Tale of Birle (27 page)

“What happened?”

“He left it all behind him.”

“And you came with him.”

That was near enough to be the truth.

“And you were both, somehow, captured, and sold into slavery.”

She nodded.

“But now he's been taken to the mines. And now the best you can hope for him is that he will die quickly.”

Birle gave no voice to her anger—how could he say it so? Even if it was true, to say it so, as if it were no more than any of the other ideas he uttered so easily.

“I thought last night—you smile so seldom, but last night there was springtime in your smile. Maybe they are right, Birle, and we are bound to the wheel until death frees us.”

As if she had hoped that her master would be able to do what she knew could not be done, Birle's heart flickered like a candle, and went out.

“I must,” she said, “prepare the meal. I must. There's work must be done.” How she could bear the weight of the hours, she didn't know. But if there were no toil she must think of Orien—a tiny figure bound like all the others to a wheel of iron, and his eyes the blue of bellflowers.

Those days Birle labored long, late and early. She didn't know how many days there were, she only knew that there was no easing to the grief. All she could do was bear it, through the long days. Yul worried for her; she saw his worry without being able to ease it.

Joaquim too worried, but not over Birle. Her master was often out of the house, but doing what she didn't know and he didn't say. When he was at home he didn't work in the laboratory but wandered restlessly about whatever room he was in. Birle thought Joaquim was afraid, but that didn't trouble her. Neither was she troubled at the changes in the marketplace, where fewer customers—and none of them the wealthy of the city—paid more than goods were worth, and paid the sums without question or complaint. Fewer red shirts patrolled the streets of the city, watched over the marketplace, guarded the gates. Birle had no thought or care for any of this. It was the most she could do to thank Yul when he brought her in a handful of flowers grown wild in the grass of the yard. She sat up by candlelight, copying pages into Joaquim's book, until her head fell forward onto the table and she could sleep.

Beyond the open door to the yard, a heavy black sky hung like a curtain, pricked with stars. The wavering light of the candle flowed like water over the sheet of paper, and the pen scratched steadily, as letters and words—carefully shaped—came from its sharpened tip. Sleep would find her there, and carry her off before she had time to notice its presence. Sometimes when she slept she dreamed, and sometimes when she dreamed she saw Orien, and once he was laughing. When she awoke from that dream her face was wet with tears.

She lifted her head and saw that her tears had blotted the page, so that it would have to be redone. She went outside. Once again it was the silvery time of day, but this morning a fine rain filled the air and brushed against her face. On her way to the privy, she saw that Yul had put a bundle of clothing out, up against the wall of the laboratory. She would launder that day, then, and never mind if it was not fair. She would heat the water to scalding over the fire, so that when she put her hands into it there would be a pain she could put a name to. It was not until she was coming out of the privy that Birle thought to wonder why Yul, who had never before bundled his dirty clothing in that manner, should do so, or to remember—with a suddenness that squeezed the breath out of her chest—that there had been something like a stick across the top of the bundle, as if to hold it in place in a wind, or like an arm.

Until she had pulled the arm away, and turned the listless head to face the rain, she didn't dare to know it was Orien.

There was no time for gladness. When she turned his face, the one eye that could open opened, and didn't see her. His tongue flicked between his caked lips, to taste the rain. The right side of his face was an open sore, red and festering so that the eye—caked with pus and dirt—couldn't open. He was burning up with heat, with fever. The sore that was his face smelled like rotting meat.

Birle crouched on the ground beside him, just for a minute or two, until the joy that made her hands tremble and the fear that made her heart beat painfully fast had both receded. Then she decided what to do.

She went into the laboratory and roused Yul. “Help me,” she asked. Yul carried Orien back down the grassy yard and laid him on the ground under a cluster of bushes, grown so tall that their branches formed low rooms. Birle sent Yul to bring blankets, and a bucket of clean water, and cloths.

