The Kingdom of Little Wounds (20 page)

So, on an afternoon when we are both released from the nursery to sleep, and the early autumn chill is sharper than expected, I creep into her cot and pretend it is for coziness.

When she feels me next to her, she shudders like a caught fish. The bed straw crackles.

“It’s hard to come from the nursery on a cold day,” I explain chattily, “when we don’t have the advantage of a fireplace here.”

This is a week in which damp monthly cloths drip in a corner of the long dorter,
plink
ing into washbasins full of more rags put in to soak. It’s not so cold that they freeze, though that does happen some nights.

Midi rolls onto her left shoulder, so she’s perched on the very edge of the cot. She pulls up her blanket and nudges something toward me with her foot.

I look down. It’s a stone, a warm one.

“How clever,” I say. “You’ve heated a rock in the nursery fire and carried it here.”

She stares at me so long, I really believe she is trying to speak to me with her eyes. I feel awkward, thinking how easy it is for me to waggle my tongue and make speech, when such a thing is impossible for her. I remember Lord Nicolas’s threat —
But be careful elsewhere, or something might get your tongue
— and I ask, “Does it hurt?” I stick my own tongue out of my mouth and point to the tip. “Does it now, I mean — I’m sure it hurt when it happened . . .”

Midi Sorte sits up abruptly and pushes a long, hissing breath out of her nose. She grabs the stone from the bottom of the cot and heaves it into my hands.

“Saints and stars!” I drop the stone on the floor and blow on my palms. They have already turned a tender red.

Midi lies back and smiles. She holds up her hands, red palms toward me. Showing without words that she is not a person who lets herself feel pain.

I flee her cot for the one where I usually sleep, shared with a laundress who leaves a scent of onions and lye on the sheet but is otherwise unremarkable.

There were a time I had one tongue, and I used it to speak from red sky to red sky, a straight stream of talk that ran the length of the sun.

Little girl, have a care,
said poison-auntie.
That tongue might tie you up in knots one day.
She give me honey to make my voice sweet, but there never were a sweetness in me. I prefer a taste of rot.

And so it happen. When poison-auntie die, and I run out the gate behind her body and wander to the docks; when the men see my oiled skin and gold arm-rings, they pounce and ask me,
What is your name? Who is your father? Where have you come from, fairy-child?

I use my tongue to shout at them. I shout and call them names, I cry for some one to help. I cry for poison-auntie. They take the veil from my head and cram it in my mouth, and they tell me to be silent. But I think there be only danger in a silence, so I scream behind the cloth until my throat too raw for screaming. And it make no matter be cause I ’m loaded in a ship. One arm chained to the wall and the other to my feet.

I am sick for longer than I know.

And then come the sail-captain. He like to hear me scream, in the fog on the water that he say would take me to my fate. He take my bracelets. He take my clothes and lie me on his bed and roll his dirty coins over me, for he say I going to make him rich. That be
his
fate. He put coins on my eyes, in my ears, my nose, my mouth, and down below both front and back. He count them careful on the way in and out again, and hit me if they slow to return.

By time of the selling, I am use to being a coin-purse and too tired to scream. I watch him sell me; the coins are gold. I watch the next man swive me; I am too tired to feel it. He say that I taste sweet; he make me say his name. Some month later it be the last word I do say.

When his wife first hear it from me, she take out her knife. She drive it in the table between us, where I ’m shelling nuts to make a cream will beautify her skin.

“You are not to speak of him,” she say.

And some thing in me, some thing small and stupid, make me say the name again.

She call her husband, have him hold my head while she take her curling tongs and pull my tongue. I cry to let her know it hurts. But this be not enough, she pick up the knife I were using. She start halfway, and she slice my tongue as if to make her dinner. I choke on blood. I vomit and it burns. I take to bed with fever and wish that it would kill me.

She seem to have some mercy then, or so her husband think. She give me salt and water to cure the wound, and in one week she pull me from my bed. I return to dress her beauty.

Now you are mine,
she say.
Now you will keep my secrets.

It were true, he never want me after that. He look sick when ever he see me. And then he go to join the war and come back broken.

It is true too, I know her secrets now. And I never tell them, even to the ink and paper that I hide inside my bodice. But also I do n’t forget how it feel to have a secret of my own, and a past, and think to shout it out with the power of poison.

Ava Mariasdatter is as the women who smile at poison-auntie while they plot to kill her. She bring a nest of hornets to my heart and I can not feel any but the sting.

But I know some things about her too. So I wrap the belt of Gorma’s old wax doll around my wrist, for fortune, and I go to the King’s new Secretary’s closet. Some crowded, creaky wooden room in the main palace where I hand his man a paper:
There be some thing to tell you. From Countess Elinor’s nurse Midi Sorte.

There are not many people at court that can talk with out there be some one else in the room to observe. The King’s Secretary, Count Nicolas Bullen, be one such person. He send out his servants and clerks so we are alone. And there is no thing for any one to hear any way, since every thing I say I must put on paper.

He do n’t seem surprise to find I write. He read my words as if there be never a thing new in the world.

Some one lie to you,
I write. My fingers jerk from hornets, and the letters wave across they page, but I get that sentence out. Then I know to wait in a way that make him ask me:

“Who? Who has lied?”

He behave as if he think this very amusing, the idea of a lie told him. But his eyebrows knit together, and his eyes burn like my father’s when he trying to guess which of his wives betray him with a eunuch. I know from the Countess that he do n’t like to be surprise. So there
is
some thing new after it all.

I write,
The needle you save from prison. The sewer you make a nurse.

