A Wizard in a Feud

11

Can you cure them, lady?” the grandmother asked in a frosty tone. That, plus the sharp anxiety in her eyes, told Alea how hard she was working to maintain her dignity when she was frightened for her children and grandchildren.

A dozen of the adults and children had sores on their faces and hands. Alea studied the slack jawed faces of the adults, then asked one woman, “Do your gums bleed?”

“How did you know?” The woman stared at her in amazement, and the others muttered to one another incredulously. “It’s part of this disease,” Alea explained. “Have your teeth grown loose?”

“She’s a witch!” a man hissed, shaken.

“No, only a healer.” Alea turned to the grandmother. “It’s nothing to fret about, Lady Grandmother. They’re not eating right, that’s all.”

“Not eating right!” the old woman exploded. “I see to it they’ve plenty! Cornbread, beans, and molasses, just as their parents and grandparents had!”

“If they did, you must have seen this sickness before,” Alea said, and from the haunted look in the grandmother’s eyes knew she had guessed rightly. “What kinds of fruits do you grow?”

“Why, apples and pears, like every other clan!”

“No oranges or lemons?”

The grandmother frowned. “What are those?”

Alea guessed the climate was too cold for citrus fruit. “What vegetables, then? Do you grow tomatoes?”

“Aye, for a bit of garnish.” The old woman made a face. “Who would want them for anything more?”

“Like them or not, you’d better serve them with the noon meal and the evening meal every day from now on,” Alea told her, “and make sure the young ones finish theirs, too.”

The old woman frowned. “Will that heal them?”

“Oh, yes,” Alea said. “You’ll see some improvement in a matter of days, but it will be a month or two before all the symptoms are gone.”

“Tomatoes!” The old woman made it sound like an obscenity, then sighed. “Well, you don’t bring in a healer to ignore her advice. We’ll try it for a fortnight, at least.” She turned to one of the younger men. “Jonathan, till a bed and plant more of the blasted things.”

“As you will, Grandmother.” The boy made a face on his way to the door. Apparently he shared her opinion of tomatoes. “Now then, Moira.” Grandma turned to the seer, one problem disposed of and out of her mind, another problem before her. “Not that you’re not welcome, mind you, but how is it you’ve come back so soon?”

“By the good graces of this healer, Grandma.” Moira smiled, amusement showing for a second before she throttled it into bland politeness. “She is graciously allowing me to attend her as a traveling companion.”

“Graciously, is it?” Grandma gave Alea a suspicious look, as though tolerating Moira’s company automatically made her suspect, but she admitted, “It is better for young women to travel together, though. A solitary road is a long one—and dangerous.”

“We trust that even bandits will not assault a healer, Grandma,” Alea said demurely.

“Trust no one, when you’re on the road,” Grandma retorted. “Still, Alea, I find it hard to believe you can tolerate this young preacher’s cant.”

“We do talk of peace,” Alea admitted, “but I don’t find it burdensome. I, too, would like to see all the clans put the past behind them and live in harmony. I suppose every healer would, though.”

Grandma frowned. “Why, how is that?”

“Why, because we spend so much effort in trying to mend wounds and save lives,” Alea said, surprised. “How could we delight in feuds that undo all our work and kill more?”

Grandma pursed her lips, mulling it over. “Hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“It makes you wonder if there’s any point to your work when you see it all undone,” Alea told her. “Yesterday I saved a young woman who had just given birth and was bleeding her life away. Two years from now, I might come this way again and find she’s been killed in battle. Why then did I go to all the labor of saving her life?”

“Why, to give her two more years,” Grandma said, “and her clan another rifle to help defend them.” But her expression was dubious.

“What of her baby, then?” Alea said. “I’ve served as a midwife often enough. What good was helping a baby be born if I come by fifteen years later and see him cut down in a firefight?”

