Bohemian Gospel

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  This time, the river heard her.

  With a vicious swirl, the water snatched her feet out from under her, and she sucked in a panicked breath just as her head plunged beneath the water. The river pulled her to the bottom, dragged her against the rocks and debris. When something sharp jabbed into her leg, she cried out, but the sound floated away in a bubble and water rushed in to take its place. Mouse clawed her way to the surface, spluttering and coughing, and then sucked in another quick breath before the Vltava took her again.

  It did not let her go this time. Her chest burned with the need to breathe, but as she tried to push herself up, the riverbed dropped away and her head slammed against a rock, and the darkness swallowed her.

  Mouse tried to move but something had her pinned. She opened her eyes, expecting the sting of river water, but it was dry, cold air that drew tears to her eyes. She couldn’t tell where she was. Everything was dark except for an eerie glow in the distance. Just like in the pit.

  Fear drove her to a frenzy.

  She pushed hard against the surface under her. Ice cracked and fell around her like slivers of glass. Her clothes, frozen stiff, ripped as she shoved herself up, and her skin burned where it peeled away from the icy ground. As she rolled onto her back, Mouse could see now that the glow was only the moon behind the clouds; its faint light glistened on the ice that coated the trees. Her feet still dangled in the river.

  She grabbed at a nearby tree and pulled herself up. I should be dead, she thought as she stumbled through the woods toward the keep. She must have been lying on the riverbank, soaking wet and freezing for hours. Why am I not dead? But her mind was as numb as her body and gave her no answers. Her skin was bluish in the dim light, her heart sluggish from the cold.

  She thought the guard at the tower asked her something, but she couldn’t hear over the high whine that filled her head. Only when she tried to speak did she realize that the whine was coming from her. As she silenced herself, she fell to her knees. It hurt when the guard picked her up, his hands burning her through her clothes, which crackled as he shifted her in his arms. She saw blurs of color, heard bits of sound.

  She squirmed as she was laid on the bed, someone’s hands tugging at the thawing clothes, the warmth already beginning to drive needles into her. As the pain mounted, she pulled herself inward, back to the abbey where pain was for a purpose; she could take the agony of the knives running through her, the throbbing in her leg, the burning in her chest if she knew it was for a purpose, penance for something she had done.

  And then Ottakar was with her, whispering in her ear. “You are a soldier, Mouse. Fight!” But she didn’t care about fighting; she had done something wrong, but for the first time in her life, she couldn’t remember, her mind too full of pain.

  “Please, Mouse.” He sounded like he was crying, and she felt sorry for him, but she was too close to finding what she had lost to help him. As the bishop’s face, bulging eyes and gaping mouth, flared in her mind, she felt her stomach clench. Someone pulled her to her side, lifted her hair from her face as she retched up river water and bile.

  “I love you,” he said as he wiped her face with a warm cloth. It hurt too much, so she let go of the pain and the penance it offered and fell asleep.

  Ottakar was not so gentle in the morning when it was clear she would live.

  “What did you do?” he demanded.

  “Went for a walk, fell in the river, dragged myself back to the keep.” She looked him dead in the face as she lied. She had woken midday and wrestled for a moment with guilt and fear and then moved on to trying again to figure how she had lived, but after an hour with no plausible solutions, a recklessness had settled on her.

  Mouse just didn’t care anymore.

  The river had most certainly offered her a prophecy, and she was smart enough to understand the lesson: Just as she had no soul, she had no future. She had been a fool to think herself made for a purpose, wasting all that time trying to figure out what she was meant to do. She was meant to do nothing. There was no path laid out for her, no destiny. Just as her parents hadn’t cared enough to give her a name, God had not cared enough to give her a soul or a purpose in life; she was like the chaff, discarded waste left to burn or not at God’s whim. She could get pulled under and spit out at his whim. She would live or not at his whim. Suffer or not at his whim.

  So Mouse decided then that she would live in the moment, day to day; she would not consider tomorrow or harbor the past. She would not care about rules or opinion; she would do as she pleased and lie when it felt right.

