Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  While the maids dressed Rachel, the Old Master went back to the great house, taking the gardener and several other peasants. At the old man's command, they used axes on the furniture and broke them to kindling. Then, the old man read long passages from the house Bible and set piles of kindling alight in all the downstairs rooms.

  The blaze that roared through the passages and up the stairwells consumed the house, undaunted by the long veils of rain sweeping out of the mountains.

  From the sanctuary of the gardener's shed, the Old Master and his granddaughter watched flames gush from the windows and doorways. When the tile roof collapsed in a vortex of flaming cinders, the old man lowered his head and prayed yet again.

  Rachel stared intently, her eyes keenly focused, seeing the dead tongued with fire.

  -/

  Gévaudan, Winter 1187

  Corpses lay heaped in the snow, the tips of their noses, their lips and cheeks gone, devoured by rats, the eyes taken by the crows. The old man paused over them and recited a few lines from the Bible.

  He no longer bothered reading whole passages for the dead. There had been too many in the past thirteen weeks of their trek. At the outskirts of each village, the same horror greeted them—corpses heaped in the forest for the animals to feed upon.

  At first, he had even tried to bury them. But there were too many. Then, he read pertinent passages for the dead over their bodies. As the weather grew colder and his granddaughter thinner, no time remained for that.

  They had wandered far. After the great house had been lost, with all the gold coins and valuables stolen by the Crusaders, the Old Master had taken Rachel up the mountain slope to live with him in his cottage. More Crusaders came south, and when they learned that Jews lived in the high meadow, they came looking for them.

  He and Rachel escaped at night and headed east, to Muret, where the old man knew a holy man. He had hoped that the holy man might break the spell of silence that had muted Rachel since the horror. Outside Muret, the leaf-fall covered mutilated corpses, and the holy man could not be found.

  The old man cut his beard and used the ax he had carried from the estate to work as a woodcutter in the forest villages. He earned just enough to buy them old bread and stale cheese.

  Staying in any one place too long was dangerous. Everywhere, fanatical Crusader gangs roamed, sacking synagogues, murdering Jews. The old man's satchel contained the scroll of the Law copied in his own hand, the Bible given to him by his grandfather, and his tasseled vestment with the blue riband.

  So, they lived in wattle huts in the forested hills, shivering beside open fires, gnawing roots and woodbark when there was no bread. Occasionally, the old man managed to kill a squirrel or a rat. The girl ate whatever he presented her, and he was sometimes grateful, sometimes dismayed for that. Surely it would be better if she were dead, but he had not the strength to be a martyr. Even chopping wood and freezing in the snowfall was easier than doing what his son had done.

  "We will go south," the old man told Rachel, "to the big cities, Nimes, Avignon, Marseilles. The synagogues there have not been sacked. The bishops will have protected them, and we will find a place among our people."

  Rachel said nothing. Nonetheless, the old man spoke to her as though she understood, as he was certain she did. "The bishops have protected the synagogues, because they need us. Their Christian law forbids them from lending money to each other at interest—and none is Christian enough to lend money to their fellow Christians without interest. Ha! So, you see, their greed protects us. They need us to lend them the money to finance their wars. All the kings of Europe honor and protect us. It is only the rabble that loathe us, for they envy the affluence we have earned with the blood of our exile."

  Rachel listened intently, hearing her grandfather as though his voice warbled through water. His face, too, shone, lit in diamond brightness, as though he appeared before her through a glare of water. Something had gone terribly wrong with her. She knew that. No words offered themselves to explain anything, only a humming silence like the pressure of water against her ears.

  The old man sorrowed at the sight of Rachel’s perplexity. "Life will be good again," he promised her. "You will see. You are young. We will find you a good husband. You will have children and know joy again. And that—" He squeezed his granddaughter’s icy hand, "That will be good. For happiness is our duty to God."

