Paradise for the Damned. - 18. Chapter 18

There was the paltry harvest, there was the reading of Tacitus. Guiranda was Janelo was Cecile in Guy’s deft arms. Claude hung back at the doorway of the sweltering inner chamber, asking of Roman expostulations. The maidens moaned, St Catherine, St Agnes, St Therese. When passions cooled and their tresses were braided neatly again, they never asked Claude what it was like to live with the Zeus of their longing. For that matter, Claude never told them that as they lay, half awake to Guy’s purrs, the louche steadied wrathful eyes over their gentle faces. He did not speak of those ocular windows of wizardry, or that and when its shutters burst open, the air burned with the dust of calomel. Brands of interlocked squares would be emblazoned on Guy’s cheeks, and all would flee for mercy’s shield. As they traipsed out the door, he smiled curtly and assured them their evil Papa’s would know naught of their looseness. They pranced away with all the moon’s fairness in their hearts. The room was remained with the dull glow at the heath, the questions glaring from Tacitus and arithmetic, and Claude was inured in his transfiguration of dread. Was there a denouement in the struggle between the cross and the black?

The nights lengthened, the chestnut leaves lay over the front yard crinkled and yellowed, and the air blew in coldly, damply through the windows. Polecats and ferrets were shedding their rich dun furs for wild white coats. Miserable figures goaded half-starved oxen to plow again, to begin anew the cycle of cultivation. Polecats and ferrets were shedding their rich dun furs for wild white coats. Winter was dawning over Aurin, and in the crypt of Claude’s soul. Claude shivered within the confines of Guy’s fur cloak, breaking up in defeat. He watched Guy give a gasconade with villagers. Was it about his time in Vienna and he fought against the Turks? Or when he travelled the silk route met men with slanted eyes? Guy’s hands pressed on his embroidered jerkin, twirled in the air in exaggeration of a tedious point. His black hair flowed and tossed from underneath his baggy beret. Claude could not deny the scorpion of need crawling up his thigh, or the poison in the air, the leaden greyness of the sky.

There was a loud thwack across his back, courtesy of Guy boisterously reclaiming his attentions. Claude shuddered with the infusion of unease, and then noticed Clarisse humbly trying to make conversation with Guy. On the subject of her base liaisons, sadly, Alphonse or Leo had given no new report.

“The Dona, when does she return to Aurin?” she asked. “Amaline misses her lessons so.”

Claude’s blood congealed in his veins. Guy persisted with a doltish smile over the Clarisse’s humble mien.

“She took to heart my student’s ( Guy shook him gently) calls for repentance and joined the Disascled Carmelites in Toulouse,” Guy said.

“Disascled?”

“They walk around barefoot.” Clarisse grimaced, but Guy held on stubbornly. “God is apt to listen to you when you’re barefoot. When you need something particular from God, trying praying to him barefoot, he’ll incline his ear to you. Even better if you pray to him naked under dewy dawn.”

Paire Dennis somersaulted from wherever corner he was hiding. “For sooth? She has joined an order? What a great example the Dona is.”

He rambled on the her true grace while people glared Claude condemnation on his vile sermons on witch widows. Leo and Amaline turned their backs on him. Alphonse scowled at him. His nose slanted a permanent and hard left. Their glares condemned him for his vile sermons on the witch widow, or that Alphonse’s nose slanted a permanent and hard left. Paire Dennis had learned enough Latin from him, had not naught to say to him about Aurin flowers or demon orgies. He was aware of it. The autumn dawning, the lengthening dark days, the loss of song and melody, he was the cause, he was root of it.

The truth on her whereabouts Claude refused to inquire. If she were dead, his relief would only be overshadowed by a deepening fear of a sorcerer tutor. If she were alive, he, not only had a furious Sabrine as his enemy, he had to turn to Guy for protection. How now must he withstand this? And there were the worries he had been too shamefully curious to allay, like his ordeal with his wife or the true nature of his relationship with Roland. The happy mood freed Claude to think about the questions he had been too shamefully curious to ask like the business of Guy’s wife death or Roland’s true relationship with Guy. He refrained

“My student will be speaking to a rector at the College de Foix,” Guy said with the boom of pride, shaking Claude out of his fantasies of fear. “Bless me, my work will soon come to fruition. Claude, perchance after Christmastide, we present you to the rector?”

Claude colored in a flush of good feeling. “Oc, good news indeed.”

The villagers had gathered round, undecided between the cragged look of scorn and the unsteady, waddling gaze of half-smiles. Claude straightened taller, prouder, forgetful of Sabrine’s whereabouts. He concluded she was a demon and whatever her end, she deserved it. And between the despair and the hope quavering in his heart, vainglory budded its flinty leaves. It gave him the much-needed iron to prop his lubberly back. At last, he could stride by the overburdened asses and their fish-eyed drivers, with his gaze firm over the coal-lined horizon. These villagers, he determined, he would prevail over them. He would prevail even if his fate was tied to a demon. He would overcome and be respected.

