MY FATHER IS dead. The thought seized Melchior Wakenstede in the night as he lay in bed; it pierced his thoughts with no warning, painful and deep as an executioner’s searing-hot lance. Melchior had a dream in which he was walking on the rocks between the town wall and the sea; a woman approached him, crying, and said to him, ‘Do you understand that your father is dead, Melchior? You are all alone.’
He is dead. He’s gone. He died in my arms. All that remains of him is rotten earth in a decaying coffin deep under the ground in St Barbara’s Graveyard. Never again will I smell his scent or watch his hands as he prepares medicines. Never again will I listen to his voice as he teaches me something. He loved me, and now he is dead.
To understand this was painful, as painful as it had been the first time Melchior really grasped it. His father fell ill when he had been back in Tallinn for two years following his journeymanship in Riga and was working with his father once more. Not with a simple sickness, the medicines to counter which he would have known himself, no – it was an ill-natured and onerous affliction that made him cough blood and confined him to his bed with a high fever. It was not the cough and the fever, however, not the periods of weakness or the sweating palms but rather his expression that spoke to Melchior and told him that the man would not rise from his bed on this occasion. His father’s expression had no life, no love for life; it showed that he knew that this was the end and that he had submitted to God’s will. An apothecary must be familiar with and understand death, and he must know when his own is coming.
Melchior’s father died after eight days of suffering. He faded away and heeded the Lord’s call, and Melchior knew that nothing, nothing in this world, could lead him off this path. The town doctor paid a visit and shook his head, said that he was powerless, that this man’s life was in the hands of God alone. No earthly cure could be found for this disease, not any miracle remedy, no theriac, nor Mithridates’ potion, nor bezoar, nothing at all. His father was beyond help, and all Melchior could do was to wait and watch as his father coughed blood, faded and eventually expired. Melchior would be left with only memories and teachings, with things his father had touched, this house in which he lived … nothing more.
Melchior screamed and writhed in his bed. My father is dead. His chest heaved from the torment, and there was no other thought in his mind. He felt nothing as he pounded his head against the stone wall; he did not feel the wetness after he knocked over a jug of water. Only the agony of loss churned within. He clawed at himself to relieve it and howled.
Three days before his death his father could no longer speak. His countenance, from which the life had already vanished, said it all. He loved his son and regretted his departure from this world, but this was how it had to unfold. And he would not be alone in the Kingdom of Heaven; his Rosamunde awaited him there. Melchior’s mother visited his father in dreams, so his father had no fear; he knew he was expected. None the less, he felt grief. Just before drawing his last breath he managed to speak one final time. He had found the strength within at that moment to seize Melchior’s hand in farewell and utter his departing words in a feeble voice, ‘Take a good wife.’ A Wakenstede must always marry the right woman. A Wakenstede is damned without a good woman. The scourge will devour the man’s soul from within until he crawls naked in the dirt, screaming, flailing and tearing his hair from his skull, gnawing the flesh from his own bones, clawing his eyes from their sockets. Then Melchior’s father had whispered these words, ‘Saint, remember, fear.’ He gripped his son’s hand – he had wished to say so much more, but he was given no more time. Which saint was it that he must remember and fear? Melchior did not know, nor was he ever able to work out what his father had wanted to say, whether the words were a raving before death or something else. He was determined to find out one day.
Keterlyn was woken by her husband’s howling.
So it is tonight, the woman thought with alarm. Tonight is that night. It had been over six months since the last time, and she had begun to hope the Wakenstedes’ curse had released its grip on her husband, that her prayers before the altar to St Barbara and the candles that she lit there had helped, but no. She must be patient, she must believe, and hope, and love.
Keterlyn embraced her husband, but Melchior pulled free from her arms, curled up into a ball and howled.
This is the Wakenstedes’ curse. The pain of the whole world descends upon them like a hundred demons, and they cannot find solace. Death and horror, inferno and plague haunt them. Not every Wakenstede is afflicted – but if one is free from it then his son will not be. It had never found its way into Wakenstede sisters and daughters; only the men were stalked by it, as if a malison had been placed on them for some unspeakable sin committed hundreds of years before, one that they must carry and suffer. They had read books by scholars and scrutinized the secrets of nature to find a cure, but no cure had yet been found. They learned about the lives of the saints to find one to help them – yet no saint, no pilgrimage, no relic had ever been of any succour. And a man taken over by the Wakenstedes’ curse ultimately either perishes in the clutches of its pain – as if all the world’s sins were heaped upon his shoulders – or finds the right woman to be at his side, a woman who loves the man and prays for him and with whose support he can venture out across this sea of torment. Yet the curse does not leave these women unscathed – Melchior’s mother departed this world before her time because she had helped her husband to vanquish his pain, and in doing so had been punished herself.
