The Testament of Yves Gundron (27 page)

We burned the mattress on which everyone we loved had died, stitched another of burlap, and filled it with straw. We boiled the sheets, the rags, and all their clothes, and left our door open night and day that the cleanly breeze might draw out all traces of infection. Mandrik would not spend the night on the accursed bedstead, and took to rambling about in the darkness. Some mornings I would find him in the barn or up a tree, others lying on his back in the meadow or between the untended rows of wheat. One morning when midday did not bring him home, I called myself hoarse in search of him, and began to fear the worst. By the time I set out upon the High Road I was mad with fear and grief, and choked so that I could barely call his name. I cannot express how fiercely my heart leapt with joy when, at Ydlbert's rise, I heard a person weeping in the high grass. I trudged through to
find my brother curled up into a ball, his hands wrapped so firmly around his knees that his knuckles were white.

I fell onto the ground beside him and held him as tight as my strength allowed. His body was hot, and I feared he had caught fever out among the mists. “What happened?” I asked him, but he only cried.

I do not know how long we sat before finally he quieted, wiped his face upon his sleeve, and blew his nose into the grass. He pulled away enough to look at me with his swollen eyes. “I have seen the Angel of Death,” he said quietly, “ablaze with light, and full of beauty.”

I touched his hot shoulder and arm.

“As I walked this way late last night, trusting to the dim light of the moon, I saw a glow, a terrible radiance over the rise. My heart trembled with fear as my steps brought me to this spot. And as I looked out over the good land, a form became clear to my vision. It stood in the graveyard, tall as the mountains and made all of light, as if it had no body but spun gold and heat. Its golden hair cascaded down like rivers, and its white robe burned my eyes. Its arms were crossed before it, and in each hand burned a sword of fire whose heat I could feel even here. It did not regard me, for its eyes were like two suns and would surely have burned me had they looked my way.”

I touched his soft hair and his shirt, soaked through with terror. “You saw this?”

“As surely as I see you now. It burned all through the night, Yves. It did not move or speak though I called out, though I begged it tell me what it desired. When the first rays of the dawn broke over the city, it vanished. But I am frightened it is here now, gliding among us, unseen, and waiting to consume me with its eyes of flame.”

My body trembled with fear. If this were a sickness, he would follow the others soon enough, and if it were fancy, the weight of all our troubles had driven him mad. That my brother in his fervor could see through to the inner workings of things was not yet clear to me, so I held him and rocked him as our mother would have done. When he had cooled down I stood him gingerly up, and with my arm close about him, walked him home to bed.

“I will be leaving you, Yves,” he said, once he had hunkered well down beneath the blankets.

“Shh,” I told him, unable to keep my hands from off his arms, his face. He no longer burned with fever. “Think not of it.”

“Nay, I go not off to join the dead, but to join the living.”

“Sleep, Mandrik. Perhaps when you wake, the vision will be gone.”

He slept for two whole days—not in the delirium which had taken our brothers, but in a deep, peaceful slumber. I made a pot of vegetable broth and kept it simmering against his wakening, and took it also for my own sustenance. I prayed for him more fervently than I had for the rest of my family combined, so dearly did I need him now. When at last he awoke on the third day, he sat up and said, “I'm hungry, and I think it's time you were married.”

I laughed and brought him his soup, pleased that he thought me so much a man. Ydlbert had married at my age, but somehow he had seemed more adult than I.

“Yves,” he said between sips from his bowl, “you see how many times Death has visited this very hearth. Hurry now, before you, too, are taken.”

I wanted to find his advice funny, but could not. “You need to marry first.”

“Not I, Yves—I won't marry, and I won't work this land. I cede it all to you.”

“I don't want it.”

He shrugged his stooped shoulders. “I have other work to do. I can't tend this soil.”

“What other work?”

“The work of a treatise. The work to which the angel beckoned me.”

His eyes were afire, but he had not gone mad. Still, my stomach grew tight at his saying.

“I will travel abroad.”

