“Grim in there,” said Abasio, not looking back.
“Blood in there,” replied the horse. “People died making that cut.”
“Dwarves, do you think?”
The horse shrugged and rested his chin on the man’s shoulder when Abasio came forward to assess the view. Mountains closed from either side behind them. They stood at the narrow end of a widening green valley that fell away into the distant, hazy south. With Abasio walking beside him, the horse tugged the wagon into easy, downslope movement. Several chattering streamlets trickled toward them, joining at either side of the road into brooks plunging away to the south. Before the sun had sunk much farther the right-hand stream had found a rocky culvert and ducked under the road to join the left-hand stream, which gradually became a modest and rather talkative river. The great hand they had seen earlier, somewhat less forbidding when seen from the side, was surrounded by greenery and its fingertips were identifiable as the conical roofs of five separate towers. Within another hour, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, they approached a rustling crowd of fruit trees behind a low stone wall, the tree shadows mottling the roadway before them.
“Apples,” said the horse, breathing deeply and approvingly. “I smell apples!”
Directly before them a particularly old and massive tree leaned across the wall, and Abasio pulled gently on the reins as they approached it.
“Hello,” he said to the tree. “What are you doing there?”
A brown branch uncurled itself and peered at him between two lower limbs. “Watching.”
“Not for me,” Abasio said. “I didn’t even know I was coming.”
“I was watching for what I was waiting for.” The small brown person uncoiled herself further and stepped onto the wall. “Your horse talks.”
“Ah, yes,” said Abasio. “Strictly speaking he is not my horse, though we do travel together. And though it’s true that he speaks, I’d prefer that you not mention it to anyone. Talking animals are more or less customary where I come from, but I don’t notice many of them around here.” He blinked. He saw a child. But he also saw something . . . as though the child stood within some larger, older embodiment, crystalline, barely visible . . . invisible. He blinked again. It was gone. One of those temporal twists that sometimes proved true? Or not?
The child murmured, “I wouldn’t talk about it. People would just laugh at me.”
“Do they do that a lot?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. He wasn’t in the habit of seeing things, but he had definitely seen something.
“No,” she replied after a moment’s consideration. “Mostly they don’t talk to me at all. My teacher, the Great Bear of Zol, says you have to be very careful of some horses, especially their back ends, but yours seems nice.”
“His name is Big Blue, or just Blue. My name is Abasio.”
“Abasio. I’m called Shoo-lye,” she said. “It’s spelled with an X in front, but in our language that’s pronounced like an SH. Xulai.”
“Your language. And what might that be?”
“Tingawan.”
“Ah. From over the Western Sea. And how do you happen to be here in the land of Wold, so far from the Ten Thousand Islands?”
She stared at him wonderingly. “Not many people know about Tingawa. I was sent from there. I am the Xakixa, soul carrier, for the Woman Upstairs. You probably don’t know what that is . , .”
Abasio smiled. “As it happens, I do. I have read of the custom. Yours is a very responsible duty. And the Woman Upstairs? That would be the wife of the Duke of Wold, am I right?”
The girl went suddenly rigid, as though overcome by a sudden awareness of guilt. “I shouldn’t have told you. Why did I do that! I’m not supposed to talk about . . . I never talk about . . .”
“It’s all right,” snorted the horse. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone tells him things, but he doesn’t tell people’s secrets. He just goes hither and thither helping out . . . orphans?”
“Blue!” said Abasio, somewhat discomfited. “Really!”
“Well, you do,” said the horse in a strangely puzzled voice. He stared at the person on the wall. “You do.”
“Oh,” cried the girl, her face lighting up in joyous wonderment. “Then you are the one I was waiting for! I prayed to Ushiloma, protector of the motherless, to send me someone!”
Abasio went from the wagon step to the wall top, where he sat down beside her. “Life has taught me that almost anything is possible. For example, it is possible I will trade this horse in for a donkey. Or perhaps a yak. Something less given to making spontaneous and gratuitous commitments.”
