My Swordhand is Singing

  Florin had wheeled his ox around, and he and Magda began to trundle away, both riding in the cart. Peter turned to see Teodor step forward. Teodor untied a cloth bundle that he had been holding all the while, and a clutch of twigs fell into the snow. Just before the sexton started to pile clods of soil over Radu, Teodor placed the twigs on and around his body. They were short, but stout, thick with long sharp thorns. Peter knew they were hawthorn, and he glanced at his father for some explanation. But Tomas’s lips were tightly drawn.

  The funeral was over, and each party went their own way back to the village.

  In the square, Tomas clutched his son’s arm. It was only midway through the afternoon and already the light was failing. Peter’s mind was full of questions, about the funeral, about why they had attended it at all. He’d been astonished when his father said they would go, but maybe it was the right thing to do. It was just that it was a long time since Tomas had done the right thing.

  Tomas shook his shoulder.

  “I’m tired. Let’s go home, Son.”

  Peter smiled.

  “Lean on me, Father.”

  Tomas draped his arm around his son.

  “I think there’s some slivovitz left.”

  The smile slipped from Peter’s face, but as they made their way, he dutifully supported his father’s weight.

  “Why did they turn him face down?” Peter asked.

  Tomas said nothing.

  “What were the thorns for?”

  “They’re not for anything,” Tomas snapped, pulling away from his son. “They’re simple, superstitious people here. Don’t take any notice of their foolishness.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Peter. We have wood to cut. And plum brandy to drink.”

  And Peter knew, as so often, which of them would be cutting wood and which of them drinking brandy.

  4

  The Goose

  Dusk fell with the snowflakes as father and son made their way home. Peter was as tall as his father now, and certainly as strong. Maybe Tomas had once been a powerful man, but Peter could not remember that time. Tomas did less and less work, and relied more and more on Peter to keep them fed. As far back as Peter could recall, Tomas had drunk. Once upon a time it must have been different. Peter’s mother had died giving birth to him. Tomas had found a wet nurse, but had brought Peter up himself ever since the child could walk and talk. Maybe he hadn’t been able to afford the nurse anymore, but it seemed he had wanted the woman out of their lives as soon as possible. Since then it had been just the two of them.

  On Peter’s fifth birthday Tomas had given him a clasp knife. Not a toy, but a well-made and useful tool.

  “Time you learnt to use one,” Tomas said.

  Peter had watched, entranced, as his father took an off-cut of a branch and quickly carved a small bird for him. A goose.

  “It’s a good one,” Tomas said. “Sharp.”

  “Yes, it’s a good one,” his little son had echoed, laughing, though it was not the knife he meant, but the slender little goose, the very image of the birds that he loved to gaze at as they flew overhead.

  Later, Tomas taught him to read, and that wasn’t the action of a drunkard, nor even a soldier, but once Tomas had belonged to a very different kind of family. Now the drink seemed to possess him, and it cost Peter a lot of effort chopping logs to buy a bottle of slivovitz or rakia.

  As they came within sight of the hut, Peter could see the birch smoke trailing up from the chimney, gently twisting into ghostly shapes in the dusk, drifting away and spreading like mist through the treetops.

  Peter smiled. The fire was still alight; the hut would be warm.

  The hut stood in a strange position. The river Chust, from which the village took its name, forked in two here, as it snaked through the woods. With deep banks, the river had spent ten thousand years eating its way gently down into the thick, soft, dark forest soil. Its verges were moss-laden blankets that dripped leaf mold into the slow brown water. But at a certain point in its ancient history, the river had met some solid rock hidden in the soil, and had split in two. It was at the head of this fork that the hut stood.

  Just over a year ago, in late autumn, Tomas and Peter had been traveling again when they’d heard there was a need for a woodcutter in Chust. They’d been moving from village to village, always heading as far from civilization as it seemed possible to go, and ever deeper into the vast forest. Tomas was pleased, and they took the job. There was a perfectly good, large hut on the edge of the village, but Tomas had insisted they build a new one of their own. Peter was used to such eccentricities, and he merely bent his back to the axe to cut the trees to make the planks for their new home.

  They laid a rough bridge of two halved tree trunks to cross to the middle of the fork, and began to build.

  Winter was coming on by the time they finished the hut, with a stable on one side and a toolshed on the other. Then Peter started to cut wood to earn their keep, but Tomas got his spade out.

  “What’s that for, Father?” Peter asked, but his father, as so often, replied only with actions.

  He surveyed the hut from the very tip of the river fork. Then he strode around the sides of the hut’s single storey, inspecting it from every angle.

  Peter leant on his axe and watched his father from across the river, where they had decided to make their timber yard.

  Tomas stood at a point twenty paces from the front of the hut, in the exact center between the two arms of the river. He swung his spade from his shoulder, thrust it into the spongy soil, and began to dig.

  Peter shook his head and went back to work. They had promised the kmetovi deliveries of chopped birch a week earlier, and they had already aroused suspicion by deciding to live outside the village. Father had tried to explain that it made more sense for them to live closer to their work, but that sort of logical explanation impressed no one in Chust.

