“What a strange child,” says Mama. “God’s glory on earth all round us, and my daughter wants the prayer book.” She is shaking her head, but she’s smiling. Mama loves the book as much as Aleys does. “Never mind the laundry. I’ll get the psalter.” Mama trundles into the house, Farrago at her heels.
For as long as Aleys can remember, she and Mama have read the psalter together. Well, not exactly read. Mama isn’t lettered, and it’s in Latin, anyway, which not even their priest understands. Mama inherited the little book from her aunt, abbess of a convent near Sint-Truiden. Aleys wishes she could read it. But Mama knows all the prayers and the lives of the saints, no matter what the Latin says. She spins them into stories for her children. Henryk and Claus will sit still only for the goriest of her tales. Saints rarely end peacefully, and Mama sends them to their deaths with relish, leaning in to the stonings and hackings, flayings and clubbings. Aleys frowns at her sometimes. It seems impious. Mama sighs. “Aleys, I have to give your brothers some kind of Christian education. Those rascals aren’t about to become monks.”
And Griete? She’s all about the drama. Aleys’s younger sister likes to act out the stories, flinging her golden hair all over the place. Griete’s favorite is Saint Ursula, who led eleven thousand of her best friends on pilgrimage. When the Huns attacked, Ursula and her maidens chose to die by the sword rather than submit their virtue to the soldiers. Aleys wonders what it would be like to have so many friends. What it would be like to have just one good friend you could take on pilgrimage.
Her siblings seem to think that martyrs exist solely for their entertainment. Just yesterday Griete hopped up when Mama closed the psalter and went back into the kitchen. “My turn,” she announced. “I’m the saint today.”
“No,” said Aleys. Sometimes Griete was imperious. “It should be Claus.” He was the only one who could remember his lines.
“He’salwaysthe saint,” whined Griete. “Can’t we do Ursula? I’ll be the virgin. The boys can be Huns.”
“You’re not that good a virgin,” said Claus with a lopsided grin. He was right. Griete was an unconvincing Ursula. She just flirted with the Huns, glancing back over her shoulder and giggling as they gave chase.
“Virgins are boring,” declared Henryk, who made a decent soldier but not much else.
“How about Saint Laurence?” Claus nodded with his own enthusiasm. “You can grill me to death over a pit of flame.” He threw himself to the ground. “Watch.” He rolled on the floor as if on a spit. “I’m well-done!” he shouted. “Turn me over!”
Privately, Aleys thinks they should take the saints more seriously. It would be marvelous to be a martyr. So sure, so full of passion. Everyone loves them, despite how strange they are. Maybe because of how strange they are. She tries to convince Griete to join her. “Straight to heaven,” she says. “No purgatory. It’ll be easy.” The problem is, how to get yourself martyred? You might become a pilgrim and hope to be beheaded or burned for your love of God in the Holy Land. Or better yet, you could be shot through by a pagan arrow en routeto Constantinople; that seemed a tidy, even cut-rate, entrance to heaven. Given the alternatives. But then Papa told her that he had no plans to take them farther than Brugge, let alone Byzantium. “You and your mother,” he said, chucking her under the chin, “are all the saints we need.”
Aleys is convinced she’ll live her life and die in triviality. There must be other ways to get God’s attention. Aleys tests her faith like she’s wiggling a loose tooth. She tries fasting, but after a day or two, though she pinches her thighs and is sure she’s wasting away, nobody notices. It’s a great disappointment.
Aleys needs a hair shirt. She collects the shed fur of Farrago and painstakingly glues it to a belt that she fastens beneath her girdle and under her nightdress. It works beautifully, it itches horribly. Aleys breaks out in bright pink welts and can hardly keep her hands from clawing at her torso.
“What is that?” Griete shrieks in revulsion when Aleys lifts her shift to show her.
“My penance,” supplies Aleys.
Griete wrinkles her nose. “What for? You’ve never done anything wrong in your life.”
The hair belt develops fleas, so Griete bans it from their bed, and that’s the end of that.
Aleys has tried everything she can think of to prove herself to God. She can’t help but feel her talents are wasted. The saints get all the adventures. All the friends.
“You’re a strange child,” says Papa, “but you’ll save us in the end.”
It started with the pictures in the psalter. When she was small, Aleys would sit on Mama’s lap and grip her braid as ballast to lean over the book and fall into its miniature world. Illuminations, Mama called them, paintings that bring light to the prayers and psalms lettered on the page. Even now, when Aleys leans her cheek on Mama’s shoulder, she loses herself in colors so vivid they seem to vibrate. There are ladies who might suddenly speak or bend to feed a green apple to a ruby deer. Turn the page, and there are sinners with bug eyes peeping from cauldrons or pleading from dark pits guarded by scaled beasts. Aleys has to look at the demons through her fingers. Angels land on the pages, too, trailing banners with tidings in Latin that Mama can’t read. Somehow Mama knows what the angels think.
