with the oak burl under one arm. Crumbs and clots of dirt broke into the folds of her white dress. But there was no one to tut over the damage. The foggy road was beginning to grow strange with its emptiness. The fields, which should have been bustling with harvesters, were empty. The farm huts let no smoke from their chimneys. She met a cow that lowed to be milked and butted at her. Mile after mile, there was no one.

She came finally to a wheat field that was half harvested, rough-shorn as Drina’s hair. It was quiet, thick with starlings that were feasting on the fallen wheat.

Plain Kate was a town girl, but she knew that wheat shouldn’t be left to lie in the fields until poppies came up through it. She walked beside the red flowers, feeling her legs begin to tremble with their weakness. Something was wrong. Something was wrong.

She kept walking. There was a brew-house sour smell of wheat rotting. A wave of starlings startled as she passed, and flew up, twisting over her head like a ribbon of smoke. Taggle craned his neck to follow the flight, but he was staying close to her side, almost like a dog. She didn’t mention that, of course.

She trudged on. Her legs felt like old wineskins: her skin stiff and her muscles sloshing. She teetered a little as she walked, though she tried not to. But there was nowhere to stop. She squinted ahead. There was a place where the wheat was still standing, and beyond that, at the edge of the field, a windrow of birch. When she reached that windrow, she promised herself, she would cut a walking staff and stop to carve it. She locked her eyes on the white trees and tried to keep her feet from dragging. When she got to the windrow, she kept thinking. When she got to the windrow—

But she never reached it.

At the raged shore between the cut and uncut wheat, there was a splash of poppies. Something dark lay in them like a log. She would sit down on that, she thought, staggering, and—

She saw that the log was a body. A half-grown lad with wheat-bright hair lay sprawled there with his scythe stuck in the ground beside him. Kate toppled to her knees.

Taggle sniffed the lad’s face. “He’s alive. He had fish to eat…but…Katerina. I smell the thing. The thing has done this to him.”

Kate took the boy’s limp hand, shook the rough-clad shoulder. The lad didn’t stir, didn’t even sigh in his sleep.Like Wen, she thought.Like Stivo and like Wen. She shut her eyes and tried to get up, but fell forward instead. She might have passed out. Time stopped, blankly.

When it moved again, Taggle was butting at her hand. She could feel the lump on his skull where the axe had hit him, a gnarled spot under his soft fur.“There are more of them,” he hissed. His fur was on end. “The thing. More sleepers. The thing has been here.”

“The white shadow.” Plain Kate gagged and spit out the sourness in her mouth. “The thing that killed Wen and Stivo.” She looked at the limp, sleeping lad, then yanked the scythe out of the earth, and, leaning on it, staggered to her feet. She stood panting.

Taggle was looking at the sky, a ridge of fur standing up from his spine. Plain Kate looked up too, her skin beginning to goose-bump with a slow-dawning fear. It was dimming toward evening. A fog twined off the river, snaking over the road. It would be night in an hour or two; the fog would come; the white creature would come with it. It had killed Stivo with one touch. She had no defense.“We have to go back,” she said.

So they went back. Exhausted, Kate went stumbling and limping, hauling her burl, leaning on the scythe, until its smooth handle rubbed through her scars. She arrived at Linay’s boat in purple twilight, both hands bloody, stooping like the angel of death.

Linay raised his eyebrows.“That was a long bath.”

Taggle bit him. Kate collapsed at his feet.