Tale of Birle (34 page)

All around the hall, the men were standing, with goblets raised in their hands. The ladies didn't stand and Birle followed their example. Gladaegal gave the toast. “To my brother, returned. You are welcome to this house, Orien.”

Everyone raised goblets, echoed him, and drank. “See?” an excited voice said, down the table from Birle, “it's me he's looking at.”

“No it's not,” someone answered. “You're always such a ninny about him. It's her he's looking at.”

Birle raised her eyes to meet Orien's bellflower glance, almost as she'd first seen it. For a brief time, only heartbeats long, it was as if nothing had changed.

“He's not married yet,” the wistful voice said. Then Gladaegal's Lady rose from her seat between the brothers, and all the Ladies rose to follow her out of the hall. Birle moved among them, although she had no idea why they were leaving, or where leading. She was taken back to the room upstairs, her fine gown was removed, and the shoes, and the shift; a long white dress was put on her. She was put to bed in one of the beds that lined the wall. She was asleep before the curtains were drawn closed around her, on that bed softer than even her imaginings had thought it might be.

O
N A WINDLESS WINTER MORNING
Birle stood by a high window, looking out. Smoke rose from city chimneys into a clear blue sky. Beyond the city, fields and hills were blanketed with snow, and the frozen river looked like a long gray snake, asleep in the winter sunlight. The air on her face was cold.

Birle had everything she had imagined, and more: That was her thought as she listened to the voices of children playing in the snow that covered the castle grounds, and the sounds of servants at their work. She had somehow found for herself everything she had wanted, and better than she'd dared to dream. At her back lay the apartment of the Earl of Sutherland, where a broad fire burned, where tapestries hung over the cold stone walls. The Earl himself had just asked, “Come sit by me, Birle, and read to me.”

She would never have imagined it. She would never even have thought to imagine it. But if she had, she wouldn't have thought that she wouldn't be contented.

Birle turned around. The Earl sat by the fire, in a tall carved chair, with a blanket over his legs. Two woven tapestries, hanging out from the wall on long wrought-iron poles, kept him out of drafts. The Earl was an old man, with sixty-one summers behind him. The skin on his face was as papery as the dried skin of garlic bulbs. His body was weak with age and sickness, but his mind was not weak, or dull. At their first meeting, the Earl neither gave her the customary greeting nor pretended that he hadn't heard of her. Even weak as he'd been then, he had fixed his pale blue eyes on her with a boy's direct glance, and said, “I knew your grandparents. I was sorry when they died.”

Birle had learned already not to give voice to questions. Why did he not speak to her in formal manner? Why should he know Gran and Granda, and even so, why should he remember? She had asked nothing of the old man in the high bed, pillows piled behind him to help him sit up. She had stood silent beside Orien, trusting Orien to show her how she should behave. In the castle, every word spoken seemed to mean something more, and also less, than the word itself.

“Doesn't she speak?” the Earl had asked Orien.

Birle felt the Earl's impatience, and she saw it in the way he scratched at the backs of his pale hands and arms. She thought she might make him formal greeting, but the words were clumsy in her mouth. She felt always clumsy these days, her hair loose and needing frequent attentions from the servants, her hands and mind without occupation. Even though the dress she wore had been made especially for her, it seemed to fit her ill. The seamstress, she had learned, might do that, if she didn't like you. She might pretend to be doing her best, but the finished gown would make the girl look awkward. Birle didn't know if the seamstress had disliked her, or even if the dress did fit badly; all she knew was that she felt awkward and clumsy, and she couldn't think of any words to speak, even though her silence was making the old man in the bed cross.

“Say something. Say anything,” he had commanded. “Say your name.”

The woman who sat in a chair beside the bed had spoken then. “You already know her name, my Lord.” Her hands were busy with knitting needles and fine wool. The blanket she knitted lay like snow on her lap.

It was not her words but the laughter in her voice that made Birle lift her eyes from her own clasped hands to look at her. The woman wore a gray dress, soft as rain clouds; her hands held the needles ready to begin their work again. A gray silk band was wound into her white hair, and her eyes, under white eyebrows, were a deep, bright blue. “I'm Orien's grandmother,” she said.

