Nadezda stepped closer. “I will plunge this candle into your bowels again and give the angels leave to seize you.”
“I cannot make the promise that you ask,” Lilith protested. “But I can vow that I will depart from Prague and that when I return again, I shall leave your family untouched for as long as the sun and moon endure.”
Nadezda stopped. “Leave my family untouched? For as long as the sun and moon endure?” She considered the offer.
“I so vow,” Lilith repeated.
“Then go. Depart from Prague for the present.” Nadezda turned and rested both her hands on the table, concealing the still-burning Candlemas candle from Lilith’s vision.
Another blood-curdling scream shattered the night behind Nadezda. The flaming figure near the door she faced winked out. A mighty wind blasted through the room, knocking mugs and pitchers from their places. When she turned again to look behind her, Lilith and the three angels were gone.
Exhausted, Nadezda collapsed onto a bench and licked her fingers, extinguishing the Candlemas candle with moistened fingertips, soot smudging the patterns in her skin. The wick sizzled and the flame evaporated into the darkness. She set aside the candle and allowed her face to sink into her folded arms on the tabletop. She wept, unsure that even with this knowledge she would be able to avert the wrath of Svetovit.
Nadezda made her way to the rabbi’s study again the next day. She told him of her encounter with Lilith and all she had learned from the creature the rabbi referred to as “that vile makhesheyfe.”
“Why did you not warn me of her ability to escape through a mirror?” she wanted to know.
“I had no idea,” he responded. “I will make a note, however, and add that to the lore that concerns Lilith so those who hunt that vile makhesheyfe might know more of her tricks and deceptions and not allow her to escape through one.” He picked up his quill, dipped it in the ink, and scratched a reminder to himself on the parchment before him. He shook his head in dismay when she told him she had nearly allowed the fire to die as she had pondered the puzzle of delivering Prague.
“Your attempts to save the city might have led directly to its destruction. I told you, dear one, that this is a dangerous game. A necessary one, I agree. But dangerous.” He looked at her over the rim of his spectacles as he sat perched on his stool. She sat below him, on the edge of the stool he had cleared for her. The maid stood near the door, leaning against the doorframe, her eyes closed as she listened to the conversation, trembling slightly.
The rabbi cleared his throat. “Alas, my child, I fear that perhaps you have not heard the news that fills the market of the Old Town Square these past days. It is reported that the winter has grown warmer, unusually warm for these midwinter weeks. It is almost as if spring has come to the regions upriver. Heavy rain is falling there and snow banks have begun to melt, all contributing to the height of the Vltava. Floods unlike those seen for many, many years have inundated the towns along the river. Many communities of my people as well as of the Bohemians, the Germans, and others have been washed away. Have you heard no rumors of this?”
Nadezda confessed that in her concern with Lilith and Fen’ka and the curse, she had listened to little of the news that occupied most of the residents of Prague.
Rabbi Isaac went on. “The river is growing increasingly high and these floods are coming dangerously close. Word of all this first began to trickle into Prague,” he paused, so that Nadezda appreciated his play on words, “just a week ago. After you nearly allowed the flames in your hearth to expire.”
Nadezda gasped, her hand flying to cover her mouth.
“Yes, my dear.” The rabbi shook his head sadly. “It seems that Svetovit leapt at the opportunity you inadvertently offered him. By allowing the fire to nearly die, you opened the door for Svetovit to act. In rebuilding the fire, the door was closed again—thanks be to ha-shem!—but Svetovit has set loose a series of storms and changes in the weather that cannot easily be stopped. Not even by Svetovit himself. The swelling river is beyond control, even if he cannot make it any worse at this point.”
“I should never have let my attention wander,” Nadezda scolded herself. “I have brought disaster upon us all, Rabbi Isaac, all because I thought, in my arrogance and pride, that I could save us all!”
“You must not chastise yourself so,” the rabbi comforted her, taking his spectacles in his hand. “You had no idea that allowing the fire to die could bring such consequences upon our heads. You were attempting to save us, and that is always a good thing. As our Talmud teaches us, child: ‘He that saves a single child has saved the world.’ You sought to save many worlds in saving the children of Prague and their parents. You are to be commended for that. It is not your fault that the floods bear down on us. They may yet be averted if we discover the proper way to reformulate this curse.”
They sat quietly, considering what options lay before them.
“Even though you control the fire, you cannot undo the curse altogether,” the rabbi reminded them. “How do you propose to rewrite the conclusion of the curse?”
Nadezda ventured to offer one idea that had come to her in the sleepless hours since Lilith’s departure. “Rabbi Isaac, rather than tie the consummation of the curse to the dying of the fire, I had thought to tie its consummation to the dying of the world. If Svetovit is barred from Prague until the end of the ages, then his wrath will be irrelevant. Whatever dangers his anger poses for the city will be subsumed in the dangers of the Last Judgment. He will even face judgment, then. The Day of Doom will bring both the realization and the frustration of all his plans and hopes.”
The rabbi chuckled. “How very appropriate,” he agreed. “Prevented from destroying the city until it is already caught up in the conflagration that destroys and renews the world. I congratulate you, child, for your ingenuity.” His eyes twinkled. “But how do you propose to phrase it?”
