‘God forgive you,’ Marek said to the bandit.
He got closer still, then deigned to lay a hand on the bandit’s arm. Marek could see that his foot was broken, limp, a bone sticking out through the flesh, the skin wrinkled and yellow. His breathing was quick and raspy. Flies swarmed, unbothered by the bandit’s repeated cries of jibberish. Marek closed his eyes and prayed until the bandit stopped wailing. He opened them in time for the bandit to spit in his face. He knew not to flinch, as that would show disgust, and God would judge him. Instead, he bent down and kissed the bandit’s head, then licked his lips to taste the salt of the man’s sweat and the rancid oils caked into his reddish hair. The bandit winced and stuck out his tongue. Marek curtsied and turned and walked away, feeling that the bandit’s cries now were not in anguish or petulance, but in rapture of salvation, even if they sounded exactly the same.
Marek left the square and walked calmly now, a feeling of goodness tingling in his left arm, which he took to mean that he had earned a bit of grace while the rest of the village had reviled the bandit and suffered now in darkness, laying down the dead, who were, unlike the rest of them, at peace.
* * *
*
Outside the village, Marek passed a few of Villiam’s guards patrolling the road. He smiled and waved to them. They paid no mind to the boy. The guards were all descended from northerners, so they were tall and strong. Northerners were known to be single-minded and cold. They were physically superior to native Lapvonians, and if they had any interest, they could have sacked the village themselves and stomped into Villiam’s manor and killed him with a swift elbow to the heart. But they’d been sufficiently tamed and trained after generations of indenture, and now they did the bidding of Villiam as though he owned them. He did own them, in fact, and all the servants at his manor, and the entire village and the woods and the farmsteads spread throughout the fiefdom. Villiam owned Jude’s pasture and the small cottage he shared with Marek. The pasture was bounded by woods, which were Villiam’s also.
As Marek now turned into these woods on his way home, he decided he wouldn’t tell his father that he had kissed the bandit. Jude didn’t understand forgiveness. He was incapable of forgiveness because he was so addled by his own grief and grudges. This bad blood was what kept Jude’s heart pumping. The first grief had been for the deaths of his parents when he was a teenager—they drowned in the lake during a storm. They’d been fishing for krap and their little raft had broken in the wind. So rare was a wind so strong that it seemed to Jude that the tragedy had been aimed at him specifically, an evil air cast up from hell to take from him the only family he knew and loved. The second grief was the loss of Agata, his lady, Marek’s mother. She had died in childbirth, Jude liked to recount, bled to death on the floor by the fire. You could still see the stain of her blood thirteen years later. ‘There, the red still shows,’ Jude said, and pointed to the spot by the hearth where the dirt seemed worn down harder than the rest. Marek could never see the blood. ‘You’re blind to color, just like your mother,’ Jude said. ‘That’s why.’
‘But I see my hair is red,’ Marek protested.
A punch in the jaw left Marek’s tongue flayed by his own teeth. Blood spilt from his mouth on the very spot on the hearth where his mother had supposedly died. Jude pointed again.
‘You see it now? Where she left me to raise a child alone?’
Not that Marek got much raising. Jude never held him or rocked him. Immediately following his lady’s departure, he’d handed the boy over to the care of Ina during the day while he tended to his lambs. Ina was the wet nurse then, and something of a legend in the village, a woman without a man or child of her own, whose breasts had fed half the population. Some called her a witch because she was blind and yet she was industrious. And she had an intuition about medicines. She traded mushrooms and nettles for eggs and bread, and some people said the mushrooms gave them visions of hell and others said they gave them visions of heaven, but they always cured their malaise—nobody could doubt her knowledge of medicinal plants. They distrusted Ina because of her wisdom, while they still made use of it. She lived down the valley in a dark patch of woods south of Jude’s pasture.
Ina was older than anyone could say, and by now her milk had dried up. Marek loved Ina. At thirteen, he still visited her once a week. She was the only person to caress him and give him a kind word now and then. He brought her flowers from the pasture and lamb’s milk and chestnuts when they were in season, bread and cheese when there was some extra.