This New and Poisonous Air
SHE BEGAN TO WAIT in the snow-swept square, the same place where village sheep pastured during summer months, and she thought she could smell the memory of them—damp wool and grassy dung. She tried hard not to make a game of pretending to be a sheep, knowing that would only make her look more like a child. She wore a piece of red fabric tied at her throat, having heard it was a sign. The men took the older girls who did this, gave them work. Following example, she lowered her eyes, glanced up again—a ship signaling. Death had swept out of the cities on the backs of rats and fleas. First came the rash, then the cough, an unseen guest knocking. Finally, a spread of boils. The body became a cauldron set upon a fire. Some said the arrival of the death would be signaled by a riderless horse, gaunt and gray, that would wander into the square and eat from dead winter grass. Others thought a voice would issue from the ground—listing the names of those set to die.
In the end though, cloaked riders had come and told them to prepare. The riders remained mounted, wearing leather masks that covered their mouths and noses, making it look like they had muzzles. The King’s Dogs, she called them to herself. And the Dogs spoke roughly, saying the village would sicken, they’d fill all their graves and hurt for more. “Dig plenty of holes while you’re still healthy,” said one of the Dogs. “And don’t any of you go accepting travelers into your homes. Tell them all to move along. People who come on the roads carry boils.”
Soon enough Illinca’s father and his men, known as the Irontooths for their strength, were busy moving bones from graves to the charnel house so there’d be more room to bury the plague dead and hopefully the disease itself as the Dogs had prescribed. While they worked, Illinca idled. The charnel house cut a thin shadow over the yard where she played. Sometimes she pretended to be Mother—all home and prayer, the logic of folded linens. Other times, she was Father, putting her back into digging ragged holes while talking of ghosts. She liked looking at the artifacts piled in the charnel alongside the exhumed bones—a sharpened silver tooth, the swollen binding of a forgotten Psalter, clay dolls with painted eyes, ever-open to ward off things that would steal from the dead. There was a skullcap, still neatly folded after a hundred years, and a porcelain arm that rose from a pile of debris, fingers stiff and accusatory. Her father called this the bric-a-brac of the underworld.
The Irontooths numbered eleven in all, and there was music to their digging—the muffled thud of shovel heads striking the ground and the hush of dirt falling from the blades. Sometimes one of them would pause and say, “I know this one’s people. Let me be the one to roust him.” And then he would jump into the grave and collect the bones, holding a ribcage gingerly like a muddy trap in which some animal was still alive. The men were kind to Illinca, their little audience, and brought her creatures carved from wood—elephants and monkeys and stranger things (monsters really) with two beaked heads and tusks protruding from their stomachs. One carved her what appeared to be a man who was trapped inside a wheel, hands and arms fused to the wooden circle. The man was naked but for his body hair, and his face was that of a grinning demon. She accepted these gifts and put them in her skirt pockets, pretending to be pleased. Her father’s partner, Frenir, said, “Soon you’ll have yourself a whole ark, Illinca. You’ll float away from all this and be saved, won’t you? ” She imagined standing on the deck of a creaking ship, waving to her parents and her village, then turning to realize she was all alone with her wooden bestiary that had somehow grown to full size and stood unsteadily on matchstick legs, watching her with the dark holes they used for eyes. And when she turned to look toward home again, she saw nothing but a wooden sky upon a wooden sea.
Her mother fell sick along with so many others.
Illinca was playing on the road when she heard the soles of her mother’s shoes scrape against the porch, then watched her step away from the house, moving in quick jerks. Illinca steadied herself for a lashing, but none came. Her mother only stared—face red, her blouse opened indecently. A rash, like the tail of a comet ran between her breasts.
“Mamma?” Illinca said.
“Have you said your prayers?” her mother asked.
“I have.”
“Have you said all your prayers, my darling?” she repeated.
Her father dug the grave himself. By then so many were already gone that the cemetery was beginning to boil over—the King’s Dogs had been right on that account. But her father found a special place for his wife, putting her deeper than the other bodies and tamping the soil. For a long time then, he sat cross-legged on her grave, holding his shovel in his lap. He talked to his dead wife, said things Illinca was too far away to hear. She stood near the charnel house and saw only that his lips were moving, like a fish pulled from the river.
