Unruly Princess

Margit Rides to the Dingle In this stretch of our wooded isle my father has a hunting lodge, in the same preserve along the rDanube River where our ancient Magyars harried the elk, the red deer and antelope and the tarpan horse. Now this preserve shelters only the smaller game, the wild hen and the hare. Hearing shouts, I take my mule into the deeper foliage. Hunters could be out today. I remember now that I left hurriedly without taking time to change my clothing. I’ve still got on the finery my mother sent over and I scoured the kitchen tiles in it. I can imagine how I look. From a distance nobody would take me for a sister. I’ll be taken for a poor girl of the town, a creature of sale, a witch. I can hardly keep from laughing out loud. The subterfuges, the struggles it takes to strive for a hope of sanctity! I’m giddy, and it’s driving me to think in hissing alliterations! The shouts grow louder, closer. I pray the dogs don’t catch my scent, that I’m not recognized by some huntsman with his game bag of hare and quail. Under cover of shade again, I guide my mule toward a huddle of thatched wattle-and-daub huts at the far edge of the fields. Women, their heads shawled closely in black, gather around a horse’s watering trough. The trough is a rudely chiseled oblong of stone, carved with dour men in togas. The trough is an ancient Roman sarcophagus pressed to everyday use. Romans walked here in our Magyar land a thousand years ago. The women fold their hands tightly in their aprons. I see them crowd with smothering closeness around the boy. They are already resigned to his death. “Stand back from the child,” I order, coming upon them and breaking them up. “Let him breathe.” They creep away in awe of my strangeness, the oddity of Domina Margit. I can see they’re startled witless at my appearance today in this bedraggled grass-green fairy garb. I’m a tall lady to them, yet I have to show them I am humble and kind. To them I both seem and do not seem like a princess. The villagers want to edge close to me to touch my frayed and filthy velvet, obviously costing hundreds of florins, but so neglected by me. Only his mother does anything useful, dipping water from the trough in an earthen cup and trying to force it between the child’s numb blue lips. I recognize them both. The mother is Ilma. Her son, a sturdy knave child of eight summers, is Csaba. His smock is blood-spattered, his face is dead gray and smeared with dirt, tears, and terror. He whimpers, retching and hiccupping. Somebody tied his wrist with a length of coarse rope, one they use for binding reeds. I kneel by him, quickly undo my kit, and take out the rags of my old veils that I keep for holy bandages. I tie them securely around the bloodstained stump of wrist, then unknot the rope and throw it aside. “Stop crying, Csaba, and open your mouth. Here’s a delicious candy linctus, my poppet.” Between his lips I place a red lozenge that I make up in little batches when I have time out of a wolf’s liver, dried, powdered, sweetened, and mixed with soporific balsams. It’s a sovereign remedy for clotting the blood and calming the spirit. I lay my tattered Leechbook of medical recipes beside me, but I don’t have to read it since I know the contents by heart. I thumb through to the page where I find the picture of a severed limb and immediately muster to memory the Tres Angeli. Cradling Csaba’s stump, I chant the correct prayer: “Three angels were sauntering by Golgotha and they ran into Flumen Sanguinis, River of Blood, flowing from the side of Our Lord, whose blood and water streamed out to redeem us. The three angels said, ‘Oh, Csaba’s blood—by the blood that flows from the side of Jesus Christ, stay, stay, stay!’ Then the three angels went down to the River Jordan and stopped the river’s flow, and the blood stopped flowing too. So let the blood of Csaba’s body stay, stay, stay its flowing from his wrist, in the name of Christ and His sacred angels.” I repeat the prayer three times, looking intently on the boy’s face and holding his wrist between my palms. Hypnotized by the story, by my voice and my concentration, drugged by the linctus, the child starts to go limp. He lets his eyelids droop as he sucks the linctus and wills his own blood to run back into his body. I feel with one hand in my kit for a little ebony box. It contains an unguent of goat’s grease into which a handful each of purple spiked betony, St. John’s wort, centaury, self-heale, and quick-in-hand have been mingled and simmered for half a day. “This is going to make everything better. You’ll see, my Csaba,” I whisper to the child, who gapes and nearly loses the red linctus. “Close tight. Keep sucking the lolly, it’s got holy goodness in it!” I order. I smear the unguent on the wrist, talking all the while in a quick, soft voice. “Now, child, where is the hand?” Stupefaction spreads over his face. “The cut-off hand, yes! Give it to me.” The villagers gawk. Csaba’s mother, Ilma, who has been tightly grim-lipped until now, breaks down. “I don’t know! It’s lost,” she sobs. “We never did see it.” “Find it!” I can be peremptory. “What for?” asks Csaba, roused from his drugged lethargy. “No foolish questions, Csaba! We’re wasting minutes of your life.” I order a tall, freckled-nosed lad with an alert face. “Search in the grass, János, won’t you? Bestir the others and bring back the hand! ” He bobs his head and grins. “Ho, let’s go,” he shouts to his companions. “You heard the Lady Domina!” They edge away, and one or two rake the tall grass and dirt with sticks. “We don’t see it!” they cry. “Keep looking!” “Here!” the boy Csaba whimpers and pulls the severed, bloodstained hand from his homespun blouse “Don’t take it away, Domina. It’s mine! I want to play with it.” “No foolishness. Give it over!” My voice isn’t soothing now, it’s a commander’s stern tone. “I’m going to put it back where it belongs.” I seize the hand from him. The strange rising brilliant energy of this morning overtakes me, my heart wildly beating, the silver ladder stretches to the lowering black sky. I can climb, I can move worlds with God’s help! The bleeding hand is a tight fist, white and waxen and dirty, the fingernails outlined in jet. It could be a reliquary case for a dead hand. I slather more of the unguent to the two stumps with my fingers and fit them together, binding the whole securely with bandages of veil from my bag. When it feels that it’s beginning to hold, I tear more strips from my old veils. I curve my hands around his wrist like a bracelet. A tremendous force of love, burning hot and dangerous, flows from my body to his. The people fall stunningly quiet, leaning together, swaying, hardly breathing. The sky grows darker. Thunder rumbles, like giants moving heavy chests in a garret. I close my eyes and I will the rain to hold back a little longer. It holds back. I clasp my hands, and I feel a force so fiery in me that I must incinerate, soar in a flaming column and die in ecstasy. Oh, I’m salted in the fire. For every man, woman, and child shall be salted with fire and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt! The salt is ourselves, yourself and myself, and shall restore us! I’ve sunk to my knees beside Csaba, still holding on, still praying. The rain hangs back until it can wait no longer. Rain explodes downward from heaven’s floors; it bursts and flashes in a roar. I feel my own body so heavy I can scarcely get up, but at last I let go of the boy. People have fallen to their knees, and some of them are crying, but soaked now by the rain most of them scatter.