Bohemian Gospel

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  Twenty years and not a mark on her to show it.

  Mouse felt the anger that had flared earlier that morning come back to life. At first she meant to lay this at God’s feet—he had indeed extended her life to prolong her wandering, to punish her. But then she thought of Bohdan, her manna from heaven, her peace offering. She was not at war with God. She was at war with—

  “Him,” she hissed, shocking Enede into silence. “His doing. Always him.”

  “What him, child? Him who mishandled you out in them woods?”

  Mouse stared at the woman blankly, slowly shaking her head as she let the pieces fall into place. A prolonged life, her not aging, they were like the other marks of her birth—unnatural senses, rapid healing, a quick mind and perfect memory. Mouse knew her enemy.

  “My father.” The truth ran through her like her tainted blood.

  Still holding Enede’s hand, Mouse folded to her knees, weeping. The old woman held her, crying with her.

  “Your father? He what done this to you?” Enede ran her hand gently over Mouse’s shorn head. “Shame on him. God curse him. But don’t you let him keep hurting you.” Mouse sobbed. “That’s better, girl. Let it out and then you can heal. Then you can move on.”

  When the men came back to the cottage that night, Enede met them at the door, whispering warnings at them. Mouse heard it all, but she was still grateful when none of them said a word about her now fully shaved head.

  Drained from the day’s revelations, she wove between them listlessly as she filled bowls with stew and cups with wine. Her ears pricked when the talk turned again to Ottakar.

  “Eh, the nobles don’t like him because he cares about the likes of us more than filling their bellies full. But they cannot touch him.”

  “Maybe they can now that he got the ban put on him by the emperor,” the new man added.

  “What you say?”

  “I heard word of it before I left Prague. The Holy Roman Emperor has named the King an outlaw of the Church. Anybody can kill him now and not hang for it.”

  Mouse walked to the fire, hiding her face from the men, afraid that it would show too much.

  “Ent nothing holy nor Roman about that Rudolf. God be with our good King,” said Enede, crossing herself.

  “God may not have much to do with it,” the man answered. “Heard the King done been excommunicated.”

  Mouse stepped outside, not wanting to hear more. A fresh snow was falling. Ottakar an outlaw, the doors of the Church closed to him. Just like her. He was alone.

  As impossible as it might be to help him in his troubles, Mouse could not silence the voice screaming at her to go to him, that he needed her.

  And so she went.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Whatever Mouse expected of an outlaw king, it wasn’t the swarm of tents spilling out beside Wroclaw, hoards of oxen, horses, and goats framing the swirl of white spires circling around the scarlet pavilion at the center.

  Here was Ottakar. And he was certainly not alone.

  Leaving the old woman’s house, head shaved and dressed in a stolen monk’s habit, Mouse had made for Prague first. Ottakar wasn’t there, but slipping in and out of monasteries along the way as she played the traveling monk, Mouse had gathered the pieces of his story, of what had happened to him while she was wandering the Sumava. She learned that many of the Bohemian nobles had failed to support him in his earlier bid to thwart the Holy Roman Emperor’s grab for land and wealth. Ottakar had built a mighty empire, overflowing with riches and filled with German craftsmen and Jewish tradesmen protected by his just laws—laws that revoked the unbridled power Vaclav had granted to many of his nobles. When the emperor came calling, besieging Ottakar in Vienna, those nobles gladly took the opportunity to seek revenge on their king and only a few of them sent knights to Ottakar’s aid.

  Ottakar had come home defeated—shunned by Rome and betrayed by many of his own, as well as the Austrian lords who had once begged him to be their king. But he was determined to protect his people from the emperor’s ruthlessness. And so Ottakar had gone looking for help elsewhere.

  As Mouse now looked down from Mount , beyond the fields already white with the first snowdrops of the spring, it seemed clear that Ottakar had found his army—thousands of loyal Bohemians and Moravians as well as Silesians and Poles afraid that a hungry Rome would not stop at the Krkonose Mountains.

