Maresi Red Mantle Read online

  Each time I have doubted the way, when a path has forked or disappeared into the undergrowth, Grey Lady has chosen the way with perfect composure, and each time I have soon realized that she made the correct choice. She is smarter than I, this mule. I do not know what I would have done without her.

  I have travelled through the spring, witnessed the first sprouting leaves, and birdsong has followed me along my path. Yet it seems like an eternally timid spring that never manages to take the leap and burst into full greenery and warmth. The farther north I go, the cooler the regions become and the later spring arrives. It never occurred to me that spring, which brings mild breezes and good travelling weather to Menos, is a time of rain in Rovas.

  I believe that I am following the same route that I took south eight years ago when I left Rovas, but I cannot be certain. It was so long ago, and everything was so new and frightening that I did not pay very close attention to the route. I was only a child, loaded onto a cart and driven away from Rovas to the southern mountains. From there I was transferred onto a donkey’s back, led along the mountain pass and loaded onto another cart for the remainder of the journey to Valleria. I fear I may not be able to find my village. It is an unremarkable settlement, and when I ask the folk I meet in the villages they only shake their heads in answer.

  And Sister O, there is another thing I fear, and I can only admit this to you: I fear hunger.

  At the Abbey I got used to always having a full belly. Sometimes we had simple, humble fare, but in any case I have not had to go hungry in eight years. Now I am met by the faces of people who know the true meaning of hunger, and I remember. I remember when we slaughtered our last pig. I remember going hungry for so long that I forgot what it was like to feel full. I remember eating things not intended for human consumption: rotten seeds, leaves and grass, animal carcasses, boiled leather. I remember the taste of bread made with sawdust. I remember how swollen my stomach became, and how thin Anner’s limbs were, and how diarrhoea weakened her body day by day.

  It appears that the recent harvests have been plentiful. The village folk have bread to give me and sometimes they invite me into their homes and feed me porridge and hard rye bread, and once I was even given salted fish. People only eat meat at this time of year if they have had several good harvests in a row. Approaching the villages, I am met by little flocks of hens and sheep, and pig-men herding long-legged, shaggy pigs while playing willow pipes. I remember making pipes from pussy willow when I was a girl, and still recall the taste of the green willow. It does my heart good to hear them. During the hunger winter all the animals in our village were slaughtered.

  Nonetheless, it is evident that these people have known hunger, before I left and while I have been away. The children are stunted and not nearly as round and rosy as our junior novices. No one has any extra body fat. The animal flocks are small in relation to the size of the villages. I am afraid, Sister O. Of course, I knew that life here would be different from the one we lead at the Abbey, but there is so much that I had forgotten.

  Most of all I am afraid of what awaits me when I eventually find my village. Is everybody still alive?

  I am trying to be strong, Sister O. I am trying to be brave. Yet there are days when my heart is as heavy and dark as the wool of my cloak.

  Yours,

  MARESI

  Dearest Jai,

  It was early evening when I suddenly recognized where I was. I saw a babbling brook where I used to play as a child! I saw the meander where we used to race our leaf boats, and the footbridge we would run to and cheer our crafts on. I was tired, and so was my mule, and I was about to set up camp for the night, but the sight of the brook filled my limbs with renewed vigour and my heart with a longing so strong that not even a stubborn mule could stop me. I dismounted to lighten her load, and led her over the footbridge and in among the newly ploughed fields. There was no proper road to follow, only a path that ran along various ditches; but even in the fading light, my feet found their way. Jump here; careful of the slippery edge of this ditch; this is where mushrooms grow in autumn. I led my mule, and she must have sensed my excitement because she was less resistant than usual.