After her mother was gone, Illinca’s father wouldn’t look her in the face, and an old neighbor agreed to take her in as his servant. He called her Anna, his dead wife’s name. He was sick, not from the plague but from the infirmities of age. She was to bring trays to his bedside, read to him from the Bible, and brush his hair before he went to sleep. He often touched her arm while she brushed, remarking on the softness of her skin and saying, “Slower now, Anna. My scalp is so tender.” He died one evening while she watched, holding his hands against his mouth as if embarrassed by the final words that might slip out. Her father told no more stories of ghosts and began carrying a woodcut in his pocket showing the Virgin with the infant Christ standing on her knee. The child was crudely etched, looking more like a grim man than a baby, two fingers of the same length raised in a sign of peace. Her father wept over his dinner and once threw his wooden bowl against the wall with such force it left a mark that Illinca could not rub clean. A week later, he told her he was leaving the village for a digging job with the Irontooths. “I’ll be back before month’s end,” he said. “I’m sorry to go, but the money will be good. Many gravers have fallen into their own yards.”
“But you’ll be a traveler,” Illinca said. “Travelers spread disease.”
Her father could not find it in himself to respond, and the Irontooths waved from the backs of their tall horses. Illinca’s skirt pockets bulged with her collection of carved animals, and just as she feared, she was left alone with them feeling too young and foolish to guess the next step.
WHEN HEINRICH ADLE ARRIVED in the square, two months had passed since her father’s leaving, and Illinca was becoming frightened. She tried her best to seem cheerful, sticking out her little tongue to catch snowflakes, holding the red fabric against her throat so the wind did not whip it away. She understood now that the fabric was a sign, though of what, she didn’t know. Perhaps it meant the wearer was free from disease, free to be a wife. But Illinca was not taken like the other girls. When she realized a man was actually watching her, she composed herself, trying to look sweet, but when she saw exactly who was watching, she nearly laughed. This man wore the strangest clothes—a cloak lined with silk the color of new pumpkins, a soft hat that fell over one eye, and a heavy-looking talisman around his neck—a brass cross with a hole in its center. She knew he was not from their village, and had only a moment to wonder how a traveler had gotten in. Maybe people were too sick to bar the way.
Heinrich Adle stooped to examine Illinca, and she saw that his face was oddly cleaved—chin, lower lip and forehead all dented with the same vertical line, as if he’d been hit with an ax. He looked something like a book held open to a page. “Are you eating snow because you’re hungry?” he asked.
She tried for charm. “Snowflakes don’t satisfy, sir.”
“Then we must find something that will,” he said, mustache rising above crooked teeth.
“What would that be? ” she asked, feeling that at any moment she might learn the secret of the red fabric.
“Satisfaction is variable,” he said. “Finding the proper source is an art. Luckily, you have met satisfaction’s sculptor.” He extended his hand and she took it, finding his skin warm and his nails clean. “I am Heinrich Adle from Alland.”
“Illinca,” she said, forgetting to report her surname because she was trying to remember if she’d heard of Alland. She was fairly sure she hadn’t and wondered if it was a made-up place, and this man was indeed as mad as he looked.
“And how many years have you seen, Illinca?”
“Ten,” she replied, refusing to drop her gaze from his. “Or at least that is my estimation. How many have you seen, sir?”
“An unfortunate number,” he said. “I wish that it were ten.” He paused, as if trying to remember an important detail. “You know you are too young to be standing in the square. Have you parents?”
“Gone,” she said. “The death took Mother, and my father is digging graves in other villages with his men, the Irontooths. Gone two months.” She touched her red scarf. “I’m learning to make do for myself.”
Heinrich Adle let out a quick laugh. “Is that so?”
Illinca wasn’t pleased—the other girls never got laughed at. If anything, they were approached with a kind of reverence.
“Where did you say these Irontooths are?”
“Another village,” she said, not wanting to show her full ignorance of the details, “to the south.”
“Of course,” he said. “I should have remembered that I’d heard talk of their name. Listen, my dear, I’m about to leave this place, as my job is done, but if you’ll come along, I think we might just be able to find these Irontooths of yours. You could be with your father and not forced to stand out in this cold. What say you, little Illinca?”
