Bohemian Gospel

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  “Of course I did not mean it, you ass,” the King spat back. “But I gave you one order, Vok. Protect my ward. And yet here she is bloody and—”

  The heavy chamber door closed with a thud behind her.

  “This way, my Lady.”

  “I am . . .” Not a Lady, Mouse started to say, but what would she have him call her? Girl? Mouse? She looked up to the high arched ceilings, the rich wood polished to a shine; her leather slippers crackled on the rush mats covering the stone floor, and the sweet smell of pennyroyal followed her. “Mouse” didn’t seem to fit here.

  “Grateful,” she finished meekly.

  Mouse was looking under a bed three times the size of her little cot at the abbey when the girl surprised her.

  “Been sent to help you bathe and dress, my Lady.”

  “Dress for what?” Mouse asked.

  “To go down to the Great Hall for supper with the rest, my Lady.”

  “Oh, no I am not.” Mouse knew she was breaking some protocol by the look on the girl’s face. “Not well,” Mouse added. Her head still hurt, though the gash was now little more than a scratch. But she felt ill at the idea of facing all those people and their questions. She wasn’t ready yet.

  After the girl helped Mouse bathe and brought her a borrowed tunic and silk mantle, Mouse sent her to tell Ottakar that she wouldn’t be coming down for supper. But Mouse knew she couldn’t hide in her room forever. She needed answers for the questions that would inevitably come about who she was and what she was doing here. She ran her fingers in her hair, rubbing at her scalp, sore from braids and pins as much as from slamming her head on the ground.

  The knock on the door startled her, and again she was faced with not knowing what to do. She wrapped the mantle around her more tightly and moved toward the door, but it opened before she got there.

  “My Lady, my Lord the King of Bohemia.” The girl bowed slightly and Ottakar swept into the room.

  “They said you were unwell. Your head?” he asked as he stepped close, looking down at her forehead.

  She meant to answer, but she couldn’t stop looking at his scarlet cloak fanning out behind him, lined with golden fur, and the silver belt at his waist and the pearls stitched into his surcoat. The crown on his head caught the candlelight. It was all too much for Mouse who was more aware than ever how much she did not belong here.

  Embarrassed, she finally managed to mutter “No,” and stumbled backward to the chairs near the fire.

  “Can you tell me what is wrong? You are my ward, after all.” She heard the smile in his voice.

  Mouse tried to laugh, too. “And you, my wise old guardian.” But then she second-guessed the tone of familiarity; he seemed far more a king now than a boy or her patient. “I am sorry, my Lord. I should not—”

  “Did you know I had an older brother, Mouse?” he asked as he lowered himself into a chair opposite her. “Vladislaus.”

  “You told me . . . that first night.”

  “I was never meant to be King.” He pulled at the gold belt, reached up and took off the crown. He sighed. “Vok and I were foster brothers. I lived with his family part of the year and he lived with mine for the other. He is a younger son, too. We hunted together. Trained together. I was just Ottakar to him when I was the second son. I lost that when my brother died.”

  Mouse looked up at him.

  “I know I am King, Mouse. And you know I am King,” he said, smiling. “And there is a level of formality we must follow at court, but here”—he waved his hand at the room—“I would like it if I could just be Ottakar.”

  Mouse wanted to say yes, but she wasn’t sure what she was agreeing to—calling him by his name so he didn’t get lost in his title, so someone in the world knew him as himself? She could understand that, trying to hold on to who he was. She could help him do that. But was he asking for a different kind of intimacy?

  “Mouse?”

  She had never thought much about boys. Her mind had always been on God and books. When Ottakar said her name, her body betrayed her.

  “But who am I supposed to be?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Am I your physician? I am no longer your ward. The papers grant guardianship only until we reached Prague.”

  “Mother Kazi insisted I change that. I am your guardian still, wise and old or not.”

  That Mother Kazi would still look out for her surprised Mouse, but it did not solve her problems. “So what am I, then? They are calling me ‘my Lady,’ but you and I know—” She hesitated as she looked over at the servant girl. Ottakar followed her eyes.

