The Bloodletter's Daughter (22 page)

“I am yours, good angel. Please never leave me again,” said Don Julius, his voice suddenly high and trembling. “The demons retreat at the sound of your voice.”

As the two men retreated into the hall, they could hear the contented sighs of King Rudolf II’s son.

There were no more screams.

T
HE
C
ODED
B
OOK OF
W
ONDER

Alone with Don Julius, Marketa continued to apply the leeches. He winced, not at the nip of the leech, but at his awkward position.

“This chair is damned uncomfortable,” he complained, grimacing. “I have an ache in my back that consumes me. A deep pain has dug into my shoulder blades. But those men—they do not care about my torment!”

Marketa moved quietly behind him, slipped her hand between his shoulders, and eased him as far forward as the ropes would allow. She dug her strong fingers into his aching muscles, loosening them with her experienced touch.

“Oh, oh!” Don Julius groaned. “What healing hands you have, fräulein!”

Marketa said nothing, but continued softening the knots on his back, her brisk movements warming his muscles and encouraging blood to return into his stiff body. Under her fingers she could feel his vertebrae and ribs, and she realized that he was growing leaner more swiftly than she thought.

“
Mein Gott
!” he sighed. “How you give me comfort!”

“We must have the carpenter build you a proper chair for bleedings,” murmured Marketa as she rubbed, melting the pain. “One that reclines so you may lie comfortably on soft cushions. Your spine needs to be supported. And an armrest that splays wide.” Marketa’s mind conjured up the details of the chair as she continued to massage Don Julius. “An elevated leg rest, so you can recline and we can reach your inner thighs. And slats to allow my hands to touch your spine, unimpeded.”

Don Julius swallowed hard and purred to her, “Think how much easier it would be to administer the leeches were I untied and lying in my own bed, with you beside me.”

Marketa stopped the back rub and dropped her hands to her side. “I will speak to Doctor Mingonius today about commissioning the carpenter to construct the chair.”

“So that your hands can more easily reach my groin,” whispered Don Julius. “How could I not beg for such a chair!”

Marketa felt the gaze of the smirking guards. She reminded herself she was practicing medicine. She cleared her throat and lifted her chin.

“You will not speak to me in that fashion or I shall leave. You must understand that. Now, with your permission, my lord, we shall continue treatment.”

“By all means, Fräulein Doctor,” murmured her patient, drowsily. His flesh had melted under her hands, and he still felt the flush of heat in his back.

Marketa moved around to face him. Her hands dipped into the bucket, and she retrieved a torpid leech. She warmed it in her hands, letting it smell the blood that lay close to the fine skin of her fingers.

“Pray tell, Don Julius,” she said, to keep his mind engaged as she rolled the mouth of a leech to the thin skin of his ankle. “What is the Coded Book of which you and Doctor Mingonius speak?”

Don Julius leaned back, savoring her touch as she held the leech to the prominent vein above the sole of his foot. It bit and he flinched, smiling slowly.

“You pretend you do not know the book, and yet you are one of its principal players! As you are in the bathhouse below.”

Marketa’s skin prickled. She did not like that Don Julius knew anything about her life, but the bathhouse was in plain view from his window. Clients arrived rumpled and dirty and emerged wet and clean.

“What does my mother’s bathhouse have to do with an enchanted book?” she demanded.

“Ah,” said Don Julius. “When you stepped from its pages, you must have lost your memory, your mind is befuddled. You have always been a bathmaid, and a most seductive one. You are the one of slim hips with a cherub hiding behind you, peeking around your waist.”

Marketa pressed her lips together tight in frustration. “I have a perfectly good memory, and I have never seen or heard of any such Coded Book, nor of bathing angels and cherubs. This is a delusion, a product of the humors that swirl unbalanced in your head.”

Don Julius sighed, a sad look overtaking his face. “Pity to forget your origins. Still, you must hold the secrets, if only we could persuade you to remember.”

This conversation is not going well
, thought Marketa as she moved a leech to another point on his leg.
He does not follow reason; he lives in his own fantastical world.
She took a deep breath. She needed to know more.

It was she who would play mad now.

“Perhaps you are right—I have forgotten my origins,” she said. “But if I were to see the pages, I might remember.”

Don Julius straightened and looked down at her.

“You are so clever! Yes, I will procure the book and share it with you! You will help me decode it, once you see your world
again in its pages. And then my father the king will find favor in me once more and we will return to Prague together to be married!”

