Arcane II (17 page)

Again I found the opening into the garden. Talking and laughing, seven withered sisters were gathering apples in large baskets. Had they no vow of silence?

No sign of my graceful novice. Caught here, among these chattering magpies, she’d look like a pure white swan...

Oh,
she
was what I was searching for, and not the rats that wounded me. With every beat of my heart, my whole body pulsed for the slender maiden. Closing my eyes I could see Kunigunde beckoning to me... How I yearned for the maiden’s tender lips, and her cool, small hands like white rose petals...

My spit tasted rusty, my hot skull ached and my hard cheek burned like hell. Shaking off my weakness, cursing myself, I went blundering down a different fork. From here I heard raucous voices, louder as I turned another bend. Light seeped into this tunnel and showed a blood-dark liquid curling across the ground. Trembling I plunged a finger into it—hot. Then I tasted it: dirty water.

Bending to a hole the size of a thumbnail, I saw seven women on bath-house benches, most flabby hags with sagging breasts and bald as bent old men. Lean Sieghilde hunched in the middle of the pack, holding up a plump rat with amber fur (and never had I seen one of that hue). Cooing, she stroked his bristly back, and when she set him down, on a turned-over basin, there he sat like a spoiled little darling, preening his fur like a cat.

Meanwhile, having donned her habit, she stowed her pet away safe in her bosom. Breathing hard, I sat back on my heels and caught my throbbing head in both hands.
These sisters didn’t want to part with their rats.
Was that why the bishop sent me? I felt myself a wooden pawn in a game played by wise and evil masters. What did these weird women want from me?
Was Kunigunde a bait to trap me?

I heard a roaring in my ears. How could I understand? Stubbornness—I’m a tough old rogue—and the habit of darkness kept me on my feet, while I retreated to the tunnel opening into the gardens of delight. And there, on her knees, softly weeping, under the sprawling bush of thorns, as if she were doing some painful penance—there Kunigunde was waiting. I felt trapped in a drunken stupor; I felt drawn like a moth to the fire. When I scrambled out on all fours, she squealed, flinching away.

“Don’t run,” I gasped and collapsed on the ground.

“Franz.” Kneeling, she seized me in her arms, and I felt her small heart leaping. “What happened? Your cheek, it’s oozing black milk.”

“They bit me—your rats. They wanted to kill me, just like they killed old Hans on his bed.”

From her bosom she drew a silver flask, uncapping it with one hand. I smelled the tang of fruit brandy, and my tongue slithered like a fish out of water.

“No. I vowed on my mother’s grave—”

“Franz, don’t be a fool, it’s the medicine you need. This will soothe your pain like a dream.”

Feebly I tried to pull away while she pressed the warm flask to my lips. Damn me then, but I gulped her sweetness, choking and weeping and wanting
more
; and at once the brandy struck me like poison and I couldn’t move, I didn’t breathe; now I was dying in her arms. No more struggling, no craving... such a relief.

***

A dead man has it easy when he sleeps undisturbed, knowing no hunger, lust or shame. After Kunigunde dosed me, I lay still as a bone at the bottom of a pit.

Woe to me, then, to rise again; and I fought waking like a hard-beaten boy, who tries to burrow deeper and stay under, so he doesn’t have to feel his bruises or taste his own bitter tears...

And then—as if God, our righteous judge, had packed me off while I lay sleeping—I woke to a din of drums and blaring horns, and stamping feet like a demon army. I woke, I swear, to find myself in
hell.
Dazzled by a cloud of lights yellow as butter, blinking and squinting I could make out dozens of arm-thick candles on the tables lining a spacious hall. Was this the convent’s refectory? Tightly bound, both hand and foot, I lay on my side in a crude wooden cage just big enough to hold me curled. The floor felt all sticky, as if I lay in blood.

From the corner of my eye I saw a naked hag dancing, black hair streaming down her sweated back. Then she whirled and cast a cup of liquid in my face, and I licked my lips: sweet wine
.
My whole body throbbed in the tortures of need, and twisting my head I saw my Kunigunde across the room. She stood on a black stone column, her golden hair shimmering down around her pale, bare body like a silken cloak, and over her head she held a tarry torch which cast
dark
light upon the mob of dancers.

