Chance (6 page)

He splashed into fen. No matter, still; already he was wet to the skin. Though never before, even in Wirral, had he met with such a bog. Thick mud oozed up to his thighs, almost up to his crotch, slowing him to a snail's pace.

“How much farther?” he called into the dusk.

A babble of laughter sounded instead of an answer, and Chance stiffened: something large was bestirring the fen, rising luminous into the dusk.

The laughter of the denizens rippled and warbled from the forest all around. There must have been hundreds of them watching, as dense as a flock of starlings.

And Chance shouted with terror, falling back into the muck.

Looming over him, a sort of a snake of single eye, a dragon—but no, the thing was too stubby to be called a snake, too formless and squalid for a dragon. More like a huge worm or a maggot, fungus-colored, with the glistening soft skin of a catfish. Slimy fen water dripped down from it, and the single eye deepset in the center of its head peered toward him.

Chance floundered back from it, thrashing for balance and footing, and the Denizens shook the small tree limbs with their laughter. Gleeful voices shouted.

“Don't hurt it, Chance!”

“It only wants to dance!”

“Wirralworm, we call it!”

Above them all the voice of the young prince carried.

“Chance, there is no cullion tree. But see, we've found a phallus for ye!”

If I had a sword
, he thought grimly,
if I had a nobleman's weapon
.… But what would be the use, indeed, of doing battle with the nodding monster? It had not moved from its place amidst the muck, and even as he crawled at last onto solid ground and stood, streaming bogwater and greenish slime, to face it, the thing went limp and collapsed beneath the surface. There was a faint glow as of something rotten, and it was gone.

“But it's always there,” said a voice close by his ear, “hidden deep yet not asleep. Just like the manhood in you, Chance.”

He turned, sluggish with disgust, to face the copper-brown prince of the Denizens, barely visible in the nightfall darkness.

“Very well,” said Chance, “you've had your play. Now which way to my home?”

The handspan youth chuckled in delight at the happenstance rhyme. “The sun will show you the way, come day,” he sang. “Sleep well!” Within the moment he and all the others were gone. Their laughing farewells echoed away into Wirral.

Chance did not wait for day. He blundered off, on the move to keep his chilled blood from pooling in his veins, and roamed all night though he could see nothing beneath cloud gloom that shut out the moon and stars. He did not mind the darkness; it matched his wakeful rage.

Halimeda's babe was born as the first snow fell thick and cold on turrets and trees. It was a girl. A hard labor, but the lady would be well enough after a ten of days, if she did not weaken with fever. This much Chance learned from the talk of the alehouse—he went often to the alehouse, those days, and made friends with those who muttered there in the evenings after a day of wearisome toil in the lord's service. He inquired of Halimeda also from Roddarc's steward, to whom he made his reports. The lord himself he had not seen since the night he had ordered Roddarc out of his lodge. Nor was Chance admitted to see Halimeda.

The talk had it, after several days, that she was on the mend and the infant thriving. But the tenth day came and passed, and there was no courtly gathering, no ceremony of welcome for the little one, no bestowal of a name.

Near Chance's cottage lay a broad, hollow log of apple, the most auspicious of woods. When that day had passed he worked the evening by lantern light and cut a section of it, took it in by his hearth. There in days that followed he cleaned and shaped it, polished it with wax, fitted ends to it, and rockers.

Snow after snow fell. The Wirral stood shrouded, white and cold.

“Any tidings?” Chance asked of a tree one day.

A small, cross face looked out at him. “We have said we will tell you, Chance Lord's Man.”

He believed them in this, for he considered that they might be inclined toward kindness since the affair of the fen. For a time.

“But someday—” the Denizen grumbled.

“I will pay,” Chance finished impatiently. The small woodsman scowled at him.

“Think not, fool, that you can pull from one of us a thorn. We take care of our own.”

“Just tell me quickly when she comes.”

As it chanced, he saw her himself and needed no telling. Barefoot in the deep snow she came, in the pale winter's daylight, slowly walking, gowned in black, carrying the baby in her arms. So as not to be seen from the fortress, he let her come well within the shelter of the trees before he met her.

