Chapter Three. Wherein I Break the Law.
Three
Wherein I Break the Law.
The farrier and his family of seven live behind his shop just off the market square, but he doesn’t dare bring me in the front.
Though time is precious, and the stink of his fear is a roar in my nose, he scuttles me down an alleyway strewn with dirty hay and manure to the back side of his combination workshop and house.
His cracked and black-stained hand trembles as he grips the iron ring of his stout door, and I glance over my shoulder to see if we’ve been followed.
No one. Nothing.
I can’t sense the stalking presence anymore, and I tell myself I was confused and it was just the farrier coming for me. The lie holds no logic as the danger was approaching from the rear, but sometimes I’ve got to construct a reality I can live with.
“This way,” he says.
As I step through, he shields the entrance into his home with his hulking body, but it’s not to protect me. I’m the last thing he wants in his house, and he’s making sure nobody sees me, even though no one watches back here—
The smell is terrible. Fresh blood, old sweat, horse hooves, and melted metal.
The kitchen is a mess, with chicken bones sucked clean of meat and gristle scattered across a planked table and the remnants of stew molded into the bases of tin bowls.
Bladders of drink are lined up, but going by the acidic whiff of him, I’m betting they’re full of mead, rather than milk or water for the children.
“He’s down here.”
The farrier’s boots thunder over the floorboards, his weight like that of the steeds he shoes, and he makes no apology for the state of his home. Then again, that’s women’s work to him.
As he rips back a tattered curtain, the first thing I see are the young ones.
Four daughters are clustered together in ragged clothing, their pale faces dirty, their hair tangled and matted.
All under five, born each year since the farrier took this wife.
He killed his first one on the birthing bed, too, the fetus refusing to vacate the womb and souring inside of her.
There is also an older girl, one of teenage years, and I recall that she’s a niece he took in at some point for labor.
She has a gaunt appearance, and she puts a thin arm around the children.
She shows no interest in me, her fearful eyes only worrying about where the farrier is, and I don’t need to know how many beatings she’s had under this roof.
It’s all in the way she hunches her shoulders and lowers her head.
I don’t look any of the children in the eye. I already cannot bear what I’m seeing and don’t want to know their futures.
I turn to the pallet in the corner. The young woman lying twisted as a rope on the bloody blankets is soaked with sweat and breathing in shallow pants.
Her swollen lower body is fully exposed, her knees wide, the umbilical cord still tying her to the blue infant that lies waxen and motionless between her thighs.
The farrier speaks: “The laboring lasted most of the day and—”
I hold my hand up. “Silence.”
I want to slap him for forcing this breeding once again.
I have memories of her before he claimed her as his birthing chattel, a girl of my own age, carefree and lovely, her dark hair streaming behind her as she danced with her sisters in the sunshine in the village square.
Now she’s here dying like a plow horse used too hard.
And he will go on and get another to raise these unwanted daughters of his, and more importantly give him the son he wants, because he has the money to do so.
And if that one dies, he’ll just return anew to the well of young girls.
Kneeling down at the pallet, I brace myself and look at the perfect little face of the infant. The eyes of the boy are open, and as I stare into them …
Nothing. No sensation, no images. I’m doing what others perform easily, meeting the pupils of someone else.
A familiar sorrow runs through me, filling my veins with a sour despair.
I have to try to help the bairns, even if I hate the fathers—even if it means I am breaking the law and risk being flailed raw in the town square.
When I was abandoned as an infant, a stranger cared enough to save my life.
It’s my calling to do the same, the only legacy I have to live up to.
Besides, even though their families will never acknowledge me, and they themselves will disdain me for being a scur, or the lowest of the lower class, my loneliness abates when I stare out of my hood at the children I’ve saved.
As they go and live their lives, I know that they are alive because of me, and in this, they are the babies I will never have.
Though they shun me, I love them. And mourn them when I arrive too late.
“What of my son?” the farrier demands hoarsely.
I shake my head, and he begins to weep. He doesn’t bother to inquire after his wife, and that brings me back to attention.
As I shift up to her, I want all the demons to come find him. “Elly?”
