Tide King (10 page)

“Who taught you your manners?” He lifted his hand and made to slap her. “Surely you are an orphan. No one in our village would allow such a mouth.”

“I would not want to be the child of any fool in this village,” she answered and hopped down from the wagon. A stone hut leaned at the top of the road, just outside the town, and a man, folded and beaten like a weathered sack, sat outside on a carved wooden bench, whittling a piece of wood.

“Antoniusz!” she shouted, and when he saw her, he stood up slowly, his mangled leg even more shrunken than she remembered it.

“Young thing.” He hobbled toward her, drawing a dirty wool cloak across her shoulders. “What business do you have with me?”

“It's me, Antoniusz! It's me, Ela!” She ran her hands on his good leg, feeling its warmness, inhaling the faint traces of pipe that lingered on his clothes. “Do you not know me?”

“What kind of laugh do you play on an old man?” He pulled from her grasp, and nodded toward the wagon, where the farmer sat watching. “Idzi, whose child is this?”

“I haven't the faintest.” Idzi shrugged, drawing up his reigns. “A dirty orphan that I will call the magistrate on if she keeps talking her mouth.”

“Antoniusz!” She grabbed his good leg and did not let go. “Please, you have to believe me! Where is Matka?”

She felt his hands underneath her armpits, herself lifted up. She met his eyes, brown broken spires that drew in her features before rejecting them, the way an ocean rejects a shell. His brow wrinkled, his eyes wet before he blinked and put her back down.

“By God, if you don't look like her.” Antoniusz reached and touched her hair, her shoulders. He looked past her. “Idzi, I will take care of this. I am sorry that I have detained you.”

The farmer shrugged and went on his way to Reszel.

“Would you like some milk, little girl? A little honey?”

“I want Matka.” She buried her face in his stomach. “Please tell me where she is.”

“Come.” He moved toward the cottage. Inside, she ate some bread and apple slices, hoping she would not throw them up as well. She studied the carved figurines that lined the walls of the cottage, little men and women and birds. He watched her eyes, the folds of his face leaking sorrow despite the firm lines of his brow. After a time, he reached into a box by the table, emerging with a wooden horse. He placed it in front of her.

“Is this the horse you made for my lalka?” She ran her fingers over the wood, so smooth and oiled, and moved the legs. When she moved one of the back legs upward, like she remembered him telling her, its stomach opened, revealing a hiding place. Antoniusz rubbed his fingers against his forehead until Ela was sure the skin would begin to tear.

“I do not know who you are,” Antoniusz said finally. “She has been dead for the year, almost. And her mother as well. Clearly you have heard the stories from someone, and you pretend to be her. Even down to the dress. Unless, of course, you are but a ghost, torturing me until the end of my days.”

“I'm not a ghost,” she answered. She looked at her hands, so small, even as her mind, her understanding, her memories, her sorrow, had grown. “I am Ela. I have been her forever.”

“I buried the girl myself after the fire. I shall prove you are an imposter.” He stood with surprising vigor, purpose. They got on his horse and rode to the bone house. The sun stabbed through the woods and Antoniusz knelt by the dirt behind it. The hole had healed over, a scab of earth with irregular borders, but still flat. Antoniusz bent and attacked it with his hands, digging and scattering dirt to all sides, his bottom lip low and dripping with sweat as he sank lower and lower into the earth. She went to the river to get him some water, and when she touched his back he ignored her, his shirt wet and sticking to his muscles, stringy like an old goat's. She went inside the house and lay down on the straw bed, sleeping without dreams. When she woke, the sun lay low in the trees. Outside Antoniusz still knelt by the dirt. The hole was the size of her, a depth of several feet, and she looked at his hands, dry and cracked and covered with dirt and blood, and they both looked at the empty hole, Ela clutching her lalkas.

“She spoke the truth.” Antoniusz shook his head, and something in him looked so torn that her eyes hurt to look at him. He took a lalka from her and smoothed its hair, still dull with dirt. “And we did not heed it. I am so sorry, my child.”

“What do you mean?” She clutched her dolls tighter.

“She was tried as a witch, my dear, for burning the village.”

“But it was Bolek! I heard him tell my matka himself. I remember!”

“Of course, it was impossible to prove her innocence…but she implored me, while she was imprisoned, to get an herb, a tincture, from the house that she thought would protect her from the stake. She said to gather and hide you as well, that you had eaten the herb and would have survived. But when I came, you were dead. That I did see. So I buried you. But here you are, and I cannot believe it.”

He put his hands, smeared with dirt and blood, to his face and wept. Ela put her hand on his heaving back.

“Child, I have failed you. You and your matka both.” He leaned over, letting his arms fall into the grave. “And I am not fit to live on this earth.”

“But what about me?” She pulled at his shirt, feeling the strain of his weight, whatever he carried, against it. He leaned forward, as if to crawl all in the way in, before pushing himself out of the grave and sitting on his hauches.

