The Tale of Oriel Read Free Page B

anyone who wants the pleasure.” Those women were as sharp as stones, and besides, Griff was right. “What does it matter?”
    â€œWomen have a man’s sons,” Griff said. “He hates you.”
    â€œI don’t mind.” That was true. “He can’t hurt me.”
    â€œThat’s what I mean,” Griff said, his eyes troubled.

    IT WASN’T MORE THAN TWO days after that cold fall evening that the weather blew in mild from the south, as if summer had traveled halfway home across the sea and then changed her mind. Such a season wasn’t unknown on the Damall’s island. Lady Days, they called it. This Lady Days, the Damall gave orders. Griff and Nikol would stay at the longhouse to care for their master, but the others must go to the other end of the island. They could take with them nothing but their clothing. They must feed and shelter themselves, which would be no great hardship, the Damall told them, not in this fine Lady Days weather. He did not wish to see any of them back before the weather broke.
    They stood around, staring at the Damall, staring at one another, dumb with surprise, stupid with confusion.
    Angry now, the Damall pointed at him, jabbing the finger into his chest. “You’re in charge. Now, go. Are you all deaf? Does every one of you want to be taken to market and sold?”
    It was a long morning’s walk. He led the boys, through the woods, over the stony hills. At the island’s end, looking down a short cliff to the sea where it fed among the rocks, he found a patch of woods. The leafy trees held branches bare as arms up to the sun. The firs never shed their needles, so those were the trees under which to shelter. He sent the boys to gather armloads of dried leaves, for warmth at night. All of the ten boys, even those who were older, obeyed him. He spoke, and they obeyed.
    They had brought no fire nor tinder with them, so he set two of the older boys to rubbing dry sticks together to make sparks that would ignite a handful of leaves, on which they might blow—gently, just a whistle of breath—until the little pile of twigs beneath caught fire, and so by slow steps they would have a fire large enough to cook over, and to give them warmth.
    Some of the remaining boys he sent back into the woods to find branches to feed the fire, and the rest he led down the cliff and out onto the rocks, to gather the blue-black skals that clung under beds of seaweed and clustered at the bases of boulders.
    They slept that night huddled under piles of leaves for warmth.
    He kept their fears at bay by insisting that each boy find his own food. He showed them how to catch a gosta behind its hard-shelled head, where its snapping claws couldn’t reach a boy’s fingers. He showed them how to burn a stick’s end in the fire, and scrape it to a point with stones and shells, so that a boy could spear the fish, if he waited patiently and a fish appeared.
    He kept their fears at bay by concealing his own fear—What if they were never allowed to return to the longhouse, for example, then how would any of them survive the winter months? If one of the smaller boys were to slip into the icy water, and drown unnoticed, then how would he be repaid by the Damall for his carelessness?
    He kept their fears at bay by telling the old stories over again. He told about the Great Damall, and what he didn’t know or remember he made up. He told them about the market town, and the Old City—although not about the slave market and the collars worn by slaves in the cities of the mainland. He told them tales of the faraway Kingdom, hidden away among mountains, a land that didn’t have four seasons every year like other countries but was always in harvest season, the orchards always in fruit and the goats always giving milk and sweet cakes always in the oven. In the Kingdom, he told them, the King had no whipping box, for he executed evildoers and all the