Bohemian Gospel

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “You believe her?” Lord Rozemberk asked.

  Mouse poured wine over the wound and focused on the row of neat stitches and the skin already beginning to pucker as it healed.

  “Yes,” Ottakar said. “And so do you.”

  Lord Rozemberk sighed with resignation. “Just as you know who wants you dead, my Lord.”

  Mouse squinted as the morning sun broke over the tree line and burst through the window; it brought with it a sudden awkwardness as she was too aware that she was rubbing crushed herbs and wine along Ottakar’s naked rib cage, which was now bathed in the light.

  He must have felt it, too; he flinched and put his hand on hers. “Let Hartwin do it. Vok, go get him.”

  She snatched her hands back.

  Ottakar saw the flash of anger in her eyes. “You misunderstand, Mouse. Clearly you know your craft. I owe my life to your skill. But you have also been up all night; you should sleep. Surely we can trust Hartwin to dress my wound.”

  “He was once your father’s physician,” Lord Rozemberk said, his voice laced with disapproval and doubt.

  “What does that matter? My father has summoned us to Prague to reconcile, Vok. I am his only son. His only heir. He does not want me dead.”

  Lord Rozemberk crossed his arms over his chest. “As you say, but the girl does well enough. Let her finish the job.”

  “Do you think you can sit?” Mouse asked Ottakar, fully focused now on being a healer and not a girl.

  “Gladly,” he said as he started to push himself up, wincing with the pain.

  “Wait. You might pull the stitches loose inside.” She slid her arm beneath his back. “You.” She nodded at Lord Rozemberk. “Put your arm behind him on the other side. Lift when I say. But gently.”

  Ottakar let go the breath he was holding once he was upright. “Vok, get a chair. I am done with the sickbed. And bring me a shirt.”

  “You must move slow and easy or your lung will fold again,” Mouse argued as she wrapped the linen around his chest. She was tying it off when Lord Rozemberk returned with the chair, a shirt, and Brother Jan and Hartwin following behind him.

  “Put the chair by the fire,” Mouse directed as she slipped herself under Ottakar’s shoulder and waited for Lord Rozemberk to do the same on the other side. They moved as one to lift the King, bearing most of his weight as he took the few shuffling steps to the chair and sat. Mouse lifted the shirt, helped him thread his arms through the sleeves, and let the linen fall to the seat, making mounds of white against his black woolen chausses. She slipped the pillow from the pallet behind his back.

  “My Lord, I was told you needed my services,” Hartwin said as he stepped forward, clearly irritated.

  “It seems I already have a physician, Hartwin.”

  Mouse could not stop the smile that played at the corners of her mouth.

  “My Lord, I think you have been misled. This girl might offer you certain . . . comforts, but she is no physician.” He sneered with his insinuation.

  Mouse froze; she willed her eyes to find the crack in the floor again, made herself breathe, but the sting of embarrassment grew hotter still.

  Ottakar shifted in his chair. “Lord Rozemberk, pay the man for his trouble. And, Hartwin, be sure to let my father know I am in good health when next you see him.”

  Mouse turned to pour a fresh cup of wine, looking for anything to do that would hide her face long enough for her to regain her composure. She handed the cup to Ottakar without looking.

  “I am hungry. Am I free to eat?” Ottakar asked her abruptly.

  “No meat. Start with a simple soup and bread. It is the feast day of Mary’s birth. Brother Milek will have fish soup for the poor in Teplá.” She turned to Brother Jan. “Bring only the broth.” Her voice was as flat as she could make it, healer only, no woman to be ashamed of being made an object of some stranger’s scorn, no self to be offended at Ottakar’s failure to defend her honor.

  Brother Jan waited for a nod from the King before he turned to leave, looking past Mouse as if she weren’t there.

  “You may go,” Ottakar said.

  Mouse thought he was talking to the prior.

