Chalice Read online

Chapter 4

 

  "I was prepared for this or something like this; I thought I was prepared. But I believed that we would reconnect in the land - I would not have come otherwise - and that has not happened. I have begun to fear that perhaps I do hear the land any more either. "

  "Do you?" she said. She did not think that this speaking out of turn was much worse than her last, although to ask a Master if he could feel his own land was beyond any conceivable breach of etiquette, of law; if she had thought of it, she would have expected lightning - the Fire of the sky - to strike her dead before she finished saying you. But she did not think of it. She thought of her land - their land - which so badly needed its Master, and what she heard in Willowlands' Master's voice was despair. She knew despair, and she would draw him away from it if she could, both for the land's sake and for his own - and for hers. And perhaps if a Chalice could not speak openly to her Master, no one could. "Do you hear your land speak?"

  He was silent; silent long enough that she might have thought of what she had said, of the perfidy and faithlessness of the query she had dared put to her Master. But she did not think of it. She thought only of what he might answer her; and prayed for him to say that he was still Master.

  "I believed I did," he said at last. "I felt - something - the moment the carriage bringing me here crossed the boundary from Talltrees. I have thought that part of my exhaustion was not merely that a priest of Fire can no longer live as human, but that the land - my land - drew me back toward it so quickly that I was torn in two, between it and my training in Fire; that it needed my strength, and drew it remorselessly from me, when I had little to give. I lay awake all the first night here, listening, when I was so weary I could not stand, and when what I heard seemed half dream. . . . "

  His voice trailed away and she said quickly: "No, it is often like that for me too, still; I have thought it is because I am so new to it and because I was not called to it and bred up in it the proper way, but snatched, almost stolen, out of my old life and thumped down in this one. I think perhaps it is like dreaming, but like dreaming as a breeze is like a storm wind. If all you know is breezes then your first storm wind is - " And then finally, belatedly, it occurred to her to whom she was speaking and what she was saying, and she stopped and caught her breath - half in terror, half in shame - but even as she did she thought, He speaks to me clearly enough. Tentatively, because this was neither the time nor the place, she felt for her own landsense, and it was right there, close, solid, steady - closer and steadier than she would have expected it to be, if it were not also responding to the presence of the Master.

  He said: "This morning, now, your words to me, have been the first human words I feel I have truly heard since I arrived five months ago. I thank you. You give me hope. "

  And then the Grand Seneschal appeared in the doorway, and glared at them both as if he couldn't help himself, before coming to make his obeisance to the Master with a smooth, respectful face. His apprentice, Bringad, followed him, looking worried; Bringad always looked worried. Then several more people arrived, Circle members and attendants and a few more apprentices; then the factors for farmers and woodskeepers, for whom this meeting had been called; and more bows and greetings were given. The woodskeepers' factor, Gota, to whom she had once reported, had never once looked her in the face since she became Chalice. She acknowledged his respectful greeting with a hand gesture that his downturned eyes should be able to see, and sighed. Soon everyone who was to attend this meeting was present, all standing behind their chairs, waiting for the Master to sit first.

  The Chalice took up her goblet and hesitated; she had thus far always chosen to stand by the main doorway during all House meetings, in whichever room they were in. This was the least controversial place for the Chalice to stand. She hadn't yet had time to learn the rules about standing by a window, which were complex, to do with the cardinal directions, the seasonal angle of the sun, the position of the House, and the earthlines that ran through the demesne. The maths oppressed her, though she often thought wistfully of being able to stand in sunlight.

  It was also perfectly proper for the Chalice to stand by the Master's right hand.

  But when she looked at him, with the thought barely half formed, she saw him with a little shock, for it was as if the conversation they had just had had not happened - and yet the absence of pain in her right hand told her that it had. But the great cloaked figure standing by the fire held power and authority as it held darkness; their conversation could not possibly have been what she seemed to half remember it had been about. He might be strange, alien, no longer human; but he could not be doubted. This was the Master. She turned toward the doorway.

