Zel (14 page)

“So you’ve fallen in love.” The countess shakes her head ruefully. “And all along I’ve been so worried.” She smiles. “Tell me about her.”

“I met her at the smithy.”

She nods. “She was having her horse shod?”

“She has no horse or cow or much of anything. She lives in a small cottage on an alm.”

“She’s a peasant girl.” The countess stands up. “Now I know why you’re miserable. This talk of marriage has disturbed you beyond reason. You need to eat. Then sleep. We can talk sensibly later.”

The next day the countess comes to Konrad’s room with the count. The count sits at the desk chair. The countess stands by Konrad’s bed. Konrad tells his parents everything.

For once, Konrad’s father sits silent.

The countess speaks up. “It’s all harebrained. You know nothing of the girl, Konrad. By your own admission, she is a mystery to you.”

“I know her spirit, Mother. It glows with boldness.”

“Konrad, you and this girl have nothing in common. She has no education, no training, no refinement. . . .”

“Zel is refined!”

“The spirit of a peasant who tries to entice a count is neither refined nor bold, but insolent.”

“She didn’t try to entice me. She was bold enough to take charge when the smith looked in Meta’s ear, that’s all. And she was lighthearted enough to ask for a goose egg when she knew she could have asked for practical things. And . . .”

“Oh, Konrad, stop this. She’s a peasant. You can’t even imagine what she’s really like.”

Konrad swings his legs over the side of the bed and sits on the edge, ready to rise. “Aren’t you the one who read the stars? I am to make my own decision.”

“Here’s what we’ll do,” says Father, suddenly standing.

“Yes, you tell him.” The countess steps aside.

Konrad tenses for a fiercer fight.

“We will send out the manservants. They will find this cottage and bring back the maiden.”

Konrad can hardly believe this turn of events. A smile breaks across his face.

The countess reaches out in protest. “But . . .”

The count cuts the countess off with a quick look. “And, Konrad, once she is here, you will return to your lessons and tasks. You will lead the life you led before, the life you were bred for, and you will see that this Zel has no place in that life.” The count now turns to the countess. “He will learn for himself that she is unsuitable.”

Zel is not unsuitable. Not by any measure. But Konrad sees that fighting the point is not in his best interest. The manservants will find Zel. That’s what’s important. “Yes, Father.”

And so the manservants search for the cottage on the
alm. But they return empty-handed. Konrad sends them out again, and he goes with them this time. He is convinced that the fiddler has his Zel. And he is convinced something is very wrong. Perhaps the girl has fallen ill—she must have—for nothing less could account for the profound sadness of the woman’s music.

They search day after day. Father decides that only one servant should accompany Konrad. So Konrad searches with that one servant for the rest of the month. Then even that man is needed elsewhere. Konrad searches alone again.

The fall ends. Winter rains, then ices, come. There is no point in trying to find a mountain path any longer, for such a path, were it found, would be impassable until spring.

Konrad goes to the smithy every day. “Send for me immediately if the girl appears.” The same demand every day.

“You know I will, sire.” The same response.

“There is a heavy purse involved.”

The smith nods.

Konrad resumes his lessons now. He studies alchemy to be able to judge the purity of goods, for Father has put him in charge of the town’s growing commerce. One of his major responsibilities is to thwart would-be cheaters. Konrad scoops the spices from their damp
vaults and dries them before weighing. He tests for brick dust added to the medicinal Sumatran ginger. Trickery abounds, but he is diligent.

Konrad guards against dangers as well. He cuts away the toxic leaves from the New World rhubarb before repacking it for the surgeons. He checks for eggs, parasites, cocoons in the guaiac wood brought from the West Indies to treat syphilis. No caterpillars will ruin their crops, like the scourge of Troyes. No small monster will sneak in on cloves from the Moluccas.

Still, Konrad steals time to ask in town after a girl with light braids and dark eyes who goes by the name of Rapunzel. And most Saturdays and every Sunday he rides as far up the mountainsides as the ice permits. With the arrival of spring, Konrad wakes before dawn to fit in a daily visit to the smith before haggling with the importers. He takes to eating the midday meal rapidly, so he can fit in a visit to the rapunzel vendor, as well, before he’s expected back at work.

And he buys great quantities of the lettuce.

Annette watches him. “I think you grow rabbit whiskers, young sire.”

Konrad twitches his nose at her.

After spring comes summer, with his birthday and Zel’s birthday. July sixth. A day sacred to Konrad. He drinks much wine and falls asleep under the stars, thinking only one thought: The universe has conspired to
bring Zel into his life, and all he can do is surrender to the awesome power.

Then comes fall. Winter. Spring again.

Konrad stands on his bedroom balcony. He rubs his arms, though there is no chill in the air. He covers his mouth and nose with both hands and breathes his own warmth. The taste of despair coats his tongue. Spring is too cruel.

Chapter 19
Mother

sit at the table. I think of the food I should prepare for dinner, but I do not move. I sit and look at nothing.

I don’t have to see nothing. I have the choice of seeing whatever I want. Whomever I want. But I see nothing.

I think of a story.

Once upon a time there was a little girl full of all the whimsy and unspoken hopes of any little girl.

