by James Comins
A single, tentative note of longing, sustained, breathy, exploring.
"Next, now that you've broken through the silence," Papa is telling me, telling the audience too, "you must boast. You must share with the woman the idea that you're a great man. She doesn't believe you, of course--she's not an imbecile--" Papa winks--"but she will feel hurt if you don't work to impress her." Men in the front row laugh at Papa, feeling the wisdom in his words. Papa plays a trill of notes, boastful, arrogant, a strange departure from that first note.
"And now," he says, "if you are very lucky, you may speak to her. Through your words, you build love." He demonstrates, beautifully. "And then, at the very last, you find the very first."
I don't know what that means.
"It helps," Papa says, "to have a woman to look at when you play. Here--" and he selects a man's wife from the audience, asks permission from the husband, brings the wife onstage, sits her in his lap. The audience roars, and the husband looks drunkenly amused, tolerant. And Papa plays on the recorder.
In the great hall, I look at the ealdorman's wife, with her Spanish eyes, dark hair, glowering eyebrows, and for all that I know for sure she's a passionate woman, I don't find love there. I feel fear of being hung for insolence. My neck itches.
I close my eyes and play the first note, but my thumb, anxious to scratch at the noose around my neck, slips, and I squeak.
Papa taught me: always pretend you meant to do it. That's very important.
So I wave the recorder around a little, laugh in the Gallic fake style, and say loudly: "Inexperience!" Because that's what Papa would say.
The ealdorman erupts, his red face wheezing with joy. Edward smiles. I may have fooled him. My neck is burning.
I look at the ealdorman's wife, and she's not laughing. I clam up and try again.
Who am I to look at while I play?
There are no other women in the hall, at least none eating here. Further afield are scullery maids. I don't love them. I can hardly see them. I look at the ealdorman's wife, and I can feel myself wilting. I will be hung for insulting her unless I begin to play right now, right away, I must start, I--
I will be hung. My body vibrating, my throat closed, my neck partially snapped, the world spinning on a rope, the voices of children younger than me jeering below, the brisk cold morning wind chilling my chafing neck as I turn, my body shutting down as my breath ends--
"Tom?" says Malcolm quietly.
My body shakes--I may have been sleeping--how long?--seconds--everyone is now looking at me--play it off, like you meant to do it--I am consumed by Malcolm's ice-green eyes--the first note--I play--
Malcolm, ice and fire--
I play, the notes sounding heavily, like tears. The room fades and here is my recorder, alive in every way, bringing light to darkness. Bringing love.
"Yes," breathes the ealdorman's wife, her hand running up her opposite arm, feeling love, making love. "Yes, that's it."
I will not be hung.
* * *
Dinner is over. We have washed our hands again, blessedly. The feeling of juice from roasted meat against your skin is the worst. I air out my recorder and examine the cork, which has not been replaced in a decade. When I have a patron, I will ask for new cork, which, at least in the vinelands of France, is not cheap. Half a mark at least, which is a good month's pay. I set the recorder to dry--you'd be astonished how spit wears away wood--and it's evening, but not midnight.
In the firelight, I sit beside Edward; there's the sleepy nodding red lump of the ealdorman's face, fingers clasped like a palmer praying, a jovial smile, a salmon-colored chair. In another chair, a dark woman, contented for the nonce, although as with any ill-tempered wind, that could change. The ealdorman's reeve has joined us in talk for the evening. Where is Malcolm? Is that him in the shadows, burning too brightly for the fire to contend with? How will he and I and the girl Liza get to the meeting place? It isn't yet midnight.
Edward is speaking. He says that the Viking king of England, Hardknot, is a villain, accursed, a Godblighted Viking invader. At least that's the way it sounds. He doesn't use those exact words--that would be treason, which no man will commit--but instead he speaks of the king in glowering tones that hint at his true meaning. It's easy to tell what people are really saying, if you listen hard enough.
