Burning Twilight (3 page)

I climbed out, pulled a short knife from my belt, and cut the ropes binding her wrists. She was still unresponsive, so I propped her against a rock, pried her mouth open and put my fingers down her throat. She had swallowed the gag, but I was able to get a piece of it. And the bastards must have used an oily rag, because when I pulled it out of her, the evil thing was black and blue and slippery. Then she vomited up all the water she had swallowed and started gasping for air, and shivering with cold.

By now Rabbi Loew had crossed the narrow bridge and was coming toward us, holding my cloak and a small bundle that presumably belonged to our new acquaintance. I seized my cloak from him and wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders, rubbing her arms to get the circulation going while the rabbi rustled about gathering driftwood for a fire.

She babbled a bit about how “they” were coming for her, so I put my hand on her shoulder to steady her and said, “I think we’re on the Polish side of the border now. So you’re safe.”

“S-S-Safe from what?” she said, her teeth chattering.

“Safe from the Germans.”

Rabbi Yaakov of Toledo says that delivering a person from the Eretz Gezerah, the Land of Calamity, his term for the German Empire, is the same as saving their life.

She saw the faded circles on our cloaks where we had recently worn our yellow badges.

“You’re Jews?” she said, suddenly quite lucid.

Her green eyes sharpened and I waited for the inevitable curses, but they never came.

Good. That would make it easier for us. The Sages say that the value of a single human being is so great that all but three of the 613 Commandments may be suspended for the sake of one life. So we built a fire to warm ourselves, even though Shabbes would arrive shortly with the setting sun and we didn’t have much time to spare. It was already the twelfth of Iyar of the year 5352 (April 24, 1592, on the Christian calendar), in the fourth year of the reign of King Sigismund III of Poland, Protector of Jews, and we only had a couple of weeks to get to Poznan, where Rabbi Loew was set to rejoin his family and become chief rabbi.

Rabbi Loew rested his bones on a jagged rock and lent me his cloak. The strange woman thanked him for returning her bundle, and after some clumsy handling and averting of the eyes, the two of us sat around the fire watching the steam rise from our drying clothes. The Maharil— the renowned Talmudist Jacob ha-Levi—advises us to dress in tattered clothing while traveling, to avoid attracting robbers, but I only had one set of clothes, which were already quite tattered, so it was a moot point with me.

As the dirty blond hair clinging to the woman’s broad forehead dried and the color came back to her face, she told us her name was Castava, or Kassy for short.

“So you are a Bohemian,” Rabbi Loew observed. “Your name harks back to the warring maidens of pagan times.”

“Right. And I’ve just been kicked out of my homeland.” She drew my cloak tightly around her shoulders and inched closer to the fire.

“Really? It looked more like you were thrown out,” I said.

“You have a strange sense of humor, Jew.”

“The Germans thought so too,” I said, since our people had recently been cast out from all but a handful of German cities, and expelled from the Kingdom of Naples, where we had lived since the days of the Roman Empire.

“We’ve been exiled from so many places, we’ve lost count,” I said. “The last town was so crowded even the cemetery was twelve layers deep.”

“You’re from the Prague ghetto?”

I caught the rabbi’s eye. Our Bohemian friend was clearly more knowledgeable than most.

She told us she had worked as an herbalist and healer in the Protestant neighborhood of Bethlehem Chapel—that is, until she was brought before the Inquisition.

“On what charges?” asked Rabbi Loew.

“What do you think?”

Rabbi Loew lowered his eyes and nodded his understanding of the madness that had been sweeping through the German Reich.

“Don’t you know that ‘midwives surpass all others in wickedness’?” said Kassy, quoting the Inquisitor’s handbook.

“And that’s what this business of tossing you in the river was about?” I said.

“The only reason they didn’t try to burn me alive was because they were too lazy and stupid to gather up the wood,” she said with a cynical chuckle.

I told her not to worry, that she was among Jews now, and the Jews were experts at making the best of a bad situation.

“That must be true,” she replied, “for I have heard that when God sent the Plague of Blood against Pharaoh’s people, the Israelites learned to profit from it by selling fresh water to the Egyptians that they alone could supply.”

“At least according to the
Midrash Tanchuma,
” I said, uneasy about what she might be implying. I mean, I’m sure it worked in the desert, but you couldn’t make money selling bottled water to people nowadays.

“We’d better find our way to the nearest village before dark,” said Rabbi Loew, leaning on his staff and rising to his feet.

“I don’t even know your names,” she said.

She had heard of the famous Rabbi Loew of Prague, of course. The great Maharal was known throughout the Four Lands, but my name was new to her. Actually, it was pretty new to me too. I was still getting used to the “Rabbi” part.

“Thank you for saving me from a cold and lonely death, Rabbi Benyamin. I know that you didn’t have to. A lot of men wouldn’t take a risk like that for someone they don’t even know.”

I said, “God commands us not to stand idly by when your neighbor is in danger.”

Especially if your neighbor is a pretty blond woman.

S
till, we thought it best to keep off the main road for a while. So we found a narrow path through the forest and hurried through the brambles, stepping over the fallen trees and catching our clothes on thornbushes so tirelessly devoted to ensnaring us they belonged in one of those fairy tales about an enchanted castle with a sleeping princess in the topmost tower. Dead branches crackled underfoot as we stepped into a clearing, then Kassy’s hand flew to her mouth as she stifled a cry.

The early spring grass was trampled in all directions and spattered with blood. In the center of this lay the body of a nobleman who looked like he had been torn apart by wild animals. His clothes were shredded and his flesh had bled out from countless lacerations.

Kassy crossed herself while I said a silent prayer. Then I spat twice, and we approached the body.

