The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction (24 page)

In the end she decided to try to see if anyone besides Estra felt poor Seyth’s death was anything other than a dreadful accident. It was the least she could do before dismissing Estra as annoyingly cracked in the skull. Since Estra, whether she liked it or not, was her cousin, she thought it only fair to ask people on both sides of the river what they thought.

She spoke to women rather than men because she didn’t think it was the sort of thing men would feel they should be concerned about. Everyone seemed sincerely touched that young Niav was taking such a charming concern in her cousin Estra’s tragic past. Niav felt almost ashamed.

The house-proud ladies on the eastern bank saw Estra’s mother, the Lady Seyth, as an amazingly beautiful wise-woman, and they had almost woven her tragic ending into a romantic legend. As they saw it, Master Lurgan, the son of their wise-woman (Niav’s grandmother) had gone off into the West on an “axe-quest” – something that devout young men did not do enough these days. He had returned to his mother’s deathbed to bring a polished axe of superb quality, to everyone’s universal approval. To all of them, it made some recompense (with respect) for the distress that they had all felt when his sister, Mistress Befind (Niav’s poor mother), had chosen to disregard her birthright and throw in her lot with a weaver on the other side of the river.

Shortly after this – and even better – Lady Seyth, who had encountered Lurgan while on his questing, had fallen so deeply in love with him that she had deserted her own people and gone in search of him, bearing their new-born child. Such a beautiful thing – and they had all had every hope that she would be their new Lady.

This failed so completely to fit in with Niav’s vision of Uncle Lurgan that she could barely keep a straight face. Besides, what about poor Aunt Helygen – where did she fit in? But for the eastbankers, Helygen was not part of the story – everyone moved on to the terrible tragedy of the drowning. They were all sure that poor Lady Seyth, a stranger to their river, had simply misread the currents on a stormy day – and nothing more.

Attitudes on the west bank were very different. There, it seemed to be generally felt that her uncle, Lurgan – who, if she didn’t mind them saying so, was somewhat given to religious extremes – had taken it into his head to go off on the weirdly outdated custom of an “axe-quest”, leaving his intended bride, poor Aunt Helygen and his terminally ill mother to wait for his return.

He had no sooner arrived home, to bore them all to death with the stories of questing, than a most unattractive and self-opinionated young woman calling herself Lady Seyth had arrived, in one of those unwieldy dug-out canoes with a baby girl that she claimed to be Lurgan’s (though it looked nothing like him or any other members of his family). Lurgan had actually seemed on the verge of setting Helygen aside, when one torrential afternoon, the fool of a wise-woman refused to listen to everyone’s advice not to attempt a crossing, misjudged the river currents, and, very sadly, drowned.

Bemused, Niav finally sought Aunty Grizzel’s casting view on the matter; she was particularly condemnatory. “Dreadful woman! She would spout esoteric moonshine at you by the hour, but Lurgan was convinced she was a ‘great mind’. Your granny would have died laughing if she hadn’t already been dead. Poor Helygen, to be subjected to all that; she is such a brilliant herbalist and a really caring soul – not that I need to tell you.”

“But where was Estra? Why wasn’t she drowned too?”

“That is the appalling thing! That bitch, Seyth, had left Estra for Helygen to look after, as though she was her minion, while she swanned over here to get some unnecessary fiddle-faddle for her “work’. Poor young Estra, I am afraid, shows every sign of becoming another exhibitionist like her mother. Clear your mind of it. Nothing or nobody murdered Seyth – it was just an accident.”

Totally deflated, after all her busy questionings, Niav wondered if, equally, maybe, nobody had murdered her parents either.

But then how was it that Artin the Magician had re-emerged, and such a long time later, when you would think that a cripple like him should have been sucked into the stormy seas beside them? No wonder people wondered if he wasn’t some sort of godling. And why had Fearn’s mother died suddenly like that? And, particularly … why was it that Grizzel did not seem, any longer, concerned to know?

