Fine, yes, except for the memories.
If only a doctor or magician could drill a hole in her head and extract them. Or burn them out? Perhaps Temujin Gur himself, the infamous Mongol spellcrafter of Empress Elizabeth, might do the job.
Though the Mongol devil might replace them with something far worse.
She saw him yesterday, late, only a glimpse after the Empress and he arrived in that massive black Berlin carriage. Like everyone else, she’d heard the rumors spreading like dark plague all over Europe that Gur was the real mastermind behind the Russian throne and Elizabeth only a puppet. Many claimed him more ancient than The Great Wall of China, and said that he presided over the burial of Genghis Khan himself, putting to death all those who witnessed it so they would not reveal the location of the Khan's sacred necropolis.
Prior to the arrival of these powerful beings, Freddie had barely dressed in time. Under the glare of her mother, she stuffed and groaned herself with Babette's help into a full court outfit—the kind she so hated. Whenever she wore it she felt like a cross between a red peacock and a frilly doe. The ridiculously big hoop skirt forced her to go down the castle staircases sideways, one careful step at a time, and with every five steps she took, her mother barked at her from behind, "Damn you three times, Freddie! Be quick!"
Once positioned in the courtyard to greet Empress Elizabeth, what happened next became an event she would never forget.
From the carriage, the Empress emerged into the sunlight, her huge blue eyes flaming with command. Nothing could resist her dominance. Were the very walls of Bärenthoren expected to forget their masonry and bow to her? The walls remained aloof, of course, though all beings of flesh and blood demonstrated obedience. The assembled Prussian nobles from over a hundred miles around in their long coats and powdered wigs, the noblewomen in their frills and jewels and hoop skirts, Princess Johanna and Freddie's beloved father, Prince Christian, as well as the Bärenthoren chief servants, stewards, butlers, valets, and maids in their finest blue-and-gold livery, all ranks displaying themselves in one long line full of bow and curtsy as the mighty Empress of Russia stepped down to the stone.
Freddie watched those royal eyes as they moved, imagining a grand symphony of music reaching thunderous climax, but then an unexpected thing happened. The eyes of the Empress found a curious object to rest upon, to fixate upon. The entire crowd in the courtyard glanced sideways, straining without turning their heads to see whom the almighty Empress of all the Russias stared at. And those with a view could see the target quite clearly:
The Princess von Anhalt.
The imperious flaming gaze rested on her, only on her.
Freddie gasped in the light of the royal glare. The eyes bored into her like the points of a hot lance. The entire courtyard full of nobles and servants spoke not a word (they did not dare!), and Freddie sensed the crowd growing more nervous as the stare continued.
Why is she staring at me like that? Am I supposed to fall to my knees?
The eyes and face of Empress Elizabeth inhaled Freddie, long and deep, as a person might breathe in a few gallons of fresh air after confinement in a stale cabin. The princess felt embarrassed and looked down. Other eyes glanced from her to the Empress, curious and growing fearful; and at the same time, Freddie's fingers began to hurt. She knew something lay hidden in that carriage, yet to emerge into the sunlight.
An evil thing.
Even so, her patience had come to an end.
Enough is enough! And my fingers are pricking again. At least if an apparition appears, everyone will see it this time.
Freddie swallowed and steeled herself. Glancing up, not wishing to appear afraid, she avoided the eyes of the Empress and focused instead on her curly locks glimmering in the sun like burnished gold. It reminded her uneasily of the Vermeer girl. Was there a connection? The Empress wore a crème silk dress with a low neckline woven in gold thread, a tight bodice, and draped around her shoulders, a gold silk cape, the black wings of the Russian imperial eagle flaring out on either side and caressing her shoulders.
Finally, the Empress walked forward, towards Freddie. The entire courtyard silent, not even a breath. Freddie bowed her head and curtsied as the Empress came near to her and said, “You are Princess Fredericke von Anhalt, n’est-ce pas? I would know you anywhere. Please, rise and lead me inside to the castle. I must speak with you.”
