Burning Twilight
Authors: Kenneth Wishnia
Tags: #Historical, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective
BURNING TWILIGHT
A Novella
KENNETH WISHNIA
“To my Grandparents for their foresight,
leaving Europe before the roof fell in”
CONTENTS
An Excerpt from
The Fifth Servant
P
eople are always saying that writers get to play God, but this is only partly true. God isn’t big on revision. After all, everything He makes comes out right the first time—except for human beings, of course, who are still a work in progress. And even the worst disasters are conveniently smoothed over as part of His grand “plan.”
Writers get no such consideration.
Which is my way of explaining how I came to write
Burning Twilight
as a self-contained sequel to my novel
The Fifth Servant.
Set in 1592, it tells of Kassy the wise woman, an herbal healer who has been banished from Prague for practicing “witchcraft,” and Rabbi Benyamin Ben-Akiva, who is traveling to the Kingdom of Poland with Rabbi Judah Loew to escape the ravages of the Counter Reformation in Germany.
I couldn’t get Benyamin and Kassy together in
The Fifth Servant
, even though I
really
wanted them to meet. But they inhabited two different worlds, on opposite sides of the wall dividing the Jewish ghetto from the rest of Christian Prague, and I just wasn’t able to make it happen.
Until now.
Because I wasn’t finished with these characters, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to give them new life in
Burning Twilight
, which takes place a few weeks after the action of
The Fifth Servant
. (As in the novel, Kassy’s experience is told in the third person, while Benyamin’s is told in the first person.)
The long march to writing a novel set in the Middle Ages began decades ago when I was a kid living in Scotland and France (where my mom was doing her doctoral research on French labor history), with direct access to genuine medieval castles, cathedrals, and other locales, and where I had the formative experience of seeing classic films like
Alexander Nevsky,
and
The Golem,
in all its terrible glory, on the enormous screen at the Cinémateque Française. (Talk about inspiration!)
Yes, I know, 1592 is really the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. But the great Rabbi Loew of the Golem legends was active in Prague at the time, and the late sixteenth century was the height of the witch craze, so plenty of people still held medieval attitudes about the power of black magic, witches, and evil spirits.
Things haven’t changed all that much.
We still cling to our belief in magic, in secret powers, and in life after death no matter what form it takes (enough with the zombies, already, people. It’s getting old).
But I also knew from Mom the historian that the Middle Ages were anything but magical for 99 percent of the population. Then I read Cecil Roth’s
History of the Jews
and—well, that chased all remaining “magical” thoughts out the window. The Jewish experience of European history can easily be reduced to a description of one massacre and expulsion after another.
But something kept us going through all that—as my grandparents would have said,
mir zaynen do
, we’re still here—and I wanted to counter the notion that Jewish history begins with Moses and ends with Hitler, with very little else in between, and write about the thousand-year history of the Jews in Germany
before
their world went up in flames.
My usual working method is to gather enough material for five novels, and then write
one
. But in the case of
The Fifth Servant
, I only used about one-tenth of the material I gathered during my research. So I knew I’d have plenty left over for a story, which is how you come to be holding this e-novella in your hands (unless your hands have been replaced by digital technology as well).
And so I was
finally
able to get Ben and Kassy together and introduce new readers to their world, thanks to Linda Landrigan, editor of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
, who engendered much of this material after she read
The Fifth Servant
and wanted to see more; to my agent Leigh Feldman at Writers House for working her special brand of magic on those mysterious and cryptic documents (the local druids call them “contracts”); and to Jennifer Brehl and Emily Krump of William Morrow Books, for including this in their new line of e-novellas, which may only be summoned into being by those who have mastered the secret art of conjuring the ephemeral letters of the alphabet out of the darkness and into the light.
And so to you as well, dear reader. Enjoy!
Note: Some readers tell me that they got through the whole story before realizing that there was a glossary at the end, so to all of you who need to know this: Hey, there’s a glossary at the end.
When rubles fall from heaven, there is no sack.
When there is a sack, rubles don’t fall.
Russian proverb
W
e will meet again under the stars, the old woman had said. But by the time Kassy reached the village, it was too late. The old woman was gone.
Now she sat alone, hunched by the campfire, wrapped in a long black cloak, trying to keep warm until her supper was ready.
The wind blew the flames of the campfire low and ruffled the gamecock’s feathers. The proud creature flapped its wings and pecked at the length of twine tethering its leg to a tree.
