Tale of Elske Read online

  Elske asked what a Courting Winter was. They told her that every second year great and rich families from many distant lands sent their sons and daughters to Trastad, where they were welcomed, for a price, into the best houses of the city. These Adeliers, as the foreigners were called, were offered various entertainments, dances, feasts and Assemblies, during the course of which many of the sons chose wives, many of the daughters husbands. Whatever the Adeliers made of the opportunities Trastad offered, Tavyan said, the Trastaders made profits.

  Before they left the shelter of the high valley, snow had caught them twice. Then the stream they followed led them out of the mountains and through steep hills, growing deeper, its banks becoming steeper as other streams ran down from the north and west to join it. By the time the land became rolling hills, their stream had become a river, and they were drawing close to Trastad. “How will you live,” the three asked her now, “in Trastad, in the winter?” Elske had no answer; how could she know how to get food and shelter in Trastad? “We’ll help you,” they promised her. “Don’t worry.”

  Elske had never thought to worry.

  The river looped through gentle country, close to the city; here the land was cleared and farmed. On the last night they slept in the stable yards of an inn. Just as Tamara had told, the inn bustled with activity of hosts and guests and animals; it offered foods richer than Elske had even imagined, and rooms with beds. But Tavyan preferred to dine on bread and onions, and to sleep the four together, close to their horses and goods, discouraging thieves.

  When they asked her what the Volkaric did with someone who stole, Elske couldn’t make them understand that only the Volkking owned treasure, so that a man could steal only from the Volkking, which was treason. For treason, a man’s feet were cut off and they drove him away, crawling, to feed the wolves. “I never saw this, but my grandmother remembered,” Elske told them. “We had no thieves,” she told them, and she thought that the Trastaders must honor this in the Volkaric.

  But “Brutish,” Tavyan said and “Cruel,” Nido said, shaking their heads. Taddus said nothing, but only because they were so close to Trastad that he could think only of his Idelle.

  They met no other travelers. “At this time of year, merchants choose to travel by sea,” Tavyan told Elske. “So would we have, except there was a storm from the northeast and I have no wish to die by drowning. We found horses to carry our goods, and set off, leaving the sea captains in the port awaiting fair weather. Also, one of us was impatient to be home.”

  “We risked the Wolfers,” Nido interrupted, proudly.

  “We’ll be home before we are expected,” Taddus said.

  “They’ll be expecting us to come by sea,” Tavyan said.

  “I think Mother must have had a boy. There have already been three girls and only two boys,” Nido said. “It wouldn’t be fair if it wasn’t a boy.”

  “You must wait and see,” his father reminded him. “Like Elske,” Tavyan said, “you must wait and see what chance will be offered you.”

  Chapter 4

  TAVYAN HAD DRAWN ANOTHER OF his rough maps, showing Trastad. Although it was a single city, Trastad included three islands, lying in the sheltering arms of land where the broad river spread out into the sea, and hamlets and farmlands on the mainland. The island at the river’s mouth, the largest, was Old Trastad, “where the first traders settled. Old Trastad is where the most important business of the city is conducted, by merchant houses and merchant banks, in the great marketplace. Also there are taverns and inns, as well as the Council meeting hall and of course the docks, warehouses and shipyards.”

  “Council?” Elske asked.

  “The men who rule Trastad.”

  “The Council is your Volkking,” Elske said.

  “We want no King when we have our Council,” Tavyan said, and Elske asked, “Where is your own house?”

  On the middle island, Tavyan explained, called Harboring, where most of the lesser merchants lived, behind and above their shops, and the craftspeople, too, and manufacturers. Harboring had its own taverns and livery stables, although not so large or many as were to be found in Old Trastad. The last island, most inland and thus most protected from the sea, had used to be farmland but now the wealthiest merchants—the great Vars—built their magnificent villas there. Logisle, this innermost island was named, for the lumber it had supplied to build the great docks of the city, and the bridges that joined the three islands to one another, and to both banks of the river, also.

