The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  Several times I must double back because a bridge has collapsed or an alley I once knew well has been filled in with a kitchen garden or privy. But soon enough, I am crossing the longest, sturdiest bridge in town and entering the district where I became myself, where the air sings with glass shivering against glass.

  Glasvand Kanal. The glassworkers’ waterway.

  I clack-clack past Helligánds Kirke and see (or believe I see) that my blood still stains the square; then Helligánds Hospital, with madmen screeching out the torments of imagination. It’s just a quarter mile farther to the wind-scrubbed stone head beside my father’s door. Today the glass lenses on its nose shine like moons and the head has increased its lean to the right, like a scholar squinting to recognize a once-familiar face.

  Gerda, our servant, lets me in. She curtsies to me, and I nearly topple her over with a hug. Father embraces me like one he has long missed, and my stepmother gives me a hearty kiss on the cheek. I am the daughter returned from court! They haven’t heard of my demotion. They draw me into the paneled hall and offer me ale and cake like a guest.

  “We have so much news!” Sabine declares, looking about to burst with it. She is even squeezing herself. “Ask your father to tell you.”

  Sitting in a room that I might call mean if I hadn’t been raised to think of it as one of the grandest in our district — painted wood, pictures of Saint Catherine and Jesus, pewter ware on the sideboard — I listen. Klaus Bingen, my father, has another commission for a perspective glass. This one will be even larger than what he ground for Stellarius, and it will be part of the King’s new observatorium atop the flat west tower. He is very proud of —

  Sabine interrupts to announce that she is pregnant.

  “Yes, Ava, you will be a sister again!” Sabine strokes her belly as if it were the subject all along, and Gerda (who I think hoped to marry Father herself) sulks as she refills our cups.

  A sister. I look dubiously at my stepmother, who has always been stout and rosy but is definitely fat and glowing now, though she says she’s only three months gone with child. She’s forty years old if she’s lived at all — rather late to be having a first baby.

  “It’s a miracle,” Sabine pronounces, as if reading my mind. “I prayed and fasted. I took a boat to the green islands and visited the house where Saint Ruta worked his miracles. There’s a lovely little shrine . . .”

  “If it’s a boy,” Father puts in, “we’ll name him Klaus Ruta.”

  I smile weakly.

  “Won’t you like having a brother?” asks Sabine. Her red face is set; she truly expects us all to join in her joy. “You know, in case you never marry and something — the saints forbid! — should happen to your father. You’ll have a protector.”

  Yes, in case I never marry . . . I could return here and keep house for my brother, to whom all this naturally will belong. If he would have me. I remember that splash of blood on the church square and think myself more likely to find a home among madmen. I have no right to jealousy.

  I bow my head and wish them all the best.

  This is enough to satisfy Sabine. “We’ll see him in January,” she says, beaming again. “Klaus Ruta Bingen.” She invites Gerda, whom she usually treats as a mere servant, to join us in toasting the new baby.

  We all draw together and drink once, twice, again. This will be the most welcomed boy in Christendom.

  When we are all a bit topply, my stepmother asks for a tale of the court. “How I have missed your stories!” she exclaims — she who, as far as I recall, never listened to a single one, since she associated them mostly with my mother, who taught them to me. “Tell us about Princess Sophia — was the wedding feast splendid? We did feel so bad for the King and Queen, losing a child like that . . . Was the funeral beautiful?”

  She is as hungry for luxury as I once was, and she will take it in the form of words. No words about Nicolas, of course, though his secret room may well be the grandest in the palace.

  “And tell about the witch’s hollow in the courtyard,” Father adds. “What does Stellarius think it means?”

  Gerda nurses the last drops in the bottom of her wooden cup, her blue eyes bright and eager. All of them want the truth about the court. Their truth.

  I draw a breath and steady my voice.

  “I can’t tell you how beautiful it was,” I say, “because it was all very beautiful . . .”

  I drop the words like rubies.

