The Corn Read online

  Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  Contents

  Map of Eden and Shamm

  Foreword

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part IV

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Part V

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

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  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019 by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Anoushka

  Map of Eden and Shamm

  Foreword

  Forewords and backwards

  Welcome to THE CORN, the first book in my new series CORNUCOPIA.

  I do hope you enjoy reading this, but I feel I should first offer a couple of warnings.

  Firstly, as an English author, I write with English words and spellings. Some of my lovely American readers will find this odd in places, for American spellings can sometimes be remarkably different. I’m sorry about this – please have patience. I do not know all the American spellings and word changes, so am not qualified, but it would also be quite impossible to create a novel that offered both. My apologies.

  Secondly, I must point out that this entire series contains some important differences to previous books. For although the world of Eden and Shamm, my fantasy planet, are closely based on English medieval society, there are some dramatic differences, and this is certainly not England, nor any other country which we might recognise.

  This is a fantasy world. And it is a dark one. The genre these days is entitled “Dark and Gritty” – or something close. I do not shirk the sort of cruelty and crimes which were indeed taken for granted in our own history. I have always believed that the terrible suffering of folk in past ages should be admitted, and acknowledged.

  This series therefore carries some such passages, and I accept that many readers won’t like this, and will prefer not to read such explicit novels. Once again, I apologise. I feel I must make myself clear from the start. But none of my descriptions are gratuitous nor written purely to shock, they merely are part of the realism and the plot, and so I hope you will forgive me.

  With thanks,

  Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  Part I

  Chapter One

  My desperate attempts to save Jak’s life were all I could think about, while at some distance away, my mother was busy killing the priest.

  Or perhaps I should pretend diplomacy and say that my mother was watching the priest die while I was doing the same with Jak. But my mother was a witch with medicines and could cure some things, just as she chose to poison others.

  Saving lives was less profitable than ending them, and I couldn’t pay my mother with anything but the usual cliché of adoration, but if that wasn’t price enough, then I would steal every medicine she had. The Black Plague had come to Eden again as it had thirty years before, and as it did in sultry summers when we had all forgotten to expect it.

  My adoration for Jak filled my life, and I would never permit his death. I met Jak first when I was just a child, and he was not much older. My mother had been pounding poisons in the back shed behind the pantry and I still had hellebore pollen on my fingers. I ran out for fresh air and rushed onto the lower hills with their scattering of buttercups and daisies, gasping for breath. And there he was under the big alder tree, helping some village girl lose her virginity in the long grass.

  I was twelve and he was fourteen, and I have no idea how old the little blonde cherub was. She puffed and blushed, quickly lowered her skirts and ran back down the hill leaving me to stare out the son of our local lord while he adjusted his long silken coat and tight trousers beneath, while grinning back at me.

  I stood gawping and thought him so stunningly beautiful that I might have surrendered up my own maidenhood on the spot, even without having any notion of what that entailed. But he just took my hand very firmly, led me through the grassy slopes beyond the village and delivered me back to my own door. So he knew exactly who I was, just as I knew him, even though we had never met before.

  He was our lord’s son, Jak Eden-Lord Lydiard, heir to his father’s land and high title. And I was the witch’s daughter.

  Eden is a land of such beauty, but ever since the invasion over fifty years ago, it seems so much has changed. Not having lived then, nor knowing a single soul who was alive so many years ago, I have never been sure if the changes are all so terrible, but certainly disease is worse, there are slums where people manage to survive amongst the rubble left by the invasion where no one seems capable of rebuilding, and the carriage trains cross the country faster and more often, rumbling and repeating that deep threat of death should anyone damage the rails. Every night I heard that horn blow, thundering into my dreams. It held such menace.

  And the trains, their lines extended, and their stations enlarged, were the first repairs and improvements to be constructed after the war was over. It was the enemy, or so I’d heard, that had given Eden the knowledge to construct steam engines. Indeed it was the steam engines I now thought of as the enemy, and swore I’d never ride one. We had been attacked with rockets, things flung at us with catapults, which exploded with death. An invention from Shamm, that Eden had never discovered.

  We must have been impressed as we died, an absurd philosophy – but once the war ended, the scientists abandoned their previous ideas and invented the steam train, using the Shammite creation of steam-fired rockets, changing what had been a stream of rattling old cats led on huge wheels by a couple of tired and fractious oxen. That was quickly dismantled and the roaring engines and plumes of steam, and the rails which crossed the land, even the farms, like flattened cages.

