Firethorn

by Sarah Micklem

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy; General Fiction

Synopsis

In a first volume of an epic trilogy, Firethorn is granted healing powers and casts aside her life of drudgery, but when she accompanies high-born warrior Sire Galan on his journey to join the king's army, she struggles for power in a caste system that treats women as inferior. A first novel. 20,000 first printing.

Release date: May 25, 2004

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter 1: UpsideDown Days

I watched for the Midsummer's eve bonfire from my lair on Bald Pate. I meant to return to the village a year to the day I'd left for the Kingswood. But why should the day matter? The seasons go round the year and never come back, for, as everyone knows, time moves in a spiral, not a circle. To persist in folly made me no less a fool. Once I'd counted myself brave for venturing into the Kingswood alone; now I wondered if it would not have been braver to stay among people. Solitude had withered around me like a husk. Yet I stayed until the bonfire released me.

On Midsummer morning I walked down through the ripening fields to the croft of Na's sister, Az. I carried my sheepskin cloak under one arm and shaded my eyes with my hand. A great humming and chaffering of insects rose around me as I walked, as if the fields had a voice under the Sun.

When I stepped through the gate into the mud-walled yard, the croft seemed deserted save for the hens scratching around the stone feet of the granary and a sow sleeping in the Sun. But I saw smoke coming from the summer kitchen, a lean-to built against the hut and roofed by the huge leaves of a golden hopvine that clambered up the poles. The yard smelled of dung and dust and meat cooking.

I stooped under the pitched roof of the lean-to and peered inside. Az was squatting by the fire pit in the scattered yellow light that came through the leaves. She was smaller than I remembered, and I wondered if she'd dwindled since I saw her last. I hadn't thought she was so old. Her head grew forward from the rounded hump of her shoulders, and she had to strain to look up at me. I couldn't bear for her not to recognize me, so I called out, "Az, it's me, Luck, that used to come by with Na. Are you in health? How is Na?" After a year in the woods without speaking, the words stuck to my tongue.

Az got to her feet, steadying herself on my arm, and came into the light. "Ah, Luck, did you think I wouldn't know you and your red hair? You look to be on fire with the Sun behind you like that. Come and sit." She led me to the croft's guardian tree, a rowan, and we sat on the ground in its shade. Az pulled her shawl close around her, though it was a warm day. The pattern was the loveknot; I'd made the shawl myself as a present for Na. I thought of the Dame, how she never could make a weaver of me. My mind would go wandering and leave my fingers to fumble, and mistakes unnoticed had to be picked out later. But Na had treasured the shawl. I wondered why Az wore it.

"How does Na fare these days? I don't want to go to the manor, so I hoped you might send one of the boys for her."

Az shook her head. "Na is gone. Carried off by the shiver-and-shake this winter. Others too: Min and two of his daughters, and some of those Herders who live off by themselves and never get along with anybody. Dame Lyra caught it too and miscarried. It was bad this year, with all the snows and the cold."

I was silent for a while, and wouldn't look at her. "I should have been here. With the Dame gone you were in need of a healer."

Az said, "Nothing to be done, it was that quick. I know Na missed you, though. She'd come to visit Peacedays, and we'd talk of you living on white bread and cream at the king's court."

A year ago, I'd stood beside Na watching the dancers around the bonfire, and told her I was going to the city of Ramus, where the king lived, to find work as a dyer. It was a likely lie, likelier than the truth. I lacked patience as a weaver, but I'd been drawn to the mysteries of dyestuffs and mordants, the transformations in the dyebaths. It was a kind of green lore, and all such lore came easily to me, as if I had only to recollect it rather than to learn it for the first time.

Now my lie came back to shame me. How could I admit I'd been in the Kingswood, so near at hand when Na was dying?

Az cocked her head and looked me over with her shiny black eyes. I'd taken care to wash before leaving the Kingswood, but my hair was a bramble thicket, my dress a rag, and my feet bare and hard as horn. She sighed. "But I see you were never at court. I wouldn't bother to kill a chicken as skinny as you. Wouldn't be worth the coals to cook it."

