The Taker-Taker 1

by Alma Katsu

  And what about his family? Where would they be in seven years? They were itinerants, moving to find work, shelter, to escape the bad weather. Not one of them could read or write. He would never be able to find them. To lose his family was unthinkable. They were the lowest class of society, shunned by everyone else. When he left the stranger’s employ, how would he survive without them?

  A cry broke in his mother’s throat. She knew as well as Adair what this meant. But his father stood firm in his decision. “It is for the best! You know it is. Look at us—we can barely earn enough to feed our children. It is better if Adair took his burden on himself.”

  “You mean that we are all burdens to you?” Radu wailed. Two years younger than Adair, Radu was the sensitive one in the family. He ran up to Adair and wrapped his thin arms around his brother’s waist, blotting his tears on Adair’s ragged shirt.

  “Adair is a man now and has to make his own way in the world,” their father said to Radu, then to all of them. “Now, enough of these hysterics. Adair must pack his things.”

  Adair traveled all that night, riding behind the stranger, as instructed. He was surprised to find that the old man had a magnificent horse, the sort of horse a knight would own, heavy enough for its hoofbeats to shake the ground. Adair could tell they were headed west, deeper into Romanian territory.

  Toward morning, they passed the castle of the count by whom the physic was employed. There was nothing lyrical about it. It was meant for siege—squat and solid, foursquare, surrounded by a scattering of dwellings and pens of sheep and cattle. Cultivated fields stretched off in all directions. The two rode for another twenty minutes through a dense forest before coming upon a small stone keep, almost hidden by trees. The keep itself looked dank, overgrown with moss that ran wild without sunlight to keep it in check. To Adair, the keep appeared more dungeon than house, seemingly without even a door cut into its daunting facade.

  The old man dismounted and instructed Adair to take care of the horse before joining him inside. Adair lingered as long as he could with the giant equine, stripping off the saddle and bridle, fetching water for it, rubbing its sweaty back with dry straw. When he could avoid it no longer, he picked up the saddle and went into the keep.

  Inside, it was almost too smoky to see, a small fire burning in the fire pit and only a miserly narrow window to let the smoke escape. Looking around, Adair saw that the keep was one large, circular room. A woman slept next to the door on a bed of straw. She was easily ten years older than Adair and matronly, with large florid hands and almost sexless features. She slept surrounded by the tools of her gender: mixing bowls and clumsy wooden spoons, pots and buckets; a slab of a wooden table, worn and greasy; stacks of wooden chargers that served as plates; crocks of wine and ale. Garlands of peppers and garlic hung from hooks in the stone walls, along with ropes of sausage and a string of hard circlets of rye bread.

  On the far side of the room was a desk covered with bottles and jars, sheaves of paper, an inkstand and quills and an oddity Adair had never laid eyes on before: books, bound with wooden covers. Baskets holding strange artifacts from the forest stood ready behind the desk: dusty dried roots, cones, handfuls of nettles, tangles of weeds. Beyond the desk, Adair spied a staircase leading downward, possibly to a cold cellar.

  The old man was suddenly at Adair’s side, peering at the peasant boy. “I suppose you want to know my name. I am Ivor cel Rau, but you shall refer to me as ‘master.’” As he took off his heavy cape and warmed his hands at the fire, the physic explained that he came from a line of landed Romanian nobles, the last male in his family. Although he would one day inherit the family’s castle and property, as a young man he decided to pursue a career and had gone to Venice to study medicine. In his decades as a physician, he’d served several counts and even kings. He was now at the end of a long career, in the service of Count cel Batrin, the Romanian nobleman who owned the castle they had passed. The physic explained that he had not hired Adair to teach him the healing arts, but expected Adair to assist him by gathering herbs and other ingredients for salves and elixirs, in addition to doing chores and helping the housekeeper, Marguerite.