This nobleman had fought bravely for his life. A series of elongated drops of blood in the dirt tapered to sharp points, indicating that he had kept moving, maneuvering quickly even while wounded. And a section of clean white shirt under the blood-smeared brocade suggested that at least one part of his doublet had been bloodied
before
it was sliced open. But the mortal blow was of an immense savagery—at least a half pint of blood had spurted onto the grass from a main artery, and the blow had sent tiny dots of red nearly fifteen feet from the spot.

Kassy’s green eyes followed every movement as I unsheathed my knife and carefully lifted the hem of the nobleman’s garment with the point. I searched the surrounding area the same way, gently flattening the grass with the blade of my knife so as not to get any of the blood on myself.

“No sign of a weapon,” I said.

“You mean, besides the one in his right hand?” said Kassy. The lifeless hand still gripped an ornate sword with a few drops of blood smeared on it, but there was no way of telling whose blood it was. The victim’s fourth finger bore a gold signet ring with a double-headed eagle on a red and white striped background.

“I mean no sign of the weapon that did this to him.”

“Oh, the signs are there,” said Rabbi Loew. “They are written all over his body. We just have to find the author of these wounds.”

I poked around the large puddle of blood but didn’t find anything worth reporting, except that the nobleman’s boots were missing.

Kassy watched me curiously. “Tell me, Rabbi Benyamin, isn’t it your belief that the blood of a dead man is ritually unclean?”

Very few Christians know such things about our ways, so I took a moment to answer her accordingly. “The Mishnah says the blood that gushes forth while a man is still alive is unclean, while the blood that drips from a corpse is clean. But Rabbi Judah disagrees. In fact, he says the opposite. So we figure it’s better to play it safe and treat all such blood as unclean.”

“It’s like something out of the tales of Oddo the pirate,” said Kassy, surveying the carnage. “They say he could raise storms and blind his enemies with fantastical visions of flashing swords.”

“Where’d you hear
that
?” I asked.

“I didn’t hear it. I read it in the works of Saxo Grammaticus.”

It was the rare woman who could read, at least among the Christians, whose literate females were mostly cloistered nuns or countesses with a flair for dabbling in poetry. I had only heard of this grammatical Saxon once or twice before.

“ ‘Saxo Grammaticus’? What does that mean? The German who can read?”

“I suppose that would be an acceptable translation of his name,” said Kassy, her mouth curling into a feline smile. “He’s best known as a rhetorical philosopher—”

But her brief show of levity vanished at the sound of voices coming our way.

I looked toward the north edge of the clearing. A silver cross was bobbing along at the head of a solemn procession, its edges burning with an orange glow from the setting sun before slipping into shadow as a group of villagers advanced through the darkening wood.

A priest was chanting in Latin, but I didn’t recognize it at first: “Hominum filiis a eorum semen et perdes terra de eorum fructum. Ignis eos devorabit et eos conturbabit sua ira in Dominus. Tui vultus tempore in ignis clibanum ut eos pones.”

Something about the sons of men and their seed losing the fruits of the earth and being devoured by the flames of God’s wrath. It sounded like the Twenty-first Psalm, but—

Then I realized: “They’re saying it backward.”

“Aye, to ward off the effects of witchcraft,” said Kassy, with a note of bitterness.

A twig cracked behind us.

I turned and discovered that our escape route had been blocked by the same band of brigands I had chased away before with my pseudo-Kabbalistic curses. Rabbi Loew has warned me many times about the dangers of using such hocus-pocus tactics, but they outnumbered us ten-to-one and it was all I could think of on such short notice.

“There she is!” said one of them, pointing at us.

I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever make it to Poznan, or if our journey would end here, in some lonely spot you couldn’t even find on a map of the German Empire
or
the Polish kingdom because it lay somewhere between the two and was too small to matter in either case.

“She must have cast one of her spells on him,” said another, drawing a rusty sword that looked like it had been beaten from a plowshare sometime during the peasant wars. And I saw that these were not brigands, but villagers—ignorant, terrified villagers advancing toward us, keeping close to each other.

I planted myself in front of Kassy, while Rabbi Loew stood at her back, protecting her with nothing but his long gray beard and years of accumulated wisdom.

“You bring proof from where?” I demanded.

“Just look at her face—”

“You can tell she’s guilty!” said a crooked little man with a huge gap in his front teeth.

“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” said Kassy.

“See how quickly she answers!”

“There’s no surer sign of guilt!” said the little man.

I asked if anyone could identify the victim, since he was clearly a prominent nobleman.

“What’s wrong with you? Everyone knows that’s Sir Tadeusz Strekov, eldest son of Lord Strekov,” said a stocky villager with an unshaven face.

“No wonder he defended himself so well,” said Rabbi Loew, endeavoring to show respect for the local gentry.

“And look at the size of that wound,” I said, pointing to the puddle of blood. “I doubt that a woman would have that kind of strength against a young nobleman armed with a gilded sword.”

“Not if she used magic on him.”

“If she knew magic, you wouldn’t have been able to tie her hands behind her back and throw her in the river.”

“Everyone knows the river takes away her powers!”

I couldn’t argue with that manner of logic. Rabbi Loew says that what separates man from the rest of the animals is his ability to reason, but sometimes I have to wonder.

“Who are you to defy us?”

“I am Rabbi Yehudah Ben Betzalel of Poznan,” said Rabbi Loew.

“Oh. So you’re Jews. It figures.”

“What is she being accused of?” I said.

“You tell ’em, Father Stefan.”

The priest stepped out from behind the cross with his lips pinched together as if he were being asked to empty a sick man’s chamber pot. With his fine blond hair and soft pink face, he looked more like an oversized baby than a fire-breathing crusader, but one should never underestimate the zealotry of a Polish priest.