“You do me great honor, son.” His words vibrated with emotion. Ottakar had been true to his word—he loved the son Mouse gave him.
She wrapped herself in the moment, and as the men continued to talk war, she let her mind drift until the voices grew softer, gentler, and then faded away.
She jolted awake, never having meant to sleep. The sun sent spears of light through the low trees to the east. The back end of the cavalry was riding down the hill toward the river.
Mouse ran, sucking in the hot, humid air; sweat ran underneath her wrapped breasts by the time she caught up with the men.
“Down! Down!” The echo pealed up from the Morava riverbed below.
The clearing filled with the high whine of feathers slicing the air and the thumps of broadheads as they bounced off shields and landed in the dirt. Iron bodkins squealed, metal on metal, as they pierced the hauberks and bit into flesh.
Then the screams started.
Full-throated and shrill, they tore from the horses as they rolled in the dirt, trying to stop the stinging pain of the shafts dug deep in their haunches. Muffled and ghostly screams came from the riders crushed underneath. Men wailed as they clawed at the arrows in their backs or jerked in the last throes of life while they fingered the blood-soaked fletchings.
With her unnatural senses, Mouse could hear all of it. Not as a chaotic symphony of war, but as individual sounds—the crack of arrows as they hit their mark, tearing flesh and shattering bone; blood falling like soft rain on thatch, turning the dirt into scarlet mud; last breaths bubbling in the mouths of dying men.
She threw back her hood, trying to calm herself with a clean breath, but the sour sweetness of bowels voided from the dead men and horses mixed with the sharp taste of blood in the air, and she gagged. Shoving her fist against her stomach to stop the heaves, she, too, ran toward the riverbed. By the time she reached it, the living had moved on toward the battlefield; the dead dammed the river.
Where was Nicholas? Where was Ottakar?
Mouse weaved through the bodies and waded into the water.
Blood swirled in the current. She pressed her lips together tightly as the water rose nearer her head. Mouse could feel the anger swelling in her, chewing at her. Anger at all this needless loss. Anger at men and their ambition and pride. As her anger grew, the river began to churn with heat, rolling in angry swirls around her and slapping against the shallow wall of corpses a foot upriver. She froze at the thought that it was because of her—that her wrath had become the river’s wrath.
The churning Morava finally drove its way through the crooks of the dead men’s elbows and knees, disentangling the unlucky dam. The gush of water swept Mouse downstream among the corpses until she tangled her foot in the fronds of quillwort on the river bottom, anchoring herself as the bodies flowed past, and then she climbed the riverbank. Cresting the hill and using a birch tree to push herself upright against the heaviness of her soaked robes, Mouse got her first look at the battle of Marchfeld.
Everywhere men and horses. Hacking and stabbing. Screaming. Rearing.
She raked her fingers across her bare head. “You God-damned fools!”
All of them under pretty banners whipping in the stifling air as army ran up against army. All of the flags red, decorated with fanged lions or eagles, their wings spread wide and talons sharp.
Bohemian. Moravian. Silesian. Hungarian. Austrian. Imperial.
She thought she saw Nicholas’s red-and-white banner on the far side of the field, but she could not see Ottakar anywhere. She ran along the hill at the edge of the fighting, searching for him. And then she saw him with a small group of knights moving behind the front lines toward an oncoming Rudolf surrounded by Imperial forces.
As she ran toward the battle, she watched Ottakar’s knights fight boldly, cutting through line after line of enemy soldiers.
And then—“All is lost!”
Mouse turned toward the sound and saw a man holding a shield decorated with a five-petal rose—Lord Rozemberk. He was near the edge of the field not far behind her; he was already turned and riding for safe ground. “Ottakar flees! Save yourselves!” he cried.
Mouse saw the smile play along Lord Rozemberk’s lips; Ottakar was betrayed.
Others looked up, confused, and saw their King riding away from the main battlefield. Just as planned, Ottakar was heading for Rudolf, who had held back from the front lines. Lord Rozemberk knew this, but the soldiers didn’t. He preyed on their doubt and made them think that their King had abandoned them.
