Tide King Read Online Free PDF Page B

so far west in the highlands that they passed through the forest and came upon a clearing, burned to black chalk by a lightning strike, and nothing grew in this grave save for a plant with three to four long stems, little white bouquets of flowers topping them. Burnette saxifrage. Ela remembered her mother talking about such flowers. They were part of the old folklore, when the goddesses purportedly roamed the earth. Her own mother did not pay much attention to the stories except to pass them along to the older, more superstitious villagers in order to sell them her tinctures.
    â€œThere were once three scythe-wielding goddess sisters,” she told Ela as they picked the flowers. “Who brought death. One of the sisters, Marzana, hurt her leg and lagged behind them as they moved through the towns, lusting for blood. But no matter how much she begged for them to wait, they went on without her. So she sought revenge. She limped through the villages the sisters had not yet visited and told the townsfolk to eat and drink saxifrage to protect themselves from her sisters of death. They did, and they survived.”
    â€œIs that why these flowers survived the white heat?” Ela asked, rubbing her hand in the coarse soot. How anything had survived, had grown here after the lightning strike, she did not understand. In the past, she’d seen trees halved, rock blackened by the swords from the sky. “Marzana gave them the blessing?”
    â€œIt’s not likely, the lightning, my sweet. The saxifrage is hardy, like weeds. It needs not much love to prosper.” But in truth, Barbara did not know why they grew in the dead soil or why they did not succumb to the lightning. She caressed her cheek with the petals from one of the flowers and felt a tickle, a surge down to her feet, as if the herb had captured the electricity from the strike. But when she brushed her cheek again, the sensation did not return.
    â€œMatka, do you believe such a thing?” Ela smelled the flowers, running her thumb and forefinger down their long stems.
    â€œBelieve what?”
    â€œIn magic.”
    â€œOf course not—but the roots and leaves we find have healing properties, some by themselves and some mixed with others. And maybe we’ll be able to help Antoniusz. Would you like that, Ela?”
    â€œI would.” Ela skipped around in a circle. “Maybe when Antoniusz is healed, you will love him?”
    â€œCome.” Her mother Barbara gathered the herb in the apron of her skirt, and beckoned. “Time is not to waste.”

    There were two men who loved Ela’s mother, Bolek and Antoniusz. Bolek was sixteen, a farmer’s son, one of many spit in Reszel, Poland, hard like rock and yet soft with youth, a sheep’s head of blond hair that would probably thin as had his father’s, eyes like river water, the brain of a squirrel. For years, he had visited Barbara, to get tinctures for his father’s gout, his mother’s headaches. Barbara had watched the sweetness of his boyhood, when he had fawned over Ela and confided that he wished men could have babies, shrivel into the erect swagger of manhood. And yet he could still charm them, bringing grapes and cheeses he had filched from the village, his angled jaw and easy smile reminding Ela of a jackal. When Bolek came, Ela’s mother sent her outside to play far from the bone house. The first few times she heard her mother screaming, she ran home and tried to pull away Bolek, who lay on top of her mother on the straw bed, by his knobby toes. I am feeling pain in a good way , Ela’s mother explained, shooing her away. Because Bolek is helping me with my back .
    Antoniusz was the other man who visited. Although Ela’s mother talked with Antoniusz for hours, she did not let him help with her back. A friend of Ela’s father, Jan, who had died in one of Poland’s many uprisings, Antoniusz still led the underground resistance.