“He never said he had a grandmother,” Birle protested. She turned to Orien, her tongue unlocked by anger and curiosity. “You never said.” In the days she had lived in the castle, she had seen him only across the dining hall; when they did pass close enough to speak, there was only time for his quick question, “Are you content?” and none for her answer.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she demanded. Then she heard her own voice and was ashamed, and fell silent again. She felt sad, and sick at heart at what she was beginning to unwillingly understand. Orien must regret asking her to be his wife; he had never said so to her, but since they never had opportunity to talk, she couldn't console herself with that thought. It seemed often as if she were a puppet on a stage, being presented before the people of the castle, who observed from their places in the audience how the doll performed. Gladaegal's Lady, who had the duty of instructing Birle in the running of the household, referred frequently to “Your foreign customs,” as if she refused to know who Birle was. Birle had been lost in unknown lands, and lost among strangers, but she had never felt so lost as she did here, in Orien's home. He stood beside her, now, but as the Earl that would be, not as the man she would wed.

“Orien doesn't know this,” the Earl said, “but your grandparents saved my life, and my father's.”

“The girl should have a seat,” the Earl's Lady said. A servant brought a chair forward, setting it beside the Lady's. Birle sat down gratefully. The Earl seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

“I never heard anything like that,” Birle said.

“If I were given a goblet of wine I could tell the story. If you'd like to hear it. Would you?” the Earl asked.

“Aye, my Lord,” she said.

“You probably should hear it, since you seem to have stolen this boy's heart from him.”

At his way of putting it, Birle could have laughed out loud. So that was what the castle said she had done, stolen Orien's heart, as if she were an enchantress. To think that the castle believed that made her want to laugh.

“And you look just like your grandmother when you smile,” the Earl said. “Just like her.”

Birle heard his pleasure in his voice. That it pleased him satisfied something in her, so that she dared to ask, “What is this story?”

He drank the wine, and told the tale, of long ago feuding in the castle, and war in the lands as brothers fought for the title. He and his father had fled to the north, where they had been caught by a blizzard, and the Innkeeper's daughter had kept him safe in an isolated house they chanced upon, and the Inn's servant had brought his father safely through the blizzard. Birle listened, trying to imagine Gran a girl of sixteen and Granda a servant. As the Earl described the long days of being snowed in, she wondered if this was how Gran and Granda had learned to read. The Earl had been then just a boy, he said. A boy might not know that the people were forbidden to know letters. “My grandson tells me that you know how to read,” the Earl said.

“And write,” Orien added. Both he and the Earl were watching her, as if they had agreed about something she didn't understand.

Birle had had enough of feeling that everyone knew and understood things of which she was ignorant. “I think it must have been you who taught letters to my grandmother,” she said to the Earl. “And given them the books that were in the cupboard in their holding, and the maps, and also had them taken away when the house was empty.”

At least she had surprised the smug expressions off their faces. “Now that Birle has given us her greeting,” the Earl's Lady said, “we would ask you, Lady, to tell us something of this foreign city. Orien tells us nothing of the time, except that you brought him out alive from slavery. He said your master was a philosopher. What does that mean?”

It was this question, and Birle's answer, and all the questions and answers of that first long afternoon, that made the Earl's apartment the place in the castle where Birle most liked to be. It was a place where the map of the skies could be mentioned, and the ideas of alchemy considered. Here too Birle had a use—for while she couldn't heal the Earl, she could make him more comfortable. She knew that aged cider added to his bath water would ease the itching that tormented him, and that the sores she could soothe with an ointment of comfrey and honey would not appear if he moved from his bed. She advised hot infusions of chamomile and catnip for sleeplessness. In the Earl's apartment, Birle had work to do. Although the Earl was won more slowly, his Lady had—from that first meeting—seen into Birle's heart, and smiled upon her.

