In the morning, he wandered down to the great room before the guests arrived and found a gift on the side table, a bottle wrapped in red cloth. He asked Petra where it had come from. One of the guards had delivered it for Villiam that morning, she’d said. It was a bottle of wine from Ivan, Dibra’s brother. Father Barnabas stashed it in the cellar, afraid of its power, certain that it was poisoned. He didn’t tell Villiam about it, nor did he hide it very well. He simply placed it on a stool in the corner of the cellar, sniffed the sulfurous air, then scrambled up the stairs, afraid to be alone down there. He’d sat in the great room in a stupor, grateful for the footsteps and mundane chatter of the servants as they set the table and swept the floor.
‘This is my son, Marek,’ Villiam said now to the visitors, nodding to the boy.
‘Hello,’ Grigor said. Jon and Vuna smiled.
Marek sat with his head in his hand, already spooning the thin soup up and spilling it back into the bowl to cool it. Marek, too, was hung over and tired from poor sleep. He didn’t acknowledge the guests.
‘Let’s eat,’ Villiam said. He snapped for Lispeth to refill his cup with wine.
‘Our Father,’ Grigor said, determined to make good on this day of God’s gift of His son to the world. So he prayed while the priest slurped and Villiam gulped his wine. Jon and Vuna bowed their heads but kept their eyes open, glancing at each other, their eyes widening as though to say, ‘What is wrong with these people? Is it not right to pray before you eat?’ Grigor was unperturbed. He had been prepared for any weirdness. Finally, he reached the end of his prayer and Father Barnabas reached the end of his soup.
‘Amen,’ Grigor said.
‘Amen,’ said Jon and Vuna, and crossed themselves and lifted their heads.
‘Amen,’ said Marek and dropped his spoon. His soup tasted gamey. There were chunks of mutton at the bottom.
The priest waited for his empty bowl to be cleared away, staring down at the bits of herbs and carrot stuck to the bottom. While the rest slurped their soup now, he was debating with himself about what to do about the gift from Ivan. With that wine, he knew, he could kill whomever he pleased. He could do the Devil’s work. Perhaps that was what his vision of the cavalry was meant to tell him: ‘Kill. Be a hunter. Join us.’ Maybe he should, he thought. Better that than to be endlessly harassed. He’d never really believed in such things before—spirits, messages, anything beyond the trite reality of the world around him—but his sleeplessness had indeed made him susceptible. For the first time, he entertained the possibility that there was some deep meaning to life. Was he destined to be a killer? He looked around the table to test whether he was tempted. Of course, Villiam’s scowl was what caught his eye first. The priest considered this, sitting back in his chair while the servants now removed the bowls and replaced the dark linen tablecloth with a blue silk one. Or he could kill himself, he thought, yawning. Or no one. Perhaps that was the best choice, to do nothing.
Next came a stew of wild leeks and fennel. Barnabas gazed at Vuna as he ate. Her cap was still crooked but her veil cast a shadow along her face that haunted her cheeks with wonder. Would he kill her? No, no. She was too easy. He would rather kiss her than kill her, if he had to. Had he kissed too many girls when he was a boy? Was that the problem? Was God torturing him in retribution? Was God capable of that? He could remember each girl he’d kissed back in Prepat: the black-haired girl with the harelip; the brown-haired girl with freckles in her dimples; another brown-haired girl with battered eyes. Even at the age of four or five, she’d looked as if she’d seen the fires of hell already. What had happened to those little girls he’d kissed and pinched? Had they hated him forever? Had they told their husbands, years later, ‘There was an awful boy who kissed me once, and they sent him up to the monastery?’ Did their husbands get jealous? Did those girls get beaten for his stolen kisses? He felt sorry for himself that he couldn’t see their faces now. He looked back up for a moment at Villiam, who was prattling on about something—‘Leeches are good for virility, unless you leech too much’—and watched his mouth move. Had Barnabas really dedicated himself to that spoiled rat? Was that the great tragedy of his life—had he traded in a life of kissing whomever he pleased to guard the rotten soul of a man who couldn’t clean the shit from his own asshole? He could have done better than that, the priest reckoned. Maybe that was the message he was meant to receive.
And then the servant girls took the bowls away again—the priest hadn’t even touched his, but no matter. They changed the tablecloth now to a mustard yellow linen and brought out herring and a tureen of eel soup and a platter of oysters and crab. The village guests looked horrified. They’d never seen such creatures of the sea, and truthfully they were not commonly served at the manor. Since the drought, the trade rate for seafood had gone quite high.