A baker horse in medieval Paris is out on the town during the Carnival festivities.

4049 words

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He hadn't expected the applause. He stood on the rickety stage he'd helped erect with his fellow guildsmen, powdered head to hoof in flour, reciting lines in a falsetto voice—as soft and light as he could manage—while he crowned a boy as a princess.

The bakers' guild had decided to put on a different miracle play this year: instead of the usual "Saint Honoré and the miracle of the blackberry-blooming bread paddle," they were portraying the martyrdom of Saint Justina. And he, Eluard the baker, was her unicorn. So he stood there like one of the carved kings of Notre Dame, half-angel and half-symbol, nodding and smiling beneficently as she converted some ancient magician from his pagan ways, stepping close when she vowed to the audience that she would remain chaste all her life, and finally standing beside her to provide heavenly support when she was stabbed through the breast.

And then the applause thundered. Perhaps they had appreciated the technical artistry that allowed the emperor's dagger to pierce the padded breast of young Lief's costume, bursting the sachet of chicken blood that sprayed across the stage. Or perhaps they felt uplifted and ennobled by the lesson of the saint's life.

Or, Eluard thought with a cynical smile, perhaps they're just glad we did something different for once.

He took his bows with the rest of the ersatz cast, then descended the stairs behind the rough-painted scenery. The evil Emperor Diocletian—in reality, Lief's father Louis, a pot-bellied lion as merry as a brewer—clapped him on the back, sending up clouds of flour dust.

"You almost had me fooled, unicorn," he joked. "Here, dippeth thine horn in this, mine goblet, thereby purifying all it contains." It was as though he were still on the stage, still acting out stilted dialogue.

"Verily, sir," Eluard returned, playing along. With one swift move, he plucked off the false horn and shied it into the empty cup the lion held aloft. "Good job with that stab, Louis. I thought for sure you meant to skewer your son."

"Aye, well, it'd save me the hassle of keeping the whelp steered straight and true, but he's gotten rather good at crimping pie crusts, so I suppose I'll keep him around a mite longer." The company laughed and the cub blushed, stumbling as he struggled to get out of his blood-stained dress. "Are ye going back to your bakeshop, Eluard?"

"Nay, the day's half over as it is. There's no sense in going home for a bath when I'll just get dirty again," he gestured at his hooves, where flour and spattered mud mingled. It had rained the week before, but thankfully the skies for Carnival were clear and bright, with only a handful of fluffy clouds hanging in the crisp March air. Eluard dusted more of the flour from his hide, revealing that the angelic unicorn was in reality a spotty black and white horse, thick-set and sturdy. "Besides," he added, "my apprentice is keeping an eye on things."

The two bakers chatted about their trade for a bit, as was polite among guildsmen, then Louis and his son stepped aside to greet their wife and mother, the beautiful Anne. The lioness was all smiles and plaudits, but she only had eyes for her men. Eluard bowed his leave, the flowing white alb billowing out around his ankles, and made his way towards the Seine.

The stage had been set up on the eastern end of the city's primary grain market, Les Halles, in front of the building that served as the guildhall. As Eluard walked south, he could see the tips of the Sainte Chapelle and the Palais de la Cité rising above the tile roofs of the houses and shops he passed. Soon he was at the still-frozen river, echoing with the cries of ice skaters enjoying what might be the last cold weather before the spring thaw. On the banks were giant bonfires, casting their glow on the walls of the wooden Pont au Change—with its moneychangers' houses—and the ancient Milbray plank bridge further east.

The wind changed and blew the smoke westward, obscuring the buildings on the Île de la Cité and making Eluard cough. Perhaps the bonfires weren't where he wanted to spend his remaining hours before Lent, he thought. After all, it's not like I don't spend every day in front of a blazing fire as it is. And his alb—the long white tunic one of the other bakers had decided was perfect costume for a unicorn to wear—was warm enough.

He adjusted the belt where it cinched the white linen under his belly as he skirted around the roaring blazes, watching the revelers as they danced hand-in-hand, circling first deisul then widdershins then back again. Something about the singing—not to mention the rattle of the tambourine and the nasal buzzing of the crumhorn—set his teeth on edge. Perhaps I'm just not in a festival mood, he thought as he ducked down a street leading away from the smoke and noise.

The small alley was mud-paved, with the upper stories of the houses on either side coming almost together above him. He leaned against one of the timbered corners, resting his cheek on the cool and weathered plaster. After a moment's rest, he noticed that the sounds of the dancers had been replaced by the more usual "music" of the city: the shouts of neighbors, the hawking of vendors, the squawking of free-roaming geese, punctuated by the occasional gust of wind as it whistled through the knock-turn streets and alleys.

