Nobody's Son (2 page)

There: there it was again, another yellow crack in the dusk, in the shadows by the road, perhaps twenty paces from where he stood. He peered into the darkness. At a place where the low limb of an oak thrust out level with the ground, someone had made a crude shelter, stacking cedar boughs to make a ramshackle lean-to.

Company in the Ghostwood! A warm fire, friendly stories, a meal and someone to share the dark watches of the night!

Mark trotted forward, faltered, stopped.
A fire? Here
? “Only madmen come here,” he said to himself. “And ambitious idiots.” He tugged out his sword. Where pine-sap had stained the blade it was tufted with sheep’s-wool from his fleece-lined sheath.

Shite. Now don’t you look ridiculous
. He hovered, torn between caution and hunger, loneliness and plain fear.

Balls, boy. If you can’t handle a blink of fire, how d’you think ye’ll manage the Red Keep, eh ? Shielder’s Mark, hero of legend. Specialty: running away from things. You aren’t standing here for caution’s sake. You’re soft as lead and yellow as goat’s piss. What will you do, mama’s boy? Wait for the sun because you daren’t cross candlelight?

His fingers tightened around the pommel of his sword and he started forward.

High overhead the oaks whispered, swaying and lamenting,
all gone, all gone
. Around the Red Tower, memories crowded thick as moths around a candle flame.

A huge black squirrel, the size of a big cat, padded from the lean-to and hunkered back on its haunches, looking Mark over. Its black eyes gleamed like polished pebbles. A moment later, an old woman followed it. “Well an’ well! Come, Shade: look at what jetsam the dark hath stranded on our shore.”

Mark blinked. “Best o’ the night to you, awd Mother,” he said uncertainly.

“I did not crack for tha to flower from my nut,” the old woman said tartly. “Am no man’s mother now, boy.”

O lord. The old woman’s accent was thick as cream and queer as a lead nail. Mark wasn’t sure what she’d said, but he got the idea he wasn’t supposed to call her Mother.

Easy enough
. He looked at the old crone and suppressed a shudder. She was short and thin-boned as a squirrel herself; her black eyes glittered in her pinched face. Once her dress had been rich and proud with braid, but now it was tatters of coal-coloured cloth; her long grey hair was wrapped in a rag of satin.

She was mantled in a fine man’s cloak, twice her size, closed with three mismatched clasps. She wore a broad-headed signet ring on each thumb, one marked with the impress of a star, the other with a swan. A crude wooden charm dangled from her neck, hanging from a thread of cedar bark. At her hip hung a duster made from squirrel-tails.

“Art tha moon-mad or mazed, to stand gawping at my door?” the old woman demanded. “Come in, come, boy: I’ll have you for dinner.”

Mark gulped. “Dinner in me, were that, or me in dinner?”

The old woman cackled and reached out to fluff him with her squirrel-tail duster. “She were not such a scathesome hag as
that
!” She smiled with small yellow teeth and held out an acorn. “Oak-egg?”

Thrown by the old woman’s firelight, Mark’s shadow trembled behind him like a frightened boy as he hastily shook his head. Many times had he taken his mother’s pigs into the wood and knocked down acorns to fatten them for All Hallows. He had no wish to be fattened for the slaughter himself. A score of witchtales flooded back to him.

He found his hand on his dagger hilt; then slowly took it off.
Heroes don’t stab mad awd women
, he told himself sternly.
At least, not without a good reason
.

“What’s tha clept, boy?”

Mark blinked. “Er, what was that?”

The old woman pursed her thin lips and spat in annoyance. “John? Jack? Ven? Perse? Bill? What’s tha clept?”

“Oh!” The light dawned. “Uh, Shielder’s Mark. Mark. And you?”

The old woman sighed. “No easy telling, boy: no easy tale. I buried my name under a bush and ne’er could find it more. ‘Tis better so, in sooth,” she whispered. “Names as mine are better underground.” Her loneliness pierced Mark like a spear; it seemed as if all the Ghostwood lingered in her withered frame, everything lost and alone.

Moodily the old woman shook her head. “Tha must clepe me Husk, as. Shade does,” she said, nodding at the huge black squirrel. She flicked her duster at Mark’s sword. “Tha’lt be going to try thy luck at Red Keep.”

He nodded.

Husk glanced back at the Tower, her eyes mazy with hatred and old longing. “Well an’ well. I’ve some speaking as tha might need to hear, if ye’ll be going yonder. But ‘tis my fancy to ask all the fine stallions to take a small fence afore I give ‘em oats—dost tha follow?”

Mark spat, a long working man’s spit. “I have to pass a test before ye’ll tell me about the Red Keep.—Right?”

