Fortune Told
The First Adventure of Swordsman Caelan the Cat
by
Nicky Galliers
The outbreak of peace
following the Great Conflict doesn’t suit everyone and mercenaries are finding
their services are no longer in demand. Caelan Thorn, also known as Caelan the
Cat, has chosen to use his particular talent, not for fighting, but to fill his
purse another way - by telling fortunes.
The girl was like every girl I had ever had seated in front of me,
leaning forwards, eager to hear what I could see for her. Was that tall,
dark-haired young man at the other end of the bar singled out for her by Fate,
his modest fortune to be hers to squander if he didn’t waste it all himself
first?
‘I see something else for
you,’ I said, discarding the more insubstantial images, ‘a shorter man,
balding, but rich and kind. You don’t know him yet but he will come into your
life by the end of the year.’
Her pretty face fell; it was
not what she wanted to hear. She cast a wistful, longing glance towards the
handsome boy across the room.
‘Rich, you say?’ She turned
her attention back to me while she curled a long skein of golden hair around
her finger.
‘Very.’ And he was. And ugly.
And old. But she would be happy enough. She would find physical satisfaction
elsewhere, and until her husband found out, she would live in luxury. But I
didn’t expand on what I had told her. There was no point. There was a
possibility that she wouldn’t stray, and she would find that looks and hair
were not all that mattered in a loving relationship, but it was unlikely.
She rose and, without a word
of thanks, she returned to her friends on the opposite end of the tavern bar,
swishing her long skirts as she swayed her hips, for my benefit in particular
or merely any male watching, I didn’t care.
Her place would be taken
quickly. There was never a shortage of people wanting to know their fortunes.
Prescients - soothsayers - like myself didn’t visit often in such rural places
and we were always in demand.
A tankard landed beside me,
the contents slopping over the rim.
Reckon you need it,
Prescient,’ the innkeep said, stepping back from my table.
‘How thoughtful,’ I said, and
meant it. I leaned towards him, my brows drawn together severely. He ducked
down to hear what I wished to say, the sweet stench of stale beer rising from
his dirty apron. His hair hung lankly and nearly brushed my nose ‘Two months
from now, a hooded man will come. Serve him, say nothing. He is on the run;
don’t challenge him.’
‘Hooded?’
‘Hooded. You won’t mistake
him.’ My blue eyes bored into his. ‘Have a care to yourself,’ I urged.
‘I will, and thank you,’ the
innkeep said, backing away, his reticence about having me there still warring
with his desire to be generous. However, I had repaid him, even if he would
never fully appreciate it - if he did as I said.
I drank from the tankard,
good, homemade ale with a bit of a punch and a satisfying freshness of flavour.
It tasted all the better for being free; I had coin in my pocket, plenty of it
for now - though less than I was used to - but I am really no different to
anyone else and like a free beer here and there.
Another figure sat in the
chair at my table; I saw her over the rim of my tankard. She was not as young
as my previous customer, had at least ten years on her, and she was not pretty,
not so that you would notice. Her hair was brown. There really was no more to
say than that, brown and flat in the poor light in the tavern, pulled back in a
messy knot at the nape of a long, slender neck. Her eyes were equally dull; her
skin was clear, smooth, but her mouth tipped down at the corners and I could
feel the desolation coming from her in waves.
Others in the tavern had
noticed she was there and a few jeers sounded from the end of the bar where the
handsome young man held court. I didn’t care for bullying, and I rose from my
seat, demonstrating my superior height and breadth. From another part of the
tavern my prettier customer admired me, her smile teasing. I ignored her and
watched the young lordling. He sized me up, openly raking me from my cream coloured
hair to my booted feet. He came to his own conclusion that he didn’t stand a
chance against me and turned back to his minions. There was a burst of laughter
but it held a tone of desperation; mirth more to fool themselves that they were
not afraid than me.
I sat again, noticing the
anxiety in the eyes of the plain girl in front of me. I regretted that; she
didn’t deserve to feel scared.
‘I want to know if anything
will improve for me here.’ Her voice was quiet, fearful. She was a shell of
herself; abused, albeit mostly verbally, but not always; browbeaten and bereft
of all care. I shivered, seeing her as she saw herself - empty, useless,
pointless.
I saw the innkeep watching
us, saw others still casting sideways glances at the girl, expressions veering
between pity and distaste. They all knew what this girl had suffered and few
had done anything to help her or make her life in any way easier. The innkeep,
he had tried, I saw, offering her shelter when she couldn’t face going home to
a father who used her as a skivvy.
