The Lives of Saints Read online

  SANKT NIKOLAI

  A captain took his crew to sea, and because of his good leadership and the talent of his sailors, his ship came to be known as the fastest and most profitable on the ocean. It darted in and out of coves and ports, slipping past rocks and glaciers, a dancer on the waves. But the captain grew prideful and his crew greedy, and they began to ignore both sense and caution.

  “What wind would dare cut down this ship?” the captain shouted to the sky.

  A young boy was on the crew, a gifted sailor despite his age, who had learned to work the nets and lines and scaled the rigging fearlessly. He worried that the captain’s pride would offend the Saints. But as it happened, the captain was right: It wasn’t the wind that claimed his ship. It was the ice.

  In the treacherous waters of the Bone Road, the captain piloted his sleek craft to pockets of fish no one else had dared seek so far north. Though it was late in the year, he insisted they could make one last run to fill their nets with cod before the winter set in. The ship made its way easily through the waters, the winds so favorable they seemed to serve the captain’s whims. Later the sailors would wonder if the weather had been luring them north.

  They put in at a cove with a black rock shore, and settled in for the night, prepared to haul up their catch at first light and then head home. But in the morning, the sailors woke to see the world had turned white. The sea had frozen around their ship, leaving them ice-locked. The winds blew, the sails filled, but the ship did not budge.

  “Someone must scout the land to see if food or shelter can be found,” said the captain. The crew knew that they were too far north to find aid, that to leave the ship was certainly folly and might very well mean death. So they sent the boy—the smallest and the youngest among them—out into the snow.

  The boy’s name was Nikolai, and he had always loved the sea and the Saints. Since the sea had stranded him, he hoped the Saints would protect him, and as he marched over the cold land, he sang his prayers like a shanty. Eventually he came to a high gray outcropping of rock that looked like a serpent asleep in the sun, though there was no sun to be seen. There, he found a reindeer waiting. Breath pluming in the air, the creature stomped its hooves and lowered its big head, and after a moment’s hesitation, Nikolai climbed onto its back.

  The beast carried him deep into a forest where the very trees seemed made of ice and the silver leaves on the silver branches tinkled like glasses clinking at a fine dinner party, and though the wind blew hard, Nikolai held tight to the reindeer’s neck and felt only warm.

  In time, they came to a clearing in the wood, and there the boy found a feast had been set beside a roaring fire. There was a small shelter and inside it, next to a high pile of thick blankets, Nikolai discovered a pair of fur-lined boots and a pair of woolen gloves. He put them on and found they fit perfectly.

  Wishing to be polite, he waited to see if his host would appear. But time wore on, and his belly growled, and the only sound was the fire crackling and the reindeer snorting in the cold air.

  Nikolai began by sipping from a hot ladle of spicy soup, rich with chunks of fish. He ate from a platter laden with juicy slices of roasted meat, buttery dumplings heaped with sour cream, stewed apples and candied plums that sparkled like fat amethysts. He drank warm wine and then, his belly full, fell deeply asleep.

  The next morning, he made a sack from one of the blankets and packed it with all the leftover food he could manage. He climbed onto the reindeer’s back and it carried him many miles to the serpent stone, where Nikolai dismounted, thanked the creature, and walked back to the ship.

  The captain and the crew were shocked to see the little figure with the golden hair tramping toward them across the ice. They’d thought he must be dead, for who could survive the night in such a wilderness? As he drew nearer, they expected to find him hollow-eyed and ragged with hunger and cold. Instead his cheeks were pink, his stride even, his eyes bright.

  The boy told them the wonderful story of what had happened in the night, but when he opened the sack to offer them food, all he found were rocks and ash. The sailors beat the boy for lying, took his fine gloves and boots for themselves, and the next morning, they shoved him back out onto the ice.

