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THE WOODEN devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn’t even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn’t let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered. The wooden devil’s official duty was to guard the grave of an alchemist named Rowan Wayland. The grave was empty; in fact it was one of seven scattered across the continent, and the other six were empty too. As an alchemist, Wayland had liked the idea of implying that he’d excelled at his profession—this could only work if he left absolutely no evidence of having died. His plan had worked. Six centuries had passed and the residents of the streets surrounding the cemetery still didn’t feel they could rule out the possibility of his being around somewhere. Every fourteenth of July without fail the town council received a bag of antique gold from an anonymous benefactor; symbolic payment for Wayland’s burial plot. It was actually somewhat unlikely that this payment came from Wayland himself, since the main reason King Rudolf had ordered the alchemist’s execution was his failure to produce gold from base metal as promised. Wayland had good friends. They arranged for a wooden puppet to be buried in place of his body. The man himself had fled the Czech lands and lived to advance his career in other royal courts.
The wooden devil had been through a lot since she’d been discovered to be the grave’s sole inhabitant—she’d been waxed and lacquered and pegged to the earth, frozen, drenched, and dried out again. She’d even seen the traveler in the trees: “Spinning, as a wheel does.” The life in the wooden devil was slight and vague, only a little more than that possessed by inanimate puppets, but it was maintained by the fact that the first impression she gave was one of humanity. Graveyard visitors approaching the wooden devil from behind tended to mistake her for someone about the same age as Myrna Semyonova was at that time, and would confidently strike up conversation, though they were either sheepish or oddly repulsed when they discovered their mistake. At any rate this persistence of address cultivated a silent response. The wooden devil had a good vantage point, and served as secret audience to a few Topol-Semyonova wrestling matches. The devil was slightly worried that Myrna and the boys would make a nuisance of themselves once they found her. But there was one tree that the wooden devil thought of as her mother, because this tree had murmured soothingly to her when she’d still been coming up as sapling. That tree watched over her still, and murmured what the elder trees at Ol?any always murmured:
“To pominulo; stejně m??e i tohle.” That went by; so can this.
The tree was right. This situation wasn’t unique. The children were most likely to run for their lives as soon as they saw her.
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MYRNA SAW THE DEVIL before the Topol brothers did, and she approached without calling out. She read the name on the headstone and brushed a little lichen out of the devil’s hair. Her gentleness left the devil nonplussed. It was highly irregular for anyone to be curious enough about the feel of her to voluntarily touch her. And nobody had ever seemed quite so pleased by their findings.
The boys overdid their nonchalance, treating the devil’s shoulders as coat pegs. The girl’s front door keys were always falling out of her pockets, so she left them on the devil’s lap before chucking her under the chin and saying: “Thanks, Rowan.” A sequence of elaborate stretches followed, and then Jindrich and Kirill were ready to fight, with Myrna playing referee. It was a highly unusual afternoon for the wooden devil, who was intensely aware of the arm that Myrna had casually flung around her shoulders, as if they were friends who had come to that place together.
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