Keterlyn took no notice. Keterlyn believed, hoped, loved.
Be it godly wrath, be it a demonic curse, be it a scourge for whatever sin, but Keterlyn was an honest Christian and would fulfil the oath she swore to God before the altar. Neither St Catherine nor St Gerdrud nor any other saint could stop her from doing so, as she had vowed to be at her husband’s side in distress and in worry, in storms and in blizzards, in life and in death.
There was a drink that Melchior had mixed for himself for these occasions. It was so strong that it dried the moisture from his eyes and knocked the wind out of him, but Keterlyn did not dare to dash to the pharmacy to search for it at this stage. She was the wife of a Wakenstede and must do her duty. Melchior was unconscious, babbling. He shrieked, ‘Father, Father’, and when Keterlyn kissed him on the mouth she found that it was salty blood not sweat that now encrusted his lips.
Keterlyn cast the blanket off and gripped the man in her embrace. Melchior resisted, but she caressed his body with her lips. She straddled him, grazed his stomach with her breasts and buried his mouth in deep kisses so that his howling could no longer be heard. She squeezed his hips with her legs and ground her vulva against his penis and testicles, which did not yet seem to understand what was expected of them. Keterlyn was tough; she was no pampered town girl but rather descended from the ancient Viru elders in a line in which the women had always been known for their prowess in taking what they needed. Keterlyn rubbed herself against her husband’s skin, covering his naked body with hers. Her tongue penetrated deeply into his mouth, and she finally sensed Melchior beginning to grow calmer and something twitching between his legs. She slowly slipped down along his body, brushing his staff gingerly with her lips. It was still small, but Keterlyn took it into her mouth and tickled along the length with her tongue. The townspeople called this ‘the bishop’s love’, although the art had also been known in Viru since time immemorial. Melchior’s senses were still not in their right place, but his body began to calm itself and follow the summoning of his wife’s lips. Keterlyn continued to move her tongue around Melchior’s penis and sucked the erect shaft straight in towards her throat until she felt her vagina moistening. Melchior groaned – and now no longer from pain. Keterlyn ran her hands along his stomach and chest while caressing below with her tongue until Melchior’s cock was fully engorged with a manly force. She moved her tongue more rapidly and swallowed down more strongly, rubbing Melchior’s cannonballs with one hand and his buttocks with the other. Melchior was still not yet aware of his surroundings, but the curse was retreating. When his cock began to throb with anticipation and his hips moved with his wife’s rhythm Keterlyn released him from her mouth, straddled him again and worked Melchior’s firm trunk inside her. She placed one of Melchior’s hands on the curve of her buttock and the other against her firm breast, feeling how a wave of pleasure moved like molten iron upwards from between her legs through her abdomen. She moved her hips more rapidly and rocked her thighs backwards and forwards until Melchior’s body loosened and he ejaculated. Keterlyn threw herself off of him and clutched her husband’s quivering church tower as if it were an udder, milking it to the very last drop. And then, finally – thank St Catherine and all the saints; thank the ancient Viru shaman – she felt Melchior’s hand groping her breast and the brush of his lips against them. She heard him whispering sultry words to her, and she knew that the curse had been broken for this time. And only when Melchior started to breathe regularly and slept did Keterlyn raise her naked body from his, slide off of the bed, sit on the cold floor and rub herself between her legs until her body, too, shook from pleasure.
Under the bed Keterlyn kept a stork’s beak and a multicoloured cloth band knotted in Viru, which had been blessed by the shaman of Iinistagana – just in case St Catherine’s blessing might not work. Keterlyn reminded herself she must send some beer and salted meat to Iinistagana. It would also be better if Melchior did not find out about the objects yet. There might be other medicines that counter the Wakenstedes’ curse apart from the biographies of saints and the recipe books of Roman sages.
Keterlyn pulled on her nightshirt, covered Melchior with a blanket and snuggled up at his side. She fell asleep immediately to the sound of Melchior’s peaceful breathing.
They both awoke earlier than usual. The clamour of market-goers filled the room together with the first rays of dawn sunlight.
‘Christ Almighty … killed … the Toompea Murderer … his head chopped off, holy heavens, his head has been chopped off … the Toompea Murderer has killed again.’