The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I (31 page)
Read The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
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“I’m not Astrophil. I’m Roshina.”
It was a tin mouse with a long tail and tiny paws. Petra saw Josef pushing aside bare tree branches. He walked steadily toward her. She didn’t move. He hunkered down beside her. “Petra, you’ve done a brave thing.”
She didn’t look at him. She rubbed at her tears.
“When your da’s less scared he’s going to realize that, too.”
“Scared?”
“When Lucie and Pavel returned from Prague and said they’d left you there with some make-believe aunt, we were very worried. Prague isn’t a place for a twelve-year-old girl on her own.”
“I’m thirteen,” she said sullenly.
“Thirteen.” He nodded. “Everyone rounded on Tomik. I don’t think he’s been let out of his room all this time you’ve been gone. He kept claiming that the only thing he knew was that you wanted to go to Prague.”
Petra had known she could trust Tomik not to reveal her plan.
“So I went to the city to look for you,” Josef said.
“You did?”
“Of course. Do you think we would have waited around until you came home,
if
you came home? What would you’ve done in our shoes?
“I asked the beggar children about you. I saw homeless, crippled, and mad children your own age. And I had to go home empty-handed, thinking the worst things. Don’t you understand that when your da’s upset the way he is, it’s because he’s still seeing all the things that we thought must’ve happened to you? Even though you’re here and alive and safe? He blames himself that you left in the first place.”
As Petra listened, she imagined how everything could have gone wrong. She had never let herself think about it before, because then she might not have had the courage to go through with her plan. But she understood now what it would have been like if she had been caught, thrown into prison, or hanged. She realized that this would have given her father misery on top of his blindness. She imagined what it would have been like if she had returned home, as triumphant as she had felt only an hour ago, and discovered that her father was dying from a sickness, or from worry, or from anything. Then everything she had done would have been for nothing.
“Let’s go back,” Josef said, and held out his hand.
She took it.
W
HEN SHE WALKED
into the Sign of the Compass, she could hear Dita and her father arguing. They stopped when they heard the door creak. Her father turned around. He wore no bandages, and his face was whole and cured. His silver eyes gleamed. “Petra.” He walked toward her and put his hand on her cheek. He looked into her face. “Now, that—” he started to say. He tried again: “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
P
ETRA HAD TO LIE IN BED
for two weeks while she recovered from her fever. She wasn’t unhappy, however, for she had visitors.
Tomik, freed by his father, was at first thrilled to see Petra. The tin dog thumped her tail with fierce delight as she and Tomik stood by Petra’s bedside. Atalanta had grown into a hulking, bristling, sweet-tempered beast. The dog’s shoulders were powerful, but her slender flanks suggested that she might fill out even further. Oil dripped from her fangs as she wriggled her broad head under Petra’s arm. She drooled all over Petra’s pillow until it was splotched with grass-green stains.
Tomik proudly said that he had always known Petra would be able to accomplish what she had set out to do. He told her about his new inventions. Tomik had created an antidote to the Worry Vial’s flaw: a gel that coated the inside of the jar, just like Petra had suggested. Tomas Stakan’s gratitude had made Tomik’s virtual imprisonment at the Sign of Fire after Petra had disappeared a little more bearable. A little.
Tomik was impressed when Petra described how she had used his Marvels. “That much water?” he said. “I’ll have to fix that.” As
he mused about how to do that, he looked at his friend’s tired face. A sudden awareness of how much danger Petra had faced without him rose in his heart, and awoke the seeds of unpleasant questions: Should he have gone to Prague with Petra? Would their friendship change because he hadn’t?
“Maybe you should leave it as it is,” Petra suggested. “Make the next Bubble just like the first. It was pretty useful.” She didn’t notice the shadow that changed Tomik’s expression. Astrophil did, but he remained silent.
David made her tell the story over and over again. Neel was his new hero, and he kept pestering his mother to make a red and gold page’s jacket for him.
