The Testament of Yves Gundron (7 page)

I think her mood picked up at the mention of the ale, for she thrust her chest forward and resettled the gruesome tumor on her back. “Sounds great, thanks.”

Our idyll trounced, my wife and I joined hands and led the stranger back to the clearing in the grove, wherein our neighbors made merry. Perhaps, I reasoned, her oddity was purely one of form, and once we grew used to it we would like her. I hoped this would be so, for I did not like the discomfort she then elicited. I also hoped that discovering her on the day of my festival might be an auspicious sign, despite the cold tremor which tickled my spine when I thought of her tall, strong body clomping through the field behind me.

“How many are you, in the village?” she asked.

“But a few score, counting beasts and babes.”

“All born and raised here?”

“All, aye.”

She walked silent a few paces, then added, “But you say your brother's been all over the world?”

“To the Orient.”

Children were still dancing at the Maypole, but the elder boys, Ydlbert's among them, had wrested the straps from the tots, and were now jumping and spinning like heathens. Prugne, her freckled bosom half bared to the breezes, spun about like a top, calling joyfully to the skies. To appease the small ones, Mandrik had hitched a cart to Hammadi, who was festooned in garlands of white flowers and anointed with oils, and drove the children about like so many bushels of potatoes. Their small heads, russet- and flaxen-haired, peeked above the high walls of the cart, blissfully accepting the warmth of the April sunshine and the coolness of the breeze.

“They're having a Renaissance fair, only they're not,” Ruth whispered, unintelligibly, behind me.

For a moment I hoped that our arrival would go as unnoticed in the general tumult as our departure surely had but a while before, but a dark, brooding hush soon spread about me like falling snow. The cart
ground creaking to a halt, bumping up against Hammadi before it stopped, and my horse stood facing me, her brown head high, her star shining watchfully forward. Soon the whole square was silent but for the wailing of Tansy Gansevöort's new bairn and the humming of one lone locust, come up too soon from the thawing earth and destined to die.

Miller Freund, his hat perched all the way back on his head, muttered, “Leave it to Gundron to bring such a strange thing home.”

“Friends,” I addressed the assembly, “for the first time in two generations, we have a visitor in our midst. She calls herself Ruth Blum, and speaks English. Do not be frightened. She did wander days and nights in the wilderness before she appeared to me and my wife but a stone's throw from this grove.”

“What were you doing over there, hm?” Dirk questioned, then stuck the tip of his tongue salaciously through his teeth.

Anya slapped him, and his brother Bartholomew cheered.

Father Stanislaus rubbed the back of his long neck nervously with one hand. “Looks like a sea-thing.”

Wido Jungfrau, who had been known to see the doings of evil spirits in a measure of spoiled milk, took his pipe out of his mouth long enough to say, “Looks like the Devil's work to me.”

Yorik said, “Nay, in the pictures devils have tails and claws.”

“You never know what's beneath the clothes.”

“On the contrary, I think I can see it right clear.”

Bartholomew whistled and his younger brothers whooped their praise.

“She may, gentlemen, be no emissary of darkness, but an angel come to reside among us; or, as I think most likely, an ordinary person, come from far off. Who can say? Whatever her purpose, she is as solid of form as you and I.” To demonstrate I leaned my hand against her arm, and she swayed slightly under the weight of her tumor.

Dirk, between two bites of bread sopped in ale, said, “Gundron, I can see everything about her legs.” The boys erupted all around in laughter. One added, “They're prettier than my mum's.”

“Silence,” commanded my brother as he approached. The new white robe my wife had stitched him for the occasion shone with its own heat. By now our stranger had begun to hump her back into the terrible growth, weary with its weight or with shame. “I am Mandrik le
Chouchou,” he said, inclining his head of clean, soft curls toward her. “Who are you?”

“Ruth Blum,” she said, her voice drawn in small. She was only a bit taller than he was, but had to turn her worried face modestly down to look him in the eye. If I looked strange to her, imagine what a sight was he—his hair as long as hers, his blue eyes glimmering with the light of divine knowledge, his white robe bright as the sun.

“And the city of your birth?”

