by Ken Liu
It is only natural, Papa said, for who wants to buy a cake spoiled by the touch of Death? We Rimbaud carry the stink of death wherever we go—no, we carry a scent worse than death, for there are things worse than death and that is our craft. The Ratcatcher is literally the cousin of the Executioner, the Knacker his brother-law, the Leper his charge. As the Goldsmith deals in Rubies and the Milliner works in fine Damask, we trade in Mayhem and Murder, Torture and Despair.
When I was very little, I used to think people gave us gifts because they loved us. My Papa, so tall and strong in his black and orange cloak, my Mama with her sleepy blue eyes and lips as red as strawberries. My great grin always pleased my Papa and I assumed it earned me a bit of honeycomb or a sweetmeat. Later, when I knew the truth, I refused to go into the streets, though I loved the color and the smells and the stories, lingering like smoke on the clothes of the passing crowd.
I blushed and stammered, so shamed was I by the abhorrence of strangers. It seemed unbearable to me that they would shrink from my gaze and pull away from my fat, baby fingers as they strayed toward a bright ribbon. I hid behind my father’s leg and lagged behind him in the street and wandered away, as if by accident—anything to pretend I was not the Daughter of Death.
Finally, my father beat me. He threw my over his shoulder and hauled me home, barging through the front door, not in a rage, but quiet and hard. Before we got to the stairway he lifted my skirts and thrashed me soundly, while Mama stood crying in the hall. Then he sat beside me on the stair, wiping my blubbering nose with his handkerchief.
“It is enough, Pierette. This must stop. You will go with me every day into the marketplace and through the city and you will not cry and blush. I am what I am and you are what you are. I will do my duty as my father did, and his father before him. You will walk beside me and feign pride if you cannot feel it. If you do not, I will thrash you again. Do you understand?”
I did not understand, but I nodded anyway. I understood the stinging of my buttocks well enough.
At Michaelmas that year he bought me a dress to match his official cloak. A tiny dress of black and orange and a miniature drawstring purse with silken tassels and little bone carvings hanging from it like those on his white staff of office. And, as Mama lay dying at home, fading on the tide of the blood-cough, he took me with him to attend the scaffold for the first time.
There were two thieves sentenced to death that feast day for taking horses from Bouchet’s inn at the city gate. A happy crowd gathered in the square, for word had got out that Papa would today take the heads off Two Villains with One Blow.
I did not know what to feel and, indeed, spent most of the day running my hands across the slashed silk sleeves of my new dress. I wandered in the crowd, while father did his business inside the prison. He’d given me a silver coin to spend and charged me to account for my pennies and bring back the proper change. I knew we would do the sums that night when we sat at the table to practice tracing out letters and numbers like any fine lady.
The the crowd surged around the scaffold full of laughter and jokes. There were mothers with babes at the breast and children on their father’s shoulders eating candy soaked apples and licking their sticky fingers. I saw a great lady with a purple, feathered cap and soldiers and whores and acrobats. There were mincemeat pasties and roasted chestnuts in pretty papers, carved toys and toffee and mulled cider and new beer. By the cathedral steps a gypsy woman sold lucky charms and a tiny nun sang the “Ave” and peddled medals with the Virgin’s image stamped in scarlet.
As it turned out I kept my coin and spent not a sou, for as soon as they saw my black and orange sleeves the vendors pushed all manner of goodies toward me and waved me off with a curse or crossing themselves or both at once. Every person in that crowd had come to this place to see the dying. They are worse than I am, I thought, for I come here for a duty and they come for the pleasure of it, which must be worse in God’s eyes.
At noon the guards brought the thieves and I went to my place behind the scaffold stair. It wasn’t pretty. The boys dragged fear in along with their chains, their eyes casting wildly about as if a ladder might drop from the sky to save them. They smelled like vomit and boiled onions. Tall lads both, looming ginger-haired giants when standing and thick as a log pile when they knelt for the blow. They were thick. Thick arms, thick hands, thick hair, thick necks too. I thought that must be what folks meant when they said “Thick as Thieves.”
