Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Did you see our Savior?"

  "No. I saw only the Grail and the tongues of flame wagging in the air about her. Then, it was over. The Grail disappeared. The flames and the luminous cloud were gone. And she was young. I wept. We all wept. I was not worthy to behold such a miracle, to feel the warmth of the Presence, to smell the fragrance of heaven. I was not worthy. Why did God choose me?"

  Maître Pornic regards the young canon carefully and, even in the dark, sees the sincerity in his mien. With an expression of profound sorrow, he lays a narrow hand against the side of Gianni's face, and his touch is bright.

  Gianni sits up straighter as the hand falls away. "I have changed, padre. The miracle has changed me. I lust as much as ever. Horror of horrors—I have even desired the baroness herself! I have locked my desires inside my heart. I will not sin again. I have learned to fear the Lord."

  "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," the old priest quotes the Gospels.

  "Padre, you are a true holy man. Have you ever witnessed a miracle?"

  In the dim light, the bony highlights of Maître Pornic's face seem to glow. "Yes, I have seen many miracles," he says, slowly. "And, if you like, I will show you one, the greatest one of all. You must come with me to the hilltop and stand with me under the great cope of stars. And then soon, if you can bear the darkness long enough, you will see the sun rise."

  -/

  Dwn stares down at the sleeping baroness. The crone is too excited to sleep in the couch that has been set up for her at the foot of the great bed. For hours, she has been sitting at the edge of the large feather Maîtress, watching the young woman breathe, her eyes darting wildly under her closed lids. "Servant of Birds," she whispers. "You have come back. God has sent you back to us, Servant of Birds."

  When the presence of the miracle becomes too great for her to bear, Dwn rises from the bed, walks to the door and opens it. Falan Askersund lies at the threshold. His watchful eyes glint in the dark. She walks past him, and he does not stir.

  Down the passage, she finds her way to stairs she would know well even blind. No one occupies the great hall or any of the small chambers she passes on her way to the large front door of the palais. It opens soundlessly, and the huge blue stars and bloated moon stare down at her as she wanders across the shiny flagstones of the inner ward.

  Though he does not recognize her, the inner gatekeeper lets her pass: She wears a silk bliaut and has obviously come from the palais. The bailey looms empty. A lone dog drifts out of an alley between the shops. The guards on the parapet pay her no heed. At the outer gate, the porter, who is old enough to know who she is, asks where she is going.

  Dwn holds up her hands, knobbed as thick roots, and the porter opens the gate. The long walk across the exercise grounds, through the barbican gate and along the great garden road shines with beauty in the glossy moonlight. On the toll bridge, she holds up her knurly hands again, and the bridgekeeper lets her pass without a word.

  The village sleeps. Cats flit among the squat houses chasing rats. No one sees the crone in her silk gown as she strolls along the dirt street. Above the stand of alder and ancient elms at the end of the village, bats whirr, circular blurs against the lunar glow.

  At last, Dwn comes to the dung pile and stands a long time before it, gazing softly at its voluptuous mass. The small round windows gaze back. The slanted door of bleached wood opens with a cry, and she enters the acrid darkness. Among the familiar contours, she finds her way to the little hearth and kneels there. She reaches through the darkness and clutches the crucifix of lashed sticks. Placing the cross in the hearth, she opens her tinder-box and strikes a spark.

  Dwn’s eyes wince as the crucifix catches fire and all the wretched shapes of her hovel leap at her. In the glare, she sees again the measureless old age of her bent hands and the delicacy of the filigree cloth at her wrists.

  Then, the glow begins to fade as the cross falls to ash. The terrible incongruity of warped fingers and white silk startles her, and she has almost lost the opportunity to send her prayer off with the flamelight of the crucifix.

  As the glow fades into the straw-tangled wall of dung, she prays fervently so that the light of the most holy thing she owns will carry her message to God, "Thank you, Lord. Thank you for returning her to me—the Servant of Birds."

  Garden of Wilderness

  Angels fashioned the Grail out of an emerald that dropped from Lucifer's crown as he hurled into the abyss.

  Lunel, Gascony, Autumn 1187

  Treachery shone in the colors of the season. The brassy oaks and feverish maples pulled inward, away from the world. The brown eyes of chestnuts spied from among rotted leaves on the spongy floor, their lids hairy and somnolent, knowing what was to come. Gusts of mauve asters and wild jonquils burned brightly among the grassy verges, where vipers hid and pebble-sized spiders hung their webs. A lightning-split tree bubbled with mushrooms bright as embers, and poisonous gills rippled on the deadwood. Overhead, in the snow-valleys of the Pyrenees, purple bundles of thunder descended with that afternoon’s storm.

  -/

  For now, the morning was blue and brisk. A girl named Rachel, who knew all the dangers that the colors of the season signified, sat peacefully on her secret knoll. Twelve autumns had left her serene with knowledge of the terrain where she had grown through childhood.

