Mouse rubbed at her eyes. The letters would not stay still on the page; they swirled and darkened.
“Have you found something, then?”
Mouse sat up quickly, surprised that she’d not heard him coming.
“Yes, Father,” she said breathlessly. “I think I have found the key, but it will still take time to decipher the text.” She looked up to the sky where the bright stars and moon glowed against a deepening blue. “But we have no more time,” she said, pulling the book nearly to her nose as she tried again to decode the first word.
And then she had it. A name—one of the Watchers Enoch had listed.
Suddenly the letters ran together like wet ink on the page. By the time Mouse understood what new image they shaped, it was too late. Thousands of spiders poured out of the text, crawling up her arms and face. She dropped the book, screaming, but still they came. Down the neck of her tunic. Under her veil. She clawed at her hair, hands coming away covered in the black things. As they sank their teeth into her, their bodies liquefied and seeped under her skin, running dark along her veins.
“Let her be!” Father Lucas cried out as he kicked the book closed and knelt beside her, sweeping the spiders off. But she was rolling and beating at her body, trying to stop the searing pain of the ones under her clothes biting her.
Father Lucas slid his arms around Mouse. “Be still, child. Let me take you.” He lifted her up and into the water of the fountain, her skirts billowing around her. He cupped the water in his hands and poured it over her head. As soon as it touched the spiders, they dissolved. He did it again and again until the fountain ran inky black.
Mouse crouched on her hands and knees in the water, heaving.
“Mouse?” Ottakar called out as he rounded the last corner of the hedge maze, running. He had heard her scream. “What have you done?” he spat at Father Lucas as he shoved him aside to get to Mouse. She whimpered as he gathered her in his arms, black rivulets rolling from her hair down her face.
“She was attacked by something, my Lord. Some kind of insect, it seemed.” Father Lucas laid a shaking hand on Mouse’s forehead, wiping away the watery remains of the spiders.
“Show me!” Ottakar demanded.
“They have all gone. Disappeared, my Lord,” he said as he gathered the books.
“Semjaza,” Mouse whispered.
“What is this she says?”
“I do not know, my Lord,” Father Lucas lied. He, too, had read the Book of Enoch many times since he purchased it from the man in Tunis, and he knew the names of Enoch’s Watchers. Semjaza had been a leader among the rebel angels; he had taught men secret enchantments and plant lore.
Mouse’s teeth chattered as tremors shook her and her head fell against Ottakar’s neck.
“She is burning with fever!”
Night had fallen by the time they had her dry and covered in her bed. She lay shivering, her eyes closed, silent except for quiet moans as aches coursed through her body.
Father Lucas grew more worried the longer she lay there. He had never seen Mouse sick and he knew how her body healed itself, but clearly her power would not work against the spiders’ poison.
“You must fetch someone to bleed her, to draw out the venom,” he said hoarsely to the King as Mouse arched in pain. “Please, my Lord. She worsens.”
Ottakar left and came back minutes later with the court physician. After examining Mouse, he looked gravely at the King. “I will do what I can, my Lord, but her fever is very high and her heart runs too fast.”
He slipped his hand into a jar he had carried with him and pulled out a long, slimy leech, which he laid against Mouse’s wrist. It began slowly undulating as it sucked her blood. He affixed another dozen on her arms and neck.
“By the saints,” he gasped as he looked back at the leech on her wrist; it lay blackened and curled like a dead worm. One by one, the others shriveled and died as they ingested Mouse’s tainted blood.
Her breathing came shallow and fast.
“Try something else!” Ottakar commanded.
“I can fetch a barber-surgeon, my Lord, to let her blood,” the man stammered.
“There is no time. I will do it,” Father Lucas said. “Bring a knife.”
“But Father, the Church will not allow you to do such a thing anymore than I can,” the physician argued.
“And I will not allow this girl to die.” Father Lucas held his hand out, waiting for the knife.
