Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  Ailena shivered and gnawed her aching knuckles. Virulent wrath twisted her stomach, and she could barely swallow the acorn bread the pilgrims shared with her. The next morning, the palmers agreed that she should walk the mile to the next shrine as a form of penance. That outraged her. Yet, despite the spiked burrs of pain in her joints, she hobbled that mile under the gloating stare of the burly sergeant whom her son had thoughtfully sent along as her escort.

  Three days later, her body braided in pain, her fine clothes bedraggled, Ailena reached the north bank of the Usk. There, in a Celtic chapel with a small bell cote, she had hidden a cache of gold coins several years earlier, after Roger Billancourt had almost succeeded in locking her out of her own castle. A faithful porter and several of Neufmarche's soldiers in the bailey spared her that indignity, but from that day on she had arranged to have funds cached outside the castle. Most of the money she sent across the Channel as interest-free loans to her cousins in the Perigord. Her ancestral jewels she had hidden in a niche of her husband’s vault, sardonically delighted that his corpse should become the guardian of her fortune. And to several local chapels she contributed small statuary whose wooden bases contained secret drawers in which she concealed gold coins.

  At the Celtic chapel on the Usk, Ailena feigned remorse for her selfishness and lingered over her prayers in the candle-flickering dark after the others had left. The burly sergeant, impatient for supper, left her to finish her Hail Marys alone. As soon as he stepped out, she removed her gold, slipped the pouches into drapes of her robe, and unobtrusively joined the others.

  With two of those gold coins, Ailena hired a bull-necked ferryman to accompany the pilgrims across the Usk and make sure that the sergeant did not arrive on the other side. During the crossing, the raft sweeled hard into the current, the ferryman lost his balance, desperately clutched at the sergeant, and the two fell overboard. Only the ferryman surfaced.

  Ailena knelt with the others and prayed aloud for the sergeant’s soul.

  -/

  Arles, Winter 1188

  The Rhône, gray as cold iron, harped on the gravel beds, singing with the soft, guttural voices of the dead. As usual, the dead sang morosely the Hebrew songs of the holy days. Rachel did not understand most of the words, but she knew they were chanting about God's love and the history of the people. The swollen vowels slurred among the reeds and the mizzling rain.

  "Rachel, come away from the water," her grandfather called. He sat by the yolk-light of a small embering fire in a cobwebbed nook of a merchant’s tomb. They lived here in the ancient graveyard of Arles, where Roman ruins lay scattered among ladysmock and rushes of the riverbanks. "The rain is coming down harder. Come here and sit with me."

  Rachel turned away from the singing river and climbed over stone nests and through tall tassels of grass. She sat beside her grandfather on the cold step of the vault and stared out over tilted headstones. Her stomach hurt, and without the singing of the dead to distract her, hunger twisted sharply.

  "Eat this." Grandfather handed her a waxy rind of cheese he had earned yesterday digging a grave. He had thought to share it with her, but seeing her hands fisted over her stomach he wanted her to have it all.

  Rachel looked down at the cheese rind in her grandfather’s hand. She took it, bit off one end, and passed the rest to him. She wanted to tell him to eat the rest. Fatigued from digging all day, he looked skinny to her. And she wished he would grow his beard again. But her voice would not rise from the far place inside her.

  The old man touched her smudged cheek with his callused hand. "We have shared everything so far, child. I will eat this. But you must speak to me. You must say a word to me."

  Rachel stared at his beseeching expression with a plaintive glow. She understood what he had said, though she had heard it through fathoms of depth. She wanted to speak to him, if only to say "Eat—" Her mouth opened, and the word would not come. Instead, humming silence pressed more heavily on her, and her face closed.

  Her grandfather patted her shoulder gently, took the cheese she offered and gnawed it disconsolately.

  -/

  Arles, Spring 1189

  Occasional mourners came to this field of graves by the river-bank, though for the most part the large tract of headstones, pillared vaults, and stone crosses ranged empty. A few scavengers drifted among the mounds, refugees like themselves who feared ghosts and the miasmal diseases less than they feared the scrutiny of the townspeople. The old man's raised ax kept them at a distance.