"Ironside was the last true king this country had," Edward mutters. "If I could turn back the clock . . . and my father spoke highly of the Martyr--" He means St. Edward the Martyr, who was king briefly in my grandfather's time--"but since the coming of the Danes--"
"Now, now," the ealdorman says mildly, "I have no strong love of politics. Let's speak of something pleasanter. Let's speak of women--"
"No," his wife utters. "I want to hear his mind."
"Hm? Well, er, as you say, dear, only Edward, do take care, there are some--" and he looks nervously at his reeve, who I see has gone rigid of late, I hadn't noticed. "Some Danes in the area." Yes, the reeve is blonde, I see, and vigorously built.
"Danes in Poole," hisses Edward, I've not seen this breed of anger from him before, but it's falling out of him now. "Danes in London. Invaders from the North. Had--had Æthelred the support of his own barons, there'd be no Danes south of Mercia--"
The ealdorman is flashing glances at his reeve. I feel his pinprick discomfort, see him blink rapidly.
"But Svein was allowed to sail up the Thames--" Edward seethes.
"Svein Forkbeard was a great man," the reeve says quietly.
"Svein Forkbeard would have killed all of coastal England if he were not met with our armies. He drank blood for breakfast. The world is well rid of him. England is a Saxon land."
"Em," the ealdorman says uncomfortably. "You know, there were ah men in England before the um Germans came."
Edward's eyes flick to him, he recognizes himself, takes his own measure, and calms down.
"There were," he allows. "But the affair of the Bishop of Worcester--"
"Yes, we've followed that closely, the Sarum bishop speaks of it. He speaks of old King Harold--"
"Harold," Edward snarls, "was a gibbet of a king. The men of England were prisoners of his belly. His crime against Alfred was the mark of Satan's hand on earth."
"It was not a Dane who put Alfred's eyes out," says the Danish reeve.
"No," Edward says, mollifed, "it was not. It was England's own betrayers." His anger is so deep you can hardly hear anything else.
"Er, is it cold in here? Perhaps another few logs on the fire?" the ealdorman calls out to his servants. They scuttle like furry insects between our chairs, and the fire is heightened.
"England," says Edward, "needs a Saxon king."
"Is not the isle of England a place where the Welsh, Saxons, Anglians, Picts and now the Danes have all settled in peace?" says the reeve. "Let those who live in peace have peace."
"As long as Æthelred was king, he asked for peace from every one of his neighbors. He strove for peace. And what did it get him?" asks Edward. "Plunder, invasion, Danish settlements and bankruptcy. England must defend herself, and Harold--"
"Harold's gone now," the ealdorman's wife says.
"Yes," says Edward. "And the fiend left King Hardknot with a defenseless kingdom."
"Edward?" interrupts Malcolm. "Might Tom and I have at the kitchens for a bit of something? Messire ealdorman?"
"Yes, yes, of course, bachgen, off you go," says the ealdorman. "I bet the politics is as tedious for you as it is for me," he adds under his breath.
And in this way Malcolm and I sneak out to the wooden church.
A grove of cypress trees, something I wouldn't have thought England even had--in my mind, the faded green columns that are cypress trees are trees of Provence--create thick pillars of shadow that pass around me like smoke. The moon is growing, this part of the month, I think, but it's not large, just a white beech leaf of a moon. If there are other people in this churchyard, they are--
"Tom," says Liza, stepping int
o the bare moonlight from her cypress-shadow cloak.
"Oh," I say, ineffectually. "Hi. God keep you."
"I'll prove it to you," she says, and I have no idea what she means. She smells faintly of woodsmoke.
"Sure," I say, once again drifting away from coherence. My mouth is my enemy.
Liza's ready to run out across the moors, but I must introduce Malcolm, who wants to see the goat lady and . . . something about sin? Honestly I don't even want to be here. I just want to get to school, where I belong. These other people are dragging me into these wild duck hunts and goose chases and adventures of imbecility and I just want to stand at a king's side and tell jokes. It's what I'm bred to do. It's how I was raised. These people with their bravery and their ideas are going to kill me. I'm going to wind up dead some day, I can just feel it. I'm--
"Tom," says Malcolm. I shudder with deja vu.