She fetched me a slab of unleavened barley bread and a bowl of greens stewed with bacon. I dipped the bread into the stew and crammed it into my mouth. Tears ran down and salted it. I was too full of sensation, I was drowning in it: the taste of meat after long fasting, the smell of burning wood, the flood of words coming up from underground, the sweet welcome and sad news.

Az let me eat and cry in peace until curiosity overmatched her courtesy. "So where did you go, then? You look wild as a bog wight come to scare the children into bed."

I said, "I've been on a hard road, truth be told, and I gained nothing from it but a new name. I'm called Firethorn now." I'd never spoken my new name aloud before, and I felt as though I overreached. But for certain Luck did not fit me well anymore, and sometimes one must grow into a name.

"Firethorn suits you," was all Az said.

She didn't ask again where I had been, and I was grateful for it. She spun a thread of gossip around the manor and the village, saying Sire Pava had sent away the old priest when he grew forgetful, and the new one was a Sun priest and not a priest of the Heavens, and what use was he? He had no notion of how to read the weather or the stars and birds, how to tell by signs which day to plow and which to sow, when to dig a hole or breed the ram to the ewes; he never looked up at all, as far as she could see. The crops and flocks had suffered for it -- twenty lambs stillborn and another taken by an eagle, and a blight on the rye too.

And there was talk of war. It was said Sire Pava himself was going on campaign, and refused to wear hand-me-down armor from his father. He and the steward were squeezing the village hard to pay for his new harness and weapons. To be sure, a lot of coin stuck to Steward's fingers. "Rooster thinks he rules the henhouse, but Fox knows better," Az said.

Thinking of Na, I lost the thread. It was bitter to me that I'd turned my back on her before I left, had found so little to say to her in the way of farewell. Shouldn't I have known her time was short, or felt her need of me, even in the Kingswood? I put my head on my knees and Az fell silent. We sat like that for a time, under the rowan tree, while the chickens pecked for grain and a chiffchaff sang above our heads.

I'd fed on my pride a twelvemonth and it was near eaten up, but I didn't intend to go back to the manor and beg for a place as a scullion. Az let me know that I'd be welcome to stay, and gave me Na's second dress to wear and a rag to wrap around my head. The dress hung loose and left my calves bare. Still, it was more proper than what I wore out of the Kingswood. Soon her youngest son, Fleetfoot, came home to fetch the midday meal for the men in the fields, and I went to help him.

Az had borne ten children, and five boys had lived. The two married sons had built their crofts next to hers. Their huts shared the same wall and the gates were always open between the yards for the children to run in and out. Three sons still lived at home, but all five liked working their shares of the commons together.

It was a long walk to the field where they were haying, across the river ford and the valley to a high and stony meadow. One of the wives, Halm, came with Fleetfoot and me, with her baby slung in a shawl on one hip and a great basket on the other.

"I'm glad there's a rill up there," she said as we climbed the steep path. "I get so weary carrying the water bucket."

We called the men from the pool of shade cast by a great beech, and they came laughing and shouting. They'd stripped to loincloths, and the sweat shone on their brown shoulders and legs. Their bodies gave off heat, like horses. They ate and drank, tossing a few japes back and forth. One asked me where I'd been and I couldn't think how to answer. Another said, "Looks like her tongue swam away," and they laughed. I sat with my head averted, pretending not to watch. They drowsed until the shade moved away. The smell of sweat and cut hay and earth baking under the Sun went to my head like hard cider and made me dizzy.

And so I went to live among the villagers. Their houses were of mud mixed with dung and straw, daubed on a frame of poles and withies and thatched with reeds. They slept in one room and their animals in the next. Dirt was ground into their skin. Their clothes were as drab as peat and stone, fir and straw; the Blood reserved the most vivid dyes for their clan colors. Drudges spoke the Low among themselves, but they knew enough of the High to placate their masters. Now I saw that the villagers had another face than the one they turned to the manor. They never forgot that they were there first, before the Blood, born from the earth of those very mountains.

A cock belonging to the old alewife, Anile, was always the first to crow in the village, long before dawn. I rose at his summons to grind barley, oats, and rye for bread and porridge. Wheat went for taxes, so we never had the fine, leavened bread of the manor. The brothers complained until I learned to grind fine enough. We hid the mortar and pestle in a hole in the wall, because Sire Pava enforced his monopoly on milling. We'd take the miller a scant measure to make him think it was all we had, and he'd be sure to cheat us in turn.

