ten

Sorry I’m a little late, Brother; I’ve been in the orchard again, helping bring in the apples, and storing them on their racks in the huge pantry. I worked with Brother Tobit, and he kept me well entertained with his tales and bawdy jokes. I love his wit: I notice he’s the jester in the common room in the evenings, when you’re all allowed to relax and talk, afore the hours of the night and the Great Silence. When we finished with the fruit he showed me the barn, fair bursting with straw and hay and grain. I marvelled that you monks could use it all, but he explained it’s for guests as well. He said that often manor lords or ladies come, with hundreds of servants, soldiers, and all their horses and hounds besides, and you’re duty-bound to give them hospitality, sometimes for weeks. Well, at least Jing-wei and I help out with the work, so I don’t feel too bad eating your food, even if it is only Brother Tom’s everlasting beans— Don’t jab me with your pen! I’ll get on with it!

Two things happened at Lan’s house that changed the lives of Lizzie and me. The first was to do with Lizzie’s feet. I mentioned, I think, that Lan’s feet, too, had once been broken and bound, but she had straightened them. One day early in our time there, while I lay abed resting my sore ankle, Lizzie said to Lan, “Would you mend my feet, Mother, and undo the brokenness?”

“It will be painful, child,” Lan replied. “I shall have to break the bones again, and set them straight. It will take time, and much patience.”

“How much time?” I asked from the furs. I feared the answer, and it was worse than I expected.

“It shall take twenty days or so, altogether,” said Lan. “A day or two to do the breaking and resetting, and twenty for the mending, afore she can walk on them again. That is if all goes well.”

“We can’t stay that long,” I said.

Lizzie sat on a little stool by the fire, and removed her shoes. “Let us begin,” she said to Lan.

So they did, there and then. To start with, Lan bathed and massaged Lizzie’s feet, softening them with healing oils. Then she began to separate the bent toes from the skin of the soles. All Lizzie’s toes, excepting the big ones, had been forced under when her feet were broke, and now they were squashed flat underneath. Separating the skin made Lizzie moan something terrible. Then Lan began to uncurl the toes one by one, making the bones crack, and withdrawing the curved nails from the flesh, where they had grown in. Between workings she applied hot poultices to the convulsed muscles, until the foot was relaxed enough for her to continue. Despite the potion she had taken, Lizzie sighed and sobbed, rocking in her pain. At last I could abide it no longer.

“Do you have to do this?” I cried, gripping Lan’s wrist, stopping her. Lizzie’s foot, twisted and twitching in the firelight, dropped into Lan’s lap. “’Tis cruel!” I railed. “Leave her be!”

Lan shook me off, took the deformed foot again in her hands, and calmly went on.

“Tell her to stop, Lizzie!” I cried, but she shook her head. She was beyond speech.

“Go outside, boy,” said Lan. “You’re annoying me, and distressing Jing-wei.”

“I’m distressing her?” I shouted. “You’re the torturer!”

“This is Jing-wei’s choice,” said Lan. “She wants the brokenness mended. So keep out of it, unless you wish to help.”

I did go outside, unable to abide Lizzie’s pain.

After, Lan came out and did some work in her garden. I found Lizzie lying on the bed, still groaning. I knelt nearby. “You don’t have to suffer this, Lizzie,” I said, hoping to stir some sense in her. “Don’t let Lan do any more. You’ve managed all your life with your feet bound. I’ll help you go where you want to go.”

“For the rest of my life, will you carry me?” she asked.

I thought on that awhile, then mumbled, vexed, “I’m only trying to help you, Lizzie. Only trying to save you from unnecessary pain.”

She stopped groaning and glared at me, her chin jutting out stubborn-like. “It’s not necessary for me to be able to walk?” she asked. “Is that your sentence on me, Jude of Doran? What of my wishes for myself?”

“’Tis not a sentence!” I cried. “God’s bones, you can be contrary, if you set your stupid mind to it! I’m only trotting out my opinion. I have a right to do that, surely, since I’m the one who saved you. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be a freak in a fair!”

“That makes you my new keeper, does it?” she said. “It gives you the right to tell me what to do, how to spend my days, my life?”

I was about to stand up and go, when she said, very quiet and gentle: “I have to do this, Jude. I want to be as other maids.”

“You are as other maids,” I said, my anger melting. “Better than most.”

