Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 Read online

  "Es war einmal...” I said, just before she spoke.

  "Ah, ‘once upon a time,'” she said with a laugh. “'Olipa kerran.’ I am sorry for the deception, but you so desperately wanted a name, any name, that I thought of that. You must know I did it to guard us both."

  I wanted to say, shout rather, “I forgive you,” but that did not feel right. I felt more like asking her forgiveness for doubting her. Instead I said, “May I ask your name for a third time?"

  "Yes, though we must wait a while longer for my truest name,” she said. Her eyes flashed, a silvery grey. “I am Piritta. Wait, wait a little longer, I will tell you more, but first tell me your full name, so I know it is really you."

  "Johannes Ehrenfried Erasmus Gersterbusch."

  "Ah yes,” she sighed, so that I thought I never wanted to leave her breath. “It is you. I have waited as long as you have, only I have been awake for the waiting longer than you have."

  I blinked. She laughed again and said, “Such long names you have. Mother says that it is because you don't know your true names and try to make up for the lack with four or five when one is all you need. I think I will call you ‘Hannu,’ to make matters plain and simple."

  I laughed. Hannu and Piritta. I liked that. I suddenly realized that Piritta was speaking flawless High German, and a dozen questions rushed to my tongue. She put her hand to my mouth before I could speak. I would have stood like that with her in the redoubt through the thickest of bombardments. She was blushing.

  "I brought you an egg,” she said, pointing at the basket. “A very special egg that we shall share together, if you will."

  We gathered scraps of wood and straw and lit a small fire. Piritta opened the basket and took out a large frying pan that had been resting on a tripod, removed the tripod and placed it over the fire, and then rested the pan on the tripod. She knelt down, reached into the basket again, and held up the largest egg I had ever seen, an oval that filled both her hands, an egg almost as large as her head, whiter than snow except for one red streak that circled it like an equator. The very last rays of the sun and the glow of the fire combined to give the egg a luminously orange sheen in the near-dark. She held the egg out to me.

  "Mein Herr,” she said, and the brooch quivered. “From beyond the stiled coasts and the flustering streams, from the heart of the hatch-nale and neeves, I bring you a delicacy that is the rarest in the world, one that will change your life forever. And mine as well. Hotter than fire, colder than ice. An egg, mein Herr, of the earth's first-born, the egg of a lohikaerme, the egg of a lind-worm. The egg of a dragon."

  I peered at the egg like Tycho Brahe examining the stars, like Leeuwenhoek gazing at animacules through his microscope. My hand trembled as I touched the shell, traced its longitude, found it as hot as the Tropic of Capricorn. I asked her how she had got it.

  "My little boat took me across many waters,” she said. “I came to a cove on the coast of Gotland. Tall trees ring it, boulders guard it, no man goes there. I sang to the great dam of all sea-dragons and she came. An uikku-mother, shaped as a grebe, horned and tufted with a neck longer than a ship, she came out of the water. In my little boat I stood and sang our need to her. She sang back, her bill like a spear but thicker than a horse. Long we locked in kennings and verse, her wings beating foam on the water, my boat nearly drowned. At last the grebe-dragon understood our need. She agreed to make a great gift: she gave us one of her eggs."

  As Piritta spoke, I saw in my mind a grebe taller than the tower of St. Nikolai rearing itself over a small but upright figure balancing herself in a boat. A dark rocky coastline arced behind the pair. Their singing carried through cold Swedish winds.

  "This is the choice before you,” Piritta said. “You may eat this egg with me and join me in gaining a dragon's vision, a dragon's understanding of bird-speech, a dragon's feel for Earth's dance. Gifts like this are only offered once and they always come with a price. You would have to leave your city for a while, and you would never be of the city again, not wholly. Or you can refuse this gift, and be as you were, a burgher, a merchant, a son entirely of the city. If that is your choice, our fates will be uncrossed, and I will never be allowed to see you again."

