A handful of volunteers paused at midday, wiping their brows and leaning on their shovels. A loud screeching from the clock assailed their ears, metal grinding against metal. The several arms of the clock—displaying hours and minutes, planetary and star positions—shivered and finally hung still, unable to continue their struggle to mark the progression of time. The tiny star on its rod trembled violently, alone in its stalwart efforts to continue ticking, before it also succumbed to its now-inevitable death. Drivers in the square felt their truck gears slip out of position at the same time. Volunteers shouting to one another coughed and sputtered, their words caught in their throats. Silence blanketed the square for an instant and then the rumbling of the trucks began again.
The great Astronomical Clock, the pentacle of Prague, whose gears and hands were tied to the workings of Time itself, had stopped. Judgment Day had come to Prague and the clock was broken, unable to do anything to protect the city.
Basic supplies ran low and then failed altogether in the few stores that remained open. Panic insinuated itself in the city. Rumors and reports of looting circulated. People were afraid to stay in their homes and risk drowning. They were afraid to leave their homes and risk the theft of anything not ruined by the water.
The rising river breached the landing of the bridge in the Little Town, gurgling at first around the bottoms of the steel blockades and then sweeping them away as the depth and force of the water grew.
Across the river, the plaza known as Charles Square that filled the area between the first archway and guard tower of the great bridge and the Old Town was cordoned off as the rushing river consumed it. The middle of the bridge rose like an island of cobblestones and statuary out of the river, cut off from the city on both ends. News of the bridge’s impending destruction, ripped from its stone moorings by the force of the quickly rising water, raced through the city on both sides of the river.
Electricity was shut off in neighborhood after neighborhood throughout the city. The Little Town and the Old Town went dark and shadows consumed them as relentlessly as the water did.
Magdalena glanced back along the street she had come down, trying to remember where she had turned and gone to next with the extract the day before. Something caught her eye and she realized that the priest Dmitri was bending over the place she had just sprinkled with river water and he was reciting or mumbling something.
“He’s following me!” she muttered to herself. “Probably working some hex against the charm George gave me! How dare he? I wonder how long he has been following me?” She scowled in Dmitri’s direction and looked up and down the street again.
The chalice was nearly empty. She needed to go back to her apartment and refill it with the river water in the plastic jug. “But I cannot let Dmitri see where I live!”
She quickly turned and walked as if she had not seen Dmitri and then darted down a narrow alley.
Dmitri, exhausted and sweating, made his way back to Sophia waiting with their suitcases.
“What happened?” Sophia asked excitedly. “Were you able to stop her?”
Dmitri shook his head. “I was able to follow her for a few blocks and on every block I found a wet mark where she had sprinkled water, so I recited the Last Gospel but then I lost the trail. There were no more wet splashes on the streets anymore. I tried to retrace my steps, thinking I had taken a wrong turn, but… No. I couldn’t find wet marks and I could not find Magdalena. But I spent hours looking.”
Sophia sighed, slumping back down onto the suitcase.
In the late afternoon, George’s taxi was caught in a massive traffic jam. George recognized the streets they were driving along from the trip to the Ďáblice hen-house that morning and thought they were near the back of the castle. Cars inched along, horns blaring. Traffic crawled along in both directions. Traffic signals perched atop their poles communicated nothing to the vehicles below.
The driver fiddled with the radio station dials, changing them from the music station that had been playing. Static sizzled across the airwaves until he found one news report and listened before turning to look at George over his shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir,” the driver began. “The river… the floods have risen… the Little Town near the river is being evacuated… our hotel, no longer open.” He raised his eyebrows in alarm. His day away from the overanxious town did not seem to be concluding as the small vacation he had clearly hoped for.
George thought a moment. He leaned forward.
“The American Embassy,” he instructed the driver. “Get me as close as you can.”
