Chapter 1 Aleys #2
Aleys needs a hair shirt. She collects the shed fur of Farrago and painstakingly glues it to a belt that she fastens beneath her girdle and under her nightdress. It works beautifully, it itches horribly. Aleys breaks out in bright pink welts and can hardly keep her hands from clawing at her torso.
“What is that?” Griete shrieks in revulsion when Aleys lifts her shift to show her.
“My penance,” supplies Aleys.
Griete wrinkles her nose. “What for? You’ve never done anything wrong in your life.”
The hair belt develops fleas, so Griete bans it from their bed, and that’s the end of that.
Aleys has tried everything she can think of to prove herself to God. She can’t help but feel her talents are wasted. The saints get all the adventures. All the friends.
“You’re a strange child,” says Papa, “but you’ll save us in the end.”
It started with the pictures in the psalter.
When she was small, Aleys would sit on Mama’s lap and grip her braid as ballast to lean over the book and fall into its miniature world.
Illuminations, Mama called them, paintings that bring light to the prayers and psalms lettered on the page.
Even now, when Aleys leans her cheek on Mama’s shoulder, she loses herself in colors so vivid they seem to vibrate.
There are ladies who might suddenly speak or bend to feed a green apple to a ruby deer.
Turn the page, and there are sinners with bug eyes peeping from cauldrons or pleading from dark pits guarded by scaled beasts.
Aleys has to look at the demons through her fingers.
Angels land on the pages, too, trailing banners with tidings in Latin that Mama can’t read.
Somehow Mama knows what the angels think.
Mama’s psalter holds the real world, too, not just trees and birds, but things Aleys has never seen, mountains and waterfalls and strange fruits from faraway lands.
She wonders how they’d taste if you touched your tongue to the page.
Aleys wants to dive into the paintings, to swim in the crimson and blue, the willow, the traces of gold.
The psalter holds prayers for every hour of the day, precisely lettered across the page.
Mama knows that Aleys loves the psalter more than anyone, even if neither of them knows exactly what the words mean.
Someday this will be yours, but you must be very, very good.
When they finish looking, Mama will slip the psalter back into its silk pouch and place it out of reach.
Aleys’s eyes will follow, her imagination caught within the pages of a small book on a high shelf.
Sometimes, as she’s dropping off to sleep, the illustrations waver before her.
Birds fly through forests of inked letters and she wakes wondering what the bristly shapes could possibly mean.
Today, though, Aleys wants a particular story.
“Perpetua?” Mama looks at the book in her hand. “You’re sure?” She puts her other hand back on her stomach. Any day now. “It won’t be too much?”
It’s not actually the tale of Saint Perpetua that Aleys craves, it’s what Mama always says at the end.
Aleys could recite the story herself, though never as well as Mama.
It brings tears to her eyes when her mother describes Perpetua unlatching her newborn from her breast and handing him to her brother.
Perpetua holds her head high as she strides into the arena where wild beasts wait to tear her apart for the emperor’s birthday.
All because she refused to renounce the one true God for the emperor’s menu of Roman gods.
Aleys wonders what it would be like to be so brave, has imagined herself as Perpetua.
But not today. Today it’s Mama about to enter the arena.
Aleys isn’t exactly sure what happens when you have a baby, but she knows it’s dangerous.
Last year they lost a neighbor, one of her favorites, to childbirth, a woman whose three sons would dash laughing to see Aleys when she came to pick up the yarn.
She remembers the armful of blood-soaked rags the midwife carried from their door.
Reading her mind, Mama pulls Aleys into a tight embrace. Aleys can feel the baby kick through Mama’s dress, right into her own belly, and she feels a surge of anger. They don’t need a baby. They’re fine as they are, the six of them. She wishes the baby away. It’s a wild beast, it doesn’t belong.
Mama whispers into her hair. “Remember, you still have your wishes ahead of you.” Every girl receives three charmed events, almost like wishes, in the three years before she weds.
They might be subtle, so you have to be alert.
Aleys is in no rush to marry, but she likes the thought of spontaneous gifts.
“Maybe one of them will be the baby,” says Mama.
“No.” Aleys doesn’t want to waste one of her wishes on an infant. She wants to spend them on herself. “Mama, what if the baby . . .” Her glance strays toward the neighbor’s yard, then back to her mother.
