“There was a russet-coloured moon of ominous size too low above the whispering bushes; he danced exuberantly for five minutes beneath it after the click when his neck broke. His bowels opened. What a mess!”
—Angela Carter, “Elegy for a Freelance”
It was on the basis of his sorry reputation that we arranged for Puccio the ex-valet to desecrate the chapel. When we first arrived in town, we were told by villagers of every description—the lordlings and plainclothesmen, the monastics and innkeepers, the stewards and eelbaiters and whores—that he was a timid man and a coward. Puccio was, they said, bumbling and ineffectual, hopelessly maladroit, constitutionally avoidant of drinking and fights, a slow worker, and a punk around women. The older nuns recalled how, as a child, he’d been too scared to milk the cows. Though he had the body of a nominally grown person, all spotted and hairy, he yet retained the anxious, carping predisposition of a little boy. He was stunted and aggrieved, so pilloried as to justify any counterclaim. He was estranged from creation itself. Mwah. He was perfect.
We devised a plan: the town pariah, the dead animal glorified, and the awful village brought low. Whirlwind, heat, and flash.
To prepare for the ritual, we camped out in open forest by night. Mornings we entered the village, disguised assiduously, to collect information. Few in town knew where to find the young man, but eventually a pair of pockmarked merchants pointed us in the general direction. These days, they said, Puccio kept mostly out of sight, bivouacked with the sick and unwanted animals in the far field behind the burnt stable.
“They say he accidentally started the fire,” one of the merchants told us, clutching his wool wrap against the biting wind. “Since then he’s been a shiftless louse, Mesdames, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
The men were under the impression we were Ladies of the Privy Chamber, maidservants in the household of a regional consort. Though they were determined to play it cool in this regard, they were idiots, and their titillation was obvious.
“I’ve seen his type before,” the merchant continued. “Too lazy for a trade, too womanlike for military service.”
“And too warped for the church,” the other one said. “Prone to unholy acts, how I’ve heard it put.”
The first merchant clucked and shook his head. “You don’t know that, after all.”
“What, about his deviant behaviors?” The second man made a lewd gesture and grinned, revealing several broken teeth. “His tendencies contrary-to-nature?”
The first merchant covered his ears. “You shouldn’t speak of it, not in front of strangers—”
“It’s alright.” We affected clean, girlish accents and placed reassuring hands on their shoulders. “I’m sure we’ve heard worse before.”
“Course they have,” the second man said, looking us over, trying to be impressive. “Anyway it’s just how he is, innit? Once a stableboy, always a stableboy.”
***
We emerged from the woods on the third night, rubbed clean and slicked in hot tallow, moonlight catching where it would. Each of us had drunk heavily from the consecrated sacks of wine, and as we sprinted through the dark, our breaths inside our masks resounded like wet slaps. The members of our detachment were giddy, lightheaded by the time we reached the clearing and fixed sights on the ruined stable.
It was a four-cornered plot, patchily mown but much neater than what the townspeople had described, at whose center the smolderings of a recent campfire smoked beside some wire-lined animal hutches and a pair of shabby linen tents. Though the intervening distance was largely obscured by darkness, we’d taken care to reconnoiter the whole of the field during the prior days of close observation. We knew exactly where to be.
We squinted through the loose, flappy eyeholes, trying to bypass the smoke from the camp while our visions adjusted. Finally, at the clearing’s far edges, we saw them: our Sisters, in all their finery, standing stock still. Shapely forms, angles all glistening, fleshly knots of curve and slick straightaway culminating at their necks, where the fearsome glory of the masks slipped over the top like a churchmaid’s headdress. Gazing at them, noting their formidable bodies against the dark, their towering nakedness, the easy dominance of their stance, we felt rushes of pleasure. We loved the idea that this was how we looked. We howled the signal across the clearing. The other detachment howled back its readiness. And together we moved in.
We found Puccio in the larger tent, asleep on a pallet of loose cloth and hay, a small earthenware bowl balanced on his sweaty belly. In the corner, a clatter of personal items: sacks of food, sheep shears and farming utensils, a bridle, a guitar, other pieces of frippery. Beside these, a corpulent sow lay snoring facedown, a dozen or so fussy piglets vying for access to a single exposed teat.
“Peace?” When he woke, Puccio’s voice was high, tentative, trembling. He couldn’t see us yet, but he knew someone was there.
“Shhh,” we answered.
We bound him to the tentpole with his bedclothes. Within a minute or so we’d commandeered the rusty shears and started in on his long, greasy hair. On account of our not having gagged him, he made a lot of noise at first—shrill, ribboning sounds that seemed to aggravate the nearby animals, some of whom we could hear neighing and stomping fitfully from their hutches outside. But everyone soon calmed down, and by the time we completed his shave, Puccio had become docile, accepting, eyes sort of passively unfocused as he gazed into our false faces. It was as though, in feeling the monastic tonsure we’d cut out of his crown, he’d begun to intuit his role.
The assault on the chapel and the breaking of the town would require, we knew, another animal of sufficiently encrusted contempt. We asked after the ones in Puccio’s care: their number, the nature of their ailments, the causes of their abandonment. It turned out he kept an ancient pack donkey named Cephas who’d been worked to lameness by a village farmer, beaten badly and left at the edge of town. The creature couldn’t walk or even stand, having developed enormously inflamed hoofs; it also suffered from infections along its flanks, where it frequently worried the flesh and bit itself raw. It would be dead by Sunday.
