“Oh, no! She is pure, I swear it. She has never lain with a man!”
“Good,” muttered Pichler. He sighed deeply, and his shoulders relaxed. He reached back with a crooked elbow and rubbed the muscles between his shoulder blades.
“I know she is of age for a patron, but it is our good fortune she remains a virgin, Wife. The leeches she harvests shall be the only ones that can touch the skin of a Hapsburg.”
Lucie Pichlerova swallowed hard. She thought of how she had almost bartered away her daughter’s virginity and her service to the king of Bohemia, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, for meat scraps and beer.
That night, Pichler called the town councilors and the elders of Cesky Krumlov together at Uncle Radek’s tavern. There in the stone-walled cellar, with the door barred and shutters pulled closed, they sat talking, arguing, and when it seemed necessary, shouting at one another through most of the long night. Over tankards of ale, they pounded their fists on the wooden barrels and threatened treason.
“King Rudolf cannot let that madman loose on our town,” said the tanner from the corner where he sat alone, his smell having driven the other men away. “How can we protect our women?”
“I saw the letter myself,” said Pichler. “The king’s orders were clear. And then Don Julius asked me about my daughters. He leers at the women from his chambers in the castle.”
The baker shuddered and pounded his fist. “I will kill the bastard before he sets his fingers on my Katarina.”
“Watch your tongue,” warned the jailer. “A spy from the castle hears you say that and you will be hanging from the gallows come morning. Have a care what you say, all of you!”
The blacksmith, sooty and red in the light of the tavern fire, stood up, towering above most of the men. His raised a meaty fist.
“I won’t stand aside and let that filthy bastard defile our women. I’ve heard the stories from Prague and Vienna. We are a God-fearing town, but I’ll not be afraid of a hanging if he touches one of our own.”
Pichler rose again to speak. The side conversations stopped, for he was the only one in Cesky Krumlov who had met Don Julius face-to-face.
“I appeal to your reason,” he said.
“Oh yes, you’re a man of reason,” the rope-maker said over his beer. “Until he touches one of your girls!”
Pichler stared the man down.
“You think I do not worry about my girls, especially Marketa, who is old enough to catch his eye? He talked about her today. He has watched her from the castle when she rinses the letting bowls in the river. I live in horror at the thought of him walking freely in our streets, but I know what I heard today. The king has declared he shall be free, once he has undergone a cycle of bleeding. I know that I cannot protect myself and my family from the wrath of a Hapsburg. Don Julius will descend upon us as soon as we have balanced his humors.”
“Bleed the whore’s son dry,” said a drunken sot in the corner. “Let that lancet slip, good barber, and you will do all of Bohemia a favor.”
The jailer growled at the drunk and went to check the door and windows to make sure no royal guards were straying close to the tavern.
“Listen to Pichler, you drunken fools,” he said. “Not enough of you have witnessed the kicking and choking of a hanged man, or you wouldn’t be so quick to tie the noose around your miserable necks.”
Pichler continued, “Doctor Mingonius is a respected physician. Together we will work to bleed out the bilious imbalance of the king’s son. But I have witnessed his crudeness in Austria, and I cannot but warn you to lock up your womenfolk. They will not be safe from his lechery for long, for we have permission to bleed him but a couple of months.”
Pichler woke Marketa at what seemed the middle of the night to set off for the Rozmberk carp ponds. Lucie had packed some buttered bread and a piece of cheese and pickle for each of them. Marketa carried hers in her apron pocket wrapped in a rag. She tied up her skirt in a knot at the side of her waist so the cold morning dew and mud would not soil the cloth. If she returned with muddy skirts, her mother would make her pound the hem on the rocks with urine collected from the chamber pots to get out the stains. Marketa avoided getting her clothes dirty at all costs.
Her father knew the way even better than she, and Marketa marveled at how he could thread through the meadows so quickly. She realized that he had spent many summers there before she was born, gathering leeches for his practice. He carried two buckets with a long pole across his back, slipped through the wooden handles of the pails. Despite the burden, he ducked agilely through the brush and around the trees.
