Chance Read online

Her shoulders sagged, and she started to weep.

  Blinded by her own tears she walked, and Chance led her to his lodge, as it was the closest dwelling. He sat her by his hearth, put fragrant apple wood on the fire, drew water and set it to boil for hot herb tea to soothe her. She looked up at him. Her face was white, drawn down by grief, ravaged by tears, her hair hanging down her forehead in strings.

  “There is nothing for me any more,” she told him with deathly calm, “for my babe, nothing. No hope.”

  “Hali, please.” He had not called her by the pet name since she was a tiny girl, but that night it burst from him. “Do not say that!”

  “How am I not to say what is but simple truth? What is there for me but to be a whore, and my baby a whore’s brat? Unless I die—”

  “Hail, no!” He knelt before her, his shoulders broad and bare in the firelight, reached up to touch her face, as if his touch could somehow heal her of tears. It did not.

  “Far better that I should die. I am a blot, all goodly folk scorn me. My own brother hates me—”

  “I love you,” Chance whispered, his face upraised and his eyes meeting her eyes.

  Her face grew very still, and she looked back at him as if she were seeing him for the first time.

  “That was not spoken as my brother’s warden,” she said slowly after a moment, in a hushed voice.

  “No.” Chance swallowed, and shame tugged at his face, but still he met her eyes. “And it should not have been spoken, for it is unseemly, except that—it is truth, Lady, and something you needed to hear, tonight.”

  “You—love—me?”

  The tremor in her voice smote him to the heart.

  “How not?” he said. “Hali, you are of all maidens most beautiful, most brave, most—most dreaming. What man can see you and not love you? And you are wrong, Lady.” His voice grew stronger and yet warmer. “There will be a worthy lover for you someday, after these dark days are behind you. A noble lover, I feel sure of it.”

  “You call yourself unworthy?” Halimeda’s voice also grew stronger, and with her own hands she reached up and brushed away her tears.

  “I, a commoner and a bastard?” He laughed briefly, harshly. “Yes, manifestly unworthy. I am a fool to speak.”

  “No fool. I know better.” Halimeda was looking at him thoughtfully, desperation turning into a bold thought, and Chance saw. In a few moments, he knew, his heart would break—for still he must speak truth.

  “Hali, I have—nothing to give you.”

  “No name, you mean, for the babe? No family? But already I am bereft of those. I came here with nothing, and you have offered me a commoner’s love. It is that much more.” She spoke not warmly, but in a settled, collected way. “Perhaps, in time, I could learn to return it.”

  Looking up at her, hope dawning in her gaze, he faced at last the agony that for years he had held at arm’s length. He sobbed, bent as if by a blow, hiding his face behind his hands.

  “Chance, what is it?” Halimeda drew him toward her, letting his head and shoulders lie in her lap, against the warm curve of her pregnant belly, as he choked on pain. “My life’s friend, what is wrong?”

  He stopped struggling and found the calm in the vortex of the pain, looked up at her.

  “I have—nothing to give you, Hali.”

  Scarcely comprehending, unwilling to comprehend, yet she began to understand, and her face grew very still. She did not speak. He got up, found a shirt and put it on, made the tea, gave her some and himself some as well. Sitting near her by the hearth, he told her the tale.

  “It happened the day of our victory in the long war. Roddarc and I fought side by side always, and he in the fore, as befits a lord’s son. And he is a splendid warrior, I was proud and joyous to stand by him. And many a time had he taken a spear on his shield. But this one time of those many times, he erred somehow, and instead of deflecting the spear harmlessly he let it slip down and to the side, and it struck me featly in the groin.”

  He had never spoken of that day, not to anyone, and it was as though he felt again the blow; he shuddered and winced. But the lady’s steady eyes were on him, and he went on.

  “We fought on, both of us. We had to, or be killed. Luckily the battle was nearly over before I weakened.… Roddarc carried me to safety, and laid me down and tore open the clothing to bandage the wound. And when he saw what had been done to me, he wept. When I awoke, the next day, he was still weeping.”

  “How—how horrible,” Halimeda whispered.

