Tale of Birle Read Free Page B

away from the unending labor of the Inn.
    â€œIt isn’t any treasure you’d guess,” Gran said, rising from the stool she sat on to go to the cupboard under the bed. Bending down, she lifted out bedclothes, and then a long sheet of paper, which she carried over to the table as carefully as she would a baby.
    Birle didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what paper was, or what it was used for. But it was the Lords who owned and used it. The Steward kept his records, not in his head, as Da did, but in long books, a stack of paper sewn together and then placed between thin pieces of wood. The Lords wrote proclamations on paper, then rolled them up and tied them with strips of cloth, and the Lord who was riding as messenger would unroll the paper and read off what it was the Lords wanted their people to know. Birle couldn’t think what her grandparents were doing with this sheet of paper, how they had come to possess it. But it wasn’t anything to call a treasure, she thought, getting up to look closely at it; only the Lords would have a use or value for it, and she wouldn’t dare to offer it to a Lord. He might ask where she had gotten it.
    The paper was drawn over with dark lines, which divided it into odd-shaped sections, and with irregular markings, which looked like the traces of birds’ feet in mud. The stiff paper was spotted brown, like the backs of her grandparents’ hands. That was the first map Birle had ever seen.
    Her grandparents explained it to her, pointing out the different parts of the Kingdom—the mountain-walled north, where they had been born, and the forest-walled south, where they now lived; the long rivers, which divided the Kingdom between those lands the King held for his own and those he gave over to the use of his two Earls; the places where the cities had been built; the King’s city, the Earls’ cities, and the cities of the great Lords who served the Earls. As she learned how to see the map, Birle looked for her own place on it.
    â€œThe Inn stands here.” Granda put his finger on a bend of the longest river. His finger was swollen at the joints, hooked like a bird’s talons. “And this house lies—about here, think you, lass?”
    â€œAye, you know better than I,” Gran answered him. “You could always read a map better than I. When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south,” Gran told Birle.
    â€œNot empty,” Granda corrected her. “The forest is never empty.”
    Gran was more interested in talking about the map than in quarreling. Her finger followed the river off to the north, to show Birle where the great mountains guarded the Kingdom. “We’ve stood at the feet of the mountains, your Granda and I,” she said. “We lived”—her finger moved—“here.” The finger stopped at a point on the King’s Way midway between two cities.
    â€œYour mother’s mother also came from those parts,” Granda said.
    â€œWhen you journeyed north, to bring back the vines,” Birle told him, to show that she remembered the story. “When Da was only a little boy.”
    â€œAye,” Gran said, in her memory-laden voice, “so that when your mother’s mother died of giving birth to Lyss, and my own child died before three days were out . . .”
    â€œLyss filled the empty place,” Granda said.
    Until Lyss herself died, Birle thought, wondering if the map was a treasure because it held the key to so many memories, as if the memories themselves were somehow put into the map. Her eyes found a place on the river, above the Inn, where her mother would perhaps have capsized, on a late-winter morning when the water ran icy cold, and come home to die in fever before a fire that couldn’t warm her. Birle was too young to remember her own mother; she had other people’s memories, but none of