Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (32 page)

I vomited many times on the narrow winding road to Schloss Ambras. Our whole family was filled with fear. We kept the drapes on the carriage closed so as not to attract attention in the villages we passed through. When we did have to descend, to stretch our legs and answer nature’s call, we did so in remote areas, keeping our faces hidden even from curious livestock so as not to be blamed for causing them to abort their young.

Ambras, to our enormous relief, was a marvelous place. High stone walls and iron gates concealed a huge castle with red and white striped shutters and crenellated towers, surrounded by low buildings to store the archduke’s collections. I set out to explore every inch of the castle and quickly found a secret passageway that I told no one in my family about – a secret is a kind of treasure, isn’t it? There was a grotto, and a labyrinth, and a hunting preserve. We met a man shaped like a shrimp who lived in the castle, and a giant named Salvatore, and too many dwarves to count.

The archduke, it turned out, was an eccentric collector with a large
wunderkammer
, and beside his corals and his jewels and his paintings and clocks and sculptures, he had jars of babies with one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and conjoined twins dead in their mother’s womb. I tried not to stare.

We were surprised to learn that the archduke did not plan to display us for the public – he measured us, studied us, made notations in his notebooks. He seemed fascinated by us, but always treated us with dignity. I found him kind, despite his many questions and his habit of collecting our bodily effluvia. His second wife prepared medicines for us from herbs she grew in her garden, and prayed for us all the time. They say his first wife, who died not long ago, was a good witch, and that she planted the herbs.

Though my parents pressed me to practice my dancing, gossip, games, and music, I preferred to hide myself away in the archduke’s library, which he allowed me to investigate. I was supposed to be reading poetry, and learning to tat lace, so that I might in my turn entertain and unnerve the nobility in their drawing rooms and palaces as my monstrous father had, but I was more interested in the archduke’s stash of alchemical tomes.

Reading those heavy leatherbound books with their pages of symbols and strange drawings, I learned about antisyzygy, the union of opposites. That is what alchemy seemed to me to be focused on, the marriage of sun and moon, man and woman, God and the devil, in a great alchemical wedding in which truth is revealed. Was I, I wondered, the result of someone’s spell, an attempt to unite animal and human?

The books were filled with potions and incantations and rites to call out the angels and also demons. In his laboratory at the top of the castle I discovered the archduke had many strange powders and tinctures in tiny, labeled jars: bezoars, unicorn horn, dragon scales. I examined the jars for boiling, and a small oven, and many vials and vessels for purification and distillation.

From the archduke’s books I also learned about Anubis and his connection to the Island of the Dogs where my father was assumed to have been born. Anubis, also called Hermanubis by the Greeks, who merged his legend with that of their own Hermes, was an ancient Egyptian god of the dead, specifically of the passage to the afterlife. The archduke, whispers in the castle said, was trying to bridge that gap, to speak to his late first wife. The job of Anubis, I read, was to remove your heart and weigh it against a feather to see which contained more truth. If it was your heart, you went on to a happy afterlife. If it was the feather…

Anything seemed possible at Ambras, a place of experimentation and curiosity and acceptance.

It felt like we had landed in Eden.

But then we heard the howling.

Tonight, as the moon passed behind a cloud, I crawled out my window onto a small ledge and made my way into the adjacent chamber, and then through a tiny door behind a tapestry into the secret passageway, down a small flight of stairs, and out into the garden. I quickly slipped away past the topiaries and the maze and the grotto into the hunting preserve below. As I removed my clothing and hid it under the lilac bush, I could hear the drums, and the chanting for blood. I could not see the anxious faces of the archduke’s guards, but I imagined them as sweat- and soot-streaked, wild-eyed, and at the breaking point.

Now the night is still. I do not even hear an owl, or a nightingale. It is as if the whole world is holding its breath, as I am.

I wonder if I am indeed a daughter not of my father, but of Anubis. For several months now, I have had the urge to to bite something. I want to feel my animal self, not hide it. I have dreams, dark dreams of flesh and fire and pleasure.

