The Witch (10 page)

“I suppose so,” the priest said, although he did not much like
having his priestly duties likened to the agent's dubious enterprises. As if a priest would go capering around on a stage in the public square, tootling on a horn and clowning about!

“Now, Father, indulge me in one more matter, if you would be so kind.”

“Certainly,” the priest murmured, wishing that the agent would take himself off. He felt unwell. More than ever he disliked the man, more and more he found reasons for distrust and alarm. The agent was looking so fixedly at his empty wine cup that the priest poured the rest of the bottle into it.

“Why did you take holy orders? Did you feel a calling in yourself?”

The priest hesitated. The agent said, “Again, your pardon. An impertinence on my part.”

“Not at all,” the priest answered, though it was, if not an impertinence, at least a liberty. “I suppose I wanted . . . that is, I strove to perfect my faith. To become stronger in it.”

“Ah.” The agent nodded. “Only the saints are able to rise above all our human weaknesses. To trust without doubt, to accept without exerting one's own will!”

“Yes,” said the priest, losing track of the man's words, agreeing foolishly to he knew not what. A headache had nailed itself to his forehead.

“. . . in the matter of Jesus walking upon the water. A miracle? Or perhaps one of those occasions where the sun on the water tricks the eye and makes all distances suspect, so that a man walking on the shore appears to be in the middle of the sea. I have seen such things in my travels.”

“But surely you have not seen the blind made to see, or the lame to walk, or the leper cleansed,” the priest said, reproving him.

“Ah, Father, there can be such bold fakery among a certain class of beggars, it would break your heart to see it. No matter! If only I could turn water into wine, as our Lord did at Cana! Now that is a trick worth knowing!”

“It was not a trick,” the priest said, but the agent was still pleased with his own joke.

“The one miracle I can perform? Turning the wine back into water! Ha!” The candlelight cast its long, drooping shadows over his face. One corner of his mouth turned up in laughter and the priest saw, as he had not before, that the agent was missing several teeth. “Such foolishness on my part,” he said, recovering himself, reaching for the wine. “But our Lord gave us the gift of laughter, did he not? As well as our unsettled minds, a weakness we must guard against. Because who would think such blasphemous things, if they could keep from doing so?”

“The Gospel,” the priest began heavily, but he could not finish his thought. It was as if the man had found some chink in him and was prying and picking at it. What if there were no miracles? No angels of the Lord in the empty tomb, one seated at the place where the head of the body had lain, and one at the feet? What if there was only the teller's desire to make his story better? “I'm sorry,” he said. “Some passing weakness in me . . . a moment's faintness . . .”

The agent was out of his chair in an instant. “I've overtired you with my idle talk. I'll take my leave, with your permission, and pray for—”

The agent went silent, and turned his sharp nose to a dark corner of the room where a small scratching could now be heard. Noiselessly, he drew something out of his leather bag and took a few steps closer. Quicker than the priest's eye could follow, he darted after the rat that had emerged from its hole. He
cast a long, stiff noose round the rat's neck and tightened it with a flick of his wrist. The rat squealed and flailed and then lay still.

“Nasty creature. Difficult to believe that it too is part of God's creation. Don't worry, Father, I will dispose of it for you.”

He bowed and left, the rat curled up and dragging on the end of the noose.

The priest remained in his chair. When the housekeeper entered to clear away the meal, she might have been surprised to see him still there. But like all women who attended the priests, she had been selected for her advanced age, undoubted piety, and absolute lack of curiosity. The priest roused himself to drink a cup of water, then watched without energy as the housekeeper went about her chore. When she was turning to leave, he asked her, “Do you think it is a good plan, the children leaving for the new settlements?”

If the woman was surprised at having her opinion solicited, as had never happened before, she gave no sign of it. “If it pleases our Lord, he will favor it.” And then she swept the table clean of crumbs and departed.

