“Well, enough of that. Please, come in. I don’t bite,” said Diana with a mischievous smile as she gestured into the house.
The inside of Diana’s home was not so very different from the outside—it called to mind the captain’s quarters in a battered vessel that had been through a bad storm.
Wooden chests reinforced with iron bands were everywhere, piled in every corner of the room, their drawers left sloppily open, and there were sturdy, expensive-looking chairs mostly buried under clothes or books.
Also within the room were countless quill pens, as if some great bird had done its grooming in the room.
The only places in the room that seemed even marginally free from the chaos were the bookshelves and the large desk where Diana plied her trade.
“So, what might your business be?” asked Diana, pulling a chair out from under her desk, on which by some miracle of planning sunlight fell. She neither put hot water on nor gestured for her guests to sit down.
Tea or not just as Lawrence was wondering if she wouldn’t do something about a place to sit, Batos took the liberty of removing items from one of the chairs turned into storage and gestured for Lawrence to sit.
Even the most arrogant nobleman would invite his guests to sit.
Lawrence felt no special malice behind Diana’s eccentricity; it seemed part of her strange charm.
“First, I should apologize for my sudden intrusion,” Lawrence said.
Diana smiled and nodded at the standard pleasantry.
Lawrence cleared his throat and continued, “Actually, Miss Rubens, I was—”
“Diana, please,” she corrected him immediately, her expression serious.
Lawrence concealed his perturbation. “Excuse me,” he said, and Diana’s face resumed its soft smile.
“Yes, as I was saying, I have heard that you are quite knowledgeable about the old tales of the northlands. I was hoping you would share some of that knowledge with me.”
“The north?”
“Yes.”
Diana’s countenance became thoughtful, and she looked at Batos. “And here I thought he’d want to talk business.”
“You jest. Had he spoken of business you’d have had him out on his ear.”
Diana laughed at Batos’s words, but Lawrence got the sense that it was probably true.
“But you don’t even know if I know the tale you seek.”
“That might mean the tale I heard was made up from whole cloth,” said Lawrence.
“Well then, it appears you will have to tell me this tale, and I shall do the listening.”
Lawrence had to look away from Diana’s kind smile as he cleared his throat again.
He was grateful Holo was not there.
“In that case, the story I wish to hear of concerns a village called Yoitsu.”
“Ah, the one said to have been destroyed by the Moon-Hunting Bear.”
Diana seemed to have immediately opened the drawers of her memory.
Given how quickly the subject of the town’s destruction had tome up, Lawrence again felt that leaving Holo behind was the right choice. It looked as though Yoitsu really had been destroyed.
His head hurt when he thought of how he would have to break this news to Holo.
As Lawrence thought this over, Diana stood slowly and approached the room’s strangely well-ordered bookshelves, taking down a single volume from a neat row of large tomes.
“I seem to recall...Ah, here it is. The Moon-Hunting Bear, also known as Irawa Weir Muheddhunde, and Yoitsu, the village it destroyed. There are many stories of this bear. All quite old, though,” said Diana smoothly as she scanned the pages. She had a callus on her index finger from writing, and it was swollen, making it seem quite possible that she had written all of these books.
How many pagan tales and superstitions were contained in those pages?
Something suddenly occurred to Lawrence. Batos had said he was thinking of making a business out of the old tales—no doubt he meant selling Diana’s books to the Church.
With the stories in the books, the Church leaders would be able to instantly ascertain which heretical beliefs had penetrated which lands; they would do nearly anything for such information.
“It’s not the bear I’m interested in, but the town.”
“The town?”
“Yes. I’ve occasion to be searching it out. Is there anything in your tales that might reveal its location?”
Anyone would have been puzzled by Lawrence’s question, which had nothing to do with the source for a commodity but rather the setting for an old legend.
Diana made an expression of surprise and then set the book on the table and began to think.
“Location, eh? Location, indeed...”
“Have you any ideas?” Lawrence asked again, at which Diana put one hand to her head as though suffering a headache anti gestured for
Lawrence to wait with the other.
As long as she was silent, it was easy to imagine this striking woman as the head of some solemn convent, but seeing her like this revealed an amusingly comical side to her personality.
Diana’s eyes were screwed shut as she groaned with the effort of searching her memory, but then she suddenly looked up, happy as a maiden who had just succeeded in threading a needle.
“I have it! At the headwaters of the Roam River, which flows north of Ploania, there’s a story like this in a town called Lenos,” she said, suddenly and surprisingly as affable as she had been when speaking to Batos.
She seemed to forget herself when talking about old tales.
Diana cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and began to recite from an ancient legend.
“Long ago, a lone wolf called Holoh appeared in the village. Its great height was such that one had to look up to keep it in view. The villagers were certain that it was the punishment from the gods, but Holoh told of her journey from the deep forests of the east, explaining that she was bound for the southlands. She loved wine, and at times would take the form of a maiden and dance with the village girls. Her form was both fetching and youthful,
I thought she kept her wolf tail. After frolicking with them for a time, she blessed their harvest and continued south. Since that time, bountiful harvests have continued, and we of the village remember her as Holoh of the Wheat Tail.”