  They said the city was still partly in ruin. But I had never yet been to the city. Lydiard was distant from Eden’s centre and had escaped much of the battling destruction. Absurdly, our northern squabbles, all ending on some wretched swamp of a battlefield, were quite separate to the Great Invasion, and had gone on far longer.

  Knowing he was beautiful had never made Jak arrogant. He despised such unremarkable luck and despised those who admired him for it. “Being beautiful,” I told him once, “may not be a sign of your own achievement. But there is nothing wrong about it either.” His cheekbones shaped his face into strength and depth, but it was almost all in his eyes. They were tunnels into wonder and delight, promising dark secrets and passion. His hair was black with just a hint of golden silk, but his eye
s were as green as the maple in summer and the climbing ivy mesh in spring.

  “How could any sensible man be proud of something which he never created himself?” Jak had answered me. “And if fashions were different, I might be considered horribly ugly. A century ago, the fashion was for hair like sunshine. I would have been utterly ignored. And,” his voice cool with contempt, ‘the idiots are so concentrated on the ridiculous prettiness, they look no further. I might be a genius, although I’m not. I might be a villain, although I’m not. Not yet, anyway. They simply kiss my hand because I’m pretty.”

  “Pretty is the wrong word,” I told him at once. “You’re – gorgeous.”

  “Please don’t be an admiring idiot like everyone else,” he ordered.

  I hadn’t bothered to argue.

  My mother must have cured hundreds of their dreadful diseases, while she murdered perhaps twenty others. A high number, I think, for one sweet-natured woman, but a thousand times that number were slaughtered by the idiots who made war. She fed me her special herbs from babyhood, and I wore her talisman around my neck to ward off sickness, curses and ill luck. A little large and a little heavy, this metal cradle was also beautiful and the herbs it contained smelled of honeysuckle kindness for all my life. Throughout my life, I remained immune to most diseases and silently thanked her for it, but as for keeping me safe from wretchedness and contrary fortune, I sometimes wondered if she had chanted backwards for ill luck later became my companion and made its home in my heart for many years.

  I loved the root of the monkshood, which my mother called wolfsbane. It was strong and pale and confident with a sort of rough, dissembling nature. I often gathered it for her, and although it was easily mistaken for other more edible roots, I became quickly expert. No nobleman would pay for a draught which turned out to be a table delicacy, providing simple peppery pleasure instead of speedy and violent death. Antimony was more subtle and could be used slowly over a long period to disguise its administration. Quicksilver was particularly useful when mixed with other substances and could first be offered as medicine before being secretly increased to a lethal dose. My mother preferred velvet coated fungi, the fat blackberries of the shrubby dwale, or arsenic with its almost undetectable malice. This was my education, and I was studious, prideful of my expertise in kill and cure. The herbs spoke to me, and I spoke back. I slept with their perfumes and could tell immediately on waking what leaf or root had now been put to boil.

  I never knew my mother to kill for herself. Her poisons were like fine wines to her, to be treated with delicate fascination, petted and admired, and finally to be preserved in darkness, their precious little earthenware bottles hidden below ground with all their artful talent saved for special times to come. They were expensive. She earned a good living.

  I’m not sure if she had any preference between killing and curing, but she disliked fore-telling because it came unasked and unannounced and woke her, sweat-bathed during the cold nights. She sometimes sold love-potions to the village people but confided to me that they were all absurd nonsense, as were the charms to protect against brownies, faerie and the evil eye. “If faeries exist at all, which I very much doubt,” my mother told me, “they would certainly not be interested in these dull, plodding folk, nor would anything I could produce ever stop them from their mischief.”

  I inherited none of her special talents and could predict nothing more portentous than the coming of rain from the black rain clouds above, but I always remembered how to brew medicines and mix poisons. My mother’s tutorship stayed with me for life.

  Although I adored Jak at first sight, life did not change that much after we became friends. But I was certainly happier. While the village children were scared of my mother, I had never made friends. So young Jak Lydiard brought excitement and the hope of many possibilities back into our placid countryside with his molten green eyes, honeycombed with gold quartz that tip-tilted in the candlelight, long black lashes, and cheekbones like the blunt edge of a knife blade catching the sudden smoulder of the sinking sun. But more than candle or sunshine, it was his smile that lit his eyes, and it was that which I remembered above all else in those pitilessly long years after Jak went away into the shadows. Oh, the sweet, hopeful dreams of youth, and how we learn their futility as we grow.

