Tide King Read online

  They talked of such things as Ela played with her lalka, the names of men floating around her like bright butterflies that eluded her attempts at capture. The lalka had real hair, the toymaker in Reszel who sold it to Ela’s mother claimed, dark like Ela’s, and its arms and legs moved as well. Ela liked it so much Barbara had bought another, a blonde with blue eyes, for her birthday the following month, and hidden it under the bed.

  Ela smelled Antoniusz’s pipe, the musk of cloves and tobacco, and felt happy. When he was around, she could hear her father’s voice in the rustle of the forest, see his thick shoulders in his shadowed form. Antoniusz’s mangled leg, thin and weak, was tucked under the stool, while his healthy, firm one lay in front of him. A low fire heated a cauldron of horseradish soup in the corner of the room.

  “If Prussia goes down, Napoleon will install a French government, not a Polish one,” he argued, leaning over and coughing, his face almost in her mother’s lap. It was much too crowded for three in the bone house, barely livable for two.

  “The Polish Legion is his mongrel.” Antoniusz cleared his throat and sat up. “We’re lucky if we get a few scraps of rotten meat out of the deal.”

  “For people who do not get much meat, it is a king’s ransom.” Her mother crouched before the pot. The steam reddened her cheeks, and when she turned back to Antoniusz, he smiled, blushed.

  “Since you are so worried about him, maybe I will try to talk Bolek into joining the underground resistance instead of Napoleon’s army under Dąbrowski.” Antoniusz rubbed the thigh of his good leg. “He will be safer with us, and fighting for our cause, not someone else’s.”

  “Thank you, Antoniusz.” Barbara ladled soup into bowls and put them on the table she had dragged from the trash of the sweetshop in town. “The Wysickis are my customers, and I shall feel terrible if their son dies for nothing.”

  “So many die for nothing,” he shrugged. “Ones who fight for something, ones who don’t. Everyone dies. Does it matter what they die for?”

  “It matters to me,” she said. Ela’s mother had told her Antoniusz had lost both his wife and child many years ago, in childbirth. “I know we have been through so much, but we must live for something, and also die by it, too.”

  “I want you to be very careful in town when you run your errands,” Antoniusz said between slurps of soup.

  “But…why?”

  “Dąbrowski’s army will begin attacking Prussian interests and sympathizers. Shops, homes, properties, castles—nothing will be spared. Of course, you are probably safe because of your distance, but with your excursions to the city…perhaps it is safe for you to stay out here. I…I can bring your tinctures to town.”

  “Antoniusz, no.” She put her hand over his, and the long strands of hair he had combed over his bald spot began to stick up. His skin, porridged, reddened. “That’s very nice of you, but…everyone knew Jan. And even if they don’t respect me, think I’m some dirty witch, surely they’ll respect Jan’s legacy.”

  “As you wish.” He stood up, hunched over, and straightened his jacket. “You were always firm with your thoughts.”

  “Matka has a stone head,” Ela, who had been silent to this point, blurted, and Antoniusz laughed.

  “She’ll be wiser than Jan in half the time.” He rubbed Ela’s head. It fit, almost entirely, in his palm, like a river stone.

  “That would be a blessed thing.” Barbara nodded, and let Antoniusz kiss her on the cheek before leaving.

  “Antoniusz, I hate it when you go.” Ela grabbed onto his good leg, her eyes wet. “Why do you have to go?”

  He looked at Barbara, who gathered Ela close to her.

  “We aren’t the only people he cares for,” her mother answered. “He has a sister who loves and depends on him very much. And many men follow his lead to free Poland. We cannot weight him anymore than we do.”

  “I’ll be back soon, love.” He knelt, a little laboriously, down to Ela. “I am carving a horse for your lalka. Its legs will move! And perhaps I can borrow a little of your hair for its mane. When it grows a little longer, I will be back with my shears.”

  Ela nodded and smiled, but her eyes, still wet, tipped her thoughts. Barbara held her close as Antoniusz walked down the hill, leaning on his cane, a man too wise and beaten for his years.

