Arcanum Part 33

It was light when she woke. Sophia was vaguely aware of a hammering noise, and she wondered if it was her head. Purim drinking was both epic and legendary, and she'd taken some wine when she'd got back home, despite it only being the men who were obligated to get to the point where they couldn't tell the difference between cursing Haman and blessing Mordecai.

As she raised her head from her pillow, she realised that the banging was real, insistent, and coming from downstairs.

It was loud enough to wake the dead. More importantly, it was loud enough to wake her father, who, as well as being just a little deaf, had imbibed heroic amounts of syrupy sweet wine and danced the hora well into the night.

She threw back the covers, dragged her heavy housecoat over her night-clothes and tried to hurry. She fell against her bedroom door, hauled it open with difficulty and then crashed against the opposing walls of the staircase on her way down.

"All right already," she called. "Enough."

The knocking stopped, and she worked the latch, with no result. Seemingly, she'd had enough wits about her last night to close the bolts.

Last night. She pressed her fingers hard into her temples and leant against the wall. Then she put her hand to her neck, and felt the scab of dried blood, and touched the top of her head where it was sore.

"Who is it?"

"It's Mr Thaler, Miss Morgenstern," came the reply, bright and loud.

What was the idiot doing? She struggled the bolts free and heaved the door aside.

It was Thaler. It was also half a dozen librarians, two of the town's militia, and three high-ranking guildsmen.

She stared at the crowd, trying to understand what brought twelve men to her house before breakfast. They stared back at her, clearly expecting something to happen, Thaler the most expectant of all.

"What?" she asked. She moved the hair that was curtaining one eye. "What is it?"

Thaler looked behind him at the waiting men. "We need your help. What else would we need?"

"My ... help?" Her hair fell over her face again, and she made more of a concerted effort to trap it this time. "I don't understand. Is this about the books?"

"Yes," said Thaler, "but not those books. I, we that is, have a plan."

He beckoned one of the librarians to him and plucked the roll of parchment from his pale hands. He unrolled it and held it up to her. It had lines and markings on it, with tiny annotations made in Gothic script.

"Yes. I see. You do have a plan." She leant back against the door frame. "What is it a plan of?"

Thaler let go of one end of the parchment and it rolled up again with a snap. "The water supply. Is your father up?"

"Up?" She looked back into the house. "You won't get any sense out of him before midday. And honestly, I'm not getting any sense out of you, either. What do you need my father for?"

"We need a scholarly Jew," said Thaler. "We have a book."

He waved at another librarian, who stepped forward and held up a black-bound book, the cover embossed with a menora.

"I can see you have a book. A book and a plan." Sophia shook her head to try and clear it. "Why do you need my father again?"

Thaler opened his mouth, but the man carrying the book got in first. "Begging your pardon, miss, but Mr Thaler's had no sleep at all, so if I might explain?"

"Someone needs to," she said.

"I think Mr Thaler's already told you that he thinks he can get the water running again. He has what we hope is a map of the underground cisterns, but we need someone who can read this Hebrew script. The library's got Hebrew readers, but they can't make head nor tail of this."

She focused on the man with his slicked-back hair and thin face. "Let me have a look."

She took the book from him and opened it at a random page near the middle. The spine creaked, and she had difficulty supporting its weight in one hand. She didn't want to drop it, so she only took a quick look.

"It's Yiddish, not Hebrew. Vernacular and old. No vowel marks."

Thaler looked pleased. "Your father can read it?"

"If I can, he can. But if I wake him up now, he'll still be drunk. As will every other male Jew in the street who might be able to make out what it says." Sophia handed the book back and stuck the heel of her hand into her eye socket. "Mr Thaler?"

"Miss Morgenstern?"

"At some point, we're going to have to stop doing this. Wait here." She stumbled back inside and pushed the door closed. This was insane. She had the fires to make, food to cook, dishes and clothes to wash, and today was Friday! The Sabbath wouldn't wait for anyone: two days' work to fit into one.

She couldn't afford to nursemaid goyim librarians through an obscure history book for the rest of the day. She needed to be here, in this house. Nursemaiding her father's sore head. Lighting the Shabbat candles.

But it was still very early, and her father wouldn't be conscious for hours. She ran a good household, so she could spare some time. Her neighbours would talk, but they hadn't seen the look on Eckhardt's face: the Jews needed the Germans like never before.

She growled at herself, and fled upstairs to get dressed, stamping back down again and flinging the door open on the still-surprised men.

"Where are we going?"

"The, ah, mikveh." Thaler pointed up the street in the direction of the synagogue.

"I know where it is, Mr Thaler." She closed the door behind her, and still they all stood and stared at her. "Oy. What are we waiting for?"

Sophia elbowed her way through and set off without them. Some of the window shutters were already open in the other houses, and as she strode past trailing a gaggle of black-robed men, spear-carriers and guildsmen, faces appeared at the openings, heads and shoulders leaning out to get a better view once she'd gone by.

The synagogue was at the corner of the street where it made a dog's leg into Scale Square. Stone-built, it was sturdy and squat, and underneath it, accessed by separate steps, was the mikveh.

She'd barely put one foot on the first step down when a window flew open.

"You men! Stop!"

They all looked up.

"You can't go down there. It's not allowed."

Thaler looked briefly confused. "But the prince has ordered it."

It was the turn of the woman stretched out of an upstairs window to be stunned. "The prince?"

"Yes, good lady. And the mayor."

Sophia retraced her path, and shielded her eyes so she could see. "Good morning, Mrs Cohen."

"Who's that?" She peered down. "Sophia Morgenstern? What are you doing?"

"I'm assisting these gentlemen in the execution of their lawful duty." She smiled. "I expect they'll arrest you if you try and stop us."

