Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  They carried her back to the temporary wooden bridge that led from the Little Town to the Old Town. Her hands tied behind her back, she was pushed and shoved along the roads. She had no choice but to listen to those around her reminding each other that she had harmed them or someone they loved: failed marriages, miscarriages, bad harvests, toothaches that wouldn’t go away, poor collections of honey, chickens that didn’t lay eggs and cows that wouldn’t give milk, sudden deaths were all her fault. She had caused them all by the power gained from consorting with the Devil, they testified. The Devil, the Prince of Lies himself as well as the lesser devils, too numerous to mention, that they had all seen at one time or another around her house. She held her tongue, knowing that protest was useless—in the shouting and the chaos of the mob, no one would hear her and, more importantly, no one would believe her.

  Burly men stepped through the crowds and led her down to the riverside under the bridge. Rope appeared from somewhere and the men prepared to test her for witchcraft by dunking her in the river. If she sank in the water, it would prove she was innocent. But if she floated, if the water that washed away sin in Christian baptism rejected her, then she would be proven a witch beyond doubt. The men, assisted by those nearest to them in the mob, knocked her over and pulled off her shoes. Pulling her to her feet, they next pushed her head and shoulders down and tied her left wrist to her right ankle and her right wrist to her left ankle. In this traditional position, not only was the woman’s body made into an X, a version of St. Andrew’s Cross (and therefore her body itself was a prayer-made-flesh that God’s truth would be manifest), but it was also that much more difficult for her to swim and exonerate herself by propelling herself along the bottom of the river. Then, lengths of rope were fastened around her waist and she was thrown into a nearby boat. Three of the men climbed in with her and rowed out into the current, hugging the wooden beams that supported the ramshackle bridge above them. When the boat had gotten a third of the way across the river, the men stopped rowing. Holding the ends of the ropes around her waist, they shoved her out of the boat and into the current.

  She gulped air in the instant before she hit the water. Even if the water did not condemn her by pushing her to the surface, there was no certainty that the men would pull her out of the water in time. People were known to be declared innocent of witchcraft by the water but nevertheless drowned because they were not pulled to the surface in time. Water roared in her ears as she was caught in the swirling eddies of current that hit the bridge supports. She flailed about, trying to push herself through the water towards where she thought the bridge was. If she could wedge herself against one of the massive stone supports of the old bridge, she imagined she might have a chance of surviving the day.

  She felt pulled by the water, tossed about, all sense of direction lost in the murky depths. Her lungs were burning for lack of air. The ropes around her waist were tight, cutting into her skin as the water tugged and pulled them. Pain—from the ropes cutting into her skin, from the lack of air in her lungs, from the water pounding her against remnants of the very stone columns she had hoped to encounter but seemed unable to anchor herself against—filled her consciousness. She was dimly aware that she had maybe been underwater long enough to vindicate her. But then the water pushed her upwards. One arm of the river’s current seemed to be bouncing off the ruined bridge supports and was tugging her along in its relentless surge to the surface.

  She burst through the river surface and gasped, gulping river water as well as air to fill her burning lungs. The mob gathered along the wooden bridge above her and those standing on the shore burst into cheers. She turned over and over in the water as the men hauled her back toward the boat from which she had been cast. At last she crashed into the side of the boat and was roughly pulled aboard. The men rowed back to the Little Town side of the river.

  She was untied. She clambered out of the boat bobbing at the shore’s edge. She was cold, river water poured off her, and weeds were tangled in her hair and dress. The priest from the church on the Old Town Square was waiting for her. She could see hatred, fear, and glee light his eyes all at once. Without a word to her, he tried to tear her dress away from her breasts but the sodden cloth would not rip. So he spun her around and, in one gesture, pushed her head down and pulled her skirts up.

  “The witches’ mark!” he cried to the mob. “We must search her private parts for the witches’ mark made by the devils who nurse themselves on her flesh!”

  “Witches’ mark! Devil’s mark!” roared the townsfolk, surging close to get a good view of her exposed backside.

  She bit her lip and cringed. She knew they could plainly see the purple-red birthmark on her left buttock.

  “See, the Devil’s brand is on her!” shouted the priest to his ad hoc congregation. “Malefica! She has rejected God and His Holy Church, so the water with which she was baptized has rejected her! She has suckled demons! She killed Václav last night and she has tormented the valley far too long already! She is a čarodějnice!”

  “Burn her!” cried a child in the third or fourth row of the crowd around her. “Burn her!” The whole town took up the cry, those around her on the shore and those watching the proceedings from the bridge. Later, no one could remember who exactly had begun the cry, which was only proof that it was an inspired decision. Inspired by God, that they should not suffer a witch to live anywhere near the towns. They were lucky He hadn’t already visited them with His divine wrath for their laxity at tolerating her presence for so many decades.

  They pulled her up to the bridge and practically threw her across to the Old Town. “Witch!” they taunted her, the brave boys running up to her, spitting at her, and darting away again into the crowd that surged across the bridge, down the winding streets on the other side, and then spilled out onto the Old Town Square. Someone, anticipating the probable culmination of the day’s events, had erected a stake across the square and boys were already piling bundles of sticks and straw around it.

