Fiction Friday: The Honeythief

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2: Song and Dance

The village, Katy saw, was a four-cornered compound surrounded by a palisade fence, perhaps twenty-five feet high and blank as a cliff-face. They were met at the south gates by two middle-aged matrons in myrmidon armor of hide and shell. One raised her ranseur—rain glimmered on the toothy arc of its blade—and narrowed her little round eyes. “Black 23,” she rasped, “Why are you not with your work crew?”

“This traveler needed assistance,” he said.

“She should be at home with her clan, instead of wandering the world expecting strangers to care for her,” said the other guard.

“Ah, good lady!” said Katy. “It is the way of my clan to wander. Pray, tell me that hospitality is not dead among all the Emeth. This fine fellow does not think so, at least.”

The myrmidons scowled at that. The first turned to the miner. “You shouldn’t be alone,” she said.

“That one is always alone,” muttered the other, and they both made a sort of grumbling noise.

Then of one accord they swung their ranseurs around and pounded the butt-ends three times against the door, in unison. “Open the gate!” they shouted. “Black 23 comes with a traveler!”

With a clash and growl of gearworks, the gates rolled aside, and Katy and the miner walked beneath the shadow of the palisade. Katy made her courtesy to the myrmidons as she passed, then murmured to Black 23: “Soldier aunts, eh? Now I’ve seen everything.”

He said nothing, but led her across the softening mud of the parade ground, making for the high street boardwalk. She shot a glance over her shoulder as the gates rolled shut again. The fence was a simple construction of broad wooden pales, built without ramparts. Every forty feet or so, bastions bulked inwards—square wooden guardhouses that also served to buttress the palisade.

Reaching the boardwalk, they continued into the residential quarter. The streets were unlit. Hundreds of tiny wooden houses—cabins, really, each only big enough for a bed and a cupboard—stood in neat quarters around the high central hall. There was a hook beside each cabin’s front door, and from each hook swung an unlit lantern.

The tall miner moved quickly—his feet seemed hardly to touch the ground—such that even Katy, longstriding farwalker she was, was hardpressed to match him. He was not Emeth-born, she decided. He must be of some other tribe, sent to live among them. Such was not unknown. Some of the Grail clans, distant cousins to her own people, were known to foster their young to the Emeth, for whom they tended the hearths.

But the one called Black 23 she could not place. He swung along lightly in his heavy miner’s boots: the rain seemed to bead off him.

They came to the hall, and the door swung open before them. All within was dim. There were row and rows of eating-benches, and great iron kettles hung empty from the ceiling beams. At the center of the room, clustered around the dying coals of the firepit, sat a knot of elders., perhaps ten or twelve—in the shifting shadows it was hard to tell—their faces lean and parched, dames and gaffers both, all in claybrown jerkins, ragged grey heads leaned close in together. One cocked a baneful eye at Katy and the miner and said, “What have you brought among us?”

The miner lowered his head. “Red Five,” he said. “Honored Council. The saltimbanco Fiddlin’ Katy asks food and a roof for the night.”

Katy stepped forward, spread her sodden kirtle and curtseyed low, Katy did. And making bold she said, “In return, good gentles, I offer my services. A singer of songs and teller of tales am I. I play all the dances, the gavottes and galliards, and I carry the news from my wanderings—news from Cathedral, the doings of the market-towns, rumors of war from the distant frontiers. All the gossip and buzz, a flea for thine ear, all the word on the butterfly.net—”

“Enough,” said Red Five, and Katy’s quick tongue fell still in her jaws. In the silence old Red Five glared with her terrible eyes, and all the others with her, the force of their stares all gathered into hers. Red Five in the end spoke to the one called Black 23, as if Katy were not there at all.

“We never did know your mind,” she said softly, “But if we had ever guessed that you might do this...” Red Five shook her grey head, then turned to Fiddlin’ Katy. Her eyes were black and bitter.

“You have nothing to offer us,” she said. “We of the Emeth have our own songs, and they are songs of work. What do we care of Cathedral? What do we care of the comings and goings of bishops and beadles and the Birds of Our Lady? ¡Sancto Imago!” she swore. “We have our Truth; we have no need of Cathedral and its pomp.

“What are your rumors of war to us? We are miners and carpenters, farmers and cutters of leaf. We have our own soldiers, and we have our tunnels. No war will touch the Farm.

“Go, ye singer of songs. There is nothing here for you.”