She felt her insides vibrate with tones of pure joy. She missed her father terribly, and in recent weeks, she’d woken time and again from a dream in which he never returned. Months passed, then years, and she grew older in their thatched cottage, hair turning white, nose and ears distending, until one day she finally gave up on waiting and slumped to the floor.
“You’ll not harm me?” she asked.
“Harm you?” Herr Adle replied. “Why in the world would I do something like that?”
She half-closed her eyes because she thought it made her look intelligent. “What motive do you have to take me on a journey?”
Herr Adle sighed. “I am in need of a girl, that’s all I’ll say at present, my dear. There’s an element of theater to my trade. Remove the red scarf and come with me, if you will. Otherwise, remain.” When he turned to leave, Illinca realized this was not a time for logic. Even her mother, who’d been logical about everything outside of God, would have agreed. If Father would not return, it was time to set out after him. Herr Adle’s carriage was hidden in the shadowed alley way behind the bakery that had been closed for weeks because the man and wife who’d owned the shop had succumbed. The carriage was made of polished wood and had real glass windows, something Illinca had never seen. There was a driver, wrapped in a thick blanket, who appeared to be in a deep sleep. Heinrich Adle tapped the man’s knee. “Be quick,” he said. “And don’t light the lamps. We needn’t make a scene on our way out.”
She marveled at the warmth as she stepped into the woody sweetness of the carriage and sat on a pillowed bench across from Herr Adle who’d crossed his legs and removed his formless hat, patting it like some animal. “Are you a nobleman, sir?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not, dear.”
“But you have such wealth.”
He paused, the crease in his face looking ever more like the center of an open book. “I suppose you could say I’m a visitor to noblemen,” he said.
Illinca was fairly sure that was not the name of an actual trade, but then again she didn’t know everything about the world. In fact, her parents hadn’t bothered to tell her that much at all. Her mother spoke of the mysteries of God and her father talked of old stories, but as for the actual world and how it worked, they’d said little, most likely because they knew little themselves. Illinca tried to think what to say next, still attempting to deduce what Herr Adle wanted from her. Obviously it was something that a red scarf could provide, otherwise he would not have chosen her. She remembered a thing she’d seen her father do to her mother once. “Are you going to kiss my breasts and hair?”
Herr Adle’s yellowish eyes grew slightly wider. “My dear,” he said. “Your breasts—as you call them—well—you have less of a those than I do. And your hair, it doesn’t appear you’ve cleaned that in weeks.”
Illinca felt her cheeks redden and willed them not to betray her childishness. “Will you kiss it if I wash?” she said.
“No,” Herr Adle replied. “I don’t think that will be necessary, Illinca. And at any rate, I shouldn’t think your father would be pleased.”
They journeyed for what felt like hours, and Illinca was fascinated by the idea that she had become a traveler. She was now an illegal spreader of the Mortality along with Herr Adle, but what better thing to be now that death was everything? The countryside was dark—perhaps the moon had fled to another place like so many wealthy citizens. Herr Adle closed his eyes and seemed to sleep while Illinca watched the landscape. She’d never seen these forests and lakes and thought that at any moment she might catch a glimpse of her father and the Irontooths, and she wondered if she’d run to him or pretend she’d turned into a lady who rode in polished carriages and could not be bothered with the likes of gravers. She’d only carry on the charade for a few minutes, of course, to punish him for leaving her for so long. But she did not see her father or any of his men, and when the carriage hit a road-hole, it bounced so violently that Herr Adle awoke, grabbing his hat and stuffing his hands inside for warmth, then slowly realizing that Illinca was watching him. “What is that you keep in your skirt pockets?” he said.
She reached into her still bulging pockets and produced two handfuls of wooden monsters which Herr Adle looked at carefully. “The Irontooths made them for me,” she said.
From the pile, he selected the little man bound inside a wheel, hairy body stiff, face contorted in fear and rage. “This one is quite powerful. How do you interpret it?”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t have a meaning, as far as I know. It’s meant as a toy, though I’m too old for that sort of thing.”
He handed the little man back to her. “Keep hold of these treasures, my dear. It’s not every day that I see creatures quite so interesting.”
She settled back against the cushioned seat, pleased to have shown him something new, and soon the carriage arrived at a fine stone house bordered on either side by thickets of trees and brake ferns. A candle hovered in the front window, illuminating the long face of a maid who stooped to watch Herr Adle and Illinca emerge. “Is this your house?” Illinca asked, drawing the collar of her ragged dress higher to protect herself from the cold night wind.