Mama draws back and holds both her shoulders and looks Aleys right in the eye.
“Listen. I delivered the four of you. I’m strong.
” Then Mama pulls Aleys close again and whispers in her ear the words she always says—her very own words, just for her daughter—at the end of Perpetua.
“Never could I leave you, child. Not even for God.” But it doesn’t comfort Aleys the way she wanted, and she goes to bed uneasy.
That night a steady rain creates a dense hush around the house, punctuated by the occasional slap of the shutter against the window frame.
Aleys sleeps fitfully, in and out of dreams, finding no rest. In the small hours, a shriek pierces the quiet.
Aleys starts awake, gripping the sheet, her heart racing.
Maybe it was an owl. The cry comes again, from inside.
Downstairs. Aleys sits up, hugging herself.
The shutter gives a loud snap, and Aleys looks over at Griete.
She’s sound asleep. Her sister sleeps through everything.
She could wake Griete, ask what the cry was, hold hands and huddle beneath the bedclothes.
But Griete would only stoke her fear, and Aleys feels her heart can’t beat any faster.
She slips out of bed and down the stairs.
The floor in the hall outside her parents’ chamber is cold beneath her feet.
Farrago waits in vigil. He’s shivering. His eyes are worried.
His tail gives one short wag when he sees Aleys, then stops.
Aleys puts her ear to the door. For a moment, she thinks a wild animal has gotten into the room, but then she understands that the growling is human, the laboring breath is Mama’s.
It’s here. The baby is coming. The sounds are terrible, inhuman moans and grunts, as if Mama is wrestling with a dark angel from the psalter.
An image invades her mind of the leathery, winged beast from the book, the king of the abyss, sprung to life in Mama’s chamber with his terrible clawed hands and thrashing tail.
The baby is breaking her mother, and demons are waiting to seize her.
Another cry, more panting. Aleys feels a chill course her limbs, like she’s freezing from the inside out.
She braces her hands against the doorframe.
Within the chamber are horrors, things she shouldn’t see, things she’s afraid to see.
She should be fearless, like Perpetua. She should go to Mama’s aid.
But she can’t. She just can’t. The demons.
Aleys stands locked in terror outside the door, her feet frozen to the ground. “Mama,” she whispers.
Aleys begins to pray. Please, Lord, hear me.
She slides to her knees and presses her forehead into the door.
All she wants is her mother. She doesn’t care what happens to the baby.
Take it, just spare Mama. She concentrates everything into this one desire, until her need is a hot coal in her belly.
Send the angels. She prays to the saints, she prays to Mary.
She leans into the door, all her small weight, as if she could push the monsters back to hell.
Light breaks around the frame. Is it a sign?
Bring more light, Lord, more angels. She prays harder, scarcely breathing, the words in her mind frantic, each one crashing into the next.
Her wishes. If ever there were a time for them, it’s now. Dear Lord, I wish Mama to live. It’s not just her first wish, it’s her every wish. I’ll give them up, she prays, all my wishes. Just not my mother.
Then it grows quiet, so still that Aleys can hear the tumult of her blood in her ears.
A flicker of hope kindles within her. She takes a breath, holds it, listens.
Then a whimper, long and plaintive, so unlike her mother, so strange, snakes under the door.
It’s the worst sound she’s ever heard. She clenches her fists against the noise.
There are other murmurs, voices Aleys doesn’t know, a few urgent words in Papa’s familiar voice.
And then a terrible silence. There should be a baby crying.
There should be sounds of joy, of relief.
The quiet is all wrong. Aleys clenches her fists as the knowledge seeds itself.
No. No, no. The silence seems to swell, until it is vast and bottomless, until it opens into the dark abyss of the prayer book, and Aleys pictures Mama falling, falling away from her, into the pages of the psalter, forever.
Mama. Aleys can’t draw breath, doesn’t want to draw breath.
Take me with you. She shuts her eyes and wills herself to leap into the darkness.
Farrago releases a howl. Someone opens the door.
Aleys falls forward onto her hands and knees.
Inside, on the floor by the bed, is a heap of bloody linen.
The dog is keening. Her wishes were worthless. Mama is dead.