Grandma winced at that one. “Aye, and what point in the months of waddling about with a great weight before you, and of the pain of birthing, and the years of toil and patience and throttling down anger and nurturing, when the little ones are killed before they’ve scarcely had a chance to live?” She gave herself a shake. “But like it or not, it’s the way life is, child. We can’t change it, and must try to fare through it as best we may.”

“Must we?” Moira said, suddenly intense.

Grandma turned to her glaring, and Alea said quickly, “Maybe we can’t change it, Grandma, but we have to try anyway.” Grandma turned back to her. “What point, if you can’t succeed? It’s wasted labor.” Then she caught the echo of her own words and looked uncertain.

“Aye,” Alea said softly, “and it’s wasted labor trying to save people’s lives and heal their wounds. It’s a question of which labor I’m willing to waste, Grandma, that’s all.”

“Well, then, if you think that, why try at all?”

“Because I’m alive,” Alea said simply, “and to stop trying is to stop living.”

“There’s some truth in that,” Grandma said grudgingly. “All right, let’s say you’re going to try to stop the fighting. How would you go about it?”

“Why…” Alea stared in surprise, then recovered and answered, “The same way I go about healing—find the cause, then seek the remedy.”

“Well, that makes sense,” Grandma allowed. “You can’t fix something if you don’t know how it broke. But what causes a feud, child?”

“I’ll have to ask you that,” Alea said gently. “What started your feud with the Gregors?”

“Started it?” Grandma asked, as though surprised that anyone wouldn’t know. “Why, Colum Gregor shot Great Uncle Hiram in the woods when Hiram was only out hunting, not doing anybody a lick of harm!”

“Going about peaceful work, not bothering anybody?” Alea frowned. “Why did Colum shoot him, then?”

“Because he was a wicked one and a villain, that’s why!”

“And a low-down, sneaky, treacherous snake, too,” said one of the clansmen, coming near. “Shot Uncle Hiram in the back, he did.”

“Those Gregors are all backstabbers,” said a middle-aged woman, coming forward in indignation. “They’d kill you as soon as look at you, and steal your daughters into the bargain.”

“Oh.” Alea looked up. “So Colum had stolen Hiram’s daughter, then?”

“No, it was young Malcolm stole my daughter Sary!” the woman exclaimed. “Stole her away in the dead of night, he did, and right from out the midst of her kinfolk, too!”

“Laid a ladder against the side of the house and climbed up bold as brass to knock her on the head and carry her off,” another woman added.

“Slipped past the sentries and drugged the dogs,” the clansman said, glowering.

But Alea saw a teenaged girl sitting by the hearth staring rigidly into the fire, her fists clenched, and knew there was more to the story. “How do you know he knocked her on the head?”

“Know!” cried the mother. “Why, I daresay she wouldn’t have gone with him any other way, now would she?”

It sounded like quite a feat to Alea—impossible, in fact “And his kinfolk applauded him for this?”

“Applauded?” the woman cried, scandalized. “Not even a Gregor would let a man stay if he consorted with the enemy! No, they cast him out, right enough.”

“Then Sairy came back to you?”

“How could she, when she’d been with an enemy man?” the clansman demanded. “No, she was outcast too, of course.” For a moment, sorrow threatened to overwhelm the mother, but she forced it back, squaring her shoulders and holding her head high.

Alea watched the teenager in front of the fire out of the comer of her eye; the girl was biting her lip and fighting back tears. She changed the subject “Was that the first time a Gregor man had courted a Campbell woman?”

An uneasy silence fell, and the clansfolk glanced at one another. Then Grandma lifted her chin and said, “That was the third time.”

“When was the first?”

“Why, when Colum and Hiram both courted Esther Avenell, that’s when!”

“I see,” Alea said slowly. “And she married Colum?”

“That she did, the worthless trollop! That’s why Hiram went hunting—to be off by himself and alone with his grief.”

“At least he gave a good account of himself,” the clansman grunted. “His shot broke Colum’s shoulder. A little lower and he would have killed his killer.”

