by Susann Cokal
We meet in his paneled chamber or some stony corner of the courtyards. We embrace. His lips are soft, and over and over he presses them to my brows, my cheeks, my neck. My own lips.
His kisses coax the stories of my past, even my growing-up years. With just a few questions, I tell him about my mother’s sweetness and my four mischievous brothers; how all of them died, one by one, during the Great Sickness when I was six. I describe the room we shared by Glasvand Kanal, in the house with the spectacled stone head; the feverish way the light jittered over the walls when we were too weak to close the shutters; and how when they’d been taken to a faraway green graveyard and only Father and I were left, that room became my bedchamber alone, and the light made me wake morning after morning to the memory of sweats and nausea and purges. I tell him about needle school and learning the stitches — satin, chain, couching, crosses, knots — and the hat I embroidered to help Father impress the King’s astrologer.
“The constellations of the zodiac, with Cassiopeia, arranged to predict fortune for one born in Scorpio,” I say.
“I’ve seen Stellarius wear it.” Grammaticus nods approval. “It is fine work.” He pats my fingers and assures me that soon I might hold a needle again. Soon — that means when Grammaticus has an audience with the King, who is more interested these days in reading the stars (through my father’s device) than hearing the chronicles of his court that Grammaticus is compiling.
Grammaticus confides that he is composing more than one such tome. There are histories both official and unofficial — one of the court decrees and displays, and one of secrets that he keeps for himself; for as he says, secrets shape events even more than what is widely known. It is for this history of secrets and private lives that he wants my stories.
He is right about the importance of secrets. Of course I say nothing about my time with Lord Nicolas. And even as I hope to fall in love again, I hold my tongue about Jacob Lille. If he has other informants, Grammaticus probably knows that tale already and wants to hear one that hasn’t already wound its way into the district mortar. Or, if I am very lucky, he doesn’t know about Jacob at all, only about my liaison with Lord Nicolas: the story that I gave him, but not the rest of it, our unusual graspings and spendings. He doesn’t seem to mind this part of my life. I think it intrigues him. He and Nicolas were nearly children together, on the green island where Nicolas’s father had his lands. Nicolas was just enough older that when it was proposed that the two boys study together, as they were at the same stage in mathematics and languages, Nicolas refused to take lessons with him out of pride.
“Tell me about it,” I say breathlessly, exhausted with my own talk and with a hammering in my heart. Grammaticus may know secrets about Nicolas that I can use. “Tell me about your island.” I still have not seen a forest or even a large plain of grasses or a grave, only the kitchen gardens of the city.
So I find out who he is: Born to a gentleman of sorts, an estate holder married to the daughter of the old King’s chamberlain, Arthur Rantzen (as he was known then) had a happy childhood. His family owned two good horses and enough money to educate their only son, who was marked out for scholarship from birth. He distinguished himself at the university of Sorö, which he finished at age seventeen (my age now!), then came to Skyggehavn to be the tutor of assorted merchants’ sons and wards. His parents died somewhere along this way: his mother after childbirth, his father of apoplexy. They left debts; young Arthur was penniless.
He remembers the Great Sickness of 1561 as a time of opportunity, when he roamed the streets in his flapping black robe, writing of the various ways in which townspeople were stricken, recording their lives and deaths and the heroic prayers spoken in the chapels and cathedral. He liked the common people, respected their fears and lauded their courage. He thought a record of their thoughts would be of interest, perhaps a useful tool in governing them. So when the wave of Sickness receded, he used all his coins to bribe a guard to let him through the gates and into the presence of King Christian IV. He presented the aging King with his account and was shortly named court historian. It is a position that the current Christian has been happy to preserve and amplify, until Grammaticus achieved the distinction of a Latin name and the office of tutor to the Crown Prince (on those rare occasions when the Prince is well enough to be drilled in verbs and numbers). He has surpassed any of his family in education or influence; he believes he has even surpassed Nicolas in knowledge of the court.
I don’t dare ask what he knows about Nicolas himself — another orphan (as rumor says) from that green island, the one who has recently been given the post of State Secretary. There’s a bad taste in my throat when Arthur speaks of him. I ask instead for more about himself.
“But my life I know,” he says modestly. “Let me have more of yours.” He is ravenous for stories.
So I begin again. After months of loneliness, it is as if the episodes of my life are a hot spring; he moves one rock and lets them burst to join the flood of stories within him.
Also, he makes me wax ever more metaphoric, even though for once I’m not telling tales of witches and princesses.
“Do you wring these secrets from everyone?” I tease. “Will you use them for your chronicles?”
He says gravely, “I may,” then takes my hand in his. The ink stains bleed from his fingers to mine, and I almost believe that somehow my thoughts and memories — mine, not those I observe among the courtiers or cobble together from gossip — will find their way into history.
Nicolas, meanwhile, seems to have given up his interest in me. My one tale of Countess Elinor has satisfied him — or else disgusted him; he does not send for me. Perhaps he doesn’t need to, if he hears Grammaticus’s reports. Or perhaps he fears what I might learn about him. He is in constant company of the King.
This should make me cautious with my suitor. It does.
