Chapter 7: The Brat from the Beet-garden

 

In a valley of the northern lands, there lived a baron who spent half his time wishing he wasn’t at war with the family who ruled over Apple Valley, to their immediate west, and the other half of his time cooking up new ways to start trouble with them. He never noticed the hypocrisy of this because he was the least self-aware person in the valley over which he held title. Or they held title -- depending on whose side you were on.

Rivka was on his side, although she had little choice in the matter because she had been born there. She wouldn’t have been his first choice either -- her very existence was an embarrassment and a burden. Even had she been conventionally beautiful, delicate and demure, and talented in all the noblewomanly tasks of listening and textile art, she still would remain a living, breathing reminder that his foolish younger sister had allowed herself to be, well, harvested by one of the workers who grew the castle’s beets and potatoes.

Of course, once the pregnancy was discovered, the worker was quickly dismissed from his position and sent away. The other choice was almost certainly death, for the baron valued nothing so much as his reputation, and if he couldn’t keep the women in his own family safe, well, then the Apple Valley folks would attack at once, thinking him weak!

He wanted the people in his valley to respect him too, so having the daughter of a nobody running around the castle was already embarrassing enough. On top of that, though, she was also nothing like his own sweet daughters. She was a large and ungraceful thing, rough in her manners, too obviously the child of a field hand, but, unfortunately, also too obviously the child of his sister. She was an inconvenience and a source of aggravation. Her childhood efforts to mimic the soldiers, whose presence was a constant at the castle, filled him with dread of what she would be like as an adult.

Marrying her off became his private obsession, with what little brain he had left over after plotting the demise of the Apple Valley ruling house once and for all. Then she would be gone, and perhaps her shallow, uninteresting mother with her, if he could deftly manage it.

But none of the men who would have been appropriate for a relation of his house ever showed interest in his tall, outspoken, physical niece. And certainly he would have rather hidden her away in a tower forever than let her run off with somebody else. Too much damage had been done already by his dolt of a sister, Miriam -- known by her intimate family as Mitzi.

Not to mention the Apple Valley ruling house and their persistent raids! True, he sent his own men into their valley on occasion, to show them he still had the might to defend his keep. And yet, they sent wave after wave of troublemakers, determined to ruin the peace.

It was so difficult to be the baron of the valley.

One year, after a particularly bloody set of squabbles between the two valleys, a group of wizards who lived in the surrounding mountains decided to take matters into their own hands. Between their magic and the level of respect their Order commanded with everyone in the nation, they were much more powerful than either the baron or the heads of the other family. They were able to use that power to place one of their own in the court of each valley, to oversee matters there and attempt to subdue the feud at its source. They were not an unwarlike brotherhood, but it insulted their very dignity to see wars being fought over a dispute as old and petty as this one. Let each valley to itself in peace, they thought, and if there were wars to be fought, let them be heroic ones.

Rivka, at this point alarmingly too old to have no marriage prospects, was sitting with her mother in the Great Hall watching the newly arrived wizard verbally spar with her uncle. It was rare for anyone else in the castle to contradict the baron, but even without him opening his mouth, his appearance set him apart and marked him a definite outsider. In a household where the men’s hair was grown long and usually tied back, his was cropped short. Their beards were full; his beard and mustache were trimmed down nearly to the point where they looked as if they’d been inked with a brush onto his unusually round face. And, most outlandish of all, he wore a black cassock embroidered with strange dark-green-and-purple designs. The wizard was in his late thirties, close to Rivka’s mother’s age but certainly younger than her uncle -- which did him no favors earning the baron’s respect.

“This is never going to work,” Mitzi observed under her breath. She was knitting on a piece of fancywork, but her eyes never left the two men arguing in the center of the room. “He already hates being told what to do.”

“No man could ever win a battle that way!” the baron exclaimed, slamming his fist upon a nearby table.

“Clearly you don’t read,” said the wizard, sounding more irritated and insulted than angry. “Some already have, in this century and the last.”

The calmer the wizard’s tone, the more the baron turned red. “I have no use for your folktales. Why should I believe something just because it’s been inked onto a parchment by some fool in a cassock? Over what my vast experience can tell me? I’ve been fighting these wars since I was ten years old. You were drinking your mother’s milk when I first held a sword!”

“I’ve held a sword as well, in case nobody told you,” said the wizard in a quiet, steely tone. He pushed back the right sleeve of his cassock to show the grisly, twisted snake of a scar that slashed across his palm and curled up the length of his forearm. “When the Marantz blade fell, I didn’t stop fighting -- I learned to brandish my sword in my left hand. So don’t assume wizards know nothing of fighting -- or of bravery.”

“He also hates wizards,” Rivka murmured to her mother. “A wizard telling him what to do--”

“Well, it’s just that he disagrees with so many things about them,” Mitzi explained indulgently, her tone making it clear that she sympathized with her older brother. “He thinks their devotion to histories and parchments, and their vows of celibacy and service, are all unnatural and self-important. He always says the service makes them look weak, and I agree with him that the celibacy’s a bit self-centered -- like he says, any woman wooed by a wizard would fall asleep of sheer boredom or die of exasperation.”

Rivka had heard these words come out of her uncle’s mouth before and indeed was mimicking them along as her mother spoke. “He just doesn’t like the fact that their power is so much greater than his,” she pointed out.

“Can you blame him?” Her mother was not a complicated creature; she liked living in a castle and having someone else clean her room and feed her, and since it was her brother’s power that kept her there, she didn’t mind his power-hungry stance at all.

Rivka sighed. “He’s going to be exceptionally hard on me while he gets used to this, isn’t he?”

