Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley Fantasy Magazine, Volume 2 Read online

  The frown did not improve Geoffrey’s looks. “Wait a bit, wait a bit. Not too hasty. Maybe I can pay a bit. Just a bit, mind you. Barmaids’re plentiful, and you’re, well, nothing special.”

  “No.”

  Geoffrey shifted his considerable bulk, and his breath rattled deep in his throat. “Maybe one shilling a month, if you’re competent.”

  “Maybe two?”

  The cook turned and shook her head slightly. Geoffrey sighed. “I can’t ruin myself for a vagabond,” he said. “A shilling and sixpence.” Behind him, the cook turned back to her stew.

  “Done,” Elowyn said. “Should I begin right now?”

  Geoffrey rose ponderously to his feet. “No time like the present, I guess. Aprons are in the pantry behind you. Start at the bar.”

  Lord, how easily and unwelcomely it came back to her: serving the ale and the stronger drink, bantering with every vile-tongued, leering rascal with the price of a cup, and pretending to like it; avoiding (when she was lucky) the quick, insidious grope of dirty hands, reaching to squeeze her breast through her clothing, or, worse, sweeping up beneath her skirts to graze her naked leg. Before the night had dwindled to the inevitable six or seven maudlin or stupefied drunks, the old ache in her back returned, growing up from her heels, up the backs of her legs, like an evil vine, to bear its tiresome fruit just above her hips.

  So tired was she at the end of the day that she unwisely allowed Geoffrey to show her to the little cubicle where her pallet and blanket were spread on the floor. So despairing was she that she was not really surprised when Geoffrey pulled her against him. When she pushed him away, he put his hands on her again. They struggled, and that was when Geoffrey found the money pouch. “That’s mine!” she cried as he ripped it away.

  He hefted it in the dark. She heard the clinking of coins. “Thieves about,” he said. “I’ll just keep it safe for you. Now—”

  “No,” she told him. “Take the purse, but—”

  His hands were at her. She scratched and pushed. Finally, wheezing, he growled, “I’ll have the money anyway, vixen. Fool, you’ll make nothing extra like that. Customers’re willing to pay summat extra for a bit of fun, even with a plain-looking slut. But you—pfah! I’d sooner lie with old Teresa.” He pushed himself away and out the door, but the stench of his sweat lingered, with the prickling memory of his stubbled jowls against her throat and cheek.

  She drew the ratty blanket up to her neck and clutched it there. “Oh, Mat,” she moaned. In the dark, tears stung her eyes, overflowed, and ran first warm, then cold, down her temples and into her grey-streaked, mousy hair.

  Brother Xavier—that was the young monk’s name—brought Mat his supper of broth, bread, and peas. He said before he was asked, “Not yet, Mat. We haven’t found her yet.”

  “It’s been seventeen days!” Mat protested.

  “I know, I know. Here, please, eat.”

  Mat gnawed the dark bread and sipped at the broth. “My wife,” he said. “Something’s happened to her.”

  “We are still seeking her,” Brother Xavier said.

  Mat looked around. The business of looking, of seeing, was still new to him; it seemed that the little cell broke new on his sight each morning, born wondrously out of the black night. It was plain enough, three high narrow windows let in bars of sunlight. A simple chest, a bedstead that held a straw mattress, two straight chairs, and high on the wall facing the bed, a wooden crucifix. Mat found delight in it all still. He marveled at the texture of the stones that made up the wall, the cunning fit of one among its fellows, at the different ways the dark wood of the cross looked, with the hazy glow of morning on it, or the deep shadow of noon, or the warm gleam of the setting sun. His eyes were as hungry as his stomach.

  “Father Berien has spoken to the Duke of Welford about you,” said Brother Xavier. “Would you like to meet the young duke?”

  “I’d like to find my wife,” Mat said. He finished the broth and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. His beard bristled. Elowyn always kept him clean-shaven. When Brother Xavier had confessed him and shriven him, on the day of the miracle, the cup of ritual wine had been borne on a salver of polished silver; in it, Mat had seen his face for the first time in forty years: seamed, red, and rough, the eyes dark under hanging brows, the cheeks lined with care and travel. Since that first shocking glance, Mat had shaved himself only infrequently, not caring to see that countenance again in any mirror.

