Maybe it was up to her, she found herself thinking.
* * *
The poem that came to her that night after she left Jilly and got back to her little apartment in Ferryside, came all at once, fully-formed and complete. The act of putting it to paper was a mere formality.
She sat by her window for a long time afterward, her journal on her lap, the acorn in her hand. She rolled it slowly back and forth on her palm. Finally, she laid both journal and acorn on the windowsill and went into her tiny kitchen. She rummaged around in the cupboard under the sink until she came up with an old flowerpot which she took into the backyard and filled with dirt—rich loam, as dark and mysterious as that indefinable place inside herself that was the source of the words that filled her poetry and had risen in recognition to the conjure man’s words.
When she returned to the window, she put the pot between her knees. Tearing the new poem out of her journal, she wrapped the acorn up in it and buried it in the pot. She watered it until the surface of the dirt was slick with mud, then placed the flowerpot on her windowsill and went to bed.
That night she dreamed of Jilly’s gemmin—slender earth spirits that appeared outside the old three-story building that housed her apartment and peered in at the flowerpot on the windowsill. In the morning, she got up and told the buried acorn her dream.
* * *
Autumn turned to winter and Wendy’s life went pretty much the way it always had. She took turns working at the restaurant and on her poems, she saw her friends, she started a relationship with a fellow she met at a party in Jilly’s loft, but it floundered after a month.
Life went on.
The only change was centered around the contents of the pot on her windowsill. As though the tiny green sprig that pushed up through the dark soil was her lover, every day she told it all the things that had happened to her and around her. Sometimes she read it her favourite stories from anthologies and collections, or interesting bits from magazines and newspapers. She badgered her friends for stories, sometimes passing them on, speaking to the tiny plant in a low, but animated voice, other times convincing her friends to come over and tell the stories themselves.
Except for Jilly, Sophie, LaDonna and the two Riddell brothers, Geordie and Christy, most people thought she’d gone just a little daft. Nothing serious, mind you, but strange all the same.
Wendy didn’t care.
Somewhere out in the world, there were other Trees of Tales, but they were few—if the conjure man was to be believed. And she believed him now. She had no proof, only faith, but oddly enough, faith seemed enough. But since she believed, she knew it was more important than ever that her charge should flourish. With the coming of winter, there were less and less of the street people to be found. They were indoors, if they had such an option, or perhaps they migrated to warmer climes like the swallows. But Wendy still spied the more regular ones in their usual haunts. Paperjack had gone, but the pigeon lady still fed her charges every day, the German cowboy continued his bombastic monologues—though mostly on the subway platforms now. She saw the conjure man, too, but he was never near enough for her to get a chance to talk to him.
By the springtime, the sprig of green in the flowerpot had grown into a sapling that stood almost a foot high. On warmer days, Wendy put the pot out on the back porch steps where it could taste the air and catch the growing warmth of the afternoon sun. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it once it outgrew its pot.
But she had some ideas. There was a part of Fitzhenry Park called the Silenus Gardens that was dedicated to the poet Joshua Stanhold. She thought it might be appropriate to plant the sapling there.
* * *
One day in late April, she was leaning on the handlebars of her ten-speed in front of the public library in Lower Crowsea, admiring the yellow splash the daffodils made against the building’s grey stone walls, when she sensed, more than saw, a red bicycle pull up onto the sidewalk behind her. She turned around to find herself looking into the conjure man’s merry features.
“It’s spring, isn’t it just,” the conjure man said. “A time to finally forget the cold and bluster and think of summer. John can feel the leaf buds stir, the flowers blossoming. There’s a grand smile in the air for all the growing.”
Wendy gave Ginger a pat, before letting her gaze meet the blue shock of his eyes.
“What about a Tree of Tales?” she asked. “Can you feel her growing?”
The conjure man gave her a wide smile. “Especially her.” He paused to adjust the brim of his hat, then gave her a sly look. “Your man Stanhold,” he added. “Now there was a fine poet—and a fine storyteller.”
