Marek finally appeared, wet and trembling, his panting breath stinking of bile and his eyes pathetic and fearful. The rain was falling hard by then. It was seeping into the cottage through the doorway.
‘Don’t be a baby,’ Jude said. ‘Get in and calm the lambs.’
Marek found a place to squat between the babes and petted their heads and cooed at them, trying to forget that he had left Jacob up on that rock. His father watched the storm through the crack in the door, looking out as if someone were coming, waving his hand behind him to hush the lambs. Marek was good. He petted the heads of the babes and hushed them some more. He was an innocent, he told himself, a child. If some stray impulse had resulted in horror—a simple rock was all it was—someone should be comforting him, in fact. A child makes mistakes, yes, but accidents are God’s purview. Was Jacob’s death really Marek’s fault? Hadn’t the little prince been vain to walk up the mountain in such slippery shoes, and hadn’t he been perverse and greedy to want to catch a wild bird, break its neck, and stuff it with sawdust? Marek had invented the cliff birds, yes. But he hadn’t really lured Jacob up the mountain to kill him. He had only wanted to see the boy’s disappointment.
Jude watched the storm hover over the mountain and then change its course toward the north, and he saw only a few flashes of light out that way. ‘I think the worst is over,’ he said.
Marek took some comfort in his father’s relief. He sank his hand into a bag of grain and ate it raw, grinding his teeth so that the grain turned to paste. He drank from the bucket with his cupped hand. His jaw hurt and he was quiet.
By early evening, the storm had passed. The clouds cleared and the sun glowed pink and purple. Jude opened the door and watched the light flood the pasture. The horizon was hazy with rainbows. He smiled.
‘Come on, my babes,’ Jude said, clapping his hands in delight at the soft golden light angling over the mud. Let the storm torment the northerners now, he thought, they deserve it. They were the ones who ate his sweet creatures, after all. The babes followed him into the sunset and grazed in the balmy air, their feet sticking in the mud, until the sky was low and dark blue.
Alone in the cottage, a nervous dread seeped into Marek—it was the truth hitting him at last. The sun was setting and Jacob was still out there. Was he really dead? Marek thought of the spilt guts of the bandit, then of Jacob’s crushed head. ‘Help!’ Jacob had cried. And Marek hadn’t helped him. He went outside, desperate for something, anything—an embrace or a blow to the head. He trudged through the mud toward Jude, trembling, tears budding from his eyes, his face mottled with sweat and dirt. Jude turned and looked at him. Could Marek be just another babe to care for? Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? To be pitied just once? Didn’t God owe him that, after all the horror he had endured?
‘What?’ Jude said, pulling a broken root from the ground. He wiped the mud from his hands on his pant legs and looked up at Marek impatiently. ‘What?!’
‘Something terrible has happened to me,’ Marek began.
* * *
*
As they trudged up the mountain the next morning, Marek played the events of the previous day over and over again in his mind. He had not told Jude the truth. Rather, he had begged his father for protection from what he called ‘an evil wind’ that picked Villiam’s boy up off the cliff and into the air—‘like a bird catches a mouse by the skin of its neck’—and dropped him on the stone outcropping. ‘I was so afraid, Father! There was blood! I couldn’t do anything, I was paralyzed there, terrified that the evil wind would come for me next!’
‘You poor boy,’ Jude said coyly. ‘What scent had the wind? Was there myrrh in the air?’
‘Oh yes, Father. And fire! And the smell of burning flesh! Lightning must have struck Jacob.’
‘Burning flesh, eh?’
‘Like a lamb struck by lightning!’ Marek offered, hoping to garner further fright and sympathy from Jude, who he knew had been so disturbed those years ago when the same had happened to one of his babes. But Jude had invented the story of the lightning. It had been merely an excuse for his overprotectiveness of his lambs. He himself had been afraid of storms since his parents drowned. They sent him into a panic. He had collected his babes inside the cottage for the comfort of their closeness. No lamb had ever been struck by lightning. God could never be so cruel.
‘I should beat you dead if you’re lying to me,’ Jude said when they stopped to catch their breath. But his fists were too tired from the work they’d done already.