"Fresh pies, hot and fresh! Pies of small size, pies of small price!" Eluard distinctly heard the cry through the common din, like picking a single thread from a tapestry, and his stomach added its own voice to the babel. His tall ears cocked themselves and soon he located the proper direction. A pie or two was just what he needed to set him to rights again.

The smell of the golden crusts grew stronger as he approached, as did the aroma of fresh fish from the next vendor. Pulling a few deniers from the small purse tied to his belt, Eluard bought a few of the palm-sized leek and kale pies, then withdrew down a cross street to get away from the fish stall. Tossing the pies from hand to hand to help them cool, he felt he must look like one of the jugglers that performed on corners of the more major thoroughfares, along with traveling minstrels and troubadours, small troupes of acrobats, and the occasional itinerant preacher declaiming the debaucheries all around.

By now, most of the flour dust had been blown or shaken from his arms, returning them to their normal black-spotted-white. Having eaten the first pie in nearly a single bite, Eluard sighed, feeling a bit more like himself...at least until the blat of a trumpet behind him nearly made him jump out of his skin. Turning quickly to press up against a wall, he watched as the trumpeter strode by: the bull was wearing a nun's wimple.

Eluard watched, eating his remaining pie, as the small procession passed by. Obviously they were students from the left bank's Université, getting in a bit of fun for the season: drunk to a man, they wore their clerkly gowns backwards, with the hoods draping down their chest. To their backs were pinned scraps of paper or cloth with different names painted on them. Thankful for the letters he'd learned at the cathedral school when he was a colt, Eluard spelled out "Saint Acedia" on the back of one listless "monk," as floppy in his movements as a willow bough. Saint Vainglory was right behind, his chest puffed out with pillows as he mimed tales of his heroic exploits.

The horse had to chuckle as he watched them: better that the students expend their energies like this than their usual boisterous carousing. Perhaps they'll even learn a little humilitas into the bargain. I'd wager they'll be hungry after all their marching, too, he thought with a pang. If he hadn't been cast in the bakers' guild's play, he would have had his shop open and packed to the brim with the usual Carnival treats.

Sighing and drawing the alb closer around him, he continued down the street, hoping that the value in the hereafter of his participation in such an edifying and virtuous play would outweigh the lost sales' value in this world. Of course, the priests would say that the less power I gave to avarice the better, but I've got to eat somehow. Another loud crowd seemed to be catching up behind him, so again he tucked against the wood beams and plaster of one of the houses fronting the narrow path.

A knot of revelers—ordinary citizens this time—drew near, with the boisterous shouting laughter of the newly-drunk. He recognized a familiar face and stepped up beside her. "Greetings, Isolde," he said with a small bow.

The sturdily-built cow goggled at him for a second, then snorted a laugh. "Eluard? Is that you? Why're you so white?"

"I'm," he said, drawing himself up with exaggerated pride, "a unicorn."

"Ha, a hornless unicorn? Come, dance with us, let's see how those shoes fit your dainty, pearly hooves," she joked, slipping her burly arm through his. The blacksmith had her shop just a few doors down from Eluard's bakery, and they often traded with one another.

The horse hoisted the skirts of his alb, showing off his dull and un-dainty hooves and their ordinary metal shoes—paid for by a particularly light and airy ginger cake that just happened to be Isolde's particular favorite. A little two-step clopped on the packed earth below him, and sent the cow into fits of laughter.

"A dancing, hornless unicorn, with my shoes no less!" She elbowed her compatriots, gesturing at Eluard. One of them produced a rebec and began to fiddle out an Italian saltarello. Isolde thrust her half-empty bottle at another friend, so her hand was free to take up Eluard's. She led him in a bounding, quick-stomping dance; the brawny cow would not be denied, her strong hands on his back and fingers showed no signs of slacking as they leapt and spun together, and he found he was laughing too.

On one pass, he reached out and plucked the bottle from the ram who'd been holding it for Isolde, and took a long draught, not missing a step of the dance. Sweet and tart, the new wine's bubbles tickled his snout, making him whinny and shudder, which only caused the blacksmith to draw him tighter. The rebec player's bow slowed, drawing out the notes.

Eluard found himself being pulled closer by Isolde, feeling her hot breath on his neck. She was taller than him by half a head, at least, and her broad shoulders and strong muscles made him feel oddly protected. Neck bending back, equine muzzle resting along bovine, his hands enfolded by hers. She seemed to be pulling him closer with each step.

"I...I must go," he muttered, barely audible above the music.

The burly cow leaned in. "What was that?" She asked, her eyelids fluttering.

"I—" But he was interrupted by her kiss. The sweet wine on her tongue was the same as on his, and her mouth was soft and warm, and if they both were a little on the tipsy side, neither minded. At least, not until the assembled party began to shout and cheer.

