Servant of Birds

by A. A. Attanasio

  Clare wails at the sight of her bedraggled mother and takes the horse's bridle to guide the steed to the inner ward. Rachel, seeing pigs rooting in the alleys, pulls on the reins.

  "Why are swine in the castle?" she demands.

  "Guy threatens us, Mother. We brought in the pigs for food against a siege."

  Rachel looks about at the numerous faces watching her expectantly. Several hundred people—the whole castle—throng about her; yet, even in their midst, she still feels the reverberations of embracing emptiness. "There will be no siege," she declares.

  "Mother, we have told Guy early today we would fight him before surrendering your castle."

  "And our scouts tell us," Gerald adds, "Neufmarche’s men are marching here even now."

  "Then send a herald to declare my return," Rachel says. "Tell him that his mother would like to come and go as she pleases without his trying to steal what is hers."

  Laughter courses through the crowd.

  "What of Bold Erec?" someone shouts.

  "He found only my face young," she retorts. "My heart is too old and gristly for his taste."

  She nods to Denis, and he nudges the horse through the crowd. On the way, Rachel notes William nervously chewing the corner of his mustache. Beside him, Madelon hangs her head forlornly.

  Rachel scans the gathering. "Where is Canon Rieti?"

  "I will tell you later," Clare says discreetly.

  Thierry shoulders closer. "The false-faced priest has dishonored my sister. I demand high justice."

  "Where is he?" Rachel asks.

  "In the dungeon," Gerald replies.

  "Release him at once," Rachel orders.

  Clare clutches her mother's leg and asks hopefully, "Ummu, too?"

  "Yes. I will meet with them in the palais. I want Madelon there as well—with her family."

  Rachel rides on, and the crowd parts. Only Thierry stands his ground as she passes, watching her with eyes hooded as a falcon’s.

  -/

  Branden Neufmarche stirs uncomfortably in his saddle as the herald from Castle Valaise rides off. Behind him, on the enormous meadow fronting his fortress, his army mills, readying a caravan of wagons laded with supplies and horses caparisoned for battle.

  Roger Billancourt paces on horseback among them, shouting orders. Guy Lanfranc budges against Branden’s personal mounted guard, trying to get through to see what message the herald has conveyed.

  For a moment, Branden entertains the idea of asserting his command and ordering the army to stand down. Then, Guy blusters through the helmeted horsemen and approaches Branden. "What news from the herald?" he demands, annoyed to have been held back.

  "Bad news," Branden admits. "The baroness has returned to her keep."

  "And Bold Erec?"

  "Somehow she has removed herself from him." Branden’s chin folds glint with sweat, and he casts a disparaging look at the glowering sun. "Now, at least, we shall be spared a sweltering campaign."

  "Bloody hell!" Guy glares. "Who knows what secret arrangement with the barbarians the bitch has won by her loins? Why else would they have set her free? We strike now—hard and swift—and be done with her before she opens her castle’s gates to the Welsh as wide as she spread her legs."

  Branden plucks at his lower lip. "It seems a great risk to take with so little known."

  "What more do you need to know?" Guy sweeps his arm at the meadow of mailed soldiers. "They know enough to fight. They know they'll win and they'll have crofts of their own, each of them a little baron with their own peasants. There's land to be had—or to be lost. Will you take or lose it?"

  -/

  "Then it is war." Rachel sits in the chair of state, muscle-sore from her wandering but refreshed by a lilac-petaled bath and clean robes. The chaplet of presence glints among upswept hair that has been brushed free of nettles and washed in fragrant soapberry water.

  "War," she repeats, fear of disaster churning in her. She wants the fear to expand into the emptiness of all she has lost, though it just twists inside her. "Is that what you want?" She looks around the table at Gerald, Denis, Harold, Thomas, and the several sergeants invited into the council chamber by the knights.

  "None of us wants it," Gerald says. "But Branden Neufmarche has assembled armored forces outside his fortress, and Guy is among them with his warmaster. Our scouts report they are bivouacked by the oak glade in the disputed pastureland between our realm and Branden’s."

  "How long will it take them to reach us?" Rachel asks.