Dita scolded Petra for talking too much, reading too much, staying up too late, and overall doing just about everything she could do to avoid getting better. Petra found herself breaking rules deliberately, just so Dita would complain that she’d have to check in on Petra every hour, since the girl clearly didn’t have the wits to take care of herself. The cousins played this game with each other, and Petra realized, perhaps for the first time, that they played it with love.
After his rare burst of eloquence, Josef went quiet again. He nodded at Petra if he passed by her room. He said very little, as if he were embarrassed for having said so much. But then, he was busy, for he had a lot of work to do as a laborer. During the winter months, there wasn’t much work related to farming, so Josef hired himself out. He did odd jobs, repaired houses, and took care of horses. He rode Boshena. She obeyed him willingly, and he didn’t ask too much of her, for they recognized that some affinity rested between them.
Petra’s father came by her bedroom several times a day. Although he was no longer blind, the family had decided that this
should remain a secret from everyone but their closest friends, the Stakans. This meant that Mikal Kronos rarely left the house, and if he did, he had to wrap bandages over his face and pretend the need to lean on someone’s arm. He didn’t like to fake blindness. But he knew that word of his miraculous recovery could so easily reach the prince.
Petra and her father shared ideas as they had almost a year ago, before Mikal Kronos left for Prague to build a clock for Prince Rodolfo. But things were different. You could see this in the slightly stiff way that they talked together, as if they each wanted to ask for the other’s forgiveness.
One morning, Petra woke up at dawn. This was another way in which things had changed. Ever since she had worked as a servant, she had gotten used to rising early, and found that she liked it. Today she felt strong and well.
She slipped from her bed and went to her father’s library. Astrophil rode on her shoulder.
Petra shut the library door behind her, and then opened the secret compartment in the floor. She pulled out the bag of invisible tools. This action marked another change. For, you see, she now knew why her father had hidden that bag away. It was because the tools could be used as weapons.
She carefully sorted through the bag, trying not to prick her fingers on any sharp edges or points. Feeling along the invisible shapes, she found one that was not really a tool. It was not a screwdriver, or a hammer, or a wrench. It was a thin sword. She hefted it in her hand. It felt light. It felt as if it had been made for her. Indeed, it probably had been.
The greatest change of all for her family had been shouted by her father: they were no longer safe. He hadn’t meant to be so angry. He hadn’t meant to accuse her. Petra knew this. But she also
knew that some of the things he had said were true. It might not be long before the prince came looking for them.
She stared at the blade, even though she saw nothing.
What are you going to do with it?
She replied to Astrophil as if the answer were obvious: “I’m going to practice.”
W
HEN
I
VISITED PRAGUE
for the first time, my cousin David walked with me to see the astronomical clock that stands in the center of Old Town Square. He said that legend has it that the clockmaker, upon completion of his project, was blinded so that he could never build anything like it again.
David said nothing more on the subject, and I have never investigated this legend.
I don’t get to see my Czech cousins very often, but this past summer I found myself in Prague, sitting in an outdoor restaurant with him, his sister (Petra), his mother (Jana), and his grandmother (Mila). I told them about
The Cabinet of Wonders,
and reminded David of the conversation we had had about ten years ago by the clocktower.
He paused. Then, in that careful, generous way he has when speaking my language, he said, “But I think this legend is not true.”
It never mattered to me whether the story was true or not. Most of
The Cabinet of Wonders
is pure invention, brewed in my own personal Thinkers’ Wing laboratory. I took what I wanted from history. What I took, I changed.
The Cabinet of Wonders
is set during the European Renaissance,
at the very end of the sixteenth century, but my Renaissance has magic and all sorts of events that are different from what actually happened. Mikal Kronos’s clock is similar to the one David showed me, but it is not the same.
