Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  The thread settles into place, binding her own fate. She will see her husband and not know him; recognition will not come until he proves himself to her again.

  Her weaving is done. She kneels before the grey-eyed goddess and bows her head, accepting the ignorance that wisdom bestows. The brilliant light of her creation flares and then fades away.

  Her maids find her collapsed on the floor and hurry her off to bed. These are the ones whose threads will continue; they have kept faith with their queen, and so they will not be hanged with treacherous Melantho and her sisters. But all of that lies in a future they have not seen. Neither maids nor mistress know what she has done.

  She sleeps a day and a night, and when she rises, her hair is as long as it ever was. She goes about her duties in a daze, which her maids attribute to the absence of her son. Their reasoning is borne out when Telemachos returns, for then it seems that she wakes at last from her dream.

  She goes to the head of the hall, looking out over her suitors, the men who have clamored for her hand, believing her to be the means by which they will shape their own fates.

  The old beggar stands disregarded at the back of the hall. In this moment, every eye is upon her.

  Penelope holds the mighty bow in her hand and speaks for all to hear. “My husband will be the man who can string the bow of Odysseus, and fire an arrow through twelve axe-heads. Thus the Fates have decreed, and on my word, it shall be so.”

  MARIE BRENNAN is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She is the author of several acclaimed fantasy novels, including A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent; the Onyx Court series: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire; Warrior; and Witch. Her short stories have appeared in more than a dozen print and online publications.

  Among the Thorns

  Veronica Schanoes

  In seventeenth-century Germany, a vagabond with a magic fiddle murders a peddler. Many years later, his daughter seeks vengeance. Edited by Ellen Datlow.

  They made my father dance in thorns before they killed him.

  I used to think that this was a metaphor, that they beat him with thorny vines, perhaps. But I was wrong about that.

  They made him dance.

  * * *

  Just over 150 years ago, in 1515, as the Christians count, on a bright and clear September morning, they chained a Jewish man named Johann Pfefferkorn to a column in our cemetery. They left enough length for him to be able to walk around the column. Then they surrounded him with coals and set them aflame, raking them ever closer to Herr Pfefferkorn, until he was roasted alive.

  They said that Herr Pfefferkorn had confessed to stealing, selling, and mutilating their Eucharist, planning to poison all the Christians in Magdeburg and Halbristadt combined and then to set fire to their homes, kidnapping two of their children in order to kill them and use their blood for ritual purposes, poisoning wells, and practicing sorcery.

  I readily believe that poor Herr Pfefferkorn confessed to all of that.

  A man will confess to anything when he is being tortured.

  They say that, at the last, my father confessed to stealing every last taler he had ever possessed.

  But I don’t believe that. Not my father.

  * * *

  They say that in their year 1462, in the village of Pinn, several of us bought the child of a farmer and tortured it to death. They also say that in their 1267, in Pforzheim, an old woman sold her granddaughter to us, and we tortured her to death and threw her body into the River Enz.

  * * *

  Who are these people who trade away their children for gold?

  My parents would not have given away me or any of my brothers for all the gold in Hesse. Are gentiles so depraved that at last, they cannot love even their own children?

  * * *

  I was seven when my father disappeared. At first we did not worry. My parents were pawnbrokers in Hoechst; my mother ran the business out of our house and my father travelled the countryside of Hesse, peddling the stock she thus obtained, and trading with customers in nearby towns, during the week. He tried to be with us for Shabbat, but it was not so unusual for the candles to burn down without him.

  But it was almost always only a matter of days before he came back, looming large in our doorway, and swept me into the air in a hug redolent of the world outside Hoechst. I was the youngest and the only girl, and though fathers and mothers both are said to rejoice more greatly in their sons than in their daughters, I do believe that my father preferred me above all my brothers.

  My father was a tall man, and I am like him in that, as in other things. I have his thick black hair and his blue eyes. But my father’s eyes laughed at the world, and I have instead my mother’s temperament, so I was a solemn child.