  The Trastaders were famous builders of bridges, Tavyan told her proudly, drawing quick lines in the dirt to join the three islands to each other and to the mainland.

  “Then will I be close to the saltwater sea?” Elske asked.

  “Close enough to touch, if you wish. Ours is a seafaring city. Can’t you smell it?”

  “But you don’t see the ocean from Harboring,” Nido said. This last path on this last day of journey was a roadway broad enough for six men to walk abreast. On this road they saw some other men, fishers and farmers Elske was told; some of the men were accompanied by women whose hair was wrapped around with colored cloths. These men and women stared at Elske, in her fur boots and wolfskin cloak, but when she stared back at them they looked away.

  The bridge, when they came to it, stood as tall as a house above the river’s watery surface. Elske crossed over to the island on planks of wood, with the water visible between them, looking down on the river as a bird might, from above. On the island the dirt road had been covered by stones, some small and sharp, some as large as a fist—to make walking less dusty in dry weather and less muddy in wet, they explained to her. Just beyond the bridge, a man hailed them from his small, steep-roofed house.

  The man spoke to Tavyan. After some talk, Tavyan took out a purse of coins and gave some to the man. When he rejoined his three companions, Tavyan said, “The taxer reports a storm, not four nights past, lasting from afternoon on through the night, and all the next day and night as well. There was tidal flooding on Trastad, but no loss of merchandise. Some boats may well have been lost to the storm, those carrying Adeliers, but most merchants have returned.”

  “No other urgent news in the city?” Taddus asked.

  This new street was crowded with people moving in both directions. Between tall, close-built buildings the stony road climbed and dipped, and they followed it.

  “No news,” Tavyan said. “So, no fires, no fever epidemics over the summer. No sudden deaths. We may well find all as we left it.”

  “Except there will be the baby. You hope for a boy, don’t you?” Nido demanded.

  “I have only a small store of hope,” Tavyan answered his son with a smile. “So when I expend any of it, I think not of more sons but of lower taxes. Tell me, Elske, must the Volkaric pay tax moneys to their King?”

  Elske told him, “The Volkaric have no money.”

  “They are a fortunate people,” Tavyan laughed.

  Nido asked, “Then who pays to keep the streets cleaned of garbage and offal? Who hires justices to say when a law has been broken, and name the punishment, and who sets guards over the cells? Who gathers together the tribute money, for the Emperor?”

  “The Volkking pays tribute to no one,” Elske said. “And if his people please him, then he will give them all they need.”

  “What if they displease him?” Taddus asked.

  “None wish to.”

  “Are his people slaves?” Nido asked, but Elske didn’t know that word.

  “What do you think of Harboring?” Tavyan asked Elske. His hand waved about him, indicating people and doorways, houses crowded together until their roofs made a single line, and he told her, “All the storehouses will be filled by now, and wood chopped and stacked, with winter coming down on us. Attic spaces will be piled high with round cheeses, and barrels of salted fish, and boxes of smoked fish. The cellars will be crowded with sacks of ground wheat and stacked onions, turnips—”

  “Ugh, turnips,” Ni
do said.

  “Come spring, you’re glad enough of anything not salted, even turnips,” Taddus reminded his brother.

  “You’re just acting—” Nido started to answer, but his father cut him off, explaining to Elske, “Trastaders lay in great stores, before winter comes. Our lives depend on being ready for the worst. Should things fall out other than we expect, well, then, we will feast in spring, but we are like bears, fattened for winter.”

  “Especially the Courting Winters,” Taddus said, “when there is so much profit to be made from the Adeliers. This winter, Father’s house should make—”

  “Let’s add up our profits in the spring, when they fill our pockets not our dreams,” Tavyan warned his son. “What is it, Nido? Have you fleas in your trousers?”

  “May I go ahead, Father? May I surprise them? They’ll expect us by sea, and I can surprise them. Elske can lead my horse. She’s strong enough and she’s not afraid of horses. Are you, Elske?”