So, in spite of her own worried imaginings, Niav concentrated on trying not to lose her temper with Estra. She tried to feel sorry for her, because Aunty Grizzel clearly did, and Aunty Grizzel was not a one to suffer fools gladly. But she couldn’t come to terms with the way that Estra obsessed so about what she seemed to consider were their exclusive rights to magical power.

To Niav, if, as a result of her family background, she ended up more able to help other people stay lucky and well, that was a gift she was happy and honoured to share. But if it came to some inbred right to dominate people and the forces of nature, just because you could, that was where Niav, very firmly, drew her line in the sand.

But Estra’s next, worrying, foray into the worlds of imagination concerned the sacred “barra” or wand of power. Obviously every self-respecting wise woman would be expected to have one.

“We have to have barras!” Estra solemnly announced one afternoon as the three girls were busily engaged in collecting the latest harvest of wool that the sheep regularly rid themselves of in the thorny field hedges. “We have a great heritage, you and I, Niav, a mystic bond, I sense it! This river – it’s malevolent. It wants to steal our powers! We have to join forces to face the river out. I know we can do it!”

“I think you have to wait for your barra to find you,” countered Niav nervously, plucking out of the air a vague memory of something Aunt Grizzel had once mentioned. She had the greatest respect for the raging majesty of their river, but she doubted that it would waste its time on the rantings of two little girls.

Where on earth had this latest notion come from? Some puzzled questioning finally made Niav suspect that someone had mentioned to Estra that both her own mother, Seyth, and Niav’s mother, Befind, would have had their barra with them when they died.

Somehow Estra had turned this obvious fact into a cosmic conspiracy, and Niav noted to herself that their mothers’ barras hadn’t proved much good against the power of the river. But still, she began to wonder what had happened to her mother’s barra.

Had it been in their family a long time? Could Lurgan have told Estra as much, and made her feel that it should really have come down to her, his eldest daughter, because Befind had abandoned her birthright and should never have taken it away?

Aunty Grizzel, for once, seemed to think this was perfectly probable “Poor child, nobody likes her. She simply wants to feel special in some way. She will grow out of it, I expect.”

“Did Mother’s barra belong to Granny as well? Would I have had it?”

“I dare say it did – and possibly a whole string of grannies before that. It would have come down to you, in due course; certainly not to Estra, anyway – things like that would go down female relatives, and her mother was a complete stranger. Besides, it sounds as though she had also thrown away whatever birthright it was she
claimed
to have had – from wherever it was she came! It’s just Estra’s nonsense. Try to distract her on to something else. If either of you two is meant to have a barra, it will emerge when the time is right.”

But it was her mother’s death, not her mother’s mislaid barra, that most concerned Niav. However, month followed month, and year followed year, with Artin showing not the slightest sign of reappearing at the river’s mouth. There could be no chance of Niav (even if she had managed to approach him at all) questioning him successfully about her parents’ tragedy. Artin seemed to be the most elusive of men – if he was just a man.

However, for all the other people who awaited him in the valley, the legend of what Artin was and the things he’d said and done seemed to simplify and became easier to understand – mainly because Uncle Lurgan was so assiduous in keeping his interpretation of Artin’s teachings alive in people’s minds.

“You know,” Aunty Grizzel observed, “there are times when I doubt that Artin would recognize a word of what he is supposed to have said at all.”

As for Artin’s boy, by now everyone loved Fearn for himself as much as for the memory of whose son he was. He was found to be astonishingly creative even by local standards and determined to try his hand at mastering any skill that the people on the western bank would let him learn – besides what Lurgan tried to teach him over on the eastern side.

The bees liked him too and he helped to take over the care of the hives – as might be expected of someone who has been used to the mysteries of smoke and magic – and the honey yield prospered.

He missed his own family, of course, but he did not seem unduly surprised that he had been left behind. He could wait. He had seemed a silent boy, but Grizzel and Niav gradually came to appreciate that it was more the case of him knowing how to be silent in many different tongues.

His mother had not come from the same homeland as his father, and they had lived in another place entirely – and then there was the mixture of languages that the sailors spoke which was almost a language in itself. That was why understanding the people of the river-mouth had presented no problem to him at all. He could cope with Kyle’s insipid attempts at bullying him and Estra’s flurries of melodrama, and he really appeared to like Canya just as much as Niav did – he particularly seemed to delight in music just as they did.