  “He never told you?”

  “No!”

  “I think—he does not speak of it, any more than I do. I think—my lady, he has never said this to me, but it may be why he has never wed. So that he would not enjoy what I could not. He is—he is all bound up in honor and loyalty; he would think in that way. And he was a merry enough wencher before it happened. We both were.”

  Halimeda grimaced at him. “Did you make yourselves babes in the wenches?”

  “We may have. I know Roddarc did.” And his punishment, as usual, was visited on me. The thought, new to him, took his breath away, until he saw the look the lady was giving him. “No, it is not right,” he told her.

  “Or fair,” she said hotly. “Men share the pleasure and escape the blame.”

  “It was a long time ago. We were young fools. And—Halimeda, do you think it may be part of Roddarc’s spleen now, that you have enjoyed lovemaking.…”

  She flushed and glanced down at her hands. Impulsively Chance reached over and touched her hair, straightening the straggling locks.

  “I don’t know when I began dreaming of you,” he said softly. “Years ago. It happened stealthily.… And, you see, it did not matter to me that you were unattainable.”

  “I must think,” she muttered, still staring at her hands.

  “Take note, my lady, you are not so willing to hurl yourself away after all.”

  She looked up at him with a small, shamed smile, and he nodded.

  “Truly, there will be someone better for you. Your case is not so desperate that you must settle for a bastard commoner with no manhead. Life’s course is full of strange quirks and turns. You are so lovely, there must yet be a worthy lover for you. I cannot believe otherwise.”

  “Chance,” she said slowly, “I am all in confusion. You have made me see outside myself, and it is a comfort, but strange.”

  “Then go home, bear your child, wait. It will come clear. Only, Hali …” One last time he permitted himself that love-name, and he looked at her in plea. “Think no longer of Gallowstree Lea.”

  She gave him her hand for a moment. That was her pledge.

  On a day when bone-chilling drizzle fell from a gray sky, Chance paused along a deer trail in Wirral to relieve himself against an oak—a thing he had done often enough before, forsooth. But this time he had no more than undone the lacing of his trousers and parted the fabric when a trilling laugh sounded, to be echoed from several directions.

  “No nuts, and only half a stem!” a fey voice sang. “Chance, don’t you miss them?”

  Chance scowled and started to cover himself, then considered that it would be worse to be pursued elsewhere. He emptied his bladder, and as he did so the Denizen who had accosted him strutted into view. It was one of the tough-breasted females, to his chagrin, and he flushed deeply. The woodswoman laughed again.

  “Chance, it is a wonder they call you man!”

  He closed his trousers, fumbling with the laces in his haste, and burbling laughter sounded from all around. Then a small brown form shot through the air and landed like a squirrel beside the other. It was the Denizen Chance had first bespoken, the handsome russet-colored young prince of them all.

  “Pay no mind, Chance,” he said. “Fate is unkind.”

  “And you, I suppose, are kinder,” Chance retorted sourly.

  “Indeed so! Listen, and you shall know.” The young Denizen paused for effect, and crouched down on his bough in a manner as of a conspirator. �
�In the midst of Wirral,” he said in a lowered voice, “in the very fundament of it, stands a tree which bears nuts such as those you lack.”

  Chance snorted aloud. “You must take me for an ass,” he said.

  “You doubt it? When Wirral grows thick as grass?”

  Chance scowled; they were rhyming with him, now. “What of it,” he said curtly, “if there is such a tree?” For he did not know all that lay in the penetralia of Wirral; no one did. Stranger things than what the Denizen named might be there.

  “What of it? Chance!” The Denizen prince seemed aghast. Still standing beside him, the female took up the tale.

  “Just do as we say—”

  Other voices joined in.

  “Pluck the nuts from that bole,”

  “And you will be whole,”

  “And join the dance within the day!”

  “Bah!” Chance exploded, but he did not turn away. If the small folk were bejaping him, they had judged nicely as to their bait. He could not turn away, not while there was even the fool’s chance that they were speaking truth. In no mindly sense did he believe them, but he had heard tales of these folk, their many powers. He had to risk.…

  “Danger?” he demanded.

