The Romance of Eowain

Chapter Seven, Scene Seventeen

As they marched through the no-man's land from Droma into Ivea, Eithne imagined the land became more familiar. The people of those lands were related to her own. The mountains loomed closer. Even the air seemed native and ordinary.

Yet for all its homeliness, unease knotted her belly. She was glad of the change of clothes and the jack of stern leather she wore, grateful for the sword at her hip.

But the threat of more banditry, the loathsome regard in which Lord Feoras held her, the insult she'd suffered from the Lady Gluintír, those things worked at her mind. She worried at her lip with her teeth.

"What troubles you, Lady?" The ban-drymyn Alva rode beside her, dark and weathered, and put a hand upon her knee.

Eithne looked about. Eowain and his men rode somewhat ahead with her father. Aside from her own three horsemen, there were none near enough to overhear. "It's just—." She wasn't sure what to say. "Do his people truly hate me so?"

Alva patted her leg. "Not all of them, I wager. But there has long been blood between the Donnghaile and the Gwynn."

"Not with our branch of the Gwynn."

"Our people are far away in the mountains. But it was not so long ago that the Fiatach rose in rebellion against Murdach. The chief of the Donnghaile is also the Lord-Marshall of all the tribes of the East. It was Eowain's father that led the force that suppressed the Gwynn." She shrugged beneath her woolen cloak. "Feoras is certainly not the only father who sent sons to that war." She nodded meaningfully in the direction of Lord Tnúthgal. "Nor the only son who sent a father, I think."

"But that was nigh on twenty years ago. I was barely more than a babe."

She nodded. "Indeed. A great deal of time in which to sharpen a knife. And whatever gave you the notion this was about you, lass?"

She chewed over that, but it did little to ease the fear in her belly. If she married Eowain, would she always fear the knife in the dark, the poison in the cup? Would there be others like Feoras and the Lady Gluintír, with nothing but insults and contempt for her?

By the Sixth Hour of midday, they crested a hill and saw the large village of Midachath ahead. It lay hunched beside the river Gasirad. Smoke rose from the holes in the thatched roofs of modest round-houses. The house of their king hulked over the village, surrounded by a palisade of timbers.

In the fields below, many of the people were drably dressed, while others wore clothes patched and patched again, but always in contrasting colors, so that the patchwork was visible even from a distance. It became a kind of design, leggings and tunics in red and blue, orange and rose. The vivid colors stood out against the dark earth.

She watched a new field being plowed, the black iron blade hauled by two oxen. The ard-plough itself turned the Abred of the furrow neatly on both sides. Behind the plowman, a peasant sowed seed with rhythmic sweeps of his arm. The sack of seed hung from his shoulder. A short distance behind the sower, birds fluttered down to the furrow to eat the seed.

But not for long. In a nearby field, she saw the harrower: a man riding a horse that dragged a wooden T-frame weighted down by a large rock. The harrower closed the furrows and protected the seed.

Most of the fields were already planted, their furrows closed over. The spring planting of barley, peas, oats and beans — the Damaran crops — was nearly finished. Everything moved in the same gentle, steady rhythm: the hand threw the seed, the ard-plough turned the furrow, the harrow scraped the ground. And there was almost no sound in the still noon hour, save the hum of insects and the twitter of birds.