  The tinctures smelled sharp, moldy, and at times lightly fragrant. When Barbara was ready to test them, she had Ela catch some field mice. She took a knife and made cuts of different lengths and deepness on their bellies and their limbs, their bodies squirming under her fingers, and stopped the bleeding with the vodka. Then she applied the mixtures to their wounds, murky dressings that bubbled and clotted in the blood. She put the mice in glass jars Antoniusz had brought her from the village, trying not to watch their tortured forms scramble against their glass prisons, the bloody paw prints streaked on the glass.

  During the next few weeks, they would study their progress while continually applying the tincture dressing. But when Barbara returned from washing the laundry a few days later, several mice were quiet, and she assumed that they were dead. She pulled out the first mouse, the one with the shallowest cut; the cut had disappeared. She rubbed the mouse’s hair, feeling its skin, smooth and intact, on its stomach. She wondered whether Ela had switched the mice to play a trick on her. She took out the second mouse. She had made a deeper cut in its stomach, and when she turned it over, she could not find that wound, either. Then she pulled the third mouse out, the one in which she had made the deepest cut, almost severing its right hind paw. But both hind paws of this mouse were fine.

  “Ela!” Barbara stood at the entrance of the bone house, letting the mice fall out of her hands. They scrambled away, little currents firing through the grass. “Ela! What have you done to the mice?”

  It didn’t matter what animals they used—mice, birds, frogs. Barbara, with the sweep of her knife, would leave animals clinging to life, cuts so deep that organs, bright and smooth like unborn children, peeked from underneath layers of tissues. Tendons trailed behind legs, bone gleamed white. After a few drops of the tincture and rest, they healed, in days or weeks depending on which mixture was applied. The only constant between the potions was the lightening-struck saxifrage, and the more saxifrage, the more potent the potion. Barbara cut off the paw of a wild rabbit completely, in desperation, in disbelief, and threw the rabbit in a pot. All night, she listened to the scraping of three legs against the sides of the pot, waiting for the sound to subside.

  Barbara shook Ela awake when the first slither of light bloomed from the chimney. They carefully removed the lid of the pot. The blood-smeared rabbit did not move, but Barbara could see its quick breaths pushing its fur in and out. She turned the rabbit over. Where there once was a bloody stump was now a skinned-over dwarf paw, pink with nubby nails. Barbara tied a brightly colored thread tightly around the base of its tail and set it free. When Ela ran up to the bone house a week later, she swung the same rabbit by its upper paws, and two hind paws, each mirroring length and width, dangled before her.

  Barbara and Ela ran errands in Reszel, dropping off tinctures, leaving an invitation with Antoniusz’s sister for Antoniusz to come for dinner. When they returned from the village, Ela’s mother killed one of the rabbits that they had not treated, slicing its throat and draining its blood into a jar for later. She tied its carcass to a sturdy stick and roasted it on a spit behind the bone house with wedges of potato and rosemary. Inside, Antoniusz’s tincture, brown-clouded and sour, waited in a glass vial. The rest of the untreated saxifrage flowers were spread on a rock by the door, waiting to be seeped eventually in Barbara’s love potion, the rest ground in powder for use later. But when the time came for him to arrive, she and Ela stood on the hill and could not spot him walking through the fields. Plumes of dark smoke rose from the village, furling up to the clouds like an umbilical cord.

  “Matka, the city is on fire!” Ela grabbed at Barbara’s hip.

  “It’ll be all right.”
Barbara stroked Ela’s hair. “It’s probably just a stable or something.”

  The smoke curled and funneled and was still whispering through the darkness when Barbara put Ela to bed. It would not spread, Barbara told her, but whatever it had been had been significant. Ela knew. The air was brushed with burning wood, the sear of heat, and her eyes watered. She closed them, her dried eyelids tickled by the straw, and listened for Antoniusz’s step on the path.

  She was nearly asleep when she heard the rustling of brush, stones skittering underfoot. She opened her eyes and stood, joining her mother at the door, following the shadow’s progress across the fields.

  “Barbara!” The voice was Bolek’s, and a minute later, his soot-smeared face began to form in the bone house. “Quick, get me under cover!”

  “Are you all right?” Barbara felt his body in her hands. Ela could feel the heat of his clothing. Threads of fabric on his shoulders and elbows sizzled.

