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Chapter 17

Stunned beyond all thought, I felt a strange sensation of light-headed disbelief. My legs went weak and I collapsed in the lane. I drew up my knees and hugged them to my chest. I wanted to scream: THE SHIP IS GONE!

Astonishment turned swiftly to rage: Those flaming idiots! They left without me!

Rage melted just as quickly into forlorn self pity: How could they? How could they just go away and leave me? Drustan promised to take care of me. He promised! How could he do this to me?

I began rocking back and forth as the enormity of my predicament fell full upon me with the weight of a mountain. I was stranded, lost, without food or water, without money, abandoned in a place where I knew not a single soul and no one knew me. What, Lord help me, was I going to do?

I sensed a presence behind me and started as someone coughed to draw my attention. I whirled around. It was the priest from the church; I had not heard his approach. And now he was bending over me. He spoke quietly and I touched my ear. He repeated, more loudly. “Girl? What’s the matter?” he asked, his voice full of concern. “Are you ill?”

“The ship . . .” I flung a hand toward the pier. “It’s gone.”

“Ship?” he wondered, turning his gaze to the seafront.

“They left without me!”

He offered a puzzled frown. “I don’t understand.”

“The ship!” I jabbed my finger at the waterfront. “My ship—it’s gone!” I wailed. “They left without me!”

“Who has done this?” he asked.

I started rocking again and the tears began to flow.

“Miss?” he asked. To my surprise he gathered the hem of his long priestly robe and sat down in the dirt road beside me. He drew up his knees, like me, and stared out at the sea-starved bay. “Let me see if I understand this,” he said, his voice calming, gentle. “You arrived here aboard a ship and expected to depart with it when it sailed. But this vessel has sailed and you have been left behind.”

The way he said it—so simply, directly, without the mind-numbing panic that gripped me—somehow reduced the immensity of my dilemma. It became a difficulty rather than a disaster. Trouble, yes—definitely that—but not utter tragedy.

“Were they people of yours?” he asked.

Not certain I had heard him correctly, I asked him to repeat, and tapped my ear again. “The ones who left you,” he said, speaking clearly, “were they people of yours—your relations, perhaps?”

I shook my head. “No,” I told him. “No relation at all. They were traders. They were going to Deva and I was travelling with them. They were meant to look after me.”

“Ah-h-h . . . Deva,” he replied as if this explained everything he needed to know. He regarded me for a long moment. I sniffed and dabbed at my tears. “You have people there maybe?”

I nodded. “Friends, yes.”

He was silent for a time, content to sit with me in my misery. Finally, I stopped my sniveling and, drawing a deep breath, turned my face to him and asked, “What am I going to do?”

He smiled. “Go on to Deva, I expect.”

“How? I don’t even know where Deva is, how far it might be, or how I might get there.”

“Yet, the way is known,” he said simply. “Perhaps not by you, but there are others who know how to get there—and they will also know how far it is. We will ask them.”

“But my things—my clothes and possessions . . . my books,” I complained. “Everything I own is in a box on the ship. I have nothing.” Even as I spoke, my hand moved to my purse secure in its deep pocket beneath my cloak. I felt the reassuring weight of coins and my panic receded a little. I was not completely beggared. I still had my money.

“Ah, well,” my priestly companion said. “Our Lord Jesu travelled about the land without these things. You can do likewise, I think.”

For some reason this made me laugh. “But our Lord could also walk on water when he wished. I don’t think I can do likewise at all.”

He chuckled, too. “No, maybe not that.”

He rose and brushed the dirt off his robe, then reached down a hand for me. “I am Heddwyn, cleric of this cantref.”

I accepted his hand and allowed him to help me to my feet. “I am Aurelia,” I told him. He invited me to break fast with him in the Priest House where his wife was preparing a meal. The offer was kindly given and, though I was still wildly anxious over my plight, I saw no reason to decline—who knew when I might eat again? Turning away from the seafront, we started back toward the church and he asked me how I had come to be sleeping on the churchyard bench.

“Were the men—ah,” he paused, considering how to ask the question, “ . . . abusing you?”

“Abusing me?” Uncertain I had hear correctly, I glanced sharply at him. “You mean . . .”

He made a gesture toward my body and nodded.

“No! Oh, no—nothing like that,” I answered quickly. “Drustan and Gubric were looking after me. They are good men. No one so much as touched me.”

“Looking after you,” he said, nodding slowly and regarding me somewhat doubtfully. “And yet, they abandoned you.”

I sighed. “So they did.” Haltingly, and with one or two sniffles, I explained how we had all enjoyed a fine evening on the beach with wine and bread and fish roasted on spits around the fire, and how I had gone back to the ship to sleep. “The men came back much later and woke me,” I said. “They were very noisy with their snoring, so I got up and went in search of a quiet place to spend the night.”

“My churchyard.”

I nodded. “I saw it earlier in the day and liked it there. It was peaceful.”

Priest Heddwyn nodded again and fell silent. We reached the churchyard where he paused with the gate half open. “Might it be,” he said, his hand on the latch, “that your friends did not know you had come ashore in the night?”

“No, I—I . . .” Fear and anger had so consumed me that any such thought had not yet had time to winkle its way into my thick head. I stared at him. “Do you really think . . .?”

“It is possible, is it not?” Heddwyn suggested. “If they were asleep and you were very quiet . . .”

The realization shook me like thunder.

