The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  “He suffers terribly, Your Highness,” Candenzius says on a note of conclusion. He politely pretends not to see the smile of glee on Isabel’s face, or else he ascribes it to her delight in her son, now being swaddled by the dark nurse who has taken Countess Elinor’s place.

  When Isabel says nothing (speechless with pleasure), Candenzius continues: “But you will be relieved to know that the Queen Apparent — that is, Princess Beatte — is not presently being blamed for the accident. The Duke and Duchess of Marsvin say it resulted from some sort of game they played during their courtship. The dagger being one that he gave her himself, Your Highness, in order to protect her virtue until her wedding night. She may simply have misunderstood the circumstances . . .”

  “Are you accusing my daughter of stupidity?” Queen Isabel asks with something like sharpness of tongue, a quality that has not been noted in her since the children began to appear. “Of course she was preserving her virtue — this was not her wedding night, and she should not have been put to bed with that man.”

  “I’m sure Count Nicolas had no intention of consummating — not with the entire court there to observe. It was ceremonial only. But if you would allow me” (Candenzius seeks escape from a conversation beyond his diplomacy), “I may bring in Your Highness’s councillors, who will explain far better than I can . . .”

  “Yes,” Isabel says, serene again, holding out her arms for Baroness Reventlow to fill with the child, now neatly swaddled and sobbing himself scarlet in the face. “Yes, do send in my councillors, all of them. We must prepare decrees clarifying the succession and excusing Beatte from that ridiculous betrothal. Perhaps we should arrest Count Nicolas as well. Yes, send the councillors and —”

  “Your Highness!” Doctor Venslov, old and jaded as he must be, and disappointed in his own career in court intrigue, breaks into her stream of words. He has just tightened the sheet over the royal parts again and feels he must speak, if only to protect the Dowager from her own ambitions. “Count Nicolas is bleeding heavily. Our messenger tells us that the Duke has had trouble stanching the flow. It is a most terrible wound, and there is no saying what may happen. At the very least, the Count will lose the use of his leg.”

  “But I have a solution,” says Isabel. Once again she has popped her nipple into the little boy’s mouth, and even the physicians who know her body so intimately are forced to look away out of a mixture of decorum and, truth be told, ill feeling at the unseemliness. So no one is able to read Isabel’s face when she says, “Yes, I have a solution. That black nurse there” — and she seems to gesture toward the woman known sardonically for some weeks now as the Dark Countess —“send her to Nicolas. She will know how to take care of him.”

  In the puzzled silence, the baby’s lips smack on the Queen’s teat.

  “That woman was the children’s favorite. She always did know how to quiet them, even when they were having the most dreadful fits,” concludes Isabel. “She will do the same with Count Nicolas.”

  Let it be recorded that upon hearing these words, the dark nurse curtsies toward the bed, behind which the chronicler hides and watches every movement on her face.

  The nights in this month are not longest of all; that consuming darkness belongs to days before Christmas. But at any season, some nights feel eternal. And now, as I watch Midi march out of the Queen’s inner chamber to succor Count Nicolas, I am inevitably led to the everlasting night that follows the brief sun rays we call our lives. How will I spend it? Who will be beside me?

  Not, I hope, the monstrous little worm in his wrapping of fur, the creature it is my task somehow to spirit away while Midi restores Nicolas’s health and Grammaticus makes his last notes on the state of the Queen’s womb. And yet, at the moment, this demon seems my most likely companion: for when I am caught with him, we shall both be destroyed as evidence of sin, crime, witchcraft — whatever the councillors who control the Queen will call it. Is there any hope of saving Father, much less myself? Dubious, but still I might pray that complicated Fate will step in, so I continue with the plan we’ve begun.

  While the room is astir, I go to the monster’s chest. I open it. I make a show of searching out clean linens and soiled ones, placing what’s dirty and monstrous in the bucket in which I carried the poisoned nightdress destined for poor Isabel and setting aside something clean for making the Queen’s bed yet again.

