Daughter of Black Lake Read online

  She wanted to climb Edge with Arc, to see what she could from that only place where she had ever glimpsed what lay beyond Black Lake, but her mother would be making cheese and she should help. There was wheat to be milled to flour and thatch to be cut for a weak spot in the roof. All this, and she needed to gather comfrey root so that it might be ground to a paste, and stirred into warmed beeswax to form an ointment useful in healing the lesions blistering on a dozen of the bog dweller children’s hands and mouths. The pain was mild, but she would not neglect her obligations as Black Lake’s apprentice healer.

  She knew the bog dwellers’ ailments—Old Carpenter’s gums, Old Tanner’s bound bowels, Old Hunter’s strained heart, one hand’s menstrual cramps, another’s wakefulness at night. She cured and mended and sometimes wept when all she could offer was the comfort of sweet violet draft. For her generosity and skill in preparing Mother Earth’s magic, she was praised, sometimes rewarded. When she tended a Black Lake tradesman, she might be given a scrap of hide, a handful of oily wool. From the hands, she received only blessings, bowed heads, astonishment.

  “I’ve got to dig up some comfrey,” she said to Arc, hoping he heard her sincere regret.

  “A large, hairy leaf. A purple bloom.”

  “Like a goblet,” she said, curious that he knew the flower. But then, why would he not with his habit of observing the world?

  “I know a good spot,” he said.

  As they made their way along the path that led to the bog, he stepped lightly. It pleased her, the way he hardly disturbed the woodland floor and touched the tall grasses edging the track, their furred tips skimming his palm, the calluses left behind by the mattock. She thought of his gentle hands sliding from her cheeks to her neck.

  What would she answer if asked whether she preferred Young Smith over Arc, or Arc over Young Smith? It depended on the day, who was closest, which particular moment she had most recently rehashed in her mind. Arc, when she thought of the sweet violets or the thrill that rippled through her when she heard his bullfinch call. Young Smith, when she thought of the amulet or the pair of them kneeling in the old mine. Arc, when she thought of the golden curls on his belly. Young Smith, when she thought of his thick-lashed eyes. Oh, the hours she spent pondering.

  She turned her mind to silently naming the flora rooted alongside the path. Her knowledge of the riches all around had blossomed three years ago, when she was just ten. She had slipped into an apprenticeship with the ancient bog dweller who birthed the babies and cured the warts at Black Lake, who knew that a menstruous woman should not take the honey from a hive. Their familiarity began with Crone standing firmly, blocking small Devout’s passage on the path between clearing and bog. “What do you seek, child?” Crone had said. Her voice was like stone sliding over stone. Her face was wizened, her eyes thinly lashed.

  “Stinging nettle,” Devout said, stepping backward from so ancient a woman.

  “Won’t be finding any so close to the path. Already been picked.”

  Crone pinched a handful of yellow blooms from a slender stalk and tucked them into the sack looped over her shoulder. “Bloodroot,” she said and began clawing the ground with fingernails as thick and curled as talons. “Good for a nervous gut.”

  She teased a thick root from the earth and snapped it in half. Red sap oozed from the flesh. “I’m making dye for Old Hunter’s firstborn girl,” Crone said. “That buck Tanner skinned, she’s got it in her mind she wants a red cape.”

  Few at Black Lake dyed their wool, and none their skins. It added nothing to strength or warmth, and it meant collecting and preparing the dye and then extra wood gathered and water hauled so that a cauldron could be set to boil. Still, a red cape was the sort of indulgence Reddish liked, and Old Hunter was inclined to spoil his brood.

  “The scraps from the hide will come to me as payment,” Crone said.

  She raised a leg, stretched her ankle, rocking her foot from side to side as though showing off a foot wrapped in fine leather rather than an assortment of scraps. “I’ll lace red shoes around my feet.”

  Crone would wear red shoes, and Reddish would cross her arms and huff. Devout dared not smile, though. The old woman was leaning close and saying, “Your name came to you because of your devotion to Mother Earth.”

