The Testament of Yves Gundron (24 page)

Jude said, “Why pick me for an example?”

“But committing a sin against two who are already dead could save everyone else in this village.”

“You cannot,” said Stanislaus, “weigh one sin against another. They are equal in the eyes of God.”

“But not to the people of this village.” Her eyes pled with Mandrik for support, but though his expression was equally fervent, his lips remained tight shut. “Would it not be a terrible act to allow every person in this valley to die when it's within your power to let them live?”

Stanislaus had no immediate reply.

Ruth looked out over the upturned faces, and beyond to the black trunks of the oaks. “Death is certain,” she said softly. “Death is imminent. Do you not believe me? Do you not trust me to tell the truth?”

At the edges of the crowd a sound began like the first whispers of a storm. Before I knew I meant to speak, I said, “I trust you, Ruth,” and placed my hand on my wife's shoulder to silence her. She shuddered.

The mumbling ebbed, and Jungfrau said, not looking at me, “Aye, the mad tinker thinks she's all right. She's less strange than his own kin.”

“You'll not insult my brother and walk from this meeting.”

“Your brother? It's your grandmother witches my crops.”

“Really, Yves,” Mandrik said, one gentle hand on mine. “Stop arguing with him.”

Ruth wiped the sweat from her brow with the heel of her hand. “Please, trust that I know the ways of my own people, and what we can expect of them and their machines.”

Uncle Frith had sat quietly by some time now, thoughtfully chewing a piece of hay. Now he rose, bowed his head toward our sweating, frantic-eyed lady, and asked gently, “Tell me, whose side are you on, miss?”

The fireside once again grew silent. Ruth looked to Mandrik as if he might have her answer hidden in the palm of his closed hand. “I don't know,” she said at last. “I want them to have what they want, so that they'll leave you, us, alone. Because I've always dreamed of you. Because I love it here.”

Mandrik said, “Because she belongs among us.”

“Is that what the spirits say?” Jungfrau scoffed.

“I have not consulted the spirits. It's what I say.”

The gratitude poured forth from Ruth's eyes and, to my mind, outshone the fire.

Stanislaus's face was red from the heat of his convictions. “I would feel myself a bad shepherd if I allowed ill to befall every member of my flock. And perhaps, gentlemen, Ruth's faith in us is as deep as the faith she now asks us to place in her.”

“He has seen it,” Mandrik whispered.

“Seen what?”

“Seen the truth of what she says.”

“I would not betray you,” Ruth said. “I cannot speak for the sanctity of human remains, but please believe that I know what's best.”

Stanislaus, his head bowed but his eyes full upon us, said, simply, “Chouchou?”

My brother took his hand from my shoulder, buried each hand up the other sleeve, and approached the fire, where he could better face the crowd. “Father, good neighbors. I have seen the horrors of which she speaks—weapons so fearsome they attack cities with the strength of twenty barbarian hordes, plagues so ghastly and merciless that the people pray for the smiting hand of God. I have seen Death in aspects more various than the mind can number. I have seen visions in this world more terrible than all we imagine of Hell. I have seen the terrors man can wreak against his neighbor. With my own eyes have I witnessed what Ruth describes. Take heed, my brethren. The wrath your Maker may bear against you for disturbing the soul's eternal slumber will be but a candle's pale flicker against the bright beam of destruction, the blinding light of Death, man may unleash against his brother.”

For the feelings of the villagers I cannot presume to account, but when my brother opened thus his mouth to speak his truth, a cold feeling lodged deep in my spine, despite the heat of the fire.

“Do not allow them to sojourn any longer among us. Make haste. Send them back whence they came in their airborne death machines.”

“Hurrah!” came Dirk's lone, hollow cry. The sound of a single voice in jubilation was infinitely, impossibly sad.

“But they will not return without their quarry. We must give them up the bodies of their dead.”

Ydlbert stepped forward from the shadows. “Gentlemen, so much has happened these past few months I hardly know which way to look
to see the sky. But I do think this Ruth is a kind lass, and what she and Mandrik describe if we don't do as she asks seems terrible to me.”

The clearing once more grew quiet.

“We must pray,” Stanislaus said, quietly, “for guidance and forgiveness as they draw the bodies from the ground. We have no choice but to hope that we are committing the lesser of two sins.”

