The Testament of Yves Gundron (17 page)

THE GREAT NORTH MEADOW

he next Sunday there were no more visits to look forward to, so after church we went driving. Adelaïda and Elizaveta wore their frocks of blue linen so fine that the slightest hint of breeze threatened to bear it away. Ruth, in a black shirt in the back of the cart, cut a surly figure. We began by turning toward the Great North Meadow, which Jepho had said was grown fair. Thence we planned to travel to the Great Mountains to the east, from which Ruth had come, and which she had not since visited. At Mandrik's urging we had brought flowers, water, and a stick of fragrant wood to offer at the foot of the mountains, to thank them for her safe deliverance among us.

“I wonder if the Archduke's going to make those maps,” she shouted over the clatter of the cart.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I'm curious what they would look like. He can't have any clear sense of geography beyond this island.”

“What need have we of maps? We never venture to the outside world.” I grazed my darling's bay quarters with the willow switch, somewhat more forcefully than I might have, alone and without female intrusion. She neighed her complaint and sped up. “Perhaps you should make maps yourself, if you're keen on them.”

“It's no fun if I make them. I know what they're supposed to look like.”

Hammadi ran like the wind, and the sound of the wheels was soon louder than Ruth's voice. Even when they come from afar, women are women.

Then, in a flash of sunlight, a bird with a wingspan as broad as a house, as smooth as a burnished pewter mug, came hurtling down from the sky. The whistle of its spiraling descent drowned out even the sound of my wheels, and burned like fire through my ears. High above its rumbling wail did I hear the terror in my daughter's shrieking and Hammadi's opening her mouth before God. Foul smoke trailed from the nether parts of the terrible bird as it wound with a stiff and awful grace toward the ground. When at last it hit—half a day later, by my reckoning, though it could only have been a moment—it erupted in a mass of pale flames, throwing the horse back toward us as she bucked, reared, and averted her head from the consuming heat. The cart still desired its forward motion and barreled onward, striking Hammadi square in the neck with such force that her noble head tore from her body with a thick, squelching snap that froze the marrow in my bones. I heard my family screaming behind me, but could see only my own slow progress over the mangled, blood-spitting carcass of my beast. The cart, hitting her squarely, overturned, and as my family wailed at a distance of thousands of miles, my body, freed from the ordinary constraints of motion, traced a long, slow, beautiful path through the smoky, bloody air and toward the beckoning ground.

In that moment, as placid and seamless as any in my life, I felt both the dull weight and the spiritual gravity of my body, and knew in my marrow what it meant to die, and did not regret the separation of my earthly form from my deepest selfhood, bent as it was on returning to so many I had loved. My flight was longer than the centuries, and when at last my flesh met Mandragora's soil, its cold, hard welcome was as inevitable as Death's crook beckoning me to what lay beyond. The ground pressed the last air from my body, and I left myself behind without regret as I wakened into the world of the dead. I lay still and awaited my parents, my first wife, and my brothers and sister, armed with their instruments, singing the songs I had heard only faintly in life.

Soon, however, it became clear that there was no music, and I grew panicked that the world of the dead was so ordinary and quiet. It let out a soft, general hum, which soon enough gave way to Elizaveta's plaintive shrieks and to Adelaïda's and Ruth's voices, shaken and comforting her. Then the dry, bitter smoke entered my mouth and nose in a torrent. When at last I opened my eyes—the same eyes I had closed forever but a moment before—the sky was as gray as the prospects of the damned, and beneath it I saw the body of my horse, entwined with the wood of the cart, which yesterday had seemed a masterpiece. Her life's blood stained the meadow black, and gave forth the stink of misery.

My Hammadi was dead, but since I could realize it, I reasoned., I could not be; therefore did I decide to sit up, loath though my body was to support the weight of my eyes' grief. The great bird had split head from tail and lay crumpled and steaming. My horse had met her end, but her blood pumped as vigorously as if she were atrot. My daughter's cries, though they grieved me, meant she still made her way among the living, and my wife's and the stranger's quiet voices gladdened my paralyzed heart. I turned to face them, and there they were, in their earthly bodies; my wife with one hand on the child and her forehead to the ground, praying, and Ruth reaching across her own leg, which lay at a strange angle, to comfort my wife.

The great bird hissed.

“Did you see it,” I asked them, “come out of the sky?”

Adelaïda sat up and gathered the wailing baby to her filthy breast. She did not, I think, hear me speaking to her.

When I stood, the world, already off balance, turned sideways, but I pushed through it to walk to them. They were covered in the season's rich mud—the blue dresses ruined, their pale skin bloodied and exposed through the gashes in their clothes—and their hair stuck to their faces. I knelt to hold my wife and daughter with such force that I knocked them down. When we righted ourselves, I reached out to take our stranger's hand, and looked at her for the first time. Ruth's leg had a bend in the mid-calf, to look at which gave me a wrenching pain in my stomach.

“I think it's okay,” she said, her lips pulled tight across her teeth. “I can't feel it.”

I said, “If you can't feel it, it's not right.”

Adelaïda let go the child long enough to examine the wound, which
caused Ruth to draw her breath in across her teeth. “Mandrik will set it, the Father will bless it, and if we pray—”

“I'm not worried about it,” she said, her voice gone harsh. “I'm worried about the people in the airplane. I hope they're okay.”

“People die of broken limbs,” my wife said.

We all regarded the smoking carcass. My throat was raw. “That monster killed my horse,” I said, unwilling to look anymore upon the carnage.

“It's terrible, Yves, but we have to check on the people. They need help.”

My stomach grew heavy as I understood what she had said. “That thing? That is your airplane?”

