Tale of Birle (13 page)

She thought she knew what he must now think, and wanted him to know better of her. “When I cared for my grandparents, it wasn't—I wasn't—it was easy to say yes to my grandparents, to do the task. They didn't wish me to be servant to their wishes.”

“Nan—she wanted you for a servant?”

“It felt so.”

“What about the others, your father and brothers?”

“They said Nan had the right of it. When the Inn prospered we all prospered. The work had to be done and done right.”

Orien took a while to think about that. “I begin to understand why you were eager to wed your huntsman.”

“I was a fool,” Birle told him.

“Maybe. But how could you know. It would be hard if someone else owned all your days, and all your work.”

He understood, he did understand. The Lords need never concern themselves about the people, much less understand, but Orien did. If such a man were Earl . . . but Orien said such a man would be dangerous to the house, and it must be that he understood that too. For which reason, he had left everything behind him, all that was his by right of his high birth. That was much, a third of the Kingdom. She thought Orien must be made of different material from any other man or woman she had known. Even, she thought, her grandparents. Such a man ought to live at his ease, she thought, and his people labor to keep him.

“I'm tired,” Orien said. “Hunger leaves me tired. Thirst too, and I am thirsty. I am not well-schooled for this fortune.”

“Hunger fades, after its time,” Birle told him. “Even if you don't feed it, hunger fades.”

“I get impatient, waiting for what will happen next,” he said.

What would happen next Birle didn't want to discuss with him. The sun hung high in the sky and there was no shade for them to move to. She didn't know if Orien understood their peril, but if he didn't she wouldn't be the one to tell it to him. Telling would make no difference.

“If we were in one of the old stories,” she said, trying to speak lightly, “what would happen next is that Jackaroo would come riding across the water, to carry us to safety.”

“How could a horse cross the sea without sinking into it?”

“In a story,” she reminded him. You could grow accustomed to almost anything, she thought, surprised. She had grown so accustomed to speaking with Orien that she spoke without thought, and he a Lord. She had grown accustomed to this stony world; her body didn't protest rock for ground and floor, stool and bed. She had learned how to watch the endless sea, with its rising and falling water, she knew what she might expect the sea to do. The music of waves against rocks was as familiar to her now as her Granda's pipe, playing. “It is no more amazing,” she said, full of the strangeness of the actual even more than the strangeness of the fabled, “than a boy sleeping forever, forever young.”

“Do you ever think, Birle, that the truth of stories is deeper than the truth of the world? Because—a man can be put to sleep by a woman's beauty, and never ask to awaken.”

She had never thought of that, Birle thought, sleepy with hunger in the warm sun. “Not actually asleep,” she said, to be sure she understood.

“No, but truly asleep.”

She wondered if some Lady had cast her spell of beauty over Orien.

“Maybe, then, I'll watch for Jackaroo over the water,” he said, but he was teasing. “Do you know the tale of Jackaroo and the prince?”

“No.”

He told it to her, of the prince kept in a high stone tower by his jealous stepmother, so that her own son might become king even though he was not the eldest born. The prince was a child when he was stolen away, by guards who did not dare to slay him. The king's grief killed him, leaving the stepmother as queen regent. The prince grew to young manhood in the tower. Jackaroo came, and climbed up the tower wall, a wall steeper and more impassable than the cliffs behind them. He carried a rope, down which the prince climbed, but the rope broke, stranding Jackaroo above. The prince rode away, and it was the stepmother who ended her days in that same tower, where only the bodies of the guards were to be seen when the prince returned with his soldiers, to set Jackaroo free.

“The story makes you smile,” Orien said.

Birle hadn't known there was a smile on her face. “I'm thinking how differently Jackaroo serves the people,” she said. “Do you know the tale of Jackaroo and the robbers?”

He didn't, so she told it: Jackaroo had met a woman, struggling through the snow with her babe in her arms. Robbers had set upon their holding, slaughtered her husband and sons, and set the house to flames. She had escaped into the woods while the robbers were busy at their work. Jackaroo took her and the child to a safe house, then rode up into the mountains, into the robbers' stronghold, and captured all three of them. He brought them before the Steward, on a day when people had gathered before the city walls and the Lords had gathered atop the city walls, to watch the hanging of a highwayman. Jackaroo claimed the law to protect the people as well as the Lords. The Steward dared not oppose him, nor could he lay his hands on Jackaroo, who stepped into the crowd and disappeared among the people, who would not move to let him be seen, and taken. “Sometimes the Steward could see the long feather on his hat, moving ever away, like a man walking through a field tall with wheat. But the people kept Jackaroo safe,” she said.

All the long hours they traded stories and songs. Not trying to hide her harsh voice, Birle sang him the song about the gay maiden who spurned the lad who loved her true, and when he died of a broken heart fell down dead herself at his burning pyre. Orien told her the story of Jackaroo and the bride, whom he rescued from the wedding her father forced her to and left in the bed of her true love, where once the night was spent her father would not have her back. He sang her the song of the true knight, who laid down his life for his king against traitors, even though the king had ignored his warnings and only with the knight's death knew the truth of him. She sang him the lament of the girl betrayed, whose blossoming belly made her shame known. When dusk fell, their voices faded off into sleep.

Birle awoke to thirst, and moonlight. The cool light fell on Orien, asleep, as if he were a statue carved out of the stone he slept on. She watched his sleep, until clouds covered the moon and she fell asleep herself.