  “I promise, Ottakar. It was an accident. I am not so lovesick as to risk eternal damnation.” She sounded convincing even to herself.

  “I love you, Mouse,” he said more softly. “No matter who claims the title of husband or wife, no matter the demands of country or Church, I will always love you.”

  “And I you.” The truth of it almost pierced her newfound callousness.

  When she went down to supper for the first time days later, she tried to drink herself drunk. She was surprised no one had questioned her about Bishop Miklaus, but when she opened her mouth to ask about him, she silenced herself by tossing another glass of wine down her throat. She reminded herself that she didn’t care—not about whether he had recovered or if he had named her as his attacker.

  “So you fell into the river?” Mouse heard the disdain and doubt in Vok’s voice. She was now seated beside him as his betrothed; he sat between her and Ottakar. They had been at table for more than an hour, and these were the first words he had spoken to her.

  She shrugged in answer to his question.

  “It was an unlucky day, then. The bishop also had a bad fall. Hit his head, it seems, though he cannot remember what happened.”

  Mouse swallowed the wine in her mouth.

  “I mean for us to marry soon. You have no family, and the only one of mine I care to be present is already here,” Vok said.

  In the corner of her eye, she saw him nod toward Lady Rozemberk, who sat on the other side of the King.

  “Whatever pleases you, my Lord,” she answered, and, in her mind she kept telling herself that none of it mattered. She had no future. Only now.

  “I also mean for us to leave immediately for my castle in the south. My older brother threatens to claim what is now rightfully mine. I want to establish myself as lord there quickly. And we need no feast to celebrate our marriage, do we?”

  She didn’t bother to answer and instead drained the cup of wine and kept her eyes on the couples dancing the carol.

  She sensed Vok stiffen, offended at her refusal to acknowledge him.

  “Tomorrow then.” And he turned to speak with Ottakar.

  She tried to deaden herself to the sting. Tomorrow she would be Vok’s. She would leave Prague. She would not see Ottakar. She could make herself not care about the first two; the last brought tears to her eyes. Ottakar would leave for Austria just after Martinmas, but that would’ve given them several days to spend together—not now, though.

  The sound of Ottakar’s voice from the other side of Vok interrupted her reverie. “Tomorrow? You need not rush, Vok. I will not change my mind. I swear it,” the King said.

  Clearly Ottakar was not ready to say good-bye so soon, either. It made the knot in Mouse’s throat burn more. She announced that she was not feeling well and slipped from the Great Hall to seek solace in the small walled garden.

  The weather had warmed a little, making the evening almost pleasant. But the gentle sounds of horses and the hounds and the sight of the stars and the half moon angered Mouse. Signs of God’s goodness, the rightness of his world, they salted her wounds. By the time she reached the fountain, her tears were dry and her tongue sharp.

  “I will not come to you again for comfort as I did the other night,” she hissed to the heavens. “Why should I? What do I get for all my good works, my obedience and long suffering, my faith? Nothing. You break me. You take everything from me even though
I have so little.” She closed her eyes against the beauty of the night sky and saw again the darkness in herself. “Yet still you do not claim me. You give me no soul. No future. No hope. What good are you to me? You close your Church to me, hide your face from me? Well, so be it.” She was yelling now. “I close my heart to you. I turn my back on you. I swear it!”

  She spun quickly toward the path to leave, but a wave of nausea sent her to her knees, her stomach awash with acid and wine. She lowered her head against the stone bench, the coolness settling her queasiness. In the quiet, visions of the days spent here with Ottakar as he healed played out like ghosts before her and then, more vividly, images of the book she had made him—the illumination of Siegfried and Kriemhild’s wedding night.

  Mouse knew what she wanted.

  She would give herself over to her desire in hope that it would drive out her anger and sadness. She would save those for tomorrow and think only of tonight.

