He woke with a headache at the top of his spine, which ran around inside
his head to the place over his eyes; nose feeling as though driven with
a wooden plug. Mathurin’s decent black clothes were horribly stained and
scratched. Down the way he had come—not at all far from where he had
crossed the wall, now that one could see by the light of morning—the
footprints lay, a fingerlength deep into the soft ground. At once he was
oppressed by the thought that only too easily could his path from the
villa be traced, there was Tuolén’s witch behind as well, and fear
mounting over the illness, he climbed to the wall itself and tried to
walk along its top to hide his marks. After the rain, sky and air had
become clear, and there were violets visible on the grove-side of the
wall, not that they did him any joy in his misery. The stones quickly
tore a hole in shoes made for indoor walking, so he had to jump down
again and consider.
Right across his direction, at a little distance, there jutted out from
the stone wall a hedge which lack of care had let grow into a screen of
low, sprawling trees. It slanted down leftward to where a gap would mark
a field entrance; beyond, a slow trickle of smoke ran up the blue to
signal breakfast. Rodvard, deciding what he would do if he were hunter
instead of hunted, found more than good the argument against harborage
so near the villa. He climbed over the wall again to wipe his streaming
nose with a burdock leaf, whose bitter juice stung his lips, and
perceiving that he left less marked traces in the ground on that side,
stayed. The overgrown hedge proved to line a deep-cut track that in one
direction wound down toward the main road past the villa. Beyond that
track was true forest of old trunks and heavy underbrush. It was surely
a good place to seek concealment, but Rodvard was ignorant of how far it
might run or what it led to, and with illness galloping through his
veins, felt he must have shelter early, so murmuring half aloud to
himself that he might as well die in hot blood as in cold rheum, he
turned up the track toward the cottage-smoke.
The building was more prosperous than most in the country, with a barn
outside, and two complete windows under the thatch-edge. No one answered
his knock; as he pushed open the door, a child’s squall was sounding
with irritable monotony from a trundle-bed on the right, and a woman who
had been doing something at a table before the fireplace on the left
turned to face him. She was bent and dirty; her face was older than her
figure. “What do you want?” she demanded.
“A place to rest, if I can,” said Rodvard, “and perhaps something to
eat.” He crossed the room and came down weak-kneed on a stool by the
fireplace corner.
The lined face held no sympathy as her eyes swept down the detail of his
torn, mudstained clothes and lingered for a tick at the servant’s badge
on his breast. “This is not an inn,” she said sourly.
“Madame, I am unwell. I can pay.” He fumbled at the waist-pouch.
“This is not an inn,” she repeated, then spun on her heel, took rapid
steps to where the child in its bed still bawled, and administered it a
severe clout on the side of the head. “Will you be quiet?” The cries
sank to whimpers. She came to stand looking down at Rodvard.
“I know about your kind,” she said. “You’re too lazy to work, so you run
away from a good master down there at the villa and probably rob him,
too, on festival day when he’s drunk, and then expect honest
country-people like us, who have to labor for everything we get, to hide
you from the provosts. My husband and me, we have to get up at dawn and
work all day as hard as we can, and we’re never through till the sun
goes down, winter or summer, while you servant-people are drinking and
stealing behind your master’s back.” All this was delivered in a torrent
as though it were a single sentence, ending as she uplifted one arm to
brandish an imaginary weapon. “Now you leave here.”
Too weary and ill for a reply, a trickle he did not try to disguise
running from his nostril, Rodvard did so, out into the bright spring day
and along the track. Where it turned round a boss of hill that thrust in
from the westward, a sense of being watched made him look back. The
farm-wife had come out to the end of the house to look after him, and
the sound of the child’s petulant wail was on the air. (Rodvard felt a
surge of bitter anger; there was an unfairness in life, every
pennyweight of pleasure is paid with double its measure in pain, and
only those who grubbed at the ground were entitled to call themselves
honest. Why, if this be so, then joy must be wrong, and God himself must
be evil, in spite of what the priests say.) But his head was too muzzy
to follow any rabbit of reasoning to its hole, so he trudged along for a
while without thinking anything at all, until he heard the creak of a
cart, and here was a mule coming out from the Sedad Vix direction. The
driver somewhat surlily gave him the time of the day.
