The Ring Оf Fire. The Wolf Bell

TWO

Zephy sat alone in the deep loft window, four stories above the town, its pale, thatched rooftops washed with moonlight, and black shadows picking out doorways where the buildings crowded close along the cobbled streets. The cool wind felt good after the heat in the fields. She stared south past the houses to the gaping grave in the burial wall. Nia Skane’s grave. In the morning before first light, Nia would be sealed into that wall to stand forever motionless in death.

How could such a quick, bright child, even if she was only six, have fallen from a tree so simple to climb? One minute alive, her blue eyes seeing everything; the next minute death. Zephy shivered and remembered how she had tried to turn her attention away from the viewing services that had been held that afternoon. The open plank coffin with the little body strapped to stand forever upright. The light of the sacred flame playing across the dead child’s face in a mockery that made her seem to be listening to the Deacons’ Plea of Supplication that Nia’s spirit dwell with the gods in Eresu. Zephy felt a dismal uncertainty. Would Nia really dwell in Eresu? To question the edicts of the gods is a sin. To pry into the ways of the gods is to sin.

Nia’s death had focused all her questions into a painful rebellion; she stared up at the mountains above her: Eresu lay deep behind the peaks, the very core of the Ring of Fire. The very core of Ere’s faith, the core of life itself.

Clouds blew across the moons so the sky was a place of shifting images. She stared above her, searching, but she could never be sure: were there winged forms sweeping behind that shift of clouds? Or was it only blowing clouds? She sighed. To truly see the gods would be wonderful—though other Cloffa didn’t yearn so. They simply accepted the edicts, did as they were bidden, and had no time for the sight of wings: a good Cloffa didn’t yearn after things forbidden. But twice she had seen the gods’ consorts, the flying Horses of Eresu; far off, indistinct, and almost as wonderful as seeing the gods themselves.

Behind her, the loft was brushed with moonlight, the sparse furnishings, the two cots, the chest, the few meager clothes hung on pegs. Shanner’s empty cot. Her brother was still out, dallying with a girl again in the moonlight. Well, what could you expect? Let Shanner get a girl pregnant, that would fix him. Cloffi’s Covenant decreed marriage for such, and the Cloffi Covenants did not yield. She tried to imagine her brother married and settled to the stolid Cloffi ways. Wild as Burgdeeth’s young men were, once married they changed completely to dull, obedient, settled men as Cloffi custom decreed.

And for a girl, the quicker pregnant and married the less the trouble she was to the town. A woman was a vessel and a creature of duty, the Covenants said, commanded to submit, commanded to fulfill her role as servant of the Luff’Eresi, and of man, with humility and obedience. Zephy scowled. I’ll be servant to no man. And if that makes me sinning, I don’t care!”

“You’re not docile enough,” Mama said often. “You’ve had not one offer of marriage, Zephy, and you’ll be grown soon! What will you do if no man wants you! And no one will with that bold tongue in your head. And that bold stare! Look at you! And not only in this house. You stare at the Deacons too boldly, you look at everyone too boldly. And you say things—you . . .”

Tra. Eskar did not have to say, if you don’t marry, there’s only one place for you. Zephy knew that far too well. But to go into the Landmaster’s Set as a serving maid—never. And Mama knew she could never. The girls who went there to live were docile as pie. She could never be like that, nor would want to.

Grown girls, not allowed to stay in a Cloffi city unmarried, must go into the Set or were banned from Cloffi to make a living as best they could in some other country, though few girls left Burgdeeth. But, there’s something else to life, Zephy thought rebelliously. Something besides plant and hoe and weed, cook and scrub. Become a woman, put on a long skirt under your tunic, and be some man’s servant forever!

Not until this summer had she felt the agony of Cloffi’s binding ways so bitterly, nor rebelled so at Cloffi’s rules, and at the way Mama prodded her about them.

Was it because she was growing up that she was suddenly so crosswise with Mama? They had never been before. Or was it Mama? Maybe the gossip about Mama and the Kubalese made Mama at odds with everything, too, though she would never admit it. Zephy reached out with her foot, snagged Shanner’s blanket from his cot, and drew it over the sill to wrap around herself. Her brown hair, tumbled half out of the knot she pinned it into to work in the fields, shone tangled in the moonlight. Under her hearthspun nightdress she was as slim and lithe as a bay deer. There was a smear of dirt across one ankle, and a long scratch from mawzee briars down her arm. She pushed back her heavy hair, then stopped abruptly, her hand half-lowered—there were torches being lit at the Landmaster’s Set. She could hear men’s voices on the wind, and the faint jingle of spurs and bits. They weren’t out to hunt the stag on the night of a funeral!

