Bohemian Gospel

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  She knew the Church rules, of course. Even the Sisters were not allowed in the Brothers’ area of the abbey, but this place was the only home Mouse had ever known. She might not belong to the Church, but she had always belonged in the abbey. She knew it better than anyone—the best places to hide, the loose stones, where the herbs would come up in spring—this place was hers as much as anyone’s, and she never thought to question why she alone had free reign to go where she wanted. She was like a ghost haunting the place, the Brothers and Sisters aware of her but looking through her, past her.

  “But you would not be allowed in the Brothers’ cloister,” Ottakar said.

  Mouse couldn’t understand why he sounded so sad, and then she realized that he thought she was lying. If he thought her a liar, he would likely assume that she had also lied about Gernandus’s confession, just as Lord Rozemberk had suggested.

  But if she told the truth now, that Father Lucas allowed her to go where she pleased, it would put him in jeopardy.

  “I sometimes slip in while the Brothers are at prayer.” She stared out the window as she spoke. Mouse wasn’t used to lying; she discovered that she was uncomfortably good at it. “How would I get the knowledge I want if I had no access to books?” She turned to him as she asked the question because that part of it was true, and she wanted him to see it in her face; it would help hide the lie.

  Ottakar pushed himself more upright against the pillows at his back. “Thank you for telling me the truth, Mouse, but the law of cloister is the foundation of the abbey. You have defiled the space.”

  She flinched but nodded, wondering what he would think if he knew that besides being a woman and vow-less, she was unbaptized, unholy in the eyes of the Church.

  “If the abbot knew . . .” he said.

  Mouse’s stomach squirmed. She could not let Ottakar tell anyone. She could imagine Brother Jan’s glee at confessing to the King that Father Lucas actually took her into the cloister to study with him. If the opportunity presented itself, Brother Jan would surely make the most of it; he was next in line to become abbot. And the Church would certainly strip Father Lucas of his title. He would also face punishment. Mouse had seen the Brothers flog themselves, ripping the flesh on their backs as acts of righteousness. She didn’t want to imagine what they did to one of their own who had broken the law.

  Mouse began to wonder if she could make Ottakar keep silent like she had stilled the pine martens.

  She had compelled a person once before, but it had been an accident, and there’d been something wrong with the boy. An “idiot,” people called him, laughing at him or ignoring him. Mouse had always felt sorry for him until that day she had gone to the village on an errand for Mother Kazi. She was twelve. The boy, who was as big as a man, saw her. He wanted what he wanted. As he shoved her into the stall out back of the smithy, she had screamed at him to go away. And he did. He walked out of the stall into the pasture, and he kept on walking. His parents started looking for him when he didn’t come home for the night. The town searched for him for days, but no one ever saw him again. And Mouse said nothing. On that day, she swore to herself and God, if he was listening, that, except with Father Lucas, she would speak only when necessary. She hadn’t broken that vow until yesterday with Ottakar.

  “I know I am in the wrong, and you have the right to—”

  “I will not tell anyone, Mouse, but you must swear that you will not enter the Brothers’ cloister again.”

  Mouse thought of the books and the days of study with Father Lucas she would be giving up when he came back—if he came back—but she would not put his life at risk.

  “I promise,” she said.

  “So have you convinced him not to ride?” Lord Rozemberk called out as he turned the corner into the room with several lay brothers carrying food behind him.

  “Not yet,” Mouse said, taking a quick step back from the King’s bed, startled by the sudden intrusion and hoping Lord Rozemberk had not been listening. “Did you walk here from the infirmary?” she asked Ottakar, happy to slip back into the role of healer.

  “No. We carried him,” Lord Rozemberk said.

  “And how did that feel?” Mouse asked the King.

  Ottakar opened his mouth to answer, but again Lord Rozemberk spoke for him. “He groaned like a woman about to—”

  “Vok!”

  “Excuse me, my Lord.” Lord Rozemberk bowed to the King but his eyes were on Mouse, and he was smiling.

