“Joana.” I nodded.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing out so early?” Instead I pitched a stone into the water to measure the pace of the current, watching as it drifted from the surface to the bed. “I’m headed to Richard de Calne’s house,” she said.
“Going to gawp at the green children, I suspect.”
“Going to
work
with the green children.” Her voice was thistleish with irritation, and I had to smother a grin. It was one of my joys to provoke her. “I’m teaching the girl her duties as a woman,” she said. “De Calne plans to raise her to his wife.” She swung the copper-colored horsetail of her hair over her shoulder. “So are you going to take me across or not?”
I slapped my palms against my back and said, “I’m at your service, dear,” but she winked at me and declared, “No, Curran, I want to ride up front”—which is exactly what she did. She wrapped her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck. I swung forward with her into the river.
As I carried her deeper into the water, she allowed herself to sink slowly down over my crotch, exaggerating her fall with each jerk of my stride. The muscles of the current pulled at my ankles. I could feel her releasing her breath in a long, thin rope against my chest, and my nose began to prickle with her scent. “Why so quiet, Curran?” she asked. “Hmm?” When I set her on the other shore, she placed a slow-rolling kiss on my lips and ran her finger up my penis, from the root to the ember, which was visibly propping up my waistcloth. “So what do I owe you?” she whispered into my ear.
I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed the knuckles. “No charge,” I said.
Sometimes I wish it was still that way.
I was leaning forward on my stone, eating a boiled egg one of the farmers had given me for his passage, on the morning the monk arrived. I watched him hobble around the end of the stables and follow the path toward the river. His robe was coated so thickly with dust I could not tell whether the cloth underneath was brown or white. “Tell me,” he asked, planting his staff at my feet, “have I reached Woolpit?”
“You have.” I cast the eggshell halves into the water, where they went bobbing off like two glowing boats. I have watched the river for many years, and there is nothing it won’t carry away. I’m told that if you follow it far enough into the distance, past the hills and the long forest of pines, it empties into the sea, offering its cargo of sticks, bones, and eggshells to the whales, but I have never been that far.
“I’ve come for the monsters,” said the monk. The sun shifted from behind a cloud, and he squinted into the glare.
“The children, you mean.” I pointed across the river. “They’re at the house of Richard de Calne.”
“The soldier,” he said. “Yes, so I’ve heard. How much for passage?”
“Three coins,” I said. He drew open the pouch that was sagging from his belt, handed me the silver, and then rapped my leg with the end of his staff. “Up,” he ordered.
I looked at him grayly. He was not a large man and I could have broken him over my knee, but instead I pocketed the coins, counting repeatedly to three in my head.
While we were crossing the river, I allowed him to slip a few notches lower on my spine so that the hem of his robe trailed in the water and took on weight. Snake-shapes of dirt twisted away from him downstream, but he did not notice. He told me that he had heard of the green children from a beggar in the town of Lenna, who had informed him fully of their strange condition. “They speak a language known to no Christian ear,” the monk recited, “and are green as clover. The girl is loose and wanton in her conduct, and the boy shudders at the touch of any human hand. They are a corruption to all those who look upon them.”
“Most of what you say is false,” I said. A little whirlpool spun like a plate on the surface of the water before it wobbled and came apart. “The children have learned our own tongue now, or at least the girl has, and while I can’t speak for anyone else, they’ve certainly done me no harm.”
“You’ve seen them?” he asked.
“I have, and they’re no danger to anyone.”
He made a scoffing noise. “Yes, but you are clearly an ignorant man. I’m told they will eat nothing but beans. Beans! Beans are the food of the dead, and the dead-on-earth are the implements of Satan.”
“They eat flesh and bread, just like the rest of us. It was only those first few days that they ate beans.”
“The devil quickly learns to hide himself,” he said dismissively, as though he had tired of arguing with me. “I aim to baptize them, and if they won’t take the water, then I aim to kill them.”
I stopped short, anchoring my foot against the side of a rock. I could feel the anger mounting inside me. “You won’t harm them,” I said.