“Yves, we talked about it—you said you'd heard it and seen it.”

“But never this close. It never came and tried to kill my family.”

“That's not the kind I came in—it's too small to be a passenger plane—but anyway, yes—”

I continued to look on its stinking, mangled form. “I thought it would be beautiful.”

“Yves, please, we need to help the people.”

“You tell me you can fly, but you don't tell me you do it in a death machine.”

“It doesn't always end in death,” she yelled, then turned to press at her leg with her muddy fingers.

For some time, I suppose, the rumbling of our neighbors' carts had been drawing near, but now the hooves and wheels—equal in number—drew nearer still, though all stopped a good distance from the charmed circle in which we sat, panicked, stinking, and still. I saw Dithyramb and Miller Freund shielding their eyes, but Mandrik and Ydlbert jumped down from the cart and ran to us.

“Does it live?” my neighbor asked. “Does your family live?”

At the sound of his familiar voice, my daughter's wail grew louder.

“It has murdered my horse.”

Mandrik, once assured that we all still breathed, turned bravely toward the beast. He approached the mangled form and peered in.

“Be careful, brother,” Adelaïda shouted.

He leaned closer, and pulled out, by the arms, the slender, lifeless body of a man, dressed in a strange suit of clothing of a bay leaf's hue, with zippers, like Ruth's, over his breast and at his hip. His loose, sandy
hair was matted with blood. A gasp escaped the crowd before Mandrik lay the body down. I ran over the tilting ground to help him, and Father Stanislaus was soon beside us. His face wore an expression of panic, and he swung his piffling censer against the great smoke of the dying machine. Mandrik pulled forth a second corpse, identically clad, but with rich, dark hair, and one arm hanging loose in its sleeve, pumping forth blood as terribly as did my Hammadi.

Ruth held both shaking hands to her mouth. “Oh, my God. Is there anyone else in there?”

Someone among the crowd began to retch, and Father Stanislaus's normal pallor blanched to sickly pale.

“No one,” my brother said, looking around. “Nothing but machinery, and two great metal boxes.”

Father Stanislaus made the sign of the cross over the corpses, then stopped and leaned into Mandrik's ear. “I have always held, Mandrik, that your private devotions are a detriment to our community, and that you would do better to bring them within the confines of our church.”

“This is no time—”

“Let me finish. I hold fast to my opinion still. But you are the only other man of God among us, and I must ask your advice. Do I administer Last Rites over these bodies?”

My mouth dropped open. “You're the priest.”

He smiled nervously and half bowed. “This, excuse me, Yves, is a matter for holy men.”

“I don't think it takes a holy man to see that with two men dead—not to mention my horse—Last Rites are in order.”

“Yes, but see here. They're strangely dressed—who knows what paganism they might have subscribed to? And even should they have been Christians, if these men have been consumed by this beast, will they be rebegot at the Last Reckoning in their own bodies, or will their bodies be brought up as part of the beast's?”

Hammadi was dead and my heart shaken, and I stared at him in disbelief. My brother, thankfully, retorted, “Do you use this occasion to discuss minutiae of theology?”

“I wouldn't call this—”

“Do you suggest that a smoking, belching beast will be resurrected, along with man, at the end of history?”

“Mandrik,” I whispered, “it's a machine. Like a grist mill.”

“Let me handle this.”

“Mandrik, you misunderstand me. What do you think will happen to all the food you've eaten when at last you are called up in Rapture?”

“Do you suggest, Father, that carrots, parsnips, chickens, and cows will be resurrected? That the Christ you so passionately believe in died for the barnyard's sins?”

Father Stanislaus's face went red. “No, Mandrik, but I am asking you, will their flesh be resurrected as part of yours when the Lord God calls you up?”

“Well, I don't think so,” he answered, flaring his nostrils. “But I don't believe in your niggling church.”

My ears sang with confusion and at last my voice rose, rasping, from my throat. “All of this, excuse me, seems irrelevant.”

“When we have never before,” said the Father, his pointy chin in the air, “seen such a beast? No, Yves. You're mistaken.”

My brother shook his head. “This is an odd occasion for heterodoxy.”

“I have asked for your opinion, Mandrik, not a sermon.”

“Bury them, if you will, then, as Christians,” said my brother. “For whatever your speculations about the last day of history, they were not eaten by this—” Mandrik tapped its skull with his finger, and it rang like a low, sickly bell.

I said, “Airplane,” and a smile crossed his face.

“Keep out of this, Yves. They were not eaten.”

“Clearly you don't understand the—”

“You're right,” Stanislaus said, ignoring me utterly, “belched out whole, like Jonah from the whale, before the actions of the digestion had yet begun to work upon them.”

“However you care to think of it, Father.”

Father Stanislaus looked hard at my brother before kneeling once more to bless the poor corpses. We left him to his duties and returned to ours. “I will talk to you about this later,” Mandrik said, turning his head as we walked so that our neighbors could not catch his meaning. “But, meanwhile, say nothing.”

Anya had gathered my wife and child, wiped their soiled faces with her apron, and begun to plait my daughter's wild hair. Ruth had broken into a sweat. Mandrik looked at her leg, which was swelling, changing the shape of her trousers. “Cut me a thong from off the horse,
brother,” he commanded me, “and pry me a board loose from the cart.”

“I cannot—”

“I need your help.”

My whole body began to shake with anger and pain. “Is no one aware,” I asked him, “of the horror that has befallen my horse, and nearly befell my whole family?”

“Praise God he took the beast and not your wife.”

“Beast? She had a
name
.”

“A bad omen,” one of my neighbors commented, but Desvres's voice hushed him.