Papa said something and they froze there, upright on their knees, close as two trees grow when the seeds fall too near each other. One boy took the blindfold; the other would not.
I knew better than to turn away from the business at my father’s hand, but I did not know what to feel nor how to see. I did not know if this were something or nothing at all.
The crowd still jostled and yawned, sung, shouted; someone threw horseshit. No one can stand against my father’s stare, however, and he looked at every one of them and none wished to be seen and they went silent. I heard Papa say to the boys, “be still” and they were still. His sword went up and high, flowed across the sunlight, then – I cannot say it fell, for there was no nature in it, but a hard arc in the severed air.
Two heads fell as one into the wood shavings.
There were no men left there, except Father, on the scaffold. You could see those Pieces of Boys were just Things now, no different than stones or barrels. I did not expect the blood. I don’t know what I thought—that creatures would die with no blood? But I did not want to see the red ink that sprayed as they fell, some in a mist, some in big drops like hail on a foul day. Those who had been too eager and crowded too close were all bespattered and wore thief-blood home to their dinners.
After that as I grew, even after Mama died, I always had a fine black cloak and always with a collar or lining of orange or peach or burnt ochre to mark me as the Headsman’s Daughter. The city laws are clear—we were required to wear the mark of what we are, so that none might accidentally be contaminated. Now I know that they tell stories about us at inns all across the land. They tell of the evil that happens when the Designated Killer walks among ordinary people Unmarked or with the Sign hidden, hidden out of malice or from shame. They tell one story, the worst one to me, of some innocent man who kisses the girl he likes, only to find that he has made love all unknowing to the Daughter of Death.
There was no way out for me. I could walk with pride in the marketplace, but could not escape my fate. It was not how I saw myself. I wanted to be laughing and gay, like the Queen of England. I wanted to flirt and be loved for my pretty mouth, and have babies with innocent cherub cheeks all wrapped in lace. I wanted to write or draw or cook minced meat pasties for a man who loved me. I did not want to carry on a curse into another child and another town, living beside some tradesman-killer, picked out for me to match my father’s lineage.
And so I waited for a changing tide that I might make my escape. And the tide changed.
Gossip came to us that spring – events in the great world. We heard that a Black Pirate Armada of strange many-hued ships had been sighted off the coast of Greece and that Emperor Charles had sent his fleet to Tunis to give battle to the Pirate Barbarossa. The heard of a machine to make many books from one book and a red foal born at the crossroads that was sure to win many races. We heard, that old lady Bonniere plucked up the fattest turnip ever seen – said to be as large as a small pig and of a blood rain in the Channel Isles, Our King Henry declared himself head of the Church in England and built his warships to number thirty and five and he killed his Friend Thomas More for facing him down. All news is not to be believed, however and truth tells in the end. Early in May there came a rider to St. Omer and straight to our door. Father left the letter out on his desk and did not object when I picked up as we did our figures in the candlelight that evening.
The wax seemed redder than usual, splashed with a great unreadable seal, now broken and split on the page. A formal request from the secretary of
the King of England. Or the secretary of the secretary. “The Executioner of Calais to be paid £23 6s 8p for his merciful expertise in the execution for treason of the lady consort of the Kind of England.” I’m sure the lad who wrote the letter knew not what to call her, as each day more titles and honors were stripped from her.
Among the usual rumors, this we had not heard. In fact the King and Queen were expected soon for feasting in Calais. Her babe had been born too soon and with a hole in his tiny heart and we heard of her Lord’s displeasure, but even in England execution does not follow so soon upon disappointment.
I looked at the paper and at my father. He shrugged. A very large sum of money. Enough to buy a piece of land in the country or build a sun room full of real glass at the back of the house. I think he would have done it for nothing, for my father cannot abide the Axe, a dirty death and horrible and not fit for such a Lady who should die at one blow and not be hacked about by amateurs—for he had seen her pretty mouth too and it was very like my mother’s.