Marketa fished another leech from the bucket. The king indulged his eldest son generously, even if he was mad as a rabid dog. His fine clothes, his stable of horses, a dozen servants. His own castle and estate. What would he give his son were he to behave as a normal man? The stars in the heavens above, all manner of riches. But marry a common bathmaid? The thought was, itself, a symptom of his madness.

Marketa knew better than to argue with a madman.

She realized that his behavior at this point was beyond his control, but perhaps if he had some objective clearly focused in his mind, his behavior could change. After all, they were wringing the bad humors from his blood, drop by drop.

“I want you to pretend that I have never seen or lived in the book,” she said. “Imagine you were speaking to a stranger and explain the contents of the magical book in all of its splendor.”

“Ah!” he said. “A game? But you will laugh at me, because I cannot know its depths—it is undecipherable to man.”

“Ah, but that is what I want—to know what a mortal perceives. While the leeches purge your humors, tell me your story.”

Don Julius looked down at the leeches at his legs and ankles, and then back to Marketa’s face.

“It is the work of a magician, a sorcerer, a hermetic,” he began, closing his eyes. “The symbols speak of the marriage of the moon and sun, the polar opposites, as in the Kabbalah or the Hermetic Principles of Egypt. The first section deals with all sorts of plants, flowers, and herbs used for medicines. A catalog collected by witches and sorcerers. Recipes conveyed from an ancient’s toothless mouth to the tender ear of the next generation through the ages.

“The next quires are dedicated to the zodiac and the stars, a study of the heavens. You and your sisters mark the twelve signs of the zodiac—bathmaids crowded into the circle, your breasts and nipples erect above the barrel’s rim. All are pregnant, except you. You appear slim-hipped, by far the most beautiful and the most seductive. You are the only virgin.”

Marketa blushed but was too fascinated for the color to remain in her cheeks for long. What was the point of being modest in front of a madman?

“It is you who hold the deepest secrets,” he went on. “You protected me.” He fell silent for a long moment, then spoke in a smaller voice. “You kept away the evil voices. You saved me from them. And then...” His voice tapered off, halting, uncertain, as if it came from far away.

And then, silence. Don Julius slumped in his chair in a swoon, tears running down his cheeks, as the bleeding finally took its toll.

A C
HANCE FOR
P
EACE

In the hunting lodge near Katterburg, Austria, torches flickered in the darkness. Here, amid the dense foliage of pine and beech, not far from the front lines of the war against the Ottomans, lay the sanctuary of Matthias, archduke of Upper and Lower Austria.

Matthias’s father, Emperor Maximillian II, had inherited a hunting lodge on this spot, but it had burned to the ground. One day when Matthias was hunting, he had seen the charred remains of the lodge and, near it, the clear waters of a spring. The bubbling fount pooled against the green grass and rocks, shaded by a canopy of great beech trees.

The waters sparkled innocent and pure. Matthias tied his horse to a nearby tree, removed his riding boots, and dangled his bare feet in the cool waters.

He called it Schönbrunn—beautiful spring.

And though the Katterburg property lay within the domain of Rudolf’s empire, it was Matthias who fell in love with the spot and swore to restore it.

Being one of sixteen children, Matthias did not have a close relationship with his father, and really only knew him by gazing at the oil portraits of the emperor in Hofburg Palace. Emperor Maximillian had brought peace to the kingdoms of Moravia, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. Though he had no time for his many children, he had found time to cultivate tulips in his beloved
hrad
gardens in the city of Prague.

How Matthias longed to behold a tulip now, a sign of peace and tranquility. Only with respite from war could one occupy oneself with planting bulbs and pruning fruit trees.

Matthias spat on the ground, thinking of the lush beauty of his brother Rudolf’s
hrad
gardens, cultivated by a royal physician no less. What was his name—Horcicky? A physician should leave the pruning shears to a gardener and instead administer to the ranks of the dying soldiers littering the countryside of Hungary. But Rudolf kept the doctor tending orchids in Prague.

How could his brother dare breathe such sweet perfumes as lilacs and jasmine when the borders of his own kingdom burned!

Their father had brought peace during his reign. He had turned a deaf ear to the pope and had given Protestants equal rights, stifling the beginnings of the Reformation. Maximillian had paid tribute to the Ottomans to purchase peace in Hungary. He ruled a far-flung empire without the fires of war.