Ottakar took out his own knife, dousing it with the wine they had tried to get Mouse to drink earlier. “She did it before she cut me,” he explained, handing the blade to Father Lucas.
Ottakar held her arm while Father Lucas drove the blade into the vein in the crook of her elbow. A gush of black spewed forth.
“God save us! What manner of illness is this?” the physician exclaimed.
“Get out,” Ottakar said. “And if you speak of this to anyone, you will no longer have a tongue to speak at all.”
“Yes, my Lord,” the man muttered as he backed his way to the door.
Father Lucas cut the other arm and Gitta placed a bowl to catch the inky fluid. Ottakar watched Mouse’s face go from flushed to pale. “Enough,” he ordered.
“No, my Lord, not until her blood runs fully red again,” Father Lucas said.
“The bowls are nearly full and she is such a little thing. You will drain her dead.”
“She is stronger than you may realize, my Lord, and we must get all the poison out.”
Ottakar’s arm shot out, grabbing the Father’s shoulder. “What do you know of this?” He nodded to the black that now mixed with red as it oozed from Mouse’s arms. “More of your evil spirits?”
As if he had been heard, the first screams of the night rang out through the castle bailey.
“The evil came when you came, Father,” Ottakar said coldly.
“No.” Mouse stirred, trying to push herself up. “This is all my fault,” she whispered.
“Lie still, little andílek, while I wrap your arms.” Father Lucas took rolls of linen from Gitta and pressed them into Mouse’s elbows.
“How is this your fault?” Ottakar asked her as he bent to kiss her on the head.
“I—”
“The scripture tells us that evil is the consequence of all men’s sin. It is no one’s fault,” Father Lucas interjected.
The high screams of a panicked child pierced the quiet, and Mouse turned to Father Lucas. “We must do something, Father.” She started to roll to the edge of the bed, but Ottakar pushed her gently back.
“No, Mouse.”
“I will go and do what I can, child,” Father Lucas said. “You must rest.”
“The books?” she asked.
“I do not think you—”
“You know I must.”
With a sigh Father Lucas took them from his bag and laid them on the foot of the bed. “Not now, though. Rest. There will be time later.”
Mouse started to argue that there was no more time—night was here, the screams already begun, and some child might drown himself or some mother jump to her death because of the tricks of those dark creatures—but she could not move without her muscles spasming and her head spinning. She could tell from the look on Ottakar’s face that he meant to keep her there.
As Father Lucas closed the door behind him, fresh cries floated up from outside the castle. Mouse regretted letting him go.
“Will you stay with me?” she asked Ottakar, slipping her hand in his.
“I do not think—”
“Gitta will be with us.”
He nodded and then sat on the bed beside her. They both startled at more screams, from inside the castle this time.
“Talk to me,” she said, wrapping her arm around his and laying her head against his shoulder. He was safe here with her.
After telling her about his meeting with the bishop—His Excellency’s willingness to order an inquest and his assurances that the Queen would be allowed full burial rit
es—Ottakar talked about his plans to build a church at Mother Agnes’s convent. His head was full of ways he could ease his mother through purgatory.
“When Bohemia is mine alone to govern, Mouse, I will build cities for the people. And grand churches. And schools. I will make laws to shield the weaker from the power of the nobility. I will honor my mother thus.” His voice sounded dreamlike as fatigue finally took him.
“It will be a golden time for Bohemia, and you, its Golden King,” Mouse said, listening to his breath grow deep and steady in sleep.
But as tired as she was, she wouldn’t let herself sleep, easing down instead to the foot of the bed.
Her hands shook as she opened the cover of the book, waiting for it to once again defend its secrets. She flipped to the section she’d been reading in the garden and found another image that fit the pattern, an image of intricate medallions whose spokes pointed to strings of letters in the unknown language. Using the formula, she pulled words from the text carefully, watching the letters for any sign of malice, but they stayed still and on the page. Perhaps the protective spell she’d cast in the room, the blood and salt cross that shielded her from the dark things, also inhibited the power in the book. Or maybe the spiders had been the book’s only defense besides its encryption. A defense meant to kill made any other defenses unnecessary, and the spiders’ venom would surely have killed a normal person.
