L S Johnson - [BCS282 S01] - Gert of the Hundred Read online

  Gert of the Hundred

  By L.S. Johnson

  1.

  The boy’s name was Nicholas, though it took Gert some days to learn it. At first he was just a shadow in her garden, watched by the spiders who strummed their webs as he passed them, vibrating intelligence on the invader: he touches leaves, he watches you. Only as it grew colder did he start dawdling in the doorway, then sitting by the hearth when she left the door open. Like a stray cat learning to trust.

  His name was Nicholas, he finally told her one day between spoonfuls of her soup, stuffing them in his mouth so quickly he spluttered while he talked. So thin he seemed at certain angles all bone; the mice paused in their transits to eye him, recognizing a fellow scavenger. His father, he said, was a builder on the tower. He had two sisters and his mother had iron in her stomach so she couldn’t work. He wasn’t yet old enough to help with the tower, though he would be in a year or two. But his mother was so sick now...

  “Ah,” Gert said, watching drops of soup soak into her tablecloth. Silently she filled in what he left unsaid. His father was one of the dozens of men building the new watchtower, their half-starved families living in tents and the children wild. At first the villagers had welcomed the tower and its implied protections, but their welcome soured when the builders arrived. They said it was because the builders were dirty and uncouth, sheltering thieves and whores in their number; but in truth it was because they had expected to be offered the work, and instead they were forced to provide food and share the river. A belligerent anger had slowly accumulated, souring every interaction; the moreso when guards appeared on the river bridge. Not that the villagers had cause to cross the river, before or now; but the conspicuous prohibition had only nettled them further, sharpening the tang in the air.

  But there was one thing Nicholas described that was new to Gert. “Iron in her stomach?” she asked, wincing at how her accent mangled the words.

  Nicholas explained, as easily as if she had perfect diction: bits of iron got in their food and water, and when you swallowed too much iron it made your vomit brown.

  “Ah,” Gert said again. This, too, was familiar, at least in its bones. She remembered when Ned Chandless was alive; how years of running the smokehouse had made him wheeze even in fresh air. And women who worked looms for Polly Steveson sometimes vomited threads of wool or little feathers from the bedding she sold all through the duchy.

  “I cannot cure her,” she said, forming the words with care. “But I can make it hurt less. Would you like that?”

  His eyes shone at her words. They worked all that afternoon, choosing the best leaves from the plants, Gert guiding his hands around the mortar to grind, grind. Heating the paste and loosening it with oil to ease digestion. Only once did she have to admonish him, when he made to kill the spider that had dropped onto the table. She caught his hand swiftly, shaking her head at him.

  “No,” she said. “Not them. Never them.”

  He looked surprised. “But they bite you and make you sick.” He showed her the livid red circles on his arm, laced by scratch marks.

  Again Gert shook her head. “You must never antagonize them,” she said. And then, at his uneasy expression, “they only injure those who threaten them.” It wasn’t a lie; more a careful kind of truth. She coaxed the spider into her cupped palm and carefully returned it to the beams where the others lived, aware of the boy’s wide eyes watching her. His simple acceptance—of her words, her accent, of her—warmed her in a way she had forgotten was possible.

  The shadows were lengthening when at last Gert handed him the little jar with its wax seal. He took it reverently, then suddenly burst into tears; she took him in her arms and held him.

  More children came after that first day. Little mouths big bellies the spiders sneered at her, the air shimmering with their derision. Each small face grim and wary until presented with hot food; her tomcat Matty was driven to the furthest corner of her bed by the sudden invasion, his grumbling noisy brats soothed by their enthusiastic petting. Three, four, sometimes as many as seven children, Nicholas directing them like a general. They cleaned Gert’s house and raked her garden in exchange for food and medicine and the warmth of her fire. Sometimes one would stay the night, Nicholas explaining in a whisper about an angry parent or too many sick siblings. The small restless body huddled against Gert’s for warmth; that sweet regular breath in her ear all night.