“When do you go?” Even now the messenger ate roast chicken down in the kitchens and they had more gossip already no doubt, than either Father or I.
“In an hour. Apparently there is a great hurry about the thing.”
An hour. I knew he would use the time to sharpen and re-sharpen the Great Sword, though—you may believe me—it was never dull.
I drew my courage about me. Here was the tide I had prayed for, Sunday after Sunday at the foot of the Queen of Heaven in the back corner of the cathedral.
“Let me ride with you. Please Papa. I’ve never been anywhere but the seaside twenty miles away.
All the stars in heaven will be watching you that day. Let me come.”
He shook his head. “Too far. Too fast. And a bad business.” He put his arm around me, his mind already on the dark road and ready for the sea crossing.
I wound my hand in his doublet, “Wait, listen. If I must be the Executioner’s Daughter, it is only right that when the steps of history cross our steps, I should be able to see what is ours to witness. It isn’t right to leave me the curses and shut me away from the things that only you and I can know, you and I among all the people of the world. Let me go with you.”
He looked down at me and whether he saw his pale-haired daughter or the scaffold I do not know, but, he heard me.
“Come then, if you wish it so much,” he said. “Dress for warmth and a small bag only.”
I had spoken the truth, but betrayed him more than ever the Lady Anne did betray her Lord, for I planned to make my escape.
At Calais we safely crossed the waters dividing this little piece of England from the greater and, though often treacherous, the trip was quick and silent for us. Only two odd things happened on that crossing. Before we boarded I walked on the beach in the icy wind and looked for shells. The wind was so cold and fast that I could not believe in May at all, but felt that I walked in the silver ice of a February dawn. There, strewn about me on the ashen sands, I found a hundred jellyfish, the kind we call Les meduses, for they have the long snaky locks of that mythic lady creature. They lay scattered all purple and white like blown and frosted glass and so bejeweled the beach, that it seemed as if a Goddess had passed, strewing behind her these gems from the beading of her train. I stood there in the cold wind and looked at this marvel until the chill brought tears flying down my cheeks as random and frozen as gulls’ wings.
The other thing that happened didn’t mean as much to me then. When we were well out to sea, the boy in the crow’s nest saw something and shouted down to his mates, just as the sun broke over the bleached and weary tide. His words tossed away on the wind, but he made us all look over the rail and out to the greater waters. I had no glass, but for a second, far out on the horizon was a jagged shadow, a tiny black tear on the border of water and dawn. The boy must’ve seen more than we, for there were mutterings among the crew all the rest of the passage.
I don’t think Papa cared. Nothing lay in his head, but the need for haste and the job that waited. Little else, indeed had he cared about since Mama’s death. I tried to overhear the talk among the boys and the old men on deck, but being a girl and young I got only a tip of the cap or wink from them and one said not to worry, no enemy fleet could be that big, that it was only a trick of the light.
At the docks a horse waited, already hired and tossing it’s head. I hoped to take a horse myself and ride like a lady, but being little, Papa just pulled me up after him and said, “Sleep if you can.” The port was busy; soldiers milled about everywhere and I wondered if there really was an Armada off the coast of England. Charles V was the nephew of the old Queen, Katherine the Spaniard, Henry’s first wife and since she had been cast off he had been the sworn enemy of Queen Anne. He had the only fleet of any size and his ships still lay at port in Tunis. Even were he planning to invade and perhaps bring Englishmen back to the Mother Church on his own private Crusade, it would be impossible to guess where such a fleet might land, for England has many coasts. Only a goodly spy could tell such plans afore time.
We rode out on a fast horse. Soldiers were the least of our problems, until we threw a shoe just past Wrotham Heath. As we waited at the smithy, where I last wrote in my little book, a worried frown began to ride Papa’s brow. I knew the delay looked ill for him and the King might not wait to kill his Lady and we might come too late, having had the Expense but not the Payment.