“Chance!” she gasped, then burst out at once with her trouble. “He has said I must leave the little one here in the Wirral!”

“I know. So it would have been done to me if your kind lady mother had not taken me to the keep.” Easily, as if he had done nothing in his life but handle children, he reached out and took the babe. “Now the little lady of Wirralmark comes to me.”

“But Chance—oh, I am filled with hope, but how will you care for her? How will you feed her?”

“I will find a woman to nurse her. I will cherish her, my lady.”

Halimeda's eyes filled, and she touched one of his weathered hands.

“How is Roddarc?” he asked her gruffly.

“Much the same.” She sounded more weary than bitter, but then her eyes widened with fright. “He will learn that you have sheltered the babe, he will punish you for it!”

“He will learn,” Chance agreed, “but I think he will not trouble me. There has to be shame in him, or he would have killed the child outright.”

The infant in his arms stirred and began to wail.

“Go back quickly, Lady, before you freeze,” Chance urged. “Only tell me, what is this pretty one's name?”

“I have called her Sorrow.”

“She is worthy of better than that, Halimeda!”

The lady hesitated only for a moment. “Call her Iantha,” she said softly, and she touched the babe's petalsoft cheek, kissed her on the forehead, glanced once at Chance and turned away, running.

Iantha. The name meant “Violet.”

Chance carried her to his lodge, and the babe howled loud with hunger.

He satisfied her with a sugar-teat and the rocking of the cradle until after dark. Then he carried her to the village huts that huddled beneath the fortress wall. But he had misjudged, thinking his fellow commoners would be as brave as he. Not a woman of them would take the infant to nurse, or a man permit it, for fear of the lord's wrath.

By the end of the next day Chance knew that Iantha was starving. She could not hold down the milk of cows or goats, or even that of mares. Her wailing grew weaker, mewling and piteous.

Frantic, Chance bundled the baby warmly and began to stride through Wirral toward the distant demesne of a neighboring lord. He would be a renegade to Roddarc thenceforth. He had thought it would be a while yet before that happened; Iantha was upsetting his half-formed plans. But he could not let Halimeda's daughter die.…

“We will feed her, Chance Love-Child!” a voice piped from the beech tree at his elbow.

Chance stopped short, but he looked doubtfully at the twiggy female Denizen who had spoken. Great-breasted she might be for her size, but the whole of her was no more than half the length of the infant, and maybe a quarter the mass.

“How?” he demanded, and the woodswoman gave him a dark smile. She was greenish gray as well as brown, with hair that hung in airy tendrils like liana, and Chance realized suddenly that her tough, narrow face was both grotesque and beautiful.

“Simply, as the sap rises in the tree. Take me up in your hand.”

He did so, conscious of his own daring—he had never touched a Denizen, and he found this one dry, cool and pleasantly hard, almost like a lizard. He held her beside the baby's head, and she gave the breast. Her entire dug fit into the infant's mouth.

For a moment Iantha did not respond. Then she began to suck greedily, and she sucked at length.

“Is she being nourished?” Chance asked doubtfully.

“Does earth nourish yonder beech?” the small woman retorted. “Open her mouth; I must change breasts.”

Chance pried apart the infant's lips with a fingertip, and Iantha bellowed angrily, a strong sound that was good to hear. Sucking on the second breast, she fell warmly asleep. Chance took the Denizen and set her back in the tree.

“Many thanks,” he said, hoping thanks were warranted, for he felt a stirring of misgiving even as he spoke. The woodswoman did not speak to the thanks. She seemed exhausted.

“Take the babe back to your dwelling,” she said, “and we will tend her.” She turned, slipped away, and Chance did as she had said.

When Iantha woke and cried, some hours later, another great-breasted Denizen slipped down through a gap in the eaves, between rafters and thatch, climbed nimbly down the stones of the wall and gave the breast to the babe in the applewood cradle.

So it went for the space of many snows. A different woodswoman came each time; Chance never saw the same one twice, to his knowledge. Nor were his nursemaid visitors ever the lovely dancers he had seen, the ones shaped like the most lissome of human damsel, but always the bark-brown, twiggy-limbed females. The others would be too delicate, Chance decided, their breasts too small and fine. But he would not have minded seeing one of them again. They were in their way nearly as beautiful as Halimeda.