  I stared at the egg blazing with the reflection of the fire and I stared at her. The voices of Thomasius, Kant, and the Englishman Hume were in my head arguing against this madness. More loudly still were the voices of my sister Dorothea Luisa, and my brother, and even Herr Classen and my cook Elisabeth Sophie.

  "But I love Ollemunde. It is all I have ever known. It is not a bad city as cities go, is it? The Widow Harloff was just scared of you, that's all, and understandably ... all she has to live on are the eggs her hens lay."

  "Ollemunde is a fine city,” Piritta said. “But it will pinion you forever if you let it, slowly but surely mortar you into its bricks and tiles. Is that what you want?"

  I looked at the distant church towers dimly silhouetted in the northern night. Slowly I looked back to the woman who sold eggs. When the mind has decided, the stomach still needs convincing. I said, “Knowing the language of birds is all very well but I cannot eat what birds eat. Will there be pickled herring wherever you would take me? With good black rye bread and cucumbers so crisp they burst in your mouth? Strawberries we can pick in the summer, and mushrooms we can find in the autumn?"

  Piritta said yes. I mounted my last defense: “I may return to Ollemunde? I must be allowed that."

  Piritta said yes. At that, I nodded and Piritta cracked the egg over the pan. The yolk was red as blood. In seconds the egg was frying, sending out a rich aroma that filled the redoubt, drifted past the cannons, and wafted over the waves. Piritta took out spoons and knives that had been strapped to the inside of the basket lid. As she did so a braid of her hair fell out from under her scarf, and dangled in front of her face. I knelt beside her and tucked the braid back into the scarf. Piritta put the cutlery into the basket, put her arms around my neck, and drew me to her. We only stopped kissing when we smelled the egg beginning to burn. Laughing she took the pan off the tripod and slipped the egg onto a plate that she pulled from a slot in the side of the basket. We held the plate between us, still kneeling, as Piritta cut the egg in two. The yolk ran like a river of steaming blood.

  "Quick, Hannu,” she said. “Before it cools!” We scooped the yolk into our mouths, we forked in strips of the white. The egg burned our mouths and seared our hearts but we ate every bit, licking the plate at the end like wolf-cubs.

  When we finished we sat and spoke through the night, holding each other close. I asked my dozens of questions and Piritta answered them all.

  "I will leave you at dawn, Hannu, and return in three months time, time enough for you to arrange what you need to arrange in Ollemunde for your departure. We will go to another city, the sacred court under the running water, where the Twilight Mother and the World Surveyor watch over humans, as they have since the beginning."

  Piritta spoke of the guardianship of the world, how the Mother and the Surveyor protected humans in ways long forgotten by burghers who thought their city-walls were all that was needed. She told me of the wild forces that city-walls could only shut out by losing knowledge of humankind's origin and purpose: Iron-Copper Grandfather who strides over forests, Hand with a Bell who comes at dusk, the Archer who is as tall as seven sables stretched nose to tail, the Glutton with iron teeth, the Baba Yaga with her pestle before her and broom behind. Mostly she spoke of dragons.

  "You burghers don't believe in dragons any more but you preserve their memory. What do you think you are commemorating on St. George's Day? You eat the candy dragon on St. Margaret's Day without understanding, you recite the rhymes on St. Boniface's Day without listening. But dragons are very real and very necessary ... for human survival, if only you knew that. We shall go together to speak with dragons, to the forests where the clapper-tongued troll-owls cry, to the neeve where the dragonets play, north up the Bothnian coast, inland to the great lonely lakes abo
ve Tammerfors and Viborg clear to the White Sea. South we shall venture beyond Minsk to Palyessia and the Prypesh marshes where the mire-drakes are, to Belovezhskaya where burr-flukes hunt bison. We shall go east into the Lettish Kalns to meet the glabricaries, oldest and wisest of all, who remember still the languages of bird-kinds no longer in the world. We shall watch the hackle-worms come down to the dunes of Courland, where they sport on the empty strands between Libau and Windau, hanging like kites above the surf."

  "Do you not fear them?” I asked, knowing that I was frightened, egg or no egg.