  His voice stopped her. "Stand by me," he said, and took two long, loping, silent steps to the tall chair at the head of the table. Two Housemen stood by it, waiting to slide it forward as the Master sat down. He sat, and the Housemen stepped back - a little too quickly, a little too far - and the Master raised his right hand, and the cloak fell back from it. She saw, in the low morning light, that a few fine hairs grew on the back of it, just as on a human hand. She shifted her grip on her goblet, proudly turning the back of her own unblemished right hand toward the company, and took up her place at the Master's side.

  She heard the plans being made to visit the Well of the Red Fishes that afternoon, but she did not pay attention. The Chalice would not have to attend; the Well needed neither binding nor calming. She could go home and sweep the floor and chop the wood and talk to the bees - and read more hand-sewn books and crumbling piecemeal manuscripts about Chalicehood.

  There was another meeting tomorrow she would have to stand Chalice to; and another one the day after that. And soon the Overlord's agent would be coming again, to see how the new Master was settling in to his responsibilities. This is what Overlords' agents did, they visited their Overlord's demesnes and discussed any problems a Master might be having, in his own lands or with a neighbouring Master; and in a difficult Mastership - as for example when a Master died while his eldest son was still a child - a responsible Overlord would send an agent to that demesne more often. But in this case she mistrusted the Overlord's motives. She wondered again what Prelate said to the agent; and were not Prelate and Keepfast increasingly friendly? And on the last occasion of the agent's presence in Willowlands had she not felt Keepfast had spoken too long and too animatedly to the agent also?

  She would bring the cup of unity to the meeting with Deager, and she would sprinkle a little of its contents around the table before anyone arrived.

  Once the Grand Seneschal had realised that he was stuck with her - once all the Circle had become resigned to her as the new Chalice, that there was no escape through deciding that the omens had been read wrong or the rods had fallen incorrectly - they had tried to persuade her to move out of her small cottage and into the House. Chalices lived in their Houses. But she did not want to move, not least because the Grand Seneschal and several of the others of the Circle, including Keepfast, did live at the House; and there was no rule that the Chalice must live at the House. She was still afraid that such a rule would turn up somewhere, even though she doubted any of the Circle were still actively searching for it.

  One of the things she'd learnt on her own ragged, bemused, zigzag way was that the best sources of useful information were often in strange places, and she wondered if any of the Circle were imaginative enough to guess this, after they'd run their fingers down various indexes and inventories and failed to find "Chalice, living quarters, requirements of" anywhere. She wanted to feel that none of the Circle were imaginative enough, but she didn't dare; hope was dangerous, and might make her reckless or more vulnerable - about where she lived or anything else. She wondered what she would do if she herself found a rule about the conduct of a Chalice that she did not want to - could not bring herself to - conform to. She was sure the Grand Seneschal and the rest of the Circle didn't really want her at the House
either; the attempt had been to make her look more like what they believed a Chalice should look like - and perhaps living at the House would indeed seep into her awkward woodskeeper's ways till she looked like someone who belonged there, if perhaps not someone as illustrious and irreproachable as a Chalice should be.

  But the attempt had failed, and living at a distance had never made her late or careless of her duties (although it often helped make her short of sleep). She thought too that the time it took her to walk to the House and back again was a kind of mind-clearing, mind-composing exercise. . . perhaps even a protection. She thought of the weight of the mere air of the House - and of trying to live somewhere not only constantly surrounded by people, but constantly surrounded by people who would not meet her eye. She also thought that the Circle could not have guessed how much easier they would have found it to intimidate her if she lived at the House or they would not have given up so soon.

  Sometimes she regretted her odd sources of information nonetheless: one of them had been where she had discovered the story about the Master having been put to death for harming his Chalice. She had read it shortly after the Grand Seneschal had received the letter saying that the priests of Fire were allowing their new third-level acolyte to return home to be Master, while Willowlands waited for his arrival - while she was urgently reading all the crabbed and fusty old records she could lay her hands on, for anything she could learn about Chalices and their circumstances. She had read this tale with a shock, but it had not occurred to her then that it would bear any relevance to her or to her Master. Would I really rather not know the law existed? she thought. Wouldn't I just have invented something like it - and worried about where I'd finally find proof?