Matthias felt a connection to his father in Schönbrunn that did not exist during the emperor’s lifetime. The peace and tranquility of the Austrian countryside gave him strength and clear vision after the stench and smoke of war. He longed to find a way to bring peace to the Holy Roman Empire, just as his father had once done.

On that first day by the spring, Matthias had stared down at the clear waters, untainted by battle, greed, and power. Upon his return to Linz, he had commanded that the lodge be rebuilt, so he could enjoy his solitude in the green hills of Austria.

Matthias had grown weary of war. As a young man of twenty, he had joined forces with the Protestants against his own uncle, Felipe II of Spain, in the battle for control of the Netherlands. It was a reckless adventure that enraged the entire Hapsburg family, but it branded him as the Soldier King, distinguishing him indelibly from his hermit-like brother Rudolf.

But his tranquil moment of discovery by the spring and his youthful daring in the Netherlands were long behind him. Now his eyes were rimmed bright red, burning and raw from the constant smoke of the battles against the Ottomans along the Hungarian border and the scorched scent of fires perfumed his woolen clothes. He woke at night, gasping for breath, from a recurring dream of long tongues of flames licking his beloved Schönbrunn.

On these nights, it seemed to him his entire life was defined by war and nothing else. He was weary of death and dying, of bloated bodies, and most of all, endless battles under religious flags, flapping pointlessly in the wind. So when the messenger rode up to the lodge at a full gallop, Matthias had the rider sent to him immediately.

Matthias was eager to see the proposal for peace.

It was on a sleepless night that the seed of compromise was planted. Matthias’s stewardship of Hungary would forever be defined by the Peace of Vienna.

Matthias held the tallow candle low and closer to the parchment map, being careful to catch the dripping wax with a small pewter plate in his other hand. Outside a peahen screeched in the night, her ugly cry stabbing the silence.

The flickering candlelight illuminated a new map of Hungary, drawn by Istvan Bocskai of Transylvania, with the blessing of the Ottomans. This was their proposal to settle the
Hungarian-Ottoman War. To the north and west was Royal Hungary, a possession of the Holy Roman Empire. The mapmaker had slyly chosen a cardinal red to denote its imprint. To the extreme east was Transylvania, bulging to the Black Sea, in a moss green.

And the middle section, dun-colored, was the Ottoman Empire, including the great city of Buda.

Matthias frowned at the map. The bright color of Royal Hungary could not camouflage the fact that Ottoman Hungary was an oppressive bootprint, larger by half than the Hapsburg share. And—this could not be!—Transylvania’s proposed principality dwarfed Hapsburg Hungary.

The traitor Istvan Bocskai had been granted the vast principality as a reward from the Ottomans for fighting in their legions. Matthias had heard just that day of Bocskai’s gold, jewelencrusted crown, a gift from Sultan Ahmed himself. Because Ottoman sultans did not wear crowns, it was modeled on the miter of an Orthodox patriarch, heavy and clumsy, but cast in pure gold, adorned in rubies, turquoise, emeralds, and pearls.

Istvan Bocskai. The filthy swine. A renegade Calvinist who had once fought for the Hapsburg crown, Bocskai had sided now with heathens. King of Transylvania, be damned!

A knock on the door was followed immediately by a draft of air from the cold hall, making the candlelight flicker.

“You are up late tonight, Matthias,” said Bishop Klesl. “Was it that damned peahen or do you require any spiritual counsel?”

Matthias tapped his finger on the parchment.

“I am reviewing the map. Bocskai’s kingdom will be larger than ours,” he muttered. “Rudolf’s suppression of the Protestants has provoked a war we can never win.”

Klesl sighed. “There once was a time when I thought as Rudolf did. Rid the Hungarians of the scourge of Protestantism
and return the country to the traditions of its founder Saint Stephen.”

“I remember. You called the Protestants wriggling maggots on rotted meat.”

The bishop stared at the map. His eyes were sunken into his head from lack of sleep and his jowly skin was ashen. He too was weary of war.

“Even bishops can be fools. I underestimated the Protestants and their zeal for their religion. Men who thirst for freedom will find it, even if they drink at a poisoned well. I have searched my soul, looking for answers.”

“And what have you found, Bishop Klesl?”

“Only a recurring question: How can the Protestant Christians be allied with barbaric Saracens? These are our brothers in Christ we fight.”

The bishop crossed himself, his pale hands white ghosts in the candlelight.

Matthias nodded and then gazed down at the map and the proposed division of the Hungarian kingdom.

