Christmastide
Part One
The dull weariness grew a tiny bit stronger, and it made the cold breeze feel more unpleasant, but Rulen only had a little farther to go. His face was drawn, but only a close observer could have seen the lines of fatigue.
In the evening light, the snow-covered hillside felt rather peaceful. Ever since he was a small child, Rulen had been drawn to the dim shadows of the trees on a winter’s night. A silence descended upon him and something in his heart stirred.
His boots landed softly in the snow, carrying him on, as they had all day and would for some time. He’d been much more tired before, and he would be again. Though fatigue had become like an all-encompassing haze to him, he had no worry he would need to stop.
When he emerged from the trees and stood on the edge of the hillside, the valley below opened up before him. Dozens of lights twinkled in the windows of cottages. Evergreen branches were draped from the rooftops. A little ways beyond the village, there were torches and campfires. He was too high up to see the candles that he could already picture. He felt warm again despite the deepening chill, as though there were nothing so bleak and empty and inhospitable about the frozen winter’s night that was descending.
He almost smiled. The light meant men and women and food and something warm to drink. There was a small castle at the edge of the village. He would make for it and see if they would grant him shelter for the night.
He had been traveling for many days. With heavy feet but lightening heart, Rulen made his way down the slopes and into the village. He could hear dogs barking and – just at the edge of hearing – the voices of small children making snow-castles in the last minutes before supper.
Sylva smiled across the table at the traveler. His boots and coat were drying by the fire and he seemed to be relaxing and enjoying himself, but she couldn’t be the only one who noticed how tense he was. He ate as though he hadn’t eaten in days – and from the sight of his face, perhaps he hadn’t.
He must have been more than a messenger, by the looks of it, though he’d brought a message from the king for her father. Her father had bade him stay the week, if he didn’t have business elsewhere. The man seemed surprised, but glad.
“My dear fellow,” her father had said. “Don’t be astonished at our hospitality. Why it’s Christmastide! T’wouldn’t be right to send you back out into the cold. Have you nowhere to go for Christmas?”
The man shook his head. “None,” he said. “The king doesn’t expect me back for many months. I’d been planning to make my way to Caledonia – but I won’t reach it by next Sunday.”
“Well then, stay here for Christmas,” her father had insisted. “After all, it’s the season for kindnesses and giving bread and shelter to strangers. Stay! We’ll have a grand feast here. We may not be York or Cambridge, but we manage a good show in this town. Our little chapel may not be Canterbury, but we keep the feast here and our priests’re as holy as the bishop I daresay.”
So it was that the stranger joined them for supper and for the week – a week which had turned into a fortnight in her father’s telling by the time supper was half-over. It wouldn’t be right, her father insisted, to turn a man out on his boots inside a fortnight. He added that they’d provision the man well for his journey onwards.
He had dark hair and dark eyes and he seemed distant. He was polite and gracious and clearly grateful. And he didn’t refrain from honoring her father or paying his respects to her. But it was almost as though the warm fire and the mead and the seasoned meat didn’t quite reach all the way inside his mind, as though – despite the welcome and the company of a dozen of her father’s men – the cold and the night and the snow were still inside him.
Sylva was intrigued by the man, who said his name was Rulen. He must have been the strangest and most exotic man she’d ever met – and she’d met the king and plenty of foreigners. He seemed guarded – from habit, rather than anything else. Not wary, but unwarm.
She realized he was looking at her.
“You must be tired,” she said. He nodded.
“How long have you been on the road?”
“Several days.”
She smiled and gestured at his plate. “Good sir,” she said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you’ve eaten two pounds of beef, an onion, two potatoes, and a small loaf of bread…”
He almost smiled. “I haven’t eaten since Thursday,” he said.
“My word,” bellowed her father from the head of the table. “Today is Saturday.”
And so they welcomed this stranger into their household. But he remained a stranger. He didn’t spurn their hospitality, nor did he demonstrate any ingratitude. Still, there was something distant about him. Sylva felt that she’d hit upon it that first night – that it seemed as though a part of him were still lost in the frozen wilderness, wet and tired, never warm.
He wasn’t enthusiastic about the festivities. While he was perfectly willing to accompany her to the Christmas market and later to the Town Lighting, he said very little while they were there. And when they were walking back, all he said was, “Thank you. I enjoyed that.”
Sylva appointed herself the task of bringing this stranger outside of himself. Or, rather, not bringing him outside of himself so much as making sure the merriness of the season reached inside of him. He smiled sometimes, but he never seemed jolly.
It felt wrong that someone could be so dour at Christmastime – the brightest time of the year, when even the town cranks had a spring in their step. Sylva didn’t pity him. She didn’t take offense at his lack of enthusiasm – it was clear that he was grateful and had no desire to insult him or her father. In fact, in every way or action that was customary for a guest to pay his respects to his host, Rulen did so dutifully. He never failed to stand when her father stood, or hail all the members of the household when passing – sometimes in overly formal greeting, but in greeting nonetheless. Sylva didn’t think that he lacked gratitude.
No, Sylva found this man very curious. She had met men who were bold and brash, and men who were curt and blunt. She had seen men in their wrath and violence, and men who became belligerent and cruel when they had enjoyed too many tankards of mead.
