There are three ways to sell a miracle to a man.
The first is to give him what he wants. Expensive, troublesome, and then he comes back again. The second is to give him what he fears and sell him protection. Trustworthy, but it takes patience. The third, the best, is to give him the opportunity to complete the miracle himself. People love their own thoughts. For his thought, a man will pay twice against a stranger and then defend her with a knife.
I work the third way. I'm good at it because I'm fourteen, and a fourteen-year-old's face hasn't learned to lie beforehand.
- The seal of the monastery, I say, and I do not give it into her hands. Never get your hands on it. - Prokopovskaya, before the Plague. See the comb? It was only there.
The woman is looking at the wax. I cut the comb myself, with a knife, in four evenings, from the real seal, which the drunk sacristy showed me in half a coin, and then forgot what he showed.
- And it's -- she can't speak.
- Helps, I say softly. - Not always. I will tell you right away, Madam: not always. He who promises always is a thief.
That's where she buys. Not on print. The word "not always."
Truth is the cheapest condiment in the world, and I pour it generously.
My name is Laska. The real name was, but it remained in the Second Victim’s shelter, along with a blanket, a cup, and a boy who believed that if you prayed for a very long time, you would stop getting sick.
I was seven. I prayed three nights in a row, as they taught me: straight, in full words, without missing out. By the morning of the third night, Sister Irma had died, and by the way, I had it all gone.
I thought God was listening, he just didn't have a good score and he was treating the wrong people.
Then I thought again and realized that I would have gone this way. It wasn't even a disappointment. It was a relief, like taking off someone else's boot that stung half a day.
I don't owe anyone since.
In Kutna, I live under the Three Mills Bridge, in a dry corner where two retaining walls converge. It smells, but it's dry, and dry in this world is more expensive than it doesn't.
It rains every other day. You wake up because the water is drumming differently - denser, more mute. You get out: the street is red, the drains are red, people have red divorces on their shoulders, and everyone goes about their business, because if for every bloody rain to sit at home, then there will be no time to live.
For the first two hundred years, they say, they went crazy.
We're used to it. People get used to everything but the good; it is impossible to get used to the good, it always seems like a mistake.
My product is water from a public well, settled, filtered through two canvases so that there was no mud, and painted with a meerka to the desired shade. One drop of real pig blood per measure is for smell. People smell. Always sniffing.
I have real vessels. It's important. Glass now no one pours like the poured before the Plague: thick, greenish, with bubbles, heavy in the palm of the hand is not in size. I buy them from the gravediggers for a quarter of a coin, wash, burn, pour, seal.
Eight measures a month. No more. They'll notice.
I don't sell to the dying. It's not kindness. The dying die, and then their family comes with axes, and I want to live to fifteen.
I sell to the hopeful. Those who "do not yet succeed." Those who are expecting a child for the third year and are willing to pay for a month of restful sleep.
Sleeping is the only thing that I really have. And it's, by the way, an honest commodity. For a real measure, they would give a house, and they would still not have enough, because there are no real measures for everyone. They hardly ever happen.
That's how I explain it to myself.
The explanation has been working since eleven years and has never failed.
Keeper is coming on Thursday.
They can be seen in a hundred steps: gray, long, without jewelry, and a staff that is not actually staffed. The Keepers of the Dead God doesn't carry weapons openly because open weapons are a statement and they don't like statements. They like to return.
He's standing at my corner and watching me trade. It's okay. Waiting.
When the woman leaves, he says,
- Do you know how much a real measure costs?
- I know, I say. - Knowing is my job. A house with land in the upper city. Or four good horses. Or forty like me.
- Forty?
- I overestimate myself, I agree. - Thirty.
He's not smiling. He has the face of a man who smiled a lot in his youth and then stopped for a reason that is not told.
- You're cheating on women who have children dying.
- I sell them three weeks in which they believe they're doing something. - I'm packing the bag. Slowly, he sees that I am not afraid; he sees that I am afraid, but he is pleased that I am trying. Which is better, three weeks or nothing?
- Really better.
- No one will buy them the truth.
This is where he's smiling. One side of the mouth.
- My name is Brother Otakar. I'm going to Hare balds for autopsy.
- Congratulations.
- I want a boy who can climb where an adult can't, and who won't run into town to tell.
- I'll run, I'm honest. - I'll be sure to run.
- I know, he says. - That's why I'm offering you. You don't have to lie, and it's cheap.
You have to understand this about autopsies.
The earth here remembers what fell on it. Sometimes, after rains or after the river shifts the channel, the slope collapses and opens what has been closed for six hundred years.
Then everyone runs in there.
We walked for three days. The third came out to the ravine, where there was something at the bottom, and it was bone.