  Gerald looks to one of the sergeants, and the soldier answers, "If they decamp at dawn, they will be at the Llan by noon, my lady."

  Rachel presses her fingertips together, stares into the emptiness they hold, and pretends she holds the Grail. What to do? she asks the sacred chalice—and no answer budges past her fear. She looks up and asks, "What should we do?"

  The knights exchange perplexed glances. "Before Denis returned you to us," Gerald replies, "your knights and sergeants asked themselves that very question. We decided to defy your son. But now, my lady, the decision is entirely yours."

  Rachel shakes her head. "No. I have no heart for war. What objection is there to submitting to Guy?"

  Gerald and Harold lower their eyes. Denis looks at them and then at Rachel. "Baroness, if we submit, you will be deposed."

  Rachel smiles weakly. "I will return to the Holy Land. Those of you that wish may accompany me." She looks pointedly at Thomas.

  "Grand-mère," Thomas says, "what of your edict from heaven? The Lord has returned you to the world."

  "To kill?" Rachel frowns. "There was no anticipation of war in my vision."

  From the back, a sergeant speaks, "Mistress, the villeins will suffer if you submit to Guy. Already they have lost their swine. They are angry about that. And their anger will provoke the baron."

  "And what of the rabbi?" Denis queries. "Canon Rieti claims that the bane-root that killed our rabbi was purchased from Pig-eyed Mavis by Roger Billancourt. That is murder! Will we submit to murderers?"

  "The rabbi would not want vengeance," Rachel murmurs quietly and sits deeper in her chair, feeling heavy.

  "Not vegeance," Denis proclaims, "but justice. Vengeance belongs to God!" The white-haired knight speaks with uncontainable emotion, his lifelong love for Guy now warped into hatred. The knowledge that his old friend has defied God with a holy man's murder enrages him.

  For without God, there is only the arrogance of men, he thinks, and his lifelong denial of sexual desire, the ache of his effort to match Guy’s impotence with continence, serves not love but only Guy’s pernicious ambition. The waste of his devotion has sickened him. "Let us face Guy on the field—and let God arbitrate."

  "God is not a weapon," Rachel replies.

  Despondently, Denis pushes back from the table. "Lady, you have already decided. There is to be no battle."

  "No." Rachel stares with half-opened eyes at the men before her. No voices or distant hymns stir in her. Only silence answers the dread in her, as if the whole world where she sits stands empty, waiting for her to fill it.

  And if she refuses, it belongs to Guy.

  No, she decides and says aloud again, "No. David Tibbon was murdered. If we submit, then his death serves his murderers. We will not submit."

  The men, who had sat locked in the stillness of her indecision, turn to each other, animated, muttering encouragement.

  Rachel breathes deeply, confirming her strength to flee no more before those who have killed her family. She rises, and as the men stand, declares in a strong voice, "It is war."

  -/

  Madelon gasps when she sees Gianni Rieti enter the council chamber, the flesh around his eyes mollusc-black. She pulls away from her mother’s grasp and runs to him, throwing her arms about him.

  Rachel silences Hellene’s protest with a gesture, begging patience. She summons the couple closer. "Where is your father and twin brother?" she asks Madelon.

  "They would not b
e present," the young woman answers.

  "Father is ashamed," Hugues pipes up, "and Thierry too angry." His mother shushes him, and he scowls at her.

  "Then they have no faith in love," Rachel says and looks to the pair before her. "Are you both prepared to swear your love for each other before God and all others?"

  Embracing, Madelon and Gianni smile at each other and nod. Hugues wrinkles his nose, and Hellene puts a hand over her open mouth.

  "Gianni Rieti, you will forsake your vows to the Church?"

  "In my heart, lady, I already have."

  "Then I will write to the bishop at Talgarth myself and recommend that your penance be light, for you have been called by God to serve Him in a way more difficult than solitude and prayer. Now you will meet God in the harshest discipline of all, fulfilling the demands of love."

  -/

  The banked colors of sunset fill the tall, tapered windows of the palais room where Clare and Gerald sit with Ummu at a banquet table. Servants hover nearby, ready to refill the crystal decanter with apricot wine and replenish the silver trays with mint-jellied meats and salad trimmings of cucumber and wormwood.