Eluard's eyes flicked open, and he struggled briefly before Isolde released him. "Please, I must go," he repeated as he backed away, “wouldn’t want my apprentice to burn down the block, he added to lighten his going. On a whim, he plucked up the bovine blacksmith's thick hand and pressed it to his lips, which seemed to forestall her protests.

She did let him go, watching as he clopped down the street. As he walked, he told himself to think hard on the question of their union—they both had well-established trades with hard-to-move equipment, for one—but later, when he was less tired, less upended by the strong cheap wine and the heady festival air. Perhaps a visit to the Innocents will un-knot my thinking, he mused.

He continued north on the street, dodging between other groups of revelers, troupes of jugglers, and the ever-present beggars. Acting nonchalant as best he could, Eluard dropped a hand to the money pouch on his belt, half to keep it from jingling audibly, and half to reassure himself it was still there. The curfew bells rang out, staggered across the city.

Through the smoke of the fires and the light of rush torches mounted in brackets on the beams of more-well-off houses around him, the horse hadn't noticed the sunset, nor had he realized how late it was. Any other day and I'd be hieing home by now. The mystery play had taken up more of the short hours than he'd thought. Good thing they relax curfew on holy days. I'd like to get in a little reveling of my own before the night is out.

Then he realized just how dark the street had become, just a stretch of mud between more run-down buildings. The rush lights were fewer and farther between here, making him wish he'd brought his own torch. Up ahead the University students were bathed in light, having paused at a crossroads to perform some sort of miracle play of their own. They were still too far away to hear, but Eluard could tell it was a fair sight less edifying than the one the bakers' guild had put on.

His ears canted forward as he walked, trying to listen in on the students' doggerel; he didn't notice the hand on his belt until it had almost sawed through his pouch's cord. With a wordless cry, he reached back and grabbed at the arm, nearly missing the knife as he spun around. Eyes dazzled by the firelight he'd been staring at, he only saw a vague shadowy shape lurking behind him. The cutpurse's knife glittered in that same light, drawing his eyes.

He tried to reach his own knife, but it was hidden beneath the folds of the alb. The other bakers had decided it wasn't appropriate for an angelic unicorn to be armed, so he'd tied it to the waistband of his undershorts; though separated only by a thin layer of cloth, it might as well have been leagues away now that he needed it.

The mutt struggled in his grasp, trying to twist his wrist free, or at least angle the knife to nick the horse's arm, but Eluard's hands were too strong from years of kneading dough. They struggled in silence: Eluard too focused on keeping the robber at bay and the robber, of course, not wanting to attract any attention.

The stalemate dragged on, the baker's strength and size against the thief's wiry smallness, until the horse had had enough and lashed out with a hoof, catching his opponent a glancing blow on the thigh. The dog fell back in the mud, then scrambled to his feet, limping as he dashed away.

"You better run," Eluard shouted after him as he tried to regain his composure. "That'll learn you to mess with a baker." He made a rude gesture utterly unbecoming to either angel or unicorn, then felt about his person to make sure everything was still intact. There was a small nick in his purse, but not big enough for any of his coins to slip through; otherwise, he seemed unhurt by the encounter.

A glimmering in the mud caught his eye. Thinking perhaps that he had lost a coin or two, he stooped to pick it up, finding a metal oval instead of a circular coin. In the darkness he could just make out a figure on one side, and a sort of raised border, reminding him of the mandorlas he'd seen above the portals of the great cathedrals. Rubbing off the mud, he carried it down the street until he stood beneath one of the torches that guttered at the intersection.

The top of the oval had a few links of chain still attached, but this was no Christ enthroned. Looking close, he could just make out the letters "sancte nicolae" running up one side of the oval disk and "ora pro nobis" down the other, with a bearded old horse in a bishop's mitre making a sign of benediction.

"Saint Nicholas," Eluard muttered, recognizing the patron saint of children and repentant thieves. Not very repentant, he thought with a smirk as he rubbed the last smears of mud off the little medallion. Still, it wasn't as though he'd stolen it, so he slipped it into his moneypouch and continued along the street.

With the coming of night, the revels seemed to shift their tone as the celebrants tried to fit some last few debauches in before the official beginning of Lent. He'd known people who felt as though waking on Ash Wednesday with a hangover (or worse afflictions) was simply part of their Lenten devotions. The raucous laughter was growing louder, as were the snatches of doggerel song echoing down the streets.

But Eluard had reached his destination, and turned through a round-headed arch. The sounds were muffled here by thick stone walls of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, which seemed to push the shouts and drum-thumping and discordant blasts of music up higher, thinner in the air. Instead, it was his nose that was assaulted: with the iron-tang scent of wet earth and the sweetness of putrefaction, and threading through that was the flowery perfume of the prostitutes.

