A Sojourn in Bohemia Read online

  “Do say hello to the peasants for me,” Varanus said, exchanging a smirk.

  As she watched Ekaterine flit away to her next source of amusement, Varanus caught sight of Julius approaching, now in the company of the two officers whom Varanus had recently overheard. A glance told her that neither of the men recognized her, so it seemed likely her eavesdropping remained a secret. And that was just as well, since their business was of no interest to her.

  “Princess Shashavani,” Julius greeted her, smiling warmly. “I hope you are enjoying our little soiree.”

  “As I said when you asked me an hour ago, it is a splendid affair, Count,” Varanus replied.

  The two of them paused for a moment exchanging a knowing look. Varanus still remembered the pleasant warmth of Julius’s soft lips when he had asked her the first time and the intoxicating reverberations of the pulse in his throat.…

  Stop that, Varanus reminded herself. Julius was a friend, not someone to be eaten, though he would probably be quite delicious, she concluded.

  Before their lingering stare could become too obvious, Julius motioned to the other two men and said:

  “Princess, may I introduce you to two of my oldest friends? This is Colonel Graf von Steiersberg,” he indicated the Austrian man, named Franz, “and Count Istvan Erdelyi, both of them my honored guests from Austria-Hungary.”

  Erdelyi smiled and quipped, “Yes, together Franz and I are both halves of the Empire.”

  “A pleasure, gentlemen,” Varanus replied, carefully studying them.

  The two men were quite polite, and they shared Julius’s aristocratic dignity, but there was something about them that was not altogether likeable. They lacked Julius’s geniality. Their smiles were less pleasing, their pride something more like arrogance.

  “Franz, Istvan,” Julius said, “this is the Princess Shashavani, the very charming wife of my new friend. I believe I mentioned the Shashavanis before.”

  Von Steiersberg chuckled and said, “Do not be mistaken, Princess. Julius speaks of you and your husband constantly. His ‘new friends’, as if his old ones are no good for him.”

  At this, the three men laughed together, and Varanus only thought it polite to join in.

  “Well, it is wonderful to meet Count von Raabe’s old friends,” she remarked, smiling pleasantly and quietly hoping to end the conversation.

  She rather suspected that Erdelyi’s missing daughter was none other than Friedrich’s young friend Erzsebet. The mention of a radical violinist with whom she had fled all but confirmed it. Nor was it much of a coincidence when Varanus took a moment to think about it. Aristocracy was a close-knit institution, crisscrossed all across the continent with ties of marriage and camaraderie. If she had bothered to spend any real time hobnobbing with the notables in the Empire for the past year, she suspected that she would have encountered either Von Steiersberg or Erdelyi long before now.

  She would have to write Friedrich a letter warning him. The affairs of his artist friends were of no real interest to her, but she did not want him becoming caught in the middle of things.

  “Well, I certainly hope that I at least will be seeing more of you and your husband,” Von Steiersberg said. “Julius certainly will.”

  Again the men laughed.

  “I don’t quite follow,” Varanus said.

  “Oh, I should explain,” Julius told her. “Franz has a house in Prague for when he is there on business, and he has generously allowed me the use of it. So, you…and the Prince will have to call on me there after our collective return to Bohemia.”

  He grinned at her and winked ever so slightly, which made Varanus smile at the insinuation. But her smile was suddenly interrupted as she chanced to look past Julius and saw Korbinian standing in the center of the room, his face and clothes wet with blood, as the other guests flitted about around him, ignorant of his presence.

  Suddenly the candles burned low and the room grew dark. Soon there was nothing there but Varanus and Korbinian and the blood. And the shadows, which seemed to writhe about the two of them, caressing Varanus’s face with their formless fingers, smearing her hands with Korbinian’s freshly spilt blood. A ringing noise filled Varanus’s ears, drowning out the talk and the laughter and the gaiety, a sound not quite like that of buzzing flies nor of an Edison bulb a moment before its filament snapped.

  And through the noise, she heard Korbinian’s gentle, loving voice whisper over and over again:

  “Are you having fun, Liebchen?”

