Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Mother!" Clare cries as the sergeants escort Rachel into the palais. "What has happened? The temple is burning!"

  Rachel says nothing. She walks to her room accompanied by Clare and the maids. As they remove the horse blanket from her shoulders and see the mud stains on her legs, Clare, horrified, orders a bath drawn at once. Rachel counters the order with an impatient wave and lies down on her bed.

  Odors of grass and dark soil fill her loneliness. And when servants extinguish the lamps and the door shuts, darkness closes on her with its soft fires.

  -/

  Erec watches the blaze on Merlin’s Knoll from the woods where he has camped. He sits alone. His men have left, disgusted that the Invaders would poison a holy man in his temple, angry that their chieftain’s son would desire one of their women.

  After the murder, Erec had tried to reach the baroness, to protect her. The Norman sergeants had immediately closed ranks around him and his men. They had come within a shout of drawing blood, and the sergeants had sent Erec and his warriors away as intruders. Erec does not blame his men for abandoning him. His love for this woman, he knows, cannot be justified. His people believe him ensorcelled, and he thinks they may well be right.

  For hours now, he has been lying in the darkness, listening to the wind suffering in the trees, staring up through rents in the canopy at the cold fires in the heavens, trying to argue away his love—or is it just lust?—for this audacious, moon-bright woman. Would he have her if no castle went with her? Would he have her without any dowry at all? Quivering with desire, he knows his depraved answer would be yes.

  Let Howel curse me. Let my father send me out of his sight. I'll have the woman I love.

  On his feet, Erec stares through the trees and clings to his courage. A red cloud squats on the knoll like a wraith of the Apocalypse.

  -/

  Ummu sleeps soundly in a straw pallet at the foot of Gianni Rieti’s bed. Ta-Toh stirs beside him, sits up and chitters. The monkey senses approaching footfalls and lays a paw on the dwarf’s nose. Ummu swipes it away and rolls over.

  Fists pound the door. Ta-Toh screeches, and Ummu and Gianni sit up. The next instant, the door swings open and four sergeants barge into the room, followed by Thierry, shouting, "Seize him before he flees!"

  With drawn swords, two sergeants stand over the dwarf, and the other two open the chest by the window and rummage through the clothing. Ta-Toh barks and spits furiously, dancing about the men whose swords point at his master.

  "What are you doing?" Gianni demands. As he gets out of bed, one of the sergeants pricks his sword point into the canon’s chest, and Gianni sits.

  "Search his litter," Thierry orders.

  A sergeant grabs the dwarf's arm and heaves him off his pallet, then stirs the straw with his sword. He turns away, shakes his head, and Thierry kneels down and thrusts his hands into the ticking.

  "Look here!" the youth shouts and holds up a thumb of black, blistered tuber.

  The guard standing over Ummu takes it and sniffs at it. His nose wrinkles, and he coughs: "Bane-root!"

  -/

  Rachel will not talk. She sits in the bay of her window gazing at golden scales of morning light on the Llan. Clare and Gianni stand in her room and plead with her to free Ummu. Their frantic voices sound inert to her and do not penetrate the thickness of her mourning. She does not know what they fret about and feels relieved when they finally depart, muttering grievously to each other.

  At midmorning, Thomas shoves past her maid. "Grand-mère, I watched the synagogue burn last night," he says with emotion. "Mother told me it was the pyre for the rabbi. I ... I am sorry."

  Rachel looks blankly at him, standing before her dressed in gray jerkin and brown trousers, his white cassock in hand. Since the fire, the voices have stopped. Rachel fears that if she speaks, the deep choir of voices will return. Her silvered profile does not budge.

  Thomas throws his white cassock on the ground before her. "I am done with the abbey," he declares. "Yesterday, while I prayed with the others over the body of the rabbi, Aber the Idiot brought us a stone with the miraculous likeness of our Savior shadowed within it. We all marveled. And Aber called for Maître Pornic. But when the abbot saw it, he smashed it. Called it the Devil's work. But it was not, Grand-mère. I behld the visage of our Savior. Touched it. It almost lived and breathed in my hand. Yet, he destroyed it. He is so afraid of signs, so afraid of the affirmation of your miracle and the rabbi's teachings."

