Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [163]
She didn't know when, but she knew she was going to die, either with her face against the floor of the night room or swinging from a rope in the market square. It didn't occur to her to protest. She was farther away from the living than the dead, and she couldn't remember the way back. On the worst days, all she longed for was to skim right over this winter like a stone on a lake. A vague wish for time to leap forward—as in her father's last year on earth—and for it to be all at once the day of her death.
Mary found herself talking to her father a lot in the night. It was suddenly easy to do what she'd never done before: forgive Cob Saunders. For his madness, his outrageous demands, the way he'd laid down his life for the sake of eleven stolen days. Mary knew now that death moved through the crowd wearing the face of an ordinary stranger, and tapped you on the shoulder with no warning. Better to run into his embrace.
It was not that she wanted, with any great passion, to die. She still breathed in what air there was and ate the little she could scrounge, though mostly for something to do. It was more that she no longer thought of herself as truly living, or as having anything left in the world to lose. Everyone she'd ever loved had left her, and always through her own fault. She had broken her mother's heart, abandoned Doll, and killed the mistress who loved her. This made it hard for Mary to imagine a future worth staying alive for.
Late on Twelfth Night, darkness covered the whole sky like spilled pitch. The guards were drunk; they still hadn't come to bring the prisoners up to the night room. Mary was standing by the window, wrapped in half a blanket against the cold. The only light came from a lantern in the corner of the cell where prisoners were crammed around a game of dice. The yellow radiance spilled into the night and was lost. Mary couldn't feel her fingers; one hand was knotted in her blanket, the other was wound in and out of the bars. If she stayed here any longer the guards would have to tear her away like ivy, her brittle fingers snapping as they were pulled free.
She became aware at last that what she thought was the sound of sheep outside the town was a chorus of voices, almost erased by the wind. She heard men's voices, coming nearer, but couldn't make out a word of their song. Then the music broke off, and for a moment there was nothing but the shuffling of feet on the cold road below the gaol. Mary pressed her head against the bars, but couldn't see a thing in the darkness. The sky pushed against her eyes. There was a thumping on the door below.
What reared up in front of the window was a nightmare Mary had never had before. The horse was pure white, clothed not in hair but bone. Its teeth were bared in fathomless delight. Its body was a cloud, rippling in the night breeze. So it had come for her at last, thought Mary, the white horse in her dreams of riding triumphant through a crowd. The great jaw opened and shut with a clang of bone.
She must have screamed without hearing herself, because all of a sudden the window was full of prisoners, jostling for a view. Mary was crushed against the bars, her ribs registering their print. She bent her foot against the wall, but the crowd wouldn't give. Her body swayed back and forward with each surge and shove. Barely an arm's length from her, the horse's glittering sockets held her gaze.
'It's the Mari,' cried an old man behind her.
And then the song rang out and was carolled back again, from behind her this time, all around her, in the hoarse voices of condemned men, and Mary could hear the bells and tambourines from below, the answering chorus. She didn't understand a word of it. It was as meaningless as the crunch of bone when the horse's jaw lifted and fell—on a stick, she saw now. Beneath the great beast's paper ears, green ribbons swung like reins, and its eye sockets were full of broken glass. It began to prance; suddenly she could distinguish the man inside