“Why not?” Ottakar asked angrily.
Father Lucas moaned.
“Please, Ottakar, just trust me,” she said.
“They have already brought some of the food for the feast tomorrow, have they not?” the King asked the servant, who crouched at the top step, the praying masses at his back.
“Yes, my Lord. It is in the north transept.”
Ottakar turned to look at Mouse. She nodded.
Folding his arms across his chest, he paced the dark edges of the crypt until the man returned with bread and a cup of wine. While Mouse tied off the makeshift bandage, the King tore small pieces of wine-soaked bread and fed them to Father Lucas. Despite the crown and jeweled mantle, nothing about him seemed stiff or regal. Mouse kept her head bent where she could watch him unseen. His face was soft, kind, his voice gentle as he encouraged the old man to eat.
As she lifted her face, she realized that she had also been watched unaware. A look of sadness flitted across Father Lucas’s eyes before he could mask it.
“You must finish, andílek,” he said.
She nodded as Ottakar turned to look at her, too.
“What does he mean?”
Mouse opened her mouth, but it was Father Lucas who gave the answer. “Evil spirits are among us, my Lord,” he said weakly. “This night it is easy for them to torment the living, and they seem particularly bent to vengeance on people in this church.”
“How?”
“They play on the minds of your people, make them see things, hear things that are not true.”
“The bleeding crucifix?”
“Yes, my Lord.”
Ottakar crossed himself. “Is it a tainted soul seeking revenge on someone?” Mouse saw the anguish pull at his face. Ottakar almost sounded like a child needing reassurance—a child sure his damned mother had come back for revenge. Mouse laid her hand on his arm, wanting to offer comfort, to tell him it was not his dead mother harrowing his people, but he did not know she knew about the Queen’s suicide.
And Father Lucas was too quick.
“Yes, my Lord,” he said, lying in order to feed the King’s misunderstanding. “We must pray for the dead, my Lord, pray to ease their suffering, but we must shield ourselves from their wrath. We were using the vade retro satana like St. Procopius himself to protect those inside the church.” Father Lucas closed his eyes again as he gave the lie; the spells he and Mouse used were not sanctioned by Rome.
“But why the blood?”
“It strengthens the exorcism,” Mouse said, fumbling for her knife and holding to Father Lucas’s lie. “A shedding of life to preserve life.”
“Like a beast at the altar,” Ottakar said.
She nodded. “We covered the perimeter of the church but not the crypt.”
“Finish,” Father Lucas said again. He sounded strange. Mouse looked first to his face and then followed the line of his sight. He was staring at a statue of Mary nestled into one of the alcoves along the crypt walls. She was flanked by angels about to crown her. Mouse could see nothing unusual about it, but when she turned back to Father Lucas, she felt his terror.
And then she saw the shadows move, slowly stretching toward them.
“Stay in the light,” she said to Ottakar as she pulled her knife across her hand.
“No!” He grabbed for the knife too late but held her by the wrist.
“The worst is done, Ottakar, now let me finish.”
He pushed her hand away and spun toward Father Lucas as Mouse moved quickly to the edge of the light, trailing blood.
“You let her do this? You taught her to mutilate herself? This is your purview, Father, your vocation. Not hers! She is just a girl,” Ottakar hissed.
“You are right, of course, my Lord, but we both know that she is not just a girl.” Father Lucas closed his eyes again until Mouse sat down heavily beside him. He looked warily toward the statue again and, smiling, laid his head back. “I think I will rest a little now.”
Mouse pressed her thumb into her cut palm to stop the flow of blood.
“You are pale. Drink.” Ottakar held the cup of wine to her lips. Mouse drank.
Then he held out his hand. She took it. He led them to a bench on the other side of the crypt, grimacing at the barrier of her blood behind them as they sat.
“You will not do that again, Mouse.”
She stiffened at the sound of command; this was her king and not Ottakar talking. “Would you order your men thus, my Lord? To preserve themselves at all costs even if there are others in jeopardy? I do not think so.”
