When each of Marjeta Kronos’s sons had been born, she had given him the same name, showing a stubborn streak that Petra might have appreciated. Born years apart, the boys were named Petrak, which means “rock.” The first two sons each lived as long as a cut lilac branch in water. For a week, they breathed shallowly, barely cried, and refused to nurse. Varenka massaged their limbs with oil and wine, and rubbed honey on their gums. She offered to concoct a drink of mummy. This is a syrup made from body parts dug up from graves and then boiled. Mummy is supposed to ward off death. But Marjeta refused each time Varenka offered, saying that nothing could save the babies and she would not make their brief lives painful in any way, including forcing them to drink a vile liquid that wouldn’t work. Varenka was offended, but didn’t argue. After all, Marjeta Kronos could tell the future.
When she became pregnant for the third time, her spirits got heavier as her body grew. Her older sister—Dita’s mother—and all of her friends did their best to help her through this difficult pregnancy. But Marjeta Kronos was no longer the cheerful woman they knew. Her husband had been distressed by the deaths of his first two sons, but he refused to give up hope for his third child. He pressed his wife to tell him what the matter was. Marjeta always grew distant and tired when he asked, and shook her head with the decision of someone who knew that what she said would not be believed, or would do no good.
When she gave birth, it was to twins. The first child was a son. He was stillborn, but Marjeta said he was to be named Petrak anyway. The second child was a pink, healthy, squalling girl. She was wrapped in clean cloth and given to her mother, but by then Marjeta was too weak to even hold her. Mikal cradled the girl in his arms instead. Marjeta opened her eyes and spoke to the infant, “I worry for you. The future is not clear, love.” And then she added, strangely, “The horseshoe makes its own luck.”
When Marjeta died, Mikal wanted to name the baby after her. But his sister-in-law Judita suggested the name Petra, saying that she thought that this was what Marjeta would have wanted. And so Petra became who she was.
“Petra.” Lucie leaned over the bench. “In Prague you can’t walk around looking the way you do, half boy and half girl. Maybe people in Okno don’t care how you dress, but in Prague people will look at you oddly. You should comb your hair and wear something more suitable, more ladylike.”
Petra considered this. “May I borrow a comb, then?”
Lucie handed one back to her. Then she turned around and faced the road, settling into her seat with the satisfaction of someone whose words, after many years, have finally been listened to.
When Lucie’s back was turned, Petra dug the knife out of her pack. She opened it and proceeded to saw away at her tangled hair, cutting so it fell just to her shoulders, like Tomik’s. Petra worked the comb through her newly short hair, screwing up her eyes in pain. But when she had untangled most of the knots, she enjoyed the way her hair swung about her neck. She felt lighter, freer.
“Thanks, Lucie,” she said to the young woman’s back, and passed the comb.
Lucie turned around with a smile that got stuck somewhere along the way. She gasped. “Petra,” she whispered in horror. “You look like a boy.”
Pavel, who had been keeping his eyes trained on the road, stole a glance over his shoulder. He let out a long whistle.
“Dita is going to kill you,” said Lucie.
“What else is new?” Petra shrugged, and tossed her cut hair out of the cart for the birds to make nests with.
9
The Golden Spiral
THIS WAS PRAGUE?
Her first vision of the city had filled her with wonder. When Lucie, Pavel, and Petra reached the outskirts of Prague, night had fully fallen, and the city glimmered with lights. The Vltava River flowed like quicksilver in the moonlight. Boats bobbed along in the water. The castle spires on top of a tall hill pierced the black clouds.
Lucie had fallen asleep by then, her head resting on Pavel’s shoulder. When they reached the inn, Petra helped him try to wake her up. Lucie flickered open her long, fair eyelashes for one good look at Petra. “Who are you?” she murmured confusedly, and fell back asleep, her cupid-bow mouth open. Pavel and Petra managed to get her upstairs to their room. The innkeeper brought an extra pallet for Petra. The girl plopped down onto it, and tried to ignore the bedbugs. At first, she was too excited to sleep. The pattern of the city lights, not quite wild and not quite orderly, burned behind her closed eyes. She decided she had never seen anything so beautiful as this city.
But morning light can be unforgiving. At dawn in the common room downstairs, several of the inn’s guests slurped down bowls of lumpy gruel. Petra decided to skip breakfast. She hurried away, telling Pavel and a still sleepy-eyed Lucie that she had been to Prague before and knew the way to Aunt Anezka’s from the inn. Pavel was thinking of all the things they had to do that day, so he simply told her to meet them at the inn before dark and let them know then if she planned to sleep at her aunt’s or with them. Lucie, half awake, nodded without really understanding and stirred her gruel with a spoon. Petra shouldered her pack, which contained the things she could not bear to have stolen: her father’s book and Tomik’s Marvels. She tied her purse around her waist, inside her shirt.
The first thing that happened on her first day in Prague was that Petra stepped into a pile of something very unpleasant. She looked down and grimaced. “Ew.”
Astrophil peeked over the edge of her ear. “It looks like someone just emptied a chamber pot in the street,” he said disbelievingly.
Across the street, a pair of hands appeared in an upper-floor window to prove Astrophil’s theory. The spider and the girl shared a moment of shocked silence.
“That is not what I would call the practice of good hygiene,” Astrophil declared.
Petra walked, trying to ignore the squish of her right shoe. She stayed in the middle of the street, where it seemed less likely for her to be pelted by things people were tossing out of their windows. Soup bones and empty bottles rained down from above.
There were no trees in the city, and no space between the buildings. The houses and shops were jammed together. Many of the buildings looked very ramshackle. They leaned, they sagged, they towered, they tilted.
Petra spotted a trough of water and pushed past a few horses to reach it. Bits of green stuff and a number of bugs (dead and alive) floated on the water, but Petra didn’t care. She plunged her right foot into the trough.