The Tale of Oriel (35 page)

At the dance that evening, with the fiddlers and pipers playing music that bubbled like water under his feet, Beryl would not dance with him. He chose, then, girls whose hair fell loose down their backs, going boldly up to such a one with his hand held out, to lead her into the dance. And she would always take his hand, and follow him into the circle of dancers, and follow him with her eyes when the dance was over and he led another partner into another circle of dancers.

At last Griff stopped him, to take him back to where Beryl stood. Beryl told him that those girls were only wed that morning and unless he wished every bridegroom at the fair to seek his blood, he had better become one of the circle of watchers, aye, and best to stand apart from her. For he should not become known as the Spaewife's man. Not if he would be Earl. If he would be Earl, Beryl advised him, then as showman he had best be seen to be alone, to stand apart from all other men. “As you do,” Beryl added. “Is it not so, Griff?”

Griff was there in the shadows with them. “It was always so, lady,” he said. “From the first—”

“Aye, don't tell me,” Beryl said, and held up her hand to Oriel as if it was he who had spoken.

Then, one afternoon, Oriel was challenged. As the puppets bowed behind him, and in front of him the people laughed and clapped their hands together and reached into their purses to drop copper or silver coins into the basket, a man's voice called out. “You, Showman. Show-peacock.”

Oriel stepped forward, searching the crowd for the face that voice might speak from. A rough-bearded man stepped to the front of the crowd, with two companions. All had dark hair, and they might have been brothers. “You, Showman. Have you a name?”

His was the voice of a man eager for the fight. “Aye,” Oriel said, but said no more. If there was to be a fight, it would not be one he asked for; neither would it be one he feared.

The crowd subsided, whispering, watching.

“Are you too proud to give it out, this name?”

“No,” Oriel said. He could have laughed aloud.

“See him, people,” the man said. “He goes unbearded. Would you wonder what his name is, when he goes unbearded, and colors his shirt, and his boots are up to his knees?”

The crowd's curiosity was raised, and Oriel thought he might satisfy it. But he was careful to toss his name out to the crowd like a girl's laugh, not to give it up to the man like a surrendered weapon. “Oriel.” He called it out clearly.

A ripple went through the crowd, and for the first time Oriel was uneasy. He didn't understand. But the man did, as his smile showed.

“Rik's my name. Although you are too proud to ask for it. Or-i-el,” Rik said, dragging out the letters. “And you came from the south, I'll wager, that's what you'll say, if I ask you.”

Oriel was opening his mouth to agree, when the murmurs warned him. The language was the one Oriel spoke himself, but Rik's tone was a Wolfer tone, the way a Wolfer with his blade at a man's throat spoke, and stood, and smiled.

“You'll say the south, Showman, Or-i-el with your high-stepping name, aye, and your fancy clothing, like a lord, isn't it? Isn't the creature made to look like a lord?”

The crowd murmured behind Rik, now nearly convinced by him. Griff stepped out from behind the stage. “What is it?” he asked quietly.

Oriel shook his head, without taking his eyes from Rik's face. “Don't know. Wait.”

“For we all know what the girl is,” Rik called.

He said that, as if that was what he had been waiting to give voice to. The sigh of fear that rippled like rising water among the crowd greeted these awaited words.

Rik turned to the crowd, but his two companions stayed facing Oriel, and Griff. “I know what I think she is,” Rik said. “I've heard of women who can take the bones of dead men, and the blood of living babes, and stir them in a pot. When such women say the words, they draw on the power that threw stars out into the sky, the power that cracked open stone mountains to let out rivers—They say the words and a living dead man steps out of the cauldron.”

Oriel watched the faces. They were unsure, and in their fear ready to be convinced.

“Aye, Rik, she's only a girl,” a woman's voice called. Rik turned to see who had spoken, but could not catch her. Once the woman had broken silence, a man asked, “Aye, and how has she harmed you, Rik?”

The man meant well, meant peacefulness, but the question inflamed Rik. He didn't answer the man, but wheeled around to pour his hatred out onto Oriel. “I ask you again, who are you?”

It was not the time for a soft answer, nor for a coward's answer, whatever Beryl might have advised. Oriel would choose his own way, and he would take it boldly. “I am the Spaewife's man.”

This was not the answer Rik had looked for. It was not the answer the crowd had expected. It displeased Rik, but the crowd saw something to like in it.

“I am the Spaewife's man, for her goodness, and her honor,” Oriel said.

“And I also,” said Griff at his shoulder.

“So you had best tell us in what way she has harmed you, Rik,” Oriel said. By naming the man, Oriel isolated him from all the rest. Rik had to answer alone, now.

“Aye, and she gave a charm to the girl who was to be my wife, and she refused to wed me then, and she wed another. Until then, the girl had been mine, as her father and her brothers agreed, and the holding that her father gave with the girl would have doubled my lands. Aye, and I am a man of broad lands and fat flocks, and the girl had never said nay to me before, until the witch charmed her. On the day we were to wed, friends,” he added. This the crowd sympathized with. “Her father came, and her brothers, and they brought her there, but the girl would not say the words. Aye, and she had been found at the Spaewife's cart.”

Oriel didn't know what the crowd was thinking. He only knew what his own choices were—to fight, with whatever chance he himself had against Rik's bulk, and he thought his agility made chances even; to call Beryl out to speak for herself; to make the fight general and then flee at the first chance, when the melee grew wild enough; or to say his thoughts and trust the crowd to prefer him. He thought they might, he thought they already did if he could give them good reason. He thought, if he made that choice and it failed, he could then choose among the others, so he had little to lose.

He angled his head to one side, waited for silence, then asked, “So the great harm is she took away your wife-to-be from you?”

“Aye,” Rik grumbled, and his companions echoed him.

