Chartres, France, 1174
DAWN. THE SPIRES OF THE CATHEDRAL ROSE BLACK AGAINST THE SUNRISE AND cast long, knife-shaped shadows across the town.
The Colorman led the girl to a wide, calm spot in the Eure River where a simple crane made of long wooden poles was levered out over the river with its nose dipped into the water like a drinking bird. The girl was thin, and only a little taller than he, with dirty ginger hair that hung in tangles around her face. She might have been thirteen or twenty, it was hard to say, as her face was the blank, unprimed canvas of a simpleton, portraying no interest in what was going on around her. Her green eyes and a thin sheen of drool on her lower lip were the only things about her that reflected light; the rest of her was muted by a patina of filth and stupidity.
He’d found her the morning before, squatting beneath a cow, squirting a stream of milk into her mouth from the udder. There’d been a wooden pail there, ready for the morning milking, but she’d never gotten to it, as the Colorman had lured her away from her task with a bright red apple and a shiny piece of silver dangling from a string.
“Come along, now. Come on.”
He backed his way across the village, leading her to a stable he’d rented, where he’d given her the apple, and beer, and wine spiced with a narcotic mushroom that made her sleep until he’d awakened her today. The promise of another apple lured her to the riverbank.
“Take that off. Off,” said the Colorman, showing her the gesture of lifting her frock over her head.
She made the same gesture but failed to grasp the idea she was supposed to actually remove her dress, a grimy, woven wool arrangement that was tattered at every seam.
The Colorman held the apple up in one hand, then tugged at the cord tied at her waist as a belt.
“Off. Take it off. Apple,” said the Colorman.
The girl giggled at his touch, but what concentration she had was trained on the apple.
The Colorman uncinched her belt with his free hand, then held the apple just out of her reach as he alternately tickled her and worked her dress up to her shoulders and her arms out of the sleeves as she flinched and giggled. Finally he put the apple in her mouth and yanked her dress over her head with both hands as her full being seemed to fold over and around the apple. She stood in the mud, completely naked, except for the small silver coin suspended from a string around her neck.
She was laughing as she gnawed into the apple, and from the noises she was making the Colorman feared that she might choke before he finished his work.
“You like apples, huh?” he said. “I have another one for you after that one.”
He unslung a leather satchel from his back and removed the materials he would need. The blue was in an earthenware jar no bigger than his fist, still in the dry, powdered form, as it had to be for the glassmakers. For this, since it didn’t need to dry, or last very long, he would bind the color in olive oil, which he poured from a bottle into a shallow wooden cup to mix with the Sacré Bleu.
He stirred the mixture with a stick, until it was a smooth, shiny paste, then, with the distraction of another apple and another piece of silver, he applied the blue to the girl’s body as she squirmed and giggled and crunched away on her apple.
“She is going to be angry when she sees you,” said the Colorman, stepping back from the girl and checking over his work. “Very angry, I think.”
There was a large, flat stone tied at the end of the wooden crane, just at the level of the Colorman’s chest, and he pressed down on it the best he could, but the end of the crane in the water remained there. He grunted and hopped and swung back and forth, and still the crane only lifted a few inches.
“Girl, come here,” he said to the simple girl, who was watching him with the fascination of a cat regarding the workings of a clock.
He trudged over to her, took her by the hand, then led her to the large stone.
“Now, help me push.” He mimed pushing down on the stone. The girl watched him, having returned both her hands to guiding the apple into her mouth. Nothing.
He tried to get her to jump up on the stone, but there was no strategic placement of the apple that could get her to do that, and finally, when he couldn’t get her to grasp the concept of boosting him up onto the stone, he lashed her to it with her belt slung under her arms, then scrambled up her body and knelt on the stone as he used the girl for leverage while she made a distressed mooing sound approximating the call of a calf caught in a thicket of thorns.
But the wooden crane moved, and its far end lifted out of the water a charred, twisted mass that looked like a statue of a suffering saint fashioned in pitch. It streamed soot and muddy water back into the river. Here in Chartres, it was the tradition to both burn and drown the witches, so at least he wasn’t sifting bones out of an ash pile, as had been the case in the past.
The Colorman cringed, then chanted something that sounded more like a grunt than a prayer, repeating it until the black mass at the end of the crane cracked, showing pink, burned flesh beneath the surface.
The simple girl stopped mooing, took a great gasping breath, and stepped away from the stone counterbalance, slipping out of her rope belt as she moved. The Colorman was catapulted upward, his twisted form describing a gentle arch in the air before he plopped, ass first, onto the muddy riverbank.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said the simple girl, backing away from the whole apparatus.
“I knew you’d be angry,” said the Colorman.
“Of course I’m angry,” said the girl. “I’ve been burnt up.” There was light in the girl’s eyes now, the dullness gone. She wiped the drool from her lips with her arm and spit out the blue pigment.
“I brought you an apple,” said the Colorman, pulling the last apple from his satchel.
The girl looked at him, smeared with the oily blue, then at her own body, covered head to toe in blue, then at him. “Why are you all covered in the blue? You better not have bonked me before you brought me back.”