Zombies Vs. Unicorns

I thought it all had ended. I had begun to relax and think life might return to being more comfortable, the night Johnny Blackbird took it into his head to goad me. He was a man of the lowest type; I knew even as I swung at him that Mam would be disgusted—Dad also—by my having let such an earwig annoy me with his crawlings. But he had gone on and on, pursuing me and insisting, full of rude questions and implications, and I was worn out with being so fecking noble about the whole business, when I had never asked to be led away and put beside a princess. I had never wanted picking up by queen people and bringing into royal presences. Most of all, I had not wanted, not for a moment, to touch even as much of her clothing as I touched, of that young lady, let alone her flesh. I had never thought a smutty thought about her, for though she were a beauty she were much too imposing for a man like me to do more than bow down before, to slink away from.

Anyway, once I had landed my first thump, to the side of Blackbird’s head, the relief of it was so great, I began to deliver on him all the blows and curses I had stored up till that moment. And hard blows they were, and well calculated, and curses that surged like vomit from my depths, so sincere I hardly recognized my own voice. He called pax almost straightaway, the little dung piece, but I kept into him until the Pershron twins pulled me off, by which time his face was well colored and pushed out of shape, the punishment I’d given him.

After that night people left me alone, and rather more than I wanted. They respected me, though there was the smell of fear, or maybe embarrassment—bad feeling, anyhow—in their respect. And I could not jolly them out of it, having never been that specimen of a jolly fellow. So I tended then to gloom off by myself, to work when asked and well, but less often to join the lads at the spring for a swim, or at the Brindle for a pot or two.

We were stooking early hay when the soldiers came again. One moment I was easy in the sunshine, watching how each forkful propped and fell; the next I came aware of a crowding down on the road, like ants at jam, and someone running up the field—Cal Devonish it was, his shirt frantic around him. As soon as he was within the distance of me, he cried, “They are come for you, Manny!” And I saw my death in his face, and I ran too.

The chase was messy and short. I achieved the forest, but I was not long running there before my foot slipped on a root, then between two roots, and the rest of my body fled over it and the bone snapped, above my ankle. I sat up and extricated myself, and I was sitting there holding my own foot like a broken baby in both my hands, knowing I would never run again, when the soldiers—how had they crossed the hay field so fast?—came thundering at me out of the trees.

“What have I done?” I cried piteously. They wrenched me up. The leg pain shouted up me, and flared off the top of my head as screams. “’Tis no less true now, what I said, than it was in the spring!”

“Why did you run, then,” said one of them, “if you are so innocent?” And he kicked my broken leg, then slapped me awake when I swooned from the pain.

Up came Constable Barry, his face a creased mess of disgust and delight. “You filth.” He spat in my face; he struck me to the ground. “You animal.” He kicked me in my side, and I was sure he broke something there. “Getting your spawn upon our princess, spoiling and soiling the purest creature that ever was.”

“But I never!”

But he kicked me in the mouth then, and thank God the pain of that shatterment washed straight back into my head, and wiped his ugly spittle-face from my sight, and the trees and the white sky behind it.

Straight up to the foot of the tower he rode, the guard. He dismounted jingling and untied a sacking bag from his saddle. It was stained at the bottom, dark and plentifully.

“You have someone in that tower, I think, miss,” he says to me. “A lady?”

“We do.” I could not tear my gaze from the sack.

“I’m charged to show her something, and take her response to the Majesty.”

“Very well,” I said.

He followed me in; I conveyed his purpose to Joan Vinegar.

“Oh, yes? And what is the thing you’re to show?” And she stared at the bag just as I had, knowing it were some horror.

“I’m to show the leddy. I’ve no instructions to let anyone else see.”

“I’ll take you up.” Joan was hoping for a look anyway. So was I. He was mad if he thought we would consent to not see. Nothing ever happened here; we were hungry for events, however grim.

Up they went, and I walked back outside, glanced to my gardening and considered it, then followed my musings around to the far side of the tower, under the arrow slit that let out of the lady’s room.

It was a windless day, and thus I heard clearly her first cry. If you had cared about her at all, it would have broke your heart, and now I discovered that despite the girl’s general lifelessness, and her clear stupidity in getting herself childered when some lord needed her purity to bargain with, I did care. She was miserable enough already. What had he brought to make her miserabler?

Well, I knew, I knew. But there are some things you know but will not admit until you have seen them yourself. The bag swung, black-stained, before my mind’s eye, a certain shape, a certain weight, and the lady cried on up there, not in words but in wild, unconnected noises, and there were thuds, too, of furniture, a crash of pottery. I drew in a sharp breath; we did not have pots to spare here, and the lady knew it.

I hurried back to the under-room. Her shrieks sounded down the stairs, and then the door slammed on them, and the man’s boots hurried down, and there he was in the doorway, a blank, determined look on his face, the bag still in his hand, but looser, only held closed, not tied.

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 into 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.