Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,84
prevaricated? Because, she thought, she knew her answer was the only one she could give.
She brushed fir needles and leaves from her dress. She ate berries from a bush and drank from a stream. Days passed, and sometimes she couldn’t find anything to eat, and she became weaker and felt her life ebbing away. At last, she lay on the forest floor, clasped her hands on her breast, closed her eyes, and said a prayer, thinking she would not wake again. But at dawn she heard birds singing in the trees, and everything was as it had been, except that a woman appeared and knelt beside her and took her hand. This woman wore a plain gown of homespun gray wool; her snow-white hair curled around her head like an aura.
“Get up,” she said gently. “Get up off the cold ground and come with me.”
And Marica did as the woman said. They came to a cottage in the woods that seemed to grow out of the trunk of a tree and had a twisting chimney with smoke curling up out of it. The woman took Marica into the cottage and bathed her hands and feet in scented water and gave her bread and honey and a fragrant tisane to drink. The woman’s name was Apolonia.
Marica could not discern whether she was in the company of an angel or a sorceress.
In the weeks and months that followed, Marica learned from Apolonia how to spin wool and dye it with colors made from flowers and roots and the bark of trees and weave garments with it. She learned how to prepare a rich, nourishing stew from herbs and various vegetables and how to candle eggs. Apolonia taught her to collect honeycombs from beehives without suffering a single sting and how to milk nanny goats and how to plant beans and corn in long, straight rows facing east and west. And when the fruit in the orchard ripened, Marica learned to put up preserves. She did not know how long she lived in the little cottage with Apolonia. Three years? Four? Then Apolonia said she had no more to teach her; Marica was ready to make her own way in the world. Hearing this, Marica wept and said she would rather die than leave Apolonia.
“It is the way it must be,” Apolonia said, placing her hand on Marica’s head. She gave Marica a bag of salt, a feather, and a wand cut from a willow branch. “Whatever you do, keep these things safe,” she said, helping Marica to wrap herself in a beautiful cloak she had woven for her. “Use these gifts only when necessary, or their magic will not keep, and be sure to take care of the salt.”
Weeks of rain and flooding in the kingdom, she said, had caused all the salt there to go black with mold or to melt away into the ground, and now there wasn’t a single grain of it to be found anywhere in the land. With the exception, that was, of the small store of salt Apolonia kept in a warm, dry corner of her cottage, and from which she had taken enough to fill the bag Marica now held.
Marica made her way back to the palace, hid her true identity, and begged for work in the kitchen. Her diligence and skill encouraged the head cook to heap more and more responsibilities on her shoulders, so that she worked from dawn until nightfall, carrying buckets of water, scrubbing stone and marble floors, and replenishing supplies of coal and wood for the stoves and fireplaces. When those tasks were completed, she mended clothes and dyed wool and wove it into garments for the royal household.
Every now and then, she would catch a glimpse of her father, the king, accompanied by his retinue of courtiers and physicians and alchemists. She saw her sisters, Branimira and Danjana, dancing to the music of lutes and pipes in the great hall with their dancing tutor. They didn’t see Marica; she was just a servant in an apron and cap and wooden shoes—and no one saw servants. She ran back to the kitchen, where the cooks were consulting their recipe books, attempting to prepare tasty meals without salt. They seasoned the roasted meat with rosemary and thyme, with basil and finely ground black pepper. They added thick cream to the potatoes and sprinkled dried oregano and thyme in sauces. When the butler and the footmen served these dishes at the royal