  I approached the village from the south rather than from the forest path that runs to Jóla, the neighbouring village to the west. I stood on the hillside overlooking two black fields and saw the houses nestled together against a backdrop of deepening dusk. Between me and the village the mill stream flowed, urgent and thick with foam after the rapid rains of spring. On the other side of the stream was a medley of barns and sheds, and beyond them were four houses facing in towards each other to form a protective ring around a central yard. The forest surrounded them like a dark curtain. Smoke was streaming from all four chimneys, but there was not a soul to be seen. Nothing but a little light seeping out from the edges of the closed window shutters. The animals were in their barns and hen houses for the night. My heart had not pounded so intensely since what happened in the Abbey crypt.

  My mule snorted and began plodding down the path that runs between the fields, and I followed slowly. The stream was surging, and even slopped onto the footbridge, making the planks slippery. With the rush of the stream filling my ears, I walked in among the houses that leant into each other, low and grey. The air smelt of manure and smoke and wet earth. I took a deep breath, and it made my chest ache. I tethered my mule to our home’s guardian tree. There before me was my mother and father’s cottage, grey and dark in the rain, just like the last time I had seen it. I walked to the door and lifted my hand to knock. In that moment, the moon rose above the trees and shone its light upon the worn wood. I opened my fist, ran my fingers along the flaking wood and thought of all the doors in the Abbey: the brown door of Hearth House with its bready scent, the rose-patterned marble door of the Temple of the Rose, and the honey-gleaming double doors to the library in Knowledge House. I leant on the door and inhaled deeply. It smelt of damp wood.

  In Rovas people enter each other’s homes freely during the daytime, but come nightfall the doors are latched. I knocked.

  “Who goes there?” came a deep man’s voice. My father’s voice. I was barely able to muster a response.

  “Blessings on your hearth, Father.”

  There was a moment of silence, followed by the sound of the latch being lifted from the inside. Then the door swung open and I was dazzled by light. All I could see was a tall, thin figure before me. Then two strong arms pulled me into an embrace and my father mumbled into my hair.

  “My daughter. My daughter, my daughter, my daughter.”

  Then I heard my mother’s voice. My eyes had begun to adjust to the light, and over Father’s shoulder, I saw her. She was sitting by the fireplace with knitting in her lap, holding her hands over her heart.

  “Maresi. Is it really you?”

  I loosened myself from Father’s embrace and looked up into his dear face. He was just as I remembered him: warm brown eyes; a large, broad nose; flat, protruding ears. Only he had more wrinkles and his beard was a little greyer.

  Mother rose from her chair and came towards me with outstretched hands. Her braid of thick brown hair shone in the hearth light, and she did not look much changed either. She was even thinner than when I had left, if such a thing were possible. I took hold of her hands and we looked at one another. She tried to speak, but only shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. She pulled me close and held me tight.

  “I thought I’d never see you again—never again, I thought. My child, are you home now?”

  “Yes Mother,” I replied. “I am home now.”

  Mother smelt just as I remembered, of flour and cabbage and wool. Immediately I began to weep. I wept like the nine-year-old I was when I left my mother and father and everybody I had ever loved. I never wanted to let Mother go again.

  Her bony shoulders against my body. Her hands stroking my hair. I felt them more intensely, more deeply, than anything I had ever felt in my life.

  She withdrew sudden
ly and exclaimed through sobs: “Oh, but you’re soaked through! This won’t do, you’ll get all sooty!”

  I undressed in front of the fire while Mother found me some dry clothes, and I looked around our beloved old cottage. Everything was exactly the same: the trodden earth floor with a thick layer of clean straw; the table and benches at the hearth; my parents’ and Akios’s bedrooms along one side of the house; the little animal pen in the entranceway. The shutters were closed against the night and the rain, and a glorious fire blazed in the fireplace.

  “This will have to do,” Mother said, handing me a striped skirt with embroidered flowers around the hem and a threadbare, short-sleeved smock. As I dressed, she hung my own clothes up by the fire to dry. She eyed the trousers and shirt with an incredulous expression. Then she handed me a woven belt of red, white and black.

  “I was thinking of you when I wove this,” she said. “With each colour I wove in my hope that you were still alive and that we’d see each other again some day.”

