"Marked" Chapter One (Part One)

I called for the candle to be brought closer. The chambermaid held the flame beside me as her shadow lurched against the wall behind her. The woman sitting in front of me looked down into the bundled blanket she was holding. I heard a tiny whine, almost like a hinge on a rainy day, but it had not rained for weeks, and the door was soundly bolted. The bundle seemed to shift, but it could have been the flickering candle. The woman sat on a bed, a plain frame, with a mattress, most likely feathers. Her husband, a successful merchant, could afford four posts with curtains, and more. Even so, the bed frame was plain, well-oiled pine, honey under the single flame. I turned my eyes back to the bundle. I reached to move the cloth aside. The woman’s shoulders started shaking, her head hung lower. Pulling the cloth back I could see something smooth, pale pink. I touched it with the side of my finger, the pale part rolled away, revealing a dark red cloud. I touched that too, soft, silky, yielding yet firm, like a ripe berry. I pulled the cloth aside to get a better look, and a tiny fist pushed up through the folds. The baby plugged his mouth with his fingers and rolled his eyes at me, cow-like. He was not more than two days old.

Our faces turned as we heard a swish of someone on the other side of the rough wooden door. But no one knocked. The baby mewled again. One of his fists rubbed up against the mark, the voglie as I had learned to call it. The surface of the mark was downy, plump and red like a raspberry flattened on the side of his face. I touched the infant carefully, turning his head from side to side to get a good look in what light we had.

“He is fortunate.” The chambermaid jumped as I spoke, almost dropped the candle. “Hish!” I reprimanded her immediately, before continuing. “This mark will fade with time.” The woman holding him let out a long breath. She began to rock him slightly. Our work had just begun. “But there is more.” Her movement stopped. I sat on the bed next to her.

“Will you take your cloak off then, sir?” The chambermaid reached with her free hand to take my cloak, but I slapped her wrist and she drew back.

“Stand just there with the candle so. I need the light to shine here.” It would not do to let the candle get too close. I took the baby from his mother. The bundling fell away, draping across my arms. Fully exposed, his face looked like any other infant’s face, on the left, but the right side was a dark, downy, tumescent map of desires and possibly betrayal. The mark started just below his right eye, next to the soft hollow above his ear, a bright red blotch down to his jaw, across half his cheek, and stopped just at the edge of his ear. The infant’s father had hired me to interpret the mark, to help him decide. I knew all that hung in the balance. Each of us in this room knew. Not all mothers were the same. And the marks always told the story. Once, I saw a mark of pure betrayal: a baby born with what looked to me like a shadow of the face of another man on the babe’s shoulder. The young mother had offered me the pleasure of her body in exchange for a favorable reading. I have never accepted a bribe to answer speciously, not then, not ever. This mother’s eyes were pools of prayer. I took pity on her. What little I knew of this household spoke of her virtue.

Looking at the voglie, I unfocused my eyes and turned the baby this way and that, despite his weak protests. As I centered my gaze into the puffy red blotch, careful to avoid focusing on the surface, the edges seemed to recede and shapes began to reveal themselves as if rolling over within the clouded skin. I was born with this ability, but it took years to hone it, and then to make my reputation and by that a living of sorts. In this babe’s mark I could see a hint of house and field, then of kitchen and hearth, perhaps a church’s nave. This was rare. Usually I saw a face or an expression, sometimes laughing, often angry. The way most people could see shapes in clouds, or stars, or bones, or tea leaves, I could see not prophesy, but history in the marks made on babes in the womb.