“Or commit one,” Gar said thoughtfully.
“The Midgarders, do the raiding?” Alea asked, shocked.
“What would the dwarves have that we—I mean, the Midgarders—would want?”
“Dwarves,” Gar replied. “More slaves.” He raised a hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to insult your people—but human nature doesn’t change much.”
“They’re not my people! Not any more.” But Alea was surprised to find that she still felt the urge to defend the Midgarders. They didn’t deserve such loyalty, of course. No doubt Gar was right—it was they who started the raids, not the dwarves. “Do you think they’re the ones who start the raids on the giants?”
“Sometimes,” Gar said, “on the excuse that they’re keeping the giants from raiding them. Do they bring back giant slaves?”
“Of course not!” Alea said. “Who could keep a giant? That would be far too dangerous.”
Gar nodded. “Bullies, then. Do many slaves escape?”
“Not in my village.” Alea was fighting the urge to defend her people from the charge of bullying, so she answered absently. “Maybe three or four in a year. But we hear that a great number of slaves do try to run away, all across the country. Every week, the crier calls out the news the messenger brings him from the baron, and there’s always at least one tale of a slave who tried to run away but was caught and brought back. Usually two or three such.”
“Each one a separate tale?”
“Yes.” Alea frowned, wondering what significance he saw in that.
“Told in full and gory detail, no doubt,” Gar mused. “What happens to slaves who are caught?”
Alea shuddered, remembering scenes she had watched and thought were right. “They’re beaten at least, then usually maimed in such a way as to keep them from running off again.” She remembered how Noll had hobbled afterward. He’d been a child with her, but had stopped growing early. She wished she could apologize to him now, for all the taunts and insults she’d hurled at him. Of course, all the children had…
“You were enslaved, too.” Gar made it a statement, not a question.
“You know I’ve said it,” Alea said, her voice harsh. “I was sentenced to slavery a week after my father died. The headman confiscated everything we’d owned, house and lands and cattle, all Mama’s jewels, even their clothes.” Tears stung her eyes. “The ruby brooch she loved so—I pinned it on her dress when she lay in her coffin, but the headman made the sexton take it off and hand it back to Papa. I didn’t understand why, then. I’d never seen anyone do that before…
“You were probably the first one who ever tried to send a treasured object with the dead,” Gar said gently.
“Perhaps I was. I never paid that much attention at anyone else’s funeral, only went through the motions like everyone else, cried a bit if they’d been close friends—not that I had many of those, after I turned fifteen and grew so much.” Alea’s voice hardened. “At least their friends came to their funerals. Papa lived almost a year after Mama died, but he never really seemed to notice much of what went on around him. I don’t think he wanted to live without her.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them away angrily; she would not show weakness in front of this man! Or any man. Any woman, either, not now; she couldn’t trust anyone now, they all smiled like friends, then turned on you. The funeral came rushing back into her mind, the coffin propped on trestles in the big keeping room of their farmhouse, drawn curtains making the room gloomy in daytime, candles burning to either side of Papa, herself wearing her black dress, the same one she had worn not a year earlier, for Mama. The neighbors came up in a steady stream, gazing gravely down into the coffin, some with lips shaping silent prayers to speed his spirit to the gods and keep it from walking, some muttering a few words of farewell to an old friend, then turning to murmur a few words of sympathy and condolence to her before they moved past to take a cup from the sideboard and drink to the dead. Alea, thanked each one in turn, very mechanically, barely thinking about the words, so amazed, so daunted by the sense of loss, of aloneness, that she felt scarcely alive herself, and knew she couldn’t believe any of the offers of help.
“So all the neighbors came to see him off to Heaven.” Gar’s gentle voice intruded, made the darkened walls seem thinner, let her see through them to sunlight and leaves, perhaps even the hope that she hated now. “That meant the whole village, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” Alea wondered why Gar had said “heaven” instead of “Valhalla”—though everyone knew Valhalla was in the heavens, of course. “Even one or two enemies he’d made, the ones who hated him for having built more and earned more and having a few lovely things, even they came. I was touched—for a week. Then at the trial, I saw the gleam of triumph in their eyes, and I knew they’d only come to crow over the ones they’d envied.”
“I’m sure most of them meant it when they gave you their sympathy,” Gar said softly.
“If they did, they changed their meaning quickly enough! I should have realized they were lying!” Again memory seemed more real than the present, again Alea saw all the old familiar faces filing past, faces arranged in lines of sympathy, but all so formal, so distant, that they made her feel like a stranger. She expected it in the Wentods, was surprised to even see them there—they’d been her parents’ worst enemies, and their children the most poisonous in their insults once she started to grow too tall. But come they did, and even made grave, polite comments as they filed by, Vigan Wentod and his flint faced wife, and all six of their brood, only the youngest two still unmarried and at home. Polite, yes, but as distant as though a wall stood between them.
The other neighbors weren’t quite so far removed, but enough, enough, as though they were talking to a stranger. Alea had been numb inside, though, so dismayed and disbelieving that she never stopped to think what it meant. She sat there mouthing automatic thanks, her lips shaping the words by themselves without her mind’s help, and all the while tears stung her eyes, barely held back, as they did now…
“We all need to weep now and then,” Gar said, his eyes on the flames. “It does no harm, as long as it’s not in battle. One must let the tears fall to relieve the overflowing of the heart.”
He turned away from her, and she let herself weep, grateful to him for leaving her a share of privacy. When the worst of it had passed, she rubbed her cheeks with a sleeve and went on. “I was used to being treated as something of a monster, after all, so their reserve didn’t seem all that odd—but Alf!” Her voice hardened again. “He’s more than a head shorter than me now, but he wasn’t when I was fourteen and he sixteen, when he…” She caught herself. “Well, he made noises of sympathy as he ushered his wife past, but he looked back to give me a leer that made my blood ran cold, as though he were claiming me for his own again the way he did the. night before his wedding, whether I wanted it or not. I didn’t understand it at the funeral, I only turned away and tried to hide my shivering, tried to put him out of my mind—but a week later, when I stood before the village council in the meeting hall, and saw him standing there with his hot eyes, drying his palms with a square of linen, I realized what that look had meant. He intended to have me again, and for longer than a week or two this time! I had just been an amusement to him fourteen years before, another conquest, and one that he knew he’d never have to marry, for I was already too tall, and too plainly still growing! Now, though, he meant to claim me as a servant for his po-faced little wife, as a nurse for their horde of brats, then in secret make me do by force what he had persuaded me to do willingly fourteen years before. I made up my mind then that I would sooner kill myself than be his whore. Any one else’s I thought I could bear to be, for that was the life the Norns had plainly spun for me—but not his!”