  But where is that nightdress? Perhaps I’ve taken the wrong bucket — though this is the only one within sight. My bucket might have rolled under the bed? I try bending casually to look. The last thing I want is to be found an aspiring poisoner, in addition to a spiriter-away of demon births, but I can’t dig too deep without raising suspicion.

  Already Grammaticus is watching me, his cold blue eyes appraising my gestures. I bite down firmly on my tongue to repress an urge to babble, make up some silly story that will smack of impossible magic. I am a servant; I do not speak. I need to muster possible magic, and that I can do with my leather bucket and a few more bloody cloths. At the very least, I can remove myself from this room and drink down a lungful of fresh air before I head into the prisons.

  “Ultimates,” I say to the guard by the door. “For the privy.”

  He merely glances at the red rag I’ve laid over the bucket (one of my own, freshly between my legs). Men may savor the blood they spill in battle, but a woman’s blood is always something sick to them. “Have the physicians given their approval?” he asks, loudly enough that the physicians may hear and decide whether to respond.

  “Yes, let her go — go,” Candenzius dismisses me. He and doddering Venslov are back to examining the mother-cake, wondering again what relation its puny dryness has to the lusty boy draining the Queen’s breasts.

  Isabel has no eyes for any of us now, just the new King Christian Klaus, whose eyes have opened and are gazing into hers with rapt attention as she nurses him.

  “There is a terrible reek in this place,” says Candenzius, sniffing again at what he calls the placenta. “I can’t tell one odor from another. We might be advised to open a window fully.”

  “Certainly not!” Venslov retorts heatedly. “The infant is just making his transition out of the womb.”

  I leave as the two doctors enter a debate about the virtues of bloodless outdoor air versus the stale but comforting fug of indoors.

  The last words I hear are Isabel’s: “Open all the shutters — let the King see the moon and stars. He claims his father’s star now, you know.”

  Outer chamber, waiting space, women’s hall. I trudge with a burden heavier than it should be, for the awful miscarriage is dense. I try to make the bucket swing like a much lighter thing, ever conscious of how I might appear to watchers.

  Because I am being watched. Even a bucket can’t grant invisibility at this strange hour. A man is following me.

  For a while I try to pretend it isn’t so, or that he will ignore me and go past, but his black robes swish-swish behind until my last patience is split and I turn to demand, “Arthur, isn’t it time to leave me alone?”

  “Ava.” He stops, a good five feet away from me and out of any guard’s sight — treating me warily, like an escaped pig that wants to kill the man who’d butcher it. “I need your report on this birth. For the chronicles,” he adds, as if I might accuse him of idle gossip. “There weren’t many present, and the birth of a king —”

  I clutch the bucket so tightly the rope handle might fray in two, if my sweat doesn’t melt it away. “I’m on an errand,” I say with an attempt at bravado. “My only reason to speak with you would be to find out if my father’s still alive or how he died. I gather from the gossip that he wasn’t one of the four murdered today. As for childbed, ask Queen Isabel to tell you. Or Midi Sorte. You could have her write it down for you and save yourself some trouble. She writes a lot, you know. Busy fingers always running all over the page . . .”

  Grammaticus is tensing away from me, as if the pig has shown its tusks. “I would think you
’d be glad to be part of history,” he says in his lofty way. And then smiles, a wee bit timidly, as if he still hopes to please me somehow.

  The bucket seems to grow heavier by the second; the demon inside is converting words to flesh. “I am part of history, whether anyone knows it or not,” I say, too tired to fight him anymore. “All of us are. But you really should ask Midi for her writings. She has pages and pages tucked away in the Queen’s inner chamber. Some in her own clothes, even. And that’s not all she’s hiding from you.”

  He reaches as if to touch me, crumpling the pages he himself carries. “Why are you speaking in riddles? It’s unlike you not to say what you mean.”

  “Check Midi Sorte’s belly, and there’s your answer!” I fairly shout. Then, knowing he truly does love a riddle and won’t follow farther once he’s started puzzling it, I take to my heels and run before the devil-baby can grow too heavy for me to carry.