“You are not a soldier,” he said more gently.
“I can be.”
He turned her hands over. Mouse was glad of the thickening blood to hide the nearly healed gash. “Yes, I see that.” He kissed the underside of her wrists. “But I do not want to see you . . . I do not like to see you do harm to yourself.” Only when she saw his jaw tighten did Mouse remember how the queen had killed herself. Mouse turned her hands over quickly and laid her head against his shoulder.
“Will you pray with me, Mouse? For our mothers. Yours . . . and mine.”
Mouse nodded, and they slid to their knees on the cold stone floor of the crypt, hands entwined, heads bowed, both whispering the first of the vespers for the dead. They faltered at the third verse when they heard the screams bounce along the castle walls and sift down into the crypt. The hollow-eyed children had found others beyond the protected church to torment. There was nothing Mouse could do for them. Not tonight.
“‘The sorrows compassed me, and the pains of Hell gat hold upon me,’” Father Lucas joined in, steady and calm.
“‘I found trouble and sorrow,’” they all said together. “‘Then I called upon the name of the Lord; O Lord, I beseech Thee, deliver my soul.’”
Mouse mouthed the last words but could not give them voice.
They prayed through the night. At the sounds of the people stirring in the nave and the first signs of light softly glowing against St. George’s rafters, Mouse and Ottakar and Father Lucas pushed themselves up stiffly. Father Lucas steadied himself with a hand on the bench.
“‘On those living in the shadow of death a light has dawned,’” he quoted as he walked up into the nave.
After Mass, as the others crowded around tables set with food, Ottakar quietly led Mouse out into the courtyard and through the gate at the Black Tower. He did not speak. He did not need to, and Mouse wouldn’t either, although when he stopped abruptly in the middle of the Judith Bridge, the morning mists of the Vltava crawling over their feet, she almost spoke, wanting to wipe the horror from his face.
She was sure he was remembering; she could see the scene in her mind—him, at fifteen, struggling with the weight of his mother’s body in his arms, nose flared at the smell of death, grief and despair at her lost soul tearing at him. Mouse wondered if he had also paused here that day, thinking of tossing the body over the bridge, letting the water take his mother like Mouse had tempted the Teplá to do for her. But she did not speak; she waited until he was ready, and then they crossed over the river and silently through the streets of town.
He knocked at the door of the convent but did not ask admittance when it was opened. The nun simply stood aside. Mouse could see the family resemblance in the woman’s square jaw and high forehead. This was Ottakar’s aunt, Mother Agnes.
But Ottakar made no introductions. He gripped Mouse’s hand as they wove through a hallway and into a darkened room. He left her a moment and came back with a candle. Its light deepened the circles under his eyes. He walked past her toward the back of the room.
It was a plain room. No furnishings, no tapestries, no statues. Just windowless, cold stone.
Mouse stood quietly at the doorway until the candlelight on the wall shook with his weeping. When she put her hand on his back, he dropped to his knees like she’d cut some invisible string. She took the candle from him and sat it on the floor as she knelt beside him. She saw the marker then, fl
at and thin, not even a name, just an etched flower carved into the stone. She traced her finger along the curves of its petals; it was a bellflower like the ones that, in spring, covered the meadows purplish blue. She understood; this was where the Queen had been buried.
“No.” Ottakar pulled Mouse’s hand away. “None here would mourn her.”
“I will.”
“It is not right. She did it to herself. My mother. With my father’s hunting knife, I am told.” He ran his palm along his bearded jaw and would not look at Mouse. “She did it in the room we stayed in as children until they took us away to school. Not Vlad, of course—my father wanted my brother close. But my sisters and I were groomed as pawns he could sacrifice as he wished.” Bitterness laced Ottakar’s words, but then he sighed and his voice softened. “When we were young, though—what fun we had. Mother loved to dance and to draw. She spent as much of her day with us as she could. She read us the German stories of knights and their honor, and we played out their adventures. She made a fearsome dragon for my brother and me to battle as we saved our sisters.” He looked down at Mouse with a half smile that turned into a grimace. “She did it, right there where we wrestled and laughed as she tickled us.”
