Keturah and Lord Death

I glanced around Goody’s small house. There was little in it but a bed and a pot or two, but she had picked fresh grasses to grace her window. I remembered that once when I visited her, she welcomed me as graciously as a queen might welcome a guest to her palace, and how I had envied her and her straw bed and her husband in it beside her, and her son too. Standing there now in the warmth of her joy and her home, I shivered to think of Lord Death’s hand on my face. I gazed again upon the newborn, for it warmed me to do so, and meant to hold his tiny fingers, but Goody’s husband blocked my hand. He shook his head. Grandmother, busy with Goody, did not notice.

When I opened the door to leave, Goody’s husband came to see me out. “I thank you, Keturah, for my new son. But I bid you, come no more to my house again.”

I could see in his face how much it had cost him to say this.”I will follow your bidding, sir,” I said, and I left.

The sound of the midnight crows scraped against my heart as I made my way to the top of the village and toward the forest.

The oaks that rimmed the forest seemed to beckon with their long arms. “Come,” they whispered, “come.” But I knew that only a little way into the forest were brooding pines and towering elms. Dead brown needles crunched under my feet upon the path. I was afraid to veer off, knowing the tricks of trees.

I thought of turning back. With every step I thought of it. But I knew I could not save my life by ru

I stopped. There, off the path in a glimmer of moonbeam, was the great hart that had led me once almost to my death.

“And for all these many years Lord Temsland has not found you,” I whispered. He was very still—not afraid of me, but wary. “No other stag has ever been able to elude the lord,” I said softly, “for he is nothing if not a fine hunter. How... ?”

The hart lived ever in the shadow of the wood. He knew its winding ways, knew where to find its hidden brooks of water. When the forest’s darker night fell upon him, then he rose up and led his herd to succulent herbs and fat nuts and sweet grasses. He lived side by side with death and was not sad.

“So that is why you escape Lord Temsland—Death has bargained with you too,” I said. “But why?”

“Because,” said a voice behind me, “he is so gloriously beautiful. Like you.”

I turned to see Lord Death, and even in the dark I could tell that his eyes were upon me as if he had forever to consider me. I held my breath, waiting for him to seize me and take me away on his horse. But instead he leaned against a tree.

“Sir, we have plans to clean and repair the village, so the plague will not come.” I was like a child who could not wait to tell her news. Me he might have, but he would not have my people. Not yet.

“Have you plans? Did I tell you that would help?” He sounded amused.

“No—but I inferred,” I said.

“It will not be enough if Lord Temsland allows traffic with Great Town,” he said bluntly. “There, the plague has already begun.” He shifted to fit the curves of the tree he leaned against. “So—the end of the story, Keturah. Did the girl find her true love? Tell me the end of the story as you promised you would.”

I had not thought about the ending of the story at all, so much had I been thinking of my own ending. I cast my mind about for a way to begin.

“Once there was a girl—”

“Ah, the saddest of endings.”

“—who discovered Death’s secret.” Fear must be a fine storyteller, for I had no idea where these words had come from.

“This is not an ending but a begi

“It is all part of the same story, sir.”

He frowned. “This story is less believable than the first. But go on.”

“His secret was . . . that though he was Death, and beyond all wanting, yet he wanted something, yearned and mourned and raged in his heart for something as only an immortal being can.”

Lord Death had become very still. The trees around him were utterly silent, and even the air seemed to hold its breath. I too was silent for a moment, frightened, awed, to discover that this story was as true as the last.

“And what was it that Lord Death wanted and wept in his heart for?” I continued. “A love of his own, a consort to adorn his endless and hallowed halls, a companion who would comfort his heart when it broke from the sadness of his errands, who would weep with him when he carried home little ones in his arms, who would greet him with a joy equal to the terror with which mortals greeted him. Above all, he wished for a wife into whom he might pour his passion—”

“Hush. You try my patience,” he said coldly.

But I did not, could not, stop. “But who would love such a one? What maid wished for gold coins to shut her eyes, or a satin-lined coffin for her marriage bed? What maid would come willingly? For he would have it be willingly.”

The shadows that unfurled from his cloak had vanished, and his face caught the first light of the coming dawn, and he appeared no more than a man, no less than a great and warlike lord. I looked away, fearful that it might anger him that I saw him so vulnerable, so entranced by my story.

“And so he did his endless work,” I continued quietly, “without feeling, without pity, without rest, for to open his heart to these would be to open his heart to his loneliness and longing, and that was beyond bearing.”

“There are some who come willingly,” he said quietly, as if he were afraid his own voice would break the spell of the story.

“There were some who came willingly,” I said, as if I had not heard him, “not out of love, but out of sickness and sadness and a lack of understanding. He wanted none of them. And so he waited without waiting, and dreamed of what he could not imagine, and performed his terrible work and lived only in the moments out of which eternity is spun, knowing it was hopeless.”

I stopped. The sun was almost up now, but Death had never been afraid of day.

“And then?” he asked.

I said nothing.

“And then!” he demanded.

“And because the girl knew his secret, she asked, ‘Give me this day, and I will tell you the ending tomorrow.’“

I finished with closed eyes, for I felt his angry gaze as a cold in my bones, and I heard his icy breath come more quickly. I waited to feel his impatient touch, and to be swept into the heart of the still and ever-dark forest, never to return.

But the touch did not come.

I opened my eyes.

“For an ending to this story, I can pay a day,” he said. “Come at day’s end. And do not be late.”

I stumbled home to my bed and, fearing the dark behind my eyes, fell asleep with my eyes open.

VII

An account of an invitation to the chamber of John Temsland, which chapter is highly recommended

to the learning and edification of the aforementioned blushing young maidens.

Plague. It was my first thought upon waking. My second thought was of the touch of Lord Death last night. I could still feel his fingers under my chin, so close to my lips, where my breath was frozen.

I leapt from my bed and then sank back again, catching my breath. I remembered, then, my promise to come to Lord Death again tonight.

I held my hands before me. They trembled like an old woman’s.

“You slept late, Keturah,” Grandmother said tenderly. “Come, eat.”

I willed myself to the breakfast table and ate what I could. I realized I had lost my sense of smell, and with it, my sense of taste. The porridge tasted like paste; the fruit was not what it had been the day before.