Tales from the Uplands

by Alma Boykin

  “St. Stephen. Should have guessed,” he realized, looking up at the almost life-sized statue of Hungary’s patron. The holy king gazed over Gregory’s head, holding a crown in his left hand, the fingers of his right hand folded in the sign of blessing. Gregory turned around and saw a bishop saint behind the altar on the opposite wall. St. Gellért? He peered into the thickening shadows and caught sight of the three bags in the bishop’s hand. “Szent Miklos,” or Nicholas as Gregory knew him. The combination didn’t make much sense, and he shrugged. Then he looked up and gasped.

  A starry firmament covered the dome. Gilded dots of stars sparkled out of the shadowy height, and four angels, flanked by three of the beasts of the Evangelists, spread their wings. The wingtips touched at the center of each arm of the Greek cross. All the attribute animals – ox, eagle, and lion – looked toward the main altar, leading Gregory’s gaze to the wide, bottomless brown eyes of the Pantocrator. Pure Byzantine in execution, Christ the Ruler hovered above the altar, the gentle shepherd king, His bearded, calm face invited all the world into the faith and into union with His love, one hand raised in blessing. Gregory met the ageless Byzantine eyes and marveled. Below the figure, a medieval crucifix stood on the lace-draped high altar. Gregory’s eyes rose again to the Pantocrator.

  After some length of time Gregory turned to go. Now he noticed the soot-faded paintings on the walls, showing Cain and Able, more apostles, and blue-clad Mary in the form of the Theotokos, the God bearer, looking down on Sv. Miklos. The Mother of the Lord focused Her attention on the saint, ignoring the man. He shrugged, climbing up the stone steps. He hunted around his pockets for a few forints to drop in the alms box but couldn’t find the place to leave donations. “Oh well.” Gregory closed the door behind him and returned to the car.

  The GPS had done its thing and showed that if he continued past the church, he’d be on the side-road to Eger. As the sun touched the horizon, he backed the Skoda out into the asphalt and headed out. This road proved to be much better than the previous one, and fifteen minutes later he reached the Eger city limits. The navigation system behaved long enough for him to reach his hotel at the edge of the old town before flashing a “signal lost” warning at him. He snorted, turned off the GPS, and went about his business.

  The next summer, perhaps nine months after he’d visited the church and Eger, Gregory’s business sent him into that area of Hungary again. He remembered the church and decided to visit it, this time from Eger and by daylight. He didn’t want to imagine what that back “road” must be like now. He passed the spa in the valley, and the signs pointing to Eger, crested the hill and found the village. But no church. Puzzled, Gregory pulled into the post office’s parking area, turned around, and went back the way he’d come. Instead of a church, he found a meadow surrounded by a sagging electric fence. A handful of newly shorn sheep and their lambs grazed in the heavy summer afternoon sun, drowsing as they chewed. Gregory got out of the car and peered into the meadow. No, he remembered the bushes over to the right, and how the hill sloped down into the flat space before rolling up again and dropping away to the west. Everything looked the same, except for the missing church.

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked.

  Gregory turned to see an age-bent man in faded blue pants and a worn denim farmer’s jacket leaning on a heavy walking stick. “I … I don’t know,” Gregory admitted in Hungarian. He turned from the farmer to the meadow and back. “This sounds foolish, but, well, I’m looking for a painted church.”

  The farmer nodded and with slow steps came forward until he stood beside Gregory. “You saw an old church with Byzantine paintings. The church of Sv. Miklos.”

  “Yes. I thought it was near here.”

  The white-haired head turned left to right and back. “A church once stood here, before the Mongols and Turks. Aba Sámuel built it before he became king and hired artists from the southern empire, Byzantium, to paint the walls. Even though the people here followed Rome, they left the paintings as they were. The bishop’s accounts say it was a most beautiful church.”

  “Where is it?”

