Strand upon strand are woven into a rope. I see that a great many of the fibers are red and a great many are black, but look, in the hands of the ropemaker the stout plait waxes silver! There is nothing greater than the loving heart of this craftsman of fates.
What should now be told? One journey is like the next! All paths have their delightful plains and blackberry brambles and trees straight and trees twisted and corrupted by wind.
The two girls were making their way toward Obořiště. May God be with them! They were lamenting, but you and I have little regard for their tears, and we will encourage them to a happy outcome. Oh, you little girls, how foolish you are, why would you think that there are deeds that could terrify the architect of deeds? You arrantly proud women, you little lambs of sin, nary a zephyr has detached itself from the hurricanes of destruction to stir even a hair on your brows. We see that your guilt is indeed scant. It is no greater than if you had carelessly dropped a quail’s egg harboring an embryo of life. What is your true worth? What is the true worth of your friends? What is the true worth of people?
I would rather not answer. I have seen a dying child, a worker on his deathbed, a madman hanging onto the bars, a blind man tapping his way along the walls, innards ripped open and human hands plunging in, I have seen a man in utter despair, and I cannot believe in the majesty of death. I have sought the angel of life. Where does he dwell?
Nowhere! I have seen men and women engaged in tiresome and excruciating labor at the bedsides of the dying. Rarely do they pull themselves away, rarely do they visit the beds of the sick. Their love was unrecognizable, and their grief was unrecognizable. Grief? Love? Yes! Yes! Yes! God had fixed to each of their silly caps the little plume of an angel. Well then, human life has the inestimable worth of love. How fortunate that Marketa and Alexandra were in love, how fortunate that they had been given the opportunity to suffer, for souls cannot live without pain. The landscape these two pilgrims were traversing had already changed three times. The forest and the hilly meadows were now behind them. They saw the smoke of peasant fireplaces, chimneys, a rooftop, then finally and quite suddenly the houses of a village. The road sloped downward. They took a few steps more, and then Alexandra stopped, pleading that they steer clear of the village as it was surely hostile.
"Hide," Marketa said, "whatever for? Haven’t we been hiding long enough? Let’s go into the village, come what may."
Strangely, the bandit girl, who was not a cautious soul, wavered, while Marketa Lazarová walked on ahead without fear. Whence did this resolve come? From humility! Having exited the forest and crossed the sandy soil of the boundary, finding herself in a landscape where belfries and sunshine reigned, the unhappy girl could only feel the weight of her guilt compounded. She wished for retribution, she longed for it. She longed for retribution, for retribution was as sweet and as pleasant for this Christian woman as a bed and bath for the weary.
Retribution is the cornerstone of forgiveness, and you, O woman of easy faith, you incline toward certainties and mercy. I fail to see resoluteness in this. Just as you had been so blasphemous in your prayers, you now are equally blasphemous in your penitence. You imagine that you are kneeling in shame and humbleness before your father, beating your head against the ground, yet a repulsive scorpion lies at the bottom of your jugful of tears! I see in your heart the blissful delight of those who humble themselves, I see the happiness of mistresses pining for their beloved, I see the burning and shameful happiness you conceal. How fatuous you are! Yet God shall smile at your weakness.
Marketa entered the village first, while Alexandra kept her distance, her brigands’ prudence keeping her to the shadows. But then they came across a peasant woman leading a child by the hand. The woman cried out, and snatching her little son in her arms, she ran to a door. It was locked. Then she set to beating on it with her fists while calling out Kozlík’s name as if the bandit had come in person.
It took no longer than two shakes of a lamb’s tail for the little peasant man to see that some burly horseman wasn’t nearby. And damnation! Inspecting the scene and finding the village utterly empty, he grabbed his hazel rod and rushed out to the green.
"I'm of no mind for this, mark my words, I’ll give you what for! You forest girls steal children!"
Naturally he hiked up his sleeves and went at them, giving them the hiding of their lives. And as he was lashing them, people and sticks and war scythes gathered in front of the house. It was quite a beating. Marketa Lazarová was getting her wish. Oh, Jesus and Mary, oh, sweet Jesus, if only all our wishes were so readily granted! One snatched her hair, another tugged her ear, a third pasted her back, one blow after another raining on her buttocks. Alas, we know barely half of our true natures!
Penance or not, fie on them! The young ladies would have gladly forgone the recompense of their sins they had so desired.
Alexandra got hold of a fencepost of some sort or club and was indiscriminately flailing away at them. At once she grabbed a scythe dropped by one of the yokels. Dear gentlemen, antics such as these are the prelude to terrible things indeed. In no time at all the bandit girl had sunk her blade into the shoulder of an adolescent who happened to be closest. Once again Alexandra had spilled blood!
At that very moment her friend lost consciousness and crumpled at the feet of a shepherd boy who cried out from pity. The blood and this cry caused one peasant to pick at his club, another to lean on the rod he had just been swinging, a third to tighten his belt, someone coughed, another sniffled. There was peace and quiet. The name of the boy so bloodily wounded was Čepela. His face paled, and his soul was about to soar from his lips.
How should we act, what should we do with this inadvertent soldier?