  In some ways it was not so preposterous or absurd that she had been chosen; and if she had been chosen as apprentice at ten or eleven, she would have been ready when the Chalice came to her. (She wondered if the Chalice had ever failed to go to the accepted apprentice. That involuntary Chalice would be even less to be envied than herself. ) A well-established, well-rooted Chalice was Chalice, and all else about her was forgotten, was inconsequential. It was true that the last three Chalices at Willowlands had been Housefolk; but her family was one of the oldest on the demesne and almost everyone in it had some landsense, and had had for generations, as did all the members of all the old families, those both in and out of the House. She felt the blow when the old Master and the old Chalice had died, but that was hardly surprising. Almost everyone had felt so extreme a calamity to the land, even those families who had moved to Willowlands in their own generation. And her landsense hadn't told her what had happened, only that some great and terrible cataclysm had occurred. When Selim had come to tell her the news she had not only been shocked and appalled but astonished.

  Although Selim had been living with the news for a day and a half, telling it over still shook her so badly that she had to sit down. "Branda brought the news to me," she said, "and I told Marn yesterday. She said she would tell Kard. . . . " Her voice trailed away. She watched Mirasol moving as if blind around her own kitchen, as if trying to remember what you did when you had a visitor, and said, "If you're going to offer me something to drink, Mirasol, tisane would be nice, but your mead would be better. "

  Mirasol shook her head to clear it - it didn't clear - and then tried to smile and didn't do that much better. She'd brought Selim indoors and put her in a chair before her news had really sunk in, and, now that it had. . . she found herself standing, staring at her hands, which had frozen on the cupboard door handles, the cupboard where the mead lived. She opened the door and reached in - hesitated - and instead of mead, took down the honey brandy. She stared at the bottle. She had put down the mead that had become this brandy nine years ago: Her parents were still alive and so was the old Master, and the folk of the demesne were worrying what kind of Master his elder son would become. Her hands were shaking. The Master and Chalice both dead! No wonder the groaning of the land had been keeping her awake at night - giving her nightmares that followed her around during the day and hid in the shadows.

  She managed to pour two fingers of brandy for Selim and herself by holding the wrist of her right hand with her left, and then said abruptly, "Let's go back outdoors again. The sunlight still falls unchanged. " And there are fewer shadows for nightmares to hide in, she thought, but did not say this aloud.

  They sat on the worn stone chairs some forebear of Mirasol's had built several hundred years ago, when the family had first moved to Willowlands and been granted this woodright. The chairs had been among Mirasol's favourite things all her life, and she felt she needed their solidity now. She dropped a cushion on one of them for Selim but settled on another one herself without; she didn't mind the hardness of the stone and liked the way the seat seemed to have been worn to a shallow human-buttock-shaped cup. She liked to think this was from all the years of sitting but it was more likely her ancestor had had the luck or foresight to choose saucer-shaped stones. She thought of hundreds of years of rain and sun falling on these chairs. . . . In all those years they would have seen the deaths of many Masters and Chalices. . . but never both at the same time. And never in such a terrible way.

  Selim was watching her ironically over the brim of her glass. "You nestle into that seat like a cat on a blanket - your dad and his mother did the same. I've always thought the family name that ought to go with this woodright is Hardbutt. "

  Mirasol laughed. She knew she was supposed to - the Hardbutt joke was very, very old - but she was grateful to Selim for dusting it off and bringing it out on this occasion, when there was so little to laugh about. Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.

  Selim sipped a little of her brandy and gave a great sigh and stretched out her long legs. "Thank the gods for honey," she said. "Your honey in particular. Just so long as your bees don't decide to object. " There were bees in the foxgloves near the chairs, and Selim glanced at them uneasily. Most of Mirasol's visitors glanced at her bees uneasily; they were unusually large, and they had the disconcerting habit of coming, as if to say hello, to Mirasol and - even more disconcertingly - going on to investigate any company Mirasol might have. But Mirasol's honey was the best in the demesne; several people had told her that they thought it was even better than her mother's. The bees like you, they said, and bore with the bees' discomfiting behaviour.

