‘I don’t like songs anymore, Father,’ Villiam said. ‘The coming birth of my Christ Child has changed me. I like swimming more than singing now.’
Barnabas kept his mouth shut. Marek pouted and drank more wine. He may once have been the lamb herder’s son, but now he was as spoiled and petulant as a young lord. The visitors collectively ignored him, out of kindness.
‘We would have liked to sing in the choir,’ the northern man said, looking a bit drawn and stupid. ‘But Elba died. She had been our leader, she knew all the songs.’
Villiam looked at Barnabas. He had never even known that the church had had a choir.
‘Elba? Was she a good singer?’
The priest filled his mouth with stew. Who was Elba? He didn’t care. He didn’t want to speak of any church activities. He was mostly concerned with the look of the church now. The congregation had, in fact, taken to renovating the church with sincere devotion. It glistened and sparkled. Barnabas was running out of complaints: he knew he was procrastinating. He’d need to prepare a speech, something truly intelligent for when the vassals arrived in April, to prove his worth as an apostle, he supposed, whatever an apostle was.
‘Let’s not talk,’ he said once he had swallowed. ‘God wants us to be quiet. Maybe you are right, Villiam, that silence is holy.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘You did. Take note, all of you. The lord is wise.’
So they finished their meal in silence. Afterward, they left for the stables to see the crèche. Villiam insisted on carrying the torch, as though it required his great strength and authority. As they passed through the hall and out into the darkness of the wintry night, the air shifted into something soft and strangely delightful—a coming snow was lifting the chill from the air, pulling it upward. It was not a wind as much as a magnetic force, and to Marek it felt like an ominous sign from the heavens. He hung back in the group and watched the dark shapes of the family trailing behind Villiam. The priest had elected not to go, saying that he wanted to be alone to pray, which was a lie. He simply couldn’t stand to be in Villiam’s company any longer out of fear that the man would point to him and demand that he extol the meaning of the crèche and its components. And it was true: Villiam wanted a narrator for the scene. ‘Do you like make-believe?’ he asked Emil, reaching for the little boy’s hand in the dark.
‘No,’ Emil replied.
Villiam’s torch cast a red glow on the snowy ground. The young couple, the little girl in her father’s arms, stepped around the periphery of the glow, as though they didn’t want to get too close. Marek followed as they traversed the footbridge and took the path down to the stables.
Inside, the stableboys were ready in their robes. Marek held the torch as Villiam put on his Joseph costume—a drab brown cloak. He teetered a bit under the weight of it, unsteady on his long thin legs. Villiam had drunk wine out of thirst but eaten very little, and the wine had gone to his head, making him feel funny but not good-humored. He was drunk, he realized. He took the torch back from Marek, who was drunk, too.
‘Where is our Mary?’ Villiam asked, moving the torch around sloppily, looking for Lispeth. He hadn’t noticed that the girl had not joined them for the promenade. ‘Lispeth!’ he called out into the dark. He tried to form the word more accurately with his lips and tongue, pronouncing the two syllables distinctly so nobody would detect his inebriation: ‘Lissss! Peth!’ She didn’t come.
Marek peered around the stable, looking for Jude in the darkness. Past Christmases in the pasture had been spent fasting. The holy days were reserved for silence and introspection. Jude and Marek didn’t know the story of the census, or that Christmas marked the birth of Jesus. Jude had thought that the reason Jesus was so revered was that He had been so brutally punished by soldiers on Christmas. This was what inspired him: his passion was brought on by torment. So between the two of them, Jude and Marek, they had made quiet Christmas offerings of self-abuse, cruel words spoken carefully in their minds: ‘I am bad. I am shameful. I am a waste of life. I have done no good.’ And then they abused one another: a punch in the gut and on the jaw, vicious words of contempt and disapproval. It was the one time each year Marek struck his father, an intimacy that he now missed.
‘Lispeth! Goddamnit!’ Villiam called again, lifting his chin and yelling into the rafters of the stables. Lispeth still didn’t come. The stableboys scratched their heads. Villiam held the torch out to illuminate the Jesus doll.