  “Can you sit up, feet on the floor?” Mouse slipped her arm behind Ottakar’s back for support. He bit his lip as he moved, clearly determined not to groan. “Good,” she said. “Now take a deep breath.”

  She already knew what would happen when he started to suck in air. He grabbed at his broken ribs, crying out at the pain.

  “You are not fit to ride. Not tomorrow. Not for several days.”

  “We leave in the morning. Now bring me my food.” He motioned to the lay brothers, who picked up the small table and brought it to the King’s bed. Ottakar grabbed the bread.

  “If you ride, the ribs might push against the lung and make a hole. Do you remember how it felt to not be able to breathe?” Mouse asked.

  Ottakar chewed silently.

  “If you ride, the cut in your spleen might open again and fill your gut with blood before you even know it. And you will die.”

  Ottakar dipped the bread in the porridge.

  “If you ride, you will sweat and get dirty. Your wounds will fester. You will rot. Have you seen someone die of rot? The flesh swells and turns black and oozes—”

  “Enough,” Ottakar said as he put the bread back on the table.

  “Pretty picture she paints for you, my Lord,” Lord Rozemberk said. “I can protect you from a killer, but I can do nothing to stop rot or a bloody gut.”

  “She can,” Ottakar said. “We will bring her with us.”

  FIVE

  Mouse didn’t know what to do.

  She waited outside, listening to Ottakar argue with Lord Rozemberk, until Damek came with the order that she be ready to leave at dawn.

  It was beginning to get dark. Mouse slipped into the abbey’s cellar, gathered an armful of candles, and headed to her room at the back of the Sisters’ dormitory. She had to go down the dark stairs into the even darker hallway with only a small cresset for light. She held her breath, listening for other noises, but there was only the creaking of the door as she entered her tiny room, windowless and pitch black.

  Mouse laid the candles on the floor by the door, lighting one with the cresset flame. Shadows danced along her walls. She had painted murals over the plain white plaster, mostly images she’d seen in books—animals, dragons, the saints—and on the ceiling she had copied in perfect detail a summer’s night sky over the abbey.

  The most elaborate picture was on the wall opposite her small cot. It looked like Mary holding a baby Jesus, but Mouse had not painted an aura or a crown—just a mother cradling her child. The woman’s mouth was slightly open; she was singing. The baby’s mouth was at her nipple ready to suckle. They lay on a bed; carvings in the headboard swirled about their heads.

  It was beautiful—except for the blood seeping through the bedclothes and running onto the floor. And a dark figure that faded into the edge of the picture.

  This was Mouse’s first memory, though she had told no one about it. Who would believe that she could remember her birth? But she did. Being trapped in such a small space, squeezed over and over until she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, arms pressed too tightly against her chest. Mouse took a quick full breath as even now she panicked at the close space.

  She remembered her mother, too—her smell, her touch, and her voice. She’d sung a few lines of a lullaby before Adele had come and taken Mouse away into the night.

  Mouse bent quickly to light the other candles, filling the tiny space with a warm, yellow glow, but it wouldn’t be enough. She would have visitors tonight . . . visitors drawn by the use of her power.


  The shadowy thing that found her at the baby cemetery had kept its promise to find her again; that same night, an eight-year-old Mouse had woken with its breath on her face. It had come to play. But its games had frightened Mouse—changing its face from boy to serpent to snarling wolf to demon with rows of bloody, ragged teeth. That first night, Mouse had screamed, and Mother Kazi had come running. The creature had slid back into shadows, so that Mouse could see only its eyes as they followed the old woman through the door. Mother Kazi had said it was just a dream.

  After that first night, the dark thing had brought others with it. When Mouse stopped being afraid of the shifting figures, they had started making themselves into Mother Kazi or Father Lucas. In the light of day, Mouse knew that none of it was real, but in the night, the things toyed with her mind. In the night, Father Lucas pierced her with long, sharp fingernails, and Mother Kazi scalded her with boiling wax. In the night, the two of them did terrible things to each other. In the night, the two people she loved in the world called Mouse unnatural and unwanted, a burden, a curse. The creatures pulled her from terror to rage to despair like a needle through cloth, over and over again.