"Where's your father? Go and get him at once." The rabbi's wife's voice was sharp and demanding.

"My father is otherwise incapacitated, Mrs Cohen, as I expect your husband is. Now, if you'd like us to shout our business to the rooftops, I'll happily do so another time but not now." Sophia cupped her hands around her mouth. "We're busy."

She'd pay for that later, especially if this plan of Thaler's didn't work. She turned back around and descended to the wooden door of the mikveh.

"Watch your heads." She ducked through the doorway, and collected the lantern from the alcove. The air was moist and cool, and the sounds of moving water percolated upwards. "Tell me you brought more lights."

"Ah."

"Don't worry, Mr Thaler. I've brought a few from the library."

"Excellent, Mr Ullmann." Thaler beamed. "Yes, Miss Morgenstern, we have lights."

The mikveh was at the bottom of a square shaft, wound around with steps. They all clattered down, as far as they could go. The stairs went on, under the water, and the lazy ripples in the pool twisted the candlelight back up at them.

"Oh." Thaler leant out over the water. "I expected something more..."

"Grand, Mr Thaler?" She'd stopped on the step above the water, and held on to the handrail. "Not this mikveh. I'm told the one in Spira is very much bigger."

"But look. The water's not still."

"Can we drain the pool?" asked a voice.

"There's a gate which slides over the inlet. It's not a perfect seal, but the water leaves the pool faster than it leaks in, through a grating at the bottom. That's the way we empty it. But Mr Thaler," she asked, "you've yet to explain why we're here."

"The answer, Miss Morgenstern, is very simple. We believe this is one of the access points to the Roman water system. That you still have water here is confirmation of that. Now, if you would care to translate a portion of text." Thaler took the book from Ullmann and sat down on the steps so that he could balance it on his knees.

He leafed through the pages, and Sophia held her lantern so that he could see what he was doing. Pages of closely written Hebrew characters passed under his fingers. Then he turned one final page, and there in the margin was a drawing that looked a lot like the mikveh.

"Here." He turned the book around and looked expectant.

"How did you find this? Out of all the books in the library?" She bent forward, tracing the lines of script.

"As Mr Ullmann said, none of the librarians have had any sleep. We must have checked several hundred books until we found mention of this one. Then we had to find it. And when we'd found it, I had to look through it, while other stout-hearted gentlemen went even further back into the past, to the very founding of the town."

"You worked all through the night. And you're still working this morning."

"There's much at stake, Miss Morgenstern. But we're in company, and I can't elaborate. So if you please?" Thaler pointed to the book.

"Yes, yes, of course." She read. "Once the site for the mikveh had been established, work began. Joshua ben Cohen gave his blessing and ... how old is this book?"

"We believe it to be at least six hundred years old."

"This doesn't tell us why they chose this location, though." As Thaler's face fell, she turned back one page. "A conduit passed in a line from Scale Square north-north-west to vomit ... no, vent into the river west of the boatmaker's yard. Such living water as is passed through the conduit is by the Halakha suitable for a mikveh, and therefore determines its place."

"Which is exactly what we wanted, Miss Morgenstern." He turned around to address the men behind him. "Gentlemen? You may proceed."

The three guildsmen jumped down into the waist-deep water, one after another.

"Gods, this is cold!" one of them exclaimed, before reaching up for the chisel-tipped iron bar proffered by a librarian.

"What ... what are you doing?" Sophia turned from the book to the men in the sacred pool, who were tapping at the stonework and looking up to orient themselves. "Mr Thaler, what's going on?"

"It should be self-evident, Miss Morgenstern. We need to break our way through."

"Break? You can't do that."

"Sorry, miss. Prince's orders," said the guildsman with the wrecking bar. He drove the point between two pieces of stone and heaved. The sound of rock grating on rock echoed up the shaft.

"I thought you were just going to look." Sophia stared wide-eyed at Thaler. "You can't do this."

"My dear, we'll make good any damage we do. But you have to understand, this is the only clue we have."

"You can't do this to me. Frederik, you have to get them to stop." It felt like she was in that ice-cold water too. Numbing. Bone-chilling.

The first lump of masonry fell into the pool, and Thaler quickly closed the book to keep it dry. "We have to get the water working again, Sophia. I'm trying to help your community."

"This is the heart of our community, Frederik, and you're ripping it out." A second, larger stone came free, and the guildsmen stepped back as it crashed down, sending a wave up the steps that engulfed Sophia's shoes. "You don't understand what this means."

Even as she watched, a guildsman gave a cry of discovery "More light. More light!" and started to hack hard at whatever lay beyond the gaping hole he'd already created.

Thaler passed the book back up the line for safe keeping. "Sophia, calm yourself."

"I will not calm myself, you stupid man; you've desecrated the mikveh. No one can get married. No one can be buried. No one can have children." A gush of water from the wall sluiced into the pool, and the level rose as far as her shins. "And no one will ever forgive me for bringing you here."

She looked down into the ruined structure, at the rubble lying on the bottom of it and the hole hacked in the wall. The gout had become a trickle, enough to allow the guildsman to crawl head-first into the gap. The light from the lantern he thrust ahead of him cast dancing shadows against the walls.

"Gods," he said. "It's huge."

And Thaler, distracted by the shout, was clearly more interested in what was beyond the mikveh than in her hurt, than the fact he'd betrayed her and destroyed her reputation so completely it could never recover.

"Get out of my way." She pushed past first Thaler, then the librarians, almost sending several of them spinning into the water below.

She raced outside. The rabbi's wife was there, her hand over her mouth. How much had she seen? How much had she heard?

Enough to condemn her, for certain.

She fled back down Jews' Alley, all the way home, and slammed the door shut behind her.

34.

Chapter end