Sometimes in the dark I heard the rhythmic scraping sound of other women grinding, and I wondered if in time I'd be worn smooth enough to fit in, smooth as an old mortar. A mudwoman's toil never ends and never lasts: clean clothes are dirtied, meals are swallowed, and there are always new weeds in the garden. I remembered the Kingswood, how I'd risen when I pleased -- forgetting how restless my sleep had been, and how I'd longed for even the humblest porridge. The tedious chores wore away at me, but I was glad to spare Az the worst of them. She was not as frail as she looked, but there was so much that needed doing. She said we pulled well in the same yoke, and whatever had she done before I came?

I learned to tell her sons apart. The youngest was called Fleetfoot because he won all the village races. He was still a smooth-cheeked boy, with a deep chest and lean flanks like a gazehound. The second youngest was Ot; he was proud of his new blond beard, roaming out of the house at night to show it to the village girls. I started calling him Wheatbeard and the name was apt, so he kept it. Maken was the eldest still at home and in no hurry to be wed, for girls and widows (and wives, Halm said) were fond of his merry hazel eyes and his wide shoulders, and many had found him a sweet nut come cracking time. I found him unsettling, myself, and it made me shy of him.

On Peacedays, the one idle day in every tennight, I'd watch the green youth of the village go courting, with their banter and raillery, forthright stares and sly glances. No one looked my way. I'd been fair enough before the Kingswood, I suppose, fair enough for Sire Pava. Now my ribs showed plain as those on a stray dog; my hips had hollows instead of dimpled flesh. When I looked at my face in a basin of water, my cheekbones and chin were too sharp, my eyes too deep and too dark.

I found I couldn't sleep under a roof and within walls, next to Az and her boys when they unrolled the pallets at night. I slept under the rowan tree, and even there I rested uneasy. Carnal's female avatar, that fat voluptuary Desire, sent me dreams, and with them her itch and tickle. Better if she'd come when Sire Pava wanted me; now she was too late. I ate as much as I could, but Az's sons were hungry, and I never had my fill.

I saw old friends from the manor on market days and on Peacedays, before the village shrine. Cook was shocked that I was so gaunt, and brought me savories from the manor table. She said Dame Lyra could curdle milk with a look since her miscarriage, and no wonder: Sire Pava had brought his mudwoman right into the manor, and she'd started another bastard with a daughter just off the tit. I dreaded seeing Sire Pava about the village, but he heeded me no more than the dirt he trod underfoot. I didn't want his notice, but it angered me to know I didn't trouble his mind in the least, while he troubled mine.

When I lived in the manor, I thought the villagers dull witted, with their lazy way of talking. They lopped off the end of every word, as if they couldn't be bothered to pronounce it plainly, and yet they used so many: they dawdled all around a tale when a straight path would have been quicker. But when Az and I would go visiting, words went galloping past and I'd stumble after.

They said they were living like toads under a harrow since Sire Pava had claimed an extra day of labor every tennight, leaving them only five for their own fields. They said Steward was always watching, prying. Nothing was beneath his notice; he'd skin a flea for its hide and tallow.

And some went on to say that although the old Dame had been too meddlesome by far with her herbs and potions -- being something of a cannywoman, after all -- and too strict to wink at even a little hole in a grain sack, she'd never stolen the food from between their teeth. It rankled me, this backward praise. I thought of how the Dame and I had gone into their crofts, bringing remedies for their ills, how she'd tended women and children with her own hands, how they'd blinked and looked away in the darkness of those stinking huts, shuttering the whites of their eyes. I'd supposed them shy, perhaps bewildered by her kindness, surely grateful. Now I heard their ingratitude and distrust. But I said nothing.

They talked about me as well when my back was turned. Az was too kind to tell me what they said, but Halm and Betwyx, the wives of Az's sons, told me how the tittle-tattles clucked that Sire Pava had tried me and found me lacking -- though a few said I'd run off to bear his child and bury it. I felt shame that such tales were bandied about. Perhaps they wanted my own account of it, good currency among the other wives, but I wouldn't oblige.

