VIII
Spring’s first market day is given over to all things young and new. Tender greens, their leaves tightly whorled, tiny berries, spring peas, and fresh herbs crowded together with newly turned birchwood spoons and burlwood bowls and woolens and willow baskets woven in the slumbering months of snow. Lambs and calves and colts, trailing their shepherd lads and lasses behind them, bleated and bolted and frisked their way to market. Winter’s gossip fresh sprung from hidden depths, drunk in by the women, flowed like the ale drunk in by the men, and the news and the fragrance of spices from the wider world swirled through the air.
Clang-iron-to-anvil, clang-iron-to-anvil, Nora made her way to the smithy where clouds of steam and embers like flights of swallows rose into the air and wreathed the shiny summit of the man mountain’s head. Returning Nora’s nod with a smile, he motioned to his apprentice, a lad hanging all his slender weight against the bellows, to see to Nora.
Nora left her knife and one coin with the blacksmith, and, returning to the market square, bought fewer spices than she might have, had Berli’s kid or the roan cow been there. She smiled to think of the tiny goatherd and cowherd couple and was contented. She watched a puppet play, bought an orange from distant lands and a handful of figs which she shared with the village children, and satisfied with the new edge on her knife, made her way home.
Homeward journeys seem shorter but take longer, especially on the mountain, where down is swifter than up. Morning blue had given way to dusky gold, larksong had given way to the doves’ evening lament as Nora entered the deeper piney wood that sheltered the path below her home. Ferns and the pine needles of countless years blanketed the forest floor between the ancient, lichen covered trunks. The hushed swish of her skirt and her muffled steps startled none of her fellow mountain dwellers who merely glanced up at her passing and went their way. That is, all except one. There in the shadow of the wood beside her, paralleling her course, were whispering steps and a flash of white like moonlight on snow.
more to follow …
© Magdalen Jago 2008
I demand more Nora!