He bent over, his hands dug into his hair, pulling at the crown. “She killed herself as my army stormed the city and my father fled for his life. It was her last reprimand for me, her worst. She wanted me to know how ashamed she was of me.” His voice broke.
Mouse laid her hand on his head and waited for his weeping to ease before she said, “I wonder if your mother chose that place for a different reason.”
“What do you mean?” He sat up, looking at her.
“It was a place of joy for her, you said.”
“What does that matter?”
“It tells us something about her mind at the time she died. She wanted to be somewhere that reminded her of happier times. She could leave this world with the images of her children playing in her mind and the echoes of their laughter ringing in her ears. I do not think this sounds like someone who was angry with her son. I think it sounds like someone who was very sad and was trying to run away from more sadness to come.”
“Yes, sadness I brought to her by betraying my father.”
“Why did you?”
“What?”
“Turn against him?”
“You have not met my father,” he said quietly. After a moment, he stretched his hand out to trace his mother’s flower as Mouse had done.
“Ottakar, if your mother sided with your father, why would she not have gone with him when he fled?”
He turned to look at her. “I had not considered that. The siege was chaos. Perhaps he could not reach her, but surely his guard would have—”
Mouse could see the doubt growing in his eyes; she had more questions as she tried to piece together what might have happened. “Was your mother distraught after your brother’s death?”
“Of course she was. Her heart broke. My father’s, too. But she could find no relief from her sorrow. Her women forced her to eat, forced her from the bed where she would lay, soiling herself, no will to move until they made her. They took away the knives after she cut away her hair. It was growing back white and soft as a lamb’s.” He stretched out his hand as if he were touching it.
“Her mind was twisted with grief?”
He nodded.
“The Church makes allowances for people disturbed of mind. Even the Talmud distinguishes between those who are sane and not. If you press the bishop for an inquest, your mother can have her burial rites. We can offer suffrages to ease her pain through purgatory. She can be saved, Ottakar.”
Mouse saw the hope in his eyes and kept the rest of her speculations to herself. If his mother was in such jeopardy of mind, how had she gotten her husband’s hunting knife, and what had urged her to action after a year’s absence of self-will? Someone else’s will was at work, and Mouse thought she knew whose.
“God has sent you to me,” Ottakar whispered, pulling her from her own thoughts as he lowered his mouth to hers.
Mouse felt like she was floating in the warm Teplá River; it was taking her to her future just as she had asked.
FOURTEEN
The streets were hushed and somber, the people dark-eyed and wary, as Mouse and Ottakar made their way back to the castle. The smell of fresh rolls led them to Celetna Lane, where they stopped at one of the bakeries.
“A bad All Hallows’, my Lord, was it not? Bodes ill for the coming winter, do you think?” the baker asked as he handed the King a roll.
“Every All Saints, I hear tell of the long Eve before, haunts and strange happenings. Why was last night any worse than others?” Ottakar’s voice was bold and comforting, but Mouse could hear the fear behind it.
“You speak true, my Lord, but it is not every All Hallows’ that a man cooks himself in his own oven.”
“What do you mean?” Mouse asked.
“Was old Delf, it was. His wife—now widow, I guess—heard him crying out for his boy, crying like his heart would break. She run out to the kitchen in time to see him crawling into the fire like he was grabbing at something. He turned when she screamed for him. ‘O wife, it is our boy, our poor boy. Someone’s done pitched him in and stoked the flame,’ he told her. And then the fire took to his hair and clothes and she could not get the water fast enough.”
“What of the boy?” Ottakar asked.
