Marek had had fantasies of visiting Jude many times. They were not joyful reunions, but waking dreams of going down to beg his forgiveness. Jude rejected Marek even in his brightest reveries, ignored him as he toiled in the field with the babes while Marek ran around trying to get his attention. ‘Look at me, Father!’ he would scream. But Jude was always blind and deaf, his head ever tilted at the ground where the lambs grazed. ‘Please!’ Desperate, Marek would hit himself in the head with rocks. In one particular fantasy, he ran to his father and used his own fingernails to slice at his wrist, held the blood to drip onto Jude’s shoes. Jude simply kicked some mud onto his shoes and kept going, his staff digging into the ground rhythmically and steadily while Marek bled to death in his shadow. Wouldn’t it be nice to bring his father some plums now, to show him that his sacrifice had not been for nothing?
When Marek reached the bottom of the mountain and looked out at the dark pasture, he saw his old home and smelled the stench of death floating on the slow breeze as he walked toward it. The ground was not feathered in soft grass as it had been that spring, but was stiff with dry dirt, and he stumbled over mounds of broken ground. He knew the stench of death from the attacks by the bandits. The spilt blood of the slain villagers last Easter had carried a bit of carrion stink, but their stink was human and sweeter than what Marek smelled now. He kicked at the dirt as he walked and exposed the desiccated head of a babe. The stink was coming up from the ground, the air gamey, as though the hot dirt had cooked the little lambs in their graves.
Maybe now that his babes had perished, Jude would appreciate his son’s return and give him a warm embrace. ‘I’m so happy to see you.’ But when Marek kicked open the door of the cottage, holding the priest’s sleeve against his mouth to keep the flies out, he found it empty. He shut himself inside. It was smaller than he had remembered it, and emptier still. Marek sat on the bare bed and pulled a plum from the priest’s pocket and ate as his eyes adjusted to being home in the dark. The sweet fruit made him feel sad and hazy. He lay down, smelling the stench of his father and missing him. He would wait there, he thought, until Jude returned.
* * *
*
Agata had escaped from the abbey two nights ago. The nuns had no food left to feed her; she was free to fend for herself. So she began to creep away, sleeping first in the abbey courtyard, then against the abbey walls in the dead grapevines, and then outside the walls. She didn’t want to go with the other nuns down to the lake. They’d been cruel to her since she had appeared thirteen years ago, young and bleeding at their doorstep. They made her do the worst of the work at the abbey—cleaning the latrines, slaughtering the animals, sleeping with the dogs at night. God had not appeared to her in all that time. So she preferred to stay faithless rather than hold on to a fantasy. It was easier to live like that. She had lost everything. Her home. Her innocence. Her freedom. Her bandit family. Her ability to speak. She was empty. ‘I am an object in the room,’ she had told herself. ‘That is all that I am.’ This belief spared her the agony of her own intelligence while she was a slave to the nuns.
She wasn’t sure where she would go, or whether she could survive the journey. She was already too hungry and thirsty to make sense of her thoughts. When she looked up and saw the distant flames of the guards’ torches around the manor, she resigned herself. She would go up there. There was nowhere else to go anyway. It was stupid to take the shortcut through Jude’s pasture, but it was an honest mistake. The scorched land didn’t resemble the lush land she had remembered, not at all. Even the sound of the ground beneath her feet was different.
* * *
*
By the time Jude reached the pasture, his hunger was renewed. He could roast Klim’s head, he thought. He could taste the blind eyes and eat the brains. That would keep him full enough, and then he could sleep through the worst of the heat. But he’d get thirsty. Perhaps he could skin Klim and sew the skin into a pouch and use it to carry water home from the lake tomorrow. He’d need a sharp blade to do such work, and good light. At home, he had an ax and a few dull knives. He would need to find a good rock to sharpen the blades when the sun came up. He could find one. God would help him. Maybe the chipped edge of Agata’s gravestone would work, he thought.
Jude found his ax in the dry dirt in the pasture, past the graves of his babes. It had been only weeks since he’d buried them. Had they been guarding him from his own depravity all along? He put Klim down and used the ax to chop off his head. He could burn the broken chair in the hearth and roast Klim’s head and eat it, sleep, then sharpen the knives to skin his torso in the morning. Yes. He picked up the head and carried it under his arm. The torso he heaved up and carried across his shoulders.