  The old man rummaged through an open chest until he found a tatty old blanket of rough woven wool. “Make up a bed of straw by the fire. When Marguerite awakes, she will give you food and your orders for the day. Try to rest some, too, because I will want you to be ready tonight when I awaken. Oh, and do not be surprised when Marguerite neither heeds you nor speaks to you—she is deaf and dumb, and has been since birth.” And then the old man took a candle, which had been burning on the kitchen table in wait for him, and hobbled toward the dark stairwell. Adair followed his orders and curled by the fire, and was asleep before the light from the physic’s candle had faded down the stairs.

  He woke to the stirrings of the housekeeper. She stopped what she was doing to stare at Adair openly as he rose from the floor. Adair found her a disappointment, more so than when she’d been asleep: worse than plain, she was ugly, with a mannish face and the broad body of a field worker. She gave Adair a meal of cold gruel and water, and when he’d finished, led him to the well and gave him a bucket, pantomiming her instructions. In this way, she had him chop firewood, as well as haul water for the kitchen and the livestock. Later, when she went to scrub clothing in a big wooden tub, Adair tried to nap, remembering the old man’s admonition.

  The next thing Adair knew, Marguerite was shaking him by the shoulder and pointing to the stairway. Evening had fallen and the old man was rising downstairs in his chamber. The housekeeper went about lighting candles around the main room, and presently, the old man came up the stairs, carrying the same stubby candle from the early morning hours.

  “You have risen—good,” the physic said as he shuffled by Adair. He went straight to his desk and riffled through pages of indecipherable writing. “Build up that fire,” he ordered, “and fetch a cauldron. I must make a potion tonight and you will help me.” Ignoring his new servant, the physic started searching the rows of jars, each covered with waxed cloth and string, and turned each in the firelight to read its label, putting a few aside. After the cauldron had been hung and heated above the flames, Adair helped the old man carry the jars to the fire pit. Sitting to the side, he watched the physic measure ingredients in his withered hand, then toss them into the pot. Adair recognized some plants and herbs, now dried to ash, but others were more mysterious. A bat’s claw, or was it a mouse’s paw? A rooster’s comb? Three black feathers, but from what bird? From one tightly lidded jar, the physic poured an oozing, dark syrup that emitted a foul smell as soon as it was exposed to air. Lastly, he poured in a pitcher of water, and then he turned to Adair.

  “Watch this carefully. Let it come to a full boil, but then knock the fire down and take care that the unction does not seize up. It must be thick, like pitch. Do you understand?”

  Adair nodded. “May I ask, what is this potion for?”

  “No, you may not ask,” he answered, then seemed to think better of it. “In time, you will learn, when you have earned such wisdom. Now, I am going out. Mind the pot as I instructed you. Do not leave the keep, and do not fall asleep.” Adair watched as the old man took his cloak from a peg and slipped outside.

  He did as he was told, sitting close enough to inhale the foul fumes coming off the bubbling liquid. The keep was quiet except for Marguerite’s snores, and Adair watched her for a while, the rise and fall of her broad stomach under the blanket, straw crackling as she turned in her sleep. When he tired of this miserly entertainment, he went to the physic’s desk and studied the pages of handwriting, wishing he had the ability to read them. He thought about trying to persuade the old man to teach him to read; surely the physic would find it helpful for his servant to have this skill.

  From time to time, Adair poked at the contents of the pot with a wooden spoon, gauging its consistency, and when it seemed right, he took the poker and knocked down the burning logs, scattering them to the edges of
the pit so only the embers remained under the cauldron. At that point, Adair felt it was safe to relax, so he wrapped himself in the threadbare blanket and leaned against the wall. Sleep nibbled at his ear, a delicious ale of which he’d been given a sip but knew he could drink no more. He tried everything he could think of to keep awake: he paced the floor, gulped cold water, did handstands. After an hour of this, he was more exhausted than ever and on the verge of falling to the floor in a stupor when, suddenly, the door was pushed open and the old man entered. He appeared invigorated by his excursion, his milky eyes almost bright.