  Rachel's gaze follows the young man talking to her. She has not heard what he has said, though the emotion in his voice reaches her. The thick bones under his eyes that make his stare appear so wide, as though his gaze has fallen from heaven, glisten. He has been crying. She looks at the cassock in its thick folds on the floor, and she comprehends that, somehow, he too has lost his world—adrift like herself.

  "Father, Harold, and Denis have spent the night in the village," he goes on. "They are preaching about the Sacred Visage and the rabbi's teachings. Maître Pornic will be enraged, but they do not care. He has called this upon himself."

  Rachel returns her attention to the sliding light on the river. Silence aches inside her. Where are the dying hymns and the nightmare drift of voices?

  "I am done with Maître Pornic and the abbey," Thomas insists. "The miracle of the Grail has not just changed you, Grand-mère. Everyone is changed by it." He steps closer and peers into her stony eyes, where the river’s sharp reflections cling to darkness like stars. "You were right when you told me that God wants us to live in this world, not flee from it. I thought that was heresy. But this is the world of the final judgment. How we live here touches eternity."

  Thomas lays a hand on Rachel's arm and sits beside her, very close, his heart thudding. Mother has told him that this woman beside him walked naked into the night to set the temple ablaze. Clare dismays that her mother is mad. The Grail has made Ailena young, and the nakedness displaying her youth displays the true testimony of that miracle. Now, at last, he has become thoroughly convinced of her sincerity.

  "I love you, Grand-mère," he says tenderly and kisses her cheek. She smells of smoke, and he lets his face linger close to hers. "I want to tell you now, I loved you as soon as I saw you standing at the portal of Grand-père's crypt. I knew my ardor was wrong, and for weeks I could not bear to admit it to myself. But I feel so compelled to tell you—I love you, as a man, not a grandson. There! I've said it! And I'm not ashamed of it. I know I can never have you, but I will always love you. It doesn't matter what becomes of me anymore, where I go or what I do or what God does to me. It only matters to me now that you know I love you and believe in you with all my heart."

  Rachel looks at him vacantly and sees his yearning face very close. Her hands come up, and she moves her fingertips over his features, feeling the proud jut of his bones, the velvet down along his clean jaw.

  Silence shivers in the hollow of her chest with the urgency to tell him something—though she cannot grasp what. Her hands fall away. A swell of fright smothers the tenderness in her.

  I am alone, she thinks. I am all alone—even the voices of my dead are gone. Grandfather took them away with him. It is just me now, with no one else alive or dead. No one else.

  Thomas sees the fear in Rachel's face and believes the threat of incest appalls her. He stands up quickly. "I am sorry," he blurts. "I know this is a love that cannot ever be returned!" Lurching to his feet, he staggers out of the room without looking back.

  "Never," Rachel says to his absence, and her heart swells at the echoless ring of her voice. "And always."

  -/

  Gianni paces outside the council room where Thierry and the sergeants confer with the baroness. He has despaired since morning, after following the guardsmen to the donjon and down into the dungeon as they carried off Ummu, with Ta-Toh squawking hysterically the whole way. The leather-faced men had ignored the dwarf’s pleas of innocence, and then threatened to lock up Gianni with him if he did not stop d
emanding the assassin's release. The soldiers even threw Ta-Toh into the dank darkness.

  After loud assurances to the weeping dwarf, Gianni had rushed back to the palais, seeking the baroness. But her grief for the rabbi rebuffed his pleas for an audience. And then she was in her bath, receiving Thierry's report on the arrest through her maids. She will not see Gianni until she has spoken with the sergeants.

  Rachel holds up the black tuber that killed her grandfather, presented as evidence by the soldiers. It looks like the charred finger of a corpse.

  "Go," she tells the sergeants and Thierry.

  The guardsmen bow, and Thierry, stiff-faced to keep from grinning exultantly, leads the way out.

  Rachel turns the bane-root about in her fingers and sniffs its acrid potency. She wonders what it felt like to die by this poison.

  From far away, the thought arrives that this root may have served another of Thierry's cruel ploys. Then, she remembers Ummu cornering her and warning her not to deceive him, not to impart lies to Gianni, for he has a soul of glass.

