CHAPTER EIGHT

A Change in the Weather

It’s easier to deny that something strange has happened when you can’t say anything about it. I was silent, and during the incessant rain of the next six days, the disturbing fact that time had somehow slipped its chain in the Fenlen Forest fell into the back of my mind. It didn’t change anything, really. I still had to do the same things—find Sida, get home. I just didn’t know what would be waiting for me there.

I made my escape from the house a week later, when the bad weather broke. Every morning I had looked out from the portico with less and less hope of finding my way back. The rain had grown stronger and then weakened in turns without stopping. The river swelled above its banks, and I understood why we lived in a treehouse and why Torun had led the sheep away. His absence meant a week of Melina’s tortured attempt to explain the loom in words I did not understand. I lived in a lonely silence. After finding me still in the treehouse the next morning, Pa decided that honesty was not, after all, the best policy. He was playful, slick and evasive. Without anyone but Pa to speak with in my native Gersan, the sounds of their tongue and the shape of their lilting words began to flicker through my dreams. I became uneasily aware that, but for my father, I might start to forget my mother’s language.

And then, the clouds finally scudded west across the river and towards the forest. The tepid sun revealed a sludgy landscape. The watery morning light cast itself over the puddles and raindrops that trembled on each leaf and beaded each strand of grass. Dressed in my breeches, I hauled up the trapdoor and let it fall to the wooden boards of the portico floor with a damp thud. I was feeding the ladder through the floor when I heard the pat-pat-pat of Telka’s bare feet. She threw open the door, panting a little. I did not want her to be scared or cry at the sight of me running off—there was no guarantee I would find Sida, and if I didn’t, I would still need to come back to my father’s house to sleep and eat.

“Ni zafor!” I whispered gleefully as the ladder hit the ground with a squelch. “No” and “rain” were two of my recently acquired words. Telka was my main source of vocabulary. She was proud of teaching me, since I spoke like a child a few years younger than her. I gave a small whoop of happiness that Telka echoed back to me. As I pulled on my boots, Telka ran back to look inside and put a finger to her lips. They were still sleeping. Excellent. I waved at her and started climbing down.

The earth was saturated, and when I stepped down, muddy water came up almost to my booted ankles. Telka, barefoot in her nightgown, was already halfway down the ladder. When I was her age, Ma’s worst fits of exasperation came when she was frustrated and tired after a day of work only to see me come home filthy. I imagined that a morning scrub would not please Melina. I turned and patted my shoulders and waist.

Telka, being the youngest of a large family, instinctively climbed onto my back. I anchored her legs with my arms and I stepped out into the early morning sunlight. I had not set my boots to the ground in over a week and before this morning, my eyes had always been trained on what lay beyond the yard—the river, the hills. Although I had only seen the hedged meadow on the night of my arrival, I now saw that within this meadow were two three-walled shelters—a summer kitchen with its own clay furnace in the southeast corner and a larger shed for the sheep inside a pen in the northwest corner. Beside the pen was a henhouse, from which the disgruntled clucking of damp, cooped birds came. Now I understood what Dan and Maro and Pa had been doing throughout the week. The poultry had needed feeding, and the sheep shelter had been re-shingled and filled with clean hay. From the ground, I saw that there were cisterns to catch rainwater above each building. Along the northeast side of the yard was a fenced off, muddy vegetable garden within which stood a shed on stilts that I supposed held extra supplies.

Telka nudged me with her heels and I made a neighing sound like a horse. She laughed, pulling on the neck of my shirt with one hand. She wanted to go out of the little confine of the yard, and so did I. Telka pointed me towards the narrow, crooked gap in the hedge and we were free in the great world.

The rain had beat away the chill of winter, and the tall grass leading down to the swollen river smelled green and new. I couldn’t set out and find Sida with Telka wrapped around me, but looking out across the river helped me think about how I might try next.

From up the hill, we heard the distant sound of bells and the bleating of sheep on the move.

“Torun!” Telka said, kicking my thighs.