  Suddenly, the sound of Von Steiersberg speaking interrupted the vision and dragged Varanus, silently screaming, back into the waking world.

  “Do not make yourself too comfortable on your own, my friend,” Von Steiersberg was saying to Julius. He exchanged a look with Istvan, and the two of them shared a little smile. “I suspect that business will bring me to Prague very soon.”

  “Well, the more the merrier!” Julius announced, his cheerful tone so contrary to the anguish and shivers that Varanus was even then struggling to conceal behind decades of discipline. “Won’t that be a delight, Princess?”

  Varanus stared into the empty space at the center of the room where Korbinian had recently stood, now without any trace of him or his cascading blood. It was all she could do to nod in agreement and put on a smile.

  “A delight,” she managed to say without her voice shaking. “An absolute treat, I’m sure.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The morning after the soiree was a late one, for the revelry had lasted well after midnight. Many of the local guests had already departed before sunrise, ferried back home by their exhausted coachmen; but the dozen or so who remained enjoyed a late breakfast together a little after noon. And having refreshed themselves for the day, the guests were then taken on a tour of the nearby Valkenburg castle, complete with a picnic luncheon.

  The sky was gray and overcast, which Iosef regarded as a favorable sign. Though it might threaten rain, it meant that he was free to go about unshrouded, keeping his veil atop his wide-brimmed hat in case a sudden parting of the clouds threatened the burning of the sun. Sunglasses were still necessary to shield his eyes, but aside from a mild tickling of the skin, he carried through the day unscathed. It was a testament to the regimen of limited sun exposure that he had carried out almost daily for two hundred years. Another century and he would be completely free of the sun’s threat, but that was still some time off. And, of course, Varanus was still obliged to go about fully veiled, as both her youth and the laxity of her sunlight regimen kept her flesh vulnerable to the light. Fortunately, as a woman, a veil did not appear too out of place: certainly nowhere near as strange as if Iosef had been forced to wear it.

  Valkenburg was surprisingly intact for a ruin. True, its outer walls were crumbling, but the inner keep still stood despite more than a century of abandonment. It was a fortress that had been built to withstand the elements as well as armies. As Iosef strolled through the central courtyard with the others, he found himself casting his eyes skyward, as if tempting the sun to reveal itself.

  Adrift in contemplation, Iosef reached into his coat pocket and felt for the amulet. Its cold touch against his fingertips brought him back to clarity, as it always did: back to the world and to the one thing it now lacked. The one voice that ever whispered:

  Sophio, Sophio, Sophio.

  “How are you faring, my brother?”

  Startled, Iosef looked and saw Luka walking alongside him. His sworn brother seemed rather cheerful, in his own way. The man puffed on his long-stemmed pipe and had a half smile about his lips. Evidently he had had an enjoyable evening.

  “I am well,” Iosef replied, quickly pulling his hand away from the amulet and folding his arms. “I am merely in contemplation.”

  “Of course, brother,” Luka said. He took another puff of smoke. “Strange people these Prussians. Disciplined and also cheerf
ul. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “I suspect it is only these Prussians who are cheerful,” Iosef said.

  “Mmm,” Luka mused. “That would make far more sense.” He took a long breath of smoke and exhaled. “Why are we here, brother?”

  “To see the castle,” Iosef answered.

  Luka snorted. “I mean why are here in Germany? I understand the Doctor’s motivation.… I do not understand yours.”

  “We are here because I want to learn what Julius von Raabe knows about a subject of mutual interest.”

  “More of your ‘black goat’ nonsense,” Luka grumbled. “Why has it so captured your fancy, Iosef? You cannot believe that such a thing is real!”

  “No, I certainly do not,” Iosef said. He placed a hand on Luka’s shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Come now, Luka, you know me better than that. I do not believe in demons or phantoms. The Black Goat is not real. The Horned Serpent is not real. But the people who worshipped them were real. The amulets are real.”

  “That damned amulet again.” Luka swore and shook his head. “It is playing tricks with your mind.”

