The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  Wait here, croaked the stooped servant, who seemed more beast than man, and limped into the shadows from which he had emerged.

  I was left alone in Groot’s chamber of horrors. Shelves lined the wall nearest me, shelves crammed with jars containing a milky fluid. Within them floated Death. Dead pigs, dead mice, dead hands with perfectly preserved fingernails. At the center of the room, a corpse lay across a marble table, its chest split open, its eye sockets hollow, its lips peeled back in a gruesome smile. A menagerie of clockwork creatures clicked and wheezed inside their cages, watching me with sightless eyes.

  —A Kunstkammer of my own, fine as the Emperor’s, I like to say. Though not to the Emperor, of course.

  Groot’s voice was velvet, rich and smooth. He spoke not in German or Czech or his native Dutch, but Latin, as if knowing it would please me. A candle flickered to life and uncloaked his caped figure, on the far side of the laboratory. It was the eyes I saw first. Not his eyes, those narrow pools of darkness I quickly learned to avoid. The eyes that lined the wall behind him, dead eyes floating behind mottled glass, stark white bulbs laced with spiny red veins. Would you believe, dear brother, that no scream escaped me?

  —Your Father recognized greatness when it crossed his path.

  This, before I could introduce myself.

  —The world has suffered a great loss. As have you.

  I could not speak.

  —You were a beautiful child. But the result is no surprise. Tragedy is never kind to beauty, is it?

  As if by magical incantation, this broke the spell. I assure you, brother, it was not vanity that unstuck my tongue. My crooked nose is what it is, my curls do what they will, and the wistfulness in our Mother’s voice when she speaks of my younger self as if it were another, golden Elizabeth is more telling than any reflection. I have always known what I am. But to know that Groot had watched me as a child, to imagine that his spindly fingers had stroked my once obedient hair or his voice had crooned rhymes in my ear, that was intolerable.

  You know I have never had much affection to spare for the mass of mankind, brother, but never had I met someone so easy to despise on first sight. Yet our Father trusted him. I gave him the letter and watched his long, pale face transform as he read, filling with surprise, wonder, and, finally, desire. When he met my gaze again, his smile matched that of the corpse.

  —The end of all true philosophy is to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through knowledge of the created world.

  Bacon, I said, recognizing one of our Father’s favorite pieces of wisdom. He nodded. Though I did not understand it at the time, that was the first test.

  —Do you understand what I pursue here? My struggle?

  His arm swept across the laboratory, its mechanical and organic death. No, I told him, and did not want to.

  —We know the world only by acting upon it. We know the Creator only by creating. Paracelsus understands this. Also Agrippa and Porta. Ultimate knowledge derives from ultimate creation. The alchemists pursue their philosopher’s stone, purifying the soul as they purify their metal, readying them for the divine. The astronomers seek our Creator in the heavens; the mechanists seek Him in the workings of earth. They speak of reading the Book of Nature. But there are those few of us who seek to write a new Book. Bacon. Your Father.

  You, I guessed.

  —You want to know about the Lumen Dei, what it promises us. I want to know your promise. A fair trade, I believe.

  Another test. At dawn the following day I returned to his laboratory, which was shaded in perpetual night. This time, his hobbled servant spoke.

  —It is in need of eyes. You are to choose, and then to supply.

  Where the corpse had been, a mechanical man lay, an armless and legless torso with a head of iron. And gaping cavities where, if I wanted to prove myself, there soon would be eyes.

  They watched me from their jars. Brown, blue, green, black, all with the same dead stare.

  I chose a pair with large pupils, rimmed with bottomless black, the pair most closely resembling Groot’s inky gaze. I plunged my hands into the cold water that was not water and smelled of sickness, and cupped my fingers around two eggs that were not eggs and felt to be pulsing with life. I once, in the shadow of Most Castle, held a newly hatched chick in my palm, its feathers sticky and slick, its heart fluttering warm and afraid against my flesh. This was the same.

  On his table, the mechanical man waited.