  I remember, sometimes, the modest glory that was once my family’s, back when we numbered seven. I think of it as I return to the palace: our evening prayers, our New Year’s feasts. A game my father and brothers used to play with lumps of rough waste glass and a pattern chalked upon our doorstep. My hands upon my mother’s knee as it pumped up and down, helping drive the wheel that spun the thread that she would later weave into a dress for me.

  She was telling me a story, no doubt — something about a princess and a ring and a beast, or a princess and a glass mountain and a prince — anyway, about a princess. She was explaining the necessity of the dark forest (she also had to explain what a forest is, as there are none within a stone’s throw of Skyggehavn’s enchained islands), the tests of mettle, the kindness to a repellent creature who might be a fairy or a prince in disguise.

  “You must keep an eye for every opportunity,” she said, with the wheel whirring so fast it blurred into, I thought, a door through which I could pass from this world into the one she’d described.

  I took the opportunity to stick a spare spindle into the door, to test it. I thereby broke the spindle and a spoke of the wheel.

  “Bad girl, bad Ava!” my mother shouted, and she thrashed me so I wouldn’t hurt myself worse the next time. She ended with a kiss on the lips so I would know I was loved none the less.

  I thought her kiss tasted of forest. “I hate you!” I screamed. And just a short time after, there came the Great Sickness.

  I tell myself I have an opportunity now, presented by Lord Nicolas as punishment for my crimes. I must think how to twist it to some good for us Bingens.

  INSIDE THE QUEEN

  TOWARD the end of June, when the sun has just begun to last a little less long each night, Queen Isabel of the Lunedies lies with her knees in the air. Three men scurry intently behind, between, around as they prepare to go inside, under the heavy sheet that covers the all-important space between those soft thighs.

  She waits. Gulps down deep breaths and waits.

  It is now two weeks past the morning her maids expected to see blood on her sheets, and in that time she has been tired and ill, given to vomitus, weeping, and faints. So her husband has ordered her examination.

  Of course, she is still in mourning. Of course, she and the King coupled only that one time. And she is thirty-nine years old. But still. It just might be that her body is cooperating in the quest for another son.

  And how badly such a boy is needed! Now more than ever: For the past month, the Crown Prince has been failing. His sores are deeper than his sisters’, his spirits even worse. No matter how often he is reminded that his duty is to live, he seems to be consigning himself — willfully — to a different fate: sleeping, fretting, fading slowly away. He refers to Sophia by her nickname, the Perished Lily, and has carved a clumsy version of that flower into one lion’s paw of his bed. He begs to be brought down to see the witch’s hollow, which still gapes obscenely in the inner yard, swallowing stones and twigs that the courtiers throw in for amusement. He says he would like to glimpse the inside of the earth that will devour his body, though he knows perfectly well that he will be entombed (if he does die, which he must not) in marble with the rest of his kin.

  Isabel has worn herself out (and Countess Elinor, so devoted) with the feedings and bleedings necessary for the boy’s treatment, and the constant prayers for his recovery. Her husband has prayed, too. In front of all his courtiers, he thanked her for nursing the Crown Prince, then wiped tears from his eyes and retired with stomach pains.
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br />   All of the kingdom is poised for more grief. But today Isabel and the physicians could so easily give them joy.

  “You may begin,” she tells them.

  These are the last words it is proper for the Queen to utter; now she must pretend not to exist, even as it is her body that is explored. Two ladies — the ugly old Duchess of Marsvin and Isabel’s dear, pale Elinor — pull on the strings that hoist the sheet up, and then Isabel cannot see beyond her breasts.

  The men, in return, can’t see her face. In this way, the niceties of social position are observed.

  As Isabel breathes, the sheet swells and retreats, swells and retreats, like the sails that once bore her to these rocky islands. She turns her head to look at her favorite painting of the Virgin Annunciate. The serene surprise on Mary’s face, the reassuring joy on the angel’s. The puddle of light around his feet, more silver than gold.