Lawrence was doubly surprised—both at Diana’s smooth recitation and at the mention of Holo’s name.
The name’s pronunciation was slightly different, but it was unmistakably a story about Holo. Her blessing of the village’s harvest supported that as did her maiden’s form and retaining her lupine tail.
Yet this surprise paled in comparison to the content of Diana’s tale.
The town of Lenos still existed at the headwaters of the Roam River. Using that as a reference point and knowing that there was a forest to the east Lawrence could draw a line southwest from Nyohhira and east from Lenos, which would put Yoitsu right at the intersection.
“Was that any use?”
“Yes, as it limits the area to the forest east of Lenos. It’s a great help!”
“I’m so glad.”
“I’ll surely repay you as soon—”
Lawrence was cut off by a gesture from Diana. “As you can see, even if the Church pursues me for it, I love the old pagan tales—the ones that haven’t been twisted out for consideration of Church beliefs. As you are indeed a traveling merchant, Mr. Lawrence, surely you have even one story you could share with me. If you’ll do that, I’ll require no further payment.”
Those who composed histories for the Church did so to preserve the Church’s authority. Historians retained by the nobility composed works praising their employers—this was simply the way of the world.
The Church’s tale of Saint Ruvinheigen, namesake of the great Church city bearing the same name, was quite different from Holo’s story of the man. The tale was deliberately rewritten to protect and extend Church authority.
Diana loved the old tal
es enough that she was willing to live in the slums of Kumersun, a town devoted to religious and economic freedom.
Lawrence wondered what terrible knowledge she must possess to have been chased from her cloister on charges of heresy, but now he saw that she simply loved the old tales enough to die for them.
“Understood,” he said and began to tell his tale.
It was the tale of a place known for its bountiful wheat harvests.
And the tale of the wolf that ruled over them.
Eventually, once they had all gotten into some wine, they wound up talking of old tales and legends from all sorts of lands.
The sun was low in the sky when Lawrence finally remembered himself, and politely refusing Diana’s invitation to stay, he left the house with Batos.
As he and Batos walked along the narrow street, neither could help laughing as they talked of the many stories they had shared.
It had been some time since Lawrence had enjoyed the tales of dragons and golden cities—he was well past the age when such stories were taken with anything but a large grain of salt.
Even after Lawrence had begun his merchant apprenticeship, he still longed to take up sword and shield and battle his way across the lands as a valiant knight-errant. As he traveled with his master across the countryside, the tales of fire-breathing dragons, birds so large their wings blotted out the sky, and sorcerers powerful enough to move mountains at will still set his heart secretly racing.
Of course, eventually he had dismissed such tales as pure fantasy.
It was meeting Holo that allowed Lawrence to enjoy them again.
Many of those old tales and legends were not fantasy at all, and even a humble traveling merchant might have adventures as great as any knighterrant.
That realization alone was enough to cause a warmth he had not felt in many years to spread throughout his heart.
In the midst of his giddiness, however, he remembered the events that happened during the attempt at smuggling gold into Ruvinheigen. He smiled at his folly.
He hadn’t seen its form, but there was no doubt that a wolf not unlike Holo in those eerie woods near Ruvinheigen were the source of so much rumor. Lawrence, though, had been no strap ping protagonist of a thrilling adventure. He was merely a helpless minor character caught up in the tale.
A merchant’s life suited him much better, he felt.
Lawrence mused on this as they came to the broad street that led back to the inn. He took his leave from Batos there.
When Lawrence thanked Batos for acting as a go-between, Batos’s reply was quick. “People tend to gossip if I go to Diana’s place alone, so you were a fine excuse.”
The lot back at the trading company were very fond of such talk.
“Ask me along anytime,” Batos said. It was no mere pleasantry. He seemed to genuinely mean it. Lawrence, too, had enjoyed himself, so he nodded in the affirmative.
The sun was beginning to sink below the rooftops on the broad avenue, which was crowded with craftsmen returning home from a long day, traders winding up their negotiations, and farmers on their way home, having sold the produce and livestock they brought from their villages.
Lawrence headed south down the street into the central part of the town, where drunkards and children were added to the mix of the crowd.
Normally the number of town girls in the street tended to drop after sunset, but today they were plentiful, adding to the atmosphere of anticipation for the next day’s festival. Here and there, circles of people gathered around fortune-tellers and the like, who did their business brazenly amid the crowds.
Lawrence cut his way through the throng and passed right by the inn along the street, heading straight for the market in the center of Kumersun.
Thanks to Diana, he had a general grasp of Yoitsu’s location, and thus would not be heading for Nyohhira, but rather the town of Lenos.
Lenos was closer, and the road leading to it was better maintained. He also expected that once he was in Lenos he would be able to get more detailed information about the legends of Holo.
Thus it was that Lawrence found himself visiting Mark again. As Mark was gathering travel information for him, he needed to know about this change in destination.
“Hey there, lover boy.”