But they were. She could see six riders coming up from the Set with their sectbows. Well, what was a dead child’s funeral to the Landmaster? A girl child—less than nothing.

In spite of her disapproval, the clatter of hooves made her yearn to be down there, mounted on that plunging steed in place of the fat Landmaster. The Landmaster’s pudgy daughter, Bagriba, sat her gelding like a sack of meal. Only Landmasters’ women were considered clean and allowed to ride a mount. A common girl could drive her donkey or lead him in the fields, but never straddle him, and must never touch a horse. For the horse was a creature that shared in a meager way the sacred image, and so shared its holiness, too. For woman to touch a horse was to blaspheme that which was akin to the gods.

“You could ride to the hunt if you married the Landmaster’s son,” Meatha had said once. “No other girl cares about horses the way you do, you would be . . .” Zephy had stared at her until Meatha broke off in mid-sentence. Her friend looked innocent and serious, her pale-skinned, dark-haired beauty framed by the greening mawzee stalks. “Elij will be Landmaster one day. A Landmaster’s wife—”

“Like marrying a trussed-up hog from Aybil!” Zephy had snapped, thinking Meatha meant it. “Besides, why would he want me!” Though sometimes she had caught Elij Cooth staring at her so strangely she became uncomfortable. Then she saw the laughter in Meatha’s eyes, and they collapsed together in a fit of mirth.

“Besides,” Meatha had said at last, “you’ll marry no man of Burgdeeth, neither of us will.”

The hunt was below her, the horses’ hooves striking sparks on the cobbles. The quick jingle of spurs made a fire in her blood. Elij, tall and blond, was having trouble with his horse, which had begun to shy and stare behind into the shadows. Zephy looked back down the street as two figures stepped out from an alley, glanced toward the hunt, then turned away as if the riders did not exist. The boy dangling the jug and walking unsteadily was Shanner. You might know! With the Candler’s oldest daughter again. Elij steadied his horse and laughed. “Swill the moons, Shanner, my boy. What do you feel for in those dark alleys! Does she feel up good, is she warm and soft on this cold night?” There was a roar of laughter from the hunters. Crisslia’s face would be red. Zephy felt embarrassed for her, though she didn’t like her much. Shanner must be drunk as a lizard to be so silent. Sober, he would have charged out to pull Elij off his horse, the fight ending in laughter.

Kearb-Mattus, the dark Kubalese, sat his horse silently, watching the episode with contempt. How elegantly he was dressed for a hunt. You’d have thought he was riding in a festival, the dark heavy cape the man wore flowing out over his saddle. The wind caught at Zephy’s night dress so she drew back. When she looked again, the Kubalese was smoothing his cape carefully. What was tied under it behind the saddle to make such a lump? Maybe it was a sling for the stag they hunted. The hunt moved on, and Shanner and Crisslia were alone on the street. Shanner stepped across the gutter, pulled the Candler’s door open roughly, slapped Crisslia on her backside, and was gone before she got the door closed. Zephy watched her brother come up the inn’s steps, heard the wrench of the door that would never close quietly, and could picture Shanner glancing at their mother’s door that faced the inner entry as he began to climb the stairs. Then she sat looking at the empty street, feeling a mixture of uncomfortable emotions she could not name or sort out.

The dallying of the boys—and most of the girls—was common enough. Why did it upset her so? Maybe it was the attitude of the boys, Shanner’s attitude. She felt a sudden surge of satisfaction at the black eye Shanner had earned testing young Thorn of Dunoon. Sometimes her brother was too arrogant even by Cloffi standards. Dunoon boys were not so self-important as the boys of Burgdeeth. Nor did they play so loose with their girls. They were laughed at in Burgdeeth, made fun of for their reticent ways. Well, Dunoon boys fought well enough all the same. There was a long black welt across Shanner’s cheek, and his lip was cut and swollen. Zephy thought of the beating Thorn had received in the square, fighting the Deacons, and her blood rose hot with anger. Her hatred for the Deacons had increased this last year too; though she had never loved them. She could see Thorn’s face, closed in cold fury as the Deacons struck him.

