Bram pulled the goatskins all the way up to his chin. They were old and no longer smelled of goats, just dust As he lay there, looking out, he realized it wasn't wholly dark. The milkstone glowed. He fell asleep, and for once he did not dream about his brother Robbie. Just the milkstone.
He awoke to the strange thuds and calls of a foreign clan. Close by a door was shut with force. Someone shouted, "Blade court at dawn!" Someone else shouted back, "Go away and let me sleep!"
Bram rose and scrubbed the sleep from his eyes. His possessions were in Gabbie's saddlebags, so he couldn't do much about his hair, clothes or teeth. Plucking at the front panel of his tunic, he brought it to his nose and sniffed. Not good. And today he had to meet a chief. Drastic action was called for. Lifting the water pitcher high, he emptied its contents over his head. It felt cold and good. Maybe it would help with the smell.
After he aired the goatskins and relieved himself Bram headed downstairs to find the Milk chief. Clanfolk were up and about, sweeping corridors, dousing torches, chasing children, carrying buckets of fresh water up through the house and slop buckets down to the river, buckling armor as they raced toward weapons practice and hauling packs as they made their way to the stables. Most people ignored Bram, though one or two glanced at his blue cloak. Last night as Pol was showing him to his cell, Bram had made sure to memorize the route. It was an easy thing for him, for once he saw something he seldom forgot it, and he had no problem finding his way back to the kitchen. From there he headed left toward the entrance hall. Outside the sun was rising, and he quickly learned how to orient himself in the maze that formed the groundfloor of the Milkhouse. Exterior walls appeared brighter to the eye than interior, dividing walls. It was a fact that wouldn't do him any good at night, he realized, but was surprisingly useful at dawn when you knew the sunlight was coming in from the east.
The Oyster Doors were flung wide open and a stiff breezing was blowing off the Milk. A crew of swordsmen had gathered on the wide steps outside the entrance hall and Bram looked to see if one of them might be Pol. They were big men, with graying hair and deeply lined faces, their bodies toughened by decades of hard work. Some were wearing cloaks pieced together from white fox pelts and others had fox-head brooches fastened at their throats. All carried the one-handed fighting swords Castlemilk was known for, the curved knuckleguards and finger rings clearly visible above the tops of their scabbards.
Unable to locate Pol, Bram asked the nearest swordsman where he might find the chief. The man was sitting with his back against the doorframe, picking gravel from the sole of his boot He did not look up as he said, "Chiefs out back, paying her respects."
Bram hiked over the man's legs and went outside. Sunlight glinting off the river dazzled him and it took a moment for his eyesight to clear.
The white sand on the landing beach was blowing across the grass and onto the gravel road that led from the river to the roundhouse. On the far shore, hemlocks and black spruce murmured as they moved in the wind. Turning his back on the dark and glossy trees, Bram headed up the path that ran along the roundhouse's exterior wall. He could feel his hair drying as he walked.
When he rounded the rear quadrant of the Milkhouse he spied Wrayan Castlemilk, the Milk chief, in the distance, standing alone. A quarter-league north of the path, beyond the orderly beds of the kitchen gardens, the hard standings, training courts, eel tanks, pigsties and cattle pens lay a large, white-walled enclosure. The gate leading to the enclosure was open and Wrayan Castlemilk stood just beyond the threshold with her back to the roundhouse. Although the wind was still high, her silver cloak did not move: stones just have been sewn into the hem.
Muscles in Bram's stomach loosened. He had heard of Castlemilk's gravepool and wondered if it was proper to approach it. The sheen of water was clearly visible on either side of Wrayan Castlemilk, and as Bram watched she knelt down and leaned forward. He continued walking toward the pool, curious and cautious, passing a children's court that had been colored with orange and blue chalk, and a mulched and caned vegetable bed, before coming to a halt thirty paces before the wall.
Unlike the roundhouse, the wall enclosing the gravepool was built from simple baked bricks, not milkstone and it had not aged well. Green mold grew at the base and mortar had worn away leaving deep cracks around the bricks. One of the gateposts was listing, and the gate itself had been hastily stained with the same matte limewash as the wall. A fox head, deeply carved into the wood, was its only decoration.
Beyond the gate, Wrayan Castlemilk rose to her feet and brushed dirt from her cloak. Her right hand glistened with water. Turning, she saw Bram. With a small crook of her wrist she beckoned him forward and then waited, motionless, as he approached.
"Welcome" she said once he had come to a halt. "I had expected you sooner."
Bram's face flushed with blood, and he was about to apologize when he remembered his brother Robbie's contempt for people who tried to explain their actions. A king has no use for sorry.
Wrayan Castlemilk watched Bram, her brown eyes shrewd and thoughtful She was the second-longest-reigning chief in the clanholds and had ruled Castlemilk for nearly thirty years. Bram could not guess how old she was. Her face was unlined, though her waist-length braid was equal parts red and gray. "Our guide, Drouse Ogmore, is acquainted with Robbie's new guide at Dhoone. Both men keep birds, in the manner of the old clans, and it is not unknown for messages to pass between them." The chief raised a cool eyebrow. "So if a boy was to leave Dhoone for Castlemilk and arrive ten days late Drouse, and therefore I, might know it."
Aware he was being reprimanded, Bram bowed his head.
"Come, Bram Cormac," Wrayan said. "Take a walk with me around the pool." She did not wait for him, and began walking a circuit of the artificial lake.
It was a perfect circle, about eighty feet in a diameter. Only a three-foot grass verge separated the lake from the wall that enclosed it. Bram was nervous as he followed the chiefs footsteps, worried that some errant impulse might make him leap into the water.
And that was one place he did not want to be.
He could see the lead coffins, dozens of them, lying beneath nine feet of water. Round and encrusted with mussels, they looked like pale, ghostly boulders. Bram wondered how the bodies of the Castlemilk chiefs had been fitted inside them, and didn't very much like the answer he came up with.
"Skerro Castlemilk, the Winter chief, used to farm the mussels and eat them." Wrayan came to a halt by the edge. "He went insane. Some say it was the lead."
Bram could think of no suitable response. He frowned at the water, hoping to look serious and alert.
Wrayan Castlemilk did not appear to notice. "The milkstone silt at the bottom is nearly a foot deep. At one time it was custom to have a boy stir it every day with a paddle so it looked as if the caskets were submerged in milk." She smiled flatly at Bram. Sunlight sparkling off the shoulders of her silver cloak threw a strange brightness upon her face. "My brother Alban lies here, though he swore every day of his life that he did not wish to end up in this pool. Once a chief is dead, though, he has no say over his clan, his body. His sister."
She had ordered her brother buried here against his wishes, Bram realized.
Wrayan acknowledged Bram's expression with a small nod. "Someone will do it to me one day, order my body cut and sunk. It is the Milk way, and a clan is nothing without its ways. Dhoone, Blackhail, Bludd: what do you think makes them different?" A tiny movement of her wrist indicated that Bram need not bother formulating an answer: the Milk chief would supply one for him. "Our customs are the only things that separate us from other clans. We worship the same gods, abide by the same laws, want the same thing. It is in the small details that we forge an identity as clan; boasts we speak, weapons we carry, the manner in which we dispose of our dead. Twenty-eight years ago, when given a choice between betraying Alban and betraying the customs of this clan, there was only one answer for me. I am chief. If I fail to uphold the old ways I diminish us." She gave him a cold look, a warning, before continuing.