  Devout bobbed her chin, liking how even this old woman knew her piety.

  “Mother Earth’s magic is a useful thing to know. The bog dwellers will need someone to prepare the magic when I’m gone.”

  “You’re going somewhere?”

  “Not just yet,” Crone said. “First you have much to learn.”

  Devout liked the idea of being more than a hand who sowed and reaped and did not know a single thing more of the world. She liked the idea, too, of the bog dwellers one day calling her generous and wise. And would knowing Mother Earth’s magic not help her in some way? Might she at some point trade bloodroot dye for leather just like Crone? Devout dipped her chin, the tiniest bit.

  “I’m old,” Crone said. “We’ll begin today.”

  * * *

  —

  Devout and Arc continued through the woodland, the path beneath them well trodden by those heading to the causeway, the pool at its farthest reach. They went to scrub bodies or linens, or sometimes to find comfort in so hallowed a place. At the bog, the peat and rushes of their earthly lives touched the mist and mystery of the gods, the shadows and whispers of those already departed to Otherworld—that place without hunger and want, free of every kind of unease. The barren went to the bog, the anxious, the brokenhearted, the ill. Along with tears, they dropped offerings into Black Lake’s pool—pretty stones and pottery vessels, clay roughly shaped into the tiny newborn who had not come or the eye that saw no more than dusk.

  As Devout and Arc approached the causeway, he pointed to comfrey in the distance, the fallen log, and stepping-stones that would spare their feet the most sodden of the ground. He held out his hand—all strength and sparseness, all muscle, sinew, and bone. It was not unusual; many times he had steadied her as they descended slopes slick with rain or climbed patches of sheer terrain. Yet his hand had been absent since the feast, for she had not declared an intention to take him as mate. True, from that evening onward, they had been together only in the fields, but still, he used to haul her up from a low stone where they had sat drinking water and wiping the sweat from their brows. Why deliberate now, when a hundred times before she had taken his hand? She took it, because still he held it out. His fingers closed. His grip was firm, as though he would not risk her hand slipping away.

  The route was tricky, and possibly his hand was only a guide. But when they came to a dry, level patch of hard-packed earth, his grip did not loosen. Her palm grew damp, but still he did not let go. He gripped infinitesimally tighter. Then his fingers threaded hers, and she gave in to an urge to rub her thumb along the ridge of his.

  The comfrey consisted of a dense patch of a dozen plants as high as a man’s knee. The stalks bowed under the weight of the flowers, purple and fully open at the apex of the arch, and still encased in sepal husks farther along toward the tip. In between were flowers in every stage of bloom, and it felt like a miracle, the way they were lined up in perfect order from green and unripe to purple and fully formed. “It’s like seeing a lifetime all at once,” Arc said, and she thought how he was her kindred spirit in appreciating the natural world.

  “It’s the roots we’re after.” She reached into her sack for a small trowel. “The taproot needs to be severed. Some are as long as a man’s leg.” It was what made the comfrey potent, the way it reached so deeply into the earth.

  Arc took his knife from the loop of cord where it hung at his waist, and together they began to dig the circular trough that exposed the roots around the tallest of the comfrey. Their elbows, their knuckles knocked several times and they said “I’m sorry” or laughed timidly, but neither shifted to th
e plant’s opposite side. The peat was rich and black and under their fingernails. A smear ran from Devout’s cheek to her earlobe until Arc rubbed it away with his thumb, no different than he once would have in the fields. She thought of his thumb on her cheek again. She imagined turning her head so that her parted lips brushed his fingers. And it was so pleasant, that ache in her loins. How could that be when the sensation teetered on raw? Then again rams mounted ewes, and the ewes bleated and bleated yet stayed put. Her skin awakened. She felt her nipples taut against the rough wool of her dress. How strange that she could so distinctly feel the woolen folds grazing her thigh, the seam that ran over her hip. The ache between her legs widened, not unlike the pang that sometimes spread through her jaw as she raised a first heaped spoonful to her mouth after a long day in the fields.