“Oh, Rivkeleh! He just wants what’s going to make you a happy woman someday. He doesn’t want you to end up like your old mammeh, hanging around being useless and having even the lowest scullery maid in the castle know her most intimate business.” Mitzi smiled sadly.

“Don’t worry, Mammeh, I won’t embarrass you that way.” Rivka smiled. “If I must marry, I’ll marry a warrior, so I can go off and fight at his side.”

“Rivka, you can’t run around holding sticks as swords anymore. You’re a grown woman, and it’s going to scare away husbands, not attract them.”

“We’re at war. We’re always at war. Why can’t I help fight it?”

“Because it’s unwomanly, and you wouldn’t be any good at it. Here. Work on this.” Her mother stood up and placed the unfinished piece of lace in her daughter’s lap. “It’ll help calm your mind and drive away those unsettling thoughts. Don’t worry about defending the hold. The men have it under control.”

“--never let one of you wizards command my men! Are you crazy? Wait, why am I even asking that? Of course you’re crazy. You’ve been inhaling parchment fumes and your--”

“--too many of your own men, your tenants and your most loyal soldiers, die every--”

“--never had a woman, not even allowed to touch a woman! I bet when you joined up they even cut--”

“--fought under three kings after my vows, so don’t you accuse me of--”

Rivka looked at her mother and deadpanned, “Yes, the men have it under control.” She picked up the knitting and fiddled with it, making three mistakes without even trying on her first row.

She didn’t know how she felt about having the wizard around. She didn’t disagree with his ideas, but she was a member of the family, even if pretty much all of them were completely alien to her; she felt threatened, like an animal whose burrow had been breached.

On the other hand, he had parchments, and some of them were about military strategy or the history of warfare. She yearned to read them. Here, at last, she would find the information for which she had been so thirsty all her life. Caught between her sex and her uncle’s distaste for written histories, it had been dry pickings. She had listened intently every time a soldier told a tale, but they presented only the narrowest view, and she knew she needed more.

The idea came into her head that she might get her hands on these parchments in secret and read them quickly, replacing each one before he might miss it. What a delicious prank!

She plotted this for days before actually beginning the project. Already practicing her strategizing, she took note of any times the wizard could predictably be found in the Great Hall (and nearly as predictably, arguing with her uncle over any topic from whether the sky was blue to the treatment of the guard’s dogs.) After a while it became apparent that he always lingered after luncheon, usually by falling prey to verbal taunts given out by the baron between the soup and the rest of the meal.

This, then, would be her time of opportunity. She ate her food quickly and unobtrusively, and then, as the baron’s voice grew louder and louder in an attempt to drown out the wizard’s gentle basso, she slipped out of the Great Hall into the dark passageways.

The wizard had been given a room high in a tower, at the end of two flights of rickety stone stairs. It was actually the room where Mitzi had stayed during the final few months of her pregnancy, hidden away in her shame from curious eyes, and so it was lavishly furnished and relatively clean. But it was as inconvenient a room as the baron could muster, and he was doing everything he could to make it clear that he resented everything about the wizards stepping in and mucking around with his business.

Rivka scurried up the stairs as quickly as was prudent on their uncertain surface and then pushed open the door in one sweeping gesture -- better to find out right away if there was some kind of spell put on the room, trapping her or informing the wizard of her intrusion.

Nothing happened.

She looked around the room. It was as she had always known it from her childhood wanderings, save for a few spare cassocks and several trunks, all of which belonged to the wizard. Two of the trunks were open, both containing piles of bound parchments. She stared for a moment, breathing heavily over the sudden wealth at her fingertips. Where to start?

Stepping over to the first trunk and peering in, she read the title of the book on the top. A Complete History of King Pampas IV’s Battles -- His Victories and Defeats. She had no idea who King Pampas was, let alone his three ancestors before him, but she figured this was as good a place to start as any.

Her hand darted out and snatched the book off the pile.

The ceiling did not collapse, and neither did the spare cassocks hanging across the back of the chair get up and block her way. Everything was as it was before. “That’s right... He thinks we don’t read,” she said out loud to herself. He’d be mostly right, she added internally.

She was back in her room reading the brittle old book before she let herself relax -- not that she could relax completely. Her heart was pounding pretty strongly as a result of her little pilfering adventure. The book in her hands was a connection to all her dreams for the future, and it was a few minutes before she could focus on its words instead of the importance of the moment.

The king in the book had been a great general who lived in another land several hundred years ago. During his reign he protected his people from numerous invasions and also won a civil war when another member of the royal family grew strong against him. She could tell there were plenty of things in the book that could help her uncle, whose situation was always on her mind because it was on his. But she knew he’d never want to hear about anything that had happened to people so irrelevant to his life.

That was okay. She’d find a way to defend his keep even over his own objections.

When she had finished the book several days later, she waited until the daily lunchtime battle and then snuck back into the tower to switch it out for the next one. So did Rivka bat Miriam slowly make her way through the books in the trunk. Her hungry mind soaked up all the new information. She didn’t dare take notes for fear they’d be found, so while she ran around in the garden feeling the sun’s warmth battle the crispness of the air, or during bad weather when she was trapped inside mangling yet another piece of fancywork, she repeated the important points to herself over and over until they were nearly as automatic as Bless you, O Lord, King of the Universe...

One day, she had taken one of the books into the garden because she knew a place in a tree where she wouldn’t easily be seen and could hide there to read in peace. She opened the book, and to her breathless horror she beheld an unfamiliar scrawl--

If you’re going to borrow my parchments, why not ask permission?