  -/

  The Old Master continued to talk with Rachel as they wandered among the villages. He related what he knew about the places they visited, why they existed in those particular locales, and what famous personages had dwelled there. He sang her songs, and he told her the stories she had liked as a child, about his own childhood and his grandparents, anything but the terror they had endured.

  The girl seemed to be listening, but the melancholy glow in her face shone even in the dark—and she never spoke.

  Rachel did hear her grandfather. Though glad for the comfort of his resonant voice, she somehow did not understand him. Why is he speaking to me in another language?

  She wanted to tell him to speak langue d'oc or even the Hebrew that she knew sufficiently well from listening to her brothers' lessons. Her voice hovered so very far away, and always fatigue and cold intervened. It took all her strength just to stay awake, walking and listening, abiding the cramps in her stomach and the needling pains when she went into the bushes to void herself.

  Other voices drifted along the slushy roads. Easier to understand, the prayers of her brothers reached her even if mumbled, because their heads were lowered. At night, she stared up at blue stars, and her eyes ached before the beauty of such flowers so far away.

  -/

  Castle Valaise, Spring 1188

  The black branches of the fruit trees looked woolly with white blossoms, and the wood thrush trilled loudly from the forest. The baroness sat in her litter, a mild wind ruffling the canopy that shaded her and the wimple that protected her neck. She hated drafts on her neck, for they made the muscles stiff and painful for her to turn her head. Lately, she had been turning her head a lot, glancing over her shoulders to be sure her knights were still with her.

  Ailena breathed deeply of the fragrant air that the physician from Hereford claimed would help clear the pain in her joints. For two years now, she had been drinking his febrifuges to quell the hot ache of her bones, and she had listened patiently to his discourses on humors, hoping to gain some insight into the searing flashes of pain that had made walking nearly impossible. His lectures about the liver as the seat of honor and the spleen as the footstool of laughter sounded as nonsensical to her as Maître Pornic's mumblings about God coming down as a white bird to bless Himself as His own son.

  Even so, twice a day she drank the physician’s concoctions of dried and pulverized liver of toad immixed with he-goat blood and dog urine. She lifted her hands and turned them before her, amazed at her fingers bent and twisted at odd angles. Her knuckles had swollen big and round as oak galls. Her hands looked like crushed sea crabs. No swills of dog piss were going to heal these hapless bones.

  "Do you see the family?" she asked her companion.

  Dwn, sitting beside the canopied litter on a stool, looked up from her embroidery. "Hellene is strolling the twins in the garden and Leora is with them."

  "And her swain? Where is Harold?"

  "I saw him with William earlier. I believe they're off riding, hunting I think."

  "With Guy," the baroness muttered darkly. "My knights should be at my side. Harold especially. He wants Leora's hand, so why is he not cozening me as he did all last year?"

  Dwn returned her gaze to her embroidery.

  The baroness held up her hand mirror, to see behind without having to endure the hurt of turning her head. Indeed, William Morcar, who had always been within earshot before, eager to cater to her every whim, had departed her presence. Harold Almquist, too, who still required her blessing to take his place in this household as Leora's husband, had stepped away. B
oth landless knights, they would have to seek employment elsewhere without her indulgence. Always before, they had been solicitous of her, but recently they had been spending more of their time with Guy.

  "Their shift of alliance speaks more loudly than my speculum," Ailena said and glanced at the aged face in the mirror. The sight of her rumpled visage appeared almost fungoid to her, like some pale, wrinkly tree growth. She dropped the mirror in her lap and pressed her swollen knuckles to her eyes. "They plot against me, Dwn."

  "They dare not," her old friend consoled. "In the eyes of God and king, you are the rightful ruler."

  "Ah, but in the eyes of men, I am but an old, bent woman." She flexed her fists angrily, and the pain felt as if made of iron.

  -/

  Languedoc, Autumn 1188

  The old man watched Rachel carefully. Today marked the anniversary of the massacre in Lunel. For a year, they had wandered the countryside, precariously surviving. In the spring, he had found work in the vineyards doing what he knew well, pruning and grafting.