She washed Orien's face and neck. He turned and complained under her hands, but he didn't know who hurt him so. He spoke no words, and if he had she would not have heard them. They had branded him, the wound had infected—as if half his face had been held in the fire. She didn't think of that. She thought only of cleaning his poor face, gently, gently, bathing it in cool water and dripping water from her hands into his mouth when it turned, like a sucking babe, toward the coolness of water.

His wrists were chained together with iron loops two fingers thick. She didn't think of that. The little rain pattered down.

Leaving Yul with Orien, she went into the laboratory for medicines. Garlic ointment—it would pain him but it would clean the wound—barley water . . . she didn't know what she might use, she thought, but then she realized that she did. The pages she had copied were copied into her memory. Thinking quickly, she took down the vial of dwale. A drop or two, in the barley water, would give him sleep. Too much—and her hand shook—would kill him; but dwale in small measure—she watched one drop, then two, fall into the vial of water—would ease him, and let him sleep.

While he slept, she would cut away the hair from his face, then she could apply ointment with less pain to him. She didn't know if Yul's strength would be any use against the chains on Orien's wrists.

She could only hope that her master would be too distracted by whatever was worrying him to notice that something was going on. She must put a meal on the table, but it wasn't time yet. If Orien was sleeping a drugged sleep, she could leave him safely hidden there, for the time it took to feed her master.

If Birle had been less distracted by her own misery of the preceding days, she would not have been so surprised at her master's announcement as he sat down for his morning bread and wine.

“Today I leave,” Joaquim said. “I leave the house, the city, this warbegone countryside—and the false alchemy too—and I leave my brother's rule. You've no reason to look dismayed, Birle. I warned you.”

“I had forgotten.” They would have the house to themselves, then. That suited her needs. “What should I pack for your journey?” Orien could have Joaquim's comfortable bed. There was medicine and food to hand.

“You'll pack nothing. And you'll say nothing either, not to anyone. Corbel won't know until nightfall that I've gone, he mustn't know. When the soldier brings a cart to the door, you and Yul must put the sacks into it—as we did last year. Where is Yul? Have you woken him? I'll put my Herbal in one of the sacks, that's all I need to take with me.”

“Will the soldier let you leave the city?”

“He won't know until I don't return. I wouldn't think of giving the order. Only Corbel has the power to exact obedience. I'm like your lost Earl—I have no desire for power. It's my brother who desires that. He counts the cost well spent that gets him what he desires.”

“Aye, and so do you, master,” Birle said. She knew this, because she knew it of herself. “And so does every man.” The only difference lay in what the object of desire was.

“I've no time for talk,” Joaquim said. “As for you, and Yul, it would be well for you to be away from the house by sunset. I don't know where, or how you can hide yourselves, especially Yul. It might be that you ought to go separate ways, for your safety. I've silver coins to aid you. Don't let Corbel find you. Unless you think you'd be safest in his house, in which case you should wait here for the soldier to bring the news of my escape to Corbel. Corbel will come here first. He'll be angry.”

Too much was happening, all at once. Birle couldn't take it all in; she could think only of Orien.

“So I'll say farewell to you,” Joaquim said. He left his food uneaten, and held out a small purse to her. “I wish your future fortune happier than this one.”

If Joaquim left her here, Orien would be trapped. She must hurry, to fetch Yul, and think of how they might hide Orien, they must hurry before they lost this last chance to leave the city, before war and Corbel—

“No.” Birle's voice was as harsh as a raven's, strong and sure.

Joaquim turned back to face her. She said it again, lest he misunderstand her. “No, master. You won't leave us behind.”

J
OAQUIM ANSWERED HER IMPATIENTLY. “IT'S
the world, the way of the world. If I could change the world I would, but in warning you and giving you coins, I've done all I can.” Until she heard how his voice trembled, Birle hadn't understood how frightened her master was. He gave out fear just as a fire gives out warmth. “I'm helpless. Don't you understand?”