I grew up with stories about the remains and thought I was ready. I wasn't ready. Not because it's scary. Because it's wrong. The bone was on its side, the length of the street, and it was a bone — with an articular head, with roughness where meat is attached to the bone, everything is like a chicken, only from the house. And it had three heads at one end. Three. One big one and two smaller ones, each one worked as carefully as the first.
I was standing there thinking, who could have a bone with three heads?
No one. That's the thing. No one can have a bone like this, and yet there it is, and a lichen grows on it, and a lizard runs on it.
Otakar said from behind:
- Don't look too long.
- Why?
- Because in an hour, you'll start building the rest. He said it casually, as they say about wet feet. - Everybody's finishing up. You can imagine where that bone went, what it was attached to, and what it should be there and there. And that's bad enough.
We're down.
Down there, where the slope had collapsed, the bone had cracked -- not fresh, long ago, but the top layer of the earth had only now come down, and you could climb into the crack.
I got in because that's what they took.
The bones are empty and not empty inside.
There's cells. Like honeycombs, they're just uneven, and their walls are thin, translucent, and they're warm. Not "like warm." Warm. Six hundred and sixty-six years after his death.
In the third cell from the edge was a liquid.
A little. The mug. It was not flowing when I tilted the lantern, it was moving all at once, like mercury, in one body.
And the light didn't go through. I held the lantern close, and she took the light and didn't give it away.
I was there for maybe half an hour.
Not because I was afraid. Because for the first time in my life, I held something in my hand that did exactly what I was told.
Everything else in my life could not stand the stories. The prayers didn't hold up. The shelter couldn't stand it. The father who's coming back couldn't take it. Every miracle I reached for turned out to be tinted water on closer inspection - and I honestly made a career out of it.
And it took.
I poured it into my vessel. In green pre-reliquary glass with my fake Prokopov seal. Funny, I didn't have any other.
Upstairs, Brother Otakar was lying face down, and there were three holes in his back, and there were four sitting next to him, and one was holding a gun that still had smoke coming out of it, and three were looking at the hole in the bone that I was sticking out of.
There are three ways to get out of this situation.
One is to run. Not with my feet or my squirrel.
The second is to fight. Don't be ridiculous.
The third is to give people the opportunity to think of a miracle to the end.
- Empty, I said and cried. I've been crying since I was eight, it's like whistling. It’s empty, it’s just honeycombs, he sent me, I climbed four times, there’s nothing there!
The guy with the gun said,
- What's this?
- It's his. I handed them the vessel with both hands, shaking. It's not hard to shake, either, if you're really shaking. - He came with that. He said he was real. He promised me half a coin if I could take it.
They got it.
They certainly took it: they had a sealed pre-reliquary measure, made by a monk from a fresh autopsy, that is, exactly the story they were following, only better, because it did not have to climb.
The one with the gun looked at the light. The lights didn't pass.
He told the others: real.
He was right.
I was released. The boy roaring over the body is a bad witness and a good story; they even gave me a quarter of a coin to remember them kind.
There is one way to take away a miracle from a man.
Give him a real one.
I got to Kutna in four days. On the way I thought of things, and much of Brother Otakar, who died because someone in town had sold information before he could get there—and the world’s information was more precious than blood, and I knew it best, and I didn’t tell anyone, but I didn’t ask myself who the sacristic man I was printing had told.
I didn't think about that long. I have a good head, and it can end a thought exactly where it is no longer useful.
I also thought this.
I have a second measure now.
It's real. I kept it for myself. Of course, I kept it for myself, I put it in advance, in a little bottle of almond oil, because someone who has been selling fake for five years knows the main rule of forgery: show the beautiful, and hide it in the ugly.
I finished the one I gave up with a well. Not all. Halfway.
So the guy with the gun was only half right, and he honestly bought half the miracle.
Now tell me why I need a quarter of a cup of liquid that holds light.
I thought. All the way.
We can sell. A house with land in the upper city, four horses and no bridges for the rest of your life.
You can give it. There is a laundromat in this town who has been in a year of trouble, and she bought me a muddy water with a meerka for two coins last May, and she carried me bread after that because I was a “good boy.”
You can have a drink yourself.
I was standing under the Three Mills Bridge, and blood rain was coming, and the water was running over the walls, and I was holding a bubble in my hand that didn't let the light pass through.
And I suddenly realized that my whole life was built on one assumption: miracles don’t happen, so I don’t owe anyone anything.
If it happens, I think I should.
And that's the meanest thing they've ever done to me.
Laska has chosen, and you will not learn from me.
I will only say that a child was born and lived long that year on Kosya Street; that seven years later a very young man with very good manners appeared in the upper town, selling glass; and that both of these facts may have nothing to do with each other.
People will, though. People love their own thoughts.
For his thought, a man will pay twice against another man.