The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

  “You must watch over Midi instead,” he says, rubbing her hands between his own. “She is the vulnerable one now. And she cannot stay here. She has done — something.”

  At the same moment, I feel blood escape my cloth again.

  “To Nicolas?” I guess.

  “She finished what Beatte began,” says Arthur. “She killed him.”

  I cannot describe how this news makes me feel. Elated — I could sing and feel the stars and the seas would sing with me. Also ashamed, as if I had a hand in his death, because I wished so hard for it. And, finally, suspicious: What if Midi and Arthur have settled on me to take blame, as one of the murderous Bingens? I feel another rush of blood. I take a step backward. Where will I attain absolution now?

  “Tell me,” I say, “is my father alive?”

  With that, it seems, the cats who followed Midi and me discover us once more. They stream darkly to her fallen body, curling and rubbing on it both as if they wish to eat her and as if they might keep her warm.

  “Please” — Grammaticus arrests me as he tries to shoo the animals —“won’t you help us? Take her away? I’ll fix History so neither of you appears at all. You’ll simply vanish from the record. Come, you have always said you wished to travel . . .”

  Travel. Sail away from Skyggehavn, from my brother and Sabine (who may have died or else is rich with Nicolas’s ruby); even from my father, whom I have just rescued, if Isabel keeps her bargain.

  It will be a kind of rescue for me too, though one that brings an exile. In the company of Midi Sorte.

  “Where?” I ask cautiously. “How?” Without the ruby, I have no wealth at all, just the handful of silver coins left behind in the dorter to which I cannot return.

  “A boat,” he says. “We’ll find one on the quay used by the laundresses. You can reach one of the green islands, at least . . .”

  “A rowboat won’t get us that far.” A plan, a wish, is bubbling in my mind already. Do I dare?

  We argue back and forth a few quick minutes, while Midi slows her breath to recover strength; but it is clear to all of us that in the fullness of time (and sooner than I’d like), Midi and I will be in a boat rowing into the bay.

  Meanwhile, the inner yard grows more populated, with people running back and forth bearing news and demands; and bells all over the city have taken up the cathedral’s cry.

  “I must return to my duty,” Grammaticus insists, cowering behind a pillar. “It’s expected. If I’m not in one place or the other, all of us could lose everything.”

  “But what do we have?” I ask practically. (I mean to ask what I have.) “I can’t row a sick woman all the way . . . to Copenhagen.”

  If Arthur and Midi are shocked by my daring to name a destination, they do not show it. Why not Copenhagen, after all? We understand the language, and it is one of the great cities of the world. They don’t need to know about Jacob and what I hope to find there.

  “True, you’ll need passage on a ship,” he acknowledges. I hear a jingle. Grammaticus has a small handful of coins to press into my palm. “This won’t get you far,” he admits, “but it is something . . .”

  That is when Midi stirs. She draws a deep breath and gestures at her bosom. I think, too late, that since she is in the costume of Countess Elinor, she is probably wearing stays, and I should have loosened them to help her breathe. I do it now, propping her up while Grammaticus looks anxiously around, fearing discovery. I unlace the back of her dress and then the whalebones beneath it.

  Midi is still gesturing at her chest. There is something stoppering her breath. I reach into that curiously wet, warm crevice and find an unexpected handful of flesh.

  I don’t know how I know exactly what this is, but I do. I’ve touched it several times, after all, though in a different condition. I feel no horror, only pleasure; now I have the luxury of pulling my hand away.

  “We will be fine,” I tell Arthur. “We can get to Copenhagen.”

  “Your father is alive,” he says. “And I will do my best to keep him so.”

  So it is that the first purple inkling of dawn finds us down on the laundresses’ quay, loading Midi into the sturdiest of the rowboats tied up at the water gate. I balance in the center, moving backward as I take her weight from him. She helps as best she can, but she is exhausted at last; I think that if we were not moving now, she might allow herself simply to fade into death. We settle her in the bottom of the boat. Grammaticus wraps her securely in his woolen robe and gives her a kiss upon the brow — not the lips, I notice with some interest. Her lips are wrapped already in black wool.

