The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell Page 0,11

“She may have use of them. She is a king’s child. We do not know, when she wakes, what path she will wish to take. Bury them in the floor.”

“And risk blasphemy?” Ilbran said lightly, though he knew, and they knew, that the Law was too strait to be kept as it was taught. “What do we say if any catch a glimpse of her?” he asked.

“Why, we say that she is my brother’s daughter, Rile,” his mother said, as she dampened another rag, and gently washed the sand and dirt from the girl’s torn feet. “Come from Meyrens to the south with her parents, who died of traveling, and so she is ill with grief.”

Ilbran laughed, in spite of himself, as he looked at his mother’s calm and innocent face. He had never heard her tell a lie, not even the tiniest shading of the truth. “Maya, how many fugitives have you sheltered, that you tell a story so easily?”

Andiene slept through the next day, while Ilbran gathered sea-grass and twisted it into bunches for their winter fires. Hammel sat and knotted a net, his hands strong and skilled yet, though the rest of his body had wasted away.

Sometimes scarcely seeming to breathe, Andiene slept through the week that followed. The fish began to run, traveling down the coast; the tide of autumn had turned. Every day that Ilbran took out his boat, he dreaded what he might find when he returned, his home burnt to a roofless shell, his parents gone, the soldiers waiting.

But he had luck with his fishing. One day he dragged back his nets heavy with leaf-green kervissen. His father’s face was filled with pride, and Kare danced with joy like a young girl. “More of them than I have ever seen.”

“Work yet to be done.” He picked his father up in his arms to carry him down the cliffside path, another pair of hands to help him in the dirty and dangerous work.

“No, Maya,” he said, when his mother moved to go with him, to help. “The house … .” She understood well enough what he meant, that she should stay to ward off any visitors who might enter and see their unwanted guest.

But his father could help him. Though the path was steep, he had climbed it countless times with heavier weights than what his father had become.

Down at the shore, they drew on the heavy gloves that reached above their elbows, and set to work beheading and gutting the kervissen, and, above all, cutting off the poisoned spines that curved long and golden along their backs and over their heads. Many fishermen feared them, and would tack their boats to some other quarter of the wind if they saw the wake of a school of kervissen before them. Ilbran tried to search them out, studying wind and weather to tell him where they could be found.

He gave them due respect, though. He had seen men with the flesh rotting and sloughing off from their arms from tiny scratches, and less fortunate men dying in poisoned agony.

Fel, the courser, knew to keep his distance, but he gobbled fish entrails with delight, the best food he had had since summer began. Even after he had had his fill, he taunted the sea-hawks who came to the bounty. One, young and foolish, was not quick enough; Fel leaped high on his powerful back legs, snatched the sea-hawk flapping and clawing out of mid-air. He ate all but the leathery wings.

Ilbran sang as he worked, enjoying the sound of his own voice, spinning out the many verses of the song of the kervissen, how they were as wise as men once, till the first fisherman betrayed them. At last the fish were ready for market. Ilbran looked appraisingly at the pile. “If salfish had run today, I could have brought back twice as much.”

“Kervissen bring us a higher price.”

“Yes, but are less food, all the same. We must sell to the rich to buy food to feed ourselves, and be cheated buying and be cheated selling.” He held up one of the fish. In the sun it shone like a great transparent leaf, not scaled and mailed like ordinary fish, but covered with soft skin like a man. “Beautiful, though,” he muttered grudgingly.

His father looked surprised. “So it is. I had never thought of that.”

At the market, the servants of rich ones of the city came and bought eagerly, since only two other fishermen had caught