The Testament of Yves Gundron (28 page)

Though Elynour and I were at our work daily, in fair weather and foul, each day of the next three years, no child came to us. I had heard of such cases—Miller Freund was one such, though all attributed his childlessness to his hoarding of pennies and his wife's shrewish ways—but could not imagine how such misery could befall us after all we had suffered. Mornings I prayed, and wished I had Mandrik's voice, which was so much dearer to God. And as the seasons turned, and as Elynour and I grew better able to manage the business of the farm, I grew accustomed to this curtailed happiness, and thankful to have been granted it despite my life's large measure of grief.

It was high summer of that third year of his absence when Mandrik returned—high summer, a stifling haze, and days so long one was hardly over before the next began. Mandragora had never in memory known a season so dry, and the crops suffered. My heart went out to them—not only because without their bounty my wife and I would starve, but because they looked so weary and sick. A stalk of wheat can have no feelings, sure, but if they had, what misery those stalks would have spoken. Each day I prayed for rain, each day trudged to the cairn and begged my grandmother for rain, and each new day dawned parching and bright. My heart tickled constantly behind my breastbone, and I could think of nothing but the drear winter ahead. My wife and I labored to bring in our crops, sure, but it was not labor as in other years. There is little to do when nothing has grown. The work was mostly insufferable because of the heat.

I thought of my brother as often as I drew breath, but I had ceased to expect his return two years since. I knew nothing of journeys—no one had ever taken one before—so I could not say how long he would be in returning from his destination; but I knew in my bones how long he had been gone. The seasons turned round upon his absence exactly as if they turned round upon his grave, except that he did not come resplendent in visions to tell me things, and there was nowhere I could visit him. He had simply, my last true companion, vanished from the
earth, and though the grass might grow and the leaves sprout on the trees, the world held a strange, unholy silence.

I was loading sheaves onto the waiting cart—then but a one-wheeled toy tied round the neck of a nameless beast—when he returned. I saw his figure approaching over Ydlbert's rise, and my stomach sank in fear, for though I had grown used to apparitions of the dead at evening, none had ever yet been so bold as to appear in the broad light of day. He bore a heavy burden upon his shoulder, and I shuddered to think what he was bringing me from the other side. The horse flattened her ears to her head. The wind whistled in the trees.

“Yves!” he called lustily, and his voice was nothing like Clive's and Marvin's whispers.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and waited for this to be over.

“Yves Gundron!” He began to run, the great weight bouncing against his back. “Great God, how I've missed you! I've gone all the way to Indo-China and returned, hale and well, bearing gifts. Are you not glad to see your brother after three years of silence?”

He could not be an apparition. I ran to meet him in the road, and was overwhelmed when he cast down his possessions and threw his arms around me—his odor was still the same, and it was his familiar shape, grown somewhat bulkier, which held me, not a wisp like my other brothers had become. “I thought you were dead.”

“And leave you alone in this world?”

“After three years' absence, what else was I to think?”

“And how should I have contacted you from the other end of the world, to tell you I was fine?”

I shook my head; my hair rustled against his coarse cassock.

“Your Elynour lives?”

“And thrives, though we have yet no child.”

“Soon enough. Take me home and let her feed me, and I will tell you of my travels.”

I hoisted his sack, which was heavy as a man, and walked home beside him, delirious with joy and unwilling to believe that it was truly mine. Elynour, at her butter churn in the sunshine, stared in disbelief as we stumbled up the drive. “Wife,” I called to her. “Look.”

Her sweet face filled with joy. “Why, Mandrik. I can hardly believe it's you,” she said.

Sweating and smiling, he reached out for her. “How you've grown. A fine woman, Yves.”

“Soup's boiling,” she said. “It's not been the best harvest, but it's good enough for broth.”

Mandrik said, “Thank you, sister,” and my wife went in to prepare our meal.

We followed, and I set down my brother's sack inside the door. “What makes it so heavy?”

“Paper.” I must have stared at it a moment too long, because he said, “The volumes of the treatise I am writing, as well as books brought back from abroad.” He ducked to release himself from a small carrying sling. With the care of a mother tending her newborn, he retrieved two young plants, their roots wrapped in burlap. “Perhaps by the time you have children, Yves, these will bear fruit.” Each, a twig with a half dozen leaves, would have been a mere snack for a billy goat, yet he wiped the leaves with care. “And I brought presents, naturally.”

