Tents rose against the morning sky, their soot-black peaks like woodcuts inked on a vellum scroll. Late-coming mules made their way toward the fair, dragging skiffs loaded with copperware and bolts of fabric. Men from the coast carried horned ocean fish in water-filled leather tanks, and those from the country pushed carts of fragrant cinnamon and cardamom. Drouet moved carefully, concealing herself behind the black trees at the side of the road. Any one of these travelers might know her father, the burgher. If she was caught, she’d be returned to him by a merchant hoping for reward.
On a different morning, Drouet might have climbed to a low-hanging branch and written about the merchants’ procession in her Book of Hours. She’d make a record, as her mother taught her long ago. But she found herself unable to concentrate in the high, pale light of the morning. She was tired of the city and tired of her father’s strictures. She wanted to feel the hot and busy release of the fair. And she could think of little more than the elm-shadowed butcher’s stall where Bledic would be working. The boy was Italian; he’d come north in a caravan along the Roman road. He fumbled his knife when he worked. He gouged flesh and cursed. It was clear that, like Drouet, he longed for escape.
Drouet had been visiting Bledic since the fair began. The last time they’d spoken, he asked if she had money.
“For what purpose?” Drouet said.
“There’s something I want to see,” Bledic replied. He worked at the piece of meat on the block in front of him with his knife. Even covered in animal’s blood, he was so terribly handsome. Drouet thought that if she got any closer to this boy, a tongue of fire might leap from her skull. “They say there’s an entrance to hell,” he continued, “over at the southern edge of the fair.”
Drouet almost laughed at this but stopped herself. As a rule, she did not favor whimsy. Her mother had told her that such conceits were sometimes even dangerous.
Bledic glanced at Drouet. He made a circle in the air with his still wet knife. “Rumors are nothing more than rumors,” he said. “I want to see the place for myself.”
“I can get money,” Drouet said, thinking of the lead coffer her father kept on the stone mantle. It was full of coins. “I’ll bring it tomorrow—on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“You’ll take me along,” she said, “to Hell.”
Bledic grinned at her. He slid his long knife back into the meat.
The fair was like a painted halo, concentric alleyways cut by the radii of stalls. Bledic’s butchery was in the western quadrant. Chickens and rabbits struggled before poultrymen’s carts. Drouet rounded the column near charred Tannery Gate, stolen coins jingling in the pocket of her dress. The gate had been damaged in a fire ages ago. According to her father, who kept a chronicle of the city, the Devil himself had appeared at the fair in 1188. He walked the grounds in fine clothes and talked kindly to the men selling wares. A day after his visit, a south-bearing wind carried sparks to the thatched rooftops and burned half the fair to the ground. The burgher said it was likely that the Devil would return one day, as he was drawn to places where he had history.
Drouet didn’t care about devils. She cared only about Bledic. When she finally reached the butcher’s stall that morning, both the jowled master and his handsome apprentice were working on a calf that lay open to the spine on the wooden block. Blood flowed across the grain of the wood. Black flies swarmed the body. The smell was not of death or rot, but rather a clean coppery scent. It was only when the master slipped behind the tattered curtain of the stall to collect some fresh implement that Drouet allowed herself to approach.
Bledic looked up from the animal, hands gloved in shining blood. “The burgher’s daughter,” he said, as if he hadn’t been expecting her.
“Drouet,” she countered.
“Why do you always come alone? Don’t you have anyone to walk with?”
“I don’t,” she replied.
“No mother?”
“I have a mistress,” she said, “from Paris. My mother is—” For a moment, Drouet saw her mother’s body hanging before her, cool and frail. Her deathbed had been suspended on ropes to avoid an infestation of fleas. Light from a high window illuminated dust motes in the air. Drouet’s mother smiled. She mouthed the words “my love.”
Drouet pulled herself back from the memory. She reached into the pocket of her dress, removing the coins she’d stolen from her father’s box. Bledic looked at the coins, rolling a bit of animal fat between his fingers and finally flicking it to the ground. “Meet me at Tannery Gate in an hour.”
She nodded.
“You aren’t frightened?” he asked.
Drouet’s skin prickled. The sensation did not come from fear.
“Go, before signore returns,” Bledic said. “He doesn’t like me talking to girls.”
Drouet did as Bledic asked, moving away through alleyways, back into the maze of stalls. As always after speaking to Bledic, she felt shaken. She walked through the narrow artisan’s corridor and thought of meeting him at Tannery Gate. To actually travel with the young apprentice through the fair. How wonderful would that be?
She paused at a table of painted clay dolls of the sort her mother had once made for her. They had molded heads and burlap bodies that were filled with sawdust. She dared to touch the fragile arm of one and the roughhewn skirt of another, taking pleasure in their simplicity. The doll merchant, a man with one drooping eyelid, was busy attending to another customer and didn’t seem to mind her presence. Drouet certainly didn’t look the part of a criminal. The dolls themselves wore absent expressions, neither asking for her attention nor rejecting it. Though Drouet had put away her own playthings when her mother died, she found she longed for one of these dolls now. But what would she do with it when the church bells rang? Carry it along for Bledic to see? Should she also wrap herself in swaddling clothes?
The last doll in the row was larger than the others and curious enough to cause Drouet to momentarily forget the butcher’s handsome apprentice. The figure was quite unlike all the others. Made with a finer sense of craftsmanship, its features were detailed in such a way as to make the doll seem almost fit for a reliquary. Yet it was not this precision that interested her. It was the fact that clearly, astonishingly, the doll resembled Drouet herself. Its hair was the same as her own—hay-colored and held back from the face. Even more remarkably, the doll wore the red cape, stitched at the hem with lilies, that Drouet donned each day for the fair. The way the doll clasped its hands reminded her of the penitent way she often held her own hands when she walked.
Drouet glanced at the doll merchant who was still busy with his customer. Had this man seen her one day and been so enamored with the burgher’s daughter that he made a replica of her? She wondered if that was the sort of thing a man might do. Whatever led to its creation, Drouet knew she had to have the doll. It belonged to her, after all. It was her. She certainly could not spend the coins she’d taken from her father’s box. Bledic needed those coins. So, with great resolve, Drouet simply grabbed the large doll from the counter and then ran as fast as she could into the jostling crowd with the figure’s clay head nodding against her chest.
There was a moment when Drouet felt sure she’d be caught. She knocked against another merchant and fell sprawling in the dust. Yet no one came to take her by the shoulder. No one called her a thief. She was still free, though she’d torn her dress and scraped her arm and didn’t look as pretty as she’d intended.
In a nook near the cathedral of St. Étienne, Drouet concealed herself and sat considering the doll. She wished her mother were still alive so she could ask what such a thing might mean. If Bledic fell in love with her, would he also make a copy of her? A bloody Drouet with bones for eyes and gristle for a tongue?
When the bells rang Terce, Drouet dusted off her dress and tucked the doll under her arm. She couldn’t very well leave her double there in the shadow of St. Étienne, and though she tried to make the thing appear as unobtrusive as possible, it was much too large and awkward for true concealment. She reached Tannery Gate by way of side alleys, keeping close lookout for the doll merchant who might be searching for her. She found Bledic leaning against a pillar, thumbs tucked in the waistband of his woolen breeches. His eyes widened at the sight of the doll, but he made no disparaging remarks. It seemed that he’d either learned manners or his mind was elsewhere. “The burgher’s daughter,” he said.
“Drouet,” she replied.
“Follow me,” Bledic said, turning away from the gate. Drouet hurried to catch up, the doll kicking at her with its sawdust legs, as if in protest. She followed Bledic along the graceful curve of a wooden alleyway, moving deeper into the fair. They passed guilds marked with the symbols of their patron saints. The wheelwrights were gathered beneath a sign painted with the figure of Saint Catherine, who’d broken a torture wheel merely by touching the instrument with her frail hand. There was Saint Magdalena too, who’d washed the feet of Christ with oil. Saint Claire’s face loomed above the mirror maker’s stand. She’d been too ill to go to the cathedral, and it was said that an image of the Mass had appeared flickering on the wall of her room so that she might watch the service still.
Drouet looked down at the face of the doll she carried. She wondered whether it might be meant as a sacred image. If Drouet was a saint, what was she patron of?
She nearly lost Bledic in the crowd but then found him again. Spots of animal blood were spattered across the back of his linen shirt. She thought they looked like a constellation of stars.
“Where did you say this stall is again?” she asked him.
“At the very edge of the fair,” he replied, not glancing at her.
“What’s it to be like,” she asked, “this entrance to Hell?”
“Dark and wet,” he said. “Full of creatures.”
“But isn’t Hell supposed to be fiery?”
Bledic continued as if he hadn’t heard her question. “There are yearly fairs in the underworld too, you know,” he said, “more majestic than the one in Troyes. Impossible wares are sold: golden heads that speak ten languages, animals that wear clothing and walk upright, boxes of blood that can give birth to an army on command.”
“How do you know these things?” Drouet asked.
Bledic finally glanced back at her. His gold-flecked eyes were nearly more than she could bear. “Because I’m from Rome,” he said. “We know all the old stories there.”
“My mother once told me that Hell is nothing more than centuries of poetry,” Drouet said.
Bledic seemed irritated. “We’ll see,” he said. He pointed into the distance where Drouet could make out a low wooden structure with two Doric columns that formed a gate. The columns were clearly made of some cheap material and painted to resemble Italian marble. An old merchant slouched on a stool, wrapped in what appeared to be a winding cloth. He’d fallen asleep in the depths of the fabric. The sign nailed above the entrance did not bear the mark of a saint but rather read, “Averno: Entrance to the Under Realms.”
“It’s a theater, Bledic,” Drouet said. “Just look at it. There’s probably a stage inside with actors dressed as ghosts and devils who’ll prance around for us until we’re as bored as the old man who sells glimpses of it.”
“I watched a man go in last night,” Bledic said. “He didn’t come out again.”
“Bledic—”
“You have the coins?”
They’d drawn nearer the entrance as they talked, and now they stood in front of the sleeping man who had crusts of yellow tears at the corners of his eyes. Drouet reached into the pocket of her dress and felt a sinking in her stomach. The coins were gone. They must have slipped out when she’d fallen after stealing the doll.
Bledic looked astonished, then angry. “You spent the money on that ridiculous toy, didn’t you?”
“Of course not,” she said.
He lowered his gaze to the doll, the effigy. “Give it to me. Maybe he’ll take it as payment.”
Drouet clutched the doll, then realized how silly she must look. If she was ever going to escape this city, escape her father, she had to let go of things. She had to act like a woman. Drouet extended the doll carefully toward the sleeping merchant, who was not, in fact, sleeping. He stared at her from beneath half-closed lids. The old man took the doll, touched its hair gently, then its mouth.
Drouet felt a chill.
The old merchant stood from his stool and swung open an iron gate to allow them passage. Drouet followed Bledic down a narrow hall painted with a mural showing high red cliffs. The two of them came to a landing where a wooden boat waited in a man-made stream.
“You see,” Bledic said. “It’s not a theater.”
“It’s a show, nonetheless,” Drouet said. Yet she felt a new hesitation when she saw the boat. She was no longer quite sure about Bledic either—the way he’d grown angry when he learned she lost the money. She didn’t like how he’d forced her to give away the doll. Yet his hands felt strong and good as he helped her into the boat. His touch still thrilled her. As they pushed away from the dock, she wondered what her father would say if he could see her. She smiled briefly at this, thinking how angry he would be.
The boat glided out into darkness, Bledic at the prow and Drouet in the stern. She thought she could hear the rushing sound of the sea in the distance and wondered how such an effect might be achieved. There were more murals that showed bleaker landscapes, populated by thin wraiths.
“Will you hold my hand?” Drouet asked, and Bledic obliged though he appeared far more interested in the darkness ahead. His palm was sticky with the remains of butcher’s blood. Still, Drouet clutched it thankfully.
The little river curved once and then again. She felt they were dropping deeper into the earth. The images on the walls grew stranger, sylphs and satyrs dancing. Symbols hovered in the air before the boat, ancient scripts. Finally the river opened onto a small lake. At the center of the lake was an island of trees—not real trees but painted props with stuffed black birds perched on the branches. “A stage,” Drouet whispered. “You see?”
“A forest,” Bledic replied excitedly, steering the boat toward the island.
Together they disembarked. Drouet felt her boots sink into the muddy quagmire at the island’s edge. “We should—” she began, wanting to tell him they should go back. But there was such a silencing about this place. The false trees made a kind of chapel. The stuffed black birds were a congregation, eyes of yellow glass.
“Walk a little more with me,” Bledic replied. He took Drouet’s hand and eased her forward. “Your mother—perhaps we’ll see her. Wouldn’t that be good?”
“My mother?” Drouet said, confused.
There was something different about Bledic in this darkness. His eyes shone. His lips curled. It was as if he belonged in this place, Drouet thought. Far more so than he belonged at the butcher’s stall.
“Bledic,” Drouet said, “how—how did you come to work for the butcher?”
He stared ahead, as if he could see something in the far distance.
“How did you take up your trade?” Drouet repeated.
“It was on a lonely road,” he replied, “running north from Rome. Cypress trees made deep shadows there. It was the kind of road that seemed to move toward ancient times. The butcher found me there. He lured me onto his cart.”
“Lured you?” Drouet said. A fearful thought occurred to her then. What if the butcher had trapped the boy, forced him to learn a trade? And what if Bledic wasn’t merely a boy? She’d sensed that all along somehow, hadn’t she? Bledic was something more. And now Drouet was foolishly setting him free.
As they walked, Drouet continued to glance back at the tiny rocking boat in the lake until she could no longer see it through the painted trees. The island was much larger than she’d first imagined. Bledic strode ahead now, hurrying toward something unseen. She remembered how he’d described the yearly fairs in the underworld—the talking golden heads and boxes of blood. Was Bledic’s body changing in the dark, Drouet wondered. Did the boy grow smaller and more hunched? Did his fingernails lengthen and did horns protrude? Or was all of this another trick of the shadows? Either way, Drouet knew she wouldn’t have his company for long. She wished she had her doll again. She wanted to use its face as a mirror. She wanted to know that everything was still in place. But what Drouet had given away was now gone for good. She looked up, hoping for at least the comfort of a painted ceiling, another mural, but instead she saw the dome of an actual sky, dark and vast, full of twinkling red stars.