“Pride,” he muttered. “My brother’s pride. Rudolf now curries favor with the pope and the House of Hapsburg, boasting he will transform every Protestant church to a Catholic house of worship. He who worships the occult and drains the treasury in search of the Elixir of Life.”

Melchior Klesl sighed.

“His Majesty has a better chance of filling those Catholic pews with Muslim warriors than staunch Protestants. They will never give up their religion now.”

The peahen screeched again. Matthias’s back stiffened. He thought he smelled smoke, but decided it was the scent he carried from the front lines.

“I shall wring that peahen’s neck in the morning and make soup of her, with your permission, sire,” said Klesl, shuddering.

“My brother has turned every Hungarian against the crown! Ninety-five in every hundred are Protestant. We cannot wage war both on the Ottoman borders and within the country itself! What madness plagues him?”

Klesl did not reply.

“What counsel can you offer me? Not of spiritual nature, but of an astute politician.”

“Politician, my lord?” Bishop Klesl raised an eyebrow.

“Every clergyman who holds a title, be it bishop, cardinal, or pope, is a politician.”

Klesl nodded in the dim light. He grimaced, then squared his shoulders and answered.

“I think you have no choice, sire. You should secure your bargaining terms from our king as soon as possible and negotiate peace. Force him to accept terms if need be, or he will be at war with his own Hungarian subjects.”

“He will roar and bellow at relinquishing land and tribute. And he has promised Catholics they will acquire the estates of the Protestants. Their greedy mouths water at the prospect.”

“Our king is blind to what transpires beyond the walls of Prague. The Ottomans will burn the land and take it as their spoil, moving closer to Vienna. A compromise, a treaty must be made before the Ottomans swallow us whole.”

Matthias rubbed his hand through his sleep-rumpled hair. The Soldier Hapsburg was faced with concession and the wrath of his powerful brother.

“I hear wisdom in your words, but I am loathe to approach my brother with words of compromise and defeat.”

Klesl touched Matthias’s sleeve.

“Pray listen to my counsel, my lord. Send your emissaries to meet with Bocskai in Bratislava. Give Hungary its religious freedom, or they will be at war against the empire and fill the
Ottoman ranks alongside the Janissaries. Nothing will stop them from marching to Vienna.”

Matthias listened carefully, his brow wrinkled in consternation.

“Place Protestant on equal footing with Catholic?” he asked. “My brother will never consent. It will make him look weak in the eyes of the pope.”

“The pope could think no less of him than he already does. And even the pope recognizes the danger of the Ottomans and their stranglehold on Europe. And our blessed pope does not live cheek by jowl with the Saracens and their scimitars.”

“And Bocskai emerges from our disgrace with the principality of Transylvania?”

“It is a wild and perilous land. I doubt Bocskai will make it through a year without being murdered. Give him Transylvania—it is overrun with Roma and other heathens. There are cutthroats at every bend of the road and witches who brew poisons to kill kings. The wretched Bathorys will seize the crown yet again, mark my words.”

Matthias looked hard at Klesl and retrieved a key from his belt. He unlocked his desk and withdrew a parchment. The broken wax seal made a click as he threw it on the mahogany wood.

“Read, my good priest. See how God has seen fit to bless me.”

Klesl bowed at the honor of seeing Matthias’s private correspondence, sealed with a Hapsburg ring.

“What is this?”

“A secret letter drafted by my younger brothers. They have asked to meet with me in Linz. Ferdinand and Maximillian see the inevitable ruin of the Hapsburg Empire if our brother is not stopped.”

Klesl jumped to his feet.

“My lord, is it—Are they supporting your succession to the throne?”

Matthias closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, good Klesl. They pledge their support. They are convinced that the other royal families will do the same. My brother’s incompetence stains the Hapsburg name across Europe.”

“Oh, blessings upon you and our kingdoms! You, King Matthias, shall save the empire from the torn vein of bloodshed.”

“It is your counsel I shall count on, now and in the future as emperor. Damn it, I will speak to Bocskai and begin preliminary negotiations in secret, though we must push our military advantage now to strengthen our hand. The borderlands near Esztergom are still in peril.

“I will restore the equilibrium of freedom—neither Catholic nor Protestant shall prevail. Hungarians will return to their Christian home without threat of persecution. We shall stand united against the Ottomans, I swear it before God!”

The candle in his hand guttered and died under his fierce breath, leaving the smell of smoke in the sudden darkness.