But Lark did not find this difficult to believe. She indicated the scroll with her awl. “You can understand those marks? You can read?”
Foxbrush nodded. Lark let out a plaintive sigh. “My da used to read, he says. He once showed me letters in the dirt, and he told me about reading. But he can’t remember now, and none of us knows the way. It is a strange and wonderful magic!”
“It’s not really . . .” Foxbrush stopped. What was the purpose of protesting magic of any kind in this new world? “Would you like to hear?” he asked, surprising himself. He’d not intended to make the offer. But he felt her pleading, though she’d said nothing.
Lark’s eyes fairly shot out of her brown little face. She sprang to her feet and called to her siblings in their mother’s tongue. “Come here! Come here! The wasp man is going to read!”
The three little sisters—Cattail and the two who were not twins, though they looked very alike and were only a year apart in age—grabbed their work and their brother and hastened over to join Foxbrush and Lark. Without a word they sat, pulling small Wolfsbane down between them and shoving a rag doll into his hands. He paid no attention to this but watched Foxbrush with fascination equal to that of his sisters.
“Um,” said Foxbrush, a little nervous at this sudden, eager audience. “They don’t understand me.”
“I’ll tell them what you say,” said Lark with a grin. “Read to us, wasp man!”
Foxbrush shrugged and tried a smile at the grave, upturned faces. They did not smile in return. “Well, all right. This is a story told in . . . in my country. A famous story. You might know it yourselves. It is The Ballad of Shadow Hand.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly at Lark.
She shook her head. “Who’s Shadow Hand?”
Foxbrush frowned at this. Shadow Hand was, after all, one of the oldest and best-known heroes in Southlander history; his tale not quite as beloved as the tale of Maid Starflower and the Wolf Lord, but very nearly so.
“Well,” said he with a shrug, “I suppose that’s what I’m here to tell you. Lumé! Perhaps I’ll be remembered as the first man to tell this story! Take that, why don’t you, Bard Eanrin?”
The children exchanged puzzled glances at this. But Foxbrush, chuckling to himself, unrolled the scroll to its full length, which was long indeed. And he read as best he could by the firelight (supplying the rest from distant childhood memory). Lark translated as he went.
“Oh, Shadow Hand of Here and There,
Follow where you will
Your fickle, fleeing, Fiery Fair,
O’er woodlands, under hill.
She’ll not be found, save by the stone,
The stern and shining Bronze . . .”
Here, his voice faltered. As a child, he’d paid little heed to the story, certainly not to poetic details. Poetry never had been his area of comfort or even interest. But when he came to the word Bronze, his voice cracked, and he scowled at the page. He recalled suddenly what the Eldest had said a few nights previous:
“They say a maid came out of the jungle, a maid wearing a bronze stone about her neck. . . .”
Foxbrush felt the blood drain from his face with sudden, dreadful foreboding that he could not understand and was quite certain he did not wish to.
“Is that all?” one of the look-alike sisters demanded. Foxbrush, who did not understand the words, understood the meaning and read on.
“She’ll not be found, save by the stone,
The stern and shining Bronze
Where crooked stands the Mound alone
Thorn clad and sharp with awns.
“How pleasant are the Faerie folk
Who dwell beyond your time.
How pleasant are your aged kinfolk
Of olden, swelt’ry clime.
“But dark the tithe they pay, my son,
To safely dwell beneath that sun!”
There was a great deal more written close upon the parchment. Foxbrush read to the end but scarcely heard himself. The story was familiar: the old, comfortable familiarity of nursery tales known since before real memory begins, associated ever in his mind with a certain smell of leather binding and the soap-roughened hands of his nursemaid holding him in her lap and turning pages.
But as he read it out on that darkening night with children gathered round—their laps full of figs, their nimble fingers working awls—the familiar phrases took on new meaning. Darker meaning that comes when childhood fantasy slips into reality and is not quite what one expects it to be.
Here and There.
The Bronze.
These words rang in the forefront of his mind so that he scarcely heard his own reading. Thus he was surprised when Lark interrupted with a noisy, “What?”
“What?” Foxbrush echoed, looking at her over the scroll. “Is something amiss?”
Lark, her hands on her hips, the awl still gripped in one fist, wrinkled her nose at him. “Read that verse again.”
“Which verse?”
“The one you just read!”
Foxbrush looked down at words that swam before him in the shadows, trying to recall where he’d been. Then he read:
“In broken sleep upon the ground
The dear one lost now lies.
Yet a kiss in faithful friendship found,