  She found him talking to the Austrian nobles and slipped her hand in his. With just the slightest pull, Ottakar followed her. She led him to All Saints Chapel where, just days earlier, he had killed her hopes of becoming his wife. But Mouse would have what she wanted, one way or another. If he could not be hers, then she would be his. Before God, if not man, and whether God liked it or not.

  “Send the guard away,” she said.

  He did as she told him.

  “What are you doing, Mouse?” Ottakar asked, his voice already thick with longing.

  “I want you,” she said simply, and she took his hand and wrapped it around her waist.

  He pulled her against him and lowered his mouth to hers. His beard stung her skin like tiny needles. Her jaws hurt as he pressed his mouth against hers, forcing her lips to part. And then he pulled away.

  “Not here. Come.” He pushed her toward the back of the chapel to a small door that she knew opened to a hallway. He would have her in his own bed. In secret.

  “No, Ottakar. Here. Now.”

  She would not be just another of his conquests. She would not have him remembering her tangled in his blankets, stained with his wine, her hair spilled across his bed like so many others. Mouse was not a fool. She knew what this night was. It was not a promise or a future. She would make herself a wife now and think of herself as a widow in the morning when Ottakar left her. No one else would ever know.

  Except God.

  Mouse pulled Ottakar’s face back to hers and slid her hands behind his neck. She opened her mouth for him this time. He ran his fingers along the front of her gown and tugged at the corded belt that hung low on her waist. He moved his hands to the laces at her back, and she shivered when the cold penetrated the loose linen underdress as her gown fell away. His hand ran along the linen edge, tracing her collarbone, pulling the underdress gently over her shoulder until it, too, fell away.

  “By the saints, Mouse, you are lovely.” He bent to kiss her neck, pressing himself into her, and she could feel the hardness of him. Feel his desire. “The most beautiful woman—”

  She put her finger against his mouth. This was not his seduction; it was hers. And this was not about romance. This was not the beginning of something. It was the end, a final act of rebellion. She lowered her hand to touch him. He groaned. And then he had no more tender words for her, just the grunts of his desire, which he’d leashed for the year she had been with him. His hands pulled at her body, the rings on his fingers cold against her back, her buttocks, her breasts. His own clothes, shifted but not removed, billowed around her, slapping against her face, smothering her as his weight pressed down on her, again and again, until he cried out and she lay beneath him, shaking, her lips bruised, blood on her thighs.

  “I am sorry. I meant to be gentle.” He wrapped her in his mantle as he pulled her head to his chest, trying to warm her. “Next time will be easier, Mouse.” He kissed the top of her head. But Mouse knew there would not be a next time. Tomorrow she would marry Vok.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  They rode for five days in heavy snow, Mouse and Vok and Lady Rozemberk dragging a long tail of men and carts filled with supplies. Ottakar did not mean to march into Austria with a horde of knights like a conqueror, but rather with the pomp and show of a newly elected duke. And so he’d given care of the larger portion of his men to Vok to have at the ready should circumstances take a less congenial turn. Ottakar would collect them when he came back to Bohemia with Margaret in the spring.

  Those had been the last words he spoke to Mouse on the day she left Prague—a promise that he would see her again. He had bent to kiss her but then pulled back quickly, the muscle in his jaw twitching, his nostrils flared.

  “Be well, Mouse,” he said as he helped her onto the horse.

  He had said those same words when she left with Father Lucas for Houska; she’d promised him then that she would come back to him. Now she felt sure Rozemberk Keep would be just another kind of pit with its own demons, and she made no promises this time—except to herself. She would look no further forward than the moment in which she lived, nor linger on the past.

  She allowed herself one look back as her horse pranced in step to follow Vok’s through the South Gate. She did not want the last time she set eyes on Ottakar to be the moment he had bound her to Vok. At midday, she’d stood in St. George’s with Lord Rozemberk at her side, one hand on the small of her back and the other wrapped like a vise around her arm as he claimed her. Only Ottakar had served as witness. The deed was done in three words: “I marry you.” Vok’s had sounded like a branding; Mouse’s were a sacrifice. And a lie. She had already given herself to Ottakar.