  “Take care,” he cautions me needlessly, as I sit on the rough plank seat and take up the oars. Or rather, he cautions us both. We are taking many cares away with us.

  I nod — why speak now? — and begin to row.

  I am not good at rowing. Even with all the buckets I’ve hoisted lately, it’s a matter of minutes before I feel wet blisters rising on my palms. But I move doggedly on, pulling from sore shoulders, nearly exhausted enough myself to curl up against Midi and doze away into death.

  I look up and see we’ve traveled perhaps twenty feet. Grammaticus is still on the quay, near the servants’ portal, watching anxiously. He raises a bony hand in farewell. And I notice also that cats are following, stepping delicately on the quay and jumping over ropes to stay parallel to us.

  We are some small distance toward the silvering bay when a terrible thought fills my mind: What if Nicolas lied all along? What if those bumps that I — and Midi — felt, are not jewels after all but some deformity? I remember the sight of the demon-child, poor monster, spinning in the witch’s bed and am struck by terrible doubt.

  I stop rowing. “Take it out,” I order Midi. “We need to see it, make sure of what’s inside.”

  She understands immediately; she has always been a suspicious person. Weakly she rummages around beneath Grammaticus’s robe and pulls out that lump of flesh, puts it in my hand. It shrinks slightly in the cold air.

  I feel tension from the quay — Grammaticus eager to see us gone, the cats wondering what we’re about. The bells are deafening; I imagine yowling and shouting, but we can’t hear it echoing off the water.

  In the slowly growing light that ushers in a brief winter day, Midi and I study the squat little thing in my hand. The bumps are barely visible now. We have to press hard, squeezing out a drop or so of blood, to locate those hard places that Nicolas used to count off for me like a rosary: emerald, turquoise, ruby, pearl . . . I can’t even remember what all he promised I would find. I have a vivid memory in which he explains how wise it is always to carry some wealth about one’s person where others cannot reach it. But we must reach it.

  I feel inside my pocket. Nothing. My seamstress tools are gone.

  Midi guesses my intent and moves. I hear again that tinkling sound of magic. But this time I recognize it as glass.

  And when I reach into her pocket — and cut my finger — and remove a crescent shard, I recognize this too: a lens carefully ground in my father’s shop.

  I use it as Father never expected it to be used. I cut — so we can see. When I feel the scrape of something hard, I set down the lens and squeeze.

  A stone pops out. Yes! Clotted in blood. I spit in my palm and rub it to wash it — rub fast lest it become an icicle — and there we are. It is round, small, the size of a pea; luminous. A pearl. I rub its surface against my front tooth and feel the slight roughness that is a sign of authenticity.

  Midi and I, both tired beyond belief, smile at each other. Because, at last, we have something in which to believe.

  We decide we will finish the job, unpack Nicolas’s legacy right here, so that whatever obstacles still await us and whatever favors we must ask, at least we are not carrying a nobleman’s mutilated manhood when we do it. Grammaticus jumps and shouts while together we cut and press and pop the stones out, and with each one we crow with glee. We are wealthy. We are filthy and criminal and floating in a rowb
oat, but we have wealth beyond imagining.

  And when we are done, there’s the thing itself. We both feel (Midi may not speak it, but I know she feels it) the need for a Gesture. We cannot simply cast the prick upon the waters and let it sink or swim.

  Midi, of course, has the right idea. She takes it back from me and struggles herself upright, then uses what last strength she has to hurl it toward the quay.

  The cats are still waiting, though the boards must be trembling with bell sounds beneath their paws. A scrawny black-and-white specimen with a broken tail leaps up above the others and catches Nicolas in its mouth, then streaks off to enjoy the prize, the others tumbling after her.

  Let Nicolas at last nourish the strays. It will be his charity.