“Aye.”

“What happens if I don’t take it?”

A crinkle of sly crow-footed eyes. “Nought, nought. ‘Tis ony if ye care what sooth an old hag might speak, who’s waned beneath yonder Tower for a moon’s age.”

Mark grunted. “Well, set me the task, and I’ll do my best.”

The old woman hissed, pleased. At her feet, Shade studied Mark with glittering black eyes. “See tha yon oak tree?” the old crone asked. “Each dark I watch the Scarlet Tower gore the dying moon, sitha, but now that oak hath swole and blocked my seeing; stars wiggle fishwise in its twig-nets. If tha were to move that oak-tree from my way, I’d thank tha.”

Mark took a long, careful look. The oak in Husk’s way must have been sixty years old at least, tall and smooth-limbed and strong.

He had a tinderbox to work with, a lead pencil and a sturdy knife, a hank of string and a twist of haywire that he kept always in his pocket. “An I had a magic sword I could fell it with a single stroke,” he murmured.

“Oh aye. Fhilip Four-fingers went that way.”

Mark shot the old woman a glance. “You really saw him?”

“All, my chick, all of them.”

Mark grunted. “If I were giant I could pull the damn tree over.”

“Sir Veramos did; caught splinters in his eyes and never saw the sun again.”

Mark studied the oak up close, thoughtfully fingering his tinderbox.

“No fire,” the old woman called, as if reading his thoughts. “Too easy for it to run thruff the trees and gobble up my orchard.”

Scratch the tinderbox. A long coil of rope filled half Mark’s pack, along with his climbing spikes. Maybe he could use the rope to saw through the oak? Or ring it with spikes and then, and then…
Shite
.

Mark spat reflectively. “An I had spade, I’d dig away at base until the bloody thing fell ower on its own.”

Husk nodded. “Aye. Tine Silverhand took it so. Brought a pick for to mole beneath the Red Keep’s walls.”

“But I don’t have a bloody pick,” Mark growled. Oh, he was stupid, he was stupid. He’d spent all his life smithing himself into a blade with a single purpose, to storm the Red Keep. Was he to blunt against the first piece of wood that got in his way?

Steady on. Your temper was never your best friend, Shielder’s Mark. There’s a way through. There’s a way through, if only you can see it.

A sharp eye cuts neater than a mail fist.

You’ve no magic sword, no giant’s arm, no pack of tools; so you’d better use your brain. If you don’t know the answer then change the question. That’s your manner, Shielder’s Mark. If the snake’s head is slick then grab its tail… Ah!

Aaaaaah. T’awd woman gives the test to every passing Hero: but the tree’s still here!

Quickly Mark peered into the twilight. Sure enough, not ten paces away he saw a stump littered with woodchips.

Grinning, Mark ambled back to the old woman. “Grand news, awd Husk! You’ll have a fine sight o’ moon tonight.” He bowed as best he knew how, reached down, and picked up the cedar branch that made the left half of her doorway.

Because of course Husk had to set the test up new for each hero. There had to be some way
she
could solve the puzzle. And that was to move the hut, not the tree!

Well pleased with his own cleverness, Mark started rebuilding Husk’s hovel against the limb of a different oak.
By the Devil’s scratchy drawers, you’ll make a hero yet, Shielder Mark
!

The old woman cackled too, and ruffled his hair with her bony fingers. “Mayhap tha’lt stay a stranger to worm guts for a little, boy, an’ a little yet.”

She asked him in, after he’d dug a new firepit and remade her walls. Her hovel swarmed with squirrels. Two crouching squirrels in the middle of the tiny room stared greedily up at five dead fish, blind and stinking, that swung on strings tied to the oak branch that served as a roof-beam. The great black squirrel, Shade, eyed Mark coolly from between Husk’s legs.

From the roof-beam Husk had also hung a score of medallions like the one she wore around her neck: chips of wood carved with a crude pattern, a snake eating its own tail. In the corner of the hut were baskets lashed from willow-wands, filled with acorns, sloes, and goosegrass. Husk nursed a reeking stew in a small black pot above the fire; the pot might once have been a knight’s helm.

Mark thought uneasily of Husk’s borrowed cloak, its three different brooches, her pair of mismatched signet rings. “What happened to the men who didn’t pass your test?”

Husk stroked Shade tenderly on the flank. “Why we et them, Shielder’s Mark. If a gallant fails an old crone’s test, I wis he weren’t likely to conquer the Keep! And waste’s a sin, tha knows.”

