by Tosca Lee
“Whatever you do,” I say, “don’t open it, don’t read it, don’t even feel it, or you’ll end up in the same position I am.”
My mother’s notes—the ones Nikola found—are spread across my lap, but I am convinced, once again, that they are a red herring.
Jester seizes the phone from Claudia.
“Where are you? We’re coming there.”
“No. Get out of the city. Stay safe. Set up shop. I’ll need your help.”
An hour later I’m just trying to hold my brain together. To summon meaning from the inconsistencies between Nikola’s collection and mine. To decode the numbers (or letters) tattooed on my back in case they served a dual purpose. To trace imaginary roads between the Bathory family estates, scattered like pebbles across the Austro-Hungarian empire. Searching, all the while, for patterns until my mind is as cluttered as one of my mother’s pages.
I ask Jester to research the burial grounds of the Bathory relatives, the conspiracy theories about the location of her body, which has never been found. It’s got to be near the last place she drew breath, at Cachtice in modern-day Slovakia, northeast of Bratislava.
“But it wouldn’t be a church, I don’t think,” I say. Her name was unholy at her death.
“And Gregory Thurzo’s wife—find out where she might have gone. She systematically stole Elizabeth’s jewelry on her visits—maybe she took something else out with her. Her husband is the one who lobbied to keep Elizabeth alive. And find out where Elizabeth’s daughter Anna lived and was buried. She visited her mother regularly at Cachtice.”
“I’ll look,” Jester says. “But do you know how many family records—archives, anything—exist after Elizabeth? None. They were serious when they said it would be as though she never was.”
Even as I disconnect, I know a theoretical diary could have ended up anywhere. Smuggled to her cousin the prince in Transylvania to plead her innocence. Destroyed by Elizabeth’s sons-in-law or Pál’s tutor and guardian, who managed Pál’s share of the estate—at least until it was stripped from him. Burned in frustration by Elizabeth herself.
I have to remind myself that there was something—something—damaging that I hid as effectively as Elizabeth and her elusive diary.
I comb through the connections between Ivan, Nikola, Amerie. The princes of the courts they frequented, their birthplaces, religions (all Catholic), and the sites of their deaths. Ivan, I am convinced, was purposeful about the location of his death, if not his death itself. Amerie, purposeful about her death.
We’ve just crossed the border into Slovakia when I say I need caffeine.
“I can’t think anymore. I’m going crazy.”
It’s the second time I’ve made Rolan stop. The first time was at a tiny café on the outskirts of the city just so I could hold still long enough to regain some semblance of rational thought. But now the images are racing like frames of an old-fashioned film—too fast for my consciousness to grab hold of. And I know Rolan is struggling, his mind not wired for the Progeny disdain of sleep.
He stops at a gas station, goes inside for coffee. A police car pulls into the station, parks across the lot. I study the officer who emerges from it until he glances in my direction, though I never persuaded him to do so.
Does he recognize me, know I’m wanted for murder?
I’m more innocent than Rolan in this fact. But I’m the one who will be convicted if I fail.
Five days. So little time. And I don’t even know what to look for once we get to Slovakia—or where to go from there if I fail.
A line from my journal tugs at my thoughts.
So here we are. I’m at a crossroads and you’re where I was months ago . . . I couldn’t stay long enough in Bratislava. I’m running out of time so fast, the sun’s practically moving from west to east . . .
I’m pinching my brows together when Rolan gets back in the car.
“I got you some coffee with your cream and sugar,” he says.
As though I haven’t heard that before.
“West to east from Bratislava,” I say.
“What?”
“I went to Bratislava first, said I would get to Nyirbator if I had time, which I did not. That everything was backward. That the entire story is backward.”
Life is beautiful, Audra. I know it doesn’t seem like it, with everything. But it is. And it is new.
“It isn’t where Elizabeth Bathory died,” I say.
“Then where?” Rolan says, setting a tray with no fewer than three coffees on the console.
“I don’t know!” I pull my hair. “It isn’t where she died. She died in Slovakia.” But she was born in Nyirbator—literally “New Bathory”—due east of here, in Hungary.
“Turn around,” I say suddenly.
He looks at me for a hard minute and then starts up the car.
We stop in Esztergom, just within the border of Hungary, for a few hours’ sleep after Rolan almost goes off the road and I barely alert him in time.
Just before dawn, Rolan’s phone chirps. He rubs his face and taps in his code and then, after a moment’s hesitation, glances at me.
“What is it?” I say, feeling instantly ill. Have learned, by now, to fear the worst.
“Luka’s still alive.”
“Let me see,” I say, reaching for the phone. When he hesitates, I shout, “Let me see him!”
It’s a photo. Luka, in the back of what I recognize as a semi trailer. Just like Nino, blood drying on his face.
“Send a message to the Historian—”
“I don’t have direct access to her.”
“Then send it to whoever you report to.”
He glances at me warily.
“Tell him to convey this up the chain of command: I want proof of life every twelve hours. If I see one more bruise on Luka’s body, I will take a running leap off the next building into traffic. Tell them I said that even if you manage to stop me, they can’t get from my memory what I, myself, don’t know.”
