Tobias began to weep. “Keturah—he died of the plague.”
XI
J bestow my first kiss.
My lemons had brought plague. I had brought plague to my beloved Tide-by-Rood. Had Lord Death not warned us about Great Town? Plague. The word stopped up my ears and filled my mouth and throat so sufficatingly I could not speak for a moment.
Tobias put his face in his hands. “I am sick, Keturah,” he said.
Gretta threw her arms around him, and I stroked his hair. “Do not be afraid,” I said.
Tobias raised his face to me. His tears had mixed with the dust from the journey, making gray, chalky lines down his cheeks.
“You must tell no one what you know, and I will go to Lord Death,” I said, and now I was crying too.
“It is too late to keep it secret,” Gretta said. “Padmoh has already flown to spread the news.”
“What are you going to do, Keturah?” Ben said to me, and there was fear and accusation in his voice. “Is it true that you have brought death into our midst?”
Down in the village I could hear shouts and screams.
“They will think you have brought the plague, Keturah,” Beatrice said, her hands clasped as if in prayer.
“But I have, my friend,” I said. “They will be right.”
Gretta went to the window. “They are coming!” she said.
Grandmother came to me in her nightdress. “You must go into the wood and hide, Keturah,” she said, and her voice was chillingly calm. “I will pretend you are here and not let them in. I will forestall them as long as I can.”
“I will go into the forest, though not to hide,” I said.
Just then I heard a clattering of hooves on the cobbles outside, and a great pounding at the door.
“Ben, you must protect Grandmother,” I said.
“I? How can I protect her from a mob?” said Ben helplessly.
Again there was pounding, and the door flew open. In the doorway stood John Temsland and Henry and a number of young men.
“We will disperse the mob,” John said. He dismounted. “Take my horse and flee, Keturah. Run away. Go to my father at the king’s court. I will find you there.”
“No, I go to the forest. Protect Grandmother. Be silent about where I am, and trust me.”
I took Tobias’s hand and ran out the back door and into the forest. We ran together until we could no longer hear the cries of the villagers. “Now we must wait,” I said. “He will come. He always comes.”
And truly it was not long before Lord Death on his horse emerged from the trees, his cloak billowing behind him like great black wings. He rode slowly and surely. His face was beautiful and terrible with resolve.
In the light of day he seemed appalling. How dare he ride in the sunlight without apology, without shame? He and his great horse were together a massive shadow that drained the light out of the day. The horse’s feet drew down the clouds in their wake, so that it seemed he walked in fog. The trees greedily sucked up the sunlight and left none but deep green shadows to drift down to the forest floor.
“Oh, Lord of Heaven,” Tobias whispered beside me. “I can see him now, too.”
The freckles on his face stood out in bold relief. There was no time to comfort him.
Lord Death looked down at me from a great height, and his expression was dark with bitter power. The clouds that now covered the sun made the whole world gray, and even the leaves seemed of doubtful color. Tobias crossed himself and began to rock.
Lord Death dismounted and bowed to me, a stately bow, and I returned it with the deepest of curtseys. He did not flinch from my gaze, nor I from his. My eyes asked him, asked him why, why, why.
At last he said, “It would have been enough, the changes you have made in the village, but—”
“It’s my fault—my lemons. I brought the plague,” I said.
“I warned you to stay away from Great Town,” he said, turning a withering look upon Tobias. Tobias whimpered. A wind arose. Black clouds banked higher and higher upon one another, as if the whole earth were burning and the sky were choking with dark smoke.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you destroy our people, the innocents?”
“Are they so innocent, Keturah?” he asked. “Those who gather against you and would burn you alive even now if they could find you?” His voice made the ground beneath me shake.
“Do you think I don’t know that the plague does not pick and choose? What of the children, the little children? What of them?” I asked. My voice sounded small and lost, as if drowned in a great wind. But he heard me.
“If untimely death came only to those who deserved that fate, Keturah, where would choice be? No one would do good for its own sake, but only to avoid an early demise. No one would speak out against evil because of his own courageous soul, but only to live another day. The right to choose is man’s great gift, but one thing is not his to choose—the time and means of death.”
To this I had no answer.
I knew what I must do.
I raised my palms to him. “Forgive me,” I said. I did not recognize my own voice, it was so choked and piteous.
There was a crack of lightning in the distance, and again thunder, only closer now. The gray clouds above us began to roil and blacken, but there was no smell of rain. The air was dry as old bones.
“Do not ask, Keturah!” he commanded quietly, but in his voice was the hint of a plea.
“Forgive me, my lord,” I said, “but I must ask.”
“It is too late,” he said. “Goody Thompson and her husband and her two babies are already sick with it. And others ... It is too late.”
“No, sire, no. I know that nothing is too late for you. I ask—I ask—”
“Keturah!” His cry echoed against the clouds as if his voice and the thunder were one sound.
“My lord, I ask—”
“Do you dare, Keturah?” The sky around us was near as dark as night, and lightning snaked silently overhead. Tobias fell to his knees beside me, then fainted utterly away. The thunder and the wind roared around me.
“His life! His life and”—I raised my hands higher— “and all of Tide-by-Rood! And the king, and—and you must make my friends happy, though I die. I do ask. You cannot deny me!”
I did not look up. I saw his boots before me. And then, though the wind thrashed in the grass and rocked the forest, though the black sky railed and lightning flashed, all near us became silent. In the silence, his voice spoke into my heart.
“Keturah, don’t you know your soul is mine? Not a man on this earth, no king, no wise man, is greater than I. Every one of them humbles himself before me one day. Yet you, Keturah, a peasant girl, bargain with me, rob me, and ask greater and greater favors of me—all the while saying you will marry for love! What do you say to this?”
The wind in my face made it hard to breathe. “What if, this time, I gave you something,” I said. “Something precious.”
Dark shadows leapt around him. “There is nothing you could give me,” he said, with great dignity.
I stepped closer to him.
I traveled a hundred miles in that single step. In a stride, my village was so far away I could scarcely remember it. It would be a journey of a thousand days to return.
There was no breath in him, no flush of blood, no taint of sweat or tears. Next to him, I felt the grossness of my own body, how more I was like the earth than I was like him. He was air and wind and cloud and bird; I was dust and worm.