A Knot in the Grain
and Other Stories
TO
Mary Lou,
who brought me to
Cumberland Lodge
The child was born just as the first faint rays of dawn made their way through the cracks between the shutters. The lantern-wick burned low. The new father bowed his head over his wife’s hand as the midwife smiled at the mite of humanity in her arms. Black curls framed the tiny face; the child gave a gasp of shock, then filled its lungs for its first cry in this world; but when the little mouth opened, no sound came out. The midwife tightened her hands on the warm wet skin as the baby gave a sudden writhe, and closed its mouth as if it knew that it had failed at something expected of it. Then the eyes stared up into the midwife’s own, black, and clearer than a newborn’s should be, and deep in them such a look of sorrow that tears rose in the midwife’s own eyes.
“The child does not cry,” the mother whispered in terror, and the father’s head snapped up to look at the midwife and the baby cradled in her arms.
The midwife could not fear the sadness in this baby’s eyes; and she said shakily, “No, the baby does not cry, but she is a fine girl nonetheless”; and the baby blinked, and the look was gone. The midwife washed her quickly, and gave her into her mother’s eager, anxious arms, and saw the damp-curled, black-haired head of the young wife bend over the tiny curly head of the daughter. Her smile reminded the midwife of the smiles of many other new mothers, and the midwife smiled herself, and opened a shutter long enough to take a few deep breaths of the new morning air. She closed it again firmly, and chased the father out of the room so that mother and child might be bathed properly, and the bedclothes changed.
They named her Lily. She almost never cried; it was as though she did not want to call attention to what she lacked, and so at most her little face would screw itself into a tiny red knot, and a few tears would creep down her cheeks; but she did not open her mouth. She was her parents’ first child, and her mother hovered over her, and she suffered no neglect for her inability to draw attention to herself.
When Lily was three years old, her mother bore a second child, another daughter; when she was six and a half, a son was born. Both these children came into the world howling mightily. Lily seemed to find their wordless crying more fascinating than the grown-ups’ speech, and when she could she loved to sit beside the new baby and play with it gently, and make it chuckle at her.
By the time her little brother was taking his first wobbly steps it had become apparent that Lily had been granted the healer’s gift. A young cow or skittish mare would foal more quietly with her head in Lily’s lap; children with fever did not toss and turn in their beds if Lily sat beside them; and it was usually in Lily’s presence that the fevers broke, and the way back to health began.
When she was twelve, she was apprenticed to the midwife who had birthed her.
Jolin by then was a strong handsome woman of forty-five or so. Her husband had died when they had had only two years together, and no children; and she had decided that she preferred to live alone as a healer after that. But it was as the midwife she was best known, for her village was a healthy one; hardly anyone ever fell from a horse and broke a leg or caught a fever that her odd-smelling draughts could not bring down.
“I’ll tell you, young one,” she said to Lily, “I’ll teach you everything I know, but if you stay here you won’t be needing it; you’ll spend the time you’re not birthing babies sewing little sacks of herbs for the women to hang in the wardrobes and tuck among the linens. Can you sew properly?” Lily nodded, smiling; but Jolin looked into her black eyes and saw the same sorrow there that she had first seen twelve years ago. She said abruptly, “I’ve heard you whistling. You can whistle more like the birds than the birds do. There’s no reason you can’t talk with those calls; we’ll put meanings to the different ones, and we’ll both learn ’em. Will you do that with me?”
Lily nodded eagerly, but her smile broke, and Jolin looked away.
Five years passed; Jolin had bought her apprentice a horse the year before, because Lily’s fame had begun to spread to neighboring towns, and she often rode a long way to tend the sick. Jolin still birthed babies, but she was happy not to have to tend stomachaches at midnight anymore, and Lily was nearly a woman grown, and had surpassed her old teacher in almost all Jolin had to offer her. Jolin was glad of it, for it still worried her that the sadness stayed deep in Lily’s eyes and would not be lost or buried. The work meant much to each of them; for Jolin it had eased the loss of a husband she loved, and had had for so little time she could not quite let go of his memory; and for Lily, now, she thought it meant that which she had never had.