With a quiet nod of understanding, he makes the call.
Four days left.
42
* * *
East of Hungary’s great plain, the village of Nyirbator looks like what I imagine the Ukraine to be: eastern European and nonaffluent. Car repair shops with names like Zolt and Attila dot the corners, and the best-looking restaurant in town takes prime real estate in the tiny square. As for us, we have had a diet of nothing but coffee since we left Esztergom this morning.
“The Bathory family home is a museum now,” Jester says on speakerphone. “Gutted, except for a few wax figures. Tourists hardly even go there.” I can hear her keyboard clicking in the background.
“What else?” I say, rubbing my eyes.
“There’s a mausoleum . . . a new walkway with a bunch of sculptures of Stephen, who became the Prince of Transylvania and King of Poland. It runs between two churches Stephen built with spoils after defeating the Turks . . .”
“Tell me about the churches.”
“Both built by Stephen Bathory. One Minorite—”
“What’s that?”
“The Friars Minor—the minor brothers,” Rolan says quietly. “Franciscans.”
“It’s been rebuilt,” Jester says. “It burned down. It isn’t original.”
“What about the other one?”
“The other one . . . is Calvinist.”
I glance at Rolan.
“Elizabeth was a Calvinist.”
“The Bathory family is buried there. The churches are near one another,” Jester says, sending directions.
We come to the Minorite church, and I look up at its ornate red-striped exterior. Except for the adjacent museum, it’s the same shape and size as the Calvinist church farther up the hill.
I insist on peering inside the reconstructed sanctuary in case something catches my eye, stirs a memory. An image. A shape. A smell. I’ll take anything at this point.
The minute we step into the interior I reel back, overloa
ded by the gilded altars, the icons, the shape of the pews, the figures of saints.
“We’ll never find it,” I say. My pulse is a cudgel in my head. “It could be anywhere. Anything. In a drawer of the office. In the bookshop. A hollowed-out arm of a saint—”
I struggle to catch my breath, an iron band closing around my lungs. My mind won’t stop, is traversing the museum, charting churches, diagramming the walkway between them, juxtaposing saints . . .
Rolan takes me by the arm, pulls me out into the air.
“This isn’t it,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“She was a Protestant.”
I shield my eyes with a shaking hand. “The Franciscans helped her!”
“They helped her child.”
“Why, when she wasn’t even Catholic?”
“Because they believe in direct interaction with the world. Feeding the hungry. Clothing the poor . . .”
“Protecting the Progeny.”
“Protecting the Progeny.”
We trudge up the hill, past the wooden bell tower separate from the church itself. It is labeled with a large sign: BATOR.
Bathory.
Near it, on an outdoor pedestal, sits a bust of Stephen, the placard in Hungarian.
I begin to tremor. I am surrounded with Bathory images, land, conquest, and history. And, in the absence of sleep and a good burn, I am falling apart.
We enter through the carved side door. Gothic windows stretch up the walls of the church. The sanctuary is airy, modern, and white except for the wooden joists that split apart like palm fronds to spread into a magnificent lattice across the vaulted ceiling. It is too clean, too sparse, to offer a hiding place for even the least tainted soul, let alone an artifact as morbid as Elizabeth Bathory’s diary.
An entrance near the back of the church opens into a whitewashed room. In it: a single marble sarcophagus with an ornately carved lid.
The dragon biting its tail.
Stephen Bathory’s tomb.
There are only a few other things of note in the chamber: a knight carved in a slab of red marble that looks as though it was formerly broken in two. A stone crest—the dragon again.
That is it.
I clutch my head. Nothing makes sense except the ticking of the seconds, the precious hours we spent driving here. Nearly two of five days . . . gone.
I almost miss the slight figure of the man who comes to inquire of Rolan in a voice so soft it’s as though he has only a short breath to speak each sentence. He is thirty, if that, his thick glasses making him appear older.
The comb-over doesn’t help.
I don’t have the concentration to try to hold a conversation, turn away as Rolan speaks with him. Not that I’d understand them anyway—they’re talking in Hungarian.
Meanwhile, Luka is somewhere in a semi trailer, bleeding out for all I know.
Just beyond the last row of pews, I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I refuse to replay the last words we spoke, or to dwell on how strong his hand was, holding mine, the way he smelled. I force myself to focus, to speed and calm my mind at once. But I can feel the tears seeping down my cheeks.
“Audra,” Rolan says. I hear him as though from a distance. Because I am praying a petition that is both plea and demand at once, in a deafening mental scream.
“Audra!” Rolan says.
My eyes snap open. But he is not standing there with a diary, or with a long-hidden lockbox. Or with a map of local landmarks that somehow form a dragon, three teeth like the center of an X.
“I am Pastor Tamas,” the man says, so quietly that I squint, as though doing so will help me hear.
“Welcome to our church,” he says. I glance desperately at Rolan. I am not here for the indoctrination tour!