“If only,” Herr Adle said. “I told you, I believe, that I am a visitor by trade. This is the home of a friend of mine who’s abroad and has been kind enough to invite us to lodge here in his absence. Now, you need to curb your inquisition once we get inside, my girl. You may betray our secrets.”
“What secrets do we have?” she said.
He patted her head. “Quite a few, I’d say.”
Illinca was still confused but composed herself. She had to save her questions for important things. “Will we find my father in the morning?”
“Perhaps,” Herr Adle said, pausing to consider. “But you must prepare yourself that we won’t find him until the next day or the day after that. At any rate, soon, dear, very soon, and in the meantime, I shall keep you fed and happy.”
HE DID NOT LIE. The two were served roast lamb and fennel in a room with pressed metal walls that reminded Illinca of being inside a large oven. Over the course of the dinner, Herr Adle talked a great deal, telling Illinca about the plague towns he’d seen. “Absolutely dripping with pestilence,” he said, gesturing with his silver fork. “I saw a woman who died on laundry day, hung herself over the line between the linens, if you believe it. And I saw a man with half his head half-rotted off, still hammering at a piece of wood, as if work was that important.”
“Why haven’t you taken sick?” she said.
He paused, chewing his lamb. “I could ask the same of you, couldn’t I, my little dear? Perhaps we’re both angels, descended to view this horror but remain untouched.”
“You don’t need to talk to me like that,” she said.
Herr Adle raised his black eyebrows, “Well then, most likely our humors are somehow suited to this new and poisonous air.”
Illinca pushed at her food on the bone-colored plate, her stomach feeling more full than it had in years. “May I ask another question, Herr Adle?”
He wiped his mouth, then tossed the napkin aside. “If you must. But please don’t let the maids hear. They really are such cunts at this house.”
“What’s cunt?”
“A person of no manners,” he replied.
She committed this word to memory and then said, “You don’t think something’s happened to my father, do you? ”
“I thought the Irontooths were strong men, Illinca.”
“Oh, they are. I saw one of them bend a metal bar with his bare hands once, and another can chop down a tree with only five blows of an axe.”
“Then nothing has happened to them,” he said, matter of fact. “Nothing at all.”
She imagined she was turning the pages of Herr Adle’s booklike face, searching for answers, but finding only a language she didn’t understand. After dinner, he dropped to one knee and spoke quietly to her. “The maids will see you to your room,” he said. “You need not speak to them or ask their names. They’re going to provide you with a costume. Take it graciously and go to bed.”
“A costume?” Illinca asked.
He plucked at his odd cloak with the pumpkin-colored lining. “I have mine and now you shall have yours. And one more thing, dear—in the night, it’s important that you stay in your room. These large houses can be very dangerous when all the lights are put out. There are ghosts.”
Illinca nodded silently. She knew of ghosts.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” Herr Adle said.
She snapped her heels like a little soldier. “There’s nothing to fear, sir.”
He laughed, and then they both laughed together. Herr Adle left her then with the sour-faced servants who acted like she was something they’d found in the yard. She watched as he mounted the stairs and entered a door at the end of the landing, marking its place in case she needed him. The maids took her to a small bedroom and gave her three dresses—one made of pressed velvet with glass beads sewn around the neckline and the other two of cotton with white lace. They even provided a small valise in which to carry these articles, and at that point, Illinca couldn’t help herself. She had to ask. “Whose things are these?”
The two maids paused, the one with darker features frowning at the lighter one. Finally, the darker said, “They belonged to the little Missus, didn’t they now?”
“She doesn’t need them still?” said Illinca. “I don’t want to take her nice things.”
“On no—she’s in the ground,” the lighter maid responded. “As far as I can count, she only needs one dress there.”