  Common sense as well as the ache of abused muscles and the dizzy spells that came with silver streaks of angel’s wings in the air told the old man that he could not live much longer digging holes all day and eating scraps. Yet, he refused to let the girl muddy herself with grave dirt. Instead, she plaited hats from the rivergrass. The hunchbacked yardmaster, who paid the old man in moldy bread and rancid cheese for the holes he dug, gave them an extra crust for the hats.

  God of Israel, the old man prayed daily, hourly, Creator of the world, break my miserable body but spare my granddaughter. Return her to her people, to a good husband, where she can fulfill your promise to Abraham and know the fulfillment of children.

  Once, he had ventured through the sprawling city with her bundled in his mantle, her head cowled, seeking others like themselves. Casual queries to old women in the marketplace informed him that, two summers ago, the Jews had been expelled from the Free City of Arles after Jerusalem fell to the infidels. The synagogues, some two hundred years old, had been torn down and their stones incorporated into the lofty cloisters and portals of Saint Trophime's Cathedral.

  So the old man returned to the graveyard, grateful at least for the work. In the evenings, he would read aloud from the Bible. His hands usually too stiff to turn the pages, she would hold the holy book in the firelight and follow him silently. As a girl, she had never learned to read Hebrew, and now, following her grandfather's black fingernail as it moved among the words, she began to learn. Now and then, to his utter surprise and her own, she pronounced phrases aloud.

  This impressed the old man and gave him strength. Inside her hurt, she thrived, eating not just the scraps they earned but also food of the spirit.

  -/

  Arles, Summer 1189

  Rachel sat on the ground by her grandfather while he dug graves, and she plaited hats and threaded their brims with wild flowers. He worked slowly, pausing frequently under the hot sun to lift the grass hat she had made for him and wipe his brow. Often on these arduous days, he fell asleep immediately after sharing their meal of dandelion soup and berries, too exhausted even to read from the Bible.

  With the sun lingering over the ruins' broken parapets, Rachel wandered the lonely tracts along the river, gathering berries from the shrubs that flourished between the crypts. Not far from the graveyard, pillar stumps and stagnant pools of the Roman baths stood among river willows and poplars.

  In the long, fanned light of sunset, eroded faces in the stones watched her serenely. And the peace she had known on her secret knoll in Lunel glittered upward in her soul, like a silver bubble in the cold, pressured depths of her horror.

  -/

  The baroness lifted her crabbed hand with its misshapen fingers to block the blaze of the setting sun, and she sat up straighter in her litter. At her signal, the bearers lowered her to the ground, and the knight she had hired to protect her stepped closer and blocked her view. She angrily shooed him out of the way and squinted into the red glare.

  Ahead, at the end of an avenue of chestnuts, the ruins of the Roman bath held for a moment among its arches and vaulted spaces the bloated sun, gaseous and quavery. Ailena had been drawn here by the local rumor that at twilight the oily waters of the baths relieved the pain of hot joints. The torment of her gnarled bones had worsened with the difficulty of her journey south.

  A young woman stood silhouetted against the fiery sky. The sight of her regal bearing and intent profile assailed the baroness with strange, a
brupt memories, and she rose to her knees, ignoring pincering pain to see more clearly the shadow before her.

  The surprised knight at her side took her arm and helped her stand. Glims of remembrance spurted as she gazed at the tall young woman and her halo of loosened hair. "Who is she?"

  "A waif, my lady."

  "No. Look at her."

  "She is dressed in rags."

  The baroness reached out her twisted hand toward the shade, and her wrinkled face went entirely slack, stunned by the brightenings of time in that dark shape.

  -/

  When the shadow fell over him, the old man bent atop his spade, up to his shoulders in the dark earth, groaned over an impacted stone. He knew at once the doomful aspect of the shadow, for it carried a sword. Tilting back his hat, he peered up at the sun-crowned stranger.