“Boston, Massachusetts. Cambridge, actually, if you know Cambridge. Across the river. Your brother said you had traveled.”

In the murmuring that followed after her voice died down, my brother bowed three times, then stood with his hands in prayer, eyes closed. All the village waited for his words. “I have heard,” he whispered finally, “of your city. I am most pleased to meet you.”

Had night fallen in a rush right then, mid-afternoon, no greater silence could have damped the festive air. The darkness spread her fingers into our throats and hearts.

Even the stranger shivered at his pronouncement. “I'm glad to meet you, too. And, well. I'm so glad to be in Mandragora.” She looked nervously around. “I had heard a rumor
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that your village might be here. I was hoping to find you, praying, actually, but I got lost. You're not on the map.” She fidgeted back and forth on her feet like a young girl, though by the lines around her eyes I guessed her to be my own age.

“May I see your map?” my brother asked.

“I'm not sure that's—”

“Beware her trickeries,” said Stanislaus, clearing his throat. “They may be vile.”

“Stanislaus,” Mandrik interjected, “she hasn't done one frightening thing. Why not trust her?”

“Come up out of who knows where, and so strangely clad? I do not know if she means well or ill—only that we should be cautious until we are sure.”

“When my grandmother arrived,” my brother added, “she, too, was accused of strangeness, yet died a well-respected woman.”

Jungfrau snorted. “In your family, any kind of freak can be respected.”

“Perhaps you'd best feed her,” said Prugne Martin. “She looks a sight too thin.”

But already Ruth was working at a strap across her chest, and when it sprung, it released the awful tumor to the ground with a resounding thud. Bartholomew said, “Mercy.” The crowd instinctively recoiled, but as a gasp escaped me my heart also rejoiced to see the long, gentle curve of her back reaching over the apparatus. Her black shirt fit snugly, and I saw the sweet bumps of an ordinary, bending spine.

“What do you call this?” Adelaïda asked, leaving my side to point one hesitant finger toward what had, a moment before, seemed too dreadful to name.

“My backpack.”

Adelaïda half frowned and sat down at a safe distance from her on
the grass. Anya, from the back of the crowd, called, “Be careful, Adelaïda.” What a difference between the figure of my wife and that of the stranger—the one plump, golden, full of sweetness, the other dark and hard, despite her odd beauty, as the Reaper at his grim work.

Ruth worked open a fastener that made a strangely bright sound. Adelaïda startled slightly and drew farther away. Ruth, too, startled, and said, with a shy smile, “It's only a zipper.” She worked it open and shut a few times. It sang.

An amazing array of objects left the sack—more slender pants, balls of woolly fabric, and many items wrapped in small parcels with a luminous sheen.

Adelaïda sang:

“Silence, sister, I pray you,” Mandrik urged her. He bent down reverently to touch a shiny package, his knees creaking though there was no sign of rain.

“That's a Baggie,” Ruth said, “with granola.”

He leaned closer toward her, a gentle expression upon his lips. “You needn't tell me the names of things.”

“Adelaïda,” she said, pronouncing it strangely, “asked me what the backpack was.”

“I am not Adelaïda.”

She colored slightly. “I can see that.”

“He's like an anchorite,” Ydlbert offered, “only not locked up.”

“More like a freak, if you ask me,” Jungfrau interjected.

“I wouldn't be wise with the holy man,” I warned him.

“What's the difference between a holy man and a freak?”

“If I knock out your teeth, will that help you understand? Oh, but I forget me, you don't have any teeth.”

Mandrik clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. His cheeks were flushed. “Do you know nothing, Yves?” he called back to me over his shoulder. “As our sainted father would have told you, wasted breath is wasted breath, and a fool's a fool.”

Ruth extracted a tightly folded paper and held it a moment in her hands. “I'm not sure I should show you this.”

Stanislaus said, “What do you seek to conceal from us?”

“Nothing, I—”

“For nothing is hidden from the eyes of the Lord.”

She paused, then opened her paper to an absurd breadth, which revealed blues, greens, and browns as vivid as any in God's creation, and the names of fairy places in an even, minuscule hand. The crowd drew closer, pulled by its beauty as it fluttered in the ripening breeze. “Look. Here's your island.” She tapped unceremoniously at the paper's edge. “Here are the mountains, so somewhere in here must be your valley. And nothing.”