Prince Rodolfo is loosely based on Rudolf II, who was part of the Hapsburg family and inherited the title of Holy Roman Emperor after the death of his father, Maximilian II. Rudolf was already emperor and more than thirty years old when he moved his court from Vienna to Prague. Rodolfo, on the other hand, is very young and doesn’t have nearly as much power. But Rudolf and Rodolfo have something in common: they both owned a cabinet of wonders.
Originally, a cabinet of wonders was a piece of furniture meant to display odd, beautiful objects. Wealthy people built their collections over time, and a cabinet could house things like narwhal tusks (which some people thought were unicorn horns), oil paintings, and ostrich eggs. Sometimes a collection grew until the cabinet overflowed, and its contents filled an entire room. Then the collection filled many rooms. Eventually, it became what today we call a museum.
Rudolf II’s cabinet of wonders was one of the most impressive in Europe. The king was attracted to bizarre items, machinery, and new inventions. Magic fascinated him, and he welcomed people who claimed they could practice it.
One such person was John Dee. He was a real man, and a fascinating one at that. He was a well-known magician, mathematician, astrologer, adviser to Queen Elizabeth, a visitor to Bohemia, and (probably) a spy.
Dee and many other people in the Renaissance believed in the power of scrying. It was thought that only children could scry, and that they needed to stare at a crystal, mirror, or oil-covered surface in order to do it. Dee tried to teach his eight-year-old son, Arthur,
how to scry, though the boy saw nothing special in the crystal. Before you think that the real John Dee was just as unpleasant as mine, I should say that there are no historical documents about children losing their minds as a result of scrying. I made that part up.
Neel is fictional, but the Roma certainly are real. Though their origins are uncertain, the Roma likely came from India and then traveled throughout the Middle East, Europe, and other parts of the world, facing suspicion and even persecution. For five hundred years, they suffered enslavement in Romania until this was abolished in the nineteenth century. In more recent history, hundreds of thousands of Roma were killed during the Holocaust.
Although the Roma in
The Cabinet of Wonders
share some things in common with real Roma, Neel’s culture is highly fictionalized. The story of Danior has no origin in anything other than my imagination (and my love of elephants), but the one Neel tells Petra about the fiddler is based on a Hungarian Romany tale recorded by Vladislav Kornel in
A Book of Gypsy Folk-Tales.
I have changed this oral legend in several ways.
Now it’s time for me to confess something. I’m a little worried that someone, somewhere is going to object to the way I’ve manhandled history. I can already hear a disapproving sniff, followed by the words, “History is not a toy for you to play with, Marie.”
So I asked Astrophil what he thought.
He pondered. “But—correct me if I am wrong—you are not a historian.”
No, I replied. I write fiction.
“Did you make any promises to anyone to be historically accurate?” the spider asked.
Not that I recall.
“Well, then.” Astrophil settled into his favorite resting position. “I do not think you need to worry.”
Oh, good.
“I am also relieved,” he admitted. “After all,
I
am not historically accurate. But I exist.”
Which, I thought, was as good a perspective as I am likely to get.
December 2007
New York City
I owe my first thanks to my grandmother, Jennie Hlavac (born Zdenka Pavliek) for always keeping me aware of my Bohemian heritage. I am also grateful to our relatives Mila Kostova and Viktor, Jana, David, and Petra Valouch.
Many friends read drafts of
The Cabinet of Wonders,
offered me a beautiful place in which to write it, discussed ideas with me, or gave encouragement: Manuel Amador, Eric Bennett, Esther Duflo, Dave Elfving, Caroline Ellison, Francesco Franco (whose Genovese is acclaimed in several countries), Erik Gray, Dominic Leggett, Jonathan Murphy, Becky Rosenthal, and Holger Syme. My greatest debt is to two amazing friends: Neel Mukherjee and Bret Anthony Johnston. This book would not exist without you.
I’m grateful to Charlotte Sheedy, Meredith Kaffel, Violaine Huisman, and Marcy Posner for their faith in
Cabinet.
Finally, many thanks to Janine O’Malley, who helped make this book the best it could be. I’m lucky to have such a wise and delightful editor.