“I will do as my conscience demands.” He cuffed my ear. “Now move, you!”
At that, I whipped my body around and let him drop into the water. He sideslipped downstream, tumbling and sputtering in a fog of brown soot, before he managed to find root on the riverbottom. Then, bracing himself with his staff, which swayed and buckled in his hands, he hitched his way slowly to the other shore. By the time he staggered onto the rocks, I was already sitting against the high ledge of the bank. His robe hung on his body like a moulting skin, and his hair curtained his eyes. “You—!” he said. He flapped his arms and water spattered onto the shingle. “I want my silver returned to me.”
I did not feel the need to answer him. Instead, I reached into my pocket and retrieved the coins, slinging them at him one by one. They thumped against the front of his robe and fell to the rocks with a ting. He picked them up, then straightened himself and set his eyes on me. “I have a mission,” he said. “God has given it to me. I will not be discouraged from it by the muscles of any Goliath,” and he went stamping up the road into Woolpit, wringing the water from his clothing. Three blackbirds landed in the path behind him, striking at the dirt.
It was late that afternoon when I heard that the boy had died.
I abandoned my post by the river that night to attend the burning of his body. The pyre had been laid with branches of white spruce and maple, and the silver wood of the one and the gold wood of the other carried a gentle, lambent glow that seemed to float free of the pyre in the air. The moon was full, and I could see the faces of the townspeople by its light. Alden was there, and Joana, and the boy Martin, along with the blacksmith and the reapers and all the other men and women of Woolpit. I had never seen so many of them gathered together in one place. The monk, though, was nowhere among them. He had indeed baptized the children, I learned—immersing them in a basin of water, each for the count of one hundred—but while the girl had survived the dunking, the boy had not. He was already weak with illness, and when his body met the water, it stiffened in a violent grip and went still as the monk pushed him under. One of the servants who was watching said that he breathed not a single bubble of air. When de Calne learned that the boy had died, he set his men on the monk with clubs, and the monk was made to flee by the western road.
There was some discussion between de Calne and Father Gervase, the town priest, as to whether or not the boy ought to be buried in church ground—had his spirit passed from him before, during, or after baptism?—but finally it was decided to follow the path of caution. They would allow the fire to consume him.
The boy was laid out on the pyre inside a white sheet painted with wax, and as we stood about the fallow field watching, de Calne signaled to his servants and a ring of torches was driven into the wood. The flames were tall and bright, the smoke so thickly woven that it blotted out the stars. Our faces were sharp in the yellow light, which was clear and steady, so that our shadows scarcely wavered. I saw the green girl holding on to Joana, her arms wrapped tightly around her waist. A moment later de Calne stooped at her side, taking her chin in his hands. He stared into her eyes with a strange, questioning zeal until she quailed away from him, hiding her face in Joana’s dress.
The fire burned long into the night, and I fell into conversation with the merchant brothers Radulphi and Emmet. They were deliberating over what had killed the boy, and they had flatly differing notions on the matter, as they had on so many others. “He was not of this world,” said Emmet. “That much was clear to see—and so, of course, he rejected the baptism. The sacraments are for members of the body of Jesus Christ. The boy was a member of no body but his own.”
“But the girl accepted the water without sign of affliction.” Radulphi smacked his palms together as he made his point. “And it’s not at all clear that the children are from another world. They might have gotten lost in the flint mines of Ford-ham, nothing else, and simply wandered around the mine shafts until they came out inside the wolf-pits. It’s happened before.”
“Then how do you explain the color of their skin?” I asked.
“It was the greensickness, like the chirurgeon said.”
“Not likely,” said Emmet. “And if it wasn’t the baptism that killed the boy, then what was it?”
“Starvation,” said Radulphi. “His body wasn’t accepting the food he ate, and so it devoured itself.”
“At the very moment he touched the water?” Emmet smacked his own palms together. “Hah!”
Radulphi had been working an acorn between his fingers, and he tossed it to me. “You haven’t told us what you think, Curran.”