  After an hour, Peter straightened his back and looked across to his father. Tomas had by now dug a deep but narrow pit. Peter sat down and pulled his knife from his pocket, the same knife he’d been given on his fifth birthday. From another pocket he pulled a piece of plum wood he’d been working on, and began to shave curls of wood from the back of the little sheep he was carving.

  Tomas was already up to his waist in the soil when Peter suddenly looked up to see his father’s eyes on him.

  “Get on with your work,” Tomas called. “I’ve got enough to do here.”

  Peter muttered to himself, but did as he was told. His father was in a mood. A mood that told Peter to keep himself to himself. It seemed to Peter it had always been like that, the two of them living in the same single room, but like leaves that fall from the same tree, always spinning ever further apart.

  Peter muttered again. There was always something.

  Always something to do. Somewhere to go.

  Something he was told to do. Something he was told not to do.

  Something like the box his father owned, that Peter was never allowed to open.

  After two days’ digging, Tomas’s hole had become a trench, and Peter began to have an inkling of what his father was doing. Two more days and the trench was four feet wide and stretched very nearly from one arm of the river to the other. Only a small gap of maybe three feet lay between the hole and the gurgling water at each end.

  “Careful,” Peter said, unable to keep quiet. “If you dig any closer the bank will give way.”

  Even as he said it he saw that that was just what his father wanted.

  Tomas laughed, and swung his spade into the top of the last plug of earth. Water gushed into the trench, filling it more quickly than Peter would have believed possible. Tomas ran to the other arm of the river and breached the soil there too. He had dug the channel on a slight slant, so that water was already flowing in from the arm of the river nearest to the village, through the channel, and away to the other arm.

  “I always wanted to live on an island!” Toma
s, suddenly full of joy, and laughing like a young boy, called to his son. Soaked to the chest, he climbed out of the water and went inside to dry his clothes by the stove.

  That night he got drunk on rakia, while outside the flowing water did a good job of cleaning and widening the trench, removing the last clods of soil from its two mouths. As he sat by the fire, his arms ached from the work, and through his tiredness something stirred within him. His muscles remembered working that hard. Years ago, he had swung his arms, but not with a spade.

  Not with a spade.

  Now Peter and his father made their way over the same bridge of trunks they had laid a year ago and onto their little triangular island.

  Their horse, Sultan, whinnied softly as their footfalls sounded on the bridge. He pulled at his tether, a simple rope from his bridle to a tree stump.

  “Put him in, Peter,” Tomas said.

  Peter nodded.

  He patted Sultan’s flank and led him into the tiny stable.

  “Hay again, Sultan,” he whispered. “One day I’ll bring you some beet. You’d like that. One day soon, I promise.”

  Sultan flicked his head toward Peter, but it was a gentle gesture.

  By the time Peter got inside, Tomas had already poured himself a mug of rakia.

  “Have some?” he asked.

  Peter shook his head.

  “For God’s sake!” his father shouted, without warning. “For God’s sake have a drink with me for once!”

  Peter stood, shaking a little, trying to stay calm and be friendly, as he always did at these moments, though his heart felt as if it were in a vice.

  “I will, Father, I will.”

  He went over to sit by the stove with Tomas. The lamp glowed; a lone moth flitted about against the smoky glass. His father fumbled for another mug and poured a thick finger of rakia into it.

  Peter forced the firewater down, trying not to shudder as it burnt its way into his belly. He knew that would irritate Tomas further. But his father seemed placated, and began to hum tunelessly. Peter looked at him, opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again. He could see that his father’s eyes had glazed; his mind was elsewhere, miles away. Years away, maybe. Peter tried to think of something to say, something that despite the drink would reach out to his father, make a small bridge across to his island.

  But it was Tomas who broke the silence.

  “We haven’t heard that tune for a while, have we?” he said.

  Peter shook his head. “I never understood it anyway. Why does the shepherd let himself be murdered? Without trying to fight, or to argue? It’s stupid.”

  “Ah,” Tomas said. “Ah.”

  He began to sing, his eyes shut and his face turned to the roof beam.

  “By a rolling hill at Heaven’s doorsill…”

  The moth tumbled onto the table, exhausted by its efforts to fly into the light. It lay on its back, struggling.

  “Where the trail descends to the plain and ends…”

  “Why does everyone sing it anyway?” Peter asked. “The Miorita?”

  Tomas stopped and turned his gaze momentarily on his son, but he was distracted by the moth, which had flipped over onto its legs. From the strange milky skull-shape on its back they could see it was a death’s-head moth.

  “It makes no sense, but people sing it all the time,” Peter went on.

  Tomas slammed his hand down on the table and left it there. The moth had no chance of escaping. Peter winced, then looked away as his father lifted the squashed corpse from his palm, opened the door of the stove, and threw it in.

  There was something wrong with killing even such a small thing for the sake of it. There was no point saying so, Peter knew that, unless he wanted a lecture about what ten years in the King’s army did to your opinion on killing. Ten years in the army and four in jail. Enough to make any man violent.

  Peter stood up and got the pot from the cupboard, to make soup.

