by Susann Cokal
That other stands before her now, moved by her pain and gaping at its cause — and unsure, after some arithmetic, whether it be his responsibility or that of the man in the bed.
He asks, “Is it — ?”
She catches herself on the bedpost, braces herself on the high mattress. Her face has broken into sweat. Still her bed-bound lover does not speak, either to defend or dismiss her. In this way, History knows that the occupant of the ceremonial letto matrimoniale has died.
The historian should make a note of the time and the man’s expression, but he does not. He goes around the bed to take Midi’s elbow and guides her to the carved-arm chair in the corner. He helps ease her down and puts the tablet and stylus in her hands.
“Now,” he says, and he is proud of voicing it without anger or judgment, “what would you like me to know? What should I know? For example . . . a small example . . . How should I describe this man’s death?”
She takes a few more gulps of air, then picks up the stylus and writes on wax, Misadventure.
That is all.
Sitting, the curve of her stomach is more pronounced than before, when the belly was hidden in her skirts. She could have been harboring this atom a long time, in which case it is (most likely) the product of History’s seed, not the Count’s.
But that is not what he asks her next. He asks, “What did he promise you?”
In answer, she gives one of her maddening shrugs and removes hands from her belly long enough to hold them up empty.
True, the Count is a master of not-promising.
“Did he say anything to you just now?”
She shakes her head.
“Did you kill him?”
Finally, she looks at Arthur Grammaticus. It is a look for which poets would have a thousand comparisons — her eyes like black stones, the twin tips of a murderous lance, the mushroom caps beneath which wicked fairies prepare their poisons. None of these would be adequate expression for the anger she bores into him. Her feeling makes him both recoil and long to kiss her.
“A few moments ago,” he says instead, “Ava Bingen instructed me to do two things. I should look to your belly and I should ask for your writings, as you have been keeping a history of your life at court and most particularly with the Queen. I suppose” — he cannot help himself, he stares at that rounded belly and must keep speaking —“the secret of your baby is revealed there too?”
He lets his heart run ahead of History, which is a grievous offense when he should be doing his best to secure those papers. And, yes, to determine what has happened to Nicolas Bullen, the companion of his youth who managed such a rise to prominence.
In answer, his dark love reaches into the bosom of her tattered finery and draws forth a handful of scraps. She shoves them at him, but so carelessly as to let them fall about their ankles. The ink is smeary with her sweat, tears, rain, something — but he sees a word here and there: story, lick, turquoise, Queen, Gorma.
Of a sudden, he sees the danger. Not just in these words that he is scrambling to collect before others see them — but in the entire situation: Midi, the dead Count, and himself alone in this chamber. The words have made him know it. He might stuff the pages inside his own shirt and hope to prevent other eyes from finding them, but how is he to extricate his darling, who is perhaps to bear his child, from a situation that will surely warrant her death?
And with that question, he knows something else: He does not mind so much whether she carries his child or the Count’s, only that she survives somehow. Some truths do not matter.
“You can’t stay here,” he tells her, still stuffing the crackly sheets into his own clothes. She rolls her eyes at him. “Here, I mean, in the palace — in Skyggehavn. You must go away. Whether you’ve killed Count Nicolas or not.”
He is fairly certain that she has killed him. Whatever may have happened earlier tonight, somehow when Nicolas was left alone to die, she made sure that die he did.
“You will be blamed, not Princess Beatte,” says the historian. “Everyone knows Queen Isabel ordered you to tend to the Count. The physicians left you with him. My dear, you have to flee. Take a ship far away — the guards will let you pass tonight, at least until his death is known.” He stops and watches that forked tongue press against her upper lip again. Beloved tongue. He reaches into his pocket and finds only two silver shield coins and some brass, no more. His little bit of wealth lies pathetic on his palm. Not enough for a single passage, let alone two, and no time to return to his chambers in the far quarters. And Midi Sorte wears no jewelry, even in her costume as the Countess. She has no way to bargain for her safety.