  Again Nikolai walked to the serpent stone, and again, the reindeer was waiting. He rode the animal into the white forest and on to the clearing, where the fire crackled and a merry feast had been laid out once more. A red wool coat lined in lush fur lay neatly folded on the heap of blankets, another pair of boots, another pair of gloves. The boy did not know what to think of it, but the food was as real as he remembered. This time he ate goose glazed in honey and dressed in berries tart enough to sting his tongue as the juice ran down his chin. He bundled into the warm clothes and slept soundly through the night.

  But when Nikolai returned to the ship the next day, the sack he carried was once more filled with rocks and ash. The crew beat him soundly and sent him onto the ice again.

  It went on like this, and as time wore away, the men starved and the boy grew sturdier and stronger. With every day, the sailors’ eyes grew wilder, and hunger became less a need than a madness. One morning, the sailors tried to follow Nikolai, but as soon as they spotted the serpent-shaped rock, a snowstorm overtook them. They wandered in circles all the day and night and returned to the ship even hungrier and angrier than before.

  Soon an idea was whispered from one man to the next: What if they ate the boy? Who would know? He was fat and healthy, his cheeks rosy; he could feed them all for a week, maybe more, long enough for rescue to come or for the cold to break.

  The boy heard these whispers and shivered in his bunk. As soon as dawn arrived, he raced out into the snow. This time when he met the reindeer, he whispered in its ear of all his fear and worry. But the reindeer had nothing to say.

  Again, the boy sat by the fire, though he hadn’t much appetite for the fine meal set out for him. He ate a bit of quail egg pie and a single sugared plum and prayed that the Saints would protect him, because he did not want to be eaten.

  The next day, when the boy woke, he found he was sweating in his blankets. The sun beat heavy and hot on his neck as the reindeer carried him back to the serpent stone. And sure enough, as soon as he set foot upon the ship, the ice sighed and cracked. The boat rocked, the wind filled the sails, and the ship broke free.

  At first, the sailors celebrated; all ill will vanished on the rising breeze. But as they drew closer to home, the men began to mutter to themselves, wondering what might happen if the boy told anyone how he had been treated aboard the ship and how his crewmates had nearly resorted to cannibalism. They began to think that perhaps the boy shouldn’t reach home at all and soon set out to make sure he didn’t. But every time they raised their knives, the winds would fall away, becalming the ship, its sails limp as wilted leaves. In this way, Nikolai survived the journey.

  When the ship finally reached port, the sailors were met by disbelieving crowds. Their countrymen had assumed they had long since wrecked and perished. The crew praised their captain’s ingenuity and said that everyone among them had banded together with courage and heart—all but the young boy Nikolai, who was not to be trusted, no matter what horrible tales he told. Nikolai said nothing but hurried to the first church he could find to offer prayers of thanks.

  The captain and his crew were given medals and pronounced heroes. They were invited into the best homes and celebrated with feasts and parties. Tempted by mouthwatering smells and the sumptuous banquets laid out before them, again and again, they tried to eat. But none of them could manage much more than a bite. Every morsel of food tasted of stone and ash. One by one, they withered away and perished, desperate for just one spoonful of gravy, just one mouthful of wine.

  As for Nikolai, he’d kept his fine red coat and the sack he’d used to try to bring food to the crew, and now each morning he woke to find the sack stuffed full of sweets and delicacies. So he took to traveling from village to village and house to house, lay
ing feasts before the hungry, even when the world was at its coldest, even when the wind howled and snow lay thick on the ground.

  He is known as the patron saint of sailors and lost causes, and it is traditional to set a place for him at the table on the darkest night of the year.

  SANKTA LIZABETA OF THE ROSES

  There was a village, somewhere to the west, nestled in the shelter of a tall hill called Gorubun because of its crooked shape. From the top of this hill you could just see the blue promise of the ocean, and when the weather was right, the wind would carry the salt smell of the sea from the distant shore.