  And so. There is enough light, now, to see Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle and the great ships at anchor near the mouth of the bay. There is enough hope, now, for me to take up the oars again and set to work with a purpose.

  The palace eases away, and Grammaticus with it, as the sun heaves up from the water. An early ray picks out white swirls of sandstone against the scaly red bricks (a little redder now than I’ve seen before). It reveals the ornamental moon, the mermaid, the Latin motto that have made the palace famous. In tenebris lumen meum metue: In the darkness, fear my light. Gray winter sunlight touches the bristling copper spires and lingers on the stark black teeth of the gates.

  It almost misses the single figure running — running! — down the quay, as if chasing the cats who’ve disappeared. A figure clutching, as always, a sheaf of white papers in his hand, but without the twinkling glass over the eyes that might allow him to see far and distinguish, in this tiny boat drawing steadily toward the sea, two women: one dark and not natively of this place, one so fair as to be invisible, both grabbing for the oars as if they might row back to receive some declaration from the dark folds of a heart that appears loving after all. He waves as if to call us back, as if he’s found some new solution to our troubles.

  But it is no use. The mermaids have hold of the little boat now, and they are driving it forward with strokes of their muscled tails. We are borne toward the ships and the sea and adventure.

  And this, in its own way, makes a pleasant-enough end to the story.

  So we go, and so we end.

  “That cannot be the end!” cries the youngest among the listeners, and for once her sisters agree — the one who will rule, the one who will poison, the one who insists that Truth is Magic. None of them accept this conclusion.

  And indeed, even a dwarf born to entertainment has to acknowledge that a story told true never ends in hope. There must be something bitter to make the sweetness; for there is no happiness without contrast, just as there is no substance that is not poison, no delicacy without the capacity for harm. Only the dosing makes the difference.

  The story must obey; the story continues.

  Perhaps it goes on in this way:

  By full daylight, the hole in the courtyard has knit itself together again, with ground as firm as any in that city, the bare earth cold and smelling no worse and no sweeter than any other patch in the environs. This healing of what was long wrong in the court is interpreted as a blessing from the angels and a favorable omen that portends happy fortunes to those so often battered by Fate. They welcome their Christian VI.

  Delighted by this outcome, the truthful princesses speculate: What if . . .

  It’s possible that the two women, the seamstress and the slave, survive a long journey at sea to reach Copenhagen. They will certainly find it’s a bigger city than the one from which they came, with a warren of streets no less complicated and far more extensive than in Skyggehavn, though the ground is stable and less prone to change.

  When they step off the ship, the women are quite well and healthy, round of limb and waist; but they have somehow failed to calculate the difficulties both of understanding a new inflection in the tongue they know best, and of finding one Lutheran among an entire nation practicing that faith.

  It is likely that they take a room in a neighborhood of travelers, where a Negresse is uncommon but not unimagined, not necessarily enslaved. It is probable that they make a series of inquiries, that they spend their wealth as carefully as possible and keep the reserve hidden within their persons, lest their room be searched while they are gone. Experience has been their best teacher in this matter.

  But teachers are many. During summer’s long light hours, the dark mute of the forked tongue shows pen and paper to the pale girl who speaks — too much — of locating the heart’s desire that led them here. Slowly the seamstress learns to prick out a story not just in threads but also in words. They come to understand each other at last. When the Negresse gives birth, the seamstress catches the baby (a dusky girl) and sews up the tears in maternal flesh. When infection sets in, poison-auntie’s niece writes a list of useful plants and the stargazer’s daughter goes to market to buy them, then follows the recipe for a cure. The new mother recovers. Her baby is slender and prone to giggles.

  Together, throughout the year, they read the letters sent regularly through official mail by Skyggehavn’s court historian. He assures them that the chaos of the palace has settled into a tranquil routine, much as the earth around the witch’s bed has healed itself. He is now appointed tutor to King Christian VI and is a member of the Dowager’s council. He also oversees the education of the two young princesses, who have been sent to the green islands to live free of miasma and under the strict guidance of Duchess Margrethe.