  The man looked up at Gregory, his brown eyes sad. “No one knows. When my ancestors came to this village, after the last battles against the Turks, they found nothing. The records from the diocese said it had been here, but no one remembered it. Perhaps the Turks took the stones for the battle at Eger?” As Gregory wondered if he’d gone mad, the man smiled. “But do not worry, you are not the first person to see Sv. Miklos church since then.”

  “How do I find it again?”

  “You won’t. It finds you when you need it.” And with that the old man walked past Gregory, stepped over the fence, and went to tend his sheep.

  Written in Stone

  Chisel scraped stone, smoothing the gritty rock into a soft curve. Peter frowned as he worked, trying to ignore Master Antonio looking over his shoulder. He needed a few more taps of the mallet and the curve would be perfect, matching the other five on the piece. The Benedictine Brothers had ordered that the bases of the church’s pillars be plain, only simple curves softening the shape of the tan stone. Peter looked more closely, ran one finger over the stone, and reset the chisel, then tapped again. He straightened up from the work piece and stepped out of the way so Master Antonio could look.

  “Good.” The Italian master gave a curt nod of his head, grey-spotted black hair bouncing. He took his own small chisel and hammer and marked the back of the stone so the paymaster would know to pay Peter. Master Antonio returned his tools to his belt and opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and backed a little, bowing. “Father Martin.”

  Peter bowed too, deeper, as the black-robed abbot walked between the scatter of work pieces to inspect the latest one. “Master Antonio. Peter. How goes the work?”

  Master and apprentice straightened up. “God be praised, it goes well, Father.”

  “Very good.”

  Master Antonio shooed Peter off to go sharpen and repair his tools, leaving the men to discuss the work on the church. Peter trotted in a curving path through the other workmen and the blocks, columns, and figures of stone and pieces of wood, eager to get something to drink and to be away from the crane. Workers had begun lifting the fourth course of stones for the wall, raising the heavy brown blocks twenty feet into the air and then setting them into place. The rope on the hoist had not broken yet, but Peter did not trust it. And if it did break, the journeymen builders would probably find a way to blame him. They liked picking on the youngest apprentice, even if he was a stonemason’s student and not a builder.

  Peter got a drink of spring water and sat down by the smithy wall to check his chisel blades. As he did, he looked down to the woods and plains around St. Martin’s Mountain. A few wheat and barley fields appeared in gaps in the trees, and sheep and grey cattle grazed, watched by boys as old as he was. They were Magyars, sons of the barbarians who had swept through the land. His people came from Bavaria to the west and north. Or at least, his mother’s people did. His father lived as a Magyar, or so his mother told him. God had taken his father after an accident in the forest three harvests ago. Now Peter was an apprentice, and had finished his first unsupervised work.

  “Boy, what is that?” Brother Cyril demanded on a hot summer afternoon. “That looks like,” the old monk peered down at the carving on the stone. “A toad. You ruined this work, boy, and wasted time and treasure.”

  Master Antonio appeared at the monk’s shoulder. “Your apprentice is wasting stone,” Brother Cyril complained. He complained about everything, or so Peter thought. The monks’ motto was supposed to be “work and pray,” but old monk ignored both, at least where Peter could see and hear.

  The Italian mason leaned down and ran calloused and scarred fingers over the palm-sized animal. “Good. The proportions are correct, the shape is correct, and the finish is smooth.”

  “Did you instruct him to waste stone?” The beak-nosed monk looked from stone to mason and back.

&nbs
p; “No. I gave him permission to make a small representation of one of God’s creatures, with Fr. Martin’s blessing. It is time Peter began learning how to carve more complex forms and figures.” Master Antonio nodded to Peter. “Good. Finish the peak between the curves and mark your piece.”

  By that fall Peter had carved two more bases; one with a fish, and the final one with a salamander. The salamander’s curves had given him trouble, but he finished at last. And this would be the final column base. Peter ran battered fingers over the curves, tracing the little lizard’s backbone from its head to down to the tip of its tail. The stone felt warm from the sun and gritty.

