At dusk, death came to me in the form of a man.
He was dressed in a black cape and came mounted on a black stallion. Beneath his hood I could see that he was a goodly man, severe but beautiful, not old but in the time of his greatest powers. My courage failed me. I wanted to escape, but I was too weak to stand. My limbs seemed rooted in the ground beneath me. The tree I leaned against cradled my shoulders.
I remembered the good manners Grandmother had taught me with her switch and paddle. When he had dismounted and was coming toward me I said, “Good Sir Death, forgive me if I do not rise.”
His steps slowed. “You know who I am, then?”
“I do, sir.”
The dusk deepened, as if the gloom unfurled from the folds of his cloak.
“Is it Keturah?” he asked. His voice was calm and cold, and thrilled me with fear. “You are the daughter of Catherine Reeve, whom I know.”
“Yes, sir.” He knew my mother indeed, but I did not. She had died giving birth to me. “I regret to say, sir, that, as in the case of my mother, you have come before I was ready.”
“No one is ready.”
“Forgive me, sir,” I said, without hope, “but there was something I wanted to do.”
“Your doing is past.” He hunkered down on one knee as if to get a good look at me. I saw that where his boot had been, the grass was utterly crushed and flattened. “You were foolish to come so far into the wood.”
I did not look in his face but studied instead his powerful thigh and his great, black-gloved hands.
“I followed the hart, sir, the one Lord Temsland tries to hunt, the same hart who last winter led his herd to raze the lord’s haystack.” Somehow the sound of my own story voice comforted me. “Tobias said the hart once fought off a wolf—”
“Silence,” he said.
It was not harts or wolves that would save me. I looked for worms about him, but he was clean as stone, as far from life as wind and rain and cold. Perhaps there was no story that Death had not already heard. I felt my eyes begin to close.
“My lord, I have not slept for cold and hunger and insects these three nights,” I said. “Will I sleep now?”
He stood. “Do you try to be brave? It does not sway me,” he said, prouder than a king.
That was not what I had intended, but I replied, “I am brave, sir. I have had much practice. I was born into death, my grandmother has told me many times. It filled my mouth upon my first breath. I sucked it in, Grandmother says, and cried as if my heart were broken, and even my dead mother’s pap would not console me. My father searched you out to find my mother and died before my first tooth, so that it became my grandparents’ burden to raise me. Then my grandfather died after I had lived long enough to love him. I have been in conversation with you perhaps all my life.”
Now his pale, severe face softened. “You have grown to be beautiful and honest, too, Keturah,” he said, “for all you have said is true. How old are you?”
“I am sixteen, sir,” I said. A beetle crawled on my hand, but I had not the strength or heart to brush it away.
“Sixteen—many younger have come.”
He reached forward. I held my breath, but he only brushed the beetle away from my hand. I could scarce feel his touch but for the coldness of it. I met his gaze. His face was craggy but noble, as if it were cut out of fine stone.
“If I chose a bride,” he said, “she would have your courage.”
What would it be, I thought in a moment of terror, to be the bride of Death?
“Sir,” I said, “I cannot marry you. I—I am too young.” A feeble excuse, since many in my village married at a younger age.
He appeared startled. Then he laughed, a frigid, haughty laugh. “ ‘Twas no proposal but only a compliment.”
If I had not been so weak, I would have blushed for shame.
Then he said, “You are too young to marry, Keturah. And too young to die.” He put his hands on his hips, and his cloak billowed in a breeze I could not feel. “Therefore, I will give you a boon: choose whom you will to die in your place so that you may live.”
“You mean that someone else... ?”
“Only name the soul, and it shall be,” he said. His voice had become stern again, and lordly. It echoed in the wood. “Choose.”
I thought of my poor, shabby village, nestled in the farthest corner of the kingdom, and my heart longed for it. How dear it seemed to me, and how dear all in it.
“No, sir,” I said. “I cannot.”
“Your grandmother is old,” he said. “I will be coming for her soon anyway. I say it will be her, for she is even now praying that her life be taken instead of yours.”
“I decline your offer, sir,” I said, trembling, “for I love her dearly, and the life you gave me would be too bleak without her.”
“No one declines me.”
“But I do, sir.”
His dark eyes seemed less cold then—a great relief to me—and I thought perhaps those might not be the last words I ever spoke.
Lord Death said, “Choirmaster, then? All he wants, I understand, is to sing in heavenly choirs. This I could arrange. Surely it is not long before he mourns himself into the grave.”
I shook my head. “Sir Death, if you heard him play the organ, you would know why it cannot be him. Even his saddest music makes a cloudy day one to be glad for, and a sunny day one of joy.”
“What of Tailor?” His gaze left me and lifted—toward the village, I suspected. “Though half of him lives for his children, the other half of him longs for death so he might see his wife again. He will come soon to me anyway.”
“But his children need him, sir, for as long as they can have him.”
“The village gossip, then. She causes nothing but trouble,” he said.
“She makes everyone feel better, for she can always tell you of one who is worse off than yourself. Please, not her.”
“There are many old in the village.”
“Sir, each is loved by someone young, someone whose heart would break. Besides, the old are full of sin and may need one more day to repent.”
“There are many very young who have no sins at all. I could make it quick and painless. Pick anyone—it makes no difference.”
I gasped. “I would die three deaths before ...” I swallowed the dust in my throat. “No, sir, it shall have to be me.”
“I tell you, your courage is to no avail. Many of them will die anyway, much sooner than you think.”
“Sir, what do you mean?”
“Plague comes,” he said.
Plague!
“And those who live,” he continued, “will wish they had died, so great will be their sorrows.”
Plague. Plague! The word clanged in my brain like a bell.
“I—I will tell them to flee,” I gasped. Around the common fire I had heard tales of the plague, so horrible I scarce believed them.
“The swiftest horse cannot outrun the plague,” Lord Death said, and though he said it without pity, he also said it without joy.
“When does it come? And whence?” I pressed.
Lord Death did not answer.
“Tell me—tell me how to stop it!”
“Even if you lived, it is not in your power to stop it.
Your manored lord, perhaps—but it may be too late even for his efforts. Lord Temsland has allowed his lands to fall to dire ruin.”
I did not know how that had anything to do with the plague, but I could not ask him. A sob must escape my mouth if I spoke.
“But you could be spared,” he said.
It was as if I had awakened from a three-day sleep. My mind was a whirlwind, and at its center was a single word, black and quiet: plague. I knew I must live a little while, if only to warn my village.
Then he removed his black gloves without taking his shadowed eyes from me. “You don’t mind if you die.”