  Mouse slowly made her way down and meandered between the tents and the edges of fields where the soldiers trained, wondering what she would do when she found Ottakar. She could hardly just introduce herself; she looked exactly as she had when Ottakar last saw her twenty years ago. But something kept pulling her closer to that scarlet tent in the center of the camp.

  “Name?”

  Mouse took another step toward the tent before the guard’s hand came down on her shoulder.

  “What is your name, Brother?”

  “Herman,” she said. It was the best she could do in the moment, German for “army man.”

  “You have business with the King?”

  She tried to think of some reason a poor monk would need to speak with the King, but as the possibilities of being near Ottakar again played out in her mind—of looking him in the eye, hearing his voice, saying his name—her courage fled. Panicked, she shook her head and slipped quickly out of sight behind a tent opposite Ottakar’s. And from there, she watched. Every time the flap of his tent lifted, she held her breath; each time it was someone else who came or left, she went back to chewing at her lip, waiting.

  When, near twilight, they brought horses to the front of the tent, Mouse knew she would get her glimpse of him, but still she wasn’t prepared. She held the moment, outside of time like she had when she first saw him at the Teplá River all those years ago, and she drank in the sight of him—the white along his temples and in his beard, which softened the tawny hair of his youth, the dark circles at his eyes, the wrinkles as he squinted to look off into the distance. Her heart raced with wanting to go to him.

  But it was the young man who came out of the tent just after the King that broke the spell.

  “Nicholas,” she called out before her hand clamped her mouth shut.

  He spun around, but Mouse had ducked behind the tent.

  He looked so much like his father—same nose and eyes, the way he held himself—but his hair had gone dark like hers, his mouth was shaped like hers, and his skin was light like hers. He was her son. Fear chased her joy, and she trembled at the thought of what his likeness to her might mean. Mouse closed her eyes quickly, hoping for the first time that one of her gifts was still there. She sighed as she saw the glow in Nicholas, steady and full.

  And then they were on the horses riding off toward the city.

  Mouse sat relishing the gift. She had buried him in her mind, never dared hope to see him again, and even as she sought out Ottakar, she’d not considered that Nicholas might be with him.

  Seeing him here filled her with joy and terror. It was as if he had come back to life. And she could think of herself as his mother again. The joy of it swelled in her until she could barely breathe, but with it came the worry of what might happen to him, since he had clearly allied himself with his father against Rome. Her fear for him brought with it a fierce desire—to be with him somehow, to protect him in any way she could.

  And so Mouse found a new purpose. She went to war.

  During the week before they broke camp, she found it easy to lose herself among the sea of soldiers. Wherever men gathered, there was illness even if battle had not yet come to make the wounded. Mouse gathered herbs on Mount and made teas and poultices. She moved among the sick, who were laid on cots or blankets or bare ground depending on rank. She tended them and pretended to pray with them when they asked.

  “Little Brother,” they called. “Come say a word to God for me.”

  And she would bow, silently. She felt helpless then, but many of them lived anyway.

  Every day, Mouse looked for Ot
takar and Nicholas. She allowed herself only one glimpse each day and never close enough to catch their smell, never close enough that she might be tempted to speak. But then the son of one of the Moravian lords fell from his horse and was trampled and someone mentioned the healing skills of the Little Brother.

  Mouse blinked as the soldier guided her into the dark tent, a sense of déjà-vu running through her as she knelt beside the boy who was struggling to breathe. He looked to be about the same age as Ottakar when she first met him. She laid her head against his bloody chest. She cut him quickly, slipped the cannula in and stepped back from the rush of blood. It turned her feet scarlet.

  “What have you done?”

  Mouse froze, unable to turn around at the sound of Ottakar’s voice asking the same question he’d asked her all those years ago. He stepped beside her, took her by the shoulder and spun her to face him. It was Nicholas; he sounded just like his father, though his eyes were a softer blue.

  “Brother, I asked what did you do? The lad breathes better.”

  She lowered her face quickly and shook her head.

  “The Little Brother does not speak,” said the guard who’d brought her to the tent.