I gave the gossips another cud to chew, for I never said where I'd spent the year away. Neither the truth nor a lie would do, and that left only silence. Some took offense, saying I supposed I was too good for them. But all agreed that wherever I'd gone, I'd come back strange.

Word got about that I was god-bothered and the questions ceased. The Blood who are touched by a god are sent to the temples to serve as Auspices, or, if their wits are too addled, to be tended with care. Among the mudfolk, the god-bothered may become wandering Abstinents, pleasing their god by mortifying their flesh, or revelators who tell fortunes in the marketplace, or servants at a temple, drudging for the priests of the Blood. Most stay in their villages, sometimes shunned, sometimes sought after for their gifts of healing, hexing, or foretelling. Always pitied. It's said the gods most love those they most afflict. This I doubt.

As one of the god-bothered, I might have done anything -- raved of voices and visions, fallen down in fits or gone naked -- and no one would have been amazed, save Az and her sons. But I wished only to be unremarkable. If Ardor spoke to me now, it was no more than any woman might hear when she roused up the fire for the morning porridge: the fire song of Ardor Hearthkeeper.

A few women came to me for help, and then a few more. One pleaded for a blight to mar the smooth skin of her rival, and I sent her off with my rage at her heels; another asked for a charm to make her next child a boy, and I turned my back on her. But I did my best to soothe those who came to me with pains. I filled Az's hut with drying herbs, and her kitchen with tinctures and salves, and daily I brought home beneficial plants from hedgerows, fields, orchards, anywhere my duties took me.

I'd been mistaken to think the Dame was the only healer in the village. Every mudwoman knew simples and the charms that went with them to treat everyday complaints, but there was also a midwife and a woman who could cure a baby's colic with her spittle. The men had their own healer, of course; a woman could ease a man's aches, bruises, and fevers with a poultice or tisane, but if she touched his open wound, she'd sour his blood and cause the wound to fester. The men's carnifex, named Fex for short, came to his calling by way of gelding calves, colts, and hogs; his remedy for everything was leeches and more leeches.

They called me a greenwoman. I only did as the Dame had taught me, but they trusted me more now that they thought I was touched.

One morning Az saw three crows land in the yard while she was weeding the kitchen garden. The one on her left flew away over the wall; the middle one preened; the one on her right went into the byre and came out with a beakful of straw. I was next door with Halm and her baby and her daughter Lilt when Az called us to come and look. By the time we came, only one crow remained, strutting in the dust.

Az was shaken. "I must go to the Kingswood today. Will you come with me?"

Halm made the sign to turn bad luck away. "Why must you go there? Knock on Mischief's door, he's sure to bid you welcome." Like Na, like most of the village folk, she thought the forest was full of menace, and not just from the kingsmen. Those who thought otherwise were not inclined to speak of it.

I said I would go, and gladly. "We'll be back tomorrow," Az told Halm, and she gave me a basket to carry loaded with barley and a flask of goat's milk.

We followed the river toward its source in the mountains. The path climbed gently at first, then steeply, and I matched my pace to Az's. She panted as she climbed under the hot Sun, so I forbore to ask her questions until we stopped to rest in a field of blooming flax. Swallows darted over the field, the undersides of their wings catching the blue of the flowers.

"What did you see, Az? What does the omen say?"

To my surprise, Az began to cry. "The crows told me I'll have but one son left in my croft by wintertime, for one will fly and one will marry. We'll be begging the woodward for the king post to raise a new roof soon. Ah -- change is hard for an old woman! Even good news comes like a thief."

"You think Maken will marry? Who will he marry?" It was a question I pondered often at the time.

Az shrugged her humped shoulders. "The crow flew right over the village with the straw, and there's no telling where he came down. Plenty of women in his path. I worry more for Fleetfoot. I fear he might not live to grow a beard." She rubbed tears from her face with both hands. "Come, we have a ways to go."

There is a path the fallow deer use when they come down from the woods to nibble on the heavy heads of ripening grain. We followed it through the wall of brambles, out of the Sun and into the shadows under the trees, and then Az left the path and led me deep into the forest to the great oak, Heart of the Wood.

I knew where she was leading me, of course; every step was familiar. Yet I wondered at how I could have forgotten -- or put out of my mind -- the sense of presence that fills the Kingswood. I had been a creature of the wood, one among many, so enfolded in that vast life that I'd lost myself there for a time; now I was touched by awe and dread, like any trespasser who strays too far within those precincts.

