Watermark (2 page)

The lady Elena
was dead.

Onors, the healer’s apprentice, dropped her muddy clump of roots and leaves and rushed to Elena’s side. Seeing a child kick beside its mother’s eviscerated body, she crossed herself. Had the old healer butchered the poor mother and cut the child from the dead corpse? She looked more closely at the infant and gasped. This thing was no child at all but a sickly creature, ivory-colored in skin and hair, white as bone. Even its eyes were so light, the translucent pink of a worm.

It had come too soon, undercooked, with no color yet baked into its skin and hair, so silent that she wondered for a moment if it still lived. But then it blinked.

“Demon,” she said in a whisper and crossed herself again. The healer swaddled it in a rough woolen blanket and thrust it toward her. Onors jumped back, warding the white creature away. Biatris stepped closer and shoved it into her arms.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Take the babe to her father.” Her gaze lingered on the mother’s peaceful face, then dropped to the bloody tear that gaped from Elena’s deflated stomach. “I have work yet.”

Onors mouthed a quick prayer. She held the creature at arm’s length and shuddered in revulsion. What a small thing, weak, like an animal that had been born in a barn, doomed to be crushed under its mother’s feet—as this witch-child ought to have been. The healer turned her back on them. Onors shifted the babe’s weight onto one hip and grabbed the bloodied knife.

She tucked the blade into her sash and pushed open the door. Father and daughter rushed to her with fearful questions writ large in their eyes.

“She’s dead,” Onors said, turning as their faces crumpled. They stumbled past her into the house. The door shut behind them and she bolted with the babe.

She ran blindly, sliding between brush and garigue all the way downhill until she ended at the river Aude. Fed by glacial runoff from the Pyrenees, the water ran black save for white eddies laced with shards of floating ice. She placed the witch-child on the rocky ground and stared at its too-white flesh and watery eyes, and the blood-specked white fuzz that covered its head. What kind of child could be born without color?

No, not a child, but a creature cut from dead flesh and born bedeviled. She’d heard about wretched abominations like this before, born in other towns. Cursed omens, they heralded ill fortune and despair. Maybe this one would bring bad crops, drought, even the dying sickness.

“Roumèque,”
she whispered at it with a tremble. She should dump the creature in the river and watch it drown.

But she couldn’t do it.

An idea was born in her head. Dipping her hand into the river, she crossed herself and traced a cold, wet cross on the child’s forehead. Shouts sounded, not far in the distance. She withdrew the knife. “Born badly. But still I can save you.”

She shoved three fingers into the child’s mouth and pinched
its tongue. With her free hand, she brought the knife under the pink flap of flesh. In a single tug she slashed the blade through. Bright red blood spurted from the wound and splattered against Onors’s face. The child opened her mouth into a wide, perfect circle and screamed.

“O Lord,” Onors said, not flinching at the girl’s cries. She raised her eyes to the cloudy sky. “We give this unto You to protect the babe from the devilment.” She flung the piece of flesh into the dark river. It swirled into an eddy and disappeared.

She stared at the shrieking child. If the wound healed and the babe lived…No ifs. This babe would live. Determination burned bright in her pink eyes. Yet at least now the curse of her birth would bleed from her soul, and then the babe would be safe.

Just as the child launched into another wail, her father burst through the copse of trees, holding his other daughter. He dropped the girl and rushed toward Onors. Snatching the babe, he slapped Onors hard across the face. She fell to the ground.

Scuttling away from his fury, she gaped at him with unblinking eyes filled with tears. Didn’t he understand?

“What have you done?” he demanded. His eyes darted over the babe’s pale face, then moved down the length of her body. His fingers rested on her lips and came away crimson with blood. He wrenched loose a corner of the child’s blanket and held the bunched up cloth against her mouth. A vibrant red seeped across the brown material. He let out a low cry.

“Nothing wrong, I’ve not done anything wrong,” Onors insisted. The words tumbled from her lips.

The man pried his older daughter off of his leg and placed the infant on the dirt beside her.

“Papa?” the girl cried.

“Just sit.” He advanced toward Onors.

“I’ve not done anything wrong,” she said again. “I’ve saved her.” She backed up on her hands and rear. “The babe won’t never speak, won’t never have the chance to spread the devil’s lies.”

