Zombies vs. Unicorns Read online

  He thrust it at Joan as she arrived white-faced behind him. “Bury this,” he said.

  She held it away from her skirts.

  “I’ll be off,” he said.

  “You’ll not sleep, sir, or take a bite?” said I.

  “Not with that over me.” He looked at the ceiling. We could hear the lady, but not down the stairs; her noise poured out the arrow slit of her room, and bounced off the rocks outside, and in at the tower door. “I would sooner eat on a battlefield, with cavalry coming on both sides.”

  And he was gone. Joan and I could not move, transfixed by the repellent bag.

  “She has gone mad,” I said.

  “For the moment, yes,” said Joan, as if she could keep things ordinary with her matter-of-fact tone.

  We exchanged a long look. She read my question and my fear; she was not stupid. “Outside,” she said. “We don’t want to sully our living place wi’ this. Fetch the spade.”

  We stepped out in time for a last sight of the horseman a-galloping off into the trees. The gray light flared and fluttered unevenly, like my heartbeats. Joan bore the bag across the yellow grass, and I followed her into the edge of the forest, where we had raised the stone for old Cowlin. Joan sat on Cowlin’s stone. She leaned out and laid the bag on the grass. “Dig,” she said, pointing. “Right there.”

  She did not often order me about, only when she was very tired or annoyed, but I did not think to question her. I dug most efficiently, against the resistance of that bastard mountain soil, quite different from what we had managed to rot and soften into the vegetable garden. The last time I had dug this was for Cowlin’s grave, and the same sense of death was closed in around us, and of the smallness of our activity among the endless pines, among the endless mountains.

  While I dug, Joan sat recovering, her fingers over her mouth as if she would not let words out until she had ordered them better in her head. Every time I glanced at her, she looked a different age, glistening like a wide-eyed baby the once, then crumpled to a crone, then a fierce matron in her full strength. And she would not meet my eye.

  “There,” I said eventually. “’Tis done.” The mistress’s wails in the tower were weakening now; you might imagine them whistles of wind among the rocks, had your very spine not attuned itself to them like a dowser’s hazel rod bowing toward groundwater.

  Joan sprang up. She brought the bag. She plunked it in my digging. Then she cast me a look. “You’ll not be content till you see, will you.”

  “No.”

  “It will haunt your dreams, girl.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I will die if you don’t show me.”

  “I will show you, then.” And with her gaze fixed brutal on my face, she flicked back the corner of the sacking.

  I looked a long time; I truly looked my fill. Joan had thought I would squirm and weep, maybe be sick, but I did not. I’d seen dead things before, and beaten things.

  “It is her lover,” I said. “The father of her bab,” I added after some more looking.

  Joan did not answer. Who else would he be?

  I touched him, his hair, his cold skin; I closed the eyelid that was making him look out so frightening. I pressed one of the bruises at his jaw. I could not hurt him; I could push as hard as I liked. But I was gentle. I felt gentle; there is nothing like the spectacle of savagery to bring on a girl’s gentleness.

  “I am astounded she recognized him,” I said.

  “Oh, she did,” said Joan. “In an instant.”

  I looked a little longer, turned the head to both sides and made sure I saw all there was to see. “Well, for certain he don’t look very lovable now.”

  “Well, he was once. Listen to her noise, would you?”

  I glanced behind me, as if I might be able to see the thin skein of it winding from the window. One last glance at the beaten head, at the mouth—that had been done with a boot toe, that had—to fix the two of them together in my mind, and then I laid him in the sacking in the ground, and I put the cloth over his face and then some of the poor soil on top of that, and proceeded to hide him away.

  Joan Vinegar woke me, deep that night. “Come, girl, it is time for midwifery.”

  “What?” Muzzily I swam up from my dream. “There are months to go yet.”

  “Oh, no, there ain’t,” she said. “Today has brought it on, the sight of her man. She is in the throes now.”

  “What should I do?” I said, frightened. “You have not had time to show me.”

