Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  Nadezda felt ill. That her grandmother’s friend had been murdered in the square by the crowd that had always gone to her, looking for help, was sickening. But this news of Petr’s that Fen’ka had cursed the crowd as she was dying… That worried her.

  Squatting in front of her brother, with her hands on his shoulders, her legs pricked her like pins and needles. She slowly got up and sat on the bench along one side of the table. She pulled her brother onto her lap and held him, stroking his hair and trying to control herself. She finally found the words. “Tell me, Petr. Tell me exactly what she said.”

  “I told you already.” Petr squirmed in her arms.

  “Tell me again,” she said softly, closing her eyes and trying to shut out the image of the old woman consumed by the fire and screaming at the crowd. “Tell me exactly what she said and what happened when she said it.”

  Petr cocked his head and looked at his sister strangely. “Why is that so important?” he demanded.

  “Trust me. It just is.” Nadezda sighed.

  Petr thought hard for a moment. “She said…” He took a breath. “She said that Svetovit should teach us to fear him and pay attention to him. That’s when the lightning started and it got dark and the wind started blowing. Then she said that we should all be cursed, in the town and in the castle and in the square. That’s when we poured the oil on the fire and I grabbed the stick. ‘Lay to their charge guilt upon guilt,’ she said, ‘and let them receive no vindication.’ That’s when the lightning hit. A bolt of lightning hit the square right in front of the fire and the soldiers came running from around the Town Hall!” His eyes lit up at the memory of all the commotion. “Everyone started running and screaming and the soldiers tried to save Fen’ka but she was a witch and they couldn’t. I watched them for a few minutes and then ran home before they tried to get me in trouble for burning the witch like she deserved.”

  Nadezda took a deep breath. She shook her head. That was about as much information as she would be able to get out of her brother. She held him for another moment and then let him slide off her lap. “All right, Petr.” She sighed. “I’m sorry Fen’ka was burned and I’m sorry that you were part of it. But it’s over now. Let’s hope nothing worse happens and no one else gets burned.”

  Petr looked at his sister. “Should I go back to the bakery now?” he asked.

  “Yes, go back to the bakery and help Vavrinec clean up before dinner,” she instructed him. He ran out the door. Nadezda stepped across the room to close the door behind him but she paused on the step and looked at the sky.

  It was dark, much darker than it should have been, even at this late afternoon hour. There was a distant rumble of thunder and a droplet or two of rain fell, but the wind was also blowing and it was chilly for the time of year. How had she missed what was going on in the square? That they lived on a byway in the Újezd district of the Old Town, near the New Town, far from both the bridge and the square, did not excuse her ignorance of that afternoon’s events. Unsure of how her presence might have made a difference to the outcome, she was nevertheless certain that events would have played out differently had she been there. She had heard the thunder cracking throughout the skies earlier and had seen the lightning but had thought it no more than a late September afternoon storm. What had Fen’ka unleashed?

  Vavrinec made his way home later, escorted by Petr, who had returned to the bakery and now sported a fine dusting of flour in his hair. Sending him off to wash in the bucket behind the house, Nadezda asked Vavrinec if he knew what had transpired that afternoon.

  “Yes, I was there,” he admitted sheepishly. He confirmed Petr’s recollection of the day: he and the boy had been across the river in the Little Town at the mill loading bags of flour when they had become separated in the crowd that swept down to the river to test Fen’ka in the swiftly flowing water for witchcraft. All work had ceased as the miller and his apprentices were also caught up in the excitement. “It would have been impossible to get the cart back across the bridge,” Vavrinec pointed out. “There were too many people, all shouting and pushing and demanding that she be burned.” He had followed the mob across the bridge to the Old Town Square, where a stake had been erected before the church of Our Lady of Tyn, where the priest Conrad, who was leading the horde, served the Mass and preached.