  Would Ummu try to kill me to protect Gianni's soul? In the new silence of her heart, that possibility rings loudly.

  She listens for Ailena. To face Thierry and the sergeants, she has had to imagine the Grail—yet, the memories of Ailena seem frail and trivial to her now. And hard as she tries, she cannot hear the old baroness thinking inside her.

  "Mother, you must release Ummu at once," Clare demands, bustling into the council room with Gianni in her wake. "He is too dear a man to have worked such evil."

  "My lady—" Gianni falls to one knee beside the table where Rachel sits. "You have known my dwarf since the Holy City. When has he been anything more than a buffoon? There is no murder in his heart."

  "Go." Rachel waves the poison root at them.

  "Mother, I have come to know Ummu—"

  "Go, Clare." Her stare flexes, unyielding. "Gianni, stay."

  With a pained expression, Clare departs.

  Rachel summons Gianni closer and presses the stub of bane-root against the crimson cross on his black tunic. "I have spoken with Madelon," she says in a slow voice. "Go to her."

  Gianni's deep eyes look startled. "I would go to her—but she will not have me."

  "Go," Rachel orders.

  "But Ummu—" Gianni presses his forehead to her hand, then looks up at her through his anguish. "You will spare my dwarf?"

  "Go to Madelon now." She watches him through her emptiness, and he drifts away, disconsolate.

  Let the dwarf sit in the dungeon a while, Rachel imagines the baroness counseling in her vacuous meditation. She must strive hard for even this flimsy counsel. The Grail is make-believe. The baroness is make-believe. Only death is real.

  The piece of death in her hand does not hoard its poison but stings her fingertips, reaching through her flesh for her blood. Yet, she holds onto it as if it were an amulet.

  -/

  Madelon returns to the palais from a contemplative stroll in the garden to find Gianni at the door to her room. She had chastised herself all morning. Now, Gianni faces her red-eyed and haggard. "Ummu is in the dungeon," he moans.

  "I know," she says with concern. "My brother Hugues tells me that the dwarf poisoned the rabbi."

  "It's not true!" Gianni asserts, wild-eyed. "Ummu is no poisoner."

  "I believe you." She places a reassuring hand on his arm. "Have you spoken with the baroness?"

  Gianni nods dejectedly. "She is too bereft to see that Ummu is harmless." He runs both hands through his hair. "So much trouble. The rabbi dead. Ummu imprisoned. And you pregnant." Impulsively, he grabs her shoulders and pleads, "Marry me!"

  Madelon pulls him into her room and shuts her door. "Be silent! Others will hear you."

  "Let them hear me. I want you to be my wife."

  "You are a priest! I cannot marry you. Moreover, I am going to marry Hubert Macey."

  "You are with child. God has chosen me to be a father. I will forsake my priesthood." Gianni's dark eyes shine with earnest clarity. "I will speak with your parents today."

  "No!" Madelon's mouth tightens. The knuckles of her fists mesh together under her breasts. "This is not your child."

  "That does not matter," Gianni persists, taking her fists in his hands. "This is your child—and when you marry me it will be ours."

  "I want to be rid of this child." She jerks her hands away from him. "I will marry Hubert Macey."

  Gianni gropes for her, and she steps back.

  "He can never love you as I do," he pleads.

  "You do not know that," she retorts haughtily.

  "Even so. I love you." Gianni feels stupid with need. The face of the Savior burns in his heart. By this, he knows that God will forgive him his betrayal of his vows if he can live his love as truly as Jesus lived His. "I will care for this child."

  "If you care for me, you will help me."

  "How?" His hands open with sincere entreaty. "What more can I do?"

  Madelon’s face softens. "There is a woman who lives in the hills—a witch. Her name is Pig-eyed Mavis. She will have a potion that will rid me of this child. If you truly love me, take me to her. She is my only way out of this grief."

  -/

  Denis, Harold, and Gerald stand with a dozen villagers among the ashes in the stone shell of the synagogue, their hands clasped in prayer.

  Aber the Idiot kicks at the fallen rafters, intrigued by the big flakes of shiny black ash that fall off.

