Review
"Tight plot and excellent characterization."
About the Author
CHERRY WILDER lived in Australia and Germany. She died in 2002. KATYA REIMANN lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
WANDERER
BOOK ICHAPTER IGAEL MADDOCGael Maddoc grew up on a hill farm in the Chyrian lands of Mel'Nir. Holywell Croft was the land of the Maddoc family by deed and by custom. It was all they had: a wretched croft that hardly nourished the farmer, his wife, and their two surviving children. There was little else in their lives except the backbreaking struggle with the stony pasture. It seemed they had always been poor: Rab Maddoc could hardly look back to a happier time, and Shivorn, his wife, had grown very quiet.Gael, their third child, was strong from birth. She survived and was not brought behind the hill to the graveyard where so many Maddocs lay under the tumbled stones.Then again there were two bad years, and at last Shivorn bore her third son, her sixth child, the second survivor. The boy, Bress, was a year old, then two years, crowned with his father's dark curling hair, and he was all their joy.One spring night when Gael was seven years old and her brother three, it was certain Bress would die. Their mother had not slept for two nights, but still the fever would not shift. Gael crouched by the fire, for they had forgotten to send her to bed. She heard her mother say:"I will go!"And Maddoc made some reply, half angry, full of dread."Go, then!"Her mother snatched up the child, wrapped him in her second shawl, and ran out of the stone hut. The yard was muddy, crusted in the shadows with ice. It was Crocusmoon. The breath of winter lay upon the ground around them, not quite ceded to the gentle winds of spring. Gael followed Shivorn through the yard, past the well; her mother had never run so fast. She ran and ran, little Gael stumbling after her, round the corner of the hill. She ran to the sacred Holywell that gave the farm its name. The moon looked through clouds as Shivorn Maddoc parted the bushes and the dead grass of the last season and opened the dark mouth of the grotto and its flowing spring, in the sacred precinct of the Goddess. Clutching her son against her breast, Shivorn bowed her head and entered.In a moment, Gael had gathered her courage and followed her mother in. With one hand against the coolness of the limestone wall, she entered the darkness of the passage, keeping always to the right, away from the waters of the spring. She stumbled on the age-polished tiers of the flowstone floor, for the light was poor and her memory dulled by the passage of many days since the Holywell's last ceremony. Ahead, already within the grotto, she saw her mother dip the boy in the sacred font, heard her utter a prayer before the altar. Then the cave was filled with the radiance of the moon, shining through an opening in the roof, and it was a sign the prayer was answered. So the boy lived, and he was a beautiful child who repaid all their love and attention.Gael grew up taller than Maddoc, her father; her skin was lighter. The blood of the incomers, the giant, tawny warriors of Mel'Nir, was mixed in the veins of the dark Chyrian folk. Her mother had old Chyrian tales she told by the fireside to Gael as they did the baking. In winter she had family stories for Bress and his sister. Shivorn's father, Euan Macord, had been an incomer, in Chyrian the word was Fallan, one who came from beyond the campfire, a traveler, perhaps, or a wanderer. He was a Chyrian, certainly, but pale-faced and with hair dark red. He was a hunter and something of a harp player and had taken serviceat Ardven House, by the Cresset Burn, where he wed Gael Rhodd, one of the spinning girls--the grandmother for whom young Gael was named.Now the great house by the river was a ruin. When Sir Oweyn Murrin had passed on, his eldest son, the Heir of Ardven, was well set up on family lands in Balbank, and the elder girl, Avaurn, had married in Rift Kyrie, to the southeast. The younger daughter, Emeris, had gone for a kedran battlemaid and led a wandering life in all the lands of Hylor and beyond. Now there was no one living in the ruined house but this half-cripple kedran captain, Old Murrin.In summer Gael took her brother down by the Cresset Burn, and Old Murrin let them fish within the grounds of the manor. They were shy children, unused to strangers, unused to the simplest comings and goings of village life. Besides the occasional desperate ceremony, such as that which had preserved Bress's health and life, there were festivals and ceremonies held about twice or three times a year at the Holywell. The reeve of Coombe village came along, with the Druda Kilian Strawn and the old woman Fion Allrada, one of the half-Shee, to conduct the ceremony.On these occasions, the Maddocs cleaned the grotto and set greenery about and readied the ancient urns for flowers, brought by the village wives. There was a small dark place, a cave, hidden within the passage to the grotto--across the spring, and