“What do I think?” I was, as I have said, a young man then, and my answer was a young man’s answer: “I think it’s foolish to argue over matters that cannot be decided. Who knows why our spirits depart, and who can say where they go when they do? These things are a mystery. Nothing more can be said.”
I have grown older since then, if only occasionally wiser, but I have tried to pay attention to what happens around me, and there is one sure thing my age has taught me: death is no mystery, in its cause if not in its consequences. If Radulphi were to ask me his question today, my answer would not be the same. I would tell him instead what I have seen with my own eyes: you can die of too much, and you can die of too little, and everybody dies of one or the other. That night, however, I simply fell silent. The shadow of the boy’s body flickered in and out of sight inside the flames, and as the wood settled, de Calne’s men prodded at it with long, forked sticks to keep it from tumbling free.
“I still believe it was the baptism,” said Emmet.
“And I still believe you’re an idiot,” said Radulphi.
I cast the acorn into the fire, listening for the nut to explode in the heat.
It was ten years or more before I saw the girl again. The last of the trees were turning color with the end of autumn, and the air had the fine, dry smell of burning leaves that signals an early snow. I was resting against the edge of my stone, worn smooth from all my years of sitting, when a young woman emerged from the spinney of elm trees by the tavern. She walked swiftly but deliberately, turning occasionally to look behind her as though sweeping the ground for footprints. I crossed the river to be ready to meet her on the other bank.
“I need passage over the water,” she said when she arrived. Her breath was coming rapidly, in thick white plumes. “Quickly. How much?” she asked.
“Four coins,” I said.
She counted out the money from a leather satchel hanging at her side. A shirt that had been tucked neatly inside poked out from the broaching after she tied the straps down. “Is there anybody following me?” she asked.
The sky was hidden behind a single flat sheet of clouds, and the path into town was long and shadowless. Even the birds were resting.
“No one,” I said.
“Good.” She handed me the silver, then shifted her satchel so that it fell over her buttocks and climbed onto my back. “Let’s go.”
The water was frigid that morning. It rose around my stomach in a sealed, constricting ring, and I began to shiver. I couldn’t help myself. Even the year before, the chill of the water had seemed only the barest prickle to me, a tiny gnat to swat away with my fingers, but with each passing month, ever since the summer had fallen, I had noticed it more and more. The young woman tightened her arms around my chest and said, “I hate this—crossing the water. I feel sick inside.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
It was then that she made a clicking noise in her throat, and I could feel her seizing upon a memory or perception. You learn to recognize such things when you carry people as I do: it’s in their posture and their breathing and the power of their grip. In this case, it was as if all the heaviness drained from her body into mine, then gradually returned to her. “I remember you,” she said. “You were here by the river on the day I came.”
Whereupon I realized who she was.
Her body had spread open into its grown-up shape and become paler over time. Her skin was now a yellow-gold, like that of the spice merchants who travel through Woolpit from Far Asia.
“Seel-ya,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“You look—different.”
She almost smiled. “I know. I lost most of my color a long time ago. The chirurgeon says it was the change in my diet, but people take on new colors all the time as they grow older, don’t they? They’re like caterpillars turning into butterflies.” She tensed suddenly. “Tell me, is there anybody following me yet?”
I looked behind me. “Still no one.”
“Good,” she said, and her muscles relaxed. “Then so far he hasn’t realized.”
I bent my thoughts to what she had said about people taking on new colors. It was not without its truth. The tillers and planters, for instance, were gray with a soil that would never wash out of their skin—you could recognize them by the stain of it on their hands and faces—and my own body had turned a rich chestnut-brown across the chest and shoulders from the hours I spent in the sun. Children were born with murky blue eyes, and only later did they become green or brown or hazel, or the lighter, more natural blue of the living. Old people faced with their last sickness turned white as tallow as they took to their beds. I caught my likeness in the water and saw the two long cords of silver in my hair. I deposited Seel-ya on the shore.