  As if they had heard, two or three bees broke off from exploring the foxgloves to fly toward Mirasol. They settled first in her hair and then walked down to her shoulders. Two or three more bees joined them, strolling down her arms and then creeping over the rim of her tumbler to taste the brandy. As well as being unusually large, only their bellies were striped yellow; their backs were a black as velvet-glossy as a fine horse's. One bee flew on toward Selim. Selim made a noise.

  "Don't worry," Mirasol said mildly. "They're not going to say 'what are you doing with my honey?' and be angry. The most amazing honey they've ever made was after I put some mead out for them one winter when I'd got some other stuff wrong and didn't have anything else to give them. Put your hand over your glass if you don't want bees walking in it. "

  Selim nervously put her hand over the rim. The bee flew round Selim twice without landing, and went back to the foxgloves. Selim was accustomed to ordinary bees - many people had a hive or two tucked away in a corner for their own use, including Selim's nearest neighbours - but no matter how often she visited Mirasol she never quite adjusted to Mirasol's bees. "You have been stung, haven't you? Even you," she said.

  "Of course," said Mirasol. "Every beekeeper is stung. Hasn't your cat ever scratched you?"

  "That's different," said Selim, but she sat back in her chair.

  Mirasol found the hum of her bees soothing - bees and honey were two more things that went on and on - but neither sunlight, stone nor bees could distract her long. Distantly she still felt the land lamenting its loss - an almost tangible dru
mming under her feet. The earthline that ran through her meadow had the restless, unhappy, unseeing manner of a horse pent and pacing in its stall when it is used to being able to run loose outdoors. "What - what will happen now?"

  Selim knew she was asking about the news Selim had brought. She shrugged. "I don't know. Branda said he'd see Gota today. " Gota spoke to the House for all the woodskeepers, because his woodright contained Willowlands' ancient willow coppices and was thus the most important of all the demesne's woodrights. "So if there's anything to know Gota will tell us. "

  "The Master's brother. . . " Mirasol began, and didn't know how to continue.

  After a pause Selim said, "Yes. We're all thinking about him. But nobody comes back from the Elemental priests. He's been there seven years; that's too long. " She didn't have to add, Down-brook was given an outblood Master sixty years ago, and it has still not recovered from the shock of the change. Nor did she have to add, And Willowlands was already under strain, from seven years of an increasingly bad and careless Master and a Chalice who put no check on him.

  And when, almost immediately after Selim's visit, things had begun to go wrong for Mirasol, the truth never occurred to her. She guessed it was to do with the devastating loss of Master and Chalice, but assumed that equally strange and punishing things were happening to everyone in the demesne.

  She lived in a small cottage in that corner of Willowlands' old forest which she tended; whose tending was her inheritance from her father. Ordinarily she saw Selim or Kard or Marn at least every few days; their woodrights bordered on hers, and the woodskeepers were a close group throughout this and every demesne. Two days after Selim's visit Kard had stopped only long enough to tell her that despite the unlikelihood of any result, the Grand Seneschal had written to the priests of Fire about the younger brother of the dead Master.

  Kard had looked worried and preoccupied, and had been in a hurry, and Mirasol asked no questions. She was worried and preoccupied too, and also in a hurry, because things had already begun to go wrong. And after that some time passed when she saw no other human soul. But she was too busy - and too distressed - to go in search of someone to talk to. The loss of Master and Chalice would have thrown all the demesne's workings into confusion, but she soon felt that she did not want - did not want to risk - telling anyone what was happening to her for fear that she would be one of those whose landrights did not survive the current wreck.

  She had guessed that her axe would not strike true, so she had put the heavier work aside for the present. There were always smaller tasks mounting up that she never quite kept up with the way she wanted to, although she knew that was normal enough. But the day Mirasol came home from tending the ash grove which the Lady had blessed, she found that one of the big crocks in the cellar where the end of her winter's mead remained had foamed up and run over. This in itself was annoying and wasteful and had to mean that she had set it up badly and been trapped by her own incompetence, but it was also surprising. If this had happened five years ago she wouldn't have thought beyond finding out what she had done wrong. But she knew - mostly - what she was about by now. That this should happen was almost frightening.

