Paradise Red

by K. M. Grant

  Cador creeps to Raimon’s side. He is weeping unashamedly. “I was pulling the sleigh up the hill. I was too far away.” He sobs, bending over the corpse. “Poor dog!”

  Raimon is taking off his cloak. He wraps Ugly in it and picks her up. “We can’t bury her until the ground thaws.” He looks around. Laila is slithering up the hill as fast as she can go, talking nonstop. Her voice is shrill. She does not look back.

  Cador, Metta, and Raimon set off back over the bridge, Raimon in front carrying Ugly, Metta in the middle, and Cador behind. The sun’s rays are still dancing. Why not? The sun does not care about a dead dog. But the burial party are all huddled, thinking of the cold and the river and the knocking of a small, desperate head against unyielding ice. They bypass the graveyards and find a small clearing in which a completely circular drift of snow has settled. Raimon lays the bundle down and he and Cador scrape out a hole. When it is as deep as they can get it, they lower the corpse while Metta offers a simple, heartfelt prayer that the dog’s spirit may be at peace. When the prayer is over, Cador stares at the misshapen bundle, his grief giving way to incomprehension. “How can she be dead, just like that? She was so happy this morning. It doesn’t seem possible.”

  Raimon casts a glance at Metta and is aware that his earlier desire to unburden himself has vanished. He will stick to his plan. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” he says, noting, and not to his credit, a new piety in his voice. “At least Ugly now has eternal life that can’t end in death.”

  Cador frowns. “Are dogs granted eternal life?”

  Metta answers. “Well, we believe that a dog cannot take the consolation and become a perfectus, but a dog is a living thing and every living thing is important to God. When animals I love die, I always tell myself that if Christ cares even for the sparrows in the air, he’ll certainly care for something bigger, so I’m quite certain that he’ll have a place for Ugly.”

  Cador looks more cheerful as they pile the snow over the dead dog until, in the end, only a last leg sticks out in final supplication. Raimon covers it up as Cador sculpts a lumpy headstone. “How do you write ‘Ugly’?” he asks.

  “Letters are quite hard, aren’t they?” Metta has the virtue of never sounding disapproving.

  “Do you find them hard too?” Cador asks. “I did know them, but I’ve forgotten.” Like Laila, he does not like Raimon’s attachment to Metta, but unlike Laila, he has made no comment, and he certainly could not complain that she is unkind. When she takes his finger, he is quite willing that they should scrape out Ugly’s name together.

  Once they are back over the bridge, they stop and look at the water. Already a thin sheet has formed over the murderous hole. Metta shrinks deep into her cloak. “Poor Laila.”

  “Why do you say that?” Cador juts an angry chin. “She just ran off. She didn’t seem to care at all.”

  “Oh, she cared,” Metta replies. Cador remains disbelieving.

  Half an hour later they reach the chateau gates. Sir Roger is waiting. “Thank goodness you’re back,” he booms. “Everybody tells me there’s been some kind of accident with a dog.”

  “There was, sir,” Raimon says, “but Metta’s safe.”

  Sir Roger looks at Raimon, then at his daughter, and then back to Raimon again. “I hope so,” he says, and Raimon’s heart lurches as, without a smile, Sir Roger takes her inside.

  5

  In the Cold

  Yolanda is crouched by her bed, her lips bared in a snarl that only gradually subsides. Hugh has left her, although his presence still reverberates. He came to her, as he warned her he would, then left without laying a finger on her. She did not snarl when he was with her. This snarl came after, from the animal part of her, the part she does not want him to see because if he thinks of her as an animal, it will be easier to treat her like one. When he was here, hard-eyed and grim, she stood, forbidding Brees to move, matching him look for look. Not a word was spoken until finally he had blinked first and retreated. Only then did she crouch, and now she must get up. He will be back, and that tactic will not work again. If only Laila were here, she might poison him. She must get out.