  “Not the amulet,” Iosef corrected. “The two amulets. Almost identical, yet one was found in Turkestan and the other in Poland. These are rare and precious things, not trinkets to be distributed through trade and barter. Who made them, Luka? Where did they come from? From the steppes of Turkestan or from the Polish plain? It cannot have been both.”

  They turned down a ruined cloister that ran along the main keep. The cloister’s roof had almost entirely collapsed, revealing the gray sky. A flock of crows sat perched along the top of the ruined wall. As Iosef and Luka approached, the birds flew into the air with a chorus of angry caws.

  “There is some peculiar mystery behind all of this,” Iosef continued. “There is a connection—of culture, of faith, of mythology—that I do not yet see. And I will find it.”

  Luka was silent for a time. “Iosef,” he finally said, “discovering the origin of that piece of metal will not bring her back.”

  Iosef stopped short and looked skyward, inhaling a deep breath of air.

  “This is not about her,” he said.

  “Of course it is,” Luka replied. “Ever since you returned from Turkestan, you have been obsessed with that amulet.” Luka circled around and stood before Iosef, staring into his eyes. “It is not her, Iosef! It is not some fragment of her that you can keep with you! Some mystery to unravel to bring her back!” He grabbed Iosef’s shoulders and looked at him, torn between anger and despair. “She is gone and you remain and you must accept that, Iosef.”

  Iosef was silent as he stared back at Luka. He had heard this before over the past five years, many times and with increasing regularity. He did not blame Luka for it. Five years were barely a moment for him, so short a time that it truly felt like Sophio’s death had happened that very day—and yet, also so far away that it seemed a hundred lifetimes ago. But his pain was Luka’s pain, he knew that. And though he hid his suffering well, he knew that Luka saw it every moment of every day that the two of them passed company together.

  “I am aware, Luka,” he said softly.

  He stared past Luka at the haze of fog swirling about the far end of the cloister. Even in the wisps and clouds, he still saw Sophio: her dark hair that flowed like water about her shoulders, the bloodless alabaster of her cheeks, the glimmering black jewels of her eyes.

  “But when Basileios took her from me, there was no part of her left for me to mourn over. The fire saw to that. That piece of metal is all that I have. It is the only thing that remains.” Iosef blinked slowly, anticipating a tear that would not quite form in his eye. “I know that it is nonsense, but it is a comforting nonsense. I beg you, Luka, let me have my foolish obsession. Let me grasp at smoke and find nothing, and in that nothingness let me find my peace.”

  Luka did not reply, but he looked away and frowned. Iosef desired to be alone with his thoughts and with his grief, and he knew that Luka understood that. Luka always understood. But that did not mean he liked it.

  And so, without another word, Iosef stepped past Luka and continued down the crumbling hallway and into the fog, as the crows circled above him, softly cawing:

  Sophio. Sophio. Sophio.

  * * * *

  “A curious name, ‘Valkenburg’,” Varanus remarked to Julius, as she strolled with him through the ruins of the castle keep. Somewhere behind them, the rest of the luncheon party lingered in the courtyard, being regaled by Ekaterine about her adventures in Siberia and “uncharted Kent”.

  “It is Dutch, actually,” Julius explained, smiling in acknowledgement of the curiosity.

  “A Dutch name for a German castle?” Varanus asked, poking Julius with her fingertip. “How does one accomplish that?”

  Julius chuckled. “It was named for a knight of the Teutonic Order, Claes van Valkenburg, who died valiantly in battle against the pagans that occupied these lands. He was hacked to pieces by the chieftain’s bodyguard as he slew their leader with his bare hands.”

  “With his bare hands?” Now it was Varanus’s turn to chuckle. “Had he dropped his sword?”

  “Oh, you mock!” Julius protested.

  Varanus glanced over her shoulder to be sure that they were out of eyesight from the others, and she leaned over and kissed Julius on the cheek.

  “I do mock,” she said, which made Julius laugh. “But come now…a valiant Teutonic crusader losing his sword in the midst of battle? It is a little absurd, you must admit.”

  “I did not say that he had lost it,” Julius replied.