  Mouse remembered how the creature had fled the cemetery at the first signs of light, and she started spending her days dipping wicks into the hot suet to make candles so that she could keep them burning through the night in every corner of her room. If there was even a bit of dark, they could come. She kept vigil through the nights so she could light fresh candles as one would begin to flicker and the shadows would start to grow.

  Becoming herself a creature of the night, she was always awake when the Sisters stumbled down to the chapel at Lauds. For months, Mouse slept only during the day in a few clustered minutes, huddled with her back beside the church wall, listening to the drone of the Brothers at prayer. She hoped that the prayers would cover her like a second skin, camouflaging her so the dark things would lose her scent and leave her in peace.

  Father Lucas had been gone during that time, taking the salvation of the Lord to the Carpathians. He was shocked to come back to a hollow-eyed ghost of a Mouse.

  “Have you found trouble, little andílek?” he’d asked, holding her hand as they walked in the Mary Garden among the foxglove and wild thyme.

  “It has found me, Father.”

  He had cried a little as she told him about her nightmares.

  “They are not just dreams, are they?” she’d asked. “God is testing me. He does that to his people.”

  Father Lucas buried his face in his hands. When he looked up, he said, “I will show you what you must do.”

  No one had ever been in her room, and Mouse blushed as he studied her paintings. She worried that he might ask about the paints and gold leaf she had stolen from the scriptorium. Instead, he had shaken his head in wonder and said, “Why, you are an artist, my little Mouse.”

  And then he taught her a protective spell. He showed her how to make a shape of power with the salt they had taken from the cellar. Many shapes would work, Father Lucas had said—circles, a pentagram, a cross. But the first shape he taught her was of a fish like the early Christians used to identify each other in secret, though Mouse learned that the shape was far older than Christ and meant many things to many people, which is what gave it its power. Father Lucas drew the salt fish around her bed then sliced his palm as she gasped and let his blood drop at the fish’s mouth and at each fan of the tail. He read from a book as he walked the salt line. Mouse memorized the words as soon as they spilled from his lips, like a cat stealing a baby’s breath.

  Doubting the spell, Mouse had sat awake, waiting. Nothing came. The second night, her faith growing, she lay on the cot, arms crossed on her chest like a body ready for burial, and she closed her eyes. As she began to slide into sleep, she’d heard them, like cloth tearing as they pulled themselves up through the dark.

  Mouse sat up. There was but one candle still lit within the salt-line fish. Dozens of the child-things pushed up against each other as they neared the cot, but they froze at the salt and screamed at her. Mouse had laughed. They could not touch her, body or mind.

  She had given Father Lucas a picture as an act of gratitude, a portrait of herself small enough to fit in his breviary so he could carry her with him on his travels. So he would not forget her, she had told him. So he would always come back to her.

  She had been a child then, waiting for Father Lucas to save her, but now she was nearly a woman and must learn to take care of herself.

  Mouse took the bag of salt she kept in her room and shaped a cross with her cot at the center. She slid the knife across her forearm and let the blood drop at the four ends of the cross as she muttered the words of the spell. Let the dark creatures come, one by one, as the candles sputtered and died, but they would not be able to reach her—not to sink their teeth into her flesh, not to play with her mind.

  With a sigh Mouse threw herself onto the cot, wrapping her arm with a piece of linen. She needed her mind clear tonight. She had much to decide. She knew she couldn’t go with Ottakar. A young, unmarried woman traveling alone with a group of men would be prey to gossip and worse. But if she let Ottakar go, the chances were high that something would go wrong with the lung or the wound. The King would die, and it would be her fault.

  She needed to talk to Mother Kazi; she would know what Mouse should do. But Mother Kazi was at the nunnery in Chotesov. Mouse sat up quickly—she could get there by morning if she left now. But then she saw the salt sparkling in the candlelight. Mouse wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight.

