Chapter 14
Madoc
The old clanswoman comes to my yard the morning after Carys pays the green her sweetness, alone, leaning on her stick, and she stops dead at the sight of the anchor half-raised in the middle of it and she starts to weep.
Not soft. The hard dry weeping of somebody very old who thought they’d cried the last of a particular grief a long time back and finds they had more of it saved.
I don’t rush her. I set down my mallet and I wait, because a thing that big wants waiting out, and after a while she wipes her face with the flat of her hand and comes and lays that hand on the rough joint of the anchor, the great root-joint I’ve been three days cutting, and she says, “You built it. You actually built it. I told the tale to a boy who’d forget it, and the boy grew up and built the thing the tale was for.
I did not think I would live to see it.”
“You know what it’s for.”
“I know what it’s for.” She lowers herself down onto the bench along my shed wall, slow, and Carys comes out with tea neither of us asked for and sits beside her, and the old woman looks at the both of us a long moment, the joiner and the bee-girl, and something in her face settles into a thing close to peace.
“Then sit, and I’ll give you the whole of it, since you’ve earned the whole of it now.
Not the half a child gets. The true tale.
It’s an ugly one. You’ll want it anyway. ”
So she tells us, and it’s worse than a fireside tale by a long way, and it makes the cold thing in the trees a great deal harder to hate, which I think is the point of her telling it.
There was a first bargain, she says, older than either people, older than the war, older than the clans.
When the land was raw and the winters killed, a human and an orc who should have been enemies loved each other across the line instead, the first ever to do it, and they went together into the deep green and they asked the old power there for the land to be kind enough to live in.
And the green said yes. But the green said yes the only way it knows how to be given, which is a bargain, freely made, both sides bound.
The land would hold its sweetness for the mortal peoples.
And every high bloom, the mortals would give a share of that sweetness back, with intent, spoken, so the green stayed remembered and the bargain stayed alive.
The two who made it swore it for all their kind, and it held, and it was good, and the land grew kind, and nobody remembers their names.
“And then,” the old woman says, and her voice goes flat and hard, “we forgot. Not all at once. That’s the cruelty of it, forgetting’s never all at once.
A generation gives less. The next gives it grudging.
The next calls it superstition and gives nothing, and laughs at the ones who still want to.
And the war came, and the war made us forget everything that wasn’t the war, and the tithe stopped, and the green waited.
It’s patient. It waited a hundred years and more, owed and unpaid and unthanked, watching the peoples it kept alive spit on the promise that kept them, and it did not take its due, because the bargain was made freely and it would not break its own half by force.
” She looks at the trees. “Until now. Until the one it trusted first stopped being able to bear it.”
“The cold one,” Carys says, quiet.
“The cold one.” The clanswoman nods. “It is not a monster. That’s what you’ll want it to be, and I won’t let you have that.
It is the one who stood witness at the first bargain.
The one who vouched for the mortal peoples to its own kind, who swore we were worth trusting, who staked its standing in its own court on our promise.
And it watched us break that promise for a hundred years and make a fool of it in front of everything it ever answered to.
It is owed, and it is right to be owed, and worse than owed it is humiliated, and there is no fury on this earth or under it like the fury of a thing that trusted and was made a fool of for its trouble.
You cannot beat it. It has justice on its side, or near enough.
You can only give it, at last, the thing it was promised, and give it freely, since freely is how it was promised in the first place, so it can go back to its court with its standing restored and stop needing to take the payment out of children to prove it was right to be angry. ”
The three of us sit with that a while. The anchor stands half-raised in the yard. Somewhere up the hill a thing that trusted us and got made a fool waits to be paid or to take its due out of the sweet and the small.
“That’s why the working needs the binding,” I say, slow, turning it in my hands like I turn every problem worth turning.
“Her song to be heard. The anchor to hold the door. And two who choose each other, out loud, freely. Because the first bargain was two who chose each other across the line, freely, and the only coin that mends a broken free-made promise is another one, made true. We’re not paying it back.
We’re making the first bargain again. New. ”
The old woman looks at me a long moment.
“The boy grew up clever as well as skilled,” she says.
“Yes. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be.
Two enemies-become-something-else, choosing each other out loud where the green can hear, and meaning it, so the green remembers the shape of the promise it was made in the beginning, and forgives the breaking of it, and holds its sweetness one more age.
” She sets down her tea. “You’d best mean it, then.
The both of you. The green will know a lie the instant it’s spoke, and a lie in that working would be worse than no working at all.
It has to be true, or it kills you where you kneel. ”
She goes, after. Leaves us with the true tale and the anchor and each other.
I finish the joint by mid-afternoon, and then comes the raising, and a thing that size doesn’t go up by one man’s arms.
I’ve built the anchor to stand three times the height of a tall orc, rooted deep, braced wide, the great root-joint meant to drive down into the pit I’ve dug at the worst seam of my yard where the pull comes strongest. Getting it upright off the ground and down into that pit without it twisting itself apart on the way is the kind of problem I’d have solved with a company of sappers and a day’s rigging, once.
I’ve got rope and a shear-legs and my own back, and it’s not enough, and I know it’s not enough about the time Ordun comes up the lane with his sleeves already rolled.
He doesn’t ask what I need. He reads the rig in a glance, the same soldier’s eye, and starts hauling the shear-legs into place, and behind him come others.
The dairyman whose churn split. The candle-seller, and her boy holding a coil of rope near as big as he is.
The girl Ordun pulled back from the trees, and her mother, and half a dozen more, drifting up the lane to the north-edge yard they’ve avoided for five years because the big unclanned orc lived there, come now because the big unclanned orc is building the thing that might save them, and they’ve decided to lay hands on it.
“Tell us where to pull, joiner,” Ordun says. “You built it. You captain it up.”
So I do. I set them on the ropes, and I show them the pace of it, all together on my word and not before, and I take the worst of the weight myself at the foot where a slip would crush a man, and we walk the great living anchor up out of the dirt hand over hand, a dozen frightened neighbors and a maimed old soldier and a beekeeper and the orc they used to cross the green to avoid, all of us straining on the same ropes, until the root-joint tips over the lip of the pit and drops home with a sound I feel in my teeth, seated, deep, standing.
Rooted. It’s up. It stands in my open yard in the failing light, oak and cold iron and stolen living rowan, tall as a young tree and twice as stubborn, and the handful of them stand around it breathing hard and looking up at the thing they just helped raise, and nobody says anything for a moment, and then the candle-seller’s boy says “it’s like a tree made of a barn,” which is exactly right, and everybody laughs the loose shaky laugh of people who did a hard thing together and it held.
It’s the first of them to come. Not the town yet, not the whole of it, that comes later and harder.
But a dozen who’d have crossed the green to avoid my yard a month ago, come up the hill of their own will to lay hands on a mad orc’s mad tree, and that’s a start, and a start’s more than this place has given me in five years.
They drift off toward home as the light goes, back down the hill to their marked doors and their frightened suppers, and Ordun’s the last to leave. He stands a moment at the foot of the anchor with me, looking up at it, rubbing his bad hand with his good one.
“It’ll hold,” he says. Not a question, but not quite sure either, the flat wary tone a soldier takes to a fresh-dug earthwork the night before. “You built it to hold.”
“I built it to hold the day it nearly doesn’t. Like you told me.”