Az did not seem afraid. She had me put the basket with the barley and goat's milk in a crotch of the great oak high above her head. Then she began a low chant, standing between two roots as thick as a man's thigh, rocking back and forth. I sat on the ground nearby, and after a while I fell into a shadow dream with my eyes wide open. Before me a green veil stirred in the wind, woven in a shifting pattern of leaf and branch, light and shadows. I looked at it sideways and caught a glimpse of a black horse galloping, its rider cloaked in a green flame. But soon I became aware of other shadows crowding close, at the edge of vision. I felt we had a multitude around us, and it raised the hair on my nape.

Az was still murmuring, rocking. She wept again.

Late in the afternoon she came out of her trance. She cut a green branch with a fine spray of leaves from Heart of the Wood, giving thanks as she did so, and led me away, sure of her steps even without a path. We climbed a steep slope and then descended into a ravine between two long ridges, where one of the streams that feed our river had cut deep into the rock. The shale walls of the gorge were covered with ferns, sprigs of twinflower, and brilliant green mosses lush from seeping waters. The stream was shallow, swift, and cold. We scrambled on slippery rocks and clung to roots and saplings. Az's breathing was harsh and her limbs trembled. I begged her to stop and take some food, for I'd gathered mushrooms and starchroot and berries on the way. She shook her head and we went on, unspeaking.

Darkness comes early deep in the mountains. By the time we reached our destination, the bright blue ribbon of sky overhead had turned cobalt. Az had led me to the headwater of the stream. Where the two long ridges joined, the waters of a spring tumbled out of a fissure in the cliff face into a pool littered with great boulders. One side of the ravine was a wall of pure gray clay. It had been mined over the years, and the diggers had left a wide shelf of clay next to the pool. We piled up leaves in a hollow, and Az and I curled up to sleep.

I spoke in a dream, and woke myself, though both word and dream escaped me. I saw three lights moving near us and shook Az in a panic. "No fear," Az said. "They're here to keep us from harm," and she went back to sleep.

In the morning she was more forthcoming. "Our dead are all through these woods," she told me. "We buried them here to keep them close, so they'd look after us, each one under a sapling according to their nature. Many of these trees are our people. Then the Blood came along and made us burn the dead. We've lost six generations since they came from Oversea, six generations wandering who knows where. But those who are left here still come at need, if they are not forgotten. I think soon they may be forgotten."

She pointed at the ridges. "In the beginning our people were fashioned from this clay, right here between the Thighs. You'll not come into your strength till you know what clay made you. This isn't your place."

Tears started to my eyes as if she'd struck me.

She leaned over and took my hand. "Don't take it hard. I'm only saying I don't need an omen bird to tell me you'll fly away again."

I went to find food while Az worked all morning, digging and shaping clay. By the time I came back, she'd made a clay woman about knee high, forming it around the oak branch so that a topknot of leaves sprouted from the head. She smoothed the clay until it was like skin, and incised spirals over the round breasts and belly. Last of all she scratched eyes in the featureless oval of the face. I was amazed and afraid to see how the clay woman looked back at us from her new eyes, and I wondered if Eorõe Artifex had been surprised, when she shaped our forebears, the first people, to feel the clay come to life in her hands.

We left the woman behind rubble in a dry niche in the rock. Az said Maken would come to fetch her when he was ready to build his house, and hide her in the wall to bring blessings.

Az was in good spirits on the way home, for she'd heard under the great oak that Fleetfoot would not be dying just yet. She knew he'd be leaving, but not where he'd go or whether he would return. She'd made him a clay man the size of two fingers, with an acorn for a heart. She wanted him to keep a bit of the earth he came from, to keep Mischief from crossing his path. But some fates are beyond our power to avert; the more Az fussed over Fleetfoot, knowing she'd lose him, the more surely she sent him away.

When harvest came we reaped daylong in the fields and went to sleep with straw in our hair and grit under our lids. The work hardened me, until I could keep up with the fastest reapers. Everything smelled dusty. The stone granary within the manor walls filled up while Steward and the priest, Divine Narigon, stood at the door making the tallies, watching each other like two cats.

