The Book of Blood and Shadow (35 page)

Every muscle in my body clenched. I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself he was whole. I couldn’t. But he saw my face and understood.

“Nothing happened,” Max said. “I promise. And I managed to lose him—but when we got back, and you weren’t here, I thought …”

I put my arms around him. His skin was cold. I wondered how long he’d been standing outside, waiting for me to appear. Worrying that I never would.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, holding on. “I know—” How it felt, to wait. To wonder. “I’m sorry. I should have left a note.”

“You shouldn’t have left at all. You should have stayed here, where it’s safe.”

I don’t know who let go first, but we were apart again. “Well, I didn’t. And maybe it’s a good thing, because”—I drew Elizabeth’s letter and the leather pouch out of my pocket; they didn’t belong to me, either—“I have something to show you.”

30

E. J. Weston, to my foolish brother
.

The Jews drink the blood of children. Or so our Mother told us when, as children, we wandered too close to the gates, spying on men who spoke in foreign tongues, draped themselves in foreign clothes, and thirsted for our lifeblood, to be heated in a pot with the foul soups and stews they prepared for their foreign holidays. Our Father promised us we had nothing to fear from these men who worshipped a God that was our God and yet not. Our cousins, he called them, and we pretended to believe it
.

Once he got his hands on Elizabeth’s latest treasure, Max was a lot more forgiving of our little midnight adventure. He tied a length of cord around the small leather pouch and strung it around his neck, for safekeeping.

I kept the letter.

This translation took me less time than the last—Elizabeth’s language was becoming my own, her strange configurations and exotic word choices seeming more familiar with each page I copied into my worn notebook. But it wasn’t until past noon the next day that I was ready to share the results.

Our Mother told us of the golem, that soulless creature of night who rambled the quarter and did its master’s dark bidding, and that we did believe, and molded our own men from the soft clay of the Vltava banks, urging them to smash, to consume, to destroy. Stories to frighten a child into sleep
,
and yet, when Groot sent me behind the walls in search of the golem, I believed I would find it. Or it would find me
.

I confided my destination in Thomas. No, as this is to be the full record of my transgressions, I will admit here that I confided all in Thomas, while we stood alone in the laboratory, our faces illuminated by candlelight. He had labored over our Father’s alchemical formula for two weeks, working from the first timid light of the moon to the sun’s bold return, and I remained by his side, sleeping only in those brief hours before the burdens of daylight called me back to life. Our attentions were directed only to our work, to the delicate sublimation, dissolution, putrefaction, and distillation, and the bubbling fluids that resulted, as if by magic, from his tender ministrations. Until the last night, we spoke of nothing but the elements and their mixtures, and I stayed silent as Thomas spun me tales of alchemical greatness, the magi who plundered the secrets of nature and drew themselves, elixir by elixir, nearer to God
.

That last night, I could take it no longer, and confessed to him the role of this formula we labored over. I confessed to him that he had, unknowingly, joined us in pursuit of the greatest glory of all
. Lumen Dei,
the very words were on his lips when the chemical marriage bore fruit, and our elixir was born, as if the knowledge of our destination, and his desperate desire to reach it, had borne us there
.

Once a secret is told, there is no untelling, brother. There is no unknowing, a sad truth you will soon understand. And so Thomas joined me, and I was no longer alone
.

Groot, for reasons he refused to share, was not allowed
within the walls of the Jewish quarter, but he arranged for my entrance, and offered his servant as accompaniment. Václav frightened me no less than he had at first sight, and I would rather have taken the golem. Instead, I took Thomas. Groot secured us an interview with the great Rabbi, but there were certain circumstances, he confided, that could not be avoided
.

When the first three stars appeared in the sky, I met Thomas behind the Church of St. Nicholas. He laughed to see me. I fear that in response, I blushed
.

He shook his head
.

—Maybe you should let me go alone, because this will never succeed
.

—Do I look so terrible?

I touched the hat perched precariously on my head, unruly curls tucked beneath. The breeches were stiff and coarse on my legs. Father’s tunic, too large for me by half, still smelled of him
.

—You look beautiful
.

And now he blushed in return
.

—Too beautiful for this task, I mean. No one with eyes would believe you were a boy
.

—No one with eyes would believe I am beautiful, but I seem to have you fooled
.

She gave herself to him so easily, I thought. A few compliments, a few candlelit conversations, and she was ready to give everything away. Was she that lonely, I wondered, that desperate to find someone who would treat her as an equal, listen to her secrets, fill the hole her brother had left behind? Or was she simply, even without realizing it yet, in love?

Needy or happy? There had to be a difference.

The Rabbi would not speak to a girl, and so I did what needed to be done. We ventured past the gate, shoulder to shoulder, two young men, one sandy-haired with dancing eyes and a crooked smile, one bunched into a large tunic and foolish hat, scrawny of body and delicate of face, and possibly, for the first time since his carefree youth, beautiful
.

A song wafted on the air, foreign and intoxicating, and the dark houses watched suspiciously as we passed, as if even the stones knew we did not belong. The temple was low and dark, its earthy walls cool to the touch, nothing like the churches of our childhood, with their golden edges and seas of rainbow glass
.

The Rabbi awaited us inside. He stood on the altar at the fore of the chamber and bade us remain in the entranceway. He spoke a smooth German, without the accent of a Jew
.

—I have granted this meeting at the behest of a trusted friend. But if I am to grant more, you will have to be persuasive
.

I dropped to my knees
.

—I come to you in the name of Edward Kelley, the name of Cornelius Groot, and the name of the Emperor. We request a handful of the sacred earth you have endowed with the gift of life
.