  Most significant, the historian reports that on the first day of spring, the lengthy process of closing the prisons is concluded. While Count Nicolas and his former betrothed intended to execute all prisoners, the Dowager and the people have been clamoring for their release. The people have been especially inspired by an event that they see as a miracle akin to the sudden manifestation of Saint Ruta’s bones in the cathedral a century ago: Some fishermen trawling the bay have netted, along with a glittering catch of herring, an actual mer-baby — somewhat nibbled by the fish but luminous in its beauty. The surprising find has restored their belief not only in the diversity of God’s creatures but also in the myth of their own origins; in the amber-lined cathedral, a special Mass celebrates the marriage of sea and land. After entombment beside the bones of Saint Ruta, the mer-baby’s image is woven carefully into a history tapestry that commemorates the birth of Christian VI.

  So, in May, the last of Christian V’s prisoners step into the military yard half blind with darkness and with pain, wincing at the sun and staggering on shrunken legs. They are led out the gates to freedom.

  Among those are the most notorious prisoners of all: the man accused of murdering the old King with magic and the woman who, some claim, confessed to poisoning that first poor princess on her wedding night.

  Countess Elinor Parfis is so broken in body that she has no choice but to join her husband in his sickbed on one of the far islands, there to live out her few last days in an agony of spirit that might have led her to a nunnery, if fever didn’t catch her first.

  The ambitious astronomer, meanwhile, vanishes into the labyrinth of the city. The star once said to have obeyed his bidding has now vanished too, having faded slowly from yellow to orange to red to nothing. By the time of his release, it is as if the star never existed at all.

  Perhaps he reaches his old house to find strangers living within; perhaps his wife has remarried, thinking him dead. It is likely that he does not stay in the city but departs for some other land, one where he might climb a mountain and gaze at skies with naked eye. His whereabouts are unknown, but all agree he’s made a fortunate escape.

  There has been another strange disappearance, that of the wicked Count who nearly brought down the Lunedies. When the physicians returned to his bed, they found it empty, bloodstained, with a discarded bandage nearby. It is conjectured, and recorded, that Count Nicolas wandered in a delirium from his sickbed, to take refuge in some hidden nook behind the wall of a fir
eplace or window seat. Though his body is not recovered, for some months the palace is plagued with a sickly sweet odor of rot.

  Soon a year has passed and both of the traveled women, established ladies now, are out of funds; for Copenhagen is a costly city. Thus it is that she who has long believed in the quest is finally convinced, by sheaves of argument that stain twenty fingers coal-black and feed the fireplace for weeks, to stop hoping.

  Neither of them, writes the new mother, shall see a lover again.

  The two take their baby, now a sturdy girl with green eyes and white teeth and nearly black hair, to an island — for they are most comfortable on islands — where they find a cottage and a meadow yielding several useful herbs and a certain spider whose webs are useful for stoppering wounds. Here they set themselves up as wise women. They provide cures for many another woman’s ills, from broken heart to leaky womb to the painful gleet of Swedish Fire. Their child plays along the shore, bringing home pockets full of pebbly treasures: black rocks ringed in white, amber droplets, shards of brick or glass polished soft; strands of a brown seaweed that the three of them call mermaid hair and that can be boiled into simples that villagers believe will summon lost love home.

  And so run their lives, peaceful and not entirely unhappy.

  But if one day there should appear a man, no longer in his first youth but retaining a certain weary charm; a man who knows Copenhagen well and may not listen much to rumors but cannot overlook the clues that Fate plants regularly in his path . . . and if this man should speak in a rusty accent and smell pleasantly of piney clarified amber, and stride with purpose over pebbles and sand to the cottage of the two wise women . . . and if that man were to knock upon the cottage door and ask to be driven mad with love again — would there be any harm in a happy ending? Who could regret such a conclusion?

  Certainly not a princess, who must applaud for heart’s desire.

  A NOTE ON THE HISTORY