  He peered into the cauldron. “Very good. The unction looks fine. Take the cauldron off the spit and let it cool on the hearth. In the morning, you will pour the unction into that urn and cover it with paper. Now you may rest. It’s almost dawn.”

  Several weeks passed like this. Adair was glad for the routine to keep his mind off the loss of his family and his lovely Katarina. Mornings he assisted Marguerite, and the afternoons he rested. Evenings were spent preparing potions or salves, or being taught by the old man to recognize and gather ingredients. He would lead Adair into the woods to hunt for a specific plant or seed by moonlight. Other evenings, Adair bundled cuttings and hung them from the rafters near the fire pit. Almost every night, the physic would disappear for a few hours, always returning before daybreak, only to withdraw to his chamber underground.

  After a month or two had passed, the physic began to send Adair into the village that surrounded the castle walls to exchange a crock of ointment for goods, some cloth or ironwork or pottery. By this time, Adair was desperate for the company of people, even to hear his own voice. But the villagers invariably kept their distance once they learned he worked for the physic. If they saw that Adair was lonely and desperate for company and a few kind words, they were unmoved and kept the transactions curt and unfriendly.

  Around the same time, a change occurred between Adair and Marguerite, to his shame. One afternoon, when he’d woken from a nap and started to dress, she came up to his bed and put her hands on him. Without waiting for encouragement, she pushed him on his back onto the straw, feeling his chest under his tunic, then went to his breeches and searched for Adair’s manhood. Once she’d gotten it sufficiently engaged, she lifted her dusty skirts and squatted over him. There was no tenderness in her movements, nor in Adair’s, no pretense that it was anything other than a physical release for them both. As Adair grasped handfuls of her flesh, he thought of Katarina, but there was no way to pretend that this great bear of a woman was his delicate, dark-eyed love. When it was over, Marguerite made a guttural noise in her throat as she rolled away from Adair, lowered her skirt, and went about her business.

  He lay back against his straw bed, looking up at the ceiling and wondering if the physic might have heard them, and if so, what he would do. Perhaps he took his own pleasures with Marguerite—no, that didn’t seem possible, and Adair figured the old man visited a wench in the village to satisfy that itch during his nocturnal prowling. Perhaps in time, he would be able to do the same. For now, he seemed to have fallen into a strange way of life, but it wasn’t as difficult as working in the fields had been and there was the promise of betterment, perhaps, if he could persuade the old man to teach him about the healing arts. Though Adair still missed his family terribly, he took comfort from these facts and decided to stay a while longer and see what his fortune might hold.

  TWENTY

  After months had passed in the physic’s employ with only the sparest contact with anyone besides the old man and Marguerite, the night came for Adair’s first visit to the castle. Not that Adair wanted to go to the stronghold of a Romanian nobleman. He had nothing but hatred for the devils who raided Magyar villages, destroyed their homes, and captured their land. He couldn’t easily dismiss his curiosity, however; Adair had never been in the abode of a rich man, never been inside castle walls. He’d only worked the fields. He figured he would be able to bear it if he pretended the owner of the castle was Magyar, not Romanian. Then he could marvel at the grand rooms and finery all the same.

  His job that night was to carry a huge jar of a potion they had worked on the previous evening. As usual, the potion’s purpose was kept secret from him. Adair waited by the door as the physic fussed over his appearance, finally choosing to dress in a fine tunic embroidered with gold threads and studded with colored cabochons, signifying that it was a special occasion. The physic rode his charger and Adair trudged behind, lugging the urn on his back like an old grandmother who could no longer walk upright. The drawbridge over the moat was lowered for them, and they were escorted into the great hall by a squad of the count’s soldiers. Guards lined the walls.

  A feast was in progress in the great hall. The physic joined the count at the head table and Adair squatted in the back of the room against the wall, still hugging the jar. He recognized some of the emblems on the shields decorating the walls; they were from the estates where he’d worked. The count’s dialect sounded familiar, but Adair couldn’t understand what they were talking about because the conversation was peppered with Romanian. Even a simple boy like Adair understood what this combination of facts meant: this count was originally a Magyar, but he had allied himself with the Romanian oppressors to save his own skin and preserve his fortune. That had to be why the villagers shunned him: they figured Adair was a Romanian sympathizer as well.