The Landmasters of Burgdeeth set little store by the goatherds of Dunoon, yet they must be tolerated or Burgdeeth would have little meat. The people would be living on old hens and an occasional rooster, and a meager few dairy calves tough as string. That, and the garden produce, which was the staple of Cloffi, of course. The Dunoon goat meat, rich and fine-grained, was a delicacy that Zephy suspected went on the Landmaster’s table more often than on the tables of the town. She fingered Shanner’s soft blanket woven of Dunoon wool and felt suddenly, for no reason, that without the knowledge of Dunoon, of that one free village on the mountain, life would be dull indeed.

When Shanner came up the ladder, ducking his head away from the slanting ceiling, she was sitting very straight in the moonlight. He hated that, hated her to watch him come in late. He was drunk. He staggered toward his cot, gave her a long resentful stare, slipped out of his pants and jerkin, snatched his blanket from her, and lay down wrapped in it with his hands behind his head. “Why aren’t you asleep? Why do you have to sit in that window and spy? Curiosity felled the Farrobb tribes, little sister.”

She couldn’t help but grin. Even drunk and angry, Shanner could charm the feathers off a river owl. “You’d think,” she said slowly, reflecting, “you’d think the Landmaster would wait a day to ride to the hunt, with Nia Skane’s burial tomorrow.”

“Go to bed,” he roared. “You can’t help the dead by mourning. Why do you take on so! Why is it always something? Why can’t you just leave things the way they are? If he wants to hunt, so let him!” He rolled over, sighed, then growled, “No man wants a wife who doesn’t know her place,” and was asleep almost at once. The stink of honeyrot filled the room. Zephy stared at him indignantly.

She slid down from the sill at last, satisfyingly chilled, and padded across the cold floor to her own cot. She fell into it, almost dead for sleep, and she slept at once.

*

The cry of the vendor brought her awake. “Roasted marrons, hot saffron, buy my marrons and brew.” The rumble of the coal and bittleleaf wagons from Sibot Hill could already be heard and the squeak of water carts coming from the river. She knew, guiltily, that she had dreamed and lay in the darkness wrapped still in a sense of wonder; she wished she could remember the dream, but only a tide of glory remained, slowly deflating as she worried that somehow the Deacons would know she had dreamed.

But that was silly. She rose, lit the candle, glanced at Shanner, still snoring, then washed herself in the icy water from the blue crock. She bound up her hair, dressed in her everyday tunic, and, carrying the candle, started down the ladder to uncover and feed the kitchen fire before Mama should rise.

The sculler opened off the kitchen and was the first room to catch the morning sun. The round wire basket of the mawzee thresher glinted in the brightness. The stone walls of the sculler were lined with shelves that held crocks of mawzee grain, some of yesterday’s loaves, a bowl of charp fruit turning golden, and some oddments of tools and jugs and crockery. Zephy knelt by the low stone ice safe, opened its drain and let it drip into a bucket, then took off the lid of the safe itself and settled the bittle-leaf packing tighter around yesterday’s milk bucket and around the crock of meat. Outside the sculler window, the Trashsinger called and began a tune Zephy loved. She sang it with him softly, “Jajun, Jajun, come to the winter feasting.” She longed to reach down her gaylute from where it lay atop the cupboard, but to play it this time of morning when she should be doing her work would only anger Mama, and she guessed she’d done enough of that lately. She got her milk pails from the sculler and went through the kitchen, then the longroom, where one of the chamber girls was setting out plates on the tables. In the entry she passed her mother’s room, heard her stirring, then pulled open the heavy outer door.

The street was busy though the sky was barely light. Wagons were unloading at the Storesmaster’s and water buckets were being filled. She tried not to think that the Deacons had already buried Nia Skane, in darkness, and were probably, even now, mortaring the stone that would seal her in forever. No one seemed to remember it, the town was far too busy with its morning chores.

By noon she had finished her work in the sculler, hoed the charp bed where weeds seemed to spring overnight, and packed Shanner’s noon meal to take to him in the forgeshop. She paused outside the doorway to the shop, for she could hear Shanner and the Kubalese apprentice arguing loudly. She heard the bellows huffing and saw the firelight flare up and saw the shadows of the two facing each other as the Kubalese mocked sarcastically, “What do I care what they say in the street! What do I care what the old women prattle—Kubalese in the Inn woman’s bed!” He laughed harshly.