  Elske took the rein without a thought, and Nido dashed off. Her eyes were full of the faces and dress of the people around her. Smells crowded the air as closely as houses crowded the sides of the streets. Was the entire island of Harboring filled with houses, tumbled upon one another like onions in a basket?

  They came at last to an open gate beside a narrow timber house in a row of narrow timber houses, where Nido stood watching for them. “It is a boy!” he called. A plump woman watched with him, and two younger women stepped out of the doorway. All three wore dark dresses, protected by aprons; all three had their heads wrapped around with colored scarves. A little girl, her hair also covered, hid behind the opened door. The older woman—the mother, Elske guessed—greeted Tavyan with pink-faced surprise. “I thought, if you lived, you’d be another sennight at least,” she said. “I am glad to greet you safely home, my husband.”

  “You have another son to learn your trade, Father!” Nido cried, and his mother asked him to hush, now, if he’d be so good.

  Tavyan moved all of them through the gate and into a small open yard beside the house, with two outbuildings against its far wall. He and Taddus took apart the packs the horses carried, and instructed the others where to carry each item. The mother bustled about, promising a hot meaty stew for everyone, repeating again and again how Nido surprised her, knocking on the shop door as if he were a customer, and how she was wiping her hands dry on her apron when she saw who it was. “Didn’t I scream?” she asked her older daughters, who agreed that their mother had frightened them out of two years’ growth with her screams.

  Nobody remarked Elske, who stood silent and aside, although the two older sisters looked as if they might have, if their father hadn’t had them hurrying about so.

  Finally, Nido and Taddus were sent off to take the horses to the livery, and then run back so that their mother could serve up the meal, if they wanted food in their bellies this day; because Tavyan had much to do arranging his goods, and taking his inventory after the summer shopkeeping. And this was a baking day, especially now that there were so many to feed. Now that they were safely returned, more bread would be needed. And who was this person?

  “This person is Elske,” Tavyan said, waving her forward. “Bertilde, I present Elske, who joined us on our journey. Daughters? Dagma, Karleen, Sussi, I present Elske to you. Don’t be shy, my little Sussi, she’s very friendly. We’ll be glad of another hand, with so many in the house, and Elske is both strong and willing.”

  “I never asked for a servant,” Bertilde humphed. “Nor a pretty one, neither. And what is she wearing under that barbaric cloak? It looks like animal. What kind of creature have you brought to my house, Husband? Look at her hair!”

  Elske did not know servant or pretty, but she had heard Tamara spoken of in just that way, all her life. The girls—as thickbodied, short, round-faced and blue-eyed as their brothers and parents—ignored their mother and urged Elske inside, and so she did not know how Tavyan answered his wife. The girls were proud of their cook room, warmed by a fire in the hearth, over which a cauldron bubbled, proud of the long table at its center now displaying a line of shallow wooden troughs in which bread dough was rising, proud of what they called glass in the window. They knocked on it with their hands, and suggested Elske do the same, but she did not wish to. She watched through it, to the yard, where Tavyan had an arm around his wife’s waist as he spoke to her, and two cats strolled out of the shed, one with a bellyful of kittens.

  The sisters called her into the shop at the front of the house, to admire its windows and its empty shelves. At the back of this room, a narrow staircase climbed up.

  Elske had heard from Tamara that there were such dwelling places, one level resting on top of the other; so she was not surprised. Each of the three rooms above held a bed, with a mattress as deep and puffy as a summer cloud, and each had a small window under the low roof. Elske could not take it all in at first sight, the wooden floorboards, the whited walls; and the sisters enjoyed her amazement.

  Back in the cook room, she stood to the side while the mother ladled out wooden bowls of stew and Dagma set them around the table, and Karleen sliced off chunks of pale bread and set out metal spoons. By the stone hearth, Tavyan crouched low and looked into a little box where a baby slept. A cradle, they called it, used only for a baby to sleep in.

