Tale of Birle (22 page)

On Midsummer Day, when the light would last longest, a soldier brought a cart to the door of the Philosopher's house, at Joaquim's request. They were going out, beyond the city. Birle and Yul sat in the rear of the cart, on empty cloth sacks. Joaquim rode beside the driver. They left the city through the one gate in its outer wall, which was taller and thicker than the inner wall, a stronger defense. As they were going out, people were entering, bringing food and livestock to market. The soldiers at the gate, who stopped each farmer to look into his wagon and take a share of the goods he brought, let their cart pass without question.

The track they followed went through level farmlands, then up the rising land into the forest. There, Joaquim told Birle, were the mines. If they followed this track for two days they would come to the mines, where gold was taken out of caves that ran deep under the mountains. If they took the fork to the right they would come to cities under the rulership of Corbel's bride's father. It wasn't safe to travel to those cities.

Their destination was the forest edge, and the uncultivated meadows before it. The soldier waited with the cart, while Joaquim and his slaves gathered herbs. They stopped neither to eat nor to rest, all that long day. “The gate is closed at sundown,” Joaquim explained. “If we must require the guards to open the gates to us after dark, Corbel might hear of it. I have only this one day for my purposes.”

“What if he comes while we're away?” Birle asked.

“But he won't, now it's summer,” Joaquim told her. “Yes, those two, that's palsywort, and take that one too, dragon's herb. Gently, Yul, you mustn't bruise the leaves, the goodness in the leaves mustn't be lost.”

Yul knelt down to work with his fingers at the soil surrounding a ragged little plant.

“He and his soldiers have gone into the service of a prince whose city lies a week's fast journey to the south. He'll be campaigning all summer.”

“But his soldiers are still in the city.”

“Those were left lest the city be attacked. Corbel is away, I promise you. There—see it? Those, Birle, it's a wondrous healer, aloe, more sweet than garlic and better for burns. While Corbel is safely away, I can work on my own great task, we both can, you and I. Be tender with them. To be transplanted so is a shock to them.”

Birle's back ached from bending over the low plants. Her shoulder ached from carrying around the sacks, grown heavy with their load of plants and soil. Yet she welcomed the work. The heavier her duties, the more tired she would be. The more tired she was, the more easily sleep came to her.

Along the edge of one meadow, half in leafy shade and half in warm sunlight, lay a thin patch of blue. Birle's heart smiled to see that. Bellflowers, of a blue that brought before the eyes of her imagination Orien's face: that first morning, when he had opened his eyes from sleep and smiled. Misery threatened her at the memory, but she set it aside to take—while it was there before her, more real than meadow and trees and the two men, more real than the ache in her back—the joy.

“You're smiling.” Joaquim's voice drove the vision away. “Now you've stopped. You look different if you smile, you look—glad. You should smile more often.”

ALL SUMMER LONG BIRLE SEARCHED
for Orien, in the twisting streets of the city, with Yul at her back. These streets wound, joined up with one another and then forked apart, ended abruptly—it was so confusing that Birle often found herself lost. As summer went on, however, she began to have a good map of the city in her head. The streets came together at fountains, like the spokes of a wheel at its hub; each fountain was different, in shape or statuary. There people gathered to fill buckets and bowls, and to talk, under the eyes of the soldiery. At the fountains especially, the bright red shirts of the soldiers stood out among the dull, patched clothing of the poor and the rags of slaves. Slaves at the fountains wore chains at the neck, to mark them for what they were. Slaves huddled together, furtive, as if to be caught in speech was a danger. Birle's eyes searched these gatherings of slaves, for a pair of high, proud shoulders, for a certain slenderness of neck, for a pair of bellflower eyes. Among such men and women, he would stand out.

At the marketplace, Birle always walked first along the long walkway, where the entertainers performed. In the presence of the entertainers, the wealthy mixed with the poor, slaves with soldiers, countryman with city merchant. Singers, puppeteers, jugglers, dancers—the voices of the entertainers crowded against one another, crying out for attention and coins. There, Birle thought—if it was possible for him—Orien might like to stand, and watch.

Birle went often to market, to purchase household needs. It amazed her that city dwellers would pay coins for things they might make for themselves—soap and bread, candles, chairs, bowls, everything was purchased at market. But they loved making purchases, bargaining, passing the coins between two hands. They loved their coins, and called them by as many names as fond parents give children. The gold coins could be asked for as kings or sovereigns, masters, or goldies. The silver were also known as ladies, sillies, beauties, or—for some reason—truemen. The coppers they named little men, or mannies, or littles, pennies, twigs, kiddles, dogs. “You can't pass a dog off for a man,” they said of any item where the price was too dear. But if Joaquim succeeded for Corbel, Birle thought, then a dog could be transformed into a king.

As summer swelled, the air lay hot and damp on the marketplace. Tempers grew short, and the greens the farmers brought to market wilted in their baskets. The market became a dangerous place, although that didn't keep anyone at home. The fear of plague that lay over the city made men foolhardy. If we are to die, they seemed to think, at least let it be with a full belly, whatever its price. Daily, new heads appeared on the spike: thieves, spies, slaves who had attempted insurrection or escape. Birle studied each head, hoping not to recognize it.

Fights were frequent, for everyone simmered with anger ready to come to the boil. It was not unusual to mark blood on a man's face—or on the chest of a man killed before the soldiers could get to him through the crowds—nor to hear women's voices shrieking out, in quarrel or in grief. Birle moved warily through the volatile crowds.