  When my father lifted me in his arms and kissed me, his beard stroked my cheek. I was proud of my father’s beard, and he took such care of it: so neat and trim it was, not like my zeyde’s beard had been, all scraggly and going every which way. And white. My mother’s father’s beard was white, too. My father’s was black as ink, and I never saw a white hair in it.

  * * *

  We had a nice house, not too small and not too big, and we lived in a nice area of Hoechst, but not too nice. My parents grew up in the ghetto of Frankfurt am Main, but the ghetto in Frankfurt is but a few streets, and there are so many of us. So we Jews are mobile by necessity.

  Even though it is dangerous on the road.

  And Hoechst is a nice place, and we had a nice home. But not too nice. My mother had selected it when she was already pregnant with my eldest brother. “Too nice and they are jealous,” she told me, “so not too nice. But not nice enough, and they won’t come and do business. And,” she added, “I wanted clean grounds for my children to play on.”

  We had some Jewish neighbors, and it was their children I mostly played with. The Christian children were nice enough, but they were scared of us sometimes, or scorned us, and I never knew what to expect. I had a friend named Inge for a while, but when her older sister saw us together, she turned red and smashed my dolly’s head against a tree. Then she got to her feet and ran home, and her sister glared at me.

  I was less friendly after that, although my father fixed my dolly when he came home that week, and put a bandage on my head to match hers when I asked him to.

  Some feel there is safety in numbers and in closeness, but my mother thought differently. “Too many of us, too close together,” she said, “and they think we’re plotting against them. Of course, they don’t like it when we move too far into their places, either. I do what I can to strike the right balance, liebchen,” she said.

  This was my mother, following the teachings of Maimonides, who wrote that we should never draw near any extreme, but keep to the way of the righteous, the golden mean. In this way, she sought to protect her family.

  Perhaps she was successful, for the Angel of Death did not overtake us at home.

  * * *

  Death caught up with my father when he was on the road, but we did not worry overmuch at first. My mother had already begun to worry when he was still not home for the second Shabbat, but even that was not the first time, and I did not worry at all. Indeed, I grew happier, for the farther away my father travelled, the more exciting his gifts for me were when he arrived home.

  But Mama sat with my Uncle Leyb, who lived with us, fretting, their heads together like brother and sister. Even though Uncle Leyb was my father’s younger brother, he was fair-haired, like my mother. I loved him very much, though not in the way I loved my parents. Uncle Leyb was my playmate, my friend, my eldest brother, if my brothers had spent time with a baby like me. But Uncle Leyb was also old enough to be my parents’ confidant. Sometimes he went with my father, and sometimes he stayed and helped my mother.

  I am grateful that he stayed home for my father’s last trip. I do not think he could have done any good. But Leyb do
es not forgive himself to this day.

  “Illness, murder, kidnapping,” said my mother calmly, as though she were making up a list of errands, but her knuckles were white, her hands gripping the folds of her dress.

  “It will be all right, Esti,” said my uncle. “Yakov has been out on the road many times for many days. Perhaps business is good and he doesn’t want to cut off his good fortune. And then you’d have had all this worry for naught.”

  “They kidnapped a boy, a scholar,” said Mama. “On the journey between Moravia and Cracow.”

  “Nobody has kidnapped Yakov,” said my uncle. He had a disposition like my father’s, always sunny.

  “If we sell the house,” Mama went on as if she hadn’t heard him, “we could pay a substantial ransom.”

  “There will be no need for that,” my uncle said firmly.

  My mother’s fears did not worry me. Though I was a serious child, my father was big as a tree in my eyes, certainly bigger than Mama or Uncle Leyb or most of the men in Hoechst.

  And my parents were well-liked in Hoechst. My father drank and smoked with the younger Christian men, and when he offered his hand, they shook it.