  He lie there in his fine bed, with pictures of the kingdom wove in thread upon the walls, his fat bandage upon his thigh, his fever sweating on his brow and armpits. He look please with him self none so less. As if it be enough to him to have reach this bed and these sheets and tapestries, and he do n’t mind that he him self bear the wound of it.

  But he is sleeping; Doctor Krolik’s sleep. Of course he have powers now to make pain a pleasure, give the right powders. I curse inside, I did hope there would be no men of medicines.

  At least there are no courtiers. The Duke and Duchess have carried Beatte away.

  Krolik stand with Dé by a candle, shakes a beaker full of yellow. “How dark would you say that is?” ask the ugly old doctor. The more dark the urine, the quicker he must pack his bags to hie back to Poland.

  “Not so very,” say little Dé. The one who all ways were kindest to my girls. “I don’t believe the blood has entered his voiding channel yet. Maybe it is a superficial wound only.”

  But the bed be so bloody as if Nicolas did deflower a dozen girls, not just go through a ritual with one of them.

  And still he smile that weird smile, which I wonder now be a smile of death pulling at the face to make a joke of him at the last. But no, his chest rise and fall, and his lips part enough to make a whistle while he breathes.

  “He is a lucky man?” Dé says, unsure, he will make no opinion till Krolik give it him.

  “He might well survive this insult,” Krolik agree with him.

  They neither one cast a look at me. They can ’t think of functions for a black countess in a dirty gown and gloves, so they do not see her.

  Thus it be easy for me to cross to that bed and do my own inspection. I feel Count Nicolas’ brow and neck, both wet with sweat but cold any way. I lift his arm and drop it, plop, to see how limp it fall against the mattress. At this I think his eyes blink at me and ope to slits that stare like house windows on a damp day when every body be at church.

  This the doctors do not see. “The new King is a healthy boy,” say Krolik, “or so the messengers have told it. They say also that the Queen’s regained her senses. We should ascertain for ourselves before we go further.”

  Dé nods, he seem too terrified to speak. He must wonder were he wrong to come to Nicolas and not Isabel when these events did happen.

  “The question is,” say Krolik, “would it be best to leave one of us behind to watch over the Count, or should we pay homage to the new King together?”

  “We can’t leave him alone,” say Dé. “Can we?”

  They both turn now and do look at me. I drop Nicolas’ other hand, plop, against the feather bed. I smile.

  “Did you send for her?” Krolik ask. Dé shake his head.

  I make the gestures for Queen Isabel — tall, round body, and a crown — and for rocking a baby, then touch my mouth for speech and point to Nicolas. I make them under stand. They know me as dark nursey long before Dark Countess.

  “Well, if the Dowager Queen ordered it . . .” Krolik say with some relief.

  “We would not be deserting our post,” say Doctor Dé.

  “There are guards outside the door . . .”

  “And we must pay our respects to the King.”

  So they bundle off to see which side of this day’s bread have more butter on it. They leave so fast the tapestries do shake, so a tide wash the mermaids’ water and a wind blow the air round the witches and the priests and the man who lived his winter in a whale. They stir the bed-curtains too, and the curls on Nicolas’ brow, and his beard, and they coax a tickle more of blood from out his wound.

  My Beatte, murderess! I wonder can I go to her. I wonder what the lords will do if this man dies. What Nicolas will do if he live and he realize he have one more princess left who be younger and more docile. This were suggest in Ava’s story, he have more than one chance for a Lunedie wife. Gorma, who all ways were most tender.

  So this be what decide me.

  I lean in to see his wound. The bandage blood be mostly black by now, except that one red spot in center. I poke with my glove on and the wound do not give way so much, just flakes of blood upon the leather tip. He looks like to heal. But to be sure, I take a fleam from the physicians’ kit and cut away the cloth where it is dry, and then I yank it off at one rip and see the wound exposed.