  The eyes sank into their holes with wet clicks, the sound of rotting limbs snapping off a corpse. They were only eyes in a cage of metal, but in that moment, I truly believed that my act had brought the man to life, and that the eyes would take their revenge.

  From the darkness came applause.

  Cornelius Groot stepped into the light.

  —I see your Father’s blood runs true.

  Forgive me, brother, but I nearly spoke the words I have long forsaken. I nearly declared to this man that our Father was not our Father, that our true Father was long dead and Edward Kelley wore his clothes and his wife but could not lay claim to my blood.

  I swallowed these words, not for love of our Father, but because I knew them to be a lie. Another man’s blood may run through my body, but Edward Kelley’s blood runs through my soul. He is my true Father, and Groot saw this, from the start.

  —For many years I have labored to create life, as your Father labored to surpass it.

  The two of us sat together before the first page of our Father’s translation.

  —Only God can grant the power to create life. Only God can know a man’s soul, as He can know the beginnings and the ends of the universe. Only God can truly understand, and only God can truly destroy. To know God is to know ultimate power. Such would be a miracle. The Lumen Dei is that miracle. Together, we will build it. Together, we will build a ladder to the divine.

  Blasphemy, I whispered.

  This angered him, and when he spoke, there was danger in his voice.

  —Blasphemy is a fiction of the Church, which proscribes our questioning and supplies answers of its own.

  Our Father had little love for the Church, which bore even less for him, but such talk was unwise. The Church believed the Emperor to be allied with the devil, and I dared not be his opportunity to prove them wrong.

  —It is the duty of natural philosophers to question. We seek the unification of man and machine, of material and spiritual, of the heavens and the earth. The Lumen Dei, too, is a question, one we must prove ourselves worthy enough to ask. The Lord reveals Himself to us in nature, in art, in geometry, you believe this, do you not?

  I could not argue. He had shaped words around the truth at the center of my life.

  —Who else but God gave us the desire and the capability to know? We need only muster the will to ask. Will you join me, as your Father wished it?

  I joined him, dearest brother. For our Father. But not only for our Father.

  So she believed in it. More than that: She wanted it. I could understand. She’d lost her father, lost her belongings, her home, her power, and now someone was offering her the control over life and death, over everything? Eli had been right: If the Lumen Dei was real, of course people would kill for it. Instead, they had died for it—for a comforting fiction. I almost wished it were as easy for me as it was for her. That I lived in a world where God wasn’t a choice, wasn’t even a necessity, but was simply a fact of existence, obvious and present as the earth and sky. Because at least then they would have died for a reason. Everything would have happened for a reason. Wasn’t that the whole point of telling ourselves the nice stories about the old man with the beard and the lightning bolts?

  I envied Elizabeth—but I admired Groot. Because if you truly believed in the lightning bolts, why not do everything in your power to take them for yourself?

  The Lumen Dei would bring together the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. We would begin where our Father had, with the liquid of life itself, an elixir to coat and
purify our fantastical device. It was a potion, Groot said, that would unite the humors of man with that of the heavens, and bring the microcosm and macrocosm together into one. He selected for us a young alchemical apprentice who, for a price, could be trusted to follow our Father’s formula and Groot’s command.

  And so, I found Thomas.

  I cannot yet speak of him, except to tell you of our first meeting, and how his corn-silk hair shined in the candlelight, and how his blue eyes were kind when they dared meet my gaze. You know how I have hated my name, but his voice gave new life to it. Elizabeth, he said, and it was like a song.

  If you have found this letter, as I know that you will, you now have possession of that formula which Thomas prepared. And with the formula, I leave you a choice. I cannot destroy the Lumen Dei, but as I once drew it together, I have now torn it asunder, and spread its limbs across this city I used to love.

  Follow me now, if you dare, from water to earth, that element deep in the bones and marrow of life. Groot sent me in pursuit of the sacred earth that had once walked as a soulless man, a pursuit that began and ended with this beast’s creator, the holy man who in this way nearly became a god.

