Scarlet From Gold (Book 3) Read online

  “Looks like we’ll be milking cows,” Dex said breezily.

  They walked up to the back door of the farmstead and knocked, then waited below the steps until a matronly lady opened the door and looked at them. A swift was painted on the doorframe. The woman squinted at her visitors closely for a moment, as the three of them stood looking up at her, the two older men with their hats removed and held in their hands.

  “I know you two, don’t I?” the farmwife asked. “You’re pilgrims – you’ve been here before. And who’s this? Did you bring your grandson?” she asked Dex.

  “Please madam, he might be my younger brother, or at most, my son,” Dex grinned up at her as her face broke into a smile.

  “You rascals!” the woman laughed. “Father Pivot, you come into the house and sit with me; you youngsters go milk the cows,” she directed as she held her door open for Pivot to enter, sending Dex and Marco off to the barn.

  Regular farm hands were already at work leading the cattle into their stalls, and one worker gave Marco a cursory lesson before setting him on a stool with a bucket and letting him work. Marco’s initial efforts produced more sounds of protest from the cow than milk, but over time he improved his methods with the help of a remedial lesson from Dex, and by sunset the two men carried in several buckets of rich milk.

  “We carry this downstairs,” Dex advised as they entered the kitchen door. He grabbed a lantern and awkwardly led the way down a narrow set of whitewashed steps, into a set of rooms that were also whitewashed on the walls and ceiling.

  “Put the buckets here for now,” he raised his buckets to a counter, and when Marco had done the same, he led the way down a small half flight of stairs and lifted a trap door from the floor. Inside were small barrels immersed in water.

  “They’ve got a spring house right here in the cellar,” he commented, “which makes the farm a pretty convenient place to produce butter and cheese.” They lifted a pair of kegs from the trough the chilly spring water flowed through, and took them out, then poured the newly produced milk into kegs that they added back to the spring.

  And so it was, after skimming off the cream from the kegs of milk that had separated, Marco found himself churning butter while he listened to Pivot and the farm wife talk in the kitchen, as the stew that was to be the evening dinner slowly cooked in a pot in the fireplace. Marco switched arms from time to time as his churning tired his muscles, and listened with interest to the stories that the pair, along with Dex, told one another.

  “They say that the Duke of Barcelon is building his own navy to fight off the barbarian raiders who are appearing all over the Great Sea. Nappanee and Marseals have been attacked, and the Lion City has fought off a couple of raids,” the lady of the farm told the others.

  “Doesn’t Barcelon have some great new champion who can protect them?” Dex asked.

  “He’s disappeared. The women of the Ophiuchus cult took him to their island and he never came back. The Duke’s upset about that, I hear. The champion’s lady traveled through the snows to go to the Duke to beg him to find the missing stalwart, but neither she nor the Duke have had any luck with the cult,” Roural answered.

  “A man on the island of Ophiuchus?” Pivot snorted, though he looked at Marco out of the corner of his eye, as he remembered his companion’s obligation to visit the leader of the order in Barcelon.

  “I know, I know, it’s crazy,” the woman answered as she arose from her seat to stir the stew, then came over to check on Marco’s butter.

  “Your work is done. You can take this back down to the butter room and squeeze the butter milk out, then put this into the cask of butter under the shelves,” she directed Marco. “And what is your name anyway, and how did you get mixed up with these two rascals?”

  “We met him on the way, and asked him to come with us,” Pivot answered for Marco. “We think he’s under a geas; he’s on the way to Barcelon, speaking of that city, and we told him to make it a pilgrimage for these first few miles of his journey.”

  “Where’d you come from?” Roural placed her fingers on his chin and held his face as she studied him. “That’s a princely piece of gold you’ve got knotted around your neck.”

  “I don’t know,” Marco answered. “I don’t remember anything before I got to Station Island, and all I know is that I have to go see the Lady Folence in Barcelon.”