  “I said you may go, Mouse.” Ottakar’s dismissal of her was sudden, though not unkind. She gave a stiff bow and a mumbled “my Lord” anyway. She passed Lord Rozemberk on her way to the door. He did not look at her.

  She heard the King as her hand closed around the latch. “Prepare the men to leave.”

  FOUR

  Mouse ran down to the Teplá River and along the bank until it grew shallow. She was afraid of the water and could not swim, but here her feet would stay on the bottom, toes curled around the smooth rocks, anchored against the current. As she lowered herself into the water—made warm by the area’s hot springs—strands of her hair floated in front of her; she saw trails of red pull away from her and disappear in the river. The water loosened the King’s blood in her surcoat, and pools of it swirled at her chest as if she were bleeding. But they, too, slowly vanished.

  And then she was as done with the King as he seemed to be with her.

  She tossed the surcoat onto the bank and laid her head back in the water, playing with the idea of letting the river carry her away to a future she couldn’t figure out for herself. Surely it would be better than going back to the abbey.

  Mouse stood up instead, the weight of her wet hair pulling at her neck, and her linen undershirt clinging to her body. When she heard the sound of something in the tree line, she dropped back under the water, wrapping her arms around her chest, waiting.

  Huffing and snarling, a pair of pine martens tumbled out of the dwarf cherry at the edge of the woods, fighting over the shredded remains of a squirrel. The marten in the front dropped his piece of the flesh and launched himself against his enemy, tearing a gash in its golden fur. The injured marten bared its teeth and coiled, ready to strike back.

  “Stop!” Mouse yelled.

  In an instant, both martens sat back on their haunches, lips still curled with fury, their bodies quivering with the desire to move, but they just stared at her, waiting unwillingly for her next command.

  Mouse shuddered.

  This was another of her gifts that she hated and one over which she seemed to have little control. It didn’t matter what she said or even how she said it, but sometimes, especially when she was angry or afraid, she seemed to be able to compel living things to obey her. She felt so powerless in her own life, following Church rules and trying to mold herself into everybody’s expectations, that the last thing she wanted was to play master over some other creature.

  “Go on then,” she whispered.

  The wild things obediently turned and disappeared into the brush, leaving their bounty behind.

  Mouse pressed her fist against her stomach; she felt ill, though some part of her thrilled with her use of power. She’d been so careful these past years—never looking for souls, until last night, walking barefoot like Father Lucas or St. Norbert himself, using the pain of her damaged feet not as penance for what she had done but as mindfulness against what she might do. She kept as busy as the Sisters and silent as the Brothers. Mouse might not be a Norbertine monk, but she lived like one, which meant that until yesterday, she had not spoken more than a dozen words to another person in nearly three years.

  Except for Father Lucas. They broke the vows of silence together, reading and talking in the scriptorium, in the library, even as they walked in the Mary Garden. But he’d been away for more than a year now, and in those months of silence, she had almost tricked herself into believing that she was normal. But it was all a lie. No normal person could see a body’s soul or command the animals with a word.

  Andílek, Father Lucas called her. An angel. With special gifts.

  Father Lucas had taught her to hide those gifts and never to use them, telling her how people are afraid of what they do not understand. And when she argued that Jesus warned against hiding talents or when she cited the saints wh
o used their gifts for God, Father Lucas told her somberly, We live in an age of doubt, little Mouse, blind to the wonders of God. The people would condemn you.

  But Father Lucas was also blinded—by his love for Mouse. He wished to keep her safe above all else, but she was not his “little Mouse” anymore; she didn’t need protecting. If she could save a king all on her own, what might she do if she let loose her power and let herself be who and what God made her to be?

  She took a full breath, tasting the metallic cold of the air, and pulled herself out of the river. She walked over to the bloody corpse the martens had left behind. It looked like a torn rag. Only its head, the face partly peeled away from the skull, named it as God had made it—a squirrel.

