FOR OLIVER ROBIN
CHAPTER THE FIRST
IN WHICH THE BOYISH GIRL DIGS UP HER TURNIPS
ONCE, ON THE FAR END OF THE VILLAGE IN THE LAST OF the crumbling homes, lived a girl. Perhaps a girl, the neighbors said; at any rate, she was not pretty. She kept her dark hair shorn as tight as a lamb’s in spring and wore a boy’s dirty tunic and leggings and boots, and when she was not with her father, which was often, she skulked in the shadows of the buildings or at the corner of her house, where she dug and poked in the dirt around a miserable patch of turnips and straggly weeds. She never smiled or offered a hello or bonjour or guten morgen or ahlan wa sahlan or privet or a greeting in any language, no matter how many times the neighbors showed her their own rows of yellow teeth, and when they tried to stop her to make her speak—to mind her manners—she would scuttle away, bounding out of their grasp, and disappear with a bang behind her own front door.
A shame, one neighbor would sigh.
The child needs a mother, another would add.
How about you? a third would suggest.
This always made them all laugh, great heaving, spittle-laced laughs, for as much as the motherless boyish girl set the neighbors’ tongues to flapping, the thought of anyone marrying that man, the gray and wizened, stooped and shuffling little man who called himself her father, was too much for any of them to bear.
Oh, he has one foot already in the grave! the first would hoot.
Just one foot? the second would sputter. I think there’s a leg and an arm in there as well!
Ah, if he only had a fortune, the last would cry, the first gust of winter would make his widow rich! This thought, of course, silenced them for a while. But no, he could not be rich. Whatever work he did, it was daily—or, rather, nightly: he would depart each evening before the sun sank below the mountains and arrive each morning just as the town began to shape itself out of the darkness. There was no leisure. And night work… whatever it was—emptying the chamber pots or sweeping the stables or loosening the grime that clogged the gutters along the streets—was filthy work. Rank, lowly work. Work that smelled. Work best done in the dark. Work that did not fatten a man’s purse.
But it mattered little how much the neighbors talked, or how often the girl—for she was a girl, shorn hair and short tunic and all—darted into the shadows to escape their eyes, or how often her stooped and aged father trudged past on his way to his dark duties. For there would come a day, there always came a day, when the father would not return, and the girl, after having swept the stoop and plucked the last small turnips and the weeds from the little garden and tied them in a sack, would clamber over the village wall and disappear into the fields and then the forest, never to return. Sometimes, one of the neighbors, up at dawn and yawning at the window, would see the girl perched on the wall, ready to jump, and would ask, Now where… but the neighbor would scarcely form the question before letting herself forget all about the child and the old man. That he was too old and she too boyish was really all there was to talk about, and when they were not there, well, honestly, what was the point in calling them to mind?
So Clo, wall-jumper, turnip-grower, corner-skulker, lived a life in the shadows. But those moments before they left the village, the ones where she perched on the wall and prepared to launch herself off into the wilderness, small bag of turnips and weeds and household things in hand, those were the moments she most treasured. The sun, just rising above the edges of the hills, would be staining the sky a faint pink; the village, just beginning to wake up, would be quiet and still, except, perhaps, for the distant noise of a cart trundling along the cobblestones; and Clo, relishing the silence and the air at the top of the wall that carried the scent of dew and pine and not the steaming, fetid odors of the town, would feel her pulse quicken at the thought of the journey that awaited. Her father would meet her at the edge of the woods, his pockets heavy with breads and pastries and cheeses he had pilfered from the kitchens and his bags strapped to an ass he had pilfered from the barns, and the two would set out, tramping for days upon days through bright fields and dark forests and glimmering mountain heights.
These travels, thought Clo, and not the towns that interrupted them for a scattering of months at a time, made up their real life. For it was only then, walking under the thick shadows of trees or at the edges of windswept moors or even in the gloom of dank and terrible swamps, that the worry and fear that lined her father’s eyes faded, and Clo, sensing his relief, allowed her own face to relax into a smile that—had the villagers seen it—might have caused them to reconsider the word pretty. No, even then, they would not have said pretty, but pleasant, yes. They might have called her smile, at least, pleasant.
And so it was such a smile that Clo should have worn that morning that found her again on the wall, swinging her legs and taking in her first deep breath of non-manure-scented air. Having heard the tower bells chime five and having not seen her father come through the front door—Were they meant to leave today?—she had rushed to wrap up their scant belongings and pluck the garden and sweep the stoop and clamber the wall. But once there, about to push off into the damp morning air, she felt, instead of joy, a small, uncomfortable seed of foreboding. She delayed a moment, frowning, wondering. Her father had not given her any warning. Usually, he offered her some notice that their town days were drawing to a close: Clo, I am nearly finished—a fortnight, perhaps, or Clo, the steward is, I think, suspicious; take care to heed the bells these next weeks. But this time, he had said nothing.
No matter. They had been in this particular village for many months, as many as they had ever stayed at another. Even the grandest manors had only so many moldering baubles for her father to polish: he would certainly be finishing his work. Clo glanced back. There was their crumbling house with its freshly swept stoop, there was a neighbor staring slack-jawed through a window, there were a few faint curls of smoke rising from chimneys about the town. She narrowed her eyes at the goggling neighbor. My father does not, does not, she protested silently, have three entire limbs in the grave. And he does not, she added, glaring, frowning, sweep the night soil from the privies. She turned away, looking toward the open field. She would not miss this dreary hamlet and its gossiping inhabitants.
Tightening her grip around the bag of turnips and things, she pushed off, landing lightly in the muck that laced the wall, and set off at a trot through the fields. She kept her eye on the forest edge; her father would have left the manor under cover of dark, and he would be waiting now—with pastry-laden pockets—for her to arrive. Or he should be. She felt again that uncomfortable seed of foreboding, now a bit larger than before. A seed perhaps splitting and beginning to sprout. She could not see her father’s silhouette or the silhouette of a stolen ass anywhere beneath the trees. She began to run, the sack bouncing against her side. The line of trees rose and fell with her gait, and though she scanned and scanned, she still could see no form of man or donkey.
“Father!” she called when she had drawn close enough to distinguish one tree from another. Perhaps he was in the woods, resting on a bit of moss or leaning against a log. “Father!” Perhaps he had closed his eyes for a moment and fallen asleep after his long night of work. “Father!” She raced along the edge, calling into the shadows. “Father!”