Theo stood in the lobby of a hotel, waiting for the clerk to finish with a couple in front of him. He could see an ornate breakfast room or restaurant through the glass partition and a patio beyond that. He winced, the pain still dancing up his shins occasionally. He did not think he could walk to another hotel and be turned away. He had come to this one, across the flooded highway and isolated somewhat from the central area of the Little Town, hoping it was far enough from the main streets to still have at least one vacancy. He kicked one of his heavy suitcases in frustration.
“May I help you, sir?” the clerk asked as a bellhop appeared to carry away the meager luggage of the couple who had completed checking in.
“I hope that wasn’t the last room,” Theo answered. “Or is there still one available?”
“Yes, sir, we do have several rooms available.” The clerk smiled across the counter. “We had vacancies before the… uh, situation that has developed but they are quickly filling. I can offer you one, if you would like.”
“Yes! I would like!” Theo collapsed on his elbows in relief on the counter, resting his forehead on his forearms and feeling like he was about to cry.
“Excuse me, sir, but it will be on an upper floor and the elevator is no longer operational because there is no electricity,” the clerk continued.
Theo shook his head. “No matter, no matter! I will take it!”
After signing the papers to register and getting his luggage deposited in the new room, he made his way down to the patio to sit, think, and have a tall drink.
As he sat struggling to think of a way to locate his friends, he sipped the beer he had been told was “the last available in our hotel, sir.” Several of the other tables were also filled with the hotel’s newest guests, it being more comfortable to sit outside on the patio in the afternoon light than to sit in the rooms upstairs with no electricity. The water he had skirted crossing the highway lapped the edge of the patio as if it were a predator hunting him, biding its time, patiently waiting for him to reemerge from his hiding place. A pair of geese paddled into sight, investigating the new reaches of the river, peering curiously at the people peering at them.
“Look, dear!” one woman exclaimed in a Southern accent from the United States, clutching at her husband’s arm and pointing to the geese. “It’s like they done gone on vacation, wondering, ‘Why have we never come to this part of the river before?’ They done and gone on an a’venture, just like us!”
“What should we do now, then?” Sophia asked her husband finally. “These suitcases are too heavy to carry much further without knowing where we are going.” She paused. “With the evacuation, how will we find the others? They could be anywhere!”
Dmitri nodded, considering the best course of action. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he gestured up the hill.
“Loreto,” he said. “When we first met all the others, it was at the Loreto chapel because Victoria had lit a candle there. If we are going to be able to meet the others again, it would be at Loreto.”
At long last, the taxi deposited George on a side street of the Little Town a few blocks from the embassy as George had requested. The driver set the rooster in its cage on the cobblestones and, having received a hefty tip from George, gave George a shiny fold-out luggage cart to wheel the cage down the street. The driver then jumped back into the car and raced off.
George wheeled the rooster along the
crowded street and easily found his way to Magdalena’s building. This area of the Little Town, uphill from the river, had clearly not been evacuated and many of those ordered from their residences closer to the river were hoping to find lodging in the neighborhood. The door to Magdalena’s building stood wide open, a handful of people in the lobby gawking up the staircase. They turned to George and hurled a barrage of questions at him in Czech.
He shook his head, attempting to both ignore them and answer no as emphatically as he could. He knocked on Magdalena’s front door, trusting her to have followed his instructions.
She opened the door and he pushed his way in with the caged rooster on the collapsible handtruck, slamming the door closed behind him before the rush of those desperately hoping for a place to stay could push their way in.
“Let the river swallow them up!”
(early to mid-February 1357)
N
adezda caught herself on the edge of the table, grasping the Candlemas candle tightly at its base, afraid she was about to drop it in shock. “Do not toy with me, Lilith. I warn you again.” She could hear the tremble in her voice. What did the she-devil mean?
Lilith looked at her calmly and took a step towards the door. Another of the angelic figures intercepted her, blocking her exit but standing beside Nadezda. “I toy with you not,” Lilith insisted. “You have possessed the key to the curse since the day it was uttered.”
