Alys Clare - Out of the Dawn Light

‘What sort of help would you want?’ I asked, making my voice feeble and scared. ‘Finding something, I realize that, but where would I have to look? Here?’ I looked around me. ‘In Aelf Fen?’

‘Neither, exactly,’ Romain said cautiously. ‘You — in fact, Lassair, our purpose would necessitate a journey.’

‘A long journey?’ I was finding it hard to keep up the pretence of nervous little ninny, but I did my best. ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’d be brave enough for that.’

Sibert, I noticed, was eyeing me closely. I had better be careful.

‘Oh, not that long!’ Romain gave a very false-sounding laugh. ‘We have to go — er — to the coast.’

The nearest sea to where we stood was about thirty miles north. Eastwards, it was maybe forty-five or fifty miles. ‘Oh dear,’ I whispered, ‘that sounds a very great distance.’ I was thinking hard, for I urgently needed to know more about this business than they seemed prepared to tell me. ‘How long would I be away? I’m looking after Goda, you know, and I don’t think she would want me to leave her, especially now when the baby’s birth will surely be quite soon.’

‘She must not know where you’re going!’ Sibert said quickly. ‘You can’t tell anyone , Lassair!’

I certainly can’t unless you first tell me, I almost said. I stopped myself. ‘Then I suppose I would have to think of an excuse,’ I said, frowning as if this was going to be difficult.

‘Can you do that?’ Romain asked, unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice. ‘Can you tell a convincing lie?’ He didn’t know me very well.

‘Oh, I expect so,’ I replied innocently. I felt Sibert’s quick, suspicious glance. He, on the other hand, knew me much better.

‘Do you mean you’ll come with us?’ Romain said. He was standing right beside me now, almost breathless as he waited to hear what I would say.

I pretended to think. ‘If we must travel for as much as fifty miles, do this search for whatever it is and then come back again, we must surely be away for several days and-’

‘We shall travel fast,’ Romain interrupted eagerly. ‘The weather is fine, the roads and tracks are dry. We may be able to cover as much as twenty miles in each march.’

‘There’s plenty of daylight at this time of year,’ I added.

The two of them exchanged a look. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to travel after dark,’ Romain said.

I had a feeling he would say that. ‘Because all of this is so secret?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Yes. So secret that you won’t be able to seek permission to make the journey. In fact, Sibert shouldn’t even be here now, which is why you had to meet him out here in the woods.’

Oh. Not only did I seem to have agreed to act as treasure-seeker for these two conspirators, but I was about to compound my potential misdemeanours by setting out on a considerable journey — to the sea! Oh, it was exciting! I’d never in my life seen the sea! — without the knowledge or agreement of the lord.

This should have made me come to my senses and say a courteous but very firm no. I was not quite sure what sort of trouble a girl of my age would land in if caught absconding from the manor without permission but I knew it would be grave. Very grave, and probably not only for me. But then I thought of Goda, moaning and sweating in her smelly bed. I thought of how furious she would be if — probably when — she discovered that I’d drugged her so that I could disobey her explicit command and go out to join in the Midsummer’s Eve celebrations. Life in her house was already miserably hard. How much more would I have to suffer when she heard how I’d tricked her?

As I prepared to give them my answer, I was already planning what I would say to my sister to justify the sudden urgent need to be away from her for perhaps as long as a week.

That was going to be the easy part.

I was good at making up creditable fictions but, although I say it myself, the tale I wove for Goda was convincing even by my standards. I knew that if I were to cite anybody who might at some point be asked to verify my story, then it had better be someone I trusted not to let me down. The obvious person, since we already shared quite a lot of secrets, was my aunt Edild.

She is, as I have said, a herbalist and a healer. She is honest and good and always does her best to help people. If they are very poor and in desperate need, sometimes she does not charge them, merely saying that one day when she was in need, they can do something for her. Those days never seem to come.

Times, however, were changing. Churches, abbeys and monasteries were springing up all over the place and the black-clad priests seemed to be multiplying fast. Not that I had any complaints about that. The vast majority of the people were poor and the men of the Church gave them much-needed support when they were desperate. Most of them did, that is; there were exceptions. However, the problem was that some of the priests apparently believed that sickness and injury happened to people who had in some way offended God and therefore they should be made to suffer, or at least have their pain helped only by God’s own men. Edild and I did not see it quite like that and we helped all who came asking, without first enquiring whether we should let them suffer a while for the good of their soul before we did so. Furthermore, women like my aunt always aroused suspicion because they were different. Edild, typical of her kind, was unmarried, dependent on no man for the food on her table or the roof over her head. She was clever and could read and write (I once heard a priest say that a literate woman was an abomination in the eyes of God, although he was talking in general and not about Edild). And people — particularly priests — were deeply suspicious of the old ways. The God whom they worshipped, to the ruthless exclusion of any other, did not allow people to believe in the old deities or the spirits that inhabited the streams, the trees and the very stones of the earth. Edild’s methods, in their eyes, were very close to sorcery.

It had always seemed quite natural and logical, therefore, that much of what I learned from my aunt must not be spoken of outside the four walls of her snug little house. She could depend on me to be diplomatic and she knew, I hoped, that I would lie to protect her if I had to. I was as sure as I could be that she would do the same for me.

On the morning after my night-time meeting with Romain and Sibert, Goda woke from a long and profound sleep — so profound that she did not appear to have moved at all throughout the night — in a surprisingly good mood. All things are relative, and for my sister a good mood meant that she didn’t shout at me because a refreshing drink wasn’t ready for her the instant she awoke or hurl the mug at me if the drink wasn’t precisely to her liking. Still, to have her glare at me in silence was an improvement on her usual torrent of abuse.

I took advantage of the fact that she had slept so late and told her that first thing that morning, just after Cerdic had left for work, a messenger had come from Aelf Fen to summon me because Edild needed me urgently.

‘What does she want you for?’ demanded Goda.

Modestly I cast down my eyes. ‘Several people have been injured in an accident and she needs another pair of hands to treat them all.’

Goda looked at me with her mouth turned down in a sarcastic scowl. ‘She must be desperate if she wants a clumsy, ham-fisted oaf like you to tend the wounded,’ she observed. Then, prurient curiosity getting the better of her as I had known it would: ‘What sort of accident?’

‘There was a heavily loaded hay cart being drawn back to the lord’s yard and lots of people were riding on it,’ I said in a hushed tone. ‘Many more were walking along beside it and then something startled the horse — they think it may have been stung by a hornet — and somehow it put its offside feet over the edge of the ditch and before anyone could do anything the cart went over.’