  Soon she would be a woman. Her older sisters had explained the mysteries to her the winter before, and when in the spring her body had begun the awkward changes that would complete her, she experienced no alarm. Not like one of the village girls with whom she played, who thought her first blood God's punishment for missing Mass.

  Rachel savored her time on the knoll. She worshiped here. Among the black currants and pink lychnis, she felt God's presence more strongly than in the temple or around her grandfather's sacred scrolls.

  When Father found her sitting dreamily in the gooseberry shrubs behind the cart sheds and the empty hay wains, a crown of hydrangeas in her hair and foxgloves twining her arms, he scolded her for squandering her time and called her a pantheist. Since then, she worshiped creation only in this secret place.

  As she had gotten older, she found less opportunity to come here. She had more responsibilities in her family, first as an assistant to her older sisters, who managed the household with Mother, and lately with duties all her own.

  Her charge as of this past summer entailed overseeing the maids who laundered the linens and garments. That duty proved light: The washerwomen were a jovial lot who sang as they boiled the dirty clothes and lifted the steaming apparel onto the scrubbing boards, where they scoured them with pig-bristle brushes. They did not need her to supervise them, but Mother insisted that all her daughters know the workings of the household. And the washerwomen did not mind her company, for – though a playful child – she had always been willing to get her hands dirty.

  Mother frowned on playfulness in young women—managing a house so that domestic concerns did not trouble the men, whose work maintained the well-being of the family. Mother wanted her daughters to be good wives. Rachel, the youngest of the daughters, got less attention, especially lately with Mother intent on the wedding of the eldest in the spring. After that, Mother would have more time to attend to her younger girls' training, and Rachel knew that this would probably be among her last visits to the knoll.

  This high place had remained secret even from her curious brothers, who had explored all the lands of the estate but were most content playing in the fields and creek beds. To escape them and her meddlesome sisters, Rachel had long ago trekked up the hillsides of wild mustard and squirmed through dense hedges to find this place.

  Over the years, she had discovered dry rills cut by rain in winding paths among blue-green sedges and silver-branched thorn shrubs with their tiny white flowers. She alone knew those secret paths that led unhindered to the crest of the knoll.

  There she encountered, scribbled with ivy and groundsel, large blocks of weather-
worn masonry carved with fauns and serene, muted faces. These toppled stones alone had survived from a Roman shrine that had stood here a thousand years ago.

  When she had first discovered them, she had sat for hours, day after day, studying the uncanny silences of those lovely faces. These frisky satyrs had been holy to another age. The sweet, moribund fetor of the knoll's vegetation must have smelled as dense long ago when these images appeared sharp and the faith in them alive. How strange it seemed to her then that glories could die.

  Standing atop the fallen shrine, Rachel could survey the large expanse of her family's estate, from the vineyards on the cypress-spired terraces to the orchards by the brown swerve of the river Garonne.

  The stately house where she lived with its high-peaked tile roof twinkled with birds in a circle of shimmery aspen. Tiny blue figures, high on the steep hillsides above the thatch-roofed village, swung scythes. Down below, they tossed long swaths of hay to cure in the sun, and, farther down, the little figures carried sheaves off in donkey carts.

  In the orchards, peasants came and went among the trees, harvesting apples and pears to make cider and perry. Billows of perfume drifted up the hillside in waves, and Rachel breathed deeply of her happy solitude.

  -/

  Bordeaux, Autumn 1187

  They appeared first in the marketplace, drawn by the medlar fragrances of the fruit stalls. The fervent voices of the merchants and shoppers died down at the sight of them. Their faces looked charred, and they shuffled, trousered in dried blood.

  Their flesh hung like rags from their bones, glossy and raw where steel had bit them. Barefoot, bound in the shreds of their banners, without weapons or steeds, they had returned to their homes from the deserts, clinging to each other, leaning on broken spears, tattered fingers reaching for food, slobbery mouths hanging open, speechless with suffering.

  After a stunned silence, the people recognized the disfigured semblances of their kin. These men the previous year had taken up the Cross and gone to the Holy Land.

  Appalled shouts pierced the market. Mothers screeched the names of their absent sons, and the husks that had returned shook their heads and wept black tears.

  -/

  "Hattin," the broken mouth said. "They all died at Hattin."

  Heads hanging in shame, the surviving Crusaders listened to the one who had strength left to speak. Behind aged eyes, wise with pain, wicked with memory, the story shaped itself, and the broken mouth groped to speak.

  The townspeople had carried the soldiers into the nearest tavern and soaked bread in wine to soften it for their cankered mouths.

  "Hattin?" one of the merchants asked. "Is that village near Jerusalem?"

  "It is a vale—in the desert. We marched there in July, to meet the Saracens. In July, we marched—" The wicked memory could not fit his mouth, and he met again the leafless skyline, the dune-tops trembling like the roofs of ovens.

  In a rage of madness, another of the survivors laughed with a sound that was no more than a putrid sob. "In July! The largest army ever—marching to fight the Saracens in the damned hell-fires of July!"

  "When the heat had crippled us, they came down from the dunes—they came down—they came screaming—"

  The furies in their blackened faces silenced them, and they sat staring through deafness, exhausted with what they could not say.