  Master Antonio nodded. “Very good. Make your mark.” He watched as Peter tapped his mark into the bottom of the piece. “Put your tools away and go help the others unload the straw and dung. We need to start covering the stones for the winter.”

  “Thank you, Master Antonio.” Peter felt six feet tall. He’d never earned a “very good” before. It made having to unload the dung cart a much nicer task.

  Almost a thousand years later, an architecture student pointed to the frog carved into the stone at the column’s pedestal. “Dr. Moore, look at this.”

  The American professor and the local Hungarian guide both smiled at the young man’s discovery. At Dr. Moore’s nod the guide answered for them. “Yes. You found the frog,” Luca said. “Can you find the other two? They are the only three carvings on the pedestals in the entire church.” College students scattered out, peering through the dim afternoon light that struggled to reach the depths of the church. Rebuilt three times since Pannonhalma’s founding, the Romanesque design remained sturdy rather than well lit.

  “I have a lizard,” a young woman called in a quiet voice. Half the students clustered around to see the animal, stroking the sandstone curves and making notes.

  “I think this one is a fish?” The group crossed the nave to peer at the shape.

  “It’s a fish.”

  “Bet it’s a carp.”

  “Carp again?”

  “Relax Chris, this one’s not for supper. Or lunch, or tea, or breakfast,” another student joked, elbowing the complainer lightly in the ribs.

  “Come. We’ll look at the tympanum next,” Dr. Moore announced. The students trailed along behind their professor, filing out the side door and into the cloister walk to study the next point of architectural interest. A solitary visitor remained in the church and took rapid notes, a look of intense concentration on his round face. As soon as the door thumped shut behind the last student, the man set a second notebook beside the frog, paced over to the salamander and left his dark glasses just above it, and walked across the nave to stand beside the stone with the fish. “Let’s see,” he said, voice low as he talked to himself. “That was thirteen paces across,” he walked to the frog, “thirteen paces, and seven between. The fish is on the New Testament side, or would be if this had windows, and,” the muttering faded. He scribbled furiously in his notebook.

  What had the builders meant? If the frog symbolized the plagues of Egypt, and the fish stood for the ICTHOS, the secret Jesus sign, then the salamander? Ah, for the Children of Israel in the fiery furnace, that had to be it! And it was a sign of transformation in alchemy … Boaz White worked furiously. He’d found the last part of the puzzle. Water symbols on the high place of Pannonhalma, even buried here in the church, could only be evidence of the secret guild that he’d been tracking across Bohemia, Moravia and now into Hungary. The guild had to predate the monastery, it just had to, and had likely used this hill, the tallest in the region, for some esoteric purpose. There could be no other reason for these symbols and their survival.

  White measured once more, delight growing as he confirmed his initial discovery. Even the position of the animal carvings held meaning! But of course they would: the Brotherhood never did anything by accident. He’d followed their traces from tattered scraps of manuscripts in dusty archives to ruined castles and now here, to Pannonhalma, on St. Martin’s Mountain. Oh, he knew what the art history books claimed, and the audio tour guide repeated, but he knew better. He picked up his glasses and the second notebook, looking around for witnesses. He wasn’t worried, but it never hurt to check. He suspected the Communists had tried to put an end to the Brotherhood, the Communists aided by the modern Catholic Church and its purges. But they’d survived the Romans and Magyars and Mongols and, well, it never hurt to be careful. How many people had disappeared while investigating the Masons, or had suffered strange “accidents?”

  Now he had the last pieces. White finished his notes and grabbed up his rucksack, hurrying out to go look at the library. The monastery would close in half an hour, and he wanted to confirm the presence of a manuscript on the fourth shelf from the end of the second row of the philosophy section.

  To Boaz White’s profound disappointment, his monograph on the Carpathian Brotherhood failed to attract a publisher. The refusals and evasions, even from the smallest of specialty presses, confirmed his suspicion that the Brotherhood lingered on, under a different name of course. At the suggestion of a member of his virtual research group, he re-worked the manuscript into a novel, added a few sex scenes, and laughed as The Chalice Mount rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists, staying there for most of a year. The gnashing teeth and furious denials of the so-called real historians and the Catholic Church only added to his delight.

