He dreamed he was flying, a hawk with barred tail and wings, one wing darker, the feathers striped brown and red, the other striped brown and white. He did not know why that mattered, or why he stayed aloft. The bitter astringent taste of woad was on his tongue, and when sunlight touched him he became a man, again, curled in agony on a low cot.
A person in an undyed wool robe brought him soup and changed his bandages. The hands were nobbed and frail, the frame of the person so thin as to be sexless. Their fingers were stained with myriad inks, blue and black, red and yellow. The soup was bland, his pain was immense, and he slept again simply to escape it all.
When he finally woke clear-headed, he lay limp on the bed. He was in a small room, barely room for the cot and a small chest. His pack, hatchet and cudgel were piled gracelessly in the corner opposite the low door. Raising his hand, looking at it in the weak light of the single candle on the desk, he saw the tracery of scars, fresh and livid, down his arm.
For all that his wounds were clean and healed, he still wore the blood stained tunic and trousers he’d put on the morning of his encounter with the wolf. Whoever had tended him had simply cut away his sleeve and pushed aside the tatters of his trousers to bandage those wounds.
He sat slowly, taking stock of his body. His leg was stiff and slow, the bands of scar tissue across his thigh binding his movement. Pain rose to meet him, but it was the pain of long healed wounds. He thought of Bronwyn, and bowed his head, resting his face in his hands. The ring on its stained cord swung forward to dangle in front of his nose, and he caught it, considered it for a moment, and then tucked it back into his collar.
The thin person opened the door and regarded Weyland for a moment, then spoke to him in a language that was lilting and lyric. Some of the words teased the edges of his mind, as if they had been adopted from a land he had traveled, but he understood none of it. With a pang, he found that he missed Gilda and her gift for speaking whatever words were necessary to make their way. Weyland stood, his right hand supporting him against the wall, the left held close to his chest. The person seemed pleased with this development, and motioned for Weyland to follow.
The hall was narrow, which was fortunate, for Weyland used the wall to stay upright. His guide seemed oblivious to his physical limitations, walking briskly ahead as Weyland slowly made his way. There were doors on both sides of the passage, Weyland absently counted ten, with his own door at the far end.
A turn to the right and an eternity of steps later, Weyland found himself in a cluttered kitchen. He only identified it as such because there was a leaky pot hanging in the fireplace, dripping liquid onto the fire and creating a mild, mutton scented steam. The tables and shelves were covered with pages and pages of freshly inked parchment and vellum, spread to dry, the only light coming from a high window above a door. The person had moved some of the work aside and made a place for Weyland, serving him a bowl of the concoction in the pot, which was mostly mutton and turnips and a thin broth.
“Thank you,” Weyland said, and the person cocked their head for a moment, and then shrugged. As an afterthought, they brought him a crooked-handled spoon. He ate the bland food, almost wishing for the dried meat and fruit of travel rations.
“May I mend your cookpot?” Weyland asked, after he finished. The thin person tilted their head quizzically. Weyland repeated his offer, and they held out both hands in a gesture for him to stay where he was. They left the kitchen, and quickly returned with a man dressed in the same robes, an ancient fellow with white hair and a beard long and tangled, tipped with ink.
“What do you want?” he demanded. The other person spoke quickly in the liquid tongue, and the bearded man replied in kind.
“I would like to mend your cookpot,” Weyland shifted uncomfortably.
“We do not repair things here, we only re-create,” The bearded man peered at Weyland, and he saw the thick milky glaze on his left eye.
“Then, may I replace your cookpot?” Weyland thought of the cauldron he’d made in the tower workshop.
“If you like. Do you want anything else? I have work to do.” He scratched his beard, turning to leave.
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“Perhaps, a shirt and trousers?” Weyland felt awkward for asking, but felt more awkward with his leg and buttock bare.
The bearded man snapped an order at the thin person in the other language and left the way he came without further comment.
He was taken back to the bare cell where he’d woken, and the thin person left him there with the same open handed gesture to stay where he was. Weyland pulled the cauldron out of his pack, thinking for a moment that the pot was much larger than the sack, and forgetting the thought almost immediately. He slid the sword back into the pack and rummaged around until he found the hamper. There was a bare handful of dried meat and fruit, and part of a loaf of bread inside. Weyland set the food out on the small table, tearing the bread open and stuffing some of the meat into the pocket, then putting it all back into the hamper.