She awoke again, to a heavy gray morning. When the rain, at last, fell over them, they sat under it with open mouths. She licked water from her hands and wrists. She spread her cloak out on the rock, so that after the rain had stopped she might suck moisture from the cloth. That day they spoke little, and moved not at all. After it had fallen upon them, the rain blew across the sky and on over the sea, and away.

H
OW MANY DAYS AND NIGHTS
went by, Birle did not know. They might have been many, they might have been few. It made no matter to her if it was day or night. There was a time when it rained, water falling into her mouth, and all over her, soaking into her skin as if her skin itself had tiny mouths to drink in water. Long after the rain had ended, she could suck moisture from her cloak.

Always, Orien was in her sight—except on those rare occasions when one or the other disappeared behind a boulder for privacy. Birle knew that he was growing weaker, as she was, but he would still climb down from the rock to stand at the base of the enclosing cliffs, looking upward. He scratched with his dagger on the stone that was home to them. “Do you think to eat stone, Orien?” she asked him.

He shook his head. When he showed her his work, she saw that he had scratched their two names into the rock—Orien, Beryl—first his, then hers beneath it, “To mark our presence,” he said. The sun had colored his face and hands brown. “That's not how my name is written,” she said, but wouldn't let him cross it out, to scratch her own name beneath.

Orien kept watch over the empty sea, but Birle did not. He remarked on this, his voice raspy. “You seem at ease, Innkeeper's Daughter. Is it that the people are more skilled at understanding necessity?”

Birle's lips were too dry and painful to make any answer. But she was content; he was correct in that. The sea might blow up white spumes as it raced under a wind, or it might lie smooth; it might rise and fall in its restless tides; the sea might never be still, but she was quiet.

“It's hard not to be able to do anything,” Orien said. That was his only complaint. He bore thirst and the weakness of hunger without a word.

“Aye, but when all my days there's been someone at my back—goading—to do nothing is not a bad fortune,” Birle answered.

Words came slowly. She felt as if she had to walk a long distance into her head to find her thought, and carry out the words for it with great effort. If it had not been Orien who asked, she could not have spoken.

Sometimes, when Birle woke it was night. The stars shone out in their numbers, and seemed to make patterns before her eyes. The moon floated across the sky, with a face that was all sorrow, all the sorrow known to the world. At such waking times, Birle would remember: She began at the first moment, at her first glimpse of the moving shadow, and recalled all that she could from memory. With such a short time left to keep her memories, she counted them carefully. Sometimes, as she lay awake in the night, his voice would ask, “Are you awake, Birle?”

“Yes, I'm awake.” Neither spoke any more than that.

When rain quenched their thirst, they spoke with more strength. “I have no wife,” Orien said to her, without warning. Birle sat sucking on a corner of her damp cloak. The taste of wool was not nourishing, nor was it good; but it had flavor and in that it was like food. “I have neither son nor daughter. I've left no one in danger behind me.”

“You didn't wish a wife?”

“I didn't wish the wives they offered, and they didn't quite dare try to force me to it.” The memory made him smile. “Once, I wished it.” The smile faded.

Birle didn't dare to ask the question.

“But my father married her himself. He said her lands would come to me in the end, so I had no complaint to make. By her marriage into the Earl's house, the girl's father secured his son's lands, so he had no complaint to make. My grandfather was off with the King at that time, and when he returned it was all done—they were wed and bedded. What's that there? Birle? Is that something—?” He pointed across the water.

Birle looked, and saw nothing. She didn't tell him that, but continued looking, as if waiting to see. She wished Orien could learn not to hope for rescue, but he wasn't the kind of man for hopelessness.

“What of the girl?” she asked. “Did she have a complaint, marrying the father when she thought to wed the son?”

Orien shrugged his shoulders, and she saw how thin his neck had become. “I have no way of knowing what the girl thought. The women stay in their own quarters most of the time. They come out to sit among us in their beauty. To make us hunger. The girl carried three children, but none were born living. Neither did she live, after the last. She's buried beside my mother, and my father's second wife, and now my father lies in the earth beside all three. I think I would rather be burned, as the people are, Birle, than buried in the earth, as the Lords are.”

Birle didn't think he had hope of either, but she didn't say that. “What did your grandfather do when he found out?” It was like a story to her, some fabulous tale. She couldn't imagine Da acting so, or—if he did—that either of her brothers would permit it.

“He could do nothing. He was angry at my father—because he had given his word as Earl for the marriage—but he could do nothing to change what had taken place. I think also that he felt sorry for my father. You have to remember, Birle, that if you are the eldest, you are the son who will be Earl. My father had to see first his youth and then his manhood spent in waiting. He was afraid the treasure would never come into his hand. So he granted himself whatever other desires he had. He wished the girl for himself. She had the beauty of a butterfly, delicate, dainty. Fragile. And she had two prosperous villages for dowry, with all the lands attached. I didn't blame him.”

“You should blame him.”

“Maybe. But I couldn't, once I got over my own anger. I can't.”

But his heart must have been broken, because he never had married, Birle thought. Maybe Orien was right, maybe he was not the man to be Earl. Not because his father could overpower his desires, but because he had a heart that could be broken. Because he couldn't keep anger at his father, but must understand him.

“It was my father hated the sight of me, not I the sight of him, as he would have hated anyone who was the heir and might live to be Earl.”

Orien might easily have been a different kind of man, living as he had, Birle thought. This was another wonder in him. Lords or people, she thought there could be no other man like Orien. How could she not be content, Birle thought, to spend whatever days remained to her with this man?