“You are a little girl.” He turned and gathered her in his arms. “You are a little girl who needs a father.”

Ela lived with Antoniusz and his sister. They did not speak of the tinctures. Antoniusz insisted she not try to make them.

“Antoniusz, why do I grow no bigger?” Every few months she measured herself against a mark she'd made on the wall, just as her mother had made notches in an old oak by the bone house. But her line, made with a stub of coal, grew fatter, not taller.

“It is a mystery.” He stood with his hands on his hips, his brow furrowed. He did not look her in the eye.

“Why do you lie?” She put the lump back into the pocket of her smock. Although not height, time had given her bravery, suspicion, an adult's ability to reason.

“I do not lie, child.” He put a hand, large and calloused and spotted, on her shoulder. He was becoming an old man, that was clear. “Your mother was a powerful woman, in her way, with her herbs. She may have done more than save your life.”

“But what?” She wanted to be as big as the other girls in town, the ones whose limbs became long and graceful like the necks of swans, whose lips filled like the flesh on cantaloupe slices.

At night, she studied the herb she had taken from the skeleton's hand, remembering a potion, a lightning strike. Perhaps in time, the clouds in these events would clear, revealing the whole sky. She hid it in the stomach of her wooden horse so that Antoniusz would not take it and erase the last bits of her memory. She already was forbidden to travel home to the bone house, to the woods where the herb might still grow. At night, she lay awake and prayed to her mother to give her the strength to go home and find the truth that eluded her. She also prayed, squeezing the coal for luck, to grow, to grow so much her feet pressed against the wall of the room in which they slept, or at least long enough to reach the end of the bed. But each month, each year, the line of coal opposite the bed grew darker, fatter, never higher.

Antoniusz knew about the herb Ela kept in the wooden horse, but he pretended not to. Barbara would have wanted him to take the herb to be with Ela forever, but he could not bring himself to consider it, not when he had failed her. And yet, it would have been the only fitting punishment, to live forever with the knowledge he had let her die. There would have been a way to get her the herb from the bone house to the castle prison, where they had kept her before the burning, wait for her to arise from the ashes like a phoenix, if he had only believed her.

Like a veil over everyday life, the scene from that night replayed itself, the soldiers chaining Barbara, drunk with starvation and sleeplessness, to the stake, piling the faggots to mid-calf. The crowd leered and decreed vengeance for their loved ones, so many lost in flames almost a year before. He had been ashamed for feeling faint. Even after so many men had calloused his eyes to death, the sight of Barbara was a knife through the ropes holding his knees to his body and he fell to the dirt, feeling the sparks from the faggots catch his cheeks like the devil's tears. He closed his eyes when her screams began, crawling toward the sound, feeling the fire wash him in greater waves, hotter, in his face, and he felt convinced that he would climb into the faggots and burn with her.

But hands grabbed him, not of God, but of men; they held him back and someone covered his ears and when he opened them, Barbara, mouth open like the brightest angel in heaven, full of song, was screaming.

They tied him to the bed at his sister's house for seven days. He moved against the ropes and chafed his body but he could not escape, the ropes, her face, the scream. He peed and shat himself and cursed and cried. After four days, he drank a little broth, a little tea. By the seventh day, they removed the ropes but he could not move, could not walk. The fire burned lazily around the edge of his eyes, the smell of hair and flesh. Barbara's face blurred in corners but disappeared when he tried to look directly. His sister wrapped him in clean clothes and he drank the broth, a little milk, a little stewed carrots. He began to crawl. His sister found him some balsa wood, a piece as big as his head, and left it on the table. He stared at it for days until the balsa wood became other things—a soldier, a ship, a catapult. He crawled to the table, running his hands over the wood and Barbara's face, still in the cottage, receded a bit more. His sister gave him a knife, and he buried it in the balsa wood, ripping half away, and then little pieces, shavings like faggots.

He owed Ela this truth, his complicity in her mother's death, and he decided to wait until she grew older to tell her. But she did not grow in body, ever, even as his sister died of consumption one winter and his leg became weaker, the strength of only a twig. But he did not speak of the herb, nor did she.

He waited still. They grew potatoes and bought a cow. They lived many more years alone, and Ela cooked and mended Antoniusz's clothes and cut his hair, white and oily and thinning. When she suggested making a tincture to calm the fires in his leg, to build his strength, he left home and did not return for three days, white and blotched and stinking of vodka when she found him in a tavern in Reszel. She did not mention the tinctures again. But he began to whittle less and less, and sometimes he merely ran his fingers over the figurines he had already carved, as if conceding that his best work had already been done.

When Antoniusz was ready to go, he took no chances. He took the horse, now old and as broken as he, and rode it north to the Baltic Sea, where Ela could not find him, press the herb upon him, make him live forever with a kindling leg and an ashen heart. At the docks, he sliced the horse across the neck and tied himself to its leg. Then, with his wavering strength he rolled it off the docks. They plunged together into the sea, and after a splash, a bubbling, he died, too.