Wendy didn’t bother to ask how he knew of her plan. She just returned the conjure man’s smile and then asked, “Do you have a story to tell me?”
The conjure man polished one of the buttons of his bright blue jacket.
“I believe I do,” he said. He patted the brown satchel that rode on his back carrier. “John has a thermos filled with the very best tea, right here in his bag. Why don’t we find ourselves a comfortable place to sit and he’ll tell you how he got this bicycle of his over a hot cuppa.”
He started to pedal off down the street, without waiting for her response. Wendy stared after him, her gaze catching the little terrier, sitting erect in her basket and looking back at her.
* * *
There seemed to be a humming in the air that woke a kind of singing feeling in her chest. The wind rose up and caught her hair, pushing it playfully into her eyes. As she swept it back from her face with her hand, she thought of the sapling sitting in its pot on her back steps, thought of the wind, and knew that stories were already being harvested without the necessity of her having to pass them on.
But she wanted to hear them all the same.
Getting on her ten-speed, she hurried to catch up with the conjure man.
For J.R.R. Tolkien;
may his own branch of the tree
live on forever
We Are Dead Together
The ideal condition
Would be, I admit, that men should be right
by instinct;
But since we are all likely to go astray,
The reasonable thing is to learn from those
who can teach.
—Sophocles
Let it be recounted in the swato—the stories of my people that chronicle our history and keep it alive—that while Kata Petalo was first and foremost a fool, she meant well. I truly believed there was a road I could walk between the world of the Rom and the shilmullo.
We have always been an adaptable people. We’d already lived side-by-side with the Gaje for ten times a hundred years, a part of their society, and yet apart from it. The undead were just another kind of non-Gypsy; why shouldn’t we be able to to coexist with them as well?
I knew now. I had always known. We didn’t call them the shilmullo—the cold dead—simply for the touch of their pale flesh, cold as marble. Their hearts were cold, too—cold and black as the hoarfrost that rimmed the hedges by which my ancestors had camped in gentler times.
I had always known, but I had chosen to forget. I had let the chance for survival seduce me.
“Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done gratsende,” was what Bebee Yula used to tell us when we were children. With one behind you cannot sit on two horses. It was an old saying, a warning to those Rom who thought they could be both Rom and Gaje, but instead were neither.
I had ridden two horses these past few years, but all my cleverness served me ill in the end, for they took Budo from me all the same; took him, stole his life and left me with his cold, pale corpse that would rise from its death tonight to be forever a part of their world and lost to mine.
For see, the shilmullo have no art.
The muses that inspire the living can’t find lodging in their dead flesh, can’t spark the fires of genius in their cold hearts. The shilmullo can mimic, but they can’t create. There are no R
embrandts counted in their ranks, no Picassos. No Yeats, no Steinbecks. No Mozarts, no Dylans. For artwork, for music, for plays and films and poetry and books, they need the living—Rom or Gaje.
I’m not the best musician in this new world that the shilmullo tore from the grave of the old, but I have something not one of them can ever possess, except vicariously: I have the talent to compose. I have written hundreds of manuscripts in honour of my patron, Brian Stansford—yes, that Stansford, the President of Stansford Chemicals—in every style of music. There are sonatas bearing his name and various music hall songs; jazz improvisations, three concertos, one symphony and numerous airs in the traditional style of the Rom; rap music, pop songs, heavy metal anthems.
I have accompanied him to dinners and galas and openings where my performances and music have always gained him the envy of his peers.
In return, like any pet, I was given safety—both for myself and my family. Every member of the Petalo clan has the Stansford tattoo on their left brow, an ornate capital “S,” decorated with flowered vines with a tiny wolf’s paw print enclosed in the lower curve of the letter. Sixteen Petalos could walk freely in the city and countryside with that mark on their brow.