  “The Lady Folence? The Barcelon priestess of the cult? You’ll be stepping into a hot oven there, as you just heard us say,” Roural told him. “Well, get on down there and do your work, and I’ll call the others in for dinner in a few minutes,” she finished as she stood up and walked away from him, but she turned and studied him closely as he carried his butter churn back to the basement.

  When he returned from his work a half hour later, the kitchen porch was full of pungent odors, as the farm workers came to receive their over-sized bowls of hearty stew and individual loaves of bread. Roural’s husband was among them and led the group in saying grace, before the dozen folks scattered to their separate areas to sit and eat and talk before the end of the day.

  “We’ll get a spot in the hayloft,” Dex told Marco as they finished scooping their bread around the inside of their empty stew bowls; the meal had been satisfying and filling. “Except Dad – they’ll let him sleep in the house, though he’ll object.”

  The next morning the pilgrims received a large slab of bread each, slathered with a healthy scoop of jam. As they gave their thanks to their hostess, she looked at Marco. “You two take good care of your young companion. He’s more of a pilgrim than anyone else who’ll come through here this year, even if he doesn’t know it.”

  On that cryptic note they said their farewells and returned to the road. It was still cool in the morning shadows, as Dex complained about the straw that itched inside his shirt.

  “You’ll get over it,” Pivot said breezily as he contentedly ate his bread. “It was so good to see Roural again.”

  “When we were here ten years ago we came about a month later in the season, and there was a crowd of pilgrims at her place. We didn’t get to do any work for her at all,” Dex added. “This was nice, the chance to contribute something back to our host.”

  “But I thought they wanted to be nice to the pilgrims just because it’s the right thing to do,” Marco said in confusion.

  “It is, and they do,” Dex answered. “But likewise it’s the right thing for us to work for our food, to show the Lord that the pilgrimage is worthwhile to us. These arrangements work out just fine for everyone.”

  They stopped at a brook in the mid-morning, and met a quartet of traders who were going on the pilgrimage together as they all drank the crystal clear water from the stream that came merrily traipsing down from the mountains above. Although they all departed from the brook together, the traders soon outpaced Marco and his companions and disappeared from view.

  “Let’s rest in this chapel,” Pivot said a little later as they passed a wooden hut built next to the road. Inside the tiny building were a set of pews and a small altar, where the trio knelt in prayer, then sat in the pews to rest in the shady setting, cooling off after the warmth of walking through the bright sunshine outside.

  As they sat, and Marco leaned against the wall in repose, there came a knock at the door, and then a mermaid entered the chapel.

  The three men gawked in astonishment at the beautiful creature, which somehow managed to walk upright by undulating along the length of its tail.

  “I’ve been so worried about you Marco,” the feminine voice crooned as the mermaid slumped to a sitting position next to him. “After we were separated in the cave I didn’t know if you were alive, but Gawail insisted that you were. ‘The blessed one will not die here, not now; he has much to do,’ the pixie told us,” she spoke confidentially as her fingers raked through the astonished Marco’s short hair, then came to rest on the back of his neck. The tips of her fingers gently dipped between his golden torq and the back of his scalp.
>
  “I’m going to have to divorce you, my love,” she said. “Asterion is my destiny. He’ll make me very happy, and I’ll do the same for him.

  “Of course, your neckpiece is an unusual one, and we won’t be able to easily remove it, and I wouldn’t want you to anyway, which is selfish of me, but I’d like for you to remember me in some way, so I’m going to place my name back here,” she confused him by saying.

  “Plus I’ll put your other beloved’s name here too, and I’ll even put the third name in place for you, so that someday you’ll know you’ve met your destiny,” her fingers suddenly were all in place around the torq, tightening it against the front of his neck as she pressed her hand between the metal and the back of his neck, then squeezed the metal tightly. She leaned into him and astonished him by placing a soft kiss upon his lips, just before there was a shocking jolt at the back of his neck.

