Tale of Birle (10 page)

Birle couldn't have answered that question and he didn't seem to want her to. He might have plotted, she thought, against a Lord he thought was such a danger. Plotters, even among the Lords, were hard dealt with. If a servant turned his hand against his master the whole house trembled on the act, and what were Lords to Earl and King but servants to master.

And why, she wondered, were they talking of such things? It was as if both of them wished to be distracted from the troubles they faced and could do nothing about. If they were afloat on the sea, and blind in the fog—they didn't even know what direction they should turn in. What then did it matter that she knew reading and writing, or that he had been caught out in a plot against his overlord?

D
ARKNESS LOWERED ITSELF DOWN UPON
them, at the end of that day. Ordinarily, light and color drew up out of the air leaving darkness behind, but that evening the dark came down, flowing down into the fog, like mud into a river. The Lord did not speak.

How long it was after that that the wind came up, Birle couldn't tell. The wind blew at the fog, blowing it away. Looking up, she saw the sky stretched huge above her. She hadn't thought the sky could be so large. Thick clouds moved across it, dark shadows that showed—where they broke—glimpses of the young moon, and her attendant stars. Birle's spririts lifted. “My Lord, are you asleep?”

“No.”

The boat leaped about on the sea waves, like a kid at play.

“Should I row? Think you?”

“Do you know which way the land lies?”

“I thought you might,” she said.

“No, I don't,” he said. She waited for him to make the choice. When he made none, said nothing, she spoke again, across the darkness.

“I think the land is over there, where the wind comes from. It feels to me as if that's where the land is.” If she were rowing, then at least she could warm herself. This wind had an edge to it that cut through her cloak. Waves sprayed up, and into the boat. Aye, he was probably cold, too. “It'll be hard going against the wind. Let's each take an oar.”

“That's better than sitting and waiting for whatever might come upon us,” he said. “Well, then, Innkeeper's Daughter, we'll row. But move very carefully. This boat seems not as safe a place as once it was.”

Cautiously, the Lord first, they settled themselves on the rowing seat. As they stroked with the oars to bring the boat around into the wind, waves splashed up over the side. The water was ice-cold upon Birle's fingers. She ignored it, trying to match her strokes to his.

Rowing was hard work, made harder by the spray of cold seawater over her head and neck and hands. But it did warm her. She hoped it was warming to him, as well. It must have been, because when he spoke his voice was rich with laughter. “We made it safely past your dreaded port. That's something to be proud of, if the tales you told me are true.”

“Why shouldn't they be?”

“I wonder, often, about those wolves and bears you spoke of,” he reminded her. “Which matter not at all, now. There'll be little danger from wolf or bear here on the sea. And what do you think of it, Innkeeper's Daughter. Do you think if we knew where our choices would lead us we would still make them as we did?”

“But we can't know,” Birle said. She paid little attention to his words. She was busy with her own thoughts. Her own thoughts were uncomfortable companions. The wind, she thought, was rising, steadily rising. It might just seem that way now because they were backing into it, and thus receiving its full force—or so she hoped. But the clouds also seemed to be moving more swiftly across the sky, and to be massing together. Birle turned her head and saw—coming at them across the sky from the direction she hoped was west—an endless darkness, like a wall.

Did waves wash over the bow more frequently? More strongly? The whole back of her cloak felt wet. She bent herself to the task of rowing, both hands on the oar handle. She couldn't even see to know if they made any progress. There was no landmark against which to place the boat.

Aye, and there was no land, here on the sea.

She was afraid, again afraid. She did not dare to name her fear, for hope that it might prove groundless, for fear that naming it would give it truth. She sat with her back to her fear, as to the wind and waves. Fear blew and sprayed at her back but she dared not turn around to face it. How long they rowed thus she didn't know.

When the skies opened and rain poured down upon them, they both stopped rowing, without a word. Against wind-driven waves the oars did no work. Waves crashed into the sides of the boat. The boat bounced and fell. Water poured down over Birle's head and shoulders and legs. Water splashed over the sides of the little boat. The wind roared like water. “These boats,” Birle called, “are built for quiet waters.”

“If we don't bail the water out we'll sink,” he called back.

They had nothing but their hands to bail with. Birle bent down and cupped her hands together, to lift water over the side of the boat. The boat rolled and bucked on the black water, under the black sky. The Lord worked beside her.

The whole world had contracted to the little boat, and the splashing of water, out of the boat and into it. She was barely aware of the sheets of water pouring down into the boat from the sky. She would have stopped the work of bailing if she could have thought of a reason to do so; although, there was no reason to continue it, none that she could think of.

When the Lord took hold of her wrist, she thought he must be thinking the same thought. But he pointed toward a patch of whiteness, moving on the water beyond his shoulder. Except that it did not lie quiet, that patch of whiteness was like a patch of snow, hidden deep among the trees from the warmth of spring.

“What is it?” Birle called. He shook his head; he didn't know.

The boat spun around, and crashed down against a wave. Birle's knee cracked against the oar that swung uselessly up and down. There was a heavier darkness waiting behind the unquiet patch of white. Something was drawing them toward it. A screaming cry was making its way up from Birle's stomach, fighting its way up to her throat.

The boat rolled under them. She slid heavily against the Lord, who struggled to keep his seat in the boat. He fell off the seat and onto his knees on the floorboards. Birle slid heavily away from him.

His hand latched on to her wrist again. “Rocks,” his voice called close into her ear.