  Brother Xavier now bowed his head, as if in silent prayer. His tonsure was startlingly white in the dark nest of his hair. “We are trying to find her,” he said, finally. “But no one recalls a woman such as you describe. And she has not come to the church, though everyone knows you are here.”

  Mat reached for a flagon he kept on the chest. The brothers made their own wine, very good though a bit thin for Mat’s taste. “It’s me,” Mat said. “I’m so damned ugly.”

  “Brother Mat, that’s not so. You’re a man, like other men.”

  “But next to her, I tell you, next to her, I’m like—like a jackass next to a prize mare. Like a crow next to a dove. How could she love me, she that could see me?”

  “And yet she married you, you say, seven years ago. And she’s been beside you ever since.” Brother Xavier sighed. “I know little of women or of their hearts, Brother Mat, but this I do know: a woman who has given you seven years of her life will not desert you. She will turn up, never fear. But of this visit to the young Duke of Welford—”

  Folk thronged all summer to the place where miracles happened. The inn seemed always full of hungry, thirsty men. Elowyn grew to live with the dull ache in her bones; she did well enough as a barmaid—though she did without the “summat extra,” she fended off the leering proposals of the inn patrons with forced smiles and false wit. Soon, as she became more used to the place and to her new master, she put a decisive end to Geoffrey’s visits to her room. He roared and grumbled, but went off instead to the cubicle of a more willing servant and after a day or two seemed to have forgotten all about Elowyn.

  One day dragged into the next, and through them all, Elowyn saw no more of the world than she could see through the dim windows and open front door of the Saracen’s Arms, and most of what she saw was an endless procession of pilgrims, seeking entertainment, enlightenment, or a blessing from the healed blind man of Roodwell.

  Geoffrey welcomed all, not believing in miracles himself, as he said, but well content to take more money in, more, always more; Elowyn knew, as indeed she had known from the beginning, that she probably would never see Mat’s purse again. Geoffrey kept it, she supposed, with the rest of his hoard, behind a loose stone in the fireplace of his own bedroom. It mattered little, for she felt no need of the money. She felt only the familiar ache of despair.

  On the other hand, she was hidden away, safe in the bustle of the crowds. So she worked for well over a month, until one evening when she served wine to a loud table dominated by a young man come to town for the first time.

  “I don’t believe that beggar ever was blind,” he declared as Elowyn set a cup before him. “How could a beggar afford such a healing?”

  Elowyn’s hand froze.

  A steady customer slapped the table and said, “I saw it, I tell you. He had no eyes. Heard that melted silver splashed in his face when he was younger, apprentice to a silversmith. Aye, just pits, that’s all, burnt out and the color of raw liver. And the water is free to all, I tell you—that’s the way of the monks, you know.”

  “Pour, wench,” the young man ordered. She did so, stiff with listening. “Priests aren’t like that. Toll for this, tax for that—probably he was a mummer, a fraud, meant just to draw people and donations into the church. Miracle!” He raised the cup again and drained it at a gulp. “Don’t talk to me about such nonsense as miracles!”

  Another young fellow, holding his cup to be filled, said, “You can ask the man yourself, you know. He’s working up at the stables now.”

  The
man who had seen Mat’s burned eyes said, “I never heard that.”

  “Truth! The monks offered him bed and bread for as long as he wanted, but he said he had to get out of the cloister. So Brother Xavier—don’t know if you know him, he’s all right, for a monk, better than most of them—anyway, last week Brother Xavier got him a job, working for old Hubert at the stables, pitching hay and wiping down horses. We can see him if you want—”

  “Wench! Over here!”

  The voice pulled Elowyn away. She served wine to two other tables, then went back to the first. The group had gone, leaving behind three copper pennies. She took them with numb fingers, her eyes far away.

  Next morning, when old Teresa, the cook, went to haggle for the purchase and delivery meat, Elowyn went with her.

  Roodwell was a confusion of stone and wooden buildings, some grand, some plain, some wretched, and now it was a sea of faces. Elowyn broke away from the old woman and made her way around the fringes of crowds, skirting street acrobats and jugglers, walking through clouds of spice-fragrant but alien cooking smells, at last seeing in the distance the stables.