"You're a snitch," Liza says before she can help herself. "You've set me up--"
"Malcolm," I say with more confidence than I feel--she is, after all, just a female--"this is Liza. It's her mother--" I trail away.
"Gad's waird besoid ye," says Malcolm, and I realize with a profound shock that it's the first thing in English I've ever heard him say. He isn't English, I discover. He isn't French, either. But his French is perfect, precise as mine or Papa's. How strange that his English should be so sodden.
"Who is he?" Liza hisses to me.
"Malcolm's attending the Fool School with me," I say, although I realize how improbable it sounds.
"Then where's his funny shoes?" Liza says under her breath.
I think about this, and Malcolm clearly does, too. "I'll peck them up when I git there," he says.
"He's a friend," I tell Liza, and she makes up her mind and tells us both to follow her and leads the way into the darkness.
Behind us, keeping a distance, is a pair of shuffling clerical footsteps. I don't know why I don't say anything about them. I don't say anything.
After such a heavy meal--roast beef and pork ribs were plentiful in the ealdorman's house--I find myself droopy and drowsy and feeling leaden. The sky is a wheel of stars, and the soil is soft, not to say squelchy, beneath our feet. Malcolm is a wolf, his eyes blazing starlight, and Liza is a prim wanderer taking the barrens beneath a metaphorical aged walking stick, confident. She is going to show us her mother. That's what she is going to do.
The darkness closes over us. I feel the presence of Death on this road, the constant dancer, the whirl of voices silenced, the trailing edges of that black cloak, the bone silver of his scythe. Beguiling, some call him, the beguiling friend of the lost. Some seek Death, I'm told, follow, prance in his footsteps, live inside his shadow, they dance across the moors, laughing as the scythe sweeps and the bones crackle. You can--yes--if you lift your nose high enough as you walk these moors, you can smell headstones toppling, the smell of diffident skeletons beneath, complacent, asleep. The bone mask of Death is here with we three. My feet hurry to keep up with Liza.
A terrible sound. The snort of a dying calf, followed by the mewling of a cat. The goat woman tries to sleep. She cannot. In my mind I imagine the nails through her tongue waking her when she snores. How long has she been kept in the pit?
Liza leaps. A slide of dirt, a surprised scream, then a gutteral gasp and motherly weeping. I imagine that they are forbidden from seeing each other. There is a smell of necrosis, of dead flesh.
"Mum," sobs Liza, "we've come to get you out. We have. We have."
Malcolm takes my hand, and we both have fear in our blood.
"Help me get these off her," we hear Liza say, and we walk to the lip of the pit.
"Do you feel it?" Malcolm asks me in French. "That presence?"
"Death," I whisper, nodding.
"No," says Malcolm, and my head swings to look him in the eye. "Not Death," he says. "Lucifer."
But I don't feel the presence of Lucifer, no fire, no curling hairs. Only cold breath. I don't speak. A skeleton hand presses over my mouth. I heed it.
None of us has the tools to remove the iron bands from the sickly flesh of the woman. We try using our hands. I desire to hear what the woman has to say to us. I take the nails in her tongue out with my fingers. There is a voluminous stench.
She thrashes, and I hear a crack and it's one of her fingers, which she has broken. Malcolm draws out the brass nails like water from a well. The woman is blue in the skin, her veins pulsing as blood leaks.
"She won't live without bandages," says Malcolm, and I agree.
"Won't live," whispers Liza, a look of realization on her face.
I pull up my tunic and wrap her hands in it. There is still metal on her body, chains. We will likely not move her from this spot tonight. I say so.
"Thain speak," Malcolm commands her, and I believe that the very tides would heed his voice and cease now if he commanded it. "Speak noo, woman. Confaiss ta me as ye would to a priest. Be rid of thess infairnal presence."
"There ith nothing," the woman's dead, swollen voice says out loud. "Nothing to confethhh."
"Be rid of it, woman!" commands Malcolm, and it sounds so strange, these mannish words coming from a boy's mouth.
"There was no devil," Liza declares, desperate, breaking. "Tell them, mumma. Tell them it wasn't you. Tell them."
