A Sterkarm Kiss (10 page)

Women peeped from behind the brocade curtain that hid the bed, giggled, and ducked out of sight again. The men set Per down in the midst of them and quickly undressed him, throwing aside his Elvish cap, pulling at the buttons of his Elvish shirt until it came undone. Some supported him while others yanked off his long boots, and then there was a fight—even more boisterous and noisy than the women's fight—for his woolen stockings. The hounds became so excited, frenziedly running about and howling as they tried to defend Per, that Sweet Milk and another man had to drag them outside by force and tether them to stakes. Inside the hall, by the time two men were victorious in claiming Per's stockings, there was a bruised eye and a bloodied nose among the company.

The undressing was completed by pulling down the strange fastening of Per's Elvish breeches and pulling them off, leaving him in his Elvish shirt.

“They be unco short, these Elvish sarks,” Toorkild said. “Th'art only meant to show one lass what tha'rt made of!”

Per covered himself with cupped hands. His cousins swept back the curtain, and to squeals and cheers, Per was ushered to the bed, while the men chanted rhythmically in a way that reminded Windsor of 21st-century football supporters. Isobel started to cry, hugged her son, kissed him, and herself turned back the bedcovers for him to get in beside Joan.

Andrea, watching, saw Per look at Joan with a big smile, but Joan was doing her usual thing of looking down. She stared at the cover of the bed and refused to look at anyone.

The men gave deafening hunting whoops. Fiddlers and pipers played. And people screamed above the din, “Stockings! Stockings!” Andrea put her fingers in her ears. She saw Windsor standing among the men, looking pained.

The winners of the stockings, two men and two girls, now fought their way to the end of the bed, where one of each couple sat, their backs to the newlyweds. The girl looked over her shoulder, and everyone immediately yelled, “No looking! No looking!”

The girl threw her stocking, and it landed in the middle of the bed. Everyone groaned. Isobel snatched up the stocking and returned it to the girl. “Try again. Three goes!”

As the man threw his stocking, Per leaned forward, as if trying to catch it on his head—but the stocking fell onto the floor. The men booed, the women cheered. Andrea had no idea what was going on but was thrilled to be an observer.

The girl with the stocking tried another throw, tossing it harder this time. Joan, in the midst of all this noise, sat perfectly still, looking at the covers, as if she was alone. The stocking fell between her and Per, and Per threw it back to the girl so she could take her final turn.

This time the stocking landed on Joan's head—and the cheer that went up, together with the clapping, stamping, and whistling, was so loud that Andrea had no doubt that this was the point of the game. Joan plucked the stocking from her head and threw it aside, onto the floor.

Both of the men managed to throw their stockings onto Per's head—but then, he helped them considerably by moving to catch it. The second girl failed to toss her stocking onto Joan's head even after being given a fourth try, and everyone groaned with her in sympathy.

Then the game was over, and the uproarious noise subsided into chatter and laughter. Andrea sidled through the crowd until she stood beside Isobel Sterkarm. “Be so kind, Mistress Sterkarm, will you tell me—why do they throw stockings on their heads?”

Isobel turned toward her, her pretty face flushed and beaming. Her pale-blue eyes were exactly like Per's, and despite her happiness, she knuckled a tear from one. She dived at Andrea and enveloped her in a tight, warm hug, kissing her on the cheek. “Bless you, Mistress Elf—if you get a stocking on their heads, you'll soon be married yourself!”

A maid came through the curtain, carrying a large wooden bowl with handles on either side. At the sight of the bowl, the crowd gave another cheer. The maid gave it to Mistress Crosar, who took it solemnly and carried it to the bed. As she passed where Andrea stood beside Isobel, there was a whiff from the bowl's contents: something warm, milky, and spicy. There was a smell of alcohol, certainly, and cinnamon, and—nutmeg? Andrea wouldn't have minded a glass of it herself.

Mistress Crosar handed the bowl to Joan, who drank from it. Everyone watching clapped and shouted encouragement, and Andrea was quick to clap too.