The girl married a boy she half-fancied and waited for the children to come. She waited and waited and waited. Her mother, who had had eleven children if the stillborn ones were counted, and the girl counted them, waited
with her. After a while her mother died, still young, but worn. Waiting grew bitter. Her husband, the boy-now-man, wouldn’t wait any longer. Or maybe he was tired of watching her wait. He left.

The girl-now-woman went about her business. But she couldn’t stop herself from noticing all the babies of the world, none of whom would ever call her Mother.

At first she tried helping. She tended the babies, to give their mothers a break. She became expert on the fiddle her mother had left her, and the little ones danced to her music. She kissed them and cuddled them and worked to make her fingers release them when their mothers came for them. She tried.

But she couldn’t keep herself from envy. She couldn’t help despising her own body.

The woman was a good person. She didn’t want to covet the round bellies of the women who used to be her playmates just a half-dozen years ago. She didn’t want to chew the insides of her cheeks at the sight of her own sisters pregnant. She knew she could serve God simply by living a good life; she didn’t need to be Mother to be valuable.

Yet she needed to be Mother. She looked in other women’s flat faces and saw that they either had children or, in a few cases, didn’t. It was a simple bit of information in their eyes. No one else seemed hounded with need. But the woman needed, oh, how she needed, to be
Mother. She needed it with every drop of blood, every bit of flesh, every hair, every breath of her body.

The woman took to staying at home more and more, thereby reducing her contact with the townsfolk. She rarely saw women, children. When she did see them, she spoke kindly and they loved her as before. But she avoided them. She hoped to forget her need and hence squelch it.

She became a seamstress and gave her handicrafted pieces to a merchant in town, who sold them for her and shared in her profits. She looked at the money the merchant placed in her hand and had nothing, no one, to spend it on. She tucked it away. At first she sewed all sorts of things, dresses for moon-faced little girls, the softest babies’ baptismal gowns. But she soon learned these things, mere things that had no white bones to snap, brought the taste of hate to her tongue. She turned instead to tablecloths. She embroidered better than anybody and gathered effusive praise, yet still the work gave little satisfaction.

She dug a garden, modest in size and output, which met most of her needs. She ate her homegrown meals late at night, for the dark made her food smooth. She did her best to go the path alotted to her in this life.

One day as she was carrying a large bundle of material home, a voice spoke to her. “You can have it. You know that.”

She looked around, but only halfheartedly. There was an undeniable inevitability about this voice. She knew it came from within.

“All you have to do is want—want hard, want long, want enough. And it is yours. Everything is yours.”

She whispered, “And in return?”

“Work for us.”

But the woman didn’t want everything. She wanted one thing, one dazzling chip off the diamond of life: a daughter. Her daughter. To love and hold. To cherish.

The cost was lowered accordingly, for even the devils have a sense of balance. She would be given a single gift, a way with plants. In return, when her daughter came of age, for surely with her gift she could find a way to get a daughter, she would explain to her the fundamental choice in life, and she would try to persuade her daughter, too, to join the side of the devils. Everything must be open, every detail made plain to her daughter. And her daughter, likewise, must be open completely in that moment, virginal and unencumbered, tied to no one but the woman herself. That was all. A simple bargain. No evil to practice. No blood to spill. Just one last hitch: Eternal damnation was hers.

The woman thought it over. With her decent, Godfearing upbringing, she kept expecting herself to be tormented. Good people were tormented by such dilemmas; this she knew. But she wasn’t. She was almost without
emotion. Her brain ruled her. She kept all senses on alert. She went to church and listened. She got on her knees and prayed. She knew she should talk to her priest. But her priest was a doltish sort, and she didn’t like his crooked teeth and wandering eye. So she talked directly to the heavens, which met her entreaties with dense, white, silent clouds. Clouds you could climb the mountain peaks to, clouds you could stand in—and she did. But still they didn’t speak. It seemed the side of good wasn’t ready to vie for her.

If the answer didn’t come from above, perhaps it would come from below, from immediately below her feet. She became fascinated with the dead. She went to every burial. She wandered in the cemetery. She put her ear to stone and dirt. She listened hard until she was quite quite sure: No voices spoke from death’s doors.

And she knew she doubted. She doubted all that she had been raised to believe.

She realized she could not seek heaven’s help, for doubt itself made such help inaccessible. Cold, still, clear, reasonable doubt now ruled her. She must decide, she knew, not on the basis of a sense of right and wrong, taught to her as part of a story of some Jesus whose lucky mother had him without trying, without even the benefit of a father. No. Instead, the choice must be made on the basis of a personal judgment: How much was a daughter worth?

Her emotions, which she had believed were as iced over as the mountain peaks she could see from her front door, the peaks whose clouds she had dared invade just the summer before, now answered, “Anything and everything.” The answer was absolute.

Still, her brain kept working. She must think it through. What, indeed, was she giving up? If heaven did not exist, hell did not either, for one defined the other. And if she presented it all to her daughter, the whole matter of human life, and her daughter was free to make her own decision, what harm was there in that? She wasn’t bargaining away her daughter’s soul, only her own.

Which was bargaining away nothing. For without heaven and hell, what is a soul?

Her emotions and her brain were of one voice.