“Tell me what it is like to die,” I answered.
He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. “You experience something similar every day,” he said softly. “It is as familiar to you as bread and butter.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is like every night when I fall asleep.”
“No. It is like every morning when you wake up.” He searched my face, touched it gently with fingers so cold they burned along my jaw, my temple, my lips, burned me to the very core. “But to know that is never enough. Keturah, I have abdicated my claim upon your soul. Come, I must take you home. Do you not know you have defeated me? That you have tricked my heart into loving you? Do what you will, marry whom you will, go where you will. You shall live to be a great age, and you shall not see me again until life has pressed its hand so heavily upon you that you wish to see it lift.” He stepped away from me and offered me his hand to lift me to the saddle.
I realized that I held my life in my own arms, then. I cradled it, felt its warm weight and the breath of it. But I had come too far. I saw that the forest was more beautiful than the village even with its bright paint, that the forest’s silence rang more lovely than Beatrice’s singing.
I felt my life grow heavier in my arms until I could not hold it anymore.
I stood very tall. “Sir, here is my wish: that you take me to wife.”
The breeze stilled, the birds stopped their song, and the trees seemed to bend and listen.
“You have determined you would marry for love,” he said.
“I love you,” I replied.
The trees breathed around us, sighing and singing and whispering. “Can I believe what you say?” Lord Death asked.
“I will tell you the end of the story,” I said. “The very end, the truest end there ever was. Once there was a girl—”
“And such a girl,” he murmured.
“—who, long before she was lost in the wood, loved Lord Death. Last year it snowed until June. She did not care, for love of him.
“When the hungry deer and their cold babies came wandering into the town that blackthorn winter, she did not begrudge them her tulips, which they ate stem, stalk, and bud. She did not begrudge them all the yellow of her stolen spring. The hope of yellow must be nothing to the taste of it, she thought.
“In fall, she knew it was Death who sweetened the apples. He made her see the sun in a blue sky and hear the trees in a spring wind. He made her see how much she loved her friends, for all their trouble, and how much her grandmother loved her, and oh, he made her love the breath in her lungs.
“She knew she had never been truly alive until she met him, and never so happy and content with her lot until she was touched by the sorrow of him.”
He lifted his hand as if he would take mine, and then he did not. “Keturah ...” He dropped his arm.
“You, my lord, are the ending of all true stories.”
I moved to touch him.
“I will not let you go with him,” said a voice behind me.
“John!” I cried.
He burst from the bushes, vibrant life shaking the very air around him. His face was pale, his jaw set.
“I thought it was a fairy prince after all you were running away to, Keturah. I never thought—but it does not matter.” John faced Lord Death. “Let her stay, sir. If you love her, you will let her stay, for I will make her a manored lady.”
“John.” I held up my hand. “John, stay back.”
“In my realm, John Temsland, she would have the powers of a queen,” Lord Death said.
John took a step toward him. His hands fisted up, then opened, then fisted again, as if they did not know how to fight such a foe. “I heard that you have a pirate heart, but I did not know until now how black it is,” he said, his voice low and shaking.
“I love her,” Lord Death said, and his endless eyes turned to me.
“If you love her, why would you take her to your dark dwelling? To your hell?”
Lord Death looked at John now, and there was pity in his eyes. “There is no hell, John Temsland. Each man, when he dies, sees the landscape of his own soul.”
“I am not afraid of hell or of you!” John cried, taking another step closer.
And truly, Lord Death, in that moment, seemed to be nothing to fear, a dark and beautiful man only. The lightning went out of his eyes, and one shoulder shrugged. “Of course you are afraid of me,” he said. “I can take the two things you value most—your life and your love.”
John took another stride toward him, and I could hear the rage in that one step. He drew his hunting knife from its sheath. The wind lifted dust from the forest floor, filling my eyes with tears.
Lord Death raised one eyebrow. He drew his cloak aside a little, and the gloam multiplied out its folds. Night shied and whinnied.
“John,” I said, my voice shaking, “will you kill Death?”
“No,” John said to me, though his eyes remained upon Lord Death, “but if he takes you, I will follow.” He turned his hunting knife backward, to point at his own heart.
I put my hand out to steady him, just as he had steadied the hart’s mate that day in the woods that seemed so long ago. I felt my hand tremble, and with all the effort of my will I stilled it. “Don’t you see, John, I must go with him.”
The knife did not waver.
“John, I will try to tell you—” I kept my voice as even as I could, to calm him. “Doesn’t Lord Death own my every breath? Doesn’t thinking of him make me glad of a single day? John, I—I love him.”
“How can you love Death?”
How could I explain that many times in my life Lord Death had walked with me, that he was inevitably a part of my life, my intimate, bargain or no, and that he had always been and must always be my companion, my soul-and-heart love. He had steadied me before—how many times? How many times had I thought I had escaped him, when truly it was that he had not yet claimed me? How often had I felt the power in his arms, power enough to change the course of a river, to bring down a mountain, to spin or stop the world?
At last I said, “His voice is cold at first, John. It seems unfeeling. But if you listen without fear, you find that when he speaks, the most ordinary words become poetry. When he stands close to you, your life becomes a song, a praise. When he touches you, your smallest talents become gold; the most ordinary loves break your heart with their beauty.”
John turned his eyes away from Lord Death then, and looked at me as if he had never known me. He blinked his eyes as if he were awakening from a bad dream. The knife point touched his heart.