Joan handed the bowl to Per, though without looking at him. Per took a big gulp, and there was enthusiastic applause, especially from the Sterkarms.

“That be it! Keep up thy strength!”

The crowd around the bed was thinning, Andrea noticed. People obviously knew that this was the end of the day's ceremony, and they were drifting away.

Per took another big gulp of the posset. The sooner it was all drunk, the sooner he and his wife would be left alone. He passed the drinking cup back to Joan, who took a tiny sip, then held the cup a long time before taking another tiny sip. She didn't want the posset to be finished at all.

“Come along now, come along,” Mistress Crosar said. “Hurry and drink it all up.”

Joan took the biggest gulp she could and handed the cup to her husband. There was no point in trying to put it off. She was a Grannam. She had to be brave.

Per finished the last of the posset and handed the cup to his new aunt-by-law. Only Mistress Crosar, Isobel Sterkarm, Andrea, and one or two other women were left by the bedside now. Isobel kissed Per on the forehead and both cheeks; and Mistress Crosar kissed Joan on the head, and they all withdrew.

Andrea, glancing back over her shoulder as she went through the curtain, saw Per wink at her.

8

16th Side: The Wedding Night

With a jump, Per woke from a doze. The room was too big, and reeked overpoweringly of flowers and spices, and sweet, scented smoke. Beneath him the bed bounced and wallowed if he shifted even slightly, and instead of the musty, homely whiff of hay, there was another gust of lavender and roses. Every sound, every smell, everything was strange.

The Elf-Chamber. His wedding. Remembering, he scrubbed one hand over his face. His head ached a little, and his mouth was dry.

Aye, his wedding night. Raising himself on one elbow, he looked over his shoulder. There was his bride, his Grannam bride, curled up under the covers, her bony, knobbly back turned to him. She slept, it seemed. Well, there was nothing he wanted to wake her for.

He shifted gently onto his back, fearing to disturb the Grannam woman—if he had to marry her a thousand times, she would never be a Sterkarm. Above him was the dark canopy of the bed. All was silence. Not a sound reached him from outside. Everyone must have eaten and drunk themselves into a stupor and fallen into bed.

He'd missed a few fights, most likely. Sterkarms settling scores among themselves at a time when they could blame it on the Grannams—and Grannams taking their chance to blame the mischief on the Sterkarms. There would have been a few skirmishes between the Grannams and the Sterkarms, too. Whatever his father and Richie-his father-in-law-said, there would be no preventing it. They would try to smooth things over by buying off the injured parties, and hope that only cheap blood had been shed.

The memory of the Elf-May rose from the forgetfulness of sleep, and he shifted eagerly, half sitting up, before remembering the sleeper beside him and stilling his movement. He studied the Grannam woman for a while. She slept on.

What a sweet wedding night. When they'd finished the posset and everyone had left them alone, he'd looked at her, and she, as ever, had looked at the bed covers. “I be over here,” he'd said, and then she'd looked at him with a frightened distaste.

He'd leaned over to kiss her, and she'd twitched her head aside, so that his kiss landed on her cheek. Sighing, he'd leaned back against the pillows, caught between annoyance and pity.

With any other girl he might have had more patience and taken more time—but this was a Grannam. And his wife. Hadn't they told her what was expected of her? Grannams had been reiving Sterkarm farms, driving off Sterkarm cattle, killing and raping Sterkarms for generations—were they now trying another way of robbing?

“What shalt tell 'em in morn?” he asked.

She'd given him a quick, guilty, wary glance from the corner of her eye. She knew as well as he did that their families would crowd into the chamber again the next morning, full of questions about their first night together, and making the filthiest possible jokes, for good luck. It would be a disgrace to her if she was still a virgin.

He'd pulled off his own shirt and thrown it on top of the bedclothes and then reached for her gloved hands. She hadn't tried to stop him pulling the gloves off. “Now thy shift,” he said, and pulled at it, tugging at it where it was trapped beneath her. She didn't help him, but he succeeded in dragging the shift off over her head. Then she'd slumped, drawing up her knees and folding herself over them.

