Chapter 8: The Tale (2)

The days that followed were uneventful. When they left the village it was still morning, and by the end of the day he had gotten used to walking with the sword dangling at his side. When he untied her hands, so she could help with collecting fruits and berries which were ample in these parts, he found that the strip of cloth he had used had come loose, though it still held to her wrists. He tied it tighter when they went to sleep — he didn’t fear her when he was awake and had an eye on her, she was a woman while he was a man with a sword whom hardships and years had not much weakened, but prudence demanded not to leave her unbound while he slept. In the morning, the knot was still firm, though for a moment he had a strange feeling that it wasn’t the way he had tied it. By next evening, with their walking, it had come loose again. When the strange feeling that the knot wasn’t the way he had tied it came to him again the next morning, he decided to put it to a test. That evening, behind her back, he wove a small twig into the knot at her left wrist. In the morning, the knots were how he had made them, only the twig was at her right wrist now. He was a man who took things as they came. He read the message, shrugged, and never bound her again.

His sexual needs were simple — about hers, there was no mention. When he wanted to use one of her orifices she yielded, not participating, but not discouraging his short-lived passion. Whether she herself found some pleasure in these encounters, or, her hands free now, on her own during the nights, I do not know, nor is it important.

She was better than him at finding food. When, as they often did, they came across deserted farmland, where nature had begun to reclaim her territory but trees and overgrown vegetable patches still bore fruit, it made little difference, but in the forests or on the heathlands that they crossed, she knew more plants or parts of plants that were edible, and spotted them more easily. Also, she knew better than he which plants were poisonous, and which animals, small or large, posed threats, and how to avoid them. She was mute, and he, taciturn by nature and not quite sure as to how much she heard or cared to hear, spoke little to her, but even without words he understood her competence in these matters, and learned to rely on it. Still, when she showed him food that he didn’t know, he waited until she ate from it before he did.

Occasionally he still went into villages, to buy with his dwindling stock of coins food that he missed — cured meat, sausages, bread, and sweet cakes made from dough and honey. He did not think it wise to walk into a village with a naked woman by his side, so he told her to wait for him in the wood, at a spot hidden from the barely discernible path they had followed. As a symbolic gesture, to show to her what he wanted, he lightly tied her to a tree with the strip of cloth he had used to tie her wrists on the first days. He more than half expected her to be gone when he returned, but there she was, still tied, waiting for him. He offered her a share of what he had bought, and she refused the meat, but took from the bread and the cakes. She then took what still existed from the torn dress, and formed a bundle, so she could carry her share of their provisions — he hadn’t thought before of letting her carry his bundle, or maybe hadn’t trusted her to do it. He liked the way she looked, walking naked, slightly bent forward, with the load on her back, her breasts small but still large enough to sway in the rhythm of her steps.

He gave himself pleasure with her more often now, sometimes also during the day, when they took short rests from walking. The hair of her crotch, which had been shaved when he bought her, had grown back, which he didn’t like, and one day he made her lie on her back while, strand by strand, he pulled it out. As with the other uses he made of her body, she took it silently, unrepulsed, unrepulsing. He himself did not shave his face, but kept his beard in check with an old pair of scissors which he carried. Not long after he had plucked out the hair between her thighs she started to trim his beard for him, every few days, more evenly and neatly than he had been able to do on his own. When he looked at his face in the mirror of a still lake, he almost liked it.

The attack, when it came, deep in a forest, still early in the day, was sudden and unexpected. She was walking behind him on the narrow trail, her bare feet making no sounds on the soft ground. The wood was quiet, as if it held its breath. And then, in one quick silent motion, she jumped at him, grabbed the hilt of his sword, tore it out of its sheath, and violently pushed him to the ground. He fell, lying with his face down, stunned, the breath knocked out of him by a tree root under his chest — he fought for air, he fought to prop himself up — and then, over his pain and his own ragged breaths, he heard sounds, strange wild noises, screams. When he finally managed to look around there were three bodies, armed, dead, lying next to him. She had killed them. For a moment, she was the only one who was standing — then, as he slowly got to his feet, she handed him back his sword, knelt down, closed her eyes, and bent her neck. The land destroyed, the ancient laws now ruled again, unchallengeable. Having assaulted her owner, she could not stay alive.

“So, she’s kneeling, naked, arms behind her back, head bowed, eyes closed, and he stands before her, gripping the sword, blood still dripping from its blade. Don’t make this sound so overly dramatic. Even blindfolded and her arms tied, she’d still break his arm before he knew she had moved.”

“But she wouldn’t,” I said. Was it really so hard to understand? “He had saved her life at that village, which she could easily have done herself had she cared, but he had not given her any reason to live. How could he? She had lost all that had been important to her. Had he wanted to kill her, she would have let him.”

“But he didn’t?”

“No.”

When she felt the sword, it was not the blade that struck her neck, but the hilt that touched her hand. She opened her eyes and looked at him, but she did not take it, leaving him clumsily holding it by the blade, his hands red from the blood he had not spilled. She turned to the dead, and from one of them took a sword that was better than his, and also a dagger. One of the dead was a woman — she took her boots, stripped her of her clothes, not much different from a man’s, and put them on, torn by the sword and soaked in blood as they were, and as he watched her dress he realized, the scars on her body had not come from punishments, but from battles. Then she went through the bags of the dead, sorting out the trash from the valuables they had robbed, then discarding it all, even some jewelry, except for the coins — copper, silver, and, though small ones, even some gold. Now that she was dressed and armed, she took his sword, cleaned it on a piece of garment that had stayed unsoiled, handed him a bandana one of the dead had worn to clean his hands with, handed him back his sword, and, finally, gave him the coins she had taken. All the while he hardly moved, only slowly reacting when she put something in his hands, watching her silently, stunned, not sure what was going on, what had changed, what would change now.

“Say, this is not turning into a love story, by any chance, is it?”

“No.”

“Because, you know, all the stories you’ve ever told were love stories, weren’t they?”

“Were they? This one isn’t.”

When they took a rest next to a stream she took off her clothes, to wash the blood and the scent of the dead woman out of them, and off her skin. Seeing her naked, as he had done all that time, suddenly felt awkward to him. When she had spread the clothes on a rock to dry, she lay down on a soft patch of moss, offering herself as if nothing had changed, and to his own surprise, he accepted the offer with little hesitation. As always, she neither participated, nor resisted. Nothing had changed — no, everything had changed, he knew it had — but it was as if she wanted him to feel that nothing had changed. To deceive him? To reassure him? Or, he finally thought, to reassure herself?