Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 18
It would be serious indeed for Matěj, or any priest, to knowingly offer the Mass for the forgiveness of the departed—or the living—while refusing to forgive others himself or otherwise clinging to his sinful ways and habits. Just as it would be dangerous for any of the faithful to receive Holy Communion while refusing to forgive others, which was why so few dared to approach the sacred banquet, and the Church had to insist that layfolk receive the Body of Christ at least once a year. But while laypeople could avoid receiving Communion if they feared for the state of their souls, the clergy had no escape route: they must serve at the altar daily and offer the sacrifice for all mortals, themselves the first of sinners if they were honest in their self-estimation. Matěj had always hoped that his simple offering would win him pardon when he stood before the dread Judgment Seat of Christ.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona eis requiem.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona eis requiem.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona eis requiem sempiternam.
O Lamb of God, who takest away the sin of the world: grant them rest.
O Lamb of God, who takest away the sin of the world: grant them rest.
O Lamb of God, who takest away the sin of the world: grant them rest eternal.
Matěj hoped that Jiři, the man who had died with no time or thought of preparation—on whose behalf he stood before the altar—no time to forgive or ask forgiveness from those whom he had offended or sinned against, would be granted that eternal rest for which Matěj so earnestly prayed.
Matěj smiled as he folded the linen and silken cloths and placed them over the chalice after having received the Host himself. Somewhere, in the depths of his heart, he was sure that the otherwise unknown Jiři would be granted that rest.
Three nights later, Jiři slept fitfully. A strange dream troubled him, during both his first and second sleep. Rabbits, the animal associated with carefree trust in God and freedom from overattachment to this world’s wealth, scampered about a field. It was a field he recognized from one of his country estates, a meadow left unfarmed in the summer and full of madly colored wildflowers. The rabbits dashed hither and yon, down one burrow and popping out another. The sun smiled gently down on the creatures and puffy white clouds glided by, driven by a gentle breeze that—in his dream—Jiři could feel on his cheek.
One of the rabbits kept coming right up to Jiři and, the creature’s nose quivering and whiskers throbbing, would almost touch noses with him. At this point, the man would reach out and discover—each time as if it were the first!—that his arm was covered with fur, his hand was a paw, and he was evidently a rabbit himself. He would then join in the frivolity and merriment of the rabbits in the field, running, jumping, laughing in a way that rabbits can only in dreams.
But then a dark shadow would fall across the sun and a wild scream would fill his ears: the other rabbits, running for their lives, as a great hunting bird—Jiři was unsure if it was a falcon or some other fearsome bird of prey—raced down to the field, claws outstretched. Those rabbits that could, jumped into burrows, while others raced to hide under bushes, in clumps of wildflowers, or even attempted to outrun the bird as it streaked down from the sky.
Fear more intense than the worst panic Jiři had ever known in his waking life was communicated between the rabbits. The rabbit-Jiři raced and ducked and attempted to hide like all his new field-brothers. He gasped for breath and felt the wind as the great bird flew past and then back up into the air, a small brown rabbit in its clutches, screaming with fright at a volume and pitch that hurt rabbit-Jiři’s ears.
The bird would soar and dip, flying towards the west until it was a speck in the sky, the sun returning to warm the meadow and the rabbits gradually emerging from their hiding places. The cycle would then begin anew as the man watched the creatures play, realized that he was one of them, and the falcon returned to terrorize them and carry away a new victim. In that way, at least, the dream changed each time. Once the captured rabbit was a small brown one, the next time it was a large silver rabbit, the third time a small but plump white one. Each time a rabbit was carried off, Jiři would almost awake and cry out, but each time he stopped just shy of fully waking and would sink back into his sleep and dream again of the rabbits in his estate meadow.
He recounted the dream to his wife during the midnight waking, when folk would talk or engage in more amorous pursuits with their sleeping partners, before succumbing to sleep again for the few hours before dawn. His wife chewed her lip as she listened.