Petr, the caretaker, was milking his cows in the pale light of daybreak when Pichler and his daughter reached the dams. He waved, his toothless mouth spreading wide in a smile.
“I have a fresh carp for your pani to cook tonight,” he said. “As big as your shoulders are broad!”
“Thank you, Petr, you are too kind.”
Marketa’s eyes welled up with tears as she thought of Old Petr’s only grandson, her first childhood love, who had died of the pox five years before. She could see Petr the younger in his grandfather’s kind face.
“Ah, but you want the cow. Let me just finish with her,” Petr said. “Just a moment and she’ll be dry.”
Pichler shook his head.
“We don’t need the use of your cow this morning. Marketa will wade into the water and collect the leeches.”
Petr sat up so abruptly from his milking stool that he nudged the cow’s flank with his head and she bellowed, slapping his neck with her tail.
“The girl?”
“Yes,” said Pichler, setting his jaw. “These leeches are for Don Julius, the king’s son. I’ve been told to fetch them with a—with a girl.”
Petr stood scratching his head. His rheumy eyes looked distractedly at the bloodletter. “Marketa will harvest the blood worms?”
Pichler nodded at him solemnly and thanked him for the gift of the fish. He assured him his wife would be delighted and cook the fish and they would toast to Petr’s good health.
They walked to the pond, the reeds waving high above their heads as they stood side by side at the edge of the shallow water.
“Are you ready, Marketa?”
“Yes, Father.”
“You’ve never been bled before. You need to know that their mouths make a little stick, but then like magic, the pain goes away like nothing ever happened. You won’t even feel them except the tug of the water current as they start to wave.”
Marketa swallowed hard. She knew them from the buckets stored in the dark corner of the bathhouse. Her father never let her touch them when they were ready for feeding; only he could pick them lean and hungry from the murky water, and only he could apply them to his patients.
Marketa had picked them up after they had fed, either from the wet grass when they fell off Petr’s cow or from the cold stones of the floor after they had sucked the bad humors from a patient’s body.
Then they were sated, their oval mouths and sharp, tiny teeth sucking listlessly.
But now they would find her flesh in the muddy water of the carp pond. They would smell and attack her, tapping into her blood. Marketa looked at her father and nodded. She wanted him to know that she was aware of what she was doing, that she would sacrifice anything for him.
Marketa stepped into the pond. At first there was nothing. Perhaps the water was too cold, she thought. She shivered and her father put his wool jacket over her shoulders. It smelled of beer and tavern fire, comforting in the cold dawn.
Then she felt something. A slight trembling in the water, a soft brush of a weed or twig.
And then a prick.
“Ow!”
“That’s the girl,” said her father. “In a minute, you won’t feel a thing.”
She looked down and saw a leech, no bigger than her baby finger, attached to her calf. Then two swam toward her legs.
“Ow! Ow!”
“Stand still now, let
them attach. You have got to give them a chance to bite firmly or you will knock them loose and they might not come back.”
Marketa trembled now in the water, feeling unsteady, but trying hard to stand still. She studied her father’s face; he encouraged her every time they bit and she yelped. Soon the water was rippling with the small leeches, waving like tiny brown flags from her legs.
“You must have hit a nest of them,” he said eagerly. “Now wait just a moment. We can’t risk knocking them loose or scaring away the others. But they cannot fatten too much on your blood. They must be lean and hungry, ready for a meal on Don Julius’s veins.”
Marketa nodded her head. She no longer felt the pinch and prick of their sharp teeth. Instead there was a strange numbness, and her skin no longer felt so cold in the water. She felt as if her legs were drunk on mead.
Marketa’s mind raced to the thought of the leeches as they fastened to the king’s son’s skin. Would they be as eager to sup on a Hapsburg’s royal blood, her blood mingling with his in the worms’ bellies?
