Tabula Rasa

Chapter 53

“Leave that alone!” The young woman let go of the handle in the top grinding stone, grabbed the toddler, and lifted him away. Over his howls of outrage, she shouted, “Do you want to get your fingers mashed?”

The toddler wailed louder. Still squatting, she held him at arm’s length, turning toward the unkempt man who had just let Tilla and Enica into the yard. “What’s that boy of yours done now?”

“I don’t know!” The man glanced around and yelled, “Aedic? Aedic! Get here now!” There was no response. “Where is he?”

“How should I know?” The woman ignored the toddler’s frenzied struggles to free himself from her grasp. “He’s your son!”

Tilla glanced at Enica, who was looking exhausted. The harassed mother thrust the toddler toward the man. “You take this one. I’ll see to them.”

“I’m busy.”

“Oh, and I have nothing to do?”

The woman won. The man tucked the toddler under his arm as if he were a stray and very unruly lamb, and the sound of protest was muffled by the walls as they went indoors.

The woman scrambled to her feet, slapping away the pale drifts of flour on her skirts. A couple of older women came out of the better-kept house across the yard. They recognized Enica, and Tilla heard yet again the conversation that had been repeated at every home they had visited. The sympathy. The hope of good news. The promise of prayers and offerings. And behind it all, unspoken, the fear that Enica’s bad luck might rub off on them.

Duty done, the women retreated and stood with their arms folded, as if they were waiting to say, I told you so, about something.

Enica said, “We must speak with Aedic, Petta. We think he can help.”

But Petta did not know where Aedic was. “He wanders off,” she said. “I tell him not to, but he never listens to me and his father does nothing about it.”

“When did you last see him?”

The woman scratched the back of her neck. “He brought in the firewood,” she said, trying to remember. Then she appealed to her neighbors. “Did anybody see where Aedic went?”

One of them said, “Sometimes he runs errands for the soldiers.”

Enica gave a gasp of concern as Tilla asked, “Do you know which ones?”

Nobody did. As if to excuse herself, Petta added, “I have enough to do without worrying about a boy who never does what I tell him.”

Tilla wondered whether, if this Aedic had been kidnapped, anyone here would notice. “Has there been anyone here asking for him?”

There had not. Without much hope, she said, “Did he ever talk about seeing something at the wall one day?”

The question reminded one of the neighbors of something. “My son says Aedic sometimes hangs around near the old farm.” Seeing Tilla did not understand, she said, “Where he was brought up.”

“Our farm?” demanded the husband, who had reappeared in the doorway. The toddler, damp hair still stuck to his forehead, was cramming bread into his mouth. The man turned to his wife. “Nobody told me.”

Petta said, “Did you ever ask?”

“What does he go there for? There’s nothing left.” He turned to Tilla. “They took our land for building on,” he said, “turned us off good grazing, burned down the houses and-”

“Oh, stop!” Petta cried. “Nobody cares about your land. A boy has been stolen, and your son knows something about it.”

Tilla raised her voice to step in before the argument grew worse. “When you find Aedic, Branan’s family need to talk to him straightaway. We need to know what he saw at the wall.”

The father said, “I’ll tell him.”

“It is not safe to send him on his own,” Tilla told him, afraid he might be thinking of doing just that. “Do you know where to bring him?”

“We know,” growled the father, perhaps annoyed at being told what to do.

They were on the way out when Tilla said, “Do you know where their old farm was?”

Enica, busy dragging her horse’s head round so it would carry her back to the road, did not seem to hear. Tilla said, “You need to go home. I will take you back now and find some salve for your tired muscles. Then I will take Dismal and go and look for Aedic.”

Enica was too weary to argue. Tilla took hold of the piebald’s reins and led it beside her own horse, hoping the other searchers had been more successful and feeling guilty for dragging this poor woman about on horseback for hours, finding nothing, and making her suffering even worse than before. Now she was plagued with a new fear. What if Aedic had disappeared too?

Her thoughts were interrupted by “That is the first time I have spoken with Petta since the business with Conn.”

Tilla twisted round to face her companion. “The business with Conn?”

“Petta and Conn were almost betrothed, did you not know?”

“I heard there was a girl,” said Tilla, struggling to fit the woman she had just met with the picture of Conn’s lost love that she had formed after listening to the gossip at Ria’s.

“She left Conn for a soldier. He got her pregnant and then he was posted somewhere else. Conn refused to take her back if she kept the child. So Petta needed a father for the child, Aedic’s father was widowed and needed a wife, and you see how it has turned out.”

Tilla said, “I heard the soldier forced her.”

“That is what she told Conn to start with, but it was a lie.”

The story was more complicated than the gossips had thought. “Conn should not be losing sleep over her.”

Enica said, “That is what we all told him. But Conn likes to be angry. So my husband still has no grandchildren.”

Tilla wondered why people who did not deserve children had no difficulty producing them, and then remembered to tell herself that, compared with many women, she had very little to complain about.