The girl laid her hand upon his arm pleadingly. “Oh, I don’t know what a yak is, but please don’t. He . . . he sounds very sensible. I get very tired of never talking about anything. I don’t have many people I can talk to. Oldwife Gancer, she was my nursemaid when I was really little, but she’s not exactly a friend, more like a, a granny, I guess. Bartelmy is probably the youngest one who’s actually friendly. He helped me pick out my horse and taught me to ride, but he’s not someone I’d talk to about her, the princess. Besides, Oldwife says he’s a little more fond of me than he should be, being as I’m a Xakixa for a princess and he’s just a bowman for my cousin, though I don’t know what that has to do with anything because he’s very nice and kind. And the children around the castle, well, for some reason, the little ones think I’m too old, but the older ones say I’m too babyish, and the grown-up ones all have their own problems, or they keep trying to educate me, and sometimes I feel words wanting to come out all on their own but there’s no one there to . . . do you understand me? I’d love to have a horse to talk to. Don’t you find him a lot of company? Besides, if you help out orphans, I am one, and you really are the one intended to help me. Probably.” The words had come in a spate, a gush, as from an overloaded heart.
“Possibly,” said Abasio. “Only possibly.” He put his arm around the child’s shoulders and hugged her lightly, suddenly removing the arm as though the embrace had been . . . what? Inappropriate? Certainly not. He liked children, and she was just a child. Of course, no one had said there would be a child. What had he expected?
“While you two converse, I think I’ll have a few mouthfuls of grass,” said Blue, dragging the wagon to the side of the road.
Abasio held Xulai away from him. Seeing the streaks of tears on her cheeks, he wiped her face with his kerchief. Her crow-black hair, full of blue lights in the even-glow, was pulled together in a thick braid that lay across her left shoulder and hung to her waist. Her neck and face were pale nut brown and her face seemed to be at least half eyes, dark and huge, either far too old or far too young for someone her size. Or she herself was far too small, perhaps, for someone sounding as mature as she did. “How old are you?”
“I think seven or eight maybe. I’m not sure.”
“And what kind of help did you pray for?”
She sighed deeply, the words coming slowly, hesitantly: “The Woman Upstairs is very sick and she hasn’t really talked to anyone for a long time, in words, out loud. But she talks to me—kind of in my head. Do you understand?”
Abasio nodded. Oh, yes. He understood very well. He, too, often carried on lengthy conversations with someone very dear to him, someone who spoke to him in his head.
The child picked uneasily at the hem of her shirt, this small movement obviously substituting for some other, much more expressive gesture she could not allow herself to make. “She wants me to do something for her. And I’ve tried, I really have. But I got so scared. I couldn’t get there, I couldn’t do it. So . . . I prayed for Ushiloma to send somebody to go with me.”
He stared at his boots, finding himself faced with a not unusual problem: deciding what was appropriate. Was this request for assistance something that was “meant,” that is, a fate-laden task put in his way by someone or something other than this surprising female because it or they intended for him to do something about it or her? Did he, in fact, believe
in such things? Did he believe in it or them? Or was this merely an accidental meeting that provided an opportunity to do something helpful or, conversely, totally unhelpful because of this . . . person’s bad judgment, or his own? Or was it one of those dreadful nodules in space-time in which interference of any kind would do more harm than good? Or vice versa?
“Tidewise . . . ,” neighed Blue, sotto voce.
Abasio avoided the questions. “What does she want you to do?”
“Go into the woods after dark and fetch something, and it’s not long until dark . . .”
He thought about this for some time. “How many times has the Woman Upstairs asked you to do this?”
“Twice,” Xulai confessed, staring at her boots. “Yesterday and the day before, but the shadows stopped me. They’re full of writhey things that curl like snakes. And last night there was something huge that crunched as it came at me! I got partway, I really tried, but I was so scared I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t move!”
“Has she ever suggested you take someone with you?”
There was a lengthy silence. “She never really said not to . . .”
“She probably never said to tie bells to your feet and beat a drum on the way there, either, did she?”
Xulai felt her eyes filling. “No.”
“Have you done other things for her?”