  Her house had never been so clean—everywhere, that was, save for the rafters, which remained swathed in their cobwebs. For she had told the children not them, never them, and they had protested as Nicholas had, then accepted her injunction as Nicholas had. Stopping everything to coax an errant spider to safety, as if it were perfectly natural. Each act of protection winning them a grudging silence from the spiders that Gert knew signaled acceptance.

  The village women still came each day, looking for lotions and remedies; anything to ease their stiff bodies, anything to ease this life. Bone-hard, the village women, worn down by the uncertainties of a life on the border far from the safety and comforts of the cities; they had frightened Gert when she first arrived, their faces burnished and their hands laced with scars from tanning and loom-work. They curled their lips at the children, and a few said unpleasant things to Gert about taking sides, about her past tainting her, but when had Gert ever not been tainted among them? She was other, to them. She would be always be other.

  They curled their lips, and a few said things, but soon Gert began finding bundles on her doorstep: castoff clothes and extra food, a doll or a carved animal worn from old love. Regular enough that she began to anticipate them; would sometimes hurry from her bed to see what was there, perhaps a sweater for the little girl whose own was threadbare or a doll to comfort the boy whose father was sick.

  Which was how Gert found herself face-to-face with Henry Chandless on a bright cool morning, his scarred eye livid against his tanned skin, his wiry grey hair neatly shorn as always. She was astonished, not only at finding him suddenly there but at how familiar he still was. Even the spot on her path was precisely where he would stand when he had courted her; his hands in his coat pockets as now, his gaze as steady.

  Only then he’d had both eyes, and for that Gert could never forgive herself.

  “They said you’re caring for the builders’ little ones,” he said without preamble. His hand flicked out from his coat pocket to indicate the fat sack on the ground beside him. “They can’t have much meat over there.”

  Gert realized she was wiping her hands on her apron, over and over. “Thank you,” she mumbled.

  Still he just stood there, his good eye fixed on her. “I never did say thank you for coming to Jane’s funeral. It was appreciated.”

  More words than he had spoken to her in years. Why now? What else had Nicholas disrupted, by coming to her? For the first time Gert felt a twinge of fear; it was all she could do to keep from looking nervously at the woods behind her cottage. She made herself smile brightly and nod, made herself hold out one hand for the sack.

  He caught it up easily and crossed the distance between them, blocking out the sun as he stood before her. Careful, the birds cried out. Careful, careful. And then, in vibrations more like a breeze than speech: she sees you, daughter.

  At the latter Gert twitched. “Well,” she said, taking the sack. The meat inside was so heavy she nearly dropped it. How much had he given her? How much more was she costing him?

  “If you need anything,” Henry said. He touched her arm, just the slightest pressure.

  From the road came a shout, and they both turned to see Nicholas walking up
, leading a little boy by the hand. “I must go,” Gert said quickly, and again, “thank you.”

  She hurried inside, swinging the meat bodily onto her table: a large slab of cured pork, as rare as diamonds. How much was she costing him yet again? He had wanted to go to the city and study, but the eye had ended that; ended too his prospects with most women in the area. His marriage to Jane had seemed an empty thing, two children sent away to school and Henry hardly seen with her. All because of Gert.

  From the window she watched as he passed Nicholas, paused to speak to him and tousle his hair. “Please don’t hurt him again,” she said aloud. “He won’t come back.”

  Above her head the cobwebs shivered, but there was no other response; not from the spiders or the birds, the mice or the wind, not from the trees in the forest or what lay in the darkness within.

  The children kept coming, and Henry Chandless did not return, and the forest stayed still and quiet. The days took on an unnerving silence, as if the world was holding its breath; though in anticipation of what, Gert could not say. The sky remained an icy blue; the brutal rhythm of falling trees gave way to a staccato murmur of tools; the elk began their passage despite the tower work. Soon a party of tanners left for the city, their carts laden with barrels of meat and the first cured skins. The only blight upon it all were the hints of sickness she now saw in the children: their chesty coughs announcing their arrival from well up the road, their dark sputum staining her handkerchiefs. Her garden picked raw as she tried to ease their discomfort; the sink full of jars as they brought back the empty ones to refill, begging for more for their parents, their siblings, themselves.