  “You need to hide me.” He pushed past them into the shack. Barbara took one last look in the dark for Antoniusz before beckoning Ela to follow her inside. The smell of flesh, cooked, burnt, slapped the back of Ela’s throat as it overwhelmed the shack, and she gagged. Bolek’s overshirt lay on the floor, and some of his flesh did also, curled, the color of lamb fat.

  “Bolek!” Barbara turned for her treatments. “What is all this about?”

  “The fire.” He sunk to the floor, rubbing his hands on his knees. “We burned it. We burned everything.”

  “Everything?” She sank to her knees on the floor beside him. As she stripped him of the remaining swaths of fabric, they could see the extent of his injuries—the oily red muscles of his back, exposed and twitching, his left hand a charred stump. She coughed on the smoke and drew the collar of her dress over her nose and mouth. “Oh my god, look at you!”

  “We only meant to burn a few stores, places owned by the Prussia lovers.” He wet his remaining thumb with his tongue and smoothed it over a welt on his arm. “But it got out of hand. Oh, Lord, what have we done?”

  “Your parents, Bolek—what about your parents?”

  But Bolek only shook his head. He began to cry. Barbara linked her arms lightly around his shoulders, drew him to her breast.

  “I wanted to be a hero—I didn’t want everyone to die.”

  “Oh, Bolek, you’re but a child.” Barbara wove her fingers into his thick, sooty curls. “A child.”

  “The Prussians will come—they will find all of us and kill us,” he said. “They are already moving through the fields, killing everyone, even children.”

  “No, they’ll do no such thing,” she answered. “Just be calm, please. Be calm.”

  “Barbara, I have been unfair to you, so unfair.” He grabbed her hands. “In that I have never asked you to marry. Please don’t let me die. Your potions—please do something!”

  “You’re not going to die.” She squeezed his hands.

  “Do not make such promises if they’re not the truth.” His teeth chattered as he fought back more tears, his face red, the cords in his neck tense. The salt of him and something rawer, primal, grabbed at them. “You must know that if I survive, I should like a life together with you and Ela. I am strong—I can provide. We’ll go far away and I’ll take care of you, I should…you would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Shh.” She put her finger before his lips. “There will be time to talk later.”

  Ela hurried to the river to collect water for Bolek’s wounds as her mother instructed. On her return she could feel it, a footstep hum deep in the earth. Something was close. She hurried, stubbing her foot on a rock, her lungs burning from the black that wove the air like a fine lace. If she did not hurry, Bolek would die, and if they did not leave, the soldiers would catch them. She thought of Antoniusz, willed him to come and help.

  In the darkness of the hut, she could make out her mother sitting on the straw, preparing the tincture.

  “Matka, I’m scared.” She buried her head in her mother’s side as Bolek moaned from the floor. “Bolek is talking funny.”

  “He is seriously injured, my love.” She bent and dipped a rag in the bucket, touched his back with it.

  “Oh, my dear Barbara, I will be hero to you yet,” he giggled, delirious. “Grab me my gun and I shall protect you. Where is my gun?”

  “Stop.” She pushed his hands toward his lap. “I’m going to clean your wounds and apply a tincture, and everything will be okay. Do you hear me, Bolek?”

  “What is this?” Bolek picked up the spindly root with the fan-shaped flowers from the rock and smelled it. They were uncured, waiting to be soaked with dandelion and Chaga mushroom.

  “Something that will save your life,” she answered. The ground underneath her feet vibrated with the gallop of horses. Bolek grabbed for the bucket, took a large drink, and threw up. The bucket slipped out of his hands, spilling the tincture to the floor.

  The soldiers were so close. Ela’s mother stood and grabbed the remaining saxifrage from the windowsill. “Ela, come here.”

  But she did not move. Her mother lurched toward her and pried open her little mouth, smudged with dirt and sweat. She pushed the herb into it.

  “Chew, my love.” She pushed Ela’s lower jaw up so that it met her upper jaw. “Hurry.”

  “Where is mine?” Bolek moaned. He leaned unsteadily toward them. “You cannot give her all of it.”