  She crawls over to the door and puts her ear to it. One of the guards is leaning against it. She can hear the creak of his leather jerkin. He is sighing with boredom as he tosses dice, but how can that help her? She tries to clear her mind. Hugh has still not locked her in—he would not stoop to that—but if she emerges, the guard will follow her like a shadow. She goes to the window and throws it wide. Here there is more possibility if she thinks herself agile enough to find footholds in the stone. If she slips, however, she’ll be smashed to smithereens in the courtyard below. And she would have to leave Brees behind. She slams the window shut, and Brees’s paws scratch behind her as she paces back and forth.

  Food is brought. More in hope than expectation, she ties it into a bundle and hides it under the bed. She reopens the window and this time leaves it swinging. She listens again at the door. The guard has changed his recreation now. He is kicking something. She pulls the door open a fraction. At once he is blocking out the light. “I heard a noise,” Yolanda says.

  The man, thickset and with a complexion like custard, picks something up to show her. It is a goat’s bladder, roundly stuffed with straw.

  “Oh,” she says. “You like to play kick ball?”

  He nods.

  “I’d like to play too.”

  He squares his shoulders. “It’s a man’s game.”

  She ignores that and opens the door fully. Two chests, lids agape, sit at each end of the anteroom. She raises her eyebrows. “I have to get the ball into the chest,” he explains.

  “I can see that. But isn’t it a game for two?”

  “Two or more, but I can practice on my own.”

  “Can I try?”

  He is dismissive. “I’ve told you, it’s a man’s game.”

  Yolanda is already out and gathering her skirts. She is deliberately hopeless. Far from landing in the chests, the ball bangs randomly off the walls. Brees pursues it in his lumbering way and Yolanda shouts at him to leave it. The sentry stands, his arms folded, until Yolanda teases him, kicking the ball through his legs. He cannot resist. Soon they are both concentrating, and when Yolanda makes a lucky score, the man grows purple with frustration and begins to play in earnest. When the score is even, he relaxes and shows her how to use the side of her foot to push the ball around. They chase each other, Yolanda’s skirts riding higher and higher, until suddenly, with a wallop that makes her spine jolt, she pitches the ball hard at the edge of the door frame and watches it spin into her room and right out through the window. “Oh no!” she cries, “Oh no! Just as I’m beginning to enjoy myself. Quick. Go and get it.”

  “I’ll shout down.” Panting, the man leans out the window. “Eh! You!” Nobody hears him.

  “Get it quick,” Yolanda begs. “I’m just beginning to think I can beat you. I’ll close the window so that can’t happen again.” She whisks about, to stop him from thinking. “Look! Couldn’t we expand the game? Perhaps if we move one of the chests into my room and play across the way instead of down we’ll actually have more space. Getting it through the door itself can count as some kind of score, and getting it through the door and into the chest can be a bigger score. That’ll be a real test of skill.” She begins to move her feet, as though trying it out. “Like this, or perhaps like this.”

  The man sucks in his cheeks. His legs are twitching. He wants to play. He wants to win.

  Yolanda now busies herself pulling the chests just an inch this way or that as though this is her only preoccupation. She is amazed at the man’s obvious passion for what seems to her a ridiculous pastime. Nevertheless, she stokes the passion up. “Now. Do you think the chests absolutely in line? And should I shut Brees away? He’s not really an asset to the game, is he?” She finds an old belt and calls the dog to her.

  That seems to convince the sentry. “I’ll be right back.” He runs toward the n
earest set of stairs, then, just as Yolanda is fishing her outside boots out from under the bed, thinks the better of it and runs back. Yolanda feigns to be inspecting her footwear. “I really think I’ll kick better in these,” she says at once. “You’ve got to agree that you’ve got an advantage. Your boots are much tougher than my velvet slippers. Did somebody bring the ball upstairs?”

  “No, but—” The man is so torn between pleasure and duty, it is almost laughable.

  “Look,” Yolanda says, all reason and logic. “There are more guards at the bottom of the steps—and do you really think I’m going to vanish when the score’s two–one to you?”

  The man grins and disappears.

  Yolanda yanks the laces to secure the boots, seizes her thick cloak and the bag of food, and flees the room in the opposite direction with Brees pounding behind her. She does not know her way around, but since rooms lead off rooms and passages off passages, it is easy to hide when members of the household approach. She pushes downward all the time until finally, through an unguarded basement storeroom, she is rewarded with the street.