  She could stand no more. Nothing was to be gained by further silence. “Svetovit, hear me!” she cried suddenly at the top of her lungs. The crowd paused a moment in its fury, startled to hear her say something for the first time all day.

  “Svetovit, hear me!” Fen’ka cried again, calling on the ancient deity, the four-faced god who had been worshipped on the hilltop where the Christian cathedral was now being built. “These folk betray your heritage. You are their father and they deny your ways,” she cried to the afternoon sky. The clouds surged and heaved above the town. The day, which had dawned clear and had remained bright and warm all day suddenly grew dusky and chill. The dead leaves rattled across the cobblestones that ordinarily would have held a thriving marketplace at that time of day. The few merchants who had not been part of the mob since early that morning had all closed their stalls early since no one was interested in buying anything. Their customers had been at the house across the river and then watching the dunking all day.

  “Curse them, Svetovit! Teach them to fear you, as their fathers and grandfathers before them did! Teach them your power!” the old woman screamed in rage at her tormentors. “Curse them going out and coming in!” She gasped for breath. “Curse them in the towns and in the castle! Curse their casks and cellars! Let them die suddenly but go down alive into the darkness!”

  The crowd had been taken by surprise. They heard the old woman’s cries to Svetovit and they heard the imprecations she called down upon them. And then the crowd roared to life again.

  “Burn her! Burn her now! Hear her blasphemy?” It was impossible to distinguish one voice from another in the chaotic riot that was going on around her. Pushing, shoving, forward, backwards, sideways—it seemed almost like magic that she got any closer to the stake at all, given the heaving mass of people, each of them intent on being in the center of the action. If someone watching the scene hadn’t known what had preceded the chaos, it would have been impossible to tell she was the center of attention, as
no one seemed to be paying attention to her now. The crowd flowed this way and that, like waves driven by a storm.

  Finally the group of burly men got her to the stake and pushed her through the piles of kindling and sticks piled around its base. The townsfolk got her back against the stake so she was facing east, her back to the Jewish Quarter a little distance behind her. Even the Jews of the Old Town had heard the commotion and had come out to watch the goings-on, forming a human wall around the northern end of the square.

  Fen’ka squirmed and struggled against the men who held her—who were surprised by such strength in a woman of her age—but to no avail. She was pinned against the wooden pole and only managed to kick aside some of the bundles of sticks around her feet.

  “Be still, woman! Can you not see that I am trying to help you, Fen’ka? I have already not nailed you to the stake! The less you squirm,” he growled at her, “the quicker you will die and escape this misery and suffering!”

  One of the town jailers got through the crowd with a pair of heavy iron shackles, which he locked on her wrists after twisting her arms behind her and around the stake. The shackles were heavy and were locked tight, biting into her skin. New, dry rope was passed to the jailer, who then tied her torso to the stake, primarily to reduce her struggling. Rope, which burned even more easily than flesh, was never the way to keep a victim attached to the stake for execution. Normally, convicts would be tied to the stake to reduce their struggles and then their hands would be nailed to the wooden pole. In this case, as Fen’ka was already shackled by iron to the stake, tying her with rope afterwards was partly out of habit and partly an act of kindness by the jailer.

  The sky grew darker. Thunder rumbled in the distance, echoing in the hills around the bend of the river. A torch was brought and touched to some of the straw piled around the stake. The wind at first made it difficult to light the straw, but then fanned the flames across the hay and wood.

  “May they lose what they have and not gain what they want!” the old woman screamed to the clouds above her. “Scatter their bones near the mouth of hell!” A patchwork quilt of lightning sizzled across the sky, the simultaneous thunder booming in all their ears. The fire began to burn not just the straw and small bundles of kindling but also some of the larger sticks and small logs. Most of the larger pieces of wood were not well aged and smoke blew into her face as loose sparks settled on her wet clothes. Most of them sputtered out but a few glowed for a moment, causing wisps of smoke to curl up into her face. The crowd continued to cheer and roar, most people ignoring her cries, if they could even hear them above the din of mob and gathering storm. The townsfolk hoped the sudden storm would not dampen or extinguish the fire too soon. Crowds always liked the fire to burn clean and hot, inflicting as much suffering on the victim as possible, while the victims usually preferred the fire to produce as much smoke as possible. Wood smoke could be a blessing in disguise: if there was enough smoke, the victims would pass out or die from smoke inhalation before the fire started to burn their bodies; without the smoke, they would still be conscious as the flames began to devour their flesh along with the wood.

  Fen’ka leaned out over the bundles of fuel around her and breathed deep. A fit of coughing racked her. She leaned out again, as far as she could stretch against the shackles and the rope, and looked at the townspeople gathered to cheer her on towards death. She saw the priest, hanging back now, along the periphery of the crowd, near the facade of the old church. “May the sky above them be brass and the earth they walk on, iron!” she screamed in his direction.