Mandrik and Stanislaus knelt over the map, drawing it in with their eyes. “This map is beautiful,” said Stanislaus, “but it is entirely wrong.”

“No,” Mandrik said, “not entirely.”

“Wrong about everything,” he persisted.

“At all events,” my brother concluded, “it is incomplete, and must be removed from public sight.”

“Is that,” I asked, “the sea?”

“And that,” Ydlbert said, pointing at a blob ten times greater than the one on which Ruth claimed we lived, “is that Scotland?”

Mandrik pushed us ever so slightly away. “I will not have you worry about these pictures. As I said, they are not complete.”

Ruth said, “Should I not have shown you the map? You demanded to see it.”

“What is incomplete,” said the priest, gathering what little pluck he had, “about a map which shows nothing of what is and a copious lot of what isn't?” How we all missed old Father Icthyus.

“Forgive me, Father,” Mandrik said, with a slight bow of the head. “It was not my understanding that you had ever left this village.”

Two of Ydlbert's younger sons, Manfred and Jowl, pounced on the map and ran with it crackling in the wind behind them to the Maypole. “Lords of the map!” one cried, pleased to be in possession of the prize. The other children followed to view the wonder. Another of Ydlbert's sons cried, “All hail the Archduke Mappamondo!”
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My brother remained at the stranger's feet. “Just as well,” he said, watching the fluttering object go.

Ruth leaned down toward him, saying, “I'll probably need that back, eventually.”

“All things go to their appointed homes, by and by.”

Adelaïda, peering into the stranger's eyes, said, “Prugne's right, we should feed her. We are being most inhospitable.”

“Do you like oats?” Anya asked. “Because oats is what we're eating.”

Ydlbert nudged Anya gently. “Bring her cheese and fruit.”

“Bring her meat,” Mandrik commanded. “She clearly requires sustenance.”

Anya hoisted her smallest child, whose name I also could never recall, in its sling, and went off muttering, “Crank.”

“Sheep fucker!” came the shrill voice of Friedl Vox, who had yet avoided the gathering, over the assembly. Her aged, disheveled form lumbered into view, and Ruth took a step back. “You can't hide your sins before God!” Stanislaus blushed past his ears, because it was always him to whom she referred thus.

“Hello, Friedl,” he said.

The outlying villagers moved aside to let her stench pass.

“Death is coming to take you all—sooner or later, he comes! And you stand around listening to this cattle molester, listening to his blasphemy and lies. Look what this stranger brings with her—pestilence and death!”

Friedl Dithyramb was the oldest person in our village—past fourscore years if popular memory served—and had, in her time, borne six children to her husband. All but one had been taken by the same influenza that snatched my family from me nearly whole; her one remaining son, Jude, farmed quietly at the outskirts of town, but had never been able to marry because of her madness, and had therefore banished her from his house. Friedl had lived, then, in a dirt hut by the church as long as I could remember. When first my voice began to deepen its pitch, Friedl ceased to care for her widow's weeds, until finally they hung about her, tattered and faded, dark gray. Then did she cease to wash, and her white hair hung about her body in fearsome snarls. Her right eye remained clear and blue, but the left, long since blind, turned upward until it shone like a boiled egg. She began to wander the countryside night and day, screaming maledictions and talking in tongues, and she no longer responded to ordinary gestures of
kindness. Our spiritual leader then was Father Icthyus, himself quite aged, and one May he followed her about for two nights and two days., regaling her with questions and heaping prayers upon her. Come the third forenoon he grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted, “Friedl! Do you not remember who you are?” To which she replied, her voice crabbed and choked, “Vox Clamantis in Deserto!” Since that time my countrymen had called her Vox, and though they grumbled at the ever-inventive foulness of her tongue, they put out stale crusts when they heard her sharp cries coming up the lane. Some said her bad eye was the sure sign of the Devil's mark upon her, but my brother spoke differently. “Rather,” said he, “has it turned to look inward—a skill the rest of us most sorely lack.”