“How can that be?” demanded Nadezda, feeling more in control and able to stand again without leaning on the table. “How can I possess the key? I was not there when the curse was spoken in the Old Town Square. No one heard all of it.” Nadezda paused. “Is it here, even now?” she asked.
Lilith nodded. “No one heard the final clause of Fen’ka’s dying words,” she agreed, again avoiding calling Fen’ka declarations a curse. “She muttered them as the smoke filled her lungs and she collapsed. Unconscious but alive when the fire began to eat her flesh. It is also true that you were not there to hear even what she did speak loudly enough for the crowd to cower at.” Lilith’s mouth curled into a coy smile.
“Tell me the key! What do I possess that allows me to rewrite the curse?” Nadezda demanded, her patience wearing thin with Lilith’s efforts to avoid answering her fundamental question.
Lilith stepped away from Nadezda and turned to survey the room behind her. Nadezda saw her regard Milos, with the amulet. Then the door into the other room, through which Vavrinec’s snoring and Petr’s occasional stirring could be heard. Then the three angelic forms keeping their ever-watchful gaze on her. Escape had to still be impossible. Lilith turned again to Nadezda.
“Svetovit will not be pleased to learn that I have divulged the secret. It is has been his only hope—lo, these several months of waiting. He has bided his time, knowing that the key would come to pass one day and then his full wrath against the city that has betrayed him and abandoned his worship could fall,” Lilith informed her. “Until then, he has steered events as best he can to avenge both himself and his handmaiden Fen’ka against the people of the Vltava valley.”
“Then I am sorry you, as well, must face his wrath,” Nadezda said. “But I demand you tell me the key within my grasp.” She felt her fingers, grasping the Candlemas candle so tightly, growing numb but she dared not shift it to her other hand and risk Lilith escaping as the candle moved.
“Very well.” Lilith pointed to the fireplace. “The key to the curse burns upon your hearth.”
“How can that be? There is nothing there! Only coals and ash!” Nadezda’s glance shifted from Lilith to the hearth and back again, suspicious that Lilith had deposited something there that she had not seen. But, no. Only the banked ashes. Not even the flicker of a tiny flame.
Lilith strode about the room and gestured. A hazy image shimmered into focus in the air filling the fireplace above the ashes. Lilith spoke and Nadezda could see Fen’ka, tied and chained to the stake in the midst of the flames. She could see the old woman’s lips moving but heard no voice. Then she saw Fen’ka cough violently and her head loll to one side as the old woman fainted from inhaling all the smoke generated by the green wood with which the fire had been stoked.
“Let all this come to pass as surely as this fire itself will finally die.” Lilith spoke Fen’ka’s dying words. “When this fire dies, let all their nightmares come to life.” The image above Nadezda’s carefully banked ashes flickered and was gone.
“That fire has been dead for many months!” insisted Nadezda. “Its ashes, with those of Fen’ka, were put into the river the next day. There should be nothing restraining Svetovit’s hand. What has that fire to do with my hearth?”
Nadezda felt the breath catch in her throat. Without moving, Lilith’s face was leaning into hers, her body close enough that Nadezda could have wrapped her arms around the demon’s body and singed the free-flowing hair with the candle in her hands.
“Have you truly no notion of how that fire came to be the same as that which burns upon your hearth?” Nadezda could smell Lilith’s breath, the stench of long-dead bodies and rotten fruit.
Nadezda searched her memory. What had the one to do with the other?
“I cannot tell,” Nadezda admitted to Lilith.
Lilith was across the room again, next to Milos on Petr’s cot. From the corner of one eye, Lilith’s glance slid slowly along Milos’ sleeping form and the most delicate tip of her tongue slid along her lips. Nadezda feared that the monster would leap upon her son. But then Lilith turned to Nadezda once again.
“Recall that afternoon,” Lilith instructed her. “How did you learn that Fen’ka had been burned?”