  Just as I tied the belt around my waist Akios came through the door and stamped the mud from his boots. When he caught sight of me he stopped and his eyes grew large.

  “Maresi!” he cried. “My sister!”

  It felt strange to be called “sister” by a man, and by someone who truly is my own flesh and blood. I grinned.

  “Akios! You have grown a beard!”

  He stroked his downy chin and grinned.

  “Can’t be a farmer without a beard,” he answered.

  I ran to my brother and embraced him tightly. But Akios embraced me more tightly still. Then he tugged at a wisp of my wind-tangled hair.

  “Scraggle-hair,” he teased.

  “Knobble-knees,” I replied, and poked him in the belly, but realized that the old nickname no longer suited him. I am two years older than Akios, but he has grown a head taller than me, and not even the loose nightshirt he was wearing could hide the fact that his shoulders were broad and his arms were firm with muscles. His hair, once the same shade of nut-brown as Náraes’s and mine, had lightened and was hanging down to his shoulders.

  “Little brother, you are all grown up!” I exclaimed, and we both laughed until we could hardly breathe.

  There was no time to exchange stories at such a late hour. We were all tired and content simply to sit in each other’s company and look at each other’s faces in the dying firelight, while Mother fed me up with hard bread and the last scrapings of the evening porridge. She kept leaning over to touch my hair, my cheeks, my hand.

  “Tomorrow I’ll cook something good and tasty,” she said. “To celebrate.”

  “Tomorrow,” I repeated with a yawn.

  Finally I was warm and dry. Akios offered me his bed in his small room, saying that he would sleep on the ledge above the fireplace. I could hardly wait to crawl under the blanket Mother had woven and sleep to the faintly familiar sound of rain on the wood-shingle roof. But there was something I had to ask first.

  “Náraes. Is she…?”

  Father looked at me questioningly, then smiled and took my hand.

  “Náraes is alive and well. She has her own household and family now. You’ll see her tomorrow.”

  I am writing this in the little bedroom, with one small tallow candle as the only source of light. The others are already sleeping, for dawn brings another day of hard toil. I am almost falling asleep too, but I wanted to write to you first, and to capture this feeling of being safely indoors, full and dry and warm. Home.

  It is good to be home, Jai.

  Your friend,

  MARESI

  My dear Ennike Rose,

  I am home and I have spent my first night under my parents’ roof. I awoke with a dry mouth and thick head and could not remember where I was. I was lying on a real mattress, and not the bare ground as I had got used to on my journey. I could smell clean bedclothes and wool. I could hear murmuring voices and the dull patter of rain against the wood-shingle roof. For a moment I thought I was back in my bed in Novice House, but the sounds and smells were all wrong.

  I opened my eyes when the aroma of rowanberry porridge filled my nostrils. Though Sister Ers cooks up all sorts of delicious dishes in Hearth House, no one can make rowanberry porridge with honey like my mother. I sat up and realized where I was—home! Home in my parents’ house, under a blanket woven by my own mother. I threw on a smock, blouse and skirt and tamed my hair as much as I could.

  Father and Akios were sitting at the table with a grown woman with a thick, nut-brown braid, and two small children—one on her lap, the other on Father’s. Mother stood at the hearth stirring something in a great iron pot, which Father had bought from a pedlar when I was very little.

  “There she is now,” said Father. “Come and say hello to your nieces.”

  The woman with the brown braid was my elder sister Náraes! Passing the little one to Akios, she stood up and wrapped her arms around me.

  “You’re alive,” she said. “You’re really alive! Mother came to tell us early this morning but I almost didn’t believe it.” She let go and looked at me in earnest. “I’ve seen you in my dreams, Maresi. I’ve seen you walk in the shadows of death.”