Her full name is Ellyne, and hearing her nickname seems to bring her around. Her lids lift and tears spill out and run down her temples. She hasn’t the strength to speak, and as I take her hand, it’s hot as a brand. I do not meet her eyes. Me feeling her death is not going to help either of us—
She murmurs something I cannot catch for the grunting grief of her drunken, rutting murderer.
“You must hang on.” I gently stroke her stringy hair back. “I can get you medicine on the morrow.”
And I can do something else for her. If she’ll let me.
“Leave us,” I command her husband. When he just stands there, sniveling, I glare out from under my hood. “And take your children with you. They have already seen too much.”
The farrier wipes his nose on his dirty woolen sleeve. “So you can bring my son back?”
“No, but I will seek to ease your wife.”
My tone is such that the young girls quake in their clutch, and though the farrier is above me in sex and station, he’s too dumbfounded at my temerity to respond.
“Go,” I snap.
With a dismissing hand to his progeny, he shoos off the gifts he finds worthless for they haven’t a penis among them, and the lot scramble to their feet.
The niece, who has red hair, puts a protective arm about the sisters, and as they squeeze past his girth, she looks back at me, her facial expression older than the sea.
What her eyes must be showing makes me feel ancient.
“Feed them something,” I order him after they’re gone. “And not that mead you buy with your coppers.”
There’s naught to sustain a fly in that filthy kitchen, and fates damn him, someone must charge him with his neglect.
The farrier skulks off, no doubt going for those bladders of fermented honey, and that he doesn’t pull the heavy drape back into place for privacy enrages me.
I jump up and yank the folds across the doorway.
Back with Elly, I take her hand once more. “You must pass your afterbirth.”
She’s too weak so my words are naught but air, and I know what’s coming next because I’ve seen it all before. Within a day, she’ll be claimed by the infection that’s already taken root in her womb, yet I’m going to forage for her anyway.
And that is as far as I will go. She has suffered enough in this life, and if I save her from the grave, it will be no kindness to her.
“I’ll ease your pain,” I choke out.
Going inside my cloak’s cold, damp folds, I withdraw my little knife from its leather slide at my waist. I’m tempted to do horrible things with it.
If that brute had no testicles, many problems would be taken care of.
Instead of going after the farrier, I tremble as I saw through the gray, rubbery umbilical cord.
Then I grab whatever stained blanket I come in contact with and pull a cover over Elly’s privacy.
She moans as the rough wool brushes her bloodied skin, and I murmur something soothing.
Then I look once more at the bairn. Such perfect features, the little nose and wing of a mouth, cheeks that were full enough so that it should have survived.
My vengeance is such that I’m glad the farrier’s been denied what he craves, as if sons are the sole things of worth.
Yet his quest for the only kind of offspring he cares about will continue to cost my sisters in our village their lives.
There’s a tunic by the pallet, torn in half as if Elly ripped it in her laboring. I wrap the cooling bairn in the folds, and entertain a fantasy that I will bury the remains properly, in the Resting Place. But it’s been a long, long while since any of us dared to go that far outside of the wall.
I don’t know what will happen to this precious vessel, which has leached out its spark of life already.
The same is true for Elly’s body, and the distress I feel is deep enough that the pair of them might as well be of my own blood.
In all my isolation, I find that my sentiments adhere to the villagers easily, though none have ever claimed me.
“My girls…” Elly whispers.
Putting my knife away, I focus upon her lax mouth. There’s a broken front tooth that is new.
“I’ll ensure their safety.” I take her hand again, her blood and sweat fusing our palms as I make my vow. “They’ll go to the Sooths.”
The Temple of Sooths is known to take in abandoned females. The girls and the niece will be safe there with those prognosticators that I don’t believe in. At least their wall is solid and strong.
“He will never … allow that.”
My eyes move up to the tip of Elly’s nose. “You are aware of what I can see, yes?”
“Yes,” she says weakly. “And what … you can do. But death … is not always … a curse.”
I shut my lids, aware that she and I are of agreement. I will not save her in the way I’m able. “Take ease then. The torment from him will not last long now, and when his time comes, I’ll make sure your lovely daughters and his niece are taken in at the temple.”
There is a flare of surprise from her, but it doesn’t last. “Promise…?”