  “Her Highness will feel a stretch,” Candenzius announces, as he tests her opening with his fingers. She smells the beefy tallow with which he has thoughtfully greased himself. She is grateful to him . . . and to Elinor, who gave her a dose of soothing valerian before the examination . . .

  A woman with a full stomach should be kept calm, the Countess chanted as she held the cup to Isabel’s lips, lest emotions cause her belly harm.

  Isabel should forget, for a moment, her sick children in the nursery. She should think instead of the Virgin and the bounty of her own womb. She should pray.

  God, for I am such a young thing! . . .

  She cannot pray, because Elinor is bending down to repeat Candenzius’s words.

  “Your Highness will feel a stretch,” Elinor whispers. She must think it delicate to pretend that Isabel can’t hear what a man says when she is mostly naked, but she wants to be sure Isabel stays informed and reassured, as if the Queen has not been in this position a hundred times over. Her breath tickles Isabel’s ear; it smells faintly of anise. “This will not be so bad.”

  Poor Elinor, childless herself. Isabel reaches for her hand. The cool white fingers slide into hers with an agreeable pressure. “Squeeze as hard as you like,” Elinor says.

  Duchess Margrethe offers a hand as well, but it is so twisted with age and rheumaticks that Isabel shudders and drops it. She squeezes Elinor’s soft flesh, her delicate bones. She finds strength there.

  This is the first time Candenzius has served as a baby-bringer; before him, it was Venslov, and for her first two pregnancies (miscarriages), a midwife. So Isabel cannot guess how much of a stretch he means, how much pain she is going to feel. She knows only that Candenzius will examine her, and Venslov will record his findings on a wax tablet, later to be transcribed into ink and paper that will become part of the royal archives. She imagines Venslov squinting at her — all the doctors looking — stylus poised and ready. The official historian is also present, but behind a screen; he is not allowed to look directly into the royal treasures.

  Candenzius’s hand worms inside. It is not so bad until he pokes at the bottom of Isabel’s womb; then she can’t help but jump. Whether this is in pain or in shock she is unable to say, for her entrails feel at once hurt, surprised, and at the same time numb to the whole business.

  With his other hand, Candenzius presses outside her belly, feeling the shape of her through the layers of fat and loose skin that have settled in her middle age. Isabel is ashamed, but kind Candenzius’s voice never wavers.

  “Venslov, make a note: Her Highness is somewhat larger on the right side than the left,” he pronounces, and Elinor bends to repeat it.

  “Larger on the right than the left.” She adds an interpretation: “A good sign for a son.”

  The physicians surely must overhear, but they choose to ignore her. By this, Isabel concludes that they also think she’s carrying a boy. Whether a man of medicine believes in the Galenic two-celled womb (one side for a prince, the other for a princess) or Paracelsus’s seven-celled version (three male, three female, one in center for a hermaphrodite), it is always boys on the right, girls on the left. Isabel’s wheel has spun seven times, with the seed landing only once on the right; it is high time for another boy.

  She can’t stop herself from smiling, at the same time as she feels an inexplicable sorrow — as if she actually wants another girl.

  When Candenzius speaks now, it is in Latin. The words sound like long songs: Placenta . . . Plaga . . . Chancre . . . Monstra . . .

  Isabel holds very still and remembers the babies that have grown inside her. How some left her body before shaping fully: bat-blind eyes, fishy little hands, snaky spines. Tiny monsters no bigger than one of Candenzius’s fingers.

  Elinor whispers, “I’ve said a prayer against witchcraft.”

  So often the Countess expresses the very idea in Isabel’s mind. If it were proper to speak just now, she would say thank you. Instead, she smiles bravely.

  As if from far away, Isabel hears snoring. The Duchess has fallen asleep on her feet.

  Candenzius’s hand continues to roam — very little pain now, only a dullish sense of expansion and nausea.

