The Execution (9 page)

The Fat Wife also seemed to watch him,
as the Old One had, as Ravan disappeared into the woods for hours
on end—to kill.

Monsieur LaFoote looked surprised when
one evening, shortly after his arrival, Ravan carried a wild pig
through the back door of the kitchen, dropping the gutted carcass
onto the stone floor. The animal was enormous, a dangerous and
tasty prize.

LaFoote nodded in odd approval, not so
much for the meat, but perhaps for something else
altogether.

Ravan noticed the odd expression but
was unable to decipher it, his adolescent intuition serving him
better in the forests than amongst men. He shrugged it off as he
felt did not know Monsieur LaFoote well enough. After he’d dropped
the large boar to the floor, the Fat Wife had quickly turned away,
and it was her reaction that perplexed him more.

Now he puzzled over the distant event
as he made his way to the second room, carrying the candles
carefully lest he chip or fracture them.

As time passed, he’d continued to play
out his existence at the Inn. The Innkeeper had little to do with
him, other than an obsessive vigilance about his whereabouts. He
was never unkind, just—indifferent.

Sometimes at night Ravan could hear
the couple arguing downstairs. He would try not to listen, as he
lie in his small room in the attic, his orphanage blanket tucked up
under his chin, bare ankles and stocking feet sticking out. The Old
One’s daughters had woven the blanket for him, a birthday present,
and now it was tattered, too small—and dearly loved by the
boy.

Seldom did the orphans really know
their actual birthdays. The Old One allowed them to pick a day.
Most picked summer days, anticipating outdoor games, warm evenings
and swims in the stream. Ravan had picked January twenty-nine—the
last day he could remember seeing his mother.

On the nights when the couple argued,
Ravan lay still, breathing shallow, his eyes closed tightly.
Troubled, he wondered what he could be doing—what might create such
discord. During the day, there seemed to be no disappointment from
either of them about his work ethic. The big man nodded his
approval whenever he happened to notice the boy at some
task.

Ravan wondered if they might
eventually see him as a son of sorts. But, he only thought this on
very rare occasions, when the distant memory of his own mother
tapped softly upon the doorway of his mind, reminding him that he'd
been somebody’s son.

His hair grew long and one quiet
afternoon, shortly before Christmas, the Fat Wife sat him on the
stool in the kitchen. With a pair of boning scissors, she snipped
the thick locks away until it again rested above his shoulders. The
dark tufts fell silently to the floor.

The child sat, feeling the gentle tug
as her fingers worked with the comb, wonderfully comforted by the
basic grooming. He closed his eyes and absently wondered if mothers
combed their young ones’ hair with their fingers, or if lovers
combed each other’s hair in such a way. The moment was warm and
complete—a good day. He closed his eyes while she hummed and
worked. Perhaps there was a place for him in this world after
all.

Quite abruptly, she was done. Before
she could busy herself with another chore, he pulled from beneath
his tunic a gift. He possessed no money to buy proper wrappings,
but it was beautiful the way he presented it, wondrous as earth’s
treasures often are.

He had enclosed the gift in late
autumn leaves, having picked them carefully for their most
brilliant color. They were still soft and leathery, not having had
time to dry out properly. Weaving their stems carefully into each
other, he created a lovely, colorful wrapping paper. As a finishing
touch, he tied the bundle neatly in braided horsehair. The tail
hairs were gently plucked from a white, brown, and black animal,
woven so each colored strand gratified the others
beautifully.

With a soft smile and bursting with
pride, he handed the package to the big woman.

She gaped at him in surprise, her
small mouth rounding with a silent ‘Oh.’ She turned the package
over in her hands, loosening the twines. The leaves unfolded and in
between them she discovered a lovely pair of fox fur mittens. The
leather was a smooth suede with the fur turned in for warmth. They
were made to carefully fit the thickness of her plump
hands.