As Lawrence approached Marks shop, he saw Mark with a bottle of wine in one hand, looking merry indeed; the young apprentice he’d sent out to contact Batos earlier was now red faced and prone in the back of the shop.
It was Mark’s wife, Adele, that attended to the closing of the shop, covering the piles of goods with a canopy against the evening dew.
As soon as she noticed Lawrence, Adele gave a slight nod and pointed to her husband with a chagrined smile.
“What’s wrong?” said Mark. “Bah—here, have a drink.”
“So about that information I asked you about this morning...Whoa, that’s too much.”
Mark didn’t seem to hear Lawrence’s protest at all as he poured wine from a ceramic wine bottle into a wooden cup.
His expression suggested that he would have nothing to say until Lawrence picked up the cup, which was now nearly overflowing with wine.
“Fine, fine.” Exasperated, Lawrence took the cup and put it to his lips; it was good wine. He suddenly wanted some jerky to go with it.
“So, what was that? Have you changed your travel plans?”
“Indeed. There’s a town, Lenos, at the headwaters of the Roam River. That’s where I’m going.”
“Well, that’s quite a change indeed. And here I’d already collected quite a bit about the way to Nyohhira.” If he had not been able to think clearly despite the wine, Mark would never have been a merchant.
“Apologies. Circumstances have changed a bit.”
“Oh ho,” said Mark with a smile as he gulped down wine as if it were water. He then regarded Lawrence with a look of amusement. “So it’s true that things have gone bad with that companion of yours?”
There was a pause.
“What did you say?” Lawrence finally asked.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha. Word’s gotten around, lover boy. Everyone knows you’re holed up in a nice inn with a gorgeous nun. You’ve surely got no fear of God.”
Kumersun was a large enough town, but it wasn’t so large as Ruvinheigen—word spread quickly from one merchant to another until nearly all of them would have heard the news. The bonds between traders here were strong. If someone had seen Holo with Lawrence, word would get around.
If Mark knew about Holo, then everyone at the trading company would also know. He was glad he hadn’t returned with Batos.
What he did not understand was why Mark said things had gone sour between Lawrence and Holo.
“We don’t have the sort of relationship that makes for a good story over wine, but I don’t see why you’d say things have gone bad with her.”
“Heh-heh. The lover boy knows how to play dumb, that’s for sure. But I can see the worry on your face.”
“Well, there’s no mistaking that she’s a beauty. If things were to go poorly with us, it would be a shame.”
Lawrence was surprised at his own ability to stay cool during the exchange—no doubt it came about because he was used to constant teasing from Holo.
Although truth be told, he felt he would have preferred for his business acumen to have gotten sharper rather than his patience.
Mark burped. “Why, just a moment ago, I heard that your companion was seen in the company of a young lad from our trade guild. Evidently they were getting on quite well.”
“Ah, you mean Mr. Amati.” Lawrence didn’t feel comfortable calling the boy simply “Amati,” and yet “Mr.” suddenly seemed unnecessarily subservient as well.
“Oh, so you’ve given up already, then.”
“You seem to be sadly mistaken. I simply had business today and was unable to accompany her, and Mr. Amati found himself with free time and wished to show us around town. These two events happened to coincide; that is all.”
br /> “Hmm...”
“You don’t believe me?”
Lawrence had fully expected Mark to appear disappointed, so he found himself confused at Mark’s look of genuine concern.
“I used to be a traveling merchant like you, so I’ll give you some advice. Amati is more formidable than he seems.”
“...What do you mean?”
“What I mean is, if you’re careless, he’ll snatch that pretty little companion of yours right out from under you. Men his age will do anything to gain the object of their obsession. And do you know how much fish Amati moves? It’s a lot. And what’s more, he was born in a pretty nice region of the south, but once he figured out that as the youngest child he’d never be allowed to make anything of himself, he ran away from home and came here to open his business. That was just three years ago. Quite a story, eh?”
It was hard to imagine the slight Amati doing all that, but Lawrence had seen for himself the boy’s three cartloads of fresh fish.
What’s more, Amati had been able to easily arrange a room at an inn facing a main avenue—albeit one to which he sold his fish. During a time when the town was overflowing with travelers coming and going, this was no mean feat.
A seed of fear began to take root in Lawrence’s heart, but at the same time, he could not believe that Holo would transfer her affections so easily.
“No need to worry. My companion is not so fickle.”
“Ha-ha-ha. You’ve a lot of faith. If I heard my Adele was out with Amati, I’d give up right on the spot.”
“What’s this of me and Amati?” said Adele, a truly frightful smile on her face. She had been behind Mark for some time as she cleaned up the shop in place of her husband.
Adele and Mark had fallen in love four years earlier when, as a traveling merchant, Mark had visited Kumersun. Their love story was quite famous in the town, and it was enough to make even a third-rate minstrel throw up his hands in disgust. She now possessed all the dignity of a wheat merchant’s wife.
When Lawrence first met her, Adele had been quite frail, but now she was even more robust than her husband.
Two years previous she’d given birth to their first child—perhaps it was the strength of motherhood that she now had.