“Oh, aye.” I laughed, refilling his bowl and then my own. “Mandragora's produced a lot of explorers in her time. You'll be in august company.”

“There's always a first, of everything,” said Mandrik.

“We're not near the sea. Where will you go overland?”

“As far as I can go till I reach the sea. And thence to the great East, where I will seek out those masters and sages whose knowledge of the
Beyond will succor me.” His aspect wore not the slightest air of concern.

“Mandrik,” I said, “you'll die.”

“God protects those who seek him out.”

I had fields full of grain, and provender enough from the previous winter to keep me—but what did it matter? At last I said what was foremost. “Don't leave me.”

He shook his dear head. “Not till I find you a wife, but once—”

“I can find a wife on my own.”

“Good, then. Make haste, that I might prepare my departure. You will call God's blessings down upon this land. I know it.”

I had never imagined myself, the youngest son, master of so great a farm. “Are you sure you don't want it?”

“I won't change my mind, Yves. You must hurry.”

I left him that afternoon to feed the animals, gather provisions from the garden, and bring fresh water from the creek. The idea of his departure pained me—bad enough it was to be this alone in the world; I could not lose my last companion and friend. Yet I did not believe that he would go. No one had ever left before, not even to become a tradesman in Nnms. No one since the fisherman who brought my grandmother had seen the sea; how was my brother to find it? When he began leaving, mornings, to make what he called “preparations,” it got my dander up, but I could think little of it, though I soon noticed a stash of dried meat in a corner of the house.

Elynour, too, was only fourteen—if she had lived through the plague. If I trudged through the fields to her father's land, who knew what misery might await me there. Though my heart raced whenever I saw her, I had never much considered taking a wife. Clive would have been my father's heir, and the northern piece might have been carved off for Marvin; but as for Mandrik and me, we would only have received some parcel our father could buy, or would have labored—without regret, I think—for our brothers all our days. My prospects were changed. Elynour was as lovely to me as the church's frescoes of St. Perpetua, and she might now be mine.

While I was out laboring, Mandrik did work of his own, in addition to his work of gathering what he needed for his journey. He washed Clive's best shirt and new blue trousers in a bath of lavender, that they perfumed the air when they lay upon the hedges to dry. He blacked his
Sunday boots. He sharpened my father's razor, that I might remove the eight hairs that then sprouted upon my chin. My heart grew light when I saw the fruits of his labors. I believed that my suit would not be in vain, and prepared to go argue my case on the morrow.

I hardly slept all night, and was not helped by Mandrik's firelit scratchings the night through. By morning we were both as weary as if a whole day's work had been done. Yet with his prayers, a song of good cheer, and some eggs and cheese behind me, I set out upon my journey.

When I look back upon the events of that day, I chuckle to think that such a sapling could have embarked upon such an errand. Franz Nethering was out slopping his pigs in their sty, and stopped to smile broadly at me when he saw the care of my dress. “How fares your family?” he asked.

The morning's preparations vanished as the memory of my loss rose up before my inward eyes. “All perished, but Mandrik and myself.”

Nethering wiped his brow. “I am sorry.”

I nodded. “Your family?”

“All well as yet.” It was only a matter of days, though, before his sons took ill.

His lovely, dark wife, Vashti, came out upon the stoop to watch us.

“I have come, then,” I said, fearful of any further delay, “to ask Elynour's hand in marriage. I am now my father's heir, and can give her the greatest farm in the demesne.”

Nethering looked back toward his wife, but no word was said. When he turned again to me, his face was serious, though by no means displeased. “Not Mandrik?”

“Mandrik says he doesn't want the farm.”

“Doesn't want the farm?”

“I can't explain it, sir. Please—Elynour?”

Franz Nethering nodded solemnly. “Shall we ask the girl?”

I nodded, and Vashti brought her forth from the house, wiping her small hands upon a brown apron. “Hullo, Yves,” she said. “Nice weather, God be praised.”

“Elynour,” Nethering said, coming forth from the sty. “Yves Gundron has come to ask for your hand. What do you say?”