“My Lord, his boy done died years back with the fever. But if that be not strange enough, his wife says she saw something moving in the fire, and old Delf was right, too. Someone had stoked it up fresh and hot ’cause the wife and he had it cooled to embers for the night.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way to the castle—Ottakar tearing at the bread absently, Mouse unable to eat. The King took his leave of her just as they entered the gate; he was anxious to meet with the bishop to talk about his mother. Mouse’s thoughts had already turned to the coming night. How many more would suffer or die as the hollow-eyed children played their games? Mouse might appease them, offer herself in exchange for leaving everyone else alone, but she only knew spells to keep them at bay, not to draw them in. And so, instead of sleeping, Mouse read.
Father Lucas had told her that the stories in the book he had given her, The Book of Enoch, were less important than what he hoped she would find—an encoded key to decipher the book Mouse had taken from the abbey. But she found herself fascinated by Enoch’s tale of the angels—the Watchers, he called them—who wanted lives like men; they wanted children and so they left Heaven to beget them. Enoch called the children giants; God called them evil spirits. There were no illuminations in the manuscript, only text, so Mouse imagined for herself what the children of the angels might look like. The only visage she could picture was pasty, waxlike, and hollow-eyed like the dark creatures. Maybe they were the children of the Watchers.
Enoch wrote about binding them all in deep pits so they could not corrupt the lives of men. That meant it could be done, if Mouse found a way to bind them.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The sun was stretching to the far side of the room, the day passing. Fighting a growing desperation, Mouse grabbed both books and headed to the Queen’s garden. She wanted the sun on her back and fresh air to help clear her mind.
She sat on the ground near the fountain with the books spread out in front of her. As interesting as Enoch’s story about the Watchers had been, he had also written visions and histories. He spoke of secrets, which the Watchers had given to men, hidden knowledge about plants and charms and the way the heavens worked.
Mouse felt the pricking of something at the back of her mind.
The other book contained images of plants and the heavens and detailed drawings of circles in differing patterns. What if they were descriptions of charms? What if the language of that other book, unknown to man, was the language of the angels?
Mouse ran her hand lightly over the opened pages o
f the mysterious book. Could this be the book of the Watchers?
She shook away the questions as she remembered her task at hand—finding a way to protect the people of Prague against the torments of those dark creatures. Regardless of whose children they were, Mouse knew they were here because of her. She turned back to Enoch with a renewed focus on finding the key. There would be time later to unlock the book’s other secrets.
Mouse had decrypted several texts for Father Lucas over the years, mostly letters hiding information about apocryphal writings he wished to acquire without the scrutiny of the Church. All the codes she’d encountered were based on mathematic formulas. The formula should be in Enoch’s book since that was the key.
She spun around onto her stomach and tore at the dying grass until she had a clear patch of dirt. She broke off a branch of lavender, stripping its leaves and spilling the soft scent into the air. Her hand shook a little as she began to write in the dirt, remembering her drawing that resurrected the squirrel, but she pushed the image away, emptying her mind to let it race through Enoch’s words, thumbing the pages as she looked for the numbers: Six portals, twelve windows, thirty mornings, ten parts day to eight parts night, seven great islands. She played with the figures in the dirt, first one way and then swiping her hand across the soil to try them all again another way. Was movement west, toward the setting sun, a subtraction or an adding of days as we neared our death? Her mind ran through the possibilities until the equation lay there, stark and absolute, scribbled in the earth.
She pulled the unreadable book to her and began looking for patterns that fit the formula, looking in the leaves of the plants, in the number of roots crawling along the bottoms of the pages. She found her first code in a flower that looked like a mountain upturned, blue and green and white petals circling out around its open mouth, red flowing down its sides broken by tongues of white.
The pattern of them mirrored the mathematical equation.
Her heart pounding against her chest, Mouse looked to the words scribbled above and around the flower, letting her eyes lose focus so her mind could see through the lens of the formula. The first word started to take shape as the pattern of letters was revealed.
Bohemian Gospel Page 13