  “Assist, is all. Just do as I tell. I must get back to her. Bring all the cloths you can find, and a bowl and jug of water.” And she was gone.

  I rose and dressed and ran barefoot across the grass and rocks to the tower. The silence in the night, the smaller silence in the tower; the parcels of herbs opened on the table; the bowl and jug there, ready for me to fill; the stove a crack open, with the fire just woken inside—all of a sudden I was awake, with the eeriness of it, with the unusualness, with the imminence of a bab’s arriving.

  Up I went with my bringings, into the prison room. It was all cloth and candlelight up there, the lady curled around herself on the creased bed. She looked asleep, or dead, as far as I could see from my fearful glances. The fire was built up big, and it was hotter in here than I had ever known it, hotter than it ought to be, for the lady was supposed to enjoy no comforts, but find every aspect of her life here a punishment.

  Joan took the cloths from me, took the jug and bowl. “Make up a tea,” she said, “of just the chamomile, for now. Lots of blooms, lots of leaves, about a fifth what is in my parcel there, in the middling pot.”

  “No,” murmured the lady, steeling herself for a pain, and Joan almost pushed me outside. I hurried away. I had only heard screams and dire stories of childbed, and the many babs brought healthy from its trials had done nothing to counter my terror of it.

  Down in the lower room I went to work, with Joan’s transmitted voice murmuring in the stairway door, wordless, like a low wind in a chimney. I tidied the fire and put the pot on, then sat with the stove open and my face almost in the flames, drinking of their orange-ness and stinging heat, listening for a sound from the lady above, which did not come; she must noise loudly for her dead man, but stay stalwart for babbing, it seemed. They are a weird folk, the nobility; they do nothing commonsensically.

  I took up the tea, and Joan told me the next thing to prepare, and so began the strange time that seemed to belong neither to night nor to day, but to happen as an extremely slow and vivid dream. Each time I glanced in at the door, the lady would be somewhere else, but motionless—on the bed, crouched beside it, bracing herself against the chimney-breast, her hair fallen around her like a cloak, full of snarls and tangles. Joan would hurry at me, as if I should not be seeing even as much as I saw. She would take what I had brought and instruct me what next she needed. Downstairs was all smells and preparations—barley mush with honey and medicine seeds crushed into it, this tea and that, from Joan’s store of evil-smelling weeds, warmed-over soup for all of us, to sustain us in our various labors.

  The fear came and went. Had I a task to do, I was better off, for it took my whole mind to ensure in my tiredness that I performed it right. When I was idle by the stove with Joan murmuring in the stairs, that was worse, when I could not envisage what awfulness might be happening up there, when only the lady’s occasional gasp or word, pushed out of her on the force of a birth pain, stoked up my horrors. “Girl?” Joan would come to the door and say down the stairs, not needing to raise her voice. And then my fear would flare worst, at what I might glimpse when I went up, at what I might hear.

  Then a new time began, and I could avoid the room no longer. Joan made me bring up the chair from the kitchen, and sit on it, and become a chair of sorts myself, with the lady’s arms hooked over my thighs, my lap full of her hair. “Give her a sip,” Joan would say, or, “Lift the hair off her neck and fan her there; she is hot as Hades.” And in between she would be talking up i
nto the lady’s face, crouched before us, and though she was tired and old and aproned, I could see how she once must have been, and how her man might still desire her even now, her kind, fierce face, her living, watching eyes, her knowing what to do, after child after child after child of her own. She knew how to look after all of us, the laboring lady and the terrified girl assisting; she knew how to damp those two great forest fires, grief and fear, contain them and stop them taking over the world; she was in her element, doing what she was meant to do.

  In the middle of one of the pains, the lady reared, and there was a rush and a gush, and Joan exchanged sodden cloth for dry, out of sight there, under the lady’s nightgown. She looked up exultant, over the bump of the baby. “That’s your waters popped,” she said. “Not long now, love-a-do.”