  “I have indeed walked there, but not through death’s door,” I replied, equally earnest, gazing upon my sister. I barely recognized her. She is three years older than I, and when I left Rovas she was younger than Heo is now. She has aged. Her cheeks are hollow and her eyes appear large in her narrow face. Her hair is still thick and shiny, and she wears it in a long braid down her back with several unruly curls around her face. I used to think that you looked alike, but now she is a grown woman while you are the Rose, a blooming maiden.

  And she is with child.

  “Come, you must meet your nieces,” said Náraes. “That little savage on Father’s lap is Maressa.” She looked at me with a hint of shyness. “I named her after you. I hope you don’t mind.”

  I looked at the girl. She is a little over three years old, with fair curls like a fluffy cloud around her face, and curious brown eyes that inspected me seriously. I took Náraes’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “And the baby is Dúlan, born last spring. She’s teething.”

  Dúlan was sitting on Akios’s lap, gnawing on her hand, dribbling saliva down her chest. She has the same bright, wide eyes as Geja, but her legs and cheeks are not as chubby as Geja’s were at that age.

  “And when is the third coming?” I asked.

  Náraes glanced down at her belly and smiled. “In autumn, after harvest. I’ll be at my biggest just when I’m most needed in the fields! Tauer says it’s a boy.”

  Tauer is an old man in the neighbouring village whom the local villagers often turn to for advice on ailments and childbirth.

  “Come and sit now,” said Mother, and set the porridge out on the table. “It’s late and the men have to return to the fields.”

  When I looked at Father and Akios I saw that their hair was wet. They had already been out working. I felt ashamed.

  “It’s the journey, Mother. I was so tired, I never usually…”

  She came and kissed me on the forehead. “I understand just fine. Nobody’s blaming you, Maresi.”

  “I have to go out first,” I mumbled.

  I took down my red cloak, nearly dry now, from the hook by the door where Mother had hung it up the previous evening. I went outside wearing the cloak draped over my shoulders and Father’s great big boots on my feet.

  The morning was almost over. It was raining and there was hardly any birdsong. I followed the path around the corner to the privy, which is where it has always been, with one of the best views over the village. I saw the stream running through the valley behind the outbuildings. Around the village spanned the fields, dark and muddy, and beyond them the forest, dark and silent in the falling rain. Smoke was rising from the chimneys and, unlike the previous night, the village showed signs of life. There was a clatter from a cow barn as
a girl threw the breakfast leftovers to a flock of pecking hens. She did not see me and I did not recognize her, but by her age I guessed that she must be Lenna Adonsdaughter, who was a babe in arms when I left Rovas. A woman with a sweeping brown skirt was fetching water from the stream, but I could not see who she was from such a distance.

  When I was finished in the privy I suddenly remembered Grey Lady and rushed to where she was, still tied to the home tree. She glared at me with her mouth full of freshly sprouted twigs. I rubbed her between the ears and begged her forgiveness a hundredfold before untying her and leading her down to the stream for a drink. We encountered no one and I hurried her along as fast as I could. My mouth was watering at the thought of Mother’s rowanberry porridge.

  The house was full of clattering spoons and chatter. I kicked off Father’s boots, hung my cloak up by the door and shook the water from my hair. My place at the table was waiting. I took a seat and was presented with a bowl of steaming porridge. My family, my own flesh and blood, were talking and laughing around me, but I was too busy eating to speak.

  “Who is your husband?” I finally managed to say through a mouthful of food. Náraes smiled.

  “Jannarl.”

  I looked up.

  “From next door?”

  She smiled. “Yes. That’s where I live now.”

  I dimly recalled a fair-haired youth with blemished skin who used to joke around with Náraes whenever we took grain down to the mill by the stream to be ground. I looked at my sister. It was strange to think of her as a married woman with two children and a third on the way. Strange that she shared her bed with a man every night, and no longer lived at home with Mother and Father. Jannarl’s father had a respectable farmstead, with more fields and a larger house than ours. Now Náraes has moved there, left our family and become a part of his. Now she and Jannarl’s mother run the home together.