Of the two of them, Jolin thought, Lily was the more to be pitied. Their village was one of a number of small villages, going about their small concerns, uninterested in anything but the weather and the crops, marriages, births, and deaths. There was no one within three days’ ride who could read or write, for Jolin knew everyone; and the birdcall-speech that she and her apprentice had made was enough for crops and weather, births and deaths, but Jolin saw other things passing swiftly over Lily’s clear face, and wished there were a way to let them free.
At first Jolin had always accompanied Lily on her rounds, but as Lily grew surer of her craft, somehow she also grew able to draw what she needed to know or to borrow from whomever she tended; and Jolin could sit at home and sew her little sacks of herbs and prepare the infusions Lily would need, and tend the several cats that always lived with them, and the goats in the shed and the few chickens in the coop that survived the local foxes.
When Lily was seventeen, Jolin said, “You should be thinking of marrying.” She knew at least two lads who followed Lily with their eyes and were clumsy at their work when she was near, though Lily seemed unaware of them.
Lily frowned and shook her head.
“Why not?” Jolin said. “You can be a healer as well. I was. It takes a certain kind of man”—she sighed—“but there are a few. What about young Armar? He’s a quiet, even-handed sort, who’d be proud to have a wife that was needed by half the countryside. I’ve seen him watching you.” She chuckled. “And I have my heart set on birthing your first baby.”
Lily shook her head more violently, and raised her hands to her throat.
“You can learn to whistle at him as you have me,” Jolin said gently, for she saw how the girl’s hands shook. “Truly, child, it’s not that great a matter; five villages love you and not a person in ’em cares you can’t talk.”
Lily stood up, her eyes full of the bitter fire in her heart, and struck herself on the breast with her fist, and Jolin winced at the weight of the blow; she did not need to hear the words to know that Lily was shouting at her: I do!
Lily reached her twentieth year unmarried, although she had had three offers, Armar among them. The crop of children in her parents’ home had reached seven since she had left them eight years ago; and all her little brothers and sisters whistled birdcalls at her when she whistled to them. Her mother called her children her flock of starlings; but the birds themselves would come and perch on Lily’s outstretched fingers, and on no one else’s.
Lily was riding home from a sprained ankle in a neighboring village, thinking about supper, and wondering if Karla had had her kittens yet when she realized she was overtaking another traveller on the road. She did not recognize the horse, and reined back her own, for she dreaded any contact with strangers; but the rider had already heard her approach and was waiting for her. Reluctantly she rode forward. The rider threw back the hood of his cloak as she approached and smiled at her. She had never seen him before; he had a long narrow face, made longer by lines of sorrow around his mouth. His long hair was blond and grey mixed, and he sat his horse as if he had been sitting on horseback for more years past than he would wish to remember. His eyes were pale, but in the fading twilight she could not see if they were blue or grey.
“Pardon me, lady,” he greeted her, “but I fear I have come wrong somewhere. Would you have the goodness to tell me where I am?”
She shook her head, looking down at the long quiet hands holding his horse’s reins, then forced herself to look up, meeting his eyes. She watched his face for comprehension as she shook her head again, and touched two fingers to her mouth and her throat; and said sadly to herself, I cannot tell you anything, stranger. I cannot talk.
The stranger’s expression changed indeed, but the comprehension she expected was mixed with something else she could not name. Then she heard his words clearly in her mind, although he did not move his lips. Indeed, but I can hear you, lady.
Lily reached out, not knowing that she did so, and her fingers closed on a fold of the man’s cloak. He did not flinch from her touch, and her horse stood patiently still, wanting its warm stall and its oats, but too polite to protest. Who—who are you? she thought frantically. What are you doing to me?
Be easy, lady. I am—here there was an odd flicker—a mage, of sorts; or once I was one. I retain a few powers. I—and his thought went suddenly blank with an emptiness that was much more awful than that of a voice fallen silent—I can mindspeak. You have not met any of … us … before?
She shook her head.
There are not many. He looked down into the white face that looked up at him and felt an odd creaky sensation where once he might have had a heart.
Where are you going? she said at last.
He looked away; she thought he stared at the horizon as if he expected to see something he could hastily describe as his goal.
I do not mean to question you, she said; forgive me, I am not accustomed to … speech … and I forget my manners.