I looked up. He was busy minding the flock, and I could inspect him without catching his gaze. Though lean, he was not as tall as I remembered, but he seemed more solid with his face and clothing speckled with mud. His movements were easy and loose as he jostled and was jostled by the sheep. His eyes were narrow shadows that contrasted with his sunlit hair, the strong lines of his cheeks and nose and chin. Looking at him, I felt the knot of unease loosen slightly in my chest. He looked at peace.

Until he saw me.

Telka shrieked his name again. “Torun! Hin-ye!”

“Where you take Telka?” he called, a note of panic in his voice.

Telka laughed and shouted something. I started walking up the hill towards him. When I was three steps away, he paused midstride. One of his dogs—they were both grey with fur that curled like the sheep’s—ran up to him, curious at the change in pace. Torun crouched down to ruffle the animal’s head before whistling an order. The dog wheeled around the edge of the herd, but Torun stayed there a moment longer before straightening and meeting my gaze.

I stopped where I was. I felt my face grow hot, felt the hair on my arms prickle.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Torun.” Run, my skin said. No, my feet replied, stay.

Torun’s half-smile suggested that he sensed my embarrassment and shared it.

“You missed home?” I asked, all too aware of Telka watching us.

He didn’t answer for a moment. “Some sheep…how do you say …utta…woman-sheep?”

I dredged my memory for the word. “Ewe?”

“Some of my…ewes…will have lambs…voon. Now that the rain ended, it is more safe here.”

Telka, gripping my waist with her legs, stretched her arms out to him, a gesture leftover from babyhood. He stepped close to me, and his hands brushed my shoulder as he lifted her from my back. We were both careful not to acknowledge the touch by any glance or shift in our bodies. He balanced her on his right hip, and she looked up at him in admiration. He kissed the top of her head “Until the ewes and voon are strong, it is practice for Maro and Dan.”

“Voon?” Telka cried, now struggling to get down from her perch. He set her down and she began squelching through the mud, passing her hands over the sheep and looking for the heavily pregnant ewes. “Voon?”

“Telka, ti mi voon vog,” he called to her. She grinned at him with a streaky, muddy face. So much for keeping Telka clean. But now that she wasn’t in my arms and Torun was watching her, perhaps this was the moment.

“Torun?” I began, and he looked up at me sharply. His eyes were a dark brown, the colour of rich loam.

“Torun, I…” How did you explain that your rebellious unicorn fawn was lost, probably wounded, perhaps caught in some other moment of time altogether? It sounded so unreal…

“Torun! Telka! Lizbet!” It was Sarai, calling from the portico. Although the timbre of her voice was brighter than her mother’s, she had already developed a tone of command. I didn’t need to understand her words to know that Telka was in trouble for being dirty and I for letting her run in the mud.

Torun called back to her and began herding the sheep down to the hedge.

“You will not be in so much trouble,” he said. The left edge of his mouth lifted fractionally. “I explain you to Sarai.”

“That’s very brave of you.”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said, walking ahead of me to grab Telka’s hand and lead the flock.

I smiled at his willingness to admit that a person needed bravery to face Sarai. A week with her had taught me that she was the true taskmaster of the weaving operation. If Melina’s belts were more intricate, it was only because she had more experience. But where Melina had ample patience, Sarai had none. Sarai respected skill and nothing else.

As we chased the last sheep through the hedge, I saw that I was not the only one anxious to leave the house. Up on the portico, Pa was packing up his wife’s and daughters’ woolen wares. He was heading out on a trading trip, it seemed. Fine, I thought. My life wouldn’t be that different without him. It wasn’t as if I would miss any soul-searching conversations.

As he rolled the materials, Sarai stood above him with her arms crossed, unfolding them every few seconds to count off on her fingers before refolding them in a show of firmness. Fixing prices, I guessed.

As I passed through the hedge, Maro and Dan were scrambling down the ladder to meet the flock. Torun grinned easily as he met the children. He joked with Maro and gave Dan a piggyback ride. Sarai hung back, too old for roughhousing, young enough to pout with jealousy. She glared at me as I climbed the ladder.

I smiled and nodded at her. At this moment, I did not need to please her. Then I pulled myself up and addressed my father.

“Can I write a letter to Ma?” I asked.

“With what, child?” my father said.