  She stood up urgently, too urgently, skittish of her mind, and she felt light-headed.

  Though she was only watching now, he continued to dig. In time he angled his knife deep into the trough, working to sever the taproot. “You can tug a little from the top,” he said.

  She snapped from pondering to wrapping her fingers around the plant’s stalk. She pulled gently and, when the comfrey did not budge, with more strength. Arc worked his knife and then she was tumbling onto her backside. She came to rest with purple flowers and hairy leaves quivering in her face.

  He did not laugh, not immediately, but she could see the effort it took. “You’re not hurt?” he said. And then he smiled, because she was not hurt, and it was funny, pitching backward onto boggy soil. It was the sort of thing that had brought laughter all their lives.

  “I see you’re not to be trusted,” she said. With Arc returned to the boy she had tilled alongside in the fields, the strangeness that had come over her faded, though still her skin remained acutely awake.

  They harvested the rest of the comfrey root, chatting as they worked—the fair weather, their hopes for a bountiful harvest, all she was learning from Crone. Once Devout’s sack was full, Arc slung it over his shoulder and said they should walk along the causeway, that the mist had grown dense. It would feel like passing through a cloud.

  A thick post reached upward from the start of the causeway to the height of a man’s waist and held the large wooden wheel that symbolized the god Begetter. The causeway belonged to him, their creator, as did the bog and pool, the muck and mire from which he had drawn their earliest forefathers.

  As was the custom of the bog dwellers stepping onto the causeway, she and Arc traced their fingers sunwise around the wheel. Without beginning, without end. Begetter brought the bog dwellers into this world and to him they would return. She placed her palm on her expanding chest, dwelling place of the breath he gave. Arc did the same—the wheel, his chest.

  They walked side by side, bumping each other as they went. They each put one foot in front of the other, and Arc said, “Like stepping into an abyss.” It was true that she could see the spot on the timbers where her next step would land but not the one after that. She liked bumping into Arc, the ease of it, the way neither of them made an effort to move apart. They took another step, and a farther timber shifted from hazy and gray to distinct and black.

  Except for their breaths and footsteps, and somewhere in the distance the faint tapping of a woodpecker, the world around them was muffled to silence by the heavy mist. When a new sound came, it was Arc who heard it first. He went still, and she strained to hear what he did. From the mist farther along the causeway came a sound like someone rushing toward them over the timbers. The lightness of the footsteps told her it was a child, though the quickness suggested otherwise. The footsteps became louder and then, just when Devout expected a hurtling child to burst from the mist, the footsteps stopped, and the bog became as it had been.

  She turned to Arc and he pulled her close. They stayed like that, bound together. She could feel his heart beating, his breath on her hair. How like those first warm breezes after Fallow, those first rays of sunshine potent enough to penetrate her cape. She pressed against him, wanted him closer still and yet it was not possible to be more tightly bound than they were.

  Restlessness came to her, a creeping desire to investigate the source of the footsteps. As she lifted her face to Arc’s, he said, “Let’s take a look.” They walked more quickly, though still the mist was an opaque gray mantle. Eventually they came to the causeway’s end, the open water beyond.

  “But there was a child?” Devout said. Our child, she thought.

  “Yes.”

  “So strange.” The vanished child, the heaviness of the mist.

  She could make out his pale eyes, his slender jaw, his flaxen hair hanging in loose waves. His slight eyebrows and delicate lashes had disappeared.

  “It could be last Hope or one still to come,” he said.

  It was true. The sights and sounds that might have tethered them to this particular day, this particular season—the one when the ewes lambed so well—were all lost in the mist.

  8.