“Perhaps it is a message of some sort,” she suggested. “You, a devout and faithful Christian man, perhaps one of the most devout and faithful. There will be an attack of the Devil, or of worldly cares, or of some distraction from God’s service.”
“But I seem to always survive it, yes?” Even as he remembered the terror of the meadow, he wiped his brow and closed his eyes. “Even though others are always seized one by one and carried off, destroyed by the falcon.”
“Yes, you seem to always survive the falcon attack,” she reassured him. “Hawks and falcons reveal wealth and a love of wealth. Perhaps your fellow merchants are overcome with greed and fall from grace with God. But you will overcome temptation!” His wife hugged him and fell back asleep.
Jiři was not convinced of the meaning of the dream. The rabbits, those who trusted in God, were being attacked by something, but Jiři wasn’t sure that greed or love of wealth was an adequate interpretation of the falcon. Neither was he comfortable closing his eyes again; the fear of that shadowy menace dropping from the sky was too palpable, too tangible. His skin still crawled at the memory. But, at last, he could hold his eyes open no longer and fell back against the pillow.
He twisted and turned, half-asleep and unable to find a comfortable position. The sheets seemed excessively scratchy and he realized that he had entered his dream again. He was feeling the scratchiness of the grass and the stiff leaves of thistles and other flowers as he gamboled with the other rabbits. He nibbled the blossom of a thistle and sniffed at the crushed grass where he had played earlier in the dream.
This time there was no warning of the falcon’s appearance. The shadow engulfed the meadow, and the animal shrieks—the rabbits in their fright, the bird in its descent—became one scream in rabbit-Jiři’s mind. One scream that pierced his brain, rattled behind his eyes, and caused his throat to throb with agony.
It was his own scream that burned his throat and filled his mind. The falcon had seized him in its talons and was speeding away from the meadow, higher and higher into the sky, which was congealing into cold thunderclouds.
He writhed in the bird’s talons but only caused himself more agony as his contortions caused the claws to cut deeper into his fur and muscle. He tried to scream with his human voice, to wake himself and stop the dream that had become a nightmare. But cry as he might, he remained a rabbit in the falcon’s grip. Lightning flashed. The air rushed past, beaten back by the rhythmic flapping of the falcon’s wings. Why could he not wake up? He screamed again, flailing his paws about as another lightning flash sizzled past. The burned smell of singed fur filled his nostrils.
The rabbit’s long scream ricocheted off the surrounding clouds and thunder deafened the little creature as the falcon flew on and on and its talons gripped its prey more and more tightly. Suddenly the claws tore through the skin and fur altogether, the rabbit-Jiři plummeting towards what must be the earth miles below. Jiři twisted silently in the air, his throat too raw to even scream again. Lightning flashed and darkness engulfed him.
His wife, finally wakened by her husband’s flailing and screaming in their bed, called the servants. But Jiři never woke and made a bad death, a death unprepared for and unshriven, a death without the Last Rites. His wife was left sobbing, trying to explain the strange dream that had so bothered him earlier in the night and how she had interpreted it for him, but clearly to no avail. The sudden fever must have burned his mind in moments. Long
gashes were found in places that would have been nearly impossible to reach in waking life. As they washed the body, the servants discovered flaps of skin near his shoulder blades that had been torn away in long strips. Not unlike a man who had been tortured with various knives and weights, some of them murmured. Not unlike a rabbit carried off by a falcon, others whispered, recalling their mistress’ description of the master’s final dream.
It was a scandal and a shame, they all agreed, that such a good and honest merchant, such a charitable and faithful Christian, would die a mors improvisa. “Even that selfish braggart Aleksandr was given the opportunity to make a bona mors—confession, communion, the Last Rites!” pointed out one of the scullery maids to the chambermaid. “Why should the one sinner be given a chance to repent while our good master—a better man than any in Prague—dies so, in a sudden fever and with no chance to repent or receive the Sacred Host?”