  And then it was indeed frightening when she realised that it had not merely run over, but had covered the cellar nearly knee-high in froth and mead - which was frankly not possible. Even if she'd tipped the crock over herself what it contained couldn't have done more than make a large sticky puddle.

  She spent much of the next several days scooping the mead-lake into buckets and hauling the heavy buckets to the roots of favoured trees - and being followed by clouds of interested bees. They landed all over her - anywhere the mead might have splashed, which was everywhere, and in the buckets, on the ground, and especially the tree roots where she poured the mead, where the tiny cracks and irregularities in the bark made tiny reservoirs - but none of them stung her, even when she heedlessly and impatiently brushed them away. At least, she thought grimly, her inconvenient windfall should not go entirely to waste; she remembered the honey the bees had made from the mead she'd given them the first winter after her mother died - when she had made a mistake. Although that mistake was merely that she'd found she couldn't bring herself to kill any of her bees, which was the system all the northern demesnes used, and so had to get them through the winter somehow. She'd been cold that winter herself, after wrapping up her most exposed hives in all the blankets she had.

  Perhaps the trees too would like their improbable drink enough to produce especially rich blossoms for the bees next year. It seemed remarkably strong mead, for all that it had no excuse for its existence. She never tasted it, but the mere smell rose to her head and made her dizzy.

  As a result of the mead-lake and its aromatic effect she took to sleeping outside at some little distance from her cottage. While the earth floor of the cellar had been beaten hard enough by many generations of feet to prevent the mead from turning it into a bog, the reek remained, and she found this gave her wild, terrifying dreams of fire and water, which were no improvement on the nightmares she'd had since the deaths of Master and Chalice. She asked the Radiant Pines, whose resin was used for perfume, if they could spare her some boughs, and when they said yes, distributed them across her cellar floor, but even they were not enough. She wondered how long she would be exiled; it was all very well now in summer, but by next winter, she would need to be back in the cottage, with its sturdy walls and stone hearth - and next winter's mead in the vat in the cellar.

  But by the time she had done what she could to rescue her cellar, other things were going wrong. Her two goats, Nora and Spring, were suddenly producing so much milk that they baaed miserably for relief twice and even three times a day, which meant that she had to stay near the cottage to get back to them, and that meant she could not tend the full extent of her woodright. This would become another trouble for her as soon as anyone noticed; but she was already unhappy at the idea of neglecting her trees, especially now, when they needed reassurance, as did every living thing in the demesne. Nor was she equipped to handle so much milk; she had nowhere to keep it, let alone time to turn it into butter and cheese and hilliehoolie.

  But what hurt the worst of all was the fact that the beehives near the cottage, incredibly, were literally running over with honey.

  The mysterious excellence of Mirasol's honey had probably held her woodright for her. By the time her mother had died only two years after her father, she should have married someone without a landright of his own, to help her with her bees and her woods; it was not proper she maintain both alone, even though she was capable of the extra work. And so by clinging to this impropriety she had grown used to the sense of needing not merely to serve but to placate the Housefolk and the lesser Circle members - most of whom also bought her honey - who were more concerned in the everyday lives of the common folk of the demesne. A surplus would have done her good with those who had the power to injure her - if she had had the time to collect it, strain it, bottle it and take it to the House. Yet if she tackled the honey glut, she would fall even farther behind in her woodskeeping - and the demesne's woods were growing ever more restless with no Master holding the earthlines steady and no Chalice to bind and calm.

  She began to take her goats with her when she went off to tend her trees. They slowed her down when she couldn't afford the time, but she could at least get to the boundaries of her lot that way. She'd stake them somewhere the browsing was good, and come back to milk them halfway through the day. She couldn't bear to let the milk spill immediately lost on the ground, so she carried a bucket or a bowl with her, and left the milk for anyone or anything that might like it. She knew this was ridiculous but she did it anyway.

