While all were discussing remedies and cures encompassing everything from a poultice of mustard, goose blood, and cow spittle to a tisane of St John’s Wort, Glenna wrung out the cloth in the cool water and laid it on his filthy brow, thinking she should pour the water over his head like she did when El got drunk last year and fell off his horse and wouldn’t awaken. If that did not bring Montrose ‘round, at least it would clean his face, she thought with humor as black as his sooty skin.
From the doorway came a strange and sudden murmuring, and the crowd parted slightly as a small old woman elbowed and twisted her way through the thick throng of people gathering in the small back room of the tavern. She wore a long, dark woolen tunic, the side panels embroidered with colorful images of suns and crescent moons, animal-like figures in odd positions. A huge cat-like creature standing on hind legs and reaching upward toward a large silver moon was stitched entirely of a silvery thread. The tunic was belted to her thin waist with a hammeredmetal girdle that had strange and ancient looking markings engraved into it. In her right hand she carried a long willow staff strung with small brightly-colored, cloth herb bags, one with cattails sticking out of it. A long bladder pipe also hung down from the bend in the staff.
“Where is he? This nobleman who was hurt,” she was saying, her voice clear and as melodic as harp music, a sharp contrast to her hair and face. Using her staff, she shoved a young farmer aside and chided him for not moving swiftly enough.
“Old Gladdys,” she heard some of them whisper as the woman passed them.
“Stop yer gabbling and get ye out of my path. Is not a great lord all but dying?”
Glenna supposed if there were a Druid witch alive at that time she would have looked like Gladdys. The Welsh woman had wild and curly white hair, a face weathered by the sun (and perhaps the wind, a strong wind…a storm…a raging storm) skin like spotted sausage and the sharp black eyes and a nose like a beak of a peregrine falcon. As El would have said, ‘she has a cheese-face, one that could curdle milk.’
But then Glenna had noticed oft times men were all about the look and shape of a woman and cared not a whit for her mind, and even less for her tongue. Her brothers were no different. She preferred to believe that perhaps Gladdys might have been a handsome woman in her youth, which looked to be a long, long time ago.
Gladdys glanced down at Montrose, put her thin, knobby hand on his throat for a moment, then looked away. She unhooked her bladder pipe and blew a loud, discordant note that quieted the voices in the room and said, "Stand back ye!" Then she began to hum and twirl, spinning in a circle, her long white hair the color of morning mist flying outward as she turned, her arms out, the staff almost swiping at the heads of some of the crowd, who backed quickly away. Her humming quickly changed into a chant:
“Eena, meena, mona, mite,
Basca, tora, hora, bite
Hugga, bucca, bau,
Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
Stick, stock, stone dead.
O-u-t! Out!”
Within heartbeats the room had nearly cleared, most running from the old woman like their hair was afire. Even the believers’ eyes grew wide and they scurried away. Only two merchants and the smithy remained.
“Need ye help with your lord, milady?” the smithy said kindly. “We will stay.”
Glenna declined. “There is no need for you to stay. My thanks to you, all of you. My lord will be grateful,” she added as she pressed a piece of silver into each of their hands, and they shuffled to the door.
“If ye need help, send someone.” And the smithy left, but not before he glanced at Gladdys, then shook his head muttering about her tossing wood on the fire of fools.
With the room empty but for Montrose and the two of them, the old woman grew silent and slowly stopped spinning. For merely a heartbeat, Glenna thought that Gladdys could see her for who she was, and wasn’t, saw into her past and her future, saw her weaknesses and even her escape plan. It was unsettling to have someone look at you as if they could see not only what you hid from the world, but also see inside to the darkest corners of your heart and your head.
The old woman tapped her staff three times and stared at Glenna from sharp and knowing black eyes. It took a trickster to know one.
“That was curious display,” Glenna said to her, skepticism in her tone and waving her hand casually at the old woman’s performance. “Tell me. What exactly does your chant heal?”
The old woman eyed her for a long moment, and then shesmiled quite evilly and winked when she said, “An overcrowded room.”
Glenna laughed. But Gladdys was looking at her no more and instead had turned to Montrose. She leaned low over him and used the cloth to clean around his eyes and some of the soot from his face. At the sight of the old woman’s frown, Glenna smile fell away and she stepped closer. “He will wake up.”
Gladdys looked at her. “Ye be thewife?”
“Aye,” Glenna lied, trying to look down her nose as if daring the old woman to doubt her word.
“Hmrph,” was all Gladdys said, a word that carried a load of doubt, and she turned back to Montrose and slid open each of his eyelids with her thumb and peered closely into his eyes. “His eyes be red and swollen from the ash.” She lifted his head from the board and felt around underneath. “And he has a knot the size of me fist on the back of his head.”
She pulled her hand away and began to clean his face and brow and ‘round his closed eyes. As Glenna hovered closer, Gladdys waved her away and said in an irritated tone, “Go and make yerself useful. There, see?” She pointed to her staff leaning against a chair. “Bring me that brown bag, and the green one.” She used her unusually long-fingered hands to squeeze and press gently downward on his chest, and he moaned again.
Glenna stopped, worried.
“Bring me the bags! He’s not dying. ‘Tis but his ribs, and why his breathing is so shallow he looks dead. Most likely he cracked one or two rib bones. Go fetch a bowl and spoon from the maid, and another ewer of water. Go, go.…”
Glenna spent the next few minutes scurrying back and forth and doing exactly as Gladdys demanded, even when she asked her to send someone for a cup of sea water from the nearby sound. She made a poultice and used linen to tightly bind it to his chest.