Their thatched cottage came into view and the dunes of chestnut leaves fallen and crinkled in front yard. The verdict of a cold, dark winter came as shock in Claude’s consciousness. Then he opened the door, and air swirled in coldly and damply around his feet. Guy’s demeanor darkened, red invading the viscid white of his eyes. Fangs lengthened. His air cast off the frippery of human conviviality for the bellicose bite. Claude led himself to the hearth and began shakily to prepare fire. The plans for Toulouse and university lost its amative glow as he fought with a char cloth. Light flickered, and suddenly the lake of his mind was illuminated, clear free of seaweeds of fear and despair, and the thought was stark in the cold room. He did not want to die, but what was the good in living when you were damned?

***

Death was final, and yet a vile and grotesque admission of wanting to live when the boon of living was unknowable to him. Death was the shameless woman who kissed you in front of your wife. It was the unseen mace that clubbed you on summer’s day. It tapped on your shoulders as you used the privy. It let itself into your bedroom and demanded to be part of your nuptial bliss. And this Death now, black and dank, brazen and daring on Guy’s face. Claude burst into laughter in the loneliness of his study. He realized that he had never actually seen Guy kill anybody. Sabrine was indeterminate. He had not even seen Guy take blood from a human.

The news of eventual move to Toulouse could not shake off his trepidation. Guy grew in a nastier proportions, imp, demon, beast, wife-killer, would be sodomite of a dryly withered master. For all the mental defamations, there was yet the unmistakable humanity in Guy that would have Claude wonder in the dark night of Guy’s motives and his insecurities about Roland, or his developing physical allure.

During a fencing lesson, Jean-Baptiste told Claude about Guy’s complicated relationship with Betrada.

“And so that he mocks a woman who can kill him so easily,” Claude asked.

“Guy does not like anyone he can’t kill easily,” Jean-Baptiste said.

Claude said, wiping his runny brow, “Is she of gentle countenance towards humans?”

“She is truly like a child. I wonder how she feeds at all, she can’t abide with hurting humans.”

“I would fain to meet her.”

“Well, she’s a little … odd.”

“All your kind are odd.”

“But she’s very odd. She is strong, gently and odd.”

“How does one meet her grand eminence?”

“She has abodes all over France and Burgundy. I recall, she has a chateau in Nîmes—” Jean-Baptiste looked at Claude crossly. “I tell you, Guy despises her.”

Claude murmured, “Guy despises the sun and moon. He killed his wife, just for the cause of honor.”

“A wife? I knew not he had a wife. He can barely keep to one woman a day.”

Claude nodded in uneasy agreement. “This roué would be this great Diamhin you hold so dear.”

Jean-Baptiste smiled insincerely. “You despise us, and still you live with our kind.”

“Dislike does not obviate the benefit of our relationship.”

Claude left the Jean-Baptiste, feeling no wiser on his predicament. The conversation had elated Claude with a fresher wind of ire and contradictions. Oc contradictions on Guy, on himself, all these contradictions would not let him study in peace. And then the new of Amaline getting married catapulted him into a higher orbit of self-flagellating rumination.

What staggered him was the finality in the development. Whatever concerns about Sabrine using her to attack him were no longer in force. She would be married, and in the fullness of time, be the laden mother, become another dull woman who abandons charity for the sake of their progeny, wizen and shrink into the sempiternal crone, and then death. Time’s wheel blundered forward to an inexorable end of spent hopes and blasted decay. This finality stamped him into the unyielding earth of loneliness. And that was it, the loneliness that pickled and macerated him, bundled him up and pelted him a miserable willing sheep before Guy’s grinning eminence.

God’s toes. Claude cursed as he split firewood in the backyard. The sunset was a bloody morass. To his right, an embankment raised a shelf of thrushes and blue robins. One could see on its wall of earth roots plashed in with the burls of clumped clay. And off over the length of the yard, greens were interspersed with the tawny pallor of autumn.

Inside Guy was still in the virile summer of mirth, canorously singing over the hammer-off and pull-ons of lute strings about Claude hardening on his bite. The ringing vehemence of his lyrics rankled Claude into struggling with a wood block. The block was his fir of obstinacy.

He stopped, snorted back the astringent phlegm in his nostril, then hacked irritation upon the logs. His lowly strength was none fleshed over his lissome arms struggling with the axe. Cold raked his damp forehead, and memory rushed its ill winds from the white heights of the Pyrenees Mountains. The forests of pine and firs. The sheep upon sheep, that must moved from the valley to mountain and to valley again. And the partarge he sullied, turning away from his duty to seek something more than sheep. Running into begging brigands in Palmiers. Running into Antoine Le Salle, who bent over in every street corner for the cause of dowries for his sisters. In the same manner he walked away from his ostale in the mountains, he walked away from Antoine and scorned the demands of partarge. The Sissy died because of him.