  “Oh, I see. He ‘chose’ not to use it.”

  An absurd display of warrior prowess, no doubt. And just as surely invented by some later hagiographer seeking to inflate the dead knight’s accomplishments.

  They passed into a large hall filled with broken stone and the remnants of habitation. This had probably been the place where the garrison had taken its meals, as witnessed by the great hearth built into one wall that was clearly meant to bring light and warmth to an otherwise cold and gloomy chamber. Varanus saw a flock of crows watching them from a second-floor balcony. She smiled at the sight of them. Such pretty creatures. They often reminded her of…someone.

  Varanus looked around, admiring the remains of what had once been a majestic structure. How tragic that it had fallen into such neglect.

  Suddenly, the fluttering of wings drew her attention back to the crows as they took off in a torrent of black feathers. And in their place, she saw Korbinian on the balcony, his arms folded and resting on the stone balustrade. Blood trickled from his eyes like tears as he watched her watching him.

  “According to the legend—” Julius said, carrying on with his story in ignorance of Varanus’s distress.

  Varanus looked back at him, feeling her own heartbeat for the first time that day. “What?” she asked breathlessly. She quickly cast a glance at the balcony and found it empty save for the crows, who had never left it.

  Julius looked surprised. “The legend of Brother Claes’s death.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Varanus said. She put on a smile. “Please continue.”

  If Julius took note of her peculiar behavior, he said nothing about it, instead returning to the story like nothing had happened:

  “According to the legend, this land was inhabited by devil-worshippers. Not that a reasonable man believes such stories, of course,” he quickly added. “But the chronicler who wrote the tale down does clearly note that this tribe was unlike the other Baltic pagans. They did not share the same gods, and they were feared and hated even more than the crusaders.”

  “Ah, and so the Teutonic Order, unable to tolerate coming second, sought to redress the matter,” Varanus quipped. “I see.”

  Julius laughed softly and placed his hand on hers where it rested upon his arm. He let it
linger and she did not complain.

  “You are a devilish woman, my dear Varanus,” he said. “Imagine, mocking my ancestors so.”

  “At least my ancestors never lost their swords in a fight.”

  “I am coming to that.” Julius waved an admonishing finger at her and then tapped it against the tip of her nose. “If only you will allow me to finish.”

  Varanus wrinkled her nose at the touch, but it was gentle and the touch made in jest. “Continue,” she said.

  “These ‘devil-worshippers’ were said to burn horned effigies and to worship the very smoke of their unholy fire.” Julius shook his head. “Obviously, some form of agricultural deity now lost to the ferocity of the crusaders. But the legend says that bathing in this smoke made the tribesmen impervious to steel and utterly unfeeling of pain, so that when the knights came against them, the knights’ metal swords were rendered useless, unable even to bruise the flesh of their enemies, while the tribesmen, gifted with demonic strength, clove the knights’ armor to pieces with a single blow.”

  Varanus couldn’t help but scoff at such superstition. “Smoke bathing?” she asked. “Clearly I must take it up.”

  “You must,” Julius agreed, sharing a laugh with her. “It will be all the talk of Saint Petersburg.”

  “Milk bathing is good for my youth and complexion,” Varanus continued, grinning, “but sadly it does nothing against swords.”

  “And a woman of your station must surely be threatened by the blades of long-dead knights almost constantly,” Julius noted.

  “How ever did I manage until now?”

  They laughed again, loudly and with great delight. Varanus pulled Julius’s arm against her and rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. He looked at her and smiled.

  Beyond the great hall, Julius led her through a wide corridor and into the heart of the castle: the crumbling, rain-sodden remains of its once great chapel. It was an austere house of worship, fitting for a military order, although Varanus suspected that whatever treasures it had once held were long-removed to more secure and inhabited places. The windows were done in elegant stained glass, although most of them were broken. The sunlight that drifted in from the clouded sky shone feebly through the glass, filling the misty air with fragments of blue and red and green that could never quite form a coherent picture. The roof was broken in several places, leaving pieces of shattered slate in heaps on the stone floor.