And so it was. Once he had caught his breath and taken a sip of water, Jude calmed, then cried. He wiped the blood from his son’s face and held him in his arms, kissed his strange, swollen face, and told him the story of Agata’s sacrifice again. ‘She died for you,’ he said. ‘You see the blood?’
Marek was happy.
* * *
*
Ina had lost her vision when she was only seventeen. She suffered a high fever due to a malady that had torn through the fiefdom. The entire family fell ill very quickly, one by one, mother, father, and her two little sisters. Ina fell asleep, shivering and sweating, and when she awoke, she came to nothing but the black light of her blindness and the stench of her family’s dead bodies in the bed around her. Such stories were not unusual at the time—illness spread very easily in the region, as it was only a day and night away on horseback from the coast, where all the pestilence came in on ships crossing the sea. They said it was the rats to blame. When Ina was little, before Villiam’s grandfather installed guards around the bounds of his province in an effort to keep out the bandits, traders and pilgrims passed through the village on their way to Iskria and Bordijn, bringing with them rashes and pneumonic contagions. Travelers often stopped in Lapvona to trade work for food and shelter, or simply to see how other people lived. Lapvona was a special place, known for its good soil and fine weather. And the villagers were kind and generous people, often taking in visitors and giving freely of their stores of food. They could afford to do so as their lord was fair and God-fearing. Taxes were low. There were only a few dozen families in Lapvona when Ina was a child, and they all worked and lived together peacefully until the plague took half of them to heaven. That changed everything. The houses were burned down with the dead inside for fear that burying the bodies would infect the ground. The survivors became infected with fear and greed. Guilt was extinct in Lapvona thereafter. Perhaps this was what allowed the village to move on after so much loss. Even their dear lord, Villiam’s great-grandfather, had perished, leaving his twelve-year-old son, Villiam’s grandfather, to manage the village.
Ina was the only sick person to recover from the plague. When she staggered out of her home, the villagers were about to strike the flint. ‘God rest their souls,’ they said, then gasped at the sight of the sick teenager, her dress dark with sweat, her face bleached of color, roving blindly and calling out:
‘Where am I?’
A woman screamed. The men backed away, afraid of infection.
Ina spoke to the voices in the darkness. ‘Am I alive or dead?’
This question made the people of Lapvona very suspicious. Nobody would answer. They weren’t sure what to say, anyway. If she was alive, how had she miraculously survived the illness? Had she seen death? What devilish germ might she have brought back with her? Why did God spare her, only to leave her orphaned and blind? Wouldn’t death have been more merciful? Maybe blindness was penalty for some profane ill within her soul. And if she was dead, was she a ghost now, there to taunt and torture them? Was she an angel of evil? Only Jesus could rise, the priest, Father Vapnik, had told them. The people were perturbed. They told Ina to sit still on the dirt, then made a circle around her with small stones and proceeded to set the cottage on fire. The rest of the villagers came out to stare from a distance. In her weakness, Ina begged for water and food. ‘Should we give it to her?’ Nobody dared. They wordlessly agreed that it would be better for everyone if she were to succumb to her illness safely, within the circle of stones. They were afraid. A few people turned away, coughing in the smoke, not wanting to watch her die. But she wouldn’t die. She only begged for food more passionately.
‘She sounds like a howling sheep,’ someone said.
‘Yes, the kind with horns,’ another said.
It wasn’t until Father Vapnik heard of her situation that she was offered a cooked potato. A neighbor threw it at her, and she ate it. Eventually Father Vapnik directed the village carpenter to fashion a long pole by which Ina could be prodded this way and that, to get her safely away from the others. Nobody wanted to take her in. She was thought to have some kind of hex on her.
They closed her in the anteroom of the church, used in the past to incarcerate madmen when they were throwing fits. Nobody in Lapvona had gone mad in a century, but the room still held the charge of dread and insanity. Ina could feel it. Villiam’s grandfather, traumatized by the death of his father, took the priest’s advice and ordered Ina to be sent to the nunnery. No man would ever marry her anyway. She had been betrothed, but the boy and his family were ashes now. Father Vapnik arranged for a horse to take her up to the convent once she had recovered enough. She slept and ate, stuck in the anteroom, and touched her body with her hands to remind herself that she was real, she was alive. Emboldened by the church’s charity toward the blind girl, a few people left food and jugs of water for her, and eventually she regained her strength, but not her eyesight. Ina understood that nobody wanted to hear of her sorrow or her fear or loss or anything to indicate her passion or dispassion for life. And she knew that the nuns would make her do some menial work, the kind that a blind girl could do without mistake—probably scrubbing laundry or grinding wheat. She didn’t want to spend her life gripping dirty rags and plunging her arms into cold lye water or turning the handle of a crank for hours each day. She had indeed seen death and she was not afraid of it. What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.