At the end of each careful account, when my tongue is tired, Arthur strokes it with his tongue, presses my ribs to his ribs. But neither of us attempts to take our caresses further. We are both cautious in this way as well.
I imagine a conversation on the subject: Why don’t you make love to me as other men do? I ask, and he answers, I would very much like to do so. He kisses me, and when I still hold back from passion, he asks, Does your heart live elsewhere? I think wistfully of Jacob Lille but hold my tongue, for don’t I want — so badly — a new man, one who will not vanish? And I think it is a matter of time, then, for Grammaticus to keep courting me with poetry and metaphor, until I begin to like and trust it; and to allow himself a degree’s further liberty at each meeting; until my heart expands to embrace him and my body follows, and we belong irredeemably to each other. Why not?
But this conversation does not take place. Grammaticus seems content to love me through my life’s story and not its fleshy cushion.
Eventually I do ask, one evening in the courtyard, “Why don’t you press for more?” and he answers, “Not till we can plan to marry.”
I wonder if this is his version of a proposal. I feel a little sick. Glad, of course, but . . . Jacob. “How can we plan that?”
Grammaticus does not look at me, rubbing instead at the ink stains on his fingers. “We might plan it if I ask the King. He has to grant permission before any officer of the court is married.”
“I thought that was required only for lords.”
“And intimate functionaries. It would be a grave offense if I betrothed myself without asking His Majesty first, even if the bride brought me as much glory as you will.” He takes an obvious pride in the thought of this potential offense, in being considered important enough to commit it. At the same time, I wonder how I’m supposed to reflect well on any man, and I worry that Nicolas has spoken to him. I am on the point of asking if he believes the reports that Nicolas killed the rest of the Bullens when Grammaticus adds, “I have to earn the right to a wife.”
“Well,” I say, “how can you earn it?” I think I’m more curious now than em
otional; I want to know how the court works for men in his position. “What does the King want from you in particular?”
“From us,” Grammaticus corrects, with an ink-smudgy tap on the point of my nose. “He wants good reports. Useful information. We must help him order his kingdom, from servants to seneschals. Make ourselves as indispensable to him as we are to each other.” He hesitates, then says shyly, “You are precisely the wife I should have at court.”
My practical part thinks his ambitions are too high — I can’t imagine becoming indispensable to royalty, unless it is by means of information about Lord Nicolas that the man himself would suppress. But I urge my more feeling side to take control, and I promise to do as my lover suggests. I allow myself to hope for that kind of power; it’s the only way I’ll replace the memories of Jacob Lille’s spidery bed with those of another.
“Well, then,” I say, “it’s back to the nursery for me. I’ll let you know what the children eat for dinner and how many of them vomit it back up.”
“Yes.” He nods earnestly. “Please do that.”
Because she brought me to this man, who gives me the shimmery hint of a happy ending, I feel generous toward Midi Sorte. Perhaps I can look past her tongue to the woman inside. She seems quite nearly my age but must have seen far more in her life than I have. I think I might be her friend; she has no more friends than I do, meaning that each of us has just one and he’s in common.
So, on an afternoon when we are both released from the nursery to sleep, and the early autumn chill is sharper than expected, I creep into her cot and pretend it is for coziness.
When she feels me next to her, she shudders like a caught fish. The bed straw crackles.
“It’s hard to come from the nursery on a cold day,” I explain chattily, “when we don’t have the advantage of a fireplace here.”
This is a week in which damp monthly cloths drip in a corner of the long dorter, plinking into washbasins full of more rags put in to soak. It’s not so cold that they freeze, though that does happen some nights.
Midi rolls onto her left shoulder, so she’s perched on the very edge of the cot. She pulls up her blanket and nudges something toward me with her foot.
I look down. It’s a stone, a warm one.
“How clever,” I say. “You’ve heated a rock in the nursery fire and carried it here.”
She stares at me so long, I really believe she is trying to speak to me with her eyes. I feel awkward, thinking how easy it is for me to waggle my tongue and make speech, when such a thing is impossible for her. I remember Lord Nicolas’s threat — But be careful elsewhere, or something might get your tongue — and I ask, “Does it hurt?” I stick my own tongue out of my mouth and point to the tip. “Does it now, I mean — I’m sure it hurt when it happened . . .”
Midi Sorte sits up abruptly and pushes a long, hissing breath out of her nose. She grabs the stone from the bottom of the cot and heaves it into my hands.
“Saints and stars!” I drop the stone on the floor and blow on my palms. They have already turned a tender red.
Midi lies back and smiles. She holds up her hands, red palms toward me. Showing without words that she is not a person who lets herself feel pain.
I flee her cot for the one where I usually sleep, shared with a laundress who leaves a scent of onions and lye on the sheet but is otherwise unremarkable.
There were a time I had one tongue, and I used it to speak from red sky to red sky, a straight stream of talk that ran the length of the sun.
Little girl, have a care, said poison-auntie. That tongue might tie you up in knots one day. She give me honey to make my voice sweet, but there never were a sweetness in me. I prefer a taste of rot.