  “Shh, there is more,” Barbara answered, placing the herb in his hand. Suddenly, his eyes grew wide as if God himself had returned. But when she looked, it was not their maker but men in tricorn hats, waistcoats, stockings, one crouched in the doorway, two just outside. She could see down the barrels of the muskets they leveled at them.

  “Traitors, filthy traitors.” A man, hairs of copper curling from under his hat, spat at them. “Did you think you’d get away with this, arsonists?”

  “It was not me—I, a townsperson, am innocent.” Bolek stood up shakily. But he set his jaw, clenched his fist, his eyes unwavering from the man’s. “It was witchcraft—I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Witchcraft?” The man laughed, his mouth so wide Ela could see the spaces, far as countries, between the few yellowed teeth in his gums. He set his musket on the ground as he rubbed his blackened cheek with his palm. “You are the speaking the truth, lad? There’re no witches in Prussia. We’re not governed by spooks.”

  “What do you call all this?” Bolek waved his arms around the bone house. “This woman has been selling her witchcraft around the village for years. We all buy it because we’re scared of her. You killed her husband years ago, and this is her revenge. And we’re paying the price for it.”

  “Imbecile,” one of the musketeers bellowed from outside, but the man waved him off.

  “So why are you here, then, boy, conspiring with this witch?”

  “Because I want to be a hero, like everyone else.” He nodded toward Barbara. “I came here to capture her. Even though she could turn me into a frog or set me on fire just like the town, I knew I needed to separate her from her magic and bring her back for justice.”

  “Liar!” Barbara exploded. She looked at the musketeer pleadingly. “Pray tell, sir, who is the one covered with soot, burned? Not me. My tinctures have no such power. My own mother made the same tinctures for your mothers and fathers. You probably even know of her, Agnes Zdunk.”

  “Exactly. Her mother gave tinctures to the villagers.” Bolek pointed his finger at Ela’s mother as he swayed back and forth. He would die soon, Ela knew, and yet he would still attempt and betray them to save himself. But she was too scared to do anything. “Are they not dead now?”

  “Of old age, you fool,” Barbara answered.

  “Enough.” The musketeer picked up his musket. He pointed it at Bolek. “You—outside.”

  He did not look at Barbara as he passed. The musketeers gathered her remaining vials, glass jars, saxifrage flowers.

  “Burn it all outside.” The lead musketeer directed. �
�If she’s really a witch, I don’t want her instruments available to her.”

  “I’m not a witch.” Barbara shook her head over and over again. “I am a woman of medicine. I have been treating that boy’s parents for years. He came here tonight and asked me to hide him. He said the whole town was burned, and it was his doing. My daughter and I have no stake in any of this—we don’t even live in Reszel.”

  “You are a widow—you may not be a witch, but you have a desire to avenge your husband, do you not?”

  “I do not—I just want to be left alone!”

  “Well, the matter should be easy enough to solve.” He leveled his musket at Ela. “Are you a witch or aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not a witch. Please, stop! Stop it!” Barbara reached for her, but the soldier grabbed her arms and twisted them behind her back. “Good lord! She’s a child—a child! Don’t you have children?”

  The soldier kept his musket aimed at Ela as he spoke to Barbara. “Again. Are you a witch?”

  “No…no,” she said. He cocked the trigger. “Yes. Yes! Take me, leave the child. Please!”

  “You’re a liar, and if you’re a witch, so be this child.”

  The house exploded with the smoke and sound of the musket, sucking time and air inward, never to be released. The shot hit Ela in the chest and she lay with her lalka in the dirt, hard and milky like a broken vase. She heard her mother scream and struggle against the soldier as he dragged her from the bone house. Soon she was outside her body, following. Outside, she hovered over them, over the shadow of Bolek, his heavy breaths filling him up and then shrinking him as her mother struggled to get at him.

  “Bolek, she’s dead! Ela is dead!” She clawed the air between them until it was thin and ragged, but he stood unflinching, breathing heavily. “You have taken everything from me! And why—because you are a coward?”

  He bobbed his head, laughing like a loon, but his body slumped. She could not believe he was going to get away with it. The lead musketeer emerged from the bone house and threw her mother’s remaining tinctures on the ground. He started a small fire and rolled the glass and alcohol and herbs into it.