Birle had no time to think. The boat was thrown into the middle of white-crested waves. Her hand grabbed for his wrist as they tumbled into the water. Her shoulder hit something hard, his wrist slipped out from her numb fingers, her head was taken by the waves. She turned over, her head pulled down, down into darkness underwater. Her legs rolled heavy above her. She had no choice but to go where the water took her, turning in the icy water like a leaf in stormy air. She tried to struggle against it, struggle up into the air. Blackness struck her on the back of the head and she tumbled into it, like falling into water.

WHAT ROUSED HER, BIRLE WAS
not sure. It might have been the sun coming up over the distant edge of the moving water. When she opened her eyes, she could see the first early curve of the sun, over the unsteady horizon. It might have been the odd sucking sound below her, or the cry above her, a wailing screech answered by another and another. Birle lifted her head to find the source of the cries, which seemed to be two large soaring birds. Or, it might have been the hardness of the rock on which she was lying facedown, and the soreness of her arms, legs, shoulders, even her head, of her back and belly. She had heard such cries before.

Remembering, she rolled over and sat up, ignoring the sudden ache of her head.

The Lord lay not far distant on the same rock—it was as large as an animal shed, the rock, and maybe even larger, since it seemed to continue on underneath the water. The fingers of one of his hands grasped the edge of her cloak. She pulled it free.

He didn't stir. She could see his back rising and falling, so she knew he lived. His cheek had been scraped. A cut on his forehead had crusted dry. His gold-tipped eyelashes lay upon his cheek, and she thought she wouldn't disturb his sleep.

Birle looked around her. The sea, and rocks; rocks tumbled down from a tall cliff behind her, or so it seemed; as endless as the sea, the sky over the top of the stony cliff face, turning pale blue before the light of the rising sun. There was no sign of the boat.

Birle sat at the edge of the flat rock, waiting. The water sucked at the toes of her boots. All around her—the ragged cliff, the ragged boulders, and even the pebbles in the shallow waters below her were ragged—was stone. The world was made of stone, and water. It was a small curved inlet where they had been thrown to shore.

She reached a hand up, to touch the throbbing pain at the back of her head. A large, tender lump had swollen up under her hair. She must have been knocked unconscious, she thought, and he must have pulled her up onto the shore. She was glad he had done that, although she thought it would have been easier to drown, unconscious and unknowing. She knew, with a dull certainty, that no living thing could live long in this stony world.

If she must die here, then she must. She wished the Lord need not, but she could do nothing about that. Aye, and for herself, his was the company she would choose. He was the one she would choose for company, in her meeting with death.

There was no need to rouse him, so she didn't. She sat still, because there was no purpose to movement, and because her body protested at every motion. The sun came up and gilded the empty surface of the restless water. In the little bay, the sun reached the stones under shallow water, so that it looked as if the floor of the sea were made up of ragged pieces of gold. Every now and then, a bird cried out overhead.

“Birle?”

She turned her head to greet him, to see him. Her braids had come loose from their coils and hung down heavy over her shoulders.

“I think you must have saved my life,” she said.

“I think I must have,” he answered, with a smile that lifted her spirits and eased her pains. He stood up, groaned, then moved stiffly to sit beside her. “So we know where east is. Have you found a way out of this place?”

Birle didn't answer. He could see as clearly as she how the two cliffs came down armlike around them, three times the height of the tall walls that surrounded Mallory's city, jutting out into the water.

The early sun shone over them. Little waves played against the rocks, with the same sounds that the river made playing against its banks. Birle could barely remember what had happened in the storm. She could barely believe it was the same water that now lay so docile at her feet.

“We'll have to wait for rescue then,” the Lord said.

Birle turned to look at his face, scraped and cut.

“You mustn't give up hope,” he said.

Hope wasn't so much to give up, Birle thought; but he must think it was. “Aye, my Lord.”

“I'm hungry,” he said. “Are you?”

“And thirsty,” she realized. “But we've water in plenty.”

“You mustn't drink seawater.”

“Why not?”

“It's a kind of poison, or so I've heard. I've heard that men who drink seawater go mad with thirst. It only makes them thirstier, and so they drink more, and die in a fever. Clawing at their own throats.” He unclasped his cloak and shook it off his shoulders. He raised his face to the sun. “Who knows if it's false, or true, that story? I heard it more than once, and think it may be true. How did you learn to read, Birle? And write?”

There was no harm in telling him now. “My grandparents taught me.”

“How would they have learned it?”

“I don't know.” Birle had never even thought to ask them. “They were never like other people. They were born in the northern Kingdom. Maybe in the north, some of the people know how to read and write.”

He shook his head. “But that's not so. I can't think they would have studied with the priests. Didn't the villagers ask about them? This couple, from the north, who knew reading and writing?”

“But there was no village when my grandparents came. There was only the Inn, in the Earl's gift. Besides, even if there had been a village, they kept it secret. The Inn's treasure, they called it. The village”—and for a moment, her memory brought it clearly before her eyes—“is small, and new. It isn't even really a village—there are only four families in it, fishermen's families. Although Rue, since his accident, can't fish for many hours because his arm tires and falls useless, so he sometimes makes baskets to sell at the fairs. My second brother, who will not inherit the Inn, talks sometimes of asking the Earl for a butcher's holding—because the pigs feed fat in the forest—or a blacksmith's. The village grows slowly.”

“With the village so small, there wouldn't be many to choose from, for marriage.”