Katy started at that, Katy did, and opened her mouth to speak. Then she closed it again, for she knew she was defeated. Everywhere she had ever gone in her travels, everyone wanted gossip: everyone wanted news; everyone wanted to kick up his heels of an evening. But the Emeth wanted none of these things, and Katy, in truth, had nothing else to give. This old Emeth dame with her black and burning eyes looked at Katy and saw a worthless thing, and Katy was shaken. It was a feeling she little knew, and liked even less.

Her hand was on the strap of her rucksack when a voice said, simply, “Wait.”

She looked up. The one called Black 23 was drawn up to his full height, staring down the council with his big dark eyes. “I have given her food already,” he said. “I have given my overnight provisions. She is in my debt.”

The councilors glared in the dull ruddy light of the hearthcoals. An old gaffer whispered, with warning in his voice, “Black 23, you have not the right.”

“The food was mine to give,” he said. “She is in my debt. Let her play now, in repayment.”

“She will not play in this hall—” began Red Five, but Black 23 cut her off.

“The debt must be paid,” he said, and though his voice was not loud it would brook no disagreement. “It is the way of things. It is what must be done. Let her play for me, now. You need not listen if it pains you, but she will play.”

He turned to Katy and smiled—a strange smile, but a kind one. “If you will do me the honor,” he said.

Katy hopped up onto a bench and crooked her rebeca in her arm. “Will you call the tune, Master Black?”

He shook his head. “Play what you will. A dance, perhaps.”

And Katy drew the bow. She played a canzon, a melody long and sweet, and the timbers of the room seemed to hum with it. She tapped one foot as she played; one belltinkling spur rose and fell. Black 23 closed his eyes and swayed gently in his place. The council watched in iron stillness.

The canzon wound itself on. Katy looked up and saw that more eyes were glaring in the dark: more Emeth were entering the hall, slipping in by ones and twos. Young and old, they were dressed in reds and blacks, called from their sleep by the sound of music. Their faces were harsh; their jaws, set hard.

Katy sawed at her rebeca, slipjigging into a stately pavane. The dancing pulse was slow but insistent. Black 23 scuffed one miner-boot backward, then the other, heel and toe. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, he began to dance.

Katy’s bow cut the elegant, circular tune into the smoky air. The miner moved with a sliding, shuffling grace. The hard faces of the Emeth—and there were more of them crowding into the room with each moment that passed—composed themselves in masks of silent rage. Beneath the keening of her strings Katy became aware of a deep, wicked growl thrumming through the room. With dawning horror, she realized that the assembled Emeth were snarling low in their throats.

And yet they stood stock still. The only motion in the room was the dancing of Black 23, the arcing of the bow, and the drift of the smoke.

Katy wound into the next tune of the set, a lively galliard. Black 23’s elbows cocked up and out, toes and ankles scissoring as he cut a contracted figure-of-eight across the flagstones of the floor. The Emeth’s mouths were open now, and they bawled in anger. He seemed too lost in the music to notice. She was too afraid to stop.

The rebeca shrilled; her spurs clattered. She set up a saltarello, the quick, highstepping dance of her people, and the miner danced it, black in the shadows, boots pattering faster than the hammering rain on the hall’s roof. The rockirons jingled in his belt like a tambourine. And still the Emeth stood, trembling with fury, their howls of protest growing louder as Black 23’s dancing grew wilder. Katy’s fingers raced; her bow-arm pistoned. As the saltarello drew towards its climax, he drew back, stutterstepping backwards to the wall, his hands and his hips a-blur, then set off at a tear, hopskipping the length of the hall in rhythm to the bow. Katy had never played so finely.

At every fourth step a jump, and with each jump he rose higher. He seemed to be moving impossibly fast, but he seemed to hang in the air for moments at a time, seemed almost to take flight. And as he leaped the anger of the Emeth seemed to die. Their cries faded in their throats, and the fury on their faces turned to wonder as Black 23 launched himself high, clearing the broad firepit, nearly grazing the roofbeams before crashing his boots to the flagstones on the final downbeat, his boot in time with hers.

Katy struck the last chord with such force that one of the rebeca’s strings frayed and snapped. Its soft uncoiling was the only sound in the near-darkness of the hall.

Fiddlin’ Katy caught her breath—for she had quite forgotten to inhale. “¡Sancto Imago!” she said. “Wh—What are you?”

The tall miner turned to her, and she could see his big eyes shining with tears. “I am,” he said, “a very long way from home.”

More next week...