But if anything, this stranger could have done with a little more mead. Perhaps it would have helped him get into the spirit of things.
She found herself spending more time with him, often without anyone else around. Though he’d asked her father for work to do to earn his keep, her father hadn’t given him many tasks, so he was sometimes unoccupied. He would go for very long walks through the village and it was on the third of these that Sylva decided to join him.
He smiled at her when she fell in beside him. She always tried to greet him with a smile, in part to see if she could get one in return. This time, he smiled first, which made her very pleased. It was the morning of the second day after his arrival. The sun was out, but the sky was white.
“We didn’t get a chance to speak much at breakfast,” she said as they walked together down towards the blacksmith.
“No,” he said. “I suppose not. How are you this morning? I trust you slept well.”
“Indeed, I did. Thank you for asking. And you?”
“Fine,” he said.
“I thought I’d join you for the walk,” she said.
He looked at her. “I planned to walk for two hours,” he said.
She grinned. “Perfectly fine by me.”
He nodded and made a gesture as if to indicate that if she were willing to join him, she was welcome as far as she wanted to go. They were silent a few moments as they passed the blacksmith, and another person might have felt awkward during the pause, but Sylva understood that Rulen didn’t mind silence and didn’t see anything the matter with it.
After a few minutes, she glanced at him until he realized she was watching him and looked over at her. She smiled. He offered a puzzled, tentative smile back, but a smile nonetheless. She was pleased. Sylva took pride in getting other people to smile, and she’d grown quite good at it. This strange man offered the most difficult challenge she’d ever encountered. He rarely seemed to smile and – other than one or two of her father’s jokes – she was the only person who’d managed to get him to smile in the time he’d been in the village.
They passed a manor owned by one of the local merchants. With wreaths in every window, holly draping the eaves and wrapped around the columns, and a large tree in the great hall standing just visible through the nearest window, it was one of the most decorated houses in the whole town.
“Ah,” she said indicating the house to Rulen. “I do love the Porter house. Mrs. Porter really does such a wonderful job with the holly.”
He looked at it, as if noticing it for the first time. “It does look nice,” he admitted, but he said it distantly, as though it were almost an afterthought.
As they walked, the bells pealed ten. In the clear air, over the thin snow, the sound was as rich and full as if they had been standing right next to the cathedral.
“I’ve always loved the sound of the church bells on a clear winter’s day. There’s a romance to them, like being a child again and building snowmen on the village green. It’s such a nice sound, the bells. Don’t you think?”
Rulen looked surprised, but he nodded. They walked on and eventually he asked her how old she was. This was one of the first questions he’d asked her, and she thought it odd, but she felt comfortable telling him, in a way that she wouldn’t normally have felt with a man she’d only just met. She told him she was twenty, and asked him whether he thought that suited her.
“It’s as good an age as any,” he said, as though he didn’t seem to think much about age one way or the other.
“How old are you?” she asked him.
“Thirty-one or thirty-two,” he said.
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“Not exactly. I don’t keep track.”
“You don’t know your parents?”
He looked at her and paused a moment before speaking. But his face was blank when he told her no.
And, so, their walk continued and she began to coax a few more answers out of him, though he remained a mystery. And she also began to offer more details about herself, though he seemed reluctant to inquire into her affairs.
That night, as she fell asleep, Sylva felt an odd happiness inside her. This new man wasn’t handsome, but he was striking and he made her self-conscious and forgetful of herself all at the same time. And she fell asleep thinking about sleigh rides and Christmastide and the laughter of children and the sound of bells and the smell of newly fallen snow, and she felt so full of love for the world and for the good people in it and for those people she’d known her whole life and for this new man who posed such a question.
Rulen lay up for a little while. He always did. It took a few moments for him to relax. He let his mind wander, as he had every night for many years, waiting for sleep to come and take him from this harsh world. His mind was almost like an animal’s – there were flashes and intimations of pain, a remembrance of the sensation of being very cold, a gladness for the current warmth, a gradual easing in the muscles as unknown tension began to fade, making its presence known as it did. Occasionally, his fists clenched and unclenched as his mind drifted.
He thought of violence, of bloody spears and the sight of dead men and he imagined again for the thousandth time what it would be like to die. He saw the fields where old comrades lay and this time the spear pierced not his shoulder but his throat. His shoulder flinched involuntarily, remembering the wound. As before, he felt nothing untoward, no mental pain. He’d seen these things so many times that they held no sting.
Now his mind left the old battles and he was again in the woods in the snow. As he faded into sleep, these thoughts were less distinct, mere outlines and sensations and flashes – deep cold of the kind that stabs and aches, desire for warmth, weariness so heavy it sucked the strength away, fear, acceptance, bloody toes, toes swollen from the cold, bleeding hands and bleeding lips and frost in his beard. He was clean-shaven now, but he remembered the frost in his beard.
And as he finally drifted into sleep he thought of the long bitterness and those places that lingered in his soul and he thought of old pains in his hands, and old wounds in his back and shoulders, and the soreness in his hips, and the leadenness in his calves, and blistered feet – it had been a long time since they’d been able to blister, but before they’d callused over he’d rubbed them raw several times.