  When the third Shabbat without my father passed, Uncle Leyb began to worry as well. His merry games faded to silence, and he and my mother held hushed conversations that broke off the minute I came within earshot.

  After the fourth Shabbat had passed, my uncle packed up a satchel of food and took a sackful of my mother’s wares and announced his intention to look for my father.

  “Don’t go alone,” my mother said.

  “Whom should I take?” my uncle asked. “The children? And you need to stay and run the business.”

  “Take a friend. Take Nathaniel from next door. He’s young and strong.”

  “So am I, Esti,” my uncle said. He held her hand fondly for a moment before letting it go and taking a step back, away from the safety of our home. “Besides,” he said, noticing that I and my next elder brother, Heymann, had stopped our game of jacks to watch and listen. “I daresay that Yakov is recovering from an ague in a nice bed somewhere. Won’t I give him a tongue-lashing for not sending word home to his wife and family? Perhaps I’ll even give him a knock on the head!”

  The thought of slight Uncle Leyb thumping my tall, sturdy father was so comical that I giggled.

  My uncle turned his face to me and pretended to be stern. “You mock me, Ittele?” he said. “Oh, if only you could have seen your father and me when we were boys! I thrashed him up and down the street, and never mind that he was the elder!”

  I laughed again, and my uncle seemed pleased. But as he waved at us and turned to go, his face changed, and he looked almost frightened.

  The fortnight that he was away was the longest I have ever known. Mama was quick-tempered; my brothers ignored me, except for Heymann, who entertained himself by teaching me what he learned in cheder. I tried to pay attention, but I missed my uncle’s jokes and games, and I missed my father’s hugs and kisses. I took to sucking my thumb for consolation, the way I had when I was a baby. Only when my brothers couldn’t see, of course. My mother did catch me a few times, but she pretended not to notice so I wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  My brothers were out when I saw Uncle Leyb coming home through the window. His face was distorted, and I could not tell if it was an effect of the glass rippling or of some deep distress.

  He seemed calm by the time Mama and I met him at the front door, having dropped the forks from our hands and abandoned our meal. My mother brought him into the kitchen and settled him with a measure of kirschwasser. Then she told me to go play outside. I was moving toward the door with my brothers’ old hoop and stick as slowly as possible—they were too big for hoop rolling by this time, but I still liked it—when my uncle raised his hand and I stopped.

  “No,” he said firmly. “She should stay and listen. And her brothers, where are they? They should come and hear this as well.”

  My mother met his eyes and then nodded. She sent me out to collect my brothers. When all four of us returned, my mother’s face was drawn and taut. For many years I thought that my uncle had told my mother the tale of my father’s last day privately after all, but when I was older, she said not; she said that when she had seen that Uncle Leyb was alone, she had known already that she would never again lay eyes on my father.

  The four of us sat between them, my eldest brother holding our mother’s hand. My uncle held his arms out to me and I climbed onto his lap. I was tall, even as a child, and I no longer quite fit, but I think it was his comfort and consolation even more than mine, so I am glad I stayed. At the time, I was still obstinately hoping for good news, that Papa had struck a marvelous bargain that had taken a lot of work, and now we were all wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, that even now Papa was travelling home as quickly as possible, his pockets loaded with treats.

  My uncle wrapped his arms around me and began to speak quietly and deliberately. “Esti, Kinder. Yakov is dead. He will not be coming home. I buried him just a few days ago. With my own hands, I buried him.”

  My mother sighed, and somehow her face relaxed, as though the blow she had been expecting had finally landed, and it was a relief to have it done.

  My brothers’ faces looked blank and slightly confused; I suspect mine did as well. I did not quite believe what my uncle said. Perhaps, I thought, he was mistaken. But I could tell that my uncle was genuinely sad, so I reached up and patted his face.