“No!” Mouse yelled. “Ottakar rides for the emperor. Fight on!”
But no one heard her. Some of Ottakar’s men continued to fight, but in the chaos, the Hungarians washed over them like blood gushing from a slaughtered beast, and many of them broke ranks and followed the traitor Lord Rozemberk, racing for safety.
The screech of sword on sword spun Mouse back around to where Ottakar and his men pressed on toward the emperor. She watched as Ottakar charged, slashing at Rudolf; the horse fell and Rudolf with it. Ottakar’s knights raised arms in victory unaware that the battle behind them had already been lost. Their fellow soldiers ran for their lives as a fresh corps of Cuman warriors, hidden by the deceptive emperor against all codes of honorable warfare, broke through the Bohemian flank and raced to Rudolf.
A curtain of Cuman browns and blues closed around Ottakar.
Mouse screamed as she ran, ducking and weaving as she tried to see through the wall of shields and horse legs, and then the circle of Cuman warriors grabbed Rudolf and rode off to regroup at a safer distance.
Suddenly, like an undertow, silence swallowed the sounds of the army and Mouse stopped. She could hear her own breath, her own heartbeat as she watched Ottakar’s knights make the sign of the cross, and then, one by one, they peeled away and raced back into battle.
Ottakar was alone by the time she reached him.
She lifted his head into her lap and pressed her hand against his chest, trying to stop the blood, but knowing there was no point.
Mouse felt the anger coiling in her again. If the power still lived in her, she could save him with a word. Even as she turned her focus inward, desperately searching, not for the glow of a soul this time but for some sign of that dark power that was her father’s legacy, she felt nothing.
Ottakar screamed and twisted in agony.
She laid her cheek against his forehead. “Please, please,” she begged, but she knew no one would answer her. Because of who she was, what she was.
“I am here, Ottakar. You are not alone.” Her tears joined the rivulets of sweat running along his jaw. “I am here.”
“Mouse?” He mouthed the word. It was the first time she’d heard her name in more than twenty years.
Grief closed around her throat, but it was rage that tore at her, that came in hot bursts of breath. She was burning up with it.
She lifted her eyes to God. “Take him then! Damn you! You blind, absent God! What kind of Father are you? Not mine! Not mine!”
Sorrow shredded what was left of her, and she lowered her head to Ottakar’s ear.
“I love you. Be at peace. Go now.” She took a last ragged breath. “Die.”
And she felt the power erupt.
It took her last word, meant only for Ottakar, and surged forth after all the years of being beaten down and smothered in her; she understood now that it had just been waiting. She saw the eerie glow of it pulse from her and spread outward completely beyond her control. Gently, like a kiss, it touched man and boy and horse, and it drank. They dropped, one after the other.
Mouse fell forward, drained of everything; she saw the blades of maidenhead grass wither, and then she saw nothing.
When she woke, Mouse heard nothing. No buzz of insect. No whinny of a horse. No birdsong. As she opened her eyes, she saw why. Everything was dead. The grass. The trees. The armies around her. Ottakar in her lap.
She had killed them all.
She scrambled up, letting
Ottakar’s body roll to the ground. She walked over body after body, cataloguing each slack mouth and vacant eye. Not Nicholas, she thought as she passed each face. Not Nicholas.
Ten thousand dead.
She finally spotted Nicholas’s banner flapping weakly in the slow breeze; his men, dead, lay all around. She could not make herself search for his face. She had no hope that he would have been spared. God was not merciful.
She wove her way through the corpses back to Ottakar. Her hand closed around the hilt of his sword and she pulled it to her. She was too weak to lift it very far and so she crouched. Dirt stuck to the viscid blood on the blade. She heard the first of the carrion crows flying in from the river as she pulled the sword across her throat.
THIRTY-SIX
What have I done, Mouse wondered, cowering at the back of the crypt as the monk laid the first stone. She could hear the Brothers singing her Requiem Mass.
