The Testament of Yves Gundron (46 page)

Enyadatta slowed as we reached St. Perpetua; who knew if she knew it was Sunday. “Perhaps,” I called back to them, “we should pay our respects at the house of the Lord, to bring you a safe journey.”

“Do you think it's okay to go in?” Ruth asked. “I mean, if Stanislaus isn't there.”

“The church does not belong to Stanislaus.”

Eli said, “I would like that.”

I hitched Enyadatta to the post nearest the door, and she looked anxiously about her for her kin. But there would be no other horses coming. A fox ran daintily across the road, a sparrow hanging limp in its mouth.

The sanctuary door creaked open on its hinges when Ruth pushed it. Inside there was no fire burning, and no candles were lit. Some of the finest of the frescoes were lost in the gloom. Even so, and despite the chill, Nurit drew in her breath in rapture.

“Can you see at all?” I asked her.

“They're beautiful.”

“That's who everyone says I look like,” Ruth said, pointing.

“Your sister, too,” I said.

Nurit said, “She looks like Aunt Rose,” and, at Ruth's wavering assent, turned to me and said, “who Ruth was named for.”

Even in the darkness my grandmother watched us—or her eyes watched us, though it was clear from her expression that her heart dwelt on greater things. Her eyes watched the two slender young women who had come from as far off as she, and brought as many
wonders. I sat down on our bench, and Ruth sat beside me. A bird's wings tittered against the rafters. “God grant them a safe journey,” I whispered, “and grant us all peace.”

Ruth's foot traced an arc in the dust, and the church fell silent.

“Shall we send them on their way?” I asked.

She nodded. We closed the door carefully behind us, and remounted the cart.

The Great Meadow past the grove was brown as its dust, a pale, windswept brown that did not promise fecundity. Without the thrumming of insects, now, it afforded a profound quiet.

“I guess we should say goodbye now,” Nurit said, once we all stood again on the ground, “but I don't want to.”

The wind crackled in the dry grass.

Ruth said, “I hope it won't snow.”

Eli scanned the sky as a hawk tracks its prey. “We're fine. We brought warm things.”

“If you say so.”

Nurit nodded, her brow pinched tight.

Ruth grabbed her sister and buried her head in her shoulder. Eli wrapped his arms around them both. I would have given my house and all my lands to have held my siblings thus once more, and my throat grew tight with longing.

“I will miss you so much,” Ruth said, her voice thick.

“We'll miss you,” Nurit answered, patting down Ruth's loose hair.

Eli said, “We'll try to visit you when the weather breaks.”

They pulled apart enough to extend their palms to me. “Thank you,” Eli said. “Thank you for looking after our sister.”

“It has made my heart glad,” I said, and it began to feel true.

They held each other long—for despite their saying, despite their promises for the spring, they surely knew how weak are such promises against the power of God's will.

They hoisted their great sacks up onto their shoulders, and Ruth followed them to the foot of their trail. I crouched behind Elizaveta, one arm across her chest, my hand gripping her tiny left fist, which held fast to the jewel at her throat. They turned to wave farewell, and Ruth blew a kiss on her fingertips. The sound of their boots on the pine needles and leaves was lonely and quiet. Ruth's hair and cloak blew softly back from her body in the gathering breeze. Nurit and Eli were
already disappearing into the autumn forest, but Ruth stood with her right arm raised in farewell. “Goodbye,” she called. The trees all but swallowed the sound; there was snow coming, sure. From what sounded a great distance came the voices of her siblings in answer, “Goodbye. We love you.” As they disappeared from sight, Elizaveta, too, raised her right arm and thrust the heel of her dimpled palm toward their receding figures. She was too young to know the difference between a gesture of farewell and a gesture of pushing away, and her small, fat hand hovered on the borderland in between. Ruth kept shouting goodbye, her tone halfway between elation and grief. I imagined them overlooking our valley as Dirk had meant to, watching our farms and the whole circumference of our world pull away. I could see our dead grass, the snow at the peaks of the mountains all around. I could imagine them looking down upon Ruth's figure, growing smaller as they withdrew, and in contrast, my daughter, with one hand grasping and one hand raised, her gesture to send them off into the world, her hail and farewell.