  The night they reached the keep at Rozemberk, exhausted and half frozen, Vok came to her room. Mouse tensed when she heard his steps outside her door and looked helplessly at Gitta, who had begged to come with her from Prague though Mouse felt sure she did so at Ottakar’s bidding. As Gitta neared the door, ready to open it should Vok knock, he walked away. Mouse sighed, relieved. She knew the day would come, but she was glad it had not come just yet.

  Waiting ambivalently for Vok to decide when their married life would begin, Mouse settled into a dull routine and kept mostly to herself. Vok spent most of his time training the men and dealing with the estate affairs now that he was officially the Lord of Rozemberk. But there was nothing for Mouse to do, as Lady Rozemberk managed the keep; it had been her home, after all, and Mouse’s experience as first lady at Hluboka hardly qualified her to see to the domestic details of Rozemberk Castle. Mouse simply tried to stay out of her way. Lady Rozemberk did not approve of the marriage—she even refused to attend the wedding in an effort to sway her son. At first, Mouse wondered if her sketchy family history or her familiarity with Ottakar caused the objections, but the Lady’s continued whispers of “witch” and her muttered prayers against evil gave Mouse a more likely answer. There would be no rekindling of friendship with her mother-in-law. So besides Gitta, Mouse found herself in solitude once more.

  She walked as the weather allowed, but the keep sat on a narrow finger of land with the Vltava twisting around it. The sounds of the river followed her wherever she went, taunting her. On her first walk through a small grove of trees between the river bends, she ran into the outer castle battlement, which was guarded by Vok’s men.

  “Can we do something for you, Lady Rozemberk?”

  It took Mouse a moment to realize that the guard was speaking to her; she was Lady Rozemberk now.

  “I wish to pass.”

  “I am sorry, my Lady, but his Lordship gave orders we were not to let . . . anyone beyond the walls.”

  She heard the lie; Vok’s order was not for anyone but for her alone. He must be worried that she would run away. Mouse was trapped. And angry.

  “I only want to take a walk in the woods. Surely there can be no harm in that.”

  “Still trying to slip beyond your boundaries, my Lady?” Another man, unseen farther back on the wall, spoke. “And you and I both know what harm can come from a walk in
the woods.”

  Mouse knew the voice, and it laid on her another heaviness of spirit.

  “Hello, Luka,” she said, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked up at him. He did not need to cover his eyes as he looked out on her; they were as milky blind as they had been the last time she saw them—in the woods after she had taken his sight. “How are you?”

  “I am well.”

  “You serve as guard?” The men laughed, and Luka laughed with them. Mouse wasn’t sure if it was a bitter laugh, but it felt harsh to her ear.

  “No, I am Lord Chamberlain here. I was simply checking on the men. And how are you, my Lady?”

  “Happy to see you well,” she said with a sigh as the guilt pulled at her.

  “And I you.” He smiled and the men laughed again.

  Mouse could not make herself join in; she bit back words of apology and turned away quickly. “I should return to the keep. Good-bye, Luka.”

  Once she was clear of their view, she leaned against a tree, weeping, not only for the reminder of what suffering she’d caused but because she knew she could this very moment give Luka back his sight as she had the minnesinger. And why shouldn’t she? She wasn’t supposed to care anymore. She slammed her fist against the tree and spun back toward the guards. But she couldn’t make herself take a step. Digging her hand into the bag that hung at her waist, her fingers played with the woven grass witch she’d made at Hluboka. If she healed Luka, she might as well build a fire and throw herself on it. Mouse was too afraid. The fear of what waited for her after death compelled her silence now.

  As she wrapped herself in the lackluster nothingness of her days, Mouse dismissed her tiredness, her inability to recover from the journey, as general malaise. She used it as an excuse to keep to her room. Vok had come to her once, drunk, and kissed her roughly and pawed at her but then left again suddenly. She wondered what stopped him. Fear of Ottakar? Or a sense of guilt? Whatever the cause, she was happy to be let alone.