  Ummu, curly hair coiffed, attired in the silken finery that Clare made for him during the tourney, eats with gusto. Ta-Toh, dressed in a fresh green tunic, sits beside him on the table and helps himself to cherries and grapes.

  Gerald, too, eats. Clare, alone, is too distraught. "Do you think Guy will actually attack us?" she asks the dwarf.

  Ummu defers to Gerald for a reply, and the old troubadour casts him a look of fatalistic certitude.

  "War," Ummu says around a mouthful, "is the cage where men are happiest." He hastily swallows. "I saw enough of it in the Levant. But I'm only half a man and so had twice my fill. I think your brother still finds it savory."

  "But to attack his own castle!" Clare wails. "His own mother!"

  "She is not your mother," Gerald says, delicately placing a sliver of meat on a pastry with his knife-tip.

  "Gerald!" The whites show atop Clare's eyes. "Are you with Guy?"

  "Certainly not. But we have all observed that this woman is not the piss-and-vinegar baroness we loved in fear."

  "The Grail has changed her." Clare turns to the dwarf. "Isn't that so, Ummu? You saw the transformation yourself."

  "I did, indeed. And it did baffle me." He stuffs a pastry in his mouth to keep from saying more.

  "I do not doubt the miracle," Gerald adds. "But I do think she has been changed utterly."

  "Uh-er-ly," Ummu concurs with a packed mouth.

  "She is not your or Guy's mother anymore," Gerald says. "She has been made into another woman, a woman with a different soul. Guy is not unjustified in challenging her right to rule."

  Clare tilts her head back, eyes wide. "Gerald, are you saying you will not defend her?"

  "Yes, Clare," he answers gently. "I will not defend her. I am saying that when I take the field tomorrow I will be going to battle to defend you and our children—not the baroness."

  Clare’s umbrage lifts. Her eyes bat with surprise, and her plump face wobbles toward tears. "Oh, Gerald—I'm so frightened."

  Gerald leans toward his wife and puts his arm around her. "We are all frightened this night, my dear. It will go better tomorrow for those of us who know what is worth the cost of our lives. As for me, that could only be you."

  Ummu shakes his head ruefully, and Ta-Toh pats his cheek consolingly and feeds him a cherry.

  -/

  An owl cry announces the night. Rachel kneels on a reed mat among the ashes inside the burned husk of the synagogue. Denis Hezetre and Harold Almquist kneel beside her, and, behind, sergeants and villeins, kneel or sit on the toppled masonry.

  Gianni Rieti, in a blue tunic like Denis' and Harold's, with the emblem of the Swan emblazoned on it, reads aloud from the Bible. At first, he had demurred when the others asked him to read, claiming not to be worthy. The knights, the sergeants, and the villeins, who have all become accustomed to the dignity of his Continental accent, insisted. And now, as he reads the Psalms asking for their souls to be delivered from the battle, his own soul speaks clearly.

  Afterward, the worshipers depart while the evening star still gleams above the ragged forest. They return to the castle and village to rest and to make peace in their own hearts.

  Rachel lingers in the dark, watching the light of the quarter moon slant through the empty windows of the temple and gloss the black slag, where David's ashes lie buried.

  Tomorrow, she speaks to the spirit in the fallen rafters, your ashes will still be here. But where will here be? Will it still be mine? Or was it ever mine?

  Rachel looks overhead at the solitary stars, paying special heed to the void between them, holding them in their places. That same emptiness, she learned in the wilderness, holds everything in its place, even death.

  Grandfather—you are right. This is not my place. It was my madness brought us here. If I had accepted the dying of my family as much as their dead bodies, if I could have believed as you do—as I do now—that everything is perfected in death, then I would have taken from my family's defeat what they left me—the emptiness only my own life can fill. That sacred emptiness. The emptiness of the Cup. If I had understood then how it holds everything, how it purifies every death, no matter how horrible, if I could have seen how it is the reply to all our imploring, I would have been myself. There would have been no need to be someone else. Daniel Hezekyah would have had me, and our lives would have completed themselves in their proper place—in the Promised Land.

