IV
When Rycerz Telek had summoned her into the midst of the Germans, Maria had been caught off guard. Her initial impulse to help the wounded had been tempered when he had arrived to confront the invaders, to the point where she’d realized that she had overstepped herself. Fortunately, if Telek thought as much, he had kept it to himself.
Within minutes of Telek calling her down the hillside, she was one of a dozen servants of Gród Narew washing and binding wounds. Almost by accident, she became the center of the effort. For, thanks to her stepmother, she was the only servant who had a working knowledge of German.
After tending to the worst of those who still lived, she and the others assisted the recently disarmed Germans into a hay cart to travel up the hill to the fortress.
Sixteen men had crossed the river. Only fourteen had made it alive. Three more survivors were so badly wounded that Maria didn’t expect them to last the day. The old man, Brother Heinrich, was not above treating his men or helping carry them into the wagon. Even so, Maria felt as if he watched the whole process with an uncomfortable coldness.
To Maria, it was overwhelming. She rode back with the wagon, and even if she didn’t look at the wounded young men who filled the cart, the miasma of blood clung to every breath she took. Every time the creaking wheels of the cart found a bump in the muddy trail, it was accompanied by a chorus of groans from the men who were conscious.
She couldn’t help but wonder what had attacked these men so savagely. The wounds were inhuman—flesh torn and bitten. Several men were missing hands or arms, and about half showed wounds to the face that appeared to be claw marks. None of the men spoke of what had happened to them; few spoke at all. The quiet infected the Poles who treated them, so the ride back to the fortress had the mournful character of a funeral procession.
She heard some whispers from her fellow Poles: speculation that the Germans had retreated bloody from some battle and then had had the bad luck to be set upon by a pack of wolves. That explained their horrible state, and their reluctance to talk. Even so, Maria thought that whatever had decimated the Germans was unquestionably evil. Even a wild animal attacked to kill. Many of these men had been maimed, it seemed, simply for the sake of the maiming.
Maria held her cross to her chest and silently prayed to keep the Devil at bay.
Through the afternoon, the population of Gród Narew worked to accommodate the new arrivals. The order from Wojewoda Bolesław was to provide the Germans with accommodations as honored guests. This meant that, instead of being housed in the common barracks meant for visiting knights, the ambulatory Germans were split up into twos and threes and given lodgings that normally served the residents. The severely injured were placed in a series of rooms by the stables, displacing grooms and other stable hands.
Maria wondered about it until she heard one of the guardsmen comment that Wojewoda Bolesław was not just being a gracious host but was preventing any large group of Germans from assembling to plan mischief. Apparently, their leader, Brother Heinrich, had the honor of staying in the personal guest chambers of the Wojewoda himself—deep inside the central stronghold, far from the stables and the other houses where his men were being kept.
Maria thought that the Wojewoda Bolesław should be more concerned about what had attacked the Germans than the Germans themselves.
Because she was one of the few servants to speak the German tongue, Maria was one of a half dozen who gained additional duties. Along with her normal routine of assisting in the main kitchens, she now had the task of tending to one of the badly injured knights of the Order.
The man’s name was Josef—one of the men Maria hadn’t expected to make it through the day.
The kitchens had been more chaotic than usual, with the extra mouths to feed and too many people—Maria included—coming to their jobs late because of their visitors. The sun was setting by the time she had completed her duties in the kitchens. When she brought a bowl of porridge to the rooms by the stables to attempt to feed her charge, she did not expect to find the man still alive.
She opened the door to the small room, then stood transfixed for several moments, staring at the young man who had been unceremoniously dumped on someone else’s bed. His skin was pale, nearly translucent, in the fading evening light streaming in from the unshuttered window, and his face bore an expression of almost angelic sadness. Her heart caught and she found herself grieving for this man, cut down too soon—
Then she realized that Josef still breathed.
The sudden revelation struck her like a physical blow. She hastily placed Josef’s porridge on a stool and ran to the side of his bed, more afraid now that his life might slip away as she watched.
Placing a hand on his neck, she bent her ear to his lips. His pulse throbbed strong and steady under her fingers, and while his skin was damp with sweat, he was warm, not chilled or clammy. She listened to his breathing; it was stronger and steadier than she had a right to expect—strong enough that the heat of his breath warmed her ear and brought a flush to the side of her face. It was a flush that deepened to embarrassment when he groaned and turned his head so that his lips brushed the side of her cheek.
She pulled away quickly and looked at the man, briefly convinced that he had feigned unconsciousness to take advantage of her. It was a vile trick worthy of Lukasz.
But one look at Josef showed that he feigned nothing, and Maria felt shamed for thinking ill of him. Even in slumber, this man was of nobler bearing than Lukasz could ever aspire to.