  “Ah, Gitta knows how to hold her tongue.” He turned back to Mouse. “And you and I know nothing about your lineage. In fact, based on what Mother Kazi could tell me, I am more convinced than ever that you are from a noble family, most likely in France. And as soon as I have settled the matter of who is trying to kill me, I mean to find out just where you come from and who your parents were.”

  Mouse wasn’t sure if she wanted to find those answers or not; they might close more doors than they opened. “In the meantime, who am I to be?”

  “Lady Mouse?” He chuckled, and Mouse shook her head. “Lady Dusana? No. Lady Ester.” He laid his head back against the chair. Mouse smiled, thinking that she had someone to play her name-game with now. “I know. There was a woman my mother spoke of.” He was oddly quiet. “From Austria. She helped people, the poor and sick, anyone she met who needed her. They say she will be made a saint. Her name was Emma. You shall be Lady Emma.”

  It wasn’t hers any more than the ones Mouse had tried on as a girl, but it would do for now, until she found out who she really was.

  EIGHT

  Mouse stood at the threshold of the chapel but did not go in. Sts. Wenceslaus and Ludmila stared down at her from the stained glass windows flanking the altar. This was as close as she had ever been to Mass. Mouse chewed at the corner of her veil as she tried to summon the courage to enter. Lady Emma would have to go to Mass. And take communion. And make confession. But not today.

  She slipped out into the courtyard unseen. A light rain was falling, but she didn’t mind getting wet if she could find some solitude and fresh air. But the rattle of carts on stone, the squelch of feet in the mud, stifled coughs, and shouted greetings shattered her hopes of being alone. The air hung in a thick mist and carried the smells of people and animals crowded into an enclosed space. Mouse wanted the woods and the riverside. Surely if she followed the wall, she would find a way out and down to the Vltava River, to the trees and the sound of the animals—they might give her the courage she needed.

  “Where are you going, my Lady?”

  She spun around. “Luka.” She sighed with relief.

  “My Lord the King sent me to look for you when he did not see you at morning Mass, my Lady.”

  “Oh,” Mouse scrambled for an excuse. “I meant to take a short walk outside the walls, but I could not find the way out.”

  “At the South Tower, there.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “And at Black Tower, here at the back of St. George’s. But my Lady should not walk outside the walls without an escort. May I take you back now? They will have set the hall for midday meal.”

  Mouse held her tongue and gave him a quick nod, but all the way back she was thinking of how soon she might slip away for that walk in the woods despite what Luka said. She was not accustomed to being told where she could walk nor that she must accept unwelcome company.

  When Luka left her at the entrance to the Great Hall, Mouse’s hoped-for courage went with him. She arched her neck to look up at the ceilings, impossibly high. Stone columns grew like trees and then branched out in smaller arches along the ceiling, interlacing like the limbs of the ironwood trees out back of the abbey at Teplá. Brightly colored murals filled the space between the arches so that the ceiling was a canopy of pictures, animals like she had seen in bestiaries, castles, scenes of jousting and battle, people she did not know. The ar
tist in her marveled at the skill and beauty. Without thinking, she raised her hand wanting to touch them. A servant brushed past her carrying dishes and cups, drawing Mouse’s attention back to the lords and ladies who filled the Great Hall.

  Mouse recognized some of the men—Damek and others who had been with Ottakar—but it was the women she watched. They seemed to glide across the floor, their long gowns trailing behind them but never twisting, the women never laying a hand on the skirt to lift or shift it; Mouse had been tripping on hers. The women held their necks stiff, their hands posed. They all wore wimples pulled tight against their chins, their heads covered by veils capped with embroidered fillets, their hair bound by knotted nets of gold thread. Mouse shook her head a little at the feeling of being tied and tethered. The ladies lifted and lowered their eyes as they were approached by this man or that woman, clearly some unreadable awareness of social place and politics at play. Mouse felt her stomach flip at the idea that she would have to learn the game, and then she remembered Mother Kazi’s parting words that all she need do was watch the others and learn.