  "Of course, that is the point. With fear comes learning. Dragons are not all bad, any more than humans are all good. They are wild, themselves, not bound to the same rules as people. Sometimes we will have to fight them, Hannu, kill them, to protect all the Ollemundes of the world. But other times we will need their wisdom and their help for the very same reason."

  I held Piritta very tight and kissed her on the mouth, and said I did not understand but that I trusted her to lead us. She kissed me back and for a long time we said nothing. At last she said: “Mother says there is a deep change happening, a change for humans unlike anything the world has ever seen before, and that the dragons can help make the change less painful than it will otherwise be. Far off in England they have used fire to change coal into steam. In France they will slay the King and Queen, if indeed they have not already, and unleash a terrible war that will not end for centuries. I do not know much more, only that I was given the task of speaking with the dragons ... and of finding you to do so with me. Two must do it, one alone will fail. When I was a girl, Mother showed me the living image of who you would be, Hannu, and I have loved you ever since."

  I kissed Piritta again and looked at Ollemunde in the distance as the sun rose. The first rays were striking St. Nikolai. I thought of the stir I would cause. I would ask my brother to return from Riga to run the business, being sure he kept old Classen and gossipy Elisabeth Sophie on. I would invest a portion of my funds with my sister Dorothea Luisa and the child she was carrying (how did I know that? She had not written that in any letter). I would give Fraulein Hemmel enough Reichsthaler to re-plaster her cottage and mend her gate.

  Piritta stood up as the light grew. She kissed me a very long time, so that I was enveloped in the scent of flowers. Our tongues still tasted of dragon egg, smoky and vibrant, a taste that was salty and bitter at the same time as it was sweet as honey. She looked at me with deep blue eyes and said she would meet me outside the Miller's Gate in exactly three months. My head buzzed and I saw inwards. When my head cleared I was alone in the redoubt, and the little boat was gone. There was a smudge of charcoal on the floor but no other sign of a fire, and every scrap of eggshell was gone. For a moment I wondered if I had fallen asleep by myself at sunset and had had the most remarkable dream.

  But then I understood what the grebes were saying as they dived at dawn just off the breakwater.

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  Dropkick

  Dennis Nau

  My brother gets free tickets since he's the official photographer of the South Western Wrestling Alliance, so what can I say? I used to go to a match every month or so. They're entertaining and relatively harmless.

  When I met Andrea, just in casual conversation one evening, I mentioned this fact—that I occasionally went to professional wrestling matches and could get free tickets. “Really?” No, that's not the way she said it. “REALLY?” Andrea was quite an attractive young woman, and she seemed very nice, and I had been talking with her for a while, but I didn't think I was making all that big of an impression.

  "Yes, my brother is their official photographer. He doesn't get paid that well, but he gets tickets to all of the matches at the auditorium downtown."

  Andrea looked simply astounded when I told her that.

  "Would you like to go to one?"

  We went to the next, I don't know, dozen matches or so. I knew most of the wrestlers since my brother had always asked me to help him at the photography sessions, especially way back when they had flashbulbs that had to be changed after every picture.

  My brother, James, has been taking pictures of wrestlers as long as there were wrestlers, or so it seems to me. James is sixteen years older than I am. James is the oldest. I am the youngest of six kids. We had a happy, if hard, upbringing. My mother never liked wrestling. I did. James doesn't much care for it, but they pay on time—the wrestling association, that is.

  I was a sucker. None of my other brothers or sisters were.

  "Please, Bobby, can you help me with this session? The Crusher will be there."

  I don't think he paid me for the first two or three years. I didn't care then. I was a kid, and I got to see the Crusher.

  Andrea didn't believe it when Fabulous Freddy walked up the stairway that Saturday night, stopped, shook my hand, and patted me on the head.

  "Bobby, how are you doing?"

  I thought she was going to faint. We went out regularly after that, always to wrestling matches. That night Davis and Kid Clement won the World Heavyweight Tag Team Wrestling Championship—well, that was a special night. Andrea proposed to me and I accepted.