He smiled at her, but the sad lines around his mouth did not change. There is no lack of courtesy, he replied; only that I am a wanderer, and I cannot tell you where I am going. He looked up again, but there was no urgency in his gaze this time. I have not travelled here before, however, and even a … wanderer … has his pride; and so I asked you the name of this place.
She blushed that she had forgotten his question, and replied quickly, the words leaping into her mind. The village where I live lies just there, over the little hill. Its name is Rhungill. That way—she turned in her saddle—is Teskip, where I am returning from; this highway misses it, it lay to your right, beyond the little forest as you rode this way.
He nodded gravely. You have always lived in Rhungill?
She nodded; the gesture felt familiar, but a bubble of joy beat in her throat that she need not halt with the nod. I am the apprentice of our healer.
He was not expecting to hear himself say: Is there an inn in your village, where a wanderer might rest for the night? In the private part of his mind he said to himself: There are three hours till sunset; there is no reason to stop here now. If there are no more villages, I have lain by a fire under a tree more often than I have lain in a bed under a roof for many years past.
Lily frowned a moment and said, No-o, we have no inn; Rhungill is very small. But there is a spare room—it is Jolin’s house, but I live there too—we often put people up, who are passing through and need a place to stay. The villagers often send us folk. And because she was not accustomed to mindspeech, he heard her say to herself what she did not mean for him to hear: Let him stay a little longer.
And so he was less surprised when he heard himself answer: I would be pleased to spend the night at your healer’s house.
A smile, such as had never before been there, bloomed on Lily’s face; her thoughts tumbled over one another and politely he did not listen, or let her know that he might have. She let her patient horse go on again, and the stranger’s horse walked beside.
They did not speak. Lily found that there were so many things she would like to say, to ask, that they overwhelmed her; and then a terrible shyness closed over her, for fear that she would offend the stranger with her eagerness, with the rush of pent-up longing for the particulars of conversation. He held his silence as well, but his reasons stretched back over many wandering years, although once or twice he did look in secret at the bright young face beside him, and again there was the odd, uncomfortable spasm beneath his breastbone.
They rode over the hill and took a narrow, well-worn way off the highway. It wound into a deep cutting, and golden grasses waved above their heads at either side. Then the way rose, or the sides fell away, and the stranger looked around him at pastureland with sheep and cows grazing earnestly and solemnly across it, and then at empty meadows; and then there was a small stand of birch and ash and willow, and a small thatched house with a strictly tended herb garden around it, laid out in a maze of squares and circles and borders and low hedges. Lily swung off her small gelding at the edge of the garden and whistled: a high thin cry that told Jolin she had brought a visitor.
Jolin emerged from the house smiling. Her hair, mostly grey now, with lights of chestnut brown, was in a braid; and tucked into the first twist of the hair at the nape of her neck was a spray of yellow and white flowers. They were almost a halo, nearly a collar.
“Lady,” said the stranger, and dismounted.
This is Jolin, Lily said to him. And you—she stopped, confused, shy again.
“Jolin,” said the stranger, but Jolin did not think it odd that he knew her name, for often the villagers sent visitors on with Lily when they saw her riding by, having supplied both their names first. “I am called Sahath.”
Lily moved restlessly; there was no birdcall available to her for this eventuality. She began the one for talk, and broke off. Jolin glanced at her, aware that something was troubling her.
Sahath, said Lily, tell Jolin—and her thought paused, because she could not decide, even to herself, what the proper words for it were.
But Jolin was looking at their guest more closely, and a tiny frown appeared between her eyes.
Sahath said silently to Lily, She guesses.
Lily looked up at him; standing side by side, he was nearly a head taller than she. She—?
Jolin had spent several years traveling in her youth, travelling far from her native village and even far from her own country; and on her travels she had learned more of the world than most of the other inhabitants of Rhungill, for they were born and bred to live their lives on their small landplots, and any sign of wanderlust was firmly suppressed. Jolin, as a healer and so a little unusual, was permitted wider leeway than any of the rest of Rhungill’s daughters; but her worldly knowledge was something she rarely admitted and still more rarely demonstrated. But one of the things she had learned as she and her mother drifted from town to town, dosing children and heifers, binding the broken limbs of men and pet cats, was to read the mage-mark.