  “Marco! Marco, wake up!” Dex shook his shoulder. “It’s just a dream,” the old man told Marco as the young pilgrim woke with a start from his dream.

  “Are you awake? Everything okay?” Dex asked, as Marco stared about wild-eyed.

  “Are we?” Marco began to ask as he looked around the tiny room. Pivot sat in the other pew, looking at him, but no one else was present. “We’re alone? No one else came in?” Marco asked.

  “I don’t think so. We were resting, and suddenly you shouted. You had that odd hand of yours pressed against your neck, and it seemed like there was a spark, and then I shook you awake,” Dex explained.

  “My torq,” Marco said after a second’s consideration. “Is there anything written on it?” he asked, as his hand brushed across the back of the metal band.

  Dex peered at the back of his neck. “There’s a word – Pesino. And another word – Mirra. And a third word – Ellersbine. Those are what? Names?” he asked.

  “They are; they’re names,” Marco confirmed. He knew that now. The mermaid had been named Pesino, and he had married her. And the second name was his beloved, the dream had told him.

  “What’s the second name?” Marco asked Dex to repeat.

  “Mmmm, Mirra,” the man repeated directly behind Marco.

  “I don’t know it,” Marco said. “And the last one?”

  “Ellersbine,” Dex read, the moved back.

  “That doesn’t mean anything either,” Marco commented.

  “It was just a dream,” Dex repeated, “but maybe some part of your memories is trying to tell you something.”

  Pivot stood up. “We probably ought to start walking again,” he said as he shrugged his small pack of belongings onto his back.

  They returned to their pilgrim’s walk, as Marco obsessively thought about the strange dream. He couldn’t imagine why a mermaid would claim to be married to him; was he a fisherman in his previous life, used to living on the sea, he wondered.

  They stopped that night in a small village, and slept in the stables of an inn that had a swift carved into the wooden stable door. The cook at the inn gave them each a loaf of bread. “The inn hosts many pilgrims who pay for their lodging and meals, especially the wealthy ones,” Dex explained to Marco as they settled in for sleep. “And so they take care to aid the less well-off as well.”

  That night Marco dreamed that he awoke in the stables, in time to see a bull enter the space where only horses and mules resided.

  “My name is Asterion, and someday you’ll remember me,” the bull told him. “We will need to meet again, so that I can thank you for what you’ve given me – my new form, my new life, my new wife. Where shall we meet?” he asked.

  “I’m going to Barcelon,” Marco told the bull faintly, “to see the Lady Folence there.”

  “We’ll wait for you in Athens,” Asterion said. Then the bull rose up on his two hind legs and walked out of the stables in an upright mode.

  In the morning they left the inn at the same time as a group of paying guests, two nuns and a man. They turned out to be related – a mother and her two children.

  “How does a nun have children?” Pivot blurted out the question that was on Marco’s mind.

  “I entered the order after my husband died and my children were grown,” Mary, the mother explained. “And my daughter,” she motioned towards Sophia, a pretty woman, “decided to take her vows as well.

  “We decided this was the year we’d finally make a pilgrimage, and my son,” she next pointed to Saul, who looked like a prosperous businessman as he tipped his hat to them, “decided to travel with us.”

  “My soul needs all the help it can get,” he said with a laugh, “so I decided that two sisters and a pilgrimage might keep me out of the underworld for another year or two!”

  Everyone laughed, though something struck Marco wrong about the joke. “Doesn’t everyone go to the underworld?” he asked.

  “The boy’s actually right,” Mary said, as his daughter nodded. “The theologians tell us that all souls do go to the underworld for a length of time, and then some pass on to a better place, while others go to a worse place.”

  “And some remain there forever,” Sophia added.

  “I thought we all went straight to heaven,” Dex said. “How did you know that? You don’t even know who your wife is,” he asked Marco.

  “I don’t know,” Marco stuttered. The statement had just slipped out without his expecting to say anything.