Looking up, Freddie noticed fresh blood stains on the neck and bosom of the Empress’ dress. She held her tongue though. In fact, the entire affair had rendered her speechless. She could only comply with the wishes of the Empress. Taking Elizabeth’s delicate, snow-white hand in hers, she began to escort her inside.
Before crossing the threshold into the castle, both Prince Christian and Princess Johanna took pains to form a new line to greet the Empress—especially since she seemed to be ignoring the usual custom of courtyard etiquette. Freddie politely introduced her parents, and she hoped this would irritate her mother who she realized must already be fuming at the extra attention the Empress was showing her. And as her mother greeted the Empress with a face that could only be described as rivaling the sun itself in warmth and glow, Freddie felt a change in the crowd behind her, as if a sudden eclipse had blackened them all.
It began with a gasp or two from the female servants.
She turned to see a large, red-hooded figure emerge from the carriage and float towards her, following the path of Empress Elizabeth. What in Beelzebub's name? Small fluttering things like little moths surrounded it, diving in and out of the scarlet hood as if they nested there, or in the mouth of whatever was obscured. A row of tall black feathers thrust from the hood, running front to back to form a great black fin, all of it flowing into a cloak that hid the rest of the body. And as the floating apparition drew closer, Freddie noted the cloak inked with dozens of mysterious black symbols: curved chisels, sticks, tears and boxes, all collected in groupings like Chinese alphabet cells; and centered on the hood of the cloak, prominent and unmistakable, a Chinese-like pagoda temple encircled by a long black dragon, the mouth of the dragon biting the tail to complete the circle.
The very sight of the thing made her head burn in a disturbing way she had never felt, while her fingers pricked so painfully she pinched them.
Others were affected also.
Just as certain diseases have varying effects on their victims, so too this thing from Russia radiated an evil that touched people in different ways. Two of the castle valets, men of hard and gray age, shook so much their oaken false teeth clacked like wind shutters in a storm. One of the younger maids began to sing, words that sounded to Freddie, at a distance, like lines from an Italian opera. Something by Pollarolo? Another maid nearby shrieked in a savage alien language, flinging words like "Ho dah, ha dibah!," at no one in particular while the maid beside her slapped her own face as if fighting herself. A Prussian noble, the Duke of Mecklenburg, clutched at his chest with a groan and fell to one knee just as a stunned castle guard dropped his musket to the ground, causing it to fire with such a loud report that it slammed the courtyard walls and broke two giant windows. And as the glass crashed to the stones and the smell of gunpowder bit their nostrils, the assembled servants and nobles, mouths hanging open, stepped backwards, for all of them knew this emissary from Hell to be the legendary spellcrafter and Russian royal puppet master:
Temujin Gur.
Before Freddie could recover from the vision and react to her new pain, the Empress pulled her into the castle's gigantic foyer, all full of staircase and statuary, swords and elk heads, and oil paintings of nobility the size of hay carts. The familiar feel and smell of the foyer, as well as the presence of the Empress brought immediate relief. Freddie walked beside the Empress as if her own child. A crowd of stumbling, nervous nobles followed right behind while dozens of castle servants scurried to take positions. Freddie looked over her shoulder to see her mother staring at her with coldly furious eyes. A beating or some other equally brutal punishment
would follow, once the Empress left the castle, but Freddie knew, deep down for a reason she could not explain, that she no longer feared her mother.
The awkward and nervous train of the Empress was guided by Prince Christian into the Great Hall of Bärenthoren. He appeared joyful and dignified at once—the perfect host. The Prince wore a long, dark grey coat with broad gold-embroidered cuffs, and beneath the open coat, a gold brocade waistcoat atop a white silken shirt. His white wig was tied at the back by a black ribbon. Freddie knew he desired to lighten the mood after the lunacy in the courtyard. She also felt a pinch of sadness that in all the clatter and craziness no opportunity had presented itself to visit with her father. She respected and loved Prince Christian, and wished to see more of him outside the poisonous atmosphere her insanely jealous mother always created.