Whatever he said, Papa also must be thinking about the Terrible Effect of delay and waiting on the Condemned, and who but a stone would not imagine her dismay to be preparing for this last thing and the thing does not come. She must have hoped, twice hoped, that Events and the Good Lord would spare her thus, and some event come to her rescue or that King Henry might remember the nights in her arms and her pretty mouth and change his mind. She must have imagined him coming to take her from her cell, their little girl all bundled in furs, and him sweeping her away with him as he had done when once he loved her. She mayhap had dreams of a nunnery or a ship to Sweden or a quiet manor house in the country, all of which were in his hand to give.
Nothing hurts more than hope. I have come to know it. A thrown shoe and a muddy road and both hope and pain multiplied. Nothing for it but to ride ahead to do what needs must.
That’s what my mother used to say, “Just stop thinking and do what needs must.”
London Gate, the biggest city I had ever seen. Dirty and grey by French standards, especially in the rainy darkness of a night that could barely pull itself out of winter. Papa leaned down to ask a troop of running soldiers for directions to the Tower.
“Do you think they expect an attack to rescue the Queen?” I asked my father, thinking of how Lancelot had tried to save the Lady Guinevere from the Fire.
“Who would rescue her? She was never royal and who would take her part now?” he scoffed as we rode away, kicking up great gallops of mud. The execution couldn’t take place before morning, so I wished we could ride down to the river, just to see London town. I think what you find at the riverside says everything about a city, but we were late, so very late already.
A servant led us to a cold room to wash and wait. Papa let me take the one narrow bed and I fell into it. Somewhere in the night there were candles and talking among men, but I was too tired to listen
Looking back, I know now that was my last child-sleep. Before I woke I began to plan.
I would stay for the execution, then move out among the crowd, out the gates and into the streets with the spectators who had come to watch the blood of a Queen falling on the land. Best find the better part of town, for it is stupid to look for a new life in the gutter or the docks. In my bundle were fine examples of embroidery, Broiderie Anglaise and other kinds. A dressmaker, a milliner, a lace shop or if none of those worked out, I would try the back doors of fine houses. If luck deserted me I thought I could become an honest whore, though I had no idea what that meant. At the time it seemed better than my own cursed life.
I loved the idea that no one in this city would know the meaning in blood curse of my orange and black cloak. This morning I was the executioner’s daughter, but this evening I would be just plain Pierette. A pretty girl, the embroiderer from Calais.... “Poor thing,” they’d say, “Her father died of a fever in the channel crossing.” I already felt ashamed at killing Papa off in a channel crossing, but it was for the good of his grandchildren. I thought myself like a girl from a fairy tale who had to break the curse that had haunted generations.
I opened my eyes, yawned and stretched. Father turned from his prayers. “Take a little bread and wine,” he said. “You’ll need it.” I ate the bread and wine, and an apple and a piece of English cheddar. I ate a walnut biscuit and a slice of roast beef. Then I ate a chicken breast. Then I ate a tart with dried currents and a custard sauce, as if the nearness of death and my own fear made my stomach into a pit that could not be filled. Papa laughed. “That’s enough Pierette.”
I didn’t want to think about the Queen, and I had managed to avoid it since I woke. But, here it was. These were her last moments. She would be praying now too. Fingering her beads, arranging her gown, tying up her black hair. Exposing her little neck.
They led us out to the court yard, two soldiers in dirty uniforms. The soldiers looked impervious to Queens. In the morning light I could see the remains of the previous executions, though they had tried to make it clean again. I asked the younger soldier “Who has been been killed already?” I knew the signs and no buckets of water could wash them away, especially when a foul axe was the tool. An axe-man is a nasty thing who has to hit several times, who must keep his prey pinned down on the block and sometimes they do go a running and the crowd loves to see it.