Once he had been shown how to cut a set of pipes from his mother’s alder, and saw the sap run as red as blood, he told Niav that he felt that Orchil was still alive, waiting for Artin too, and smiling down on him as he played.

Niav and Canya would sit enthralled, watching the dappled sunlight fall across Fearn’s bare brown back – clearly marked with his father’s white protective wings – as he sat, poised on the great rock that his father and uncles had placed beneath the shadow of the alder branches before they left. It seemed so magical a place that the girls were sometimes too in awe to sing.

Occasionally the visitors to the river-mouth included Artin’s kin. They always made a point of giving small gifts to many of the children, not only Fearn.

Once, Niav was smilingly given a lovely greenstone bead, on a soft white leather thong, that looked almost as special as Uncle Lurgan’s quested axe. But when Niav ran home with it to show Aunty Grizzel, she looked quite bemused. “That’s a very valuable thing to give a little girl – mind you, don’t flash it about when there are traders around.”

“But why give it to me?”

“Don’t forget your mum and dad saved Artin’s life – maybe it’s time it was remembered.” She went off to look for Artin’s brother and came back very quiet.

However, if Fearn begged him (or whichever other brother sailed in to the river-mouth) for news of his father, they would only smile and say that he was an amazingly busy man these days.

Every time they came, Niav felt that she would like to sail away with them and search for him too. Every girl would. How tragic it had been, everyone said, that such a beautiful man should have been reduced to limping his way around like that.

“Oh, it doesn’t notice when he is lying down,” Aunty Grizzel scoffed. “That’s the way they wish they could have seen him; besides, time passes and he won’t be looking quite so beautiful now.”

Niav would try not to be put out by such sacrilegious observations. Aunty Grizzel was endearingly eager to shock, and Niav was determined to try and seem grown-up enough to be treated as her assistant and not just her niece. She tried to show an educated interest in Artin’s injuries, and remarked how wonderful it was that he was able to give so much time and careful advice to people, when he must, surely, be in such acute pain. Had Aunty Grizzel any notion of what drug he might be taking to manage it?

“The same thing that gives him all his visions, I should imagine!” was all that Aunt Grizzel would reply – why couldn’t she try to be serious sometimes?

But that was the trouble – she was. Aunt Grizzel always saw right through her, however hard she tried. The memory of Artin represented her masculine ideal, in spite of all her mixed suspicions about him otherwise. Even though she knew that most young girls of her age were already expected to be looking around, no one else that she met, even visiting young traders, ever seemed to come up to his standard. Her aunt was tolerant and did not pressure her, but she was obviously starting to get concerned about Niav’s future happiness.

“You will become a broken-hearted wise-woman like me, if you don’t watch your step, child,” she chided her, not unkindly. “There are six lads at least that I can think of who are trying to run after you. Don’t you notice? Don’t you care? Do you want to spend your best years with a sarcastic bitch like me?”

“Oh, I’m quite fond of you really,” smiled Niav, unmoved. “And, besides, Fearn can be fun to be with too.”

She loved being with Fearn – something about the way their minds seemed to set one another’s off, always something to make, something to do; why give that up to be with the spotty youths of her own age?

One day, not long after a visitation of a couple of uncles, Fearn was sitting pensively on his rock. “You know,” he said, “I think that, this time, my uncles were trying to tell me that maybe I’m old enough to look under my rock.”

“Why, what’s under your rock?” said an astonished Niav; it was a vast thing and had taken both of his uncles and his father to get it set in place there, she remembered.

“Oh, he buried something for me underneath, to dig out when I was older. It needn’t be difficult. There are ways of moving big rocks that would simply stun you. People round here probably know, but they don’t seem to feel the need to do it. I doubt if there will be many future changes, either, with your uncle Lurgan smothering any new idea that tries to raise its head.

“Where we lived when I was little, they hefted rocks all over the place when they were feeling religious – it was quite exciting. Still, there is a lot to be said for the way you have things here. You let the children make themselves useful, beachcombing.