  -/

  In dreamlike silence, the crowd marched to the church of Saint Seurin, where the Jews hid. The bishop himself met them at the steps in full vesture. "Go back to your homes," he commanded.

  "Give us the Christ-killers and we will leave!" a voice shouted from the silent crowd, and murmurs ruffled through the throng.

  "Go back to your homes at once!" the bishop replied. "King Henry and our Holy Father the Pope have forbidden the Jews to be harmed."

  "Who will pay for Hattin?" someone cried out. "Only blood can answer blood!"

  "Take your rage to Jerusalem!" the bishop called. "Go to the Holy Land and take Christ's home back from the Saracen!"

  At a sign from the bishop, the clop of horses echoed on the cobbles, and soldiers from the fortress advanced slowly on the crowd, driving them off.

  Fires blazed that night from the houses of the Jews, not only in the city but in the villages among the low hills of Larmont on the far side of the Garonne. The rage of Hattin marched south, burning its way back to the Holy Land.

  -/

  Rachel knew whom she would marry. The arrangements had been made years ago with a merchant’s family in a neighboring village. Wealthy as her family, they were learned. The boy's father thrived not as a merchant but a rabbi – and a friend of her grandfather’s famous cousin Judah, the renowned physician and linguist of Lunel. Rachel had met the family several times at festivals, and they seemed not much different from her own family.

  Sitting on the ancient masonry atop her knoll, Rachel lately spent more time wondering what married life would be like. Of course, she would be happy in her marriage. She always strove to be happy. Her grandfather, the wisest man she knew, often said that happiness serves as a gift we give to God.

  She looked upward at the distant slopes of the Pyrenees, where her grandfather had his cottage. Long ago, when she was yet a small girl, he managed the estate as the patriarch. Then, one day, that responsibility became her father's, and Grandfather let his beard grow and had a small house built for himself high on the flank of the mountain, where, closer to God, he could study the Torah and the Bible.

  Rachel discerned Grandfather's white cottage on the amber slope of the nearest mountain. How could one live there among the phlox and the ethereal deer and not be holy? Soon, he would be coming down, to spend the winter in the great house with his family and to share all the wisdom he had learned during his summer retreat.

  What would Grandfather say about love, Rachel wondered as she poked with her cloth shoe at the furry twigs of a dead shrub among the ruins. A brown whisper of spore vapored from a cluster of mushrooms, trailing a meaty aroma into the languorous breeze.

  Rachel had heard the troubadours singing of true love at the annual fair. Recently, that was all she had been able to think about during her visits to her secret place. What would being in love feel like? What man could inspire such powerful emotion in her?

  None of her brothers' friends did, neither did the rabbi's son to whom she was betrothed, though she knew he would be a good husband. Mother and sisters had laughed at her queries about romance, and her father had assured her that such ideas existed as a gentile madness, not suitable for her, a daughter of Abraham.

  From the village below, the clangor of bells whispered across the valley. Rachel climbed to the top of the masonry heap to peer down into the drowsy village. Today was not Sunday, so the liquid sound of the bells did not announce worship or a wedding. Perhaps someone had died.

  Once, with her peasant friend who thought her first blood God’s curse, she had visited the village church. Standing in incensed dark, staring up at the saints with their long, narrow bodies, she felt a trespasser. Or was God's thought here, too? Another question for Grandfather, though she had not dared ask him.

  Rachel noticed that the peasants on the hillsides and in the orchards had stopped their work. Something was amiss—and with that realization she recalled that the church bell also rang to warn of fires and brigands.

  No smoke smirched the blue morning, and her heart panged with her mother’s continual warning never to play far from the great house—wandering mountebanks and gypsies frequently stole children and disfigured them for display as freaks at the fairs.

  No danger showed from her high vantage. The quilted hills gleamed serenely, smelling of wild mint and cut hay. Clouds soared, and butterflies wobbled in the air. Yet, the delirium of the tolling bell sent a deep chill into her chest.

  -/

  A pulpy moon hung in the day sky, and Rachel noticed it as she picked her way down the hillside toward the village. She paused among the punky stems and waxy l
eaves of dead chalice-flowers to peer up at it.

  How serene that vaporous face looked in the teal of heaven. Under that benign gaze, nothing really serious could go wrong down below.

  Now, she could hear the commotion of the village inside the clanging of the bell, and it sounded like a festival. The Christians had more festivals than she could remember—feast days, they called them, to honor their saints. Usually the faithful celebrated these big events in the larger cities, and Rachel heard about them when the field workers came stumbling back to the orchards, oftentimes still reeking of wine.

  Lunel celebrated only one saint’s day raucously, the feast of the Pentecost on the seventh Sunday after Easter, commemorating the spirit of God coming down as tongues of flame to the followers of the Messiah. On this day of the village’s annual fair, hucksters came from all over Gascony to hawk their wares to the accompaniment of troubadours and jongleurs. Her family called that holiday Shabuoth, which celebrated the revelation of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.