Rodvard asked to go with him, and when the man said he was bound for
Kazmerga, declared that was his destination, though he had never heard
of the place and possessed not the least idea in what direction it lay.
The fellow grunted and let him climb in; sat silent for a while as
Rodvard sneezed and drizzled, then was moved to remark that this was a
heavy case of the phlegm, but it could be cured by an infusion of
dandelion root with certain drugs, such as his old woman made, and so
well that they often accused her of being a witch. “—But the drugs are
costly now.” He evidently wanted conversation in payment for his favor,
and when this beginning failed on Rodvard’s merely remarking that he
would pay for any quantity of drugs to get rid of this rheum, fell
silent for a couple of minutes; then leaned over, touched the servant’s
badge, and struck out again with:
“Running away, ey? What happened, ey? Lying with wrong woman on festival
night, perhaps? Ah, there’s many and many a high family has daughters
born nine months from festival night that shouldn’t rightly inherit, but
lord, young man, don’t you run away because of that. I say to you that
ladies can forgive and be forgive for everything they do that night,
when all’s free, and I say to you, you ought to go back to your master.”
He chuckled and waved his mule-goad. “I do recall, I do, when I was a
sprout no older than yourself how one night I went all the way to Masjon
for spring festival and at the dancing in the square there, I found a
little cat as hot as ever could be, so we slipped away for some
conversation, ey? And when I got back to where I was staying with a
friend, what do you think I found? Why, in my bed there was his
sister—Phidera, that was her name—and she was saying she had thought the
bed her own, and no more clothes on her than a fish. So there were two
of them in one night, all I could do, he, he, he, and that’s the way it
always is at spring festival, and maybe it would be with you.”
He looked at Rodvard, and the latter was glad for once that the Blue
Star had gone dumb over his heart, for there was a drop of moisture on
the lip above the ill-shaven chin, which the gaffer did not bother to
suck in or to wipe away.
“It was nothing like that,” said he (and to keep from being drawn deeper
into the morass of the old fellow’s thinking); “Have you heard that
Baron Brunivar is like to be decreed in accusation?”
“Ey, ey. Those westerners, half Mayerns they are. It will be a sad day
when the snow melts from Her Majesty’s head, with only the regents
between that crazy Pavinius and the throne, and no female heirs. Ey, ey.
Here we are in the Marquis of Deschera’s seignory. For you servant-class
it is no matter; you lay out the plates on the table and you have a
scuderius in your hand, but for us farm-people with all the taxes . . .”
(“I am not a servant,” Rodvard wanted to cry, “but a clerk who makes his
gain as hard as you; and it is you we most wish to help.” But he
forebore), saying only; “Is there an inn at Kazmerga? I need something
to eat, being without breakfast, and a place to lie down for the cure of
my fluxions.”
“No tavern—” the man stopped, and the expression above the uncut whisker
became crafty (so that now Rodvard longed for the Blue Star); “Would you
pay an innkeeper?”
“Why, yes. I have a little money.”
“You be letting me take you to my home. The old woman will arrange your
fluxions in less than a minute with her specific if you pay for it, and
give all else you need for less than half what an innkeeper would ask,
and no questions if the provosts come nosing, ey. Go, Mironelle.” He
leaned forward and rammed the goad into the mule’s rump, which shook its
ears, danced a little with the hind feet, and began to trot, so that
Rodvard’s aching head jounced agonizingly. There was a turn, the track
was broadening, fields showed, pigs rooted contentedly in a ditch, and
the trees gave back to show a church with its half-moon symbol at the
peak, and around it, like the spoke of a wheel, houses.
“Kazmerga,” said the mule-man. “I live on the other side.”