Noelle pondered this silently for a moment before returning to her questions. “And where are you from?”
Elga chuckled. “You’re going for the tough ones, huh? You are clever. I am from the far away, way beyond that edge of the sky where the sun rises.”
“But where were you born?”
“The place I come from has changed its name many times; I don’t even know what it is called now. When I lived there, it was named for the colors of the bay’s water, then it was given the name of a fire goddess and then a soldier, then a saint and then again another soldier. You want to kill a place, name it. A name only draws the people there who will kill it again. They slice it up or tear it down; they rape the women, burn everyone on pyres, and then, thinking they own it, they name it again. Stupid. Enough to know ‘there is a hill and good water, a cross in the road and a strong oak tree.’ But do not say it out loud. A home should always stay secret or someone will come to steal it.”
Noelle was quiet again. Elga suspected the girl was frustrated with the answers she was getting. Tough, the old woman thought, the real answers are never what we want them to be. She would teach the girl all she needed to know, how to read and write properly, how to curtsy and blush, how to slow time so that a wrinkle takes a century to grow, and how to cast the curses so that men would give you their fortunes, and their lives. As they reached the outskirts of Saint-Denis, Elga hoped that the spell she had put on her police car was holding, she did not need any attention. She only had to get to a bank, find a hotel, and set Max off on Zoya’s trail. Perhaps they could do some shopping at Les Halles too. There were some market stalls where Elga knew she would find the necessary ingredients.
She looked down at the girl. Noelle was a little young, much younger than Zoya had been when she had made the change, but that was fine. A lot of snares could be set with this kind of bait. The girl would learn or die. It was too late to go back; if the girl did not want to take the lessons, or if it turned out she had no aptitude for it, Elga would put her down. But her intuition told her this one had skills. They could hole up and work on simple lessons while the rat tracked down Zoya. Elga would start by showing her small tricks, how to pack whispers in hats, whistle for snakes, catch an idle eye, raise a fevered boil. Elga felt this little one would be easier to control, no adventuring off on her own, no appetite for trouble. How many scrapes and scandals had she pulled Zoya out of? Too many to count. That girl was too softhearted and too clumsy in her affections, always falling for lousy men like stupid Max.
She remembered the morning that Zoya had shown up back at the campsite with the rat. It was still before dawn and her dress was torn, her skin was scratched, her hair undone. She had crawled into the bed of their caravan wagon and collapsed, sick, doubling over with dry heaves and in a cold, clammy sweat until finally she had rested and was calm enough to pull a terrified Max out from her pocket.
As always, Zoya had a good story. Earlier the past evening, bored with all the haggling and hissing between the women, she had left their campsite and headed into the nearby town. She had longed for dancing and music and the reassurance of friendly eyes, no more than that, she said. She had met a boy there, a young priest broken fresh from seminary, drunk off berry wine and flush from his first lucky run at the tables, who now wanted to taste his first woman. Zoya was willing to oblige, she was intrigued at the idea of playing naughty with a priest, especially a young one, and she also had an eye for the rubles loose in his pockets.
The trouble started moments after they finally found a room and shut the door. The drunken boy had pulled her close and began kissing her roughly. She had laughed and tried to slow him down a bit, but instead he had pushed her hard against the wall and started tearing at her clothes, ripping the fabric. The force of his body kept knocking her head against the wall, and she tried to pull away but he would not let go. He had a funny look dancing in his eyes, one that she recognized all too well. Deciding that she had made a mistake, she had kicked him hard in the balls and lunged for the door, but he had reached out and grabbed her, pushing her against the wall and banging her head again. “You are a real handful, aren’t you? Some kind of devil’s woman?” he had said. She was dazed. He threw her down on the floor. She began crawling again toward the door, but he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to the foot of the bed. He tried slipping off his belt, but drunk as he was he could barely manage it. Sitting up, he fumbled around, clumsily attempting to unbutton his trousers, muttering, “My wise elders showed me where to stick it in troublemakers. Now I’ll show you.” Zoya went for the door again, but this time he grabbed her by the neck and pulled her back. “I will make it hard to run,” he had said, pressing her to the floor and lying down on top of her. He reached under and squeezed at her breasts roughly with one hand while pulling down his pants with the other. “Yes, now you are going to have a hard time running,” he said. She squirmed and struggled and screamed out for help but he slapped her harder and then she stayed silent. She knew nobody would come. Her head cleared enough so that she could recall what to do. She had been taken against her will before, but that was a different time. She had been weak then.