  Nicolas wake up then, to yell in pain. Fortunate that I have clap my hand over his mouth, and that in the hand I hold the night dress which he did order Ava to poison for the Queen. I had precautioned to hide it wrapped with in my underskirt.

  He take a deep breath in of all that powder in the cloth — and then he cannot shout, for he cannot release the breath.

  He look at me, I look him back. Some small blood flow from that place in his thigh, but more goes to his face, where it turn to purple and I feel his tongue come out his mouth like a dog’s that will lap water, but there be no water to lap, there be only my hand. And he could not swallow any way.

  Mandrake, I guess. The most cruel of all the poisons.

  When this have happened, I take the night dress away and fold it many times to make a strip, and this I wind about the hole in his thigh and over his hips, so if his poison do not go in the one end, it will in the other, and perhaps two streams shall meet in the middle and kill him dead. I fasten this neat with pins left from his ruff, and I remove my gloves and watch while his face go more purple and then black.

  Yes, I ’ve decide. He had me once, and he may have my Lump (I am not certain, only tired), but he shall not take both my girls. My princesses.

  For pleasure I slap his dying face with Elinor gloves and let them fall, like a noble man who challenge an other to a duel. This makes his mouth rictus in to smile again, and for the last second of his life, he and I are laughing together.

  THE ORGAN OF DEATH AND LIFE

  IT is a night of mysteries. Every mind at court, at least each mind that matters, is impenetrable, even to a chronicler expert at peering around corners and listening through walls.

  The greatest mystery lies in the chamber of Count Nicolas Bullen, regent and bridegroom, who sags abed with an injury and no one to tend him but a royal baby nurse. The two of them are smiling. She laughs her throaty version of laughter.

  She does not stop when she sees a new actor enter; and Count Nicolas cannot bother himself to turn his head, merely continues to smirk at the rafters with his eyes slitted draftily. The two of them are locked in some occult intimacy.

  An ordinary man would not be blamed for abandoning such a scene; discretion and courtesy would be expected of him. But a man who is charged with recording major court events, including and especially its secrets: this man must steel himself to stay.

  He plants his feet; he draws himself tall. He arranges his various papers, wax tablet, and stylus so as to be ready for chronicling when a noteworthy fact is revealed.

  But the children’s nurse merely stares at him with lips gone sullen, and the Count continues to gaze heavenward, as if History is not present.

  Thus the scholar might be forgiven if he does mor
e than merely observe but rather asks a question directly, to clarify what he’s heard elsewhere. Forgiven by History, that is, if not by the person to whom he addresses his question.

  He says, “What in the name of devils and saints are you doing now?”

  Her response is predictable: she presses her lips together, then licks the top one with the two tips of her forked tongue. History knows by long practice that this can be a sign of either confusion or rebellion.

  “Is he —” The historian gestures. “Is that man still your lover?”

  In answer, she bursts with a laugh, a different sort of laugh, that sprays drops from her nose and lips over Count Nicolas. He does not react. She gives a few further heaves of violent mirth, then clutches her belly with an expression of pain wrinkling her face like a walnut.

  History must not be thought to have a heart. Impartial, cold, detached — this is what History must be, though where this woman is concerned, he has often slipped. When a woman holds her stomach in that particular way, the reflex has only one meaning, and the meaning sends a jolt through the historian’s entrails.

  Check Midi Sorte’s belly, and there’s your answer! So Ava Bingen had warned him.

  Any reader of this chronicle will remember the slave’s quiet first appearance as attendant to Countess Elinor, then the part she played in the magnificent masque that marked the end of the Seven Years’ War. Glittering with white sugar, a candied purple plum between her lips, the sweetest possible kiss offered to the lord who stood in for Justice and who now lies here weak from blood loss but smiling up at her with pride. And this chronicle contains the account of terrible rumors about her liaison with this very lord in recent months, and how she yielded to him when she was loved by another. That other who taught her to write so she could express her feelings for him as he did for her.