Tehanu (22 page)

“I’ll get him out of the house. Wheelbarrow. The old man can help me.”

“He can’t lift anything any more. I’ll help you.”

“However I can do it, I’ll cart him off to the village. There’s a healer of some kind there?”

“A witch, Ivy.”

She felt all at once abysmally, infinitely weary. She could scarcely hold the cup in her hand.

“There’s more tea,” she said, thick-tongued.

He poured himself another cupful.

The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light
beyond the world. Flames of yellow, orange, orange-red, red tongues of flame, flame-tongues, the words she could not speak.

“Tenar.”

“We call the star Tehanu,” she said.

“Tenar, my dear. Come on. Come with me.”

They were not at the fire. They were in the dark—in the dark hall. The dark passage. They had been there before, leading each other, following each other, in the darkness underneath the earth.

“This is the way,” she said.

SHE WAS WAKING, NOT WANTING to waken. Faint grey shone at the window in thin slits through the shutters. Why was the window shuttered? She got up hurriedly and went down the hall to the kitchen. No one sat by the fire, no one lay on the floor. There was no sign of anyone, anything. Except the teapot and three cups on the counter.

Therru got up about sunrise, and they breakfasted as usual; clearing up, the girl asked, “What happened?” She lifted a corner of wet linen from the soaking-tub in the pantry. The water in the tub was veined and clouded with brownish red.

“Oh, my period came on early,” Tenar said, startled at the lie as she spoke it.

Therru stood a moment motionless, her nostrils flared and her head still, like an animal getting a
scent. Then she dropped the sheeting back into the water, and went out to feed the chickens.

Tenar felt ill; her bones ached. The weather was still cold, and she stayed indoors as much as she could. She tried to keep Therru in, but when the sun came out with a keen, bright wind, Therru wanted to be out in it.

“Stay with Shandy in the orchard,” Tenar said.

Therru said nothing as she slipped out.

The burned and deformed side of her face was made rigid by the destruction of muscles and the thickness of the scar-surface, but as the scars got older and as Tenar learned by long usage not to look away from it as deformity but to see it as face, it had expressions of its own. When Therru was frightened, the burned and darkened side “closed in,” as Tenar thought, drawing together, hardening. When she was excited or intent, even the blind eye socket seemed to gaze, and the scars reddened and were hot to touch. Now, as she went out, there was a queer look to her, as if her face were not human at all, an animal, some strange horny-skinned wild creature with one bright eye, silent, escaping.

And Tenar knew that as she had lied to her for the first time, Therru for the first time was going to disobey her. The first but not the last time.

She sat down at the fireside with a weary sigh, and did nothing at all for a while.

A rap at the door: Clearbrook and Ged—no, Hawk she must call him—Hawk standing on the
doorstep. Old Clearbrook was full of talk and importance, Ged dark and quiet and bulky in his grimy sheepskin coat. “Come in,” she said. “Have some tea. What’s the news?”

“Tried to get away, down to Valmouth, but the men from Kahedanan, the bailies, come down and ’twas in Cherry’s outhouse they found ’em,” Clearbrook announced, waving his fist.

“He escaped?” Horror caught at her.

“The other two,” Ged said. “Not him.”

“See, they found the body up in the old shambles on Round Hill, all beat to pieces like, up in the old shambles there, by Kahedanan, so ten, twelve of ’em ’pointed theirselves bailies then and there and come after them. And there was a search all through the villages last night, and this morning before ’twas hardly light they found ’em hiding out in Cherry’s outhouse. Half-froze they was.”

“He’s dead, then?” she asked, bewildered.

Ged had shucked off the heavy coat and was now sitting on the cane-bottom chair by the door to undo his leather gaiters.
“He’s
alive,” he said in his quiet voice. “Ivy has him. I took him in this morning on the muck-cart. There were people out on the road before daylight, hunting for all three of them. They’d killed a woman, up in the hills.”

“What woman?” Tenar whispered.

Her eyes were on Ged’s. He nodded slightly.

Clearbrook wanted the story to be his, and took it up loudly: “I talked with some o’ them from up
there and they told me they’d all four of ’em been traipsing and camping and vagranting about near Kahedanan, and the woman would come into the village to beg, all beat about and burns and bruises all over her. They’d send her in, the men would, see, like that to beg, and then she’d go back to ’em, and she told people if she went back with nothing they’d beat her more, so they said why go back? But if she didn’t they’d come after her, she said, see, and she’d always go with ’em. But then they finally went too far and beat her to death, and they took and left her body in the old shambles there where there’s still some o’ the stink left, you know, maybe thinking that was hiding what they done. And they came away then, down here, just last night. And why didn’t you shout and call last night, Goha? Hawk says they was right here, sneaking about the house, when he come on ’em. I surely would have heard, or Shandy would, her ears might be sharper than mine. Did you tell her yet?”

Tenar shook her head.

“I’ll just go tell her,” said the old man, delighted to be first with the news, and he clumped off across the yard. He turned back halfway. “Never would have picked you as useful with a pitchfork!” he shouted to Ged, and slapped his thigh, laughing, and went on.

Ged slipped off the heavy gaiters, took off his muddy shoes and set them on the doorstep, and came over to the fire in his stocking feet. Trousers
and jerkin and shirt of homespun wool: a Gontish goatherd, with a canny face, a hawk nose, and clear, dark eyes.

“There’ll be people out soon,” he said. “To tell you all about it, and hear what happened here again. They’ve got the two that ran off shut up now in a wine cellar with no wine in it, and fifteen or twenty men guarding them, and twenty or thirty boys trying to get a peek....” He yawned, shook his shoulders and arms to loosen them, and with a glance at Tenar asked permission to sit down at the fire.

