Jude and Marek were like enemies now, each keeping his own secret belief about the other. To Marek, Jude was a ghost, a revenant of guilt. And so was Agata. To Jude, the boy was a blight, a curse, something that had come to Earth to punish him for a sin he couldn’t recall. Hadn’t he been a good man? Hadn’t he prayed enough? Hadn’t he lashed himself correctly? It never occurred to Jude that the capture and detention of Agata as an adolescent was anything but his rightful duty as a man. He was a man and she was a girl. How could it have been wrong to have claimed her as his? He’d saved her, after all, wandering the woods with blood still oozing out of her mouth. If he hadn’t, she would have died, been eaten by wolves or frozen to death. He had not caught sight of her since the wedding, and although he understood that she belonged to Villiam now, he preferred to think of her as not there, but dead again. Otherwise it was too painful. In his heart, he knew the babe was his. A cruel joke this was—finally a child of his own seed and he couldn’t claim it; it already belonged to the lord and God. No. Jude couldn’t even think of it. He pushed Agata from his mind. The pregnant nun Villiam had married only resembled a girl he once knew, and she herself was a nobody. His memory of her was only a fixing of his mind upon a dream on a lonely night. He told himself that he knew nothing about her, cared nothing. She was ugly now, anyway. She’d looked so old in her wedding dress—a grown woman. He liked the look of Lispeth better, enough that any nights he felt lonely for his own hand, it was Lispeth’s face that he envisioned, her body stripped of its heavy servant’s uniform, writhing sensually under him in the hay. He saw her whenever she rushed outside to throw rubbish in the field or fetch eggs from the henhouse. Her figure from afar had a certainty to it, as though she understood more than she could think in words. That was a good girl, he thought, a pretty face and a mind that doesn’t know its own strength. He would marry her, perhaps, if he could one day command her attention.
* * *
*
Christmas in Lapvona had a strange, ominous tilt to it that winter. The birth of the last Christ was so many hundreds of years ago, and there was some trepidation around celebrating while Villiam’s new wife was pregnant with the next one. This concern over tradition wasn’t any trouble at the manor—nobody there had any loyalty to Jesus Christ—but there was apprehension about the holiday in the village, as though it would be the last. Jesus would soon be displaced by the new baby, and nobody knew what might happen next. It felt strange to the villagers to put down their tools and stay home for the while, to amuse themselves with games and songs while the future was so unclear. And the wreaths of holly that had been delivered to each house per Villiam’s orders had thorns that pricked the ladies’ fingers as they hung them on their front doors. With blood on their hands, they rolled out the dough and pressed cookies into the shape of the Cross.
Marek had thought the baby would come soon—the lambs had only taken four months. He was nervous that the birth would push him out of favor with Villiam. He imagined that he’d become unwelcome, a pest, while everyone rejoiced in the presence of the Messiah. Petra assured him that there were still months yet to pass before Agata’s baby would be born. ‘Ina is sure the baby will come in April,’ she said.
‘What will I do then?’ Marek asked.
‘You’ll be a man soon,’ was all Petra could think to answer.
The idea of growing up horrified Marek. Where would he go, and what would he do there? He prayed for an answer that night, but his dreams weren’t helpful. First he saw only the darkness of the room in his sleep, the space open and wide like the night sky before a cliff. Then his dreams descended on Lapvona, where he saw his old self shuffling along the roads, picking berries and looking in on people in their cottages. Dogs lurched out from their penned yards to sniff him, ducked away when he tried to pet their heads. He knocked on the door of Ina’s cabin, but she wouldn’t answer. Birds shat on his head and shoulders as he walked away, tripping on gravestones he’d never noticed before, there in the woods. His dreams were so lonely. Several times he awoke sweating, with the feeling that he was trapped, his arms and legs and head stuck in the stockade still sticky with blood from the Easter bandit, but he was only tangled in his blankets. He threw them off and stretched his back by twisting from side to side. In the mornings he had a burning ache in his muscles, as though they were growing even further in the wrong direction. Was he dreaming the wrong things? He couldn’t ask Ina for medicine. Each time he knocked on Agata’s door, Ina screeched like a vulture and told him to go away. He woke up on Christmas Eve in such pain that he asked Petra for a bottle of strong wine to soothe him. She complied and expressed her pity for him that he felt so bad on the holiday.