by Jo Graham
The priest comes tumbling out, hurriedly wiping his mouth. He tries to bend over her hand. They are saying something, and the priest doesn’t like it.
And then the lady in pink turns and walks straight to Natia, who stands perfectly still, her bundle in her hands, and the lady kneels down to face her in the mud.
Natia gulps. “Bonjour Madame Grandmere,” she says, and then stops, her French completely exhausted.
The lady takes Natia’s hand between hers, the gloved and the ungloved, and says in perfectly clear Polish, “My dear Natiaalie???! I am so glad you’ve come to live with me! I know that we will be very happy.”
For the first time in long months, the first time all across Europe, Natia cries. She can’t help it and she doesn’t know why, she doesn’t know how to bend gracefully into the lady’s arms that go around her, how to cry attractively rather than blubbering nonsense onto her pink shoulder. She just hangs on with all her strength, as though she were a baby and not a grown girl of eight.
“You must be exhausted,” her grandmother says. Natia can’t quite tell how she winds up in the open carriage, her bundle on her feet and her grandmother’s arm around her. “Let’s get you home and a bath and some clean clothes on you. That will feel better.”
Natia thinks that she hasn’t eaten since a bowl of pottage last night at one of the posting stops, but it’s hard to ask. Still, she might. “Do you think I might have some bread?” she asks. “I haven’t eaten today, you see. If you don’t mind.”
Her grandmother’s lips compress into a tight line, and Natia wonders where she got that scar. It looks like the ones the seminarians had from dueling. Surely grandmothers don’t duel. “Idiot priest. Doesn’t know anything about taking care of a child. Of course you can have some bread. We’ll have lunch as soon as we get home. Stupid lout. He was ready to just leave you at the posting house, if some kind woman hadn’t paid to send a message boy.”
The carriage stops and for a moment Natia is confused. It’s a florist shop, the windows full of tulips. Her grandmother doesn’t go in, but leads to the door next to it, a neat black door with a brass knocker. “I have the top three floors,” she says. “The first floors all along the street are shops, with town houses above. Come up and have some lunch, Natalie???.”Natia."
Natia stops at the top of the stairs. The drawing room is pretty and quiet, dark blue curtains framing the big windows. She stands there holding her bundle. Her grandmother speaks Polish. She can talk and have someone understand her. “Am I a bastard?” she says. It was not what she meant to say.
Her grandmother tosses her bonnet on the nearest chair. Her hair is honey colored, streaked with gray. “No,” she says. “I know that Francis loved your mother.” She gently takes the bundle out of Natia’s hands and puts it on the table, helps her take her coat off as though she were very small.
“They weren’t really married,” Natia says. It’s best to get the worst out of the way first. “My mother was no better than she should be and my father…”
“Was an impetuous young cavalry officer.” Her grandmother sits down on the blue brocade sofa so that their eyes were on a level.
“I’m like them,” Natia says. “I’m bad. I’m too pretty and it worries people, and I have bad blood.”
Her grandmother raises a hand as though to caress her, stops as though she thinks better of it. There’s a long scar across her palm too, and the back of her hand is covered in tiny white scars like snowflakes. “If so, you get it from me,” she says. “I don’t know what they told you about me. Probably not that I’m a courtesan and a scandal and a sometime actress.”
“You have scars like a man,” Natia says.
“I do,” she says. “And I’ve fought like a man from one end of this bloodsoaked continent to the other. I’m not much of a guardian for a little girl.”
“My mother had men who paid her,” Natia says quickly. “I can turn my back. Please don’t send me away! I don’t know where I’ll go!”
Her mouth twitches as though some thought was arrested, but her voice is level. “I’m not going to send you away. Not now, not ever. You are my grandchild, my son’s daughter, and I will never send you away. And I will do my very best not to get you into trouble. I promise that.” She does reach out now and brush back Natia’s hair from her brow. “As for being too pretty, well, I hope that you won’t need to get by on your looks. But it’s good to have them just in case. I’m not poor, and I hope you won’t have to use them.”
“To be a courtesan?”