  I was almost in a faint, such a strong scent billowed out from the soaked cloth beside us, from the lady herself. Jessamine, I thought. No, elderflower. No—But as fast as I could name the flowers, the scent grew past them and encompassed others, sweet and sharp, so different and so strong my mind was painted now with scattered pinks, now with blood-black roses and with white daphne.

  “Oh,” I whispered, and drank another deep breath of it, “I can almost taste the sweetness!”

  The lady’s head lolled to the side; released from the pain, she faded into momentary sleep, her face almost rapturous with the relief. Beyond her, Joan held the nightgown out, and watched below, shaking her head. “What is coming?” she said softly. “What is coming out of you, lovely girl?”

  “A little horse,” said the lady in her sleep. “A little white horse.”

  “Well, that will be a sight.” Joan laughed gently, and arranged her cloths beneath.

  What came, four pains and pushes later, was of course not a horse but a child—but a child so strange, a horse might almost have been less so. For the child was white—not white in contrast to Moorish or Mongol or African prince, but white like a lily, white like the snow, like the moon, entirely without color, except … He was a boy-child, and the boy spout on him was tipped with wrinkled green, like a bud, and the boy sacks on him—a good size for one so small—were also green, and darker, like some kind of fruiting, or vegetable.

  He was small, he was unfinished, he did not live long. Joan gave him into the lady’s arms, and I sat behind her on the floor and supported her, and over her shoulder I watched as he took a few pained breaths of the sweet, heated air, and then took no more, but lay serene. He was barely human, barely arrived; he was an idea of a person that had not got quite properly uttered, not properly formed out of slippery white clay; and yet a significance hovered all round him quite disproportionate to his size. He smelled divine, and he looked it, a tiny godlet, precise in all his features, delicate, pale, powerful like nothing I had seen before, like nothing I have seen since.

  “What is that on his forehead?” I said. Perhaps all newborns had it and I was ignorant.

  Joan shrugged, touched the crown of his tiny head. “Some kind of carbuncle?”

  The lady held him better to the light.

  “It looks like a great pearl there,” I said. “Set in his skin. It has a gleam.”

  “Yes, a pearl,” said the lady distantly, as if she had expected no less, and she kissed the bump of it.

  Joan gave her a cloth, and she wrapped him, her hands steady, though I had begun to cry behind her, and were dripping onto her shoulder.

  There was business to deal with—a body that has birthed needs to rid itself of all sorts of muck, and be washed, and dressed cleanly, and laid in a clean bed to rest, and it can only move slowly through these things. We proceeded calmly, Joan saying what I should do, task after simple task, and always I was aware of the little master, in his wrappings there by the fire, as if to keep his small deadness warm, and the dance we were doing around him, in his sweet air, in the atmosphere of him.

  When she was abed, the lady asked for him, and the three of us sat there in a row very quiet, and she held him, unwrapped, lying along her up-propped thighs. Quite lifeless, he was, quite bloodless, with the scrap of green cord hanging from his narrow belly; he ought to have looked pitiful, but I could feel through the lady’s arm against mine, through the room’s air, through the world, that none of us pitied him.

  “He looks so wise,” I whispered. “Like a wise little old man.”

  “Wise and wizened,” said the lady. I have never known anyone so tranquil and strong as this lady, I thought. Whoever she was, all I wanted that night was to serve her forever, me and Joan together in that tower, bonded till death by this night’s adventure, by the bringing of this tiny lad to the world, and the losing of him from it.

  In the morning the flower scent was gone; the fire had died, the tower was cold, and the air felt rotten with grief. He will haunt your dreams, Joan had told me, of that lover’s head, but in fact he filled my waking mind, so well remembered in all his details that it was as if a picture of him—his ragged neck flesh, the turned-up eye—went before me, painted on a cloth, wherever I went, to the well or the woods or wherever. And when he was not there, his son, pale as a corpse candle, floated before me instead.

  The lady gave the bab into Joan’s hands, a tight-wrapped, tiny parcel, banded and knotted with lengths of her own hair. “Oh, of course!” I said when Joan brought it down the stair. “So that he always has his mam around him! And such a color, so warm!”