  When Nicholas brought yet another to her, the little girl’s eyes watery from coughing, Gert shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why don’t you move your tents further away from the blacksmiths?”

  For the first time Nicholas wouldn’t meet her eyes. “It’s not that,” he mumbled to the ground. “It’s the dirt.” When she tried to turn him to face her he twisted away. “I can’t say any more,” he said, his voice tight with fear.

  “If I knew, I could help...”

  But he remained silent no matter how she pressed him, and at last she let it go. When he left that evening, his thin shoulders hunching as he herded the children away, it was without his customary farewell hug. She watched him walk away from her, unable to shake the feeling that, somehow, she had just made a terrible mistake.

  2.

  Though she had little to barter with, the next day Gert went to the market, to see if she could find something to cheer Nicholas up. Something to relax him; perhaps get him to speak more about the dirt. Had the sky turning red affected something? But that was weeks ago and the children only sickening now.

  The market stalls were patchy. Winter was coming and people were being cagey, weighing out a few last profits against their own potential needs. But Gert had three jars of her liniment, popular among those with tanners in their family, and she had the spiders and the mice. In the basket, they would vibrate from the nearby trees, or she would hear the squeaking beneath the table before it was drowned out by the women’s shrieks. Each time she had found something special: the last of the dried berries, candies from the city, a hat knit of soft southern wool. The latter made Gert reach out to touch the familiar texture. She had played with balls of such yarns at her mother’s feet—

  A hush fell over the marketplace, and she turned with the others to see a knot of men walking up the road, dressed in dull homespun but wearing armbands showing the duke’s colors. In the middle was a lanky figure seemingly cocooned in furs, and Gert thought Nicholas but then she saw: not Nicholas but a young man, his face pale and his eyes shadowed.

  “That’s that Overseer,” the seller said, her voice low. “Come to answer about the river, I expect.”

  “The river?” Gert formed the words carefully. She hated speaking to the women; hated how they flinched at her accent and whispered behind her back.

  “Haven’t you seen?” another woman put in. “The water’s all dirty now. Did my washing last week and my good sheets got stained brown. Who’s going to replace them, I’d like to know.”

  “Who’s going to make sure they don’t steal our well-water,” a third woman said, and the other two nodded in agreement.

  The Overseer and his men passed them without so much as a glance, but Gert saw him. Saw the sheen of sweat on his face despite the chill air; saw how he scratched at a white-capped swelling on his neck. An insect bite but badly infected; for a moment it wasn’t the Overseer before her but Henry Chandless, clutching at his face and screaming while spiders cascaded from the trees above and the echoing voice whispered little daughter what is he worth?

  “My Paul tried to cross the bridge yesterday,” the seller said in a low voice. “They took his name before turning him back. Said we’re harassing the builders, they’re going to start reporting us.”

  “Harassing them?” The second woman laughed derisively. “They’re the ones harassing us, driving their carts through in the dead of night.”

  “Makes you wonder what’s in those carts,” the third woman said, and the three nodded again.

  The Overseer passed, and Gert found herself looking at Henry Chandless in his stall at the far side of the market, his useless eye as white as the infected bite. She had understood, instinctively, that Henry’s eye was a warning: she was not to leave with him as he wanted. Three years of study, he had explained, his hands deep in his coat pockets, his steady gaze warm. We would have to live simply, just a couple of rooms. And Gert had looked up to the heavens, alight with emotion, with promise—and watched as spiders rained down like some dread snowfall.

  Little daughter, remember your promise.