  "Is she your daughter?" the shadow asked.

  The old man looked at Rachel, who sat at the lip of the grave. Her hands tangled in ribbon grass she had been plaiting, and her face gazed unperturbed in the shade of her wide-brimmed hat.

  "My granddaughter," he managed. He spoke so rarely, his voice sounded strange.

  "Come out of there."

  The old man leaned his spade against the earth wall and obediently crawled from the hole. When he stood, he confronted a surly-faced cavalier in short, lightweight tunic brown as old blood, with a belt of yellow leather around his hips, from which hung a dagger and broadsword. "Gather your possessions, bring your granddaughter, and come with me."

  "Where are we to go?" the old man enquired, and the surly knight pointed with his chin for him to hurry.

  Rachel rose at her grandfather's beckoning, and, after they had picked up the frayed travel bag that contained their few clothes, the scroll of the Law and the Bible, they followed the cavalier.

  They had no choice but to follow—though, for a moment, David felt weary enough to consider defying the cavalier and accepting the grave he had dug as his own. Only his concern for Rachel made him comply.

  The knight led them out of the graveyard to the chestnut-lined avenue that ran directly into the center of Arles. A cart with a sleepy driver awaited at the cemetery gate.

  Nearby, the hunchbacked yardmaster sat in the shade of a black cypress watching them and smiling toothlessly. The cavalier instructed them to get in.

  "Where are you taking us?" the old man asked cautiously.

  The cavalier turned his back without answering and strode to a horse tethered in the shade of a chestnut. The cart trundled down the wide Roman road, past the ruins of the baths, and through a gate in the truncheon-lined ramparts that opened into the narrow, winding streets of Arles.

  As in all villages and cities, the crown of the street rose above the filthy gutters, into which householders dumped slops and refuse. In the summer heat, the stink stung eyes and sinuses. Rachel and the old man, accustomed to the open air at the city's edge, gagged.

  Timber-and-plaster houses and open-fronted shops with large, gaudy signs protruding from their lintels fell away, and the street widened to an avenue. Stone buildings appeared, fronted by ancient mammocked trees.

  Before one such stone house with a small garden for a yard, the cart stopped, and the cavalier, who had been following behind on horseback, ordered them out.

  They passed under an iron-gated arch with a lionhead at its keystone and followed a curved path of blue flags to a large wooden door strapped with iron. The cavalier led them past that, along a pebbly path that ribboned among flowering hedges to a smaller portal at the side obscured by shrubbery.

  A well-groomed maid in an embroidered gown and tightly plaited hair received them into the gloomy house, and the cavalier departed.

  Through dark and fusty stone passages, the maid guided them to a vaulted apartment with walls blackened by smoke from an enormous fireplace. She opened the wooden shutters of the tall windows, and the slashing sunlight revealed above the colossal hearth venerable trophies of the hunt: antlers, the head of a bear, hefty boar tusks, and an array of hunting weapons used by departed generations.

  The old man regarded his granddaughter apprehensively. The first large house they had entered since that monstrous day nearly two years past when their own great house had become their family's pyre. Rachel stood before a sturdy chair, absently running her hand over its polished back and looking about with curiosity, not alarm.

  "You are my guests," a husky, splintered voice spoke from the doorway. "Please, sir, be seated. Young woman, come to me."

  Two servitors carried in an elderly woman sitting in a riding chair. They placed the chair beside a window, on a platform built for it, and departed.

  Dressed in a wimple and shiny emerald robe festooned with silk blossoms, the old woman seemed a noble personage. With a hand whose bones had been twisted by disease almost to a fist, she signed for David to sit in the bolstered chair facing her and for Rachel to approach.

  "Do not be afraid, child. Come here."

  Rachel looked anxiously to her grandfather.

  "Obey me!" the dame spoke sharply.

  Rachel started and approached the scowling woman.

  "Stand here in the light. Turn around." The dame's dark eyes scrutinized her, gleaming with fascination. She pushed out of her chair, straightened painfully, and limped to Rachel. Her clawlike hands seized the young woman's face and tilted the young features back into the sunlight. A gasp of satisfaction escaped her. "Where are you from, girl?"