  HOBBLE

  Flea bites riddle Seconds—who is second son to Carpenter, the clan’s head—most severely on his legs. He sits bare chested on a bench with his breeches hiked up past his knees. I apply the chickweed balm that dulls the itch on legs as strong and sturdy as a man’s. He is thirteen, same as I am, and his copper hair is streaked through with red and swoops across his forehead, almost hiding eyes of the same gray blue as the morning sky. I take my time, glance up to see those eyes closed and the corners of his mouth lifted.

  “All done,” I say.

  He opens his eyes but does not get up from the bench. “Maybe you’ll go for a walk with me?” he says.

  The question takes me by surprise, and I blurt, “Honey will help the bites you’ve already scratched.”

  “You’re ignoring my question?”

  “No.”

  “We’re to look for honey as we walk, then?” He finally gets up from the bench.

  I turn bashful and lower my gaze. He stands a head taller than I, but he ducks low and peeks upward so that I cannot avoid his face. His smile is as wide as land, and I think that a walk in the company of this boy might relieve me from scanning the southeastern horizon for the kicked-up dust of mounted Roman warriors. “Let’s go,” I say.

  I know a half-dozen hives and lead him to one hanging from a low branch of a sprawling beech. “That’s new,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve seen it before?”

  I understand what he is questioning. Had I come upon the hive another day through the usual means? Or had the site been revealed in some more mysterious way?

  Seconds is among the group I foraged with as a child. For the most part, the children proceeded haphazardly and squatted to peer beneath any old bush, as though they had no idea where they might dig up earthnut’s round tubers or pluck bilberry’s purple fruit. When we returned to the clearing, my sack always hung heaviest. I had overheard Sliver’s mother, Sullen, comment that I was industrious and Old Man say I knew earthnut’s preference for sunlight. While both claims were true, the children knew better. They had seen me wave a hand over a hollow that held no hint of the tan, pitted mushrooms that would soon sprout at the spot and say, “We’ll find morel here another day.” They had watched as I stood beneath the twiggy nest of a jackdaw and predicted the six eggs we would find rather than the more usual four. The children did not probe how I knew what I did, did not adopt an adult’s flawed reasoning and decide I had come that way before and inexplicably left a nest full of eggs undisturbed. The children simply accepted that I could make an accurate count of unseen eggs. Seconds had been no different from the others, but we had grown up since and for plenty of Black Lake youths, the mystery and magic so easily embraced in childhood had slipped beyond their reach.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m thinking about that game we sometimes played as children,”
Seconds says. “I liked that game.”

  It had been ages, but there were occasions when the children gathered around, and I shut my eyes. Sometimes I would open them, able to reveal the location of a particular stone. “At the spring, in the pool there,” I would say to my friends, “a stone almost like ice.” And off they would go, scrambling over one another to find the divined stone awaiting in the spring’s pool—a stone as smooth and milky as the surface of Black Lake during the harshest days of Fallow. I was not consistently able to name a location, and when I was not, I felt the weight of having let everyone down.

  I had decided to improve. To divine the location of a stone, I pinched my eyes shut and pictured a place I knew well—the spring, for instance. In my mind’s eye, I scanned the smooth gritstone basin, probed the shallow pool, and sometimes—just sometimes—I would find a stone to describe. I spent more time pinching my eyes shut—in the fields or as I lay on my pallet, even as I carried a slopping bucket of water into the clearing. As I labored or rested, my mind went to the mossy floor shaded by the stone altar, to the trampled earth alongside the sheep pen, to any place I could precisely recall. I made an inventory of divined stones: at the stone altar, an oval stone flecked with gold; at the sheep pen, a jagged stone cut through with a band of white. Later, with Sliver, Pocks, Seconds, and the others waiting with laced fingers tucked beneath their chins, I opened my eyes and reported a stone, not always one I had just that moment divined. With my mind blank of a newly discovered stone, I pulled from my inventory. “A stone flecked with gold,” I would say, “at the stone altar.”

  It meant the children came to my door, waited until I had finished milling the day’s allotment of wheat to flour. It meant no one minded my limp. I was unique, yes, not because I was lame but because I possessed a gift.