  With the girl, they could not stay long anywhere. Her flowering womanhood attracted men, who became too inquisitive about her aristocratic bearing, her melancholy glow and her silence, which had not dimmed with the passing seasons.

  In the cities, where they had hoped to find thriving synagogues, they found only gutted ruins. Men of the lowest stations approached and enquired about her. Sometimes her silent, tristful stare proved sufficient to drive them off. Other times, that only intrigued them more, and the old man had to dissuade them with tales of a curse, disease, madness, whatever they feared.

  Rachel's beauty had brightened despite the hardships of their roofless life. Though merely her thirteenth autumn and after a year spent living in the brush eating acorns, beech mast, and nettle soup, she had grown taller, more stately and ample. She could not hide in the girlish garments they had saved from the estate her vivid body, the fullness of her breasts or her long legs. He made her wear his mantle, yet the way she carried herself challenged the manhood in every peasant who saw her.

  To earn a meal from a farmer, the old man and his granddaughter had cleared the fallen apples of a small, sunny garth. The brown and withered fruit had been stacked in two large piles, where the farmer would cover them with bramble and, in the spring, shovel the redolent mulch into his vegetable garden. Throughout the chore, the old man had eyed Rachel, looking for signs that she knew what today signified, what had happened a year ago near their own apple garth.

  At day's end, Rachel sat in the hollow trunk of a willow tree, eating the black bread and milk curds the farmer had paid them. The jarred mass of her dark hair bunched over the collar of the bulky mantle, and she brushed it out of her face as the wind steepened from over the twilit earthworks and wall-steads. How many times had he tried to shear those loosened tresses, to make her appear less comely, but when his knife came anywhere near her, she pulled away and her eyes burned like opals.

  She remembered—she would never forget. He knew then: Every day for her bore the anniversary.

  -/

  Castle Valaise, Autumn 1188

  The baroness recognized by the look on his face that her son had found a way to defeat her. A goat-eyed, simmering hilarity played on his swarthy face as he advanced into the great hall of the palais.

  Immediately, she looked about for her men, and they waited in place: William and Harold flanked her on the dais and Neufmarchés soldiers stood casually at the back, chatting jovially among themselves.

  No one stopped Guy Lanfranc at the entry or even seemed to notice him. To Ailena, his purposeful stride and narrow-eyed grin gave warning. She signed for the soldiers at the door to detain him, and they did not notice her. They lacked the vigilance to notice her every gesture. For thirty years, she had administered her domain by direct command, not furtive hand-signals, and she regretted now not having demanded more attentiveness from her guards.

  The castle's guildsmen, their apprentices, and their families and villeins packed the great hall for the Saint Fandulf’s day blessing of their crafts by the local holy man, Maître Pornic. On this day, the merchants would pay their burgage, the yearly rent for operating their shops in the castle bailey. Everyone of prominence in Valaise had gathered here, milling about before the bailiff called order and the ceremony began with the address of the baroness.

  Several of the merchants bowed upon seeing Guy and attempted to engage him in conversation, and he brushed them aside and continued his advance, not taking his gleeful stare off the dais.

  The baroness did not like the mocking smirk on her son’s dark face. Did no one else see it? What else would make him leer so vividly but her doom?

  Ailena turned to William Morcar, and he averted his eyes, pretending to watch a petty squabble between two merchants' wives in the front rank. By this she knew she was in serious trouble.

  Alarm caught her breath. She looked to Harold Almquist, who had married her daughter not two months ago, and he, too, looked away. The ingrate! What had become of his oaths of fealty?

  The baroness appealed frantically to Neufmarche’s soldiers at the back of the hall, trying to catch the eye of at least one of them.

  Always before, they had provided sufficient threat to keep her son and her dead husband's acerbic warmaster, Roger Billancourt, from attempting physically to oust her. But they were oblivious to the threat, lumped together like laughing jays by the door of the hall, not realizing yet that they had already been caged.