There is no light in the woman's eyes, but she has not yet died. This frightens me more than anything else that has yet transpired.
"There ith a dewwil in thith town," and the woman's words are deader than winter. Her eyes flare open and she points up the brown scree of the pit to the top, where there is nothing. "Him!" she cries with a last thimbleworth's of strength, her finger shaking, and now she has bled out and died. A broken, swollen form at the bottom of a pit.
A shadow rises over us, passing between the earth and the moon. From the black shape comes a set of blazing teeth.
"Tom, lad," says the guilty priest, "I'd have hoped more of you."
I find words in my mouth. "I wanted to hear her story," I say.
"Understandable," says the priest, and Malcolm shudders beside me. "Yes, I should think that a young sinner like yourself would desire to make contact with the devil."
The priest believes that I was searching for sin. I want him to understand that I--what? That I was going to take her confession when he, the priest, would not? That I was doing whatever Malcolm and Liza told me? That I felt compassion? That I was going to rescue her?
"I didn't find the devil in the body of this woman," I say.
A hand with an appalling shape rises, casting a new shadow over our eyes. Silhouetted against the Milky Way is a humanculus like a sick doll.
"Your baby brother," the priest pronounces, and for a moment I believe he is speaking to me and has gone insane. But no, he speaks to the girl, Liza, who is pressed to her mother's body, weeping. She looks up and acts blinded by the starlight.
"Yes," says the priest slowly, turning the humanculus over and over in his hands like a windmill's blades. "Yes, I kept him, on the uncommon chance that someone should ask to see him, or that his blood should prove useful in medicine. Behold. Ecce homo."
My body does not have access to motion, but the warmth and touch that is Malcolm fades and he leaps and leaps like a billygoat up to the top of the pit and beholds the infant man. His hand reaches out and touches it.
"Hooves," comes his voice clearly.
I am shaken.
"So you see, Tom, the child and the woman who bore him are no mere aberrations of childbirth. The child is half Satan. There can be no error."
"You're wrong," Liza shouts, and bounds up from the chains of the pit to the surface. Breaking through my fear, I follow her. I want to protect her. I feel like no fool at all right now. I have no fine words or music, only cowardice.
"His feet weren't hooved," Liza shouts into the night wind. "I was there at my mumma's side all through the birth. It was an easy birth, because he was so small." She's at the top and she suddenly screams lik
e all the souls of Hades, a scream of full, surprised lungs. Breath seeps back into her and she says, "That's not him at all. Don't you see, Tom? Malcolm? My brother's body was small, like two eggs in a line, when he died. That's--that's not--don't you see--he's full-grown--it's a different babby--"
The priest strikes her down. "Lies," he snarls. He turns to me. "Do you see how the devil works his will?" he says.
"I do," says Malcolm, and I see pain in his starlit eyes.
The priest has ignored Malcolm. He is intent upon me. I am the commander of this tithing-band. "Do you see, Tom?" he asks, and I feel like I'm going blind. "The devil leapt from the body down there, Tom. That's his way. He foresaw his darling's death, and leapt."
I don't know what the priest means. I say so. "Do you mean the devil's in me now?" I add.
"One of you." The priest's voice is very certain, very calm. The shining teeth are smiling in the moonlight, and that's all I can see. "Yes, the devil is certainly here among us, I think," the priest says.
"I think so, too," says Malcolm, but I feel like he means something different.
The priest's hand rests on Malcolm's shoulder. A blaze of pain on the boy's perfect face. "Not here, I think," the priest says. "Not in this one." Next the priest's hand grips my face. The priest has big hands, bludgeon hands, reaching from my temple to my neck. I feel violated, as if these hands are unclean. "No," his voice drawls steadily, "no, Tom, for all your curiosity you are not inhabited. There is strength in you," and never in my entire life have I desired a compliment less, not ever. I want to be weak now. "But you."
Liza shrieks as long fingers take her hair and pull her face to the priest's hip. "You're something else altogether, aren't you?"
"Tom! Get him off--" she cries.
"Oh yes, my dear, I heard you tempting these boys, didn't I?"