“Recalling that afternoon is the work of a child,” Nadezda replied with scorn. She would never forget, how sick she had felt in her stomach when Petr excitedly described what had gone on in the square without her knowledge. Petr, who had run into the house and wanted to know what the word “vindication” meant. Petr, who had circled the room before throwing the firebrand in his hand into the fireplace…
Nadezda caught her breath and Lilith, smiling in her beguiling way, nodded as each recognized that the other knew everything.
“Petr brought a torch that he had seized and…”
“… and ran home with it,” Lilith finished the sentence. “He cast the burning stick into the fire here and joined Fen’ka’s fire to this. So Fen’ka’s fire still burns upon your hearth and Svetovit waits for it to die out and then…”
“… then all that stands between him and the destruction of Prague will be removed,” Nadezda concluded Lilith’s sentence. Lilith nodded again.
Panic gripped Nadezda’s bowels and she staggered to the bench behind her. She had nearly allowed the fire in the hearth to die a week or more ago. It had seemed an irritation and an inconvenience. It would have been an embarrassment to ask a neighbor for coals to begin her fire anew. But, now… What might the consequences for Prague have been if she had not been able to rekindle the fire from that last ember in the depth of the ashes? She shuddered to realize that Prague might have been laid waste and she would never have encountered Lilith or discovered the secret of the curse.
“So, now you possess both the key to the curse and the knowledge to rewrite its ending.” Lilith, now referred to Fen’ka’s appeal to Svetovit as a curse. “You have all the knowledge I possess that can aid you to save your beloved Prague. But do not be so vainglorious as to think that a fool such as yourself is clever enough to stave off the wrath of Svetovit forever. However you rewrite the curse, he will find a way to serve his own ends. Rewritten it may be, but not eradicated.”
Nadezda slowly nodded, considering already how she might reformulate the outcome of the fire’s demise. But then Lilith was at the fireplace and Nadezda snapped her attention back to the jealous wife of Adam. She leaped from the bench and thrust the Candlemas candle towards Lilith. The flame passed through the midst of the shadow that was the ancient enemy of the human race.
Nadezda could see the fl
ame within Lilith’s frame and then the candle was beside the witch’s hip, opposite to where it had entered her torso. Lilith screamed in rage and agony, contorting her mouth in fury and crying out like a wounded lioness. The air reverberated with the terrible sound. One of the angels was behind Lilith blocking her attempt to escape up the chimney.
The screams went on and on, the beautiful figure melting and resolving into that of the hag and then forming again into the seductive beauty, snarling at Nadezda and baring her teeth in rage.
“Think you that the amulet around your son is enough to protect him and your pitiful family? Know you not that I can persuade your husband to give his seed to me?” she taunted Nadezda. “In his dreams I can come to him and lie with him and bring forth children that will wreak more harm on your beloved Prague than even Svetovit could ever accomplish!” She hissed at Nadezda, a forked serpent’s tongue darting out between her teeth.
“No, you cannot,” Nadezda warned Lilith. “I will have your promise ere you go this night that you will depart not only from my house but will go from Prague forever and trouble the people of the city here no more for as long as the sun and moon endure!”
“So you threatened me earlier.” Lilith stepped away from the fireplace. “Remind me why I would agree.”
“Because if you do not,” Nadezda reminded her, “I will give the angels leave to bind you hand and foot and bring you to the judgment seat of God for your insolence and murders.” She gestured towards the fiery sentinels around the room with her free hand. Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangeloph all seemed to bow their heads in acknowledgment and edge that much closer to Lilith.
Lilith looked about her again, seemingly realizing she was still trapped. She looked at Nadezda. “Depart from Prague for as long as the sun and moon endure?” she repeated, her gentle laughter mocking Nadezda. “Even you in your simplicity must realize that even I cannot make a vow of such duration. As long as the sun and moon endure? That is impossible. Who can tell what other vow might override that, just as you hope to override Fen’ka’s words? I cannot make that promise.”
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 110