Ruth said, “I know it's the right thing to do.”

“And it will rid us henceforward of this pestilence you speak of?”

“Yes,” said Ruth.

Again there was silence, and Stanislaus turned shyly to look at each of us. “Good people,” he began with as much force as his thin voice could muster, “our seer and our stranger provide us a difficult answer to the worst question that has ever plagued our village.”

My brethren were long silent. “It's only two bodies,” Jepho at last said, “and our future at stake.”

His brother, Heinrik, said, “We have no choice. Gentlemen, are you with me?”

A somber chorus of “Aye”s came forth.

“Thy will be done, then,” Stanislaus said, his hands over his eyes.

“Thank you,” Ruth said, and slouched so heavily into her crutches that her hair fell forward and obscured her exhausted face.

“But oh, my sister, what a reckoning there will be if you are wrong.”

My brother and I removed Ruth to my cart, before which Enyadatta switched her impatient tail. Adelaïda and Elizaveta climbed up with a cool rag and a peach they had snatched from the smith's garden, and offered both to her.

“You've done your work,” said my brother. “I'll finish up our business here. We can talk tomorrow.”

My wife clicked her tongue over Ruth as though she were a fretful infant. As Stanislaus stood before the assembled company, discussing the course of the next day's actions, Friedl Vox appeared, stomping in from the high grass, shouting, “Plague and destruction! High are the wages of sin, you cock-sucking, sheep-fucking swine! Hot are the fires of Hell!”

Jude stood up behind the dread spectacle that was his mother, and pushed her roughly back into the moonlit field. Her arms continued to flail as her stream of epithets escaped her, but before long she was past our earshot as surely as she was past our ken. We drove off with our patient
before the night's dealings were through, but all the way home did I pray they concluded peaceably, and that Friedl Vox had returned, despite her madness, safely home to bed.

By morning Ruth's fever had subsided, but the dark patches beneath her eyes frightened me. Again and again she expressed her gratitude for the events of the evening before. My land sorely needed my husbandry, yet when the sun was nearly at his peak, I hitched the wrathful Enyadatta once again, that she might take me to witness, for the first time in our history, an unburial of the dead. While I was in the barn, Adelaïda came into the yard with three bolts of cloth of varying hue. When I brought the horse and cart forth, she was squatting in the dirt, examining two blue and a pale yellow stuff with a critical eye.

“What ails you, wife?” asked I.

“Nothing ails,” she said, running the flat of her hand across her magnificent handiwork. “But if Ruth is to remain among us, she'll need clothing like a respectable woman.”

“Also for Pudge,” said Elizaveta.

“It's kind of you to think so.”

“Not kindness,” she said, coolly. “Only what wants doing.”

Our daughter was, praise be, growing past the point where her hem could be let down, and with what had been lost in the accident, and the winding sheets we had given, we were short of cloth to see us through next winter. Only my wife, however, knew how much she could produce, and the selflessness of her gesture pleased me. With the image of her goodness lighting my heart did I set out for town.

My neighbors, too, were out upon the road. Jungfrau pulled up alongside me in his gap-toothed cart, and clicked at his Bodo to slow. “Sure to be a fine day's spectacle,” said he, smiling, the previous evening's wrath vanished like its dew.

“Does no one in Mandragora perform an honest day's labor anymore?”

Jungfrau grinned broadly, showing me his two sideways teeth. “There's always been work, Gundron. Roaring machines from the sky, and priests allowing the dead to be dug up like beets and snatched bodily into the heavens—that, my friend, deserves a look-see.”

“But my wheat.”

“All the care in the world can't keep it from withering, rotting, or being flattened down by hail, if that's what's bound to happen. So do you think that by leaving it for a morning's entertainment you can force it to die?”

I had no answer.

“You and your brother, with all your words, have you not yet unraveled the mystery of death and of life?” Though the question sounded serious, he broke into a laugh, and Bodo blithely relieved himself upon the road.

“No, I have not.”

“It's a jest, lad, don't look so dark.”

I whipped Enyadatta, and she grunted but picked up her pace.

“Now I've set him off again, old Yves Gundron, mad as his fathers before him, but a right good farmer, too.”