  And so Mouse settled against the wall, shielding herself from view by the door, her skin prickling as she focused all of her unnatural senses on studying the ladies. She realized that she could anticipate how they would move, like the horses at the river, though this felt far more dangerous.

  It was the music that finally drew her in, a high lilt against thrumming drums and the haunting pull of a rebec. Mouse wanted to see the musicians, but the people were in the way. With a shake, she stretched her body, mimicking the posture of one of the women who looked like someone had threaded a string through the top of her head and was pulling her upright. The woman seemed impossibly straight, but Mouse managed to make her body do the same. She positioned her arms correctly and then with a subtle kick of her knee against the long gown and a swish of her foot forward, Mouse entered the Great Hall.

  She kept her eyes on the floor in front of her and followed the music, but by the time she reached the far corner where the minnesingers played, her cheeks flamed with embarrassment. She could feel everyone in the room looking at her. She tried to focus on the music, but all she could hear were the whisperers wondering who she was.

  And then the man began to sing. Mouse had been surrounded by the voices of the Brothers and Sisters lifted in prayer, and they were beautiful, but she had never heard anyone sing like this—clear, alone, telling the tale of a dishonored knight working for redemption to win the hand of a lady.

  “The King wants you,” Luka whispered in her ear, startling her. As she turned to go, the singer opened his eyes for the first time; they were clouded and rolled wildly.

  “He is blind,” Mouse said, starting to turn back to him as if there were something she could do, but Luka held her arm, guiding her toward the high table, and she realized that everyone else was already eating. They stopped when they saw her take the seat beside the Younger King, a place of honor.

  “You like the music?” Ottakar asked, smiling.

  “Very much, my Lord,” she said. Lord Rozemberk, sitting on the King’s other side, turned his head slightly in her direction, apparently approving of the change in her decorum.

  The approval was short-lived as Mouse grabbed the King’s arm excitedly. “Oh, look!” She pointed at the tapestries hanging on the walls—one full of dark mountains with a man, stitched in gold, looking down to a land of green, and another, bright with reds and blues, showing a woman wearing a crown and taking the hand of a ploughman who held the tethers of two oxen in his other hand; they looked onto a great city. They were the history of Bohemia—Father Czech coming down the Carpathians and discovering the land; the prophetess Libuse marrying the first Premsyl and foreseeing the building of Prague. Each of the dozen tapestries around the hall gave some piece of the story of Bohemia straight from Cosmas’s Chronicle, which Mouse had copied many times at the abbey.

  She tore a piece of bread from a loaf and dipped it in the cup of wine nearest her, but she was much more interested in the room and the music than the food. She lost herself in the spectacle until Ottakar interrupted her reverie.

  “There is someone I would like you to meet,” he whispered to her and then leaned forward, speaking more formally to the person on Lord Rozemberk’s right. “Lady Lemberk, allow me to introduce you to Lady Emma, my ward.” Mouse turned in time to see the surprise on the woman’s face; it was the woman whose posture and movement Mouse had mimicked. “Lady Emma, this is Lady Lemberk,” Ottakar continued, looking now at Mouse.

  “I did not know you had a ward, my Lord,” Lady Lemberk said as she glanced at Mouse’s face and then let her eyes slide down Mouse’s body.

  “I am sure Lady Lemberk will help guide you around the castle and show you how to manage the day-to-day of court life,” he said. “Lady Emma has been recently at the abbey in Teplá.”

  “I see,” Lady Lemberk said. “I would be most happy to help, my Lord.”

  “Thank you.” He bowed slightly as he stood.

  And suddenly, everyone was standing and then bowing as Ottakar left the room, dinner officially done. As the rest of court bustled out of the Great Hall, Mouse was left with Lady Lemberk.