If only the same could be said of his smell.
Maria wrinkled her nose. As the initial panic gave way to relief, she realized that Josef not only lived, but had fouled himself. She looked at the unconscious knight and bit her lip, slowly realizing what her duty to this wounded man would entail.
“It is my duty,” she whispered to herself. Then she retreated to fetch a bucket of water and fresh linens.
When she returned, she faced Josef with some trepidation, afraid that he might awake while she cleaned him. The trepidation vanished when she pulled aside the soiled sheets covering him.
Whoever had brought Josef here must have shared Maria’s thought that he would not make it to nightfall. They hadn’t bothered to do more than remove his armor. He still had on the torn, gore-stained padding he had worn under his mail, and his legs were still wrapped in hose rank with blood, mud, and waste.
She bit her lip again, holding her tongue for fear she might blaspheme in her anger. The Germans and Poles might not be friends, but there was no excuse for this. Even if Josef wouldn’t make it through the night, it was petty bordering on cruel to allow him to suffer this kind of indignity.
She cast aside her own embarrassment, rolled up the sleeves of her chemise, and worked on stripping the filth from the young man. It helped to think of her father, and of caring for him these past few months. She focused on the mechanics of tending to someone bedridden and too weak and insensible to care for himself.
Thinking of this young man as a frail invalid kept her thoughts on a proper course while she did what needed to be done. At least until he began groaning words in slurred German.
The first time he spoke in his delirium, the washrag in her hand was uncomfortably far up his inner thigh. She snatched the rag away, suddenly realizing that this was no frail old man she tended to. Fortunately, Josef did not regain consciousness.
Maria took a few deep breaths as Josef continued mumbling. She should go and find someone else to attend to this man; she should ask to be relieved of this duty. Rycerz Telek obviously had counted this man as one soon to die, but had misjudged Josef’s strength. Would they have given her this duty otherwise?
But what do I do, leave this poor man naked and half-washed because of my own modesty? What fault of it is his?
She sighed and took a new washrag to hand, doing her best to ignore the sounds Josef made. The only complete sentence he spoke came when she cleaned and replaced the dressing on the massive wound in his abdomen. As she brushed the still-raw edges of the wound, he sucked in a breath and said, “It is here!”
Maria heard the panic in the man’s voice and instinctively turned to look for what had invaded the room. But there was nothing.
She laid the back of her hand against his cheek, and it felt like his flesh was burning from the inside out. Her own embarrassment at tending to him seemed small and petty, and she felt ashamed.
“You poor man,” she whispered. He didn’t know where he was, or who was with him. She made a silent vow not to abandon him, and lightly kissed his forehead. “I’ll pray for you, so you can wake up and know that your nightmare is over.”
She tried to feed him, but he didn’t respond to her attempts. She had to satisfy herself with squeezing water into his mouth from a damp cloth.
She left the shutters on the small window open, to let out the air of disease. They were above the stables, but the smell of horses and manure was preferable to the smell of sickness that was rank in this room. And the night air might help cool his fever.
Outside, the sun was long gone, and a fat moon hung over the trees at the foot of the fortress’s hill. She needed to go home.
The two-mile walk seemed longer than usual, the woods darker, the shadows longer. She glanced around every time the wind creaked a branch, every time something rustled in the leaves. The woods loomed to either side, shadowed and impenetrable.
Somewhere out there was whatever had attacked the knights of the Order, whatever had wounded Josef. It was something she should fear to meet. But Maria was more afraid that Josef would die from his wounds. More than anything else right now, Maria prayed that her charge would live.
She told herself it was because she had been given responsibility for him. It was because of the wrongness of such a fine young man meeting such an undignified end. She had seen many men take up sword for their household or their God, and all accepted death as a camp follower, but they expected to meet death quickly in the heat of battle, not to succumb to fever and infection, delirious in their own filth.
Few men deserved that end—not Josef, and not her father.
That’s what she told herself.
But she still felt his breath against her ear and the accidental brush of his lips against her cheek.
When she reached the edge of her family’s farm, she sucked in a breath. Hanna, her stepmother, was going to require an explanation for her lateness, and there was little reason for Maria to believe that it wouldn’t be a long and unpleasant questioning. Her father and her stepmother always wanted a strict accounting of her activities beyond their sight.
She paused at the gate and looked at her family’s cottage. She could see the yellow flicker of a lantern shining from between cracks in the shutters. The dim light shone on the flanks of an unfamiliar horse tied up by the side of the house.
Who’s here?