The thin person returned with a bucket of water and a rag, trousers that were much too big, and a shirt with sleeves that fell well short of his wrists. He eased his much abused body out of his torn and bloody clothes, recoiling a bit at the ripe smell. The water was cold, and the rag was rough, but he was able to scrub away the dried blood and much of the dirt. He wished for a lump of the harsh lye soap his mother had made and scrubbed her children with. By pulling his belt tight, he was able to secure the trousers, and he determined that the shirt would just have to do. His muddy boots he tied back on, making sure there were no clods of clay or dirt to track across the floors.
Feeling much improved, he picked up the cauldron and opened the door to find the thin person waiting for him, leaning against the wall of the passage, hands folded and eyes closed. When the door opened, they opened their eyes and yawned greatly, covering their mouth with a frail seeming hand. When they got back to the kitchen, Weyland set the cauldron on the bench where he’d sat and eaten, then carefully removed the leaky cookpot from the fireplace.
As Weyland spooned the turnip and mutton soup from the old vessel into the new, the thin person brought more vegetables, mostly carrots and turnips with dirt clinging to their fine roots, and a recently cleaned rabbit. They were about to add the vegetables and the rabbit directly to the pot, and Weyland hastily intercepted them.
“Let me, please,” he said, hoping they would understand sentiment if not the words, and took the vegetables and rabbit to the basin. He rinsed off the vegetables and checked the rabbit carcass to be sure it had been cleaned properly. With a mostly clean knife he found on the edge of the basin he cut the root vegetables up, and then dismembered the rabbit. He added all to the cauldron, pouring clean water over it all, and hung the pot from the hook inside the hearth to cook. There were no herbs or spices in evidence, not even salt, so he stirred it once with a ladle and left it over the orange glowing coals.
Feeling at least a little accomplished, he turned back to the table, only to discover that the thin person had brought his pack, hatchet, and cudgel into the kitchen, setting them in a corner nearby. They opened the door beneath the window and extended their hand, gesturing gracefully for Weyland to precede them. Confused, Weyland stiffly gathered his belongings, slinging the hatchet onto his belt and the pack over his shoulder and passed through the door. It was closed quickly behind him, leaving him in an overgrown garden. He startled a rabbit digging amidst the greenery. It froze, and they stared at each other for a long moment before it bolted from the garden through a broken wall.
Weyland looked around him again, seeing nothing remarkable in the garden, nor the high walls of the building, dotted irregularly with windows. He shouldered the club, missing the water-born knife he’d dropped in the fight with the wolf. Realizing that it was not yet noon, he followed the rabbit through the broken wall, past the cottage sulking outside the closed gates of the building, and found himself at a road. Looking up at the sky, he chose the path that took him to the east.
The forest was dark even at midday. He heard birds and small creatures rustle in the woods, and walked as softly as his scarred leg would allow. An eagle screamed far above him, and he peered up through the canopy to see it, with no luck.
He grew tired quickly but pushed on, an urgency to leave the strangers and their strange home behind him driving him forward. When he could no longer continue, he stopped, finding an unoccupied place between massive tree roots to shelter.
He pulled bread and meat and a bit of fruit from the hamper, and found a stream nearby to drink from. He considered using the horn cup, but decided that the results might not serve him well. Thus he traveled for three days, seeing not another man or woman on the dim road until a troop of a dozen soldiers came upon him. A man with a scarlet band on his shield raised a hand, and the soldiers halted their march. They were of no army or people Weyland had ever encountered, neither Roman nor northman, their shields rectangular like the conquerors’, but their other weapons more like the spears and daggers of the people Weyland remembered from long before he ever set out with his cousin to ask a lord for aid.
The man said something to him in a tongue he did not understand, a more gutteral language than what the thin person had spoken. Weyland shrugged and spread his hands. “I don’t understand.”
The man thought for a moment, and then spoke slowly. “You’re Weyland?”
Relieved, Weyland nodded. “I am.”
The soldiers circled him quickly, and the world went black when a blow landed on the back of his head.