That night, as the first flurries of snow fell like a baby's breath across the countryside, the people of Mandragora returned home. They had tied the clappers fast within their bells, but I heard the hooves and the iron tires making their slow way along the road. When I could contain my curiosity no longer, I opened the door, and Elizaveta stood shivering beside me, and waved as our neighbors approached. The Archduke's tent, preceded by torches, led the procession and halted at my yard. I walked forth to greet him, and the shining orange draperies were aglow from a candle within. “Gundron,” he called, as one of the silent musicians roped back the draperies.

“Your Urbanity.”

His body was wrapped in speckled furs. “Gundron, I have seen a land unlike anything 1 have ever imagined, a place so wonderful that I desire to make it my own. I will bring the far village under the dominion of Nnms. To which end I appoint you to the post of Court Inventor, that you might leave off this dirt-scratching and devote your energies to refining the machinery of war.” His face beamed encouragement.

“It is a great honor, but I am a farmer, sir. I cannot leave my land.”

“Farm? Nay, none of your brethren will farm any longer. Think it over, will you?”

“Aye.”

“Hut, then,” he called to his men, who bound him up again in his shining cocoon, and led forth the procession once more.

Ydlbert's cart was among the last, and he turned up my yard and stopped near the door.

“What news?” I asked him, as he, Anya, and three of the smaller boys wearily crossed my doorstep.

“The world,” he said, “is full of wonders.”

I offered Ydlbert's family some broth. In his hand Fatoush held a white, bulbous thing Ydlbert said made light when twisted into a hole shaped to it. Fatoush commenced digging a place for it in the hard floor, and Elizaveta sat by, entranced but holding tight to her own treasure.

I said, “Tell me.”

“It is as Dirk said, and Mandrik. They have machines that wash the clothes and dishes. They eat off plates whiter than the driven snow. Their carts drive about with no horses. Truly they have much that we may envy.”

Anya said, “Fares Adelaïda no better?” She took a wet rag to her friend's bedside and mopped down her brow. “Sakes, she's hot as an adulterer's confession.”

“Yves,” Ydlbert said, “the people of that village are not our lifelong friends but, after our first bewilderment wore off, they seemed kind enough. They seemed ordinary folk like we, but with an easier way of living. You might like them. And you know you were sorely missed.”

“That village isn't going anywhere.”

“But to make a first impression without Mandragora's finest—we would have been glad for your company, that's all.”

I did not like looking at him. I did not like him liking their proximity.

Elizaveta wrested the toy from Fatoush, who took it back with such force that it shattered upon the ground. Both children commenced wailing, and Ruth hurried with the broom to chase the shards outside.

“For some reason, this all makes me sick at heart.”

“I can see that,” said my oldest friend. “But you've no reason.”

Elizaveta, angry at the loss of her friend's toy, lunged forth to grab him by the throat, so that it took both my strength and Ruth's to pry them apart. I handed Fatoush to his father, and Ruth held my daughter.

“Too much is changing, Ydlbert. In the time you've been gone, Ruth's family came to pay a visit from beyond, and our stranger herself is become betrothed to my brother.”

Ydlbert's eyebrows raised. “To our Chouchou? Our own man of God?”

“Indeed.”

He shook his head. “Then things are changing even faster than I knew.”

“Aye.”

“Before the Lord's Day next, our brethren across the hills will, if the weather permits, come hither, that they might see how we live, and we might open our doors to them in hospitality. I want you to join with us when we greet them. Will you?”

All this made me want to lie down dead. Ruth, rocking the child in her arms, also wore a furrow in her brow.

“Both of you,” Ydlbert said, dandling his son upon his knee, “stop looking like the world is come to its end. Are you worried for the winter?”

I shrugged my shoulders and, when I realized it was a fair enough assessment, said, “I suppose.”

“We'll work double time now we're home. Unless you've got some inventing that needs looking after?”

“There's nothing more to invent.”

“Not,” Anya said, “when they've a machine to do the washing.”

He gathered his sniveling son to his breast and stood. “I will try you again, before the day dawns.”