The next morning the church was filled in honor of the saints' day, the two martyrs. The priest looked out over the upturned faces of his congregation, each of them waiting (with differing degrees of attentiveness) for him to instruct, inspire, bless, absolve them. The sun shone in glory through the high windows. A fresh-scrubbed day, full of solemn promise. The priest spoke of the saints' humility and resolve, their willingness to sacrifice their lives as testament to their faith. “Can you even for one moment imagine yourself kneeling, waiting for the sword to cleave your head from your body? And can you then imagine yourself filled, not with fear, but with the greatest joy?”

They could not. A few of them rubbed at their own necks, as if feeling the cold bite of the sword. The priest continued. “Their faith was so pure and strong, they knew they were about to ascend straight into heaven! Heaven! We can't see it from here, it's always one hill farther than the last one we can climb! That place where there is no hunger or want or lack of any sort! Nor cruelty nor fear nor heartsickness!”

The priest paused to draw breath. In the far back corner of the church he caught a glimpse of the land agent, dressed once again in his gaudy, ridiculous clothes. As if this was a proper way to appear in church, or even to undertake a long journey. What was he doing here anyway, skulking around behind the pillars, distracting him? Why not come on time and sit in a pew if he came at all?

“Now the blessed saints sit in great glory alongside the Father and the Son, in eternal peace and grace,” the priest continued, but the passion had drained out of him, and he only wished to reach the end.

The congregation shuffled its feet as he raised the host to consecrate it, then each of them took their turn to advance and kneel and accept the body and blood of Christ. Each one, that is, except for the land agent, who had vanished. The priest allowed himself relief at this, although he wondered why the man did not take communion.

Finally all was done and the last prayers said, and the people hurrying out the church doors and calling to each other, for those who were part of the expedition would be leaving right away. The priest followed more slowly, crossing the threshold into the welcoming sunshine. Why was his heart so heavy?

And here was the land agent, standing in the bed of a wagon, trading jokes with the crowd. There were two wagons, each
hitched to a shaggy horse, and each with a tough-looking drover holding the reins. Where had these men come from? The priest had not seen them before. They were shabby, sour-faced, as if the prospect of exerting themselves put them in a foul mood. But the land agent capered and danced, playing a tune on a little pipe he drew out of his bag.

The youngest children were lifted into the wagons beside the sacks and barrels of provisions. The older girls, who would tend to them on the way, climbed up beside them. But the main body of the children would go on foot, and these milled around behind the wagons, excited at the prospect of their adventure. Even the poorest of them had been provided with whatever could be spared: new aprons or jackets, pouches filled with seed, tools for working the ground or for carpentry, awls, chisels, whetstones, thimbles, combs, cooking pots, anything that could be carried by hand or slung over a pole. Because only the youngest among them were unused to work. So many were underfed, near-starvelings. The priest's heart hurt, looking at them, and he felt shamed. Some had parents and some had none, and some of the parents wept but most were dry-eyed and resigned. It was for the best, and it had already been decided.

Now the land agent leapt from the wagon and, before the priest could anticipate or object, mounted the church steps until he stood on a level with the priest. “Good people!” he cried, loudly enough to still the crowd's noise. “What bright fortune! What splendid prospects! Children! Have you prepared yourselves? Will you come with me to the new lands, to work and earn your bread? No, not bread, tell me what you like better.” He leaned down and cupped his ear to the crowd below.

“Pancakes!” a child called out.

“Pancakes with honey!” another added.

“Apples and nuts!”

At each new suggestion, the agent stepped back in mock astonishment, making his comical faces. “So it's pancakes you want? Pancakes with honey and apples and nuts?”

A cheer rose from the crowd of children. “Well then, we'd best get started. Because, as the good Father has said, we have many hills to climb!”

Here the agent bowed to the priest, and the priest, irritated at being made into an actor in the agent's show, had no choice but to call for prayer. The people below him lowered their heads, and he asked God to bless those going forth, to protect and cherish them and bring them success and happiness in their new lives, Amen.

