Lapvona(32)

Later, in the middle of the night, Marek awoke nude and tangled in the bedsheet. Lispeth was asleep in her chair. She hadn’t pulled the curtains closed or prepared his bedside mead, which he always drank if he woke in the dark. He sat up and looked around the room, remembering the events of the previous day. He was tired, but hungry.

In the moonlight, he got up and walked naked to the window, lit a candle, and ventured out down the hall, wrapped in his sheet. Through the darkness he heard voices downstairs, the thumping of feet across the great room, and the front door creaking open. A rush of hot night air whooshed in and up the stairs. Marek followed it. Perhaps this was a dream, he thought. But his dreams were usually more dreamy. It struck him now that his dreams were never quite right. They seemed to occur in a space without time, in death, he thought. He heard a night bird sing its aeolian melody. That was the problem, he realized. He did not dream of birds. Without birds, there was no time. He moved carefully down the stairs, his bare feet chilled on the stones. The night bird cuckooed. A jubilant voice outside mimicked it. ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ The front door had been left ajar, the guard was gone. Marek pushed it open and followed the voices across the drawbridge into the dark.

It was less hot now, but still hot enough to break a sweat moving slowly up the slope of the hill. The voices were singing a song now, and he knew it was Villiam’s singing—the nasal twang of his voice was unmistakable. He sounded drunk, and so did the other man with him. It wasn’t Clod, whose voice had a northern depth.

‘Goddamnit!’ the other voice cried suddenly. ‘I stepped on a thorn.’ It was Father Barnabas.

‘Don’t be a baby,’ Villiam crooned. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

Marek followed the blue light of the moon up the path the two men had traversed to the reservoir, which he’d never seen before. He crouched behind a rosebush and watched them disrobe and turn, naked, toward the water.

‘Ready?’ the priest asked. Villiam grunted. And then they ran in tandem and jumped into the water. Marek had never been allowed to jump into the lake down in Lapvona. Jude forbade it. ‘You’d drown, no question.’ But Villiam and Father Barnabas floated and dunked and came up and splashed at one another like little children. They laughed and swam. Marek smiled for a moment, cheered by their glee. Then he listened to them talking.

‘Father, what do you say when the people ask why it is so hot this summer?’

‘Oh, I say it’s because the Devil got out of hell and is on the loose, hungry for innocent souls. His fire has dried up the land. God has shut the gates of heaven to keep the Devil out.’ Of course, he told no one that Villiam was hoarding water in a reservoir up there. It was perfect water, clean and pure and cold as ice as it trickled down from the far mountains in underground streams.

‘Isn’t that a good story,’ Villiam said, splashing a bit feebly. ‘You really are a good priest.’

In a ray of moonlight, Marek spotted Father Barnabas’s black robe hanging from the branch of a tree. Under it were his stockings, shoes, and hat.



* * *




*

By nightfall, all that remained of Klim was his head, neck, and torso. Jude had first eaten the man’s narrow bicep, his first ever taste of meat, and it had ignited in him the hunger and the strength to go back out and chop the man’s leg from the pubis and roast it, foot and all, on the fire, snapping at Ina to shut up, to keep quiet. If she said the wrong thing, he knew, the nightmare would end and he would wake up starving. Jude could feel his own muscles relax after months of gnawing and tightening. Even his teeth, which had been aching, felt harder. His vision was clear despite the darkness of night—oddly, eating the blind man’s body had improved Jude’s eyesight. Had Ina’s vision been restored? He hadn’t been paying attention. As soon as he’d started eating, he’d turned into a wordless animal, grunting and squatting before the fire, eating the stump of Klim’s leg, gnashing his teeth at the small muscle, as the rest of the leg still cooked. Ina had her fill, regained her ability to move and stand and walk, then fluttered in the shadows behind him, dancing with her broom. He didn’t want to think of her—he wasn’t sure he could trust her. Something felt strange now that she had tricked him into eating human flesh. She seemed anxious to get rid of him once she was up and about. She swept up the bird bones and pretended to trip over Jude, who was licking his fingers. He had blood on his hands, sticky and brown.

‘You should go home,’ she said.

‘But I’m still hungry,’ he said. ‘How about some milk?’

‘Don’t be greedy,’ Ina said. ‘Come back next time.’

‘What does that mean?’ Jude asked.

‘It means goodnight.’

Jude got up and went out, lugging the rest of Klim over his shoulder.



* * *




*

    The priest’s clothes smelled of burning resin and sweat, and the blackness of the garments made Marek feel he was invisible in the dark. He had never worn black before and he did enjoy the sensation of walking unseen. He spotted a plum tree on the path down the mountain and stopped to fill the priest’s pockets so that he would have a bit of sweetness to chew if he got hungry. It had been so long since he had come this way, and then only once, uphill with Jude and the dead boy. On the way down, the slope of the mountain looked much gentler, a gradual descent into the dark sway of heat. It was odd how the air was thicker the lower he went, and the heat in these flatter reaches at the bottom was like a wall he broke through with every step. He felt somehow that the priest’s clothing protected him, that the man’s sweat had cooled the clothes. He might be in a dream, he thought, but the priest’s shoes were too big. That small trouble kept him rooted. The guards on the road tipped their hats as he passed.