Biatris crashed through the brush in front of them, sweating and struggling to recover her breath. Her gaze roved from Onors to the father, then rested on the young girl and the babe. She rushed to them with a cry.

Forgotten for a moment, Onors pulled back along the riverbank.

“The babe lives. She may yet be saved,” Biatris said, taking the injured child in her arms. She lurched toward the path that led uphill back to the house. “If we move fast.”

The man swallowed and clenched his fists. He stared hard at Onors, then followed the old woman. Onors watched until the pale-white babe disappeared from her view. Had she saved it? Would it live?

Only God knew.

A clap of
thunder startled Auda awake. Bolting upright on her pallet of hay, she pushed aside the oilcloth flap covering the square outlook by her bed. Storm clouds darkened the predawn sky. She huddled in her blanket and breathed against the furious thump of her heart. Closing her eyes, she tried to drowse to the rumble of her father’s snores from the loft above, but it was no use. She couldn’t fall back asleep.

By habit, she reached across the pallet for her sister, Poncia, to ask her to sing a tune, a love song or a hymn from church. Sometimes, after a nightmare, her sister would hold Auda’s hand and hum an old lullaby of their mother’s. But Poncia, only six months ago, had married and moved away.

Auda slid out of her pallet and pulled a woolen dress on over her shift, her bare toes scrunching against the cold winter
ground. Thin ice shards had formed in the basin of rainwater that stood outside the larder where she slept. She picked them out and washed her face, then stole into the hearth room. Dried rushes and alder leaves crunched under her feet, their sweet woody fragrance rising up.

The fire had dwindled low under the cook pot. Auda fanned the embers, then opened the shutters over the outlook and rolled up the oilcloth flap to let in some air. The rain had started again. Little wonder: it had rained every day for the past four months in Narbonne. Each morning, the downpour arrived with the salty breeze of the
marin
off the Mediterranean. Normally, the dry gusts of the evening
cers
would chase the rain away, but not these days. These days the rain was constant.

“The inquisitors are circling Narbonne like hawks,” her father had told her with a dark look, “while the priests claim the rain is all the work of the devil.” He snorted. “Pure nonsense.”

But the Church had added extra masses at Matins and Prime just to accommodate all the newfound piety.

Auda fed the fire sticks of wood. Orange shadows flickered over the sparsely furnished room. In one corner, a table and two benches stood alongside a shelf that held a pair of empty wine flagons and a green wax tablet with a wooden stylus. Two sackcloth cloaks hung on hooks nailed into the door.

Fanning away the acrid smoke that rose from the burning pine kindling, Auda tiptoed down the corridor that led to her father’s studio. A familiar sense of anticipation prickled her spine.

This was where she and her father made paper, reams of blank sheets to be filled with words from all manner of people—rich lords, learned priests.

Even her.

The workshop was centered around a large vat holding the
linen mixture that made up the paper pulp. Fashioned from an old wine barrel, the vat sat on a plinth over a low fire and next to a drainage gulley cut into the rough brick floor. Auda crossed the channel by way of a wooden duckboard and lit a torch. The flame’s reflection danced on the vat’s black liquid surface. Today her father would beat the macerated linen into a pulp; when he was done, the actual papermaking would begin.

Auda dropped the torch in a sconce over a row of smaller barrels, where the degrading cloth that would go into the next batch of pulp was kept. The wet linen rags, balled up inside, were already moldy and fermenting. She breathed in, picking out nuances in the ripe odor, the sweetness and the acidic undertone that lingered in her nostrils. Another week and they’d be ready.

She sat down at the corner desk. Its surface was cluttered with a miscellaneous ruck: quills, blades, brushes, old bits of paper, older pieces of parchment, pots of ink and sand, and an empty flagon of wine. In the middle sat a large book that her father, Martin, had rented from the stationer.

He rented books as often as he could from Tomas, even when the men had no work to discuss. A shopkeeper with strong ties to the Church and the Parchmenter’s Guild, Tomas was loath to speak in public about Martin’s paper, but for a few discreet coins would approach the papermaker with some side work.

“Cheap men need cheap copies,” Tomas would say, sniffing as he handed her father a thick wrapped package containing a book made of parchment.