Avoiding the open dirt of the cemetery proper, and the cold emptiness of the little chapel, he instead headed down to the back cloistered walk of the charnel house. Above him the rafters seemed bowed with the weight of so many thousands of skulls, with an occasional thighbone sticking out through the wattle as though reaching out to him. Here, on any other day, would be found an impromptu alchemists' marketplace, and a haven for prostitutes of many different varieties.

Eluard had hoped to meet with one or two who he'd met before, slender shapely things who knew full well the way to a man's enjoyment, seeing as they too were Adam's sons. He leaned against a pillar, looking along the plastered and painted wall behind the arcade, as skeletons and saints stared back at him and the world outside.

His hand idly fumbling in his purse with the found medallion, he looked closer at the mural, never having seen it properly before—an excusable oversight, given the type of distractions that usually reigned in the bonehouse. Waiting without too much hope that "Tybalt" or "Brom" might soon appear, looking for one last customer of the night, Eluard found himself slowly striding the length of the wall.

An emperor with his imperial orb in one hand held on to an enshrouded skeleton with the other. The skeleton's other hand rested on the sleeve of a whippet-faced queen, who herself was holding hands with a second skeleton. The daisy chain continued, with popes and merchants, monks and nobles dancing in a long line alternating with skeletons, as though the artist were trying to show every rank of society and every race of the civilized world.

Beneath each pair was a block of text; Eluard could pick out a few words, but his Latin wasn't nearly up to the challenge. Given what he could read, though, they were poems, each one decrying the common sins of the class of person directly above: the ira of emperors, the gula of the clergy, the luxuria of knights, and the avaritia of merchants. He always bristled at that last, the suggestion that he might be toiling, selling his wares, and spending long hours before the hot ovens simply because he loved the little bits of gold and silver he got in return. He reminded himself to drop a few coins in the box before he left the cemetery.

He continued walking back towards the entrance, all through the ranks of society, until he reached the end. There the chain of dancers was broken as a canine skeleton leaned forward to help an old man. He'd seen this before, and in better light than the few remaining torches provided, but there was something about it that drew his eye. Perhaps it was the flickering glow that seemed to animate the still images, or perhaps it was the effect of the hour and the wine, but these last two characters seemed so much more meaningful on this night. The old man wasn't wearing the cotehardie and hose of the middle classes, nor the houppelande and cloak of the nobles; instead he wore a thread bare tunic and a ragged coif with holes cut out for his ears.

Obviously a peasant of the lowest orders, the old man looked frail, spent; the artist had captured the look of a draft horse—for such the subject was—who'd been spent, used up, and worn out with years of toil and privation. The tendons stood out in his neck and arms, and Eluard could practically feel the wobbly, unsteady looseness of hoof and hock. And yet, the skeleton wasn't making the old peasant horse dance with the others. With a hand on his arm and another on his shoulder, the skeleton was helping the peasant to sit on a sawed-off tree stump, its smile almost tender compared to the grins of its compatriots.

His vision blurring, he watched as the figures moved, guttering torchlight making the skeletons and their living partners dance and strut, all except that same last two. They seemed content to stand and sit still, resting. An end to pain, he thought, watching the relief that suffused the long grey muzzle; the skeletal hand resting on the peasant's shoulder squeezed gently, as though to say "Rest as long as you will," and Eluard felt the sore ache in his own hocks, the stiffness of knee and hip.

As he leaned back against the column, staring at the mural, his hand once again slipped into his pouch, fingering the little medallion the thief had dropped in their scuffle. He was so lost in thought that the Matins bell didn't even register, though his ears twitched at the tolling. It wasn't until the sounds of voices chanting "Kyrie eleison" echoed from the walls that he realized the hour; dawn would be coming soon, and with it the beginning of Lent.

He placed the St. Nicholas medallion on the ground before the final two characters of the painted Danse Macabre—as though offering alms to the old draft horse for whom death meant an end to toiling—and left the cemetery. I'm too tired for debaucheries anyway.

Once out of the stone walls, he was surprised to find how dark and quiet the street was. No lamps flickered behind the houses' oilcloth windows, and the rush lights had burned themselves down—not even their sooty smoke remained in the brittle cold air.

The only light was behind him, coming from a small lantern that glowed faintly above the entrance to the cemetery, as though to remind passersby what lay within the walls.

Eluard drew the mud-spattered alb closer around him and began trudging back through the dark and empty streets, eyes wide and watchful despite his exhaustion, muttering a prayer as he made his way home. If his apprentice had kept the fire in the ovens going, at least he'd be warm as he began the day's baking. "Next year, I'll mind the shop," he grumbled, feeling far older than his score-and-ten years.