It was a familiar tale - wife dead, leaving a daughter to manage the
household; suitors for her hand rejected until they stopped asking, and the
daughter remained at home to serve her father, saving him the expense of her
wedding and his, for what need had he of another, expensive, wife?
I looked back at her. She
thought my apparent distraction was disinterest in her. Her despair deepened;
she found it easier to believe no one cared because so few ever had.
‘What is in your mind is not
the answer,’ I said to her gently. She knew as well as I did that she only saw
one way to end her misery.
‘Sometimes it is all I can
think about. Only my father will miss me, and only because he needs me to cook
and clean and manage the farm.’
‘There is someone else,’ I
said earnestly. ‘Someone for whom you matter.’
‘And why would you be
truthful,’ she said with a hollow laugh, ‘for I have yet to pay you anything.’
‘I don’t ask for payment,’
but she shook her head. ‘I seek nothing from you,’ I added to reassure her.
‘So,’ she asked, not
believing a word I had said, ‘this person? Where are they?’ She looked around
the tavern, her eyes flashing with angry desolation. ‘I see no one here.’
The pretty girl came back to
the table and leaned across it as if she had the right to command my attention
with her straining laces and corsetted waist.
‘Why don’t you join me, over there?’ She licked her lips in a manner
intended to entice me. ‘It will be much more interesting than talking to
Tessa.’
‘I doubt that,’ I replied
flatly.
‘I can pay you,’ she tried again.
I should have been insulted
that she thought my affections could be bought, but she meant so little to me
that I felt nothing other than irritation. ‘Peddle yourself somewhere else.’
She pouted but my meaning was
very clear. She flounced away, but no one in the tavern felt any affront on her
behalf.
Tessa still sat in the chair
opposite me, shrunken. She risked peering up at me through a curtain of her
brown hair that had fallen loose. She held a spark of hope, but so faint that
the slightest breeze would snuff it out.
‘What’s your name? Everyone
calls you the Prescient, but you must have a personal name.’
‘Caelan,’ I said, and I held
my hand to her.
She took it and for a moment
hers was enveloped, small and cold, in mine, rough from work. Her skin
scratched against my palm with as many callouses as I wore from my sword, mace
and my horse's leather tack.
‘I have to go.’ The chair
scraped against the wooden floor and she stood. ‘Thank you, Caelan,’ she added,
a quick glance before she lowered her eyes.
I watched her leave the
tavern, feeling the hope fade from her, the light that had briefly been lit as
she talked with me, burned low. She was returning to her father’s house, dread
setting once more into the pit of her stomach.
***
I had chosen the timing of my visit well, of course. The Spring
celebrations were to start the following day, and after a good night's sleep in
a comfortable room at the tavern, I wandered around the flower-festooned
village. Everyone wore smiles with their neatest jerkins and finest gowns and
the mood was lifted from the usual everyday working gloom.
I spotted the lordling, bedecked in fine raiment, clothes and jewels he
avoided telling anyone he had put his house in hock to pay for, and a sword
that more resembled a child's toy than the blade I carried. He glanced my way
and after he threw me a look of pure hatred, he turned away. Too used to being
the centre of attention, he was not equipped to cope with competition,
especially not such as me.
Pockets of giggling girls pointed at me, angering the lordling still
further, his gold and emeralds a poor second to my broad chest and flat stomach.
Other than a small smile - one always appreciates being admired - I dismissed
them and found a place to lean, to watch as a group of women began a complex
dance to welcome the Spring.
‘I thought you would have left,’ a voice to my side said. I didn’t need
to look to know it was Tessa. She carried a wooden bucket of mushrooms and
other foraged vegetables and her hands were covered in the dirty they had grown
in. Unlike the other girls of the village, Tessa wore her usual working gown,
brown and drab; there were no flowers in her hair, no ribbons plaited through
it.
‘I was looking forward to the festivities.’
‘I have to take this home,’ she said, nodding towards the bucket.
‘And if you didn’t?’
She looked sideways at me. ‘That isn’t an option.’ She hesitated then
pushed the left sleeve of her gown up. Her arm carried a handprint, each finger
marked out with a darkening bruise. She flushed in shame and let her sleeve
fall back into place again.
Inside, my anger rose and I swallowed lest she notice. ‘I can promise
that will never happen to you again.’
‘No, you can’t,’ she replied. She believed it, as well. ‘You are
obviously a lot more than a fortune teller; we’ve had fortune tellers here
before and none looked like you.’ Another sideways look to take in my thick
leather jerkin and black leather hose.