Or was it Colum who had died defending himself? Alea wondered if Hiram had tried to ambush Colum but found the Gregor a little faster than himself, a little more accurate. Certainly that would be the way the Gregors told it.

She felt very sorry for Esther Avenell Campbell, to be the cause of so much bloodshed and the beginning of a feud, but she felt glad for her, too, because she had married for love, from the sound of it, and her husband had lived. “I don’t suppose it could have been a hunting accident.”

“I suppose not indeed!” Sairy’s mother said indignantly. “But it wouldn’t matter if it had been.” Grandma leaned forward, locking gazes with Alea. “If one of your clan is slain, you have to take revenge, child. Otherwise there’s nothing to keep anyone from slaying every one of your kith and kin out of malice alone.”

“You speak of revenge,” Alea said. “What of justice?”

“Justice?” Grandma made the word a mockery. “Who’s going to give us justice, child? Who could we trust to see the truth and render judgment? Where could we find someone who wasn’t partial to the one clan or the other?”

And that, Alea realized, was the nub of the problem. With no impartial judge, no code of laws, no peace officers, there was no way to seek redress and be satisfied the dead had been fairly treated—or that the living would be protected.

“Great Uncle Hiram you called him,” Alea said to Grandma. “He was your father’s brother, then?”

“Heavens, no, child!” Grandma said. “More like a great-great-great-great-great … well, you get the idea.”

Sairy’s mother intervened. “This was ages and ages ago, Lady Healer—three hundred years and more.”

Alea stared at her, dumbstruck. For three centuries, clansmen had been killing each other over something that might have been a hunting accident or their own ancestor’s crime. “Three hundred years!” she gasped. “Hasn’t that crime grown cold yet? Can it still matter to you that Hiram was killed?”

“Yes it can!” the clansman said.

“But even if it didn’t, the death of two of my five sons does.” Grandma leaned forward, trying to make Alea understand. “It’s not the deaths that happened a hundred years ago that matter to us, child—it’s the ones that happened twenty years ago, and ten, and last year, and last month! It’s the wounds that our living kinfolk bear, the suffering they’ve lived through! It’s David’s limp and the pain his leg gives him whenever the weather gets damp; it’s Jael’s stump of an arm and the way she weeps whenever it thunders.” She leaned back, chin high. “Oh, yes, child, the past matters—the past and the present.”

“And the future,” Sairy’s mother said. “If we don’t take revenge for those who have died, those Gregors will feel free to kill off every last one of our children!”

“Can’t you see that the fighting is a greater danger still?” Moira burst out. “Can’t you see that your only chance for a long and happy life is peace?”

All the clansfolk turned frosty eyes to her. “No, we can’t see that, peace-lover.” The clansman made the word an obscenity. “We can’t believe in peace, for who’d see to it that it was just and lasting?”

“You’re right in this,” a woman told Alea, “that it doesn’t really matter any more whether Colum shot first, or Hiram did. There’s been too much blood shed since, too great a need for vengeance grown.”

“Aye,” said Sairy’s mother. “What do I care about some woman who lost her man fifty years ago? I care about my man that those Gregors killed when he wasn’t but twenty-six, and us married only eight years with five kids!”

“The past may be dead, Lady Healer,” said Grandma, “but the anger that it brought still lives.”

The clansfolk weren’t rude enough to let their anger make them turn guests away from the table, but Alea sensed that they needed some time to cool off, so she told one of the women that she and Moira would gather herbs until suppertime. The woman seemed glad to hear it, so the seer and the healer went out to hunt rue and rosemary.

They passed the barn and both women stopped, falling silent in respect as they saw the teenaged girl huddled on a bale by the corner, weeping quietly. She had escaped from her place by the fire and could let the tears fall. Alea and Moira exchanged a glance, then moved up to her. “Come now, lass,” Alea said gently, “it can’t be as bad as that.”

