The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  Ava make a noise inside her throat.

  She jumps up to grab the head. It is the leap of a mad woman. Last embrace of our last hope.

  When I fall, the stone head falls with me. We crash bruisingly to the footpath.

  Midi stares round-eyed. She clutches her ribs, panting; she can’t believe that meek Ava Mariasdatter — Ava Bingen — has torn a rock from its mooring.

  More than that, now I heave the thing up with both my arms and bash it at the door handle. Bash, dash, crash again: the door groans open. I drop the stone head (let it shatter, I don’t care) and shoulder my way in, shoving against a chest and a chair set there to delay intruders. There’s not much in the chest, and even I can easily lever my way inside.

  As I am about to step over the threshold, I reach back for Midi. I pull her in after, lest the Dark Countess change her mind and abandon me here.

  “Come along — you helped hatch this plan too.”

  We walk in together, fingers wrapped in fingers.

  The hall is murky; nothing’s lit. It’s also cold. I shush Midi (who never needed shushing before) and whisper not to rattle her teeth; Sabine might think she’s gnashing to make a fight.

  At the sound of my voice, there comes a noise above. A cry, stifled. Of a woman or a child? I remember the black cloth hanging from the old third-story window.

  I pray that the sound is a baby, a live baby, as I head for the narrow stairs, dragging Midi behind me.

  “Sabine? Gerda?” I call them again, though they didn’t answer when I stood in the street. Maybe they’ll recognize my voice indoors. “It’s Ava.”

  I hear no specific reply, but the sounds do grow louder as we squeeze up the narrow stairs, winding ourselves around the central spindle and tangling Midi’s fine skirts thereby.

  “I’m Ava!” I fairly shout, and hear it echo up and down the house.

  There’s not much but a name left to the place, I discover as I tug Midi into the second-floor chamber. Where once Sabine and my father occupied a room full of bridal furniture and a tall, thick-hung bed, there lie now a few heaps of junk and a straw pallet by the fireplace, where a thick woman huddles beneath the scraps of a bed hanging that must have been too tattered to redeem against Father’s debts.

  My heart sinks. Nothing of Father left in here; perhaps nothing at all.

  The grate holds the feeblest of embers, and the room’s so cold I can see my breath in the orange light. I don’t bother to stop Midi from knocking her teeth anymore. We approach the heap by the hearth.

  There we find not one woman but two, when Gerda detaches herself from my stepmother and sits, holding the old bed curtain protectively over both herself and Sabine’s gray head. She peers through the smoky light. “Is it really you, then?”

  The place must be too dark for her to be sure, I think at first — then realize that with Midi beside me, gleaming blackly, I might appear like some attendant in the company of Death herself.

  I leave Midi, kneel down. I’m afraid of what I might find out. I touch Gerda’s arm. “Is Sabine dead?”

  “No.” Gerda doesn’t move, either to embrace or to flinch away. She keeps both eyes on Midi, who stands as still as if she really is some dark, silent angel of mortality. “Weak.”

  “I —” I hesitate, reluctant to make it seem we came only for the baby; but then I realize a good stepdaughter would inquire after a half-sibling, anyway. “I heard she had her child.”

  “She did.”

  “Is the baby well?” This and a thousand other questions crowd my tongue. It’s ominous that I haven’t heard a cry or coo since coming in. “Did she have a boy or a girl?”

  Gerda clutches the curtain closer to herself. She’s shivering like a minnow. “A boy. Klaus, named as planned for his father, though the name might well doom him to the same fate. And us along with him,” she ends grimly, looking from Midi to me at last. “We hung the mourning cloth from the window so’s the neighbor boys would think the master dead and leave us alone. Not but what he’ll be dead soon enough — we hear the gossip coming from the street . . .”

  Gerda rambles on, detailing her fears for the future, which are also my own. Midi hasn’t moved in so long that Gerda must have decided she’s just an apparition, an oddity of my life at the palace.

  So, I think, I have a half-brother, another Klaus. One of the four who died was, of course, a Klaus as well. But this one — I pray he not be dead. “Where is he? Is he safe?”