  She laid him on the table. “So we’ve more digging to do, for him and the other birth leavings. It is best to bury those, with proper wordage and herbery.”

  “How is she?” I said timidly. I was unnerved that our bond was gone, that we were three separate people again.

  “Resting,” said Joan. “Peaceful.”

  Then I must have looked very lost and useless, because she came to where I sat on the bench, and stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, and she held me together while I cried into my apron, and “There, there,” she said, and “There, there,” but calmly, and patiently, as if she did not expect me ever to stop, but would stand quiet and radiant behind me, however long I took to weep myself dry.

  I sent the girl home. She was in too much distress to be much use to me, and I could not let her near the lady. I thought it odd—she had hardly been squeamish at all when that head was brought in. I had had hopes for her. But the bab undid her, whether its birth or its death or its strangeness, or the fact that its mam shed no tears over it but sank straight back away into the stupor we were used to, as if she had never been childered, as if she had never raved and suffered over her man’s death.

  With the rider who brought supplies and took the girl away, I sent a message to Lord Hawley that the mistress was delivered of a dead child, and what were we to do now? For my contract with him had only specified up to the birth, but now that the bab was gone, could not some other woman, without midwifing skills, be brought to the task of guarding my lady? For though I could use the good money he was paying, I felt a fraud here now, when there were plenty of childered women in my own village to whom I could be truly useful, rather than playing nursemaid here.

  For answer he sent money, money extra upon what he had promised, as if the death of the bab had been my doing and he wanted to show me favor for it. And he bid me stay on while they sorted themselves out at court about this state of affairs. I could see them there in their ruffs and robes, around their glasses of foreign wine, discussing: Ought they to humiliate the lady with further exile, or ought they to allow her back, instead to be constantly reminded of her sullied state by the faces and gestures of others?

  And so I stayed nursemaid. Although there were only the two of us now, I kept to my contracted behavior and did not keep company with my prisoner, but only attended her health as long as that was necessary, and made and brought her meals, emptied her chamber pot, and tended her small fire. I was under orders to speak to her only when spoken to, and to resist any attempt she might make to engage me in conversation, but had I obeyed them we wou
ld have passed our days entirely in silence, so to save my own sanity I kept to my practice after the birth of greeting the lady when I entered, and she would always greet me back, so that we began each day with my asserting that she was a lady, and her acknowledging that I was Joan Vinegar, which otherwise we might well have forgot, there being nothing much else to remind us.

  A month and a half we lived together, the lady and me in our silences, the mountain wastes around us. The lord’s man came with his foodstuffs and more money, with no accompanying message. He told me all the gossip of court, sitting there eating bread and some of the cheese and wine that he himself had supplied, and truly it was as if he spoke of animals in a menagerie, so strange were their behaviors, so high-colored and passionate. He filled the tower room with his noise and his uniform. I was so glad when he went and left us in peace again that I worried for myself, that I was turning like that one upstairs, entirely satisfied with nothing, with watching the endless parade of my own thoughts through my head.

  I stood, with the man’s meal crumbs at the far end of the table, and a cabbage like a great pale green head at the near end, and the gold scattered beside it that I could not spend, for how much longer yet he had not said. She was silent upstairs. She had maintained her silence so thoroughly while the man was here, he might have thought me a hermit, hired only to do my prayers and observances for sake of the queen’s health, not to attend any other human business. And none of this made sense, not the gold, or the cabbage, or the smell of the wine dregs from the cup, or the disturbance his cheerful voice had wrought on the air of the usually silent room, but all flew apart in my senses like sparrows shooed from a seeded field, in all directions, to all quite different refuges.

  My lady’s womb ceased its emissions from the birth, and paused awhile dry. Then came a day when she requested cloths for her monthly blood. I wondered, as I brought them, then later as I washed them, whether this was good or bad, this return to normal health. Would Hawley have preferred—would he have showered me with yet more gold?—if she had died in expelling her child, or thereafter from some fever of childbed? Had I been supposed to understand that she was not to return alive from this exile? Had I failed in an unstated duty?