Elynour left her kettle at the mention of gifts, and knelt down beside us. I brought her ribbons and spices from market whenever I could, but in truth it was not often. He lifted a large basket from his sack, in which many parcels were stowed. “For my good sister,” he said, and handed her a bolt of red fabric, covered all through with flowers in yellow and pink, and so slippery to the touch that she giggled when it cascaded to the floor. “The silk of ten thousand worms,” he told her, broadening her grin, “which I will tell you about the manufacture of over dinner.” When she held the magnificent, shining thing up, a string of milky green beads slipped out. “Jades, for your throat,” he said, and her dark eyes grew wide. “Shall I fasten them on you?”

“Please,” she said, and leaned toward him, one hand to her breast in wonder. He fastened the beads with grace; thus accustomed were his hands to delicate labor. Her fingers reached for her throat, and passed time after time across the necklace's remarkable smoothness.

The house was stifling with the heat of the cooking fire, and Mandrik glowed with sweat as if it were dew. He had changed in his years abroad—grown fuller and stronger, gained wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, allowed his hair to grow into long curls like a heathen's. The earth held no one who could ever be more dear.

“Nor did I forget my brother.” He turned the basket upside down,
revealing it to be pointy, and placed it on his head. Elynour and I laughed heartily. “You'll wear it out plowing, harrowing, slopping the pigs—it keeps the sun off your neck as well as out of your eyes.” He held the ridiculous thing out to me. “Come on, try it.”

I shied from its strange circumference. “I'm not wearing that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I never saw such a thing. It's ridiculous.”

Mandrik looked hurt. “All new things seem ridiculous until you see how well they work. Then they seem indispensable.”

This was a lifetime before the harness, and I had no idea what he spoke of. “Can't we use it for carrying fruit?”

He took his hat basket back and placed it on the floor. “It's yours; you may do with it as you please. One more gift, and I've exhausted my whole supply.”

“I do not mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Of course not.” He handed me a light, rectangular parcel, three hands in length and wrapped in pale blue silk. “Perhaps this will suit better.”

Beneath the silk was my precious dark box, all carved with the vines and flowers of the forest, another milky jade gleaming on the top, its clasp and hinges shining. I opened it and ran my fingers along its slippery blue interior. “A most beautiful object,” I told him, abashed by its delicacy, “but what shall I do with it?”

“You shall keep your pens and ink in there, and write.”

“Then it should be your box, for you're far likelier to engage in such activity.”

He smiled. “I have a box of my own. I will make you an ink vial and some good new pens. Will you use them?”

“When I have something to use them for.”

“Good enough.”

I did admire the box. Having it would be like having a puppy to coddle.

Of course we had hardly sat down to eat before Ydlbert arrived, his wife (not yet so sour) and three rambunctious sons in tow. She held the dozing infant Jowl, not yet named, in her arms. We had left the door open to admit air, and Ydlbert stuck his great head in and let out a whoop. “Mandrik Gundron, returned from the dead!” he called out, and they hugged and patted one another with manly glee.

“Not from the dead, from Indo-China,” said my brother. “Won't you join us at table?”

For Ydlbert, however boisterous his young sons, there was always room by my hearth. Bartholomew, but four years named, seized the hat, donned it, and ran out with Dirk at his heels. Young Manfred was still tied to his mother's apron, and sniveled in unhappiness. The baby suckled in his sleep. “All the way to Indo-China?” Ydlbert asked, his eyes glued to my brother.

Mandrik nodded sheepishly. “In a paper boat.”

“You must have tales to tell, then.”

Elynour replenished the bowls. Her necklace glowed against her dusky skin. “He had tales to tell before he'd ever done anything.”

“The things you must have seen!”

“More than I could tell you of over dinner.”

I was wild with wonder about my brother's journey, but did not want to importune him with questions; I wanted him to eat, and sleep, and then I wanted to trim his hair.

“Boys!” Ydlbert called out into the still bright evening, then turned back. The two children came panting to the door. “You could begin?”

When Mandrik smiled, the hoods came down over his eyes, giving him a wise and glad expression. “But where to start?”

“With the sea,” I blurted, then looked away lest he witness my excitement.

“Oh, but such a great, wild, lonely sea it was. I, and my paper boat, the salt water and the sky, and nothing as far as I could see. This not for days, but for weeks, perhaps months on end, and nothing to eat but dried meat, moldy bread, and the fish I caught by singing their siren songs.”