  Legless Owain crawls through the slag, feeling for bone-chip relics.

  And Sian listens past the praying voices, deeper into her blindness, to breezes sifting through the clinkers where the corpse has vanished.

  -/

  "It is my fault," Gianni confesses, face pressed against the iron-barred sight-hole of the dungeon's thick wooden door. He can see Ummu sitting on a rush mat at the far end of the cell in a puddle of amber light from the oil lamp the guards have given him.

  The dwarf listlessly browses through the volume of Plotinus that the baroness has brought from the abbey. At his feet, Ta-Toh picks at scraps of the meal Gianni delivered from the cookhouse.

  "I did not feel worthy of the Sacred Visage. I have decided to forsake my priesthood for love. I was not pure enough to stay with the other knights. If we had stayed, you would not be in such straits. I am to blame."

  "Stop bragging, proud knight," Ummu says without looking up from his reading. "You are troubling Plotinus."

  "This is God's punishment of me."

  "Then God is only a fair shot. His punishment has missed the mark somewhat."

  "Stump, I would trade places with you if I could! You are dear to me as my shadow."

  "I am honored you hold me in such an esteemed light—though you have gauged my stature rightly." He turns the page. "Instead of glutting me with your praise, you would do better to disclose that vile Thierry's hand in this intrigue. Fair Madelon is his twin. Surely, you have her ear—and, I daresay, more. Speak with her and perhaps you will learn of his scheming."

  "I will do that, Ummu. I am already agreed to escort her to a witch in the hills to have the child purged from her. If she knows anything, I will learn it."

  "Then after you have freed the child from its dungeon, you will purge me from mine," Ummu sighs wearily.

  Gianni thuds his head against the door. "I deceived myself to think I could follow the Lady of the Grail. Ill luck led me to her and placed you in this prison."

  "Plotinus thinks otherwise," Ummu says, riffling through the pages. "Consider tractate nine of the sixth Ennead, wherein he reminds us that 'those who believe the world is governed by luck or by chance are far removed from the divine.'"

  "Sadly true," Gianni mutters, turning and pressing his back against the dungeon door. His hand closes over the crimson cross above his heart and wrenches at it. "I have mocked the divine—I have hidden behind this cross. But now, my only shield will be my heart."

  Ummu groans, and Ta-Toh consolingly offers him a g
rape.

  -/

  Rachel sits under shaggy willows in the garden outside the castle. The sun twinkling through the branches creates small, delicate beings of light, which hover in the air about her as she considers the black bane-root in her hand. She has decided to eat it.

  The silence that has floated inside her since her grandfather’s death has become unbearable. Whenever she speaks, she hears herself in its depths. The haunted voices have vanished for good now, gone into the soaring sky with Grandfather’s smoke.

  "Baruch ata adonai," she says aloud, and the words sound hollow. Her faith has never been in words or miracles, only in the trembling trees and laggard hills and the alert wind whispering among them. Now that she is ready to die, she has decided to leave her body here in the soft shadows on the rooty ground, attended by the presences that loved her as a child.

  "Grandfather, forgive me," she speaks to the void within her. "I know that what I do you would say is wrong. But I have finished my work in this world. All that the baroness has required of me has been fulfilled. Her cruel son is displaced. The Welsh have had their grazing lands restored. And her grandson Thomas has been saved from the Church. Now that you are gone, why should I stay? To marry some man I do not love? To wait for Guy to murder me?" She presses the blistered root to her lips. "I will not carry this silence any longer."

  Gilberta and Joyce bound among the foxgloves and marigolds at the margin of the cherry orchard. And little Effie comes careering after. They spot Rachel in the cove of willows and, with laughing screams, dash toward her.

  Rachel drops the bane-root into a pocket fold of her robe and gets to her feet in time to meet the charge of the children through the willow curtains. They caper about her, shouting for her to play with them.

  At first, she resists, until she sees that the black silence within her dims their laughter. Refusing to have her grief poison the world around her, she lets the children tug her from under the trees into the summer sun. The older two scramble into the tall grass on the far side of the willow swale, and Effie pulls urgently at Rachel’s arm to keep up.