Illinca felt a rush of sadness for the dead girl and wondered too if this had been her bedroom. She didn’t ask the maids because she was fairly sure of the answer and had no interest in terrible dreams. That night, she woke to the sound of the wind creaking the great house like a ship, and she sat up in bed to see that her old rag dress was still on the chair where the maids had hastily tossed it, but the wooden creatures had spilled from the pockets and onto the floor. Two of them had broken. One of the heads had snapped off the two-headed bird, and the goat-faced cat had lost its fragile horns. Illinca knelt on the floor and held both of them for a while, trying hard not to cry there in the dark, thinking of the Irontooths and her father. She wrapped all of the animals in her old dress, which from now on, would simply act as a cushion for her treasures, hopefully providing the animals some needed protection. She’d hate to break any more because, as Herr Adle said, they were objects of interest in a world that was emptying of such things. When she turned to get back into bed, she thought better of it. She needed to find Herr Adle and ask him to name a definite day they would find her father. She’d been foolish to come this far without some notion of schedule, and she hated herself for a moment for being so imprudent and girlish. If they didn’t find him, she would request that she be returned to her village so she could wait in the cottage. She wondered, just for a moment, if Herr Adle would refuse this request, but as of yet, he’d been nothing but kind, so she put the idea away.
Illinca crept along the black hall, not afraid of ghosts or devils but of the maids—Dark and Light—who’d probably pinch her if they found her and tell her more cruel things about their dead Missus. She reached the oaken door at the end of the landing, the one through which she’d seen Herr Adle disappear earlier and knocked softly enough, making sure she’d wake no one else. A rustling came from within, and finally the door opened to show a crack of face, but the man who looked out at her was not Herr Adle. This person had straw-colored hair and a mole on his chin. “What is it?” he asked.
“Is Herr Adle in the room?” Illinca said.
The straw-haired man looked at her. “Who?”
“Herr Heinrich Adle, the visitor,” she said. “This is his room.”
The man seemed angry now. “I can assure you that this is no one’s room but mine. Are you one of the maid’s children?”
She stepped back. Her feet were bare and the floor suddenly felt very cold. The man opened the door wider to peer at her, and in the shadows beyond him, Illinca saw Herr Adle’s pumpkin-colored cloak hanging from one bed post. “Are you not his friend?” she whispered, “the one who invited us to stay? Is that not his cape?”
The man’s eyes narrowed as if what she’d said was completely mad. “If you’re through with your games, little girl,” he said. “I’d like to return to my sleep.” He slammed the door, and she refused to jump at the frightening loudness of the sound. Illinca walked the halls, fearing that Herr Adle had abandoned her, an idea that made no sense. Why could he play such a cruel joke? At a time of such uncertainty, there would be no advantage to duping a child. The maids seemed to know him and he’d certainly entered that room only a few hours before. His pumpkin cloak even hung on the post. So what had happened to put things so out of joint? She looked for clues in the house, but found only a large wooden clock in a room full of dusty books, some of which were larger than even her mother’s Bible. The clock had eyes painted on its face, two staring orbs, and in the darkness they were first her mother’s soft eyes and then her father’s. She put her arms around the big clock and held it, feeling it tick against her narrow chest, like her own heart beating.
Illinca remembered a story her father had told her about a man who could change his shape at will, becoming an animal and then a man again. “He was a kind of devil, to be sure,” her father said. “He couldn’t live like a civilized person because he was always turning into a bird or a wolf or a bat and fleeing into the countryside, and when he turned back into a man, he never looked the same as the man he’d been before.” She wondered if Herr Adle was a thing like that, a changing demon, though part of her knew better. Only darkness and her own fear made her think such things. If Herr Adle changed, he did so in nature, not in form.
When the dark maid woke her at dawn, Illinca asked if Herr Adle had abandoned her. The maid crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. “Of course not, stupid child. If he left you here for me to wipe your ass, I’d go after him myself and wring his neck. The last thing we need is another brat bawling about her cough and rash.” She found Herr Adle seated at the table in the pressed metal room, eating a breakfast of boiled eggs and bread. When he saw Illinca in her new dress, he acted like she was the daughter of the king, bowing to her and helping her into her own chair. She watched him carefully, not asking about the man she’d seen the night before. Instead, she checked for any trace of blond in his dark hair or the shadow of a dissolving mole.
THAT DAY, THE CARRIAGE WAS HALTED on the road near a marsh, and when Illinca saw who’d stopped them, she felt like a hand was at her throat. The King’s Dogs, wheezing through their leather muzzles, ordered the carriage driver to dismount and open the door, hurrying the poor man along with their cudgels. They could certainly see Herr Adle and Illinca plainly enough through the glass, just as she could see them, and once the door was opened, one of the Dogs, who had a yellow crust built over his left eye said, “No one is to be on this road.”
