When human beings first discovered honey, they had hunted the wild bees and followed them back to their nests. Some enterprising honey-lover must have noticed that bees often nested in hollow trees, and so, perhaps, rolled or dragged or hacked out a suitable log nearer home, left it at a convenient spot, and hoped a passing swarm might settle in it. Eventually someone began experimenting with making hives out of straw, mud, clay, pottery, and with sowing the seeds of plants bees were seen to like; and eventually with breeding more docile bees.
But the basic facts of beekeeping hadn’t changed that much: bees still made wax honeycomb to store their honey in; and a beekeeper had to both break into a hive and cut into the honeycomb to retrieve the honey.
Mirasol went home then and there, that day (the goats dragging sulkily behind her), and lifted one end each of all her movable hives, propped it and at the lower end sawed, pried or hammered in a hole—knowing as she did so that this was exactly the sort of drastic human behaviour that would upset the bees. Except that it didn’t. They flew placidly around her and the note of their humming never changed. She put a grass mat for a sieve under each new opening and a bowl under that, and left them. It was a nonsensical thing to do, but much of what was happening to her—and to her animals—was nonsensical.
And the daunting thing was—it worked. The honey streamed out in such quantities she almost ran out of bowls for milk. When the three hives in two old trees beside her little meadow began to drip honey down the boles, she merely tucked buckets among the tree roots. The buckets filled up too.
This was almost as distressing a problem as too much milk—no, more distressing, because honey was much more valuable than milk. And then her bees swarmed; again and again; big, healthy, vigorous swarms longing for places to build their nests and produce more honey. She, like every beekeeper on every demesne, wove spare skeps for just such an eventuality; but her mother had showed her how to use wooden or clay hives, and once she had decided she would kill none of her bees she’d found that straw skeps made the least satisfactory bee homes. Nor had any beekeeper she knew had to deal with swarm after swarm after swarm. A month after the deaths of the Master and Chalice she had bees living in all four corners of her roof and another swarm in the eave of the hearth inside; she had to leave the window near it open all day, and keep an eye out for returning stragglers in the evening if she closed it. Many of the trees round her clearing had at least one bee home in them, and the huge triple-boled hollow tree that had contained two bee families since she was a little girl now had six. By then she could no longer hear Nora and Spring bleat through the humming of the bees. Nor could she hear anything else.
And so she did not hear them when the Circle came to her cottage at the beginning of the fifth week after Selim had brought her the news. When she looked up from her midday milking—she had stayed home that day to empty the honey buckets—knowing that she was unkempt and wild-eyed, and with the remains of the still-sour stink of the cottage cellar easily penetrating to the bare bit of ground where she did her milking, queasily mixed with the intense sweet reek of the honey and the warm animal smell of the milk, her first thought was that they had come to turn her out of her woodright, and she burst into tears. She did not consider that the full Circle would not have come to deprive an obscure woodskeeper of her livelihood; all she could think of was that she was no longer doing her job, that the Circle must have gone past some of the recently neglected woods she was responsible for, and had detoured from their proper business to pass sentence on her failure.
PART TWO
The day the Circle came to her seemed a century ago now, although it was only a year. Once Nora and Spring had joined Kard’s small flock of four their milk production settled back to normal, although she heard later from Selim that it was two months before they stopped eating as much as the other four goats together. She could guess that Kard hadn’t dared complain—inheriting the goats of the new Chalice, who no longer had time for them, had to be an honour—but no small woodskeeper has much to spare, and if the new goats had gone on eating their heads off, Kard might have had trouble getting through the winter; profits from additional cheeses wouldn’t have come in time. Mirasol had been distressed at this story, declared that Selim should have told her sooner—“Why didn’t Kard say something to me himself, when I go to him now for my milk?” she exclaimed, even knowing what the answer was. But Selim smiled one of her new, uncomfortable smiles, said that Kard was very pleased with his new goats which were now both in kid, that probably she shouldn’t have told Mirasol at all except that this was a story that had a happy ending and she thought…and then her eyes slid away from Mirasol’s and she hadn’t finished what she had been going to say.
Then the new Master had returned but there was no happy ending for the demesne. Or perhaps for the new Chalice. Selim was the only one of Mirasol’s old acquaintances who made an effort to remain in contact, to be welcoming when the Chalice managed to snatch an hour away from her responsibilities. And Mirasol had lost her woodright after all: she had known that she could keep neither it nor her goats once she was Chalice, and so she gave them up because she had to. The woodright had been divided among the three other rights it bordered on; Selim was one of the beneficiaries and claimed, with a believable manifestation of sincerity, that the extra work was worth the extra result.
But Mirasol had dared try to wield some of the power of the Chalice to keep her cottage, and her bees. She had declared her preference in a meeting with the rest of the Circle—declared it officially after having borne a series of unofficial attempts to persuade her to move into the House—and had worn her most gorgeous robes, and used the cup of decision, to bind the meeting. It was bad enough that the meeting itself had been at the House, with its heavy, disapproving air—and while no one but the Chalice should know the proper names of the Chalice’s vessels, any Circle member who chose to pay attention would be able to predict, over time, which cup came out for which sort of occasion. She was sure the Grand Seneschal guessed by the damning look he gave her when she offered him the cup of decision, but even the Grand Seneschal would not dare refuse a cup offered him by the Chalice. The Circle drank—and Mirasol kept her cottage. And her bees.
It was possible that the overwhelming presence of her bees had discouraged Landsman from deciding to reassign her woodright whole, which would have included the cottage for its new incumbent, when he came to view the situation and decide on his recommendation for its future. The bees seemed as integral a part of the scene as the cottage and the trees. Landsman had not stayed long nor said much, but he had bowed to her so resentfully when he left that she felt his decision couldn’t be against her or he would have been happier about it. And saying little could have been merely conservation of effort: the Circle had had to shout over the rumble of bees to make her hear their original news, especially since she couldn’t believe it even after her ears had taken it in.