“I’ll write to her, and you’ll send it on at the next town. You’ll have to give me a quill and pen.”

“No. I don’t have any.”

“What do you mean?” I thought of my mother’s meticulous business ledgers and her diary of experiments. “How else do you do your business?”

He lifted his arm and pointed to what seemed like a half-finished bracelet of different coloured threads. “With this. I keep track of sales and things. Your mother was the one who could write, not me.”

“But…” But Ma would be due home soon. What would Mrs. Helder tell her? Where would Ma go to look for me? And then I remembered. Even if I wrote a letter and Pa sent it, I had no way of knowing that Ma would receive it. Perhaps she had come home years ago. Perhaps she had already died and turned into grave dirt.

My father saw the flush on my face and put a hand on my shoulder. “I will see what I can do, Elizabeth. Leave it to me.”

How could I trust my first betrayer? With the river rushing at my back, I had no other choice.

By noon, he had walked away from us into the eastern forest, whistling his favourite song. His family had changed, his business had changed, but he remained disconcertingly the same.

In his absence, his family seemed to stretch and shift. Sarai was the undisputed mistress of the loom, and Melina and Torun ran the farm. After Melina had me change into a shift and skirt, we sorted the twenty pregnant ewes out of the flock and led them into what I understood to be the lambing pen. Then we sat in the hay and listened to Torun’s explanations as he inspected each of his “women-sheep,” silently waiting for the lambs to come.

In the late afternoon, Melina summoned me and Sarai to help prepare the evening meal. We brought everything—the plates, spoons and stew—down so that we could eat with him. We sat with him late into the night, them conversing in hushed voices, me listening hard for any words I understood.

Right as Melina announced that it was time for bed, Torun announced that he had carved them something special over the week. He teased them, reaching into his bag and then refusing to reveal it.

“Zasto Torun!” Telka shrieked before we hushed her. Bad Torun, I understood. For example, Telka had taught me that my carding and spinning and weaving was very, very zasto. Zastola, in fact.

Torun laughed and slowly drew forth a small wooden figure. My gasp matched those of the children and Torun glanced at me, still smiling. The carving had delicate cloven hooves, grooves to indicate the downy fur, a delicate, spiralling horn.

“Uksarv,” Telka said. Unicorn.

“She’s perfect,” I said.

“Almost,” he said. “I made the…” with his finger he drew a horn in front of his head, “longer, so the children would understand.”

“Yes,” I said. I wanted desperately to stay with him when the others went. I wanted to settle into the hay and ask him how and when and perhaps even why he had seen a unicorn. It had to be Sida, I thought. It must be.

I held his gaze, hoping that he might read in my face the longing and determination to see what he had seen.

Before he could nod or make any gesture of recognition, Telka bowled into him, giving him a hug. She did not like us talking mysteries in front of her. He looked away, his cheeks pink.

There was a moment of quiet, and then Melina and Sarai began bustling. Sarai stacked the dishes into buckets for Maro and Dan to wash. Melina handed Telka into my arms. She placed a firm hand on the centre of my back to direct me towards the house and up the ladder.

I paused on the portico. I had planned on running straight back down to talk to Torun. Melina had become used to me sitting out in the evening. But not today. “Ni,” she said, with rare sternness.

I wasn’t sure whether she was curtailing my freedom because of Pa’s absence or Torun’s presence. Instead of sending me to bed, she sat me down by a handloom and tapped the belt I had been working on. Over the past week, she had insisted that I unpick my belt pattern on the handloom three times. Now she wanted me to finish it and watched me as the others washed their faces and went to bed. The pattern was not a unicorn, as I would have liked. It was horizontal stripes of red and white, the simplest of designs.

Dan was snoring when Melina gave a nod of approval and produced her pocketknife to cut the ends. I knotted the threads together, three to a bunch. She tapped my shoulder to make me stand and wrapped it twice around my waist before tying it off. She stepped back and sighed. I had a belt tied around my waist and she had done her duty.

“Naisik,” she said, cupping my face with her hand.

Another one of my few words. By making my own belt, I was no longer an unformed child.

I was a girl.

And, secretly, I was a girl who was going to find Sida.