Elynour laughed, and smoothed her skirt. “And where shall we live, in your barn?”

“His family has all passed on and left him heir. You would be mistress of his father's house.”

Each time I looked at Elynour, her eyes darted away. It was absurd that I should stand in Franz Nethering's yard with this as my purpose. “All right,” she said. “After the harvest comes in.”

I had imagined some more emotional response, but this would suffice. We all shook hands, and Vashti offered us fruitcake, over which Elynour and I watched one another shyly. She took my arm to walk with me to the edge of my father's fields, and as we spoke of the terror which had befallen my family, I watched the roses bloom in her smooth dark cheeks. When we reached the stone fence, I bent to kiss those cheeks, but instead found the flower of her mouth raised to me. To my surprise, she tasted of fruitcake. My mind spun as I probed the recesses of what had, until now, been a mouth purely for speaking; and before long we were down in the sweet grass, and I lay her rough dress over the rougher ground to shield her fragile body from its caresses. Though I had often dreamed of her, I had never imagined that she might come to me so easily, like my father's land. As I touched and kissed the sweet, dark expanse of her skin, I wanted to ask her if it was all right thus to sin against Father Icthyus's teachings, yet all I could do was stammer, so great was my desire.

“I think it's fine,” she said, stroking my face, “since we're to be married.”

To have known such sweetness in the midst of such desolation seemed the kindest gift of all. It was a hard summer, in which I did the work of four men as best I was able—and much of the crop, over which my father had so labored, withered in the field. But I managed to put up enough for the winter, and in the evenings I met my love in between our land and, weeping, thanked Heaven for her bounty. We were married in the autumn in the church, and Elynour came home with me, all her possessions strapped to the back of the chestnut horse which was her dowry, and which she led to my house by a length of rope. It died in the next summer's carting.

At fourteen, what more could a boy want than to marry a beautiful wife and be master of his household? It was my decision when to rake and hoe, and when to turn in for the night; and it was my pleasure to enjoy my young wife's body. Mandrik stopped sleeping in the big bed
with us after our wedding night, returning to his childhood hammock instead. Even that did not sufficiently remove him from our nocturnal goings-on, and he soon made his bed with the goats and sheep.

“Are you angry?” I asked one morning as together we cleaned the animals' stalls.

He raked his hay about and did not regard me. “Not angry. I simply didn't realize that was what it would mean for you to take a wife.”

“But Father and Mother—” I blushed, caught between shame and pride. “How else do you expect me to get us an heir?”

He shrugged, and redoubled his efforts. “Perhaps I'll like it better when you show me the bonny babe, that I might bounce him on my knee.”

“Mandrik—”

“Don't worry for me. I don't mind sleeping among the beasts. And I'll be off to Indo-China before the first frost.”

Still I did not believe that he would go, but before autumn had waned, Mandrik's preparations were complete, and with a sack of supplies slung across his back, he set out for the great world.

“If I don't see you again—” I started.

He would not put his sack down to hug me goodbye. “Don't tell yourself tales, Yves. I'll be back anon.”

My bride and I followed him to the top of the rise, and there watched him until he disappeared among the eastern mountains. I thought I should never see him more, and wept bitterly as we returned to the farm.

“God will return him safe—you'll see,” she said, stroking my upper arm like a cat.

“It's not but that.” How the beauty of the turning leaves and the sharp scent of wood smoke mocked me! “This farm seems so small, when I know he's to set sail for the rest of the world.”

“Much greater than my father's farm, by far.”

“By a few acres, at most.”

“Even so, what more do we need, you and I? We've brought in a good crop, and we've eight good laying hens, and I'll work at making us warm new clothes all winter.”

She dangled from my elbow like a toddler from her mother's apron strings. Her dark eyes faced clearly into the midday sun; her cheeks
were red in the chill breeze. As we walked home, my eyes blinded by my own tears to the beauty all around me, I realized that, wherever fate might take my brother, it would have to suffice to work this land, now that I had my Elynour.