“Or a spy,” she says lightly. “Now I will ring for Cécile, and we’ll have some lunch. It will all look better when you’ve had something to eat. I only hope that you won’t hate me when you know me better.”
Natia stands up very solemnly and came closer, looking into her face. Crows feet around blue eyes, graying hair and the scar. She traces it with one finger tentatively. “Where did you get that?”
“Eylau,” she says.
“And that?” She lifts her grandmother’s hand and turns it over. The cut across her palm must have bit to the bone.
“Waterloo. I was wearing heavy gloves, so it didn’t take my fingers off.”
Natia nods quietly. “I won’t hate you,” she says.
“Good,” says her grandmother.
That night, she sleeps for the first time in a room by herself, a pretty little room with toile drapes and a big warm bed. In the morning they are going to order clothes, but tonight she sleeps in one of her grandmother’s chemises. It’s much too big, but it’s soft and clean, white lawn with no lace or ribbons, just sleek thin fabric.
There are no men in the house. It’s just her grandmother in her room and the housekeeper upstairs. If there were supposed to be men they aren’t here. And Natia has her own room. She doesn’t have to turn her back.
She sinks down into the big feather pillows.
Whatever happens next, tonight she is warm.
Brunnhilde in the Fire
1901 AD
And at last the dawning twentieth century, a century that can solve all problems through science. It has no need for magic. Does it?
There are things men do, and women who let them do it. She's gotten that far from whispers, from things girls confide one to another in bedrooms where their mothers don't come, whispered among the pillows of a featherbed while the adults have dinner downstairs. She is not yet a debutante. She does not sit at dinner. Not until next winter.
She is fifteen still, not sixteen until the high winter stars of January shine cold on the ice, born under the sign of Capricorn in the Year of Our Lord 1886. There is meaning to that, to the stars that shone upon her birth, but her mother says such superstitions are for the credulous, for Eastern European immigrants who crowd the streets of Boston, dirty and speaking foreign languages she thinks she should understand. If she just listened a little longer, the words would be plain. But she never listens more than a moment. Even the scullery maid who sweeps the ashes is Irish. Her mother will not have filthy Poles in the house.
There are things men want to do. It goes without saying that women don't want to. Women want children and respectable marriages. Women want love. Love is entirely different.
Love is born in music, over songs sung together at the piano, voices mingling like captive birds taking flight. She could imagine a voice to blend with hers, practicing in the music room on long afternoons, when her voice soars sweet and true. She has not got the coloratura range, but it's a light, pretty soprano. She could make her way on it if she had to, some part of her thinks. She'd never be a diva, but she'd eat.
Not that she will ever have to. Her father says she is safe. She will never lack for anything.
She should practice more, her mother says. Music is an accomplishment. She will bend her brain reading so much. She'd like to go to school. There is Radcliffe, but her father disapproves. It turns out suffragettes and anarchists, and she will be a respectable wife and mother. Her tutor has French and a
little Latin, but it is enough. Latin comes easily. She suspects she already reads better than her tutor. It's not a matter of codebreaking, as her brother says, of taking apart words with suffixes and prefixes, memorizing declensions. She just reads it. Latin is living and breathing.
Once, when they were younger, leaning over the table with Frank, the tutor between them, she saw another table, another boy with light brown hair, his brows creased just so. "It is my father's tongue," he said. "You would think it would be easier."
Her hands are pale, smoothing out the scroll before him, words in Latin cursive flowing off the page. "It gets easier," she says, and what she feels is tenderness for him. He is a son to her, and the memory is tinged with love.
And then it is Frank, frowning at De Bello Gallico. "I don’t know why you think this is so easy," he grouses.
"I think I've read it before," she says.
She knows better than to say anything else.
Once, when she was a child, she dreamed that an angel opened her mouth. An angel with a sword of fire stood beside her in a ruined chapel, and he touched her throat and she knew all the songs in the world, spoke every story she had ever known. But when she woke they faded away to scraps and tatters.
Perhaps if she went to school she would have less time to dream, less time to write fragments that never quite fit together in composition books, fairy tales and strange stories.