  “I fell in with Hoffmann after a few days, and told him of our worries”—Hoffmann was a peddler my father and uncle crossed paths with every so often and saw at shul on the high holy days. He lived several towns away, but he took much longer journeys than did my father. It was strange, though, that he should have been peddling among my father’s towns.

  “He said that word had spread that my brother’s territory was going unattended; otherwise, he never would have presumed to visit it. He offered to join me in my search, so we pressed on together until we came to Dornburg. ‘Burg’ they call themselves, but they’re not even as big as Hoechst. As we approached, the town lived up to its name, thorn bushes on every patch of scrub by the road.

  “Yakov’s body was hanging from a gibbet mounted by the side of the road just outside the town.

  “We waited until nightfall, cut him down, and buried him under cover of darkness. I left a few stones at the graveside, Esti, but otherwise, I left it unmarked. I didn’t want to risk them digging him up. Let him rest.”

  My mother’s face was stone, and my uncle’s voice was calm, but the top of my head was damp with my uncle’s tears. I was still confused, so I turned around on my uncle’s lap so I could face him.

  “So when will Papa come home?” I asked him. I can make no excuses. I understood the nature of death by then. Perhaps I just did not want to believe it.

  My uncle put his palms on either side of my face and held my gaze. “He will not come home again. The people of Dornburg killed him. He is dead, like your baby brother two years ago.”

  “How?” I could not imagine such a thing. My papa was big as a bear and twice as strong in my eyes. He could swing me around and around and never get tired. He could wrestle my two eldest brothers at once. He could even pick up my mama.

  “They made him dance, liebchen. They made him dance in thorns, and then they hanged him.”

  “For what?” The cry burst from my mother. “For what did they hang him?”

  “Theft,” said my uncle, not taking his eyes from my face. “They said he had stolen all his money; rumor has it that they gave all he had to some vagabond fiddler, and he set himself up nicely. What’s little enough for a family of seven is plenty for one vagrant.”

  “My papa never stole anything,” I said. It was then that I realized what had happened. These people could say terrible things about my father only because he was dead.

  “Not since we were boys,” Uncle Leyb agreed.

  I put my hands over his and sta
red into his eyes intently. If my father could not bring justice to those who slandered him, I would. “I will kill them,” I told my uncle. My voice was steady and I was quite sincere. “I will surround that town with death. I will wrap death around their hearts, and I will rip them apart.

  “I will kill them all. Every one.”

  * * *

  My uncle did not laugh at me, or ruffle my hair, or tell me to run along. Instead, he met my gaze and nodded. Then he took my hands in his and said “So be it.”

  He said it almost reverently.

  * * *

  The residents of Dornburg were proud of their story, how they had destroyed the nasty Jewish peddler. How a passing fiddler had tricked the Jew into a thornbush and then played a magic fiddle that made him dance among the thorns, until his skin was ripped and bloody, and how the fiddler would not leave off until the Jew had given over all his money.

  How the Jew had caught up with the fiddler at the town and had him arrested for theft; and how the fiddler had played again, forcing everybody to dance (the residents of Dornburg often omitted this part, it was said, in order not to look foolish, but the other gentiles of Hesse gladly filled it in) until the Jew confessed to theft. And how the Jew, bloody and exhausted and knowing he would never see home nor wife nor children again, did confess, and how he was hanged instead of the fiddler, and his body left to hang and rot outside the town gates as a warning.

  How one morning, the town of Dornburg awoke to find that the Devil had taken the corpse down to Hell.

  * * *

  Uncle Leyb said that Papa would come home to me nevermore, but I did not quite believe it. I waited every night for years to hear his footsteps and pat his black beard, I waited every night for his pockets full of treats and his embrace.

  I still do not understand why I waited, full of hope. I knew what my uncle had said.

  My baby brother had died of a fever two years before; my parents had been heartbroken, and I still missed his delighted laugh when I tickled his face with my hair. But he had come and gone so quickly, a matter of months. Papa had always been with me; I think that I could not conceive that he would not be with me again.