I hear footsteps, and a faint crying. I crouch, suddenly afraid. This is not a feverish dream. I am awake.

This morning my mother woke me at dawn, fear in her eyes, and told me to dress.

“What is it?” I asked.

For several days, I had smelled smoke in the air and heard shouting in the distance. The few servants who came from the village, usually friendly folk, avoided me and my family. I felt as if they had seen my dreams, seen what I longed to be. Could other people see what was inside your head, inside your heart? Or only God?

“Greta,” I finally said to one of the housemaids whom I usually embroidered with. “What is the matter?”

She averted her eyes. “Several children have gone missing,” she said. “And yesterday one of them was found.”

“What happened?” I asked, my stomach tightening.

“The flesh was torn from the poor child’s thighs.” She began to weep.

“A wolf, then,” I said, patting her hand, which she quickly withdrew. “The men will hunt the animal. The archduke has a fine set of dogs. Last year he himself took down a bear.”

She said nothing, her lips pressed together.

Generally the wolves that inhabit the wooded areas of the surrounding forests prefer to keep their distance from humans, but young males do occasionally come down from the mountains to prey on livestock or small children. They are quickly dispatched. I did not understand her agitation, the sense of foreboding that enveloped the castle.

After lunch my father gathered us in our chambers, his brow creased with worry.

“They believe it is a werewolf,” he said.

We children and our mother stared at him in silence.

I knew the term, of course, but it had never been spoken aloud in our family. I had read that werewolves were men who, in exchange for doing the devil’s work, were given the power to transform themselves into wolves. There had been trials over the years – a man in Bavaria confessed to eating several young women, and I had heard the kitchenmaids say that in recent months confessed werewolves had been tried and burned in Anjou and Valais.

“How do they know?” I asked my father.

“Some of the villagers say they saw someone…” He sighed, knitted his brows and began again. “The archduke is concerned for our safety. He asks that we stay in our chambers.” The way he said it made it sound like it was the werewolf we had to fear.

My mother nodded and turned away, picked up her sewing, as did my little sister. “But,” I said, “do they think it’s one of us?”

My mother’s eyes widened and she told me to be quiet.

After lunch I wanted to go down the hall to the archduke’s library, to look at his books on witches and werewolves. But when I opened the door to our chamber, there was a guard outside. He was in armor and carrying a halberd. I knew him.

“Good day, Friedrich,” I said as he blocked my exit.

He said nothing, just pushed me back inside and shut the door.

As darkness fell I heard shouting outside the walls of the castle grounds. I could smell smoke and hear the crackle of the flames.

“Bring him out,” they yelled. “Bring us the werewolf.”

A flaming branch sailed up past the window and illuminated my father’s shadow against the stone wall of our chamber. He shrank back in fear. My father, whom the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi traveled hundreds of miles to meet and whom he declared one of the great scientific marvels of the world. My father, who says the rosary every day. A stone smashed the window and the crowd cheered. They tried to launch a torch up, but it fell to the ground and set a small bush alight.

In the early evening the archduke’s personal secretary came to us. “We are not certain we can hold off the mob,” he said. “There is talk of moving you to another location.”

“Is that… safe?” asked my father. I thought of how easily a carriage could be stopped, overturned, burned. Sending us out there was akin to sending us to our deaths.

The archduke himself did not come to see us. I chose to believe he was ashamed of his people, these ignorant mountain villagers. But perhaps he too was afraid of us.

The drums began. I heard my parents whispering. Another child had been found dead, half eaten. People from surrounding mountain towns had traveled here to witness the burning of my father alive. The archduke’s promise to protect us was in doubt.

I saw in the moonlight that my mother was sitting in a corner of the sitting room, weeping silently. My father sat nearby, not touching her.

“Maybe I should go talk to them,” he said. “They will see I am a man of God.”

“Do you know what they did to Peter Stumpp of Bedburg?” my mother said.

I didn’t, but I knew what they had done to Walpurga.

“The whole point of being a werewolf is transformation,” my father said in exasperation. “If I had the power to be hairless, would I be this way?” The gesture he makes, throwing his hands up, makes my heart grow dry and light like a dead thing. My father hates himself. Does he hate me, too?