Stamping and shouting, these wild women were dancing together in a ring, while inside it huge rats—red, grey or amber—raced in a circle in the opposite direction. I couldn’t see the musicians, whose drumming and blaring seemed to rise out of the floor.

Then I saw Abbess Meine, in a gown of gold with a jeweled belt. I saw a grey rat scurry up her hip, a silver snake bracelet clenched in his jaws. With a merry laugh she plucked the bauble away and slid it up her arm. When she kissed the furry gift-giver on his lips, my stomach heaved.

“Our prisoner’s awake,” Sieghilde croaked, and Meine bent and peered in at me.

“
Guten abend
, Herr Durr,” she leered, her green gaze hungry. “I hope you’re not too uncomfortable, waiting in your pen.”

“What do you witches want with me?”

“Wait a bit. We’ll offer you to our master.”

“What are you saying? Your bishop sent me—”

“That tyrant Bishop
Malefatius.
He won’t let us live as we choose, though we trouble none of his meek flock. He envies our freedom, he envies our studies, he envies us our community.”

“I don’t give a rat’s whisker what you do. You can go to the devil if you choose, but let me free, and I’ll run off—I’ll never breathe a word of your tricks and follies.”

“No. You shall be a witness to my power. I command these women, these musicians, and the rats that dig us treasures from the earth. No power born of man may take them: that is our master’s promise to me.”

Roped like a calf awaiting slaughter I pleaded,
Oh save me, dear St. Jude. Save me from this palace of rats, and I swear I’ll never sin again...
Now a tall creature whooped and turned to me, golden-skinned with a ram’s whorled horns; and though his face was the face of a handsome youth, dark fleece clothed his loins and his legs. I shuddered, my teeth rattling:
this
was the creature these wantons served.

“Bless him, rat-catcher; you bless him, before I offer him your blood.” Pulling a curved dagger from her belt, Meine pricked my throat.

“I’m just a pawn in our bishop’s game,” I pleaded. “I love neither him nor you.”

“His exorcists couldn’t pluck a hair from our heads, so he sent us a common rat-catcher.”

“You are no abbess, Meine. You’re an abscess—an abyss.”

“Oh listen how the rude fellow toys with me. Durr, we’ll throw your chewed bones into the woods. Sister dear, come hold him tight.”

Thrusting her claws into my cage, Sieghilde rolled me onto my back while I snapped at her like a helpless pup. The pounding of the drums, the howling and stamping surged as she forced my head and shoulders down. When I spied the dagger hovering at my throat I roared out, “No!”

Meine echoed it as flames flared all around her; leaping from her pillar Kunigunde set her torch to the golden gown. “Fire cannot harm me...” the evil abbess shouted. “Master, oh save me—how it burns!” The music died as she threw herself down on the floor and rolled in flames. The witches were shrieking like a flock of bats, while the golden ram-creature laughed uproariously, as if he’d played them a wonderful prank. Frantically I tugged at my bonds, which held like the grip of death. I smelled burning flesh...

Now the Master yawned like a prince bored sick; he yawned like the dry earth cracking open; he spun on his heel and vanished in a peal of thunder that shook the hall and threw the candles down. The end of my cage was smoldering, as hags and rats fled in all directions.

“You traitor—after all I’ve made of you!” Like a curse Meine leaped at Kunigunde, and seizing her by her golden hair (her own all aflame like blazing straw), she plunged her dagger into the maiden’s heart, and together they floundered into the blaze.

“Help me!” I shouted like a fool as flames devoured my cage. Kunigunde stretched out her arms to me, her blue eyes glazing over, and I flung myself against my burning bars—and too late, I broke through. I pulled the dagger from her body and sawed my bonds, and then I went groping through the smoke, half-blinded and stumbling over squirming bodies.

Was that a breath of outside air? Was there another door? Behind me roof beams came crashing down, and into a gulf of darkness I dove, landing in icy water. There I wriggled like a drowning rat—I’d never learned to swim—while all around me witches wailed and shrieked, and roof beams fell and masonry crumbled. Nearer, I heard an eager whimper...

***

This time I woke to stern silence, in cold like the end of the world... Who was that playing on the castanets? My teeth, chattering in my skull... Chilled to the marrow, I lay on my belly, grasping rubble with both hands, in my nose the awful reek of meat fallen into the fire and wasted.