too far a step for those unfamiliar with the water's course. Gael took Bress there to hide and watch all that went on. They knew it was dangerous--Maddoc was not a harsh man but he might have given them the flat of his hand if he had found them there.When Bress was a big lad of eight, ten, he stood with the rest of the people, but Gael, growing tall, awkward, and shy, still kept watch from her hiding place. She told her mother that she must stand guard to see that no one stole the sacred stone cups or the ancient urns but in fact it was because she liked to be there. The place was full of magic. One winter at the beginning of the feast days, after she had seen the small gathering of worshippers leave the grotto, she heard a sound close by. A piece of stone fell down beside her feet where she sat curled up. Investigatingfurther, she discovered a sort of shelf, natural but bearing signs of ancient chisel work, from where the stone had fallen. The stone left a square hole in the wall and inside there was a metal casket, a small thing, no bigger than a thick slice of bread. She snatched it up, tucked it inside the slack of her tunic--for she would not wear a gown and shawl--and took it home to the storeroom where she was allowed to sleep in winter.There, in the first pale light of dawn, Gael opened the grey metal casket and found an ancient parchment, folded small, and covered with writing and strange drawings. There was nothing else but a small leather pouch at the bottom of the casket--inside was a joined loop of fine silvery chain. She slipped it over her head but took it off again, returning it to the pouch. The casket and its contents she hid far away under the sacks of winter vegetables. She tried to think no more of the casket--she had hoped for some gold to give her father.On the night of the Winter Feast, when even the Maddocs made shift to celebrate a little by the fireside, she brought out the chain and gave it to her mother, saying she had found it under a stone before the grotto, which was very nearly the truth. This was the year that Maddoc had made Bress a bow and arrows and there were sweet honeycakes after the rabbit stew.One person had a care for such poor folk as they, and it was the village priest, Druda Kilian Strawn. He knew they were as needy as the wandering tinkers and the mad old men who lived in the woods. Winter and summer he came to them, reminding them that a feast day was coming so they would accept his gifts. He brought bacon, rabbits, woven stuff, and bundles of tailings from the fleece so that Mother Maddoc could spin them up.The Druda was a tall bony fellow with a lank braid of black hair streaked with grey. He was middle-aged, a few years older than Maddoc. He came and went in all the cottages round about. Men admired him because he had been a soldier and served with the men of Mel'Nir during the Great King's War, in the sad days of civil strife when opposing war-leaders' men had torn apart the country. Women talked freely to him because he had been married. He was widowed of a fair young wife from Banlo Strand down by the sea, a woman whom he had wed after the war, and the touch of that coastal life had held close onhim, in his faraway gaze. "Druda" was a title jealously reserved, but Kilian Strawn was not a distant celibate, like those of the priestly colleges in far-off Eildon. He was a Guardian, so-called, from the Holy Grove by Tuana, the old Chyrian capital, and deep trained in Chyrian ways.In sacred Tuana, now overgrown and faded--Mel'Nir's overlords distrusted magic and did what they could to discourage the old folkways--there had been always three priestesses, holy virgins, the Lady of the Grove and her two Maidens, who ruled the hearth and saw to the care of women. Then there were the warrior priests, the Guardians. In old times they had lived among the people and advised the chieftains in their councils. Kilian Strawn was of this old strain, perhaps among the last so trained.Gael Maddoc trusted Druda Strawn so much that at last she brought out the ancient parchment she had kept hidden and told him she had found it by the Holywell. He unfolded it at night by the fire in their small cot and laughed with delight."See here!" he cried. "It is a map of Coombe!"They looked, and when it was laid on a settle the right way round they all could see it--there was the road through the village, there was the Holywell marked with a sacred kell. There also were the crossroads. North and south were the twin fortresses: Hackestell, which still belonged to their liege lord, Knaar of Val'Nur, and Lowestell, which remained in the hands of Lord Pfolben, ruler of the Southland. There were words written in the ancient Chyrian tongue, and when the Druda, half teasing, helped Gael to sound them out, a strange thing happened: there came a glowing upon the parchment, and just for one moment, the outline of a great cup, with double handles.Gael laughed, she was so frightened. "Is it Taran's Kelch?" she asked, for that cup was a great Chy...