Meanwhile, inside the hall, bottles of wine, pitchers of fresh apple cider, and an assortment of pastries, tortes and cakes had been laid upon a long and shiny wooden table. Fires blazed in the eight enormous fireplaces and columns of rose-tinted sunlight, filtered by the tall castle windows, softened the misty air above their heads. Freddie felt as though she walked within an immense Byzantine cathedral, for the presence of the Empress radiated an air of holiness, God-like power and eminence, and this air was breathed by all. The very space itself seemed grand and divine. Only Temujin Gur who trailed the Empress might taint that feeling.
But where was he?
“Your Excellency,” gushed Princess Johanna. Freddie's attention was drawn to her mother who now faced the Empress. “You must be exhausted after your long journey. Please refresh yourself.”
The Empress smiled and took a glass of cider from a tray offered by one of the servants, a trembling butler with the face of a frightened bird. “I’m thrilled to have arrived in one piece. Je suis béni.”
Freddie could no longer contain her curiosity. “It looks as if you survived a battle," she said, pointing to the blood-stained dress.
To her surprise, the Empress reacted by tearing up, as if on the verge of a strong weeping. “The most tragic thing happened not far from your castle," she said, finding it difficult to speak. Freddie reached out and grasped her hand. The Empress continued. “Mon Dieu au paradis! It tore the heart from my breast. He was a boy of not more than fifteen years, and he ... he rushed into the road without warning from the hedgerow. Something was attacking him and he fled in such a hurry he didn’t see us. If not for the timely braking of Ivan Illych, my driver, the draft horses of my carriage would have trampled him.” She stopped. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She pulled a handkerchief from within her right coat sleeve and dabbed her face.
Freddie felt a pang of sorrow for this Empress Elizabeth, now transformed in her own mind from a being of godlike power to one far more compassionate and vulnerable. Freddie pressed the hand of the Empress even tighter. The Empress looked up, into the milling crowd, past the faces of Prince Christian and Princess Johanna appearing dutifully concerned, her eyes scanning for someone special. She called out, her voice breaking, "Ivan ... oh, Ivan, come here!"
The driver, Ivan IIlych, entered the circle and bowed to the Empress and Freddie's parents. He was a thick-bodied man, classic Russian beard, hands like leather gloves. He’d overheard the conversation from nearby and understood what the Empress wanted. He began to tell the story:
“A large black bear charged from the hedgerow into the road. Before we could do anything, it trapped the boy against the hedge and swatted him across the face. I saw deep and bloody wounds on his face, and as he lay on his back in the road, the bear crushed his neck with a paw. I jumped from the carriage, leveled my pistol at the bear and fired at point-blank range.”
Fascinated, Freddie listened to the story, watching the driver and noting his tunic also smeared with the boy's blood. “The giant beast hardly noticed the shot. To him, it was no more than an insect bite. He stood up on his hind legs and roared at us in defiance. My assistant threw a musket down to me and I fired again, hitting the bear, but the thing was a demon, invincible. And then, as if he hadn’t a care in the world, he turned from us and lumbered into the hedgerow. We never saw him again.”
The Empress, still teary, said, “I rushed to the boy, and held him in my arms. What a cruel and needless way to die. I had to ask myself … How did something so evil win the day so easily?”
Freddie marveled at the story, and at the realization that the Empress of Russia cared about the peasant boy's death. She actually cared. How strange when compared to her own mother and most of the nobility who abused and scorned the serfs, as well as anyone else below their station. The noble class was less than one percent of the entire world, and yet they acted as if they owned a hundred percent of it. Like vampires, they bled it dry to feed themselves. The bullying bastards needed a good forced feeding of European Enlightenment, a few hundred pages of Diderot and Rousseau.
What they needed was a revolution to send them running!
* царица *
MUSING FURTHER ON THE NOTION OF REVOLUTION, Freddie cut a path to the banquet in the Great Hall of Bärenthoren. Servants and nobles alike greeted her with words of Jours sans, aimables maîtresse ("Well days, Mistress kind": one of the French-obsessed customs for servants begun by her mother) and "Good evening to you, Princess von Anhalt," all of them bowing lightly as her red-and-gold hoop skirt, at least five feet wide, swept them away into corners and close to walls.
