I couldn’t speak and turned away to where the hares were hanging head-down. Each of them had a small clay pot suspended from its ears. Walking towards one I glanced into a pot; it was full of blood but, worse than this, there were maggots floating there.I watched another emerge from the hare’s nostril and drop into the congealing blood. Sickened, I leapt back.
‘This one’s rotten!’ I said.
Megan walked over to where the creature was hanging. ‘Not at all. It is just high. The meat will be soft and full of flavour. Wulf will be coming for it tonight. We’ll prepare that next.’
I could not watch and, without the usual courtesies, ran from the hut.
The sound of Megan’s laughter echoed after rne.
It is hard for a young man to discover that he is useless. We have such pride when young. I was a good bard and a fine musician. As a magicker? Well, there might have been twenty or thirty men in the southern kingdom who were better than I — but not more.
Yet here in this village I was little more use than a mewling halfwit. It galled me beyond words. I wanted to leave, to march away to some larger settlement. But the forest was vast and my knowledge of it scant.
That evening I sat disconsolately before the fire tuning my harp and thinking back to the days of childhood in the south. Jarek awoke sometime before midnight and, without a word to Megan, took up his cloak and walked from the house.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked the old woman.
‘Not from here,’ she answered. Her speech was clipped, the pronunciation good. But the voice was disguised, I felt.
‘Are you noble-born?’ I enquired.
‘What would you like me to be?’ she responded.
‘Whatever you wish to be, madam.’
‘Then take me as I am. An old woman in a small village by a lake.’
‘Is that all you see when you look in the mirror?’
‘I see many things, Owen Odell,’ she told me, an edge of sadness in her voice. ‘I see what is and what was.’
The fire was crackling in the hearth, the smoke spiralling up through the small hole in the high thatched roof, the wind hissing through cracks in the wooden walls.
‘Who are you?’ I asked her.
She smiled wearily. ‘You want me to be some mythic queen or ancient sorceress? Do you seek always to make the world fit into a song?’
I shrugged. ‘The songs are comforting, Megan.’
‘You are a good man, Owen, in a world where good men are few. Take my advice and learn to use a blade or a bow.’
‘You wish me to become a killer?’
’Better than to be killed.’
‘Are you a widow?’
‘What is this fascination you have with my life? I grow herbs and prepare meat for the table. I weave cloth and cast an occasional spell. I am not unusual, nor in any way unique.’
‘I do not find you so.’
She stood and stretched her back. ‘Go to bed, bard. That is the place for dreams.’ Wrapping her shawl about her, she walked out into the night.
I don’t know why, but I was convinced she was leaving to meet Jarek Mace. Taking her advice, I stripped off my clothes and stretched out on the bed, pulling the goose-down quilt over my body.
Sleep came swiftly and I dreamt of a lost swan, circling and calling in the sky above an ice-covered lake. I knew he was searching for something, but I did not know what it was. And then I saw, beneath the ice on the water, a second swan, cold and dead. But the first bird kept calling out, as he flew on weary wings.
Calling… calling.
There are, it seems to me, two kinds of pride. One urges a man to disguise his shortcomings for fear of looking foolish. The second spurs him on to eliminate those shortcomings. Happily I have always been blessed with the latter.
I set to work during the winter months to learn those skills that would make me a valuable asset to my neighbours. Despite my loathing of carcasses and blood, I taught myself to gut, skin and prepare meat for the table. I learned to tan hides, to make tallow candles, to identify medicinal herbs and prepare infusions and decoctions.
And I laboured with axe and saw to supply Megan with firewood aplenty.
The villagers also taught me something valuable — how to live together in harmony, each man and woman a link in a chain, each dependent upon the other for food, clothing, shoes, bows, medicines. There was only one piece of communal property — a large, cast-iron oven. It had been bought in Ziraccu and carted into the forest, where it was leased to Garik the Baker. The rest of the huts made do with field-ovens, bricks of clay erected over tiny trenches. Garik would make bread and cakes for the villagers, in return for meats, hides and home-brewed ale. Megan earned her living by supplying herbs and curing meats. Wulf, the hunchback, brought in venison and boar meat. Each person had developed a skill that enhanced the lives of the other villagers.
Even Owen Odell found his niche. Each week, on the Holy Day, I played my harp in the village hall, creating new vigorous melodies so that the villagers could dance. I was not popular, you understand, for I was an Angostin amongst Highlanders, but I was, I believe, respected.
In my spare moments, which were few, I sat and watched the village life — observing my neighbours, learning about them, their fears and their hopes. Highlanders are a disparate people, a mixture of races, and the ancestry of many could be seen in their faces and build. Garik the Baker was a short, powerfully-built man with flat features, a jutting brow and a wide gash of a mouth. It took no.great imagination to see him dressed in skins, his cheeks painted blue in — the spiral patterns of his Pictish ancestors. There were several like Garik, whose bloodlines ran from the earliest human settlers; they were dour men, hard and tough, men to match the mountains. Others, like Orlaith the Cattle-herder, were taller, their hair tinged with the red of the Belgae, their eyes dark, their souls fiery and passionate. A few showed Angostin lines — long noses and strong chins — but these admitted to no Angostin heritage. This was hardly surprising since the Angostins were the most recent invaders, a mere few hundred years before. And Highland memories are long indeed.
My reputation among them was raised several notches when I used a Search-spell to locate a missing child. She was Wulf’s youngest and had wandered off into the forest during a cold afternoon. Wulf and a dozen of his fellows set off to look for her, but the temperature was dropping fast and most of the men knew the child could not survive for long.
A Search-spell is not difficult to cast when one lives in a forest and people are few, though only the very best magickers could cast a successful Search-spell within a city. This one was slightly more difficult for me because I blended the spell with one of Warming. Even so, an apprentice could have cast it.
Essentially one pictures the object of the search and creates a glowing sphere of white light. The image of the object — in this case a yellow-haired child — is set at the centre of the light sphere. Then the light is sent out into the woods, seeking to match the image at its heart to an outside source. It is not an unusually complex spell, and if by chance there were several yellow-haired children in the forest, it would likely alight on the wrong one. But on this day there was only one lost little girl and the sphere found her wandering beside a frozen stream, her fingers and lips blue with cold.
It touched her and the second spell became active, covering her with a warm, invisible blanket while the search-sphere rose up above the trees, blazing with light and drawing the rescuers to the toddler.