  She had more buckets and bowls than she needed, for her family had been keeping the slightly awry ones through generations of making buckets and bowls out of odd bits of wood too good for burning. But losing one a day was rather extreme, so a few days later she went thriftily to wh
ere she'd left the first, expecting a sour, stinking mess and a polluted bucket. The bucket was where she'd left it, but it was empty - it didn't even smell of milk - it smelled as clean as it would have if she'd just scrubbed it out ready to use. She hoped the foxes or the badgers or hedgehogs or whatever had enjoyed the milk, but she'd never thought of any of the sharers of her woodland as being such tidy drinkers. It was as if whoever it was were saying thank you.

  But this is what happened with all the milk she left: the vessel shining clean and exactly where she'd left it when she went back to fetch it. She didn't believe this was fox or badger or hedgehog conduct. She began to look warily at the milk she left behind when she took her goats back to the cottage; but it always acted like ordinary milk when she was there, and the milk she used at home still behaved itself as it should. She told herself she should let the magic - or whatever it was - work unmolested; but her curiosity got the better of her and at last she went back to where she'd left a big shallow basin of milk only the day before. . . and found the surface of the milk invisible under a carpet of her bees. "Bees don't drink milk," she said to them. When they lifted and flew away the basin was empty and clean.

  When human beings first discovered honey, they had hunted the wild bees and followed them back to their nests. Some enterprising honey-lover must have noticed that bees often nested in hollow trees, and so, perhaps, rolled or dragged or hacked out a suitable log nearer home, left it at a convenient spot, and hoped a passing swarm might settle in it. Eventually someone began experimenting with making hives out of straw, mud, clay, pottery, and with sowing the seeds of plants bees were seen to like; and eventually with breeding more docile bees.

  But the basic facts of beekeeping hadn't changed that much: bees still made wax honeycomb to store their honey in; and a beekeeper had to both break into a hive and cut into the honeycomb to retrieve the honey.

  Mirasol went home then and there, that day (the goats dragging sulkily behind her), and lifted one end each of all her movable hives, propped it and at the lower end sawed, pried or hammered in a hole - knowing as she did so that this was exactly the sort of drastic human behaviour that would upset the bees. Except that it didn't. They flew placidly around her and the note of their humming never changed. She put a grass mat for a sieve under each new opening and a bowl under that, and left them. It was a nonsensical thing to do, but much of what was happening to her - and to her animals - was nonsensical.

  And the daunting thing was - it worked. The honey streamed out in such quantities she almost ran out of bowls for milk. When the three hives in two old trees beside her little meadow began to drip honey down the boles, she merely tucked buckets among the tree roots. The buckets filled up too.

  This was almost as distressing a problem as too much milk - no, more distressing, because honey was much more valuable than milk. And then her bees swarmed; again and again; big, healthy, vigorous swarms longing for places to build their nests and produce more honey. She, like every beekeeper on every demesne, wove spare skeps for just such an eventuality; but her mother had showed her how to use wooden or clay hives, and once she had decided she would kill none of her bees she'd found that straw skeps made the least satisfactory bee homes. Nor had any beekeeper she knew had to deal with swarm after swarm after swarm. A month after the deaths of the Master and Chalice she had bees living in all four corners of her roof and another swarm in the eave of the hearth inside; she had to leave the window near it open all day, and keep an eye out for returning stragglers in the evening if she closed it. Many of the trees round her clearing had at least one bee home in them, and the huge triple-boled hollow tree that had contained two bee families since she was a little girl now had six. By then she could no longer hear Nora and Spring bleat through the humming of the bees. Nor could she hear anything else.

  And so she did not hear them when the Circle came to her cottage at the beginning of the fifth week after Selim had brought her the news. When she looked up from her midday milking - she had stayed home that day to empty the honey buckets - knowing that she was unkempt and wild-eyed, and with the remains of the still-sour stink of the cottage cellar easily penetrating to the bare bit of ground where she did her milking, queasily mixed with the intense sweet reek of the honey and the warm animal smell of the milk, her first thought was that they had come to turn her out of her woodright, and she burst into tears. She did not consider that the full Circle would not have come to deprive an obscure woodskeeper of her livelihood; all she could think of was that she was no longer doing her job, that the Circle must have gone past some of the recently neglected woods she was responsible for, and had detoured from their proper business to pass sentence on her failure.