  Rachel stared diffidently from the corner of her eye at her grandfather.

  "Answer me! Where are you from?"

  "Lunel," the old man spoke.

  The dame frowned at him. "Is the girl dumb?"

  "She has not spoken in two years—since she lost her family."

  "Then she can speak." The dame nodded with satisfaction and clasped Rachel's hair in her bent fingers, examining in the sunlight the texture of the black strands and red filaments. "Gascony. You are a long way from there. Tell me, young woman, why have you come to Arles?"

  "Your worship," the grandfather spoke, "we—"

  "Silence! I want to hear the girl speak. You have a tongue in your head, child. Use it. What is your name?"

  Rachel stared timorously at the dame, searching inwardly for her voice and finding only silence and dread.

  The dame squeezed Rachel's cheeks in her fierce grip and stared hard into the back of her eyes, engaging the fear there. "You will speak to me when I address you. I will hear your voice now. What is your name?"

  Rachel’s mouth worked and made no sound. Her eyes widened with alarm at the ire she met in the old woman's face.

  "Speak, you wastrel!" the dame shouted at her. "Speak or I will have your tongue ripped from your head!"

  The old man shot up and stepped to his granddaughter's side. "Stop this, I beg you. Why are you doing this to her? Who are you?"

  "Be still and sit down," the dame commanded.

  "No, my lady." The grandfather glared hotly. "Though we look no better than peons, we are not peasants to be bandied among your questions and ordered about."

  "Shall I remove him?" a stern voice queried from the doorway.

  The grandfather stared defiantly at the cavalier.

  "No," the dame answered, more quietly. "I will call if I need you." She leveled a chill stare at the old man. "Tell me this girl's name and how she has come to be mute."

  "Her name is Rachel. I am her grandfather, David Tibbon, a landowner from Lunel."

  The dame offered her hand. "Help me back into my chair, David Tibbon. My bones are too weak to stand for very long, and I sense your story is a long one."

  David complied, then took his place by his granddaughter's side. "Why have you brought us here?"

  "I will tell you that after I hear your story. Please, sit and tell me how a landowner from Lunel came to be digging graves in Arles."

  David and Rachel sat, and the old man began to speak. Rachel heard his words from far away at first, as if they came warbling through
water, and as the story approached the horror, the words rang louder.

  Her ears burned with the vibrancy of her grandfather's deep voice, and her heart beat in hot, hurtful blows under her collarbone. When he described what had become of their family, she beheld them again—not as she witnessed them in her appalling and paralyzing memory of their deaths—she observed them again but differently. Her grandfather's pitying tale, with all the terrible loss and outrage spoken into words, stabbed her numbness alive and burst the cold pressure that had locked her voice.

  In a gush of impacted grief and rage, a raw, black, fiery cry ripped from Rachel's throat.

  Her wail met its echo. She fell forward, sobbing, curled up on the floor amid convulsive tears.

  -/

  Rachel wept for hours. The dame had her servitors carry the young woman to bed, where she lay wracked with sobs, draining the ocean of grief that had drowned her soul two years before. While she cried, her grandfather sat at her side, weeping with her, clutching her hand and softly calling her back into the world.

  Slowly, the mournful spasms passed, the waves of weeping ebbed, and the girl plunged into implacable sleep. David lay down beside her and dozed. His curiosity and dread of this great house and its bone-warped dame surrendered to exhaustion.

  The dame remained seated in the vaulted apartment of hunting trophies, staring out the window with inward-seeing eyes, smiling to herself. Rachel's tears pleased her greatly. Where there was pain, there was feeling—and feelings could be shaped. Despite the terror she had endured, the girl was not dead inside, and so there was yet hope for a new life.

  -/

  The chamber glowed amber with afternoon light when Rachel woke. The dense depths that had enclosed her had thinned away to layers of watery horizons. She felt lighter, more vibrant, cleansed.