But she had thought herself dead several times since the battle at Marchfeld.
She had woken in the field, her clothes stiff with her own blood and the deep slit at her throat sealed, a thick grisly scar the only proof that she’d taken her own life—a last mortal sin to damn her. Careless, dead in mind and heart if not body, she started walking aimlessly, though some intangible pull drew her north toward home, across the border back to Bohemia.
Despair had taken her again, and she’d strung herself from a tree along the Thaya River, but the fabric of her makeshift rope had frayed and broken, and she woke again.
She threw herself from a cliff in the Brdy Mountains; she felt her back break against a rock, limbs tore at her as she broke through the canopy of trees, and the darkness took her.
But Mouse had woken again.
And now she could not sit still as she listened to the monk press the stone into the gritty mortar as he built the wall that would finally close her off from the world. Inclusus, the Church called it—a punishment for heresy and a death sentence for many.
Mouse had begged for it.
The Brothers of Podlazice had found her at the pond lapping water with the goats. Strings of algae hung from her fingers, and she was covered in filth. It looked like she’d crawled there; she was too weak to stand and unable to speak. She moaned as they lifted her and carried her into the monastery. Dressed in a habit and with her head shaved, the monks thought her one of them. She’d found it difficult to remember who she was—whether she was a boy or a girl, human or a mouse. She thought she had been all of these things at some point. She was a Mouse but not quite human. She was a girl but had made herself a boy.
They had fed her and given her clean water, but she refused to let them touch her, to bathe her. One of them sat with her during the night and whispered last rites. They were surprised in the morning. A miracle, they’d said.
Mouse knew otherwise.
She cleaned herself and ate again. She couldn’t remember eating since Marchfeld. She asked to see the bishop. He bartered for her redemption.
“Inclusus?” The bishop studied the gaunt face of the Brother before him.
“The solitude is necessary, Father,” Mouse answered.
“For what purpose? What can you have done that requires such a sacrifice? To be walled away?” Though the young monk gave no answer, the bishop saw the pain and guilt in Mouse’s face. “I do not even know your name, Brother.”
“Herman,” she said blankly. “And I can give you something in exchange, Father.” Mouse saw the man’s doubt, but she would make any deal to get what she wanted: to be dead to the world so she could not hurt anyone else. “I will make you a book. It will be like none other. I promise. It will hold all we know in the world. A wonder.”
“Impossible.” But the bishop’s ambition had been whetted and Mouse saw it.
“It will make you famous, powerful. You will see.”
And so the Brothers had walked her down to a cell in the crypt. She leaned her head against the closed door and listened as they turned the key. She could smell the hot wax as they poured it in the lock, heard the splatter as drops landed on the stone floor and the squeak of the bishop’s ring as he pressed his seal.
Panting, Mouse paced back and forth from wall to wall of her tiny cell. What have I done? she asked at each step.
She laid her head against the door; the metal of the monk’s trowel chinked against the wood and then scraped the stone with a squeal. The wall was nearly done. A happenstance tomb like Christ’s own.
She took several quick breaths, fighting the panic of the close space, but the sour smell of the mortar stung her nose and throat, and she stepped back again. Someone pushed jars of ink through the small slot near the floor at the side of the door; like liquid ants they inched in a line toward rows of candles and a stack of parchment. The bishop meant to get his book.
Mouse would give it to him, every scripted letter a penance for a soul she had taken, every bright illumination a pouring-out of anything good left in her, until she emptied herself and hopefully withered and turned to dust.
I must write the book, she thought over and over, trying to anchor herself against the torrent of fear building in her chest and crawling up her throat as she watched the last bit of light seeping between the crack of door and frame waver and go out as the monk wrested a final brick in place.
And he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre and departed, she quoted silently.
And so Mouse was left alone in the dark cell lit with a single, flickering candle. Entombed. She whimpered as the shadows closed around her. Her breath came fast and shallow.
The Book. She knelt quickly at the parchment, picking up a quill and dipping it in the ink, her hand shaking. She could not think where to start, her mind too full of ghosts to remember words.
