Meanwhile Dirna had also done as she was told. When the plowing began at Woodbourne she had crumbled her barley loaf into fine pieces, filling a small sack, and with this she had walked along the furrows of the field beside the barn, broadcasting the crumbs like seed. She harrowed the ground and sowed it with the best barley seed she could buy, and waited for harvest.
Now men came through the forest, officials of the Emperor, to choose billets for the soldiers he would send to protect the Valley from the horsemen. While they were at it they taxed the people severely, since no taxes had been raised for many years. When people told them about the glacier, and explained that because of it they needed no protection this year, the officials laughed and started to raise further taxes, on the pretext that since the people were now spared the cost of billeting troops they could afford to pay more. This second round of exactions was savage, with torture for those who could not or would not pay, and children taken to be sold into slavery in lieu of money. But the people of the Valley were now used to their independence. They rose and fought the officials’ guards and hanged the officials and threw their bodies in the river.
When the news of this came to far-off Talak it threw the Emperor into a rage. He gave orders for an army to be sent to punish the Valley, every house burnt and razed, every man killed, every woman and child enslaved. But by now it was almost winter in those northern hills, so it was decided to hold back the punishment until spring.
Dirna reaped a good crop of barley from the field, better than anything else on the farm, and stored it separately in the stone barn. When the first snows fell she loaded two sacks of the seed onto a sledge, harnessed a pony to it, and hauled it out to a long, narrow lake, deep in the forest. Here she doled the barley out into piles beneath the branches of the cedar trees that grew all around the lake. As she did so she found that she was already singing. Words and notes, soft and lulling, seemed to reach her, not through her ears, but from somewhere beneath the soft whisper of the wind among the cedars. When she had finished she looked around, but saw and felt no change, so she led her pony home.
A short time after this Dirna’s brother went into the forest one morning to set traps, and did not return for his midday meal. Worried, she followed his footprints in the snow and found him only a few hundred paces in, lying facedown and breathing harshly through his mouth. Unable to wake him, she fetched the pony and dragged him home, where she warmed his body and put him to bed, but it was three more days before he opened his eyes, and then he could remember nothing since leaving the farm.
Much the same happened to other men who went into the forest, to hunt or trap or gather firewood. If they turned back soon enough they merely staggered and felt stupid and sick, but if they went too far they fell down and lost consciousness, and unless they were found within a morning or so they died. Women, strangely, felt no such effects, so before the winter was over it was they who were doing the hunting and trapping and wood gathering, while the men stayed home to tend the animals.
At each full moon throughout that winter Dirna took fresh barley out to the lake, but thanks to the continuing snowfalls she could not tell whether the earlier piles had been eaten, or see the tracks of what might have taken it. When the snows finally melted the barn was empty.
By then, everyone was afraid because of what they had done to the Emperor’s officials. They looked for hiding places in the mountains for the men, and they got ready to send the women and girls into the forest, because the sickness there might prevent the soldiers from following them, though they did not truly believe that either of these measures would prevail against the might of the Emperor.
They were wrong. In early summer horses began to come up the road through the forest, in harness, but mostly riderless. In a few cases armored men sprawled in the saddles because they had been lashed there, but all but one of these were dead. This one man was unconscious, and his horse was lathered with hard riding. When he woke some days later, he could remember nothing of his ride, but he told that the army had indeed marched north in the spring to punish the Valley and the advance scouts had discovered the sickness, some dying, some turning back in time. Magicians were sent for, who tried their different powers against the enchantment, for all agreed that the sickness was indeed of magical origin. The wiser ones withdrew almost at once. Those who persisted lost what powers they had had, and some went mad.
Finally, some of the cavalry had tied themselves into their saddles and set their horses to a full gallop, hoping to pass clean through the forest before they were overcome. This man had been one of those. His horse was a headstrong mare, and, he swore, the swiftest horse in the army. He alone had come through, though he had been unconscious for much of the way. Since there was no way back he stayed in the Valley, but unlike the deserter Sonnam he did not prosper or marry, and died in a brawl that he had provoked.
This, then, is the story that is told in the Valley. Or rather it is the version of it that has been passed down in Dirna’s family, the Urlasdaughters, who still farm the same land at Woodbourne that Dirna and her brother farmed. Though different versions of the story are told elsewhere in the Valley, with different names for some of the people involved, and different adventures—the tellers feeling free to add or alter as they choose—what does it matter, since it is only a story?—the Urlasdaughters do not change theirs at all, and do not talk about theirs outside the family, because to them it is true, and they don’t care to be mocked for their beliefs, and their insistence, year upon year, on setting one small field aside to be sown with barley, which is then harvested and stored in a particular barn, and in winter carried deep into the forest and left for the wild animals to eat.
The Ortahlsons, up in the mountains, still sing to the snows year after year, and take much the same line, keeping their version of the story to themselves. For everyone else, yes, of course there is a strange sickness in the forest, affecting only men, but there is presumably a natural explanation for that. And yes, there is a glacier in the mountains, where there used to be a road, but all that shows is that winters were once milder than they now are. Is that anything to be surprised about? And besides, the story didn’t say anything about the great desert that closed the Valley off to the east, just as it always had done, since long before the time of Asarta. (Though perhaps, if the story had all been lies, somebody might have invented a reason for that.)
One other thing. When the Valley had settled into peace again, Dirna planted the stone of the peach that Faheel had given her. A tree grew, and stood for many years against the south wall of a barn at Woodbourne. There seemed to be nothing magical about it, but it thrived despite the climate and bore delicious peaches, so that other families begged grafts, which grew well. When, eight generations after Dirna’s time, the barn blew down in a gale, taking the tree with it, the timber of the trunk was seasoned and used for carving small objects, particularly the elaborate wooden spoons which the men liked to whittle on winter evenings, while the women were at their spinning wheels. A tradition grew up that spoons from the original tree could be used for fortune-telling, by studying the grain of the wood, with its innumerable knots and whorls from all those years of training and pruning. The best of these spoons became heirlooms, with their own names, like the swords of heroes, but that didn’t mean that anyone actually believed in the fortunes they told, any more than they believed in the story about Asarta.
3
The Gathering
Tilja slept almost till noon. She must have fallen asleep at the table and been carried to bed by Da. Now she stirred, feeling strange and lost until the memories of yesterday came flooding back.