“Well I care, you son of Urdd! I care for my mother’s name!” Shanner, usually in charge of a situation, was far from collected now.

The Kubalese’s voice was as cold as winter. “Like it or not, what have you to say about it? It’s none of your affair and none of your sister’s, either. If she doesn’t stop that nasty tongue, she’s going to get more than she bargained for.”

“She speaks less pointedly than the gossips on the street, Kubal!”

If it were a Cloffi man their mother was friendly with, people wouldn’t talk so. But a Kubalese. Though the men of the town found Kearb-Mattus pleasant enough to drink with, laughing around the longtables at the Inn. And the Kubalese was handsome, Zephy had to admit. He seemed more alive than Cloffi men, somehow, so that women often turned to stare after him. But there was a violence about him, too, something underneath the charm that made Zephy uneasy.

“The girl upsets your mother, boy. She thinks to mind grown-up business.” Then he laughed, seemed jovial suddenly—changeable as a junfish, he was. “Needs some ardent boy in her bed, that’d change her view of the world.” Zephy’s face went hot at his rude talk. “She’s not such a bad looking child, fix her up a bit. They’re right good before they’ve had other hands on ’em—shy and goosey as a wild doe on the mountain. And those dark eyes—too bold for a Cloffi man, I’d wager. Eyes like her mother,” the Kubalese said and roared with laughter.

Zephy dropped Shanner’s dinner basket by the door and fled.

The first time she had been teased about the Kubalese and Mama, she had gone into the sculler in tears, with terrible thoughts about Mama. And she had found Mama waiting, her brown eyes dark with fury, so Zephy knew she had heard the baiting.

Comely, her mother was, and slim, and she could look beautiful. But when she scowled, a storm seemed to crack around her. She had stood blocking the door between sculler and kitchen, her brown hair escaping from its bun and her hands floury from making bread. Zephy had stared back at her, dreadfully ashamed of the gossip—and ashamed of Mama.

“So you believe what they say in the street.”

Zephy couldn’t answer, could not look at her.

“Did you ever think they could be wrong! Did you ever think it could be lies!” There was a long pause, uncomfortable for Zephy. “It’s time you thought, Zephyr Eskar.” Then, seeing Zephy’s chagrin, Mama had taken her in her arms as if she were small again, pushing back her hair as she used to do.

The last time Zephy had heard remarks in the street, she had stormed in through the heavy front doors of the longroom only to face Kearb-Mattus, standing in the shadows, and she had not been able to keep her temper, and flown at him in a rage, screaming childishly, “No one wants you here. Leave my mother alone!”

The Kubalese had stared down at her, his dark eyes expressionless. Then he had caught her by the shoulder so hard that afterward it was bruised. He held her away, his words soft and menacing. “Whatever I do, pretty child, whatever I intend to do, it’s none of your affair. Understand me?” The threat in those soft words had chilled Zephy so she hung rigid, gaping at him, a black loathing and fear sweeping her. Wanting to hit him and afraid to and unable to pull away.

“Now come on, pretty little thing”—he had brought his face close to hers, his black beard like a bristling hedge—”Come on, pretty little child—Ha! Temper like a river cat!” He had roared with laughter, spit collecting on his lips.

When at last he let her go, she had whirled away from him and up the stairs to the loft, where she had burst into tears of helpless fury. Her tears were seldom of hurt, but rather of rage at something she was powerless to change.

Mama said once of Kearb-Mattus, “All the children in Burgdeeth follow him. How can you say he’s cruel when they all like him so. The children wouldn’t—”

“Sweets, Mama! You know his pockets are full of cicaba candy and raisins. He gives them sweets for their attention. Besides, it isn’t all the children! Nia Skane won’t have anything to do with him.”

“You’re not being fair, Nia is . . .” Mama had stared at Zephy, then finished lamely, “Well, most of the children like Kearb-Mattus.”

“Nia is what?”

“She . . .” Mama had faltered. Zephy had looked at her evenly. “She . . . oh, Zephy, Nia’s different, she’s a child that . . . she’s just different.”

“Different because she doesn’t run with the other girls her age and do all the stupid things they do? Different because she doesn’t giggle all the time? Different, Mama? Different like me and Meatha?”

And now . . . now Nia Skane was dead.