  Isabel holds her breath and gazes at her painting till the black-and-white floor of Mary’s bedchamber tilts and throbs crazily, out of rhythm with Candenzius’s probings. She wonders if she might vomit. A tear rolls out the corner of her eye, and Elinor’s fingers grip her even tighter.

  The room is so hot that Venslov’s wax tablet must be dripping toward the floor, like the blood that Isabel feels leaking from her now. Or maybe what she feels is melted tallow. It is not the baby. Definitely not the baby.

  Everyone knows she is going to have a baby, a prince, even if the doctors have not actually said the words.

  “Tell me it’s perfect,” she says aloud, breaking the protocol that says a queen must not speak now. “Tell me it’s a baby.”

  As one body, the three men jump away. The ladies recoil, too, as if Isabel has committed some great transgression — broken wind or made water on the other side of the sheet.

  “Your Highness!” the Duchess exclaims (she whom surprise has in fact caused to wake and make water inside her skirts).

  Candenzius’s hand has slipped right out of Isabel’s thighs. She feels its absence as a coldness accompanied by an itch.

  “Perhaps the Queen would care for a draught,” he suggests.

  Isabel wants no such thing. “Elinor!” she calls. She tries to sit up, but of course she can’t. She reaches instead for the lady’s elbow, grabs a handful of satin sleeve, and pulls her down.

  When Elinor’s ear — shell pink, with downy white fuzz just over its opening — comes close enough, Isabel whispers fiercely, “Make him say it’s a baby!”

  She lies back, exhausted, and is unconscious before she gets her answer.

  In our northern kingdom, the days are as endless in summer as the nights are in winter. Temptations abound at these moments of extremes, and sin runs rampant. So why have I not uncovered any useful sins in the court?

  I need something to tell Lord Nicolas — some bit of news, a well-founded suspicion, anything. He may decide, after all, to have me dismissed. Above all, I don’t want the other punishments that Nicolas Bullen metes out.

  I feel as fragile as the sugar cherry that melted between my breasts on Princess Sophia’s wedding night, as stupid as the cow to which the Countess once compared me. I am no miller’s daughter; I produce nothing of value.

  One afternoon as I walk ’round and ’round the inner yard, hoping to overhear something good, a pile of actual straw sparks a memory: In actuality, the miller’s daughter does not turn the straw into gold herself. When the king tells her that she must spin and marry him or else fail and die, it is a hideous dwarf who transforms her rude materials and demands the first baby as reward.

  I must, then, be both dwarf and daughter. As observant and as clever, if not as beautiful.

  That evening with Lord Nicolas, I make my mind a blank. Into blankness, I think, some story may flow, and from there to my lips.


  “Ava Mariasdatter Bingen,” he says from his chair, as I wait to learn what will become of me tonight, “what news have you found for me at last?”

  “Not much, my lord,” I confess, and then correct myself: “The nurses and servants have been speaking of the hole in the courtyard.” My back is stiff, but I can’t stretch it more until I receive Nicolas’s permission to move.

  “Ah, that.” He yawns elaborately, like an actor. “The King’s engineers will have that pit shored up soon, and you’ll be trotting back and forth across it before you can say cabbage. You must offer better than that if I’m going to keep you.”

  Cabbage, I think. That is likely to be part of the apron wearers’ supper. A flavor I’ll be tasting all my life.

  “Some say the hollow is a sign of evil in the court,” I offer. It’s true; this morning as I lay in the aprons’ dorter and tried to sleep, I heard a couple of ladies’ maids speculating about what might have opened up that stinking hole. “I heard someone call it Satan’s close-stool. As if the devil is shitting out sins.”

  Nicolas barks a laugh. He stretches his fingers so the ruby ring sucks up its gout of light, and he decides to use the hand to give me a pat on the head. It’s as if he’s rewarding a well-behaved but not particularly favorite dog. Then he yawns again.

  “And what else?” he asks. “There must be more.”