his back turned. Leaf brown beside his younger sibling’s blond fairness, he scowled under his hat brim and waited. Since the snorting, loose bull still rampaged at large, not yet ready to settle and graze, he declared, ‘Sell that brute for a breeder, we could pay off the debt. Maybe have a little left over. A brace of coneys could set young in time for the feast over solstice.’
‘Without corn to fatten them? They’d just grow ribs.’ Tarens braced himself upright, forced to maintain a resentful stand-off while the parked wagon propped his shaky legs. ‘Shadow take the damned coin and the rabbits! We can’t brazen through a live sale since you know the randy calves by that bullock would be hell-bound to suffer abuse.’
Efflin rounded, fists cocked to strike, when their younger sister Kerelie burst, railing, out of the cottage door.
‘Leave you to yourselves, and here’s both of you, trading blows like two frothing theosophers!’ She snatched her embroidered skirt clear of the frost-rimed mud. A wet dish-cloth bunched over her stout forearm, she thrust into the fray with a raw slice of meat robbed off the hook in the pantry. The cut was too choice to succour a sibling, never mind one whose daft habit of sentiment had lately laid him out cold in the barn-yard. ‘Here’s a fine supper, wasted! Aren’t we burdened enough, without you louts bickering fit to break your necks?’
The work and the winter would not forgive the fact they were drastically short-handed. Still huffing, Kerelie tossed the chilled meat to the reeling victim. Then she laced into her unrepentant older brother, whose level good sense had flown south since their untimely inheritance placed him at the head of the household. ‘Tarens is right! ’Tis a hazard to breed that cantankerous beast, and no! You will not sell it dear for its ugly temperament! That’s cruelty. The dastards who buy such rogues use them to bait their vicious dogs for blood-sport wagers!’
Efflin tipped back the lumpish felt hat that lent him the semblance of an unsheared ram. Eyebrows raised, without sympathy for his battered younger brother, he stonewalled his sister with a stoic shrug, wiped a blood smear from his split lip, and that fast, caught the black bullock. With its nose ring roped fast to the tail-gate, the brute pawed and gored the stout slats, unaware it had wrecked its last claim to long life and a docile maturity.
The beast snorted yet when the wagon rolled out, dragging it towards the stock-yard and slaughter. The brothers perched side by side on the seat, their broad shoulders rubbed by the jounce at each bump. They winced with the same hissed breaths as the vehicle swayed to the rake of the furious animal’s capped horns. The bone-jarring journey to Kelsing market promised them no respite from their ill-gotten injuries. A stupid predicament, which once would have made them the butt of their uncle’s banter.
But the care-free family of those days had gone. Truth brooded amid their sullen silence: that the bull’s sale might buy a month’s time but not turn the tide of bad fortune. Rigid tradition still ruled in the westlands: a married man always left home to increase the prosperity of his wife’s family. This moment’s immoderate pain was a pittance against straits that could force them to sacrifice their remaining measure of happiness.
The wagon rolled into the morning’s choked mist and turned north on the rutted trade-road that wound through the wood. Already, the maples had shed their foliage cloaks of bright russet and flame. The crabbed oaks wore drab brown, shorn of acorns. The spoked wheels turned, sucking, through the ice-glazed puddles, and grated where frost crusted the verges. Only the mourning doves’ doleful calls fluted through the overcast gloom.
Determinedly buoyant in his muddy clothes, Tarens started to whistle, while Efflin clutched at sore ribs and withdrew, his scowl ingrained as chipped wood. The patience that had been his virtuous mainstay had disappeared with their burned dead. Soon enough, his tense brooding would drop a wet blanket back over his brother’s vivacious spirit.
Like Kerelie, Tarens refused to dwell on the problem, that the croft demanded more coin than they owned. Half of the harvest rotted in the field for the lack of strong hands to wield the scythe and hay-rake. The milch-cow in the barn was too aged to breed, which a healthy bull’s service to a neighbour’s dairy herd might have done something to remedy.
‘The pair of you ought to be facing the butcher’s knife, and not that savage wretch of a beeve, who should’ve been culled as a yearling!’ The puckered scar on her cheek shadowed under the rim of her pert straw bonnet, Kerelie wrung out the dish-cloth and gave up her effort to dab the stains off her holiday finery. The spatters of meat juice already set, without lye soap and a pail of hot water.
Her grumbled oath made the jaunty tune pause.
‘Forget that we never asked for a nurse-maid,’ her cheerful brother pointed out, reasonable. ‘Are you going to geld me to settle the score?’ Tarens liked his risks spicy, though usually not by acting as shield for star-crossed, recalcitrant livestock.
Efflin risked a baleful glance sidewards. ‘More of somebody’s bloodshed never did gag a woman hell-bent on a scolding.’
‘I ought to whack someone’s bravado, straight off!’ Kerelie shoved a strayed wisp of wheat hair underneath the delicate row of blue flowers stitched into her headscarf. Flushed pink, she gazed fondly at her brothers’ broad backs, alike in size and yet so different in demeanour.
Of course, the belligerent idiots behaved as though neither had just hammered the other to pulped flesh and cracked ribs. Tarens returned a wolf’s grin, brazen calm flaunting his innocence, while Efflin goaded the plodding ox with his felt-cap jammed down to his ears. The odd little goat-bell some past affectation had tied onto the band gave sweet tongue, belying his sour expression. The tucked feather, sported for the courtship that, somehow, he never found time for, defied the low cloud that threatened a drizzle.
Kerelie attacked, moved by fierce affection. ‘A good thing you bumble-butts have no children to hobble the next generation.’
Where Tarens’s gleeful insouciance failed, Kerelie’s nagging at last lifted Efflin’s grim mood: the brothers exchanged pointed glances from equally guileless blue eyes. Having made rueful peace, in sore need of distraction from their hitched groans of discomfort, they vied to see which one would bait their sister’s flaying tongue first.
‘Stubborn? Me?’ Efflin snorted. His flicked finger jingled the ridiculous bell, mocking her fire-brand common sense. ‘I can’t take that prize, sweet. Not since the time you kissed the neighbour’s mule on the muzzle in an attempt to make friends when it bit you.’
‘Once!’ Kerelie howled. ‘I was three years of age!’ Would anyone ever mature enough to overlook that blighted mistake?
As Tarens’s broad smile renewed the embarrassment, Kerelie slapped his wrist, then masked her rioting blush, bent in half, as a squabble among the crated hens drew her repressive notice. More than one stabbing beak sought to rip the rush baskets and peck holes in the harvested apples. Through a shriek meant to shock thieving poultry out of their natural appetite, she buried the branding humiliation: that her face was grotesquely spoiled, no matter how neatly the village healer had stitched her ripped cheek. She cringed to count the grasping suitors lately chased from the door with thrown pots. None of them had trampled the garden-path muddy before Uncle’s death left an inheritance.
She would be forced to marry. If her brothers remained too kindly to speak, they must broach the sore subject, and soon. A croft in dire straits for the lack of grown field-hands could not stall for long while she pined for a love match.
‘Folly lights up no candles, dear girl,’ Efflin soothed, wisely quick to dismiss the mishap that marred her porcelain complexion. ‘And Tarens won’t sow anyone’s moronic by-blow, today. The strumpets will snatch coin for his kisses, up