Mama’s psalter holds the real world, too, not just trees and birds, but things Aleys has never seen, mountains and waterfalls and strange fruits from faraway lands. She wonders how they’d taste if you touched your tongue to the page. Aleys wants to dive into the paintings, to swim in the crimson and blue, the willow, the traces of gold. The psalter holds prayers for every hour of the day, precisely lettered across the page. Mama knows that Aleys loves the psalter more than anyone, even if neither of them knows exactly what the words mean.Someday this will be yours, but you must be very, very good.When they finish looking,Mama will slip the psalter back into its silk pouch and place it out of reach. Aleys’s eyes will follow, her imagination caught within the pages of a small book on a high shelf. Sometimes, as she’s dropping off to sleep, the illustrations waver before her. Birds fly through forests of inked letters and she wakes wondering what the bristly shapes could possibly mean.
Today, though, Aleys wants a particular story.
“Perpetua?” Mama looks at the book in her hand. “You’re sure?” She puts her other hand back on her stomach.Any day now. “It won’t be too much?”
It’s not actually the tale of Saint Perpetua that Aleys craves, it’s what Mama always says at the end. Aleys could recite the story herself, though never as well as Mama. It brings tears to her eyes when her mother describes Perpetua unlatching her newborn from her breast and handing him to her brother. Perpetua holds her head high as she strides into the arena where wild beasts wait to tear her apart for the emperor’s birthday. All because she refused to renounce the one true God for the emperor’s menu of Roman gods. Aleys wonders what it would be like to be so brave, has imagined herself as Perpetua. But not today. Today it’s Mama about to enter the arena. Aleys isn’t exactly sure what happens when you have a baby, but she knows it’s dangerous. Last year they lost a neighbor, one of her favorites, to childbirth, a woman whose three sons would dash laughing to see Aleys when she came to pick up the yarn. She remembers the armful of blood-soaked rags the midwife carried from their door.
Reading her mind, Mama pulls Aleys into a tight embrace. Aleys can feel the baby kick through Mama’s dress, right into her own belly, and she feels a surge of anger. They don’t need a baby. They’re fine as they are, the six of them. She wishes the baby away. It’s a wild beast, it doesn’t belong.
Mama whispers into her hair. “Remember, you still have your wishes ahead of you.” Every girl receives three charmed events, almost like wishes, in the three years before she weds. They might be subtle, so you have to be alert. Aleys is in no rush to marry, but she likes the thought of spontaneous gifts.
“Maybe one of them will be the baby,” says Mama.
“No.” Aleys doesn’t want to waste one of her wishes on an infant. She wants to spend them on herself. “Mama, what if the baby ...” Her glance strays toward the neighbor’s yard, then back to her mother.
Mama draws back and holds both her shoulders and looks Aleys right in the eye. “Listen. I delivered the four of you. I’m strong.” Then Mama pulls Aleys close again and whispers in her ear the words she always says—her very own words, just for her daughter—at the end of Perpetua. “Never could I leave you, child. Not even for God.” But it doesn’t comfort Aleys the way she wanted, and she goes to bed uneasy.
That night a steady rain creates a dense hush around the house, punctuated by the occasional slap of the shutter against the window frame. Aleys sleeps fitfully, in and out of dreams, finding no rest. In the small hours, a shriek pierces the quiet. Aleys starts awake, gripping the sheet, her heart racing. Maybe it was an owl. The cry comes again, from inside. Downstairs. Aleys sits up, hugging herself. The shutter gives a loud snap, and Aleys looks over at Griete. She’s sound asleep. Her sister sleeps through everything. She could wake Griete, ask what the cry was, hold hands and huddle beneath the bedclothes. But Griete would only stoke her fear, and Aleys feels her heart can’t beat any faster. She slips out of bed and down the stairs. The floor in the hall outside her parents’ chamber is cold beneath her feet. Farrago waits in vigil. He’s shivering. His eyes are worried. His tail gives one short wag when he sees Aleys, then stops.
Aleys puts her ear to the door. For a moment, she thinks a wild animal has gotten into the room, but then she understands that the growling is human, the laboring breath is Mama’s. It’s here. The baby is coming. The sounds are terrible, inhuman moans and grunts, as if Mama is wrestling with a dark angel from the psalter. An image invades her mind of the leathery, winged beast from the book, the king of the abyss, sprung to life in Mama’s chamber with his terrible clawed hands and thrashing tail. The baby is breaking her mother, and demons are waiting to seize her.