The girl looked up, startled, then blotted her face furiously with her apron. “Can’t a body have a quiet cry now and then? Isn’t there any place I can be alone?”

“Not that you can be sure of, from what your kinfolk were saying.” Moira knelt, holding out her hands. “Come now, I’m Moira, and this is Alea, and at least we feel as sorry for Malcolm and Sairy as you do.”

The girl stared. “How did you know I was weeping for them?”

“Because we could see through the nasty things people were saying about them.” Alea sat beside her. “Who are you?”

“Cicely,” the girl said, almost automatically. “How come you don’t believe what they said about Malcolm and Sairy?”

“You don’t really think one man alone could gag a woman, tie her up, and carry her struggling down a ladder by himself, do you?” Alea asked.

“Not without knocking over the ladder,” Moira said, “and his kinsmen certainly wouldn’t have helped him, since marriage with the enemy is forbidden.”

“They didn’t.” Cicely looked down at her lap, plucking at her apron. “It was just Malcolm alone, that’s certain.”

“I thought as much,” Alea said. “But they’re away and happy now, so why do you care so deeply what your kinsfolk say about them?”

“Why, because they’re making Sairy sound like a hussy and a traitor,” Cicely burst out, “and she’s not, she’s sweet and pure and good! She couldn’t help it if she fell in love with a Gregor, she couldn’t!”

“No, of course she couldn’t,” Alea soothed. “Where did they meet, then?”

“Down by the stream. Sairy told me that she went to drink where he was standing sentry—go on the bank across from her, but they saw each other and leveled their rifles and shouted at the same moment. Then they stared at each other and both burst out laughing. When they stopped, they both looked at each other and felt something magical happen.”

“So that’s how it began,” Moira said softly. “And they kept meeting there?”

“There, or wherever they’d been told to stand guard,” Cicely said. “They’d each volunteer for the night watch and the worst place, the gully where it’s so harsh and lonely; just to be near enough to talk.”

“And after a while, they started wanting something more than talk?”

“They never did more than kiss!” Cicely said fiercely. “He swam a nighttime river to hold her in his arms, and finally they couldn’t keep from it any more and kissed, but that’s all!”

“I’m sure.” Alea thought of the consequences of having a baby out of wedlock in this culture and shivered. “But they did decide to run away together.”

“Well … yes,” Cicely admitted. “But that’s not… you know…”

“They’re going to find a Druid first,” Moira filled in for her. “After she marries them properly, what they do is nobody’s concern but their own.”

Cicely eyed her suspiciously. “How’d you know our Druid’s a woman, Moira?”

The seer smiled. “You forget how long I’ve been tramping this countryside trying to persuade folks to listen to reason, Cicely. I know every clan and outlaw band—so a strange seer I’d be if I didn’t know the Druids, too. How did they really run away?”

“Why, down a ladder from her bedroom window, just as they told you,” Cicely said in surprise. “Malcolm left it there, after all. He wasn’t about to carry it with them.”

“But Sairy climbed down of her own free will?” Alea asked. “Free and eager.” Cicely nodded emphatically. “Scared of what they were doing, but eager to be with Malcolm for good.”

“How did Malcolm manage to slip past the sentries and silence the dogs?”

“Why, because Sairy told him where the sentries were stationed and what time their relief would come,” Cicely said. “He knew to creep through the woods during the last hour of their watch.”

“When they would be most sleepy.” Alea nodded. “What about the dogs?”

“Sairy mixed the sleeping potion in their food that night.”

“So it wasn’t an abduction, but an elopement.” Alea smiled. “I wondered how Malcolm managed all that by himself.”

“You won’t tell on me, will you?” Cicely asked anxiously. “Of course not.” Privately, Alea didn’t think there was much to tell—they couldn’t have been the only ones who had noticed her grief. “But you’ve given us another reason for wanting to bring peace.”