“Sir,” she said now, “what is one such as you doing in our quiet and insignificant part of the world?” Her voice was polite but not cordial, for mages, while necessary for some work beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, often brought with them trouble as well; and an unbidden mage was almost certainly trouble. This too she had learned when she was young.
Sahath smiled sadly. “I carry the mark, lady, it is true, but no mage am I.” Jolin, staring at him, holding her worldly knowledge just behind her eyes where everything he said must be reflected through it, read truth in his eyes. “I was one once, but no longer.”
Jolin relaxed, and if she need not fear this man she could pity him, for to have once been a mage and to have lost that more than mortal strength must be as heavy a blow as any man might receive and yet live; and she saw the lines of sorrow in his face.
Lily stood staring at the man with the sad face, for she knew no more of mages than a child knows of fairy tales; she would as easily have believed in the existence of tigers or of dragons, of chimeras or of elephants; and yet Jolin’s face and voice were serious. A mage. This man was a mage—or had been one—and he could speak to her. It was more wonderful than elephants.
Sahath said, “Some broken pieces of my mage-truth remain to me, and one of these Lily wishes me to tell you: that I can speak to her—mind to mind.”
Lily nodded eagerly, and seized her old friend and mentor’s hands in hers. She smiled, pulled her lips together to whistle, “It is true,” and her lips drew back immediately again to the smile. Jolin tried to smile back into the bright young face before her; there was a glow there which had never been there before, and Jolin’s loving heart turned with jealousy and—fear reawakened. For this man, with his unreasonable skills, even if he were no proper mage, might be anyone in his own heart. Jolin loved Lily as much as any person may love another. What, she asked herself in fear, might this man do to her, in her innocence, her pleasure in the opening of a door so long closed to her, and open now only to this stranger? Mages were not to be trusted on a human scale of right and wrong, reason and unreason. Mages were sworn to other things. Jolin understood that they were sworn to—goodness, to rightness; but often that goodness was of a high, far sort that looked very much like misery to the smaller folk who had to live near it.
As she thought these things, and held her dearer-than-daughter’s hands in hers, she looked again at Sahath. “What do you read in my mind, mage?” she said, and her voice was harsher than she meant to permit it, for Lily’s sake.
Sahath dropped his eyes to his own hands; he spread the long fingers as if remembering what once they had been capable of. “Distrust and fear,” he said after a moment; and Jolin was the more alarmed that she had had no sense of his scrutiny. No mage-skill she had, but as a healer she heard and felt much that common folk had no ken of.
Lily’s eyes widened, and she clutched Jolin’s hands. Sahath felt her mind buck and shudder like a frightened horse, for the old loyalty was very strong. It was terrible to her that she might have to give up this wonderful, impossible thing even sooner than the brief span of an overnight guest’s visit that she had promised herself—or at least freely hoped for. Even his mage’s wisdom was awed by her strength of will, and the strength of her love for the aging, steady-eyed woman who watched him. He felt the girl withdrawing from him, and he did not follow her, though he might have; but he did not want to know what she was thinking. He stood where he was, the two women only a step or two distant from him; and he felt alone, as alone as he had felt once before, on a mountain, looking at a dying army, knowing his mage-strength was dying with them.
“I—” he said, groping, and the same part of his mind that had protested his halting so long before sundown protested again, saying, Why do you defend yourself to an old village woman who shambles among her shrubs and bitter herbs, mouthing superstitions? But the part of his mind that had been moved by Lily’s strength and humility answered: because she is right to question me.
“I am no threat to you in any way I control,” he said to Jolin’s steady gaze, and she thought: Still he talks like a mage, with the mage-logic, to specify that which he controls. Yet perhaps it is not so bad a thing, some other part of her mind said calmly, that any human being, even a mage, should know how little he may control.
“It—it is through no dishonor that I lost the—the rest of my mage-strength.” The last words were pulled out of him, like the last secret drops of the heart’s blood of a dragon, and Jolin heard the pain and pride in his voice, and saw the blankness in his eyes; yet she did not know that he was standing again on a mountain, feeling all that had meant anything to him draining away from him into the earth, drawn by the ebbing life-force of the army he had opposed. One of the man’s long-fingered hands had stretched toward the two women as he spoke; but as he said “mage-strength,” the hand went to his forehead. When it dropped to his side again, there were white marks that stood a moment against the skin, where the fingertips had pressed too hard.