  She lay back down and took a deep breath. Smiling at the sweet smell of honey, she realized that some part of her must have already decided to go; without thinking, she had taken the beeswax candles instead of the tallow ones. Brother Jan had bought them from the Prague candle makers especially for Michaelmas. He would have her skin for it if she stayed. Literally.

  Mouse was flooded with the wish to be free of the ritual and regulation of abbey life. That life would never be fully hers anyway. Surely there was somewhere she belonged, but how would she ever find it if she never left Teplá?

  She pushed herself to the end of the cot and reached into the small box on the floor, pulling out a handful of coins, a small statue of an angel with a silver Hungarian denar embedded in its chest, and a bracelet—all that she owned besides the clothes she wore. The coins she had earned over the years helping Mother Kazi, and the angel was a christening gift from Father Lucas after Mouse confessed her stolen baptism. He had carried the clay figure over the Carpathian Mountains wrapped in layers of wool and strapped to his chest so not even the fragile tips of the angel’s wings had broken. The bracelet had belonged to her mother.

  It was the only proof Mouse had that her memory of being born was true, and it was her only link to whatever past or family she might have. She ran her fingers along the braided gold circlet and traced the engraved swallow; its claws held a red stone overlaid with gold bars so that it looked like a banner striped in red and gold. Mouse didn’t understand what it meant, but she was sure it would lead her to her family someday. Adele had never said anything about her mother’s family, but surely some of them still lived. They might know her father, too. Mouse didn’t know if he was dead or not. Adele never talked about him.

  Mouse had imagined meeting him many times. She wasn’t naïve; in none of her imaginings did he scoop her up with joy in finding her at last. She knew she had been sent away and forgotten. But now that she was grown, maybe she would have some worth. People had told her she was pretty—Adele, of course, but also strangers at the market festivals in town. Maybe her father would find some value in her now.

  But not if she damaged herself by traveling with Ottakar and his men.

  Mouse slipped the bracelet around her wrist. If she had any hope of reuniting with her family, she must take care to protect not only her virtue but also the perception of her virtue.

  Startled, Mouse looked up as one of the candles in
the far corner near the door sputtered and went out. She tensed, waiting. Her eyes watered as she watched the shadows stretch long and thin and sharp until a long-nailed hand took shape. The tearing sound sent a shiver through Mouse. She knew what was coming.

  They tumbled over each other, clawed their way free of the dark into their own shapes as children of different ages, dark-eyed and gaunt and naked. Even now Mouse wasn’t sure if they were real or not; maybe they were hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep and stress or maybe they were the ghosts of all those unholy babies trapped forever in Limbo like the Church taught. Mouse only knew they were hungry and mean.

  But tonight, they could not touch her. They crowded around the salt cross, soot-covered toes jammed a hair’s distance from the ragged white line. The creatures seemed different tonight, less playful, more watchful. Their silence was unnerving; no restless fidgeting of normal children, no sounds of breath. With her gifted hearing, Mouse could usually pick out the heartbeats of people near her. Here, there were none. She had never noticed before because the dark things were usually laughing or taunting.

  Finally, one of the children ran its tongue across the clear dribble of snot running from its nose to its lips and spoke. “What did you do?”

  Though its mouth moved, the voice came from all around the room like a whisper.

  “What do you mean?” Mouse asked.

  “We felt you, but it was bright and we could not see.”

  “I do not—” she said.

  “It felt like fun,” another child-thing said, shoving its head over the shoulder of a child in front.

  “You played without us.”

  “What did you do? Tell us.” They were all asking now. The tiny room filled with hundreds of whispered questions that sounded like snakes hissing.

  Mouse started shaking; she knew they were talking about the resurrection of the squirrel. If they thought it fun, then it was surely evil.

  “Teach us your new game,” they said.

  Mouse shook her head and pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She remembered her own joy at her use of power that morning by the river.