June, 1284

At my birth, my mother, having run through the names of all the other pious women she could remember off the top of her head on my sisters, gave her infant daughter a name she thought fitting of my dark hair and even darker eyes. Salome, the girl who would be responsible for culling the head of St. John the Baptist. Cursed.

“I’ll name you for the temptress,” she said as she rocked her swaddled babe, no longer than a loaf of barley bread. “A girl with a curse is a girl who knows how to survive.” I looked the most like her of all the children. The rest looked like Papa, ruddy cheeks and ruddy hair, with eyes the flinty color of river stones.

I was the seventh child if you only counted the living and the eleventh if you also counted the dead. At night, Mama would gather us around the hearth where a pot of offal would be simmering and crackling in the embers, glowing with a heat haze that shimmered like the scales of the summer pike in the Vesser, and she would tell us the old stories, the ones that came before the risen Christ and his virgin mother, before the flood that covered the earth and purged it of sin, before woman was taken from the rib of man and they were cast away from God’s loving light to suffer the humiliation of the flesh. Those stories were for Papa to impart, delivering homilies to his children on the importance of embodying the virtues of humility, charity, obedience and righteousness if we wished to one day enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Mama’s stories did not have an author-gospel as Papa’s did, but rather were, in and of themselves, a kind of gospel, with each orator the author anew. She told her children of Sunna, the sun god, and of his brother Maní who was the moon. She told us of Nerthus, whose charge was the river, and who made it run plentifully with fish. And she told us of Eōstre, who made fertile the land, but for whom a blood price must be paid for her continued eye of favor. It was important to Mama that her children knew that the God of Mother Church was a young god and that the creatures and spirits who first sowed the land would, in the end, be those who reaped it.

None took Mama’s word so stridently as I. The rest had little care for her stories, choosing instead to kneel before their sleeping pallets, as Papa had instructed, to send their benedictions to the unknowable Heavenly Father in whose image we had all been created—or so we were told—but who somehow always seemed to bear the most striking resemblance to our earthly father. But I knew Mama’s stories held an incantatory power, not simply teaching us why she did such things as leaving a succulent marrow bone buried in the farthest reach of the eastern field. Her gods could be known intimately: could be tended like plants; watered and fed like cattle; flattered, appeased, or scorned.

And so I had always felt the shadow of the old gods hovering just out of the corner of my eye, retreating into nothingness the moment I turned to look. My brothers and sisters would run wild through forest and field, crowing and braying like animals, thunderous footfalls racing across the heaving backs of the aged mountains, a brood of golden haired beasts. And I would follow in their wakes just as the shadow of the goshawk, slithering darkly over field and fen, follows his sun dappled body soaring high above. I would quiet the slumbering beasts with offerings of mallow sweet, juniper, and the blood from my own bare feet.

“Salome!” They would shout over their shoulders, pale, fish-belly skins turning the bright pink of dogwood blossoms. “Hurry or we’ll leave you behind! We’ll leave you here in the woods where you belong.” I would let them. I would take my time, mastering my fear of the snapping and crackling of leaves and twigs—just a hart or hare or fox or, or, or—trusting the rise of the hair on my nape if my solitude was suddenly stolen. I would lay my small body in the mossy undergrowth where the fibrous network of roots and fungus held me to its loamy breast, and I would breathe deep the scent of vitality, falling sometimes asleep on the forest floor, filled completely with a sense of knowing, that if it was not my time to be harvested, I would wake, and if it was, I would still go on but as something new, my festering body the nourishment for animals and gods.

In our village, where ancient oak groves kept us sheltered from the worst of the North Sea’s wind, the turning clock of the seasons took two of my golden sisters by the time I was old enough to be expected to grind the rye for the winter beer and took yet another plus an infant boy by the time I first bled. By the time I went to bed for the first time with the boy who I would one day make my man, Papa had fallen asleep in the arms of his God and had been consigned to his final rest and I was the only one left of Mama’s children. She always said I was the lucky one, that I was, above all else, a survivor. Despite my maledictory name, the dark spot in her golden brood, I was the one to thrive.