—Rise, child. Here we kneel only to the Lord
.

His voice brushed my face like the softest of feathers. I climbed to my feet
.

—Only God can grant the gift of life. I am but a conduit for His grace. Creating brings me closer to the Creator, and
from that union, a miracle emerged. A gift given to my people. Why should I share it with you?

—Not with me, sir. With the Emperor
.

—You speak for the Emperor?

His eyes pierced my disguise, pierced my skin and bones, and arrowed straight into my soul. I could not lie
.

—I speak for the nobility of knowledge and the pursuit of grace. A pursuit in which the Emperor will be honored to join, when the time is right
.

I did not know from where the words had come
.

—The Emperor has done much for my people. You, however, have done nothing. Yet
.

He proposed a trade. In return for what we sought, a certain golden goblet the Emperor was known to have in his
Kunstkammer,
which was said to have belonged to Joseph, of the Twelve Tribes, which was priceless and would result in certain death for any person caught attempting to spirit it away
.

The word
Kunstkammer
was written in German.
Cabinet of wonder
. Everyone who was anyone had them back then, Max explained, a
Kunstkammer
crammed with paintings and plant samples and unicorn horns. Collecting was in. But apparently this particular emperor took things to the extreme, his palace a veritable hoarder’s nest, except in his case the tilting stacks of bottle caps, magazines, and empty toilet-paper tubes were generally encrusted with rubies.

—Surely you can explain to the Emperor that this will be a small price to pay
.

Again, I felt speared by his gaze, but what was I to tell him? That the Emperor had murdered my Father and stolen
his land, that while my Father commanded me to offer him this, the greatest gift, I would have preferred a different gift, one that would be his last? Was I to return to Groot a failure, and turn our Father’s dream to dust? I could only nod and promise the goblet upon my return
.

As Thomas and I crossed the Stone Bridge back to Malá Strana, he despaired
.

—There is no way into the
Kunstkammer.
Even the Emperor’s closest counselors have no access without his permission
.

—There is a way
.

Though the thought of it made me ill
.

I did not tell him what I planned to do until the next morning, when the deed was done. I am tempted not to tell you, either, as I know your feelings about Don Giulio, and you know I share them, but believe me when I say there was little choice. And you know Don Giulio has long been willing to do me any favor I like. I will admit my heart once softened for him, but no longer. When he was a child, peeping into ladies’ bedchambers, roasting squirrels in the sun, their fur matted with blood from the stick he jabbed into their sides, leaving me gifts of dead birds in gilded boxes, excuses could be made. His mother a servant, his father an Emperor, his identity a truth universally known and yet never to be spoken, it cannot have been an easy life. But he is older now, and though two years my junior, he towers over me. He scares the women of the court with the way he watches them, and there are those who say he does more than watch. His hands are meaty and his breath heavy with onion and fish
.

Yet his grandfather still has charge of the
Kunstkammer.
Help me once more, I asked Don Giulio, like when we were children. We did not acknowledge the distinction between now and then, the absence of a brother to protect me from his roaming hands, but some truths do not need speaking
.

Hradčany is different now. Rudolf has made it a city unto itself, and everywhere are men hoisting stones and carving sculptures, erecting one monument after another to the Hapsburg reign. It is well known that the Emperor prefers to stay indoors whenever possible, and he has constructed the palace around this mania for hiding, with more secluded corridors and secret passageways than we could have dreamed of as children. Don Giulio wrapped a thick, wet hand around mine as he guided us to the secret heart of the palace, Thomas following a few steps behind, his presence only barely tolerated by the mad prince, and only because I had lowered myself to beg
.

The
Kunstkammer
now resides in a long corridor that connects the Emperor’s living quarters to the Spanish Hall. Myriad images of Rudolf in vibrant colors of oil peered down at us from the walls and ceiling. We passed paintings of Bohemian countrysides and Spanish ports, mountains and deserts and bowls of fruit, but it is the many faces of the Emperor that I cannot stop seeing, his sloped eyebrows, his black beard, the jowls that hang over his ruff, as pink and fleshy as any pig. His collections have swollen since our adventures years ago, and Don Giulio swept us past cabinets that held clocks, leather-bound tomes of Agrippa, Boethius, Dee, Croll, Paracelsus, Porta, even our disgraced Father, the jaw of a siren, the horn of a unicorn, statues of the Greek gods
performing their obscene gyrations, crocodile skulls, pitchers of silver and jasper and gold, coins from the four corners of the world, bowls of shell, cups of jade, scepters encrusted with rubies, two-headed fish, a waxen creature with the body of a horse and the head of a lion, astrolabes, orreries, armillary spheres, enough musical instruments to deafen the world with song, two nails of Noah’s Ark, and a chest of knives. At this last, Don Giulio paused, fondling the blades of his father’s collection as if visiting old and dear friends: This one had killed Caesar; that one had slain a Turkish prince; another, his favorite, Don Giulio claimed a peasant had swallowed and carried in his stomach for nine years. This was the knife he was caressing, blade whispering against his neck, when a distant door creaked open, and we heard the terrifying footfalls approach
.

—Here!

Don Giulio and I squeezed between two cabinets, while Thomas wedged himself into a similar crevice on the opposite wall. The Emperor approached. Don Giulio’s breath warmed my neck. A hand clapped over my mouth. Stubby fingers stole down my back. Our bodies were too close, and with the Emperor so near, I could hardly scream. Cold metal chilled my face. It was Don Giulio, who still wielded his knife. I could do nothing but let him play spider across my tingling flesh, while I swallowed my bile and the Emperor himself strolled past. I cannot speak, even to you, of what his hands did with their dark freedom
.