“Stop him!” I commanded Lord Death.
“I cannot stop him. If he wants to follow you, he will. But—”
And then, though we did not hear him, we saw the hart step from the trees and into our small clearing.
He was so close we could see ourselves reflected in his great round eye. The muscles in his chest quivered to be so close to humans. John looked at him, his mouth agape. None of us moved for fear that he would bolt. It seemed that he looked at John as much as John looked at him.
“He makes you want to live,” Lord Death said quietly to John.
John looked hatefully at Lord Death for the briefest of moments, and then at the knife he held in his hand.
Surely all the angels of heaven smiled when John’s eye was drawn again to the hart. The hart took a step closer to him, and then slowly lowered his stately head to the ground as if he were bowing. When his head was completely lowered, he began to nibble at mushrooms.
John reached to touch the stag’s antlers. His face forgot Lord Death, forgot me as well, and soon his right hand forgot to hold the knife and dropped it to the forest floor. Then Lord Death touched him, and John fell unconscious into his arms. Together we laid John comfortably on the ground. Lord Death nodded to the hart, who turned and stepped silently into the trees.
“He sleeps only,” Lord Death said to me. “His father will find him soon, for the ha
rt will lead him here. They will find you, too, and take you home.”
“They will find my body,” I said, “for I will go with you.”
“You have no dower,” he said. “Live, Keturah. Go home.”
“But I do have a dower,” I said plainly. “This is my dower, Lord Death: the crown of flowers I will never wear at my wedding.” I could not stop the tears that filled my eyes.
He knelt on one knee before me.
“The little house I would have had of my own, to furnish and clean. That, too, is part of my dower.”
“I will give you the world for your footstool,” he said.
“And most precious of all, I give you the baby I will never hold in my arms.”
Then he folded me in his arms and wept with me. At last I laid down my sadness, laid it on the forest floor, never to have it again. Together we mounted his tall black horse and rode into the endless forest.
CODA
Being a collection of endings, every one happy.
Was it true, Naomi? Was it the end that must be?
But I am sure there are other endings that you would like to know.
Beatrice, for example. Beatrice sang in Choirmaster’s choir, and in his heart, for many a long year. And though her voice was that of an angel, it was said by many that it was love of her husband that gave her wings. She bore many children, all of whom had her small nose and who became musicians in their own right. She died before her husband, who promptly went back to making the saddest of music and joined her in death not a long time later.
Gretta and Tailor moved to be near the king’s court, where they bought a big house with a great door that Tailor painted blue. Gretta quickly forgot which were her children and which were Tailor’s. Living to an extraordinary age, she mourned them all equally as she buried her husband and, one by one, her children. In this suffering she found the best sort of perfection—the kind that never demands it of others.
Ben married Padmoh after all, and while it cannot be said that they were happy together, it can be said that they both lived comfortably and fatly, and died just the way they wanted—of food. Every one of their four sons broke with Marshall tradition and married for love.
As for young John Temsland, he grew to be a great and beloved lord, and the king held him up to others as an example. John married the king’s niece and loved her sweetly, and it is said he denied her nothing save her ongoing wish to hunt in the Temsland forest. That he was so adamant about this was a source of curiosity to her all their days, as was his wont to dream of a night and call out the name Keturah. But there were no other puzzles to him, and they were happy, as were their people.
As for Grandmother, when the fair was over, and when she came to know what I had done, she went into the garden and picked a large ripe strawberry, and then walked into the forest a long way.
“Oliver Howard Reeve,” she called, standing there in the cool of the forest. “Oliver Howard Reeve!” she demanded again.
And soon, because I asked, Lord Death allowed her husband to come to her.
“Sybil,” he said gently from the bending willows.
“You have all left me behind,” Grandmother said, with the slightest hint of a sob in her voice.
“Ah,” he said, “but someone has to be last.”
And so they talked together of all the big and small things of life, and soon Grandmother’s complaint became a thing of laughter, and she gave him the bright red strawberry and he gave her a lily-of-the-valley, and he took her hand and brought her through the woods to the meadows and the mountains. And oh, how we rejoiced over mountains together.
As for the hart—he lives to this day, as does the story of Keturah and Lord Death as it is told around the common fires of the great city of Tide-by-Rood.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some books come quietly—they are intimately the writer’s own, and even the editor need only touch it lightly before it is ready to be shared with readers.
Some, like this one, come with much help from others, and thanks are necessary. I wrote the first few pages of this book in a desperate attempt to fulfill a page quota while in my MFA program. My advisor at the time, Brock Cole, said, “There’s a book in there. You should write it.” When a writer of Mr. Cole’s stature says you should do something, you are wise to comply. I’m glad I did.
I wish to thank M. T. Anderson and Jane Resh Thomas, who nursed along subsequent pages and encouraged me to see it through to the end.
I am very grateful to my typist and dear friend Valerie Battrum, without whom this book would still be sitting on my desk, a stack of hand-scribbled pages. She is always among my first and most valued readers. I am indebted also to Stephen Roxburgh, Katya Rice, and my daughter Sarah for their editorial expertise.
Thanks go to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for their timely financial assistance.
Finally, I express my love to my youngest sister, Lorraine, who died many years ago of cystic fibrosis at the age of
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Coda
Acknowledgments
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
Keturah and Lord Death Page 16
