Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

Kuonrat wiped his sword clean, the steel still steaming with the heat of the blood. “The Lord’s will does not matter. Only mine does.”

He turned and said, with a laugh into your shocked face, that he had something much better for you. Something not nearly so painless or so mercifully quick. After all, your disappearance had continued for much longer than that of Brandeis.

Kuonrat gathered his mercenaries and gave out their tasks. One third of the men were to scour the woods for deadwood and twigs. Another third was sent into Heinrich’s house to secure any items of value-food, money, clothing-that the troop could use or barter. The remaining soldiers were ordered to prepare you.

The soldiers pulled you past Brandeis’ body. The blood leaked from his neck, still, adding to the large red blot in the snow. The mercenaries pushed you up against Heinrich’s cottage, your back to the wall. They kicked at your ankles until your legs were spread wide, and pulled out your arms until they were stretched across the face of the building. When you showed resistance, they beat you and spat in your face and laughed as if this were some great joke.

A soldier, bigger than the others, walked towards you carrying an ax. My heart caught in my throat, because I was certain that he was coming to dismember you. But this was not the case. The other soldiers, the ones holding out your arms, unpeeled your fingers from your clenched fists until your palms were open and exposed. One of the soldiers held something against your right hand. The larger soldier turned the ax backwards, and I realized that the object was a nail. He used the blunt side of the ax like a hammer to drive the nail through the flesh of your palm. Even as far away as I was, I could hear the bones in your hand cracking like the neck of a chicken being broken. You howled and you jerked at your hand, trying to pry it away from the wall, but it was held fast. They did your left hand next, another nail through the open palm, another splatter of blood across the wall. Your shoulders wrenched futilely and all the veins in your neck looked as though they were about to explode.

Next the soldiers tried taking hold of your legs, but you were kicking wildly because you were in such pain. So the axman brought the sharp side of the ax head forward and swung it hard right above your knee where the ligaments meet the bone. Your thigh contracted but your shin hung useless, dangling as if connected to your body by half-cut twine. The soldiers laughed more at this, another great joke, and your hands continued to leak blood down the wall.

They grabbed you by the ankles, and it was ridiculously easy now, driving nails through your feet so that you were skewered to the wall about ten inches above the snow line. The sound of the bones breaking in your feet, so thin those bones, was so awful and the blood, there was so much blood everywhere. You looked like you were levitating, hanging from your hands; you looked like a ghost already, floating against the backdrop of the house. They wanted your weight to hang, because that would be all the more painful. They loved the way that the nails in your hands couldn’t really support you, and they loved driving new nails into your forearms so you wouldn’t fall right off the wall. The blood was draining out of your body and Brandeis lay headless on red snow, the stain now larger, now redder, and steam, steam rising. I got the crossbow from my horse, and I took a step towards the horror, wanting to run down the hill to you, and then pulled back by the umbilical cord of our unborn child, I realized there was nothing I could do. The crossbow hung in my hand, so useless at my side, my heart beating so loudly that I was certain the mercenaries would be able to hear it above the storm. There were also cries coming from me that I couldn’t control but a part of me didn’t care and a part of me even wanted to be caught, to die, because what good was my life now? But they didn’t hear me, the wind still carrying my sounds away, and they were too busy laughing, laughing in time with the dripping of your blood, and I couldn’t do anything about it without ending the life of our child.

Now the mercenaries who’d been sent for wood were returning and Kuonrat pointed to the space under your feet. They piled the wood halfway up your legs. And I knew what was coming next. The wind and the whipping of the snow made it difficult to light the fire, but the mercenaries were used to living in the wild, so they knew how to hunch their bodies into windbreaks. Soon enough, a spark caught and the twigs started to smolder and there was smoke and I could hear the popping sap as the fire caught, and it reminded me of your breaking hands and feet. Little flames were approaching your toes but you couldn’t lift them out of the way, and they were nailed to the wall anyway. And then Kuonrat instructed his archers to take up their bows and to light their arrows in the flames and the archers did it, and when the tips were on fire, they lined up in a semicircle and they angled in on you. Kuonrat told them they were not to kill you but they were to shoot the arrows as close to your body as possible, that was the game, the goal was to light the wall on fire and slowly burn you from all sides rather than just from the bottom up. But then Kuonrat had a better idea and changed his instructions and told the archers that they could hit your body, just not in any spot that would be fatal-piercing your arms and legs was fine, but piercing your head or chest was not-and he had such glee in his voice, such utter pride in his brilliance, and the archers lifted their bows and started calling out body parts-“Left hand!” “Right foot!” “Upper thigh!”-and they were good shots, they usually got the places they called. When an arrow hit its mark, everyone cheered, and if an arrow missed everyone jeered, like it was a carnival game, and the flames under you were growing larger, new flames were bursting out all around your body, igniting with every arrow.

Over the laughs and happy shouts of the mercenaries, Kuonrat called out his final goodbye to you, “Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.”

And then I knew what I had to do.

I reached into my coat and found my necklace. I clenched my hand around the arrowhead that Father Sunder had blessed, and I prayed for strength.

I lifted the crossbow. I tried to remember the lesson that you’d given. It’s all in the breathing, you had said, you steady the instrument by slowing your breathing. In, out, steady, in, out, aim. I checked once more that the arrow was properly loaded. I knew I would have only one shot, the first shot of my life and the last. It’s all about the breathing. Trust the arrow. Calm.

I asked the Lord to deliver the arrow straight and true, directly to your heart, through the snowstorm and the condotta.

Between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Marianne Engel stopped carving. There was only one afternoon in late January when she went into the basement to complete the gargoyle that had been left unfinished when she passed out and was admitted to the hospital. When this little task was put away, quickly and without any drama, she returned to focusing on her recovery-and back to preparing meals.

Since I had been released from the hospital, only once had she brought forth an extravagant feast: Japanese food, on the night of Sei’s story. But every third or fourth day during this period, she would go shopping before disappearing into her kitchen for hours. Each time she emerged, she came with a spread of delicacies from another region of the world.

Among the more notable meals was Senegalese, a rare culinary step outside Asia or Europe. For appetizers we had black-eyed pea fritters and fried plantains, followed by a sweet milk-rice soup called sombi. The main dishes: Yassa poulet, chicken marinated overnight and then simmered with onions in lemony garlic-mustard sauce; ceebu jen, fish in tomato sauce with vegetables on rice, the national dish of Senegal; mafй, a meat dish in peanut sauce that can be made with chicken, lamb, or beef-so, of course, she made all three versions; and a seafood stew with shrimp, perch, and unripe bananas. For dessert, she served Cinq Centimes, the “five-cent” peanut cookies popular in marketplaces, and ngalax, sweetened porridge made from millet couscous. Throughout the meal we sipped on mango, bissap, and monkey bread fruit juices, before ending with tea. And as much as I enjoyed the feasts Marianne Engel was preparing, the greatest benefit was that her tattooed angel wings were starting to plump out again because of the calories.