Holding them near, her small eyes
peered closely at the detail of his work. The stitching was
magnificent and in between the mittens was a darning needle and
skein of thread. They had disappeared some time ago from her sewing
cabinet. Slipping the mittens onto her hands, her eyes flew
wide.

Ravan had tried them on himself before
wrapping them. It had been like plunging his hands into softened
butter.

She smiled despite herself—and he
beamed.

Ravan noticed how she went to market
without mittens. When the late autumn chill became bitter with the
first snows, he watched as she held her hands between the folds of
her heavy skirts to keep them warm. He also noticed how the
wealthier townswomen sported lovely, warm, fur-lined jackets and
mittens. This was something he knew the Fat Wife would never allow,
for vanity to require such a thing for her.

Society demanded such fine fur be worn
only by royalty, nobility, or wealthy aristocracy. Ravan knew
nothing of this, and cared even less, but he noticed how she held
her chin high and poked through the produce, her roughened,
scalded, red hands instinctively picking the best when she filled
her basket.

He had worked meticulously on the
gift, trapping eight fox alive and releasing them before two of
just the right animals found their way to his snares. They were a
matched pair with perfect coats. After carefully pelting the
animals out, he roasted the fox on a spit and spent the whole day
in the forest, eating fox and meticulously scraping the
hides.

Using fire-ash and fox brain to tan
the pelts, he stirred them gently, finally weighting the pelts down
into the water with stones. No one missed the barn bucket he tanned
them in, and it was some days later when he pulled the hides from
the buckets and staked them into the creek to rinse for a full
day.

Later, back at the Inn, he
painstakingly rolled the hides gently back and forth across the
foot rail of his bed, softening and pulling the skins to and fro
until they were an immaculate suede on one side, with the fur on
the other—the loveliest fawn color with black tips.

After carefully preparing the hides,
he laid them neatly on his bed, comparing their color and size.
They were a perfect match. All the while, he paid particular
attention to her hands, measuring in his mind the dimensions before
cutting the leather. When she was baking and pushed the dough down,
shoving the balls towards him to form and lay onto the oven peels,
he held his hand next to the imprints, gauging widths and
lengths.

Quietly, he sat up at night, guiding
the needle, each stitch perfect as he fashioned the gift. He turned
the cuffs out so the roll of fur acted as a windbreak at the
wrists. Truly, there were no finer mittens in all of France.
Finally, he wrapped them in the leaf wrapping, with the ties
arranged perfectly, the little horsetail tufts positioned like a
bow.

This woman had been kind to Ravan and
he would remember her kindness always. He'd grown quite fond of
her, comfortable and happy whenever her great form plodded into a
room. It gave him such great pleasure to present the gift to her,
his mouth widening into one of his rare and glorious smiles, his
chest puffed out with pride.

Her eyes became instantly damp as she
turned her hands over, admiring the beautiful gift, her rosy face
reddening. Suddenly, and without warning, she pulled the mittens
from her hands and stuffed them carelessly into her apron pockets.
She turned, averting her eyes from Ravan, perhaps to disguise her
feelings, and hastily took up a cleaver. She turned her attention
to a mutton roast on the nearby butcher block.

Confused, Ravan stood up, reaching out
to touch her elbow.

She pulled abruptly away. “Be gone
now—enough of this nonsense. I’ve work to do and you’ll be needing
to chop the wood.” She stabbed with the clever towards the back
door of the Inn, where the firewood already threatened to consume
them.

* * *

While the usual commotion from the
patrons took place downstairs, Ravan moved to the third room to
change the candlesticks. He pried the stubby nubs from their
holders and replaced them with the long, hand-dipped tapers he'd
helped the Fat Wife make the week before. The spent candle nubs
went into his pockets to save for re-melting later.

Replacing them was a task Ravan
usually tried to do earlier in the day, after the travelers of the
previous night had gone, but before the evening’s crowd poured in.
Somehow, he’d let time get away from him today.