‘True,’ I conceded. ‘I am a hired sword, when I choose it.’
She looked me full on now, studying me, her eyes narrowed a little. ‘Do
you use your prescient talents to fight? Can you see where the blade will fall
before it does?’
I grinned, delighted that she understood. ‘It comes in useful, yes.’
‘Then you are a better sword than a soothsayer, I think.’ She altered
her grip on the bucket. The rope handle was cutting into her palms and I lifted
it from her. She sighed but let me hold it.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well,’ she said in a voice that would have been playful if she did not
hold such sadness within, ‘you survived the Great Conflict and you are still
alive; if your swordplay were as poor as your soothsaying, you’d be dead for
sure.’
I couldn’t help myself and I laughed. Many people disbelieved what I
told them and I was long past being offended, and yet I had never anticipated
proving someone wrong as much as with Tessa.
‘What would you like to know?’ I asked her, unable to hide my pleasure.
‘How can you tell me anything? If it has yet to come to pass, I can’t
judge its veracity.’
‘Then ask me what has been.’
She hesitated then said, ‘Mistress Emer, over there. She had a baby
last month. Boy or girl?’
‘Girl, called Bethan, and she was born as the cock crowed. Her husband
was away at market and she was assisted by Mistress Masha and Mistress Lina.’
Tessa stared. ‘You could have overheard that in the tavern.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Do I look like someone who has any interest in
the birthing of babies?’
Tessa gave a wry smile of agreement before her lips once more
straightened. She leaned next to me on the same plank wall.
‘You see more than just the future, don’t you?’
I rarely discussed it; few ever acknowledged it out of fear. The future,
well, that didn’t exist, but reading people, that was intimate, intrusive.
‘Your eyes and hair,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘They give you
your talent, they say.’
‘Not give, but the fault that gives me my hair and my eyes, also gives
me my Seeing.’
‘Like a white cat with blue eyes is deaf.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘Caelan the Cat,’ she mused. ‘I have heard that name. A fearsome
warrior, it is said.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t listen to gossip.’
She pushed off the wall and stood straight once more and took the
bucket from me, hefted it as if it could be made more commodious to carry. ‘I
must go.’
I took the bucket back. ‘No. Stay.’
I could feel her embarrassment and fear, that she had overstepped with
me, that I had read too much into our exchange; fear of being late back to her
monster of a father. And I could feel those delicate tendrils of desire to stay
with me. She wanted it, but she was afraid. No one had paid her this much
attention since her mother had died when she was a child. Now, a grown woman of
twenty-eight, she was starved of it.
She dropped her gaze, accepting that all there was for her was an angry
father and just one way out.
‘I have enjoyed talking to you. You are not like everyone else, and I
thank you for that.’
‘Don’t you see it yet?’ I asked her, arresting her by taking her hand.
I rubbed at the palm and the red welt that was burned across it.
‘See what, the person who is going to save me from all of this?’ She
tugged her hand from mine and I had to pull her back. She lost her balance and
fell against me. Her steely control over herself and her innate reaction to me
was admirable. Many a woman would have softened, not stiffened.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘The person I see with you is me.’
Her shock was clear even for someone who couldn’t read people as I did.
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded, pushing me away.
‘Am I so hideous to you, so terrifying, that you can’t see yourself
with me?’
‘You’re teasing me. That isn’t fair.’ Tears clouded her voice and
glazed her eyes. Pain pooled cold in her stomach.
‘I don’t lie. I have no need to.’
The burst of desire that flashed through her nearly knocked me to my
knees. She would accept it; I knew she would. And soon. But I chose to help her
along.
I put the bucket down and, with my hands now free, I drew her towards
me. She didn’t resist, and I folded her into my arms and kissed her. She tasted
as I knew she would, for I had known her all these years, I just hadn’t found
her.
Around us people saw and reacted, with pleasure, with disbelief, with
anger. I didn’t care. I was where I should be and she was finally with me. Any
who attempted to harm her or ridicule her again would have to deal with me,
and, as Tessa said, I was a far better swordsman than I was a fortune teller,
and I was an excellent fortune teller.
‘You don’t know me,’ she said when she pulled away from me, her doubts
returning. ‘What if you tire of me, decide that you don’t-’
I put a finger over her soft lips and smiled at the joy I would find in
persuading her such doubts were foundless.
‘I know you as well as you know yourself.’ At her confusion I lifted a
long piece of my creamy blond hair and I added, ‘I’m a Prescient, remember?’
© Nicky Galliers
There will be another story about
Caelan the Cat on April 13th