Only Bebee Yula, my aunt, refused the tattoo.
“You do this for us,” she told me, “but I will not be an obligation on any member of my clan. What you do is wrong. We must forget the boundaries that lie between ourselves and the Gaje and be united against our common enemy. To look out only for yourself, your family, makes you no better than the shilmullo themselves.”
“There is no other way,” I had explained. “Either I do this, or we die.”
“There are worse things than death,” she told me. “What you mean to do is one of them. You will lose your soul, Kata. You will become as cold in your heart as those you serve.”
I tried to explain it better, but she would not argue further with me at that time. She had the final word. She was an old woman—in her eighties, Papa said—but she killed three shilmullo before she herself was slain. We all knew she was brave, but not one of us learned the lesson she’d given her life to tell us. Sixteen Petalos allowed the blood-red Stansford tattoo to be placed on their brows.
But now there are only fifteen of us, for protected though he was, three shilmullo stole Budo from me. Stansford himself spoke to me, explaining how it was an unfortunate accident. They were young, Budo’s murderers, they hadn’t seen the tattoo until it was too late. Perhaps I would now do as he had previously suggested and bring my family to live in one of his protected enclaves.
“We are Rom,” I had said.
He gave me a blank look. “I’m a busy man, Kathy,” he said, calling me by my nav gajikano—my non-Gypsy name. “Would you get to the point?”
It should have explained everything. To be Rom was to live in all places; without freedom of movement, we might as well be dead. I wanted to explain it to him, but the words wouldn’t come.
Stansford regarded me, his flesh white in the fluorescent light of his office, small sparks of red fire deep in his pupils. If I had thought he would have any sympathy, I was sorely mistaken.
“Let Taylor know when you’ve picked a new mate,” was all he said, “and we’ll have him—or her—tattooed.”
Then he bent down to his paperwork as though I was no longer present. I had been dismissed. I sat for a long moment, ignored, finally learning to hate him, before I left his office and went back downtown to the small apartment in a deserted tenement where Budo and I had been staying this week.
Budo lay stretched out on newspapers before the large window in the living room where Taylor and another of Stansford’s men had left him two days ago. I knelt beside the corpse and looked down at what had been my husband. His throat had been savaged, but otherwise he looked as peaceful as though he was sleeping. His eyes were closed. A lock of his dark hair fell across his brow. I pushed it aside, laid a hand on his cold flesh.
He was dead, but not dead. He had been killed at three A.M. Tonight at the same time, three days after his death, his eyes would open and if I was still here, he would not remember me. They never remember anything until that initial thirst is slaked.
His skin was almost translucent. Pale, far too pale. Where was the dark-skinned Budo I had married?
Gone. Dead. All that remained of him was this bitter memory of pale flesh.
“I was wrong,” I said.
I spoke neither to myself, nor to the corpse. My voice was for the ghost of my aunt, Bebee Yula, gone to the land of shadows. Budo would never take that journey—not if I let him wake.
I lifted my gaze to look out through the window at the street below. Night lay dark on its pavement. Shilmullo don’t need streetlights and what humans remain in the city know better than to walk out-of-doors once the sun has gone down. The emptiness I saw below echoed endlessly inside me.
I rose to my feet and crossed the room to where our two canvas backpacks lay against the wall. My fiddlecase lay between them. I opened it and took out the fiddle. When I ran my thumb across the strings, the notes seemed to be swallowed by the room. They had no ring, no echo.
Budo’s death had stolen their music.
For a long moment I held the fiddle against my chest, then I took the instrument by its neck and smashed it against the wall. The strings popped free as the body shattered, the end of one of them licking out to sting my cheek. It drew blood. I took the fiddle neck back to where Budo’s corpse lay and knelt beside him again. Raising it high above my head, I brought the jagged end down, plunging
it into his chest—
There!