Nadezda shook her head. “That I have not sorted out yet. Simply telling Svetovit that he may not touch the city until the Last Day will not succeed. Fen’ka’s words made the consummation of the curse dependent on the dying of the fire. To rewrite the curse, its consummation must still depend on the dying of the fire but with another condition following that. That other condition must be an event that cannot happen apart from the Last Day.”
The rabbi considered that possibility. “Might it not be,” he suggested after some minutes of thought, “that the additional condition, which would still be consistent with the original curse, might tie its consummation to the passage of a certain period of time?” Seeing Nadezda’s shock, he hastened to add, “A very long period of time, of course, my dear.”
“Such as the time it takes a fire to die?” Nadezda asked him. She had been proud of her idea to make the fruition of the curse depend on the coming of the Doomsday and was afraid that tying the unleashing of the full power of the curse to anything else might thwart her attempts to delay the curse to the point that it could do no harm. But the rabbi’s idea had merit, she had to admit.
“If we tie the unleashing of the curse to an indistinct but lengthy period of time, it must involve a period of years that is important somehow to Svetovit,” Nadezda built on the rabbi’s idea. “It must needs involve numbers that are important to him, numbers that would seize his attention and yet be so large as to provide the delay we are looking for.”
“Yes,” the rabbi agreed. “It must be a number of years that cannot come to pass before the end of the world and yet the computation must involve numbers that are inherently important to Svetovit and these are fairly small, are they not?”
“They are.” Nadezda was unsure which of them, she or the rabbi, might know more about Svetovit.
“What numbers are magically important to him?” the rabbi asked her, indicating his own uncertainty.
Nadezda tried to recall what her grandmother might have told her about Svetovit that would reveal his favorite numbers. “I think that four must be important to him,” sh
e concluded. “He has four faces,” she offered by way of explanation.
“His horse has eight legs, does it not?” the rabbi asked her.
“It does!” The rabbi clearly knew more of Svetovit than he had indicated earlier.
“Four and eight.” The rabbi scanned the rows and stacks of books about the room as if hoping the golden letters on their spines might reveal a further secret. “Four is the number of many things—such as the rivers that flow from Paradise to water the Earth or the elements that constitute the world. Our sages also tell us that ‘four’ indicates a door, an opening, while ‘eight’ is the ongoing conflict between unity and plurality. Eight is twice four, a multiple of four, so we come back to four again.” His eyes rested again on Nadezda. “The number of years we choose must somehow be a multiple of four, I think.”
Nadezda considered and nodded her agreement. “A multiple of four but one so large that it must not come to pass until the world comes to an end.” She wrinkled her brow in thought. “But what number of years is both so large and yet so fluid as to allow for the uncertainty of when the world itself will end?”
The rabbi retrieved his feather pen and scribbled computations on the parchment before him. “Simply calculating a number of years, alas, will not be enough.” He held up the parchment for Nadezda to examine but she could not make out his scrawls from her seat. He gestured for her to come closer and sit beside him, as she had when he copied out the talisman to protect Milos. Even at this close range, she did not recognize the figures Rabbi Isaac had used.
“As an example, my dear,” he pointed to one set of figures. “If we multiply four years twice, we only arrive at eight years as the result. Even if we use larger multiples of four and attempt to expand the result,” his pen flying across the page and more figures spilling out in a myriad of combinations, “we only arrive at longer periods of years but not so long as to encompass the Last Days.”
Nadezda looked confused. He explained again.
“If we take four and multiply it by itself, we arrive at sixteen and if we then multiply that again by four, we arrive at sixty-four. But it is only sixty-four. If we multiply that by four yet again, the result is two hundred and fifty-six. To multiply that one last time by four again, making four multiplications by four, we still only have one thousand and twenty-four at the conclusion. A very large number of years. A very long time, indeed. But long enough to warrant the coming of the Messiah by that date?” He shook his head sadly. “It is difficult to say.”
He considered his computations again. “Furthermore, it is a complicated computation. In the moment of declaring a new conclusion of Fen’ka’s curse in addition to the extinguishing of the fire, I fear that we need an elegant but simple calculation, one that can be stated with clarity and without confusion. Svetovit will struggle with all his might against the rewriting of the curse and the delay of his triumph, so the calculation must be something that can be declared even in the midst of Svetovit’s onslaught.”
Nadezda understood now. “Then we need to multiply a period other than years.” They both stared at the figures. Nadezda gasped as an idea occurred to her. “We could calculate generations rather than years, could we not?”
Rabbi Isaac looked at her, startled, and then at his figures again. “Genius!” he exclaimed. “Generations, not years! Truly genius! Nadezda, you prove your ability yet again!”
Nadezda blushed at the rabbi’s praise, unable to think of an adequate response. She fumbled with words nervously and then gave up the attempt.
“Now,” the rabbi asked her, “how shall we multiply the generations in a way that Svetovit will consider binding using numbers that already control him in some regard?”
Nadezda thought another moment. “Why not use the number of his horse’s legs? Can we not multiply four generations by eight?
