It wasn’t until midday that Villiam got dressed, bored of snoozing. He ate some more and perused Clod’s drawings from the night before. Now they seemed trite to him. Clod had failed to capture the drama of the scene—Villiam choking on the meat had been much more powerful than Clod had drawn it. But maybe if he painted the entire scene, the table laden with food, the priest and Dibra lurching up from their chairs to try to save their beloved lord, that could be worthy of a frame. Yes, Villiam thought dreamily, an action scene. And the nun punching him in the gut. He described his vision to Clod as they walked through the hall along the red carpet, down the stairs, and out into the daylight. Villiam squinted and yawned at the sun as they sauntered down the slope toward the stables, stopping to pluck a sprig of tansy and rub it between his hands and sniff. The sky seemed to darken just for him as they approached the stable where the mutilated horse was being watered and brushed.
Villiam rarely passed by the stable. He avoided Luka and anything to do with him. As he approached and saw Dibra’s eyeless horse stepping back and forth on the well-trodden hay, he remembered that Luka was gone forever.
‘Does Dibra know?’ Villiam asked the air. The stablehands muttered unintelligibly. ‘Where is Dibra?’
‘She hasn’t come back yet,’ one stablehand said. He was a stupid boy and hadn’t understood everyone’s pledge to keep quiet about Dibra. The other stablehands stepped back to distance themselves from his stupidity.
‘Come back from where?’ Villiam asked.
‘She left on this horse late last night, but it came back without her.’
‘Huh.’ He didn’t care.
Villiam wondered at the bleeding eye sockets. The horse blinked its long lashes, neighed, then seemed to stare deeply at Villiam, who kissed it on its dry black nose. The feeling of the chapped skin against his lips elicited a thought—a revelation. ‘This horse is a revelation!’ he exclaimed. Then he snapped his fingers and demanded the stableboys do a little dance for him. He clapped along to the rhythm of their feet.
Villiam felt very happy. Of all those at the manor, he was the only one to appreciate that the horse had found its way home without sight. That was loyalty. Forget Dibra. She, like Luka, would get what she deserved. Villiam would not lament his wife’s disappearance. No, he would celebrate. Something good was coming. Villiam believed this in his heart as much as he believed himself to be at the heart of all things.
‘Hallelujah!’
And just like that, thunder clapped, and the sky filled with black clouds.
‘You see?’ Villiam cried. He kissed the blind horse’s snout again and trudged back up to the manor, just in time to stay out of the rain.
Fall
The rain fell for too long. The ground had been so hardened by drought that the water just collected and stood and rose. The long fields turned to shallow lake and muck, and the men of the village waded around, trying to remember the boundaries of their plots, arguing viciously through the noise of the rain, although they were exhausted and still starving. But eventually the dirt softened and the rain turned to mist, and then a fog hovered, as though God were covering His eyes while the villagers—profoundly changed by the horrors of drought and famine—shrugged off their sins, dismantled their camps, and moved back from the lake to their homes with their belongings. A few days of strong sun dried up the mud, and the damage of the floods in their little cottages was quickly repaired with materials from cottages that had been abandoned and never reclaimed. Half the population of Lapvona had disappeared.
Now the world was so fecund and humid it was hard to get a fire started. Thank God the seeds had survived, stashed per tradition on a high shelf above each mantel. The villagers began farming again, accepting the boundaries of memory, too desperate to quarrel over a foot here or there. They were stunned when the green stalks popped up in the black earth as soon as they did. None of them would have believed such a thing could happen, that life could begin again so quickly. This renewal of hope gave everyone energy, so they were swift to renew themselves too, to emerge from the depths of their fear and hunger, to cut their hair and put on their autumn cloaks and dresses and get back to normal. They laughed at the chill in the air, how spontaneously the sun had retracted, as though it had made a mistake. ‘It’s like it all never happened,’ they said, and nobody spoke of the people they’d eaten, though the absence of certain families was acute at Sunday Mass—half the pews sat empty. The neighbors of the departed took their land over, as well as their tools and seeds.