Once, Lono came over the sea in a boat of reeds and sunlight. Gulls followed his passage, and sharks swam beside him…
When Alexander was in Asia, he dreamed of a wheel of fire…
Blood pounded in her ears, drumming out the seconds, the flying wedge elongating, powder smoke blowing straight toward them, curved epee drawing clear, charging unhesitating into shadow…
Sometimes she thinks she is nothing but a vessel, an empty thing meant to hold stories. She will never be a story, have a story. Life is waiting, moving from one beautiful room to another, while her spirit soars.
Except that the body is real. Lying by herself in her room at night, windows open to catch the Cape Cod breeze, the ocean wind does not cool her. Her hands stray over her breasts, stroke the soft curve of her stomach. Ventre, some part of her says. That is what someone calls it when they kiss there.
The thought makes her draw sharp breath. The prickle of five o'clock shadow against her skin, warm lips kissing a path down her stomach…
She has never thought such an awful thing in her life! Who would do such a thing? And yet the rush of delight that follows after drowns out guilt. She is only thinking.
Composition books, and neat social script.
I am Undine in the pool
And Brunnhilde in the fire
Gyrecompass and prisoner
Of the wings that I inspire.
Her brother, Frank, hands it back to her seriously. "Brunnhilde was a Valkyrie doomed to live as a mortal woman," he says, "Not a safe thing."
And so she waits in her ring of fire, sleeping like Briar Rose on a bed of petals, looking out through white curtains at the world.
Once there was a princess sleeping forever in a chapel in a city of brass, where sand whispered over the mosaics on the floor, covering kings and queens among the lotus flowers…
The guns are silent all over the world, the mighty tumults of the last century ended. There will be no more wars, and knights only live in books. The modern world does not need them. King Arthur is beautifully illustrated on her bookshelf, Alexander tamed by Droysen. The modern world is tidy, classified, scientific, everything in its place like ornaments in her mother's étagère, curious relics of places and peoples one shouldn't think too hard about, Chinese porcelain and Egyptian boxes, a curious necklace of links of iron wrought into flowers.
I had one like that, some part of her whispers, looted when Berlin fell. It is a cold necklace of iron, a collar of steel, a cold irony that heats against the skin…
She dreams of flying, white wings beating far out to sea, soaring over waves and daring every storm. She wakes with tears on her face and cannot remember why.
"There will be no more wars," her father says. "The Powers have reached entente. And nobody else matters." He leans back in his chair. "You children will inherit a peaceful world."
And yet she hears the whisper in the back of her mind, "Do you think the knights sleep in the hollow hills? That they have nothing better to do?"
About the Author
Jo Graham lives in North Carolina with her partner, their daughter, and a spoiled Siamese cat. She has a degree in military history and worked in politics for fifteen years before becoming a full time writer. Her other books include the Numinous World series Black Ships, Hand of Isis and Stealing Fire, as well as the Stargate Atlantis novels Death Game, Homecoming, The Lost, and the upcoming The Avengers, Secrets and The Inheritors. Her next book in the Numinous World, Fortune's Wheel, will be published in the summer of 2012 by Gallery Books. She can be found online at http://jo-graham.livejournal.com/.
Wanda Lybarger, the cover artist, has been a graphic artist for forty years. She lives in Georgia.
Table of Contents
The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories
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CONTENTS
The world is a numinous place, for those who have eyes to see it.
The Ravens of Falkenau
1614-1634 AD
Dion Ex Machina
4 BC
Cold Frontier
505 AD
Small Victories
1800 - 1810 AD
How the Lady of Cats Came to Nagada
8000 BC
Prince Over the Water
1040 AD
Horus Indwelling
285 BC
Paradise
641 AD
Slave of the World
1203 AD
Little Cat
1012 BC
Vesuvius
79 AD
Unfinished Business
22 BC
The Messenger's Tale
1553 AD
Morning Star
469 BC
Templar Treasure
1188 AD
Winter's Child
1821 AD
Brunnhilde in the Fire
1901 AD
About the Author