Jesse Bullington - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

“What was that about the Christ?”

“What? Nuthin!”

“Calm yourself, and remember your word,” and wood slid on wood, and the door pushed out. Blinded by the glare, Hegel stumbled inside, knocking over a small table. Stamping his feet, Hegel set Manfried on the ground. A smell of spoiled milk and sour sweat filled the thick, greasy air of the hut. The door closed behind them and the board slid back in place. Hegel whirled to confront the person who had possibly murdered his brother by forcing him to wait out in the snow on the verge of death.

The oldest person Hegel had ever seen stared back at him, a woman sixty years old if she was a day. He could be sure of her sex only by her lack of beard, her taut yet cracked face offering no other markers. Bald save for specters of white hair and swathed in rags, her bulbous body contrasted her emaciated countenance. The manticore-slayer and dog-breaker Hegel took a step back from the fearsome crone.

She grinned, black-toothed and scab-gummed. “Welcome, welcome.”

“Uh, thank you,” said Hegel.

“Hard night for traveling?” Her eyes shone in the firelight.

“Had worse. My brother’s in a bad way, though.”

“So I see.” Yet she did not remove her eyes from Hegel.

“Caught’em a touch a the pest out in the wood.” Hegel’s body hummed, either from the change in climate or her presence, he could not be sure which.

“Oh did he? Found a pest in the forest?” she asked.

“No, er, the pestilence. You know, buboes?”

“He’s got the black bulges, does he?”

“Not yet, he-” Hegel stopped short when the woman darted out a hand and poked his wounded face. He snatched for his sword, but the look in her eye held it in its sheath. He stared aghast as she licked the blood from her finger, appraisingly.

“Not out there,” she muttered, “no, no, caught a different case of death, I’d wager.”

“He ain’t dead yet,” said Hegel, turning to Manfried.

The walls of the cramped interior bulged with cluttered shelves containing bottles, jars, and heaps of bones and feathers, and from the ceiling hung a hundred different bundles of drying plants and strips of cloth. The firepit in the rear filled the room with a pungent, piney haze that masked the sickly smell of the crone, a small, snowmelt-dripping hole in the roof failing to accommodate all the smoke. An empty chair sat before the firepit and one corner held a heap of rags, the other a small woodpile.

Hegel dragged his brother onto the hearthstones. Manfried had grown pale but his skin burned, his body wracked with spasms. The crone leaned over them both, clucking softly.

“Caught a case right enough, a case of the comeuppance!” she jeered.

Hegel’s hand again reached for his sword but her tongue intercepted him.

“Calm, calm, Grossbart, remember your promise.”

“Slag,” Hegel hissed, “you watch yourself.”

She cackled in a manner only the elderly can master.

“Wait a tic.” Hegel swallowed, neck-hairs reaching for the roof. “How’d you know our name?”

“You look like long-beards to me,” she replied. “Don’t you call a thing by what it most resembles? Call a dog a dog, a beast a beast, eh?”

“Suppose so,” Hegel allowed, not convinced.

“Your brother’s dying,” she said, her voice lacking the solemnity Hegel felt the situation deserved.

“Maybe he is, maybe he ain’t. You don’t look like no barber, so maybe you should mind your mouth.”

“Well, Grossbart,” she said, “tis true I’m no barber-I’m better than one. Barber couldn’t do anything for that man, just put him on the cart for the crows. I might help him, if I was so inclined.”

Hegel stepped toward her, dried belladonna brushing his hair. “If I was you, I’d incline myself with the quickness.”

“Menacing words, menacing eyes.”

“You-”

“Careful. I’ll mend your brother, and you besides, if you do as I say.”

“What we got that you want?”

“Oh, nothing special, nothing unique. Just that thing all men got, the tail we feeble women lack.”

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in, but when it did Hegel recoiled. “I couldn’t give you that even if I was a mind to.”

“No? Even for your brother?”

Hegel chewed his lip, considered slaying the woman, thought better of it, spit twice and said, “See, I’s chaste-”

“Even better!”

“I wouldn’t know how-”

“I can teach you, it’s simply done.”

“I-”

“You?”

“After you fix’em up.”

She brayed again. “Think I trust you, Grossbart? Think I don’t know what you’re thinking? Don’t worry, it’ll be done soon, and might not be as bad as you think.”

“I doubt that. What guarantee I got you can even heal’em?”

“Guarantee’s my oath, just like yours. I can sweeten his wounds, same as I can make it sweet for you.” She lasciviously hiked her rags up around her thighs, revealing complicated networks of veins bulging under the pruned skin. Hegel smelled a stronger, acidic scent overpowering the burning wood and felt his horse meat rise in his throat but choked it down.

“Like I said,” he managed through his disgust, “I would if I could, but I can’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

She had turned and rooted through an array of jars on a shelf, her backside thrown out toward him. She turned back triumphantly with a dusty vessel, its rag stopper half-rotten. Withdrawing the rag she offered it to Hegel.

“Knock this into that gut of yours.” Her eyes glittered.

“Give me your word it ain’t poison.”

“Given, given,” she replied dismissively.

“What is it?”

“Something good. Something that’ll make you able. Hell, it’ll make you eager.”

He stared hard into the bottle, his intuition goading him to cast it in the fire and run her through regardless of Manfried’s condition. He had no doubt his brother’s soul would make it to Heaven, it was his own body he felt concern for. In the end his pride would not allow him to walk a coward’s road, and so with a prayer to Mary he downed the contents, the stuff filling his mouth with the taste of putrid mushrooms.

The room spun and the bottle broke on the stones, a yellow mist clouding his vision. Hegel turned to his hostess to inform her that no way no how would a little fungus water make him willing when his breath caught in his throat and tremors radiated outward from his groin. She reclined in the chair but had set one foot on an upended bucket, the firelight illuminating a thigh the color of goat cream. The pouty turn of her thin lips, the vulnerable want in her milky eyes, the gnarly fingers now snaking between her legs, the reedy sigh as she pushed her bottom forward on the chair to meet her digits-Hegel felt an almost-pain in his breeches, and his hands dropped to his waist to relieve the source of his discomfort.

The crone appeared no different from before Hegel had taken the draught, but he no longer remembered such simple things as his faith’s prohibition of carnal pleasures or his society’s scorn and disgust for women more than a decade into puberty. He simply saw her for the beauty she was, albeit a beauty of remarkably advanced years. Dropping to his knees in a show of contrition, Hegel crawled toward his host, who spread her legs farther on the chair to accommodate her guest. A pleasant chevre odor wafting from between her curd-textured, indigo-marbled thighs tickled the bulbous nose that soon tickled her mound, and his left hand hoisted her rags out of the way while its twin fumbled with his belt.

Cold as her outer skin felt, Hegel’s tongue nearly stuck to her frigid folds and the white wisps drifting from his full mouth mingled with the pale cloud itching his nostrils. She patiently coached him until he set off a trembling gush, refreshing, brisk wetness cooling his hot throat even as she squirmed off of the chair and pushed him onto his back. Tasting herself in his kiss, she settled onto his trowel and he worked her furrow, his rough hands surprisingly gentle as she guided his fingers from breasts to mouth to rear and back again.