The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,78

and the honey yield prospered.

He missed his own family, of course, but he did not seem unduly surprised that he had been left behind. He could wait. He had seemed a silent boy, but Grizzel and Niav gradually came to appreciate that it was more the case of him knowing how to be silent in many different tongues.

His mother had not come from the same homeland as his father, and they had lived in another place entirely – and then there was the mixture of languages that the sailors spoke which was almost a language in itself. That was why understanding the people of the river-mouth had presented no problem to him at all. He could cope with Kyle’s insipid attempts at bullying him and Estra’s flurries of melodrama, and he really appeared to like Canya just as much as Niav did – he particularly seemed to delight in music just as they did.

Once he had been shown how to cut a set of pipes from his mother’s alder, and saw the sap run as red as blood, he told Niav that he felt that Orchil was still alive, waiting for Artin too, and smiling down on him as he played.

Niav and Canya would sit enthralled, watching the dappled sunlight fall across Fearn’s bare brown back – clearly marked with his father’s white protective wings – as he sat, poised on the great rock that his father and uncles had placed beneath the shadow of the alder branches before they left. It seemed so magical a place that the girls were sometimes too in awe to sing.

Occasionally the visitors to the river-mouth included Artin’s kin. They always made a point of giving small gifts to many of the children, not only Fearn.

Once, Niav was smilingly given a lovely greenstone bead, on a soft white leather thong, that looked almost as special as Uncle Lurgan’s quested axe. But when Niav ran home with it to show Aunty Grizzel, she looked quite bemused. “That’s a very valuable thing to give a little girl – mind you, don’t flash it about when there are traders around.”

“But why give it to me?”

“Don’t forget your mum and dad saved Artin’s life – maybe it’s time it was remembered.” She went off to look for Artin’s brother and came back very quiet.

However, if Fearn begged him (or whichever other brother sailed in to the river-mouth) for news of his father, they would only smile and say that he was an amazingly busy man these days.

Every time they came, Niav felt that she would like to sail away with them and search for him too. Every girl would. How tragic it had been, everyone said, that such a beautiful man should have been reduced to limping his way around like that.

“Oh, it doesn’t notice when he is lying down,” Aunty Grizzel scoffed. “That’s the way they wish they could have seen him; besides, time passes and he won’t be looking quite so beautiful now.”

Niav would try not to be put out by such sacrilegious observations. Aunty Grizzel was endearingly eager to shock, and Niav was determined to try and seem grown-up enough to be treated as her assistant and not just her niece. She tried to show an educated interest in Artin’s injuries, and remarked how wonderful it was that he was able to give so much time and careful advice to people, when he must, surely, be in such acute pain. Had Aunty Grizzel any notion of what drug he might be taking to manage it?

“The same thing that gives him all his visions, I should imagine!” was all that Aunt Grizzel would reply – why couldn’t she try to be serious sometimes?

But that was the trouble – she was. Aunt Grizzel always saw right through her, however hard she tried. The memory of Artin represented her masculine ideal, in spite of all her mixed suspicions about him otherwise. Even though she knew that most young girls of her age were already expected to be looking around, no one else that she met, even visiting young traders, ever seemed to come up to his standard. Her aunt was tolerant and did not pressure her, but she was obviously starting to get concerned about Niav’s future happiness.

“You will become a broken-hearted wise-woman like me, if you don’t watch your step, child,” she chided her, not unkindly. “There are six lads at least that I can think of who are trying to run after you. Don’t you notice?