  “He’s here.” Gerda indicates the heap beside her. “Was whining till he heard you bash the door in, then for some reason he stopped. The mistress must’ve stuffed him with her nipple — though she’s not moving much these hours and don’t have any milk. We’ve been feeding your brother what sugar there’s left in the crannies of bags.”

  I clear my throat, delicate as a lady, and peel back the coverings. Cowering beneath the old drape lies Sabine, still blood-streaked and only half awake despite her fear, cupping her hand protectively over a curve that I must take to be a skull. It has been wrapped in a crude form of swaddling, with linen that was probably white in recent past.

  “Health to your soul, Sabine,” I whisper as I reach a finger toward that little head. “And to tiny Klaus’s. Health and prosperity.” I touch the linen; it is cold. “I’ve come with a proposal.”

  QUEEN APPARENT CHRISTINA-BEATTE LUNEDIE, FUTURE BULLEN

  “YOU need a goûter,” he says, acknowledging her fatigue at last. “You’ll feel stronger once you get something inside you.”

  Nicolas must have recognized long ago that Christina-Beatte has no strength left, is surviving only because her ladies and the bones in her gown are holding her up. There may be another princess waiting in the royal nursery, but this one is most likely to mature soon and grant him all he wants. So despite his own delight in prison blood, he will preserve her.

  Christina-Beatte murmurs “Yes” with lips that have gone white beneath their coat of red cochineal. She has witnessed two complete executions now — the actual severings of head from body, the scarlet squirts from arteries protesting the loss of what they spent their lives braiding into — but even her bloodthirstiness has slaked in the favor of a greater, overwhelming weakness that might be consoled with pigeon pie.

  She allows her new betrothed to bear her away to the great hall, where minstrels and dwarfs are ready to entertain while serving men circulate with platters of food and pitchers of wine. There is ever more cheering as the courtiers find their spots at table and lift their glasses to celebrate the couple now married in symbol if not in fact.

  Christina-Beatte’s temples pound. It is like the old days of the nursery and the mercury, the guaiac and antimony and other remedies pressed into the sad voids of children’s bodies. She is going to return to that sickroom, she is sure of it; she will be locked away.

  Lord Nicolas eschews as much ceremony as possible in order to feed his bride. He passes her scraps of meat under the table, and she nibbles them as she once nibbled at pessaries and licked at spoons presented by Maman and Doctor Candenzius.

  Once, when she looks down to accept a shred of chicken, Christina-Beatte meets the eyes of Le Fariné, one of her father’s favorite and most grotesque dwarfs, staring gravely from beneath the cloth.

  Christina-Beatte chokes. But quietly, swooningly, without being sick. She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. Count Nicolas pretends it hasn’t happened, and the two of them make the speeches and murmurs appropriate to a joyful occasion, the ones that Nicolas has written. An in-waiting whispers the words in the Queen Apparent’s ear, and the Queen Apparent declaims them in her reedy voice.

  Yes, Christina-Beatte is growing into her queenhood, and she has some sense of how to behave in public now. Happily; no matter how painfully.

  Count Nicolas kicks Le Fariné away, and the ugly dwarf is not seen for the rest of the festivities.

  “Drink deep! Eat heartily, good friends!” Nicolas urges the diners. “The executions will recommence once we’ve res
tored our strength. And, of course, we’ll resume the rites of betrothal this evening, after the prisons have been purged.”

  Rites? What more can there be? Christina-Beatte wonders wearily as she begins to refill her stomach, choosing mild foods such as sallet and dolphin from the plate she shares with her betrothed. She contemplates the second death she witnessed, that of a Lord Tummler, whose neck was stronger than the executioner’s ax. It took two thwacks to break the part of his spine that ran to his skull, and when that was over, the head dropped with a sound that accented the hollowness beneath the platform’s boards.

  Once he was dead, Lord Tummler’s face rolled to greet Christina-Beatte’s, to bid her farewell. He bore a surprised expression. She watched as the eyelids twitched and the orbs below them glazed fast over, as the soul departed from the body and what lay before her became only flesh, nothing more.