“They didn’t know!” I gasped. I quickly explained that my sleeping place aboard the ship was separated from that of the men by a curtain at the furthest corner of the hut. If, as Heddwyn suggested, they had awakened and hurried to ready the ship to sail with the outgoing tide, they could very well have thought me asleep and did not wish to wake me. “They might think me still asleep even now,” I concluded, then wondered. “But what will they do when they realize what has happened?”

“Will they?”

I did not hear him clearly and asked him to repeat.

Will they realize what has happened to you?” he said simply. “It may be that all they can know is that you were asleep on your mat in the boat’s house and now you have vanished.”

A heavy load of woe descended fresh upon me. “Not even that,” I replied bleakly. “Drustan will not know what has happened to me. How can he? For all he knows I might have fallen overboard and drowned.”

We entered the churchyard in silence, allowing all this to sink in. Heddwyn led me across the burial ground to a lane at the end of which stood a small house, half-hidden in a little wood. The house had a thatched roof and two tiny wind holes covered with bits of old glass; pale smoke threaded its way into the surrounding trees. He rapped on the door, opened it, and stepped inside, beckoning me to follow.

“Flori,” he called. “We have a visitor.” To me, he said, “Come in, come in. Be welcome here.”

His wife was a busy little sparrow of a woman, with quick, dark eyes and a beaky nose, and she examined me with a bird’s keen attention. “God with you, daughter, and welcome,” she said. “I am Florinia, but answer best to Flori.” She looked to her husband for further explanation.

“Oh! And this is Aurelia,” he told her. “Come all the way from . . .” He chuckled and looked at me. “I don’t know where you’re from—”

“Venta,” I said. “It’s a small town in the south near the coast. My father was magistrate there—Tullius Paulinus. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

“Venta?” the priest mused. “That I have heard of. But I cannot say I know of your father. But you said was just now. Is he magistrate no longer?”

“My father died recently,” I replied my voice cracking unexpectedly.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “And that is why you are going to your friends in Deva Vitrix. I see now—yes, I think I see. And these friends, they are—”

“Heddwyn!” scolded his wife. She stepped close and shooed him away. “Stop pestering the girl with all your prattle. She is hungry, I expect. Go fetch a chair from the church and we will all sit down to our meal.”

She led me further into their home—a single room with a hearth at one end and a box bed at the other, and all kinds of dried herbs and vegetables and things hanging from the roof beams. The room was warm and lit with candles in several places. A large table held pride of place in the center of the room and it was piled high with more dried stuff and bits of cloth, and a collection of pots and jars of various shapes and sizes. Two chairs stood at one end of the table where the couple took their meals and did their homely work. My hostess saw me eyeing the assortment of containers and said, “I make unguents and potions for the folk hereabouts,” she explained. “They bring me eggs and butter and honey, beeswax and suchlike. In return, I give them medicines for their ailments.” She smiled. “I’ve never had to make butter or cheese since we came here.”

I smiled and mumbled something about not hearing very well, adding, “If only there was a medicine for that.”

“My husband did not say how you came to be here,” she said, speaking loudly and clearly. She moved some of the clutter on the table and pulled out one of the chairs, gesturing for me to sit down. “Aberdyfi is far from Deva.”

“It is,” I agreed. “But I was travelling on a ship with some merchants who were going there to trade. There was a mistake last night and they sailed this morning without me.”

“Oh! You poor poppet. Stranded!” Flori reached over and patted my hand, then went to the hearth and took up a pot that was bubbling away near the fire. “Are you a Christian girl? Is that why you came to the church?”

“I am, yes,” I replied, “but that’s not why I came to the church.” I then tried to explain, without delving too deeply into the debacle, how I had come to be sitting in her house on this dull, dismal day.

Flori poured some of the liquid from the pot into a bowl and set it before me. “A tisane of Camomile,” she announced. “Good for calming the heart and soul. We drink it every day.”

I thanked her and she poured herself a little bowl of the stuff and we drank together. Heddwyn returned with a chair from the church. He placed it at the table across from me and the two of them began pulling things together to make a meal. Another pot near the hearth contained a thick gruel of oats, flavored with dried berries, and this Flori ladled into bowls. There was heavy dark bread and sweet butter, and a sort of mush made of cherries and apples, I think, and cooked with honey. This she smoothed on thick slices of bread and dolloped over the oat gruel.

The food was warm and comforting in its own right, and I ate as if I was a child who had never swallowed a single bite in my life. The two kept up a light chatter about this and that—not all of which I heard—about local life and the folk round about the cantref. I cleaned my bowl and held up my hands in submission, refusing another offered ladle, and Heddwyn said, “Well, now. What are we going to do for you, eh?” Before I could think what to say to this, he continued. “I have it in mind that we can do no better than to go to Cadwgan Call. He will know what to do.”

“Go to Cadwgan?” wondered his wife. A shadow of doubt passed across her kindly face.

“Indeed, yes! If anyone can help, it will be our wise chief and elder.” He put his hands flat on the table and pushed back his chair. “Cadwgan the Wise will know what to do for a sailor stranded ashore.”

Without waiting for a second opinion, Heddwyn jumped up, kissed his wife on the top of the head, pulled his cloak from a peg by the door, and hurried out, leaving me and Flori gazing at one another over the remains of our meal.

A long moment passed and the woman cocked her head to one side as if satisfying herself that her husband had truly gone. Then, leaning forward, she reached out and took my hand. “You cannot go to Cadwgan.”

“What?” I was not sure I had heard correctly.

She gripped my hand for emphasis, speaking quickly and in earnest, “We must get you away from here. Quick! Before Heddwyn comes back!”



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