“Can the animal be transported into town?” Our speech flowed slow, slurred almost to indecipherability; the night was heady, and our voices caused the air to warp inside the tent.
But Puccio nodded easily. “I can use the old stable van,” he said. “It made it through the fire in good shape. Two horses should be enough to pull it.”
We smiled beneath the masks, petting the halo of locks we’d left intact along the rim of his skull. Puccio’s cheeks were clammy, and a steady, obedient pulse could be seen beating out from a notchpoint at his temple while we whispered instructions into his ear. Our little monk.
***
That weekend, the chapel was full, the sabbath having drawn the attendance of nearly every townsperson: the church officials, of course, but also the midlevel nobles, all manner of working folk, indigent passersby. Sneering shopkeepers lined the benches beside combative drunks, shameless propagandists and wifebeaters, sanctimonious elders and loudmouth zealots. The merchants who’d shown us the way to Puccio’s camp were also visible in a front pew, their skinny, dour families crumpled beside them. They didn’t recognize us in our disguises, but we knew everyone, and as we scanned the room a hot feeling of anticipation moved through our centers.
The portly priest stood, and his painted throne heaved a sigh. Though he wore the highly decorated garb of his order—the ornately-woven sackcloth and cuffs, the heavy pendants and jewelry, the bulbous crown of damask and gold cloth—he resembled nothing so much as a bloated pigeon.
He began his invocation, turning toward the altar and chanting in a low voice while a pair of punctilious aides bobbed along the perimeter with perfume censers. The congregants picked up their end of the chants indifferently, eventually finding a sort of delicate unison, one filled with subtle desynchronizations and flatnesses of tone, with distracted murmurs and slow lullings. Human voices, shabby and drifting; testaments to impoverished, complicit spirits, to lifetimes of violent disregard. And our miracle, sudden and senseless, coming to free them.
We closed our eyes, listening as the crowd thrummed and droned toothily, and thought of the instructions we had given the stableboy, that night in the tent beside the broken stable. “You might imagine it as a doorway,” we’d said, directing his lolled-over head toward the small symbol we’d painted in the dirt: a loose oval, an egg shape, rendered in the darkened purple of our upchucked wine. The ritual, we explained, required that the symbol be wordlessly pondered, fixed on with concentration, revivified in the incorruptible space of one’s steadfast attention and enlarged, slowly and carefully, to a greater and greater stature. To the size of a key. To the size of a knob. To the size of a door.
“Carefully look over the door in your imagination.” Puccio’s hands had been tied, fingers outstretched, bloodless white. Tears on his cheeks as he nodded.
“Now open the door.”
At that moment, a crash was heard from the chapel’s entranceway.
We opened our eyes just as an enormous shape skidded across the floor. The broken donkey, lobbed deadweight into the center of the space. A terrible smell filled the air.
“If you wish to fatten up on blood,” a voice said, “then spill it in sight of the throne.”
A hush had fallen, but as soon as the congregants could see who was speaking, the tone changed again. People scoffed, rolled their eyes. More than one attendee gestured to their neighbor, indicating the speaker’s clerical haircut with ridicule.
“Stableboy.” From the altar, the priest snorted. “Are you good?”
Puccio entered, his head low. Stubbly patches had begun growing back in across his scalp the last few days, little crusts of dirt and bunchups of dead skin along the crown, along his neck and thin forearms and the furled hideaways beneath his threadbare tunic. He looked beleaguered, filthy, abject, the way they thought of him. But his smile was clean.
Looking up, he loosed a stream of curses, of invective, of magic in the old style. Probably he spoke of youth and humiliation, of unspeakable memory made concrete if not quite knowable—the details of what was said being academic, really, where actual practice is concerned. Nothing to relate about his words that isn’t irrelevant, not so much paltry or inadequate as altogether meaningless when conceived in context, amid generations of injustice, of massed mourning, of increments of voltage accumulated, held, and discharged, finally, in a single paroxysmal move. Of what consequence is language, anyway? We’re talking about action here.
Instantly, the building itself seemed to slip out of phase. A chair snapped and splintered of its own. A mother wept, staring at her baby. The flames in the censers leapt their containers, and the shocked aides dropped the vessels to the floor. The donkey’s hoofs began to twitch.
Puccio had been speaking continuously as he came up the aisle. “If you want to feed your gods on sacrifice,” he said, “then take a look at what it is they actually eat.”
Probably nobody heard him. The crowd pressed against itself, flexing and roiling, falling into the walls and the locked doors. The flames from the censers spread slowly, inching themselves along the timber floorplanks, fingering the tassels on the woven rugs. We stood, calmly, irrevocably, and in one move, cast off our disguises and revealed our true faces. Cries, prayers, panic. Behind us, the merchant with the broken teeth, desperately avoidant of our sightline, was trying to climb the masonry, scrambling over his family, knocking over icons and paintings.
In the cleared central space of the room, the donkey wiggled a leg, pressed on it tentatively, and rolled onto its feet. It breathed steady amid the building smoke, rocking back and forth for a moment, then reared up on its hind legs and, with an unbidden bray of pleasure, began to cross and uncross its forelimbs. It stood on one hoof then the other, trotting and shuffling, circling the burning chapel decorously. With a stately tempo, it danced a processional for the end of services.