  If you remember what our Father taught us, about how words do not belong to those who speak them, you can follow me there. But if you love yourself as I love you, beyond measure, you will burn these words and, with them, our Father’s dream.

  I stopped reading.

  “Well?” Max prodded. “Follow her where?”

  “That may be a problem,” I said, and showed them the chunk of text at the bottom of the page.

  “Anyone speak ancient Greek?”

  Eli sighed, Max grimaced, but Adriane, after furrowing her brow in what I took to be mock concentration, shook her head.

  “Problem solved,” she said. “That’s not Greek.”

  “I know you suck at languages,” I said. “But trust me, that’s Greek.”

  Adriane grinned. “Didn’t you tell me once that Elizabeth Weston was born in England?”

  “Didn’t you tell me, more than once, you weren’t listening?”

  “Surprise!” she said brightly. “You also told me she considered English her native language and only wrote in Latin because she was an uppity bitch.”

  “I’m pretty sure those weren’t my exact words.”

  “Words do not belong to those who speak them,” she said.

  “I can read that part, too. That part’s not our problem.”

  “I’m telling you, there is no problem. Give me the pen.”

  She wrote:

  “Words do not belong to those who speak them,” Adriane said again, tapping the page. “Think about it.”

  It was like staring at one of those paintings filled with dots—staring and staring until finally, through sheer exhaustion, your gaze relaxes, and the boat or unicorn or tree or whatever you’ve been trying too hard to see suddenly emerges from the chaos.

  She was right, it wasn’t Greek. Chapman Prep taught the Greek alphabet as a novelty act in ninth grade, somewhere between square dancing and the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. So it was no trouble to sound the letters out in my head. Iota. Mu. Phi Upsilon Lambda Lambda—I’m full …

  “ ‘I’m full of surprises,’ ” I read. “Cute.”

  She smiled. “Try brilliant.”

  None of us could argue with that.

  23

  The sacred earth lies by the greatest rabbi’s greatest creation.

  Prague, it turned out, had only one “greatest rabbi”: Judah Loew ben Bezalel, aka the Maharal of Prague, aka chief rabbi of Prague, born 1520, died 1609, buried beneath the most visited tombstone in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, famous the world over, according to the guidebook, for sculpting a living creature from the mud of the Vltava River. A brainless lump of clay clumsily molded into the shape of a man, a divine blessing that allowed a man-made impossibility. Or, as Elizabeth had put it, “sacred earth that had once walked as a soulless man,” created by “the holy man who in this way nearly became a god.” A creature with no heart, no brain, no breath, no soul; dead matter animated by a spark of impossible life. A golem.

  Every week, the rabbi endowed his monstrous creation with the breath of life by inscribing a slip of paper with the Shem ha-Mephorash, the true name of God, and slipping it beneath the golem’s tongue. Day in and day out the witless creature lumbered obediently through the Jewish ghetto, mopping floors and kneading challah and punishing any drunken goyish thugs who, sodden with liquid courage, decided they were owed a tribute of Jewish wealth or Jewish women. Every Sabbath, the rabbi withdrew the slip of paper from his creature’s mouth, and so withdrew the blessing. The breath of life, the spiritus, the nefesh, whatever animating force divine forbearance had leased to the lump of clay disappeared, and clay was, once again, nothing but clay. Dust returned to dust. Until the Sabbath the rabbi forgot his sacred task, and, deprived of its weekly nap, his Frankenstein monster ran rampant through the ghetto, nearly burning it to the ground. After that, the blessing was withdrawn permanently and the mud retired. There was no doubt this was the sacred earth we’d been charged with retrieving. There was just one problem. The golem was pure legend. Elizabeth had sent us in search of a fairy tale.

  Another one.

  Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, lay at the heart of the city. Supposedly settled in the tenth century, then settled all over again a century later after a gang of twenty thousand crusaders marched through and killed or converted everyone in the name of God. Inhabited by ten thousand people during its Renaissance golden era, when Emperor Rudolf smiled upon its people and at least mildly discouraged his other subjects from plundering or marauding through the quarter on a regular basis. Razed to the ground in 1895, by which point it had decayed into a slum and only those unfortunates too poor to spread into the rest of the city were still squatting in its urine-spattered streets. Rebuilt shortly after, but even then, despite Prague’s one-hundred-thousand-plus Jewish population, there weren’t many Jews left in the Jewish part of town; then came the Holocaust, and there weren’t many Jews left anywhere.