  Mouse knelt again, bending to see in through the cannula, her hand gently probing the boy’s belly. The horses had crushed his innards; his ribs were not simply broken but smashed, slivers of them embedded in the organs. There was no hope for him.

  She eased the cannula from his side.

  “He will live now that he can breathe?” Nicholas asked.

  Mouse could hear the care in his voice.

  “A friend?” she asked softly, breaking her silence with a wish to comfort her son.

  Nicholas nodded. “Will he live?”

  Mouse could not stop her hand as it reached out for his. Surprised, Nicholas looked at her, a gaunt and grimy monk in his eyes, but he did not pull his hand away.

  “The horses have crushed him inside. There is nothing to do.” Her voice was thick with a mother’s love.

  Nicholas nodded again, his mouth pulled tight. “Will he suffer?”

  “He does not have to.”

  “Will you help him?”

  “If you wish it.”

  Nicholas squeezed her hand. “Wait,” he said as he lifted the tent flap.

  He came back with two men: the boy’s father and his own.

  Mouse lowered her face quickly, her heart pounding. She need not have worried. Ottakar watched her crush the hemlock seeds and mix them with wine, but he did not see past her shaved head, her habit, her stained fingers, her grim face. Ottakar did not know her.

  She held the cup of wine to the dying boy’s mouth, then stepped back to let his father and Nicholas kneel beside the cot to say good-bye. As she stood beside Ottakar, she breathed him in, relieved she could be so close to him yet hurt that he did not recognize her.

  Mouse closed her eyes and watched the boy’s soul lift and leave. As Nicholas wept, she reached out to lay her hand on his shoulder just as Ottakar did the same; their hands touched for a moment and the feel of his skin on hers burned through her.

  With a gasp, she slipped quickly from the tent; her hand covered her mouth to hold back the words she wanted to say, but she was unable to stop the tears. When she reached the cover of the woods at the foot of the mountain, she spun around like she had as a little girl in Adele’s arms, like she had the night she danced with Damek at the castle in Prague, and then, dizzy, she sank to her knees and lifted her face to the ribbons of light filtering through the trees. Mouse was swirling with joy and sadness—sad for the boy who died, sad that she was dead to Ottakar and Nicholas, but she was also bursting with the joy of being with them again. Such joy and loss woven together that it left her shaking on the forest floor. Mouse didn’t rise until the trill of the nightjars echoing in the trees around her announced the coming darkness.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When the army set out on the slow crawl to battle, Mouse felt as if she were in the wilderness again, only this time surrounded by an endless forest of men. The column of horses and soldiers and oxen pulling wagons never changed; the same clanking armor, squeaking wheels, snorting animals, and complaining men week after week. She spoke to no one. She got no glimpses of Ottakar or Nicholas, who rode at the front and then sequestered themselves with the other lords behind tent doors in the evenings while she wove between the men who called out for the Little Brother to treat festered blisters and twisted ankles, and, after days of walking in the spring rains, rotting feet.

  Mouse only slept in stolen naps shuffling along with the men, and she was often disturbed by short, violent dreams in which Nicholas died, a vengeful God standing over his body. She woke with his words in her ear—“You reap what you sow.”

  At the Moravian Gate, a gentler pass between the Sudetes and the Carpathian Mountains, Ottakar’s outriders came back with stories of a mounting Hungarian army. As his own army continued toward Austria, Ottakar and a small guard rode off not long after passing into Bohemia and came back days later with thousands more men. Apparently some of the vengeful nobles liked the idea of an arrogant king better than a foreign tyrant.

  Ottakar laid siege to Drosendorf at the border and took the city and castle with little bloodshed. Except for a few Imperial guards, the people welcomed Ottakar as their rightful king, refusing to acknowledge some Swabian prince even if he called himself the King of the Romans, the Holy Roman Emperor.

  Ottakar left a few men there and moved the army on to Laa. They suffered their first casualties when Cuman warriors rained down on them from the castle high atop the Great Mountain at Staatz. The Cuman, who had slid like glaciers from the Yellow River into Europe and wandered from country to country until the Hungarian king gave them land in exchange for military services, followed no code of battle. They wore no armor and carried no shields; like ghosts, they could swiftly and silently steal up from the rear in ambush, flinging arrows as they raced.