The Earl's Lady shone like sunlight over the people of the castle. Birle understood why Orien had never mentioned his grandmother—she was too close to his heart to speak of. The Earl's Lady was the treasure at the heart of the castle—for Birle and for all of the others, servants and Lords alike; all came to her for wisdom, or for help, and just as often to bring her some gift. Only Gladaegal's wife was unchanged in the presence of the Earl's Lady, almost as if by her stiffness she hoped to curb Gladaegal's spirit. Birle had studied Gladaegal, watched and listened. She thought now that Orien had been right to doubt his brother—not for what the dark young man would do, but for what he must feel, being the younger brother, to whom the title would not come, whatever his worthiness. In the presence of the Earl's Lady, Birle could see clearly what might otherwise have kept hidden—that Gladaegal admired his brother more than he envied him.

It was the Earl's Lady that winter afternoon, when Birle had returned to her seat to pick up the book from which she had been reading, who didn't allow her to return to the task. “I think, my Lord, that Birle has something more important than reading to discuss with us.”

“With us?” the Earl grumbled. “You mean with you.”

“I mean with us,” his Lady said, “and that is why I said it.”

“Then it will be bad news,” the Earl said. He shifted in his chair. “I'll tell you how I know, so you won't have the trouble of asking. If it's good news you simply tell it to me, when you judge the time is right. Only bad news needs discussion. So it won't be anything I'll be pleased to hear. Well, Birle, what is it?”

Birle took a breath, and waited for just one moment more, hearing the soft wooden clicking of the needles, feeling the warmth of the fire on her back, seeing her own white hands as they held the book open on her lap. Then she made herself say it. “I would ask your permission to leave the castle, my Lord.”

“You don't have it,” the Earl said. “There now, that's settled, let that be an end on it. You're laughing at me, Lady,” he complained to his wife. “Well, Birle, is it that you wish to visit your family? I could give you leave for that.”

“I ask your leave to go, and not return.”

“I've answered that request.”

“I think, my Lord,” the Lady said, “that if you forbid her she'll run away from us.”

“Just like Orien, they're as alike as two peas. Never a warning and never a word of explanation. One day he's here, and the next he's gone, and when it pleases him he comes back.” Then the Earl changed the subject, but whether to divert her or to ask a question that troubled him, Birle didn't know. “Do you know why he left, Birle? Did he tell you?”

“I know what he said about it,” she answered carefully. “But I've learned, here, that what is said often masks the truth.”

“Can you tell us what he said?” the Lady asked.

“He feared that he would be too gentle an Earl, which he feared wouldn't serve the lands and the people well.”

“Like me.” The Earl spoke what she hadn't.

“Like you, but not to judge you harshly, Lord. Orien admires you, and your service to the people. What he said was that two such Earls, one after the other—that was where he saw danger.”

“He doesn't seem troubled by that any longer,” the Earl said.

“No,” Birle agreed. “He doesn't.” She didn't know what was in Orien's mind; he was most often away, visiting the southern Lords, hunting, talking with the priests and Steward, drilling with the soldiers—he was seldom at the castle. “And there was his father's death, the manner of it, and his father's jealousy, and he feared Gladaegal. For what Gladaegal might desire.”

“Foolishness,” the Earl announced. “He should have known better.”

“What about you, do you fear Gladaegal?” the Lady asked.

“No, I don't.”

“Why not?” the Lady asked.

“Because—because Gladaegal holds his honor dear to him. If he had murder in his heart he'd do it openly, before everyone. If I feared ambition's hand,” Birle added, because in this room she could speak her mind openly, “I'd fear his Lady. But she would never dare to plot harm, because she also knows that Gladaegal is a man who would give his own wife to the executioner, if honor required it.”

“In fact,” the Earl told her, “it was murder, as Orien feared. But the huntsman wasn't suborned. The huntsman meant murder, to revenge his daughter's shame. He was brought to law, and hanged. The truth didn't come out until after Orien disappeared, but how was I to know what he was thinking? He never said—he never explained or asked—he just disappeared. Have you told Orien your desire?”