Ten Minute Tales : Fortune Told - the First Adventure of Swordsman Caelan the Cat by Nicky Galliers

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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

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