“Oh, yes, many things.”
“Did she ever ask you to do anything that hurt you?”
She shook her head, seeming reluctant to do so.
Abasio took a deep breath. “Then, scared or not, if she’s your friend you have to trust her. She needs you to do this thing and she needs you to do it by yourself.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she started to climb back into the tree.
“Bastard,” said the horse, quite audibly.
“What I will do,” said Abasio to the girl’s back, “is provide some help . . .”
She stopped moving.
“I’ll give you two things. I’ll give you some good advice and some assistance. Now listen to me. No, come back down here on the wall and really listen, don’t just pretend you’re listening while you’re planning to fall apart! There. Now breathe. Again. No, not hu-uh-hu-uh-hu-uh, like a panting puppy dog! Breathe, deeply, and listen! When you set out to do this thing tonight, you will have to think. Haven’t people talked to you about thinking, using your head?”
She shivered, her face suddenly fierce with anger. “No! They tell me not to! I am not supposed to think! I am supposed to do what they tell me to do and not worry about it. Worrying about things might . . . it might get me into trouble.”
“Aaah,” said Blue very softly. “That would explain things.”
Abasio glared at the back of Blue’s ears, which twitched. “Well, for the time being, forget any advice that includes not thinking. Instead of concentrating on how scared you are, you will have to move up into your brain and think. The answer to being frightened is often right there in your head, when and where you need it, if you merely look for it. Stop shaking! There. See? You can stop when you think about it! Now, I do not mean you should merely take a quick glance around and then have a fit of hysterics! I mean look for the solution with everything you’ve got, eyes, nose, ears, everything!
“As for the other thing, I will be there to keep an eye on you to be sure nothing happens to you. You may trust me to do this. I won’t be holding your hand; I will be nearby, but you have to do the task alone because that’s what the lady asked you to do. Right?”
“Right,” she barely managed to say as she turned.
“Just a moment. I need to know where you set out from. And when.”
She gestured with a trembling hand toward the castle wall above the trees. “I go out through the kitchen garden and the poppleberry orchard through the little stoop gate in the back wall. I go as soon as it is really dark.” She trudged away, pausing to look back in case he’d changed his mind, but he was just sitting there on the wall, staring at his boots. They weren’t ordinary boots, being very long and made of red leather. Nothing about the man was ordinary. Though he wasn’t really tall, not so tall as her guard, the Great Bear of Zol, the wagon man seemed taller and his shoulders were exceptionally broad for so slender a person. His hair was dark, rather curly, with just a few silver hairs above his ears where a stray lock fell at each side, curling under the lobes at the corners of his jaw, which was square and determined looking, beneath a mouth that was just the opposite, what she thought of as a listening mouth, the lips not pinched, but always just a tiny bit open, as though expecting to hear something. Add the alert brown eyes that seemed to be looking at the world very carefully, and he reminded her more of the Duke of Wold’s hunting dog than of any other person. Even his strange wagon was extraordinary, festooned with odd things, sacks of dried plants and bundles of roots, and it was hung all over with a jangle of ladles and vats that should have clanked like an armorer’s workshop as the wagon had come toward her if it hadn’t all been tied down. She didn’t even know why she had asked him to except that Ushiloma might have sent him. It wasn’t as though she knew him. If he wouldn’t help her, the whole thing seemed dark and desperate and terrible, except he’d said . . . he had said he’d look out for her. He had said to trust him, he would be there. The horse was watching her, however. His head was cocked as though he wanted to ask a question, as though he knew exactly what the trouble was. He saw her watching. He nodded at her. No, he nodded at someone slightly above her head. She turned to look behind her. No one. Perhaps both the man and the horse were strange!