Jolin put one arm around Lily’s shoulders and reached her other hand out delicately, to touch Sahath’s sleeve. He looked up again at the touch of her fingers. “You are welcome to stay with us, Sahath.”
Lily after all spoke to him very little that evening, as if, he thought, she did not trust herself, although she listened eagerly to the harmless stories he told them of other lands and peoples he had visited; and she not infrequently interrupted him to ask for unimportant details. He was careful to answer everything she asked as precisely as he could; once or twice she laughed at his replies, although there was nothing overtly amusing about them.
In the morning when he awoke, only a little past dawn, Lily was already gone. Jolin gave him breakfast and said without looking at him, “Lily has gone gathering wild herbs; dawn is best for some of those she seeks.” Sahath saw in her mind that Lily had gone by her own decision; Jolin had not sent her, or tried to suggest the errand to her.
He felt strangely bereft, and he sat, crumbling a piece of sweet brown bread with his fingers and staring into his cup of herb tea. He recognized the infusion: chintanth for calm, monar for clear-mindedness. He drank what was in the cup and poured himself more. Jolin moved around the kitchen, putting plates and cups back into the cupboard.
He said abruptly, “Is there any work a simple man’s strength might do for you?”
There was a rush of things through Jolin’s mind: her and Lily’s self-sufficiency, and their pleasure in it; another surge of mistrust for mage-cunning—suddenly and ashamedly put down; this surprised him, as he stared into his honey-clouded tea, and it gave him hope. Hope? he thought. He had not known hope since he lost his mage-strength; he had nearly forgotten its name. Jolin stood gazing into the depths of the cupboard, tracing the painted borders of vines and leaves and flowers with her eye; and now her thoughts were of things that it would be good to have done, that she and Lily always meant to see to, and never quite had time for.
When Lily came home in the late morning, a basket over her arm, Sahath was working his slow way with a spade down the square of field that Jolin had long had in her mind as an extension of her herb garden. Lily halted at the edge of the freshly turned earth, and breathed deep of the damp sweet smell of it. Sahath stopped to lean on his spade, and wiped his forehead on one long dark sleeve. It is near dinnertime, said Lily hesitantly, fearful of asking him why he was digging Jolin’s garden; but her heart was beating faster than her swift walking could explain.
He ate with them, a silent meal, for none of the three wished to acknowledge or discuss the new balance that was already growing among them. Then he went back to his spade.
He did a careful, thorough job of the new garden plot; two days it took him. When he finished it, he widened the kitchen garden. Then he built a large new paddock for Lily’s horse—and his own; the two horses had made friends at once, and stood head to tail in the shade at the edge of the tiny turnout that flanked the small barn. When they were first introduced to their new field, they ran like furies around it, squealing and plunging at each other. Jolin came out of the house to see what the uproar was about. Sahath and Lily were leaning side by side on the top rail of the sturdy new fence; Jolin wondered what they might be saying to each other. The horses had enough of being mad things, and ambled quietly over to ask their riders for handouts. Jolin turned and reentered the house.
On the third day after his arrival Jolin gave Sahath a shirt and trousers, lengthened for their new owner: The shirt tail and cuffs were wide red bands sewn neatly onto the original yellow cloth; the trousers were green, and each leg bore a new darker green hem. No mage had ever worn such garb. He put them on. At the end of the week Lily gave him a black and green—the same coarse green of the trouserhems—jacket. He said, Thank you, lady, and she blushed and turned away. Jolin watched them, and wondered if she had done the right thing, not to send him away when she might have; wondered if he knew that Lily was in love with him. She wondered if a mage might know anything of love, anything of a woman’s love for a man.
He propped up the sagging cow shed where the two goats lived, and made the chicken-coop decently foxproof. He built bird-houses and feeders for the many birds that were Lily’s friends; and he watched her when he thought she did not notice, when they came to visit, perching on her hands and shoulders and rubbing their small heads against her face. He listened to their conversations, and knew no more of what passed than Jolin did of his and Lily’s.