  Every morning at dawn, the wise men of the village sent four scouts up the hill, and the four scouts would sit back to back, looking east, west, north, south to warn if any trouble might be headed their way. At dusk, four fresh scouts came to relieve them, and all through the night the new scouts sat, as the stars rose and black night bled away to morning again.

  But the village was unremarkable, with nothing worth stealing, and attracted attention from neither thief nor marauder. And so, year after year, the scouts returned from the hill with little to report except pleasant breezes and stray sheep grazing outside their pastures.

  Strong backs were needed to work the fields, and it seemed a waste to lose four good laborers each day and night, and so during one harvest, three of the scouts were permitted to remain down in the village and just one scout was sent to climb the crooked hill. When the harvest ended and there had been no trouble, the wise men of the village didn’t so much decide not to reinstate the other scouts, as they forgot to order them up the hill again. One scout still climbed the slope every morning and another replaced him every night, and if one of them occasionally fell asleep or the other spent his hours kissing Marina Trevich, the stonemason’s daughter, who was to know?

  Lizabeta lived on the western outskirts of the village, far from the shadow of Gorubun. Each day she walked out to the meadows beyond her family’s home to tend to their hives. She wore no gloves or bonnet. The bees let her take their honey without a single sting. There, where wild white roses grew in clouds of blossoms so profuse they looked like mist rolling in over the fields, Lizabeta would pray and think on the great works of the Saints, for even then she was a pious and serious girl. And there she was, the summer sun hot on her bent head, the bees humming lazily around her, when a breeze came from the west carrying not the salt-soaked tang of the sea but the smell of something burning.

  Lizabeta ran home to tell her father. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “The village due west is burning their trash. This is none of our concern.”

  But Lizabeta could not shake her unease, so she and her father walked to the neighboring manor house, the home of a prosperous and well-respected citizen. “Your father is right,” he assured her. “It’s probably nothing. Perhaps a roof caught fire. This is none of our concern.”

  And yet still, Lizabeta could not calm her restless thoughts, and so, to appease her, the merchant and her father accompanied her all the way into the village square to see the wise men, who gathered there beneath the red elm tree. Each day they would drink kvas, eat fresh bread brought to them by their wives, and puzzle over the great mysteries of the world.

  When Lizabeta spoke of the scent of smoke blowing in over the meadow, the men said, “If there were any trouble, the scout atop Gorubun would give warning. Now leave us to think on the mysteries of the world.”

  All agreed with the wise men of the village. The merchant returned to his manor house, and Lizabeta’s father took her home. But when Lizabeta sat and prayed among the hives, no peace came to her. So back through town she went and up the crooked hill; alone she climbed the narrow path. On the slopes of Gorubun, there was no stink of something burning, and the pastures seemed green and peaceful. She began to feel quite silly as her legs grew weary and sweat bloomed on her brow. Surely such concerns could be left to her father and the merchant and the wise men of the village.

  Still she pressed on, between rocks and boulders, feeling more foolish with every step. When she reached the top of the hill, she found the scout snoring peacefully beneath his cap with his long legs stretched out on the soft grass. The air was fresh and clean, but when Lizabeta turned to the west, she saw a terrible thing: columns of smoke like dark pillars holding up a heavy sky. And she knew that it was not just refuse she’d smelled burning or a kitchen fire. She’d caught the scent of churches set alight and bodies too.

  She ran back down the hill, fast as she could without falling, and into the town square.

  “An army!” Lizabeta cried. “An army is marching!” She told them she’d seen pillars of fire, one for each town between their village and the sea. “We must gather swords and arrows and go to our neighbors’ aid!”

  “We will discuss it,” said the wise men of the village. “We will raise a defense.”

  But when Lizabeta had gone, and they were no longer faced with the pleas of a frightened girl, the idea of a war seemed far less heroic. The wise men had all been children the last time fighting had come to the village. They had no desire to pick up blades and shields. They did not want to see their sons do that either.

  “Surely the soldiers will pass us by, as they always have before,” the wise men told themselves. And they went to have dinner and to ponder the great mysteries of the world.