  They ate seated on benches facing one another across the wooden tabletop. Elske ignored the talk and ate until she could eat no more, however much her mouth still longed to taste the tastes of meat and broth and onion, carrot, turnip and other flavors she had no names for. “Ouff,” she said, at the fullness of her belly, and looked up when the others laughed.

  She had forgotten they were present. Her bowl was empty and theirs were still almost full. “Oh,” she said, and put down a half-eaten chunk of bread.

  Bertilde now seemed pleased with her. “We Trastaders have forgotten the taste of hunger. I think we do not enjoy our food as much as Elske does.”

  “I do,” Nido asserted, and dipped bread into his bowl, and they all laughed again.

  The baby fussed then and Elske went to quiet it. This was an easy task, with only one baby, and he well-fed and warm, his swaddlings dry, and with a lap to himself. Tavyan, his wife and children talked among themselves and she could listen unobserved as she gently rocked the baby back to sleep. “I’ve not coins to spare for a servant,” Bertilde said, so now Elske knew that a servant belonged to a wife. “And it will be many years before we have no daughter’s hands to work beside mine,” she said, so Elske knew what work a servant would do. “We’ll give her one of Sussi’s worn dresses. She looks little more than Sussi in age, just a child, but she can’t stay. However good-tempered she might be. However skilled a nursemaid, if you look at her now.”

  “Where would we keep her, besides?” Dagma asked. “On the floor in here?”

  Elske felt as fat and contented as the baby on her lap, and thought the cook room floor would make a fine bed.

  Nido couldn’t be long distracted from his own interests, and announced, “Tomorrow, at first light, I will apprentice myself to the ship carpenter. You’ll give me the coins, Father? Elske,” he called to her, “I am going to become a builder of ships. And now, when my father and my new brother, Keir, who will inherit my father’s trade, wish to have ships of their own, I will be a partner in their growing riches. Until we will be so wealthy, father and brothers, such great Vars of Trastad, that Taddus will be chosen one of the Councillors—won’t you, Taddus?”

  “It’s not impossible,” Taddus said, “when I represent two such merchant families.”

  “When do you go to Idelle, Taddus?” Dagma asked. “She has been waiting all these long days, sending her aunt to ask at the docks what ships have come to port, carrying what traders safely home.”

  “I’ll see a barber first—”

  “Yes, or your beard will frighten her off forever, and you’ll never get sons to inherit the property she brings you,” Karleen said.

  “You
go with him, Husband,” Bertilde said. “You also need barbering, and you can bring back news about the losses from the storm. I’ve heard two ships were seen to go down.”

  “Drowned men sink under the waves. It’s from filling their bellies with water, when they try to breathe water,” Nido told Elske, with the same pleasure the war bands took in telling of their battles. He told her, “When they rise up again they are black and swollen with death, and the soft parts of their faces and flesh are eaten—”

  “We don’t need to be reminded,” his mother said.

  Tavyan said, “There is nothing anyone can do now, to make or mar those fortunes. So let us consider a fortune we have at our disposal. What shall we do with Elske?”

  Elske hoped they would let her sit by the fire with the sleeping baby on her lap, and feed her again when she was next hungry.

  Bertilde asked, “Can’t she hire herself out elsewhere as a servant?” and Elske understood that in other houses a servant might be wanted.

  “I could marry her,” Nido said.

  “You’re still a boy,” Karleen said, then asked, “How old are you, Elske?”

  The warmth of the stones against her back had made Elske drowsy, so it took her a moment to answer. “This will be my thirteenth winter.”

  “You look younger, but that’s still too young to marry,” Dagma decided.

  “What do we know about her?” Bertilde asked.

  “She’s strong,” Taddus said. “She’s clever.”

  “She knows letters,” Tavyan said. “Reading and writing.”

  “She kept us from fighting,” Nido said, but “How would a girl do that?” his father demanded, and Nido answered, “Well, we didn’t, did we? Also, Elske never once complained.”

  “She seems to know about babies,” Bertilde said. “If she kept her cleverness to herself—for who wants a servant who can read?—she might find a place in one of the great houses, in a Courting Winter.”