Poor doomed love. He should have married her, never mind public or royal opinion.
But she wastes no time gazing at him with a sense of all they’ve lost together. It is as if in shedding the written words, she has found a new strength in herself. She walks briskly to the bed, where she picks up a little knife the physicians left behind. He can only stare, numb, counting his few coins, as she pulls the sheet away from Nicolas’s injury and grabs that part of him that has caused so much trouble in the court’s desires. Shoving a bandage aside with her knife, she stretches his manhood to its fullest length. The flesh is still elastic, but beginning to congeal in knots beneath the skin.
With two hard strokes, she cuts it off his person.
The whole affair takes less than a minute. It leaves very little blood. But History feels the coins slip through his fingers and tinkle against the floor.
Midi stuffs that part of the Count into her bosom and wipes her hands upon the sheet. She does not bother to cover Count Nicolas again — let the whole world behold his new wound, she seems to say, it means nothing to her — and is about to open his door and leave when the historian comes to his senses and stumbles over to catch her arm.
“You cannot go alone. Let me at least show you some secret ways of leaving that I’ve learned over the years.”
She pulls herself up into the posture of Elinor Parfis, hoists her bosoms in the manner of that lady, and nods her head with its hair flying wild about her. As if permission is her favor to grant. She no longer seems unwell; she seems, truly, like a countess.
With every moment, his terror of her grows. He dares not ask why she’s chosen to steal Nicolas’s manhood, though there is a part of him that’s pleased to see her take revenge this way.
In this fear, he has discovered a greater love than ever imagined. It cannot be compared to anything; it is only itself.
BEATTE
SHE has been washed and returned to bed, her old bed — tucked in next to Gorma, in fact, who shrinks away from her in fear, although none of their attendants have made mention of any of the night’s events. Beatte knows there is a fierceness about herself now, the air of a woman — a woman! — who will do anything to please herself, a warrior who loves blood for blood’s sake.
She does not know what happened to her dagger. She wishes for it. That beautiful jeweled dagger in which the bottom of every ruby told a story, tiny figures acting out complicated tales of violence depending on how the hilt was turned. A thousand stories for Beatte to enact herself, once she gets her dagger back. She will demand it in the morning. She will have herself declared Queen in full.
For now, the little girls have been dosed with valerian, and Beatte’s lids are heavy. She feels the nurses standing ’round, some ladies too, watching anxiously till she and little Gorma tumble into dreams and cause the grown women no more worry.
And she feels the presence of the wraith children, her sisters and brother, who have come to watch over her. When she sleeps, they will pull her down into their savage world.
But Beatte will not sleep. She refuses! Until she notices that the candlelight shining through her lids gives the same impression of story unfurling that she found in the dagger that Nicolas gave her. She can watch herself stabbing him over and over, watch the ruby blood spurt from the slit in his thigh. She can stab at the wraith siblings too, stab
away everything, anything, even the parts of herself she doesn’t like.
So instead of fighting sleep, Beatte presses her eyelids down as hard as she can, to make them bloom with red. She thinks very hard to remember every detail. She will send it all as story-pictures into Gorma’s dreams. She will terrify Gorma and the wraith sisters with what she, Beatte, has done.
My heart is a hammer cracking my ribs. I wish and pray and wish for a swift dispatch of my duty — I should be glad to have dispatched Grammaticus, at least, but now I am alone with a demon growing heavier by the second, and I don’t know how long I can carry it before my body splits and my very soul pours out.
I am a jelly, there is nothing else inside me. Just the sensations of fear and the chill, pliant flesh remembered on my fingers.
When I transferred the thing from its fur wrapping to the leather bucket, its boneless body curled easily inside, as if longing for a familiar shape. I got a closer look at the one-eyed tumorous head, the long stalk hardly marked out for belly or legs, tiny stumps of arms that bent neatly to fit against the bubbling eggs where a mouth belonged. A monster from a fairy tale, a figure from a nightmare. Worse than either one; this was life. And the creature must be disposed of.