Ydlbert puzzled a bit of gristle out of his teeth. “How did you light a fire, on the paper boat?”

“A fire, lad? I ate the fish raw, aye, and was wet as a fish whenever it rained. I burned under the rays of the sun from the moment he rose to the moment he set; and glad was I when at last I descried the shores of India beckoning to me.”

“India?” I asked.

“The debarkation point for Indo-China, for one must travel overland, across the great Himalayas and through much of China, to reach that blessed destination.”

And all the time that we had grown together, I had never even wondered what went on in Nnms. Over my mind the doings of people besides my family held no sway.

“As I drew nigh land, the hundreds of people who had been bathing, fishing, and doing their laundry along shore plunged into the water and began ululating in their strange accents, beckoning to me with raised arms. Their raiment was of bright jewel hues, the women draped in articles called Saris, which hung over their shoulders like veils. Into the water they plunged, drawing my craft in with friendly shouts as the fierce southern sun beat down. Their skin and hair were dark, and some of the women wore jewels in their noses.”

Elynour said, “Mercy. I'm surprised you didn't die of fright.”

“No, I was filled with relief, thrilled to have persons to talk with, whatever their native tongue, to be safe upon land. The inhabitants of that village treated me to a feast that night of vegetables and myriad spices—some of which I have brought back with me—and promised me the next day visits to the shrines of their various gods.”

Elynour said, “More than one?” and Ydlbert, “Heathens.”

“Hindus. If you think that strange, good man, you won't like to hear the stories of the tribes we met in the mountains, or of the vagabonds, gypsies, and marauders upon the Silk Road. You won't want to hear any of it.”

The boys, for the first time in history, sat as if nailed to the floor. Dirk said, quietly, “Gypsies?”

“Singing mournful songs, and stealing their brides.”

Dirk nodded as if he had long known much of these things.

Mandrik held forth until late into the night, as more and more of our countrymen came to wish him kindness on his safe return. He told tales until the sun rose, and followed me out into the fields to tell me tales the long, work-dreary day. My brain teemed with the people and places he described, but no stories could displace my joy, my wild, ineffable joy, at having my brother back home. I would build him a house. Now he was returned from the Beyond, I would see that he stayed forever.

Less than a fortnight later, it became clear that Elynour had at last conceived a child. When she told me, I whooped in exultation, and could not quit dreaming of our future life. How much a man would I be with a child of my own! But Elynour did not fare well, did not glow
and smile meekly like the Blessed Virgin in church. Throughout the summer and into the autumn she was bodily sick, voiding by mid-morning whatever she had eaten at breakfast, and often, her narrow lips parched, she lay down for half the day. As the winter drew nigh, her belly grew taut with the burgeoning life within her, but her arms and her face grew thin and tired. Mandrik scoured the countryside for herbs and flowers to soothe her and the babe inside, all of which she accepted with a dutiful smile.

In the dead of winter her time came. In a driving snow Mandrik ran off for the midwife and the blacksmith, who arrived with implements I could not bear to behold. The long night through I held Elynour's hand and mopped her steaming brow, but the baby, despite all our coaxing and prayers, would not come. Mandrik's face was pale in the firelight, the drawn, worried face of an old man; though I looked to him for reassurance, his visage only filled me with fear. When the next day dawned and nearly waned, my wife was so weak with her labor that she could not sit up to take water. A steady stream of rich, warm blood flowed out from her nether regions, and her hand began to grow cold within mine. I could not weep, so panicked was I to observe this spectacle; and then the smith brought forth his great calipers, which he had plunged into the boiling kettle then cooled in the drifting snow, and forced them within her body to bring the infant forth. With her last strength Elynour screamed and sobbed and begged him not, but with a grim face he persevered. My wife died with the instrument inside her. The infant, when the smith brought him forth in a torrent of black blood, was a deep, uncanny blue, and wore the black snake of his umbilicus around his neck like the wreath of a terrible honor. Blood continued to gush from Elynour's lifeless body, and when I looked at the sickening grimace into which her beautiful face had contorted, I ran out into the snow and hollered until my throat all but bled. Mandrik could not bring me in to the hearth, so he brought me out a blanket. Under the cold, starry sky I shouted curses until my whole head rang, until they echoed from the mountains on every side. When at last I could scream no more, I could hear nough: but the fire within, and my brother, his voice broken, reciting the Office of the Dead.