  It is that, she thinks as she forces herself to swallow the dolphin (which is not so mildly spiced after all), it is that moment in which magic lies.

  She takes a sip of wine. She feels stronger. Formidable.

  Ava Bingen may speak “proposal” to her father’s wife, but the wife be fast to say that what Ava wants is not for her to choose but for the man of the house, who at this time be but a baby.

  A baby who be too thirsty to cry any more.

  Ava say yes, what her stepmother think be true in normal circumstance. But since the child can not speak for him self, this Sabine must speak for him, and she must make her decision out of love.

  At this the woman start to weep but with out tears. I think that if we wait some short time we will not have to ask for the child but may simply take him, for she will be dead. It seem simple to me, but I am no part of any family.

  And this idea make me weak, as do the whole reason of our errand, and I am weak any way.

  The serving woman, Gerda, hop up in the pallet and put her arms in front of the woman and her baby. “Every mother loves her child!” she cry. I clutch my gut, the Lump is swimming to the sound of that voice.

  I cannot listen more, I who my life will belong to my Lump and even it may die at any moment, and this time I ’d be miserable. So I tip toe back ward on the fronts of my pattens and do not trip on old rushes that blunt my noise or on my skirts that rustle, and I find the stair and wind my way back down.

  The bottom of the house be even more cold with its windows to the street, but I can be here alone and think as I could never do up the stairs. Also, in this plain home I might under stand how it be that a person with no money can find comfort, if this may some how be possible for me. I wonder, How could the Lump and I live? So I blow the light in to a stub of candle from the last ember down here, and I study this narrow room with no table or chair or cabinet or chest except the one that did block the door and that I open now to find some dried mouse droppings and an under shirt with brown beneath the arm pits.

  I hold it up. This is the shirt that I would have as a poor woman. I would wear a long time be cause linen be strong, much more strong than silk which shatter at a sudden move. And I would not see the brown marks be cause I would have no choice about them.

  I feel the filth up on me. I think to find some wet and use this shirt to scrub me clean of Isabel. So I ope the one door that do not lead out front, and then I am in a strange place.

  It is a big room of glistens and shines. Hooks on the walls to hang wires and a table for circles of glass. They stand tucked between ridges and facing the door. One row, two row, a dozen, more than I can count. And more on some shelf upon the wall. They wink the candle’s little light like a hundred yellow eyes, like a counting-room of coins. Like some poison-auntie magic. But they just be spectacles like such that Arthur wear.

  I hear a cat at the window, first with claws and then miaow. Just one. I once had four that were my own, in that palace made of turquoise. I see her nipples swollen, she be another nursing mother.

  I unhook the shutter and let it in, and the cat streak past in black and white to leap at the loops of wire up on the wall. The night air come in with a moon light that makes the glass circles look more faint, like the ghosts of old ideas.

  “Why don’t you stay?”

  It is Gerda who suggests this, not Sabine, though I know Sabine would want the same if she were well enough to say so. I am the daughter of the house. As such I bear responsibility to look after the other women in it.

  Gerda wraps the shred of curtain a little snugger around Sabine. “You and your friend, that dark person — you could both stay, and then there’d be a family here again. Of sorts.”

  I hear the dry, feeble smack of lips on Sabine’s teat.

  “He’ll die if I don’t take him,” I say. “He’s failing. But at the palace he’ll have milk. He’ll have everything. He’ll be the king.”

  “Unless he’s killed when you try to put him in the Queen’s bed,” Gerda points out.

  I try to “Shhh-shh-sh” her, the way Midi would do. (I wonder incidentally why Midi isn’t doing this herself.) The last thing that might help the baby or the Bingens just now would be an upset to Sabine’s emotions.

  “Poor little thing,” and I could mean Sabine or my brother. “Let me hold him,” extending my arms to touch the chilly heap of flesh the three of them make. “I’d like to hold the new Klaus Bingen.”

  I want this very much, a chance to hold a new-created infant who is not a demon. The hunger in me must show.