I had just turned my seventeenth year, when my first babe was born, a pink, writhing thing that bore more resemblance to a boiled turnip room than a boy. He was a dear thing, and the way he wailed pulled like bone hooks between my ribs, an ethric tug that connected my boy and me, one that didn’t end even after the hand of death had snatched him from me. My man, himself still a boy then and only just beginning to sprout hair on his chin, belonged to my father’s God, the God that instructed him to lay our son’s minute body in the consecrated ground surrounding His temple instead of in the sacred grove of yew and ash whence our people had been born and with no offering of bread nor ale nor slain mutton to sate his appetite. How strange, I thought, how spider-like this God that He should wish only to feed on the love of his most devout. He seemed, to me, like a dead god. At the very least, I took heart, that the now silent squall which had only recently been my son, a sprig of holly and a scrap of hair the blue-black of a crow’s feather clutched in his fist, would have a way to find me in the dark.In the years that followed, I’d had three more, and only the youngest bore my mother’s countenance, her eyes, even as a welp the canny black of a rabbit. Hedda, I called her. She alone of my children, as I had before her, etched the stories of the old gods into her bones.

The summer the Ratcatcher arrived was the summer the sun went out, hiding his face behind a thick blanket of iron clouds that would not clear for a full turning of the earth, a perpetual midwinter’s night. While my man and two eldest held vigil in the church of the resurrected god, I and Hedda, now in her seventh year, set ourselves to the gathering of mistletoe, the salting of goat’s meat and the malting of barley, the carving of beetroot and turnip and mandrake. And to the threshold of our home a smear of her blood, drawn out with the a bone needle and drying to a runic streak of umber.

“Protection, daughter,” I told her in those hushed, twilit hours, “from what is surely to come.”

And it was only we two who sensed his power and his plotting from the out. Perhaps the rest should not be blamed for what followed, so blinded were they by war, by famine, by faith without action, that they could not see the Ratcatcher, this stranger in his patchwork hunter’s garb, for what he truly was, for who he truly was, the mask behind the mask, ever the trickster playing man for a fool. None questioned his sudden arrival, nor his promises to bring about the end of the starvation. After all, the rye had gone black with rot, and those who consumed the vermin our mouldering fields attracted soon found the rot appearing on their own flesh.

Gathered were we for the exaltation of St. Barnabas, a feast day, when the Ratcatcher came with his bargain. For the expulsion of our pestilence, he only required a payment in kind, one to be collected in a fortnight at the Nativity of John the Baptist. His eyes, the shifting amber of a fox’s, looked about the congregation before alighting on mine, then moved on to the town elders at the front of the drafty church. Those venerable, once befatted men with hair and beards like dandelion clocks, now shrunken, hollowed, the skin of their cheeks drooping like tallow candles. Perhaps they had once been wise men, but their now rheumy eyes and the visible bones of their skulls gave the impression of a flock of sheep already having consigned themselves to the slaughter. And so the Ratcatcher had his deal.

That evening the music began. It was the song of a wooden flute, high and sweet, its melody wending like a serpent through cottages, pastures, barns, and fields, luring out of every dark corner the rats of the village, a procession of scurrying bodies entranced by the sound. And out of the houses the people came too to watch the tide of them following as if inexorably drawn to the very banks of the Vesser, her current swollen from the persistent rain, and into the rushing waters. A score at a time the rats went in, only to be swept from sight at once. And on and on the music played until the very last of the rodent tide had been sucked under. Only then did the final note die away, spiraling up to the starless sky from Ratcatcher's pipe.

A fortnight, he had said. A fortnight for the resolution of the debt we owed him. And yet what was to be our payment? It seemed we had nothing to offer, no sum of gold to satisfy the bargain. What price could be paid to the Piper for commission of his deeds?

It was in the hours before dawn on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist we next heard the flute. The same clear voice that had so lured our vexation now sliding in through gaps in eaves and wooden shutters, this time drawing forth a different prey. As the children emerged from their homes, unseeing, unhearing, and unceasing, their mothers followed, wailing, begging, and beating their breasts, dragged along on their bellies when they attempted to grab an ankle or the hem of a skirt. And there, on the opposite shore, stood the Ratcatcher, mouthpiece held between his smiling lips and with no need for air to break his somnolent melody. Neither the keening of the mothers nor the splashing of their children as they breached the surface of the water, wading then fully submerging into the river’s bosom, could drown out the sound of ghostly flute. Not one was spared from the reaping save for Hedda. My Hedda, with the old magic carried in her blood.

Dawn broke silently in her full, golden majesty over Hamelin.