Lapvona(48)

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Ina had no regrets about her new life and the work it afforded her. Without milk, her only possible career was as a medicine woman. Her science wasn’t faulty: she really did know how to cure maladies with herbs and tinctures. She had a hundred years of experience keeping herself alive. That was worthy of some payment, wasn’t it? She walked home through the woods, whistling back and forth to the birds who were gossiping about their approaching migration. She said she’d miss them, but she was only appeasing them. Now that she could see, she had little interest in the birds. They were alarmists, she felt, and she’d grown weak in her abilities to navigate the human world the more she had depended on them. They knew nothing of being an old woman, or a new woman. All they knew were their patterns and instincts. Ina herself wanted new patterns, new instincts. Since she had survived the famine and regained her eyesight, she felt she’d been reborn.

She lifted her feet high on the path now to be sure not to trip over the sticks and rocks and brambles, as they appeared to her twice as large as they really were. The horse eyes bulged from her head and put pressure on her inner cavities. She tried taking cannabis flowers for her headaches, but the buds were too fresh yet to have a strong effect, having only been planted once the rains let up in August. When the pain was too intense, she popped the horse eyes out into a bowl of milk. And of course she took them out each night. She had no need for them while she slept, and her head was grateful for the vacuum of space in the eye sockets. She had saved her old eyes, her original ones, wrapped them in a bit of cloth and hid them on a shelf above the hearth, keepsakes now. When she had first removed them, she had to say goodbye to many of the memories she’d had. But she was not a sentimental woman. Her new eyes didn’t know who she had been. And so she was new to herself, at least in her vision. She felt young again. One might expect a young woman to want someone to love and caress, someone to fend for her when she needed fending, to wake her with the horse eyes each morning, to admire her longevity and suck her empty breasts. She had seen Jude on the road a few times. But each time she’d lifted her hand to wave and called his name, he ran away. Anyway, he looked to be in bad shape. There were other men in the world.



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How big was the world? Marek was starting to wonder. How far did space extend past what he could see? The window was high enough that he could watch the sun sink down behind the land, its fire burning even while the land had gone cold and dark, he suspected. At night, the stars looked very far away. He would never reach them. He stared out when he tired of staring at his mother. She was boring in her sleep, immune to his poking and prodding. She wouldn’t even wince when he pulled her hair.

He had spent every night in Agata’s bed since her arrival, waiting for some profound maternal love to return to her ghost, but it never did. Instead, she was dull and speechless. She was unconcerned for Marek. And she was always hungry. Every morning, she finished her plate of breakfast and often ate Marek’s, too, before he awoke. Then she went back to sleep. She had traded her dark habit for one of Dibra’s dresses, blood red with black stitching. Marek thought it was ugly against the red of her hair and suggested she get a blue dress, but Agata didn’t care what Marek thought. The few times he’d tried, in her sleep, to nurse her again, she’d woken up angry and dragged him by the ear out the door of her room and slammed it. Marek thought that was a little motherly of her, finally. To drag him by the ear.

If there was a world past where the sun sets, would they know Marek there? If he went there, would they welcome him? Did they look like the people of Lapvona? Did they have drought and death there, too? Marek wondered about his mother’s empty grave, which he had filled with the remains of his father. He did his best to make sense of it all. Why did a ghost need so much food and sleep? She looked and felt real, although weirdly blank in the face. He touched her constantly, her hands, her hair, her arm, thin under the red linen, her legs under the folds of the dress which he disliked, which still smelled of Dibra, whom Villiam never mentioned.

Dibra’s room had been turned into storage for Jacob’s stuffed animals. It was Lispeth’s idea to move them, to make more space for the nun. Lispeth, Petra, and Jenevere had spent a few days carefully wrapping all the kills in muslin and carrying them to Dibra’s empty chambers. In some cases the animals had to be removed from their perches on the wall, unnailed or unglued from little varnished twigs and sticks that Jacob had stuck in cracks between the stones. For the most part, the animals remained intact, undisturbed in the hands of the young female servants. The badger, the skunk, the boar, the lynx, the lizards. The birds were handled very delicately so as not to disturb the lay of their feathers. Jacob had been careful to arrange them with glue to cover the wounds from his arrows. Still, a few animals disintegrated in the girls’ hands, fur and teeth and cartilage collapsing even upon their approach. The hedgehog, the bats, the marmot, all the lemmings. They preferred to crumble than to be moved away. Agata had watched the migration from her window seat, and Marek had watched her watching. Her eyes moved like a slow animal’s. She showed very little on the face beyond blushing, which Marek could not distinguish as the blush of rage or shame or hunger or love or nothing. For him, they appeared the same.

‘Will you miss the dead animals?’ Marek asked her.

Agata shook her head and flicked her hand at Marek, as if to shoo away a fly. She did not waver in her disgust for Marek, although she was slowly growing accustomed to him. Still, she couldn’t stand his inquisitiveness. Everything he asked her was a plea for affection. He didn’t care for her, not really. He only wanted to seduce her by seeming to care, so that she would care for him. Children are selfish, she thought. They rob you of life. They thrive as you toil and wither, and then they bury you, their tears never once falling out of regret for what they’ve stolen. That was how she felt. She was still a bandit at heart: cruelty ran in her blood. Yes, Marek was her son, but he was a bastard, a scar. That’s what a child of rape was, in fact—evidence. A pang of pity for Jude rose up in her from time to time. The fool had raised the creature instead of burying it alive. She would have told him, ‘This is a bandit’s bastard,’ if she could have spoken. But Jude must have known. He just didn’t care. He had made the decision to keep the baby for himself. A stupid man. But Jude was fond of babes. Oh, he was, he was, Agata remembered. How many times did he squeeze her tiny breasts in his great, hardened hands and whisper how he liked how small she was, that she looked about twelve years old in this light by the fire, and oh, the pleasure of the tight sheath was beyond him. Beyond. Beyond what Agata could tolerate, finally. She’d been raw and insane with shock when Jude had found her in the woods and fallen in love. He could only love a starving child, she thought. No grown woman would touch him. He must have known that. Such stink. She hated Jude. And although she knew Marek was not his, she recognized their similarities—blood wasn’t all that mattered, after all. Their stubbornness and their neediness, their longing like a loop of rope around her neck. She’d been happier being a slave at the abbey than she had been at Jude’s, a slave to his lust while the creature inside her fed off her body more and more each day, no matter how hard she tried to kill it.