She smiled then, not as Addy did with mischief and humour, but in a way that was warm and fond, making my heart pound like a drum and my face go red. And that was the last we spoke of the matter.

The next time Lan began to work on her feet, I stayed to help, giving Lizzie her medicines for pain while her foot soaked in potions to soften the skin. Lan had straightened the toes of Lizzie’s right foot; this time she would work on the left. Sitting in front of Lizzie again, she laid a towel across her lap, then took Lizzie’s crippled foot firmly in her hands. Lizzie breathed in deep, and a determined look came across her, like that of a soldier about to do battle. “Go on with it, Mother,” she said.

An hour passed. I don’t know how Lizzie endured it. She sat there on that tiny stool, gripping the edges till her hands were white, rocking back and forth and biting her lip till it bled. She did not seem to be aware of me or Lan; I suspect she was locked in her pain, struggling with it in some terrible battleground deep within. Lan told me to get a strip of leather from her chest of healing things, and I did, rolling it into a soft thing for Lizzie to bite upon. Then I stood helpless, while Lan worked and Lizzie moaned. Once Lizzie nearly fainted, and I got another stool and set it behind her and sat close with my front to her back, my arms about her, holding her. She clutched my hands and held them so tight I near cried out myself, but it seemed to give her some relief. And that was the way we always sat after that, when her feet were being mended.

I learned a lot of things, in those long hours I held her in her sufferings. I saw that Lizzie was not a helpless maid I had rescued from a cage. I saw that she was a woman, strong and steadfast, breaking out of a far greater prison than the one I had saved her from. I was not her rescuer; she was saving herself, breaking out of the bondage of restraint and limitation, winning her liberty with awful agony.

They were like journeys, those breaking, healing times, and afterwards we would stay sitting close, Lizzie and I, and she would lean back against me and beg me to talk to her, to say anything to keep her mind occupied. So I told her of my childhood, of the swine I had looked after, my games with Addy and Lucy and the twins, my bumbling efforts with Prue, and my wrangles with her father the miller. Sometimes we laughed, and sometimes we cried. Old Lan never interrupted those talks, but oft went outside leaving us alone in our sharing. In those times I spilled my soul, and never has another human being heard the story of my life and heart as Lizzie heard it then.

Four days it was, before her misshapen feet were new-formed. They looked normal enough by the time Lan finished, though they were bandaged firm to hold the bones in their new places. The evenings I spent making special shoes for Lizzie out of firm leather, that later would be drawn on close about her feet, supporting them all around. Lizzie longed to walk, but Lan forbade it, saying she must rest the bones for twenty days or more, for them to knit together properly.

Those days of waiting were hard for me. My own foot was well mended, and I wanted to be gone, to find a new life for myself, a purpose. Though I saw no evil in Lan, I still feared her company and the knowing way of her. I always felt she read my thoughts, and through all the hours in her home there ran the dread that she had supernatural powers. I think Lizzie laughed secretly at me, knowing my fears, but I could not help them. Even the folk from the village, coming for healing of their toothaches and their hurts, were wary of Lan. They would not come inside her door, but took their medicines from the step, and paid for them with chickens and bags of grain passed cautious-like over the dim threshold. And another thing troubled me: whenever I spoke of leaving, even when the twenty days were almost ended, Lan said Lizzie was not ready yet to walk, and must tarry longer to rest. Also, she thought up tasks she wanted done about her house, like building a wall around her garden to keep out the foxes, mending her stone oven outside, and chopping down a rotten tree behind her house afore it fell in a storm. I did not mind the work, or waiting for Lizzie’s healing, but I began to feel again that I was trapped, my stay spun out by Old Lan for reasons I did not know.

Seeking peace, I went to mass one Sabbath at the church in the village, hoping to talk to the priest afterwards; but no one spoke to me, because I stayed at Lan’s. Yet I saw folk who had been glad enough of Lan’s healing in recent days, so I called them all hypocrites, and went back to Lan’s without talking to their priest.

That evening the second thing happened, that made our time at Lan’s a turning point. The evening started ordinarily enough: Lizzie and I were sitting near the hearth playing a Chinese game with little pegs of wood poked into holes on a wooden board. Old Lan had a rushlight burning on the wall, and sat beneath it, for she was altering the brown dress I had given Lizzie, to make it fit. It was stifling in the house, and I had a headache and was not in a good humour. Lizzie had just won the third game in a row, and I swept the bits of wood into a pile, ending the competition. Then I noticed that Lan’s sewing box, in which she kept her bone needles, hooks and threads, and scraps of fabric, had a dragon painted on the lid.