  Sabine comes alive again and pulls away. “He’s mine!” She clutches the baby so hard, I think she might strangle him. At last, he wails and proves his lungs are strong. “He’s all I have!”

  “What about my father?” I remind her above the sound of the baby. “He is your husband.” I hesitate, for this is a delicate suggestion. “If you save his life, he could give you other children. And just think,” I conclude, “what a wonderful fate you would be giving this child. Your own child, Sabine, would rule over all of us.”

  She says nothing.

  I wonder if a story might help the situation, persuade Sabine as it persuaded Queen Isabel. Not the same story, but one of substitution and happy endings . . .

  “You see” — I am brave — “it is like with the wife who so longed for a child that she went to the Queen of the Elves —”

  Before I can get far, however, Gerda asks suddenly, “Where’s your dark companion? Has she deserted us?”

  I thunder downstairs, slipping on uneven angles of stone. In order to succeed, the bargain Isabel and I have struck requires two chief elements: the baby and Midi Sorte, who will get the three of us into the palace again. I can’t say that I’ve secured the one yet, only that the other must not abandon us.

  I mutter a prayer to the Virgin, then an incantation: “Midi Sorte, of all the witches! If you are in the house at all, I order you to materialize!”

  I’m relieved to see the shadow of Midi stepping quietly out of my father’s shop. There is the faintest shimmering sound around her, as of actual magic.

  “I — I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I thought you’d gone. I’m sorry I called you — that.”

  She gives one of her famous shrugs, which is the darkness moving against itself, accompanied by more of that shimmering sound. At this point, I think perhaps she likes to be thought a witch, someone with powers rather than someone enslaved. And it seems that she is, after everything, loyal to Isabel and the plan we’ve concocted. A far better person than I am. A friend.

  A cat yowls from somewhere inside the house, though we’ve never had a cat before. It is a ghostly sound. I shiver and clutch myself, preparing to return to that cold chamber and demand that my stepmother hand over her child.

  But in the time that I’ve been gone, it’s happened: Gerda’s set aside her own fears and managed to persuade Sabine for me, or else she’s given up persuasion and plucked the baby from his mother’s arms. For she appears at the bottom of the steps and holds him out, blocking the stairs with what frail bulk she has left.

  “Ta
ke him. Save him. Do your best for us all.” She says it simply, with a bend in her knees as she deposits young Klaus in the crook of my left arm, the one that does not hold the candle.

  My body assumes the curled-over posture learned from carrying other baby brothers over a decade ago. I make a shell around young Klaus Bingen. He feels surprisingly light, just a crisp atom of newborn child, in dire need of warmth and good milk.

  I realize, quite suddenly, that Gerda has not brought him to me from an instinct of self-preservation, or even because she once loved my father. She is doing it because she loves this baby and wants to give him his best chance at life. And as I draw back his swaddling and gaze for the first time at those weak, blindly pleading infant eyes, I know that for all the strangenesses and plottings of the last hours, I love him too.

  I’m struck as dumb as Midi Sorte.

  Mute — for I confess I’d hoped with some part of me to keep it for myself, to start a new life or at least a quest — I slip the ring from my pocket and give it to Gerda. And so simply, the famous ruby of the Bullens becomes the secret wealth of the Bingens.

  FÊTE

  IT is the moment of wildest entertainment, with the prettiest dwarfs dancing the most exuberant dances on the deck of a ship fashioned from one of the gilded swan beds. Everyone is laughing and banging spoons against the table to show enthusiasm; the minstrels must blow and strum all the harder, popping veins in their foreheads and arms, in order to give the dwarfs their music. Even Duchess Margrethe manages to stay awake for this. She laughs with the others — it is such joy to laugh after so much grieving.

  “I didn’t even make a joke,” whispers Lillegry, a golden-haired dwarf, to the others. She is new and uncertain.

  “But now I will.” An old favorite, Wantonesse, prepares to lift her skirts above her head.

  Champignon, with silvered hair and silvered mask, does a handspring to clear her path. He ends upside down on the betrothed couple’s table, causing Duchess Margrethe to shriek and Count Nicolas to glower.