I pinched my arms and legs to feel the fat under the skin. Az made me a new dress from cloth Na had left her, dyed a dark blue with woad. My tongue got quicker, and keener too. Laughter came hard to me, but Fleetfoot liked to tease me and make me smile. Life with the Dame was like a tapestry locked in a chest; I stopped taking it out to look at the colors. Nor did I think of my year in the Kingswood, though sometimes I dreamed of it.

All this talk of war: rumors flew like chaff above the threshing floor, and it was hard to find a grain of truth in all the dust. King Thyrse had campaigned nearly every summer of his reign, and he'd reigned since before I was born. People said he loved war nearly as well as hunting, and better than women (for he hadn't found the time between campaigns to take another wife after his first died barren). His battles meant no more to me than a rumormonger's songs, so long as he kept war from our gates and took it to others.

The Dame had filled her levy with horses instead of men: she had an old battle-scarred stallion that bred true, and a fine horsemaster to train his get. A good warhorse was worth five times his weight in foot soldiers. And if, every year, a few younger sons among the mudfolk were hungry and restless enough to run off to war, well then -- it made for peace in the village with the mischiefmakers gone.

This year was different. The king had summoned the troops to meet after the fall harvest, which meant a winter campaign. Nobody knew why but everybody made surmises. And it was true: Sire Pava was going to war. He'd called for four drudges from the village to serve as foot soldiers. Perhaps he wouldn't come home. Well rid if he didn't.

Messengers had gone back and forth between the master and his father, and Sire Pava had gone to Ramus to be fitted for his armor -- and very fine it was: a helmet topped with a crest of gilt steel feathers and armor covered in silvery scales like a fish. They said his horse's barding alone cost enough to feed us all for a year. He was spending money in the village too, buying leather fittings, cloth coarse and fine, hams and preserved ducks, cheeses, dried fruit, grain, a thousand things. But what he paid the armorers he took from us, in new taxes and fines for every small offense. It made for quarrels, as some drudges had coins for the first time and others said the granaries would be empty by midwinter, and famine would come calling. But the boys liked to sneak off and watch Sire Pava train for war, his new armor flashing in the Sun.

Fleetfoot and I went to see him too, climbing a tree that overlooked the outer court. He'd cut down the manor's guardian tree. Until I saw it with my own eyes, I had not believed it. That tree had been beloved, fed yearly with libations of ale and pruned into a perfect dome. As a child I used to hide in its branches and eat plums and cast the pits at Na when she came looking for me. Its leaves were dark, but when the Sun came through, they'd shone red as wine. Now there was nothing left of it but a bare trunk and two limbs to make a quintain for jousting, standing in a muddy field where once there'd been a garden, with paved paths and lavender and roses and benches of turf.

It had rained after tennights of cloudless skies, and turned chilly. Sire Pava and Divine Narigon chased each other on foot, whacking away with wooden swords weighted with lead. They slid in the mud, grunting and cursing. I turned my head and spat on the ground, but I could tell Fleetfoot was taken with the sight.

A little before the UpsideDown Days that mark the autumn Equinox, a company of men came to the manor on the way to the king's new war. I was in Az's croft pulling turnips from the kitchen garden when I saw the banners over the wall and heard the boys yelling. I ran with the other drudges to see the warriors, and stood at the back of the crowd to watch them enter the manor gates.

We were dazzled by the sight, for the Sun, which had hidden behind massy clouds all week, chose that moment to send her rays to gild the metal of armor and weapons. Each rider bore, on a pole strapped to his back, pennants of cloth-of-gold for the king and grass green for the clan of Crux, that streamed and fluttered in the wind; the men held the reins tight to make a better show, and their horses pulled at the bits and stamped and neighed as they jostled before the gate. Far down the valley road we could see, still in the shadow of the clouds, a convoy of foot soldiers, a train of oxcarts and baggage mules and spare mounts, and a pack of war dogs with their handlers. Two boys, pushing between legs to get a better view, slipped into the ditch beside the road and had to be pulled from the muddy water and then roundly cursed for their folly.

I mistook this troop of the Crux clan for an entire army. I couldn't count them all, for they moved about, but I guessed there were near a hundred horsemen and about the same number of men afoot. B