  “Where are you from?” Saul asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marco answered again.

  Saul took pity on Marco, seeing his face grow red as the boy blushed in embarrassment.

  “There are times when I can’t tell anyone where I’m from either,” he said, then paused dramatically, “usually after I’ve been in a tavern for an hour or two!” he made Dex and Pivot laugh, as the two women groaned.

  “Oh no, here it comes,” one of them muttered.

  “Of course, having two family members as nuns is a great advantage in a tavern,” Saul smoothly proceeded to ignore the comment. “I get more free drinks than you’d think possible.”

  “How could that be?” Dex fell into the trap.

  “Well, I tell everyone that my mother is my sister’s sister, and I bet them that it’s true. Then I point to these two sisters, and I win the bet every time!” Saul laughed at his own joke, in such a good-natured and infectious way that the rest of the group laughed with him.

  Saul proved to be a charming companion. Dex commented to Marco as they walked along, “It’s easy to see why he’s successful in business. How could anyone say ‘no’ to the man?!”

  That evening they stayed at a church in a small village, along with an additional pair of travelers, a newly married couple from Lacarona. “We’ve lived this close to the pilgrim’s route our whole lives, but we’ve never gone to Compostela, so we decided to travel there for our honeymoon,” Lars, the groom explained.

  The eight pilgrims were fed bowls of potato soup, a warm and hearty meal that filled their empty stomachs quickly. “Just think; this could have been milked by another pilgrim,” Pivot told Marco as they sat and ate the simple meal.

  “I’d like to ask that all of you say prayers for Marco,” Dex asked the group of pilgrims before they settled in for the evening. “Pray that he recovers his memories.”

  There were no recovered memories the next day, their last full day on the trail before they expected to reach Compostela. The group of eight travelers moved slowly, but Marco felt little impatience as he enjoyed the companionship and the opportunity to listen to the tales the pilgrims told.

  Lars and Ginger were interested in Marco’s marriage torq, after Saul explained to them what it meant.

  “Maybe you should wear one,” Ginger said thoughtfully to her new husband as they walked with Marco. “We couldn’t afford one so grand as this golden thing,” she added.

  “Most of them are just leather,” Marco said helpfully, drawing a baleful stare from Lars even as he wondered where in his memories that nugget of information had risen from.


  “So, did you marry a rich woman?” Lars asked. “Maybe I’m wrong, but you don’t look like you could afford to buy that much gold yourself.”

  “Her name is Pesino, but that’s all I know,” Marco answered. “Her name is on the back of the torq.”

  “Let me see,” Ginger demanded after the pair stared at Marco in astonishment. She reached over and pulled his head down so she could read. “She’s got a long name – Pesino Mirra Ellersbine.”

  “Those are three different names, I think,” Marco said hesitantly. “But I’m not completely sure.”

  “Are you married to three women?” Lars asked with a grin, before Ginger punched his shoulder in protest.

  “You may think that’s funny, but what a trial it would be for the poor boy!” Saul injected himself into the conversation.

  Lars started to laugh, but a glance at Ginger’s smoldering expression convinced him not to say anything more.

  “Yes, we’ll have to look into introducing a leather neck band into your future,” she said, and the topic was dropped.

  They stopped for the evening at a village outside of Compostela, where each pilgrim was taken in for the night by a different family. The entire village, residents and pilgrims, ate dinner together, receiving slices of pork carved off a whole pig that had been roasted for a local festival. Marco was placed in the care of a farm family, whose three boys were curious about his golden torq and about his pilgrimage alone.

  “I’m not really just going on the pilgrimage,” Marco explained as the family brought him a plate of food and sat with him at a bench in the village square. “I was on my way to Barcelon,” he told them.

  “Will you see their new hero?” the oldest son, one who appeared to be as old as Marco, asked.

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Marco said.

  “He cured the plague – practically brought folks back from the dead,” the mother spoke up, “or so we heard.”