  Many stables stood there, managed by different men, but she discovered the one she wanted soon enough: it was owned by the man named Hubert, and, oddly, it reminded her of the inn, a splintering grey structure that promised the barest of comforts to its animal guests. Hubert himself, an old man with the broad shoulders of a former blacksmith, stood there, and Mat cowered, beside him.

  “Blind!” Hubert roared, his chest working like a bellows. “Stone blind, and Roodwell’s water healed him! Come talk to the blind man, only a penny!”

  Elowyn dared not get close. She watched from a distance, as several men and women stepped up, paid their pennies—all the coppers went into Hubert’s pocket, she noted, none into Mat’s—and they spoke for a moment with Mat. She saw her husband nod, his head bowed, his gaze in the dust, she caught just the sound, not the words, of his mumbled replies to their inquiries. She heard derisive laughter, saw once the haunted look in his new, clear eyes, and felt her heart twist within her.

  A stableboy led some horses into the stalls behind Hubert and Mat. When he came out again, Elowyn beckoned him and pressed a penny into his hand. “Where does the blind man sleep?”

  The boy seemed dull, but the penny brightened his wits. “Up in t’loft,” he said. “Among e hay. Old Hubert’s too cheap to spare a room for him in t’house.”

  Elowyn pushed away and plodded back to the inn.

  Mat lay in the scratchy straw, above the dung reek of the stable. I can stand no more, he told himself. Long had it been since he had called any man “master,” and Hubert insisted on that title for himself. But worse, blind as he had been, Mat had never felt himself more a beggar than now. The center of a circle of eyes, he was the butt of a thousand jokes, a show given to a doubting and jeering audience—and alone all the while, so alone.

  Soon it would be night, and with night came a chance of escape. If only this time his nerve did not fail him. If only he could get away.

  As evening came to Roodwell, Hubert, as usual, had gone to seek wine and revelry. From the inns in the next street came distant sounds of music, brawling, and laughter. Through the open loft window drifted the dusk light that preceded nightfall. When at last Mat sat up to pull on his boots, he started and realized that he was not alone. A skinny, dull-looking drudge stood hesitant in the dim light from the open door.

  “Run away, Mat Macrone,” she said in the softest of voices. “You were never born to be a show and a servant. Run away!”

  Mat’s breath caught in his throat. Before he even knew he was about to move, he had burst out of the hay and swung down from the loft, dropping not three steps from the woman. She cried out, in fright or anger, and turned from him—

  “Elowyn,” he said, catching her by the elbows.

  The woman shook her head. “No,” she said roughly.

  “You can never fool my hands or my ears,” he said. “Elowyn, turn and look at me.”

  “No. Go away.” Anguish brimmed in her voice.

  “Elowyn… my love.”

  A noise from the street—as if someone were raising a cry of “Thief!”—jerked her head around. Her face was haggard and drawn in the half-light. “Go or they’ll catch you,” she said.

  It was as if he had not heard: Mat reached to pull Elowyn to him, and again she twisted away. “Can’t ye see I’m ashamed, you fool?” she wailed.

  “Ashamed—of me?” Mat asked, his voice appalled.

  “No, no. You don’t understand.”

  “Elowyn, I understand you are my wife. If you no longer want to be my wife, I—I no longer want to live.”

  “Don’t. Such words are a sin.”

  “I don’t care. Damn Roodwell! Damn its healing waters. It’s brought me nothing but grief. I was happier blind.”

  “Because then you could not see me.”

  He could only look in bafflement at the averted figure. “No,” he said, at last. “Because it’s made me something I never was and never wanted to be. I’ve seen my own face. A bad face it is, and I cannot blame you if—”

  She whirled on him then, anger hot in her eyes. “You’ve a kind face and a decent one, and I’ll hear no more of that, Mat Macrone! Look at me! Damn it, look at me! What do you see?”

  Mat’s face broke into a smile, a smile like all the sunrises of spring rolled into one. “Faith,” he said, his voice trembling a little, “I see hair like soft gold, and a skin as white as milk, and two lovely roses in your cheeks—”

  “Don’t mock me!” Elowyn buried her face in her hands. “I’m plain! I’m homely! My hair is brown as a mouse, and my skin is dark with wind and the sun. I told you all those lies—”

  The cry of “Thief” had subsided, but all of a sudden they burst through the door: Geoffrey, bushy-haired and wild-eyed in the light of a torch, two stolid wardens, and a young, troubled-looking monk.