  Rachel bows her head to the silence that carries the owl's cry, the rustling wind, and her sorrow.

  -/

  Denis waits until the evening star sets before approaching Rachel. "Come away now," he advises.

  She shakes her bowed head. "Go, Denis. I shall be all right here."

  "And if Bold Erec returns?" Denis sits on a rock beside the mat where she kneels. "No. I will wait here with you."

  She looks up from her prayer and sits back on her haunches. "For so many years you have loved Guy Lanfranc. How can you possibly face him tomorrow on the field of battle?"

  Denis' jaw pulses. "It is true I loved him, my lady. But I think now it was not him I loved, it was his strength. His strength has been my weakness, my blindness. Only now, as I've gotten older, I've found the greater strength lies not in the muscles of men but in their spirit." He sighs remorsefully. "All these years, I loved what I thought was noble in Guy. He had saved my life and paid dearly for it, and I called that strength noble. But his is a hideous strength after all, which is noble only in battle and which battles even God."

  For an instant, Rachel thinks she hears the baroness' spiteful cackle, and a chill finger touches her between the shoulder blades. What hatred that old woman bequeathed her son.

  "Then are we right and just in this, Denis? Are we right to meet Guy in battle?"

  Denis peers at her in the dark and remembers when she had stood naked here before him and the other knights. "How unlike you you have become, Ailena! In earlier days, you would have been so outraged, you'd have sent your men to attack Neufmarche's camp at night. If nothing else, your miracle has shown us God's power to heal and transform."

  "You've not answered my question, Denis."

  "Is there an answer?" Denis' pale hair shines with moonfire. "Remember what you said before we built this temple, when we were wondering what to do with our poor? You said love proceeds from wrong to wrong. That is my answer. Tomorrow Guy will take the field out of hatred of you. Branden will be there out of greed. But we—we will fight for love."

  -/

  Thomas Chalandon loiters among the ritual stones on Merlin's Knoll until Denis Hezetre steps out of the ruins of the synagogue. The blond, bearded knight takes up his post atop one of the moonstruck rocks, searching for scouts or signals from the castle. Thomas waves to him as he enters the temple, and Denis nods back.

  For a while, Thomas stands in the doorway, watc
hing his grandmother in the silvery darkness. He knows she sits on the far side of a decision that he had thought impossibly beyond her. He had not believed she had the old strength, the will, to choose for war.

  God lives in each heart, he had reminded her at the council meeting.

  God bleeds on every battlefield, she had replied resolutely.

  "Grand-mère," he says softly. When she looks over her shoulder, moonlight glints off the tracks of her tears, and he wishes he could snatch his voice back and slip away. She beckons him closer and wipes her cheeks and eyes. "Do you weep for tomorrow?" he asks, sitting on the mat beside her.

  Rachel has let her tears flow for her grandfather and the rest of her family, killed not by God but by men. Even so, she nods.

  "Have you forgotten, it was you who said we can find God in all of His creation," Thomas says. "Then we will find Him tomorrow as well, won't we?"

  "God—" Her mouth bends in a numb smile.

  "I believe He will be there, Grand-mère. Since throwing off my cassock, everything has opened around me. He has jumped out of the holy writings and the sacraments. He is truly everywhere, as you say." Thomas takes her hand and feels a flicker of attraction as he gazes into her young face. "Grand-mère, when I told you of my desire for you—it is true— There is ... the most strange and remarkable familiarity I feel in your presence that I can't explain. Nor can I express it—well, certainly, I've expressed it wrongly. But the desire is so strong to be with you, to share your presence, to hear your thoughts. Surely, there is no sin in that. No sin in desire, only in wrongful actions."

  Rachel removes her hand. Her mouth opens to speak, and nothing comes out. The deception is too cruel. She manages to mutter, "Poor Thomas—God is a sickness." She turns away, unable to look him in the eye.

  Bewilderment plays across Thomas' face.

  "We are the cure," Rachel says finally, in torment. "Is it not ironic? God is an ailment people must heal."