The Tale of Oriel by Cynthia Voigt Page A

woodland meadows had sprouted up pale grass and little white starflowers. Green petals had reached up towards the blue sky. After three days of such promises, they were broken. The wind shifted to the northeast and settled into a blowy rainy cold.
    First the Damall sat day after day by the fire, for warmth he said, drinking tankards of wine to medicine the shits and ease his cramping guts. Then he lay before the fire in the great bed that he’d ordered the boys to take apart, and reassemble there in the main hall. He complained of pains in his stomach, of burning in his throat. He complained of weakness in his limbs. He drank tankards of wine and kept all the boys under his eye. He wanted to see what they got up to, he said. He ate only long after the boys had dined. The sixth Damall shivered in his bed by the fire, complaining that he couldn’t get warm. He pulled clumps of hair out of his head.
    By the tenth day, every breath the Damall drew could be heard by the assembled boys, and the air he drew in rasped against the sides of his throat like pebbles rolled by waves up and down the rocky shore.
    Throughout the sickness, the seventh Damall kept near, to spoon soup into his master’s mouth, or lift a tankard of wine to his lips. He helped the sixth Damall out to the privies, then back into the hall again, until the man was too weak to move from his bed. As the Damall’s body grew weak, his mind also weakened.
    Even delirious, however, he knew Nikol. “I want you under my eye,” the Damall mumbled, whenever he remembered Nikol. “I never trust you. Stay back. Death’s-head beetle, you. You watch—I know you, what you, you want. You should,” he grabbed the seventh Damall’s hair and pulled hard, “have killed him. I told you.”
    Nikol spoke not a word. His pale face and cold eyes showed no expression as he hunched in the corner of the hall.
    The Damall turned in his bed, and he sweated. He sat up to throw his bedclothes onto the floor. He lay back to cry out, and to weep with cold. He saw people closing in around his bed when none were there, when all the boys dozed fitfully wrapped in their cloaks on the floor. He spoke to those people as if he were answering what they spoke to him. “I didn’t mean,” the Damall said. “I didn’t mean it, I was only a boy, I’m sorry, don’t.”
    By the fourteenth night, the Damall had no voice and no thirst, either. He lay on the bed, with no motion except the narrow rise and fall of his chest, and no sound except the whistling of his breath in his throat.
    All the boys were awake, hoping to see death’s moment. Smoke from the fire clung to the stained roof beams like mist. Moisture filmed the stone walls and rose up cold from the floor. The Damall coughed, choking. The seventh Damall rose up from his place at the side of the bed, and leaned over to wipe away the bloody froth.
    Nothing would happen, the seventh Damall knew, until the sixth Damall died. It might even be that nothing would happen until the sixth Damall had been first washed clean, then wrapped around in the bedclothes he had died in, with three round stones at his head and three round stones at his feet, and at last rowed out to be laid upon the sea. But he didn’t count on that much time. He counted only on the time before the sixth Damall died.
    Rain washed against the shuttered windows. It drummed on the roof. He listened to air sucked in between cracked lips. Then he stood up, and looked about him.
    Griff sat with his back against the stone wall. At only that standing movement, Griff was wary, awake, ready.
    But it was Nikol the seventh Damall signaled, with a gesture of his hand. Nikol rose from his corner and darted to the doorway, to await the seventh Damall outside.
    The seventh Damall led Nikol into the shelter of the fowl shed. He brought out a candle and struck a tinderbox. The single flame burned bright in the surrounding