“Why a dragon?” I asked, getting up and turning the box to the light, so I could see it better. The box was ancient, different from any I had seen, and I supposed it was from China.

“Why not a dragon?” said Lan. “Move, lad; you’re in my light.”

I stayed where I was, my shadow across her. “Because dragons are evil,” said I. “Also, since it was a dragon that wounded your Ambrose, surely you must hate the beasts. I wonder that you have one for decoration.”

“’Twas a dragon that sent Ambrose to me,” said Lan, poking me with her scissors, making me shift quick enough. “Besides, dragons are like people, some good, some bad.”

“That’s heresy,” I said. “The Church teaches very plain what is good and what is evil.”

“In China,” said Lizzie, “dragons are gods, guardians of the sky and keepers of the storms.”

“Then the people in China are mistook,” said I.

“Are they, now?” remarked Lan, beginning to sew another patch upon a hole. “Are they all mistook, or only a hundred dynasties, and all their wise ones, and all their holy teachers, and even the great Khan himself?”

“A whole nation may be wrong,” I said. “Think of the Scots, coming here to murder and plunder and steal our land. And it were the Welsh afore them, causing strife, and afore them the Danes, and the French are always—”

“And you English are golden-hearted and faultless?” said Lan. “You were here from the beginning, were you—never plundered and stole this land yourselves, from someone else?” I said nothing, for my grandfather had never talked about that.

“Your English ways are not the only ways,” said Lan, “nor are you all so cunning as you think. You can’t even read or write, most of you, and only men of the Church have knowledge; but in my country people are studying at great universities, making music on wondrous instruments, and doing marvellous paintings on silk. While your English soldiers are busy poking enemies with spears and swords, my people are blowing their foes to smithereens with exploding fire. You tell the time by the position of the sun, but in one of our great cities we have a machine, driven by water, that marks time, telling every hour and the moments in between. You flatten animal hides to write upon, but we make fine stuff called paper. And while your monks are still sharpening feathers to copy books slow, one at a time, my people are carving books upon blocks of wood, and printing many copies, quickly and with ease. So don’t you tell me my nation is wrong, my people mistook. We have more knowledge, more accomplishments, than you can dream about.”

I’m sorry about the feather bit, Brother Benedict; I see it disturbs you. Myself, I think your work is very advanced, and excellent, but I have to tell this tale the way it happened. If you’re interested in the Chinese way of bookmaking, you could talk later to Jing-wei, for she knows more about it than I do. Perchance the Abbot will be interested, too.

I wish I had pressed Lan to talk more on such matters, for as it turned out she was wondrous wise; but at the time I was ill-content and full of gloom. Truth to tell, seeing Lan hooking the tiny needle through the fabric, and drawing through the thread, put me in mind of my mother mending clothes for me and the four plagues, and I was hurting in my heart as well as in my head. Also, the picture of the beast on Lan’s box awoke in me some dreadful imaginings, and I could not shake them off. Wishing for peace, I pulled off my boots, ready to go to bed. The goat was eating the straw, and as I chased it off, Lan said, “’Tis not as fearsome as you think, Jude.”

“Nay, but it eats a fearsome lot,” I said.

Lan cackled. “I meant the dragon!” she said. “That’s not so fearsome as you imagine.”

“I don’t imagine it,” I lied. And I crawled into the bed and lay watching the smoke swirl about the thatch, thinking on the beast and what it might look like. ’Twould not be like the gorgeous coiled creature on Lan’s box, of that I was sure.

“The dragons here, they’re not as large as people think they are, nor as cunning,” said Lan.

“Have you seen one?” I asked.

“Nay. But Ambrose told me much about them.”

I sat up, the better to hear her talk. She was still bent over her sewing, her sparse white hair like a halo in the firelight, her nut-brown skull outlined dark within.

“Ambrose always said that fear was faith in one’s enemy,” she continued. “He said if one understood that enemy, studied his weaknesses and strengths, where he slept and ate, what his face was like, his weapons, his defence—then the fear vanished. He said knowledge was the greatest weapon of all. And when it came to the fight, he said all that was needed was the right weapon, the right moment, and the steel-strong will to win.”