Suddenly, she thought of her father. Had he …
“Papa!” she called out. She ran to her house, afraid that the horse belonged to a priest come to administer last rites or console her stepmother. “Papa!” she called again, and the door to the cottage burst open.
For a moment she felt a near-disabling relief as she saw her father push through the doorway. But it soon gave way to alarm at the expression of rage and terror contorting his face. He ran to her, clad only in a nightshirt, bellowing, “Maria!”
Maria couldn’t find her voice. He was ill. He shouldn’t be out of bed. His hair was wild in the moonlight, his eyes gleamed with some preternatural terror, and the skin of his face had flushed almost purple. He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. “You took it off! You took it off!”
“Papa?” Maria cried.
“What did you do?” He stared into her face. “Why did you take it off?”
“I don’t understand.” She hugged herself as her father shook her. “Papa, you’re hurting me.”
What frightened her most was the fact that her father was crying. “It was to keep you safe. Why did you take it off?”
Keep me safe? Her father was delirious. He must be talking about her cross. She reached up and pulled it from under her chemise. “No, Papa, I didn’t take it off.”
Her father backhanded her. She fell to her knees in front of him, clutching her face and sobbing.
“Don’t lie to me!” he screamed.
“I-I d-didn’t,” Maria sobbed into the ground.
“If you didn’t—” He sucked in a shuddering breath and stumbled backward. “If you—”
“P-papa?”
She got to her feet as her father stumbled backward again, gasping for breath and shaking his head. Her stepmother ran from the doorway, calling to him: “Karl?”
He shook his head, his voice no more than a breathless wheeze, and fell backward into her arms.
Maria held the cross between her breasts and said, “I didn’t take it off.”
Her father kept shaking his head and slid down as if his legs couldn’t support his weight anymore. Her stepmother’s voice cracked as she said his name. “Karl. You can’t leave me alone with this! Not now.” She turned back toward the door, where Maria’s three brothers stood. “Come, help me bring your father inside.”
Maria stepped forward, but her stepmother turned to face her. “Please. Not now. He’s too upset.”
“B-but …” Maria stood transfixed in front of the cottage as her brothers ran out, toward their father. As they helped carry him inside, her stepmother watched her, eyes shiny with tears and an emotion Maria didn’t want to understand.
What have I done?
The confusion and fear in her parents’ eyes confused and frightened her. Worse was the sudden unfocused guilt that consumed her.
For the first time in years, she was too keenly aware of the fact that she was a bastard child. Her father’s blood ran in her veins, but not his wife’s. Did Hanna hate her for that?
Maria followed them to the doorway, and every labored breath her father took made her shudder and left her feeling as weak as if she were the one who couldn’t breathe.
She stood in the doorway, suddenly a stranger in her own house.
Hanna and Maria’s older brother, Władysław, eased her father back into his bed; the covers were still thrust aside, as if he had sprung from his sickbed in a delirium. Her two younger brothers stepped back. The youngest, Wojciech, cried silently, while Piotr, her middle brother, held his shoulders.
Near where Maria hung back, next to the doorway, a young man tried uncomfortably to stay out of the way. Maria recognized the curly hair and the patches of stubble on his chin that had yet to make a beard. He was one of the younger sons from a neighboring farm, and he held his hat in his hand, crushing the brim in his nervousness.
“Shall I fetch a doctor—” he began.
Maria’s stepmother didn’t even glance at the boy. “And a priest. Move!”
The boy ran for the door before Maria could collect herself to remember his name. As he shoved his way by her he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how he’d react.”
He didn’t even look back to see Maria’s bewildered expression as he untied his horse and mounted to gallop the two miles back to Gròd Narew.
“Maria,” her stepmother called, “fetch your father some water.”
“Yes!” She scrambled to bring it. Her father had stopped struggling and lay still on the bed. When Maria reached his side, his eyes showed no rage or fear, only resignation. Something made her look to her stepmother for approval before raising the cup to her father’s lips. Maria couldn’t help thinking that her stepmother’s approving nod was tentative, as if some unforgiven transgression still weighed against her bastard stepdaughter.
Her father took only a few sips, then shook his head. Maria removed the cup, and he looked up at her. As she bent over him, the cross fell free of her chemise and dangled down from her neck.
He stared at it, then up at her. Then he reached with an unsteady hand and pressed it back up, against her chest.
“I didn’t take it off, Papa.”
He nodded as if he finally believed her, and let his hand fall to his side. “Karl,” Maria’s stepmother said. “Hang on. We’ve sent for the doctor.”
He looked up at his wife and very slightly shook his head: no.
“It’s not time. Please, it’s not your time.”
He took his wife’s hand and sucked in a ragged breath. “Keep her safe.”
In the end, it was the priest they needed, not the doctor.