  Following the attack, Mouse dug out arrowheads shaped like narrow pyramids with jagged barbs, Cuman-crafted to pierce armor and tear flesh both on the way in and as they were yanked out. The barber-surgeons’ arrow pulls, made for broad flatheads, would not work. Mouse sketched Galen’s diagrams of the body in the dirt, showing organs and arteries, and taught the surgeons how to guide the arrow through and out, just as she’d done for Ottakar all those years ago. Still, the work was bloody and many men died. She lost two herself, her hands buried in chest and gut as she heard their hearts stop; she closed her eyes and watched their souls spill out of them, the light dissipating in the air and the ground, until it was nothing.

  After a second attack just before the army reached Laa, Nicholas moved his cavalry to the rear.

  Mouse slept no more.

  She walked at the edge of the men, eyes searching for signs of trouble at the front with Ottakar and ears tuned behind her for sounds of horses or arrows, listening for death coming for her son.

  The siege at Laa proved more difficult than Drosendorf. Hungarian knights protected the castle, but Ottakar’s men rallied. Felling trees in the nearby woods, they built catapults and flung mighty rocks against the walls surrounding the town, biting at the stone and sending shrapnel flying into soldier and citizen.

  Like Jericho, Laa fell on the seventh day, and Mouse wondered if God was also with Ottakar. But then outriders came with the news that Rudolf had ridden from Vienna, afraid that the Viennese would rally at Ottakar’s return like Drosendorf; the Imperial army now waited in the Morava basin. Ottakar’s men marched quickly to meet them, stopping after twilight when they neared the Morava River so the soldiers and horses could ready themselves for battle.

  Mouse readied herself, too.

  Staying with the barber-surgeons and the infantry would mean staying in camp during the fight. She would be no use to Nicholas or Ottakar there; she needed to be close so she could get to them if they were wounded. She snaked through the men, many of whom were sleeping, some who called to th
e Little Brother to pray with them, but Mouse ignored them. The guard around Ottakar’s tent was heavy, but she didn’t need to be close.

  She leaned her back against a willow tree, the long slender limbs hanging like a curtain between her and the wall of Ottakar’s tent. Nicholas was there, too, with the Silesian and German lords, planning for tomorrow. Mouse let her body sink into the dips of the willow trunk, closed her eyes, breathed in the warm, damp air, and focused on listening past the chirp of the crickets and the rattle of the armored guards until she could hear Ottakar’s voice and pick Nicholas’s heartbeat out from the others. She nearly broke with remembering that heartbeat, faster, growing in her belly, and the glow of a soul she’d had for a few months.

  “Rudolf will keep all but a few of the Austrians to shield himself. He will let the Hungarians do the early fighting,” she heard Ottakar say, bringing her back to the moment.

  “They have mostly light horse cavalry. They will be vulnerable against our barded chargers,” one of the lords commented.

  “But they will be faster, Lord Rozemberk,” Nicholas answered.

  Mouse stiffened and strained to hear the other man’s voice.

  “I think I know more about war than you, boy,” he said. Not Vok—he was dead. And his father would long be dead, too. This must be a brother, then, who inherited the estate and the title.

  “Mind your tongue, Vitek,” Ottakar barked. “My son is right. Our heavy armor will take its toll on the men in this heat. We must prepare them. The Hungarians will also be fighting for revenge against me,” he added. “It will feed them.” Ottakar sighed. Mouse could hear the weariness in his voice. “The less they see of me, the better. And I want Rudolf.”

  “I will take the left, Father, and destroy the Hungarians as you did here years ago. Let them wish revenge on me hereafter.” Mouse shuddered at the arrogance in Nicholas’s voice; he was his father’s son. Yet, despite her misgivings, she smiled when she heard chain mail clink against chain mail and imagined Ottakar embracing Nicholas.