  “You must tell me all about yourself,” Lady Lemberk said as she motioned for Mouse to follow, but Mouse kept quiet as she trailed the lady’s train up the stairs. She counted them in her head, trying to ease the growing sense of dread—seventy-nine steps up to the landing and twelve kick-slide steps to the large wooden doors. The solar hummed with women’s voices. Mouse instantly isolated them, consuming bits of their conversations and piecing them together again, learning what she could about each of them. She knew many of their names before Lady Lemberk had made the actual introductions and settled Mouse near the fire.

  “Do you play?” Lady Lemberk asked as she moved a small table with a chessboard closer to Mouse.

  Mouse nodded. She had played with Father Lucas when she was a child.

  “Are you any good?”

  Mouse shrugged.

  “The ladies here have no head for it. They are all music and stitchery and gossip.” Lady Lemberk put the pieces in their places; she gave herself white.

  Mouse kept her eyes on the board, but her attention stayed on the women in the room. The woman seated near the window was pregnant; Mouse could hear the baby’s heartbeat.

  Lady Lemberk moved her pawn.

  The girl plucking at a lute in her lap had a rattle in her chest. Mouse shifted, about to go offer to make the girl a poultice, when she heard the whisper of one of the women huddled over an embroidery hoop.

  “A girl her age as ward and him unmarried?”

  Mouse moved her pawn.

  “How long have you been the Younger King’s ward?” Lady Lemberk asked as she moved her knight.

  “Some time.” Mouse slipped out her bishop.

  “Is she family? She must be family,” muttered the other embroidery woman.

  “Maybe the Old King’s bastard daughter,” came the reply.

  The heat from the fire licked at Mouse’s face.

  “Is the King’s mother here?” Mouse asked.

  The room went silent. She didn’t need to look up to know that they were all staring either at her or at Lady Lemberk, waiting to see what she would say.

  “I should think that you would know,” the Lady said wistfully. “But then, they do not like to speak of it. Understandably.” She crossed herself, and Mouse heard the scratch of silk as the other women did the same.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” Mouse said. “God rest her soul.” And she, too, made the sign of the cross, her hands shaking a little.

  “She would not be with God, my dear. She was a . . . suicide.” Lady Lemberk whispered the last. But the other women took up the story, pale and quiet from the shock, but their eyes alive with the excitement of telling the gossip to someone who had not yet heard.

  “It was when the Younger King came up against his father and them still so heartbr
oken over Prince Vladislaus.”

  “My Lady the Queen was out of her head with grief. And then to have her other boy join up against his own father—”

  “Now be careful what you say. We all know there was a right to what happened. For a father to hate his son so—it is surely a sin. And there were other things, an oddness that grows even yet in the old King,” said the pregnant woman.

  “You should mind your own tongue, Lady Harrach, or you will lose it should that get back to my Lord, the King.”

  “Enough!” said Lady Lemberk. “His Holiness has himself commanded that we make peace and let the father and son rule together. We should—”

  “She cut herself up, the Queen,” the girl at the lute blurted out. “To the bone down both arms. Run through the floor and dripped down into the Great Hall, the blood did. Can still see the stains of it.”

  “And no one would mourn her, not father nor son.” A feverishness filled the voice and spread through the room.

  “But the Younger King did cut her free from the straps as the people started to drag her. He would not let them have her to defile. He carried her to the Sisters at Agnes himself. I saw. Made them take her, he did. Shameful.”

  Mouse’s chest tightened.

  “They say the reason the great King hates the younger is because she—”

  “No more.” Lady Lemberk’s command was cold and certain. The women pressed their lips together and turned back to their entertainments, including the whispered gossip, much of which centered on the late Queen, but some of it turned back to Mouse.

  She tried to focus only on the game, but unlike looking for souls, she had no control over what her gifts let her see or smell or hear.

  “And where are you from?” Lady Lemberk asked as she moved her next piece.

  Mouse’s heart raced but she held her voice steady. “My family is from France.” She sacrificed a rook and could hear Lady Lemberk’s heart flutter as she slid her bishop to take the offering. The lady thought she was going to win.