They took a spiderweb and the membrane that clings to the shells of fresh eggs and applied them to the wound. Irate grumbling. And worming his way through the gawkers and obdurate spectators whose tenderheartedness was so incomprehensible, through these ogres who’d give you the shirt off their backs, was the village scoffer, an eternal matchmaker, connoisseur of the law, buffoon and magistrate.
Now look here, listen to what I tell you," he said as his eyes narrowed, "I say we shouldn’t buy what we need, but only what’s essential. Whosoever overbuys really is a stupid guy!" All right, all right, were you expecting him to say something sensible? Dear gentlemen, our sage said nothing of the sort. Any intelligent person knew that bailiffs and moles for hire were lurking everywhere. The judge was a lord, the king was a lord, and the nobles were lords. Why get your fingers burnt? Everyone knew that no objections would be raised if a peasant gave them a little hell somewhere out of sight, but appealing to the courts? Ohhh no you don’t, not a good idea!
This unlikely joke, which you might find halfwitted, this sagely intervention, made everyone talk again and laugh, and so conceal their overexcited hearts.
Čepela continued to breathe, and his soul sank back to a place within his breast. Yet on that day no one could know that he had but a month left to live and would die of this wound all the same.
As Čepela continued to breathe, Marketa Lazarová got back on her feet, and so the peasants said to one another that there’d been enough talk and it was time to stop. They relieved Alexandra of the scythe and vigorously chased the two damsels out of the village. They were having quite a good time of it, clapping their hands at one moment, singing mocking ditties at another, and everywhere reverberated their call that brazen souls give the nobles an earful even though they be rueful. Upon my word, I fear that Alexandra and Marketa suffered several more blows on their way out of town, which I do regret.
Hardly were the two girls a stone’s throw away when Count Kristian came riding through the village, which became celebrated for this fracas, so that even today its name is not Fishpond, as it once was, but Háva’s Fence. He was looking for his son. If only he had come an hour earlier! If only he had caught his son’s murderess! But he had no earthly idea. He was napping in the saddle, and if the mood took him, he engaged Reiner in conversation. Although in ill humor, he was not exasperated. He had dreamed that his dashing son had been squandering his father’s gold, as young men do. Thrusting his hand into his purse, he counted how much of it was left.
The royal soldiers were billeted in town, and Pivo was reluctant to send them with the count to traipse all over the countryside. Kristian did not press the matter, for the army is the army! There was nothing for him to do but take three louts into his service and set out with them on his own. With Reiner they made five. The count believed the lovers had not stayed in the forest and were seeking out a church and a priest. He easily reckoned that they were in a hurry to marry. He kept watch over the churches and would rush to overtake the pair before they could even enter. And he would have given them hell, for fathers show absolutely no compunction about calling love fornication and base concupiscence.
When the count pulled up on the village green of Fishpond, he could not help but notice the half-demolished fence, the sticks, jugs, stones, and clods of earth. All of it lay in the middle of the road. He directed Reiner to inquire as to what had transpired. And Reiner commenced his queries:
"Tell me, neighbors, who passed through your village? Whom did you beat with sticks, at whom did you throw rocks? Was it a mendicant monk going from house to house in the name of God’s love? A goldsmith returning with his wares?"
"Neither, my good sir," replied a man reputed to be the cleverest of them all, "it was no monk nor master craftsman. If the first, we would have filled his sack and his basket. To the second, we would have pointed out the road to take. I would have brought him water and wished him a pleasant journey home. No one was here except for two maidens, about whom you have not inquired."
"How can that be?" exclaimed the bishop’s servant, who had become Kristianized.
What else could they do but come out with the truth? The men-at-arms listened, but as soon as Alexandra’s name was mentioned they turned their horses around. They did not wait for the peasant to finish speaking or for the count to signal toward the road. They rode off at a gallop and in a few minutes overtook the two unfortunate women.
Marketa Lazarová was too exhausted to walk any farther. The five horsemen crowded around. Halting the horses, the men leapt down, and Count Kristian, father of the murdered boy, stood before Alexandra. Would you believe that this amazon’s heart was beating audibly, like a pair of stomping fencers? Would you believe that this bandit girl, who so effortlessly restrains a stallion, was breathless? In every memory resides a fear that rivets us before someone we have betrayed, someone we have wantonly wronged. Recall a boundless shame, an unspeakable fear that held you in its grip, and multiply it, multiply it a thousand times over, for Alexandra’s face is covered with splotches that continually refresh. Count Kristian rattled off one question after another, his foreign tongue intelligible in its ardor, as is weeping and sobbing. His speech hurtled through words, booming, bleating, then abating, until only a whisper sounded. Finally he turned away. From that moment on he said not one word more and broke down in tears. Reiner, the pitiable intermediary of this questing father, heard out the rest. Marketa spoke for Alexandra. It was getting late, the hired goons, bored, lolled around this statuary of woe and rattled metal and harness, their horses occasionally whinnying.