“In the beginning,” came a voice from the dark.
Mouse spun toward the back corner of the cell, but she saw nothing. No hollow-eyed children pulling themselves out of the blackness. No demons from the pit. No slinking silver creatures.
“It starts ‘In the beginning,’” said the voice again, light, almost laughing.
“Who is there?” Mouse barely had the breath for a whisper.
“Greetings, daughter.” The voice chuckled. “I thought it was time we met.”
EPILOGUE
Present Day
It was once considered a wonder of the world, the largest book of its time, containing the breadth of medieval knowledge—the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, a surprisingly extensive collection of medical information as well as Bohemian history.” Professor Jack Gray looked out at the stony faces of his fellow historians and tried to decide if they were bored or just disapproving of their young colleague. Taking a gamble, he clicked the button on his remote and changed the PowerPoint slide.
The scholars in the room shifted nervously in their seats as they saw the image that stared down at them: a figure with clawed hands raised and split tongue flicking out between rows of sharp teeth.
“The Codex Gigas is better known as the Devil’s Bible thanks to this full portrait of the man himself and the mysterious legends surrounding the making of the book. Yet, despite hundreds of years of study, we still cannot answer the most basic question about its production. Who wrote it?” He paused for effect. “Was it the Devil, as legend claims? Did poor Herman, the monk, walled up in his cell, eventually admit the impossibility of his penitent task—to write a single book containing all the world’s knowledge—and call on Satan to rescue him?”
The room chuckled, and Jack Gray knew he had them. His first book, Who Wrote the Devil’s Bible, lay waiting for them in pretty little stacks on a table in the lobby. But he wanted more than book sales; Jack Gray wanted to make his career.
Dropping his smile, he said more seriously, “I think we’ve been looking in all the wrong places for the author of the Devil’s Bible.” He paused a moment, distracted, as a young woman stood and made her way to the exit at the back of Vanderbilt’s Sarratt auditorium.
> She let the double doors ease shut, drowning out Jack Gray’s voice as he continued his lecture. She leaned against the cool brick in the lobby and took a steady breath, forcing her heart to slow. Mouse wondered if seven-hundred-year-old ghosts had finally caught her at last.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As my first acknowledgments page for my first novel, I wondered if I should start my thanks at the beginning—parents for conceiving me, older brother for not smothering me, and second grade teacher, Mrs. Covey, for convincing the librarian to let me check out any book I wanted (Hello, Moby-Dick!). But out of concern for your time, I’ve decided to limit myself to folks who actually helped with this book.
Early readers are vital to a writer’s process because they have to be people she can trust—both to handle the story with care and to offer honest feedback. Leanne Smith loved Mouse like I did, and she helped me find my way when I wrestled with doubt. Jamie Blaine helped me see how to tell some of the harder pieces of the story more gently, and Tessa Hoefle gave me the perfect gift of clarity to untangle a tricky bit of Mouse’s journey. Other early readers who helped me see what was working and what wasn’t were Rachel Craddock, Rebecca Smith Crimmins, and Chris Nelson. Paige Crutcher read at a later but crucial time when her enthusiasm sustained me.
I am also immensely grateful for the encouragement Clay Stafford and the people at Killer Nashville gave me. The Claymore Award was a game changer for Mouse. It led me to Iris Blasi, my awesome editor at Pegasus Books. The excitement she and the rest of the staff (especially Claiborne Hancock, Katie McGuire, Becky Maines, Charles Brock, Linda Biagi, Mary Hern, Maria Fernandez, and Michael Levatino) expressed about getting Mouse’s story out there for others to read, and Iris’s tireless investment in guiding me through my first foray into publishing, defied everything I had heard or read about publishers. The people at Pegasus are special and I am thrilled to be working with them.
My agent, Susan Finesman, has been a stalwart champion and friend who traveled with me through the dark places—rejections and illness—and she did not give up. I am so very pleased to be on this journey together.
Bohemian Gospel Page 32