Gently a soft tongue licked my forehead. To me it felt like an angel’s kiss. I wasn’t alone, for Fida had found me. Groaning, I gathered her, rib-thin, to me while she yelped and wagged her tail, piebald fur singed and back legs scratched. Strange, but my rat bite didn’t hurt. I touched it; the flesh had grown together.

Slowly I rose to my aching knees, just paces from an inky cistern. Had Fida pulled me out and saved me? Had St. Jude decided I wasn’t ripe? Saint of lost causes, he’s so patient I’d never stopped hoping
he
would help me.

Nothing remained of the Our Lady of Sorrow but a chunk of the chapel’s tower. I found no leavings of the sisters, or their pets. Maybe their master harvested them all.

As for the bishop, I’d let him think I perished in the fire. I could start over in another town; rats hide everywhere, and most won’t kill you. I’d wander north, I decided, away from the sickness the peddlers were calling Black Plague.

Later, bowed under my pack again, as I plodded down the lonesome hills, with Fida plodding at my side, wide whirls of grey snow came drifting down on us like the ashes of a great pyre. Glancing back once, I saw the convent’s ruins fading into the trees of snow.

The Pianist’s Wife

Nicole M. Taylor

Part One: Spring

I did not sleep last night once again.

Instead I tossed the covers from me and then snatched them back, I curled and I sprawled. I opened the spare little window and I closed it again. The sky outside was a muffling, enfolding velvet black. There was none of the misty peach-colored softness that I had come to know in the city, and the moon was so bright it battered at my eyelids. Soon, I suppose, I will look just like my dear and much troubled husband with his hollowed, darkened eyes and the muscles that shiver and jolt underneath his skin.

I could hear his music last night, floating low and liquid up the stairs like lamp oil. Of course it was beautiful; my husband has a genius. But it was hardly soothing. Perhaps he poured his own insomnia into the notes and they, in turn, have infected my ears and driven the sleep from me?

Either way, we were quite the owl-eyed pair at breakfast this morning. I have not slept properly for these last four nights. For my husband, it has been much, much longer. I discovered this unfortunate affliction of his on our wedding night. Which, I am given to understand, was rather unorthodox.

Do not from that statement take me for some blushing schoolgirl. I am every day of twenty-eight and I have lived in the world. But my new husband is my first husband, and I was surprised when he did not touch me. We laid like children with out faces pressed close together until, eventually, I fell asleep. I gather he did not. When I woke in the lost and early hours of the morning, I found him sitting motionless on the edge of the bed we share but so rarely inhabit together. “Darling?” I said, and reached out my hand to touch his arm. He jerked away from me as if I had fired a shot.

“I’ve had a breakthrough,” he said, and turned his shivery, pale smile on me. He left me then, bewildered in the dark. He has spent the days since then holed up in the conservatory, where he keeps his piano. His composition is starting to sound very accomplished, but my ears are hardly what one might call refined. My mother attempted to have me instructed in the piano several times when I was younger. She herself was a rank amateur, having never had the opportunity for that sort of education in her own youth. But she was obsessed in a small way with the idea that a lady must play something, piano being the favorite, violin sufficing if necessary. I had neither the fingers nor the patience for the task and frequently shirked my lessons. Thus, my nuptial match pleased her in a number of ways.

We ate fruit at the breakfast table, picking at it like birds while the sunlight bathed us in an eye-searing white. There seems to be no filter between heaven and earth here in the desolate countryside. It has a way of making one feel rather skinless. I do not inquire about his composition, he does not ask me about my tours around the house. Our breakfast passes in a bright silence but I am not disturbed by this. Neither of us are particularly loquacious. I think that is something my husband values in me: a man of his age does not want a wife consumed with constant prattle.

I spend my days here doing what my mother trained me for and what she herself would be delighted to do: homemaking. I walk from room to room, along hallways and down stairs with a little notepad in my hands, performing a kind of inventory. My husband has lived here alone for a very long time and he has not taken much care with the house, outside of his library. He has a staff, of course, though a small one to be sure. Everything here is well maintained and scrupulously clean, but it is clear that no one has given any thought to aesthetics in a very long time. What decoration there is must have been imposed by his mother, a woman I have only seen in pictures. Which, if my general impression of her taste is correct, is probably all for the best. Mothers-in-law are necessary for young wives, to mold and guide them. A mature woman and a mother-in-law attempting to share the governance of a home and a man can only come grief.