It was nearly four o’clock. The count leaned against a tree and no one could know and no one could guess what he intended to do. Kill Alexandra? Go to find his son’s grave? Return home? The murderess got up from the ground and spoke:
"I have committed the most heinous act of all. My grief does not detract from my guilt, take me captive. I wish for a punishment equally terrible. I have taken refuge in a single thought, an unwavering thought, in the thought of love. I wish for death, may its cloak open wide before me! It is the ferryman, it is the stallion that will carry me to our reunion."
What flames, what infernal emotions were in that heart? Recognizing that Kristian had loved her, recognizing her error, she was seized by a torrent of love that threw her to her knees. She cried out before this weeping father and before these men with ears coarse and eyes indecent. She stared at Kristian’s paling forehead, into the very center of his mind, which no longer had the strength to comprehend this fidelity. She struggled to invest that dead heart with a desire for her blood to run through Kristian’s veins.
Yet all this is a foolishness that old men do not permit themselves. The count stood up, and paying no attention to her pain, slammed a pouch with money between his lackeys and ordered them to take Alexandra to the captain’s camp.
Reiner and Marketa Lazarová were to accompany him to the forest grave.
Well then, see these two processions. Alexandra walks bound between two horses and does not look back or bow her proud head even a little. Perhaps she still sees that sweet face. A delusion of passion, a delusion that will last until the moment of death, seals her lips. Let her go, let her be reunited with her beloved.
The devil is a more capricious architect of events than Providence. It was surely he who prodded the count to drag Lazarová into the forest that so terrified her. It was surely the devil who whispered into Kristian’s ear that he should order the woman who wanted only to see the pine over her beloved’s grave to go in the opposite direction. Marketa walked with an obedience that was disarming. She concealed her terror – terror! – afraid she would meet with Mikoláš. What, she feared her own beloved? How could she not? Šerpin Holt was his forest, that is, the brigands’ forest, a vast den of license.
Why would Mikoláš even ask for whom you were weeping? Wouldn't he see you at the side of the soldiers? He would strike with his sword, feeling neither sin nor remorse, he would strike with his sword like a harvester strikes with his scythe at the stalks of grass at haymaking time.
Ah, her apprehensions truly were not unfounded, and a new round of bloodshed and a new round of sin were at hand.
See the silhouette of the forest, dark descending, beware the night, O Count.
Yet what would deter a father who has lost a son, what would deter him from going all the way to the grave, a spot of light between the darkling trees?
They walked on, and Marketa beseeched God to turn Mikoláš away from this place and to refresh her memory. She felt she had lost her way and was wandering aimlessly.
It was nearly midnight. Once again the owl hooted, once again rustling and the yowling of bitches in heat came from the bush. Darkness burst through darkness, the horses shuddered, and the burning eyes of a lynx glowed between the branches. Marketa Lazarová stopped and entreated them to turn back. Gone was the certainty, gone was the security when she surveyed the night sky, reticulated by the branches of the treetops, gone was the enchantment that spread peace and tranquility over the lairs of wolves. The moon of those nights was shattered, and like a gloomy wraith it bent its pallid head and dragged along a mantle of light. How could Marketa stay in this ghastly edifice of the forest, in this terrifying vessel? Yet such is the force of love that she was not afraid. She saw a lovely grove with wild animals walking along its paths, with herds seeking pasture, with the sound of a magnificent pheasant, and through which walked an unyielding lord. Everything gave way before the man.
After about two hours of wandering, Marketa saw a gap in the pine tops. At once she saw the whitish stones. She vaguely recalled it, remembering that somewhere nearby they had crossed a stream. She walked ahead, then turned back, and then, suddenly, she felt loosened soil beneath her feet. She was standing on Kristian’s grave. Her mission was over. But what would she do, stay there or leave the forest alone? No longer noticing her, the count sank to his knees and crossed himself in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. She knelt at his side, and they stayed immersed in prayer. A third hour, then a fourth and a fifth passed. Day was breaking, and Marketa gave thanks to God she had survived the night. She touched Count Kristian’s shoulder and said:
"Rise, sir, let us return home, it is time. It is time, for too much mourning only distresses the dead. The poor souls are obliged to look on us as long as we weep, and they can neither rise nor sink."
Yet the count shook his head and began to dig, scattering the earth from the grave in every direction. What hope did he still nurture within him? A hope that never dies, the hope of a father. He thought that whoever was lying here was not his son. He thought that these accursed sluts call every young man sweetheart and Kristian. He set to digging and did not reply. His wizened hands bled, he forwent the use of an implement not to damage the face that might be quite close to the surface. He ordered Reiner to stand at a distance.
Oh, you night, oh, you dawn! With what deception will you answer his zeal, with what smile will you reply? A smile with foam drying between the teeth!
Seeing the old man’s frightening behavior, Marketa screamed and, seized by fear, took off, running farther and farther away. They did not try to stop her, let her run. Reiner gave an insouciant wave of his hand. The forlorn girl fled with all her might. Black shadows teemed beneath her feet like snakes, as the sun had already vaulted over the horizon. It happens at times that the sweetness of the spring and the morning dazzles us. The weather was delightful then, mist hovering over the fields and rime blanketing the slopes. Marketa had slowed her pace. She was overcome by a fatigue so great that it felt like sleep. She heard bells chiming, and a balmy warmth pervaded her limbs.