  After that first meeting, I saw him often in the village or riding by, and he would always smile and lift his hat just as if I was a respectable person whom he was glad to know. He always smiled that secretive smile that lit his eyes, and I always swallowed hard with my pulse thumping loud enough to frighten the meadowlarks. There was some rumour of rebellion and fighting in the south, but our people lived their lives as placidly as always, and so did I. Then, come the year’s end, for me life grew gradually less normal and less placid but considerably more exciting, for it took only three short winter-white days for Jak to become the friend of my heart.

  The woods were heavy with snow, the branches laden, tipping the crunch of freeze on to my hood as I passed. The whispering isolation of white silence was all across the land, and I followed the little cross-marks of bird steps and the round paw-pads of small animals. There was a fox in a trap. Russet furred, long trembling snout, agonised eyes, all the dying breath of the creature lay there in the snow trampled undergrowth. She had half eaten her leg away, trying to escape the metal teeth that held her. I snapped the serrated iron jaws open, forced the trap wide with all my strength, and took the little vixen into my arms.

  I had been too busy and had heard nothing else beyond my own frantic panting. Jak was already standing behind me when I looked around. I wrapped the fox in my cloak against the warmth of my body, careful of its mangled leg, and stood.

  “So animals are not frightened of you,” said the young lord. He was gorgeous in a green brocade over-shirt with velvet surcoat trimmed in beaver. His black hair was thick, eyes all deep green shadows, mouth wide and firm lipped. I made my knees defiant, to stand solid and look back up at him. The fox whimpered, licked my fingers, and closed her eyes. After a pause, Jak Lydiard said, “That creature will need a great deal of nursing, if it’s nursing you have in mind. I shall take you home. My horse is tethered back by the stream.”

  I stared up at him, me shy and tongue-tied, him confidently resplendent beneath the drip, drip of morning dew from bare branch and twig. The expression in his dark eyes seemed to go on and on forever, just like another forest rich with possibilities and secrets. This was the first time we had spoken since I had seen him with the plump village girl in the long grass; his fingers caressing her breast, her smock pulled open and skirts nigh up to her waist. He had taken me home on that occasion too.

  He was our lord’s only son, and after the death of his mother, he was sent to stay with the wealthy and noble families who would train him in warfare and chivalry and then become the powerful allies he would find essential throughout his life. At fourteen, he had come home to a step-mother that replaced the mother he could barely remember, and a father he had tried not to remember at all. The house of his childhood whispered of sadness and cruelty. He was sorry to have left the castles in the west where he had learned martial skill under the sunshine with the sleet in his wind streamed hair, rolled like a puppy with the children of the household, shaping the courage he lost only when he became so horribly ill. So, disobeying his father, Jak rode out most days, avoiding the stout master at arms who was supposed to continue his training now he was home. Instead, it seemed he chose to wander alone in the great forest that surrounded our village.

  Now I breathed deep and found my voice for the vixen’s needs outweighed my timidity. “Do you care?” I said. “His lordship kills foxes as vermin. It seems he kills every living creature he can hunt down. Don’t you ride to the hunt??”

  “One day I’ll have to kill men too,” he answered me, “but I’ll still call the doctor when my friends are hurt.”

  He lifted me up, his fingers gripped strongly under my armpits and sat me high on his hors
e. I bounced into place like a skittle, and the fox mewed, plaintive. I had never ridden before and clung on, trying to balance. I knew I showed too much of my ankles, but I was an unchaperoned country brat with no beauty and no family, so I only blushed a little and let this young man put his hands on me as he helped and held me. Jak shortened the stirrups and led the horse to my home. My mother hurried out to the door and pushed past to help me down to the ground before the Eden- Lord’s profligate son could touch me again.

  Jak watched a moment as my mother bustled me indoors. As he re-mounted, he said, “I shall come again tomorrow. To see how it is. And you too.”

  “Hardly necessary, thank you, my lord,” said my mother, unexpectedly nervous and biting her lip. “It’s just a wild creature, like a thousand men that die every winter.”

  “Please do,” I called at exactly the same moment. “I’ll be waiting.”

  He came, and then he came again, and then he came often.

  I was a little surprised when my mother did not approve of my friendship with the Lydiard-Lord’s young heir, I presumed because his father was one of her customers. “But Jak doesn’t know that,” I pointed out.