The large buildings, with their smooth pink facades, were the guildhalls, Birle learned, and she learned to stay well back from their carved wooden doorways. When a guildmaster strode out from his hall, surrounded by his servants and apprentices, he might be mobbed by angry craftsmen, demanding to be given work. First words, then fists, then cudgels and knives and swords—and as the fight spread over the marketplace Birle fled with the rest of the people into the narrow streets around it. She was protected by Corbel's golden chain and by Yul's size, but in the heat of his anger a man might not see her neckchain, or her companion. Birle feared all, but feared more than anything that she would not find Orien. Every day left her feeling more hopeless as she went doggedly through the streets and among the dangers, never finding him.

The Philosopher's house was a safe haven from the disease, hunger, and fears of the city, not only because the wall with its guarded gates kept the misery within, but also because Birle's work there filled the hours with purpose; work of house, laboratory, and now also garden. Yul and Birle tended the plants, at first plucking those that didn't survive the transplanting, then weeding and loosening the soil around those that grew strongly. Summer rains fell generously onto the garden, and hot sunlight. They harvested the leaves and spread them out to dry, under Joaquim's direction. More grew to replace those that had been taken.

In the long summer twilights, Joaquim would walk beside the rows, bending over to pinch a leaf and smell his fingers, or to break off a twig and chew it. He named them for Birle—lungwort, pennyroyal—and sometimes questioned her to know what she remembered. “This?” “Comfrey,” she might answer, or “Garlic,” or equally often, “I don't know.” He spoke of ointments, infusions, emetics, and vermifuges, of which herbs were useful in root, flower, or leaf. Birle listened attentively, because her mind, like her body, welcomed the work. Work had the power to distract, and distraction eased her heart. Some of the plants were dangerous, in part or in whole, and those Joaqim made sure she knew: wolfsbane, dwale, poppy.

Often, during that long summer, Joaquim left the house during the day, to take medicines to the ill or wounded of the city. How he heard of the need, Birle didn't know, nor how those in need knew to ask him for help. Word of his knowledge seemed to have spread on the very breezes that blew from the sea and the river over the city, to the Philosopher's house.

There seemed to her nothing Joaquim didn't know. He knew the map of the sky, and was teaching it to her. She could find the Plough now and follow its directions to the star that stayed fixed at the north, the only fixed star in the sky. She knew now, because Joaquim had shown it to her, that the stars did move, arcing overhead in the same fashion as sun and moon, although more slowly. Joaquim had shown her the Wings, which looked like the letter
W
spread out against the blackness, and the seven Flowers, clustered together in a sky bouquet. In the cold seasons, Joaquim told her, she would see the Hourglass, with its three stars marking the narrow passage of time from yesterday to tomorrow.

In the night, while she copied pages of herbal lore, or read in the book of alchemy so she could write down the experiments for Corbel, Joaquim undertook to teach Yul to speak. Just as he knew which plants could soothe a sick body, and the temperature at which water would be transmuted into air, Joaquim knew the proper shape of bones under skin. He had looked into Yul's mouth, and explored it with his fingers. It seemed that Yul's mouth wasn't shaped as other mouths were; even there, his bones had grown monstrously. Joaquim tried to learn how Yul might twist lips and tongue to shape more rightly what words he spoke. Patiently, Yul did as his master asked, repeating sounds over and over. Probably, Birle thought, Yul was happier than he'd ever been before in his life. He had food, shelter, work, and companionship. He was treated kindly.

The summer lasted long, and the heat didn't ease. The marketplace was a cauldron of rumor and quarrel, violence and fear, buying, selling, display, and entertainment. Frequently, the bells tolled to announce a death. The bells made no differentiation between one man or another, a man or a woman, adult or child; whoever the victim, the bells tolled.

Birle knew that Orien might likely be one whom fever took, or one of those who bled to death in an alley, but she didn't let herself believe it. She continued her search, until she grew familiar with the city streets. She even began to recognize some of the entertainers, and to have among them those whom she always stopped to watch; she didn't know if they recognized her, and Yul, among their audience.

The puppeteers, she thought, must know them, for Yul was never content to stand at the back of the crowd, but moved—as if drawn there by a string—up next to the little high stage where the dolls acted out their adventures. All the time he watched, Yul's sweet smile stayed on his face. His eyes were filled with wonder. Birle didn't hurry him away, but stayed close beside him lest some mischance befall him, or her.

She too enjoyed the workings of the dolls at the end of their strings, and their voices that seemed to speak. Some master carpenter had carved the puppets. Their wooden parts fitted together so that their arms and legs, knees and necks, moved up and down when a string was pulled. They were dressed in bright scraps of cloth, to give them greater resemblance to living men and women. The stories the puppets acted out were of every kind, some to cause the audience to laugh and leave coins in the basket that was set out at the foot of the high stage, some to make the women weep and leave coins, some to cause all to gasp in fear and dread—and leave coins in the basket.

Summer passed on into autumn, marked by a sun that rose later and set earlier. The city filled with rumors of Corbel's return. Birle finally asked her master for true news, on a night when he had taken her outside to show her the Hourglass, spread out across the southern sky.

“Any day now, yes, but I'm not uneasy. I've many papers to show him, so he'll be satisfied with me. He'll have been well paid, if—as I hear—his battles were victories, so he'll not be disposed to be angry. I'll not think of him now, this night, and neither need you, Birle. Show me what you know of the stars.

Instead of answering his question, Birle told him, “My grandfather once told me there might be people who lived among the stars. Do you think it could be so?”

“I can't say no, can I? There are some who believe that the spirits of men rise at death, to become stars. I can't say no to that either, being a living man. You have a grandfather, do you? A man who wonders at what might be. Where did you come from?”