Within the daze of heads and bodies in the hallway, she noticed a single face trying hard to get her attention: the eyebrows nervously bobbing, lower lip quivering, eyes horror struck as if a monster had just screamed holy hell into them. She recognized it as belonging to Benjamin Barth, one of the Bärenthoren servants from a centuries-old serf family in perpetual service to Baron Eichmann of Merseburg.
"Mistress, please ... I'm sorry for this," he said with a frantic whisper.
"Benjamin, calm, calm. What is—"
"Baron Eichmann," he blurted out and glanced around as though expecting someone to pounce on him. "I would simply write you a note, but I ..." The last words failed him. He appeared like a hollowed-out tree ready to collapse in on itself.
Freddie clutched him by the arm and ushered him away from suspicious eyes into a nearby alcove lit by candles. She faced him, and as the candle light shadowed his face, rendering him darkly sad and fearful, Freddie heard his story, stammered out and caught in his throat between sobs. Baron Eichmann was selling off young serfs to pay tax debts, and had selected Benjamin's twelve year old sister, Daniela, to be one of them. The Baron chose her, and others, from a line up, suddenly rousing them from their beds at night—he and his wife, Baroness Magdalena Eichmann, along with their hired ruffians wielding swords and clubs and harshly shouting Kommen Sie aus dem Haus! (Get out of the house!). The Baron wished a proper inventory before the serfs could hide, for the party arriving by horse would have been spotted across the fields a mile away in daylight. And just to make an example, his swaggering ruffians mercilessly beat one of the fathers who dared to question the Baron's need for the cruel affair in the first place.
"Mistress, my soul is yours, my whole being is devoted to thee, I beg you. My mother will die—"
"No more, friend Benjamin," Freddie said. She felt sad for him and also a growing anger at the ruthless cruelty of Baron Eichmann whose reputation had inflamed her in days past. "I will look into this. I will even pay that beast-eyed Baron if I must, whatever it takes to save her. You have my word, sir."
Freddie had already paid the taxes for other relatives of Bärenthoren Castle servants, even purchased several herself just to save them from being sold to cruel masters or killed. Prince Christian had reprimanded her once already for turning the Bärenthoren lands into what he called "a free home for Prussia's damned and lost." No matter. Freddie possessed enough gold trinkets to buy many more, and she would, even if her dear father disapproved.
Benjamin slumped to his knees in tears and kissed Freddie's hand. When a nobl
e as high as the Princess von Anhalt helped someone as low as he, it was cause for joyful weeping. Nevertheless, she pulled him back up, steadied him and sent him on his way. She knew the banquet had commenced and her presence would be missed. She could already hear the familiar:
"Damn you three times, Freddie!"
* царица *
THE WALLS OF BARENTHOREN CASTLE IN PRUSSIA had witnessed the smoke and shot of titanic violence for centuries. The grand armies of Europe, meteoric in all their steel and pennant, had raged in galloping thunder over its body-strewn fields, burning towns to black skeleton, grinding serfs and peasants alike to marrow and less than memory, thrusting man and horse in charge after charge against the black-granite walls only to splinter them and bring needless death; and too, for so many years, the internecine wars as Lutherans fought Catholic marauders, the Pope in Rome sending his most ruthless swords to cleave the hearts of all heretics until the very flesh-of-war banged fist and wept bitterly upon the walls of Bärenthoren. But the walls never swayed, or showed compassion. They never cried.
Not until the arrival of Temujin Gur.
And then they cried. Not tears, but blood.
Bärenthoren servants saw it first, just before the banquet for Empress Elizabeth, oozing and trickling from the inside walls of several of bedchambers. Their screams brought Prince Christian bounding up the stairs, pistols in hand, to investigate. He touched the blood with one finger. It felt chill as ice and smelled of insect, like a mash of crushed hornets or bees. Princess Johanna took one look and shrieked herself into a faint. The Bärenthoren Castle priest, Father Rolfen Grimm, watched the haunted blood run in rivulets from the seams between the stones and crossed himself seven times seven. But the blood, wiser than they could imagine, possessed purpose, as all were soon to see.
War of the World Makers Page 4
