Bohemia, 1355
At last, Jitka had a grip on the tiny hoof and pulled her arm from the cow’s rear as the little calf slid, glistening in the moonlight, out of its mother and onto the field.
‘God be praised,’ she muttered, wiping her hands on the smock over her dress. The fabric was coarse and easily absorbed the blood on her palms. She touched the sweat at her brow. She said: ‘You chose midnight to deliver.’ Moments later, the lumpy sickle-shaped placenta dropped beside the calf.
Jitka had been anticipating the birth this night, and pulled a sharp knife ready from one of her front pockets and sliced through the umbilical cord. It would be important to observe for any sickness coming to mother or calf in the next few days. She would prepare a mint infusion tomorrow to wash the severed ends. She knelt down and ripped up long tufts of grass and rubbed fists of them along the flanks of the newborn as it struggled to stand. The herd placidly chewed cud and looked at the calf.
The Great Mortality had stripped Jitka, now a maiden of fifteen, of her family in fifteen days. When she was a child of nine, her mother and dearest baby Vaclav sickened together almost simultaneously with the scarlet patches, buboes, and delirium. Six days later, Father returned from the vegetable and herb garden complaining of a vicious headache and died abed five days later in a lake of blood and shit. And soon after, her beloved older brother Petr, so powerful with his scythe strokes at the mowing, was reduced to a whimpering ball of agony for four days before he too passed. The Great Mortality had robbed Bohemia of all Jitka’s family, neighbours, and friends, and who knows how many more beyond her close own circle. With no field hands, the wheat grew absently and was strangled by weeds. Yet she survived and she knew not why, but if it were God’s will that this be so, she was a practical girl; the herd hers to tend, along with onions and legumes and milk and cheese.
She discarded the grass stems and sat down and watched the calf stand unsteadily and blink. It let out a cry and the mother answered lowing, offering her udder. The calf found a teat then suckled. Jitka leant over and searched in the moonlight for her leather bag and pulled from it a blanket. She wrapped the blanket around herself. She thought: let us wait awhile, so the little one can fill its belly.
She lay down on her back and gazed at the stars. Save the solitary call of a corncrake, the silence behind the low murmur of her ruminating herd was complete. She sought the constellations. Is my mother this star and those two my brothers? And the brighter one, Father, winking at me and telling me to go on? The names for the patterns of stars were sorcery, but still she knew some. Everybody knew the one called ‘Orion’ and the shape of a handled pot, was it the ‘Great Bear’? with days measured in labours, and few chances left for learning star shapes, Jitka yet knew some, even if it was forbidden. She stifled a giggle with her hand. ‘I’m so bad,’ she thought.
Above her the sky was clear and rich with stars studding the velvet universe. She turned her head. Then Jitka noticed change above the treeline skirting the field to her right. She saw the stars start to disappear. She watched the bright jewels vanishing. The lacuna which replaced the tapestry of stars was shaped as a curve. When the vastness of this dark curve crept across the sky above her silently, Jitka in her fascination forgot to be afraid. The full moon behind her silvered the field, but an enormous shadow was forming itself into a black disc above her. Finally Jitka jumped to her feet. As she stood on shaking legs, looking at the sky with her mouth open, she heard the sudden drumming of cattle hooves and the sound of the calf crying.
‘Jitka,’ came the voice in her head, ‘Calm yourself. Patience’.
Jitka knew not whose voice it was. She didn’t ordinarily ‘hear voices’. During the great pestilence, innumerable sufferers claimed to. They died and that was that. Her head was silent this way. She was too busy with mopping Mother’s forehead and applying salves to the baby, and helpless as Father and Petr perished. Now this voice really was inside her head. And the voice was female and gentle and sweet as honey. Jitka felt no fear. She noticed the newborn calf alone and bleating, so she went quickly to it over the soft ground. She held it to her and nuzzled its vigorous new life, smelling the fur, and feeling the mother’s milk in the snorts from the calf’s nostrils. It cried still, and she talked to it: ‘calm yourself little one,’ she said. ‘Patience.’ She sat down and pulled the calf into her lap and tickled its ears and both were quiet. Jitka looked up.
At the centre of the circular darkness above her, a tiny light grew brighter and descended so that it was level with Jitka, perhaps half a furlong away. The light remained stationary for a moment and then vanished.
Now, a little way off, a woman appeared, illuminated by the moon. The woman’s head was uncovered and her hair curled around her forehead and fell about her neck. She wore clothing unknown to Jitka: a short white tunic curving closely across her bust so that the shape of her was clear in the moonlight, and enclosing her shoulders just so—a T-shape. Almost all of her naked arms were there glowing in the moonlight. On one wrist a silver band. The woman’s legs were enclosed individually by cloth that came together across her waist so closely her feminine body shape was disclosed. A belt of silver scales wrapped her hips and at its centre, below the white fabric of her tunic, a buckle shone as if it were gold. Jitka looked down and saw striped, white slippers laced multiple times.
The woman said: ‘Jitka.
Would you like to come with us?’
Jitka looked at the women and said, ‘I like your shoes. Your garments are beautiful.’
Then she put the calf down in the field and stood up, straightening her smock, and the dress beneath, both repaired many times. She lifted up her blanket and pushed it into her leather bag. The strap of the bag she put to her shoulder.
The woman held out her hands. Jitka smiled. She thought: ‘I will go on, Father’, and scooped up the calf.