She comforted herself with the possibility that the Woman Upstairs wouldn’t ask her again. Since Xulai hadn’t been able to do it in two tries, maybe the woman wouldn’t ask her again. She really hoped, really did, that the woman would forget about it. Head down, she trudged through the apple orchard toward the guardhouse at the stable gate. Once inside the walls, she turned right, past the stables, full of the sound and smell of horses, harness oil, and hay, then to the lower wall that enclosed the kitchen garden and across it to the wing of the castle that held kitchen and storerooms and laundry and stillroom and smokehouse and servants’ quarters and all suchlike inferior offices, which is what Crampocket Cullen, the steward of Woldsgard, called them. The cistern and two of the wells were at the far side of the kitchen garden beside the low wall that separated the garden from the poppleberry trees, and beyond the trees was the tall castle wall. Everything would be locked and guarded from sundown on, but just now the place was empty as a beer keg after the footmen had been at it. Everyone had had supper, and all the dinnertime mess had been cleaned up and everything put away. In Wold, days started and ended early.
She kicked dried leaves aside, following the cabbage path to the kitchen well and cistern. The little kitchen door she always used was well hidden behind a fat buttress that went halfway up the tower wall. Almost nobody knew about it, and nobody else ever used it. It was narrow and inconvenient and the door swelled shut whenever it rained and it was Xulai’s secret.
It had been dry lately, so the door opened easily. Inside, on the right, was the back of a cupboard. If one knew the trick, one could get into the cupboard and from there into the big kitchen. On the left, a narrow slit between the stones had a panel that slid sideways, letting her onto what she called the “sneaky staircase.” The stonemasons had built it into the wall when the castle was erected. The steps were narrow as the door, every one was a different height and shape, they were hard to climb and easy to trip over, and they went off in all directions: up and down, over and under, sometimes branching off to make side trips into unexpected places like the dungeons or the bird lofts or across the top of the armory. The staircase often provided Xulai a shorter though more difficult route to wherever she was going, and she rehearsed her excuses as she climbed: how frightened she was, how black the night, how terrible the darkness! All too quickly she was at the first landing, where a panel hidden behind a tapestry opened into the great
hallway.
She pushed the panel soundlessly, just far enough to peep through the crack at the edge of the tapestry. One of the footmen, the mean one who always called her “dwarf” or “midget” or asked her if she’d been “shrunk in the wash,” was snuffing the dozen or so candles that had dripped themselves into stumps on the heavy, curly iron stand beside the door into the room occupied by the Woman Upstairs. He muttered as he worked, his remarks obviously directed at the other footman, the fatter, greasier, lazier one lolling in a gilded chair he had already worn half the gold off of. Rabbity little snores fluttered between his moist pink lips and his pleated neckpiece was all slobbery.
“Useless,” said the mean footman, dropping the last candle stub into his basket and replacing the dozen with a single thick candle that would burn all through the night. “If the duke saw you here, sleeping, he’d roast your fat haunches and feed you to the dogs!”
The sleeper showed no sign of having heard. The worker made no attempt to wake him. The one always talked; the other always slept. Behind them the door to the lady’s room stood slightly ajar as it always did, in case she spoke, or murmured, or moaned—much good would it do her—though she had made no sound at all for a very long time. The candle gatherer took his time at his job, using his dagger to pry the wax drippings from the intricate windings of the candle stand, catching them in the basket. The candle maker could use the unburned wax over and over again, and it was not right to waste the bee’s labor; so said the beekeeper.
The job took a while, and it was some time before the talker’s footsteps dwindled away down the hallway, allowing Xulai to slip out into the silent hallway and through the open door of the bedroom. The castle was built of gray stone: iron gray, ash gray, silver gray, variously mottled, flecked and striped, laid with no attempt at pattern but with a fine discrimination as to fit. The mortar joints were so thin as to be almost invisible, so that the rooms appeared to have been carved in one piece, out of the core of the mountain. In this room, the lower parts of the outer walls were covered with rich tapestries that kept out the cold. The great gilded bed stood with its curtains almost closed to hold in the warmth of the braziers burning at head and foot. The room had unusually large windows, but since late afternoon they had been masked by closed shutters and heavy draperies. Xulai knew this as she knew everything about this room except why the Woman was here and why the whole of Wold was centered on this room. Were there other places in the world where women were cursed, women who could not speak, who lay silent for years while their husbands mourned endlessly and the world went on without them?