  She tore a slender branch of green wood from a beech sapling in front of her and ran her fingernail along the end, smoothing it to a fine point. She knelt between the mangled squirrel and the river and began drawing in the mud, sketching the image of a squirrel she’d seen in a German bestiary Father Lucas had brought home from one of his trips when she was a child. She remembered every detail, every line in the fur on the tail, the shape of the eye, the scale of the nut held in the tiny front paws. There beside the river, she drew an exact copy of the image with a bit of stick and some soil.

  Mouse never forgot anything. An image. A text. A word spoken. She remembered all. Father Lucas also called this a gift, but when Adele died, Mouse learned the truth.

  She could still paint Adele’s face as if her nursemaid were sitting for her; she could hear her voice just as it had been, soft and high and thick with French. Mouse could replay every moment she had spent with Adele, but she couldn’t make her live again, couldn’t make her answer the questions Mouse had never thought to ask at five but which were so vital to her now: Who were her parents? What happened to them? Where did she belong? And yet, Mouse’s perfect memory kept the grief sharp, always, never dulling as it did for others when faces of lost ones faded. This wasn’t a gift but a curse.

  And so it would be again with these hours she had spent saving the Younger King of Bohemia, being part of something bigger than herself, connected to someone if only for a few moments. He could dismiss her, she could wash away his blood, and Ottakar could be gone, but the memory of it would all still be there in her head.

  As she finished her drawing, she looked over at the ravaged squirrel and wondered about a resurrected Jesus. Had he smelled like something dead? Had his heart beat? Thomas had stuck his hands in the wounds, so clearly Jesus’s body hadn’t healed. She sucked in a sharp breath as she imagined Adele risen, her flesh rotted and bones gnawed by things in the earth, her teeth clacking together as she tried to answer Mouse’s questions.

  And then the squirrel twitched.

  Mouse pushed herself back from it, watching as pieces of skin and muscle started to knit back together. Bits of the creature’s face stretched taut over the skull and reached for the other half that must have been lost somewhere in the woods; tiny claws pawed at the dirt. And then it started to scream, high and quiet.

  “Stop,” Mouse whispered, but nothing happened. The squirrel kept writhing and screaming. “Oh, God, stop.” Turning away from the squirrel’s suffering, Mouse saw the image she had drawn, and with a sudden hope she dug her fingers in the mud and raked them across the picture. The squirrel fell still and silent. With shaking hands, Mouse pulled the bits of flesh apart again, snapping the small bones in her haste, until the carcass lay mangled and dead once more. “Oh, God, what have I done?”

  She thrust her hands, bloody again, into the river. They sank into the silt at the bottom as she leaned on them to retch, bile and saliva dripping from her mouth as the dry heaves shook her body.

  As she slowly made her way back to the abbey, Mouse tried to understand what had happened. She had not meant to bring the squirrel back to life. Maybe the pine martens hadn’t actually killed the squirrel but just wounded it, and what she had seen were its last signs of life, not a life she had given it. Mouse wanted to believe this, but she had seen the flesh weaving itself together. Somehow she had made that happen.

  It scared her—what she had done and the thrill of power it sent through her.

  She needed Father Lucas; he could explain it. But he was gone, and there was no one else who would help her, no one she could trust, nowhere to turn for answers. Except Father Lucas’s books—she might find answers there.

  At Father Lucas’s alcove in the cloister, Mouse crawled under the desk to a small cupboard in the far back corner. She sat for a moment, running her fingers along the carvings on the cupboard doors, trying to quiet her guilt for betraying the Father’s trust. The books he kept in these cupboards were the ones he had traveled far to collect; these were the books he did not want the Brothers to see, the books he had never let Mouse read. She should be patient and wait for him to come home; she wasn’t going anywhere and the questions would certainly still be there.

  But she was tired of not having answers.

  As she snatched one book and then another, racing through them, leather latches squeaking as she yanked them open, Mouse realized that the real answer she was looking for was how to rid herself of these gifts, how to make herself normal. She and Father Lucas had discovered many texts explaining how to exorcise demons; she wondered if such a book existed for exorcising gifts from God. But when she had emptied the shelves, not one of the books had offered answers or comfort.