  Here the lights that illuminate the main thoroughfares and gathering places are her enemy so she pulls Brees close and squeezes down funnels between walls that smell of old bones. Sometimes she hears her name being shouted and Brees’s hackles are permanently up for the air is alive with the ghosts of other fugitives. Soon Yolanda has no idea where she is, but she doesn’t care.

  In the end, it is Brees who forces her into the open. Smelling cat, he jerks away in pursuit, and Yolanda pursues him for she dares not call his name. When finally he halts, it is at a large iron grill loosely set into the road and through which the cat’s tail has just shimmied. “Good dog!” whispers Yolanda, rather to Brees’s surprise, for he knows he has been bad.

  The hole is a squeeze but the tunnel is slanted, not vertical, so they both slither down to the bottom. It is an old sewage conduit and even Yolanda can just stand up. Most people would gag but she breathes in the acrid stench as though it were the lavender her mother used to wear. Sewers may be vile, but they lead to rivers. She pushes on, her legs soon soaked up to the knee and Brees’s tail quickly thick with sludge. Who cares? They have only to keep walking.

  That is the easy part and had they known what awaited them, Yolanda might not have been so high-spirited.

  Once out of the sewer, over the river at the least busy of the fords and two miles or so from Carcassonne, they find the blizzard from Castelneuf has moved east. Snow is now falling here, snow that quickly thins to aggressive white hail that clatters on their heads like a relentless barrage of shatterproof marbles. Even under the dense fur of her hood, Yolanda feels under attack, and all the fierce joy at their escape soon dissolves in the bitter struggle to keep going.

  The cold out here is of a completely different order to anything she has ever felt before. It has a solidity about it, like rock, and the warm flood of sewage has now turned her skirt into a stiff frozen board that clangs heavily against her legs. Worst of all, though her feet push on, she senses she is getting nowhere. Everything looks the same all the time. Now the wind whips up in sneaky, skinny drafts that deposit powdered ice into her nostrils so that she sometimes has to open her mouth to gasp, which, in turn, makes her chilled teeth ache and rattle. Her tongue tastes of steel. A stream of water would run from her eyes except that it freezes before it hits her cheek. Even her hands are frozen because the snow has somehow needled its way inside her gloves. Yet though the gloves are quickly worse than useless, she cannot bring herself to peel them off. Bare skin is unthinkable.

  She soon becomes frightened less for herself than for Brees. The dog’s head may be large and his coat an oily matted rug but it is no match when the wind becomes a sheer, shrill, glacial howl determined to flay him alive. His steps are slowing and under his stalagmite fringe, his eyes are closing. When he begins to lean heavily against her, Yolanda knows they must find shelter or perish.

  Briefly, she toys with the idea of going back. That would be the sensible thing to do. But she cannot, will not, submit to Hugh. She tries to encourage Brees on but hardly dares turn her head to him for fear of giving the wind another chance to blast into her ear. And anyway, what is the point? Though he is so close, he is nothing but a bluish white mass, shuffling on pillars of gray.

  He stumbles, but she slaps him until he rises. It is either a slapping or death. They must keep moving, however slowly. Then she too closes her eyes, only for a second, and her eyelids weld together. She tries to prise them apart and then gives up. Even the dark seems white.

  She begins to sink, then slaps herself as she slapped Brees and grits her teeth. “Think of other things.” She pictures words being branded like red fire onto her back. No, not red words, blue. “Think of the Flame, think of it as a bridge, one end in your heart, the other in Raimon’s. Think of it deep inside Brees, burning hot and thick, like soup. Soup, soup.” She pushes on, fighting to feel herself and Raimon tossing the hay in the hazy afternoons of summer. Now she is reliving the day they tried to ride his mother’s pig. And see, see! Here is her tenth birthday, or was it her eleventh, when he gave her a catapult armed with pebbles he had collected from the very bottom of the lake. Where is the catapult now? Why didn’t she take better care of it?