  “She called out curses on everyone in the square,” Vavrinec recounted. “Everyone in the towns and in the castle, all the wives and children of the city as well. She invoked old Svetovit and demanded that he make the heavens brass and the earth iron, that he make feast days into traps, and take away what people want as well as what they have. There was lightning but no rain, thunder but no outburst. I even thought I saw a tremendous bank of storm clouds over the bluff behind the Jewish Quarter that looked like four-faced Svetovit.” He shuddered. “The lightning hit the square and it became a nightmare of confusion.”

  Nadezda collapsed onto a bench along the table for the second time that day and shook her head. “It frightens me, Vavrinec. She was my grandmother’s friend, you know. They grew up together. I met Fen’ka, Vavrinec, and she knew the old ways better than anyone. Better than my grandmother, even, and my babička knew more of the old ways than anyone in the four towns of Prague.” She looked into her husband’s eyes. “If she invoked Svetovit to avenge her death, it could mean the end of everything in the valley.”

  Vavrinec sat beside his wife and took her hands in his. “Do not worry, Nadezda,” he soothed her. “Fen’ka may have known more of plants and herbs and their properties than everyone else in the valley all together, but everyone knows that Svetovit is only an old and powerless devil. He can’t even stop the building of the new cathedral on his own hill! How dangerous can he be to the four towns in the valley? Who can tell if he even still loiters about Hradčany to listen to the complaints of anyone who cares to address him?” He chuckled.

  Nadezda studied his face and finally nodded in agreement, holding his hands tightly and drawing comfort from his calm strength. “You may be right, Vavrinec. I hope so, for all our sakes.”

  That night, as she banked the fire, Nadezda wondered if she could trust her husband’s estimation of Svetovit’s inability to avenge Fen’ka’s death.

  “There seems to have been no immediate strike against the four towns,” she comforted herself. The red coals glimmered and blinked beneath the dusting of ash that would retain the heat and allow the fire to be rekindled the next morning. Banking the fire was always the last activity of each household before retiring for bed and rekindling the flames was always the first activity on arising each morning. Fen’ka would have been doing this same activity last night at about this same time, Nadezda realized. Now Fen’ka’s hearth was cold and dark. Nadezda thought of her grandmother as well, banking the fire each evening. The continuity of the fire was an image of the continuity of the family and the household; the skill of each woman to conserve the fire of her kitchen was a point of proud competition throughout each neighborhood of the four towns that together made up the metropolis that was Prague. It was a mark of shame to ask a neighbor woman—even if a good friend—for coals in the morning, as it was a badge of honor to maintain the family hearth from day to day, week to week, month to month, year after year after year. Some hearths were rumored to have not needed a neighbor’s coal to be rekindled in the morning for a generation or more.

  When she and Vavrinec had wed, they had brought fire—in the form of coals on a shovel—from her father’s house to the hearth of the house where they would make their new family together. She could not remember the last time that either her grandmother or mother had gone to get coals to rekindle the fire she had grown up with, and she had not needed to fetch coals from a neighbor since establishing her own hearth here with Vavrinec. They had taught her well. She smiled at the memory of her grandmother first showing her how it was done when she was a small child, and then the more formal lessons she had received as an older girl. It was during those times together with he
r grandmother, raking through the coals and placing them just so (“here, not there, child,” her grandmother would gently point out), that her grandmother had told her the traditional Bohemian tales and of the old ways that she and Fen’ka had learned from their grandmothers at the hearths of their childhood homes.

  Nadezda rose and brushed the soot from her palms. Vavrinec was already in bed in the other room, waiting for her. Milos, little more than a year old, lay in his crib next to their bed. In the principal room of the house, the only light still burning—apart from the coals in the hearth—was the oil lamp that always burned before the image of the Mother of God hanging in the corner of the room. The wick of the lamp required trimming from time to time and the oil required replenishing, but it was a cost and an effort Nadezda was happy to expend. The burning oil lamp was a constant reminder to bless herself as she went about her daily tasks at home and to say her simple morning and evening prayers. The image, which depicted the Holy Mother and her Divine Child cheek to cheek as they kissed or whispered secrets to each other and was similar to those in the Slavonic monastery of Emauzy in the New Town, was something she had inherited from her mother and grandmother, who had inherited it from another, earlier grandmother. It, like the fire burning on the hearth, spoke of the continuity of Nadezda’s family and the lore passed from mother to daughter over more generations than Nadezda ever hoped to count.