“I think she did harm you, then,” Oriel said. Rik smiled, seeing a victory. Oriel went on. “To take not just the girl, but also her dowried lands, despite the word her father and brothers had given to you. Great harm to you,” Oriel said again, and some of the crowd—who suspected his thought—grinned up at him. “But I wonder if it wasn't a great good for the girl.”

Rik turned red, from chagrin and embarrassment, as the people behind him laughed at the trap Oriel had set, and called out agreement to Oriel, and women's voices called out approval of what the puppeteer had done for the girl, if she had done it, whether she had done it by charm or spell, or merely good advice, as sisters might speak to one another. Rik turned pale then, and his hands clenched at his side, but even his two companions had slipped back away from him. Besides, there was something he saw in Oriel's face that he didn't quite dare challenge any further.

Rik turned his back on the puppet stage and the two men who stood before it. He shouldered his way out through the crowd. The crowd finished what they had started earlier—fishing into purses and drawing out coins; people came forward to drop their coins into the basket. They stared hard at Oriel while they did this, although they asked him no questions.

EACH DAY, EACH HOUR, THE
audience before their stage grew larger. Oriel and Griff carried purses heavy with coins by the time the days of the fair drew to a close. It seemed that everyone who had come to the fair spoke of the mysterious showman, and wondered who he was, and where he had come from.

When the fair days at Hildebrand's city were done, Oriel and Beryl and Griff traveled with the entertainers and merchants on the King's Way to the King's city, where they would try their scheme to catch the King's attention. Oriel had at his back, safely hidden, the beryl. It was on the Damall's beryl, with the falcon carved into the stone, that the scheme rested.

T
HE KING'S CITY OVERLOOKED THE
joining of two rivers. The King's palace was at the tip of the peninsula formed by those rivers. Behind the palace, and around its spreading gardens, lay the city itself, its buildings of stone and wood, its twisting streets, the spacious gardens behind the houses where great lords lived, and the open squares and markets. There were no walls around the palace and there were no walls around the city. The fair field, where for five days tents and booths would be crammed with people, lay just beyond the city.

In the crowds that came to see the puppet plays there were more lords and ladies, more servants in livery, bands of soldiers, and occasionally a priest or a pair of priests. It was to the priests that the puppet first whispered, “Take me to the King. I have something to tell.”

The puppet whispered this as if he had a true life of his own, and had seen the priest out of living eyes, and chosen to speak out of a living will. But in fact Oriel gave the cue, if there was a likely man in the audience. “Let the play commence,” he would say, with a showman's upward lifting of the arm; and Beryl, hearing him say
commence
, not
begin
, would know that at some time during the story, a puppet should come forward to whisper to the audience.

Oriel gave the cue twice for priests, in the five days of the fair, and once for a man in purple livery, with a crown stitched over his heart in silver threads, whom he took for one of the King's household servants. So that was three times the whisper had been started, before the rest of the entertainers went on south, following the fair to Sutherland's city and then on to the other two smaller cities of the south before the final days at Yaegar's city, with its tall stone walls to defend the forest entry into the Kingdom and guard the River Way. The rest of the fair, merchants and entertainers, beggars and cooks, moved on under the care of a troop of soldiers. The puppeteer and her two men stayed on in the King's city, performing in Innyards and beside fountains, and when a likely messenger stood among the watching crowd, one of the puppets would come to the front of the stage to whisper across the audience, “Take me to the King. I have something to tell.”

Oriel watched his audience when this happened. He could see the questions in their faces. Was this a jest or was it a plot? Was it done merely to make a mystery that would draw crowds, and draw coins from purses? Or was there some urgent message the King must hear, and these bold puppeteers, and the handsome showman, too, him especially, were they heroes for the Kingdom? For all knew of the unrest in the south, and all knew how precarious was the temporary peace among those ambitious to be named Earl Sutherland. All hoped the King's Tourney would produce a strong champion, a man who could gather up the reins of the unruly Earldom and win obedience from its willful lords, and let its people till their fields in peace, and raise their herds without alarms, and pay taxes to only one lord, only at the customary times of the year. But what could a puppet know? And was there not some story that the puppeteer was a girl? Aye, and spaewife, too, who could read the future in a woman's palm, and knew what spells would cure, or cause, disease? And who was this showman who seemed to gather all of his audience together into a single heart?

The crowds flocked to Innyard and fountain square, and Oriel—who could gather them together with his voice, and hold them attentive—thought it was only a matter of time before one of the whispers reached the right ear, and the puppets were summoned to play before the King.

That time came, and the summons came, and Oriel stood at last in a long, tall-windowed hall, bathed, fresh shaven, on Beryl's advice wearing a green shirt. Before him sat the King, with his Queen beside him, and their children around them. Also present were the lords and ladies of the court, as well as a few priests and soldiers and ministers. Servants waited patiently at the rear of the hall, just as Oriel did at its front. It was the middle of a long, late spring afternoon, and sunlight the color of jonquils blew into the hall. Oriel looked at the young women of the audience, to recognize Merlis among the ladies. He saw a brown-haired girl in a golden dress, her hands folded in her lap and her face serene, and knew her for the lady who would win his heart, the lady Merlis. He saw her, and named her, and was content.

They had chosen their three plays carefully. Two were taken out of the old puppeteer's book, which was also the source of the third, but the third had been added to until it had to be called a new story. The first was a tale of a Prince who fought a dragon, to save his land and win the hand of his Princess. Oriel and Griff had carved and painted the dragon puppet, which always drew gasps of alarm and admiration from an audience. At the end of this play, in the silence after the clapping had ended, the King leaned across his sons to say to Oriel's golden-gowned girl, “Doesn't it make you wish our land was troubled by a dragon, Daughter? that such a Prince might come forward, to save us?”