Turning and taking his head in her hands, as if she was finally succumbing, she put bloodstained kisses up his cheek and whispered the spell into his ear. He paused in his fumbling action and scratched at his nose as if he had a twitch. Then it began. She rolled free to the side of the room, and watched with relief and exhaustion as his flesh started its snapping and shrinking down.
The same people who had ignored Zoya’s desperate shout for help now paid no attention to Max’s, though his were far more terrible. He shrieked and clawed, whined and rasped through the whole messy, wet transformation; a high tearing wail screeched like a chorus of screeching kettle whistles as his vocal cords shriveled down and his throat constricted. Bones snapped as they were condensed and the room filled with the smell of the burning marrow and melting flesh as the heat of the boiling blood filled the room. His eyes changed last as he lay there, small weakened, and still pink from the raw, throbbing change. Then the black fur came out and a last shrill-pitched squeal emerged from him, but it was Saturday night in a mining town and everyone was deaf to the cries of a girl being raped and a rat being born.
Once changed, he had not run away but had lain still on the bare wood floor, looking up at her through terrified eyes. The sickness and dizziness from the spell overcame her and she vomited in the chamber pot. Then she curled up in a ball on the bed and fell asleep. When she awoke, the rat was still there, sitting up as if waiting for her. Perhaps he thought this was a temporary condition, that she would help him now that the lesson had been learned, or perhaps he was simply terrified of the new, unknown wilderness of hungry house cats, birds of prey, and dogs trained to slay vermin that lay beyond the door. She had thought of killing him then and there, she told the women, but that seemed too merciful an end. Still angry, she wanted him to live out his days as the pathetic little rodent he was. So she tucked him into her dress and staggered back to their campsite.
The rat ended up being useful. Through the unpredictable twist of spells, he had wound up capable of sniffing out any trail across every landscape and in all seasons, no matter how hard the frost or how flooded the roads. They had lost and found Max numerous times over the years, for at the first sign of real trouble he would always run off scared, disappearing for weeks, even months. But then he would pop up again, sniffing his way back to their side. His brother, too, the once innocent Andrei, who had found them at the campsite, proved to be bonded to Max by some tenuous but true sense of loyalty that made him, from time to time, a handy tool. Two bewitched brothers, she thought, each living a very different life from the one they had each intended, all because of a woman whose path they stumbled across, a woman they made the mistake of underestimating. Therein lies so much of history.
Elga pulled the car to a stop in front of the bank and looked down at the rat, who was now awake, sitting glumly in the girl’s lap. “It’s not so bad, Max. Think where you would have wound up if you’d never met us? A block of ice in some Siberian grave, tucked in with all those other bad Bolsheviks.” The rat did not answer.
Inside, Elga found the bank empty of customers. She walked up to the lone teller sitting at his window, a bright and ambitious young man named Francois Collet. Elga quickly went to work. It was merely a matter of transferring between accounts to cover some bills, she told Monsieur Collet—and cash, she needed some cash too. She had an account, but stupidly she could not remember the number. But she had already been there earlier that morning, did he not remember her? She was quite positive he had written the account number down for her. He smiled politely and said that he did not recall her but then again perhaps he did. He felt confused. The morning had been a busy one. He proceeded to look through the ledger. She hummed high and low notes, and clucked with her tongue. Anyone listening would have thought she sounded ridiculous. But Francois did not seem to hear her. He did, however, almost absentmindedly, hand over every franc note he had in his drawer, a considerable sum. He even waved as she waddled off, shouting after her,