And so it happen. When poison-auntie die, and I run out the gate behind her body and wander to the docks; when the men see my oiled skin and gold arm-rings, they pounce and ask me, What is your name? Who is your father? Where have you come from, fairy-child?
I use my tongue to shout at them. I shout and call them names, I cry for some one to help. I cry for poison-auntie. They take the veil from my head and cram it in my mouth, and they tell me to be silent. But I think there be only danger in a silence, so I scream behind the cloth until my throat too raw for screaming. And it make no matter be cause I ’m loaded in a ship. One arm chained to the wall and the other to my feet.
I am sick for longer than I know.
And then come the sail-captain. He like to hear me scream, in the fog on the water that he say would take me to my fate. He take my bracelets. He take my clothes and lie me on his bed and roll his dirty coins over me, for he say I going to make him rich. That be his fate. He put coins on my eyes, in my ears, my nose, my mouth, and down below both front and back. He count them careful on the way in and out again, and hit me if they slow to return.
By time of the selling, I am use to being a coin-purse and too tired to scream. I watch him sell me; the coins are gold. I watch the next man swive me; I am too tired to feel it. He say that I taste sweet; he make me say his name. Some month later it be the last word I do say.
When his wife first hear it from me, she take out her knife. She drive it in the table between us, where I ’m shelling nuts to make a cream will beautify her skin.
“You are not to speak of him,” she say.
And some thing in me, some thing small and stupid, make me say the name again.
She call her husband, have him hold my head while she take her curling tongs and pull my tongue. I cry to let her know it hurts. But this be not enough, she pick up the knife I were using. She start halfway, and she slice my tongue as if to make her dinner. I choke on blood. I vomit and it burns. I take to bed with fever and wish that it would kill me.
She seem to have some mercy then, or so her husband think. She give me salt and water to cure the wound, and in one week she pull me from my bed. I return to dress her beauty.
Now you are mine, she say. Now you will keep my secrets.
It were true, he never want me after that. He look sick when ever he see me. And then he go to join the war and come back broken.
It is true too, I know her secrets now. And I never tell them, even to the ink and paper that I hide inside my bodice. But also I do n’t forget how it feel to have a secret of my own, and a past, and think to shout it out with the power of poison.
Ava Mariasdatter is as the women who smile at poison-auntie while they plot to kill her. She bring a nest of hornets to my heart and I can not feel any but the sting.
But I know some things about her too. So I wrap the belt of Gorma’s old wax doll around my wrist, for fortune, and I go to the King’s new Secretary’s closet. Some crowded, creaky wooden room in the main palace where I hand his man a paper: There be some thing to tell you. From Countess Elinor’s nurse Midi Sorte.
There are not many people at court that can talk with out there be some one else in the room to observe. The King’s Secretary, Count Nicolas Bullen, be one such person. He send out his servants and clerks so we are alone. And there is no thing for any one to hear any way, since every thing I say I must put on paper.
He do n’t seem surprise to find I write. He read my words as if there be never a thing new in the world.
Some one lie to you, I write. My fingers jerk from hornets, and the letters wave across they page, but I get that sentence out. Then I know to wait in a way that make him ask me:
“Who? Who has lied?”
He behave as if he think this very amusing, the idea of a lie told him. But his eyebrows knit together, and his eyes burn like my father’s when he trying to guess which of his wives betray him with a eunuch. I know from the Countess that he do n’t like to be surprise. So there is some thing new after it all.
I write, The needle you save from prison. The sewer you make a nurse.
He do n’t speak, wonder (I think) how I know all this. He can guess the name now, but I write it any way and get some pleasure: Ava Bingen.
Still he say no thing; he go as s
ilent as I am. That is fine, I think, I can wait as long as he for words.
I hear a ticking in the wood upon his walls. Some thing dying with the start of autumn.
Finally he ask, “What, precisely, did she lie about?”
I smile, but inside, where he can not see. I write, The arrest that make you Secretary. The lie that you make History. The Mistress whom you make misery.
I wait a breath, in case he will say some thing. He do not. I write, Ava invent her story to entertain you, but you take her for sincere. You punish the Countess, but you should punish Ava instead. She is an eel that slip through the ear and feast her self on brains.
And now he know what I know. But he be not grateful for it. He make some low grunt like an animal in the yard, and he grab at my skirt.
The hornets swarm my heart. I see what I have done.
I see it only, and only for one moment, cause be I do not let my self be my self while it happen. I close my eyes, I press both halves my tongue against my teeth. My hornets curl up tight.
He fuck me hard, this Secretary of the King. He do it from behind, with me on my knees like a cow. He have a lumpy thing that hurts. He spit on me to ease it in, but it go easy only for him. He do n’t take the usual way, go far back instead, where I feel every knob and every tear they open in me. He want me to hurt.
Arthur tell me once that this man he knew from child hood be odd about his prick. That he sew stones inside to bring him pleasure, bring him health. Now I do believe, the nobles do mystery every day.
And now. No such mystery, more of what come all ways.
When he done, the thing be sticky in my blood, and blood drip off the lumps that move beneath his skin. It drip down over Me.