Mouse read through the night—at least some of the book’s secrets now open to her. Near dawn, she curled up beside Ottakar again and let silent tears roll into the sleeve of his tunic. She knew now what she needed to do.
Tomorrow she would leave him.
FIFTEEN
Ottakar kissed her as he left in the morning and told her to stay in bed. She waited until she could no longer hear his steps in the hall. She groaned as she stood, her body taut and sore from the fever.
“Gitta, can you help me dress?” she said as she held the bedpost waiting for her legs to steady. “The blue one—you mended it, yes?”
“I did, my Lady, but then I gave it to Lady Moravec’s girl. Never thought you might want it again after what happened in the woods. Besides, this green draws out your eyes. Though pale as you are, the red would be better.”
“I need something sturdier, plainer. Something for travel.”
“Are we going somewhere, my Lady?”
“Not we. Me.”
“But—”
“Please, Gitta. No more questions. Just get me a dress I can wear.”
By the time Gitta came back, Mouse had braided her hair and packed the books and her small satchel of medical tools in her bag.
“Lady Harrach’s riding dress,” Gitta explained as she tossed the clothes on the bed. “Says she doubts to ever fit in it again, and I daresay I agree, broad as she got with the baby. But worth it, he is, with those lovely cheeks!”
Mouse was out the door as soon as the last lace was tied. The guard, who attached himself to her at the gate, watched her warily as she walked slowly down the path to Strahov, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest as she trembled with the remains of the fever. She felt sure Father Lucas would be at the monastery.
The monk who opened the door was not happy to see her. “Lady Emma,” he said, letting his aggravation seep into his voice, “I have told you that you are not permitted here. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. Go away.”
She put her hand on the door as he was closing it. “I do not want in. I want Father Lucas to come out.”
“He is down at town, my Lady.”
She found him leaning against the wall near the moat.
“Father,” she said as she gently shook him. She saw his bloody palms and an empty bag on the stone beside him with a small trail of salt trickling out of its mouth, and she knew how he had spent his night.
“Get a roll of bread, please.” She handed her guard a coin. “Go on. Surely I will be safe here with the Father.”
“We will need help tonight, Mouse,” the Father said as soon as they were alone. “We must think of something to tell the bishop so he will order the people into the churches. We can go from place to place today to—”
Mouse shook her head. “I found something in the book. A binding spell, I think.”
“You can read it now?”
“Not all of it. I think there are different codes in Enoch that must be worked against different sections of the book. I only had time to decipher one piece, the Semjaza section, but it spoke of tethers crafted by enchantments, chains to bind, and instructions for what seemed to be spells.”
“What do you need?”
“Simple tools, really. Gathered stones of blue and green, a mother’s milk, roots of what the book calls the Breath of Life, but it sounds like angelica to me, the juice from another plant, I think it is chicory, and blood.” She sighed at the last. “Always blood.” She ran her finger along Father Lucas’s palm and turned at the sound of the guard returning. “You can go back to the castle. Father Lucas will see after me,” she said as she took the roll.
The guard waited a moment and then reluctantly headed back over the bridge.
“So you can bind them but to what, andílek?” Father Lucas asked between bites.
Mouse shrugged as she swallowed her own bite of bread. “Me, I guess.”
“No.” He shook his head sharply.
“What choice is there? Enoch’s descriptions of the pits of fire and darkness, where God meant the evil spirits to be cast, are shrouded in vision. They seem to me more story than not, and anyway, I do not think the angel Uriel likely to come show me the way. But if I can make the dark creatures come to me, then I can lead them away, take them somewhere with no people to taunt and torture.”