Herr Adle leaned against the brass handle of the carriage door and said, “I’m taking my daughter to her mother in the south. We understand the restrictions, but I’m afraid if I do not get her there soon, they’ll never see each other again.”
The Dog glanced back at the other riders who were having a conversation of their own and then examined Illinca with his good eye. She tried to smile, which is what she thought a daughter of nobility would do. “You both should be imprisoned,” the Dog said.
“The open countryside has become prison enough for us all,” Herr Adle said with poetic air, then he gave a mild cough, and the Dog drew back, blinking in surprise.
Illinca started coughing too, as hard as she knew how, putting her hand over her mouth and attempting to appear frightened by the force of her expectorations. The Dog withdrew, circling his horse with the others. “Be certain not to stop along the way, imbeciles,” he said. “The Mortality spreads, you know?”
“I’m well aware,” said Herr Adle, waving a hand dramatically, as if to draw air to his lungs.
The carriage door closed, sealing Herr Adle and Illinca in shadows of mutual understanding. “Is that why you need me?” she whispered. “To play a fake daughter for you?”
“Among other things, dear. Your services are not limited, but certainly men with daughters in tow are a more sympathetic lot,” Herr Adle said. “Especially sick little daughters. Good work on that piece of dying, Illinca. Even without my coaching.”
“What if we’re stopped again?” she said.
He touched the top of her small hand, stroked its veinless surface. “Then we’ll repeat the game of sickness. Hone our work, as good performers do.”
“My father says those horsemen work for the king,” she said.
Herr Adle sighed. “No one really works for the king anymore, dear. We’re on our own.”
“Not us though,” she said. “We work together.”
He patted her. “That’s right, and don’t worry, Illinca. You won’t be harmed. I’ll protect you. You have my bond.” Then he coughed once more, even though they were all alone, and there was no one for whom to put on a sickness show. The beads on the dead girl’s dress felt suddenly too tight against Illinca’s throat. “I thought you were pretending that,” she said.
He waved his floppy hat. “Merely the aftereffects of stage play. The world is right. Now take your nap.”
But when Illinca closed her eyes, she saw only the red comet of a rash running between her mother’s breasts, and now too she could hear its roar.
That night, instead of going to another fine home, they stayed in a broken-down inn, partially blackened from an old fire and run by a crude-looking woman who’d cut her gray hair short, probably due to a case of vermin. There was a small tavern room with a bar of pine wood, and the woman kept an oddly dressed doll next to her while she worked. She seemed to recognize Herr Adle, and when he and Illinca were in the midst of eating an awful dinner of pickled ham and a loaf of hard bread, the barmaid asked, “Didn’t you have a different girl with you the last time you was here?”
Herr Adle stiffened. “Keep to your business.”
The barmaid squinted at them both, and Illinca thought her small pink eyes were piggish. “Least my business is of a clean sort,” the maid said.
“You have obviously not taken a night’s repose in one of your stinking rooms if you labor under that delusion,” Herr Adle replied, turning his back on the crone.
“Is it true?” Illinca whispered. “Did you travel with another girl before me?”
He nodded absently, gnawing on a bite of greasy meat.
“And she too played your daughter?”
“That’s right, dear. But the Mortality took her some months ago.” He raised the brass cross that hung around his neck and kissed the hole at its center. “I buried her in a pretty place beneath some willows.” He coughed quietly into the back of his hand so the barmaid wouldn’t hear.
“Did she give you the Mortality?” Illinca asked, wanting to put her hand to his forehead as her mother had once done for her, but as she had not been allowed to do for her mother.
“No one gives the Mortality to another,” he said. “It simply is. The plague’s in every element except fire, which won’t tolerate it. At any rate, I am not diseased.”
“But you have the cough.”
“I have a cough. Not all afflictions of the throat are the black death.”
Illinca watched the barmaid pace, cradling her doll and cooing to it. “What was the other girl’s name?” Illinca said finally.
He looked pained to recall, the crease in his face growing deeper. “She didn’t have a proper one, but I called her Petal because she was soft.”
“Petal,” she repeated, committing herself to remembering that name, so the girl who lay beneath the willows would not be entirely lost. Then quietly, she said, “And did this Petal have a father you promised to deliver her to?”
