Chapter 1 Aleys
Aleys
Aleys has fallen behind the group of children running along the canal.
She stops abruptly. Maybe she’s dropped something, or perhaps she’s studying her feet, which would be strange enough.
She’s thirteen years old and powerfully odd.
The others glance back, but they’re used to Aleys freezing in mid-sentence, in mid-chore, in mid-anything, and they move on as a pack toward the bridge, where they’ll chuck pebbles onto barges headed south to Brugge or back to the North Sea and jeer at the raised fists of English skippers.
Aleys looks around to be sure she’s alone.
She crouches to examine a caterpillar crossing the towpath.
Aleys knows she’s getting too old to care about something so small.
It’s nothing special, just a green cabbage worm, not even the length of her thumb, the kind she knows will turn into a plain white moth with tiny spots as black as monk’s ink.
Aleys watches it creep across the path. It’s a miracle that the stampede of children didn’t crush it.
She rises and walks over to a bush and breaks off a twig and returns to the creature, coaxing it onto the stem and bearing it carefully to the side of the path.
She bends to deposit it in the undergrowth and watches it disappear beneath a leaf.
Funny, how God makes creatures blend in where they belong.
How strange they are when out of place. Aleys looks up after the children.
They’ve forgotten her. She lifts the leaf, but the caterpillar is gone, too.
She worries she might not have put it back in the right spot; she hopes it finds its friends. She hopes it gets to fly.
Aleys considers, for a moment, whether to chase after the others.
By now, they’ll have reached the intersection of the canals, where they’ll wait for the old lockmaster to turn his back so they can teeter across the gates as the water fills.
They might now be running up the towpath of the Zwin toward the sea or they might have veered onto the Lieve Canal that goes all the way to Ghent.
She doesn’t really want to follow. “Aleys!” they’ll say, turning, laughing, toward each other.
“Did you get lost?” She won’t want to tell them about the caterpillar.
Not even her brothers or sister, who laughs at everything.
So Aleys straightens and turns back. A bee trails her, and another joins.
Bees love her like she’s a tulip. They don’t sting her. She doesn’t know why.
Mama will be at home. Papa’s gone to the cloth hall in Brugge to get the guild’s stamp on their spring wool.
The Lakenhalle has a new belfry as grand as that of any cathedral, and louder, too.
Mornings and evenings, it clangs out the hours that wool production must start and stop, as if there’s a race on.
Papa says that even God stops work when the Lakenhalle tolls.
Mama slaps him when he says this, but she smiles all the same.
Aleys scuffs her shoes along the path. It’s a pretty spring day, one of those that carries the smell of the sea and the rasp of gulls from the coast. She passes homes with yards facing the canal.
The spinsters have moved their stools outside and are hand-spinning thread from clouds of fleece atop long poles nestled against their shoulders.
The women tip their faces to the sun and call out greetings.
Aleys knows them all from collecting the skeins that Mama sorts on their kitchen table.
Papa takes the best yarn, creamy and smooth, for the weavers in Brugge.
The rest is used for felting or sold to carpet makers.
Aleys and Griete play cat’s cradle with the cheap stuff, full of knots and noils, beside the hearth. Or they used to, anyway.
Aleys finds Mama in the vegetable garden, sprinkling carrot seed along the furrows with one hand, supporting her swollen belly with the other. Farrago, their dog, is beside her. He follows her mother everywhere.
“Mama, you shouldn’t be doing that.”
Mama dusts the last of the seed from her hands and leans back, bracing her palms in the small of her back.
“I couldn’t resist. It feels like the first day of summer.
” Any day now, Mama’s been saying for a week.
They pulled the cradle from storage and placed it on the hearth.
When no one’s looking, Aleys sits on the stool and practices rocking it with her foot.
It might be all right, Mama having a baby.
Aleys can’t remember an infant in the cradle.
Griete’s nearly eleven. It’s been empty a long time.
Mama straightens and brushes her braid over her shoulder with the back of her hand. Aleys got Mama’s blue eyes, but not her fair hair. Her own is a glossy brown, almost black, like Papa’s.
Mama looks beyond Aleys for the others. “You’ve returned alone?”
