The Burning Time Read Online Free Page B

respected, for two reasons. First, she was that rarity, a woman of learning. Second, she had for years been teaching the peasant children to read and write—beginning with the older ones, who in turn would teach the younger, and sometimes even tutor their own parents. The practice was, she knew, a flirtation with danger, but as such it was a thrilling, guilty pleasure. Townsmen and district gentry thought it an outrage that serfs might become lettered; not many townsfolk and gentrymen could read or write themselves. In idle moments, especially after a trip into Kilkenny Town, Alyce would find herself pondering how much of a real threat their surreptitious grumblings might one day present.
    Now she flopped over onto her stomach, trying to dismiss such worries. Public opinion had never before stopped her, she reminded herself, so there was no reason to start beingconcerned with it now. Whoever hungered to learn—nobles, peasants, women—should be permitted to learn. For that matter, Alyce knew that in some of her serfs the hunger itself had to be fostered. There were those whose minds had been famished lifelong, so that the slightest whiff of appetite or hope seemed suffocated by despair. Patient, steady coaxing had to be exercised to elicit a gleam of curiosity in their pain-dulled eyes. But the children, ah … they were different.
    She burrowed deeper into her bed linen, her thoughts careening back to the work that needed to be done. Soon it would be tupping season, time to put the bucks in with the does and the rams in with the ewes for mating that would produce next spring’s kids and lambs. For that matter, she needed to have her women card more sheared fleece for wool so that she could finish her spinning. In the morning she
must
remember about the orris root. And the cheeses. And sketch out a design for the flowered garlands of the sabbat dancers. Which reminded her that she must speak to William, and find a tactful way to suggest that he should not lead the Spiral Dance this sabbat. The last time he’d done so, he had wound everyone up in a mess of confusion, with much kicking of shins and clonking of heads. Dear Will. Her son never
could
remember the difference between dancing deosil, or sunwise, and widdershins, the counter-direction. It worsened when he became excited—certainly an expectable emotion at asabbat—so that he tended to call out an instruction to circle one way while he blithely hopped off the opposite course, yanking baffled dancers after him in a lurching chain that soon collapsed into a heap of crushed garlands, wildly waving arms and legs, and mutual hilarity.
    My own sweet boy, Alyce reflected, realizing anew that at sixteen Will was no longer a boy; he was older than she had been when first she’d been betrothed. “How much younger he seems than
I
was then,” she murmured, silently thanking The Great Mother that Will showed few signs of taking after his father, her first husband. For the hundredth time, Alyce hurried her imagination past wondering what life might have been like had her child been a daughter.
    She turned over on her back again—this time Prickeare did protest, a bit noisily—and closed her eyes, letting the froth of her thoughts ebb along a wave of drowsiness. Trying to catch that wave, she began an exercise to summon and sweeten sleep. For the sheer hypnotic comfort of acknowledging its dependability, she started softly chanting to herself the stages of The Wheel that drove the year, naming each of the Eight Spokes that radiated from the hub and turned the days:
    “The Great Quarters:
    Two Solstices—Winter and Summer
.
    Two Equinoxes—Spring and Autumn
.
    Intersecting The Great Quarters, the four Cross Quarter Days:
    Brigid, the Feast of Returning Light, called Imbolc by the Druids, in early Feabhra, soon after winter’s peak;
    Beltane, or May Day, the spring Feast of Fertility;
    Lugnasad, or Lammas, summer’s Feast of the First Harvest;
    Samhain, the