The idea made her shiver, and she crossed her arms over her heart.
“Everything all right here, now?” said Old Petr, limping down to the water’s edge.
He saw Marketa in the reeds and his face went white.
Marketa looked down. At the mid-shin she could see the water churning with shiny brown leeches, twisting against each other as they vied for her blood.
“Get that girl out of the water,” he roared, his bleary eyes watering. He raised his fist in the air. “You get her out of the water, Zigmund, or I’ll carry her out myself!”
Marketa’s father looked at him and then at her.
“Slowly, Marketa. Don’t disturb them from their feeding. Walk back to the grass and I’ll harvest them.”
As she walked through the reeds the water became more and more shallow. In the frigid sunrise, she could see a dozen or more glistening bodies drape down her leg, no longer buoyed up by the water.
Petr cursed as if he were warding off the devil himself. He used words in a Moravian dialect the Pichlers could not understand.
Marketa’s father’s eyes shone as if she had brought him gold from the center of the earth. He carefully applied a grain of salt to each wet mouth, and one by one they dropped into the grass.
He greedily snatched them up and placed them into the buckets.
“Aren’t you going to attend to your daughter’s wounds, Barber?” growled Old Petr.
The barber looked up as he picked up the last leech, still sucking, and dropped it into the bucket.
“Her wounds are what anyone will get in a leeching. There may have been many at once, but they have stolen little blood from her in those few minutes.”
Petr approached the shivering girl and kissed her head like a doting grandfather.
“God bless you and protect you from this wickedness,” he said, his red eyes brimming with tears. “This is the devil’s business. No angel such as you should be mixed up in such a thing.”
“Calm down, Petr,” said Pichler. “It’s not the devil’s business at all. It’s science.”
“It’s all the same,” said Petr sadly, crossing himself with his gnarled right hand. “There are some matters better left to God, and not to the meddling of men.”
He blew his nose into his rough-skinned fingers and slid his sleeve against his face. Marketa could see he was crying. She had never seen a man cry before. Without warning he kissed her cold hands and then embraced her, mumbling a prayer to the Holy Virgin.
Marketa stood as still as a stone in his embrace, not knowing what to say.
CHAPTER 15
KATARINA’S WARNING
Katarina’s eyes grew wide when she heard how Marketa had harvested the leeches. They were sitting in the kitchen of the Pichler house, enjoying the warmth from the stove. A sudden cold spell had brought a reminder that winter was lurking not that far in the future.
“Marketa! Were you not afraid? To think of those horrid worms fastening their teeth to your flesh and drinking your blood!”
She flung her hands to her face in disgust and shivered in horror. Marketa tried to calm her, but she begged to see the wounds.
“See, they are but a prick,” Marketa said, rubbing her thumb across the small red marks. “My father treated me like a princess afterward. He had the twins bathe me and wait on me hand and foot while I sipped Uncle Radek’s best dark ale. I soaked in a barrel scented with lavender for almost an hour.”
Katarina again wrinkled her beautiful face, the skin on her nose folding up tight like an accordion. Marketa could see she was thinking of something more sinister.
“There is much evil in it. I feel the touch of the devil. Remember the fairies and the tales of the Water Demon.”
She raised her finger in warning, for she was a deep believer in the ancient Czech tales.
“Those worms are the Water Demon’s pets,” she pronounced, nodding her head at Marketa’s pricked skin. “You are lucky the demon himself did not pull you down with his gnarled claws to his cave at the bottom of the lake.”
Marketa laughed. Katarina’s fears were based on nonsense and fairy tales. Marketa’s own mind was shaped by science, she thought. It was as if the two girls were speaking different languages.
Katarina narrowed her eyes at Marketa.
“You know the story of Lidushka,” she said, murmuring. “It’s a warning, Marketa.”