  Petr stirred, asleep on his cot along one wall. Vavrinec had promised to make a room for Petr in the attic when Petr was older, but for now he slept here, near the fire, where Nadezda could hear him if he called out in the night and comfort him. His nightmares and frights and weeping came less and less often, but there were still occasions when she needed to stroke his forehead and sing him a lullaby, much as their mother had sung to them both when she was alive.

  Kissing her brother on the forehead, Nadezda went in to her husband and son. Svetovit had done nothing to disturb her family thus far. “I hope he never does,” she addressed the Mother of God as she passed the image.

  Over the course of the next few weeks, Nadezda’s fears came to seem groundless or even foolish. Life proceeded as usual, the day-to-day round of working and cleaning, cooking and washing. The sun rose and the sun set. Nothing dangerously inexplicable seemed to happen anywhere in the towns that lined the river. Svetovit was quiet as ever.

  But then Conrad, the German priest who had instigated the burning of Fen’ka, slapped the Italian prostitute Lucrezia in the Tyn church, causing her to strike her head against one of the columns in the nave. She had died within moments, and word of her death at the hand of the priest spread almost as quickly. His predawn vigil beneath Lucrezia’s window near the church, now closed as a result of Lucrezia’s death within the sacred precincts, became known, and when his murdered body was found beneath her window, it was considered by many an act he had brought upon himself. It was only when Conrad was seen after his funeral, still stalking the lane below Lucrezia’s window, that Nadezda became suspicious. The next morning, Nadezda met her childhood friend Alena, who was also Milos’s godmother. Alena was expecting her first baby and had asked Nadezda to serve as her baby’s godmother as well.

  “It seems like divine justice.” Alena offered her opinion to Nadezda as they mingled in the crowd that filled the vegetable market of the New Town. “He had Fen’ka burned. He killed Lucrezia with his own hand. Now he cannot rest in his grave and wanders beneath her window. Is that not the justice of God, Nadezda, that condemns him to such restless remorse?”

  Nadezda was examining vegetables, some of which she placed in her market basket, ready to pay the merchant when she had finished her selection. Milos slept, wrapped tightly in his swaddling bands, on her back between her shoulders. “Yes, it does seem like a suitable heavenly retribution,” Nadezda agreed. “But I can’t help thinking that Fen’ka’s curse might have played some role in closing Heaven and Hell to him. Vavrinec told me that she demanded Svetovit make the heavens brass and the earth iron. Is it impossible that Fen’ka and Svetovit were able to entrap Father Conrad in a hell of their own devising? Do you not see that as well, Alena?”

  “Perhaps,” Alena was willing to concede as she added to the vegetables in her own basket, moving along the rows of a particularly large stall. “But is Svetovit able to contravene the judgment of God? How could Fen’ka’s words prove more formidable than those of God in heaven?”

  Nadezda shook her head,, smelling some fruit before adding it to the collection in her basket. “It does sound outlandish. Vavrinec insists that I am nervous over nothing. Perhaps God allowed Fen’ka’s curse to come true because it accorded with His judgment. Who can tell?” Nadezda turned to Alena and shrugged.

  Alena seemed to be mulling the possibilities as they continued shopping. “That curse—was it one curse, Nadezda, or a series of curses?—her curse was the last thing Fen’ka spoke. Everyone knows the power of the last words of the dying. Even those criminals executed for their crimes. The last words of a man on Earth can even sway the judgment of God. If God can be persuaded to show mercy, could He not also be persuaded to be strict, to show no mercy, to let the whim of the condemned stand firm?” Alena handed her basket to the merchant to tally what she owed. “After all, Nadezda, do we not collect the remains of the executed—and even splinters of the gallows that the condemned die on—like the relics of the saints precisely because they can win God’s favor and persuade Him to enforce the dying wish of the condemned?”