He do n’t speak, wonder (I think) how I know all this. He can guess the name now, but I write it any way and get some pleasure:
Ava Bingen.

Still he say no thing; he go as silent as I am.
That is fine,
I think,
I can wait as long as he for words.

I hear a ticking in the wood upon his walls. Some thing dying with the start of autumn.

Finally he ask, “What, precisely, did she lie about?”

I smile, but inside, where he can not see. I write,
The arrest that make you Secretary. The lie that you make History. The Mistress whom you make misery.

I wait a breath, in case he will say some thing. He do not. I write,
Ava invent her story to entertain you, but you take her for sincere. You punish the Countess, but you should punish Ava instead. She is an eel that slip through the ear and feast her self on brains.

And now he know what I know. But he be not grateful for it. He make some low grunt like an animal in the yard, and he grab at my skirt.

The hornets swarm my heart. I see what I have done.

I see it only, and only for one moment, cause be I do not let my self be my self while it happen. I close my eyes, I press both halves my tongue against my teeth. My hornets curl up tight.

He fuck me hard, this Secretary of the King. He do it from behind, with me on my knees like a cow. He have a lumpy thing that hurts. He spit on me to ease it in, but it go easy only for him. He do n’t take the usual way, go far back instead, where I feel every knob and every tear they open in me. He want me to hurt.

Arthur tell me once that this man he knew from child hood be odd about his prick. That he sew stones inside to bring him pleasure, bring him health. Now I do believe, the nobles do mystery every day.

And now. No such mystery, more of what come all ways.

When he done, the thing be sticky in my blood, and blood drip off the lumps that move beneath his skin. It drip down over Me.

He wipe it and me off with a linen, then throw the linen in the fire with the papers I have written for him. He can not burn that smell, though. Every body who enter this room will know it.

He smile at me, sharp teeth, eyes be coals.

I straight my clothes and hate Ava Mariasdatter as if she be the devil’s servant instead of the Secretary’s. And as if I believe in devils.

“As far as anyone on the other side of that door knows,” he tell me as he close him self up, “this was the only reason you came here today. If you let on differently, or if you cannot keep your thoughts to yourself, there will be much worse for you. You will think me gentle in comparison to your jailers.”

I touch the doll belt and tell the hornets go there, leave my heart alone.

He crunch a savor-almond in his teeth and toss me one too. “Clean your breath,” he say. “Your secrets have the foulest smell.”

I eat. It is delicious. I hate that it is so.

O
NE morning it comes: a miracle or a curse.

Today it is not just ladies-in-waiting but nurses, maids, and even dwarfs who stand at the stinking hollow’s uncertain edge. The Queen, much occupied in the nursery, has ordered them to pray loudly enough for her to hear; and this they do, their voices settling into the monotony of Saint Peter’s monks, till the words blur together:

Ave-Maria-gratia-plena-Dominus-tecum-benedicta-tu-in-mulieribus-et-benedictus-fructus-ventris-tui . . .

They are strangely feverish, as suspenseful as they are bored. A few of them feel something is about to happen, something more than the usual gossip of pregnancies and Italian Fire. They grab one another’s hands.

Their intuition is proved right. A skinny wench who works in the kitchens makes a sudden movement, cries out, and points:

There, in the center of the hollow. Something is not being sucked away but rather spat up. Something that emerges first as a yellow tip, then a jointed stalk, finally a silver base with a lump of muddy green on one side. This item pops through the surface and floats upon it full length. It spins slowly around, as if pointing at one lady, one girl, after another.

Some of the women are struck silent with terror. Several of them shriek. Two run away. Only one, that same Negresse lately linked in rumor with Count Nicolas Bullen, dares kneel down at the edge of the hollow and reach for this slowly spinning thing.

“She will die of the attempt,” whispers Lady Drin, in a mixture of horror and delight. These have been long, dull weeks, and the death of a nurse would make a change.

The Negresse snags the thing between two fingers but cannot get her balance to stand. She struggles as if she’s about to be sucked away herself. A nursery maid has to haul on the Negresse’s apron strings to help her stand. She does this more out of curiosity for the thing discovered than from desire to save a life.

When she is on her feet, the Negresse calmly (for this one never does anything but calmly) uses a clean spot on her apron to wipe the object dry. She holds it up and invites the women to guess at it.

“A fingertip!” exclaims the young Countess Ditlevnavn.

The women gasp. A dwarf vomits on her own skirts. It is clearly true; this is a finger removed below the second knuckle. But to whom does it belong? Perhaps the key is in the tight little ring at bottom.

“Princess Sophia?” asks Bridget Belskat, whose pockmarked lack of beauty has made her ever shy but eager to participate in events. “One of her wedding emeralds?”

Lest anyone doubt this, the Negresse turns it over.

“There is the scar from her baptism,” says Lady Drin, “when she grabbed the priest’s amulet and cut herself.”

The maids sink to their knees, praying for heaven’s protection. The ladies scatter: one to tell the Queen, another to the King, a third to Lord Nicolas Bullen.

The black nurse stands still. The yellow object lies flat across her palm; the green stone winks under a suddenly bright sky.

In the court at large, superstition takes over. Now everyone from lord to lackey is preoccupied with magic, with the idea that Sophia is coming back bit by bit. They decide there is some spell against her and all the Lunedie children. They accuse Countess Elinor Parfis not merely of a physical poisoning but of a deep magical one. Or else they believe Sophia herself is casting spells from beyond the grave. Some say she will piece herself together and destroy the court. The finger thus transforms the dead princess from an angel and a Perished Lily to a demon, a wraith, against whom all souls must protect themselves.