The curtains around the bed were gauzy and let through the Elf-Light. He'd thrown back the covers and seen the sharp points of her shoulder blades and the knobs of her spine. He pulled her back on the pillows. Ribs showed across her chest, above her tiny breasts. More ribs showed below. Her thighs were like sticks. A skinned rabbit.

The Elf-May wouldn't be like that. She would be all warmth and softness, with no bones to stick in you—you could tell, even seeing her fully dressed. He would have to turn this skinny one around. There'd be a little more padding on her backside than on her front.

“Let me kiss thee,” he'd said. “That will be a start.” He'd leaned toward her, and she'd held herself stiff with distaste—and even so, her chin retreated from him into her neck.

In the end it had been a struggle, like dancing with a wooden doll. But he'd done it. It had been pleasurable enough, as chores went, and they would be able to look their families in the face tomorrow and give plain answers. Now he'd done his duty, he deserved a reward. He remembered how the Elf-May had used her eyes when they'd been talking, the way she'd smiled. He'd bet it would be very different with her. Elf-Women were said to be eager and lickerish.

Carefully he sat up. His shirt had fallen onto the floor. Pushing back the covers, he slipped out of the bed. Joan didn't move.

The great thing about Elf-Clothes was that you didn't have to be laced into them. He went through the damask curtain into the main part of the hall, buttoning the shirt as he went. The Elf-Lights still burned. His Elf-Breeches were lying on the floor. Originally they'd been ankle-length, as the Elves wore their breeches, but he'd cut them off at the knee, to make it easier to wear his riding boots with them. The cloth was so stout and good, it had hardly frayed.

There was a spindly little chair—so delicate, it could only be of Elvish workmanship—and he sat on it to pull on his woolen stockings, and then struggled with his long leather boots, which reached above his knee.

He stood, listening. There were whispers and shiftings from the Sterkarm dormitory, but from the bed behind the curtain nothing. The Grannam woman was still asleep then. Walking quietly, Per went through into the dormitory—to find the Elf-May.

Joan knew that Per was awake and moving but kept still, her knees brought up almost to her chest, her arms folded tightly over her pinched, mauled breasts. Let him think her asleep. She prayed he might think her asleep.

A terrier catches a rat by the scruff of the neck and shakes it vigorously, choking it and rattling its bones, disjointing it. She felt that she knew, almost, what it was like to be the rat in the terrier's mouth: pounded, hammered, bruised. Her husband had gasped, sweated, grunted, as intent on his work as the terrier. She had kept quiet by clenching her fists, gritting her teeth, and enduring—and good God, it had gone on so long—for her family's honor. Why did people—why did
women
—speak of it as a pleasure? She could find no pleasure in being jolted, pounded, and rattled. Now she wanted only to attract no further attention. He might have put a child in me, she thought. A Sterkarm brat. Year after year, another Sterkarm brat, each one lugged in her guts for nine months and then brought forth in sorrow. Surely, God hated women.

When she felt her husband slip from the bed, a tiny hope flickered in her. Lying very still, not daring to move and hardly daring to breathe, she nevertheless listened hard and realized that he was dressing. Oh, thank You, God! He would hardly bother to dress if he only wanted to piss. There would be a chamber pot under the bed, or if the Elves had forgotten to put one there, he would do it in some corner. So he must mean to leave her—to join his friends, maybe. To sit up late, wasting candles, bragging and drinking and gambling. If she was lucky, he wouldn't come back until it was time to get into bed beside her before their morning visitors arrived. Even so little time free of his hot body, damp with sweat, seemed a blessing. And this was to be the rest of her life.

The curtain fell back into place behind him with a faint rustle. For a little while she heard him moving in the hall beyond the curtain, and then nothing more. He must have left the hall. Thank God, thank God. Let him never come back. Let him get into a fight and be killed. No one could blame her, and her family would still be paid her widow's portion. She would be a happy widow.

