Jude went back out into the woods, cooler in that heat than by the fire in Ina’s cabin. Smoke puffed out the chimney and hung in the air like dark clouds, the wind so slow, a cruel joke. He sat by Klim’s body and prayed and cried for himself and licked his tears from his palms and thought of Marek, the bastard who had brought on the drought, he was sure of it. This anger provided him with courage. He gently lifted the dead man’s legs and twisted the torso so that the body lay on its side. Now, squinting through his tears, he pulled the left arm out, lifted the ax, and brought it down on the wrist. It broke at the joint, and the dry, loose skin split, but not all the way. Jude had to hold the ax by the blade to cut the tendon and the rest of the skin clear through. He didn’t want to touch the hand. It didn’t bleed, but the hand seemed suddenly more particular to Klim now that it was separated from his arm, as though it had come back to life and could sense its detachment from Klim’s body. Jude blamed Marek for having forced him into such depravity. This was how he could weather the horror: blame Marek. He picked up Klim’s hand by the pinky, carried it inside and threw it on the fire. Jude listened to the skin hiss and cook.
‘Don’t leave it too long or it won’t taste good.’
Ina’s mouth seemed to chew the air, her dry tongue reaching to her lips as though she were tasting something already. She started gagging again. Her eyes—which were green and young looking, as though she’d plucked them from a little girl—glistened in the light from the fire. Jude reached into the flames and drew out Klim’s hand with a stick and set it on the bed next to Ina’s crumpled body.
‘Aaaah,’ she said.
‘It’s too hot, Ina.’
‘I don’t care about that,’ she said. ‘Put the thumb in.’ She opened her mouth wide.
Jude put Klim’s thumb in her mouth. Ina sucked it and chewed it. Jude watched. After a moment, she seemed to gain strength and could lift her arms—like broken twigs. She pulled Klim’s hand away, ripping off the flesh of the thumb with her teeth. She chewed the flesh and swallowed and sighed. Then she chewed the flesh of his palm.
‘I’m happy you feel better, Ina,’ Jude said, ‘but I have to go now.’
‘Oh no,’ Ina said, now sucking the meat voraciously. Her body was coming back to life. ‘I’ll need more right away.’
* * *
*
How peaceful the boy was now, lying asleep with no shame, naked on his soft mattress that Lispeth stuffed and restuffed and batted every day, goose feathers fluttering up into the room and into her mouth and up her nose. She had wiped his arse with a rag wetted in a bit of warm milk before putting him to bed. There was shit in the chamber pot for her to cover with a cloth and carry downstairs. Of course Lispeth had no appetite for the food the family ate at the manor. The gardener used the shit to fertilize the food, to grow the hay to feed the animals. Villiam, Dibra, and Marek ate their own shit at every meal. And so did the priest. And maybe he was eating Villiam’s shit directly out of his arse, she wondered. Who knew what the two men did at night alone? They certainly weren’t praying. She imagined Villiam’s bed: blood smeared, shit smeared, semen shot on the canopy. Clod would never tell.
Lispeth watched Marek’s face as he slept, so spoiled and dumb, his top lip curling up and his bottom jaw hanging open, an oaf. He disgusted her. Poor Jacob, she thought. Even smashed and bloodied and dead, he was more attractive than Marek was alive. She didn’t know where Jude had buried him. That poor man, she thought. Everyone down in Lapvona, she knew, was doomed.
Later, in the middle of the night, Marek awoke nude and tangled in the bedsheet. Lispeth was asleep in her chair. She hadn’t pulled the curtains closed or prepared his bedside mead, which he always drank if he woke in the dark. He sat up and looked around the room, remembering the events of the previous day. He was tired, but hungry.
In the moonlight, he got up and walked naked to the window, lit a candle, and ventured out down the hall, wrapped in his sheet. Through the darkness he heard voices downstairs, the thumping of feet across the great room, and the front door creaking open. A rush of hot night air whooshed in and up the stairs. Marek followed it. Perhaps this was a dream, he thought. But his dreams were usually more dreamy. It struck him now that his dreams were never quite right. They seemed to occur in a space without time, in death, he thought. He heard a night bird sing its aeolian melody. That was the problem, he realized. He did not dream of birds. Without birds, there was no time. He moved carefully down the stairs, his bare feet chilled on the stones. The night bird cuckooed. A jubilant voice outside mimicked it. ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’ The front door had been left ajar, the guard was gone. Marek pushed it open and followed the voices across the drawbridge into the dark.