  Devils, Dragons, and Castle Tales

  “I did no such thing, my lady,” Joschka heard Rada Ni Drako protest. “I just read the children one of the fairy tales out of the book in the nursery.” Joschka looked up at the library ceiling and wondered what his old friend had gotten into this time. Then he lit his pipe and returned to reading.

  “Which book, Rachel?” Gräfin Adele von Hohen-Drachenburg asked, walking into the library with Rada, or Rachel Na Gael as Joschka’s family knew her.

  “Kinder und Hausmärchen, the copy with the green covers, the old one.” She thought for a moment before adding, “And one from the Märchen aus Kärnten about Schloss Stein.”

  Adele put her hands over her ears and looked down at the Persian rug, then sat in the chair across from Joschka. “No wonder their mother is complaining about nightmares! Rachel, Hannes is eight. That’s too young for Grimm and the Schloss Stein stories.”

  Rachel shrugged, hands spread, and turned to Joschka. “My lord General, I promise, I was not adding scary voices or anything inappropriate. And I didn’t read the ones about siblings that murder each other, or what the Devil did to Dr. Faustus.”

  Joschka blew a long plume of smoke, in part to buy time as he fought off a smile. He believed Rachel, he really did, but her idea of “not that scary” would make the bearskin rug shriek in terror, then run off and hide in the chapel. Well, he reminded himself, considering what did scare her, she’d probably toned things down considerably, even from what Grimm recorded. He took his pipe out of his mouth and set his book down. “As I recall, my lady, we went through the books in the nursery to make certain that nothing inappropriate remained on the shelves.”

  Adele nodded. “We did, my lord husband, nothing inappropriate and nothing valuable or rare. Apparently Hannes and his sister and their cousins are a bit more sensitive than we thought.” She sighed. “Or Maria is going through a phase and set the other children off in their sleep.”

  Joschka looked to Rachel, who nodded. “I believe she is, my lady, my lord General. She was complaining after her nap about something chasing her in her dreams. If she’s beginning to show an empathic gift, or Healing, she’s at the right age for it to start overpowering her shielding instinct.”

  “Well, either way, Rachel, no more scary stories at bedtime. Or you will have to sleep in the nursery to calm things down before it wakes the rest of us up,” Adele threatened, smiling as she wagged a slender finger at her guest.

  Rachel did her best to look penitent, but Joschka caught the glint in her good eye. He smoothed his beard with his free hand, wondering i
f he should warn the maids not to open the nursery door without knocking and then waiting for permission to enter. Because he would not be at all surprised to hear that someone had seen a very large one-eyed black cat sleeping in the middle of the former maids’ quarters, now serving as a children’s room.

  Rachel took her accustomed seat by the now-cold fireplace. Summer had turned very mild even by local standards and Adele had ordered the entire building aired out, including the Graf’s library. Joschka hoped no moths got in: he could imagine what Rachel’s response would be.

  She gave him a look of mild disappointment. <> Rachel protested into his mind.

  He snorted quietly, giving her a stern look as he tightened his shields.

  Aloud she said, “My lady, I’m curious about the Schloss Stein tales. The one about the murdered groom sounds rather bloody, even by Austrian border standards.”

  Adele pointed to her husband. “Ask him. The histories of noble houses are his area, not mine. I just married into this chaos, as you recall.” She smiled.

  “My dear lady wife, neither of my Houses are chaotic, I assure you, nor is my household.” Silver eye and light blue eyes shared equally unconvinced expressions and he clarified, “Christmas and school holidays aside, of course.” A look passed between the ladies that boded ill for the direction of the conversation, and Joschka changed the topic slightly. “That said, there is more truth to the story than in most, although the ending is where history and legend diverge.”