“Illinca,” Herr Adle said sharply. “I mean what I say about taking you to find the Irontooths.”
She pushed her plate away, not angry but full of new understanding. Herr Adle made use of girls to create cover for his own activities, his visiting. Whatever the lie he’d told Petal, she’d taken it with her to the place beneath the willow trees, and yet knowing this did not make Illinca hate Herr Adle or even fear him. In fact, she imagined Petal had been happy, much as she was happy now. If girls were necessary to Herr Adle’s free movement about the country, then they were significant to him, even precious, in a way. Being necessary to someone was not unlike being loved.
After dinner, Herr Adle took her by the hand and led her to a room where a filthy mattress lay on the floor stuffed with damp straw. He slept next to her that night, very close, almost holding her, and she was glad to have him there. She awoke before dawn to starlight drizzling through the open window and found that the dusty blanket had been thrown back and Herr Adle was gone. Slipping out of bed, she cracked the door and peered into the hall. A few doors down, a man with red hair and skin blotches (not the black boils, at least) stood smoking a reed pipe and talking to another man who slouched like a drunkard. The man with blotches noticed her first and gestured. “There’s the one he travels with,” he said of Illinca.
She was frozen, unable to close the door or even slip back into her room.
“Maybe she might be of some use in his stead,” said the drunken man.
The blotchy one laughed. “Tight fit, that one. But I suppose after a few rounds she’d loosen up.”
“Or we could do some fancy knife-work,” said the drunken man. “Age her a few years with artistry.”
Illinca finally found the strength to close the door against their laughter and then sat with her back to the splintered wood. Her heart beat so hard against the door, she was afraid the men would hear it, and she could not say how she fell asleep again, reclining there, barring entrance to the room. In the morning, she roused herself, and once she realized no breakfast would be served, she gathered her things and went out to the black carriage, where Herr Adle sat bundled in his cloak. Only his eyes and the tip of his nose were visible, though, by his posture, she could tell his illness had worsened in the night. She reached into her folded skirt, feeling around for the right creature, and finally produced the one whose arms and legs were fused to the wooden wheel. She handed it to him and said, “For you.”
He studied the thing with less than normal amusement.
“I found a meaning for it,” she said. “It’s not just a toy—it’s like you. Always turning but unable to leave the wheel.”
He half-smiled at the carving.
“Who were those men in the hall last night?” she said.
“Those?” he said, then coughed hoarsely. She had to wait for him to finish . “Those are the ones I see if no one better wants to employ me. I’m sorry if they scared you, dear.”
“It’s all right.” Illinca clicked the heals of her shoes and said quietly, “Nothing to fear, sir. Nothing to fear at all.”
They traveled on, sometimes sleeping in the carriage, sometimes in a convenient place they found. Illinca no longer asked about her father, instead centering her questions around the topic of Herr Adle’s health. They made three more visits, two at fine houses and one in a place that was no more than a cave with several naturally formed rooms, as dank and unlivable as any Illinca had ever see. A gray-haired woman lived there with a tall man whose skin was white as cream. The old woman offered to let Illinca inhale some powders that she said would make the dead visible to her. “I don’t need the dead,” Illinca replied. “Not while I have Herr Adle.”
“Your friend is sick,” the old woman replied. “You’ll surely need powder soon to see even him, little one.”
“I’ll soon need powder to see everyone,” Illinca responded. Herr Adle would have laughed, but the cave woman did not.
“You know what your friend is, don’t you?” she asked.
“A visitor,” Illinca said, firmly. “We visit together.”
Now the cave woman grinned. Illinca turned away. She knew, of course, what Herr Adle was. She’d even come upon him lying naked with one of their hosts. His eyes had been closed at the time, and he didn’t know she’d seen. Certainly, she didn’t need to hear a mad old woman provide a vulgar name for his work. It was what he had to do to survive.
She left the cave and found the white morning sky so big and full she thought it might crush her, and then when she saw Herr Adle lying on the side of the road like some discarded baggage, and she knew she had been crushed. Illinca ran to him and tried to remove the pumpkin cloak which he’d pulled over his face. “Don’t touch,” he said, which set off a fit of coughing. She hadn’t seen her mother get so ill, as her father had kept the two of them separate, hoping to protect Illinca from the disease. “Where’s the carriage?” she asked. The road outside the cave, as far as she could see, was empty.