“And what of you?”
Mouse looked off toward the castle. “If I know he is safe, it will be enough.” She turned back to Father Lucas. “It is my fault anyway. I drew them here.”
“But they will be bound to you, Mouse. You will not be able to protect yourself from them. They will torture your mind until it breaks.” He grabbed her arm, fear for her thick in his voice.
“Maybe this is my purpose, Father; maybe God made me this way so that I have the power to siphon off some part of the evil in the world and keep men free of it.” Water slapped against the moat’s stone wall like listless clapping.
“We will gather what you need and then we will leave.” His words were firm, determined like a battle call, and his eyes shined with fervor as he leaned close to her. “But we will not bind them to you. There is a pit, Mouse, just like in Enoch’s story.” A smile pulled taut across his face. “And I know where it is.”
They went different ways—Mouse to collect what they needed for the spell and Father Lucas to get horses and a few supplies for the trip. It took most of the morning to find the stones and plants, but the milk came easily enough when she asked Lady Harrach for a jar of breast milk to make a tincture for someone ill. Mouse carefully nestled the jar, covered with hide, into her bag.
Then she went to find Ottakar. When she thought she had no hope of returning, Mouse had meant to slip away with no good-byes, but now, there was at least a chance she might come back—if there was a pit as Father Lucas said, if it was actually a binding spell she’d found in the book, and if nothing went wrong.
Ottakar was watching his men at swordplay in the south bailey, the midday sun fading as a biting wind pushed heavy clouds in from the southwest.
“I thought I told you to stay in bed today,” he said, smiling as he took her hand, kissed it and kept it in his own. “I am beginning to think I should have ordered my men to do the same. They are sluggish.”
“It was a bad night for everyone, my Lord,” Mouse said.
He cut his eyes toward her, no longer smiling. “I suppose it will be again.”
“I want to talk to you about that. Will you walk with me?” She pulled him up and led him toward the gates of the South Tower.
“Where shall we go? It looks lik
e a storm is coming so we ought to stay close.” Their mantles billowed and snapped in the wind.
“Into the woods a little, then?”
He nodded and then waved off the guards who tried to follow them as they left the castle. As soon as they had cleared the first line of trees, he pulled her to him. “I want to kiss you, Mouse. A real kiss.”
She gave a soft nod, not trusting herself to speak, and as his mouth closed on hers, as she felt his arms slide around her, heard his heart beating fast with hers, she thought she was as surely bound to him now as any spell might do. Even as she laid a hand on his chest to ease him back so she could tell him good-bye, she swore to herself and God that she would come back to him.
“I need to tell you something, Ottakar,” she said as he pulled his head back slightly, his breath still on her cheek. “I have to go away for a while.”
“What?” He took a half step back, his hands on her shoulders.
“Not for long. Days, maybe a few weeks.”
“Why?” Mouse knew by the way he asked that he already suspected the answer.
“We, Father Lucas and I, we think we can—” she stammered.
“No.”
“Let me finish, Ottakar.” She wanted to talk to the man, not the king. “We can drive out the evil that has come to Prague.”
“Good. Let the Father do it. It is his work to do, not yours.”
“It is mine also.”
“You are just a—” He stopped short, remembering the Father’s rebuke. “What will you do that the Father cannot do alone? Let him bleed, Mouse, not you.” He pulled her against him again. “I want you here with me. I need you.” His face rested against the top of her head as he breathed her in. “I am afraid I will lose myself here, Mouse—become what they want me to be. But you—I cannot say it well—you make me feel like my real self or at least who I want to be, and if you leave—”
“I will come back to you, Ottakar. I promise. But Father Lucas cannot do this alone. I must go with him.”
A rumble of thunder broke across the hills and wind shook the trees. “Come back to the castle. The storm is here.” Ottakar grabbed her hand as they wove through the trees toward the tower.
Bohemian Gospel Page 14