  “There she is!” roared Geoffrey. “She’s the one who took my money!”

  Mat stepped in front of Elowyn, shielding her. “Brother Xavier, what is this?” he demanded.

  The young monk shook his tonsured head. “Mat, this is an innkeeper who swears that this woman robbed him.”

  “She did! She stole a purse with silver and copper in it from me.” To Elowyn, he hissed, “You’ll give it back, whore. And then I’ll take you to bed and teach you manners, ugly as you are.”

  “Mat,” she whispered, “it’s our money, our purse.”

  “This is my wife,” Mat said, and his voice had never rung as it did now.

  “Give Brother Xavier the purse.” He closed his eyes tight.

  “It is leather, studded with eight smooth brads,” Mat said, eyes still shut. “There is a nick on the inside of the flap, just to the right of the bend. You will find an embossed circle, with a line through it—the sign of Carradon, the maker, who gave it to me.”

  “It is his purse,” the monk said.

  Mat opened his eyes.

  The wardens were looking at Geoffrey and not in a friendly way.

  “I believe a thief has no right to cry ’thief’ on another,” Elowyn said.

  “Indeed not,” the monk replied. “Geoffrey, I see a long penance and a hard one for the wrongs you have done.”

  Whatever protest Geoffrey began to make was stopped in his mouth by Mat’s fist, sudden and incontestable. Geoffrey simply collapsed backward, between the stolid wardens. One did stoop, prudently enough, to pick up the burning torch the innkeeper had dropped. Behind them the barn doorway was beginning to fill with spectators. Geoffrey gurgled and moaned, finally forcing himself up on his elbows.

  In the torchlight, Mat looked at Elowyn in undisguised wonder. “You are even more beautiful than you said,” he murmured.

  Forgetting the monk, the wardens, and the onlookers, Elowyn wailed, “But I’m plain! I told you lies, Mat—all lies!”

  “No.” He put his hand under her chin and lifted her fac
e to his. “If gold is not the color of your hair, it is gold that lies, not you. If milk is not the color of your forehead, why milk is the falsehood. Oh, Elowyn, don’t you know I measure all beauty by you? I could always see you, Elowyn. Not with my eyes, but with my heart. No splash of water is going to change that.”

  A derisive guffaw choked off short in some male throat. For as the others looked from Mat’s adoring face to her, astonishment came to them, and awe.

  From the ground, Geoffrey growled through bloody teeth, “They’re in it together! I tell you the money is mine! Anything this bitch has is mine—”

  Elowyn whirled on him, but before the angry words could leap from her tongue, the innkeeper fell back, stammering in confusion: “Mine! Yours. I mean, of course, yours, all yours, my—my lady.”

  And then the wonder of the true miracle fell upon her. I am beautiful, she thought; and with the thought came the reality. She could not say for certain that any thing about her had changed. But as they walked from the stable, the crowd melted away before them, murmuring, falling silent as they caught sight of her, and men looked after her passage with yearning, women with envy, all with fascination.

  They left Roodwell behind them that night. In all their ways and wanderings that were to follow, Mat and Elowyn never met another miracle, but then, neither wanted to. As Mat always said afterward, two miracles are enough for anyone but a knave or a fool.

  About Deborah Wheeler and “Under the Skin”

  Deborah has been one of “my” writers for over a decade now, so I was delighted to get a story from her for my magazine. I was not, of course, at all delighted about the real-life circumstances that inspired this story.

  Shortly after Deborah’s second daughter was born—and, as I recall, it was an unusually difficult pregnancy, requiring her to spend months in bed—Deborah’s mother was raped and murdered by a teenage neighbor. The guy finally wound up in San Quentin, but it was a very difficult time for everyone involved, and with his first parole hearing coming up this year, we’re all remembering it. And many writers deal with trauma in their lives by writing about it, which is less likely to land you in jail than acting on your feelings about the creep who brutally murdered your mother.