Birle was as frightened as he was. Joaquim was their only hope. The only power she had was the power to touch his heart so that he would, for pity of her, help her escape from the city. For the same reason, he might also help Yul. But Orien—

Birle wouldn't leave him behind. She'd left him behind once, but she'd had no choice then. Was she any less helpless now? For all his kindness, Joaquim had still used her for his own purposes. His purposes were not cruel ones, but they were his own and not hers. Pity didn't move him. Her weepings would fall on him as the rain did. He would take them as he did the rain and make out of them something to wonder at: What caused them? Where did the water come from? Why should it be salty? Why should women weep for what they wished, and men fight?

Joaquim would neither weep nor fight. He would obey when fear forced him but go his own way while obeying, make his own secret uses of whatever occasion his fortune or his brother forced upon him.

“There is yet one more thing you must do,” Birle told her master.

He turned away, but she snaked her hand out to hold his arm. He would have pulled the arm away but she gripped it tightly with both of her hands. He raised his other hand as if to strike her.

Birle knew he wouldn't do that. Joaquim had the strength of knowledge, and no more. Even then, he would belie his thoughts with words if danger threatened. He must not know of Orien, because in Joaquim dangerous knowledge meant betrayal. He was right to value his Herbal above all else: The actions that made up his life would never be the best of Joaquim; his life was not his great work, his book was.

“You can't stop me,” Joaquim claimed, even as her hands held their grip on his arm.

Not pity then, but fear. For this time, her own will, born out of her own fears, would rule him. He was a man easily ruled.

“You'll be punished,” Joaquim warned her. “You're a slave.”

“That I'm not. Master,” Birle said, “I'm not a slave because you've never made me one.”

“And this is how you repay my kindness?”

“It wasn't kindness. You couldn't have done otherwise, so you can't claim to have chosen to be kind. No, you must take us with you, as you did before. The soldier won't suspect anything, because it is what we did last spring. But this year I'll drive the cart.”

“Do you know how to do that as well?”

“No, but I will,” Birle said. “Once we get to the hills beyond farmlands, you can leave Yul and me to make our own way. You can take the cart yourself, and make a quicker escape.”

“You don't understand, Birle. You belong to Corbel. If you were mine I'd do as you ask, I would. But—don't you understand?—if I make off with Corbel's property, as well as myself slipping away, he'll—”

Birle cut him off before he frightened himself into useless idiocy. “If you leave me here,” she said, making him her promise, “I'll waste no time in telling Corbel. I'll tell him everything. I'll tell him about the Herbal, the hours we spent on that, which were every one of them hours we didn't spend searching for his stone. Do you think he'll allow you to preserve your work, done at the expense of his? What—in his anger—do you think he'll do . . . if he were to know of it?” she concluded. “You must take us out of the city,” she told her master.

Joaquim had shrunk inside of his robe. “Yes, I must. I will.” There was no trickery to him; he didn't have the courage for deceit. “Call Yul, to tell him that we're leaving, gather what you need—”

“No,” Birle said again, again harshly. She dropped her hands from his arm, because she didn't need force to hold him now. “I need a day to get ready. So when the soldier comes, tell him to return tomorrow, at first light. Today, send him back.”

“He won't obey me.”

“He will when you give him the order in Corbel's name.”

“I warn you—it's on your head if we've left it too long, if tomorrow we can't get out of the city. It'll all be your fault.”

Birle feared that as much as Joaquim did. If the war came before the morrow, if—she had to get Orien out of the city, take him away into safety, and the day's delay might lose them their only chance—

But she needed the day, for her preparations. If she just went running off, without any thought for what she might need on whatever journey lay before her—she would purchase food from the marketplace, gather together garments for the three of them, and medicines, and the cloths for her time of the month. She would sew the silver coins her master had given them into her own skirt, so that no one would know she carried them. She needed to try to explain to Yul what they were doing, and if in doing so she gave Orien a day's healing rest, that was to the good. She needed to try to think out what way their journey should take them—three of them, runaway slaves, with war coming down upon the city, and one of them so weak he couldn't walk—