He had never been a carpenter, any more than he had been a gardener; but he knew his work was good, and he did not care where the skill came from. He knew he could look at the things he wished to do here and understand how best to do them, and that was enough. He slept the nights through peacefully and dreamlessly.
A few days after the gift of the jacket Jolin said to him, “The leather-worker of our village is a good man and clever. He owes us for his wife’s illness last winter; it would please … us … if you would let him make you a pair of boots.” His old boots, accustomed to nothing more arduous than the chafing of stirrup and stirrup-leather, had never, even in their young days, been intended for the sort of work he was lately requiring of them. He looked at them ruefully, stretched out toward the fire’s flickering light, the dark green cuffs winking above them, and Karla’s long furry red tail curling and uncurling above the cuffs.
He went into the village the next day. He understood, from the careful but polite greetings he received, that the knowledge of Jolin’s new hired man had gone before him; and he also understood that no more than his skill with spade and hammer had gone into the tale. There was no one he met who had the skill to recognize a mage-mark, nor was there any suspicion, besides the wary observation of a stranger expected to prove himself one way or another, that he was anything more or less than an itinerant laborer. The boot-maker quietly took his measurements and asked him to return in a week.
Another week, he thought, and was both glad and afraid. It was during that week that he finished the paddock for the horses. He wanted to build a larger shed to store hay, for there was hay enough in the meadowland around Jolin’s house to keep all the livestock—even a second horse, he thought distantly—all the winter, if there was more room for it than the low loft over the small barn.
In a week he went back to fetch his boots; they were heavy, hard things, a farmer’s boots, and for a moment they appalled him, till he saw the beauty of them. He thanked their maker gravely, and did not know the man was surprised by his tone. Farmers, hired men, took their footgear for granted; he had long since learned to be proud of his craft for its own sake. And so he was the first of the villagers to wonder if perhaps there was more to Jolin’s hired man—other than the fact, well mulled over all through Rhungill, that Jolin had never before in over twenty years been moved to hire anyone for more than a day’s specific job—than met the eye. But he had no guess of the truth.
Sahath asked the boot-maker if there was someone who sold dry planking, for he had all but used Lily and Jolin’s small store of it, till now used only for patching up after storms and hard winter weather. There were several such men, and because the leather-worker was pleased at the compliment Sahath paid him, he recommended one man over the others. Sahath, unknowing, went to that man, who had much fine wood of just the sort Sahath wanted; but when he asked a price, the man looked at him a long moment and said, “No charge, as you do good work for them; you may have as much as you need as you go on for them. There are those of us know what we owe them.” The man’s name was Armar.
Sahath went in his heavy boots to the house he had begun in secret to call home. He let no hint of the cost to his pride his workman’s hire of sturdy boots had commanded; but still Jolin’s quick eyes caught him staring at the calluses on his long-fingered hands, and guessed something of what he was thinking.
A week after he brought his boots home he began the hay shed. He also began to teach Lily and Jolin their letters. He had pen and paper in his saddlebags, and a wax tablet that had once been important in a mage’s work. When he first took it out of its satchel, he had stood long with it in his hands; but it was silent, inert, a tool like a hammer was a tool and nothing more. He brought it downstairs, and whittled three styluses from bits of firewood.
“If you learn to write,” he said, humbly, to Jolin, “Lily may speak to you as well as she may speak to any wandering … mage.” It was all the explanation he gave, laying the pale smooth tablet down on the shining golden wood of the table; and Jolin realized, when he smiled uncertainly at her and then turned to look wistfully at Lily, that he did love her dearer-than-daughter, but that nothing of that love had passed between them. Jolin had grown fond of the quiet, weary man who was proving such a good landsman, fond enough of him that it no longer hurt her to see him wearing her husband’s old clothes which she herself had patched for his longer frame; and so she thought, Why does he not tell her? She looked at them as they looked at each other, and knew why, for the hopelessness was as bright in their eyes as the love. Jolin looked away unhappily, for she understood too that there was no advice she could give them that they would listen to. But she could whisper charms that they permit themselves to see what was, and not blind themselves with blame for what they lacked. Her lips moved.