Chapter 4 #2
“If he wakes as a Nachzehrer, this will keep him shackled here,” I explain.
“Nachzehrer must count small things; I know not why. They can’t count beyond three, though, because the devil moves through them, and he fears that holy number, and so they must remain where they are, counting and recounting. ”
“What is a Nachzehrer?” she asks as she crouches down next to the man, her arms laden with branches she has collected to cover his corpse with. Some of them are rotting because of the rain; I can smell it, this bitter, earthy scent, much preferable to the stink of the dead.
“A sort of revenant,” I explain. “When you bury a corpse with fabric touching their mouth, it awakes a hunger in them. They eat their way through their shroud and coffin, then claw their way out of their grave and eat their family.”
Ursula shudders, making the branches click together. “Those aren’t real, are they?”
I help her arrange the branches. “My grandmother says she saw one when she was just a little girl. One of her playmates died. Kathe Müller, she was called. They couldn’t bury her because the ground was hard as stone with frost, so they wrapped her body in a shroud to keep it from leaking, and then they put it in her coffin and the coffin in the shed.
When the Müllers didn’t appear at church that Sunday, everyone knew something evil had befallen them, so some men from the village went to the Müller farm to see. ”
My grandmother described the horror in great detail, but from the look on Ursula’s face, I don’t think I should tell her, so I simply say, “They were all dead, and their bodies much mangled. Not little Kathe, though. She was still snug in her coffin, only her shroud was all torn around the mouth, and she was fat and bloated as a tick, so they cut off her head and burned her body, then threw the ashes in the river. It’s the only way to kill a revenant, be they Nachzehrer or Wiederg?nger or Aufhocker.
” I wipe my hands on my dress, for the branches are covered with dirt and some of them have gone soft and pulpy.
“What on earth is an Aufhocker?” Ursula asks, her voice shrill.
“A restless corpse who wanders from their grave. When the rot sets in and they can walk no more, they’ll jump on the back of an unsuspecting passerby and demand to be taken back to their grave.” I begin to arrange some of the pebbles in the sign of the cross, which servants of Satan dislike also.
“You are teasing me.”
I push a pebble into the soft earth with my thumb.
“Not at all. Satan loves to command the dead, didn’t you know?
He plays with corpses in the way a little girl might play with her dolls, and he teaches his followers to do the same.
My grandmother said that the most powerful witches sometimes murder people and shackle their souls in their rotting bodies so they are forced to serve them. ”
“But that is awful,” Ursula says, sounding close to tears now.
I look up from my pebbles. “Fret not. I will protect you if ever we should meet a revenant,” I promise.
This seems to calm her down a little. “Sister Hilde—” she begins and again makes that horrible choking sound.
What, I wonder, did Ursula do to Sister Hildegard to turn her very name into a curse?
“One of my sisters,” Ursula corrects herself, “told me that Satan can give special powers to women so they can spread sickness with a simple look, and that he gives men a belt that’ll allow them to turn into wolves when they wear it, but until you told me all about revenants, I had never heard of Satan puppeteering corpses before. ”
They really don’t teach them much in those convents, I think but say not, for I don’t want to offend.
Instead, I suggest putting a stone in the man’s mouth and then placing him face down with his feet pointing west, but Sister Ursula tells me it’s bad enough that we can’t observe the proper funeral rites without making an active mockery of them, so we leave him lying on his back with his face looking east, his body covered with branches.
Then, we walk, and walk, and walk.
Whenever we see a plant we can eat, we stop to gather it. We have both known the bite of hunger, though me more than most, and would be fools to leave food when we find it. Ursula teaches me their Latin names, which sound both pretty and sinister to me.
I find myself talking to her without pause, telling her more about revenants and my grandmother’s stories, about the work on the farm, about the weather.
I don’t mean to. My father did always say that a good woman is a quiet one.
I can’t seem to help myself, though. It’s as if every thought I have inside my head rolls out of my mouth.
I pluck some daisies—Bellis perennis—and braid a crown in the hope that giving my idle hands some work will quiet my tongue, but my hands are used to carding wool, spinning, and a hundred other tasks besides, so it doesn’t do much at all.
“What will you ask the saint if it’s all true and we get to wish for something?” I ask Ursula after I have placed my crown of daisies on her brow. She looks very fetching, even though her face is pale and a little drawn.
“For my living sisters to be safe, and that the souls of those who have died may be lifted up out of purgatory and sent to Heaven if they are not there already,” she says promptly.
“How selfless of you. Is there nothing you want for yourself? A knee that doesn’t pain you, mayhap?
” She has tried to mask how she favors her left leg, but I’m no fool.
I saw that soldier kick her very hard as I fought him, saw her touch her knee and wince when we were hiding in the bracken.
It makes me regret not hitting him with that rock a second time.
“I won’t slow you down, I promise!” Her eyes have gone all large with fright, her voice high as she pleads for me to believe her.
I tuck a daisy behind my ear. “Peace. I am just twittering on. I mean nothing by it. So you’ll spend your wish on your sisters, not on yourself?”
“Wishing my sisters well shall gladden my heart and give peace to my troubled mind, so in a way, I am spending it on myself, I’m sorry to say.
” A low-hanging branch almost knocks her crown from her head.
She pushes the branch to the side so I can pass by unencumbered, though really, there’s no need; she is much taller than I am.
“Why are you sorry?” I ask.
“I shouldn’t want things,” she replies, her brow all wrinkled, like a piece of muslin fretted by a rough hand.
“Wanting things is only normal.”
“Desire is at the root of all evil.”
“You can give your wish to me, then, and I shall spend it for you, if there is a wish at the end of all of this, mind,” I tease, flicking a flower at her.
I try on the second crown of daisies, but I have made it too tight, and so I open the wooden box with the skull that Ursula holds so carefully and place the crown on the skull’s red hair instead. The effect pleases me; it makes her look girlish and gay.
When I look up, Ursula’s brow is smooth again as a fresh piece of paper, and that pleases me, too.
Beauty always pleases me.
There are filth and rottenness in this world; I’ve been forced to contemplate plenty.
But I’ve found that, if I see something of great beauty and I look at it for a long time until I have a clear picture of it in my mind, then I can call up that picture whenever there’s filth and rottenness, and that makes it easier to bear.
That is why my eyes landed on Ursula’s face when those soldiers ambushed us, and why I clasped that cool white hand with such force, I felt the little bones move under the skin.
A good thing it was, for she would have surely died or worse if I hadn’t, like my big sister, Margarethe, who couldn’t run when the soldiers came…
I rub a daisy to pulp between my fingers, and the yellow smear left by its heart and its good green scent, which is a kind of beauty also, help to ground me amid the dark thoughts and memories that always lie in wait, ready to pounce and ensnare me.
When they do, there’s no saying how long I will be lost for.
I couldn’t save Margarethe, but I did save Ursula from the soldiers, and in doing so, did I not take responsibility for her? Did I not make her my charge in a way?
And if that is true, then she is now mine.
Mine to protect.
Mine to cherish.
Mine to love.