  When dawn came, Lizabeta went out to the meadow to wait for the brave men of the village to arrive with their swords and shields. She waited as the sun drifted higher and the bees hummed around her. She waited as the roses wilted beneath the heat, their white petals browning at the edges. No one came. Until, at last, she heard marching footsteps, not from the direction of the village, but from the darkness of the woods. She heard voices raised in battle song and felt thunder through the earth. She understood then that there would be no rescue.

  But Lizabeta did not turn to run. When the men appeared, ferocious and covered in blood and soot and sweat, mad with the taking of lives and treasure, Lizabeta knelt amid the roses. “Mercy,” she pleaded. “Mercy for my father, for the merchant, for the wise men who cower in their houses. Mercy for me.”

  The men were mad with bloodlust and triumph. They roared as they rushed the clearing, and if they heard Lizabeta’s pleas, their steps did not waver. She was a sapling before them to bend and be trampled. She was a river that must part. She was nothing and no one, a girl on her knees with prayers on her lips, full of terror, full of rage. From the hives surrounding the clearing came a low, thrumming note, a song that rose, vibrating through the air. The bees emerged in dense, whirring clouds, like smoke from a village set ablaze, swarming over the soldiers, swaddling them in crawling bodies, and the men began to scream.

  The soldiers turned their backs on Lizabeta and her tiny army, and ran.

  If only this were where the story ended, Lizabeta would be made a hero, a statue of her raised in the town square, and the wise men would meet beneath it each day to remind themselves of their own cowardice and to be humbled in the shadow of a girl.

  But none of these things came to pass. Word spread, of course, that the raiders had come to the coast and marched inland. But no one outside the village knew why they’d suddenly changed their course and fled back to the sea. There were rumors of some fantastical weapon, others of a terrible plague or a curse brought down by a witch.

  Word of the town that had been mysteriously spared reached a general who was assembling a great army to face the raiders when they returned. With a few of his best men, he marched to the village where the enemy had ceased their invasion. He went to the wise men who met in the town square, and when he asked them how they had turned the tide of battle and sent such fearsome enemies running, they looked to one another, afraid of what the general might do if they told him silly stories of girls and bees. “Well, we cannot say,” the wise men offered. “But we know a merchant who can.”

  When the general reached the manor house, the merchant said, “It is difficult to expl
ain, but the beekeeper down the road will know.”

  And when at last the general came to Lizabeta’s home and knocked on the door, her father saw the fearsome men with their armor and their hard faces and he trembled. “I cannot be certain what happened,” he told them. “But surely my daughter will know. She is in the meadow, tending to her hives.”

  Lizabeta met them there. “What made the enemy turn in their tracks?” demanded the general of the girl in the meadow. “What made them flee this nothing of a village?”

  Lizabeta told the truth. “Only the bees know.”

  Now, the general was tired and angry and had walked many miles only to be taunted by a young girl. He was out of patience. His men bound Lizabeta’s wrists and her ankles and placed the ropes over the bridles of four strong horses. Again, he asked Lizabeta how she had stopped the soldiers.

  “Only the bees know,” she whispered. For she hadn’t any idea how she’d done it or what miracle had transpired.

  The general waited, certain that the girl’s father or the merchant or the wise men of the village would come to her aid and tell him their secrets.

  “Do not bother waiting,” she said. “No one is coming.”

  So the general gave the order, as generals do, and Lizabeta’s body was torn apart, and the bees hummed lazily in their hives. It’s said her blood watered the roses of the field and turned the blossoms red. It’s said the blooms planted on her grave never perished and smelled sweet the whole year round, even when the winter snows came. But the bees have long since left those hives and want no business with those flowers.

  If you can find that meadow, you may stand and breathe in the perfume of its blossoms, speak your prayers, and let the wind carry them west to the sea.

  The roses remember, even if wise men choose to forget.

  Lizabeta is known as the patron saint of gardeners.