  The Denizen prince stood up, stiffly erect, cock jutting. “Some small peril,” he admitted. “Do you care for that?” Glint of his amber eyes gave the dare to Chance.

  “Bah!” Chance sputtered again. “Which way?”

  Instead of replying, the copper-colored Denizen turned to the surrounding forest. “What say ye?” he cried. “Shall we guide him thither?”

  Blast the cock-proud rascal, Chance fumed, he’ll have me begging next for my chance to be gulled.

  The cry went up from all around.

  “Away, say we!”

  “To the cullion-nut tree!”

  “Whither, thence! Hither, hence!” the Denizen prince shouted crazily, and he vanished as handily as a squirrel, within an eyeblink. A birdlike laugh sounded somewhere, and then there was silence. Chance lurched forward.

  “Where are you?” he shouted, trying to keep the fury out of his voice. Be cursed the lot of them, truly they would have him begging! For what folly? A ball tree!

  “Here!” came a teasing voice from somewhere far ahead.

  “This way!” another cried gaily from a somewhat different direction. “With a dildo hey! Away, we say!”

  Panting with anger even before he began, Chance ran toward the voices.

  “Full merrily away say we!”

  And indeed they led him a merry chase through the drizzling rain. Tearing through bracken and stumbling through stones, up scarp and down dingle, into thorn thickets that pierced him even through his leathern clothing, that would have liked to have taken his eyes. The Denizens, he decided, must have some plan for him after all, for they slowed their pace to wait for him. But as soon as he stumbled out of his difficulties they were off again as wildly as ever, and he must needs trail after, with no breath left even to curse.

  “Chance Lord’s man, he ran and ran …”

  Already they were making a song of it. They would be amusing themselves with the tale, Chance deemed, for the winter’s span, perhaps longer. No matter, for he had to know the end of the story. He ran through the waning day until the gray sky darkened into dusk. No matter, again. There was no loved one waiting by his cold hearth.

  He splashed into fen. No matter, still; already he was wet to the skin. Though never before, even in Wirral, had he met with such a bog. Thick mud oozed up to his thighs, almost up to his crotch, slowing him to a snail’s pace.

  “How much farther?” he called into the dusk.

  A babble of laughter sounded instead of an answer, and Chance stiffened: something large was bestirring the fen, rising luminous into the dusk.

  The laughter of the denizens rippled and warbled from the forest all around. There must have been hundreds of them watching, as dense as a flock of starlings.

  And Chance shouted with terror, falling back into the muck.

  Looming over him, a sort of a snake of single eye, a dragon—but no, the thing was too stubby to be called a snake, too formless and squalid for a dragon. More like a huge worm or a maggot, fungus-colored, with the glistening soft skin of a catfish. Slimy fen water dripped down from it, and the single eye deepset in the center of its head peered toward him.

  Chance floundered back from it, thrashing for balance and footing, and the Denizens shook the small tree limbs with their laughter. Gleeful voices shouted.

  “Don’t hurt it, Chance!”

  “It only wants to dance!”

  “Wirralworm, we call it!”

  Above them all the voice of the young prince carried.

  “Chance, there is no cullion tree. But see, we’ve found a phallus for ye!”

  If I had a sword, he thought grimly, if I had a nobleman’s weapon.… But what would be the use, indeed, of doing battle with the nodding monster? It had not moved from its place amidst the muck, and even as he crawled at last onto solid ground and stood, streaming bogwater and greenish slime, to face it, the thing went limp and collapsed beneath the surface. There was a faint glow as of something rotten, and it was gone.

  “But it’s always there,” said a voice close by his ear, “hidden deep yet not asleep. Just like the manhood in you, Chance.”

  He turned, sluggish with disgust, to face the copper-brown prince of the Denizens, barely visible in the nightfall darkness.

  “Very well,” said Chance, “you’ve had your play. Now which way to my home?”

