‘Welcome back,’ she said to the bride.
Agata recognized Ina despite her weird transformation. She was faint and stunned from the blow to her back, but she quickened her step away from the old lady to rejoin Villiam, brushing the dirt off the front of her dress. Ina knew the truth about her. Her name wasn’t Agata at all—that was only what Jude had named her, after his mother. Ina knew that Marek was Agata’s brother’s son, and she knew that her brother had been caught and pilloried and hanged and gutted last Easter, for all of the town to see. The birds had told her everything. Agata didn’t know that her brother had come looking for her last spring. All she knew was that she could never go home, and that Ina knew that. Agata was a prisoner wherever she went—at Jude’s, at the abbey, and now at the manor. All of this had passed between the two women in their small moment. Now the priest’s horse settled and clopped after Agata through the crowd.
Klarek ran ahead, dragging Marek with him, past a man standing slightly apart from the crowd. His clothes were rags, brown and black and caked with shit and mud. His face was so dirty, nobody but Marek could have recognized him. Marek moved in astonishment, as though he’d seen a ghost. Or perhaps the man that looked like his father was an emanation of his own conscience. That must be it, Marek thought: I have lost my mind. But Jude had looked exactly like a dead thing that had come back to life and unburied itself. Could it be? His father, risen from the dead, too? If Jude had returned to interfere with the wedding, he ought to be throwing rocks himself.
‘Never mind, never mind!’ the priest shouted back from his high horse.
Klarek pulled Marek back into the procession.
* * *
*
The ceremony was over as soon as it began, and Villiam was happy now as the villagers sang him songs of praise as he made his way back through the church, doling out zillins. Agata was a bit too slow down the aisle, so Villiam walked up ahead, flanked now by Klarek and the priest. The church steps were treacherous in the tight, leather shoes made especially for the nun for this occasion. The villagers had all touched the shoes at the shoemaker’s, had wondered over the measurements of her foot as though the numbers had some sacred meaning. ‘Did you really touch her foot?’ they asked the shoemaker. ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘And was it very beautiful?’ ‘Looked like any foot, a lady’s foot.’ ‘A lady’s foot, ah,’ the women said. The men wanted to know whether her toes were long or short, as long toes indicated great beauty. ‘I saw her face,’ the shoemaker told them all. ‘She looks like any nun from the abbey.’ This disappointed them. But Agata looked beautiful now, aglow with her pregnancy, and her eyes squinted with irritation and awe at the commotion around her. Her red hair poked out from under her veil. The village women caressed her arms and shoulders as she passed. ‘Should we touch her belly?’ one asked. Ina gave her assent. And then they were all upon her, kneeling at her feet, arms sneaking around her from behind, hands flat against the bulge as if they could suck the divinity out through the fabric of her dress. Agata surrendered. The men simply removed their tattered red hats as she passed and held them over their pubises, to shield the baby from any power that might offend it.
* * *
*
Villiam’s legs hurt from all the walking. He had walked so long—from home to the church and back—only once before in his whole life, and the memory of that humiliation had returned halfway back up the hill, when he could no longer lift his feet and needed to be carried. When it happened on his first wedding day, his father had laughed and chided Dibra. ‘He’ll die quick, so make him spawn soon. You’re no lazy woman, are you?’ His mother looked ashamed. Today, when he tired, Villiam threw a fit and sat down on the road. It had been quite a shock to go from the cheering and singing of the village to the relative quiet of the walk back to the manor. It was too boring. Klarek tried to help him up. ‘I don’t want anyone but my own blood touching me,’ Villiam said petulantly. And he felt a bit of pity for himself then as he recognized in that instant that there was nobody left on Earth in his lineage but himself. Except, wait—Marek stood before him and knelt down so that Villiam could ride on his shoulders—didn’t that lamb herder say they were cousins?
Villiam steadied himself and lifted his tired leg over Marek’s shoulder. Light as a feather. ‘Get ready, my boy,’ Villiam huffed as he straddled Marek by the neck, clutching the thick red hair in his fists to balance as he swung his other leg over. ‘Now get up, slowly,’ he said. Marek did as he was told. It was not unlike carrying the water buckets, he thought. He stood, trying to move smoothly so as not to topple Villiam, and succeeded despite the lord’s yelps of fear that the boy wasn’t strong enough to carry him. But in fact, Marek had grown strong enough that he could carry Villiam quite easily, his only stumble occurring when he turned back to see if Agata was watching. He wanted to show her that he was useful and important, someone she would need to carry her through her own hardship one day, he thought. And then he was sorry for throwing the rock. Agata looked tired and distant and sad, as though her life were a term of deployment, and she had reached surrender. She had seen that Marek had turned to her to show off his strength, but she hadn’t tilted her eyes at all, no. Just to spite him. And she was pleased when Villiam snickered at Marek to keep his head straight and pulled at his ears like a man riding a donkey.