Everyone knew the ancient tale of Lidushka. One day while she was washing her clothes in the river, a frog had begged the young girl to become godmother of her children. Lidushka followed the frog down a crystal staircase, transparent as layers of water, until they reached a sparkling room, where Lidushka blessed the tadpoles. As she wandered through the cavernous palace, she came across a room lined with shelves. On the shelves were glass jars upside down. When she lifted one, a dove flew out. She realized that these were trapped souls, and one by one, she let them loose.
Marketa thought silently about Lidushka.
“What silly ideas stuff your head?” she said. “What does Lidushka have to do with a bleeding?”
“These Water Demon pups were sucking at your soul, Marketa. Evil times lie ahead.”
Marketa laughed at her friend, until Katarina’s lovely face pinched together so tight that Marketa realized she was crying. She reached out for Katarina’s hair. Katarina tried at first to shrug off her friend’s touch, but then finally she allowed Marketa to smooth her sugar-dusted locks. To make her laugh, Marketa tasted her fingers, and indeed they were sweet like a Christmas candy.
“These leeches are medicinal,” Marketa explained to her. “They have nothing to do with fairy tales. Their tiny mouths do not suck at your soul. They release the bad humors from the body. Think of the four humors draining away from the body, just the way Lidushka freed the doves from the jars. They free the good spirit inside.”
Katarina furrowed her forehead and then quickly released it again.
“I prefer to think of the white doves rather than those evil brown worms!”
Just then, Pichler entered the room. He seemed ill at ease and his movements were fidgety.
“Yes, Father?”
He looked at his daughter and then Katarina.
His wife appeared and pushed him closer.
“Tell her,” Lucie said.
Marketa could see from her mother’s sudden color and dancing eyes that she was as excited—and as happy—as Marketa had ever seen her.
“Don Julius has insisted I bring you as my assistant to the bleeding,” he said. “He has refused the bleeding entirely if you do not accompany me today.”
Marketa dropped her hand from her friend’s sticky locks and stared openmouthed.
Her mother’s normally creased face suddenly released into a laugh. It was a rich rumble in her throat that startled her daughter, for it was so rare.
She rubbed her hands together and twisted her fingers, fidgeting with pleasure.
“The son of King Rudolf himself requests my daughter at his castle! Is this not the most fortunate day of our lives?”
Marketa watched Katarina and her father exchange a look that belied any happiness.
“Come, my girl, I will bathe you myself,” said Lucie, shooing away her daughter’s friend. “So much preparation, so little time!”
Katarina stood motionless, her fingers plunged into her mouth like a child.
“A Hapsburg,” she said, pulling her fingers away from her mouth. “My God in heaven!”
Marketa waved a good-bye to her astonished friend and allowed herself to be led to the bathhouse by her mother’s eager hands, with no chance to question her father for more details.
Marketa’s mother dressed her in a treasured Bohemian kroj, the jewel of Lucie Pichlerova’s possessions. The kroje represented her identity—it was sewn according to the Krumlov traditions and embroidered intricately by her own hand.
Marketa’s hosiery was held up with ribbons, and the starched skirts stood out as if they had legs of their own. The halenka, the blouse she wore on feast days, was embroidered with elaborate stitching, as was the laced bodice that just barely skimmed the girl’s slim hips.
After Lucie brushed her daughter’s hair until it gleamed, she twisted it up in a tight knot. Then she tied on the white embroidered cap, the black velvet ribbon stretching across her forehead to keep it centered.
Her eyes gleamed as she stepped back to inspect her work.
“You look like I did as a girl,” she murmured. Marketa could see by the wistful look in her eyes that she was lost in the past.
Marketa could smell the faint odor of her mother deep in the fabric, though Lucie had washed the material fastidiously. She had been a maiden in this dress, as well as a matron, for this was part of her dowry. The costume was only worn on special occasions: feasts, Christmas, baptisms. But in recent years, Marketa’s mother had grown too stout to wear it.
The final piece, a white starched apron, was embroidered with dark red cotton thread and colored sequins. The sequins were the scales of carp, dyed a myriad of colors.
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