  The handspan youth chuckled in delight at the happenstance rhyme. “The sun will show you the way, come day,” he sang. “Sleep well!” Within the moment he and all the others were gone. Their laughing farewells echoed away into Wirral.

  Chance did not wait for day. He blundered off, on the move to keep his chilled blood from pooling in his veins, and roamed all night though he could see nothing beneath cloud gloom that shut out the moon and stars. He did not mind the darkness; it matched his wakeful rage.

  Halimeda’s babe was born as the first snow fell thick and cold on turrets and trees. It was a girl. A hard labor, but the lady would be well enough after a ten of days, if she did not weaken with fever. This much Chance learned from the talk of the alehouse—he went often to the alehouse, those days, and made friends with those who muttered there in the evenings after a day of wearisome toil in the lord’s service. He inquired of Halimeda also from Roddarc’s steward, to whom he made his reports. The lord himself he had not seen since the night he had ordered Roddarc out of his lodge. Nor was Chance admitted to see Halimeda.

  The talk had it, after several days, that she was on the mend and the infant thriving. But the tenth day came and passed, and there was no courtly gathering, no ceremony of welcome for the little one, no bestowal of a name.

  Near Chance’s cottage lay a broad, hollow log of apple, the most auspicious of woods. When that day had passed he worked the evening by lantern light and cut a section of it, took it in by his hearth. There in days that followed he cleaned and shaped it, polished it with wax, fitted ends to it, and rockers.

  Snow after snow fell. The Wirral stood shrouded, white and cold.

  “Any tidings?” Chance asked of a tree one day.

  A small, cross face looked out at him. “We have said we will tell you, Chance Lord’s Man.”

  He believed them in this, for he considered that they might be inclined toward kindness since the affair of the fen. For a time.

  “But someday—” the Denizen grumbled.

  “I will pay,” Chance finished impatiently. The small woodsman scowled at him.

  “Think not, fool, that you can pull from one of us a thorn. We take care of our own.”

  “Just tell me quickly when she comes.”

  As it chanced, he saw her himself and needed no telling. Barefoot in the deep snow she came, in the pale winter’s daylight, slowly walking, gowned in black, carrying the baby in her
arms. So as not to be seen from the fortress, he let her come well within the shelter of the trees before he met her.

  “Chance!” she gasped, then burst out at once with her trouble. “He has said I must leave the little one here in the Wirral!”

  “I know. So it would have been done to me if your kind lady mother had not taken me to the keep.” Easily, as if he had done nothing in his life but handle children, he reached out and took the babe. “Now the little lady of Wirralmark comes to me.”

  “But Chance—oh, I am filled with hope, but how will you care for her? How will you feed her?”

  “I will find a woman to nurse her. I will cherish her, my lady.”

  Halimeda’s eyes filled, and she touched one of his weathered hands.

  “How is Roddarc?” he asked her gruffly.

  “Much the same.” She sounded more weary than bitter, but then her eyes widened with fright. “He will learn that you have sheltered the babe, he will punish you for it!”

  “He will learn,” Chance agreed, “but I think he will not trouble me. There has to be shame in him, or he would have killed the child outright.”

  The infant in his arms stirred and began to wail.

  “Go back quickly, Lady, before you freeze,” Chance urged. “Only tell me, what is this pretty one’s name?”

  “I have called her Sorrow.”

  “She is worthy of better than that, Halimeda!”

  The lady hesitated only for a moment. “Call her Iantha,” she said softly, and she touched the babe’s petalsoft cheek, kissed her on the forehead, glanced once at Chance and turned away, running.

  Iantha. The name meant “Violet.”

  Chance carried her to his lodge, and the babe howled loud with hunger.

  He satisfied her with a sugar-teat and the rocking of the cradle until after dark. Then he carried her to the village huts that huddled beneath the fortress wall. But he had misjudged, thinking his fellow commoners would be as brave as he. Not a woman of them would take the infant to nurse, or a man permit it, for fear of the lord’s wrath.

  By the end of the next day Chance knew that Iantha was starving. She could not hold down the milk of cows or goats, or even that of mares. Her wailing grew weaker, mewling and piteous.