“The old driver took it,” Herr Adle whispered. “I couldn’t pay him or fight him for it anymore.” His legs were crumpled beneath him, bent oddly at the knee. Illinca looked back to the cave where the hag woman was with her powders and the pale man. There was no help to be found there. “Let me see what’s happened,” Illinca said, pulling at the cloak again, hard enough this time to force Herr Adle to release his grip. A black boil had appeared at the base of his neck, and the whole of it seemed to be pressing at his throat, as if a creature was trapped beneath the surface of his skin. The pressure made it hard for him to breathe, and Illinca forced herself to remain still and watchful as Herr Adle’s very essence seemed to struggle for escape. She thought again about her father’s story of the shape-changing demon. Whatever remained constant in such a creature, whatever ghost haunted its core, was what wanted out of Herr Adle now.
“How does it look?” he asked, pressing his square, clean fingers against the boil.
“We need to clean it,” she said. “I can get some water. I think I saw a pond.” But she wasn’t sure that she’d actually seen a pond, or more correctly, she’d seen many ponds, but had there been one within walking distance of the cave? When Herr Adle looked at her, she saw that the possibility of a pond didn’t matter. “Illinca, it can’t be cleaned.” He coughed again and this time pinkish liquid spilled from between his crooked teeth. She stooped to clean his mouth with the hem of her dress, but he pushed her away. “I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said. “I was acting so selfishly. I’d never heard of the Irontooths. But you know that, don’t you?”
She crouched. “Everyone’s heard of the Irontooths. Stories of their strength precede them.”
“I lied because I needed you to travel,” he said.
“And you thought you’d be well,” she said. “You thought we’d be well. We were angels, remember?”
“I was never that.”
She sat down next to him in the cold dust of the road. “What did you do for Petal when she was sick?”
“Sang to her,” he said.
Illinca tried to think of a song but realized all she knew were graver’s chants, so instead she said, “I’ll make a show for you instead. Something to look at.” She fetched her folded rag dress from the dead girl’s valise, took out all the wooden creatures and began placing them in a careful circle around Herr Adle’s crumpled form. As she placed each, she gave it a name. “This is Candle Flame because of its eyes. And this one is Cunt because it has no proper manners. And here are Dark and Light, the devil maids. Here are Fat Cap and Reed Pipe. This is Knife Blade and Willow Tree.”
The features of Herr Adle’s face seemed finally at rest. “I know their names, dear,” he said. “I know all of them.”
After she’d finished putting out the monsters, Illinca sat for a while contemplating in silence, then asked, “Why do you think that no one took me from the square, Herr Adle—all the men only stared at me—was I too young?”
The booklike fold in his face had smoothed, growing almost nonexistent, as if an unseen pair of hands were stretching its covers. He took a long breath, then said, “No one is too young, Illinca. There are men who would have taken you.”
“Then why?”
He wiped bile from his mouth with the back of his hand. “For the same reason you are not touched by the plague, I suppose—because the world has found some sympathy.”
“That seems a dangerous thing to believe, Herr Adle,” she said. He did not respond, and Illinca didn’t force him. Instead she considered the circle of wooden beasts again—wondering if they’d somehow provided her protection, if the gravers had understood them not as toys but as talismans. She decided she would leave them on the road, just as they were and wondered what some other traveler would make of their configuration. What mystery would he imagine had been enacted here?
“If you’re strong enough,” she said, “we should walk. We need to find a house or barn where we can spend the night.” Herr Adle’s soft cheek lay against a stone, and he did not move. His eyes no longer searched for her, but instead seemed to silently ask what could be the point of traveling now that there were clearly no Irontooths to be found, no visiting to be done? Illinca drew tall in her new velvet dress. The point, she understood, was to do what was necessary—to move as a poison in a poisonous world. If they traveled far enough, maybe they’d find a part of the country where the air was kinder and Herr Adle could begin to recuperate. She would not let him die. Too many had died already. And if the pestilence had spread to all corners of their country? Illinca would find a bridge or perhaps a boat to ferry them. She understood there were solutions to problems like this and a real traveler would find a solution, so she took Herr Adle’s cold hands and started to pull with all her strength, slowly at first, dragging him down the road behind.