“How you dim and droop.”

Claude awakened to Guy’s shirtless figure leaning on backdoor. His chest blackly hirsute, the compact stolidity of his frame—Claude was dazed in its lascivious glow. But Sabrine’s bloodied face, Guy’s thick fingers growing talons clasping her … Claude’s throat itched hotly. He searched for the blue cornflowers amongst the autumn green of the yard. How did one wretch desire from a form of death? This was not desire, but curiosity, a vexing curiosity that haunted him to know of Guy’s true self. What on this wife? What on killing on command for Roland? How did the man who was esteemed powerful be the liegeful dog of another? Questions sprouted hot and heavy on each of hastening breath. He swung a mighty vicious hack upon the log. The two halves fell over cleanly, but the actions were nowhere as mollifying.

He stuck the butt of his axe on the ground and blurted, “Wherefore did Roland order Yvette dead?”

“Bless me, is that what colors your humor yellow?”

Claude shook his head and decided that now was not the moment to raise the rancor of a damned sorcerer. Guy ejected laughter, interjecting his resolve, and left him lonely in bafflement. The sounds thinned away as Guy leaned head against the doorway. His black hair fell over the thick hump of his shoulder. “Roland didn’t order me. She transgressed his honor and her death was demanded.”

Claude felt foolish now. For certes, Yvette had breached some empyrean etiquette beyond his comprehension.

Guy drew strands of hair away from his cheeks. He drew a long gaze into the black ingress of the cottage. After a few moments wherein one could hear the rustles and far rushes of the stream, he gave full attention to Claude coldly bare in amazement

“You asked about Yvette, and you must speak to me of Andre.”

“Andre?”

“How now Claude, this Andre must have been a varlet in bed. He was your first?” His green eyes were a bright and wide.

Ruffled, Claude attacked the task at hand, conflagrated in a zeal to fend off the horde of Antoine memories. His axe got stuck, wedged into the log, and in apotropaic fluster, Claude fought and wrested to cleave the fir of obstinacy. But a sudden cold white hand held back his forearm.

“Pitiful.” Guy took over the logging, and split the thing in a graceful precision, not straining to laugh or smile. Nothing baleful in the twisting and hardening of the muscles working over the broad back. Nothing dimming about the Olympian force tensing his forearms. Claude stood aside obsequiously unable to assail truth on the beautiful thing, who would surely take his last breath.

“Indeed the pillicock was your first,” Guy said, his brow arching over the bridge of his nose.

“I remember naught of my first. Not his name or his face. I remember he paid me one livre …” He remembered turning over the livre to Antoine, as his apology for being such a careless braggart with Simon de Gaillard. Claude hooked a hard fist to his lips. Simon de Gaillard, his first infatuation, his first calamitous mistake.

He shrugged off the past and its deathly echoes and looked forward to the future. “Perchance we forget about university and we hasten to employment with a lord,” said Claude tiredly, “I can be a notary or a scribe?”

“What babble you give.” Guy swung a prying stopper with the axe over the log. With a self-satisfied smile, he put the pieces away, then stopped, calculated. “I give you the earth, but you insist on pebbles. I would have my pride in seeing a whore educated. Bore me not with weak tales, or I shall have to eat you too early.”

Claude was hollow as an empty church. The words echoed in the crypt of his soul, re-echoing hither, thither, fainter and steadier its destructive force. It sucked of mettle and red humor, and left him mired in the impalpable dregs of self-denial on his instinct to live. And thus Claude abandoned himself to the compass of his confusion.

Claude took those words gladly; however, Guy took the a mantle of aloofness. The music ceased. Women stayed away. He spent more time with forgotten sword, staring, seething, polishing it, swinging it, playing unknowable fancies. Claude was grateful for the new somber quiet. But the somber quiet lent itself to licentious fascination at Guy who had taken to practicing sword stances in the back yard. Intent pulsated on on the hard arms, it polished his face, and in those long moments watching man swinging strokes, a tiny desire was birthed. What a precious thing Roland had in him. What would marvelous thing it was own a man of complete loyalty. If he too could have Guy to be his right arm. What enemies would he vanquish? What men would he conquer with it?

But no human could control Guy, Claude demurred in his heart. Not while Roland was around to play with him. Claude felt rather sullen about that. And if he could keep Guy as his own, he would not let Guy discomfit him or take his debt. But how could he win against a man ten times stronger than himself? There might be a way with Betrada …. If he surrendered himself to her mercy, he just might prevail.