“The pastor says this was once a Catholic church,” Rolan tells me. I blink at him, sure my expression is blank.
“Yes, it is Calvinist now since the sixteenth century,” the pastor says, before launching into something about the freestanding bell tower outside.
I glance down at my feet, at the marble beneath my sneakers, rebuilt in the lifetime of Elizabeth.
“There are thirty-three monks buried under the main church floor,” he says, following my gaze. I back a step. I’ve never understood the practice of burying priests or prominent elders beneath the floors of churches in a holy minefield of souls. Of entombing poets, patrons, and artists along the walls, or far below in crypts.
My first thought is that I hope we don’t have to break through a slab of marble to find the diary—or whatever it is—that will save Luka’s life.
My second is that I will do it, single-handedly, if I have to.
My third is sheer astonishment at the morbidity of the Christian faith. Of the dying Jesus on the Minorite church cross. Of the execution cross itself. The bodies beneath the floors, entombed in walls and stone and beneath the earth outside. Death, everywhere.
“You will see the story of our salvation in the windows,” the pastor says. “There are none along the far wall—a reminder that we must turn away from darkness . . .”
I’ve just decided there’s nothing here, am already thinking ahead with panic. We can’t afford to cross the map from eastern Hungary to Bratislava again. How many times have I zigzagged through the ancient borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire in my past life—and into Wallachia and Transylvania in modern-day Romania as well? How long can I do this and hope to accomplish anything before I lose Luka for good?
A single whisper: Please.
“The tree of life,” the pastor says, pointing to the paned window above the organ pipes. He turns to the window adjacent to it, the first of several along the length of the church, gesturing to each in succession. “The serpent, by which man was tempted. The flower of our Lord Jesus Christ. The water of baptism . . .”
I go very still. Glance sidewise at the row of windows along the southern wall.
“The fire of the Holy Spirit,” the pastor says, “and the Holy Trinity.”
The Trinity window, which is not at the very end of the concave apses over the altar but on the angle just right of it, is composed of three circles built into the top of the window’s Gothic arch. At first glance it is the same as the other windows. On the second, it is not. At the top of the baptism window, the circles are elongated into drops. In the next, the drops invert to form the petals of a flower.
Inside my skull I can almost hear my eyes clicking from one window to the next.
Rolan asks the pastor some question, his voice more gentle than I ever imagined it could be.
“West to east,” I say, my words echoing slightly.
I’m running out of time so fast, the sun’s practically moving from west to east . . .
The pastor pauses.
“What?” Rolan says.
“The story. In the Bible, it starts in Eden.” I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure of that much. “The tree of life,” I say and point to the window at back. “The serpent in the garden,” I say, pointing to the next window, the first on the long adjacent side. “All the way through Jesus to baptism, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity . . . the salvation story goes that direction.”
“Yes,” the pastor says softly, kind enough not to scorn me as an infidel or the religious village idiot.
“That’s the south, isn’t it?” I say, pointing to the long, windowed wall.
“That is correct,” the pastor says.
“But the sun goes from east to west. It goes along that side . . . from east to west,” I say, looking at Rolan.
“The sun tells the story backward.”
It does not end in morbidity. It is not mired in death. The story, once told in the unnatural succession . . . naturally goes backward. From the Trinity just right of the altar to the tree squarely centered on the back wall.
It has to end in life.
I glance up toward the slant of sun through that fourth window throwing panels of light against the
darkened wall. And for a minute I feel that the droplets in that pane are about to fall, to rain down on my upturned face.
43
* * *
The window is abbreviated by the organ pipes to a mere third of the size of its siblings. Near the top of that Gothic frame, the panes curve up like a bowl or a crescent—or the limbs of a tree. A circle floats above it, a single golden fruit. I blink, and the crescent branches are a pair of arms, lifted to the sun.
The vertical panes form tiny squares where they meet the line of the “ground” the tree grows from. They are inset with the same gold glass. I stare at them long enough to see them separate from the rest of the window.
Three. Like the teeth of the dragon. The Trinity, the holy number of the Progeny. Three, the Glagolitic symbol like two towers sharing the same line of flat ground. Like the three vows of poverty, chastity, obedience.
The images flash, rotate before my eyes. This time I juxtapose them with the curving lines of script arcing across the pages of my mother’s notes—so like those Gothic arches. I shuffle them in my mind, lay them out on an unseen canvas. Not the pages of contradictions, take those out. Not the front of the one with its uniform lines. Eight left. Two across, four high. Switch two. The back of this one instead of its front. This one turned upside down, the curving translation connecting to the end of the page beside it.
They form the Gothic arch, a tree like this, two limbs lifted as though to the sun.
A sun floating above the crescent, a golden island of light.
Rolan, beside me, is murmuring something.
“What is it?” I say.
“ ‘Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun,’ ” he says. “Francis of Assisi.”
The orb on the pages falls away, leaving only the curved arms, so like the Franciscan crest. The arms fall away, and the sun floats like a perfectly round island. The elements reassemble, forming the tree of life.