  He’d just stumbled on this realization when the old man summoned him over with the urn. Dismissed with a wave of the physic’s hand, Adair went back to his place at the wall. The physic removed the oiled cloth cover so the count could inspect the contents. The nobleman closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as though the foul-smelling stuff was as sweet as a field of wildflowers. The count’s courtiers laughed with anticipation, as though they knew something exciting was about to happen. Adair was holding his breath at the prospect of learning the purpose of at least one of the physic’s mystical potions, when the old man’s sharp gaze fell on him.

  “This is not the place for the boy, I think,” he said, motioning to a guard. “Perhaps you can find something better to occupy his time, teach him a thing or two about soldiering. He may have to help defend this castle one day, or at the very least, save my old and worthless head.” Adair was led away amid mocking laughter from the onlookers, and taken to a courtyard where a handful of guards lazed about. These were not knights or even professional soldiers, just simple guards, though far more experienced with a sword or a spear than Adair. Under the guise of “training,” they took brutal pleasure in abusing Adair for two hours as he tried to defend himself with these unfamiliar weapons. By the time he was allowed back into the great hall, his arms ached from swinging a dull broadsword, the heaviest one the guards could find, and he was nicked and bruised.

  The scene in the great hall was not what he’d expected. The count and his vassals seemed to be merely intoxicated, lolling in their seats or fallen to the floor, eyes closed, childish smiles on their faces, ropy muscles gone slack. They paid little notice as the physic made his farewells, leading Adair through the courtyard. In the gray predawn, they picked their way over the drawbridge and through the forest. Adair trudged behind the old man’s horse, and exhausted as he was, was grateful not to be carrying the urn.

  The mystery of the physic’s ways slowly began to coalesce in Adair’s mind. On one hand, Adair was grateful for the warm, dry place to sleep and not to be working himself to daily exhaustion and an early grave as a field hand. Unlike his family, he had three meals a day, nearly all he could eat: stew, eggs, the occasional strip of roasted meat. He had sexual companionship, so he would not go insane with unsatisfied desire. On the other hand, Adair could not help but see it as a deal with the devil, even if it had been made against his will: there was a price to pay for a life of relative ease, and he sensed he would be given the bill eventually.

  He received the first hint of the payment due one evening, when the physic took Adair and Marguerite to the woods. They walk
ed for a long time, and since they were engaged in nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other, Adair saw the opportunity to ask a few questions of the old man.

  “May I ask, master, why it is that you do all your work at night?” he asked, careful to sound as timid and guileless as possible.

  At first the old man harrumphed, as though he wouldn’t dignify the question with an answer. But after a few moments—for who doesn’t like to talk about himself, no matter how trivial the questions—he cleared his throat to answer. “It is a habit, I suppose … It is the sort of work best done away from the prying eyes of others.” The physic breathed heavily as they went up a slight incline, and it wasn’t until they reached a level path that he continued. “The fact of the matter is, Adair, that this work is best done at night, for there is a power in the darkness, you know. It is from the darkness that these potions draw their strength.” He said this so matter-of-factly that Adair felt it would only reveal his ignorance to ask the old man to explain, and so he resumed his silence.

  Eventually, they came to a place so wild and overgrown that it looked as if it had never been seen by human eyes. Around the roots of the poplars and larches was a proliferation of a strange plant, the broad and fan-shaped leaves standing on willowy stems high above the ground cover, waving to the trio of visitors.

  The physic motioned for Marguerite to follow him. He led her to one of the plants, wrapped her hands around it, and then signaled for her to wait. Then he walked away from her, calling Adair to come with him. They walked until the maidservant had almost disappeared in the dimness, her white smock glowing in the moonlight.