Lapvona(30)

‘Delicious,’ Villiam pronounced. ‘We should do that more often. Clod?’ he called. ‘I think I’ll take a nap. Carry me up the stairs.’

Clod was very tall and strong, his thick hair, beard, eyebrows, and eyelashes so pale blond, they were nearly white. He towered over Villiam naturally, but was so attuned to his master’s need to feel respected that he bent from the waist like an old man and bowed his head as he approached him at the dining table. He hoisted the frail lord gently from his chair and moved smoothly out of the room.

‘What will you do with the leftover sausages?’ Marek asked Lispeth, who was now carting away the bucket of vomit.

‘We will feed them to the chickens.’

‘Why won’t you eat them?’

‘It is against our God,’ she said, ‘to eat the flesh of His creatures.’

Marek gasped at this bit of purity. He had forgotten purity. It had been brushed aside and replaced with a desire to please. He was immediately embarrassed.

‘It is against my God, too,’ he said halfheartedly.

Lispeth said nothing. Marek took a last glance at the shiny, brown muck of regurgitated meat in the bucket as she took it away, and then he burped and got sweaty and hot with shame. Jenevere and Petra, the other female servants, came in to clean the rest of the mess. Marek watched in a daze, his mind strangely clear, but perhaps not altogether lucid. He thought he saw something hidden beneath the cover of calm in the servants’ faces. Underneath the placid kindness, he saw, was disgust and pity. The flatness and ease with which they performed their services were not in deference, but in charity. They were not doting servants to Villiam, they were slaves in their hearts to God. And they were judgmental observers. Who could blame them for having judgment? Marek was jealous of their power. He remembered the pride that he used to feel as Jude’s son, like a noble witness to that precarious soul that couldn’t help itself but sin. And the more abuse he took from his father, the better he was in God’s eyes. He had always known that virtue was determined in relation to others. He was on the losing end now. Each time Lispeth slopped his vomit out to the chickens, God was watching and sent her another blessing, taking a blessing away from Marek in turn.

Marek got up, wiped his tongue with a napkin and rushed through the manor to the large doors. ‘Let me out,’ he said to Pieter, who did not hesitate to unlock the doors and lower the drawbridge. Marek winced, moving from the dark cool of the stone manor to the bright sun. The air was hot and teeming with bugs from the water in the moat. The level was higher since he’d arrived that spring. How different life had been that day. And how tricked he felt now that the servants were so secretively cruel and pious. He could feel their satisfaction, like a rash on his skin. The worse he behaved, the more God loved them.

The land around the manor was green and aflutter with butterflies and bees humming around the flowers. The stableboys were bent over in the garden, filling baskets with vegetables. Luka was feeding carrots and apples to a steed by a trough of gleaming water. The cows grazed the dark, rich grass. Bunny rabbits slept on their backs under the shade of a tall pear tree. All was well, it seemed, though it was hot. Marek followed a path up the hill to gain a view of Jude’s pasture. The last time he’d seen the pasture was the day he had climbed the hill to the manor with Jude carrying Jacob on his back. Marek had grown stronger since then. His breathing was easier now as he climbed, his feet in their supple leather slippers digging into the hot wet soil. At the top of the hill was a grove of peach trees. A ripe peach fell at his feet, and he stooped down to pick it up—it was pink and yellow, red streaks nearly splitting it open. The fragrance made him swoon. He bit into it, and despite his previous nausea from the sausages, the sweetness sent him into a state of heady relief. He leaned against the peach tree and sucked the fruit, the juice dripping down the heel of his hand onto the lap of his fine satin pants. No matter, he thought. Lispeth would bathe him and clean his clothes. Every day there was a new set of pants and shirt, specially tailored to fit his own strange body. So quickly had he forgotten his shame and unhappiness. Sugar was the cure. He sucked the juice as though it were milk from a lamb’s teat.

The sky was cloudless as he stood and walked to the ridge of the hill and looked down. At first it was all a haze in the heat, the air vibrating and blurring. And then a breeze hit him like a slap in the face, and his vision cleared for a moment. Lapvona came into focus. It was all gray. The trees were bare. The roads were nearly white with arid dirt. He saw no water in the streams, only pale rocks. There were no animals being herded through the lands. He could see Jude’s pasture, a graveyard of dry dirt, no lambs, no movement. He looked down at the peach in his fist. A worm squirmed out of the flesh, a small pink thing that seemed to rear its head toward Marek, then burrowed back into the flesh of the peach, drunk on the sugar of its home. Marek was horrified. He threw the peach over the ridge and watched it roll along the soft dirt. Crows quickly descended on it.

Marek felt himself grow faint. He turned and vomited the sweet peach and saw another worm crawling through the chewed flesh at his feet. He vomited again, the last of the sausages. It burned his throat and he gagged, heaving more and more. A voice from below spoke to him.

‘Shall I carry you home?’

It was Lispeth. She had followed him up the hill.

‘No, Lispeth. You shouldn’t do anything for me anymore.’