  Nadezda could not resist adding to her basket as she waited for Alena to pay the merchant. She then gave her basket to the merchant’s wife, who also worked at the stall. “Now Vavrinec would say that your words could be mine, arguing for the power of Fen’ka’s curse!” She laughed. Alena laughed with her, taking back her basket from the merchant as she paid the sum he asked. “In the end, who can say?” Nadezda was constrained to admit, parting ways with Alena to continue their workaday errands.

  “Truly, Nadezda. Who can say?” Alena kissed her friend on the cheek and, waving gaily, turned down the street that led to the fishmongers.

  That evening, in bed as the boys Petr and Milos slept, Nadezda recounted her conversation with Alena to Vavrinec. He laughed and shook his head.

  “What do you think, Vavrinec?” Nadezda wanted to know. “Yes, I know you think Svetovit is powerless and Fen’ka’s words meaningless, but is not this the kind of thing she would be pleased with?”

  “She would be pleased, yes, with Father Conrad’s fate.” Vavrinec nodded, rubbing his brow.

  “So, Vavrinec, could not the rest of her curse come true as well? If she had a hand in shaping the priest’s fate, making the heavens brass and the earth iron as you told me she cried out, who can say that her words could not also shape the fate of everyone in the Old Town Square that day.” She paused as she realized the implication of her own words. “Even the fate of men such as you.”

  “It is all too hard for the likes of a baker such as me to puzzle out, Nadezda!” Vavrinec burst out, chuckling. He tussled her hair and hugged her shoulders against his own. She leaned into him, happy to have a reason to pursue her thoughts no further.

  Little more than a fortnight later, Nadezda’s suspicions were raised again. Vavrinec reported over their supper that word had come through customers at the bakery that one of the Italian masons who lived on the far side of the Little Town and had labored in the reconstruction of the castle or the construction of the cathedral—the informant had been unsure—had died and his wife gone mad. But the dead man had approached drunks and whores who roamed the dark streets of the Little Town by night and begged them to pull a nail from his skull. “It would give him rest, he said, it would.” The gossip in the bakery had gone on and on, repeating the tale as another customer entered, each time adding another detail or flourish to the account. “The dead man always begs, ‘Pull the nail and let me rest in peace.’ He cries and wails for mercy, that he be allowed to rest, if only the nail be wrenched from his head. But, o
f course, none will touch him or the nail,” the story always ended. Vavrinec finished his recounting of the events and silently sipped the fish stew Nadezda had prepared.

  Petr looked across the table at his sister. “What do you think, Nadezda? Do you think a dead mason really walks the Little Town or are the drunks just drunk?” He was slurping happily through his bowl of stew, nearly ready for more. “I heard the story in the bakery today, Nadezda, and you should have seen how excited and frightened the old gossips were when they heard that news!”

  Nadezda swallowed her last spoonful and set her bowl down. “It is odd,” she announced at last.

  Vavrinec looked at her. “I tell you this tale only because I am certain that you would hear it from others, whether I will it or no,” he offered, glancing towards Petr, who was scraping the sides of his bowl before helping himself to more. “I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from others and became concerned. Before you thought that I was hiding anything from you.”

  “Thank you.” Nadezda’s voice was even more quiet.

  Petr looked up and turned from his sister’s face to her husband’s and then back again. “Why so solemn, Nadezda?” He took his bowl to the pot hanging at the edge of the fireplace and ladled more stew into his bowl. He sat down, waiting for an answer. He looked at Nadezda and Vavrinec again, appearing perplexed.

  “It is only…” Nadezda began hesitantly. “It is unusual for such an apparition to be seen in the Little Town, Petr, especially so swift on the heels of the apparition of Father Conrad under Lucrezia’s window. Two apparitions, so swift on the heels of each other, is unusual indeed.” Nadezda, whose downcast eyes had been focused on her hands folded in her lap, looked up and into her husband’s eyes.