It was almost always a text for a university, though occasionally a colorful romance or collection of verse made an appearance. Martin would make sheets of paper in an identical size and number to the parchmented work and copy the text in his careful hand. A binder would sew the work up into
gatherings of eight pages, then stitch the gatherings together and bind them with cloth-board covers. The resulting book would be far less grand than a parchmented work with colorful illuminations and a tooled leather cover, and would fetch small coin for all the effort. Still, Martin jumped at every chance to copy a parchmented book on paper.

“Someday people will flock to us directly, eh, Auda?” he said often. “They will seek us out to have their words captured in a dozen books spread all over Christendom.”

Auda quelled a shiver of excitement and tried not to dream, as she often did, that the first original book Martin made would be written by her. Surely that was his dream, too—why else would he go through such effort to bring books home to share with her? She could picture it, a leather-bound volume containing pages and pages of her writing, maybe even decorated with bright illuminations. If Poncia knew of her ambitions, she would scoff at them both, asking what kind of woman wanted to write books? Few could even read.

Poncia might well be right. But what if she wasn’t?

“The Lord saved you for a reason, my special child,” Auda had heard her father mumble once. “If only I knew why.”

She caressed the dark book on the desk, her fingers trailing over the fat black script on the book’s cloth-board cover.
Liber compositae medicinae
. She’d told her father she wanted to make a booklet of simples and herbal cures for her sister, on the occasion of Poncia’s saint’s day. Her sister was ever at a loss to remember which herbs fought melancholy, which soothed distemper, and which chilled a fever. The week after Auda had shared her plan with her father, he had brought her this book on physicking. The volume was due to go back to the stationer’s today.

She flipped it open. The first page, as usual, bore the book’s curse.

The curse should have scared her but Auda only felt a kinship with the writer who’d authored the warning not to mistreat his book.

Reaching into a desk drawer, she pulled out the paper booklet she was making for Poncia. She’d already sketched in the symbols for wind, earth, fire, and water over a drawing on the human body, copied from a Greek codex she’d read months before. On the front page she had drawn a pelican, which had been a favorite of their mother’s. On the back page she’d written herbal wisdom on getting a babe secured in the womb.

She flipped to the blank middle now and chose a last few simples to copy. Humming while she worked, she wrote each recipe like a verse to be sung, crafting it into a rhyme that her sister could remember.

She read the words over, pleased. It was only in moments like this when she thought she heard her own voice.

A loud snore interrupted her tune and she glanced up at the loft. Her father had returned home late last night from the
tavern, drunker than a sheep’s head soused in ale. His snores rumbled, deep and regular. Dawn would soon break. If he didn’t wake soon, he would miss the morning market. Three times a week, on market days, Tomas allowed Martin to set up in a corner of his stall to serve as a scribe, a reader and writer of letters for those who could not do for themselves. The work earned Martin a few pennies, and Tomas even more for supplying the parchment and ink.

Auda laid down her quill, intending to wake her father. Yet as if on cue, he groused himself awake and a few moments later, lumbered into the workshop. The months of dampness had stiffened his joints and he walked with a slight limp. The rains had waterlogged the crops and thinned the stock of birds and beast sent to the butchers. Martin’s once ample paunch had receded into mere chubbiness, though his shoulders were still strongly muscled.

Martin climbed the steps to the vat and loosed a stream of urine into the murky water to help the soaking linens degrade. He leaned in and plunged a hand into the pulpy water. Gray strands stuck to his fingers.

Sitting back, Auda focused on her father as light from the torch caught him in profile. On the surface he looked like any other man, stout with swarthy skin, thick limbs, and cropped hair. But to her his brown eyes spoke of his true character, of risk and passion.

She loved watching him work in the quiet moments of the morning. Somehow, when he held his long-handled paddle and churned the pulp, his awkward gait grew into grace, his reserved manner into an expression of devotion.

Today, however, he didn’t pick up his tools. Instead, he rubbed his wet fingers against his smock and sought his daughter in the shadows.

“Ah,
ma filla
,” he said, his thin lips curving into a wide
smile, “one week more and this batch will be ready to sell. And just in time! This is going to be the batch that changes everything for us.”

Auda lifted her head to meet his merry eyes. What did he mean?

“We have order for paper, Auda. A real order! Not this piddling work of scribing dull letters or copying books for the cheapest bidder. No, this request is for blank sheets, not just a few but four whole reams. And here’s the best part.” Martin leaned in. “The order comes straight from the palace!”