  Lightning crackled over the church. The people in the crowd looked up nervously, unsure if they should take shelter from the storm. Boys and young men took advantage of the lull to dart to the stake and throw oil on the wood. Fire surged into the air and they stumbled back, anxious to avoid being caught in the conflagration. Through the smoke and fire, Fen’ka saw another boy, a little slower than the rest, also dart up to the stake empty-handed and look around, blinking. He had nothing to throw on the fire.

  He grabbed one of the smallest of the flaming logs. “Curse their wives and children!” She spat the words at him. “Let the shadow of death stalk them in the night!” The boy ran through the crowd, holding the firebrand aloft. “Burn her!” he shouted, echoing the crowd’s earlier cries.

  The crowd still stood nervously quiet. Should they evade the storm? Some had heard the old woman’s angry cries of damnation and wondered if they should evade those as well. Those who had not heard the old woman heard the whispers passing through the crowd, repeating what she had called out. Was this even a simple autumn storm, some wondered out loud. Why wasn’t it raining yet?

  She gathered her strength for one last outburst. “Curse them eating and drinking!” She saw a carriage rumbling away across the square. “Curse them in the streets and squares!” she screamed at the back of the carriage driver’s head.

  “Let your torrents wash over them! Let the river swallow them up!” Her voice rang out above the roaring flames, the whistling of the wind and the snapping of the richer townsfolk’s cloaks in that wind, the dim echoes of the thunder. “Let them receive no vindication!”

  Lightning flashed directly above the square, and another bolt cut through the air and struck the square itself, just in front of the pyre. The crowd ran screaming, flying away like the dead leaves across the cobblestones. The wind gusted. The next day, some would say they saw a multi-headed figure in the thick, black storm clouds above the promontory across the river. A few even said they thought the storm-cloud figure was Svetovit himself, furious with the townsfolk for replacing his shrine not only with the little, ancient churches on the hill but also with the new cathedral they were constructing and for which they had stolen his name by dedicating it to a saint—Svaty Vit—whose name was almost identical with his.

  “He appreciates and rewards whatever loyalty might be shown him,” a few folk whispered to each other in the shadows of the night, afraid that either God or the priest who had led the mob that afternoon might hear. “It gives him a reason to vent his wrath and display his fury with us who have forsaken him! Svetovit himself was answering old Fen’ka’s invocation of him!”

  As suddenly as the lightning striking the cobblestones, soldiers burst into the Old Town Square. News of the hysteria had finally reached the castle on the hill above the Little Town and the newly crowned emperor, Charles IV, had immediately sent soldiers to break up the mob, stopping the riot and the execution. His soldiers, bursting into the square, were met by the screaming townsfolk running in every direction away from the fire. In the confusion and crowds, it took the kings’ men several minutes to wade through the panicked townsfolk and reach the fire.

  The old woman coughed into the sky again, over and above the flames growing hotter around her. Smoke billowed from the wood and steamed hissed from her clothes and hair. Fen’ka could feel the flames caress her hands behind her. The iron shackles felt warm.

  She coughed again and hung her head. “Let all this come to pass as surely as this fire itself will finally die,” she whispered to herself in the smoky haze. A cloud of smoke blew into her face and a final, violent spasm of coughing took hold of her.

  Finally the soldiers reached the burning stake, but they could only stand there helplessly. They had arrived too late. Even if they had some way to extinguish the flames, they could see the old woman’s torso slump against the stake, her clothing finally catching fire and her face blistering in the inferno before them.

  Hot ashes, carried by the wind, darted across the square and then floated down onto the fleeing townspeople. No one heard her last request, borne aloft by the acrid clouds of smoke with the glowing sparks and cinders.

  “When this fire dies, let all their nightmares come to life.”

  The Moon

  (March 2002)

  M

  agdalena stood on the New York City sidewalk, trying not to look at the sign in the storefront window. Crowds swirled and part
ed around her like river water that surrounds a rock, parting and passing around it, then continues on with no memory of the obstacle encountered. She turned away, bit her lip, and saw the crosswalk sign change from “Walk” to “Don’t Walk.” Traffic snarled in the street, horns blaring. People surged out between the cars and charged ahead to wherever they were going. It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, a Friday, but there still seemed like more people out on the streets and sidewalks than lived in some of the small towns or villages back home in the Czech Republic. She turned back to the storefront with its alluring temptation. She took a deep breath and plunged through the door.

  A small bell chimed as the door swung shut behind her. She had seen the sign in the window, “Tarot Cards—Readings Available—$5,” in the midst of a collection of candles and occult-looking paraphernalia: a crystal ball, a gold statue of Nefertiti and another of an unknown pharaoh, a faded chart of the zodiac, a plastic replica of a human skull. Through the window, she had seen the small waiting room in which she now stood. An overstuffed armchair was against one wall and two folding metal chairs were next to the window. An old woman stood in front of the overstuffed chair, as if caught in the act of being about to sit down. She had a bandana over her head and a shawl over her black dress. She looked at Magdalena and smiled. The wrinkles that lined her face rippled out from kind, gentle eyes, like ripples that radiate out from two stones thrown by a youngster into a country pond. A curtained doorway seemed to lead further back into the storefront. She heard voices, and then another woman parted the curtain and stepped into the waiting room with them.