She gestured to the hearthseat. “You must be worn out,” she whispered.

“I slept a little, here, last night. Couldn’t stay awake.” He yawned again. He looked up at her, gauging, seeing how she was.

“It was Therru’s mother,” she said. Her voice would not go above a whisper.

He nodded. He sat leaning forward a bit, his arms on his knees, as Flint had used to sit, gazing into the fire. They were very alike and entirely unlike, as unlike as a buried stone and a soaring bird. Her heart ached, and her bones ached, and her mind was bewildered among foreboding and grief and remembered fear and a troubled lightness.

“The witch has got our man,” he said. “Tied down in case he feels lively. With the holes in him stuffed full of spiderwebs and blood-stanching spells. She says he’ll live to hang.”

“To hang.”

“It’s up to the King’s Courts of Law, now that they’re meeting again. Hanged or set to slave-labor.”

She shook her head, frowning.

“You wouldn’t just let him go, Tenar,” he said gently, watching her.

“No.”

“They must be punished,” he said, still watching her.

“‘Punished.’ That’s what
he
said. Punish the child. She’s bad. She must be punished. Punish me, for taking her. For being—” She struggled to speak. “I don’t want punishment!—It should not have happened.—I wish you’d killed him!”

“I did my best,” Ged said.

After a good while she laughed, rather shakily.

“You certainly did.”

“Think how easy it would have been,” he said, looking into the coals again, “when I was a wizard. I could have set a binding spell on them, up there on the road, before they knew it. I could have marched them right down to Valmouth like a flock of sheep. Or last night, here, think of the fireworks I could have set off! They’d never have known what hit them.”

“They still don’t,” she said.

He glanced at her. There was in his eye the faintest, irrepressible gleam of triumph.

“No,” he said. “They don’t.”

“Useful with a pitchfork,” she murmured.

He yawned enormously.

“Why don’t you go in and get some sleep? The second room down the hall. Unless you want to entertain company. I see Lark and Daisy coming, and some of the children.” She had got up, hearing voices, to look out the window.

“I’ll do that,” he said, and slipped away.

Lark and her husband, Daisy the blacksmiths wife, and other friends from the village came by all day long to tell and be told all, as Ged had said. She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night’s terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

That was also what Therru had to learn to do, she thought, but not with one night: with her life.

She said to Lark when the others had gone,

“What makes me rage at myself is how stupid I was.”

“I did tell you you ought to keep the house locked.”

“No—Maybe—That’s just it.”

“I know,” said Lark.

“But I meant, when they were here—I could have run out and fetched Shandy and Clearbrook—maybe I could have taken Therru. Or I could have gone to the lean-to and got the
pitchfork myself. Or the apple-pruner. It’s seven feet long with a blade like a razor; I keep it the way Flint kept it. Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I do something? Why did I just lock myself in—when it wasn’t any good trying to? If he—If Hawk hadn’t been here—All I did was trap myself and Therru. I did finally go to the door with the butcher knife, and I shouted at them. I was half crazy. But that wouldn’t have scared them off.”

“I don’t know,” Lark said. “It was crazy, but maybe... I don’t know. What could you do but lock the doors? But it’s like we’re all our lives locking the doors. It’s the house we live in.”

They looked around at the stone walls, the stone floors, the stone chimney, the sunny window of the kitchen of Oak Farm, Farmer Flint’s house.

“That girl, that woman they murdered,” Lark said, looking shrewdly at Tenar. “She was the same one.”

Tenar nodded.

“One of them told me she was pregnant. Four, five months along.”

They were both silent.

“Trapped,” Tenar said.

Lark sat back, her hands on the skirt on her heavy thighs, her back straight, her handsome face set. “Fear,” she said. “What are we so afraid of? Why do we let ’em tell us we’re afraid? What is it
they’re
afraid of?” She picked up the stocking she had been darning, turned it in her hands, was silent awhile; finally she said, “What are they afraid of us for?”

Tenar spun and did not answer.

Therru came running in, and Lark greeted her: “There’s my honey! Come give me a hug, my honey girl!”

Therru hugged her hastily. “Who are the men they caught?” she demanded in her hoarse, toneless voice, looking from Lark to Tenar.

Tenar stopped her wheel. She spoke slowly.

“One was Handy. One was a man called Shag. The one that was hurt is called Hake.” She kept her eyes on Therru’s face; she saw the fire, the scar reddening. “The woman they killed was called Senny, I think.”

“Senini,” the child whispered.

Tenar nodded.

“Did they kill her dead?”

She nodded again.

“Tadpole says they were
here.”

She nodded again.

The child looked around the room, as the women had done; but her look was utterly unacceptant, seeing no walls.

“Will you kill them?”

“They may be hanged.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

Therru nodded, half indifferently. She went out again, rejoining Lark’s children by the well-house.

The two women said nothing. They spun and mended, silent, by the fire, in Flint’s house.

After a long time Lark said, “What’s become of the fellow, the shepherd, that followed ’em here? Hawk, you said he’s called?”

“He’s asleep in there,” said Tenar, nodding to the back of the house.

“Ah,” said Lark.

The wheel purred. “I knew him before last night.”

“Ah. Up at Re Albi, did you?”

Tenar nodded. The wheel purred.

“To follow those three, and take ’em on in the dark with a pitchfork, that took a bit of courage, now. Not a young man, is he?”

“No.” After a while she went on, “He’d been ill, and needed work. So I sent him over the mountain to tell Clearbrook to take him on here. But Clearbrook thinks he can still do it all himself, so he sent him up above the Springs for the summer herding. He was coming back from that.”

“Think you’ll keep him on here, then?”