  We had intended to canvass the neighborhood in search of someone who might know more about the golem than we could find in books, hidden knowledge handed down through the generations as myth or bedtime story. But as soon as we crossed Kaprova, the street separating Staré Město from Josefov, our mistake became clear. Maybe this had once been a neighborhood. No more. From what I could tell, it wasn’t anything anymore but a holding pen for tourists whose toddlers toted stuffed golems while their parents dragged them from one pristinely preserved synagogue to the next, occasionally pausing to buy a memorial postcard and candlesticks or pop into the Prada store just down the street.

  Flyers slapped to the front of every building noted the times for morning prayers and the provisions for mourners needing access to the cemetery for a private kaddish: Somewhere, hiding from the hordes, someone lived here, worked here, prayed here. It was hard to imagine. According to one of the plaques we passed as we wandered in and out of the old temples, trying to get our bearings, the Nazis had razed and plundered Jewish ghettos all over the Continent, but they’d left this one largely intact, not just preserving its treasures but shipping in abandoned and stolen Jewish artifacts from hundreds of miles away. The idea being that, once the Final Solution came to fruition and Europe had been cleansed of its so-called scourge, Prague’s Jewish quarter would stand as a museum to the vanished people, the architectural equivalent of a dinosaur skeleton or a wax caveman. It occurred to me that if things had gone according to plan, it probably would have looked a lot like this.

  Rabbi Loew—along with every other Prague Jew to have died between the years of 1439 and 1787—was buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery, a small patch of stone and weed that could only be accessed through the Pinkas Synagogue. A sixteenth-century Gothic temple built in tribute to a destroyed German synagogue, it had been rededicated as a shrine to the children of Terezín. The concentr
ation camp on the outskirts of Prague took in more than fifteen thousand children over the course of the war; 132 made it out.

  I was only a few steps through the door when a gnarled hand grabbed my shoulder. I froze, choking on a voiceless scream. Nails bit into my arm, digging deep. Next would come the blade, in my back or across my neck, blood staining the ancient floor, a scene the tourists would capture on film to spice up their vacation slide show: Girl stumbles, girl falls, girl bleeds.

  I wondered if it would hurt.

  “Your friends,” a creaking voice said. I finally shook off my paralysis and ripped myself out of his grip. “For their heads.”

  I spun around. The man who’d grabbed me was old and stooped and, even standing straight, couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall. He held a basket of paper head coverings. “Men cannot enter without,” he said.

  All my breath came rushing back and now, through sheer relief, I almost did scream. But instead I took two of the small white head coverings, shoved them at Max and Eli, and promised myself I wouldn’t forget again: Bad things happen in the daylight, too.

  We entered the sanctuary on a wave of German teenagers, their teachers barking orders at them as they pretended to read the inscribed names rather than their text messages. Max and Adriane muscled through the crowd and into the cemetery, where Loew’s massive stone tomb was waiting. But I stayed behind for a moment, trapped by the watercolors painted by the young prisoners of Terezín. Some of the children had been talented; most had just been children, drawing lollipop trees and stick-figure people with fat, round heads. There were paintings that could have been hung anywhere—on a kindergarten wall, a refrigerator—seascapes of tropical fish, a giant octopus, a dragon facing off against a golden-haired sorceress, a house in the mountains, all perfectly sweet until you noticed the plaques alongside each picture, inscribed with birth and death dates, nearly all within a decade of each other. Then it was hard not to imagine the squat red and blue house as a distant dream of a safer childhood, the dragon as a Nazi commandant. It was hard not to notice the recurring nightmare captured in one painting after another, the black locomotive puffing smoke into a blacker night, the tracks leading straight to Terezín.