Katharine Kerr - A Time of War

By the time he’d filled the damp basket with herbs, he’d forgotten the councilman’s name, and by the time he was heading home, all he retained was a sense of fear, linked to the grassy bank of some stream or other. A snake, perhaps, had startled him; dimly he could remember a sound much like the hiss of a snake.

Although there were a scattering of villages farther west, Cerr Cawnen was the only town worthy of the name in that part of the world, the Rhiddaer (the Freeland), as it was known. In the midst of water meadows lay Loc Vaed, stretching in long green shallows out to blue deeper water and a rocky central island, the Citadel, where stood the fine homes of the best families and, at the very peak, the armoury of the citizen militia. The rest of the town crammed into the shallows: a jumble and welter of houses and shops all perched on pilings or crannogs, joined by little bridges to one another in the rough equivalent of city blocks, which in turn bristled with jetties and rickety stairs leading down to the stretches of open water between them, where leather coracles bobbed on ropes. Toward the edge of town, where the lake rippled over sandy reefs, big logs, sawn in half and sunk on end, studded the surface of the water and served as stepping-stones between the huts and islets. On the lake shore proper, where the ground was reasonably solid, stood a high timber-laced stone wall, ringing the entire lake round. Guards stood on constant duty at the gate and prowled the catwalk above, turning the entire town and lake both into an armed camp. The forty thousand folk of Cerr Cawnen had more than one enemy to fear.

It was late in the day by the time Jahdo trotted through the gates to the stretch of grass that ringed the shore, and he knew he’d best hurry. Not only did the memory of his fear still trouble him, but he was worried about his elder sister, who’d woken that morning doubled over with pain. Clutching his basket tight, he jumped his way across the shallows from log to log, then climbed some stairs up to a block of buildings, all roofed with living sod or vegetable gardens. Most of the stilt-houses had wide wooden decks round them, and he leapt or clambered from one to another, dodging dogs and goats and small children, ducking under wet laundry hung to dry, calling out a pleasant word here or there to a woman grinding grain in a quern or a man fishing from a window of his house. At the edge of the deeper water he climbed down and helped himself to a coracle tied to a piling. These little round boats were common property, used as needed, left for the next person wherever one landed them. With his basket settled between his knees, Jahdo rowed out to Citadel.

Normally, poor folk like him and his family never lived on the central island, but his clan had occupied two big rooms attached to the town granaries for over a hundred years, ever since the Town Council had chartered the lodgings to them – on condition, of course, that they ‘did work most diligently and with all care and patience both of man and weasel’ to keep down the swarms of rats in the granary. Everyone knew that rodents were dangerous enemies, spreading filth and fleas, befouling much more food than they outright ate. To earn their food, clothing, and other necessities, the Ratters, as their family came to be known, also took their ferrets round from house to house all over town. Wearing little muzzles to keep them from making kills, the ferrets chased the vermin out through holes in the walls, where the family caught the rats in wicker cages and drowned them and their fleas both in the lake – not the most pleasant of jobs, but growing up with it made it tolerable.

The squat stone buildings of the public granaries clung to a cliff low down on the citadel island. Getting to the Ratters’ quarters required some of a ferret’s agility: first you climbed up a wooden ladder, then squeezed yourself between two walls and inched along until you made a very sharp turn right into the doorway. When Jahdo came into the big square chamber that served as kitchen, common room, and bedchamber for his parents, he found white-haired Gwira, the herbwoman, brewing herb water in an iron kettle at the hearth. The spicy scent, tinged with resin, hung in the room and mingled with the musky stink of ferrets.

‘Where’s Mam, Gwira?’ Jahdo said.

‘Out with your Da and the weasels. They’ll be back well before dark, she told me. Don’t know where Kiel’s gone to.’

Dead-pale but smiling, his elder sister, lanky dark-haired Niffa, was sitting at the rickety plank table nearby and drinking from a wooden bowl. Although she glanced his way, her enormous dark eyes seemed focused on some wider, distant view. A dreamy child, people called her, and at root, very strange. Jahdo merely thought of her as irritating.

‘You be well?’

‘I am, at that.’ Niffa blushed as red as the coals. ‘I never were truly ill.’

When Jahdo stared in puzzlement, Gwira laughed.

‘Your sister be a woman now, young Jahdo, and that’s all you need to know about it. It’s needful for us to set about finding her a husband soon.’

Vague boyish rumours of blood and the phases of the moon made Jahdo blush as hard as his sister. He slung the basket onto the table and ran into the bedchamber. At one end of the narrow room lay the jumble of blankets and straw mattresses that he, his elder brother, and his sister slept upon, while at the other stood the maze of wooden pens, strewn with more of the same straw, where the ferrets lived. Since his parents were out hunting, only one ferret, a pregnant female, was at home and surprisingly enough awake in the daytime, scooting on her bottom across the straw as if she’d just relieved herself. Jahdo leaned over her slab-sided pen, built high enough to keep the other ferrets out and away from her tangled ball of a nest, all heaped up straw and scraps of cloth. Tek-tek deigned to allow him to stroke her soft fur, then reached out her front paws in a long stretch, casually swiping her bottom across his fingers to mark him as hers.

‘Oh ych, Tek!’ Jahdo wiped his hand on his trousers, then remembered the pewter trinket in his pocket. ‘Here’s somewhat for your hoard.’

When he dropped the disk in, she sniffed it, then hooked the thong with her fangs and, head held high to drag her prize, waddled back to her nest and tucked it safely away. Some ferrets were worse than magpies, stealing shiny things to wad up with rags and bits of old leather into a treasure-ball. They liked socks, too, and stole belt buckles if you didn’t watch them, dragging them belt and all into their nests.

As promised, his parents came home not long after, bent under their burdens of caged ferrets and damp traps. Dark-haired Lael, going grey in his beard and moustaches, was a tall man, built like a blacksmith, or so everyone said, while blonde Dera was a mere wisp of a woman even now, after she’d borne three healthy children and two that had died in infancy. Yet somehow, when she got in one of her rages, no one thought of her as slight or frail, and her blue eyes always snapped with some new passion or other.

‘Back, are you?’ Lael said with a nod at Jahdo. ‘Help me with the weasels.’

They carried the cages into the bedroom and opened them one at a time, grabbing each ferret and slipping off its tiny leather hood. As much as they hated the hoods, the ferrets always seemed to hate having them off even more, twisting round and grunting in your lap. For creatures that weighed no more than five pounds at the absolute most, they could be surprisingly strong. Jahdo got the first pair unhooded easily enough, but their biggest hob, Ambo, was always a battle, a frantic wiggle of pushing paws.

‘Now hold still!’ Jahdo snapped. ‘I do know you do hate it, but there’s naught I can do about it! Here, just let me get the knot undone. It’s needful for you to wear them, you know. What if you ate a big meal and then fell asleep in the walls? We’d never get you back, and you’d get eaten yourself by one of the dog packs or suchlike. Now hold still! There! Ye gods!’