“Little good his knowledge did him,” I muttered, “since he was burned half to death.”

“But he survived, and passed that knowledge on to me,” said Lan. “Nothing in the world is ever wasted, Jude.”

I almost laughed. Passed the knowledge on to her? God’s precious heart! Did she have some mad notion about hunting the dragon herself?

“I know all about dragons and how they may be defeated,” Lan said. “I know why the knights failed, most of them. I know our best defence against this present beast, and what is the perfect weapon.”

A chill came over me, like a fear. I glanced at Lizzie. She was watching me. There was a curious look on her face, as if she had heard all this before, and now wanted to know my response to the matter. I returned my gaze to Lan. She no longer sewed, but looked across the room at me, her eyes burning in the gloom.

“Jude of Doran, it was fate brought you here to me,” she said. “And fate brought Jing-wei with you. For the weapon I have is something Jing-wei understands well, though you have never heard of it. And the will to win—well, who better to crave the dragon dead than yourself, since it destroyed everything you loved?”

I said nothing, but a coldness clamped across my heart, and I was sure the devil was lurking in that place.

Lan went on: “The dragon must be stopped, Jude. It will go on destroying, until all that is left is a land scorched bare, cities and villages laid waste, and corpses all consumed by flame. And if any folk survive, with burned crops and razed homes and unspeakable wounds, then they will be in such torment that they will beg the Almighty to send the plague, for even that will be a blessed relief.

“I know this, Jude, as sure as I know the sun will rise tomorrow morn. Dragons, once they have tasted human flesh, become twisted in their minds, and must be destroyed. No one else will carry out that task; the king is busy with his battles, and even if some noble knight took it upon himself to slay the beast, he would have no knowledge and would end up worse than my Ambrose did, cooked alive in his armour, and with the dragon still rampant. But we—we have the means to put an end to this calamity, to spare a land from ruin and save a multitude of souls. I tell you true, Jude, ’tis not by chance you stay beneath my roof.”

My heart thundered in my breast, and my mouth went dry. Of a sudden I knew what the old hag was hatching; knew, too, that Lizzie was already persuaded, spellbound, and that the mad plot wanted only my consent. I shook my head. I longed to escape, to flee for my life—but I was drowning in the madness of Lan’s eyes, and her words wove about me, bewitching and binding, though I strove with all my soul to shut them out.

“You fear your enemy,” she said, “because in the wildness of your imaginings it is huge, hellish, beyond defeat, and ’tis folly to even think of hunting it. But if you saw it true, as it is, in the flesh, you would see that it is but a beast, no wiser than a warhorse, no larger than an ox, no more wicked than a starved dog that hunts for food. I tell you, lad, it would do you good to face the dragon. It would knock that unseemly terror out of you, and give you the strength to take up your true destiny. This task is yours, Jude: for this you alone survived, out of all your village. You’ll not rest until you have avenged your family. If you refuse this task, the regret and grief will gnaw at your heart, all your life. I know; I saw the poison that ate at Ambrose, when he failed to do his duty.”

At last I tore my gaze from hers, and seized back my wits. “I am not Ambrose, and I have no knightly duty,” I said. “And ’tis no unseemly terror, to be afraid of a thing that overnight destroys a village and all its people with it. As for my destiny—that’s for God to know, not for you to plot. I’ll have no more to do with you, or with this heathen talk. You may have Lizzie under your evil enchantment, but you don’t have me.”

“There is no enchantment,” Lan said, “only a dragon that must needs be slain, and two people who have the means to do it—though one is brave and willing, while the other is a coward.”

“I’m no coward!” I shouted, and Lan laughed. Her mockery woke a wild defiance in me, scattering my wits again. “Since you know everything, witch,” I said, “and since you think I should face my foe, why don’t you call it here, so I can make its acquaintance?”

Lan cackled so much that she rocked back and forth, tears pouring down her cheeks. “You’re braver than I thought, lad!” she chortled. “Braver than I thought!”

But brave I was not, only a brazen fool a-tangling with a witch. And well may you splatter your ink, Brother Benedict, and cross yourself right heartily, for the next day something happened that made me know the fullness of her power, the terrible entangling way of her. For the next day—

By corpus bones! There go the bells, for prayer! Quick—be off! Yesterday the Abbot scolded me for making you late sometimes. I’ll tidy up here, and blow the candles out. Godspeed!