The rabbi’s quill quickly scratched another series of computations on his page. “That brings us to thirty-two generations.” His shoulders sunk and he shook his head slowly from side to side. He turned to Nadezda.
“Child, the history of my people is broken into periods both sad and glorious. The exile to Babylon, one of the most sad of all, was a period of seventy years. That is to say, a period of three—no, nearly four—generations. The years from Adam to Abraham were nineteen generations, from Abraham to Moses seven generations, and our teacher Rambam—forgive me, dear child, that is our fond name for our great teacher, Moses Maimonides—has calculated that from Moses who received the written Torah on Mount Sinai to the final compilation of the Oral Torah by the sages was forty generations. Of course, this compilation of the Oral Torah was not complete until after the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans. Shortly thereafter, the Romans drove us away and destroyed Jerusalem. They left no stone atop another.” He swallowed. He sighed. “We have wandered in exile from that land promised by the Lord to our forefather Abraham for nearly seventy generations, the same number as the years we suffered in exile in Babylon after the destruction of the first Temple. Do you realize what this means, my dear one?” The rabbi’s eyes glistened, wet with tears. A small smile played upon his lips.
“It is my hope, beloved Nadezda, that our exile will soon be over, that the accomplishment of the seventy generations of this exile will correspond to the seventy years of our previous exile. If that is so, then the coming of the Messiah and the End of Days will arrive shortly. If not, then the thirty-two generations of our current calculation can be added to the seventy generations of exile that we are in the midst of suffering. The resulting one hundred and two generations far exceed any of the other periods of my people’s history. The Messiah must come before that time and the End of Days be accomplished prior to the fulfilling of the thirty generations we will insist Svetovit wait before he can accomplish his will.” He took a deep breath. “Do you understand, my child?”
Nadezda nodded. “According to your hopes and calculations, the Doomsday of the world might be accomplished in two generations, Rabbi Isaac. But it will certainly be accomplished before the end of the thirty-two generations that result from multiplying the four faces of Svetovit by the eight legs of his great horse.” She understood that much. The city would certainly be safe from Svetovit’s attack if the curse were rewritten in such a way.
“That is true. Furthermore,” he pointed at certain of the figures with the nib of his pen, scattering a few drops of ink clinging to the tip of the quill, “it is significant that the number thirty-two, which can be considered as a ‘three’ and then as a ‘two,’ portends what we are looking for as well. The number ‘three’ signifies the physical rewards and punishments of this world while the number ‘two’ indicates the dwelling of the Blessed One on Earth and the fulfillment of the purpose of the creation. This is confirmation that ha-shem will send salvation to the earth within these thirty-two generations and allot the rewards and punishments due each of us, including Svetovit.”
Nadezda was very impressed, both by the rabbi’s computations and his command of the esoteric meanings of the numbers.
The rabbi rocked on his stool, muttering under his breath in a language Nadezda could not make out. Then he took his page of computations and notes on Lilith’s use of mirrors and slid it among his other papers on the shelf of the desk. He stood and Nadezda followed his lead.
“You must find a way to get Svetovit’s attention and then inform him that the curse is now reformulated according to the terms we have discussed, Nadezda. Then you must extinguish the fire, every spark of it, leaving no ember still burning. If so much as a single coal or ember still glows red, then the curse is not rewritten and Svetovit can vent his rage to the full extent of his power when that last coal does expire.” He looked at her with admiration.
“As for confronting Svetovit, I have a small thing that you may find useful.” He led her to a corner of his study and found a bag of coarse sackcloth behind some books. He took it and searched through it, muttering before pulling a tangled length of red cord fr
om the sack and handing it to Nadezda, careful that they only touched the cord and not each other. He beamed and gestured at the knotted cord in her hand. She began to untangle it.
Rabbi Isaac clapped his hands in delight. He grinned broadly. “I would be honored if you were to take this cord to use when you extinguish the fire and confront Svetovit. It will be my small contribution to both protecting you, child, and the saving of our beloved city.”
Nadezda clutched the cord to her closely. “Rabbi Isaac, you have already made a much larger contribution. Thanks to you we have the information from Lilith that will allow us to hold Svetovit at bay until the world ends.”
“Ah, dear child—he will struggle against this but you must remain resolute. The sages and masters of the mystical lore tell us that we must stand within the protective circle when we confront the powers of darkness, much as those who practice the old ways of the Bohemians teach. The circle may be etched or drawn with a knife or be formed by tying the ends of a cord together and arranging it as a ring to stand in. You may not have time to carefully draw a circle before Svetovit begins his onslaught. Be sure to make the circle before you attract his attention, Nadezda, and use this cord to do so. The sages teach that such a cord should be red, which signifies the energy that both creates and destroys the world. It is just such a cord that I have been saving for a purpose—I knew not what or when but I know now that I have been waiting to give it to you.”
He closed his eyes before continuing. “I know that you can do this. You were given the custody of the fire by the mystery of Providence, and it is up to you to use that custody to save the city.” He gestured mysteriously above her and again muttered words under his breath that she could not understand. But she knew these were the words of a prayer, another gift to aid her in her coming confrontation with the old god who was their common enemy. The rabbi opened his eyes again.
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