“Amen,” the crowd echoed, and the drovers whipped up their horses and the children called out their final goodbyes. First, though, before they got under way, the agent reached into one of the wagons and lifted out a little boy who was so frail and sickly, it was likely that his parents had only given him up so as to be spared the expense of his burial. The agent held him up on his shoulder until a woman came to claim him, and as he passed the child over, the agent also reached into his leather bag and gave her a coin as charity.

That should have helped to ease the priest's mind, but dread still weighed on him. Yet it seemed as if he was the only one in all the crowd who was not cheering the agent on, delighted at the town's good fortune. People cleared out of the path as the wagons nudged forward. At the very head of the column, the agent piped a merry tune. Goodbye, goodbye!

The crowd re-formed around the last of the children and followed them a ways beyond the city's gates, then stood watching
as the road lengthened behind them and the piping music faded and went silent.

The priest turned and went back into the church and climbed up to the bell tower, whose windows faced in all directions. To the north, the road the children had taken, he could see a portion of the blue river curving away, with knots of pale trees lining its bank. At the very edge of sight, a smudge that indicated the foothills of the great mountains. If he strained his eyes he could make out a handful of moving dust that must have been the expedition. Already they were much farther along than he would have guessed. The priest watched until he no longer knew what he saw, the trail of dust or just his wish to see it.

—

Within two weeks of the departure, the fine weather turned to a thin, blowy rain that fell in wind-driven sheets. People wondered if the children had reached their destination by now. The distances the land agent had described were vague. The new settlements were said to be at the edge of the northern sea, or perhaps farther east, beyond a great forest. No one knew for certain, and people debated uselessly over the different things they'd heard.

A gray melancholy settled over the town along with the rain. In the first days after the children's departure, there had been a lot of nervous, excited talk (and of course, some tears among the mothers), then bouts of bad temper, as if people had misgivings about the children leaving and were casting about for someone to blame. But the rain softened the sounds of the world and wore away at the heart the same way it can, over time, hollow out stone. Rain dripped and dripped from the eaves, footsteps
puddled, and no one looked out an open door or window for fear of getting drenched. It was so much quieter without the children. Of course not every single child in the town had been taken, but enough had gone away so that if a child was glimpsed in the street, being hurried along by a parent, or playing some solitary game, people often stopped to stare.

The priest sent his prayers up into the clouds, and they came down as rain. Consigning the children to prayer was a substitute for thinking about them, and in any case, nothing could be done for them now. There was enough in his daily round of study and ministry to keep him occupied, if not untroubled.

Then one night, just as he was preparing for bed, he heard, or imagined he heard, a knock at the small side door that led to his own quarters. He listened again. In the midst of the voices of water he heard a human voice, thin and beseeching. He took a lantern and hurried to unbolt the door.

A boy sat in the mud beside the door, drawn up as close as he could to the shelter of the roof. The priest recognized him as one of those who had left with the land agent, an orphan who had lived off others' meager leavings and so had been eager to join the agent's expedition. He was worn and wet and one leg was stretched out in front of him. The leg was dark with blood. The rain washed a thin line of it and sent it whirling away into the muddy street.

Greatly alarmed, the priest helped the boy to stand and come inside. He dried him off, built up the fire, and set him to warm in front of it. The housekeeper had already retired, and she was half deaf at the best of times, so the priest himself went searching for food and drink. Then he coaxed the boy into letting him examine the injured leg, which was ulcerated and matted with all manner of dirt and bark and even small stones.

“You must allow me to clean this,” the priest said. He heated water in a kettle and set to work with a cloth and a basin of the hot water. The child was exhausted and fearful but he only flinched once while the priest tended to him, washing the leg and stanching the blood and binding the wound with a bran poultice. He did not begin crying until the priest asked, “And where are all the rest?”