Somehow I march through four rooms, five rooms, six.
I’m not heading to the privy, of course, or any other place I’d name to Grammaticus. Imagine if a devil were found floating in the pits the next day! The inquiries, the talk of witchcraft. No, I have to deposit this mistake in a much more permanent spot.
By the time I reach the courtyard, I’m gasping. I lean against the outside wall and gulp down cold air till my throat is coated with the airy sweetness that floats there. My arms ache as if I’ve carried the bucket a great distance. But I put my head back and pass another final pair of sentries as if this is an ordinary errand, then slide across the cobblestones to the portal of the dock. I hope there will be fewer guards posted here than at the square, especially as so many must have rushed to the twin poles of Nicolas’s chamber and the Queen’s.
It is so quiet I can hear my own breath, pounded out below my heart. I hear the vapors of the earth steaming up from the muddy crack of the witch’s hollow.
When I follow the steam upward, I see that all clouds have gone and we have a completely clear sky with a moon and stars shining in a great bubble over the palace. My father’s star is dimming into gold, but it — no more than any of the others — does not waver while I stare.
It is at this moment that the chapel bells start ringing, then the bells of the cathedral. Announcing a birth. Almost immediately it seems that bells ring all over the city, and in their clanging tongues I hear the rush of feet — as if every pair in the palace is headed now not for Nicolas or Isabel but for me, for this particular spot I occupy.
With that, I end my decline into madness. I skate the last few yards to the witch’s hollow and upend the bucket.
Queen Isabel’s miscarriage tips onto the ooze. I throw the bucket after it.
For a moment, as the bucket itself sinks, the little demon floats like the bloated corpses of the Great Sickness. The single milk-skinned eye stares upward at the mystery of the heavens as it rotates gently. A sleet of sugar and star-shine clings to its skin.
I close my eyes; I cross myself. It’s as if I’m bidding farewell to everyone I’ve already lost: mother, brothers, Jacob Lille. Father. And, of course, the baby I once carried inside and that I lost when it was far less shaped, even, than the horrible creature I’ve been carrying tonight. I say good-bye to my life.
God’s wounds. When my eyes open again, the fetus is still there.
I fear it will be the one object that cannot sink into the hollow, that its unholy nature will keep it floating on the sulfurous mud. I prepare to turn my heels and flee.
But then the slow spin arrests itself, and I can’t look away. A rumble comes from deep beneath my feet, and a gulping sound that makes the stones vibrate. The hungry spirits of the center of the earth — mud-witches, muck-maids, whatever they are — reach up to pluck my offering, and the ground swallows the poor demon-child.
THE DWARFS
THUS the dwarfs beneath Count Nicolas’s bed are left in sole possession not only of the truth but also of the jeweled dagger that killed him. Neither they nor the dagger will be seen again.
I am running and it runs too. That slug part of Nicolas, eel part of him, will not rest. Its blood mixes to my sweat, and the eel swim down tween my bosoms in a wake of slime.
Arthur has me by the arm and he hurries me, but gentle, down a passage that he think he have invented him self, he is so proud to know the way.
He have said again that he loves me. In spite of all he ’ve seen. And I did not think there were ever such a person as he. All this, his love, in pay for sheets of broken language.
The eel of Nicolas reach my belly and stop on the Lump. I feel the Lump a-kicking. To clear that thing away, may be, or else say Bonjour to its papa.
I think it as we scurry underneath the moon: For this Arthur had me hold his pen. This is why I can write his language. I hope the Lump be of him, all though he be about to send me far from here.
Far, but where? And do it matter, if I go with out him?
So sudden, I believe there is love. I love Arthur.
My thinking makes me deaf as I am mute, be cause I do not hear the bells till Arthur speak of them.
“It means we have very little time,” he says, but yet he stop to listen while the palace vibrate round us.