After the wedded couple had been put to bed, there was a little more drinking and dancing by the younger sort, but it was plain that everyone was tired. The 16th siders were people who rose in the morning as soon as it was light, or even before—at three or four in the summer, and only an hour or so later in the winter. They worked hard, most of them, all day, and fell into bed when it got dark, to save the waste of candles. This day of celebration had been, for them, a long, long day; and they were dozy with unaccustomed amounts of food, and fuddled with strong drink. They were ready for their beds, and most of the older people had already gone to them. Many were rounding up their sons and daughters and seeing them to bed too—and out of trouble, they hoped.

Andrea was not eager to lie awake in her bed, thinking of Per with his new bride—but found that she was not eager to go into the darkness at the edges of the camp with Sweet Milk, either. Not yet, anyway. But that was what Sweet Milk had determinedly on his mind. So she made her excuses and went to bed. And lay awake just as she'd feared she would.

She thought, from its direction, that the snoring she could hear came from Toorkild. Someone far off, near the hall door, was whispering and giggling. Otherwise all was quiet. From the wedding suite itself she heard nothing. Well, she didn't want to.

Why had she come? That ridiculous notion she'd had—that she could live over again her first meeting with Per. This was nothing like her first meeting with him—how could it be? Then she had been introduced into the daily life of the Bedesdale tower as an honored guest and had slowly come to know everyone. Per had courted her. The first she'd known of his interest had been when she'd found his sheepskin cap at her place at table, filled with fresh mushrooms. The Sterkarms valued such fresh food highly, and this meant he had risen early to gather them—and then had given them to her instead of eating them himself.

But it was painful to remember such things here, now. This might be Per in everything—in looks, in temperament, in character, whatever that was—but everything else was different, and that difference changed them to each other. It had been a bad idea to come. She'd always known it. But still she'd come. Perhaps she could go to Windsor tomorrow and plead that she couldn't hack it—say that she'd gone soft and no longer thrived on conditions 16th side. He'd have to understand.

Yeah. Right.

Probably she dozed—but woke again, thinking she hadn't slept. The morning—even the 16th siders' early morning—was hours away. Then someone was bending over her. It gave her a horrible shock. She hadn't been aware that she'd been sleeping, and hadn't heard this man's approach. A little, strangled squeak of alarm burst out of her.

“Whisht.” It was Per. “Meet me outside.” And he walked away, a tall, upright, dark shape in the dimness.

She got out of bed, not even thinking about what she was doing. After all, she'd intended to do this, against all her better judgment, for five hundred years.

She trod carefully as she made her way down the hall, eyes stretched wide in the dim light, careful not to step on any of the people lying wrapped in bedding on the floor, trying not to stumble on yielding mattresses. If anyone was awake to see her pass by, they kept it to themselves.

She heard Per's voice before she reached the door. He wasn't speaking loudly—well, not for a Sterkarm—but he sounded annoyed.

Outside, most of the lighting had been turned off, or dimmed, and it was very dark. And cold. She shivered quite violently at the first touch of the cold wind after the warm fug of the hall. The Elf-Lamp over the hall door still burned faintly, and by its light she saw Per talking to two men, while Swart and Cuddy strained at their leashes, trying to reach him.

“And be wakeful!” Per said to the men as he reached out a hand to her. She put her hand into his, and without another word he led her away from the light into the darkness.

“What was matter?” she asked in a whisper.

“Guards!” he said in disgust. “Drunk!” Then he laughed. “Grannams' guards will be drunk too!”

They passed along the side of the dormitory hall, going toward the edge of the encampment. As the cold, damp wind touched her again, she became aware of the wide, empty moorland stretching away in the darkness—wild and dangerous country, with not a single metaled road anywhere. Nothing but sheep tracks and horse rides. Not a single telephone that worked. No policemen.

A shriek from the darkness made her start, gripping Per's hand and pulling at his arm. She gasped with fright but then heard his soft laugh. “Owl,” he said, and yanked on her arm, bringing her stumbling forward to fall on the soft, springy turf. A second later he threw himself down beside her. She said, “Oh!” in surprise, and then he was kissing her, and his hand was on her breast, squeezing. She thought: Oh yes! All right! And put her arms around him, pressing his head to hers.