Of the lady, he heard nothing. She kept to the fortress. Presumably, she yet lived.

Sometimes he carried little Iantha with him as he made the rounds of Wirral or went to speak with certain folk he met within the forest for secrecy's sake. Sometimes he left her sleeping in his lodge, and the Denizens cared for her. Often he shirked his duties, but he always turned in a semblance of a report. In the evenings, and often during the day as well, he would hold baby Iantha in his arms and lull her and hum to her in his husky voice. No one from the fortress troubled him; if it was known that he harbored the babe, nothing was said of it.

By the time the snowmelt came, Iantha was drinking cow's milk and eating mush, and the Denizens no longer came to her.

Spring warmed. In Wirral glades the violets were blooming.

One day of soft rain, as Chance stirred porridge and rocked the little one in her cradle, his door opened and Roddarc strode in. By his side walked Halimeda, more lovely than the violets, robed in a dress of amethyst velvet, her hair looped up in braids plaited with thread of gold.

If Roddarc had come alone, Chance would have challenged him. But as it was, he simply stood and stared at Halimeda, porridge dripping from the spoon in his hand. The lady seemed well, her bearing grave but quiet, as if she had settled something within herself. She stood gazing at her daughter, and her smile shifted Chance's glance there also. Roddarc knelt on one knee by the cradle, putting his finger into the infant's tiny fist.

When his eyes came up to meet Chance's stare, his look was full of shame. “Ten thousand thanks,” he said in a low voice.

Halimeda came with a rustle of velvet, as if she could not longer restrain herself, gathered baby Iantha up and cuddled her, conversing with her in the private way of mothers. Roddarc stood up, and Chance scowled at him, more than a little uncomfortable.

“Do you want me to go away?” Roddarc asked him.

Chance kept silence, undecided what to do. The lord's diffident manner both touched and annoyed him.

“I have hurt you,” Roddarc said, speaking awkwardly, “and I have hurt Halimeda more. So much, both of you, that I doubt if I can ever make amends. But I want you to know—I am sorry.”

Chance flung the spoon into the porridge pot. “Gaaah! Sit down,” he growled, not wanting to hear any more. “What woke you out of it when all my shouting could not?”

“My own misery.” Roddarc sat. “But it is a hard thing to face.… Chance, I am more like my father than I knew. My methods differ, but the venom is the same.”

“It served him well,” Chance said curtly.
Powers, can we make this limp worm into a man again?

“In the long war, you mean? Then I am worse than Riol. He turned his poison against his enemies, but I vented all of mine on my sister and my only true friend.”

“Gaaah!” Chance exploded again. “Be done!”

“There are things that need to be said. I know I still have your loyalty, Chance, but I know I cannot expect—”

I should say not. Though you do.

Roddarc swallowed. “I cannot expect your friendship. I cannot blame you if you hold it against me, what I have said, what I have done.”

Chance looked over toward Halimeda, where she whispered to her baby, swirling about the room and rocking the little one to the imagined melody of a carole. “Does your lady sister hold it against you?”

“Halimeda is more noble than I can comprehend.”

Chance wondered, but he could not disagree. With a grunt he sat down across from Roddarc at the hearth.

“If you can forgive me,” the lord said to him, “it will be blessing far more than I deserve.”

“Would you
stop
that!” Chance roared at him.

Halimeda looked over at them with a smile, came over and crouched by them, still holding tiny Iantha.

“She does not know me,” the lady said wistfully.

Iantha gazed solemnly up at the three of them. Though she was but a fourmonth old, already her features were delicate, her pale fawn skin very fine and scarcely touched with pink, her eyes of a startling green. The wisps of hair on her head were reddish gold, very bright and true. When Halimeda caressed her cheek, she did not answer the caress, not even with her glance. She looked skyward with a mien at once innocent, knowing and very old.

“She is the same with me,” Chance told Halimeda, meaning to comfort her. But the lady clutched her daughter in alarm.