When Božena heard the next day of Jiři’s sudden death, the old beggar-woman grew quiet. She mulled over the events of the last week. Anežka had knocked her aside, out of the path of the funeral cortege of Aleksandr, and Jiři had come to her aid, assisting her to her feet and giving her a thaler coin, thus rebuking both Anežka’s rough and haughty treatment of her and Anežka’s greed for not simply giving her a coin to go away.
“Maybe that one has more wits about her than I thought,” Božena muttered as she made her way along the twisted lanes of the Old Town. “How would she know how to cause such a death?” She snorted. Could Anežka know the secret of the saying of a Requiem Mass for the living? No, the beggar decided. The wife of the Town Council member would disdain the traditional Bohemian ways of the countryfolk. She was haughty and arrogant and would be enamored of all the so-called sophisticated fashions and practices brought to Prague by the German merchants and their priests. The new things that the priest Conrad had preached before his murder. Anežka would not stoop to get her revenge against her neighbor by such old-fashioned means.
“But, still…” Božena hauled herself around one more corner and then collapsed in a pile of filth to rest her weary bones. “Better to avoid that one, even so.”
When Anežka heard of Jiři’s death and how he suffered, she gloated but neither she nor Žofie spoke openly of it, even between themselves. “Jiři has certainly learned his lesson in manners!” she crowed to herself. This was a better triumph over her neighbor than she could have ever dared dream for. Whatever Žofie had done, it had been a spectacular success. No one would long survive embarrassing her again, Anežka was certain.
“I will have to give her a large gift, a thank-you for such faithful service. Perhaps when St. Nicholas’ Day comes this year, so my husband will not notice it or think it odd to give such a gift to a servant,” she calculated.
Žofie was taken aback by the ferocity of their vengeance against Jiři. He had been an irritant but she had only intended to cause him some major inconvenience. Or even illness and pain. But never death. That had never occurred to her as a possible result of their actions.
“But I was a silly maid, a foolish serving girl, not to expect something terrible if a Requiem Mass was involved,” she chided herself. She was at least partly guilty for Jiři’s death. “How do I atone for that?” she fretted.
The power she had unleashed by asking that old priest to say a Mass was terrifying. She could not bring herself to discuss it with her mistress that night or the next as she brushed Anežka’s hair. Žofie was grateful that her mistress did not press for details or ask how she could do the same thing again for someone else who had offended her. Žofie’s nights became sleepless duels of guilt and fear that she would be held accountable for an atrocity she had never intended.
“It will never be a finished business either, no matter how often I confess it or how much penance I do for it,” Žofie realized. Did the maid dare hope that the mistress was as mortified at what they had wrought? Žofie doubted it.
“What will I do when she asks me again?”
The days grew shorter and the snow fell more frequently, dusting the towns of the Prague valley with a fluffy coverlet which sparkled in the brief bursts of sunlight. Thanks to the many alms that Božena had collected recently, especially at Aleksandr’s funeral procession, she had enough to pay an innkeeper a small coin each night in exchange for a place to sleep in the stables, where it was warmer and drier than the streets. For another coin, the innkeeper would give her a bowl of stew and a mug of ale from the kitchen. It was the first winter in many years that Božena was able to find hospitality—for a price.
As the days of November drew to a close, the thoughts of many townspeople turned to the two major holidays drawing near. The feast of the Narozeni of the Lord, or “Christmas” as many called it, was fast approaching, but the feast day of St. Nicholas was approaching even more quickly. Everyone was eager to celebrate the holiday, anticipating the Christmas feast that would follow three weeks later. Since the St. Nicholas feast occurred in the weeks of ascetic discipline and fasting that preceded Christmas, however, the more devout would abstain from meat during the course of the celebration, though wine would flow freely for all.
Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop who had been imprisoned by both a pagan emperor for refusing to repudiate the faith and later by a nominally Christian emperor for his refusal to cooperate with early imperial attempts to manipulate the Faith, was renowned for his charity and goodwill towards the needy. He was the patron of sailors, merchants, children, those about to be executed, all the needy. Many parishes or towns called him their patron. Gifts were given to children and servants on his feast and alms were distributed among the poor. December 6 became a “feast of misrule,” one of the rare occasions when society’s rules and expectations were turned topsy-turvy: a “boy bishop” ruled the cathedral clergy for the day, apprentices governed their master’s shops, and masters often served their servants meals.
The two parishes dedicated to the memory of Nicholas—one in the Little Town, the other in the Old Town Square—were particularly busy with their preparations for the holiday. Each parish would celebrate a festive Mass with choir and all their clergy, in addition to the simpler services each priest would say on his own at the side altars earlier in the morning. Throngs of the needy would line the streets leading to the church doors, eagerly anticipating the distribution of alms by those entering the church for the saint’s Mass. (Some of the more enterprising among the needy might even cross the bridge several times that day in order to collect alms from those keeping the feast at both parishes.)
Those who could not give a coin as alms might bring food or clothing. Many alms would be given to the parish clergy as well and untold numbers of candles would sputter at the feet of the patronal images in each parish by the day’s end. No matter how poor or wealthy, everyone wanted St. Nicholas to pray for them and their extended family. Nicholas’ intercession would be sought for both the healthy and the sick, the old and the young, the well-to-do and the impoverished. The whole town on each side of the river would converge on its parish dedicated to the saint, seeking to be saved, and then continue the celebration long into the night.
That morning, Anežka left a small purse filled with coins hanging from Žofie’s bedknob, as if St. Nicholas himself had left it in the night. Although she gave gifts to all the servants on December 6 in honor of the saint, and then expected no work from them until the next morning—as difficult for Anežka to bear as the forced charity—none of the other purses were nearly as full nor with coins so large as the purse left for Žofie.
Anežka also gathered coins into small purses to give away to the outstretched hands of the clamoring hordes that would line the streets and the square. Although she would be accompanying her husband to church that morning, the preparation and distribution of the St. Nicholas Day alms were tasks he always left to her discretion.
She also admired her St. Nicholas Day finery, which had been laid out for her the evening before. All the well-placed wome
n of Prague society would be wearing their new winter gowns and cloaks to attend the festivities, hoping to be admired not only for their charity but for their good taste. The seamstress had finished the last stitches on the deep-red velvet gown, trimmed with fur along the edges, a few days before. This was the dress she would wear for grand occasions this winter, but for today—as part of the misrule and reversal of social standing—she had a new linen apron to wear over it. The apron, glistening white and stiff with starch, was sumptuously decorated along its edges as well: no fur adorned it, but silk threads in bright, Bohemian colors were embroidered along the bottom of the apron and on the two large pockets below Anežka’s waist. Traditional motifs of vines and leaves twisted and danced upon the linen as fantastic garden creatures peeked out from hiding places behind the leaves and fruit that hung amply from the vines. The apron was a treasure and a work of art that Anežka intended to sport every year on St. Nicholas Day as a grand marker of her humility.
Anežka and her husband stepped into the river of townspeople converging on the Old Town Square. Poor folk, old folk, sick folk, maimed folk lined those streets and lanes like stones lining a riverbed. Each hand reached out, each voice was raised in either a plaintive cry for attention or a rousing exclamation of gratitude. Children also ducked and darted among those who walked and those who lined the streets, hoping for a sweet or a coin from either the wealthy or the poor (who were also expected to share their alms with the youngsters). Even the plaintive cries mixing with the jollity of the day were not nearly as plaintive as on other days. Everyone shared in this holiday and the generosity of the saint.
Anežka walked next to her husband, her hand resting on his outstretched arm. Together, they nodded and smiled and exchanged greetings with everyone around them. Occasionally, Anežka would pause and reach into her purse and pull out a coin for one of the poor along the street or one of the children darting through the crowd. She did not want to give away all the alms too quickly, lest she arrive at the doors of the church and have nothing left to bestow on the needy where it would be seen by the most people and win her the most adulation.