Anya said, “If Adelaïda needs my help, run forth to fetch me.”

As they left, I felt I had lost him.

The next morning, Adelaïda would not even bid me good morning, so deep was her fever. I drove out to fetch Mandrik, who regarded me shyly, as if I might be wild. “It's no use worrying about anything now,” I told him as he climbed up on the seat of the cart. “As
our father would have told you, trouble's trouble, and what's done is done.”

When the bells rang out for Prime, their sound dull under the malignant sky, we were well ensconced at home. My brother had brought a multitude of herbs for Adelaïda's fever, and some dried plums for her delectation. Ruth gathered eggs and cooked them in a skillet, flavored with herbs from Mandrik's provender. The days were growing palpably shorter as Midwinter's Eve drew nigh.

That day it felt as if the sun began to set before it had risen fully in the sky. As the dusk descended mid-afternoon, the sky at last broke open and thick clumps of snow began to fall. I stuck my head outdoors repeatedly to check it would not impede my progress to the barn, but each flake hovered like a dragonfly above the ground, then melted straight away. “God grant that your brother and sister reach their boat in safety,” I said, seeing Ruth's face pinched with worry.

“God grant,” she said, and turned to regard the fire.

Mandrik had brought, along with the herbs that cooled my wife, a new portion of his treatise from which to read. Elizaveta paid him no mind, and twisted two strings together by hand, since she had not yet learned to spin. I kept trying to draw my attention to her, to rejoice in her innocent nature, for when I did not I had to see Mandrik straddling the bench and Ruth leaning against him—her back to his heart, his arms around her holding the fresh sheaf—and my stomach performed an intricate, unpleasant dance. Adelaïda, in bed, could hardly have noticed, but I did not like the shape of things to come.

“New work?” I asked him. “Won't you have to give that up, now that you're become ordinary?”

“A wife,” Mandrik said, “need not make me a layman.”

In my own house he said such things. “I thought your vows and your work were one thing and the same.”

Elizaveta looked up expectantly, as if she understood, but I knew she couldn't.

“You were mistaken. Do you want to hear what's new, or should I put you to bed with a pipe?”

Ruth said, “You're not going home in this weather,” though the ground was nought worse than damp.

“There's a great lot you have yet to learn about winter,” Mandrik said. “Shall I read you what I've brought?”

“Lift my heart to God,” I said, and the fire crackled its assent.

Mandrik fingered the papers briefly—the sensual pleasures thereof had always been one of his profession's great draws. He licked his teeth and swallowed.

“Mother Church,” he began, “teaches that, after death, the Soul departs the body, which returns to the Dust from which it came. The soul, unfettered, ascends to God in Heaven; or if it did ill in the body, plummets to Hell, or whiles away the millennia in Purgatory, atoning for its poor behavior. On the day of Judgment, at the end of time, the bodies will be called forth from the ground in Rapture, and, all their decrepitude and decay set to right, will become as one again with their respective souls; and Each, body and soul together (as in life, but this time perfect), will come before the Prime Mover one last time, either to be accepted into a Bliss beyond Measure, Time, and History, or to be cast out into Darkness and Misery so deep and so profound that no mere mortal may entertain notion of its Terrors.

“All of this strikes me, not only as a bore, but as a colossal Waste of Time. Compared to Eternity, a human life is a shorter span than it takes to blow the cotton from a Dandelion. Is it not a spectacular squandering of Effort, then, for God to make so many and such intricate human lives, that each might end before the Flower of its possibility might bloom? Far wiser, does it seem to me, the Oriental notion that souls sojourn in the heavens after death, only to be returned, unbeknownst to them, to new and different bodies, that they might, therein, continue to learn the lessons they require. Far more economical, on God's part, to reuse the spirits again and again throughout history, rather than to waste his breath each time two drunken Children, fumbling in the dark, create another child. Far easier to look about the Denizens of Heaven, and condemn one, for whatever reason, to toil, snort, and suffer once more among some group of the living. For each of us, this Doctrine supposes, is Heaven assured—we must simply work the dirt of human life until we are wise enough to attain it.