“Peter Stumpp was flayed alive on the wheel, and his daughters and his woman were raped and strangled,” my mother whispered.

The grass rustles. I can smell the animal before I see him. He smells of death. A tall wolf, gray, with yellow eyes. It is only a wolf after all, as I expected. He is carrying an infant in his mouth, but gently, like a hunting dog with a bird. I imagine he has grabbed it from a nearby farm.

The wolf looks around and drops the baby, who is uninjured but too exhausted and frightened to do anything but stare with huge eyes.

I will kill the wolf, and save the baby, and the villagers will see that my father is innocent. Perhaps they will be ashamed, though I suspect not. My family will be safe, and we will be able to continue to live at Schloss Ambras, under the archduke’s protection.

This year or the next, the archduke will choose a husband for me. Will my husband want me? Or will he be repulsed? Perhaps I will be sent to the palace of one of the archduke’s family members in Vienna, or Prague.
What manners
, the people will say, staring in amazement as I pour tea, and dance a minuet. And think about ripping their throats out.

As I plan my attack, the wolf noses the infant until its bare neck is exposed. The infant is calm, just the way the rabbits are before the archuduke’s hounds pounce. This is the moment of the pact, I think. The moment of connection, when one life is sacrificed to another.

I am about to launch myself at the wolf, but something stops me – as the wolf stares at the infant’s neck, he begins to transform. His snout disappears, his claws retract. For a moment I stare in disbelief as he looks like me, like my father, like my little brother and sister. Then his fur disappears, replaced with smooth skin.

I suppress a gasp.

My mind leaps in excitement. For an instant, I almost forget about the baby, I am so fascinated. Who is this man? He is so free. It’s awful and beautiful at the same time, this freedom he has. To be both man and animal. To choose.

The baby reaches up a tiny hand, waves it. The man pauses.

I will speak. I will ask him to spare the infant. I will rebalance him, be the voice of our human side. Restore the man/animal equilibrium. In exchange he will teach me how to live in freedom.

I could run away with this man, live in the shadows. There are woods, deep, dark woods we could flee to. Never be found. Live on rabbits, and mice. I could be free, with this man. I am reminded of my nakedness, of the pleasure I feel in being naked. I look at the man’s naked body, watch the play of muscles under his skin. He is an animal, and I am an animal.

But we are also human. I will remind him of that. We do not eat our own.

The moon comes out from behind the cloud, and the man’s face is illuminated.

It is the archduke.

I am all amazed, I almost stagger, swoon. The archduke, who studied the dark arts in order to bring his lost love back to life. The books, the potions, the spells… they are real. He has mastered the art of transformation, of unification. The marriage of two things. Alchemy. He is a man, and he is an animal.

I am about to step forward, to reveal myself to the archduke. Tell him that I too have dreamed of this, of blood and biting and of wildness… tell him I understand. That we are twin souls. Of course he will not kill the infant. He is the archduke. He is–

In that moment, I look again at the glint in his eyes. This is not a momentary impulse. I realize he has planned this, this murderous spree. I realize why he brought my father to Ambras. For this. To take the blame for this. When his animal side took over, someone would be blamed. Will be blamed.

He picks up the child and opens his mouth to tear out its throat. I see one tiny feather lift off from the archduke’s lips and float away into the night air. He must have eaten a duck, too, in the farmyard.

The baby whimpers. It is, I think in that moment, the same cry my father uttered, standing on a table in France. My father, who believes that I am not an animal, but a lady.

My father is wrong. We are all animals.

I spring, and plunge the silver dagger into the archduke’s back. I have not been trained in feats of strength, in swordsmanship or wrestling. I have been trained to dance and sew and laugh. To drink from delicate porcelain cups. But I am still strong, and my heart has the heavy weight of truth behind it, so the archduke’s own silver knife goes deep into his flesh. I have helped the kitchen maids quarter pheasants many times, but now it is the ease with which the thin blade slips in that surprises me, and the warmth of the blood that covers my hand, its scarlet color, the color of royalty.