  After the match, we saw the champions. I told them my good news and they hugged me. They hugged Andrea, maybe a little too tightly. James took pictures. He didn't need anyone to work the flashbulbs by then. Yes, I knew all these guys.

  A year or two later, Andrea and I had a kid and we couldn't go to wrestling matches anymore. Andrea was working as a physical therapist and changing diapers, and I was working in accounting, changing diapers, and going to school. I wasn't a CPA yet.

  Those were wonderful years. Andrea was very fussy about day care and sitters. We went out very seldom. Little Luke wasn't a hard child in the beginning. He was sweet, but prone to colic. Andrea said something one night to Luke when he was maybe two years old, and little Luke head-butted her and damn near broke her jaw. Andrea got upset.

  "Good guys don't head butt,” she yelled at him. Well, of course good guys don't head-butt. They use sleeper holds, dropkicks, half nelsons, full nelsons, shoulder turns—holds like that. If they hit, they always do it with an open hand, unless unfairly provoked, and then everyone understands.

  They certainly don't use foreign objects.

  About a week later, Andrea said, “Little Luke ... that wouldn't be a bad wrestling name."

  "No, it wouldn't. He might not be little when he's old enough to wrestle."

  He wasn't. We got him into a wrestling club when he was five. The kid loved it. He lost his first seventeen matches, but what could a person expect? He was big for his age, and he was wrestling against six- and seven-year-olds.

  I became a CPA, and Andrea became a wrestling mom. She was beginning to learn amateur wrestling rules, and I sincerely hoped that she had gotten professional wrestling out of her head. They are not the same thing.

  I had talked to her about this right after we were first married. Professional wrestling is not a real sport. It's entertainment. Granted, it can be good entertainment. “You remember that first match we went to, Andrea?” Madame Mary Lou, one-half of the evil tag team of Madame Mary Lou and Sassy Sally, was acting as the manager of the Black Sheik. There she was, in the corner, in a loose, entirely-too-loose, shiny black evening gown, which looked like it could fall off her body at any moment, except for the fact that she had her right hand on the dress over her front left breast, holding it up—the dress, that is. She'd get excited, start yelling and screaming at the referee, at the opponent (a good guy), and at the Sheik. When you yell and scream you have to point. She'd point with her right hand but immediately grab the dress with her left. There was more pointing and yelling, hands going up and down, in and out. The dress never fell off, but the audience was waiting for it to fall. At least the men were. The good guy lost, and Madame Mary Lou walked off the stage with the Black Sheik in such a haughty manner that even the parking lot attendants hated her.

  "I w
as at Madame Mary Lou's wedding,” I told Andrea.

  My brother James photographed it. I was his assistant. I don't know if I've ever met such a sweet, soft-spoken woman. Well I have. Her name is Andrea, but Jeanie was a close second. Madame Mary Lou was simply Jeanie's stage name. She was a shy woman, but she knew how to act.

  I told Andrea about that time when I was maybe twelve or thirteen and there was a carnival in our section of town. There was wrestling. It was to feature Pretty Pete McKenny, the most notorious wrestler in the Southwest. It cost a couple of bucks to get into the tent, so, what the heck, I went in. They were looking for challengers to take on Pretty Pete, who was anything but pretty. He would have been prettier if he had worn a T-shirt or something, which might have hidden his stomach, which almost hung down to his knees. Pretty Pete didn't know he was unattractive, apparently, and pranced around the ring like a ballerina, looking for opponents. He was an easy man to despise, and every person in the audience was thinking, I could beat him. But they didn't volunteer.

  A skinny guy walked up on the stage.

  The promoter looked at him and scoffed.

  "What you up here for?"

  "I'd like to wrestle Pretty Pete."

  "Sure, and pigs can fly. What makes you think you can take on Pretty Pete, who has two world championships to his credit?"

  "Well, sir, I was pretty good at wrestling in high school, and I work out every day."

  "You got life insurance?"

  "Yessir."

  "I don't know."

  He went back, conferred with Pretty Pete, who had this evil grin on his face, and returned to the microphone: