The lands at the base of Das Kagel were undergoing a change that nobody understood. It had begun two years after the Spanish arrived, dominating everything and exporting much wealth and produce to their impoverished lands. Then their church entered into a new phase of intolerance, as the Inquisition took control of civic matters and found punishable heresies in all things. This church enforced rules and laws in the Lowlands without any respect for national or local traditions and politics. Only the festivals that matched the Inquisition’s delight at bloodshed were encouraged.
The same veins of corruption, the same arteries of cruelty, were used by the plague as it swept through the land. Once it had taken its toll and moved on, the abnormalities and the visions began. Omens and sacrifices followed, and odd creatures and unknown animals that nobody could explain began to appear. They were being seen more frequently. The peasants called them Woebegots and Filthlings because they were even lower on the food chain.
Meg Verstraeten would surprisingly become the most famous of the peasants. Born into the ranks of near–slave labor hired by landowning farmers, Meg’s prospects were slight, and she was expected to snuff out by her early fifties. But she had reached a sallow maturity, having never yet complained about the hard work and abuses of her first forty-six years. Meg had gotten lucky with her late marriage to the appalling Rynch Cluvmux, a slow, dim man who had once had money and prospects.
The only things they shared were anger, frustration, and loneliness. Meg withered with determined indifference to fit the derogatory name “Dull Gret.” She began to wear her grown-in ugliness out loud, as a physical manifestation of her egregiously cankered soul. She was gaunt, bony, and tall. Her profound melancholia came from long-term abuse and isolation, which had soured a unique child into a demi-hag, fueled by the ill-tempered, black bile of the gallbladder and infected by the increasing rankness of her marriage.
Meg brooded and talked to herself about all the injustices of the world of men. Men were foolish, wasting time and lucre in idleness and bigmouthed prick-loutary. Cluvmux was a perfect example, a worthless apology of a man whose only half-achieved purpose in life had been to sire their son, Dircx. The boy had grown up watching his father piss away his trade and its lucrative consistency. Now they were broke.
Cluvmux was the third son of a third son, in swine butchery with a special skill in the cutting and curing of belly draft. But the sweet fat had turned bitter with a drunken botch-up of the family recipe and the loss of two fingers. The boy had seen everything around him fall away or had been slapped senseless for no apparent reason.
On his sixteenth birthday, Dircx ran away from home, but with his father’s hereditary foolishness, he did it during the closure of the curfew bell: when no citizen was allowed out of their home, let alone on the open road. He had traveled no more than a couple of miles from the town gate when the Caballistas del Camino found him, tied him by the heels to their horses, and dragged him back to their prison keep, his poor head and face meeting every rock and dent on the dusty road and every brick and chiseled scroll on the bridge along the way.
Cluvmux was far too afeard to approach them and beg for leniency for his son’s transgression, so Meg had to go; she had to do it.
No one was sure if the colonization of the Lowlands had anything to do with the arrival of the first Woebegots and Filthlings, but they came around the same time. The creatures began to swim toward the villages in the thick brown waters of the rivers. Some crawled onto land to seek nutriment at the town gate; some were found sheltering in barns and stables. At first they were quickly slain, being feeble, slow-witted, and friendly. But as the years passed, they grew tougher and began to understand their surroundings and to build a nervous resistance, which had the flavor of retaliation.
And now they were multiplying and becoming more robust in appearance and size. But most alarming was that they were starting to master language and communicate among themselves. The reason for their evolution, their increase in numbers, and some of the other more startling circumstances that were happening under the shadow of Das Kagel was unknown. Only the abbot of the Monastery of the Eastern Gate feared a possible cause and effect. The death of Quiet Testiyont had not been announced to the outside world, and the absence of a working Oracle coincided with many of the abnormalities that were being seen, reported, and dreamed.
There were two Woebegots on the bridge the day that Meg decided to beg for the release of her son, and they watched her very carefully as she traipsed across. One resembled a large black newt but with a crested head and a pinched face, looking like a burned leaf folded to give a near-human expression. It hung close to the parapet in a stain of water. Trying to clamber up onto the road from the side of the bridge, it had fallen back into the river again and again. Finally it heaved itself up and over the edge and sat in mud and exhaustion.
The other one was thinner and looked like a stretched rat, or some sort of weasel or mink. She could not see its face because its entire head was hidden under a child’s sunhat, which it had stolen from a pram somewhere in town. The hat was pale yellow and floppy. The Woebegots liked hats, but the ones they acquired were always too large. The most disturbing thing about this creature was its hands, which, unlike its clawed back feet, were curiously human and the same color as the hat. It tilted its head sideways to look at Meg. She could see its soft eyes under the shade of the brim. It watched her carefully as it moved, crablike, toward her feet. She thought it was totally harmless and estimated that she could kick it over the side of the bridge or stomp it to death if she so chose. Also her good fletching knife was tucked in the neck of one of her black canvas boots with the wooden soles.
“Gercha,” she hissed at the creature as it flattened its long furry body into an eellike shadow, only the hat staying jaunty.
On the other side of the bridge, Meg found the outer shed where the caballistas and their horses loitered. With her best servile manner, she approached, wringing her apron in her big red hands and explaining about her son and the mistake he had made. The guards laughed at her when she asked to have her son back and apologized for his youth. They explained that if and when he recovered from his “collection,” he would be locked in one of the great wheels of the treadmill until they remembered to let him go.
“But what of his trial?” she asked, and the men stopped smirking.
“Thars won’t be nun.”
“But he’s innocent, just a boy’s folly; he deserves a trial.”
“Dersefs! He dersefs nufin and is lucky to be alive.”
“I wish to speak to your commander,” she said primly, holding back her tears of fear and impotent rage. One of the soldiers standing at the back came forth and looked closely at her face. He took off his helmet. A laurel of green metal leaves had been added to the helm, a sign he had achieved some valor.
“Begone, yoos will make it wurst for the brat.”
Meg flinched from his face and his words, but she held her ground. “He should have a trial.”
The soldier came closer.
“If he was myn, I would beg that he goes to the wheel. Tribunals is run by priesthood. The wheel is a gentle maid compared to them and what they will give to him.”
His words silenced her, and she and the men were quiet until the last speaker bellowed.
“Begone!”
On her way home, she pledged revenge for her son with what was left of her life and for everything that had ever been stolen from her. Another Woebegot had found its way onto the bridge and made a beeline for her clanking ankles. She stopped and looked down at it, another minor outrage to her person. The thing rubbed against her like a cat made of boxwood, lifting its flattened face admiringly up to hers, its long, hairless legs indecently female. It had no arms and was dressed in rags, but its eyes were like expensive Antwerp beads, and they glimmered and beseeched her exhausted orbs. Meg meant to say a word to it, but she was caught between intentions, her maternal feelings having been so recently scorned. She did not know whether to give it prospect or the back of her tongue, and while she hesitated, her insulted emotions tugged at the black twine of her gut. She hoisted the heavy knife out of her boot and into her angry hand. The creature instantly ceded, dimmed its eyes, and shrugged its shoulders up to where its ears should have been in a tiny gesture of defeated resignation; an act it had copied by shyly watching humans, aligning the sequence of their actions in its memory.
Meg bent down in one movement and cut the gesture in half, wiping the blade clean on the bottom corner of her apron before striding home, weeping and determined to change her life and everything else around her.