He never heard the breaking glass from
downstairs. Instead, he was lost in his thoughts, pondering that
particular afternoon when he’d given her the gloves. It was all too
much to assimilate for one so young, and as a child will do, he
imagined his own flawed reasons why she might have been displeased
with his gift. She had been happy with them—he'd seen it! She
seemed to like the gift, and then...?

The thick wood carpentry of the Inn
made for very quiet dwelling and as a result, Ravan was caught
totally by surprise when the door crashed open behind
him.

Spinning about, he dropped the
candlestick he held in his hand. It fell with a smack to the wooden
floor, cracked and imperfect now. A big man filled the doorway,
flanked by two friends almost equal in size. The man seemed
genuinely surprised to see Ravan in his room and halted for a
moment, swaying in the door.

Mumbling a quiet apology for his
intrusion, Ravan scooped up the broken candle and ducked towards
the door, head down as though to leave. He could smell the heavy
liquor on their breaths as he stepped closer and paused, unsure
what to do next as they stood fast in the doorway.

He recognized Pierre Steele, a trader
who was a frequent guest at the tavern.

Robust in size, Pierre's had big, red
cheeks and a fat, pockmarked nose which spoke of frequent drinking.
His small pig eyes were closely set, sickly yellow and permanently
bloodshot. His personality was loud, and his enormous girth seemed
to fill a room.

Not surprisingly, Pierre was often
responsible for brawls at the Inn, and he was frequently accused of
petty crimes. Slippery as an eel, however, he always seemed just
out of reach of proper retribution. He also possessed coin, and not
an ounce of ambition, so the Inn was where he could frequently be
found. The Innkeeper was generally happy to negotiate Pierre’s
drunkenness, as long as the man had money.

Pierre also had a very nasty history
of perverted sexual exploits, which he kept only poorly hidden.
Ravan had even overheard a tale of how Steele had been shot once,
by the father of a girl barely ten. The girl had evidently
identified Steele as her rapist and then she’d mysteriously
disappeared. It was a few months before someone found the bent and
tortured body in the river. It was terribly decayed and twisted
horribly in the massive roots of a fallen tree, with a stone tied
around the neck.

The monster had survived his wound,
little worse for wear, the arrow tip lodged in a fat pad that
festered on and off. The father faded away into a grief stricken
hollowness. Steele, undaunted, remained as cruel and foul as ever,
having gotten away with murder. Only now, he kept a clumsy sword
strapped to his side, the hilt practically hidden by his massively
draped, oily flesh. This was what Ravan had heard about this
man.

Moving aside in an attempt to skirt
past them, he was cut off as Pierre stepped into his path. “Well,
well, what have we here? If it isn’t the maid!”

Ravan instinctively backed away and
Pierre followed, stepping towards him. “No doubt he meant to rob
me!” The big man reached down to unbuckle the heavy belt that
tightly girded his enormous gut. “And look—he’s broken a
candlestick. I think he should be punished, don’t you?” he asked
his comrades. His mouth, unnaturally small for his massively meaty
head, twisted into a sickening grin.

The two other men laughed outright,
goading him on, as though anticipating a show.

Ravan edged backwards against the bed,
its lamb’s wool duvet pressed against the backs of his thighs. The
hair bristled on the nape of his neck and an icy shiver arched
across his shoulders.

A sudden memory came upon him, of when
a she-bear and her cubs stumbled across him while he was cleaning
the roe deer in the forest. She had strong feelings about the human
and as a consequence, Ravan spent the night in a tree. He still
bore the scars on his left calf. The bear had taught him primal
fear as she lashed at him while he clung just barely out of reach
in the small tree.

Now, as with the bear, his breathing
grew faster and his body tensed. He knew this was a very bad
situation.

“
Come my friends,” Pierre motioned to his cohorts,
slurring
only
slightly. “This pretty little boy is mine, and you can hold him
while I see that he is properly punished.” The men laughed again,
eager for an exhibition.