Although it kept her fed, Kassy worried that if the mountain folk continued to pay her with live animals, she wouldn’t be able to afford to buy another book as long as she lived.
But some sense of obligation to the spirit of her onetime guide and mentor had driven her to spend the past three days teaching the old woman’s apprentice some of the secrets of their trade. The girl’s name was Paulina, and thankfully she was a quick learner, because Kassy had been banished from the imperial city and expressly prohibited from entering any village or town of more than five hundred souls. She was also forbidden and from practicing her herbal remedies in any one place for more than three days at a time, a sentence that doomed her to being a perpetual stranger in her own land.
Her practice had been destroyed. The bottles smashed. The books and papers burned. She had to start all over with nothing but the clothes on her back and a crude bundle of supplies that her friends had rescued from the flames.
And of course, no man wants a woman who’s been publicly gagged and pilloried—especially if she’s unrepentant about it and doesn’t care who knows it.
By the morning of the third day some of the villagers had taken to calling her Kassy the Wise, but others weren’t so fond of her wisdom. They came for her with that icy look in their eyes that said her time was up, and that nobody needed the services of a traveling female apothecary.
“Leave our village,” they said, as the menfolk stood in the roadway squinting into the afternoon sun and made sure that Kassy ran the gauntlet of their stares and left the village by sundown.
Now, hunched in front of the low campfire, she watched the fading orange glow in the western sky. The last rays of the setting sun brought out the green in her eyes and highlighted the blond streaks in her long brown hair.
Once upon a time these mountains had been her home, and she knew them well. So she was not surprised when the sound of early springtime revels reached her from the nearby village, where they would soon be dancing around painted maypoles and making hasty love matches.
Her only companions on this cold evening were the arrogant gamecock and a battered copy of Paracelsus that had been readable when she got it at the flea market a few months back in exchange for curing the bookseller’s child of a high fever. But now the cover was gone, along with the last three sewn signatures, which meant that she was missing at least forty-eight pages. Still, she drew inspiration from the alchemist’s most ambitious theories, even if they ended in mid-sentence, especially his unrealized dream of being able to refine plants and minerals to the point that their “active principles” could be applied more effectively, possibly by boiling their essences down to a thick syrup that would cure all manner of ailments and illnesses.
All things were possible, at least in our thoughts. Our bodies, the frail mortal shells that briefly house our eternal souls, were not in the least bit godlike. But our minds, illuminated by the divine secret of the knowledge of good and evil, were close to godlike. It said so in the book of Genesis.
The dusky path of exile had taken Kassy north and east, toward the Catholic lands. She was a Hussite, like the majority of Bohemians, but she had also learned something from the Jews of Prague. A book by one of their rabbis, now lost to the ashes, had proposed that each day a person devotes to righteous acts translates into one more luminescent stitch in the celestial garment worn by their soul in the World-to-Come. Under such a system, Kassy figured that she might manage a loincloth at best if she didn’t increase her righteous days, and quickly too. It simply wouldn’t do to be uncovered for all eternity in the Garden of Paradise.
The gamecock scratched around in the dirt, preening and searching for its mate.
By now the sky was darkening, and Kassy could just make out the angry red star in the Hyades that marked the heavenly bull’s unblinking eye, and the bright cluster of stars a few degrees to its west.
Most people in the city could barely make out the six brightest stars in the Pleiades. Those with the sharpest eyes saw seven. But on a clear, moonless night like this, she could usually see at least nine, with the distinct impression of still more lying beyond them, a glorious cluster of stars drifting in a cloudy haze.
She drew her cloak close around her. It wasn’t dark enough to see the stars clearly yet, but the curtain of night fell quickly in these mountains, which lay at the crossroads between the two mighty kingdoms of the Teutons and the Poles.
A ghostly sparkle caught the corner of her eye, and she turned reflexively. A pair of fiery marbles glowed in the dark just beyond the circle of firelight. The cock squawked and pecked at the disembodied spheres, but Kassy saw right away that it was only a cat straying from the village, its feline eyes catching the light in the way cats’ eyes sometimes did, causing them to flash like two tiny mirrors floating in the darkness.
Still, despite knowing as much, her heart still jumped for an instant, and she understood how some of the backward mountain folk could easily be terrorized by the sight. What could possibly cause such an eerie effect? Everyone knew that cats could see well in the dark, but how did their eyes
glow
like that? What was the mechanism? She shivered, and lost the next thought before it even had a chance to form. She would have to look into the matter some other time, after she had finally settled somewhere and could begin attracting regular customers and restocking her laboratory.