“When I am able to figure out—”

“Mind you don't go too fast there, Gundron—you know the consequences—and save me a place close by,” he shouted after me.

I drove around my other neighbors with only a wave for acknowledgment; I could not stand their eager grins. Life would be immeasurably better when the cart had brakes and a seat on which to sit; with those provisions I could go as fast as I pleased and stay alone at my driving all day.

A great crowd had already gathered in the graveyard by the time I arrived—everyone in the village, half of Nnms, and twelve of the Archduke's red-clad men—all standing, waiting for the grim events to unfold. Some of the women wore their bright Sunday clothes. Even the men had parted their hair and chased the dust from their trousers, and Heinrik Martin had untwisted his beard. The faces of the assembled wore a disturbing expression, somber, yet jumping with anticipation—all but my brother, who appeared perfectly content, sitting as he was away from the throng on the weathering grave of our mother.

“Mandrik.”

He raised one stout finger to his lips.

“Please, I need to speak to you.”

Her gravestone, of black granite polished smooth as the still surface of a lake, read simply, “IONA.”

“I am having misgivings,” I said, “about all this.”

“I am busy with the dead.” He took a deep breath and opened his
eyes to regard me. “Who knew we would have so much traffic with them.”

“Not I.”

“Or that you would be head of our family?”

“I never wanted to be.”

“I am sorry I made you.”

“The fault isn't yours.”

He waved his hand and let it rest again on the grass.

“Mandrik,” I said, “I am full up with questions.”

“Ask.”

How at home he looked on our mother's patch of ground. “The terrors that you spoke of, the pestilence and death—”

“I do not wish to fill your mind with darkness, Yves.”

“But did you see it with the bodily eyes, or with the spirit's?”

His gaze was as clear a reflection of Heaven as any I had ever beheld. “I do not recognize your distinction.”

“It makes a difference.”

“What difference?”

I felt close to tears. “A difference in my understanding.”

“I will ask you, Yves, to look about you and see what happens, rather than to dream up worry.”

“You do not answer me.”

“Yes, my brother, I do. Without your faith, you are nothing but a dry stone in God's garden, which is all around you full of the most succulent fruit. Now be quiet, and leave me to my work.”

The breeze picked up and carried forth Stanislaus's voice saying benediction. Close by the graves stood our two visitors, changed into tight-fitting suits of somber hue, the one's vision box emitting its infernal hiss. Our priest had never cut much of a figure—he was both too thin and too shy to stand proud among men—but on that June morning he seemed fragile as a dandelion gone to seed. What prayers was he to offer, in this unnatural sacrament? He spoke but briefly, in the vernacular, before making the sign of the cross over the yet heaping graves. Though the youths of the village were gathered about, and though a few had warily brought shovels to assist in the dark work, none of us volunteered to begin. A sickly stillness settled in the air about.

Lieutenant Commander Bradley at last said, “Well?”

The birds twittered as if it were an ordinary day.

“I can't dig two graves without assistance.”

Able-bodied though we were, we men of the village stared at him.

“Fiske,” he said brusquely. Fiske put down his machine, and they picked up two shovels to begin their foul work. No one spoke. As they dug, the two foreigners shoveled the earth into a heap on the remains of poor Jedediah Dithyramb. Friedl Vox had stood at a distance, watching the proceedings with what wit she could muster, but when she saw them thus desecrating the tomb of him dearest to her afflicted heart, she let out a wail like the murdered come back to haunt a guilty house. Fiske shuddered, but both men continued to dig, even as her cry rose in pitch and volume, so high and loud that no other sound could be heard in the graveyard. Her voice grew so loud my ears began to ring with the sound, and she threw herself onto the mound of dirt and frantically began brushing it away. They stopped shoveling, in panic; Fiske looked away. Father Stanislaus, calling her sweet names, attempted to coax, then to drag Friedl off. Anya whispered, “Witch.” At last Stanislaus grabbed hold of Friedl's filthy ankles and pulled her howling to the edge of the crowd, where people immediately made room for her terrible stench. The tears flowed from her good eye. “Tend to your mother, Jude,” someone whispered, not quite nicely, behind us, and loath though he was to own her, he went up beside her and smoothed her grizzled locks. Stanislaus was exhausted by the labor and stood panting, his hands on his thighs.