I know in this moment that he have no plan, even the lessons of history have taught no thing of this situation. A black mistress who have changed a good infant for a bad and who carry a baby inside with out surety of the father, and also who have helped to kill one man that might have planted seed in her. And who have cut away that evil part of him and carry it with her, Arthur do not know why.
For a time I wish for one tongue, so I might explain it fast . . .
But I am wrong. This is not why Arthur have stopped his hurry. He stops be cause he sees Ava.
Ava. Arthur. The snake find another inch to slither. Love turns on me to hiss.
Then Arthur be dragging me toward her. My knees lock and feet do n’t move, but they ride rough over the yard stones toward that place she stand in a cloud that lurch from the earth. She has a bucket. She throws it at the witch that sleep in that muddy bed of many tricks.
Now Arthur halt again. I fall against him, my knees are soft. I am tired. I think may be his plan is throw me after the bucket. So he and Ava can be together so long they like, with Ava’s brother on the throne and her father free and no me to remind of what they did.
So swift, I lose belief. I regain fury.
The hornets clog my throat with wings and stings. I could spit rage. I could spit words before I die.
I growl.
Arthur shush me. I push him, though I be weak. Ava turn now and see us.
Her eyes are white in the moon. “D-did you see?” she ask.
“I saw,” whisper Arthur.
I am having pain above the Lump. I cannot breathe. I hate them.
Arthur say, “I saw it blink.”
Ava wail in her throat then, she makes sounds like mine. “It can’t —” She does not finish.
They are not discussing me.
“I saw a blink,” Arthur say. “. . . Or I thought I did.”
Ava cover her face in her hands. She is of heart to confess. “It was born days ago. Yesterday? I’ve lost count — only Midi knows for certain. She was there. It could not live. It’s the Queen’s baby, you might as well know . . .”
Arthur turn to ask what I know, and he notice now that I feel pain. My belly have brought me to knees, and I swim dizzy in the sparkled heavens.
He kneel beside me.
“I shall,” he promises with an equal mix of pride and humility — only a scholar could manage it —“I will take care of History.”
He says this as a sort of plea, there by the wi
tch’s bed. With one arm he supports Midi. His love. Who is staring at me with her usual deep-boring eyes, but this time, perhaps with a little less hatred than usual and a bit more . . . yes, pleading. Her belly is causing her pain; that much is obvious.
“We have to leave this place,” I say, also obvious; uneasy about who else might spot us here and whether the demon-baby will fight his way up, if he’s as alive as Grammaticus seems to think. “Go to the dorter — maybe pretend to sleep . . .”
“You have to leave the palace altogether,” he says. “Both of you. Right away — there’s danger, awful danger.”
Just as I think I don’t know how to feel more fear, now comes another wave of it. “What do you mean? Has Isabel confessed? Has Nicolas discovered the switch? Has he taken my brother?”
“Ava, please.” Grammaticus is gathering Midi into his arms — arms that have rarely carried more than a book or two.
“I suppose Midi’s told you who the baby in Isabel’s room really is.” My poor brother, who did nothing to create this situation but exist.
Whether she has or hasn’t, Grammaticus considers the baby’s identity a trivial matter. “No one will take him away,” he vows dismissively. “Certainly not Nicolas.” He staggers under Midi’s weight to the arched gallery that rings the inner yard. “The Queen wants that boy — everyone wants him — a good, healthy king.” He pants. I trail along behind, hands empty.
Grammaticus says, “I’ll make sure the baby’s entered into the annals that way, as the Dowager’s birth. But you’ll have to leave.”
“Why?” Relief followed by dismay nearly topples me over, just as Grammaticus lays Midi carefully on the ground. He covers her in his black robe; he looks skeletal and frail without it, like something I shouldn’t see. “Arthur, everything is falling into place — I can watch over little Klaus as he grows up. I’ll make his clothes. I’d like my father to see him — if Father is alive, Queen Isabel promised to free him no matter what Count Nicolas says . . .”