Again, Aleys hears her think, though she knows it contains no judgment. Mama says she was the same as a girl. Sober, stubborn, wondering. Different. Mama’s the only person in the world who understands.
“What marvels did you find?” Mama asks.
“Just a cabbage worm.”
“You saved it?” Mama slaps her palm to her forehead. “You know it will eat this garden empty.”
“Not this one.”
“No? Well, better than wool moths, I suppose.” Mama gazes off over the fields that run behind their yard. She has that faraway look, brings both hands to her belly. Then she sighs. “Be a good girl, Aleys, will you, and bring in the washing?”
“Mama, I thought maybe we could . . .”
“On such an afternoon?”
“Please? They’ll be back soon. And any day now . . .”
“What a strange child,” says Mama. “God’s glory on earth all round us, and my daughter wants the prayer book.” She is shaking her head, but she’s smiling. Mama loves the book as much as Aleys does. “Never mind the laundry. I’ll get the psalter.” Mama trundles into the house, Farrago at her heels.
For as long as Aleys can remember, she and Mama have read the psalter together.
Well, not exactly read. Mama isn’t lettered, and it’s in Latin, anyway, which not even their priest understands.
Mama inherited the little book from her aunt, abbess of a convent near Sint-Truiden.
Aleys wishes she could read it. But Mama knows all the prayers and the lives of the saints, no matter what the Latin says.
She spins them into stories for her children.
Henryk and Claus will sit still only for the goriest of her tales.
Saints rarely end peacefully, and Mama sends them to their deaths with relish, leaning in to the stonings and hackings, flayings and clubbings.
Aleys frowns at her sometimes. It seems impious.
Mama sighs. “Aleys, I have to give your brothers some kind of Christian education. Those rascals aren’t about to become monks. ”
And Griete? She’s all about the drama. Aleys’s younger sister likes to act out the stories, flinging her golden hair all over the place.
Griete’s favorite is Saint Ursula, who led eleven thousand of her best friends on pilgrimage.
When the Huns attacked, Ursula and her maidens chose to die by the sword rather than submit their virtue to the soldiers.
Aleys wonders what it would be like to have so many friends.
What it would be like to have just one good friend you could take on pilgrimage.
Her siblings seem to think that martyrs exist solely for their entertainment. Just yesterday Griete hopped up when Mama closed the psalter and went back into the kitchen. “My turn,” she announced. “I’m the saint today.”
“No,” said Aleys. Sometimes Griete was imperious. “It should be Claus.” He was the only one who could remember his lines.
“He’s always the saint,” whined Griete. “Can’t we do Ursula? I’ll be the virgin. The boys can be Huns.”
“You’re not that good a virgin,” said Claus with a lopsided grin. He was right. Griete was an unconvincing Ursula. She just flirted with the Huns, glancing back over her shoulder and giggling as they gave chase.
“Virgins are boring,” declared Henryk, who made a decent soldier but not much else.
“How about Saint Laurence?” Claus nodded with his own enthusiasm. “You can grill me to death over a pit of flame.” He threw himself to the ground. “Watch.” He rolled on the floor as if on a spit. “I’m well-done!” he shouted. “Turn me over!”
Privately, Aleys thinks they should take the saints more seriously.
It would be marvelous to be a martyr. So sure, so full of passion.
Everyone loves them, despite how strange they are.
Maybe because of how strange they are. She tries to convince Griete to join her.
“Straight to heaven,” she says. “No purgatory. It’ll be easy.
” The problem is, how to get yourself martyred?
You might become a pilgrim and hope to be beheaded or burned for your love of God in the Holy Land.
Or better yet, you could be shot through by a pagan arrow en route to Constantinople; that seemed a tidy, even cut-rate, entrance to heaven.
Given the alternatives. But then Papa told her that he had no plans to take them farther than Brugge, let alone Byzantium.
“You and your mother,” he said, chucking her under the chin, “are all the saints we need.”
Aleys is convinced she’ll live her life and die in triviality.
There must be other ways to get God’s attention.
Aleys tests her faith like she’s wiggling a loose tooth.
She tries fasting, but after a day or two, though she pinches her thighs and is sure she’s wasting away, nobody notices. It’s a great disappointment.