  She pushed the memory away, taking deep breaths to steady herself. A warning, one that she had heeded every day since. What then of the Overseer, nibbled and sickened, being played with like a hunter with its prey? What then of Nicholas and the children, their bodies dotted with bites? What were they warning of?

  Across the market Henry watched the party pass, then spat in their wake before turning back to his customer. As he worked he glanced up, catching Gert’s eye. His smile truncated by the feathering scar tissue that ran down his cheek: her promise writ into his very flesh. Gert looked away only to find the women watching her, their expressions both sly and wary. Hunters with their prey. She knew the inn would be whispering about her tonight; how she had shown up at the market and stared at Henry Chandless. No one had ever called her witch or blamed her outright, but they had been colder in their dealings after he lost his eye, and she could not in turn blame them for it. Her face was burning as she hurried from the village, fleeing their disapprobation, fleeing what she had done.

  At first Gert told herself Nicholas was needed at home, or perhaps was ill; told herself too that without his leadership the other children were too shy to come. But two, three days passed without any word, and by the fourth she knew it had been another mistake to wait for him.

  Thus she bundled herself against the cold clear day and left Matty dozing by the banked fire in the hearth. She walked not through the village but to the south, where the river became shallow; where there were no guards to ask her name or wonder at her accent, a hundred leagues from where it belonged.

  She picked her way across the stones, her breath a steady rasp in her throat. In the spring the river swelled far above the rocks, but in winter it came in choked rivulets that did little more than splash her shoes. As she reached the opposite bank, though, she understood what had aroused the women’s concern. The drying splashes left rust-colored stains on her shoes and stockings, and when she let the water run into her hand it had a reddish, cloudy look to it.

  Past the trees dotting the rise was the skeletal framework of the tower, its upper reaches colonized by crows calling hurt hurt hurt. So many birds that they seemed the black fester of some monstrous wound, and it was a wound, she saw as soon as she reached th
e top of the rise. They had cleared more than just the land at the tower’s base; they had gouged deep into the forest, large swaths cut to still-raw stumps. It was as if some god’s hand had smote the earth, crushing everything beneath. The sparse grass beneath her feet was withered all the way to the site; the apple trees she remembered seemed to have twisted upon themselves.

  From the river to the forest edge the ground was dotted with little flags. Different colored scraps of fabric fluttered in the slight breeze, their tiny spots of color like some kind of perverse flowers. She inspected one, wondering at the strange letters and numbers inscribed on the fabric. A kind of code. Carefully she drew up the flag’s stem; it turned out to be a long, thin metal rod.

  The moist dirt clinging to the bottom was rust-red.

  Gert looked from the rod to the watchtower. The oblong base was nearly finished, the hewn stones spiked with wood framing whose rough edges gleamed raw in the sunlight. Mortar still oozed from between the uppermost layers. One long side was oriented east, where their enemies resided, held in check only by the treaty; only now, looking at the tower, did she realize the other face would look west—

  —she followed the tower’s sight-line across the river to the village and the start of the city road.

  A watchtower that could watch its own people. A soil rich with some kind of ore. The villagers had never settled on this side of the river; planting had proven useless, and the bridge became precarious in the spring. And what use were ores for a people dependent on meat? It wasn’t as if they could be sold on. The treaty had specifically forbidden the further creation of armaments, and to enforce it the duchy had taxed iron, copper, and tin beyond reckoning. Every ounce of the metals was accounted for.

  But the duchy itself was here now, building the watchtower.

  Gert slid the rod back into place, pushing the dirt to make it look undisturbed, and continued on.

  Between her and the tower were dozens of tents glittering with frost, a single large fire burning in their midst. Far more than she had realized. The camp was still and silent save for a few hunched figures tending the blaze; all activity was at the tower and a long wooden overhang that sheltered three roaring furnaces, with cut trees stacked nearby like a giant’s woodpile. Further in the distance they had dug a deep gouge in the earth, red water running in troughs away from its opening, the lip framed by stones piled like so many cairns...