  In the arched doorway, the baroness glimpsed the solid silhouette of Roger Billancourt and, behind him, the fair-haired Denis Hezetre and some men with javelins. The terrible moment of defeat had come—and here in front of all the community that her father had gathered and she had maintained.

  She nodded to the herald beside the dais, and he blew an exultant note on his trumpet that silenced the hall.

  Before Ailena could speak, Guy leaped upon the dais and announced to the assembly: "On behalf of my beloved mother, baroness Ailena Valaise, I lend my stronger voice! Harken! Archbishop Baldwin's tour of our Welsh domain this past spring has moved mother to think on our greater estate! After much prayer, she has decided to accept the archbishop’s call to take up the Cross!”

  Amazement thrashed through the gathering.

  Guy raised both hands for silence.

  Behind him, the baroness willed herself to stand, to refute this preposterous claim, but her shock had jellied her legs. How dare he presume to exile her, the rightful ruler of this domain?

  Her outrage guttered the next instant, when she witnessed the entry of Roger Billancourt and the men from the barracks he had armed with javelins. They swiftly surrounded Neufmarche's soldiers and began herding them out of the hall.

  “This very day,” Guy declared with a bright voice, “our baroness departs for the Holy Land!”

  When the astonished voice in the crowd had subsided, he continued, “A bevy of palmers from Saint David's waits in the lists with a litter to bear my mother on her holy journey. In keeping with the simplicity of our Lord's humble life during His tenure on earth, the baroness will forego all her material possessions and proceed from here rich only in her faith. An exemplar for all, she goes forth to live out her natural life in devotion and prayer to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!"

  Ailena pushed her bent figure upright, inflamed at this callous treatment.

  Guy turned and faced her with a cold smile. "No need to rise, Mother. I've arranged to have you carried out."

  The baroness sat down, and her angry eyes searched the assembly for allies and met only startled faces and Roger’s men elbowing through the crowd with a litter on their shoulders.

  Maître Pornic alone seemed offended. Denis Hezetre came up beside him and spoke with urgent confidentiality.

  "Everything has been thought of, Mother," Guy said through his insolent grin, bending close so that his pug nose nearly touched her long profile. "You are old. The knights are afraid that if we wait for
our Good Lord to take you, Neufmarché will have time to make this castle his own. Now, you may depart with dignity, a holy woman on pilgrimage, honored by Church and people—or you may depart noisily and without grace. Either way, dear Mother, you depart."

  Ailena's shriveled mouth sneered with disdain. "Your hatred could never touch me. Vengeance for your father's death is what you want. You'll not have it unless you kill me."

  "Say a prayer for me at the Sepulcher." Guy's smile of exultant bitterness settled into a grimace, and he signaled for the litter.

  "I will return," she moaned. "Unless you kill me now, I will raise an army and I will return to retrieve what is mine."

  "I think not, Mother." With his own hands, he lifted the baroness and was amazed at how light she was. Her old companion Dwn, who had watched helplessly from beside the chair of state, cried out in alarm and reached to stop him. William Morcar took her by the shoulders and pulled her away.

  Ailena did not struggle or cry out as the litter-bearers carried her off before the stunned assembly. She sat upright, erect with indignation, facing the dais from which she had been usurped. And her son watched gleefully, expecting her to screech with fury at any instant. Only the black glare in her strangled eyes marked her mortification.

  -/

  The pilgrims wore coarse robes and many had shaven heads. They carried tall staves topped with palms knotted into crosses. When they received the baroness in the bailey, they cheered with pious joy and thanked the Lord for so noble a companion on their long trek.

  In the beginning, they carried her litter buoyantly on their shoulders. By day's end, when she had refused to join in their psalm-singing and frequent prayers at the sites of the numerous roadside shrines, when she scowled at all their cheerful attempts to engage her in friendly discourse, they soured on her. Only Christian charity obliged them to give her one of their spare robes that night when the chill descended from the drafty stars.