“Why’s that?” Cicely asked, wide-eyed.

“So Sairy can come home,” Alea said, “if only to visit.”

“They’d never have her!” Cicely exclaimed. “She’s their shame and their horror!”

“I think a mother’s love is stronger than that,” Moira said with gentle sympathy. “She works hard at not showing it, but Sairy’s mother is grieving even more deeply than you.”

“Do you really think so?” Cicely asked.

“Yes, I do,” Moira said, “and if we meet Sairy on our travels, I’ll tell her that I think so, too.”

“Meet Sairy! Oh, miss!” Cicely clasped Moira’s hands. “If you do, you’ll come back and tell me how she fares, won’t you?”

“Yes, we will,” Moira assured her. “Come, now, and help us seek herbs.”

“No, I daren’t.” Cicely stood with an anxious glance at the sun. “My heavens! Is it that late? They’ll skin me alive if I’m not back in time for my watch.”

“Go, then,” Alea said with a smile, “but try not to feel badly if they speak against Sairy again.”

“I won’t, if I can think of you finding and talking to her. Thank you, ladies, thank you!” Then Cicely hurried back to the house.

“That helped her a little,” Moira said as they went on toward the woods.

Alea nodded. “I’m glad we could cheer her that much, at least. What do you suppose was the truth about Hiram’s killing?”

“That Colum tracked him through the woods, caught him when he was alone, and shouted some insult before he fired,” Moira said. “The more fool he, giving his victim a chance to turn and shoot.”

“Hiram must have been very quick and very accurate,” Alea said doubtfully.

“Have you seen my people shoot?” Moira asked. “When they hunt pheasants, they shoot for the head, so as not to have to worry about lead in their dinners.”

Alea shuddered. “Do they always hit their marks?”

“More often than not,” Moira answered, “and a man’s a much bigger target than a bird. But as to Hiram’s speed, well, I’ll admit he’d have to have been keyed up, on edge, to be able to spin about so quickly. I wonder what he was hunting—a bear?”

“Or Colum?” Alea asked grimly. “You don’t suppose she encouraged them both, do you?”

“Not as far as engagement, no,” Moira said. “Of course, that wouldn’t have mattered to some men. They’d think they should have whatever they wanted—and if she were a true beauty, one look at her would be enough to make Colum love her.” Personally, Alea didn’t think any of the clanswomen were terribly attractive, but she asked herself who she was to judge and resolved to ask Gar when she found him. “So you don’t think Colum was really in love with her.”

“Only in the way that a man’s in love with his rifle or anything else he owns,” Moira said. “If he’d really loved her, he’d have wanted her to be happy, wouldn’t he?”

“So he wouldn’t have tried to kill her fiancé. Yes.” Alea lifted her head and sighed. “I always thought it would be romantic to have men fighting over me, that it would make me feel important, desired. But it doesn’t, does it?”

“Doesn’t and isn’t,” Moira said, and the dryness of her tone made Alea wonder if she knew from personal experience. Why had Moira started wandering, anyway?

For all her bulk, Evanescent the alien could move as silently as a zephyr when she chose. Nonetheless, she knew dozens of eyes watched her as she prowled the woods, for she could hear the thoughts behind them. She smiled with complacency at the consternation of the fairies and elves, alarmed because they couldn’t hear her thoughts. Well, they would soon enough, when she found a place to make her stand.

There! A huge boulder jutted from the soil, slant-sided and flat-topped. Evanescent padded up its side and sat at the summit, looking down a dozen feet at the forest below her. It was a decent podium; it would do. She unleashed a thought at the Old Ones.

Panic, anger, and horror swept through the clearing. Evanescent frowned and spoke aloud. “Come now! If I’d wanted to hurt you, I’d have done it. Why not come forth to parley with me? I won’t eat you, I swear it.”

“Try, and you’ll choke on your meal,” said a grim and buzzing voice.