  She moves a little faster as though, if she is quick, she might step back into that other life. Too fast. She trips and spread-eagles with a cry as her eyelids are torn cruelly apart and the bag in which she has stuffed food is crushed against her side. A gust raises her dress and at once her legs and back are peppered with diamond nails. “The wind is the greatest enemy,” she thinks as she lies helpless. “If we can just get out of the wind, we may yet survive.” She clumsily rolls and her dress cracks like a biscuit. Brees is a snow ghost. “Brees! Brees!” She prods him into movement, her gloved hands misshapen blocks on the ends of her arms. “Help us!” she cries silently. “Help us!” She begins to swing her arms wildly, banging against the dog, trying to break the shell that is smothering him. Then, in her last despair, she opens her mouth and laughs and cries and just has time to scream Raimon’s name before she misses her footing completely, and, snatching at Brees, they tumble together.

  At the bottom of their fall, they do not find themselves in a miraculous home built by elves or fairies, the kind about which Gui and Guerau, sing. They have simply fallen over a shallow overhang above a river Yolanda had not even realized was frothing and spouting less than three yards away. The water is confined within its winter banks so they do not get wet, and the earthy roof under which they crawl affords a tiny respite. When Yolanda is able, she sits up, and though the blizzard still rages, she can make out trees. For the first time in hours the landscape seems to have some shape and this itself is like a miracle.

  The overhang is not much use really, but before it tapers off to expose them again to the full force of the storm, there is a small indent, gouged into the river rock by some natural means but deepened by animals. Yolanda pushes into it and finds that she has slammed a door in the wind’s face. She can breathe again.

  But though she tries to pull Brees in beside her, the hole is too small and narrow so he must sit sentinel in front, with only his tail sheltered. It does not wag and he makes no sound, not even when the birds who have ventured out drop as small, pearly corpses into snow, nature’s gift to starving hawks.

  Night falls and passes although the light hardly dims as the snow reflects upward. Yolanda’s furs and woolen undergarments, her lined boots, her gloves and the hat melt and cling. She feels like a damp statue. Her eyes are dry, though, powdery dry, and there is a permanent high hum in her ears. Her nose, the end of which feels hard as a stylus, still runs, but she has given up wiping it.

  It is Brees’s tail, such a loyal, pathetic, bedraggled thing, that finally makes her move again, although it takes her ages to decide which bit of herself to shift first. Her buttocks are flattened into plates. She tenses a muscle in her left leg. It obeys but scar
cely seems to belong to her. She tenses it again and then drags her foot to the side. That really doesn’t belong to her. She pulls the other one. Her whole body creaks. Pockets of warmth she did not know she was harboring dampen and chill. She feels colder, much colder, than when she was still, but the sight of Brees’s tail keeps up the tiny momentum.

  Eventually she is on her knees and her breaths are like milky pendants in front of her. She purses her lips, then cries out as the top one cracks. No blood runs out to soothe the wound. It remains raw and biting for a moment or two before dulling to the flat ache of everywhere else.

  Gingerly, she extends an arm and touches Brees’s back. Nothing. Not a quiver. She pats him, her breath making bigger pendants that shimmer over him before dissolving. “Brees.” He does not turn. Now she is blasted by hot terror. “Brees! Brees! Brees!” She lifts her fists and pummels his back and sides, shattering the frosted carapace that has fully enclosed him and never ceasing to call his name, demanding that he drag himself back from wherever he is. “Brees! Brees! Don’t leave me!”

  It is as she pummels that she realizes the sky is now a flawless blue. And there is sun. She blinks. The storm has passed. What is she doing under here? She must get Brees into that sun. “Shine on him, oh, just shine on him,” she implores. Unable to get through to him with her fists, she resorts to kicking him, provoking exquisite but frightful pins and needles as the tiny veins in her feet expand. The agony makes her kick harder.

  It is her screaming, however, that finally brings Brees back from the brink. An ear jerks. At once, Yolanda is hopping around, pulling and slapping, yanking and hollering and throwing herself on top of him. By the time she stops, her scalp is sweating, and Brees is shuffling on four stilts down to the river to drink. She follows him into the warm and bursts into tears. Nothing, ever, has been as welcome as this winter heat. In moments, the steam rises from Brees, and in minutes, opening his mouth in a gargantuan yawn, he lifts his leg and urinates.