Mark gulped. Beside him, the pot that might have been a helmet slurped and burbled to itself. The old woman’s eyes glinted over the squirrels that seethed around her. “Dinner, dinner, dinner,” she muttered. She squinted at squirrels by the grate, in the thatch, slumbering by her skinny thighs. “We know a wench as failed her mistress, eh, Henrietta?” she murmured, staring at a plump brown squirrel that backed nervously toward the doorway. Husk crept slowly after, crab-stiff and softly crooning. “Thine furry thighs so glossy, eh? Thy cheek so silk. Enspelled by thy own face in the pond, is it? Stuffed with thy own prettiness like a tick full to bursting. Tha’lt be sorry now, won’t tha lass?”

“Please!—Let me help,” Mark said quickly. O god: Henrietta stew. “I’ve cheese in my pack, and bread, and a bit of smoked pig.” Come to think of it, he’d feel safer eating his own food anyway. “I can’t pay much for my dinner, milady. Take this and make my heart easy.”

Husk looked him over as he rummaged in his pack. “A smooth tongue in a rough face, i’ sooth!” Her curtsey as she spoke was deep and strangely graceful; an echo from some gentler life.

Mark sighed with relief.
Shielder’s Mark: squirrel-saver. The legend begins
.

Old Husk smiled at him her haggish benediction. “A forest-f of gentles have I known, most with more good i’ their faces and less in their hearts. But art tha not cloddish, i’ sooth?”

“Er, what?”

“Base! Churlish! Low!”

“Oh. Am I common?—As dirt,” Mark said with a grin.

“Not yet too fine to break bread with a toothless mazed old bitch, eh? Not like Serimus nor Flavian nor Stargad the Shrewd. Him I remember, crouched like a silk-swaddled toad afore my lintel thruff the whole night, and then sidles by at noon.”

“You—you met Stargad? But that must have been halfway back to grandfather days!”

Husk plucked Mark’s knife from his belt and began shaving slices of pig into the stewpot. “Time, tha knows: time’s foxy in the Wood. They all come by here, this Kingdom’s heroes: brave-braided all, with their medals bouncing to heartdrums’ beat.” She grinned at Mark. “Where are thy ribbands and favours, boy? What hast tha done that harpers sing? Cracked a kingdom? Drank dragon-blood?”

“Uh, not exactly,” Mark admitted.

“Climbed a mountain’s sun-spiring snowpeak?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Arm-wrestled oliphaunt?”

“No.”

“Diced with the Devil on a throw of bones?”

Mark shook his head. “Not as such.”

Husk glared at him. “Were ye nought then but breathing? Dost tha come armoured in air and girt with hoping?”

“That’s me.” Mark fished a hank of haywire from his pocket to fiddle with, unable to meet Husk’s eyes.
T’awd bitch is right. How can you expect to win where all the real heroes lost
?

Shade jumped up to Husk’s shoulder. Crone and creature gazed at Mark without enthusiasm. “Shade, Shade, Shade,” Husk muttered. She cut up the last of the smoked pig. “An hundred hundred nights and weeks and years I’ve waned beneath yonder Tower, boy. My weft is ravelled and ony warp’s left. But still I know the Red Keep is perilous; spell-webbed, fear-fangled. Old nuts rot and nothing green grows up from them: magic has withered since grandfather days. You come with no spell sheaf, no flight of impossibles. Many mighty men that were flesh and fearless i’ th’ sun are clay now: their soul-pots cracked and ground to dust.” Stroking Shade, Husk met his eyes. “What can tha do that they could not?”

How many times had Mark asked himself the same question? “Maybe I can’t. Maybe I’ll die.” He twisted the haywire between his fingers, then stuffed it abruptly back in his pocket. “I go because I must. This is what has been given to me. This is my only gift. I am no general, no lover, no wizard nor duelist, no hero nor thief. I am only Shielder’s Mark, who waited all his life to go to the Ghostwood, and went.”

Mark fell silent. The stewpot bubbled above the small yellow fire. Beside his boot, squirrel-pups mewled at their dozing mother’s side. Shade’s tail swished across Husk’s face and the old woman sneezed. Then she laughed. “Better to go with fate than wisdom. Odds be, tha’lt die with a shriek in thy throat, but perhaps not. Still, tha must be shrewd!” She dumped a ladle-f of stew into a wooden bowl. “Bend ear a while, and hear an old owl’s screeching.”

“Gladly,” Mark said. “Tell me about Stargad!” The favourite stories of Mark’s boyhood had been about Stargad. Not so much the later triumphs, but the early days, learning bladework under his uncle’s stern, fair eye. Earning at last the famous sword that perished with him in the Ghostwood. “Did he have Sweetness? Did it sing, like the old stories say?”