  “The song, the Miorita, makes sense to some people,” Tomas said cantankerously, but Peter had turned his back on his father to chop vegetables, and couldn’t tell what his father thought of it himself. Presumably he ranked it alongside all the other superstitious nonsense people spouted. His mood was thick and dour. The death of the moth seemed to have put a sudden end to his drunken good humor, and he sat by the open door of the stove for the rest of the evening, staring into the flames, until the bottle was empty and he staggered to his cot, ignoring the soup that Peter had set in front of him.

  Peter finished his own meal, then sat by the fire, carving a miniature fir tree. Something about that appealed to him; it was almost like giving back to the forest, rather than just taking wood to sell and to burn all the time. Turning one small piece of wood back into a tree again was an offering to the Mother Forest, and Peter believed that was very important. It would never do to anger the great power that lurked all around them, every day of their lives. Peter finished the carving and put it on the shelf above his bed, along with all the others.

  He sighed. He had never had his father’s skill with his hands and the tree was clumsy. But it was his.

  The snowy night hung thickly over the village, and the two arms of the river, and the trees. The forest stretched away in almost every direction for five hundred miles, unbroken except for the faint huddle of a village here and there.

  The hut crouched on the island Tomas had made, as if waiting, a dim light shining weakly from the gaps in its two tiny shutters.

  Away, across one of the river’s arms, something watched the hut. It stirred. The figure of shadow moved slowly from cover and then sped like daybreak into the trees.

  5

  St. Andrew’s Eve

  A few days after Radu’s funeral Peter went into Chust. His father and he were owed money by various people for deliveries of logs, and Peter knew it was better that he collect it than Tomas, who might spend half, or worse, in the inn before he got home.

  It was a bright day, but the snow still lay defiant on the ground, with promise of more hanging like a gray blanket in the sky. Peter was passing the wooden well at the northern end of the village when he saw the first plumes of smoke curling up into the air. He was puzzled at first, but then remembered that it was St. Andrew’s Eve.

  As he rounded a corner there was the first bonfire. Slung over a fire pit, a huge iron cauldron was spewing coils of steam into the cold morning. Around the fire stood a paltry crowd of people, each waiting patiently with a wooden bucket in hand. They took no notice of Peter as he passed, on his way to his first call, the priest Daniel, at his house.

  In the square was another bonfire, with an even larger cauldron, and even more people waiting, with their buckets. By the cauldron stood Teodor, the feldsher, and a fat man whose name Peter didn’t know. Teodor seemed to be in charge of the fat man, who filled each bucket from the cauldron as it was presented to him. Occasionally Teodor would wave the man away and stand by the cauldron, muttering something over its steaming mouth. Whether the muttering was ill temper at a job badly done, or magic, Peter didn’t know. If it was magic, Peter wondered what the priest would have to say about it. After a while, Teodor would stand back and nod for the work to begin again.

  It was a messy, smelly job, and now Peter could see what he knew was in the cauldron, for there were thick black patches that had been spilled here and there in the snow-packed square. Tar.

  All across Chust—and, Peter knew, probably all across the country—people would be doing the same thing. Daniel’s house lay on the far side of the square, by the narrow alley that led to the church, and Peter could already see the priest, brush in hand, outside his house. Daniel dipped the fat, short, round hog’s-hair brush into the tar, trying to be quick before it set again. He was working laboriously, painting the tar onto the windowsills of his house. People were working on their houses around the square, some slowly and methodically, others fast, but all around the village, every window frame was being coated with the thick black tar. It was tiri
ng work; the tar cooled rapidly and got harder to use, and the clumsy hog’s-hair brushes came apart all too easily.

  Peter stood right behind Daniel, but the priest was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t notice. He had moved to his door, and after he had covered the frame with a good layer of the stuff he scraped the last from the sides of his bucket and daubed a large, untidy cross on the door itself. He stood back to inspect his work. He would have liked to have made a better-looking cross; he would have to get some more tar.

  “Does the protection of the Lord need the help of tar, Father?” asked Peter.

  The priest jumped, then turned to see Peter.

  He scowled, dropping his empty bucket to the ground. His hands were sticky, and he tried to wipe them on his robes, but it was no use.

  He was a tall man, balding, with a sharply pointed beard that mimicked the sharpness of his nose.

  “St. Andrew’s Eve, Peter,” he said, as if that was an answer. “You and your father would be wise to take the same precautions. It’s a long journey from here to St. George’s Eve. And it can be an evil journey.”

  Peter agreed with that, at least, against his better judgment. He thought of the Miorita: it was when the shepherds had come down from the hills for the winter that the murder had happened. The whole dark winter lay before them, and the winter was a dangerous place to be. It was just that Peter didn’t have much faith in tar for getting them through the long winter months. By spring, by St. George’s Eve, flowers and holy sweet basil would be growing in the pastures, showing that God’s power was increasing again.

  In the towns they’d lived in, no man of religion would have abided such superstitious practices. But here, in the depths of the forest, it was different. Somewhere among the trees the path that led directly to God had gone astray. It had got lost among the folktales and superstitions and the hushed talk of the fireside.