She was babbling. She stopped. With a lurch she dragged a chair to face the lifeless woodstove. “Come and sit.” Brisk now; what had she been thinking? She’d be dead before she turn a man away into a storm.
But he was too pale. Majka had seen his like only three or four times in her life. He was from the capital, or some distant country. No one ever came from such lands to the village, this place of wind and nothing, this clutch of sixty houses strung out along a gorge.
Unless they came for the ruins. The thought made Majka break a precious match.
The man crossed the room slowly. He held his hat against his chest like a peasant in the house of a lord, but there was nothing of the peasant in his bearing. He lowered himself into the chair.
“Don’t go to any trouble,” he said.
Majka was crouched almost at his knees, trying to light the tinder at the back of the stove. The man smelled of earth and moss and wind-dried sweat; there were small brown burrs on his trousers. From the corner of her eye she saw the hand he rested on his knee: a powerful hand, tough and sinewy, a harness-leather hand.
He moved his chair to give her room. There was nothing wrong with him. She was losing her dignity, and without it everything else would slip through her fingers.
The tinder caught. Majka blew gently, added twigs as though feeding a baby. The blue eyes studied her. She closed the iron door and stood.
“This is Chamsarat Spire?” asked the newcomer.
“Chamsarat Village,” said Majka. “The Spire’s just a heap of rubble, further up the hill. There’s nothing but ruins here. The fortress was destroyed four hundred years ago they say. The tower survived, but twenty years ago it collapsed as well—”
“There was an earthquake,” cried her son from where he stood by the cellar door, so excited he was all but dancing in place. His grandmother, suddenly restored to life, turned on him and shouted “Logs!”
“It’s true,” said Majka, as Udi fled. “There’s nothing left here but stones. I hope you didn’t come all this way to see the tower.”
She put the soup kettle on the stove: it would have to stretch to four tonight, and this man looked as though he could empty the kettle at a draught. Once more, accidentally no doubt, she found herself meeting his gaze.
“I didn’t come for the tower,” he said.
“That’s good.” Majka considered laughing at her own remark, but what if her mother-in-law joined in, with her raven’s cackle? The man was still looking at her; Majka felt her composure about to dissolve.
“You’re welcome to ride out this storm with us,” she said, astonishing herself. “We’ve a spare bolster. You can sleep here right here by the stove.”
Her mother-in-law was gaping. The man looked down at the hat on his knee. After a long pause, he said, “I might just. You’re very kind. It’s a long road I’m on.”
Majka stared hard at her mother-in-law, who bethought herself and fetched the wine. Majka poured him a generous measure. “Where are you bound, then?” she asked.
“Where God wills.”
And mind your own business, woman. She was about to turn away when the man glanced at her sidelong.
“God, or the Proconsul, whoever remembers us first. Isn’t that what they say in these hills?”
This time Majka didn’t meet his eye. They did indeed have such a saying. Neither the Prince of Heaven nor the leader of the Republic was much loved in Chamsarat.
But why had he mentioned the Proconsul? They were six hundred miles from the capital. The village stood in a distant corner of a neglected province on a road like a long bad dream. Even the local ministers rarely bothered with the climb.
“We say the same as everyone,” she answered lamely. “A republic is a fine and fragile thing.”
“Yes,” said the stranger, lifting the wine to his lips.
“We have the vote here,” said her mother-in-law, as though confessing some shame.
The man turned in his chair to look at her. Majka tried to smile and achieved a grimace.
“The vote. She means that every few years they send a soldier and a mule, and an iron box with a padlock. He shows up unannounced and sets the box on a chair in the tavern.”
And drinks all day. And notes the color of the ballot slip in every hand. And bears the box away in the morning with a smirk, and a coin or two for the girl whose favors he’s enjoyed.
“And you vote your conscience.”
It was not a question, or an order, or even a jibe. It was merely a statement. The man spoke as though saddened by his own remark. And for some reason his words sparked a terrible idea in Majka’s mind: that she stank. The room was close and the man could smell her unwashed skin, smell the barn and the broken egg, smell Pankolo.
She excused herself, reddening. She snatched up the wash pail and a cake of soap and fled through the back door again.
Crouched by the rain barrel, she scrubbed to her elbows. The cold was agony, but also a relief, like putting her head back to scream. Udi, laden with firewood, staggered out of the barn.
“I can’t find the axe, mama.”
“Well what in the Nine Pits did you do with it?”
“Nothing, I think.”
“Nothing you think! Take the wood inside. Then go back with a lamp and search properly. And wear your coat, you little fool! If you catch a chill I’ll slap you.”
Udi looked at her in horror.
“Oh stop that, boy. I wouldn’t really.”
“I don’t want him to be here, mama.”
“Saints above! What’s the matter with us all? Can’t we be decent to a soul in need? What in the Pits are you afraid of? I’ve told you about white men.”
“In the capital. Is he from the capital?”
“Maybe. They come from other places, too.”
“What’s he here for?”
The soap leaped like a fish from Majka’s hands. “That’s his business,” she snapped. “Yours is to be gracious. Only peasants lose their heads at the sight of a foreigner. We’re not peasants, Udi.”
He blinked at her over his armful of logs.
THE SOUP WAS delicious. The man sipped his portion slowly, making it last. The room warmed. Majka all but shoved her mother-in-law into a chair beside the stranger. Udi stood behind his grandmother’s chair, spellbound. Majka herself could not dream of sitting still, invented tasks to take her endlessly from parlor to kitchen and back again. Dusting under the table. A small rug tossed over the crack in the floorboards. The lamp in the window for a husband dead not quite a year.
Suddenly the man, wonder of wonders, spoke to them unprompted. “I thought I might go and see the Thrandaal, beyond the mountains. They say the valleys there are lush, and the rivers clean.”
That was it: he was running. Majka could have laughed with relief. The man needed to get out of the country, and you could do that here, you could climb from these hills into the mountains, cross the border into the Thrandaal, and pass unchallenged into that empty land. That was why he had looked at her so oddly when he mentioned the Proconsul.
“But I’ve waited too long, you see,” the man continued. “Down here you’ve had rains; up in the peaks it will be snow. I don’t mind a little snow, but I do mind dying in it. I’ve waited too long.”
He looked again at his hat. Majka felt dizzied: what in the Pits was he trying to tell them? Could he possibly mean to spend the winter in Chamsarat? To spend it under her roof?
The thought was rending. She couldn’t feed this man. Did he have money, would he offer to pay? And who would she be harboring? Would his enemies track him here? No, he couldn’t stay. Not in this household, twenty feet from her son. Not if he filled the barn with cattle and their pockets with gold. Not even if he fancied her, if there was kindness in those hands.