  Disheartened, Mouse was sliding the books back into place when her hand ran up against something hard lying flat against the back wall like it was part of the cupboard. She curled her fingers around the edge and pulled; a book slapped down on the shelf. She laid the small codex in her lap, hunching over it, her fingers trembling a little with the sense of foreboding that crawled up her spine.

  Like many of the Brothers, Mouse knew several languages—it was helpful in reading and copying manuscripts—but when she lifted the wooden cover to the title page of the little book, she couldn’t read it. She bent close to study the faded script and saw even fainter lettering at the top of the page. Someone had written FRATRES PURITATIS—“Brethren of Purity.” Was it a translation or a mark of ownership? If it was a translation, Mouse might use it to decode the text. The book was old, maybe older than any she had seen. She carefully turned the leaves, studying the illustrations and then turning back to the title, trying to piece together words with the unfamiliar symbols and the context of the pictures. Some of the images in the illustrations were familiar—numbers, astrological symbols, animals—but none of it made sense to Mouse.

  She jumped when the hand slammed against the table over her head.

  Brother Stefan ducked his head down beneath the table and made the sign for her to stand. Growing up in the silence of the Norbertines, the canon’s sign language was the first Mouse learned; all the Brothers and Sisters used it to communicate simple needs and wants. And Brother Stefan clearly wanted Mouse to stand. Now.

  She started to put the strange book back in the cupboard—manuscripts never left the cloister—but she felt drawn to it. More willing to break the rules than part with the book, she slipped it quickly into the leather bag that hung from her waist. Brother Stefan stomped his feet and motioned to her again. As soon as she crawled out from under the table, he put his hand to the top of his head, fingers sticking up. A crown. The King. And then he gestured toward the door at the end of the cloister walkway.

  Mouse ran to the infirmary.

  The pallet was empty, bloody straw strewn across the floor. She spun, heading for the door again, when one of the sick Brothers called out to her from his bed. “They have gone to the guesthouse.”

  Breathless from running, she found Damek standing guard at the guesthouse door. He opened it for her without a word and Lord Rozemberk met her in the front hall.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Is it the lung again? Or fever?” Mouse asked as she slipped her mantle over her head, silently chastising herself for letting her pr
ide make her neglect her patient.

  “See for yourself.”

  The King was in bed, propped on pillows. “Finally! Would you tell Vok that I can have something besides fish piss to eat? It is already well past midday. I want real food.”

  Mouse smiled as she bent to listen to his breathing. “Have you passed water today and—”

  “Yes, yes, everything is working.”

  “Then I will go get something from the kitchen for you.”

  “No. Vok can go.”

  “Eggs, vegetable porridge, bread,” she said, looking over her shoulder to where Lord Rozemberk stood by the window, keeping watch.

  “While I fetch your food, you might ask your physician whether or not you should ride tomorrow as you intend, my Lord.” The way Lord Rozemberk slid over the word physician made Mouse’s skin crawl and her temper rise. But the martens and squirrel served as an uncomfortable reminder of what could happen if she let her discipline slip. She let Lord Rozemberk carry her anger with him as he left.

  “You washed away the blood.” Ottakar was looking at her hair. It had dried in wavy strands; she had not taken the time to brush it. She fought the urge to comb her fingers through it now, imagining what it must look like, disheveled and unkempt.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But you do not look like you slept.”

  “I had tasks.”

  “Other sick and wounded?”

  “No. I am not the healer here. I only help when—”

  “What tasks?”

  Mouse could not understand why any of this would matter to the King, but she knew she must answer. An image of the squirrel’s paw clawing the ground made her shudder.

  “I was . . . in the cloister studying.”

  “The Sisters have a cloister here?”

  “No, I was—” She had answered without thinking. In trying to avoid one truth, Mouse had revealed another, and by the look on Ottakar’s face, a shocking one.