The corpse bucked as though I’d struck it with an electric current. Its eyes flared open, gaze locking on mine. It was a stranger’s gaze. The corpse’s hands scrabbled weakly against my arms, but my leather jacket kept me safe from its nails. It was too soon for him to have reached the full power of a shilmullo. His hands were weak. His eyes could glare, but not bend me to his will.
It took longer for the corpse to die than I had thought it would.
When it finally lay still, I leaned back on my heels, leaving the fiddle’s neck sticking up out of the corpse’s chest. I tried to summon tears—my sorrow ran deep; I had yet to cry—but the emptiness just gathered more thickly inside me. So I simply stared at my handiwork, sickened by what I saw, but forcing myself to look so that I would have the courage to finish the night’s work.
Bebee Yula had been a wealth of old sayings. “Where you see Rom,” she had said once, “there is freedom. Where you do not, there is no freedom.”
I had traded our freedom for tattoos. Those tattoos did not mean safety, but prikaza—misfortune. Bad luck. We were no longer Rom, my family and I, but only Bebee Yula had seen that.
Until now.
* * *
I had a recital the following night—at a gala of Stansford’s at the Brewer Theatre. There was a seating capacity of five hundred and, knowing Stansford, he would make certain that every seat was filled.
I walked from the tenement with my fiddlecase in hand. A new piece I’d composed for Stansford last week was to be the finale, so I didn’t have to be at the theatre until late, but I was going early. I stopped only once along the way, to meet my brother Vedel. I had explained my needs to him the day before.
“It’s about time,” had been his only response.
I remembered Bebee Yula telling me she would not be an obligation on any member of her clan and wondered if the rest of my family agreed with her the way that Vedel seemed to. I had always told myself I did what I did for them; now I had learned that it had been for myself.
I wanted to live. I could not bear to have my family unprotected.
Many of the legends that tell of the shilmullo are false or embroidered, but this was true: there are only three ways to kill them. By beheading. By a stake in the heart. And by fire.
What Vedel brought me was an explosive device he’d gotten from a member of the local Gaje freedom fighters. I
t was small enough to fit in my empty fiddlecase, but with a firepower large enough to bring down the house. Five hundred would burn in the ensuing inferno. It would not be enough, but it was all I could do.
I embraced Vedel, there on the street, death lying in its case at my feet.
“We are Rom,” he whispered into my hair. “We were meant to be free.”
I nodded. Slowly stepping back from him, I picked up the case and went on alone to the theatre.
I would not return.
* * *
Let it be recounted in the swato that while Kata Petalo was first and foremost a fool, she meant well.
Even a fool can learn wisdom, but oh, the lesson is hard.
Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery
The constellations were consulted for advice, but
no one understood them
—Elias Canetti
My name’s Sophie and my friend Jilly says I have faerie blood. Maybe she’s right.
Faerie are supposed to have problems dealing with modern technology and I certainly have trouble with anything technological. The simplest appliances develop horrendous problems when I’m around. I can’t wear a watch because they start to run backwards, unless they’re digital; then they just flash random numbers as though the watch’s inner workings have taken to measuring fractals instead of time. If I take a subway or bus, it’s sure to be late. Or it’ll have a new driver who takes a wrong turn and we all get lost.
This kind of thing actually happens to me. Once I got on the #3 at the Kelly Street Bridge and somehow, instead of going downtown on Lee, we ended up heading north into Foxville.
I also have strange dreams.
I used to think they were the place that my art came from, that my subconscious was playing around with images, tossing them up in my sleep before I put them down on canvas or paper. But then a few months ago I had this serial dream that ran on for a half-dozen nights in a row, a kind of fairy tale that was either me stepping into Faerie and therefore real within its own perimeters—which is what Jilly would like me to believe—or it was just my subconscious making another attempt to deal with the way my mother abandoned my father and me when I was a kid. I don’t really know which I believe anymore, because I still find myself going back to that dream world from time to time and meeting the people I first met there.